Part 9

     The next day, I still ache from my fall. I feel like I'm never going to feel normal again – but already, I'm limping a little less around the store when I go to work. I suppose a good, responsible person would have gone to a doctor and gotten checked out, but... I really think I'm only bruised, and I'm in that fun little limbo zone where I'm technically still on my parents' health care, but with them living two hours away, I haven't seen a doctor in quite awhile, since I don't have one locally, just the one I always saw back before going away to school.
     But I should be fine. Really, even with the assorted aches and scrapes, I feel so much better than I have in... in a very, very long time. I have no trouble-- well, a little trouble getting up in the mornings, being so stiff, but it's less trouble than I've had in an age. I have so much more energy than I used to, I feel... I feel like I have something to look forward to, when I get up in the morning, and I almost hate going to sleep now, anxious to get going with the next day, where I might uncover another tiny scrap of the Masons, where I might understand some new little aspect of their personalities.
     “I'd like to make myself believe that planet earth turns slowly, it's hard to say that I'd rather stay awake when I'm asleep, 'cause everything is never as it seems when I fall sleep...”
     Look at this, I am listening to ridiculous foofy pop music! I remember when every “serious” music person was mocking the living daylights out of “Fireflies”, and Owl City in general. I think I remember someone describing it as “music for the younger siblings of Postal Service fans”. Which is funny, because even Postal Service, while I still have a soft spot for them, I feel like I've outgrown, their deliberate attempts to be clever just seem pretentious to me now.
     ...not that this is any better: “'Cause I'd get a thousand hugs from ten thousand lightening bugs as they try to teach me how to dance. A foxtrot above my head, a sock-hop beneath my bed, a discoball is just hanging by a thread.” Oh my lord, I wish I hadn't paid attention to the words! I was enjoying it so much more before I actually listened to and comprehended full lines.
     But, I still crank it up a few notches more when it hits the chorus. If it makes me happy, who cares? “'Cause I'd like to make myself believe...”
     I'm just finishing washing up some dishes (it's completely insane, how many I go through, when there's only one person eating around here!), and trying to decide if I want to tackle the fried photos of doom tonight. I've done a couple of sketches, of the way the photos look in my head, just rough things to jog my memory, in case I don't have the photos themselves anymore. I could work on one of those – or one of the fifty thousand other sketches I have laying around the apartment still.
     But I'm not going to be able to calm down until I know one way or the other on the photo files. I'm off of work tomorrow, and while I've planned to head into town... I'm not really going to need to be all that awake to stare at microfilm of old newspapers, I'll be a bleary mess five minutes into the project no matter how much sleep I get tonight.
     Drying off my hands, I pull my iPod out of my pocket. Time for a playlist of Japanese pop music – best stuff to have on when I'm plowing through an endless kind of project at night.
     “Perfect star, perfect style... I still---” and then into Japanese, which I know about five words of. “...a todokanai.” Though I can fake a few when they're in songs.
     I flop down at my computer desk, and clear a few papers away, so I won't get annoyed when I inevitably knock them over. Alright. I pull up the file browser, and make a third copy of the images in question, putting them in their own folder, just to make my life a little easier while I'm going through looking at them. Part of me feels like I'm making the situation worse, by copying over and again... but I know intellectually that a digital copy is in no way a degradation of the original. Dad has told me this a thousand times, though he agrees with me that it doesn't “feel” right. He said he's copied too many cassette tapes through too many generations of copies to be able to really trust any kind of duplication.
     I try opening the files again, just for fun, and no luck. Try viewing them in thumbnail mode, and as a slideshow – slight variations in the tiny-static-bit-of-image and then vanishing into an error message. Then I try opening them in a few different programs, to see if, by some magical chance, that will help. I try a few image programs and a couple of web browsers, while letting Photoshop load up in the background. (Doesn't matter how many times I upgrade my computer, Photoshop is always going to feel like it takes forever to open.) I try a few .pdf readers, then, seeing Photoshop is open, let clunky old Microsoft Word open up in the background, while I try the pictures in Photoshop. (Half of the customers who bring in photos for us to print and make copies of, bring in a Word file, with the photo in it. I have no idea why. Thank goodness they're rarely picky about image quality, I have no idea what Word does when you embed a picture into it, and that's probably best for my own sanity.)
     Photoshop takes awhile to try opening the files... error, error, error, error, error, aaaaand...
     And there's an image.
     It's really screwed up, there are neon-colored bars along the top and bottom, and several scattered across the rest of the image. But it's Evelyn – the sketchbook in her lap, her hands resting against her lavender skirt and the pages of the book, which are filling with the swirls of her script. I realize my breath has stopped, and my heart is pounding. I have proof... it's really been happening. My camera – a disinterested, objective party, if ever there was one – saw what I saw. I mean, I have the sketchbook too, but, I haven't showed it to anyone yet, technically I could still be hallucinating that.
     Alright, so I could be hallucinating this, too. But I'm so wary of talking to anyone about this still – who would believe me? I certainly wouldn't believe me. This shot of Evelyn would be easy enough to stage... really, any of the photos I took could have been, and the handwriting been faked. So I guess it's not really proof that would stand up in court, but...
     But it's enough for me. I've been there. My fingers have moved to the screen, touching the image of Evelyn's hand, held behind the glass of the monitor. Evelyn... I don't know how, but I'm as real in your world as I am in my own. I've really been back to sit beside you, hidden behind that ridiculous screen from your crazy father.
     I try the rest of the photos, but no luck. Nothing in any of the other software I have on my system, either. But if one photo made it... maybe there's a way to get the others back.

     Eventually, I realize there's no music playing. I must have hit the end of the playlist, and was so zoned-out I didn't notice it. I turn off shuffle, turn it back on again to re-shuffle things, and hit play again. I have several tabs in my browser open, and I'm glad I looked away for a few seconds – my eyes are really starting to glaze over. While I started out looking up troubleshooting for my specific camera, I didn't stay there long. Clearly, I can't look up the actual problem, but searching for solutions to the symptoms has gotten me a few leads at least. Apparently, just trying to open things in different software wasn't a totally absurd thing to try, it looks like about half the time that will solve the trouble. Most of the results I'm getting deal with people who deleted the wrong files, and used recovery software, that didn't recover their files quite right... which isn't what happened to me, but it's possible it would have a similar effect. Since the image I have, as little chunks out of whack, it would make sense that the others all have chunks out of whack as well. But the affect must have been random enough that it's different areas of each file that got hit, so while I was able to open one and have sections of it the wrong color, the others must be screwed up somewhere in the information that opens the file, or specifies where the image starts or something maybe? Because everything recognizes it's an image file...
     What I would give to have a comp sci major to stalk about now. I wonder if anyone I've friended on Facebook ever went that direction in college? ...but I'll leave that as my next step, once I exhaust my current plans of attack, that would be another project in itself.
     Oh my God. I sit back and scrub at my eyeballs, then shake my head to clear it. I've found something that looks technical enough to actually be effective, rather than just playing with surface-level things like changing settings. But this... this is messing with the actual code of the file. That sounds right, but, holy crap is that scary to little art-student-me.
     I get up, go to the fridge, and grab a beer. I set the beer on my desk, and do some stretches. Switch to a techno playlist, because maybe it will give me good techie-vibes. Then I sit back down, pop open the beer, and start to read the small white-on-black text of a very long forum thread.