by Gemma Files
“Um . . .” It was surprisingly hard to put words to it now. “Organics, mostly. Warm. Like flowers in the countryside, maybe. But if you really didn’t do it, it obviously doesn’t matter. Some neurological thing, probably; memories firing, et cetera.”
“Maybe you should go see a doctor,” she suggested, unknowingly mimicking my mom.
“Not unless one of the things I smelled was burnt toast.” I finished my chai. “Anyhow, what’s next for you after this? You planning to go on with that project you’ve been blogging about—the Seven Angels sequel?”
Safie looked down; I saw the thin skin ’round her earlobes reddening, olive flushing darker. “That’s . . . not really finished yet.”
“The clips you put up on your site look pretty good.”
“Yeah, those are—that’s just for promotion, I guess. Proof of concept. I don’t really have much else, besides those; applied for a Canada Council grant, so I could get back into it full-time.”
I snapped my fingers. “Right, I remember you made a post, talking about all the ridiculous questions on the application form—” But as ever, I put two and two together just a fraction too late to keep my foot out of my mouth “—and you didn’t get it,” I finished. “I’m sorry, man.”
“Thanks,” Safie said, in a low voice. “Yeah, the letter came two days ago, but with all our prep I didn’t get the chance to read it till this morning. So, um, I don’t know what’s next. Might be nothing.”
“Well, if you’re looking for options, I did just get some funding; from the NFA, as it happens. Which sucks it was me and not you,” I added, hastily, as her eyebrows went up, “and if I’d been making that decision, I might’ve gone the other way. But it’s something I could really use your help on, something I really think—I hope—you’ll find at least as cool as I do.” When she didn’t answer immediately, I went on. “Look, you know me—my field of study is pretty esoteric, to say the least. I care a lot about stuff most people don’t even know exists, and even when they do, it’s not like they’re going to pay for it. This is probably the only money I’m ever going to make from doing this research. But if I give some of it to you, then at the end of the day, I’ll—we’ll have rediscovered one lost Canadian filmmaker, and helped another make the leap from invisible to visible—hopefully, anyhow. No guarantees. Nobody’s ever going to see your film unless you shoot it, right?”
Safie bit her lip, looking thoughtful. “Why me?” she asked, at last.
“You always handed in your work ahead of time, and you always did more than I asked you for; also, I like your stuff. As I believe I’ve already told you, on numerous occasions.”
Safie looked down again, this time turning slightly away, sheepish. “I guess I thought you were just being nice about that,” she said.
“I’m a lot of things, Safie. None of them are ‘nice.’”
That got a sidelong look and a slightly opened then closed mouth, meaning clear: You said it, Miss, not me.
We repaired back to the tech room at Mousch’s auratorium, or whatever, because it had WiFi and Safie could stream the Untitled 13 clips from my laptop, putting them up on a big screen. It was 3:30 A.M., and the only person there was Soraya Mousch herself, manning the board while Safie and I had our chat. Alec Christian used to rave about her all the time—called her “international model-glamorous”—and I could certainly see why: tall, willowy, with long black hair and beechwood-coloured eyes. But she looked thinner than I was entirely comfortable with, so much so that when she impulsively hugged me, I could feel her bones.
“Safie’s told me a lot about you,” she said. “And I remember your reviews, of course.”
I laughed. “You and a grand total of maybe five other people, I think, but thanks. I remember your stuff too, from back during the Wall of Love era.”
“Yes, me and Max. Those . . . were good times.”
“Too bad you guys don’t work together anymore.”
She nodded, shrugged, took a beat. “Well,” she said at last. “You just don’t know, do you? What’s going to happen, or why. If you did . . .”
. . . You’d never get out of bed, a creepily familiar voice supplied, or seemed to, from the back of my skull. I felt myself twitch, almost shying from the sound of it. She noticed, smiled to cover it up, but didn’t get a similar gesture in return. Yeah, and screw you too, lady, I found myself thinking, uncharitably—then shook my head to dispel the bad energy and turned back toward what Safie and I had already been doing.
“Got any FireWire?” Safie asked her, rummaging through one of the boxes underneath the main workstation; Soraya nodded, and passed her some. A little more technical fussing and she emerged victorious, synching my laptop to the screen’s flat blue glow. I pointed out the relevant icon and she clicked on it; from the corner of my eye, I saw Soraya’s hand literally whip up to cup her cheekbone, like she was honest-to-God shielding her eyes from the dreaded sight of something potentially film related. The hell you think I’m going to show her here? I wondered. A turn-of-the-century snuff film? Vintage porn?
“Just fast-forward, say, five minutes,” I told Safie, who nodded. “That’ll get most of Wrob’s bullshit out of the way, and things’ll be really obvious from there on out.”
“’Kay, cool.” Raising her voice, keeping things studiously light: “Hey, Soraya—you do a walk-around anytime recently?”
Soraya shook her head, eyes still blocked, downcast. Replying, flatly,
“No, you’re right, thanks. I should go do that.”
“This won’t take long,” I assured her. “Maybe eight minutes from now, we’ll be done.”
“Okay, great. I’ll see you then.”
She retreated out the installation’s back door, kicking it closed behind her. I heard a tourist cry out as they must’ve stumbled against her in the dark, then the hushed sounds of her calming them. Onscreen, meanwhile, the silver-bright figure of Mrs. Whitcomb as Lady Midday took shape amongst the sheaves, a shadow turned inside out, up-rearing to scare the child peasants in her glittering, fold-hung mirror cloak, her filmy white mourning veil.
“You know, I’d pay money to find out how this phobia of Soraya’s kicked off in the first place,” Safie murmured. “It’s pretty intense, though, I know that much—I can’t even get her to watch cat videos on YouTube.”
I frowned. “Wait, wasn’t there . . . you know, I think Alec Christian told me once it had something to do with that urban legend, the guy who shows up in everything. Background Man.”
“Dude with the red necklace, right? Or the cut throat, depending.”
“That’s him.”
“Mmm. Well, that is kinda spooky. What am I looking at here?”
“Digitized copy of a film shot sometime before 1918, on silver nitrate stock. Might even date back as far as 1908, which’d put it among the earliest examples of Canadian moviemaking, plus part of the oeuvre of someone I think could be Canada’s very first female filmmaker. A whole chunk of completely unreported Canadian film history, in other words, so my job—yours too, if you opt to help out—would be to track it down, package it up for public consumption.”
“That’s . . . kinda cool as shit, actually.”
“I know, right?” I felt my lips curve in the darkness, shaping a smile of private (yet not totally undeserved) triumph. “Wrob tripped over it as part of the Ontario Film Recovery Project, hooked it out from under Jan Mattheius, and this is all he thinks to do with it. Lost his damn job to make this film, such as it is. But Mrs. Whitcomb here’s the real deal, the real story—you couldn’t make this shit up, man. Tragic life, eccentric habits, mysterious disappearance . . .”
“Seriously?”
I nodded. “It’s all in my notes. I’ll email ’em to you, minute I get home.”
Safie was still staring at the screen, though the clips had ended at least a minute ago; she tapped finge
rtip to bottom teeth, thoughtfully. “And you wanna move quick, I take it?”
“Well, yeah. I’ve been asking around for a month already, give or take—talked to a lot of people, one way or the other. Wrob already knows, and Jan, and Hugo Balcarras. In my experience, once you start connecting the dots, a thing like this doesn’t stay secret for very long.”
“Buried Treasure: The Films of Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb, by Lois Cairns and Safie Hewsen?”
“By Lois Cairns with Safie Hewsen, I was thinking, but sure—we can negotiate, as long as you’re in.” A beat. “So, are you?”
The answer’s probably pretty obvious, by now. But nevertheless:
“. . . Yeah, okay,” Safie replied.
What I didn’t know when I left Soraya Mousch’s installation was that Wrob Barney already had people following me. I know, this sounds paranoid; it isn’t.
Much later, after everything still to happen . . . happened, Wrob’s then-boyfriend/assistant Leonard Warsame and I sat down together and exchanged frankly on exactly how, to paraphrase the Talking Heads, we got here. I filled him in on the various details of my search for Mrs. Whitcomb, while he told me what Wrob had been doing during the same time period—reading texted reports on me and fuming, mostly; trying to figure out how most effectively to undermine me, to steal my work and take credit for it. And all this while Leonard attempted at first to talk him out of it, then gradually stopped doing so, then started to scheme ways to withdraw himself from the situation without Wrob realizing he was doing so until it was an actual faît accompli. That he never quite managed to get there wasn’t really his fault, and I certainly didn’t resent him for it, but I have to admit, I kind of wish I’d known it was going on. Because he might have been a fairly useful person to call upon, in context, once things began getting really bad.
“It’s not a good idea to turn your back on Wrob if you have something he wants,” Leonard told me, sadly. “Believe me, I know. . . .”
And here he went into a long anecdote about another guy Wrob had been involved with, before either Leonard or Jan Mattheuis—this dude who’d approached Leonard out of the blue, trying to warn him off Wrob by telling him how, when he’d tried to launch projects of his own instead of simply supporting Wrob in his dubious ambitions, things suddenly began to go subtly yet horribly wrong in every other area of his life. Oh, Wrob was sympathetic throughout, but that didn’t really help; the guy ended up losing both his day job and his health, plus a lot of his friends—a downward spiral that culminated when he came home one night to find that not only had the cult video store he lived above burned down, effectively destroying all physical copies of his artwork, but that it had done so as part of an apparently deliberate, barely controlled burn designed to clear a whole half-block of Queen Street West. The area was then bought up for gentrification, costing a bunch of people their livelihoods, and the guy in question was forced to move back home to Nova Scotia, where he worked in his parents’ hardware store for the next three years in order to pay rent on his former bedroom.
“He had no clear proof Wrob was involved, and he understood that completely,” Leonard said. “As I recall, he prefaced everything by saying: ‘You’re not going to believe a word I tell you right now, and that’s okay . . . but please, keep it in the back of your mind for afterward, when things that sound familiar start happening, because they will.’ And I blew him off, of course, exactly like he already knew I would; Wrob was everything to me, my best friend, not just my boyfriend. But—”
“He was right,” I filled in. He nodded.
“So right,” he agreed.
Across town, meanwhile, and back in the here and now, Safie was helping Soraya Mousch strike as the sun came up: not the whole ear-whorl maze of flats and padding itself, since that was frankly beyond both their physical capacities and would have to wait for a brawny bunch of movers scheduled for sometime that same morning, but the network of electronics, speakers, and night-vision cameras that supported it. As she packed the last box of bells and whistles into Soraya’s truck and turned for the subway, yawning, she felt Soraya’s hand on her sleeve.
“Let me ask you something, Safie,” she began. “Do you trust Lois Cairns?”
Safie frowned. “Trust her like how?”
“Well, let me put it another way. Is she reliable?”
“Uh . . . she’s weird, that’s for sure; always has been. But weird in a good way. Like she cares too much.”
“She looks tired, to me. Maybe a little sick.”
“Said she’s been having a hard time sleeping. I don’t know if you noticed her eyes or not, but that happened pretty recently, I think.”
“After she saw Wrob Barney’s film?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Safie stopped and thought for a moment. “And that thing about smelling stuff that wasn’t there, too, in the installation . . . that was whack.”
“I overheard, yes. Now I’ll ask you something else. How do you feel, having also seen it?”
“I don’t—”
“Watching Mrs. Whitcomb’s film, for the first time. How did it make you feel?”
A simple enough question, on the face of it. Safie stopped, made a concerted effort to think her less intellectual reactions through, only to quickly find the flickering images had given her less a jolt of recognition or curiosity than a gradually dawning sick feeling, as though she were starting to perceive something incipiently dangerous drawing ever closer. That by the time the playback had stopped and she’d looked away, it had been with a lurch, a gasp—as though she’d been holding it, ever since the few tiny sections I’d shown her of what Jan Mattheuis and I had come to call Lady Midday (Version One) began.
“Why do you ask?” she replied after a moment, only to watch Soraya give the same weird smile, this time with even less humour behind it.
“Oh,” was all she finally said. “No reason.”
That night, Safie eventually told me, Soraya contacted her on Facebook, warning her: I would be careful on this project, if I was you—keep your eyes open. Other people’s obsessions can be fascinating, but there’s also an element of pull. A current. Don’t want to go any deeper with it than you need to. Might be you’re inviting something in without even knowing it.
Like what? Safie sent back. She waited for a reply but none came. Look, she continued, it’s not up to me, anyways. You said that stuff to Ms. Cairns, she’d just quote David Cronenberg at you. Be all, “where I need to go with this is all the way through, right to the end. I need to see.”
Some things you don’t need to see, though. Like some things shouldn’t be seen.
Don’t know what you’re talking about, S.
I get that.
Maybe it was because she didn’t know me that Soraya went to Safie first. Christ knows I have that effect on people, sometimes. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because she knew better, from hard—and entirely personal—experience. Because I reminded her enough of herself, or someone else she’d once known, to understand it wouldn’t have made a damn ounce of difference either way, even if she had.
“So that’s the deal,” I told Mom the next afternoon, while Simon watched as Clark bounced up and down on his trampoline in the background, hooting frantically along to his favourite album, They Might Be Giants’ No! “Safie drives me up to Quarry Argent and plays videographer when we get there. We gather as much background material as we can from the museum, then visit the Vinegar House for more—footage of all Mrs. Whitcomb’s paintings, any photos we can scavenge of her, her son Hyatt, or Mr. Whitcomb, stuff about the séances. We’ll try to find where she might’ve shot the films and check that out as well: Méliès had a specially constructed studio made of glass in a steel frame, to let in as much light as possible; the Vinegar House’s plans say Mr. Whitcomb built a greenhouse but never used it, so I’m betting that was probably Ground Zero. Then we come back, go through all the NFA’s L
ake of the North silver nitrate films again and match them up with the fairy tales, digitize anything Wrob Barney didn’t get around to . . . it’s gonna be amazing.”
“Mmm. How much are you paying her for this, exactly?”
I huffed, took a beat. “You know it’s not my money being spent here, right? That’s sort of the point of a grant.”
“I know what a grant is, Lois, thank you. I also know you’ve never done anything this big before—or have you? Am I wrong?” I shrugged. “That’s what I thought.”
“Safie’s trustworthy, Mom. I wouldn’t have involved her if she wasn’t.”
“Which you know how?”
At that, I really did have to laugh, though I saw Simon shoot me a warning glance as I did. “Because I just do, and I guess you’re just gonna have to believe I know what I’m talking about! I mean, you either do or you don’t, right? It’s not rocket science.”
In fact, though Safie probably didn’t rely entirely on her family anymore, it seemed likely she wasn’t hurting quite as badly as some of my former students, which kept her motives strictly un-mercenary. I knew this because she’d accepted my first offer without a qualm, let alone any attempt at further negotiation: a 500-dollar retainer, plus forty dollars per hour logged for her initial assistance, to be raised if the research period exceeded two weeks. Jan Mattheuis had told me it was pretty standard boilerplate, and she’d have to return a signed copy of the agreement to him before we could leave for Quarry Argent. We were planning to go up over the weekend, travelling Friday, exploring and shooting Saturday-Sunday-Monday, then back on Tuesday by the latest.
“The Archive is going to want to do a tie-in documentary for their website, which could lead to an expanded documentary for the CBC,” I explained. “That’s why I need someone with Safie’s skills.”
“But you don’t know.”
“I know if I do this fast enough my name’s going to be on it, and if she helps, hers will, too. That was my sell, and it worked.” Mom looked at me again, sceptically. “Listen, I’m not asking you for anything here; I’m telling you what’s going to happen. I signed a contract, worked out a schedule, so you’re not going to see me around for the next few days because I am going to Quarry Argent, with Safie Hewsen. Me informing you is a courtesy; this is me, being courteous.”
