I get to the stairs and find more dead flies in the shadows. I lie down and get close enough to one to notice that, no, it isn’t exactly dead. It is still twitching.
As I make it up to the armoire, to the bathroom, to outside the studio I don’t open, I imagine the dead bugs and the dust shaking free of the rags and the trash bags and splaying back to their places over the windowsills, the furniture, the banister, the stairs.
I stop for a second, just outside my room, to close my eyes and see the palace, smouldering and char black. I open my eyes. I drag the vacuum into the room, vacuuming everything but a skirt of dust around the old pry bar sitting in the corner.
When I’m done I put the vacuum in the closet downstairs, and then go back up to my bed and collapse. I turned all the lights off behind me. I don’t want to see any of it happening, the dust and the dead reclaiming their place.
My bedroom door is open, because I am afraid that if I close it, some phantom will show up with a chair to stick under the knob to lock me in. I hear the quiet creaks of the cat, in the house, moving. I want to warn them about this place. I try not to think about anything, so I think about the ceiling. I look over at the vent above the loft bed, stare at it. My eyes get heavy as the blue ekes in at the edges.
The sun climbs into the window, and I’m sweating from the cranked radiator heat, but I can almost breathe again. Getting up from my old bed, dislocated, I find three dead flies on the windowsill I vacuumed last night. As I go downstairs I hear the cat skittering across the hardwood floors. I pull the vacuum back out of the closet and go through the whole house again.
When I get back to my bedroom, the pry bar is still sitting by the window. I pick it up for the first time in twenty-seven years. It feels so much lighter than it did that night, when the door was closed and I had to do everything I could to escape from that life.
But as I hold the pry bar, its weight gradually increases until it drops onto the floor, clanging over toward the middle of the room. I can hear the sound of it falling echo through the house, my head, my memory palace.
And I can hear the darkroom scratching at the door.
7
MEMORY TRIPPING
You try not to notice it, but you trip a lot, on things you don’t remember until you do—things that are cluttering the memory palace. You stub your toes on them. You pierce the un-callused pads of your feet. No matter how often you come in here, the bottoms of your feet are always nubile and vulnerable. Always susceptible to the past breaking in, getting you to notice it, which you do despite yourself, despite your attempts to make the tour of the palace clean and easy and simple.
Sometimes you hit a patch of rogue memories so cluttered you fall over, memories stacking into drifts where they shouldn’t be, memories that you didn’t curate into the palace, but they rise up from between the seams of the floorboards. Sometimes there’s rubble so high it obstructs all forward movements; pathways are blocked and the order you remember is wrong. You circumvent your usual sequence and go through some of the rooms backwards. You go through others partway, before quitting or circling back to try again, building up the palace by rote. At times you can’t reach the warm door of the darkroom, where you pretend to know what it holds. At other times the door isn’t there. Despite your having curated the palace to avoid the clutter of memories, they crop up. Dim sensations and half images, contextless clips of time looping in the back of your eyes.
But mostly you try and pretend to be graceful. Pretend that only what you meant to remember is in here, in the palace, and that there’s no dust and no dead flies and none of Tom’s leftover clothes, that Mother’s clothes do not let their own phantoms storm your walls. But they do. They reach up from the floor and grab your ankle. They slip out of the ceiling and tickle your scalp. They pile themselves against doorways and windows and other memories so thick you can’t hope to make it through. Not without remembering them, which you don’t want to do.
Sometimes you can’t make it inside the palace at all because of all the wreckage of memories piled up in front of the door. Sensations half recalled, busted-up bits of conversations … “ever again, I will” … “me be frank: I can’t tell you” … “whenever it happens—” “Whenever what?” … muddle up the lawn. The lawn is not part of the palace, you tell yourself, always, as you make your way to the door. If the door is blocked, you try and move the contradictions: the things that are on the lawn because they cannot fit, the things that you are able, most of the time, to keep out. Things you are able to mostly ignore into forgetting until they flare back up and break into the rest of your life. Into the life you want to try and preserve.
No matter how hard you stand there, atop the mess piled at the door, you cannot clear the path. You want to get to the door so you don’t have to stand so close to the little mailbox. But you just fight against the dimness, populated with the half phantoms of your life, before you open your eyes, stop your hands from shaking, and get up from the bed or the couch or the stair where you were sitting and go to the kitchen for a glass of water. Or whiskey. Whatever you have to do to make the world pretend to stop fraying.
For the first week I was in Hamburg, I wrote letters to everyone—letters without envelopes, without postage. I wrote them on cardboard and card stock and between the lines of days-old German newspapers: to Tom, to Mother, to Karen, to myself, to Darius—purring on my lap—and of course, to Genny. They were the things I would say if I could say what I wanted to. They were fearless. I considered sending them to the States so that I’d have something to come back to, but I had no address to send them. I wrote those letters knowing that I had no place to come back to, though when I was in Germany I didn’t actually know that I’d ever leave. I spent those first evenings in my little room, at my little table, writing sprawling letters that capped off my previous life. I went days without speaking, walking and biking around the city, not yet understanding much of anything that was being said.
I was trying to locate myself in those letters by talking to everyone, telling everyone what I thought, of them and of myself. Every letter felt like it was written by someone different. Some were furious. Some were abstract, insane, written illegibly, left-handed. I used the distance as an excuse to be honest with everyone without having to actually communicate anything to anyone beyond the versions of them in my head.
Eventually, I felt like everything had been said, squared away, and for a while I was quiet inside. Life moved forward with less hindrance. The letters stayed a pile of pages in the corner of the room. I didn’t reread them, and I didn’t throw them out. I thought I ought to save them, just in case. You never know when you might find it useful to have an artifact from a cavalcade of ghosts.
It’s a day.
I open the door of the memory palace and bloody my foot on the frame on the landing that I couldn’t make out for the layer of ash from the fire. It’s hard to breathe as I walk the endless hallway to the place in the wall where the closet should be. I put my hands through the coated wall and pull out the vacuum. The one Mother used to have. I can’t find a plug in the palace, for all the ash, so I plug it into my chest. I start to vacuum up ash from the walls, the ceiling, the floor squelching with the blood from my foot.
I make it down the hall, to the darkroom door, through the kitchen. I leave the places in the palace I can reach with the vacuum spotless and make my way to the living room. I suck away the ash coating all the memories playing in the frames, on the floor, the wall, the ceiling—the looping memories of Germany and Minneapolis, of Genny and Tom, of Erwin and Mother. With Mother still looming in every single one.
Only now, after the fire, I discover she isn’t standing there like she usually does. She’s lying on the ground, on the floor, on surfaces of water—wherever there is space for her.
No, I know she is not doing yoga. I can’t trick myself into thinking that, but I try so hard. Her hands and legs are stretching bently into the sky, coming together, twitching. She rocks back alon
g the curve of her back. In every single memory I clean, the scene blurs and she gets tack sharp in a far truer corpse pose. Wingless. She looks as if she is falling through the sky, her heavy heart falling fastest.
And no matter how hard I try, sticking the vacuum to the memories —through them—only frees them of her for a second. Then she comes right back up, slowly fading back into too much sharpness.
I open my eyes out of the palace and prove I can still move my body, creaking from room to room toward the bath.
After writing the letters in Hamburg I started venturing out more, away from my little room where Darius was not yet comfortable, going out to galleries and sitting in parks with Mother’s camera around my neck.
One afternoon I was at a tiny gallery looking at some portrait photographs, of pairs of people and single people, old and young juxtaposed—classically composed but expertly shot—and Erwin Egger came up to me. He had grey hair receding at the sides of his widow’s peak, his body thin and wizened. The photograph I was in front of was of him. He walked over to me with one thumb in his belt loop and the other pointing at the old Leica III. He asked me, in German, if I took photos—“Machst du Fotos?” I, a little guarded, said, “Yes.”
He put out his hand to me. “I am Erwin Egger. I took these,” he said, tipping over into English and gesturing to the photo on the wall, him staring out unsmiling. I shook his hand. “Well, not this. Since it is of me, someone else had to hit the button.”
He didn’t ask me my name. First, he asked me what sort of photos I did, and I told him mostly self-portraiture. “Finding someone else to hit the shutter is a challenge,” I said.
“I am doing a project now, with photos of myself,” he said. “I am not quite happy with this one. Are you here long in Hamburg? Are you by chance looking for some work?”
“I am, and I am.”
“Wunderbar.”
Before I left, I got his card. As I stood in the door, he called back to me, “Wait, I never asked your name.”
“Sofia,” I said, without thinking, remembering one of the names the old woman at the hotel said while walking down the halls with the room keys, a name down another hallway, a name that was both here and far away at once.
Erwin smiled; he did not disbelieve me.
But then again, neither did I.
It’s a morning.
I pick up the pry bar from the floor in my bedroom, and then there’s nothing in the room—in the whole world—but the window and the dark outside it, nothing but the window and a rope made of knotted clothes, a rope with one end tied to the bag of things I’ve packed to take and the other to the steel pipe of the radiator. The rest of the radiator doesn’t exist, along with everything else in the room, everything that makes as much difference now as it did back then. Now. Whenever for whoever. I can’t see my reflection in the window, but I do see me—them—in flashes from my perspective standing behind in the empty dark. My hair is growing out from the buzz I’d done that January, and I’m slipping the bar into the gaps in the boards that hold in the window.
Outside the window is the world. The sun is out, but it is also the middle of the night. Neither contradicts the other. My hand pushes against the bar, slow, quietly wrenching the house apart.
I pry one board loose, then another. I can’t look back because I know what is there. To look back would be to lose, to lose momentum and then everything else. It would be to lose Genny and fall through the sky on melting wings.
On the last board, across the bottom of the window frame, I struggle. I put all my weight into it but still fail. I feel things closing in on me, and I want to cry and scream and make every noise, until there they are, the hands atop mine on the pry bar with me.
We push one more time and the board comes up, easy. I’m sweating, holding the pry bar and watching the window slowly pull out from its place. I watch the rope lower the bag from the window toward the ground, watch me as I look down out the window, and then slowly lift my leg and climb out.
And I don’t look back into the room; my eyes follow the rope down into the night, into the new world.
The sun makes hard shadows. I am not in the window—there’s new glass there now, panes that you could open up and slip through. It is not midnight and the pry bar is in my hand.
I kneel down to the light the window cuts on the floor. I set a hand there, then set the pry bar in the centre of it. I go downstairs to the darkroom, swing open the door, pick up Mother’s camera, and go back. The camera is empty, I know, but I take a photo of the pry bar anyway. I open my head to gobble up its light.
On the day of the first shoot I was to help Erwin Egger with in Hamburg, I left Darius alone in my little room and went downstairs to the office. I knocked and the woman with the keys around her neck answered. I pointed to the phone inside near the door. She let me in but didn’t leave the room as I dialled his number. She walked over to a chair in the corner and sat, the keys clittering.
“I will come and pick you up, Sofia. Do bring your camera, too, if you can. I will be out to you soon.”
I thanked the woman and went out to the curb in the heat of that late-summer morning, with Mother’s camera around my neck, to wait as the occasional breeze blew over the city from far over the harbour, from the sea. I looked up at the windows of the old building that stood out in the neighbourhood like a sore thumb. As I itched the ankle Darius had dug his claws into two days before, I counted up the windows to the floor that held him.
Erwin showed up in his truck, smiling, and I climbed inside next to him. He drove and told me about the project. He wanted to recreate photos he’d taken so many years ago. Photos of himself, his best friend, and the girl they’d both loved. Two people the war had taken from him.
“I destroyed those photos, not long after getting back from being in the war prison. I was not happy, then, and I was afraid of photos, particularly those. So I want to make them again, now, how I remember them.” He made a turn, slowing. “I will destroy them again, by bringing them back how I want them to be.”
Erwin pulled up to a little house, where two boys a few years younger than me were sitting on the porch, listening to music on a little boom box. Erwin’s son, Georg, and Georg’s best friend.
“One of my models has cancelled,” Erwin said, putting the truck into neutral. “The one who would play the girl. Do you think you could be a model for me, as well as help shoot?”
I thought about it—Sofia did. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was so hungry to feel loved again. I wanted to come back to all that pain. “That would be just fine.”
“Do not worry,” he said, honking at Georg and his friend, who put the stereo back into the house and came toward the truck. “I will pay more for it.”
It’s an afternoon.
I have been trying to make it out of the house for days now. I have gotten to the door, I have opened the door, I have walked to the edge of the property, to the opening in the little fence. I am standing there now, here, but the tension of the hold this house has on me is too much. I’m afraid to lift my legs and try another step because I’m afraid I will be dragged back in. I want to be anchored; I want to pull away.
Mother is so far from these walls, even though she is storming through them. I can see her, bones in fabric, hair and skin, sitting up in the bed. I grab hold of the fence, and my hand touches paper.
The mailbox.
Pain, like thunder, reaches you differently depending on your distance from its source. There I am, coming back out the front door of the house without shutting it behind me. It is daylight, though there was a cloudy half moon on that night. This one. On my way through the fence, having stepped through a coldness, I stop at the mailbox. I lift envelopes to the dim light from the sky, from the street light on the corner, take a few important notices addressed to Mother, and the one letter addressed to me. What I think is a paycheque from the job I haven’t been to since I told Mother I was leaving with Genny and she locked me in my room. I put ev
erything in the bag and walk down the street. I keep walking but slip out of myself, to this place behind the fence, still in reach of the mailbox, my fingers digging into the oncesoaked, now-crackly flyers. That night flickers in for a moment, then it is light again. It is a sunny day in the once-wet city.
“Burn the letters!” I yell, as the night flickers in and away for good. And before bodies can come to their windows and see me, before people can turn their heads, I surrender myself to the black-hole gravity of the house, remembering those words pretending to be a paycheque, remembering them blasting through me.
The darkroom is open, hungry. It has things it wants me to see.
The head—the mind—is a labyrinth, and we—who we are, when we are dissociated, distinctly nobody—are the Minotaur. Our many identities, which we acquire and wear throughout life, are the identities of the little people running through, feeling along the smooth walls of the dark, trying to make their way to the port at our circle’s centre. We, the Minotaur, who have mastered the dark and are hungry to be someone, hunt these identities through the cool halls, and when we find one—a sweet femme thing, a barnacle of a man—we chase them down until they’re exhausted, tripping, and then we stomp them into stasis and gore them on the rough spit of our time-stained horns.
And so we walk through the halls, for a time, wearing these corpses as our crowns, their blood covering us as we look down and believe that we are them. Someone. We believe it until their bodies begin to lose their integrity and fall to the ground in pieces, until their blood turns to red dust and blows away from our skin. As they’re falling to bits, blowing back into nobody, we chase down others in order to continue the cycle: spearing and smearing them across the reflective nothing of our hide. Stacking one identity on the heels of another to avoid the vacant moment between.
Sometimes the identities fight back. Sometimes they win, for a moment, and the transformation doesn’t take. Sometimes they chase Ariadne’s thread to the centre of the labyrinth and escape, to wherever that escape gets them. Wounded and unsuccessful, we slip out into the phase of nothingness, of suspension, until we—desperate—find the next us to gore and shroud around our lack, our next me to wallow through.
Vanishing Monuments Page 14
