Paul Klee
One of the attributes of writing is how it demands that you become an archeologist of your own life. Excavate, unearth, go deeper into the layers of who you are, were, and may become. In this sense, memory is a writer’s greatest asset and no telling what may boot it up – a casual remark or action, a particular scent or taste.
This evening, I went into Rob’s office to answer a question he had about one of my chapters in the new book. While I was leaning over his shoulder, looking at the section in the chapter, he asked if I could rub his neck. He remarked that he would be really happy to sit around all day and have someone massage his neck.
“Then your next wife should be Asian,” I said, and went off to find some cream for the massage.
I wondered why I’d said what I had and suddenly recalled Dr. Stowens, a pathologist I had worked for during my freshman or sophomore year in college. He was the lead pathologist in the hospital across the street from my college, and had hired me to develop and print photos of DNA, chromosomes and other microscopic stuff that was harvested during autopsies. My darkroom, in fact, was in the basement of the hospital, right alongside the morgue.
Many days when I walked into the morgue, a body would be on the table, awaiting autopsy. Sometimes it was covered, most of the time it was not. It invariably freaked me out to walk into that room and see someone on the table, a man or woman whose life had reached the end and whose body would now be carved up in the name of science. It wasn’t the physical body that disturbed me – the bloating, the strange pastiness of the skin, the total lack of expression, animation, life – but that the spirit had no home now. So one afternoon when I was in the darkroom and only a door stood between me and a body awaiting its autopsy, I silently asked the spirit of the body in the other room to communicate with me.
This was in the years way before digital photography, the Internet, home computers. It meant negatives, an enlarger, and certain types of high contrast photography paper, three or four trays filled with various chemicals, crucial timing for a piece of paper in each tray. The dark room was sealed against light leaks. The only lights were safe lights that didn’t register on the paper. Dr. Stowens’ morgue and dark room were impeccable. The dark room was well sealed, the high contrast paper and chemical were new. So as I proceeded developing the negatives, I kept thinking about the soul of the body in the other room and made my enlargements and placed them into the appropriate trays.
First sheet, first tray. I remember being bored and hungry and grateful that I had a part-time job. When I glanced at the paper in the first tray, I thought something was wrong with it. The paper was black except in the middle, where the word HI leaped out in pale, foggy letters. I removed the sheet from the tray, held it up to the safe light, recall being totally freaked out and dropping it into the solution that stopped the image from developing any further. From here, it went into the fix solution that stabilized the image.
When I removed it from that solution, when I turned on the overhead light, I just stood there staring at a print with the word HI scrawled across the center of it. I left the dark room and drove to a photo store and bought new chemicals, new photo paper, and went through the same process with the same negative. The results were the same. HI.
I went to Dr. Stowens with my silly proof of spirit communication. He was an interesting guy, this Stowens, who employed several of us from the college. If memory serves, he studied my multiple images. I sensed that his medical training battled his intuitive knowledge as a healer, a pathologist and as a man who dealt daily with the dead. “It’s a light leak,” he said.
“C’mon,” I said. “Since when do light leaks spell words?”
He just looked at me then with his wide, dark eyes. “Go back to work, Trish. Get me some good prints of those hose chromosomes.”
We both knew what was what. But he took the stance that he did because in those days, physicians who ventured into woo-woo land ended up unemployed.
Many years later, I was in town and found Dr. Stowens in the phone book and called him. He had retired, his wife had passed on, he had remarried. I thanked him for hiring me when I really needed a job. I could feel that HI incident between us, a third presence. But we talked around it. He asked what I was doing – I was working on my first novel then- and I asked about his second wife.
“She’s wonderful,” he said. “She’s Asian. She massages my neck and you know what? At this point in my life, I love it when my neck is massaged.”
I left it at that. We never spoke again. The photographic images of HI were lost in my numerous moves. But if I am pressed to name a mentor, it’s Dr. Stowens, the guy who got it but couldn’t admit it because of the times in which he lived. His offering me that job launched my search for what happens when we die and everything else that surrounds that question.
