But, sensei, how can it matter what I forget? I never saw like you! Anyway, once the photograph is made, the subject will be safe!
He kept saying: So sad, so sad! — Then I remembered that his bones hurt. — Pressing more sake upon him until he grew drunk, I asked how he felt about that geisha portrait, and he said: Every picture tortures me.
I wished to photograph him, in order to hide and cherish him like the ashes of someone loved. Was he two or were we one?
Again he asked why I had disturbed him, and I answered: To save everything. — He said: That’s why you’re expected tonight.
It was the time when people begin to go away, and the cemetery crows stop cawing, the hour when the crickets sing: How sad, how sad! Thinking that what had been might be again, and thirsting for those beautiful things — which is merely to say all the things I had seen, ever brighter by contrast with my greying life, not as if they were any better than whatever the moon would reveal tonight, or the sun tomorrow, although it did appear (but why should this be so?) that these things were truest of all, truer still because once photographed, printed and toned they could be held in my hand, moved closer and farther from my gaze or studied at various angles, without changing — or if they did alter it would be slowly, over the progression of several lifetimes, so that their degradation could be ignored or denied — I opened the gate, which someone had closed at dusk, and strolled past the pine tree whose roots kept stealthily parting the flagstones of the Naito family tomb just as I once parted my bride’s skirts. Whether something was spying on me I could not tell. The moon was as white as a geisha’s neck. The memory sticks were black. In a newer briefcase than the old man’s I carried a bottle of snow-white sake. I felt afraid, but hoped to cross the Bridge of Light. My heartbeats resembled the many holes within the dark skeleton of a dead lotus. Bending over my camera’s tomb, I bowed and clapped my hands twice. Oh, I was no uninvited guest! There came an odor of smoke and stale incense, a warm nauseous dizziness as of fever, and so I felt allured.
Fulfilling my promise, I now poured out sake in my teacher’s honor, and there at once he stood, taller than a cryptomeria tree. His forehead was too high to be visible, but when an oval of darkness grew more opaque I understood that he had opened his mouth.
Praying for everything I had seen and known to be saved, I flew up past the stone lamps, up the wet lichened wall of black stone cubes, to the vermilion façade inset with brass-framed phoenixes and dragons. The old man’s jaws closed around me with a click. Now I could be happy, in the place where pictures are made.
And so I had entered my old camera, or his, which was magnified — or, more likely, I myself had shrunk, after the fashion of old things. The vast metal plate had clicked shut behind me; I remembered that. My fears departed, my longings now shut out, I thought to guard my unfinished dreams. I found myself in the rubescent light of an antique darkroom, whose trays of hyposulphite and boiling selenium gave off those choking sulphurous and briny stenches I loved so well, here in the place where no voice is heard. Within the reel where the fresh film canister would have been seated, I presently discovered a spiral staircase which led me to a round chamber where some high-shouldered daguerreotypist with his back turned toward me was fuming mercury, the silvered plate already tilted to the proper angle. Since he had not observed me, I quietly redescended. The stinging vapors of the selenium now attacked my eyes and nostrils. Passing them by as rapidly as possible, I met with a tray of running water, a still tray of hypo clearing agent in which several sheets of paper floated face down, two trays of fresh-smelling fixer, a vinegary tray of stop bath, which of all my chemicals I used to find most unpleasant to mix, then a tray of developer evidently of the warmtone type, for its exhalations made me nauseous and itchy at once; in the red light, the latter liquid appeared tarry, evidently from precipitated silver; it must have received several sheets of photographic paper already. At last I reached the takeup reel, and, instructed by symmetry, easily discovered the other staircase which took me, as of course it would, to my old enlarger, whose timer was singing away the seconds while the incandescent bulb glowed white, projecting upon the wall above and behind it crooked rays like the legs of a shining spider whose head was the bulb itself. Musing over the easel, where the light cast down the negative’s image upon the paper, stood that same tall, high-shouldered gentleman who had been and perhaps still was fuming mercury in the other tower; he now turned toward me, with an agility I found unwholesome even before I saw his face, which was as featureless as the paper’s latent image. So was he infinitude or utter negation? Just then the timer flicked off and the chamber went dark. Sensing, although I could hear nothing, that he must be bending toward me, as if to get his long pale hands about my neck, I rushed down the stairs, not knowing whether he were an inch behind or had returned to withdraw the exposed sheet of paper, which in any event he would momentarily be carrying down to the chemical baths, because this is how we photographers bear our messages from this world to the world which will come; and indeed, just as I reached the door at the base of the tower, although I had heard no footfall behind me, I felt breath on the back of my neck. The horror I experienced then, when I comprehended that his mouth could be no more than a handspan away, and that his arms perhaps already drew in about me, ought to have stupefied me, in which case I could have been developed and pickled just like the kneeling geisha, but somehow I was able to throw myself down the last step and roll into the sticky, poisonous concretions beneath the long shelf-sink of trays. Now in the rubescent darkroom atmosphere I could see his tall, slender legs, white as a crane’s. His semiskeletonized majesty was as coherent and inevitable, if not as visible, as the sheen of brass chrysanthemum bolts marching in double rows up the black wood of a drum tower. He was as immense as a cedar. Although I supposed that he would promptly bend down and reach for me, he hesitated, perhaps for fear of exposing his fingers to chemical contamination, and therefore staining his prints. And very possibly he held that sheet of lightstruck paper in one hand. If he slipped it into the developer tray, I would gain five and a half to seven and a half minutes while it traveled from bath to bath, each station of which he must rock like a baby. If he set it down anywhere else, it might be ruined by some unseen chemical. While he pondered, I crawled as swiftly and silently as I could toward the other end of my camera, burning my palms and knees in puddles of ferricyanide bleach. My gorge rose and my eyes watered, but my heart pounded for fear of him who (or was it his twin?) now knelt down ahead of me, fishing for me with his long arms. Reversing course, I spied his double likewise hunting me — no shelter within this dark world! Nothing remained to me but to crawl out between those pallid twins, who straightened at once, as I could see all too well in the ruby light, and began to stride toward me with the delicate rapidity of spiders. Fortunately, I now reached what my hands remembered, for I had loved this camera so well that its workings nearly matched those of my own nerves and bones; here was the cam which used to come into play when I pressed the shutter release. Even as my two enemies commenced to strangle me, I rotated it ninety degrees, then pulled, so that the great spring-loaded mirror whirled beneath us as the lens opened and let in moonlight. I glimpsed my own desperate face, silvered down by the lunar rays. Clutching at their own eyeless, noseless faces, which were already blackening with the reliable rapidity of unfixed silver halides, the demons froze, and then, far too late, sought to preserve themselves by dunking their heads into the two hyposulphite baths. Reopening the lens again, reassured by my orbiting flash of face, I this time employed the moonshine to discover the inner catch on the camera back, during which instant my enemies, all the more discommoded by this second exposure to light, trembled hopelessly, while fixer ran down their legs; and pitilessly I pressed the catch, which swung the camera back utterly open.