Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

  “The time-honoured method.” He nestled back into me, kissed my cheek, deliberately shifted to let me free my arm after a few seconds, which I did, gratefully; I moved onto my back, made the mistake of stretching slightly, and groaned. At the sound, I felt Simon stiffen.

  “Back?” he asked, without surprise.

  “Uhhh, no. Shoulder.” I resisted the urge to shrug, adding: “Same as always.”

  “That bad, huh?” He rolled up onto one elbow, facing me. “You need Robax?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. I mean, normally, yes, I would, but the doctor said that I should try to cut back. Stick to herbal stuff, Melatonin and—” I stopped. “Hear that?”

  We both stopped, listening hard. At first there was nothing, and I found it difficult to even remember what had attracted my attention. But then it came again, that distant twang of mattress-springs shifting, a clump of toys falling, clattering across Clark’s floor. And a thin, bitter wail, followed by the sound of weeping.

  Clark used to wake himself up all the time, crying inconsolably. I never understood why, though it often occurred to me how the only thing worse than a nightmare would be one you not only couldn’t distinguish from waking life, but also couldn’t communicate to others. What little language he’d gained from echolalia was a fairly recent thing, and like I’ve said before, trauma tended to wipe it away like window fog—gone in an instant, nothing left behind but smears and tears.

  Simon and I looked at each other. “I’ll run the bath,” I said. He nodded.

  So I went to do that, and a few minutes later Simon brought Clark in, hiccupping, his pants sodden, clinging miserably fast to his Daddy’s torso like a monkey. We put him in the tub and I ran the showerhead over his equally wet hair until it ran flat and clean while he moaned in protest. Meanwhile, Simon loaded almost everything on his bed into the washing machine, except the fold-up fire engine he slept inside. I didn’t even have my glasses on, so Clark’s face was just a blur with eyes, a pale tragedy mask; he sat there hunched up, bubbles to his chest, humid air ripe with lavender and ammonia.

  “No fun, huh, bunny?” I asked.

  “No fun,” he repeated, eyes still spilling.

  “No, I know. You have a bad dream?” No answer; I waited then leaned closer, a bit less patiently. “Clark, listen—Mommy asked you a question. Bad dream yes, or bad dream no?”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No bad dream. Good dream.”

  “That seems . . . pretty freakin’ unlikely, man.” Again, no reply followed, so I sighed, sitting back. “Well, okay. You want to get out or stay in?”

  “Stay in.”

  Holding up one hand, fingers spread: “For five more minutes?” He nodded. I sighed once more, rising to set the stove alarm, only to meet Simon on my way back.

  “He okay?” he asked.

  “Not too happy, but yeah, I guess. Keeps denying it ever happened, flipping negative to positive, like saying it’s gonna make it so. . . .”

  “He always does that, hon. Like when he ran straight into the wall and said ‘I didn’t hit my head,’ remember? He’ll be fine.”

  “Hope he’s not getting sick,” I muttered, or started to, since a second later the alarm went off. Simon didn’t bother answering, just went in and pulled the plug. “Okay, bud,” he told Clark, “looks like you’re all better, so we’re going to get you back to bed. We love you. You love Daddy?” Clark nodded. “How about Mommy?”

  “I love Mommy.”

  Simon glanced at me as if to say you see? I rolled my eyes. “You know that’s just mimicry, right?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” He moved to one side. “Can you dry him off? I’m gonna put fresh blankets on his bed.”

  I nodded, letting Simon squeeze by so I could sit down on the toilet. Clark’s eyes flicked up at me, then back down at the draining water, as if he didn’t think much of the shift change but was too tired to protest. My mouth tightened, and I felt as if I wanted to laugh and cry simultaneously.

  “Oh, bunny,” I finally whispered. “I’m sorry you got stuck with such a sucky mommy.”

  At that, Clark actually did look at me full on: eye contact, that legendary holy grail of interactivity. “It’s time to kiss the mommy,” he murmured, and I laughed, dipping to do so, then reached for the towel. As I pulled it down, I realized his lips were moving as he splashed, mashing bubbles, singing so quietly I could barely hear it; I pushed the washroom door closed, filtering out the washing machine’s rhythmic clank, and tried to listen.

  “. . . and outside in,” Clark sang, “this is how the world begins. Outside in and inside out, is how you blow a candle out.” The near-inaudible tune was strange, a lilting little minor-key ditty that sounded only vaguely familiar. “Inside out and inside out; Knock at the door, then turn about. Outside in and outside in . . .”

  (there she stands so let her in)

  “Huh,” Simon said, through the door’s half-open crack. “That one again.”

  “Again?”

  “He was singing it when you Skyped me from Quarry Argent.” I shook my head. “Okay, well. I don’t know what it is either, in case you’re wondering.”

  “Sounds sort of . . . Wendish, going by Mrs. Whitcomb’s stuff. Or just creepy pseudo-Victoriana, take your pick.”

  “Ain’t the Wiggles, that’s for sure. All right, bud—enough of that, time to step out. It’s over.”

  Clark cracked a huge, shuddering yawn and stood up, wavering slightly; I folded him into my arms, the towel, pulling him onto my lap, no matter how much my pelvis complained at his weight. Rubbing his hair, I thought I heard him say a few more words, from under my armpit. “What’s that?” I demanded, pulling away. “Say again, Clark. What was—”

  Lifting his head from my chest, he studied me, bags beneath his eyes like bruises. “Not over,” was all he said, however, before settling back down. And didn’t speak again, at least till morning.

  A few days later, in and between other weirdness, I was taking a couple of minutes to square Clark’s room away before he came back from school—stack books according to size, soft toys on top of the Thomas the Tank Engine storage shelves, hard toys in their various bins, et cetera. Then something slipped beneath my foot, almost making me turn my ankle; I picked it up, cursing.

  It took a second for me to recognize it as a toy my dad—Clark’s O.G., for “Other Granddad”—had sent over from Australia just before Clark was born, a plush purple bunny with a microphone in its belly; perhaps, in hindsight, where our favourite nickname for Clark got started. When you pressed a button on its back and held it down, you could record a message; press the bunny’s nose, and your own voice emerged from a speaker in its head, as though the toy was channelling you. One cancelled out the other, always, each new message recording overtop the last—no repeats.

  That day, on sheer impulse, I pressed the playback button. Clark’s voice emerged, singing that same creepy rhyme he’d been parroting in the bath: . . . how you blow a candle . . . and outside out . . .

  Same old same old, I thought. But then, halfway through, another voice joined in—or seemed to. And maybe it was an echo, the mechanism wearing thin; maybe it was a fragment of an old message with a new message laid overtop, the first longer than the second, spliced Franken-style. Maybe it was low batteries or phone bleed, radio waves even, not that anyone really uses radio anymore—

  Yeah, maybe. Or it might have been a woman’s voice, dark and scratchy, breath-starved, each note a bare, reedy scrap of tone. Singing a third verse, one none of us had ever heard before, or since:

  Inside, outside, more and more,

  Every mirror is a door.

  Outside, inside, mirrors break,

  To look has been your first mistake . . .

  After one thing and another, it was already Wednesday of the next week by th
e time Safie and I were finally able to get together; we’d spoken, obviously—I asked her to courier the Whitcomb file box over to me and paid dearly for the privilege—but various factors made a physical meeting impossible until then. Slight annoyance factor of Simon and Mom attempting to keep me on enforced bed rest aside, however, that was fine with me, because it gave me time to sort through and peruse the writings in question with only intermittent interruption, barring the usual—another They Might Be Giants album, Here Comes Science, in the background on continual repeat, for example, plus bouncing, and cries of, “Your turn, Mommy! Dance! Sing!”

  “Can’t, honey, Mommy’s doing something,” I’d call back, at which point Clark would inevitably switch to, “Your turn, Daddy!” instead, running poor Simon through his paces. And I’d go right on back to the pile, pulling sheaf after sheaf of copied material out of the same seemingly endless file, getting semi-high off the toner’s barely set stink.

  Eventually, however, the relevant stuff did start to float to the top . . . which is when it got really interesting.

  From Arthur Macalla Whitcomb to an unnamed friend, dated 1925:

  You ask me how I feel now my wife is pronounced deceased ex post facto, to which I can but reply: were it only so easy! She is with me always, even now—her presence does not fade, nor, all pangs aside, do I wish it to.

  How well I still recall the day we met, at Miss Dunlopp’s, her standing tall amongst all the children in their rough frocks and short trousers; she was a teacher’s aide already, dressed head to toe in blue bombazine, her glorious hair wound up tight and tucked away beneath a cap like some Mennonite. Hardly a figure of glamour, and half again my age, yet I could not stop myself from staring. I wrote draft after draft to that place, completely disinterested in those other orphans’ welfare, only in order to speak with her an instant here, share a stolen moment there. Once she was of age, I was able to make my offer, which she accepted—and though I never believed she would refuse, I can state with conviction that hour when she agreed to marry me remains the absolute pinnacle of my life.

  In another age, the fascination she exerted over me might have been characterized as witchcraft, for she displayed a charisma which drew her on to heights of creative endeavour I could never have predicted—a certain Sibylline quality, visionary and pure yet touched by the malign, as I felt even before I came to know what losses spawned it. It drew me—she drew me—and I gave myself over gladly. I was never resentful. I could not be.

  I never will be.

  It was after Hyatt’s misfortune, the violent blow of his—erasure—that Mrs. W. began to affect the veil she would wear forevermore, both in and out of doors. Just as she had previously feared to allow him outside unaccompanied, so she now feared to venture forth herself without its protection; as though, it struck me, she dreaded some sort of unnatural attention, discovery, recognition.

  “I saw,” she told me, often enough. “I shall never un-see, nor be un-seen, so what I know must be told somehow, by any means. I must remove it from my head; translate it to the heads of others. Perhaps then, the debt will be paid.”

  I did not know, nor do I, of what she spoke. But it meant the world to her—and she the world to me. I would have done her any service, far above and beyond the mere vows of our union; she knew it well enough, from the very beginning. Yet she ceased to call upon me, eventually. I was cast out, forgotten. Can any blame me for taking myself away, leaving her to her own devices? Her toys and trinkets?

  Well, it is all of little account now.

  You ask me what is to be done with the boy, her charge—Sidlo, that poor little blind mountebank—so I set down my wishes, accordingly: I will continue to pay his upkeep, since I am not inclined to throw any crippled thing to the winds, let alone one who was so tenderly loved by the woman who still holds all my heart, and no doubt loved her, too. He wept bitterly enough, seven years past, when I told him that she had gone missing; I have no doubt that if she is truly beyond retrieval now, he will continue to mourn her the rest of his days. Thus we will share that, if nothing else, though I expect it will bring neither of us much comfort.

  “Boy,” I call him, though he must surely be grown a man of more than twenty years. Yet perhaps I wish only to convince myself that if he did know her better than I, it was for but a short time, and that the difference in age between them (more markèd even than that between she and I) would have left them no room to do aught of which I might be required—by law, by morality, by God’s own word—to be jealous.

  Nevertheless, I place no blame on him, or her—or myself, for that matter. No more than any other human being.

  Here I will break off, however, and though I am glad to hear from you, I apologize in advance for my lack of subsequent communication. I plan on leaving Europe at last, returning to Canada, retiring to the Manor, there to gather my thoughts and count the seconds till my own departure. It is my fervent hope that in death I will find the answers I seek . . . that she and I will be reunited, with no further mysteries left between us. Yet should this prove to be no more than idle fancy, I have no grand designs left to play out anymore, and this world holds very little appeal for me beyond the certainty of its eventual passing. I expect to neither long survive her, nor be over-unhappy to not do so.

  I am, as ever, yr. obt., etc. etc.

  Further down in the stack, I found a photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Whitcomb on their wedding day, seated together like some royal couple amidst an attendant troop of bridesmaids, groomsmen, servants—even a tearful-looking older lady who might be Miss Dunlopp, given she herself stood surrounded by a clutch of uniformed kids. As usual, Mrs. Whitcomb was veiled, though far more lightly than every other time I’d “seen” her: a fall of transparent lace hung from her hat brim, tails thrown back over her shoulders and points tied beneath her chin, embroidered with delicate flowers that reduced her actual features to a teasing, candled-egg blur.

  Mr. Whitcomb, on the other hand, was both fully visible and palpably ecstatic—he was a carthorse of a man, long, tall and bluff-featured, wearing an uncomfortable-looking celluloid collar and a walrus moustache, neither of which suited him. His hands were large enough to engulf both of hers at once, and he studied her with gentle, baffled eyes, so drunk in love he could barely sit still; one of his legs was actually slightly blurred, probably from juddering with nervous energy during the no doubt interminable exposure time.

  Whoa, man, I remember thinking, eyebrow arching slightly at the sight. Seriously, keep it in your trousers. I mean, she married you, didn’t she? That’s about as good as it gets.

  He definitely seemed to think so, anyways. And if she thought something else, well—it wasn’t like she was saying anything.

  Sifting down, I hit yet more correspondence, post-wedding—happy happy joy joy: I am enthused beyond all words at the delight we share, now that this sweetest of creatures has consented to vow herself mine before God and all congregants, blah blahbitty blah. Letters and drafts of letters, a voluminous ongoing net of back-and-forth with family and friends, business consultants and partners, basically anybody the surprisingly excitable Whitcomb admired enough to try and make a pen pal out of. If he’d lived during the Internet age, old Arthur M. would’ve probably ended up being labelled an unrepentant fanboy, prone to tweet or re-blog a million shots a day of whatever Iris happened to be working on, along with selfies of him mooning over her, and her blocking her face with anything handy.

  He was besotted with her; that much was clear—but interestingly, his powerful attraction appeared to be fuelled as much by admiration for her creativity and intellectual acuity as for her youth and beauty. For [t]hough many assert there be no female quality equivalent to genius, what I find in her—my Iris, my darling, my bride!—can, truly, be given no other name, he wrote, maybe to the same dude as before—the first and last pages of that letter were missing. She is possessed by a fierce flame of talent which illuminates
all she touches, and I would have every one in the world know her as I do, through her works first and foremost, since they cannot share daily in her life . . . and indeed, all matters of mere boorish business laid aside, I own no higher aspiration but to make this so.

  Discussion followed over whether or not to stay in town while Whitcomb Manor was being renovated (fitted up for two, with extra space cleared out for when kids started coming along), or make a European honeymoon tour, the way Mr. Whitcomb had apparently promised her they would. Though Mrs. Whitcomb didn’t seem to mind either way, Mr. Whitcomb suddenly started pushing the latter idea hard, mapping out a journey that would begin in England, then go through France and Belgium to Germany, ending up in those areas of Lusatia bordering closest to Hungary—the former Wendish territories, from where her family originated.

  You have spoken of tracing your ancestry, he wrote to her while on a business trip to Toronto, and so I have made inquiries up around God’s Ear, hoping to discover any who might recall your former family—that foul maniac, your father, as well as your mother and grandmother, of whom you have such few, yet fond, memories. Oh forgive my presumption, please, dear girl! Though you may well deprecate my methods, I believe you will gain great pleasure from their result. . . .

  And here the tone began to shift, correspondence giving way to notes, lists, little sketches, and memoranda. A map of the area, one particular district highlighted, longitude and latitude reckoned to show the position of a village—so small I could only assume it hadn’t been thought important enough to include on its own merits—called Dzéngast. (In the Sorbian tongue, dzén is day, or perhaps bright, depending on sources, Mr. Whitcomb’s scribbled commentary revealed; he’d hastily written something else underneath, before scrubbing it away once more, leaving nothing but an odd smear in its wake. Unlikely, he’d appended, right after that, with no real hint as to what had just been so summarily dismissed.)

  Well, we already knew they’d gone, right? Bruges, the check-in with Gustave Knauff, Knauff’s maybe-portrait of the two of them. But when I turned over the next wad of papers, what I got was a sort of diary after the fact, one that skipped straight over the British, French, and Belgian portions of the trip. It began in media res, as Mr. Whitcomb would have put it: with a stopover in some hotel near Bautzen, cultural capital of Upper Wendia, my guidebooks say. Dr. R— has agreed to meet us here, pretending we have encountered him by chance; he comes highly recommended by my cousin Adelhart, the surgeon, who accounts him the most unsung alienist of his acquaintanceship. To identify him as such to Iris would be impossible, of course, but seeing her megrims have become steadily worse since we disembarked, I see no other way forward. . . .