I smiled and put my hands on hirs.
“It’s not special treatment. I’d do it for anybody. It’s just treatment.”
After ten days, Ess was out. When ze was back on hir medication and rested up—with a bundle of class deadline extensions—ze told me that ze was doing a new project, even though Outside Peculiar wasn’t finished yet.
“Peculiar isn’t going no place,” ze said, sitting in my office for the first time in months, a few days before the fall semester ended. “But I want to do something about being bipolar and queer. And, yeah, I know we’ve done all this work, I just—”
“I’m totally here for it,” I said, interrupting hir. “One thing I’ve learned about art is that whenever you see smoke, you should chase it to the fire before the fuel is gone.”
The nurse at the desk pulls at the neck of her scrubs, centring them.
“Your mother just woke up from a nap, so you may want to wait for half an hour before going in. She tends to be a bit clearer once she’s had a chance to wake up.”
“That’s fine,” I say. I sign in. Beneath my signature are the pages and pages of visitors who have come to the home since I did last.
Al Baum.
I hand it over and the nurse smiles, reads the name. “Was that your sister who came in the other day?”
“Yes,” I say, turning around to the waiting room chairs, and then half turn back to say: “Allie’s my twin.”
All the chairs in the room have a sag from all the waiting done here. There are new magazines and old magazines, folded up and worn. I imagine all the people coming and going, all those names between my names, coming in and waiting, waiting upon each other’s impressions of waiting. I sat on them, too.
I think about going to the car and grabbing the book from the passenger seat, from beside Mother’s camera, but I don’t want to risk leaving. I need to practise staying.
The television is on, set to a Winnipeg news channel. I catch the tail end of a story about how a sinkhole—the size of one lane—that opened up on St. Mary’s Road a few days ago was finally filled in today. A slide show of still photos of a huge hole where the road had been hollowed out is running over the headline, the subtitles.
But then, just as they’re cutting to an interview with someone who witnessed the sinkhole breaking the road, the screen switches, and a red Breaking News banner comes up, overlaying a grainy film clip of a boat going out onto the Red River toward a railway bridge, the railway bridge just north of the Forks, just north of where I’d been only yesterday, holding my phone to the thick spring swirling. I could have turned my body and seen that bridge.
The banner says a body has been found there, in the water. The camerawork from shore is shaky, zooming in on the boat past the point of clarity. For a moment, we are intimate with the pixelated engine, with the rolling turbidity of the muddy, swollen river that is licking at the boat’s fibreglass hull. For a moment, the scene is abstracted, as the camera loses its bearings. Then the image cuts back to what appears to be the beginning of the shot, the distant pan of the river, a boat just leaving the banks, a slow and shaky zooming in.
The waiting room is quiet, the television muted. The only sound is the nurse at the desk occasionally rapping at her computer’s old mechanical keyboard. I can hear every stroke of her fingers, dancing, slowing, stopping, resuming. I can almost feel the weight of her eyes in her head as she glances up at me, looking over at her from the television, and pulls her closed lips into a hospital smile.
Not a hospital. A place where the bad attempt to gracefully get worse.
I wish I were her.
So as I wait, I watch the same news break, again and again, in a steady repetition of itself, with hardly a detail added. I can imagine a few journalists scrambling to make copy to keep people watching. The subtitles run again and again, talking about the rains, the flooding, the incidence of bodies being found in that river. “… likely got disturbed by the fast waters.” “The Red River is known for its …” “… last June, some may remember …”
“Mr Baum,” the nurse says, pulling me up. “You should be fine to go in and see your mother.”
For a second I don’t move, just look at her, and then I stand.
“Remember to talk loud but conversationally. She responds best to tone, so you don’t want to seem like you’re yelling at her,” the nurse says, standing and moving toward the hallway. Mother’s hallway. “Though I’m sure your sister told you all about that.”
I give her a hospital smile.
“We don’t talk much,” I say, waving as I go down the hall to let her know I don’t want her to follow me, thinking how a body has suddenly appeared on my horizon, dead.
I stand by the door, its kickstand propping it open. I go in.
It’s a horror how many people slip into our lives simply as bodies. Simply as broken vessels, sunk. How many people in life are not important until they are gone, until they are at the point when we’re unable to retrieve them. It can happen in an instant, people invisible or unreachable only showing up through the violence of their leaving, becoming a kind of palimpsest.
Mother is sitting up in the bed, and I go and sit down in a chair beside her.
She is so tiny, in the bed, with her face staring out from her head cocked slightly away from me, to the window. I can hardly stand to look at her, but I do. I can recognize all the parts of her—the arms, the eyebrows, the lips—but not all of her together.
The first day I came here, I could hardly recognize her. Then, I could only recognize her hands, hidden and moving under their bubbly scars.
I take up the loose collection of bones that make up her hand and rub my thumbs along the atonal wrinkles of the scars. I try to open my mouth but can’t. She looks away from the window and down at my hands holding hers, as if confused, either by my holding it or by her hand itself. The other chair is still staring out the window, and Mother is not in it. She is in the bed, and I am holding her.
Twenty-seven years break. I feel her blood pulse in her palm and her muscles tense. I loosen my grip but keep holding.
My teeth start to hurt from holding everything in. My hands do their best to draw back and not shatter her. Something in me, some dissociated fury, grows an awareness of her fragility before it is allowed to reach the end of my arms, before it can get to the headquarters of my hands, my fingers, and before it can reach the tip of my tongue or let go the muscles of my jaw. I’m paralyzed by a swell of intensity, a break in the numbness, invisible, just at the brink of expression. I can feel it moving through me like a fire.
I don’t say anything to Mother, small Mother, in the bed. She looks like a pen hung over the edge of a jeans pocket by its clip alone. If she lifted her arms over her head, she would be sucked under the covers, deep into a pocket beyond my reach. She looks at our hands. I look up from them to her.
Time. The doctor is in the room now, introducing himself, talking about how he’s doing his rounds at the home today. He is sitting on a chair on the other side of Mother, asking her questions she can’t answer.
“How are you doing, Hedwig? How are you feeling today?” She doesn’t say anything. She looks away from my hands. He talks loud, with bad tone. “Have you and Al been having a good chat?”
I want to kill him, the way his sentences fall out of his so-doctorific face, jagged and clause-less. I imagine it’s the same way he talks to his dog. After he’s done trying to talk to Mother, he turns to me and tells me about her, talks about her bluntly and honestly, as if she were not there, as if she cannot hear him. I try not to listen. He talks about the progress she has made into her dementia; the word he uses is “progress.” I am not here. He tells me that Mother’s slow progression into severe neural degradation is gaining momentum, and that from here—the recent loss of speech, added to her loss of mobility—the speed of her disintegration will only increase.
“I can’t really see her going more than a year at this rate, Mr Baum.”
I can feel her hand in mine. I can feel her moving. Beneath my skin, another version of myself is on fire. I am not who anyone sees.
I don’t look at him while he talks; I just search Mother’s mute greyblue eyes for her. I have imagined these eyes a lot over these years. I have thought most of her eyes and her body in a static motion, in her yoga studio, as I watched her through the vent in my bedroom.
The doctor is gone, and I’m not sure how long I’ve been here. I don’t know that I said anything to him at all. My chest is tight, my skin a facade.
I let go of her hand, and I start to shake. I get up and steady myself on the wall and back away. Mother looks my way for a moment, and I bolt, before she can try again to recognize me.
I go through the doors without looking at the nurse, stumble outside into the rain. I put my head in my hands and my hands through my hair, pull all the pins out of it and let my origami’d head fold down to my shoulders.
Shook free of myself, I bolt again. To the car. I get inside and try to remember how to breathe.
I can still feel her hand in mine, loosening under my hard grasp before I dropped it. I breathe out and try to breathe in but just breathe out again. My car starts to fog in the cool world of rain. I see the pixelated boat, abstracted on the water, going for the body at the bridge, trying to collect information that might lead to knowing something more, and to feeling less.
I look over at the passenger seat: Mother’s old Leica stares up at me from atop the Ovid—and in seeing the camera and screaming, I do not scream at all.
4
THE KITCHEN
The knife drawer in the kitchen is stuffed with old negatives. The drying rack is overflowing with fresh darkroom paper, and the taps flow with fixer, stopper, and developer. The sink itself is filled with a calm and palpable darkness, a darkness you can put your hands inside and lose them in until you pull them back out. In the cupboard, instead of plates, you have panes of glass that fit the stacks of empty frames. Instead of cups, you have bundles of recycled wire, handfuls of nails, for hanging. Instead of pots—instead of ingredients—you have the enlarger, developing trays, slide viewers, tongs, replacement bulbs. You have stretched string from one edge of the kitchen to the other, so that you can hang your wet remembrances to dry. In the fridge you have canisters of undeveloped film. In the fridge, you keep things you’ve been meaning to process.
Most of the time, when you step into the kitchen, the room ends there: cupboards, a sink, a fridge, then a dark gap you spin past.
The kitchen is the factory, the place where you come when you have recalled something you need to add to the palace, or when you need to fix something that you already hung up in the palace, either because you’ve reason to believe that it is inaccurate, or because it is fading and you need to meditate on it and pull it back to sharpness. Sometimes, you just enter the palace from the back door that leads straight into the kitchen and do nothing else but work.
The kitchen is your palace’s darkroom, though it is bathed in light—because to be in complete darkness when processing the memories would be the same as painting the walls of the palace black, and the floors black, and the ceilings black, and the stairs and everything, such that no room would reflect the light to allow shadows or depth. There would be no getting through it alive.
I am in my car in the rain, south on Pembina, in the parking lot of a Midas auto repair. The last half hour comes back to me, in reverse.
There is honking, I am turning off Pembina into this lot without using my blinker, without really slowing down. I’m coming south, I’m turning south onto Memorial from Portage, instead of going back to Mother’s house. I am almost merging into a reckless red Volkswagen bug, I’m turning onto Portage from Main, I’m driving south on Main and hitting the brakes for a yellow light gone red and hydroplaning into the intersection at the same time a couple crosses the street underneath the insufficient cover of an umbrella, my car slowing just enough to spare them. When the car stops, my body keeps moving, ahead of me.
I’m turning onto Main, turning out of the parking lot of the home, starting the car, screaming, climbing into the car, running away from Mother.
I am here because I was heading south. It was raining. I was trying to make it out of the city.
I call Genny, but she doesn’t pick up, and when I reach her voice mail I don’t leave one. I go into my voice mail and delete hers, and the new one I have from Karen, without listening to either of them. I turn off the phone. I beat the edge of it against the steering wheel and scream some more: for stopping, for not allowing the energy to break me out of this life. I toss the phone onto the passenger seat with the Metamorphoses.
The radio is on: “All the information the police have given is that the body belonged to an Indigenous boy, a teenager. It’s likely that the high river waters brought him up. At this point, police are not ruling out suicide.” More words spout before they go back to the weather.
One day, the weatherman says, this rain will end.
The city becomes a funnel, a sinkhole, and I know that I’ve lost my chance to escape. I put the car into reverse, into drive, and pull out of the parking lot and head north, toward the hole, toward the drain, toward the house.
The spring after I turned fifteen, the year after Mother came back from Selkirk, I thought I could run across the Assiniboine River on the flow of broken ice. At a bend, the pieces were coagulating, and I thought—being bird-like—I could make it across.
I don’t know how much I actually believed it was possible. One thing I wouldn’t have admitted at the time was that I wasn’t worried about what would happen if I couldn’t make it, if I failed halfway through. When Tom and I, walking along the river trails, saw that clog in the turn of the flow, my mind instantly jumbled into a pure, selfless curiosity, and the discovery of the possibility—or impossibility—was enough payoff to justify the act.
Tom didn’t humour my idea at first, but he came around because he knew that if he didn’t, I’d come back and do it alone. Maybe he also knew I’d make it nowhere, and that as long as he stayed, there wasn’t much danger. All I know for sure is that he knew I was stubborn, so after not too long, we went down from the trails to the riverbank. I took off my coat and stretched. It was midday and we were supposed to be at school. The wind blew a chill across the shattered river, and Tom stood there, holding my coat, trying to look supportive while feeling angry and afraid.
What happened was that I basically just jumped into the nearfreezing river. I didn’t catch a firm footing for even a second. The first moment my foot reached the ice, the second moment I was under water, the third I was above again, and by the fifth I was in Tom’s arms, being lifted up the bank. Once I was out, Tom wrapped my coat around me and carried me to his place. I was laughing through my chattering teeth while he shivered curse after curse under his breath, occasionally looking down at me and shaking his head into a smile.
He drew a very warm bath for us, and after we had warmed up some, naked under blankets, we lowered ourselves into it. The bath overflowed immediately because Tom had forgotten to account for two bodies’ worth of displacement. I laughed and pulled him back down into the tub with me just as he was about to get out and try to stop the stream of water that was snaking out under the door.
“The damage has been done,” I said, feeling his muscles lose their intensity, surrendering into me.
We sat in that tub until we got warm, then chilly again, then got out and dried off. For the next hour I watched Tom try to clean up the water before Del came back from work. He followed it out the bathroom and down the wood stairs; the water had to turn to go down them. Tom complained to me about the skewed foundations, how he always felt that the house was trying to tip him out into the world.
I watched while he mopped, his long body slowly descending stair after stair, and thought it a magically unimaginable result of a reckless moment. I sat at the top of the stairs in a blanket, knocking my feet against the wood, atonally, and
whenever Tom looked up at me, weary of the drying, I stuck my tongue out at him, and he smiled.
There’s no parking in front of Mother’s house, so I’m sitting in my car, idling in a spot a few streets over—on Ethelbert—listening to the radio. The night is coming on again, promising to be wet and long. People pull in on the street; people pull out. Someone in an SUV lurks behind me, thinking I am going to move because my car is on. We sit here, in a sort of stalemate. Eventually, they honk. Eventually, they honk again. Eventually, they speed past.
Who do they think I am? Do they not see how surrounded I am?
The radio says there’s going to be a vigil at the Forks tomorrow evening, for the dead boy. In protest of all those who continue to be lost. The host makes light of the rain, of how the Forks might be under water by then. It is not a surprise. This is the world.
I want to turn off the car, but I can’t bring myself to. Mother’s camera sits beside me, turned over, still lens-capped, to keep it from watching. All the mirrors are turned far away from me.
After Ess came back from the centre, and kept up hir medication and therapy, ze started hard at the new project. Ess titled it NON-POLAR-BI-BINARY. Ze wanted to give a sense of what it was like to live through two identities people don’t understand. Ze wanted to talk about living between the poles of gender and mood. Ze wanted to have photographs that were manic and queer next to art that was depressive and near trite. It was whiplashing the viewer that ze was after. It was trying to make them feel like ze did—thrown around from one end of hir head to the other, every single day.
Over the holiday break and the last semester, Ess filled hir portfolio and worked harder than I’d ever seen hir, which was saying something. After every meeting, I told hir that ze should go home and get some sleep. Ze looked exhausted, but despite the bags under hir eyes, I could tell ze was feeling a contentment I’d not seen in hir in a while.
“How is the fire?” I would ask Ess when I ran into hir in the halls.
“Still burning beautiful,” ze’d always say.
Vanishing Monuments Page 7
