Genny wrote the letter for me when we were still in Winnipeg, at the end of the summer of 1987, when she was leaving for school in Minneapolis and I was going to ditch my senior year to join her. She wrote the letter when our plans to leave for Minneapolis together became known to our mothers—hers a domineering Christian zealot, mine depressed and alone and without any comforting ideology—and we’d been imprisoned from one another, boxed in. We could not reach one another, so Genny sent me the letter disguised as a paycheque from my summer job at the used camera store on Portage.
In the letter, Genny left me.
She said that she had to move forward with life, had to move forward with life without me. She said that she loved me, but I was too immature and she was too desperate. That she was too busted by her parents splitting up, by her life tumbling out of her control, that she had clung to my beautiful chaos. That perhaps this inconvenience was all for the best. That being separated gave her a moment to think, and she didn’t think we could work out.
She also wrote that, a month or so earlier, she had fucked another guy. She said she didn’t know why she’d done it, besides to spite me—him: Al. She said that a night a few days before she’d fucked him, when we had broken into the zoo, he had—I had—made her feel so incredibly far away from me. So something took hold of her and she just went to this boy she knew liked her and that was that. It happened like nothing and led to nothing.
I didn’t open the letter posing as the paycheque until a few years after taking it from the mailbox and packing it away. I’d forgotten about it, just carried it with me from place to place, bundled up with the other mail I stole from Mother that night. The thing that scared me, then, was that so soon after she wrote it, I was breaking out of my window and scrambling up to hers, that so soon after, I crawled into her bedroom and we merged. I had chosen the love I was going to commit myself to. After she wrote me that letter—even though I hadn’t read it—we did not break up but instead ran off together, and because of that one night of concentric rebellions we became inseparable, and soon became so complicit in each other’s lives that they were nearly impossible to untangle. What scared me was how hard the following years were, trying to get by in the new, strange world, and achieving a sort of stable mayhem in our love. How hard we worked for that—yet the whole time, there was this message folded in a piece of pasted paper cornered with a stamp, this moment capped in a bottle lurching wave over wave to me, to when I was the least waterlogged, to when I was most willing to concede that life could be worth living.
I discovered the letter—gutted from its gorged camera store envelope—while I was packing up to move out of my apartment and into the collective’s studio for a week before I could sign the lease on a new apartment of my own. While I sat there looking down at the letter, Darius was scheming with a low mew after a moth on the other side of the room. It was to be my first nice, solitary place. It was to be the beginning of a real life.
It’s shocking how an unknown thing can suddenly pop up fully formed in brilliant sharpness on our horizon. How a dead, inert thing can simply saunter in and manipulate history with its old injuries. This letter had sat at the side of our relationship, had walked alongside us, yet I’d never known it or seen its shadow. How long had it been there, hiding in the bundle of old papers in a drawer, behind the teeth of her kiss, swirling in the slow drain of the tub or ghosting through the strands of my hair? How it must have been pulling at things, inhibiting actions, lubricating thoughts between us without my ever knowing. How stupid and innocent and stupid I’d been.
It was a thing Genny had thought insignificant when I called her after reading it, frantic, screaming. Which was almost worse: her minimizing a maximized moment of our past. The shrug-off of a potentially enormous leaving. How she had almost murdered me. So I called her awful names—Annie did—and then we hung up on her.
A part of me was missing, after that letter struck me. Some of me had stopped walking with us, fallen down in the pack and been trampled, and I found myself thrown into the imbalance that would lead me to run away. Again.
The girl who packs our bags and leaves came by, to the collective’s studio, and helped throw us together into another departure. To Hamburg. A land that ran through my blood, though my heart had never really pumped it over every edge of me.
I drive toward the home and I don’t turn around. The gas light is on, but I don’t want to stop. I have more than enough to reach her. The beeping is steady and seldom and oddly comforting. The current of the traffic carries me, and eventually, I reach the patch on the shore of this river of machines where it sits: the home. Mother.
I park in the lot. The whole drive her camera around my neck has been staring up at me, at my chin, as if trying to focus and understand me, which has always been its function.
The only film in the camera is the roll I shot when I got to the house. It is rolled up and ready, but I haven’t taken it out yet, even though there are no frames left.
I keep the camera on my neck when I go in. The nurse—the same nurse—recognizes me and calls me Miss. I tell her I’ve been busy and ask her how Mother is.
“Oh, she’s about the same,” she says.
The thought of Mother being the same seems like worsening. A static level of hell never feels the same day after day—you lose your resilience to it.
I go to the room. The paper on the door with Mother’s name has been re-taped. It’s still yellowing, but it’s flatter. It reminds me of a placard in a museum: Hedwig Baum (1931) Mixed media (depression and used non-fiction).
I do not know who has made her.
She is sitting up on the bed with a newspaper spread out across the sheets. I walk into the room and watch her finger the headlines, flip through the sections. Sports, entertainment—all bullshit. This was her domain. Her photos once dotted these pages, images she clipped out from a world and fixed here, in exclusion from it.
I sit beside her. She looks up at me. Her hands dance on the paper without needing the guidance of her empty head. Her eyes look at my shoulders, my chest, lead down the straps to the camera.
They stop.
I lift it over my head, and she stares at it as it stares into her. I put it down on the bed, atop the newspapers, weeks old. I place the camera near her eager, pink, scarred hands.
“This was your camera,” I say, picking up one of her hands and rubbing it along the old Leica’s smooth brushed-metal surface.
Mother stares down at it. At her hands. At their joining. She looks at the camera and her hands as if she doesn’t recognize either. Her face doesn’t change.
I watch her and forget why we breathe. My heart bounds against my chest, wanting nothing but to force my arms to take Mother by the shoulder and shake her out of it, the silence and the weakness she recovered from so many times, so many years ago. But my heart knows that Mother has reached the other end of an unbridgeable distance. That she can no longer be loved into speaking.
I remember the I-35W bridge—only a minute after I decided to take the 10th Avenue Bridge that ran parallel to the south instead—twisting and falling while Genny giggled on the phone in my ear.
I don’t cry. But my eyes do.
The thing about degenerative diseases is that they never stop, never start regenerating things again. They only move one way. They rip out bad boards from the boat as it floats but don’t replace them with anything better. They just tear the boat to bits until you forget what it’s called. Forget the reason why it ever set sail. Forget what buoyancy means. Just forget.
Mother looks away from her hands and the camera they are feeling. She looks down at the newspaper and over at me. Her eyes have lost their lustre.
But while her head spins away from me, and the moment, her hands on the camera, weak as they are, try and try and try to remember how to grip it.
Before Pyramus and Thisbe were lifted by Shakespeare and dropped into Verona, they were taken up by Ovid for his Metamorphoses, and even he didn’t
create them so much as borrow them for his own use. The pair died tragically before Ovid, and they haven’t stopped since. They just wake back up in their bedrooms, separated and so deeply in love—ready to let its foolish depth slaughter them again and again.
In Ovid, the two lovers are neighbours kept at bay by their fathers’ unexplained ban, their love described as a mutual fire burning without an intermediary to communicate through. They are like two trapped infernos at opposite sides of a wall shared by their houses, as if they live in ancient tenements, in which their love illuminates a fissure they can whisper through. Every night, one crackles on its side of the wall and fuels the other, infernos swelling in that unconfined yet trapped way that only first love allows.
Ovid’s pair blame the jealous wall for thwarting them, for not opening up for them to exchange more than words. But they also praise it for allowing so much to pass between them. It is the architecture, the structure—the house—and not the unexplained rigidity of their looming fathers keeping them at bay.
There are no mentions of mothers. Mothers are not important in every story.
From here, the story is well known: They agree to meet—to escape their lives, to coincide—one night beneath a tree. A tree where there will be a dire misinterpretation. A tree that will be the last mulberry to have born snow-white fruit.
Thisbe shows up under the tree first, and while she waits for Pyramus, a lioness arrives from the forest, her snout red from a recent kill. Thisbe runs away to a dark cave nearby, dropping her shawl as she goes—because in myths, as in life, something is always left behind in our leaving. The lioness takes the shawl in her bloody mouth, biting and pulling at it like a ball of yarn, before getting bored and leaving.
Pyramus arrives, finds the bloodied shawl, sees the beast’s prints, and—of course—believes that Thisbe has been killed and eaten.
After a melodramatic speech, Pyramus sinks his sword into his side and falls down under the mulberry, dying, his jilted blood fountaining the air and blotting the boughs of the tree. As he is on the ground, twitching and flailing in his throes, Thisbe comes back and finds him there: “Paler than boxwood, shivering as the sea / Shivers beneath a sliding breeze.” She falls to him, tears mingling with blood, and says his name.
He looks at her and recognizes her for one brief moment, before his head falls dead.
And before Thisbe stabs herself, transforming into another pricked can of bloody spray paint, she bids the mulberry’s pure whiteness remember them by making its “fruit funereal.” With those words, the pair’s blood blots the white fruit forever purple.
We always feel dread when we hear people tell the stories of their first loves, because we know how they end: misunderstanding and massacre, or at the very least, some sort of metamorphosis. A sort of metaphysical Rubicon crossing.
At some point, each of us tries to reach someone through a toosmall fissure. We make bold plans that could never work in a world larger than our skulls. Some aspect of ourselves runs from a lion encountered in a place where no lion should be, while another aspect always bleeds out under a tree.
Surviving a first love like that is metamorphosing into the mulberry. Into its ever-purple fruits.
I fuel up the car on the way back from the home and pull into Mother’s space in the back. As I get out, I look up at the window, the small, simple shape through which the most seismic action of my life took place. A decision I could never excise from me, because it is me. I am the window, the frame, its replacement.
I unlock the back door and come in through the kitchen, and while I do, the landline is ringing. I walk over to it and remember the doctor calling. I don’t want to hear more about Mother, about how far away she is, how unreachable.
I was just there. I have seen it.
The phone rings again and again, never ending, and I know that it can’t be the doctor. My bones know it. I have heard phones ring like this before.
As I pick it up, I am already saying that I’m sorry, that this has all been horrible, that this has been one long and never-ending mess. I tell her about Mother, the word “aphasia,” the look of her now. She breathes on the other end. She can’t tell I’m crying because I’m an expert at hiding.
“Should I come, then?”
“No,” I say, and before the air can stop coming out, before I feel like I might just stop talking altogether and quietly fall so deep into all of this too-much, I keep my voice moving: “I’m going to bring it all back. I’m going to bring all the Winnipeg back that I need to, and you can help me deal with it then.”
“I’m sorry, too,” she says. “I just—I remembered when you left before. I didn’t—”
“I know, I know, listen: I can’t talk. I can, but not now. I’ll be back soon, okay? I won’t stay any longer than I need to, but I do need to stay longer. But I will come back, okay? I promise. Don’t worry.”
“I’ll be here,” she says, and she always is.
“I love you, but I have to go. I’m sorry. See you soon,” I say, and stop listening.
I put the phone back down into the cradle. I take out the pile of paper, the list, and a pen. I go into the hall, and there is a face at the bottom of the stairs, a face in a deep grey cloud of smoke. It stares at me blankly and recedes as I approach, as I climb the stairs, looking straight into my face as I do. I can smell it—fire, so much paper burning. I get to the top of the stairs and follow the face to the studio door. I get a blank page ready, fresh, for a new room.
I train my eyes on the floor and open the door. As the seal breaks, the face disappears back into the walls of the house.
The floor is a bare film of dust blotted with dead bugs that I haven’t come in here to clean. I keep my eyes away from the walls, the windows, and write down dead flies and dead ladybugs and start to tally them. By the time I am shaking and weak, by the time I feel like I need to get out of the studio, get out of this whole life, I’ve got twenty-seven flies and thirteen ladybugs. Dead feet stroking the dead air.
Staring down at the floor, I imagine Mother’s body coiling behind the bars of the vent in my mind, and I see myself standing there, with her, still invisible to her. That’s a vision too far, so my eyes instinctually break from the floor and find themselves staring at the place on the wall where the wallpaper burnt off to the old wood planks beneath. It radiates up from the place on the floor where the fire started. My hands—instinctually—reach for the place, and my hands are Mother’s, bubbled up with scars.
The house is creaking under me, watching me. I can’t stand to look at the scars anymore, so I look away, to the ceiling, where half at least is blotted a deep ash black. I stare at it and feel heat come in at my fingers and look down, thankful to find that it’s just light coming in from the window, this time.
Then I feel the dark grey rubbing along my ankle and freeze.
But no, the grey is purring, not billowing. It’s simply the cat, marking me with their scent.
NOW
The girl who takes me into the basement of the old house off Ellice Avenue is gorgeous: long haired, pierced, and named something I didn’t exactly catch. She is shorter than me and young, probably in her mid-twenties. She does not look like I did when I was in my mid-twenties. None of me. Instead, she reminds me of Raya in her air of intensity. The biggest difference is that this girl smiles more.
The basement isn’t musty or dark, but it’s almost too low for me to stand up in, so I hunch a little, which is easy with Mother’s enlarger in my arms. It’s nearly thirty years old, and a pound for every year. It isn’t the one she had when I left; it’s much better, and I’ve never used it before.
The girl brings me to the darkroom under the stairs. She opens the door to the dark and turns on the light.
“Hudson built this here over the winter,” the girl says, touching the sanded wood of the jamb, pointing to a clear spot in the back corner. I go past her and put down the enlarger. She hands me the bag with the lenses and the extra bulbs, and I put them
beside it. “It’s small, but it’s cozy.”
“So long as it’s dark,” I say, unhunching for a moment. I feel the ceiling at the top of my hair, tied tight at the back of my head.
“We’re really happy you responded to the ad,” she says. “We’ve been hoping to get some more photographers involved with the house.”
The ad said they were attempting to create a new community of art making and crafting in the city. They wanted to try and keep things like painting, sculpture, photography, textiles, carpentry, and music alive in a too-modern world.
I look at her little hand on the wood frame. I count all five of her fingers. Every other one with a ring on it.
“I may be a bit too old for you guys,” I say. “And I’m not in the city very long. I’m just trying to get my mother’s house ready to sell.”
She smiles at me again, flashing just a tiny hint of a gap tooth that drives me deep into my skin. She’s half my age and she’s alive and I don’t know her name.
“Oh sheesh,” she says, pointing to Mother’s camera, which is slung under my right arm so I could carry the enlarger. I’m bound up and feel constricted. Allie. “That thing is probably five times as old as you are.”
Part of me wants to blush. Another wants to roll his eyes. Some me, in another reality, has fainted. I look down at Mother’s camera and touch its smooth, coated brass. Still filmless. I remember her hands on it, just the other day, fingering its ignorant knobs. I lift the camera away from my side and then let it fall back, with a huge, splintering thud. I look up to the girl, who is looking up at the ceiling.
“Hudson must be at work again.” Another thick hit. “Wanna meet him?”
I say yes, so we climb back up out of the basement, back into the cramped house with the art all over the walls: A mounted bull moose head with mobiles hanging from his antlers. Photographs. Paintings. Wire sculptures hanging from light fixtures. There’s not a place in the house that’s empty. In every room we walk through someone is sitting, reading, drinking coffee, or on their phone, smiling. The girl, whose name I still don’t know, tells me they switch out the art in the house like exhibits because there’s only so much space. They have no room for things to go stale. She points to a wall covered in abstract carvings of bone and says they’re hers. We stop and look at them.
Vanishing Monuments Page 17
