by Gemma Files
(yes, oh yes)
It’s nothing personal. Nothing to do with you, at all.
(oh no, I didn’t think it was)
Beneath my fingers, the pen scratched on, spitting out words in clumps: this Sunday’s circle, our fellowship, join hands, the spirit cabinet, coughing out ectoplasm. I feel so sorry for these other mothers, Mrs. Whitcomb wrote, interior voice buzzing in my spit-less throat, clinging to their grief, loving it publicly as they would their own absent chicks, if they only could. Yet I envy them, too—hate them, almost, when my blackest fits are on me. Sometimes I watch their tears take shape in the developing solution, reduced to unstrung frames, then deliberately hold them up to open light before the fixative sets, and laugh to watch them melt away forever.
Amongst her visiting protégés, I see none with even a portion of Kate-Mary’s gift, which gives me a bitter satisfaction. Yet this new boy is different, or so she claims; his talent, like mine, expresses itself through the lens—a true mechanical prodigy, a child of this new age, as far removed from the shaking table or planchette as I now am from M. Knauff’s noxious daubs and horsehair brushes, the paint-encrusted palette knife with which he slit his throat. Some Slavic name, reminding me strongly of God’s Ear, before my father’s oddity drove us forth . . . Sidlo, yes. Vasek Sidlo.
Were there photos? I couldn’t recall seeing any. Thought about rummaging through the box, then remembered it wasn’t here anymore—fucking Wrob. Plus, this was a dream.
(a dream, just a dream)
Shit, my head was really killing now, sparks cascading every which-where. The librarian flickered in and out, her aura gone coronal. Beneath my still-scribbling hand, the print turned white, the pages black; Sidlo’s name humped up, a gasoline-filled anthill bulging and splitting under pressurized heat, fiery insect-letters blossoming in all directions.
And now the “librarian” was Mrs. Whitcomb once more, all dog snarl, corpse lips and nude teeth under her flowing beekeeper’s veil, crowned with a nodding mask of bleached flowers. Leaning closer still, and whispering in my frozen ear—
I took up Kate-Mary’s challenge, gave him an image to play with for proof of his ability, my hand on his brow like Hyatt in some fever, or the Lady’s on Hyatt’s, inside me
and sister, sister, when I ran the printed film through its chemical bath I saw him bloom again, my lovely boy running through the maze and laughing, my own thoughts pulled like silk through a skein from my skull to Vasek’s, Vasek’s to the reel he held
Hyatt in miniscule, shadow-rendered, engraved in poison and flammable with love, with grief
my memories struck long distance, match to a ceaseless flame, and oh
so impressive
Impressive, yes. That was the word she used. As in, “to impress.”
Vasek Sidlo pressing his mind against the unexposed silver nitrate film, only to leave his lovely patron’s—Mrs. Whitcomb’s—mental fingerprints behind.
Too painful to look up now, so I looked down instead. Back at my hand. Wanting to lie down in the dark, a wet cloth across my eyes. Wanting to be anywhere but here—stumbling around blind through some unfamiliar house, bruising myself on the furniture to escape what trailed behind with its skirts in the dust, train rattling like snakeskin—
my poor blind child, poor Vasek
yet I was grateful he need never see what I sought to birth back into this world
invisible made visible, lost once more found
—then breaking out through the door into daylight, the black behind my eyes suddenly turned red, straight into a spiky clutch of close-pruned hedge twigs. Feeling my way handful by handful, gravel underfoot, ’round one corner then another, another, another . . .
Further in and faster. Still blind, staggering, too quick to catch myself as I went down, knee popping. The swish of cloth like tearing paper, icy air on my nape.
There is no one who wants you here, sister. Not even yourself. Yet still you come, over and over.
What will I have to do, to drive you away at last?
So bright, so hot. I knew that voice, and desperately wanted not to. Everything hurting just as badly, especially my fingers on the pen I held, wrist bent as though I’d swapped right hand for left. Two completely different sorts of writing, neither anything like my own, trading back and forth like question versus answer, a conversation. Minutes from a meeting I’d never had.
Will it work?
YES
Should I try?
NO
Why not?
NO GOOD WILL COME OF IT
And if I do so anyhow?
WHAT WILL BE WILL BE
Automatic writing, maybe, from one of Kate-Mary des Esseintes’ meetings . . . Spiritualists swore by it, if I remembered correctly. I could almost see Mrs. Whitcomb sitting there in the dark, watching Kate-Mary write these lines out: advice from Beyond, dictated by ghosts, or angels. It was her final enterprise she spoke of, I knew in my bones, the one she’d needed Sidlo’s help to complete—the train film, burnt up on projection, her only true work. The answer to Lady Midday’s fatal enquiry at last, posed under the lit sword’s glare, in the field’s terrible heat; that awful smell, and that voice. That voice Mrs. Whitcomb had only ever heard once, but had never forgotten.
dare the sword and be spared, then, with Hyatt regained if I do right
(if he still can be)
Down at the very bottom then, this final set of notations, in tinier letters even than the smudge-hidden message I’d plucked from that first entry:
I must, then. It will be as God wills.
As She . . .
Later, looking for proof this phantom conversation ever existed, I’d find only a section of Mrs. Whitcomb’s notebook, torn away years—decades—before, all brown and ragged along its edges. But for now, as I snapped awake, I felt nothing but a sense of relief so strong it verged on nausea as my incandescent migraine pain peeled away on contact, leaving me chilled and shaking but otherwise fine; just part of the same dream and nothing more. My skull felt light and dim, empty; I bent forward, panting, palms braced on knees, almost letting the notebook fall unheeded to the floor before I caught it and laid it carefully to one side. Simon must’ve felt me move, because he turned on his side, groaning—he flopped a hand my way, patting me absently on the thigh, like he thought that’d give me some sort of comfort.
“Y’okay?” he asked, muffled. “Sounded . . . not good.”
“Yeah, I just—fell asleep working, I guess. Had a bad dream.”
“Thass never nice.”
I sighed. “Nope.”
Nearby, somebody made a miserable little noise. I looked over to see Clark standing there, almost close enough to touch; his hair stood straight up, sweat-spiked. His wandering eyes were big and glazed, bruisey both underneath and around their edges, while a big blue vein I didn’t think I’d ever seen before ran the length of one temple, pulsing slightly. “Oh my God, bunny,” I exclaimed, staring, as Simon—spurred by the note in my voice—managed to heave himself upright. “You scared the crap out of me, seriously. Are . . . are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Clark claimed, wavery voice sounding anything but. Then he leaned forward, without even a second’s warning, and puked all over me.
Though St. Mike’s was closer, we eventually ended up at SickKids Hospital, because not only did Clark’s vomit smell absolutely horrifying—it had a greenish-black consistency, like dirt and rotting tubers, wholly incompatible with anything we’d actually seen him eat that night—but he was also burning up, so hot that taking his temperature made my hand tingle. Step one was a hasty clean-up and new clothes while Simon called a cab; Step two had us all in the back seat, Clark humped and moaning over our largest plastic salad bowl. By the time we got there, we had more than enough fresh samples for the ER staff to look at. They rushed Clark off, leaving us to wait. I
called Mom after composing myself enough to not sound crazy.
“I’m coming,” she said, brooking no disagreement. Not that I had any, for once.
The SickKids’ waiting room is a massive, echoing space bordered by McDonald’s and Starbucks on one side, and downtown Toronto’s most central source of gluten-free and non-allergenic snack foods on the other. Here and there, big flat screens blast continual Treehouse TV, though they thankfully turn the volume down at night. Simon and I sat holding hands, neither of us looking at each other, while I looked down at the few things of Clark’s I’d thrown into a shopping bag before we left: two fresh changes of clothes, his furry white blanket, various soft toys, some books he liked, his iPad.
“I don’t get it,” Simon said to nobody in particular. “He seemed fine earlier. Didn’t he seem fine?”
“Seemed fine to me,” I agreed.
“These things come on fast though, I guess, with kids. They run hot and high, burn through them quickly; I did. I mean . . . I think I remember Mom and Dad saying I did.”
“Yeah, I think your mom told me something about that once. Some fever you and your sister got, knocked you both out for a week.”
“Uh huh.” A pause. “I should call them, probably. Just to keep them in the loop.”
“Probably, yeah. You have your phone?”
“. . . No.”
“Okay, that’s okay. Take mine.”
“Thank you, hon,” he said, voice breaking slightly. I pressed his hand as I passed it over, trying to transmit whatever comfort I could through sheer contact. We both knew that since Simon’s parents lived in Mississauga, that’d make getting to SickKids’ more difficult for them than for Mom, though hardly impossible; they’d appreciate being copied in, though, even without an immediate diagnosis. Hell for all I knew, Mom had called them already, on her way out the door.
She turned up a few minutes after, just as I was paying for coffee, and hugged me so hard I almost dropped it.
No guilt, not even any questions. Just my mother’s arms around me, the way I sometimes tried to put mine around Clark, till he got too uncomfortable to accept it: gave his fake little Disney laugh, vibrating and babbling, then fought his way free again. Leaving me to laugh as well and call him a creep (I’m not a creep, I’m a dangerous creep, Mommy), something she never liked, and wasn’t exactly afraid to say so—you think he doesn’t hear you, Lois, but he does; you need to understand that, and act accordingly. But what she never got was how I had to do it, to minimize the hurt bouncing back my way, this pain I’d long since absorbed—the idea I had no right to feel. To play Bad Mommy to the hilt and wear that title like a joke, call myself it, before anybody else could.
Always thinking, as I did: I hold as much of my son in my heart at any one given time as I can, Mom, and I’m sorry if that seems like it’s not enough. But I have to protect myself, first and foremost: not from him, but from my own . . . disappointment in him, over things he can’t even help, over my own reactions to those things. The sheer poison of it. I have to keep myself just far enough apart from him to be able to love him at all, knowing it’ll never be as much as he deserves to be loved. And that’s not because he’s broken, no. Not at all.
That’s because I am.
It’d been three in the morning when I first woke, or thereabouts. Around six—just as the sun was starting to think about coming up—the pediatrician assigned to Clark’s case finally came out to talk to us.
“I see he has ASD,” she began, flipping through his chart. “Has he ever had a seizure before?” That made us all sit up.
“No!” I snapped. “Did he have a seizure?”
“Mrs. Burlingame, we’re just not sure. Things got fairly ischemic-looking around the same time the fever broke, but with these kinds of episodes it’s about establishing a pattern. Except that we don’t really want to do that, so . . .”
. . . no way of knowing until we figure out the variables, the inciting factors, Dr. Harrison’s voice chimed in, in my head. Followed by my own, replying: Until I have another one, you mean.
(. . . basically, yes.)
“My name’s Ms. Cairns,” I started to point out, but Mom waved me silent. “Please, doctor,” she said, “my daughter’s just upset, obviously. You see—”
“She was hospitalized over last weekend, at St. Mike’s, for something very similar,” Simon hastened to put in as I glared at Mom. “Though, I mean . . . I wouldn’t think that was catching, exactly.”
The doctor blinked. “You had a seizure?”
“That’s debatable,” I muttered, as Mom clarified, helpfully: “Two, actually.”
“Um, well—I’m surprised you didn’t put that on the intake form.”
“Seriously? Why would I? The circumstances were completely—” I shook my head, huffed. “Let’s put it this way: high fever aside, I had no reason to connect the dots. We don’t even know what happened, let alone why.”
“All the more reason to mention it, I’d think. I’m going to need to talk to your physician.”
I gave her Harrison’s contact info from my phone, which she copied down. She told us there would be tests, surprising exactly no one, then cast disapproving eyes on me and walked away. In her wake, Mom looked my way like she definitely wanted to lodge some criticism of her own—but thankfully, Simon’s phone chimed before she could.
“That’s Mom and Dad,” he told us, checking it. “They’re coming down, should be here by ten. They’re taking Dad’s car.”
Mom nodded. “Good.” To me: “I still don’t understand why you wouldn’t—”
“Yeah, I get that, Mom.”
“I mean, come on, Lois. Didn’t it seem . . . pertinent?”
I looked at her for a long moment. “No?” I said, finally.
“Lois . . .”
Simon raised his hands, placatory. “Not all autistic kids have seizures, Lee; very few, in fact. The ones who do, it usually starts early, before diagnosis, even. And Clark’s never done anything like this before, not even when he was a baby—remember that ear infection, back when he was three months old? That’s the highest fever he’s ever had, until now.”
Mom shook her head, clearly frustrated. “There’s no consistency,” she said. “‘One kid with autism . . .’ Oh, shit.” She turned away and sat down abruptly, burying her face in her hands. Simon sat down too, and put his arm around her, saying nothing.
I’ve never been able to figure out if that was a guy thing, a Burlingame thing, or just Simon—that reflex instinct to distract yourself from your own pain by trying to console someone else—just like I’ve never been able to figure out whether I find it more endearing or off-putting. Right now, though, even as I fell back into myself in my own autonomic response (always to shut down, hard), I realized that more than anything else—I envied it.
Simon was right, I told myself: our presenting symptoms were wholly different—Clark never blacked out, never acted as if he had a migraine; I’d had no preliminary fever, no nausea. And up till last week nothing like this had ever happened to either of us, so what was the likelihood we shared some neurogenetic time bomb that only went off now? It was stupid; it was impossible. The two things couldn’t have anything to do with one another, really. . . .
Unless they do, a small, flat, pitiless voice from the back of my brain said while I stared as though hypnotized at the empty chair across from me. The same way whatever happened to Hyatt Whitcomb had something to do with what happened to Mrs. Whitcomb, in her father’s field, or that town, Dzéngast—because she thought it did, didn’t she? So much so she spent the whole rest of her life trying to set that story straight, record it, like a warning: making the film over and over again, writing down the fairy tales, telling and re-telling it. Like she was trying to get something right . . . trying to fix something.
But no. Because even if she had thought that, all it me
ant was that she was wrong. Or crazy, like so many brilliant, creative people. Or desperate, like anyone in her place would be. Because stuff like that just didn’t happen. Ever. And even if it did—
(even if it does)
—it surely didn’t happen again.
And now I really did feel something—not just annoyance, not just emptiness. I felt cold, ice-filled. I felt . . . scared.
Slowly, over this mounting sense of horror, I gradually became aware Simon was murmuring to Lee, his voice oddly threaded with laughter. For a moment I found myself flashing back to long childhood rides stuck in the backseat of my parents’ car, telling myself stories to live inside while Lee and Gareth argued, focusing so intently on the pattern of the seats it felt like I could fold myself down inside it and disappear for hours. More than once, they’d had to yell at me to get me to re-emerge. But then Mom laughed, too, a chuckle, watery but real, and I relaxed.
I leaned forward, turned my head slightly, and saw that Simon was flipping through photos on the iPad—the latest photos Clark must have taken in his endless ongoing series, fifty to a hundred mostly repeated images in a row: dust-bunnies under the bed; close-ups of the slightly decayed wicker trunk in the bathroom where we kept our towels; the too-bright smiling faces of his Thomas the Tank Engine shelf buckets; light through the window of his fire engine bed-tent. Then, some reverse shots he’d obviously taken on my laptop’s webcam, posing and chatting away, flirting with himself: Disney prince faces, Disney princess faces. Sometimes he applied effects. He was particularly enamoured of the psychedelic colour shift that made everything look like a Kirlian photograph, all vibrant lime green and purple auras, but he also liked the doubling mechanism, which made one half of the screen mirror the other.
“What’s that?” Mom said, suddenly.
I was already drifting away again, expecting Simon to answer her. But the seconds stretched out and he didn’t, until—finally, he did.
“I . . . really don’t know,” he said, tone unnerved enough to jerk me awake. “That’s weird.”
