My mom waited patiently, wearing a lavender sweater set which I’d never seen before, and I wondered if she’d bought it just for this occasion. As I zoomed in and focused the camera, the slanted smile on her face became clear as the image sharpened. She asked, “Are we ready to go?” I took a step back from the camera and gave a thumbs up. She nodded. “Okay. So, what is it that you’d like to know.” “I’d like to know my father,” I said. “Would you please tell me about him. Important things, even if you’ve talked about them before. I want to preserve them here. And tell me the little things too, since it’s the little things that add up to make a life.” “Oh gosh, that is a lot,” my mom said, tucking a curl behind her ear in a thoughtful gesture. “Well, I suppose it’s important to start with how we met. Your dad was in college studying photography. He’d known he wanted to be a photographer, ever since his mom gave him a polaroid camera for his birthday, and she had to drive to the store on the same day for a second pack of film since he used up the one the camera came with before they’d cut the cake.” My mom smiled and got lost in thought for a few seconds, like she was imagining the antics of her husband as a little boy. I sat silently while the recording rolled, enjoying the look on her face as much as the story, and in no mood to rush either. After a moment, she continued, “Anyway, I met him when he was 20 and I was 21. He still carried a polaroid camera with him everywhere, even though he now had access to a darkroom to develop film. He told me cameras reminded him of the joy he felt as a little boy taking his first picture. And I saw that camera before I saw his face – I was browsing the shelves at the library. Just as I found the book I needed for class, I smiled. Then I heard a click and looked up. Your father was on the other side of the shelf, and he’d taken my picture.” I’d heard this story before, but I still chuckled at the indignant look on my mother’s face. I could just picture her glaring at my dad. I said, “And then you gave him a piece of your mind.” She nodded. “I told him how creepy he was being. He apologized and said he’d leave, and I told him not without giving me that photo. He passed it to me over the stack of books and then left.” My mom pulled a polaroid from her sweater’s pocket, which she held up for the camera. Then she leaned forward to hand it to me. “Turn it over. Do you see? He wrote his number on the back of it. I didn’t notice until after he’d left. I nearly didn’t call him. For all I knew, he was a pervert. I almost threw away the photo.” “Why didn’t you?” I asked, looking at the photo of my mom smiling at the book in her hands. The lighting of the photo was interesting. Half her face was in shadow, almost blending in with her dark hair, but the other half was lit by a window high on the library’s wall. “I couldn’t throw it away once I looked at the picture. I knew when I saw it that he was an artist, and a talented one at that. It was the most beautiful picture I’d ever seen of myself. So, I called him, and we had our first date that weekend.” “Let’s skip forward a bit,” I requested, moving to the next question planned for this filmed interview. “I’d like to hear more about your married years. Could you describe a typical Saturday morning for me please?” “Hmm…” My mom looked up and to the left as she thought. Then she continued, “Well if it’s Saturday morning, we’re having pancakes for breakfast. Your father was the master of the griddle. It’s amazing he was able to cook anything in our little kitchen. Right out of college, the only house we could afford was our little place right in the heart of the city. We practically had to buy dollhouse furniture to fit it. But we had each other and pancakes. Your father made the best pancakes. We had breakfast together every Saturday. As we ate, I would be reading the New Yorker, while your father read the New York Times, and we’d tell each other about what we were reading.” “That’s a tradition you kept up,” I said, remembering all the Saturdays I spent listening to my mom reading excerpts from the New Yorker. The pancakes had been Eggos though, and I couldn’t help wondering what it would’ve been like to have my dad there reading too. My mom smiled. “And after breakfast, he’d go to his darkroom of course. I used to call him a wizard stirring his cauldron. Because that’s how it looked to me. He was magic. He used a box to capture light. But the light was still invisible on the blank paper. It wasn’t until he submerged the paper in a solution that the image formed. I watched him work so many times, but it was always magic to me.” It wasn’t magic though. * * * It was science. Hydroquinone, monomethyl para-aminophenol sulfate and phenidone. The most common developing solutions. I could see where my mother was coming from, as a literary major. She viewed the world through the lens of an artist who paints with words, so that’s how she described my father’s job. Since he was an artist as well, I’m uncertain how he would’ve described his work. Was he also awed by the way the image formed on the paper when submerged in a chemical bath? Or did he view it clinically, through the eyes of a scientist who could describe each stage of the process? I would never know since he wasn’t here to tell me. But I’d come to a realization; I might not know my father, but I could learn his craft. And learn it in a way that excites me. In the lab at college, I prepared a fixer, following a recipe. As I dissolved 180 g of crystalline sodium thiosulfate in 500 ml of double-distilled water, I felt my breathing quicken. This was my art form. The shine of a beaker. The shimmer of a crystal in a distillate. The scent of a flask as it heats over a Bunsen burner. I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful than the process of making these chemicals in the lab. I was going to try though. I wanted to see my father’s process, so I bottled up the fixer and cleaned the equipment. As I packed the chemicals in my bag, I took out a camera, a standard Bolex H-16. It was one of my dad’s 16mm film cameras, but not one he’d typically used. He had collected cameras as well as using them, and this model was manufactured between 1949 and 1950. Surprisingly, Kodak still made film for it, though in black and white only. The content of the film didn’t concern me too much, only the development process. As I stepped outside, I opened the lens cap on the 8mm film camera and started filming as I walked. I pointed it at random things at first – a squirrel running across the sidewalk, the arch of an old building, a construction site where a wing was being added to the library. And then I started to unexpectedly enjoy myself. There was something thrilling about the process, something I didn’t usually feel outside of the lab. I found myself looking around for the next shot that had to be preserved, a girl reading a book under a tree, the chalkboard in a public square where upperclassmen had written the freshmen welcome messages, the garden circling a statue of the mascot, and the bench dedicated to a teacher who’d sat there every day for 40 years eating his lunch. Just as I had filmed the empty bench, the film ran out much sooner than I’d hoped. These three-inch reels could only record a few minutes of footage. I reminded myself that it was development I was interested in, not photography. So, I put the cap back on the camera lens and hurried home to my darkroom. * * * “This is wrong…” I said as I stared at the results being projected onto the wall before me. I had followed every step in the process perfectly. After winding the film into a canister while in the darkroom, I had poured the developing fluid I’d mixed in it and shook the canister. Once finished, I took the film out, dried it, and then loaded it in my dad’s old 16mm film projector to see the results. Everything I had filmed that day was still fresh in my memory, which is why it was so jarring to not recognize a single thing in the light being cast through my film. Was this even my film? The first possibility that occurred to me as I watched the people in the film, dressed in such strange clothing – poodle skirts, saddle shoes, padded suit coats, and slicked back hair – was that the film I used from the 1950s already developed? I might be new to photography, but even as a rookie I didn’t think I’d make a mistake like loading my camera with used film. As more scenes flashed past, like a Korean war protest in a square with chalk boards and students gathered under trees reading books while dressed in odd clothes, it wasn’t until the final scene on the film of a man sitting on a bench eating his lunch that I realized the oddest thing of all… these were all the locations I’d filmed, in the exact same order as well. It was my film, but also not. None of the people walking through these scenes were the ones I had passed today on the sidewalk. I turned off the projector, unable to understand the reel I’d just viewed. Hoping to see something that made more sense, I returned to my darkroom. There was some more footage I’d shot yesterday on a vintage 35mm film camera. The photos, which I’d developed in a bath of my finishing fluid, were now pinned to a clothesline running across the room. I found the clothespins by feel and unpinned the photographs from the line. When I carried them into the light, I dropped them in shock at what I saw. I settled onto my knees on the floor and spread the photographs out around me to get a better look. These had been taken on the beach, and what should have been normal snapshots of beachgoers suntanning in bikinis, children playing in the tide, and surfers waxing their boards were… different. Once again, it was the clothing that dated the photograph, and the bathing suits were modest and concealing black and white in the style of the 1940s. With a year in mind, I started to make a connection. My 35mm film camera was a Cine Kodak model K from the 1940s, and the beach photos looked to be shot in the 1940s as well. The same was true of the Bolex H-16 camera which I’d used to record the odd film on campus. Then I realized something that didn’t make sense. I had previously used the 35mm film camera to take pictures in a park, and I’d sent the film off to a Kodak lab. The pictures that came back looked normal, so what had changed? The developing fluid, which I had mixed myself. This was the first time I’d ever used it. Then I snapped myself out of it, as none of this was logical. Developing fluid that shows a glimpse of the past? Impossible. But… if it were possible, what could we see with it? I allowed myself to daydream for a second, forcing my scientific brain into the backseat. If there were such a fluid that could develop film that offers a window into the past, then what would be the implications of this technology? What could it be used for? There’d certainly be uses in the field of criminology. Any police case where there isn’t CCTV could be aided with a camera that develops old film. And it wasn’t just recent criminal cases that could be solved, I realized. There are working cameras from the 1930s. This technology could solve the kidnapping and death of the Lindbergh baby, finally naming his killer. My heart started to race as I thought of another great mystery, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart in the same decade – I imagined myself traveling to Nikumaroro Island, where some believe she lived out her final days after her plane crashed. What if I walked around the island with a camera from the 1930s and was able to develop film that showed her living there to finally prove what happened to her? It would no longer be a conspiracy theory. Some of the greatest mysteries of the modern world could be solved. As I sat there on my sofa with a camera in my hands and endless possibilities before me, they fell away one by one until only one next move remained. There was only one mystery that mattered. I got up and packed my bag with a camera. All of this was still crazy, I knew it. But I would allow myself to believe that the impossible was still possible for just a little bit longer. I could still be a scientist and still do this – it would just be an experiment. About 30 minutes later, I knocked on the door of my mom’s house in the heart of the city. When she opened it, I held up cups of coffee, as if I was just here to join her for a late breakfast. “Hi, can I come in? Sorry I didn’t call.” “Of course, sweetie! You never need to call. Come in, come in.” she said, waving me inside. As she led me through the living room, she asked, “Have you eaten yet? I was just about to make breakfast.” “I haven’t. I’d love some. Thank you!” We entered the kitchen, though I lingered by the doorway. She hustled over to the stove, and she didn’t need to ask if I wanted bacon and eggs, since she knew I was always up for that. My mother didn’t turn to me as she said, “There’s a box of your toys on your old bed. I wasn’t sure if you wanted them, or if it was okay to give them to charity. Before you go today, would you mind taking a look and letting me know?” “Sure,” I said, as I pulled the old camera out of my shoulder bag. I took a quick panning shot of the kitchen, the same kitchen my parents shared during their marriage, and I focused on the table where my mom said my father used to read the newspaper while she cooked. Taking a step back, I said, “I think I’ll go do that now while you cook.” Then I slowly walked through the house, holding the camera as steady as I could while I pointed the camera at every spot my father might have once stood. It felt like I was hunting for his ghost, and I knew that I had jumped on the crazy train, but I just wanted to enjoy the ride for a little bit, if this path might lead to me seeing my father’s face on film. And while I knew what he looked like and had looked at every existing photograph and film of him a hundred times, the fact that there were a finite number of films made the possibility of seeing something new priceless. I ended up at my father’s darkroom, where I opened the door and peered inside. It was similar to the one I had built at my own apartment, but it was a living monument to the man rather than functional these days. All of the chemicals had dried up, dust had collected in the chemical trays, and cobwebs hung from the clothesline with pins rather than photographs. If my father could be seen anywhere in this house, I knew it would be here. After getting a good look, I turned off the antique movie camera and shut the door on the past, so I could briefly return to the present. * * * A day had passed, and yet I remained frozen in the moment where I turned on a 16mm film projector to view the film I had developed. If I was crazy, then this train was still rolling down the tracks – even before my father walked into frame on the camera, I knew it had worked. The house appeared like I’d never seen it outside of photographs, with modern-style furniture, geometrical wallpaper, and shag carpet. I knew that if my film were in color – Kodachrome unfortunately only makes black and white film now – that the room would be in bold primary colors. And there was my father, darting in and out of the frame. It wasn’t a perfect video, as I hadn’t known precisely where he’d stand as I filmed a two-minute reel while wandering through the house, but he was there too in the past, drifting past me like a phantom ship adrift at sea. I caught little glimpses of him at first: his back as he stood at the sink washing a dish, his face blocked by a newspaper as he lifted it to read, and his profile as he strolled past me down the hall. But then I found him in the place I most hoped to see him – his darkroom. It was a scene my mom had never photographed before, so I’d only imagined it. This was such a mundane thing for her to see every day, so she’d felt no need to preserve the simple scene of him strolling into his favorite room to unpin from the clothesline and examine the dried photographs he’d developed that morning. As I watched the scene projected on the wall by my 16mm film projector, my father smiled seeing the photograph in his hand, and little creases appeared at the corners of his eyes. Just as quickly as he appeared before me, my father vanished with the rustle of the film flapping away on the projector as nothing but bright light flashed on the wall until I turned it off. It had run out. I started shaking. This wasn’t enough. I needed to see more. I was a scientist though, not someone who would just lose herself in the frenzy of a task, so I took a centering breath and picked up the camera I had used to film this footage. It was just a vintage ARRI S/B 16mm film camera from 1981, one of hundreds of models made that year – which just happened to be the same approximate year in the life of my father I’d just filmed. So, why this camera? Why could I use it to see into the past? Then I realized, this wasn’t the only camera I had used. The first strange film I’d shot was using a Bolex H-16 camera from the 1950s on campus, and I’d confirmed the approximate date using the age of the old professor sitting on a bench, which was later dedicated to his memory after his death. Based on this, I’d theorized that I might be able to see my father using a camera model from that time. This hadn’t proved my theory since it was only one more data point, but it hadn’t disproved it either. I needed more data. And maybe a neutral group for comparison? For a price, Kodak will still develop black and white film or photographs developed for certain camera models on vintage or reproduction films. That would be interesting to compare it to my film. As I formulated the plan to test my theory, I gathered the various models of vintage cameras I had around me. More than anything, I wanted to go back to my mother’s house to see Dad again. But first, I had to know for sure what was going on. At least, in as much as I could understand it by testing. * * * “Hi, sweetie! How are… oh!” my mother exclaimed, as I pushed past her to get inside my childhood home. “Sorry, Mom,” I hurried to explain, as I was already tugging a camera out of my bag. It was an old camera my dad owned, and my mom would probably recognize it. “I don’t have time to explain. There’s something I need to show you. Just wait, and you’ll see.” “Okay,” she said patiently, stepping back to watch what I’d do. I followed the same path I had last time I filmed the house, though this time I had a vintage 35mm film camera with me to take photographs rather than film and I lingered on the areas where he’d shown up before. As I once more stood before the open door to the darkroom and pointed the camera into the empty room, my mother’s patience started to wear thin. She sighed and said, “Would you mind telling me what this is about now?” “Just give me a few more seconds, Mom,” I said, as I panned the camera around the room, taking some more shots. Finally, the film ran out, and I turned to my mother with a triumphant grin. “There! I have what I need.” “I thought you said you were going to show me something,” she asked with an arched eyebrow. “I will show you, just as soon as I develop the film,” I said, reaching into my bag once more while the camera hung from a strap around my neck. I pulled out a compact developing tank with a spiral reel inside it, as well as a small jug of developing fluid that was concerningly light but would get the job done. My grin widened and I said, “Luckily, we have a darkroom right here.” Her eyes widened, as I’d never expressed an interest in using my dad’s darkroom before. As far as I knew, no one had been in there since his death. But she shrugged and said, “Have fun. Come get me when you’re done with whatever this is.” When I stepped into the pitch black of my father’s darkroom, I expected to feel the usual comfortable solitude I felt in the one I’d built in my home. Yet it was different here. As I wound the 35mm film onto the spiral reel in preparation for adding the developing fluid, I felt like he was standing beside me. About an hour later, I came stumbling out of the room, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the light. “Mom! Mom, come see this!” I shouted. Yet I didn’t wait for her to come. I ran through the house until I found her in the kitchen and waved the freshly developed photographs at her, the corners still damp with fluid though I’d used a hairdryer. “Do you see it? Do you see him?” She blinked at me like an owl, only have risen from the chair at the kitchen table where she’d been arranging coupons. “Can I at least put on my glasses? My gosh…” my mother said, pushing the photographs away, until she’d retrieved the glasses from her shirt pocket. As I practically bounced with excitement and impatience, I ignored the exasperated look my mother shot me and urged, “Please look. You have to see this.” Finally, once her glasses were situated on her face, my mother flipped through the photographs. As someone who lived with a professional photographer, they probably looked worse than the work of an amateur to her – the lighting was off, the subject wasn’t always in focus, and nothing was properly framed – but it was the content that was extraordinary. There he was again, the person we’d lost, living his life in photographs that had never been taken during that life. After flipping through all the shots of my father, she looked up at me with a blank expression. “Very nice,” she said, passing them back to me. I took the stack of photos stiffly and said, “Is that it?” She shrugged. “What do you want me to say? You’re getting very good at photoshop.” “Mom, this isn’t…” I spread them across the tabletop on her coupons, hoping she’d see what they were if she looked again. “I made this chemical in the lab at college, and it does this. I don’t know how yet, but it just works. It does this. I’ve taken thousands of photos, and it always does this. It’s incredible, isn’t it? It’s impossible, but somehow it is.” “Honey,” my mother said gently, grasping my wrist to still it as my hands hurried over the photos. “Please sit down. I want to talk to you.” She waited until I sat wordlessly to continue. “I’m not sure what you see in these photos. I’m looking at you, not them, and I’m concerned. When you started getting into photography, I understood that you were searching for something. For him.” She gestured to the photographs. “For your father. But this isn’t how you find him. This isn’t you.” I opened and closed my mouth several times, searching for a way to get her to understand that the photographs weren’t fake. That I’d actually found a way to see him. Her words distracted me though, so I asked, “What do you mean?” She squeezed my wrist again and said, “These things you’re doing, the rambling way you’re talking, it isn’t my daughter. The flights of fancy you’re having when you speak… My daughter is a brilliant scientist who only needs a few words to get her point across. It’s like this hobby has consumed you, and I get that you miss your father, but trying to become him won’t bring him back.” I didn’t know what to say. I said nothing. My mother cupped my cheek to make sure I met her gaze and couldn’t flinch away. “Sweetie, you can’t lose yourself in something like this. You won’t find him by losing who you are, and he wouldn’t want that. He never got to meet you, but he would have loved you. So, you have to be yourself. For him.” I swallowed heavily. Then I nodded. * * * “Well, Dad. It looks like I found you. And you’re where I always knew you were.” The sun was high in the sky, casting my shadow across my father’s headstone. It was strange to think that this stone had been here as long as I had been alive. I crouched down so I could rest a hand on the stone and said, “It feels strange talking to you like this, when we’ve never had a conversation. But I have to say it to someone. This is going to be my final report on the results of my experiment.” I pulled a notebook from my jacket pocket and read to my father, “My hypothesis was proven, though there is still little information about why this phenomenon occurred. The Kodak corporation’s film processing yielded the expected average – images in the present day which I recorded using the cameras, nothing extraordinary. This is in contrast to the images which I developed at home, the most remarkable of which was a scene on the boardwalk recorded using a Bell & Howell 70-DL 16mm Filmo Camera, which like the rest rendered images that were likely from the year it was made, 1927, as indicated by the clothing worn by people in the film. The exception to this came when I attempted to make new developing fluid, and the results using this fluid were comparable to that of the Kodak professional development. That is to say, only the first batch of developing fluid I made has had the ability to show a view of the past. And I’ve tried 23 times to recreate the fluid without success.” “This is it, Dad,” I said, as I put the plastic bottle with the last splash of fluid in it on his headstone. “I spend every night thinking about it. I could get a mass spectrometer to analyze a sample, and perhaps I’ll find that tiny molecular difference in this chemical compound, maybe after years of study, and I’ll find a way to manufacture more. A thing like this could change the world… but to be honest all I want to see again is you. I don’t want to spend years studying this thing; I want to use this last splash to develop one last batch of film just to see you.” I rubbed roughly at my cheeks and took a steadying breath before continuing. “But Mom is right. None of that will bring you back. And I know you don’t want me to spend my life chasing you. So, this is it. I’ve got to let you go, Daddy.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so I stood up and stepped onto the path that would lead me back to my car. I had let him go in my heart so that I could walk forward in life again, but in my mind he remained with me in a way that pushed me forward rather than holding me back. I closed my eyes and behind my lids was the blackness of a darkroom, and he stood beside me watching me work. He always would.
Erica Berquist’s work has been published in Grub Street Literary Magazine’s volumes 65 and 71, Levitate Magazine issue 7, Sheepshead Review’s Spring 2023 Edition, OFIC Magazine issue 6, and Marathon Literary Review issue 24. In her free time, she enjoys making jewelry, researching family history, gardening, and spending time with cats.