Vanishing Monuments

by John Elizabeth Stintzi

  Despite the fact that I vacuumed and dusted everywhere in the house last night—everywhere except Mother’s yoga studio and her old darkroom—by the time I woke up this morning, the dead flies and ladybugs had already begun to repopulate the house. Legs and bellies to the roof—to the grey, wet sky above—back in the same corners and atop the same sills.

  I go back downstairs and pull out the vacuum, plugging it in and unplugging it as I drag it through the house, sucking them back up. I wonder if, at night, they dragged themselves out of the vacuum’s tube. I wonder if I should take the bag to a stranger on the street and ask them if they can see them in there: the dead.

  But I don’t do that. I go to the kitchen, put the bag in the trash, tie it up, and put it outside. Then I come back in and put the vacuum away.

  After Ess and I started working together on hir thesis project, I rationed hir to two visits to my office hours a month. Ze kept it up, kept meeting goals for having new pieces to show, rarely skipping any, even if ze hadn’t been able to make it to class that week. By the time ze stopped coming to class altogether last November, ze was pretty much finished Outside Peculiar, aside from hir essay.

  One day, at the far end of the two weeks ze’d missed, Ess didn’t show up to our meeting, which had always been set for the two hours before class. I closed my office door and called hir. The call went to voice mail. The voice mail message said: “Can’t answer the phone right now. Prolly dead.”

  The only thing that delayed my sprint to my car was looking up Ess’s address on my laptop and running over to the administrative assistant to tell her that I had to cancel class, last minute. I handed her a sticky note with the room number so she knew where to go and in big bold letters wrote the word: EMERGENCY

  From life in the house with Ilsa I also remember the backyard, where I would dig with a little gardening trowel Mother got me for my fifth or sixth birthday—which are some of my earliest, stable memories. I would dig all sorts of little holes, cutting through the weak turf. I remember the smell of the grass clippings and unearthed soil. I remember the tall wood fence that separated the yard from the alley, except for the opening where the car could pull through to park, where Mother’s old car is now. These days the fence is drooping in, but back then it was stalwart. I remember Mother sitting on the back stoop and watching over me, with the back door to the kitchen open, listening for Ilsa’s call—Hed! Hed! Our life was so much simpler, both of us seemed so much lighter.

  I didn’t remember why I wanted the trowel until my ears got reacquainted with German while I was in Hamburg. It was a warm but overcast afternoon and I was biking over the little bridges crossing the city’s capillary canals, down thin residential streets, when suddenly—halfway there, in a quiet neighbourhood—a woman who was watering a hanging planter on the absolute tips of her toes called out to her friend on the opposite sidewalk in German, “I wish I were taller!” And that word “wünschte”—wish—brought me back to my little face pressed against that tall wood fence, pressed to the place where a knot had fallen from a board, where I could see a man digging a hole to plant a bush in the yard across the alley.

  As that word came back, the doors in my head opened up and the past slipped in. I kept pedalling, remembering how I called Mother over from her station on the stoop and pointed to the little hole, saying, in German, that I wished to be a digger. Though looking back now, I think in that young moment I just wanted to be him.

  I was surprised, when that memory came back to me, that the feeling of looking through a barrier at something I wanted to be was significant enough to return. But that’s the feeling I could be chasing when I put my eye to a camera’s viewfinder. It’s a feeling that has lived inside me all this time, invisibly, pulling me along.

  On the way to the kitchen to heat up a can of soup, I stop in the doorway of the living room, where the soft grey light is lounging across the floor and the furniture, and there I am: sitting on a little stool against the wall, and the light is gone but for the sudden blast of the flash. Mother lowers the flash and sets it on the floor, as my eyes fill with blank spots. I’m in the doorway, too, so old. I’m six or seven. I’m naked.

  Mother looks down and scritches a pencil on the yellow pad at her knee. I cannot hear the real sound but an assumed one fills the space. She looks up at me, then adjusts the exposure on the camera on the tripod. But there’s no camera there, so she just readjusts the air, hair tumbling down her other side. An older woman is dark in the doorway, the camera that Mother is using looped around her neck. She doesn’t look over at me. She’s looking toward the blacked-out window.

  I know the words I’ve got are hers. The head on my shoulders, that Mother is photographing, isn’t any more mine than my body. Isn’t anyone’s.

  Mother looks up at me, finger to the camera’s invisible trigger, flash held out to the right of her. My right.

  Click: brilliance.

  I rub my eyes, Mother scribbles on the pad, I jump off the stool.

  “Ey,” Mother says, looking up at me. My feet don’t feel the wood underneath, but it still hits them. “One more. Get on the seat, Alani. Please.”

  “No,” I try to say. “Nein.”

  Mother puts the flash on the floor again and opens her mouth. Words fall out and align themselves in the space between us, obscuring one another. I do not understand them, but the little head on the little body does, climbs back up onto the stool. Mother puts her eye to the empty tripod and refocuses, then recomposes. She lifts the flash back up, and I ask, “What is it a camera does?”

  The flash arm slackens. Mother, the look of her, is mostly falling hair and assumed movements, assumed flesh, but now I see her face: less burdened, less ravaged—but than when? I’m filled with the doorway’s life, the doorway’s forgetting, but when Mother smiles I can see it, there, on her face. A turn of the lips. And just like that, I realize how much pain smiles can cause.

  “They, hmm …” she says. The woman in the door has disappeared and Mother’s Leica is on the tripod. It has always been there. “They sort of take time, and they hold it still. So it is easier to look at.”

  I squirm at the words I know and do not know, because Mother switched to English after Ilsa died and I am still trying to catch up.

  “What is the word ‘time’ mean?”

  “Zeit,” Mother says. Her voice is not her voice. She has been recast, borrowing the inflections of some voice in my head. The smile floats above her head, like the blank spots in the eye after the flash has pierced them. Her smile is looming everywhere I look.

  “Zeit, time, is a sort of river of moments you float down. And I do. Everyone does.”

  My heart races. I know it’s not happening, it’s only remembering, but I feel that moment in me, the terror of it, of realizing that I’m living on sprinting water, past blurring riverbanks. I remember the tempo of that little human’s heart. Mine.

  “But I can’t float,” I say, and the flash breaks the moment open and spills me out to now: a middle-aged woman—person—in a doorway, her camera sinking in at my belly and the day dragging its way over hardwood and upholstery. The stool is gone. The tripod. But the camera is still around my neck, gazing. The wind in the house feels like it’s grabbing the back of my head, as if it’s about to push it down into a trough of water, as if I’m some drunk cowboy in a Western that it wants to sober up.

  The little girl’s little naked heart is bolting. It wants out. But someone called it a rib cage for a reason.

  The only thing that is superimposed onto all of the memories in the living room of your memory palace is Mother. She is standing in each of your memories, staring at them, at things she knows nothing of because you didn’t tell her about any of them. She stands, in each of the compositions, waiting, as if she were a still photograph sutured into the motion of life. But you think she is simply standing still, you think if you look at her hard you could see her blink or breathe, but you can’t bear to. She is just there, everywhere, waiting w
ith a patience that only those with a sickness of the mind can muster, waiting for the occurrence through which all murky things will clearly mark themselves knowable. Waiting for an answer to life in the living movement of another.

  Mother stands perfectly exposed in your memories; everywhere you look she is perfectly clear and stark, even in the memories that are faded—old or boring things that were on the brink of being lost when you first built this palace. Things you don’t grab quite so desperately.

  Despite being everywhere, Mother never looks at you as you move through the memory palace. She stands in the memories, not always in focus, waiting. You can’t tell if she’s judging your memories. You can’t tell if she can see them at all, despite standing within them and staring. But you know she’s there. You can hear the familiar silence of her.

  After cancelling class, I drove hard toward Ess’s place with both hands. I’d been once before, when I picked hir up for the opening of the collective’s show on flatness that ze had a piece in.

  It didn’t take long to get there. I put the car in park, left the key in the ignition, and ran up the wood stairs that went up to hir tiny studio above the garage.

  I tried the door. It was locked. I started knocking, and thankfully, Ess opened the door before I had to start pleading for hir to let me in.

  “Hey,” I said, standing there catching my breath, staring at Ess in hir underwear looking too tired to be alive. “Let’s go for a drive, yeah? Let’s get you help,” I said. “But first, let’s get some clothes on you.”

  Cicero, a famous Roman orator, practised the mnemonic technique called the method of loci—also known as the memory palace—to help him remember his long, complex speeches. Cicero did this by imagining his rhetorical points pinned onto memorable things in a perfect recreation of his own palace in his mind, which allowed him to picture himself walking through the rooms he knew so well, visualizing things in his home that represented different movements in rhetoric. When walking through his imaginary mansion, while standing in front of a huge crowd, Cicero could recall long, meticulously constructed speeches with grace and eloquence—as if speaking with a natural and spontaneous brilliance. Through this technique of pinning memories into intimately known places, the mind becomes capable of incredible feats of memory.

  A few years after Mother was diagnosed with dementia, I began attempting to compose a memory palace that could contain all the remembrances that I felt made up my life, made up myself, out of the terror of eventually losing them. For a long time, I tried different houses—from Tom’s to mine in Minneapolis—but ended up using Mother’s, despite it being a bit small for all the things I needed to remember. I didn’t want to use it, but after a while I knew that it was a place whose walls I could trust would always be standing in my head. That no matter how far, or how close, I ran I would always have it with me. Because it already had so many of the memories I wanted to hold onto storming through its walls.

  When Ilsa died, she wanted the house to go to Mother instead of her children. For almost half a decade, Ilsa and Mother talked and smiled and wept and gossiped and lived together. Though I can’t hear their voices, I’ll never forget their faces together.

  Mother cried as they carried the body from the bedroom. I stood in the corner of the room, staring at the bed, the bed that I don’t remember really seeing empty before that moment. I must have, but that emptiness felt different. I don’t really remember Mother crying much since then—aside from after her return from Selkirk. Ilsa’s children were a string of shadows cast along the wall outside the door as I watched Mother cry, kneeling in the middle of Ilsa’s bedroom floor, as faceless men carried the body out of the room.

  But then, perhaps I was the one crying, and Mother was simply kneeling in respect for her dead friend. Mother began packing our stuff that night, but two days later, Ilsa’s daughter came by, more annoyed than sad, and handed us the deed to the house. I can’t imagine how much that must have hurt Mother, thinking that Ilsa—a phantom she cared for and consoled for so many years—had, at the end, thought to try and buy her love. Mother must have thought of that deed as a letter saying, Please remember me. But maybe that’s just something I would think.

  In the following days, while Mother and I were grieving in the emptiness, a crew came by and carried all of Ilsa’s things from the house. The place grew bare. They carried out pretty much everything but the beds and the armoire on the second floor, at the top of the stairs. The armoire was well crafted, by Mennonites, but it wasn’t an antique. It wasn’t worth the effort.

  The house was transformed from a home into walls surrounding space, space that we would hardly make a dent in ever filling up. It always seemed like we’d only recently moved in, because we were not a family who had things to fill houses with. We had what we had, which was mostly just each other.

  Before Ess was admitted to the mental health centre, I put a hand on hir shoulder and told hir, “The wave of bullshit will come, but it won’t get you. I know people who have come through here and were treated just fine. And don’t worry, I’ll come visit you.”

  After the nurses took Ess in, I went back to the waiting room and called Genny. My heart was racing, remembering the sound of footsteps on those tile floors, the sharp sound the backpack made as it was placed on the floor at the front desk. And the sound of a zipper opening to show what had been packed. What had nearly happened.

  I told Genny where I was, quickly adding that it was for Ess. “I was really scared ze might have already done something,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, again, Genny.”

  “Allie,” Genny said. I stared out the window toward the grey November day. I felt a breeze circling my shoulders, tugging at me a little. “Do you think, after all this is over, you will let hir apologize to you?”

  “No,” I said, thinking about Mother in bed after Selkirk, thinking about how she never apologized either, how I never wanted her to. “You’re right.”

  “Good. Are you stuck there? Or are you coming by for dinner?”

  “They just took Ess back. I’ll come back to see hir tomorrow. I’ll be there soon.”

  Sometimes while you’re walking around the living room, remembering all the memories framed on the walls, on the floor, the landline on the phone table rings, reminding you that it exists. Its ring adds to the mutterings of the people in the memories on the walls.

  Sometimes you pick up the phone, and sometimes you do not. Sometimes when you get to the phone, the receiver is stuck to the base and you cannot answer it, and you cannot pull its plug from the wall, because it’s not plugged in at all. Sometimes you answer it and you can hear yourself, muttering things you do not want to hear. Things that you said to the boy in the mirror, or the girl in the mirror, or to yourself outside of it. Horrible things.

  Sometimes it is Genny, and she is trying to talk to you, but she cannot hear you respond. She gets frantic at your quiet, you get frustrated with your unheard noise, and she hangs up on you.

  Sometimes you pick it up and it’s quiet and you begin to talk and you get frantic. You ask why they called if they don’t want to talk. You go from scared to angry, but before you hang up—an action that always throws you out of the palace—you mutterspit into the phone: Mother, Mother, Mother. The last thing you hear before you slam the phone down is her, on the other end, stop breathing.

  I check my phone, but Genny hasn’t called. I try to call her again and fail. My fingers want to, want to follow their path and bring her voice back, but can’t. I consider listening to the voice mail she left as I drove north, imagine the worry—the nostalgic weariness—in her voice and don’t listen to it. My nerves rack. I put my phone down. I can feel the house start to close in around me, the pressure making my ears want to pop.

  It comes back to me, the wind. It puts a hand on my back and pushes. I surrender myself to it. I do not look at it. I let it take me.

  A coat, car keys, an umbrella—the remains of the afternoon. But as I open the doo
r, I feel the running girl swirling through my head, and I go back into the house and grab Mother’s camera and the Metamorphoses from the couch.

  I stand outside the house. The wind pushes at me, but I don’t move. I let it gather its momentum. I know the direction it wants me to go.

  I walk to the car to go see Mother.

  Every time I went to visit Ess in the centre, I made sure to ask hir how ze was, specifically drawing out what annoying things were happening to hir so ze could vent about it to someone who’d been there: casual but excessive misgendering, prying and semi-judgmental and semi-racist questions about hir tattoos.

  “But I feel like I’m coming out the other side,” ze said, a week in. “I’m sleeping some!”

  A few visits in, I told hir that I’d talk to the department and see what Ess could do to make up for the lost weeks. Ess disclosed to me an interaction ze’d had with one of my colleagues, who’d asked hir to stay back after class to talk about a project ze had done for a course on experimental film. She told Ess that the project ze’d submitted felt a bit unfinished, a bit unrefined, and that she was giving hir the opportunity to work on it for another week to tighten it up.

  “It was fucking impossible for me to get it that done,” Ess said, rubbing hir hands on hir forehead and looking down at the table. “Doing more—the idea near killed me. Feel stupid just admitting it.”

  “I know. I get it,” I told hir. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Al,” ze said, placing hir hands on the overly clean table between us, tilting hir head up to me a little but not quite meeting my eyes, “I don’t want special treatment.”