If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  Triumphantly, she dragged the box through the hall into the kitchen. Normally she left packages in the entranceway for Will to open when he returned, but the heft of this one intrigued her. She fetched the key from its hiding place, unlocked the knife drawer, and removed a small paring knife. After carefully splitting the tape, she lifted a stack of film canisters from the box, each entombed painstakingly in foam, all battleship gray or mint green—six in total. Next she unearthed a newly minted hardcover book, published by the National Film Board, entitled Diane Cardiel: A Filmography. Inside were lushly published still images from her films and many essays, including one called “The Constructedness of Public Space in the Age of Anxiety.” Folded into the book was a letter from the director of the NFB, stating that they’d reissued her entire filmography two years ago but had been unable to locate her. Until a former student of his named Penny Gustavson, who was now an elementary school teacher, had recently informed him that Diane was living back in Thunder Bay. Perfect timing, he said, because the NFB was mounting a running retrospective in Toronto and Montreal next spring and would like to invite her to speak. “I understand, however,” he added tactfully toward the end, “that travel may be problematic.”

  A retrospective? Weren’t those for the dead, or at least the near dead? It struck her that she was now widely regarded as a relic, an oddity. But had she been away that long? Long enough for the mildew of enigma to grow upon her? Even if she could make it there, somehow, people would ask what she’d been doing all this time, what work she’d done. “Oh, hiding in my house, watching my son paint,” she’d be forced to say. Of course she’d write the director to say she couldn’t go, but as she turned the book in her hands, she couldn’t avoid feeling some blush of pride at the crisp handsomeness of it, and at the care and delicacy the director had exhibited in his letter, which seemed intended for a person much more eccentric, fragile, and important than herself.

  While reboxing the canisters to hide them in her closet, Diane noticed that Jonah and Will had left the 16mm projector set up in Cairo. Though it was nearly time for her usual 10:30 Relaxation Session, she found herself threading her first film—The Sky in Here—into the take-up reel. She made tea, snuffed the room’s lamps, drew the curtains, and coaxed the projector into a clatter.

  As the film played, Diane sat quietly, her mind not so much absorbing the images as turning inward to reconstruct the person who’d shot this film, who’d synced the sound and spoke the now precious-sounding voice-over, astonished by how foreign to herself she’d become. After the first film ended she loaded another, watching them in the order she’d created them, fascination creeping into her, each film a missive from a dark region of her self she’d left unconsidered for so long.

  She had such feeble command of the period after she’d watched them pull the first tatters of her brother’s body from the lake. Oh, how did she ever survive it? In the days following, she’d cried with such force she learned to navigate their house by feel, a grief so fierce and depleting her whole body felt like a turned-out pocket.

  When she gathered the strength, she phoned Whalen’s house and spoke to his father for the first time. He said his son hadn’t been home since the accident, and he begged Diane to tell him where he was.

  The number of the funeral home sat on her table for a week. Arranging her brother’s burial was the kind of task that grief should impel a person to do, but she couldn’t lift the receiver without fear of screaming into it, and was too proud to ask her father’s old coworkers for help.

  There was still no sign of Whalen. The truth came out about how they’d been swindling the Native crew, and though Whalen’s father claimed he hadn’t laid eyes on his son since the night of the accident, the common belief was that to avoid scandal he’d changed Whalen’s name and packed him off to a university dorm somewhere back east, his head now buried in a law book. On some level she’d been preparing for Whalen to abandon her all along. As she suspected now she would have done herself had Charlie made it to university, and they lost the thrill of secrecy, left only with backgrounds and lives that could never be properly woven together.

  It came then to Diane that with both Charlie and Whalen gone, and with no real ties to Thunder Bay left, for the first time in her life she was completely free to do as she pleased. She could leave, tonight, and though she wouldn’t have Charlie to answer her questions or roll up his sleeves and fight her battles, she also wouldn’t have him watching over her and correcting and interrupting and sucking the light from every moment either. It pained her to say it now, but a long-crushing weight had come off her chest, and while she hadn’t known it at the time, her brother’s accident assembled inside her a kind of engine of courage.

  She packed a bag, locked the house, and walked along the creek to the highway. For months she hitchhiked south and west through a series of uncelebrated American roads. During that time she slept beneath interstate overpasses, drank from eaves troughs, ate wild raspberries and plates of all-day breakfast she’d treat herself to. She had sex with an unhappily married civil engineer who smelled like Whalen in a long aqua-colored car, then a few others as easily as talking to them. She rented weekly-rate motel rooms in a few insubstantial towns, inventing new names for herself in each one. It was during this period she’d made all of her life’s most monumental mistakes, seizing every possible occasion to endanger her mind and body, as though Charlie’s death had stripped her of the capacity to fear for her own safety. But like a plant that benefited from rough treatment and neglect, she felt more herself than she ever had in Thunder Bay.

  From a pawn shop she bought a Nikon camera and a 50mm lens. She preferred photography to sketching: the immediacy, the immersion of seeing, the endless hunt for the perfect subject. She shot empty taverns, derelict train cars, abandoned bicycles, crude underpass graffiti, broken people milling around Greyhound stations, all of it—she wouldn’t realize until later—somehow touched by decay.

  Eventually, after a time living with a separated beekeeper outside San Francisco who measured his food with a hanging scale and refused to orgasm for spiritual reasons, she made her way back to Canada and enrolled in some arts courses while working at a city-run day care in Toronto. She bought a smelly wool duffle coat from a thrift store and an acoustic guitar, which she plucked nightly until her fingertips hardened into thimbles. In her classes she painted murky watercolors, molded lumpy sculptures, stained glass, fired ceramics, even crocheted—her capricious interests dragging her from one artistic disappointment to the next. An instructor told her that she was cursed with the aesthetic sense to know her work was dull but lacked sufficient skill to fix it. Yet she was not discouraged. It was so much easier to fail without her father or her brother peering over her shoulder.

  She came across a book on the history of cinema and after reading it in one caffeine-fueled gulp, she enrolled in film full-time. Her dedication captured the eye of her instructor, yet when called upon in class, either her voice faltered or she talked in tight, senseless circles. Near the middle of the semester, a friend from class brought her to a club popular with U of T grad students, where breathtakingly awful poetry was read as they quaffed Pernod and water. Arthur was an architecture student with tortoise-shell glasses and a clumsy girth. He had a Beach Boy wholesomeness that in a sea of Dylan and Sartre imitators infantilized those around him. Without her brother to speak for her, Diane had become a blurter—offering too much, too quickly, her sentences like a verbal yard sale—and found Arthur’s habit of thinking long and hard during conversations soothing. That night she fell into his circle and drifted to a party at an off-hours theater space, where Diane drained six cans of a tasteless beer popular in Thunder Bay that Arthur’s friends drank for its “working-class authenticity.” Soon after, she kicked Arthur in the side of the knee—hard enough to topple him to the carpet—to prove some point about pain tolerance and gender. Minutes later, she was dragging him to a secluded futon with such verve that her mind didn’t return
to her body for days after.

  It was a mutual friend who later told Diane that Arthur was married to a woman who’d been his English professor when he was an undergraduate. In a rushing daze Diane called this woman at the university, impersonating the dean’s clerk. Her office was slated for renovation, Diane said. When would she be next out of town at a conference so they could schedule accordingly?

  Diane waited weeks until the proper time to ring his bell. Her reward was a week of cab rides to converted lofts in the East End, where they smoked hash from comically large faux-Arabic pipes. Arthur got drunk enough to stand on couches and say, “Friends, countrymen. This is essential,” launching into speeches with full awareness of his own silliness, the discussions always devolving into the drug-addled men questioning meaning itself, which went down the conversational drain of Derrida and deconstructionism before the women cradled them off into the night.

  Unlike Whalen, Arthur was so brazen with their meetings, it wasn’t long before he parted from his wife and Diane quickly fixed herself at his new apartment. His fridge was full of Polaroid film and homemade pickles bought from a Polish neighbor, sketches of cities and plazas spidering over every square inch of wall. He sang her “Factory Girl,” complete with a Jagger fish-mouth, and delighted in her working-class tales of Thunder Bay. He surprised her with a photo of the old elevators—including Pool 6—in Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, who admiringly wrote that they were “the first fruits of the New Age.” It was as disorienting to her as finding a portrait of Theodore or Charlie displayed prominently in a museum.

  She hungered for Arthur every waking minute, and when he left to fetch Korean takeout or cigarettes, she would count seconds and watch his apartment door with the same rising panic as when watching Charlie drop into the grain bins. Arthur’s world tolerated her as a pretty curiosity. His stature, both physical and intellectual, was enough to shelter her from comments on her attendance at an unremarkable college and her dearth of artistic accomplishment.

  The nights shrieked with drugs and sex and overcomplex conversation that ended in screaming matches as often as bed. Everyone was making a film, writing a book, the air a stiff meringue of ideas. It was as though you could pluck one down, staple your name to it, and attain national recognition by that time next week. She set up a desk at Arthur’s place and dared to construct a few poems, little bowls of word-salad she threw together hastily enough to disavow attachment to them. At Arthur’s urging, she read them to a few slit-eyed friends dozing on a shag carpet.

  Then for her birthday Arthur gave her a 16mm camera, a Bolex he’d bought in the park from a smacked-out chess player named Steve. She wandered the city alone, shooting quick bursts of whatever caught her eye, recording snatches of sound with a reel-to-reel slung over her shoulder. A streetlight, some trash, people on benches. At the time she was enthralled by Richard Avedon’s photographs: coal miners with blackened faces shot against white, angelic backgrounds, the effect rendering his subjects eerily otherworldly, transcendent. Everyone is worth noticing, the images said and always put her in mind of Charlie and how even today she’d give everything for a photo like this of her brother, with his light-chipped eyes, slanting grin, and grain dust in his coarse hair.

  Then one September day she walked to Union Station, closed her eyes for nearly half an hour, deciding that the person she saw when she opened them would be her first subject. She threw her eyes open and asked a young woman if she could film her face, dead on, looking into the lens. The woman kindly complied and after some nervous smiles and hair fiddling, gave her thirty golden seconds of raw vulnerability. She repeated this with twenty others.

  When the film was developed, however, a good portion proved unusable: a milk of ghostly light spilled over each frame. Diane was devastated. She’d changed the canister improperly, and light had leaked into the black felt bag while she switched reels.

  Arthur pulled a favor and arranged some free late-night time on an editing machine at the National Film Board. “Make something at least,” he’d said. There she found some usable clips and a few nice frames she managed to duplicate as stills. But it wasn’t enough. Then, on her way to the bathroom, she spotted a nest of cut footage in a waste bin nearby. Nearly in tears, she asked another editor if she could use it. “Knock yourself out,” he said.

  She spliced these unwanted clips, intercutting them with her own shots of the city and people at Union Station. She laid the sound she’d recorded of a crowd roaring at a hockey game over a shot of a person sleeping. The sound of a fistfight over lovers walking, a baby gurgling over documentary clips of a bullfight, trains shunting over shots of trash. It was the public invading the private, the inside invading the outside, and the effect was disorienting. When she showed it to him, Arthur declared her film genius, adding that it was about anxiety and public space and love and dread, which confused Diane but still flushed her with pride.

  A premiere was organized. The film, which she’d titled The Sky in Here, drew effusive praise from those who cared about that sort of thing. They said that it had captured the “anxiety of the age” and compared it to Joan Didion’s essays and the films of Arthur Lipsett, both of which Diane had always loved. She won a first-film award and quickly made a few more works in a similar vein with money from the Film Board and the Arts Council, garnering still more awards and praise.

  During that time she and Arthur discussed marriage at length and decided against it. Reasons like resisting the patriarchy and his previous marital debacle were tossed around, but in truth, they were both skittish about commitment, the drift toward entrapment. Though she never found words to tell Arthur about Charlie or her parents, she suspected he knew she couldn’t stand to do any more losing.

  Arthur had gone to private schools and had never held a job, something the closeted Marxist in him hated to admit, but after graduation he landed an office remodeling, then a small park and a community center. He soon developed a name, which he snidely claimed was the only thing one actually built as an architect. Then came the plaza in Copenhagen, and almost overnight Arthur was inaugurated as the high priest of plazas—the great facilitator of urban renewal and community. He was described as visionary, a “starchitect”—a word they had once only used with the tongs of irony. He designed increasingly significant structures: galleries, libraries, public buildings, first in Europe, then throughout North America, Asia, the Middle East. Arthur would do anything to get his projects built: spew flurries of pseudo-intellectual claptrap, employ the theories of far-flung psychoanalysts, the folklore of African hill tribes—anything to entice funders and investors. It was during this rise that she’d become pregnant, and Arthur did his utmost to hide his trepidation.

  “What about your work?” he said. “Your next film?”

  “I can come back to it,” she said.

  After Will was born, Arthur tunneled deeper into himself. Increasingly, he preferred life rendered, sketched, blueprinted—better yet, modeled in balsa wood or viewed from a plane, high above the disappointing actuality of place. He applied the same aerial view to Will, reserving his energies for the greater questions: where he should go to school, in what neighborhood would they live. He spent more and more time away, at his drawing table, off in the stratospheres of theory. In truth, Arthur had never enjoyed people. Even Will he treated like a project he was overseeing, checking in every so often like a foreman in a white hardhat to ensure construction was on schedule. Then came their separation, the subway platform … but here she was rooting around again in the past, and with that her thoughts gained traction in the slapping of her last film in the take-up reel, the projector blasting pure, empty light on the collapsible screen, and for the first time in years Diane was battered with the sense that though the cupboards of her self had been abundantly stocked with determination and some modest store of talent, she’d made so little of these ingredients to set upon the table of her life. These six canisters of celluloid and one marvelous boy were the totality
of her life’s output. Her mind writhed with specters of conversations she could’ve participated in, words she might have combined, films she could have cut together, the howling ghosts of ideas she would never have.

  But maybe there was still time, she thought, rising to kill the projector. Her panic was lessening each day. Who was to say it wouldn’t continue? Perhaps by spring she could make it to the retrospective, at least the one in Toronto. And just so she’d have something to talk about, she could shoot something new. At home. Nothing grandiose. Maybe some time lapses of the sun swinging through rooms like a pendulum. Plants growing. Dust fuzzing the tops of books. Carpets speckling with lint. Will painting—if he ever did again. And these tapes she’d been recording during Relaxation Times, maybe she could work them in somehow, cut them up, cobble the better snippets into a voice-over. She’d pulled those unwanted filmstrips from the trash to make her first film; who was to say she couldn’t do it again with the trimmings of their life here? That settles it, she thought, dragging the box upstairs to her room. She’d ask Will to fetch her old Bolex from the basement when he got home. She only hoped it still worked.

  15

  The next Monday, Will asked Jonah to accompany him to the police station downtown. “I won’t let anything slip to MacVicar,” Will said, “But we need to see what he knows about Marcus.”

  “Sounds like a solo mission,” Jonah said, flung laterally across the armchair in Cairo, eyes boring into the latest Thrasher. “It’s a fact they have great difficulty letting Indians leave that place.” He then reminded Will how Social Services can steal a kid from their parents any time they please, just uproot you from your house like a brown tooth. “They do it all the time,” he said. “They did it to Marcus. They tried to get me.” Jonah said Social Services nearly took him after Hosea went to jail for hunting deer within city limits. But his other brothers hid Jonah in the basement and said he moved up north. “I stayed down there for a month memorizing medical textbooks and eating tinned salmon.” Since then, Jonah’s little basement tent was the only place in the house he could sleep. “But they don’t only do it to Indians, Will,” Jonah said, lifting his eyes. “They do it to White kids, too, if their parents are messed up enough.”