The Darkroom ✔️

2

Almost a year passed before Dane noticed The Spot, again, on a summer evening in June of 2009.  Suzie was a thing of the past and the Tibetan protests were replaced with both Iranian protests over a contentious presidential election, and also the news of Michael Jackson's death.  This week the pop star was demanding the lion's share of the coverage.

Little had changed in Chez Alden.  Two new photos adorned the walls: one of a sinking airliner in the Hudson river, and the other of an Iraqi war vet in a wheelchair, his leg amputated above the knee.  The latter showed the vet wheeling himself across a tarmac, eyes searching the crowd for someone that was not there as a scattering of strangers greeted him with smiling faces and polite waves.  Dane was proud of that one, even though it had received very little play in the press.

Beyond the pictures the only significant change was the replacement of the old armchair with an equally large messaging armchair that did just as little for Dane's back.  Yet at 43 his aches were no longer confined to just his back.  His joints hurt, as well; particularly his left elbow.

This evening Dane was at his fridge, a wrap on his now bad elbow, pulling out a beer to drown his pain and preparing to catch an hour of Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House.  Before he could settle down, however – before he even left the fridge - he was hit by a wave of nostalgia and his thoughts rushed back to Ellen Veers.  Perhaps it was the drinks they had shared in the summer of '06 that brought the memories flooding in or perhaps it was the summer heat, but in an instant he was submerged in that distant memory.

He had been in Iraq at the time.  He was sent out during Hussein's trial to photograph the troops and the local reactions.  After Hussein's indictment there was a tension among the other journalists in their Baghdad-based hotel, which coincidentally wasn't far from the Palestine Hotel that had been rocked by a coordinated car bomb attack the previous year.   As May turned into June, troops were on edge.  Congress voted down withdrawals, and the war didn't seem anywhere near over.  The violence kept escalating and by late June the news coverage included the deaths of al-Queda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, two tortured U.S. soldiers, and Hussein's defense lawyer.

Every day, Dane had wondered how much longer until his luck would run out and he would be just one more statistic, one more journalist lost in the war.  He had hit a local bar popular with some of his colleagues at the hotel.  The evening had been hot and the air was still, providing no relief.  Power was spotty in this section of Baghdad and there was no working air-conditioning at the bar.  Even the beer ran warm, but that night it would do.

Dane had gulped down that first beer in one long chug as if he was still some college frat boy.  Getting here always made him nervous.  The bar stood at the end of a long corridor guarded by armed militiamen. A metal detector framed the entryway, and a bin rested beside it where they collected your guns.  Once you got past the guards, the place wasn't much better, just a hole in the wall with two choices of beer and not a drop of liquor.  Dane always had the Heineken.

As he sat the first empty bottle down and pulled out a few thousand in dinar notes to pay for another, he'd heard her voice for the first time.

"It's on me," she said.

Short and to the point.  Ellen was always to the point.  She smiled at him.  Her teeth were slightly yellowed, and he suspected she was a smoker, but he didn't care.  That was the first time he had seen a woman at the bar, and she was hot, and for some reason, she was into him. 

She held out her hand.  "Ellen Veers."

He had taken it in his own, and he knew that after that he'd introduced himself, but he couldn't remember that introduction.  All he could remember was the feel of that hand, coarse and callused.  Ellen Veers was no pampered woman.  She had lived and she knew the darker sides of life.

Waking from his memories, Dane popped the top of his beer (this one was a Sam Adams – he didn't have any Heineken in the house), and glanced to the black and white photo of he and Ellen from its place on the guilty pleasures bookshelf.  She stared up at him with that look of adulation, her thick hair caught in an eternal breeze.  Even in the colorless photo Dane could almost make out the rich red of that hair.

He could have taken this shot in color, immortalized her in those vibrant hues, but this photo was as much art as the pictures of war and famine that hung from his walls.  This photo was not about capturing the image of them, but capturing the truth of them, and more importantly the truth of Ellen.  It was about capturing her soul, and that was what was on display here: the soul.

When you wanted to capture the soul, the photo had to be black and white.  Dane always believed this.  He also believed that it had to be film.  This he came to later in life, after the digital revolution took over the majority of his business.  His best photos, like this one, had to be taken with his 69 Minolta, and always on a black and white Kodak stock.

This shot made the case; it showed Ellen through and through.  The adulation in her eyes, epitomized that softer side, while that smile exposed those off-white and – were they, yes they were – slightly crooked teeth.  Her brows were thick, and not overly groomed, and her blouse hung loose blowing in that same immortal breeze that whipped her hair, framing her flat chest and her muscular figure.  Here was a hard woman, softened with a love for Dane that he could never understand, and in the harsh contrast of black and white, her humanity and her own duality were on full display.

Yet something was off with his own image.  There on his arm, that left arm draped over Ellen Veers shoulder on the balcony of a Baghdad hotel, was The Spot.  A year ago it had been a blemish, but now it was something more.  Dane could swear The Spot was bigger, almost like an ink stain splattered against his skin.

That's when his obsession began.  Blemishes did not grow.  A photograph was immortal; it was truth made eternal.  If it changed, then it was just one more useless piece of ephemera; one more trivial and meaningless scrap of clutter.