ATDTDA (3) Daily Discombobulation, 64-69 1060-62

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Monte Davis:
You get two (at least) of everything in Against the Day,
but nobody promised they'd be matched sets.  

". . . .Back when I was still a junior alchemist, passing through 
What Cheer, Iowa, met up with this old-school spagyrist name 
of Doddling, who showed me how to get silver to grow just 
like a tree. Tree of Diana, he called it , goddess of the Moon 
and all. Take some silver, amalgamate it with quicksilver, put 
it in with just the right amount and strength of nitric acid, wait. 
Danm if pretty soon it won't start to put out branches, just like 
a tree only faster, and after a while even leaves."

     "Branches," said Lew.

     "Right before you eyes---or lens, 'cause you do need 
some magnification. Doddling said it's because silver is alive. 
Has forks in the road, choices to make, like the rest of us." (1060)

"And Merle saw the image appear. Come from nothing. Come in out of the pale
Invisible, down into this otherwise explainable world, clearer than real." (64)

MD:
"We've been on the border of Aether madness for a while. Should it surprise
us that the first image to capture Merle is of Newburgh inmates?"

Or the last, viewing an Integroscope:

At the end of the working day, when all sources of light  have withdrawn 
as far as  they were going to, making shadows  as long as they would be 
and Roswell was off to a circuit of freindly speakeasies, as this was his 
habit most every night, Merle cranked up the Inegroscope one more time 
and took one of the photos he'd kept of Dally, taken when she was about 
twelve years old. . . ." (1061)

MD:
The "all-night illumination" and "inescapable glow" lead Merle to avid study 
and practice of "light-portraiture," pushing the envelope with experimental 
emulsions that-- while quite legit as chemistry -- have more than a hint of 
alchemy about them.

". . . .he thought he recognized a Bethenod-Latour alternator and beneath 
the tower a little studio with geraniums at the windows where Dally drank 
coffee and ate a brioche and sat by a control board while an operator with 
one of those pointed French mustaches found the coordinates for Los Angeles, 
and somehow Merle now, tumbling, trembling in a rush of certitude, was on his 
feet and across the shop, fiddling with the radio receiver, its tubes blooming in 
an indigo haze, finding the band and frequency, and all at once the image of 
her silent lips on the wall smoothly glided into synchroniization, and her picture 
was speaking. . . ." 1061/62)