Vanishing Monuments

by John Elizabeth Stintzi

  “I make them from bones I get from people. I put an ad on Craigslist every now and then asking for bones and people bring them to me. Sometimes I meet them and sometimes they just drop them off outside. I don’t know what half the bones are from. There’s an anthill in the backyard where I put the ones that are still stinky. Sometimes people just leave roadkill on my lawn.”

  The whole wall feels like some sort of bizarre collaboration. I take it in, then she taps me on the shoulder and we continue. We get to the back door, which can’t open more than halfway, and somehow cram through. Everything in the house is tiny and quirky.

  In the backyard there is a small concrete porch where a man in a stained undershirt, his long hair tied back in a sweat-drenched bun, is swinging a huge wooden mallet at wedges in a section of huge, freshly cut log, trying to split the log in two.

  The girl and I stand there, watching him as he takes up the axe and swings it into the edge of the rift he’s made in the log. Once the axe is in, he hits it deeper with the mallet. When it won’t go in any farther, he turns to pick up one of the wedges from the pile beside him and finally notices us. Blue eyes, bare face, glasses laced with sweat and particles of wood, surprised.

  “Helena,” he says, pronouncing her into being.

  She scurries up to him and kisses him, without touching him. He doesn’t touch her either; they just meet at the lips for a beat, nothing but energetic air between them. Then Hudson takes a handkerchief from his back pocket and wipes his face dry.

  “This is Hedy,” Helena says, gesturing to me. I’m Hedy. I forgot I’d said that when I called, responding to the ad. “She’s a photographer. She brought us a new enlarger!”

  “Lovely,” Hudson says, putting down the huge wooden mallet and picking up one of the wedges. He is maybe thirty. He plays with the wedge in his hands and sits on the huge log.

  Helena goes inside to grab us a few beers, to cut the rare latespring heat, and Hudson asks me about what I’m working on right now. I tell him I’m doing something about my mother, but I’m not sure yet what it’s going to be exactly. This feels like a lie wrapped in truth. He is quiet and easy to speak to because I can tell he is listening. I tell him that all I know is that I might call it Shadows of the Prison House. The name comes from a line from the first page of a book Genny had, which stuck with me more than the title. I did not know I intended to call something that until I said it. Hudson sits there, listening, and when the beers come, we drink them.

  I’ve got the roll of undeveloped film in my pocket, the one I shot when I first got to Mother’s house. After we chat for a bit, Hudson gets up and goes back to splitting the log and Helena takes me back down to the darkroom. She wants to be there while I develop the roll.

  In the complete dark I can hear her breathing. I open up the roll and pull out the long strip. I string it onto the spool of the developing tank. Hudson’s mallet is thudding at a regular rhythm again, like a bass line. I turn on the light, pour the chemicals into the dark tank, and start to agitate it. I agitate it in time to his beats. Every six hits. I can sense the moment of the light being set in the film. Helena is leaning against the door, watching me. I glance over at her and her mouth is half-open. She is concentrating.

  Hudson hits and hits and hits, big beats of an old wood heart, far off. Once the roll has had its time, I stop the developing and wash the chemicals from the roll in the sink. I decide to take it back to Mother’s house wet.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” Helena says from the doorway as I go out toward my car.

  I smile at her and wave. Instead of saying what I want to, that I will always be a stranger, I say “I won’t.”

  9

  THE UPSTAIRS BATHROOM

  You take a step, then another, and soon you’re going past the bathroom. The door is closed; it’s always closed. There is light coming out from under it. You always pretend you’re going to skip the bathroom, but every time you get here you still knock on the door, lightly, and every time you do nobody answers. So you put your ear to the door and you hear it, the breathing, similar but different from the sound of the darkroom ventilation’s sucking and blowing. You listen and you think, It’s Mother, isn’t it? You believe. You go to the door and put your hand on the knob and it isn’t locked, of course.

  You open the door and look inside. Inside is Mother, sitting on the toilet, crying, as you yourself—whoever you are when you get to this part of the tour—are sprouting from the top of her head. You are almost completely out, but it seems like your foot is stuck. Neither see you at the door. Mother is crying and you are crying and they are both breathing. You can stand the crying, but the breathing—Mother’s breathing, and yours in sync—is too much. You step back slow through molasses and close the bathroom door before you can catch the tears from your own eyes rivering toward you.

  When Genny and I escaped Winnipeg, escaped our mothers, mine moved out of my life and into my skull, and along with her came—integral to Mother and me—the expanse between us. My heart was easy with love for Genny, but my head unfolded into leagues of absence. Sometimes the closest inch of my life felt like it was at the end of a very long tunnel. Sometimes I tried to look myself in the eye in a mirror and could not see myself but for a blip, deep in far-off eyes.

  I was obsessed with Mother and Winnipeg as soon as I left. The act of leaving this city and her behind with the vow of never returning made them both stiff and unmoving in me. Static. The streets of Minneapolis paved over Winnipeg’s, were renamed, but I knew that Winnipeg’s were there, always just under the surface. I felt, moving through my new city, the surge of Portage and Pembina, and all of Wolseley’s little veins. I could close my eyes and see them. Hear them.

  I became afraid of construction sites, of potholes, because I thought that if I looked into them I would fall back here, to this city.

  When I ran away to Hamburg, those streets were paved over Minneapolis’s streets which were still over Winnipeg’s. Though the canals of Hamburg seemed a strange novelty, they seemed to be thick with a mixed swill of the memories of elsewhere. They were tiny versions of the Red and the Assiniboine and the Mississippi, repeating themselves inescapably across my new landscape.

  Mother lived at the corner of my eye. She wandered the streets under the streets.

  Everything was thick with a reminiscence of home, yet I pretended it was pure freedom. I pretended that I’d escaped it, that I’d moved past that life, even though in leaving it I’d only ensured the permanence of its hold on me. It was a sort of preservation of it. I was just pushing it along with me, up the hill.

  The further I got away from things, the wider my head could get, and while I grew more and more capable of taking measures to zoom into the reality of my life, into where I was, there was no escaping those moments of vanishing, those moments when it felt like I was falling from the lip of my eyes all the way to the back of my skull.

  It felt like I’d been holding onto the edges of a cliff until someone came over and stomped on my fingers, making me fall deep into the dark chasm of myself.

  I didn’t head back to Mother’s house after meeting Helena. I came here, to Cousins Deli on Sherbrook, a table in the corner. I’m meeting Dorothea in person for the first time.

  She comes into the deli, picks up her food, and walks straight over to me. Sits down and puts her hands on my hands on the table.

  “I can’t believe it’s you,” she says. “You have her exact eyes.”

  Dorothea is maybe fifty-five or sixty years old, stout and smiley. She has a beer, a local Half Pints IPA, with her sandwich. I’m drinking tea and mostly I just want to hear her talk. If she has anything to say about Mother, I’ll hear it. I will let myself—or make myself—hear it.

  Dorothea tells me about some of the heartbreaking minutiae that led her to think that Mother may need full-time care: emptying the cans of soup from the pantry into the bathtub; screaming at Dorothea the times she arrived a few minutes late, or without knocking first, or on
time; filling all the small plates with water and putting them in the closet, under furniture, on the stairs, for the fish, she explained, who were looking for a home. Despite it being a cold April day, Mother had opened all the windows in the house to let them in. One of the plates of water on the windowsill in the kitchen, Dorothea said, was covered with a very thin layer of ice when she got there.

  When Dorothea refers to Mother she calls her by her full name: “Hedwig forgot my name a lot. I would sometimes, while dusting or cooking her breakfast, sing my name throughout the house. ‘Dorothea! Dorothea!’ And once, when I got there in the morning and let myself in, I met Hedwig coming down the stairs, and she looked at me and sang, ‘Dorothea!’ It was very touching. But in a few more weeks, she started falling.”

  At this, Dorothea finishes her beer. The sandwich is already done. “Then, of course, there was the fire.”

  But Dorothea talks past that, because we talked about it enough years ago. Instead, she small-talks about some of the other clients she’s already seen today. I half listen and wonder if she knew that Mother, when she was around Dorothea’s age, before turning to photography, did exactly what she’s doing, with Ilsa, with other elderly people around the neighbourhood. But I don’t tell her that. I don’t want her to imagine herself in Mother’s shoes. I’m not finished with her shoes.

  She stops talking, so I stop listening. We get up together and go to the counter, and I pay for everything. I thank her, and she hugs me. It feels like a century passes by the time she lets go.

  “Give my love to Hedwig,” she says.

  When I get back to the house, I park in Mother’s spot again, carry the negatives I developed this morning at Helena’s up to my bedroom, string them out atop my empty little bed, and go downstairs to call the realtor.

  She says yes, she will be coming over today.

  I put the phone down and realize that Mother’s old Leica is still around my neck, lens-capped and collapsed into the body, realize that it has been there all day, maybe longer. Filmless.

  For a moment, I do not remember it ever being anywhere else.

  For a moment, I wonder if it’s still a camera if it doesn’t have film inside? If it doesn’t have the capacity to hold on to things?

  In Germany I began to shoot photos that abstracted the body in a more constructed, material way—where the shots were more complex than just my body meeting light. I incorporated sculpture, painting, anything that inspired me. I lifted the limits. I had a shot where a friend of Erwin’s painted my own face offset onto my actual face—my eyes on my cheek, mouth on my chin—so that I looked like a double-exposed portrait. I had a shot where I held a mirror, hinged at my abdomen, to reflect myself into a kind of four-legged, double-vagina’d aberration.

  My favourite shoot was one where I built a scaled diorama of the blue-collar mall surroundings of the Monument against Fascism. I stepped into the role of the monument in the shoot. I painted my body fully black, greased my hair jet black, and scrawled on my body in silver paint and splashes of graffiti colour—just as the monument was, at that time. I set up small wire-framed figures, some drawing on me, others considering me from farther back, as I stood, for the first shot, belly button up, bare and monolithically tight, my eyes looking down at the figures beneath me with an air of statuesque judgment, if not slight worry—as if challenging them to prove they were not the monsters that humans very often are.

  For the second shot, I was lower, my breasts scrawled over and drooping across the ground, my face more furious. The third showed only my neck and head. The last seemed flat but for the crown of my head and my fingers snaking overtop.

  That was one of the few shoots where Erwin used his Polaroid to show me the compositions before I committed them to film. He helped me with a lot of my shoots, as he was intrigued by my use of the body as a tool of abstraction, and felt guilty he couldn’t pay me more for my help. For Erwin, the bodies he used didn’t abstract so much as refract his scenes through their presence. They were like magnets, interrupting a story. His bodies were about the artificiality of art meeting reality, about how the act of looking back colours and offsets the past. In mine, the body almost always abstracted an object or idea. Bodies in my photos were inconvenient; they got in the way. His haunted in a way that clarified his vision, while mine just obscured any sense of a vision. By making the body an object, I was trying to erase both the body and whatever the body stood for. What was left was the very material of absence.

  The moment he took the Polaroid of the first composition of me as the monument, the composition that would become the best image from the roll, I saw him pause, as if struck by the power of the image. He didn’t bother to show me the Polaroid first. He didn’t want me to break from whatever moment he’d captured. He told me to stay as I was. Then he looked through Mother’s camera and took the shot.

  I go up to the bedroom where the negatives are lying out, snoozing in one huge string, on the bed I grew up sleeping on. The sun is slicing in through the little window—this life I sliced my way out of so long ago. I pick up the string of negatives and carry it toward the light, doubled over and slung across my arms like a body. I hold them against the cool glass and look closely as the light comes through the film, through where the darkness would be printed. My mind reinterprets them, develops them, as I slowly draw the string of them up, spilling over my turned head.

  The images are as expected: blurry, underexposed. If they are printed, they will be expressions of darkness. The negatives themselves, though, are bright and nearly transparent. By the end of the string, I am seeing spots from looking into the sunlight. Darkness balancing the eye where the brightness once was.

  As I step back from the light, I notice the pry bar on the floor. I pick it up like it’s nothing, like it hasn’t been waiting, and take the string of negatives and wrap it around the bar, bottom to top, permanently scratching them, permanently ruining the chance of making a clean print. The negatives wind up the whole shaft, to the start of the crook.

  I carry the bar wrapped in the negatives downstairs to the kitchen and crudely tape each end. I go and stand at the big living room window and stare out at the street. I lift the little bar above my head in both hands and hear a mew in the doorway. The cat is standing there.

  For the last few days I’ve felt them at the edges of my life; I’ve heard the house’s pulse change as they moved through it. They have gotten brave, finally willing to approach me. I stand still.

  When they reach my ankles, they sniff me. Sniff again. Then, they press their little grey skull against me. I crouch down, and they back away but not out of reach. I put the pry bar on the floor, wondering if I will ever be able to pick it up again or if it will have to live here. I stretch my hand out toward the thin little cat, and they sniff the air and don’t run. They let me trace my fingers along the top of their skull.

  I try to ignore the faces coming out of the walls. The smell of smoke. The whispering I can’t unravel.

  When you get up to the top of the stairs, before you make your way toward the bathroom—before you try to get past it—you always look at the four closed doors. If you want to get out quick, you skip straight to your bedroom, because once you open any of the other three doors you’ll have no choice but to remember the whole thing before you can leave. But if you decide to leave without going through the rest of the rooms, to go directly to your bedroom, you don’t get to actually go through the door. You touch the knob, and then you are out of the memory palace. You can breathe again, but you are filled with a sunken feeling of defeat. You’ve let the palace overwhelm you. You have let yourself go.

  Even though you can skip the rest of the rooms, getting out of the palace from the second floor is difficult. You always try—at this point—to turn back, to recede down the stairs, but the stairs either disappear or end up leading you back here. You can’t escape, not like that, just like you can’t not try to. This is your palace; this is your life. But that doesn’t mean that
you don’t have to follow the rules. They’re built right into your brain.

  After the realtor called to push our appointment later in the day, the cat transformed back into a sound in the house.

  I hung up the phone and tried to look out the window, but the smoke was obscuring the space. I could only really see the light of the outside world through the holes of its open eyes staring back through me. I wanted to pick up the pry bar and swing it at the cloud like a sword.

  Now, I am sitting on a blank, shallow counter in the red—the darkroom. The door is very closed. I’ve kept the fan off, because I don’t want to suck anything outside in.

  I have my cellphone out, to watch the time. The realtor won’t be here for another forty minutes. I pull up the emails on my phone. Minutes from the collective’s board meeting. An email advertising some talk at the university that they want me to help share. A YouTube link from Archer. A string of emails from some of the grad students I’m advising, including Ess. Things to look at, things to sign. A few emails from Mother’s home, about social events.

  I feel suspended from time, as I always do when I’m in a darkroom. Everything in the room is red from the light. There is so much space where Mother’s equipment used to sit. Where Mother used to bring lived moments back to life in stillness.

  I think of Helena, Hudson, their darkroom. I think about my darkroom in Minneapolis, in my little house across the street from Genny’s. I want to open the door and come out somewhere different. I want to be able to pull things back that have slipped away.