by Gemma Files
“What?” I asked.
They both glanced over, startled. Mom opened her mouth, but Simon forestalled it by handing me the tablet. “Have a look,” he said, and sat back.
I studied it a minute, maximizing the photo in question—Clark, dancing in his bedroom, the iPad propped on his bed, angled to record while he watched himself in his screen—and turned it in my hands, this way and that. Trying to figure out exactly what I was supposed to be looking at beyond the obvious: my son’s bony chest and flappy, jigging limbs, his welcome crocodile grin . . .
And then, all at once, I saw it—recognized it. What it had to be. It, her: She.
She, with a big “S.”
In the corner of Clark’s room, by the door, stretched almost two-dimensional—so flat, somebody who didn’t know his room might’ve mistaken it for a painting on the wall—was something almost exactly like what I’d seen on the monitor with Safie and Malin: the sound-file image, Safie’s PixelVision spectre. Except instead of shades of grey, it was in brass and gold and fierce, bright silver-white, so pale it was almost blue tinged.
Lady Midday, standing in the corner of Clark’s room with her wings hanging down around him, looking in at him, eyes fixed and inhuman, sharp as a stooping hawk’s. Every angel is terrible, as Rilke says, with her no exception to that rule.
And Clark was smiling up at her, with full eye contact like he knew her, like he welcomed her. Like she was his usually invisible friend. As widely as he grinned at his “friend Daddy” . . . or, once in a while, at me.
“What’s wrong?”
I almost didn’t recognize Simon’s voice. At the sound, however—as angry as it was worried—everything inside me locked up; I could only imagine what my face already told him. But I couldn’t think where to start, how to say any of it, without proving I was exactly as crazy as I was already terrified I might be. I couldn’t not look at him—owed him that, at least—but even as our eyes met, terror meeting confusion in a crackling spark, the only thing I could manage by way of a reply was: “. . . Nothing.”
Broadcasting to both of them, as I did, with my hunched shoulders, avoidant gaze, knotted hands, and drawn-taut mouth: don’t ask don’t ask don’t ask . . .
Simon would’ve probably have backed off if it had been just him. But not Lee. Not my mom, with her innate knack for picking up on exactly what people least wanted to give away, and her utter lack of any reluctance to call them on it, especially when she thought it mattered.
“Answer the question, Lois.”
“Nothing,” I said. “I—” My phone beeped with a calendar alert—thank Christ—prompting me to look down, almost to smile. I stood up, grabbing for my bag. “I gotta go.”
“Excuse me?”
“Go, that’s what I said. I have to—”
—get away from you, from him. Because if I can get far enough away, maybe this thing will go with me, and leave you guys alone; it’s followed me this far, after all. It, she—
(She)
Unlikely. I saw the word inscribe itself across the inside of my head, in Arthur Macalla Whitcomb’s looping scrawl: letters run together, brain knit with bone. So, so very . . . unlikely.
“—go, I have to go. I have an appointment.”
“No you don’t!”
“Yes, I do.” I shoved my phone at Simon so he could read the message alert, and then stood and gathered my coat in one arm while shrugging my knapsack half on with the other. “At the NFA, Mom; nine thirty meeting, Safie and me. We’re presenting to Jan Mattheuis, to get him up to speed on the Mrs. Whitcomb project. It’s been set up for a week.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, I’m really not—Simon, you remember, right?” I appealed to him, and while he didn’t exactly nod, he didn’t not nod, either. “C’mon, Mom, what do you think I’ve been doing this all for? I have to. This isn’t the kind of appointment you can miss.”
“Your son is in hospital, Lois. I somehow think they’ll understand, if you—”
“No, they won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Oh no, you’re right, of course; what was I thinking? ’Cause there’s nothing in this whole wide world that I know, and you just don’t.”
Mom recoiled a bit in her seat, as if from a slap; the venom of my words even splashed onto Simon, who stood as well, putting a hand on my sleeve. “Lois,” he said. But I was still looking at Mom, her face gone rigid in a way that made me want to snort, or maybe give a nasty little grin. Neither would be the smartest move in the world, but after the night I’d just had, I have to admit I wasn’t feeling all too smart.
So—
“What is it you think is gonna happen if I don’t stay?” I asked her. “Like if I’m not within a certain physical range of him the whole time, he’ll never wake up again? All we know is they don’t know anything yet, so he’ll either get better or he won’t, full stop—and nothing I do, here or anywhere else, is going to make a damn bit of difference. Any more than you being there, or Simon not being there, in St. Mike’s, made a difference to what happened with me.”
My voice had gotten louder than I’d intended; both Simon and Mom had backed up a step. Simon was taking the slow deep breaths he used to stay calm, and I could half-read his thoughts already: Easy, easy, she’s just blowing off steam, don’t take it personally. But Mom just blinked, mouth working like—she couldn’t figure out what to say, for once. At all.
“Why would you say that to me, Lois?” she said at last. “This isn’t you. It’s cruel. You were never cruel.”
Fear, I guess, I thought. And pain. And disappointment.
The thing I heard myself say, however—voice gone suddenly hollow; tired, as though pithed—was: “I don’t mean to be. But I’m going, Mom; least I can do, so I’m doing it. I’m always good for that.”
’Bye.
And I shrugged my backpack the rest of the way on, turned, and left.
I think I might’ve been half-hoping one of them would say something; I was mostly relieved, yet simultaneously depressed, when they didn’t. Still, as so often happens, reality conspired against my dramatic exit when, outside by the elevators, I heard rapid footsteps and turned to see Simon trotting up to me. “Oh, God,” I sighed. “Simon, I’m so sorry about all this—all that, too. I didn’t mean—”
“Lois, look, it’s okay—” He caught himself, with a snort. “Well no, actually, it’s not okay, but we’ll talk about it later. Here.” He held out my iPhone and I swore; I’d completely forgotten giving it to him. “It’s Safie, for you. She called about ten seconds after you left.”
I swore again then thanked him and took it.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry if I’m late, I was just on my—”
“Forget that,” she replied. “You seen the news yet?”
“No, why?”
“Just watch it, Miss.”
“Um, all right. What station?”
A pause passed between us, stretching far longer than I expected it to.
“Any should do,” she said.
That was how I found out.
ACT THREE
SCREENING
It’s amazing, really, when you think about it: film has a language all its own, a vocabulary of visual storytelling, and it was people like Mrs. Whitcomb and her contemporaries who invented it over an amazingly small period of time. Everything since has been nothing but elaboration, technical change. George Méliès laid the basis for every special effect we have today.
I’d love it if real life came equipped with those sorts of narrative short cuts, you know? Especially when things get complex, start to accelerate, just like they will—like they did. Irises, fades, dissolves, wipes . . . smash cuts to black.
If life worked that way, then that’s where this chapter could start, right now: a black screen then a
title card—TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER. Because that’ll be when I wake up, back in hospital again. And the light’s on, I can tell it is; feel it on my skin somehow, like a warm touch, a red intimation inside my skull. But I can’t see it, because I can’t see anything.
I’m blind.
And somebody’s sitting beside my bed, holding my hand very gently. And I want to believe it’s Mom—I really do. But even then, even right then, I know it’s not.
And then there’s a breath, near my ear. Somebody leaning in. That voice I know so well, inside the hollow of my own ear. Saying, sadly—
Sister, I tried. I tried so very hard. But you wouldn’t listen, and now here you are.
Here we are, in the dark, together.
If my life was a movie, this is the exact moment—
(this space between frames, flickering past too fast to see, conveying only the illusion of forward motion in the service of a closed loop, a forever-predestined end)
—where I’d scream out loud.
Smash cut to black again; rewind, re-set. Another title card.
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS EARLIER.
Moments after Safie suggested I get myself to a TV set, Simon and I stood in the SickKids waiting room once more watching CITY TV’s all-day local news coverage on the screen nearest the door, having managed to persuade the staff member managing the information desk to switch the channel. Or rather, I watched—iPhone still clutched in one hand with Safie on speaker, providing occasional commentary—while Simon surfed, cross-checking as many sites as he could on the iPad. Mom hovered beside us both, obviously still not happy with my previous behaviour, but having perked up considerably when we came back in.
“What’s wrong?” she’d asked, seeing my expression; “I don’t know,” I’d replied. Then added, hastily: “Not yet.”
Well, now we did, all of us—the story was pretty much the same on every media forum, and it was bad. It was, in fact, the very worst.
“Story’s the same pretty much everywhere,” Simon told me, which wasn’t much of a surprise. I nodded, eyes never leaving the news anchor’s face as the fifteen-minute mark passed, and the tale regurgitated itself once more:
Though their investigation has yet to be completed, Metro Toronto Fire Department spokespeople believe the fire broke out around 3:00 A.M. By 3:15, reports of the NFA offices being “engulfed in flame” were pouring in, and firefighters arrived on-site within minutes. It took until six this morning to extinguish the blaze, which appears to have started while a silver nitrate selection from the BFA’s Ontario Film Recovery Project was being screened. Silver nitrate film is highly flammable, especially once it’s reached what experts call “the vinegar stage,” a stage of decay at which the film can literally combust if you attempt to screen or copy it. . . .
Three A.M., I thought. That would’ve been right about when I woke up, first noticed Clark looking ill, or makes no never-mind. A moment before he vomited up what looked like half of Mrs. Whitcomb’s garden and kicked this whole trip off.
“You know what this means, right, Miss?” said Safie, over the phone.
It meant that everything was gone, all Mrs. Whitcomb’s films in one fell swoop—the Hell Hole cache, the Japeries. Up in a puff of noxious, toxic smoke, as though they—or she, for that matter—had never even existed. And why? Because some fucking idiot just had to open the box. To run Schrodinger’s Cat through a projector and see with their own eyes whether or not it was alive, dead, or (somehow) both at fucking once.
“Why the hell would they have been screening one of those films in the first place?” I asked. “Jan told me they’d all been digitized already, half of them by Wrob Barney, remember? Totally unnecessary to look at them again.”
“Maybe it was from a new cache, nothing to do with our project at all.”
“Maybe, yeah. Christ.” I paused, poised to relax—but at that very moment, something else occurred to me. “Wait, though . . . where are those digital copies, anyhow? They’re okay, right?”
Safie took an uncomfortably long beat before answering. “Well . . .”
“Oh, you have got to kidding me.”
Though I couldn’t actually see her pained shrug, I knew it was there, nonetheless. “Jan kept it all on the mainframe, which was in the NFA offices. He told me that the last time we talked, right after your—whatever-it-was. When I asked about backup. Said it was the safest available option.”
“What? I . . . didn’t an off-site backup make more sense? I mean, I’m not exactly an expert, but—the fuck?”
“Budget cuts.” Adding, as I made an almost-indescribable noise: “Man, I don’t know. But I’m guessing they probably weren’t expecting that to happen!”
I nodded slightly, only then noticing I must have been unconsciously rubbing the middle, ring, and pinkie fingers of my free hand across the area between my eyebrows for some time—half grooming and half scratching, trying my best not to get obsessive with it. “Well, we’re gonna have to get in touch with Jan, obviously,” I made myself say, after a moment. “Set it all up again, the presentation; we could do it at Malin’s maybe, right? Yeah, that’d work. Gotta think, gotta plan, gotta . . . gotta figure out . . .”
“Miss Cairns—” Safie broke in, gently, as I babbled on. “Miss, Lois, just listen, okay? Please.”
Took a bit more effort, but eventually, I stopped and did. “Yes,” I said, finally, while Simon and Mom watched me do so—equally still, equally careful. Equally worried by what they saw. Safie seemed to know it as well, which might be why she took a few beats more to let me calm down even further. Before she finally sighed, and explained—
“Jan was in there, Lois. When the fire started.”
“. . . Yes?”
“That’s right, yeah.”
“Uh huh, okay. And?”
“He’s dead.”
“I’m so sorry, Lois,” Mom said, and I nodded, slightly; it was good of her, especially considering what a bitch I’d been not a quarter hour previously, but I could barely feel anything. Too many climactic revelations, I guess, with God only knew how many more yet to come—a kind of Hollywood shell shock, all plot twists and car crashes. Like the third act of a Michael Bay movie.
“Thank you,” I replied, numb from the heart on down.
Remember, I didn’t know about Wrob Barney’s previous boyfriend at this point—the guy before Leonard Warsame, who told Leonard he suspected Wrob of having essentially burned down a section of Queen Street West just to force him out of Toronto. The guy who heavily implied that when pressed against the wall—or even sometimes when not—Wrob had little compunction about using any method that came to mind to get whatever he wanted done, with arson probably not plumbing the full depth of that particular bag of tricks.
As I stood there studying CITY TV’s looped footage of the scene at the NFA, however—first engulfed in flames, then sodden, black and smoking, and eventually hollowed like a scooped-out gourd made from melted glass and heat-bent steel—all I could see was what they weren’t showing: Jan Mattheuis’s blistered corpse under a sheet, or shoved in a body-bag; Mrs. Whitcomb’s life’s work as a filmmaker wiped away like ash. Twelve thousand dollars’ worth of grant money I’d already spent at least five of developing a documentary whose subject matter would now be even more difficult to “prove” than before—and how the hell I was going to pay that back, if the government decided to demand it after whatever enquiry was to follow, I simply did not know. Et cetera, et cetera.
Two weeks ago, I’d been high on potential, possibility. I’d gotten into a territorial pissing contest with Wrob over the phone, and then slapped his face with my metaphorical dick long-distance and run away laughing. And sure, within a few more days I’d been convulsing on the glass-house floor listening to my brain sizzle beneath the unbearable weight of Lady Midday’s hot, invisible regard, but much like poor Art Whitcomb, I really hadn’
t known any better, not even then. And none of the weirdness I’d encountered along the way since had really ever challenged that initial sense of elation, of god-touched transfigurative ekstasis, of seeing and being seen . . . right up until the moment I realized I might not end up being the only person who suffered for being reckless and arrogant enough to drag the former Giscelia Wròbl’s long-buried, literally damned art up into the pitiless noontime light, that is.
I could have borne it with equanimity if the only person paying the price was me—because on some level, I’d been expecting to pay a price for something, sooner or later. Knowing on some level that I didn’t deserve any better, and never had; believing, on much the same level, that I probably deserved worse.
When did you figure out you hated yourself, Lois? I wondered yet again. Or better still, and far more relevantly, in context . . . when was it you started thinking you were essentially unlovable, even by yourself?
I mean, what the hell kind of person can’t even manage to be their own friend, for Christ’s sake?
Wrob did this, I told myself, looking at the damage the fire had left behind. But I was the one who gave him a “reason,” fucked though it might be—the one who kicked him when he was down then laughed at him. The one who let him think this might be the only way left to win.
Which meant, in the end . . . this was basically my fault. Most, if not all of it; in thought, if not in deed.
“Wrob Barney do this?” Simon asked me sidelong, mimicking my own thoughts uncannily, as his parents arrived. I shook my head.
“No,” I replied, just to hear it out loud. “I did, if anybody.”
I knew he wanted me to elaborate, but there wasn’t time—we immediately switched into meet-and-greet mode instead, his mom hugging me while his dad patted her back, eyes meeting mine, so forgiving I abruptly wanted to weep. Simon explained Clark’s situation, or what little we knew about it, till he got to a point where Mom could comfortably take over, allowing us to move backwards, bending our heads together once more.
