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Show 1^ demerol-dulled patients and chatty doctors, but through it all he cannot get Ahmed off his mind. Never before, not even with Trish who became pathologically neat during the month before she left the farm, has he known anyone to become so obsessed with something which was so recently alien. Not that it was necessarily bad. In Trish's case of course it was a symptom of a much deeper dissatisfaction, but with Ahmed it seemed the opposite. His solid contentment, a newfound good humor, is beginning to infect even Garrett. The doctors note Garrett's distraction, interpret it wrongly, tell him he needs to go out after work and get plastered. Garrett grimaces at their little joke, tells them to give him a break, gets on with his job. What he cannot understand is the ease with which Ahmed seems to have arrived at new happiness in his life through something as simple as photography. Garrett glances at the x-ray lit up on the wall-viewer, life clearly exposed on the inside and in this case shattered, and wonders. When the school quarter is over, Ahmed takes an entire week off from the lab and devotes himself entirely to his camera and tape recorder. He no longer goes out nights at all. He experiments with slides but goes back to prints, talks about setting up a darkroom in the basement, talks about how he could get most of the chemicals for nothing, but in the end decides it would take too much time. Stacks of photos, of everything, appear everywhere. Garrett watches with more and more interest as the piles mount, amazed at the Turk's output of energy, his almost adolescent enthusiasm. More than once Garrett has seen him smile |
