by Gemma Files
Which means the best they can do for us . . . the closest they can ever come to doing “good,” as the Peacock Angel supposedly does . . . is to force us to make our own distinctions between right and wrong. To discover what we truly value, by asking for it as payment.
It was over, then. I knew it; She knew it. But She didn’t like it.
Reality slipped, stuttered and jerked like film caught half-on and half-off its sprockets; pain smashed into me and I went down, clinging to the projector stand, struggling to hold myself upright, with smoke in my once more useless eyes. Unable to see anything except for Her, still searing bright and impossibly tall, her molten sword hefted in one taloned hand. Rising, slowly, up over me.
(do—your—WORK), She told me, Lady Midday. And I coughed out something I knew She’d know was a laugh, even if nobody else could have recognized it.
“Oh, I’m gonna,” I told Her, this time out loud, voice raw. “But it’s gonna be my work, not yours. And whether or not it’s worth it? You don’t get to say.”
The rising sword paused, as if surprised at last. Maybe nobody really had said no to Her before, or never as firmly as this.
(you wish to matter), She reminded me. (my chosen stand apart. for others, nothing—but for my chosen, special favour)
“Special like how, exactly? Like Special Ed-type special?” I laughed again, choking. “Lady, I’ve been like that my entire life—just like Clark.” I hauled myself up far as I could, determined to go out standing. “So I don’t want anything, not from you. Take it all back, and everything else, too, while you’re at it. From now on, my work will be to make sure no one ever remembers you again.”
A long silence, broken only by the crackling of flames, and a whirring sound in my ear: the film had run out, whipping ’round and ’round the projector’s take-up reel. Nothing else mattered, not except Lady Midday, and that blazing sword high above.
(be blind then. forever.)
The sword swept up—
At the last minute, though, came the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, or ever expect to see: Wrob Barney, of all people, charging in to knock me aside. Wrob Barney screaming into a goddess’s face with only a folding chair raised between, for the world’s most ridiculous weapon—no, you do NOT, it was ME all along, not her, not her! It was supposed to be ME!
Choose me, choose me, choose me, like a kid on a playground. Like the teams were all matched up for kickball, but nobody had picked him.
I mean, I didn’t like Wrob, and I still don’t, not even now. Not even after he obviously saved my life, if not—for all I know—my soul.
Christ Almighty, though. What a pitiful goddamn way to die.
I remember lying on the floor, contorted in pain, as the projector fell away from me, Sidlo’s film sparking, going up like a Catherine Wheel. I remember Wrob falling the other way, in two pieces. Lady Midday, first there, then gone. Her sudden absence left a scar on the world, white hovering over black, reversed.
Somebody who later turned out to be Safie turned me over, drawing a scream. She slid her arms up under mine and hugged me around the chest, dragging me back toward the doors, where she was met by Leonard Warsame and somebody else—Simon, staring down at me white-faced, grabbing my ankles. They heaved me up, then headlong down the stairs and out, under the stars.
(No, I couldn’t see them, obviously. But I knew they were there.)
The night air was cold, but clean. I breathed in, coughed, breathed in again. Felt everything around me narrow like a D.W. Griffith signature move, so damn old it was new all over again: up, back, down. My mental camera’s perspective, dollying straight in on my own shrinking pupils, employing first a slow pull into focus, then an equally slow pull back out of it. An iris, shrinking inward, taking everything with it.
Simon’s lap was warm, comforting. He and Safie were talking to each other someplace far above my head. He stroked my hair, possibly not even knowing what he was doing. Soon enough there were sirens, coming closer.
I lay there a few minutes more, contented, until I finally fell asleep.
Credits
In their forensic analysis of the Ursulines Studio fire, the Metro Toronto arson team’s report implies that something almost as flammable as silver nitrate itself—a casually thrown joint, perhaps, though the screening room was supposedly a non-smoking space—must have hit the projector in mid-rotation, thus causing Untitled 14 to ignite. And certainly, a few witnesses do claim they saw it burning merrily in the moments before that last explosion, the one which supposedly ripped Wrob’s head from his shoulders with one single, weirdly level blast, cauterizing his neck from throat to spine. Of course, none of that really explains where his head actually went after that, or how it eventually came to be found buried two feet down in the concrete floor of the bike shop, a whole storey beneath where the rest of his body fell.
Construction workers finally drilled down into it during the rebuild, five years later, when that whole block was being turned into a condo everyone else in Kensington Market almost killed themselves protesting. The end of an era, some said. The end of something, anyhow.
By then, the book Safie and I did indeed end up co-authoring was into its third printing, and still going strong: Highly Combustible, a weird—and in the event, award-winning—mixture of true crime and lost Canadian cinematic history; the story of how one filmmaker’s obsession with curating another’s legacy ended in literal disaster, accidental mass murder, and equally accidental suicide. I think the real cornerstone of our pitch, once we’d recuperated from the fire’s aftermath, was having returned to Quarry Argent and confirmed—via Val Moraine, natch—that the unlucky “kid from Overdeere” who fell through the floor in the Vinegar House and got stuck there overnight while researching his thesis had been, in fact, Wrob Barney himself. He’d been enrolled in Brock University’s film studies program under a different name, doing his courses on a correspondence level, while simultaneously amassing a move-to-Toronto fund by working in one of his family’s stores.
In hindsight, it all looks remarkably straightforward: this traumatic experience obviously formed the cornerstone for Wrob’s lifelong jealous obsession with Mrs. Whitcomb and her art, which led in turn to him trying to seize it and make it his own, both literally and figuratively. With Leonard Warsame’s testimony backing us up, we can retrospectively assume that Wrob had already found and planted the cache of Mrs. Whitcomb’s films, to which he led Jan Mattheuis, having done all the necessary legwork while tracking down Japery’s old pit stops and discovering the Quarry Argent collection. Building on the same theory, we can likewise assume that Wrob somehow arranged for me to be there to review Untitled 13, expecting me to imprint on his use of Mrs. Whitcomb’s clips and become his champion, making sure he was credited for her discovery. Then, when I not only didn’t but tried to co-opt “his” project as my own, he got progressively more unstable: bribed people to stalk me, arranged burglaries, maybe even stage-managed the NFA fire and Jan’s death. That last part’s not strictly provable, so we didn’t end up going too far with it, in the end—but then again, we didn’t really have to, once it became clear the Barneys had no interest in suing us for defaming their familial black sheep’s name post-mortem.
It sounds ridiculous, obviously, given what I’ve already told you. I’m well aware of that.
Funny how eager people will be to believe almost anything, though, especially in the face of tragedy, so long as it sounds even mildly plausible.
The book sells well, even now, and I’m proud of it, which I suppose only makes sense—it’s made me more money than anything else I’ve ever written, hands down. Too bad I can’t ever tell anybody outside my own home that it also happens to be my very first stab at fiction.
When I woke up after the fire, back in hospital yet again, Detective Correa was standing over my bed. I saw her indistinctly, as through a mist, and smiled—mainly because I wa
s surprised to be able to see her at all.
“Ms. Cairns,” she said. “You’re either the luckiest woman I know, or the exact opposite.”
I coughed, throat rough, semi-cooked. “Six of . . . one, I guess,” I whispered, unable to stop grinning.
She told me thirteen people had died in the fire, which seemed surprisingly low, considering what Safie and I’d stumbled across on our way in. But while the injury toll was far higher, and almost nobody involved had escaped without damage, the people we hadn’t been able to save had either all died before we got there, or been unable to escape for other reasons. One guy, for example—his name was Hartwin Tolle—had somehow managed to get his arm stuck halfway inside the wall, as though it had suddenly become so hot the plaster itself had started to melt. I didn’t even know if that was strictly possible, according to the normal laws of physics, but it didn’t really seem like something worth bringing up at the time.
Only two of the dead remained unidentified, Correa said, a pair of skeletons found near where the screen had once hung. Both were totally denuded, fleshless, and old, though one appeared to be older than the other—a mature woman and an immature child, probably male, possibly around ten years old at the original time of death. Did I have any ideas about who they might be?
I allowed that I did, but that the idea might sound a little nuts, even in context. To which Correa just crossed her arms, eyebrow hiking only slightly.
“Go on,” she said.
Eventually—a relatively long while later, at least by CSI standards—authorities were indeed able to match the DNA of the late Arthur Macalla Whitcomb’s surviving relatives to the child’s, thus proving he was probably Hyatt, while similar tests matched his DNA with that of the woman, revealing her to have once been Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb, née Giscelia Wròbl. What demented satisfaction Wrob Barney might have gained from digging up their bones after somehow finding out where they were both buried, meanwhile, remains a mystery, as does the exact cause of Mrs. Whitcomb’s death—let alone how she ended up back near Quarry Argent after having disappeared, while still in transit, from a Toronto-bound train. But given how much other cracked-out shit Wrob’d been posthumously charged with, in the interim, I suppose everyone involved just sort of agreed to let it slide.
It’s like I’ve always said: re-frame any story with its end in mind, as a faît accompli, and it all suddenly becomes very logical indeed. Besides which, what did anyone really have for evidence to the contrary? The testimony of a two-time seizure survivor who says a ghost told her in a dream a dead goddess did it? No, that was obviously my own subconscious playing games, solving a crime before it even happened; that’s what I wrote, and that’s what I’m more than happy to keep signing off on, so long as it keeps bringing in the bucks.
I have a son with special needs, after all, and 25 percent of everything I make goes into a fund for him, to keep him well looked after, once Simon and I are gone. Which I guess makes being legally blind for the rest of my life look like a pretty good trade-off, inconvenient though it may be in daily practice.
As things stand now, I’ve got my career back, and better than ever. I can kind of write my own ticket, in a way; I’m programming for festivals here, interviewing and being interviewed there, hosting special screenings. I’ll never be able to learn to drive now, not even if I wanted to, but my eyesight does keep on improving steadily; the other day I woke up and realized I was looking at the ceiling, actually able to see all the cracks, the stippling, the stucco-shadows . . . Christ, that was amazing. I didn’t stop crying for the next half hour.
“The great part,” I told Simon, just the other week, when he, Safie, and I got together for dinner, like we do almost every other month, “is that most of the stuff we found out about Mrs. Whitcomb I can still talk about in public without looking insane, ’cause it’s just true: her dad killed her family, she grew up obsessed with fairy tales, made art, lost her son, talked to ghosts. She made films.”
He frowned. “All that information about Lady Midday, though—it’s still in there. Somebody could go look it up, pursue it, if they wanted to.”
“Yep,” Safie agreed, poring some more wine. “But why would they? Factor Wrob’s actions in on top, it all just becomes a bunch of crazy shit Mrs. Whitcomb happened to believe in, stuff she thought was true, because of all the bad things that happened to her. Sad, for sure. Totally. But nobody’s gonna be burying anybody in fields over it anytime soon.”
I nodded. “‘Just because you think something’s real, doesn’t make it so’—they say that about all sorts of religions, all the time. And a religion without miracles doesn’t tend to leave much of a footprint, does it?”
“Hmmm.” Simon lifted a finger, the old aha-gotcha twinkle back in his eyes. “What about Scientology?”
“Scientology doesn’t count,” I replied. “Not when it comes to old dead religions requiring human sacrifice. That’s common knowledge, man.” And I kissed him.
Later, Safie told me the producers she’d been working with had finally managed to net a bit of Telefilm funding, though not for her long-deferred Yezidi film. “They want to do the book, adapt it,” she admitted, reluctantly. “Like, semi-fictionalized—sort of a braided narrative, back and forth through history. Mrs. Whitcomb juxtaposed with Wrob. Like The Hours, but with setting yourself on fire.”
“Aaron Ashmore in a fake nose?” I suggested, laughing when she shuddered.
For myself, I know I see things differently, literally, since that night at the Ursulines, that day in the Vinegar House. That on the one hand, I no longer reckon my own worth—or lack thereof—by the same standards; while on the other, I know beyond a doubt that the world is full of holes behind which numinous presences lurk—secrets no one should ever have to see, or want to. And those who do will never be the same.
Maybe the iconoclasts were right—any image is an anchor, a trap, an open invitation. When you see the god, a god, you either forget or you go mad, trying to forget—ekstasis, the Greeks called it, “to stand outside oneself.” A removal to elsewhere.
But there’s a third choice, or at least I’ve found so: remember, no matter how it hurts to, and deal with the consequences of remembering. Submit, and bear your scars proudly.
I work on doing just that, every day, give or take. I work hard. And what will it get me, in the end? Will I be allowed to escape or be pulled back in, falling between the cracks? Into the places no one wants to think exist, to face what I know lives there?
I don’t know yet. I can’t.
I may never know.
What I didn’t tell Simon, though, in our conversation—what I’ll tell you, now—is how you’d be infinitely surprised what people will accept as a miracle, so long as it gives them something they really want: forgiveness of sin, unconditional love, the idea that your wounds make you special. That doing your art—your work—can help you save your own life.
Miracles, black, white, and grey all over. Like light on a wall, telling a story; like magic. Like cinema itself.
But, and still, and even so: it’s the things you don’t see, in this world or any other—the hidden things, unseen, lost between frames—
—that will always make all the difference.
Sting
Soraya Mousch sent me this last part. It’s something written at the Freihoeven Institute, during a “free imaging” session, a sort of channelling course for mediums. This chick Carraclough Devize teaches it, apparently—so maybe she wrote this on someone else’s behalf, or maybe it was one of her pupils, at the behest of similarly unseen powers.
One way or the other, I’m pretty sure I recognize the style.
It is so hard from where I am, it begins, & so difficult to reach you, so near & yet so far—
—but then again, I do not even know where I am. So I try to warn you & you do not hear, you never hear, not any of you.
See
ing is more important than hearing, though. & that is why I made it, made them, though I knew that I should not. Because. Because.
So hard, but I keep trying.
I did not look up, you see, not even when She touched me, & yet I know, now, what I would have seen. I have always known.
& so I tried to cut it from me, cast it far away. To show you all, though it is always better not to see, not to know, by far—
I can show you, now: what I saw, or almost. A black miracle, done brightly. A flame, once lit, burning everything it touches.
But no, don’t: look down, not up—shut your eyes & keep them shut, no matter what you hear. No matter who comes, or what they ask you.
I was wrong to make them, I know that now, any of them. They are not for you, or me.
They are for no one.
My father was convinced that the world would end and we with it, unless we followed after this Call of his. But it did not, & now I think the tragedy is that the world never does end, ever. That it goes on & on, forcing us to go on along as well, until at last there is nothing else, nothing more. Until there is only what was, same as what is and what will be—
Only the truth, which never changes. Truth not made flesh but image, for anyone to see.
For a thought cannot be un-thought, anymore than the world can be un-made, & thus we can never escape the consequences of our mistakes, not without great price, & cost, & pain. Or perhaps not even then.
Oh so hard & all for nothing, all of it, for you will look, no matter what. You must, it being your nature—all our natures.
