Self-Correcting Photographs

The 41 photographs a missing man left on a wall, from infancy through to last month, every one of them with a 1 mm grey-white ring at the edge of the right pupil. The left eye is clean. The living man's eyes were clean too. The primary-school graduation photo, the high-school orientation, the basic-training portrait, the first suit photo after starting work — every one has it; the mother stands beside them and says there is no such thing. The scope of what the overwrite changes eats backwards onto the prints, and photographs taken in the past change along with it.

Measuring it takes a reference. Use the print's border as a scale, measure the brow ridge, the tips of the eyebrows, the eye sockets and the position ratios of the grey ring relative to the border, write the figures into the notes and align them with the file hashes; run the same set of ratios again the next day, and the numbers will speak for themselves.

What is more wrong than that: measure the same group photograph several days running, and on the third day every item is a shade fainter than on the second, and on the fourth fainter again than on the third. Brow ridge, eyebrow tips, eye sockets, grey ring, smaller by the day, closing bit by bit on "the way somebody remembers it."

As though something had noticed it was being watched — and had begun quietly editing the evidence into the version that person is willing to believe.

The owner of the wall is changing too. She will say her son's favourite snack as a child was green-packet Kuai Kuai — the one who liked green-packet Kuai Kuai is a different missing man; she will say the father is in the university graduation photograph, but the father died ten years ago; she remembers the high-school graduation trip as Green Island, and the ticket stub says Okinawa; she remembers him building Gunpla in his room in junior high, and that room holds no trace of a model ever having been assembled in it. There isn't a flicker of hesitation in her voice, as confident as three weeks ago. That is simply how she remembers it.

Three weeks later the wall went from 41 to 39. The missing ones are the 11-year-old pool shot and the 13-year-old field shot. The nails are still in place, and on the wall there is no square where a frame pressed, no ring of paint less faded than the rest. Those two don't look as though anyone took them down.