Vanishing Monuments

by John Elizabeth Stintzi

  My old copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses sits at the bottom of the luggage, with a random assortments of things: floss but no toothbrush; a 150 mm lens for my Hasselblad but no camera body; half a ream of blank paper but no pencils; three empty film canisters, one with a roll already shot, another two with rolls of unshot Kodak Tri-X; a bottle of shaving cream with no razor; and a single eye’s worth of fake lashes. Just in case.

  The book is wrapped in my first real binder, whose elastics have been so stretched by time and use that it no longer keeps anything flat. It has long since lost its transformative powers but is tight with nostalgia. I got the binder after Genny and I ran off to Minneapolis, when I met Archer after a show and they told me where they’d gotten theirs. After noticing the bandages peeking out from under my arm, they said, “That’s really dumb, but I’ll help you,” cementing our friendship.

  I kept the book and that binder on a shelf in a cabinet at home, a small museum of artifacts from my life—the things that the running girl didn’t end up ditching between the fires: A poem Karen wrote for me when I ran away to Hamburg, in purple permanent marker on her birth certificate—mirrored, so as to only be read through the bleed. The collar I bought for my cat, Darius, with his name and my name, but could never get over his neck for his claws and hissing. A bottle of cheap plum nail polish I stole from Genny’s bathroom twenty years ago that has since become one dry piece of colour. A crumpled two-dollar bill someone gave me for a Polaroid print I shot—the first time I ever sold something I’d made.

  Mother’s camera, the old Leica III that I stole when I left this place at seventeen, was kept on top of the cabinet, not inside it, and not on that shelf.

  I pick up the library-bound Ovid, unwrap it from the binder, toss it onto the bed, and then slowly pick through the clothes until I find something worth wearing. I leave Mother’s camera sitting on the bedside table and carry the book downstairs. I sit on the couch—for the first time in decades, I realize—and flip through the pages, past underlines and marginalia riddles, from previous readers as well as me. The library loan card, still stuck in its slot in the front of the book, has yet to hold my name. My page-flipping eventually lands me at the poetry, and I skip past the first lines, the call to the Muse—Of bodies changed to other forms I tell—and rest on the lines about the creation, one of the many things that always seems to bring me back to this spine:

  Ere land and sea and all-covering sky

  Were made, in the whole world the countenance

  Of nature was the same, all one, well named

  Chaos, a raw and undivided mass,

  Naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds

  Of ill-joined elements compressed together.

  The words sink in like a mantra, and as I shut the book my mind feels the flurry underneath it all. I try and try to forget Mother—Mother in the home this morning and a thousand others before, each one a morning where I wasn’t here. But I can’t forget her, so she slides into the room and sits across from me. Her hair is short. She does not look at me, because she does not have a face, or any front at all. She is nothing but a silhouette with that short hair and her scarred hands, which dance on the armrests. She is quiet, bound in the chair by more than a belt, dark tendrils like ivy weaving her into it. I cannot look at her, or away. The radiators sound like a crowd trying to pound their way into the house.

  I close Mother out with my eyelids. I take a breath, walk from the curb to the front door of the memory palace, and open it, stepping over the first memory without looking down. The sound of the door closing sneaks up behind me. It is always shocking; I’m never prepared for that sound.

  In the hallway ahead of me a collection of distances rolls out. I begin to walk.

  Somehow I make it all the way to the top of the stairs in the memory palace, remembering as much of the things I have designed the palace to remember. But as soon as I make it to the top—where the old armoire is—I can’t take anymore. I sprint straight to my bedroom door, and opening the door opens my eyes.

  Mother is no longer sitting in front of me. She and the chair are both gone, and I get up from the couch, leaving Ovid there face down, alone. Outside, the rain is getting heavier, darker. Inside, that gust of wind is back, rustling everything up.

  I slip on my shoes and jacket, grab my umbrella, and run upstairs for my phone. After I check to make sure the voice mail Genny left me is still unlistened to, I look at Mother’s camera on the nightstand. I don’t remember putting the lens cap back on, don’t remember collapsing the little 50 mm Summar lens into the camera’s body, but I’m happy I did. It’s hiding, too. I sling the camera around my neck and zip my jacket over it as I make it out the door. The umbrella fwoops open. The camera is an amorphous bump at my belly.

  I walk south, streaming down sidewalks toward the river, and don’t look back at the house. I do not need to look. I know that the house is following me.

  The wind sprays a horizontal mist from the drooping trees along the Assiniboine River and my eyes squint to keep it out. Water will always find a way in. The umbrella doesn’t help much here, next to the swelling river. I can only walk on the far edge of the muddy path, the only part that’s still above water. My other hand holds my jacket closed at the throat, to try and keep the water from dripping inside the coat, down my chest, and onto the camera. I’m almost there, the place where the Assiniboine loses its name and power to the Red, where both rivers—thick and brown and quick—meet to traffic the province’s water north through the rest of the city, to swell up the lakes, to tickle at Hudson Bay, and to end up as nothing but a frigid spit in the ocean.

  The Forks.

  There are a few people irrational enough to be on the river trail because no weather can slow a Winnipegger, especially not weather so dreary and moody. When someone is coming toward me, I walk off the trail first and let them pass. When I hear them walking behind me, when I can hear them over the sound of the rain, I walk faster. I don’t look back.

  I try not to imagine the river frozen and me walking down the middle of it. I do not imagine it.

  I walk under bridge after bridge—cars splashing by overhead—and stick as close to the water as I can, going straight for the Forks. I ignore the market, the tourist trap, the things that are near the Forks but are not the real Forks, that are just the profitable capitalism of proximity. I steady my attention on the disappearing pathway, on the confluence where the Red takes off, emboldened after swallowing the Assiniboine, on the place where you can stand and stare at the water and be unsure which river you’re actually looking at, where you can just look and be lost, knowing nothing certain except that the thing you’re looking at is water, is river, is moving. That’s all that can be said about them. The names, any words of distinction, for places like these stop making any sense.

  A raw and undivided mass.

  I stop on a piece of high, dry land out of the way of the few people trying to walk the river path. I stand there and stretch my spine, pulling at the cap of my head until the word “mountain” jumps to mind, until I’m barefoot in the yoga classes where I tried and tried to learn to move and hold my body like Mother always did. The rivers are both mud brown, and the rain has decided to slow down a little. I can see the far end of the bank. I try to remember which neighbourhood of the city that would be, but nothing comes. The words for specific things fall off into the flux. I take my hand from my collar, pull my phone from my pocket, and call Genny—speed dial.

  I know that she’s at work, that her phone will be silent, and even if she was not and her phone was not, she still would not answer. I know all that. But I switch to speakerphone and hear her recording say, “This is Genny Ford, leave a message,” and when I hear the beep I hold the phone out toward the rivers, the Forks. Little whirlpools swirl not thirty feet from me as the water spins along the rocks set at the edge of the path—rocks that are now under water—to try and keep the rivers from eroding the path away. To try and keep the space.

&
nbsp; I stand there, with the phone recording at the far edge of the umbrella’s protection, recording whatever little sounds the mic might be able to transcribe into the message. Then I force myself to yell: “The Forks!” before I can turn the phone around and hang up without saying anything, because I don’t want to fall off the edge of her world, our world, as much as everything feels like it’s beginning to pull me under. Or rather, rise above me. That the chaos, the too-much, the teeming that is the foundation of everything is bubbling back up. The dark place that makes people grow quiet.

  When I turn around to leave, I’m glad that Mother’s house is nowhere to be seen, that it has not followed me all this way. But its creaking has sunk into my head again, hasn’t it?

  I think it is my bones themselves, that sound.

  The sun has almost set and I’m so tired of the rain by the time I make it back to Mother’s house. On the way, I stopped at the grocery store to get some food and some things to clean and dust the house with. I stopped by a restaurant on Sherbrook that was not there thirty years ago and ate a sandwich alone at a corner table where the waitress called me ma’am. I wanted that moment to drag out, to skin me with a dull blade, rather than come back to the house. But once I carried my grocery bags past Walnut, I couldn’t stop walking. These creaky floorboards have a terrible magnetism.

  As I walk up to the door, I put my bags down on the ground so I can put my hand on the knob. When it turns, the door opens. I didn’t lock it. From the open door comes a huge whooshing sound of air escaping, rushing past me, as if the house had been holding its breath. I turn around, to see where the wind is heading, and the world blinks out into pitch-dark night.

  I’m there on the sidewalk, scrunched into a stiff denim coat, and it’s raining and my feet are worn out. I’m fifteen or sixteen. Tom is holding his umbrella over me. His other arm holds his jacket to his chest, conspicuously hiding the street sign we just finished removing from its post atop the stop sign. I can remember the intersection—Palmerston Avenue and Lenore Street—but not which name we ended up taking for Tom’s collection. That specific part of the night is gone.

  From here, nearer to Wolseley Avenue, we can’t see inside the house, into the lit window, to see Mother sitting and waiting. I don’t think to look at the darkness at the door to see if someone is standing there, watching me.

  “You’re sure? It’s still early,” I say to Tom, trying to convince him as a means of making him stay longer, though we’re both running on the last dregs of our fumes. He looms over me. I’m not short, but he is a lanky giant. It’s around two o’clock and we’ve spent the last three hours—at least—walking, hopping over deep, endless puddles.

  “Yeah, I just don’t think so. Del has been trying to, you know, do things with me again. She quit Thursday. For good this time, she says. I should get a little sleep.”

  I feel the weight of Mother’s camera around my neck, and when I put a hand to my belly to touch it—under the cover of Tom’s umbrella —I’m briefly at the door, feeling the lens cap through my coat. Then I lift my hand from my belly and I’m back with him.

  My hair is buzzed down clear to the scalp. I am shivering. Tom has not lost his hope, and that is why I love him. He and I are impossibly different. I squeeze my way within his umbrella arm and his tall body. I don’t remember my hair getting buzzed, but it happened that night—this night—before we went out walking. I am no longer the person who wanted that done. The want is trapped in fog.

  I can feel the pressure of his umbrella arm on my back, the hidden street sign pushing against my shoulder. And then I feel myself pull away; I watch myself do it. I feel the wind on my head, feel the rain knock into it as I move from under his umbrella toward the brightest house on the dark lane, toward the door. I try not to look at the lit window, where I know Mother is sitting, waiting for me. Tom and the whole world behind me disappear and everything is quiet, silent, as I can’t help but look in the window and see her looking up at me. Allie. Me. I stop moving.

  I shake my head, feel my hair long and tied back, so I go inside and untie it, sitting dry on the couch with the grocery bags at my feet. The living room light is off, and outside is nobody. I lie down on the couch and attempt level breathing. Dust, dust, dust. I can imagine them going to the door, taking out their keys, unlocking the door, hanging the jacket they stole from Tom’s house, and climbing up the stairs. I can picture the light switching off in the living room and hear the sound of the stairs measuring her ascent to her own room, to her own bed. Mother.

  When my breath evens out I get up, flip on the living room light to combat the encroaching grey, go to the closet under the stairs, and pull out Mother’s vacuum. It’s a different vacuum than I remember, but it has been kept in the exact same place.

  I plug it in and push it room to room, sucking up the dirt, the dust, and all the dead bugs.

  3

  THE LIVING ROOM

  The walls of your living room are covered in memories. Layers of them, framed like photos, or windows. Memories from everything: your exile in Hamburg, your school days and late nights near Tom, the long summer weeks, the days at home, and the countless hidden journeys into your various darks. In the living room hang the scenes of your life—the living scenes. The people in the framed memories move and speak. When you walk into the memory palace, as you come down the hallway—for as long or as little as that takes you—you hear the memories looping in the living room. If you listen closely, you can pick up which memories are going to be the loudest.

  Framed above the phone table is the memory where you are sitting on the docks of the Elbe near Cuxhaven while Erwin Egger takes a landscape photo. He is shooting on his Hassy, and the wind is blowing your hair. You are not looking through your own camera—Mother’s old camera—that you set up on your tripod, because you just can’t find the beauty in bare, unpeopled worlds like Erwin can, not at all anymore. Erwin finishes his shot, comes over to you at your tripod, and tells you to stand at the end of the dock. You do. You stand there and you take your clothes off, because that’s how you prefer yourself, in photos and in life—imprescriptible. At the edge of the memory you hear young dock workers walking along the shore, commenting on the lucky old man. Erwin finishes the shot and the memory rolls forward again, mostly the same, though the angle is a bit different.

  Beside that one, blossoming across the walls and sitting on the floors, are memories of you climbing in and out of windows. Genny’s, mostly. In Minneapolis, when she lived apart from you in a place that did not welcome guests. There’s the memory of you climbing into Genny’s window in Winnipeg, too, the night you two left. In a few it is Tom’s window, for fun, and in one—sitting face down on the floor in front of you, which you lift up to check—it is your own. As you kneel to that memory, you don’t see yourself in it. You just see the makeshift rope. You just see the room, beginning a second life without you in it.

  Whenever you lift this memory, the rope snakes out from the frame and begins to weave itself into and back out of every single memory in the room. Binding memory to memory like a web. The rope winds itself around your body, like the ivy that Ovid uses as one of the sensible flourishes of Bacchus’s powers. Only it doesn’t transform your body into some wild aberration. It just takes over the space around you until it finds your throat and tightens up until you’re dead in every single one, while the rest of the memory keeps replaying.

  Eventually, the rope will web across the doorways, trapping you, so you want to make sure that you leave the living room while you still can. If you’re trapped inside, you know the web will tighten around you until you are unable to get away. Pulling memories from their frames on the wall into a gibbering mass with you at the centre. If you don’t get out while you can, the memories that you built the palace to acknowledge—to remember and then pass by—will become even more your only world.

  Mother never told me anything about Germany, about leaving, about our life before, about us coming here and what the plan
was if she hadn’t found the job caring for Ilsa, the old Belgian woman whose children had transplanted her from Antwerp into a relatively cheap house in Wolseley when her husband died. I don’t know anything about our life before we lived with Ilsa. My earliest memories are of living in this house with Mother and a woman who spoke only German and who was dying very slowly.

  The job working with Ilsa was probably hard to fill, since she required a live-in nurse who could speak German, and because her children were dreadful and did not pay as well as they could have afforded. It was all obligation and appearance to them. But Mother still took the job, and somehow, she didn’t hate the work, I don’t think, despite the fact that since I was a baby, her whole life revolved around keeping two fragile things at either ends of their lives from dying.

  I remember Ilsa having the air of a sage: her eyes set in deep sockets, her hair thick and dark and long and rootlike. I remember Ilsa and Mother always talking, frantic and tired. I remember sitting outside the door and listening, though all the words are gone. Mother may never have talked more in her life than when she lived with Ilsa, but despite that, when I remember that time, I can only see their mouths moving. That past is almost completely silent.

  We lived in Ilsa’s house with her for nearly half a decade. She hung on as every mechanism in her body started to fail. If it wasn’t for Ilsa, I suppose Mother might have turned to photography sooner. But I’m not sure working in photography was ever what she wanted to do, even though a year or so after Ilsa died she ended up shooting portraits in a little studio she set up in our living room.

  I don’t remember Ilsa’s children except that when they were in the house, they rarely talked when I was in the room, and they demanded that Mother speak English to them. They hardly climbed the stairs to see Ilsa but instead stood on the landing and were briefed by Mother about how Ilsa was. Occasionally, they would come and, with Mother’s help, carry Ilsa down the stairs to a wheelchair and whisk her off to some function of theirs. But I don’t really remember their presence but for the feeling of sprinting upstairs, or ducking into doorways downstairs. I remember running down the hallway toward the living room or through the kitchen to the backyard when I heard their feet approaching and their keys jangle in the door. I remember them most vividly in my fear of them.