18. Franklin Pieces It Together.
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Room 708
The duct tape shrieked as Franklin pulled a strip. He tore it with his yellowed teeth and taped the curtain flush against the wall. He pinched the partition between the two curtains and taped them together as well. He stood back and let his eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses critique his work.
The taped curtains diffused the sunlight, but not enough.
He dropped the roll of tape on the desk; it spun and settled as he hustled into the closet. He pulled the hanging light bulb and found a dark green wool blanket that the hotel had provided its guests for extra warmth. He went back to the window and draped the blanket over the curtain rod, straightened it out, and stepped back once again to examine the darkness.
Almost.
He spun around and saw a thin band of light streaming in from under the front door. He leapt to the bed, grabbed the pillows, and mashed them into the cracks. He took one last look around the room for any other trickles of pesky light, and saw none.
“Perfect,” Franklin said to himself in the pitch black.
He flicked on the desk lamp for momentary aid, pulled on a rubber glove, then removed the cover from the film canister. He daintily removed the reel inside and brought it to the projector he’d set on the nightstand; then wound the reel through the projector’s feed sprocket, down against the gate, and into the takeup. He started the mechanism rolling, lifted his eyeglasses so they sat on his forehead, and flicked off the lamp.
The room was dark save the projector’s white light illuminating the film against the room’s broad, blank wall.
The film lasted about a minute. It showed a silent, grainy celebration in a large ballroom. Balloons hovered, revelers waved at the camera, a stoic man offered a subtle tip of his bowler hat. And then the man’s face froze in terror as the shaking of the great earthquake began.
Franklin had seen the reel hundreds of times, during which he’d internalized not only every second, but every frame’s edge. He’d bought it on a whim at a flea market, more for the case than anything; he didn’t even know there was a reel inside until the seller asked for $20 but settled for $10. He’d come across the country to sell the film to a collector for a price that meant he could take a few years off work.
The projection flickered against the wall, the tinny sound of the running motor ticking in the quiet room. The reel sputtered at its end and cast white blankness on the wall. One more look couldn’t hurt, Franklin thought, so he rewound the reel through the sprockets and started it again.
But on this second viewing, as the man in the bowler hat extended niceties to the filmmaker, a flash of orange came into Franklin’s periphery. It was one of those things that, in retrospect, he’d wonder why he didn’t jump up right away. But instead, he watched the man’s face morph into fearful realization, then freeze completely. Franklin watched a bright hole emerge in the man’s eye and expand, blossoming across the frame.
“No, no, no!” Franklin screamed, scrambling to turn off the projector.
The strip had gotten stuck, and the power of the light was enough to burn a hole.
Then, the fire started.
“Damn!”
He sprinted to the bathroom and turned on the faucet but didn’t find a glass, so he cupped his hands and ran back in to splash the small flame. It sputtered for a moment, but then grew again.
“Shit!”
He opened the front door, and as his eyes adjusted to the hallway light, he heard a voice to his left. A bellhop accepting a tip before a door was slammed in his face.
“Cup!” Franklin frantically screamed. “A cup! I need a cup!”
“Excuse me?” the bellhop said.
“Fire! There’s a fire!” Franklin shouted.
The bellhop stuffed the change into his back pocket and skipped to a hallway alcove that was occupied by a small, round table decorated with a potted tulip. He grabbed it, ran into Franklin’s room and let out a long whistle upon seeing the flame. The bellhop ran into the bathroom, dumped the tulip and soil into the tub, stuck the pot under the running faucet, and ran into the room, where he dumped the liquified mud all over the projector.
The fire went out in a hiss of smoke.
“Kid,” Franklin exhaled, “I just set fire to ten grand.”
The bellhop let out an even longer whistle.
Franklin examined the projector. The metal was mangled, but cool to the touch. He slowly disassembled it, and found that while the strip’s middle chunk had burned up, the ends were undamaged. He tore open the duct-taped curtains, and sunlight filled the room and it flashed across the bellhop’s silver name tag.
“Not a good feeling, Hoight,” Franklin said.
“Can’t imagine, sir,” Hoight said, and took the pot back into the bathroom to collect the soil and replant the tulip as best he could.
Franklin held the first half to the sunlight and made out the ballroom partiers. The second half was the shaky view as the earthquake sent the revelers scattering away before the bricks began to fall.
Hoight came out of the bathroom with the tulip repotted.
“Need anything else, sir?” he said.
The sunlight splashed on the kid’s bellhop cap, that curious round design Franklin hadn’t seen in decades. There was something timeless about that style. And that’s when an idea came roaring into Franklin’s head.
“Maybe,” Franklin said. “This is an old building right?”
“Been standing straight up for over half a century now,” Hoight said with a proud grin.
“You don’t have a big ballroom or something?”
Hoight smiled and nodded.
“How’d you like to make five dollars, kid?” Franklin asked.
The kid’s nod sped up, his smile broadened.
Franklin gave Hoight a few addresses and sent him off into the city to wrangle supplies: splicing tape, three empty pitchers, a large bucket, borax, developer, and fixer. And when that was all taken care of, Franklin explained, Hoight was then to find a few people who looked, well, old-timey.
“Know what I mean?” Franklin asked.
“What are we doing, sir?” Hoight asked, skeptically.
“We’re making a movie,” Franklin said.
He’d brought his 35mm camera on the trip with the hopes of shooting the city at night. It would make for a slightly different color, and not contain the same scratches and grain that came from decades of mishandling, but if he spliced the edit in just right, maybe the collector wouldn’t notice. Not at first, anyway. And once the money exchanged hands and he was on the train back home, what were they going to do? The rest of the film was intact—still the only known film of the great San Francisco earthquake. That was worth something, so why not ten grand?
In an hour, he got the phone call from Hoight to meet him in the lobby. He was standing next to a door with an anchor emblem carved into it. As Franklin walked to him, Hoight opened the door and yelled inside.
“Come on out, my Hollywood stars!” Hoight said.
Out of the darkness staggered a motley booze-fumed crew, squinting with confusion and annoyance at the harsh lights of the lobby. Franklin winced as he looked them over. They weren’t pretty, but they’d do.
“Said you’d give them a buck apiece,” Hoight whispered.
Franklin rolled his eyes and took out a wad of bills. They walked through the lobby, past the front desk where Red with his thick mutton chops was dozing off again. They hung a left to a set of double doors marked Tabor Hall. Hoight held the door open for his director and the extras.
Inside was an expansive ballroom with a stage in the distance and a second floor of surrounding seats. As the drunks milled and swayed, Franklin shut his eyes and hummed a few bars to settle his mind.
He’d spent the last hour examining the strip to figure out just what he needed to recreate the missing chunk. It was that one moment when the stone-faced man tipped his cap to the camera, then when his face turned into horrified awareness. Behind him, the group of partygoers were thankfully out of focus. All he had to recreate was those lost few seconds.
Franklin opened his eyes and began grabbing drunks by the shoulder one by one, placing them on different spots around the dancefloor. Whenever he got stuck, he’d hold the strip up to the ballroom light for consultation. “And we danced, and we danced,” he sang to himself. Some tune that’d gotten stuck in his head, he wasn’t sure where he knew it from.
When the drunks were all set, he walked to where he’d set up the camera.
“Where do you want me?” Hoight asked.
Franklin looked him up and down.
“You’re my star, kid,” he said.
He grabbed Hoight by the shoulders and placed him in the center of the frame. He plucked Hoight’s bellhop cap off the top of his head, snatched a soiled brown hat off a drunk, and plopped it onto his star’s head. He told Hoight to tip his cap, then look as if a giant wave was about to come crashing down on him.
“What about us?” one of the drunks yelled.
“Pretend you’re at a party,” Franklin said.
“No problem there!” another called.
Franklin stepped behind the camera, began filming, and called out, “Action!”
He had enough film for three takes, and he ran through them as quickly as he could. When he was done, he called out, “That’s a wrap!” and the extras gave him a round of mock applause on their way back to the bar. Franklin slipped Hoight another few bucks, then went back upstairs to see if his plan had worked.
In the room, he filled up three pitchers with water then dissolved the borax in one, developer in another, and fixer in the third. He brought them all in the closet and turned on his portable red light. In the ruby tint, he removed the film from the camera, balled it up, twisted it gently so it wouldn’t kink, then stuffed it into the bucket. He poured in borax, then traded that for the developer, then finally the fixer. He used a rag to clean off any chunks left behind on the film, said a little prayer, and opened the door.
The sun had set so he flicked on the desk lamp and held the film in front. He began to run it through his fingers, examining what he’d made.
There was Hoight in the drunk’s hat, void of emotion. It was incredible how different he looked here compared to the happy-go-lucky bellhop that’d been bouncing through the hotel.
In the film, Hought pulled the brim of his hat, preparing to tip it toward the camera, when a look of horror splashed across his face. But in the next frame, he was gone.
“Damn,” Franklin said.
He scrolled past a few more frames of black, thinking he’d screwed up the developing process somehow. But then a new image appeared.
It was the same ballroom, but was now populated by an entirely different group of people. They wore black suits and elegant white dresses, all facing away, looking at the stage. A few frames forward, a blue spotlight shone onto a silver microphone set in front of purple curtains that began to ripple.
Then, nothing but blackness.
Sometimes, film stock had already been exposed, but it was too subtle to detect. When that stock was exposed a second time, another image faintly appeared as a kind of double—a “ghost exposure.” Franklin told himself that must be what it was, even though it didn’t explain the colors—the spotlight’s blue, the microphone’s silver, the purple of the curtains.
He cycled the film forward again until he came to the second take.
There was Hoight. He again began to tip his hat, then the terrified look, before disappearing. Once again, that crowd of strangers in the ballroom.
But this time, the angle was somehow closer to them, showing only the backs of their heads. Slicked-back hair for the men, blond curly bobs for the women. Further forward, and Franklin saw the purple curtains onstage begin to open.
Black again.
Franklin scrolled forward to his final take.
It started fine enough, with Hoight putting a hand to his cap, his mouth opening as fear built in his eyes. But then came that strange crowd again, this angle now closer still. It was focused entirely on the spotlit microphone.
Scrolling through the reel rapidly, Franklin watched the curtains part. Out walked a woman with long brown hair and blue eyes like twin propane flames. She wore a red dress. Franklin gasped, and the film quivered in his hands as he saw the shock of color on the black and white film.
The woman had a despondent look on her face. As if sick of having to go through the motions once more. She stepped to the microphone and began to sing.
The film reel went black again, but Franklin kept winding through it, further and further. Even though, by then, the film should have run out.
He fed the film past the lamp light, and his motions grew frantic, almost as if his fingers were possessed. He heard a faint sound in the room. Like a gnat buzzing.
As he continued running the film through his fingers, and realized the sound was coming from his hands. He turned an ear toward the strip, and as he cycled through, he heard what sounded like singing.
Franklin kept feeding. The woman in red suddenly appeared. Her face was flushed, and her eyes were closed as the spotlight caught sweat pouring down her temples. Her forehead was contorted into a pained grimace, as if off-camera some part of her body was being branded by a scalding hot iron.
And then Franklin realized the sound coming from the woman wasn’t singing at all. It was shrieking.
The film strip suddenly caught fire with a whooshing hiss.
Flames danced in Franklin’s glasses, and behind them, his eyes teared in pain, and then growing horror, as he realized no matter how hard he tried, his scalding, blistering hands wouldn’t let the strip of film go.
Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.
If you like Tales from the Palmer Hotel, tell a friend. If you really like it, the suggested donation for the series is a one-time payment of $6.66. Venmo (@Rick-Paulas) or Paypal (rickpaulas@gmail.com).