Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

  “It does. It will.”

  “We don’t know that,” I replied, throwing his own words back at him, 99.9 percent unconsciously—then realized what I’d done, and went a little white. But he simply shook his head, took me into his arms, hugged me hard. Laid one hand on the back of my neck, warm and soothing, and let me dig my face into his collarbone.

  “It will,” he repeated. “You will. I have faith.”

  I woke up at four-thirty in the morning.

  Simon was snoring, duvet wound around him, sheets underneath sweat-hot; like Clark, he runs at a fever pitch, particularly when unconscious. By contrast, I was naked to the waist, clammy, frigid—I’d somehow managed to bend my arm up behind my head and lodge it there, cutting off the circulation so my hand felt gloved in needles, all their pricks turned inwards. The room was dark, my eyes unfocused, perceptual lag-trails hovering everywhere like worms sketched in light, a thousand blinking spirals. A drawn breath rattled in my throat, pulse hammer-fast.

  Abruptly, I found myself upright, hand on the bedroom closet’s light-switch. One flick and a wash of light showed our apartment exactly the way I’d left it: no crouched figures, white-eyed and grinning; nothing extruding from the walls; no ceiling spiders. I pulled on a robe then scrabbled around in bed for my glasses, where they must’ve fallen off in my sleep. A huge smear bisected one lens. I rubbed it clear if not clean on my collar, thinning the grease so I could look through without squinting. This lent a weird, pale light to everything, including The Snake-Queen’s Daughter, which still lay on the glass-topped dining table.

  Shivering, I sat down and picked it up, resisting the urge to re-read “Lady Midday.” I studied the table of contents, which was laid out in a small, crabbed font with occasional smearing. Thirty titles, each slightly weirder than the next: “Why People Today Die Their Own Death,” “In Spring We Drown The Winter,” “The Green Boy,” “She Washes Your Feet With Her Hair,” “Prince Worm Sheds Twenty Skins,” “The Pots With Candles In Them,” “Nightingale the Robber,” “There Were Eyes In The Knots of Trees,” “The Iron Trencher,” “The Drowned Dog,” “The Princess Who Was One Hundred Animals,” “Lamentation of God.” “Never Trust An Old Man With A Frog’s Mouth,” was the last. “No shit,” I heard myself mutter as I turned the page, revealing Charles Pelletier’s Afterword.

  The process of editing the volume you now hold in your hands has been a quizzical one, it began, not least because the transcriber of these tales was as curious a figure in life as she was in her, if not death, then certainly ending. Mrs. Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb was, in her time, a painter, scholar, helpmeet, and mother; a charitable institution, a seeker after occult knowledge whose tireless chronicling of the Unseen all similarly inclined personages must sure feel grateful for—

  My knuckles went white.

  —and such further records as were left behind in the wake of her “departure” serve to reflect both the truly mercurial and impermanent nature of all such talents. The tales held within these pages are not the result of any formal study in the folkloric field, but rather the efforts of a gifted amateur; they comprise the contents of a series of notebooks found at the famed Whitcomb Vinegar House and thought to be Mrs. Whitcomb’s private aides-mémoires, ranging from early 1899 to mid-1918. From these journals’ perusal, it becomes clear that Mrs. Whitcomb’s interest in the Austro-Slavic mythology of her Wendish ancestors was a lifelong body of work, though she did not begin transcribing fully-translated versions of the stories until the year 1905, possibly as an entertainment for her lamented only son Hyatt, before his own vanishing.

  Started the stories in 1905, my brain repeated, idiotically. Before Hyatt; before the train. Before she took the veil. Long before those films were made . . . before she made those films, goddamnit: there it was, in black and white. My proof.

  A massive yawn took me by surprise; my eyelids felt like iron, vision blurry and balance wobbly as I pushed myself to my feet, letting the book fall. Maybe I should go back to bed, look at it in the morning, take some time; not like there was any great rush, now. I turned back toward bed, toward Simon, not meaning to wake him so much as snuggle up and murmur in his ear, apologize for my depressive agnostic’s lack of belief.

  Thinking, my whole body humming: This is going to happen. I’m going to make this happen.

  (Please don’t.)

  I looked up at the sound—the thought, more like—and caught sight of my own reflection in the double window that ran ceiling-to-floor along our living room’s front wall, blinds un-pulled to show a mostly black cityscape with occasional light pollution; the balcony of the guy across the road, where he sunbathed every summer. Superimposed, however, came a single, horrid, micro-moment’s blink of something else—behind me yet in front of me, suddenly inside my silhouette, some bad idea made manifest. Another figure impossibly occupying the chair I’d only now vacated, legs sprawled and skirt awry as a dropped doll, looking up through a thickness of veil: sequin-eyes flashing cold, white brightness, palely lit, like glass in noonday sun.

  At the sight, I released a completely involuntary sound, gasp-choking—spun around, staggered back. My foot slipped on something, a toy of Clark’s we’d managed to miss in our scramble—a puffball-shaped green creature with big plastic eyes, one patched like a pirate’s: Arrrr, matey, walk the plank! it exclaimed in a tiny, tinny electronic voice as the wrench threw everything about my body out of balance: hips, neck, back. My shoulder gave an actual spark, shocking as any touched wire.

  Heart-punched, I slumped against the wall, cursing. Made myself look, and saw—nothing, obviously. An empty chair, slightly dented from my own ass.

  Back inside our bedroom, Simon turned over. And—

  Two days on, I turned up back at the NFA armed with a spreadsheet tracking imagery from every Snake-Queen’s Daughter story, and Mattheuis and I went through the rest of the Japery films, connecting the dots. One of the biggest surprises? All of the Quarry Argent Museum cache turned out to be probably Mrs. Whitcomb’s, given their content—the funny ones as well as the morbid: one must’ve been her riffing off the “Old Man With A Frog’s Mouth” model, a creature I’d since ascertained was called a vodyanoi, smoking his pipe by one of those Lake of the North alkaline swamps and leading travellers astray, sending them into the clutches of sexy rusalki who used their long hair like a fishing net to trap unwary young men. By the end, Mattheuis was literally rubbing his hands together, and I couldn’t stop myself from grinning.

  “So Wrob was right,” I said, at last. Mattheuis snorted, replying, “Oh, fuck Wrob, Lois—and I say that as someone who has. You were right.”

  Yeah, I thought. For once, I was.

  I got my contract, my money, my project. Simon kissed me when I came home. Mom congratulated me when I called to tell her. Clark danced and sang. Granted, I don’t think I had much to do with that last part, since I rarely did—but for once, it was a lot of fun.

  The next day, I found another text message from Wrob Barney on my voicemail, that same flat robot monotone: congrats on yr coup cairns. He’d found out, just like I’d suspected he would; Wrob has his sources, Leonard Warsame would warn me, eventually. But even without knowing that yet, I still ignored it.

  Five minutes later, as I was checking Facebook, my phone rang.

  “So,” Wrob said, as I picked up. “You really are as big a bitch as people say.”

  I flinched, but kept things light, shooting back: “Yeah, probably. Care to get specific?”

  “Uh, all right. Specifically, I handed you Mrs. Whitcomb on a platter, and specifically, you took me up on it, to the tune of Jan fronting you, what—was it ten thousand? Twenty?” Twelve, I automatically filled in, not answering. “Solid like that rates a thank you, I’d think, at the very fucking least.”

  “Well, okay, Wrob: thanks, a lot. Very much. Are we done?”

  “Like fun, we are. Already wrote a review an
d an interview linking Untitled 13 to this big discovery of yours, Lois, which means I’m in this already, balls-deep. Think I’m gonna let you ret-con it so I’m not?”

  “Of course not! You did all the digitization, the preliminary cataloguing, and I’m going to give credit where credit’s due. I want to be fair.”

  “Which is why you’re gonna talk to Jan for me, right? Get me re-hired.”

  “What? Um . . . no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s between you and Jan, Wrob. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “But . . .” he trailed away, genuinely nonplussed. “. . . he’s never going to let me back on unless you push, and if I don’t get back on, we can’t work together.”

  “I’ve got my own people in mind, Wrob.”

  “Like who?” Again, I just waited. Sharper: “So you don’t want to work with me—is that it?”

  “Not on this, no. Sorry.”

  “Yeah, right. ’Cause saying that makes it all better.”

  Now it was my turn to get shirty, standing straight up, pulse already starting to jitter. “Look, you want me to say it right out? Then okay: frankly, I don’t trust you, and you want to know why? Because the one thing I know for sure is that by your own admission, pretty much your first impulse after seeing Mrs. Whitcomb’s work was to jack random bits of it—”

  “Sample!”

  “—then smuggle them out under your shirt and, well . . . I won’t quite say ‘pass it off as your own,’ ’cause there’s no way you could, but definitely try and use it to make your pretentious crap look a little better.”

  I heard him huff, then take a beat before replying, teeth audibly gritted—

  “You know, legally, those films don’t belong to anybody. Not her, not me, not you, not Jan.”

  “No argument there. Who they belong to is all of us—everybody. To Canada.”

  “‘To Canada,’ really? The Maple Leaf Forever! Oh, grow the fuck up.”

  “I’m sorry—am I crazy, or did you actually say exactly that to me at Sneaky Dee’s, drunk or not? Wait, I know: yeah, you did. I’ve got you on tape.”

  “You stole this from me.”

  “I stole from you, right—stole the thing you stole from your boyfriend, which is why you’re not attached to this anymore in the first damn place. The thing you spun into a film that you went ahead and showed in public, where anybody with half a brain could see it and pick up the connections. . . .”

  “‘Connections’? Fuck you, I gave you all that! Don’t pretend like you’re the Sherlock fuckin’ Holmes of CanCon, Lois—”

  “Look, just shut the fuck up right there, okay? Because at no point in our conversation did you say the words Mrs. or A. Macalla or Whitcomb. You said Lake of the North, yes, Quarry Argent, yes, but I was the one who remembered ‘Lady Midday.’ And I really doubt to hell and back that any other random critic could have done that, especially somebody down on their luck enough to get sent to watch some no-budget programme of experimental fuckin’ films at the goddamn Ursulines Studio.”

  “Lady who, now?”

  I laughed. “Exactly. Holy shit, you need to get over yourself.”

  “Pot to the kettle, baby.”

  “Whatever, Wrobert. Thanks again, better luck next time. Hanging up, now, and by the time you try to call back, I’ll have your ass blocked.”

  I thumbed the icon, sat down again, and took a long breath. Palms were clammy. Felt the charge prickle as it faded, warming me from the inside out, and felt . . . better than I had in ages, actually, like I was finally awake, alive. Like I was whole. The person I barely remembered once having been, back when.

  I didn’t tell Simon about any of this, naturally; he’s big on reconciliation, not burning bridges, my sweet Catholic boy. Besides, it didn’t seem to matter, aside from the brief natural high. I had work to do.

  So I opened Contacts, ran my thumb down to “S,” and called Safie Hewsen.

  ACT TWO

  FILM

  When I was a kid, I used to dream about angels. Some people might find that comforting, but I didn’t—mainly because the way I was brought up virtually guarantees that “angels” mean something substantially different to me than whatever they probably mean to you.

  “Here is the world, Safie-girl,” my Dédé Aslan used to say, “and our place in it. Here are seven angels, one with peacock feathers for wings and a crown, but no devil. And here also is God, behind it all, who created both Himself and them, whereby everything else was created. Yet there are other things as well, you must remember—things which have always been, which fools without true religion sometimes choose to worship, or trick themselves into worshipping. Small gods for small minds, trapped in small places. And while these creatures’ scope is narrow, as with all half-made things, their reach can be long, long . . . just so long as their names are still known in this world, so they may hear them whispered somewhere, recognize themselves, and come calling. . . .”

  My Dédé knew all about weird religions from personal experience, and he passed that knowledge on to all of us, or at least tried to. That’s what made me want to make films in the first place.

  That’s from Safie Hewsen’s pitch doc for Seven Angels But No Devil, the film she made as her Practical Production course thesis project. I still remember reading these words and feeling an immediate stab of sympathy, a sense of kinship, because I’d had very similar dreams all my life—though me being me, they were really more like nightmares.

  I’d find myself back in the McLaughlin Planetarium, closed since 1995 due to provincial budget cuts at its sister institution, the Royal Ontario Museum; I’d sit there staring upwards with my neck slightly crimped, as if in a dentist’s chair, while the central Zeiss-Jena projector (since sold to the University of Toronto for the grand sum of a dollar, then broken down for parts) ticked back and forth, casting star-maps up onto the domed darkness. The movement was vertiginous yet weirdly lulling, white holes of light in a fake black “sky” blending and flowing without pause, brightening intermittently to form constellations—Orion’s Belt, Ursa Major and Minor, Draco—while a soothing voice I could never quite recognize droned faintly on about how long light from those same stars took to reach Earth.

  On bad nights, the maps would gradually shift, showing how universal expansion would eventually deform each pattern far beyond recognition, as the sun swelled to engulf our world before shrinking to a cinder, a gravity-torn hole sucking everything into itself till it simply went out. Or they’d turn negative, revealing various deep-sky objects hidden within these cheerfully familiar mythological constructs: galaxies, dwarf or otherwise; quasars and pulsars; dark cloud constellations. The Great Rift, a series of dark patches in the Milky Way, more visible and striking in the southern hemisphere, where Australian Aboriginal star charts described an “emu in the sky” between the Southern Cross and Scorpius, its half-lifted head formed by the Coalsack Nebula. . . .

  And on very bad nights, the angels would come.

  Looking back, I eventually realized the seed of this particular vision was probably planted during my actual visits to the Planetarium, either during summer—since Mom made it known she wouldn’t object to anything that took me out of the house, no matter how far downtown I had to travel—or around Christmas, when we’d often attend their annual show about the Star of Bethlehem, which never entirely succeeded in reconciling biblical canon with scientific theory. This might explain why “my” angels always seemed Byzantine in design, long-faced and claw-fingered, with tiny, stern mouths and distant eyes; cruel parodies of the far rounder, kinder figures routinely stencilled on Christmas ornaments rather than along the edges of illuminated manuscripts, managing to evoke two thousand years of Christmases Past in one simple silhouette.

  One way or the other, they would take shape as the darkness peeled away around them, lightening to a scal
ed or studded curtain of gold, uniform yet infinite: so massive they blocked out everything, even the projector. Their presence remade the Planetarium’s dome into a globe, a self-contained pocket universe, with no easy way of knowing which way was up or down, left or right. And from the moment they took shape, it seemed to go on forever, halo-glare-lit and shrouded in a double-cloak of feathers, half-spread wings hanging poised but shadowless between two useless horizons.

  Be not afraid, they told me, uselessly, even as I shivered in terror, wanting to vomit myself hollow. For unto you I bring great good news, forever and ever, Amen. Forever, and ever, and ever.

  I’d never quite been able to convey all this—not to Mom, only imperfectly and occasionally to friends, and certainly not to Simon, who’d only nod in sympathy but no real empathy. But reading Safie’s thesis was the kind of wonderful gobsmack that happens all too rarely: the instant realization that somebody else just gets it; that you’re not alone in your dislocation. That you’ve finally, finally found somebody else you can talk to without having to explain to.

  For all the practical and mundane reasons I had to turn to Safie Hewsen for help, that shared and secret terror was the thing that really made the choice for me.

  As you may have gathered, in the normal course of events I wouldn’t willingly hang around with most of my former students, let alone invite any of them onto something as important as filling in Mrs. Whitcomb’s background. This was, in large part, a reflection on the whole Fac process: the place essentially ran on selling OSAP grants to people who, for one reason or another, either couldn’t get into or weren’t willing to invest their time and money in “real” colleges, which meant we got a pretty amazing spread of candidates. Sometimes it was technically adept but academically weak people who wanted to get into the industry and saw the Fac as a jump-start; sometimes it was people coming straight out of high school, often with various learning disabilities, whose educational experience thus far had consisted of being warehoused and talked down to, people to whom “teacher” was a synonym for “person who thinks it’s their job to make me feel stupid.” In the latter case, reframing the Fac as a service industry gave them the impression that because they were supposedly paying my salary, I’d let them treat me like a waiter. Not so much, really, but we could usually come to some sort of working agreement—a position of mutual respect—at least long enough for me to make sure they graduated.