Then there’s a cut, a lag, during which Abbott must have viewed the playback. When we return he seems shaken, slightly manic, while Sidlo appears . . . basically the same. Almost bored by his own powers, calloused over through constant interaction with the miraculous.
DR. ABBOTT: My God. My . . . God, yes. How incredible! How—that is truly remarkable. Isn’t it? [As Sidlo gives him a look] Though yes, I suppose you have . . . no way of knowing, really.
SIDLO: Not as such.
DR. ABBOTT: And this was what you did for Mrs. Whitcomb?
SIDLO: More or less. She wanted the impression made on film, of course—silver nitrate, very particularly. Her medium of choice, though there were alternative stocks available by that time.
DR. ABBOTT: Interesting, considering its volatile nature.
SIDLO: Industrial alchemy, she called it. I knew nothing about such matters until she explained them to me, in detail. Silver nitrate was once one of the most important ingredients in such processes, lunar caustic or lapis infernalis, the hellish stone; silver could be sublimated by dissolving it in nitric acid, aqua fortis—strong water. Evaporating the solution then produces silver nitrate crystals that when applied to an organic substrate—paper, for example—become photo-sensitive, depositing tiny silver-black particles on any area exposed to light. With the addition of common salt, it also turns into silver chloride, two of the most important ingredients in the history of photography: a moon solution, to reflect—and summon—its opposite.
DR. ABBOTT: Summon? Summon what?
SIDLO: You wanted to know what the memory was, the one Mrs. Whitcomb wanted captured.
DR. ABBOTT: . . . Yes.
SIDLO: She wouldn’t tell me. But it didn’t matter, no more than with you just then; I picked it from her head, let it run through me, bloom like frost onto the reel of film we both held. It etched itself into the silver. [Pause] I couldn’t tell what she saw, not really. Being what I am isn’t the same thing as not being blind; even if I could actually see through other people’s eyes, I wouldn’t know what I was looking at. But I remember what I felt, intensely. I can still feel it.
DR. ABBOTT: Describe it.
SIDLO: Lying down, in long grass. Scratchy everywhere. Bugs . . . cicadas in the trees, very loud. Hot. There are other people all around me, just lying there, not moving. A bad smell. Very bad. And someone praying. And then—someone else is there, all of a sudden. Asking questions. A voice like . . . I don’t know. Terrible, brazen. Like a steel bell. Like nothing on earth.
DR. ABBOTT: And what happens then?
SIDLO: I start to cry.
DR. ABBOTT: Where did this person come from?
SIDLO: I don’t know.
DR. ABBOTT: Who are the other people?
SIDLO: I don’t know. I never knew.
DR. ABBOTT: Did Mrs. Whitcomb know?
SIDLO: . . . Yes.
DR. ABBOTT: She told you?
SIDLO: Not until later, but yes, she told me. Who she thought it was.
DR. ABBOTT: And who did she—?
SIDLO: You know. Her family, her father, Her. The Lady. The one who took her son, her Hyatt. The one from the field.
DR. ABBOTT: The field where Giscelia Wròbl’s father died.
SIDLO: That field, and every other. She lives everywhere, you see, at least once a day—that’s what Mrs. Whitcomb would say. Between the minute and the hour, at the very crack of noon. [Pause] She told me she was tired of thinking about that moment, so I took it out for her, as I said I would. And she was happy, and so was I—very happy, to have helped her, the best and most lovely woman I have ever known. I thought that would be the end of it, until . . .
DR. ABBOTT: Until?
SIDLO: She vanished. You’ve heard the story, surely.
DR. ABBOTT: Yes, we’ve done a fair amount of research into that, without much result. But you were there when it happened—what did you think? Did you expect her to be found?