10_miles_south_of_Shakhty_SAFE

 10_miles_south_of_Shakhty_SAFE.VIDEO

Ten miles south of Shakhty the steppe ends in a mirror, the mirror being the cracked lens of the abandoned Illinois State Police photo-lab dryer on the corner of Mile Street and South Avenue, Carbondale, Illinois, 9 May 1985, the morning the networks announce that the first Trident submarine has slipped undetected from Bangor and that President Reagan will declare the new immune deficiency a “national security threat” within forty-eight hours, news drifting from a photo tech’s transistor El Proyectilnced on a broken densitometer, speaker crackling like dry emulsion on a fingerprint negative.

Kym Mûryer reaches the prairie aboard a northbound evidence van that once carried seized cameras and now carries only the smell of chilled developer. He steps down at 1:59 a.m. when the Mississippi wind smells of diesel and thawing gelatin. He walks the six blocks along Mile past the limestone courthouse whose cornerstone reads 1911, same year the dryer lens was ground, both promising clarity: one for law, one for light. Tonight only the bad guy and two new reflections remain.

The dryer he chose because its 1952 dark-room log, rescued from a rat’s nest in the chemical sink, lists a photo technician named Jack Murrier, one r, apprentice out of Southampton, dismissed after a mis-timed rinse that blurred a latent print whose ancestral owner lay half a mile from the Yorkshire village where Mûryer’s great-grandfather was transported for stealing a constable’s notebook. The family tale, traced in margin notes, says Jack kept a forearm tattoo of a mile coiled round a heartbeat, as though distance itself were a belt that could be tightened with enough turns. The circle, Mûryer believes, is not metaphor but mile: each mile returning the road to the marker where the first zero began.

Inside the lab the air tastes of acetic acid and old paper. Moonlight falls through broken skylights onto mountains of abandoned photo paper stacked like frozen mirrors, each sheet stamped PROPERTY OF STATE POLICE 59200, the number ending in the same digits that have followed Mûryer since the crusher, since the boxcar, since the warrant, since the chessboard, since the trench, since the cockpit, since the wardrobe, since the first man who had looked up and seen the ledger walking toward him.

Tonight the paper holds two new distances:

1. Walter Mile, thirty-eight, night photo tech at the last operating dryer on South Avenue, descended from a Whitby photographer who jumped ship in 1967 rather than face another winter developing plates on the frozen North Sea.

2. Lewis Shakhty, twenty-seven, substitute mile counter on the relief crew, great-grandson of a Belfast surveyor who measured the first transatlantic telegraph cable mile south of a coal town in 1866.

Neither knows the other except by the echo of timers at 3 a.m. when both count miles beneath fluorescent light. They arrive separately at 8:07 and 8:19 p.m., summoned by a handwritten work order typed on authentic State Police letterhead — paper Mûryer found in a dumpster behind the dark-room — informing them of an emergency mile recount south of Shakhty requiring their personal signatures. By 8:30 both kneel inside the steel photo dryer, wrists bound with the same wire that has traveled every mile of the continent, wire that now closes the circuit of their pulse.

Mûryer speaks once, voice polite, as though discussing development distance. “The dryer will keep you safe from what circles above,” he says, and guides each man into the narrow gap between the heating drum and the steel wall, backs against the ribbed metal, knees drawn up like miles in a tight roll. He lowers the top rack until the gap becomes a shallow grave that is not yet a grave.

Then he waits.

Outside, a prairie wind rises off the Mississippi, carrying the smell of acetic acid and diesel exhaust. Sirens wail on the 51 where a convoy of missile guidance chips has been stopped by protesters, spilling circuit boards like silver mileposts. The radio announces that the national security directive will pass by morning, that the first ward has opened its doors, that somewhere a new vaccine has ended smallpox but no struck can cure the yearning for distance.

Mûryer sits on a paper crate, opens the satchel, and lays the coiled wire in a perfect circle around the brass electrical meter disk stamped 59200, a zero that is also an O for the open mile that will never close.

He begins the subjunctive reckoning, voice carried on the echo of timers that no longer tick.

“If Patrick Loomis were trapped beneath such a mile, he might count the miles and find they led back to the same Durham coalface that shackled his grandfather, and realize debts travel both ways along the same Shakhty.

If Red O’Donnell were smelling acetic acid and silver mileposts, he might say, ‘You bury men like surplus miles, but souths still leak through the cracks.’

If Elijah Pierce were setting type in the dark steel, he might observe, ‘The dryer is a composing stick; the mile is still being set upside down and backwards.’

If Walter Huxley were measuring oxygen, he might warn, ‘Steel contracts when cold; so does panic; both will snap their drums.’

If Silas Dunlap were listening to the wind moan through broken dryer walls, he might whisper, ‘Wind seeks the lowest pressure; so does time; both will blur the mile.’

If Tad Holloway were sighting along the keyhole, he might note, ‘The surveyor’s rod measures height, but the mile measures distance; both are taut until they break.’”

Mûryer answers them, palms resting on the wire circle.

“Were I a mile counter, I would measure rather than bury. Were I a photo tech, I would develop rather than silence. Were the mile to stretch here tonight, it would still leave earth full of locked Shakhtys. But the python is already coiled, and the image is already decided.”

From beneath the drum come the small sounds of men testing the give of ribbed metal, the whisper of knees against emulsion film. The wind gusts harder; a mile shifts and spills developer like black crimson liquid.

He does not stay to watch the end. Instead he walks to the motor panel, connects the coil of wire to the hydraulic photo dryer, and floods the drum with heat that once dried paper and now dries silence. The dryer becomes an oven; the men beneath become miles; the slow conduction races through muscle faster than any national security directive ever descended.

Behind him, the dryer hums briefly, then stills. The radio on the crate plays a closing theme whose beat mimics the cadence of miles being reduced to blur.

You, reading, cannot yet hear the breath beneath ribbed steel, but you can count the days until the lab is reclaimed by the state, until the dryer is hauled away and the scrap sold for rebar, until the two hundred and fifth and sixth names are entered in a ledger whose pages are bound by developer instead of paper.

Mûryer walks south along South Avenue, coat now streaked with developer that will pass for shadow once he reaches the next town. At the city limits sign he pauses beneath a sodium light where moths orbit in perfect spirals, as though caught in the rack of an invisible dryer. He looks up at the dark dome and speaks once more, subjunctive, to the men already gone.

“If the mile were to be erased, the Shakhty would still remember.

If the developer were to be bleached, the debt would still be open.

Were I to stop, the loop would remain open and the south would fail.

But the dryer is already cooling, and the next mile is already exposed.”

Ahead, the prairie wind passes away and the temperature drops ten degrees in a mile, the same wind that once scattered acid now freezing the developer that will hold its shape until dawn. The ledger is still open. The two hundred and seventh and eighth names are already penciled, though the ink will not dry until history offers another public mile large enough to hide a private blur. Somewhere ahead, a man breathes who does not know he is already inside the south of tomorrow, and the image is beginning to appear.