The fifth weekend would turn out to be our last day of business; my mom would take my snow cone machine away only a couple days later. When I protested, she told me that she didn’t want me cutting my hand off, although I had injured myself weeks ago. Even at that age, I thought that this late reaction was bizarre.
Because Josh and I both had a snow cone machine, we each had a separate stack of money that we put together into one pile, and we then split it evenly. When there was an odd number of bills, we would play “Paper, Rock, Scissors” to see who would get to keep the extra bill; we called this decision-making ritual “gaming.” That day we had made a total of seventeen dollars, primarily from the same people we had been selling to since we started our business. After we stopped selling for the day, Josh was divvying up the spoils, and as he paid out my fourth dollar, I was consumed by a feeling of profound bewilderment.
The dollar said “FOR STAMPS.”
I must have vocalized my surprise because Josh noticed my shock and asked if he had miscounted.
“No… That dollar… Josh, that’s the dollar I sent!”
“What?”
“That’s the dollar, man! The one I sent!”
“What dollar? What are you talking about?”
Seeing the dollar here in my hands befuddled me, and I struggled to compose myself so I could explain more clearly.
“From the balloon! I sent it off with the balloon, remember? I put it in the envelope with my letter!”
Josh pondered this for a moment before deciding what this meant.
“That’s so cool!” he shouted.
As I thought about it, I came to agree. The idea that the dollar had made it right back to me after changing so many hands staggered me. I had no way of knowing how far the balloon had traveled, but whatever the distance had been, this was still amazing. Whoever found my balloon must have bought some stamps at the post office, and then slowly and incrementally the dollar had worked its way right back to me.
I rushed inside to tell my mom, but my excitement coupled with her distraction from an in-progress phone call made my story incomprehensible to her, to the point that she responded simply by saying “Oh wow! That’s neat!” just to placate me. Frustrated, I ran back outside and told Josh I had something to show him.
We thundered up the steps to my front door and ran immediately to my room. I opened the collection-drawer, took out the box of envelopes, and showed Josh some of the pictures. I started with the first picture, and we went through about ten before he lost interest in looking at poorly angled and meaningless Polaroids. I grew irritated with his disinterest; my penpal had sent these pictures and today, after countless transactions, the dollar he used to send the photographs had landed right back in my hand. This was almost too much for me to take in — the sheer improbability of it all. Even the most minor alteration would have changed things entirely; if Josh had paid the first dollar to himself, I probably would never have even noticed my returning, defaced currency. Josh, however, had become completely disengaged and asked if I wanted to go play in The Ditch before his mom came to pick him up. I responded with a distracted and almost dismissive agreement as I shuffled through the envelopes.
I’m not sure how the routine was born, but The Ditch had become a battleground to Josh and me. Nearly every time we stepped into The Ditch, one of us would lob a clod of dirt at the other, and this would catalyze a full-scale assault in both directions. It probably started with a single, playful toss of a dried mass of compacted dirt, but it became nearly impossible for us to step into that arena without almost instantly entering into a standoff. We enjoyed these battles so much and sought them out with such frequency that “that ditch” became “The Ditch” without us ever noticing. That day was no exception to the rule of combat, but the war game was persistently interrupted by rustling in the woods around us.
We were used to these sounds; there were raccoons and stray cats that lived in the woods by my house, but there seemed to be a little too much noise coming from the forest floor for it to be caused by either of those things. As we continued our battle, we traded guesses at what the source of the ruckus was in an attempt to scare one another — playing games like these gradually evolved into the games I would play by myself when exiting the woods as the sun rolled away.
My last guess was that it was a mummy, but in the end Josh kept insisting that it was a robot because of the sounds that we heard. As we were leaving, I said that if it was a robot, it would have made much more noise, but Josh shook this off and became a little serious. He looked me right in the eyes and said, “You heard it, didn’t you? It sounded like a robot. You heard it too, right?” I had heard it, and since it sounded mechanical, I agreed that it was probably a robot.
It’s only now, looking back, that I understand what we heard.
When we got back to my house, Josh’s mom was waiting for him at the dining room table with my mom. Josh told his mom about the robot, our moms laughed, and Josh went home. My mom and I ate dinner, and then I went to bed.
I tried to sleep, but I was feeling restless. Josh might not have been interested in the photos, but after seeing that dollar, I could think of virtually nothing else. Before too long, I climbed down from the top bunk and took the box of envelopes out of my dresser drawer. I took out the first envelope, set it on the floor, and placed the blurry desert Polaroid that had been inside of it on top. I laid the second envelope right next to it and put the oddly angled Polaroid of a building’s top corner over it. I did this with each picture until they formed a grid that was about 5 x 10; I was taught to always be careful with the things that I was collecting, even if I wasn’t sure whether they were valuable or not.
I realized that I hadn’t actually looked at the majority of these pictures before. I may have paid them a passing glance when I opened the envelope to look for a letter, but upon being reliably disappointed, I would simply close the envelope and put it with the others. As I looked at them now, I noticed that the pictures gradually became more distinct. I scanned my eyes over the Polaroids.
There was a tree with a bird on it, a speed limit sign, a power line, a group of people walking into some building… Right as my eyes were about to move onto the next photo in the sequence, they froze and focused on something that vexed me so powerfully that I can now, as I write this, distinctly remember feeling dizzy and capable of only a single, repeating thought.
Why am I in this picture?
In the photograph of the group of people entering the building, I saw myself holding hands with my mother in the very back of the crowd of people. We were at the very edge of the photo, but it was us. As my eyes swam over the sea of Polaroids, I became increasingly anxious. It was a really odd feeling. It wasn’t fear; it was the feeling you get when you are in trouble. I’m not sure why I was flooded with that feeling, but there I sat, floundering in the distinct sense that I had done something wrong. This feeling only intensified as I finally managed to break my gaze and look at the rest of the pictures.
I was in every photo.
None of them were close shots. None of them were only of me. But I was in every single one of them — off to the side, in the back of a group, at the bottom of the frame. Some of the pictures had only the tiniest part of my face captured at the very edge of the photo, but nevertheless, I was there. I was always there.