The world is never what it seems

The day of graduation, the mourning dove didn’t sit where I could see it. I could hear it. I could always hear it. Twoooeee-toooo-tooo-tooo. But I couldn’t see it to test my magical bat powers. I was partly relieved because I didn’t really want to have magical bat powers. I was hoping all of that was left in yesterday—that sleep had cured me.

I snuck down to the darkroom first thing, while Dad was in the bathroom doing his usual morning routine. I opened Why People Take Pictures to the next random page of scribble. There weren’t many of them. Mostly, it was pictures with handwritten captions, just like my sketchbooks.

The page read:

I am tortured by the mundane. You are mundane. I am tortured by you.

I am tortured by eating, drinking, and sleeping. I am tortured by brushing my teeth. I am tortured by the dishes that are always in the sink even though I do them four times a day. I am tortured by basmati rice, by egg noodles, by goddamn boneless chicken breasts. I am tortured by beef bouillon and salt and pepper. I am tortured by lunch foods. Limited options. Ham and cheese. Peanut butter and jelly. Soup and sandwich. Salads.

Is this okay? Are you all right? Are you tortured too?

Shit.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

I read it three more times. I asked myself the question. Are you tortured too?

Are you?

I pulled out my own sketchbook and I wrote the answer.

I am tortured too. I am tortured by belly fat and magazine covers about how to please everyone but myself. I am tortured by sheep who click on anything that will guarantee a ten-pound loss in one week. Sheep who will get on their knees if it means someone will like them more.

I am tortured by my inability to want to hang out with desperate people. I am tortured by goddamned yearbooks full of bullshit. I met you when. I’ll miss the times. I’ll keep in touch. Best friends forever.

Is this okay? Are you all right? Are you tortured too?

I had to be at the school for graduation by eleven, so I didn’t have time to read or write any more. I didn’t feel like going to graduation. I didn’t feel like doing any of it. Not the cap and gown. Not the swishy tassel with the brass ’14. Not the line of congratulatory teachers. I wanted to just sit there and read Darla’s Why People Take Pictures all day.

Because I was tortured.

By questions whose answers might live inside her book.

By the elephants living all over my house. (Hint: Check the freezer.)

By lunch foods, too. I hated sandwiches and salads and everything lunchy. When I read that part, I felt like someone might finally understand me. But maybe hating lunch foods was another step toward… you know.

I turned the page and found a picture of a naked woman, the photo torn right across her shoulders. It wasn’t like the stuff Markus Glenn showed me on his laptop in seventh grade. It wasn’t like any picture Darla ever took. It was in color. It was soft focused. Warmly toned. The backdrop was wrinkled and too close to the woman. The lighting was harsh and cast deep shadows.

Above the picture Darla wrote: Why would anyone do this?

Under the picture Darla wrote: The world is never what it seems.

I turned to the next page not really prepared for what was coming.

It was a portrait of a man with no head because he had shot it off with the gun that was still lying next to him on the bed.

Above the picture Darla wrote: Why would anyone do this?

Under the picture Darla wrote: I’ve decided to name him Bill.

I stared at the picture for a long time.

“Bill” had his jaw, a tiny portion of his ear, and his beard. That was really all that was left of his head. His jaw was blown out, it was twice as wide as it should have been and the ear and the sideburn connecting the two, they were sticky and brown and swollen, as if the head was trying to make up for the lack of itself. As if it was trying to fill in the missing pieces that were scattered all over the room. His flannel shirt looked new and as if it had been ironed that morning. It was black with his blood, but I could see the flannel pattern under the wetness.

He looked like a big man. With his head, I’d say he was over six feet. Maybe six foot one or two. By his side there was a shotgun of some kind. I didn’t know guns. We were peaceful out here in nonconsumerist artist/hippie weirdo freak land. We didn’t even lock our doors.

I looked back at the picture of the naked woman with her head torn off. It had the same question as the picture of Bill. Why would anyone do this?

I braced myself for the contents of the next page, but all it was, was the chemical backstory of stop bath. Stop bath is the acid that stops a silver gelatin print from developing in developer. The order of simple printing is: Developer, stop bath, fixer, rinse. When you put an exposed piece of paper into (alkaline) developer, it will continue to develop until you put it into (acid) stop bath.

Darla’s desired working stop bath was 0.85% acetic acid.

Apparently, Darla was into the history of acetic acid. I found it boring and would be late for graduation if I didn’t get back upstairs, get showered and get dressed, so I closed the book and put it back in its hiding place. But I couldn’t get Bill out of my head. And it turned out Darla couldn’t either.

If there was a stop bath—an emotional sort of stop bath for thoughts like that—would Darla be alive today? And if so, what was that stop bath?

After a shower and some forced relaxation yoga that didn’t do much but make me feel like a failure at yoga and relaxing, I went downstairs and flopped myself next to Dad, who was working on his laptop on the couch trying to help three online chat customers at one time. I stared at the screen and avoided eye contact, which was easy from that position.

“This one doesn’t even know what the word reboot means,” he said. “There should be a test before you’re allowed to buy a computer.”

I looked at him as he typed and then clicked and then typed again. He was handsome. Rugged. Smart. So smart. Smart enough to know that he shouldn’t be on the couch dealing with people who didn’t know what reboot meant.

“Ellie called,” he said. “She’ll meet you at the school.”

“Oh,” I said. “Did you offer her a ride?”

“Yeah. She said she had one.”

I looked up at the painting on the wall. Woman. I looked at her curves, her plain face, her pale skin, her relaxed pose. I looked back at Dad typing on the couch. I thought about Darla’s pictures. The woman with no head. The man with no head. I tried to figure out what it meant. I wanted to ask Dad where Darla got the picture of the dead guy, Bill. I wanted to ask if Darla was some crime scene photographer or something. I wanted to know where she got the naked picture of the now-headless woman.

But it was graduation day. I didn’t want to ruin it. So, I said something I’d been meaning to say to Dad since the ninth grade, which was the last time I’d said it.

“Dad?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, still typing something.

“I want you to paint again.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No. I mean it.”

“You going to pay the bills?” he asked.

“The trust will pay the bills and you know it.”

That was true. We owned the house. We didn’t buy much. We barely used our phones. And the trust was large last time I peeked at the bank statement that I wasn’t supposed to be peeking at.

I pointed to Mom’s pictures. “See that wall?” A series of landscapes I never really liked. They were dull. I didn’t care how long they’d last, how every zone was represented, or how meticulously she’d framed them. Who gives a shit about a tree stump and a triptych of large rocks? “I want a Roy O’Brien on that wall. Something that screams at me. I want that.” I didn’t tell him about the German expressionist oven paintings in my head.

“I have to get back to work,” he said.