I can feel the house stalking me, eyes on me as I leave the red light and head to the back door in the kitchen, the kitchen that will not be this old yellow much longer.
I’ve got Mother’s camera around my neck, still. There is film inside it, and the lens cap is off. This has been dissuading the house from showing itself, from allowing the grey to seep around the corner into a room I’m in. The house has become the sound, instead. Creaking, knocking, coiling around me.
I put on my shoes and go—get in my car and drive.
Life seems almost peaceful: the cars move quiet through the morning, the sun is half-blocked by clouds, the music playing on the radio is not as objectionable as I expect. The city is coming back to life after long winter. I stop and start, keep my windows shut because I don’t want the world to feel fresh, don’t want to feel the wind on my face. Not wind but air, coming at you fast because you’re going fast. It’s different. It’s friction.
At the home, the nurse at the desk tells me that Mother is finishing breakfast in her room.
“Would you like to go in, or wait?”
“I’ll wait,” I say, going over to the seat with the silent televisions, not playing the news anymore but sitcoms, where the comedic timing of the captions doesn’t work. I dig my phone from my pocket and join the home’s guest Wi-Fi.
Seven emails, the most recent from Helena, replying to my response from Craigslist: “RE: RE: RE: RE: Winnipeg Artists and Creators, Join Us!” I click it.
Hedwig!
Are you still in wpg?? Our darkroom is lonesome!
There is a cool new show in the Exchange I’ve been meaning to check out. Lemme know if you’d like to come along.
—HV
Helena included her phone number in a PS at the end, so I add it to my contacts and text her. I do not read any of the unread texts on my phone.
—Hey this is Hedwig. Still in wpg. What show?
I wait, in this room built for it. I think about Mother eating, about how the last time I remember looking in her mouth was when I was holding the flashlight and making sure she’d swallowed her medication after Selkirk. How dark and deep Mother seemed then. I remember wishing I could climb inside and see it all, understand all that pain.
—Hi! It is called stitches or sutures or something like that? Not sure tbh. Supposed to be cool. Busy this afternoon?
“Your mother’s finished her breakfast, if you’d like to go in.”
I put my phone away and go to Mother’s door, rest my hand on its jamb, and look at her. She is in the chair again, in the light, looking out the window into the building’s little green courtyard.
I turn back, toward the nurse’s station. “Can I get into the courtyard?” I ask her.
She smiles at me as she turns and points over her shoulder, to a little hall. “You’ll need to buzz to be let out, but you can go out there. Do you want to take your mother?”
“No,” I say, looking toward the hall. “I just want to surprise her.” I wave a hand to the nurse without turning back because I know she’ll just be wearing that hospital smile again. I have seen enough of those.
I go outside and count down the windows to hers, the first with open blinds on her wing. I walk down the little brick path, past the little bird bath, past the benches and the handrails and the planters filled with flowers still far from budding.
I climb over the handrail toward her. She looks down toward me. She is a pinhole camera. She just needs to look at me a long time, and then she will be able to see me. Lick by slow lick, I will finally burn back into her head.
I look at her face—still her face—looking out the window but not quite seeing me. The sky, the sun, blinks on and off. This is how I remember us: me looking in, being able to see her, and her looking out, only able to see the reflection of herself in the mirror of midnight’s window. Stone, slipping away.
She doesn’t know me. I hold up her camera and she doesn’t seem to recognize it. I extend the lens. I adjust the settings. I put the camera to one eye and stare at her. I put her into focus.
I don’t see her, either. Because what do I even really know about her?
I don’t take the photo. Mother looks away. I let the camera fall to my chest, turn around and climb over the handrail, lie on a bench gripping the camera and feeling those eyes behind me: blind, blownout searchlights.
I look into the sky and a grey cloud stares down at me. It is the size of the world. I wipe my face and sit up and take out my phone. I don’t look back.
—No
When Mother was doing work that didn’t require her to turn in her negatives, she would often make small, unnecessary modifications to her shots in the darkroom. She would remove birds from the sky in the background of a portrait and add those same birds to the empty sky of another. She would remove shrubbery, street lights, and bracelets and add tiny freckles to the shoulders of brides. Sometimes, she would print old photographs and add whole new aspects that were not there before—people or objects she shot decades after those old photos.
Whatever she saw through the camera at that moment was hardly ever what she wanted to help bring into the world. She wanted to take what she had clipped out of the decided reality and add something to it, fix it, or just tweak it in some way that contained her intention. Her. She wanted, I think, to control the world. To be a witness but with some say in it.
She hated the world. She hates it, I mean. Or maybe she doesn’t hate it anymore.
The photograph I remember best is the one of me digging in the backyard. It’s the photograph that is most often framed and set on the landing of my memory palace, the photo that I haven’t found anywhere in the house. Not that I expected to.
In the centre of the photograph is me, my body pointing toward the camera, throwing dirt over my right shoulder with a gardening trowel. I’m looking down at the hole I’m making between my knees, and the definition of my face is softened by small adjustments of the head because Mother set the shutter speed slow, probably around one-thirtieth of a second. Because of the speed of my digging, the trowel in my hand is blurred into my arms, becoming part of my body. In the background, there are holes from my other digs.
I don’t remember Mother taking this picture, but she must have taken it through the kitchen window, despite the fact that the photo seems too clean to have been shot through glass. The windows of the house were probably cleaner back then.
But when Mother printed the photo, she printed the negative inverted, which I noticed because it feels more natural that I would throw dirt over my left shoulder than my right.
Looking at the photo in the memory palace feels like staring into a mirror, except that in the sky above me, Mother added a black, jagged sun.
I honk and here comes Helena—long jean shorts and a white V-neck T and her hair in a wild bundle at the top of her head—slipping out the door of the little house toward my car. I try to see her just as she is, not as the ghosts she reminds me of, but I can’t. Not that I even know which ghosts those are.
My hand is on Mother’s camera around my neck, and it seems that I left the home so fast I forgot to put on my seat belt. I leave it off. Helena opens the door and slides inside. She has brought nothing with her but a smile and a small sketch pad.
“You got here so quick!” she says, earrings dangling.
“Where to?”
“North, ’til McDermot.” She points.
We go. She compliments me on my hair, my car, asks me how I’ve been.
“Alive,” I say, and I can feel her roll her eyes.
“Come on, Hedwig,” she says.
I keep my eyes on the road, the intersections, thinking of Mother staring out the window and through me. I keep driving as Helena talks until it’s time to park. As I turn off the ignition, she puts two fingers on my forearm; I don’t know what she’s been saying. I don’t move. I don’t want to scare the fingers off.
“It’s okay,” she says.
We sit there, parked along M
cDermot, the day slowly decreasing. The air in the car disappears. The world crumbles into large, vital parts. Then—slowly—it comes back. Everything. I lift the neck of my shirt to my forehead and dry my face on the inside of it, feel its wetness as I let it go, lingering above the binder.
“Do you wanna see the show?”
“Yes,” I say, putting my hand on the door and looking over at her, trying to look right at her and not at any of the car’s mirrors, reflecting a darkening sky that I know she can’t see. I look right at her face, diving directly into her beauty. “Absolutely.”
She smiles. We get out of the car and walk to the gallery. Mother’s camera knocks against my belly. My head is light, my limbs unheard of.
I found the print Mother made of me trowelling when I was maybe thirteen years old. I was wearing baggy hand-me-down clothes Mother got from Asha’s son, who had moved to Alberta to go to university a year before. My body had split open by then, and I wore his clothes with an intense desperation.
I’d just gotten back from school, and I had a deep bruise on my arm from being pinched by a girl named Sylvia. I was looking through Mother’s things for some money—I wanted nothing but to go down to the corner store and buy bars and bars of chocolate. I wanted to eat so much I’d die.
I was looking through the box in Mother’s studio, the box that once held wine, the box filled with envelopes from letters in German and pictures she’d printed, the box that was the only thing in Mother’s studio besides the small mat where she did her yoga.
A box that I had carried home, empty.
I rifled through, ignoring all the letters, all that information I’d never know, my body desperate for some sort of relief. I looked and looked, and there was nothing, no cash. Just paper: folded-up letters and prints of photographs I couldn’t be bothered to memorize, photographs completely blank now in my mind.
But then I found that photo of me, and I was transfixed. Because of that sun. It was black as the page would go, round, with licking black flame. And the shadows were so stark and sharp and below me that it must have been noon when Mother took it. I sat there, looking down at the print, feeling a warmth in my body, and decided to walk to a gas station farther off and try to shoplift the chocolate. Then, I put the print back in the box, replaced the lid, and left the studio. Like it had been nothing to be in there, to have my hands inside Mother’s private life.
But since finding that photo, I have seen it. That sun. I have seen it rising, slower, farther down the sky. Sometimes it comes out at night. It has been known to change its speed, to catch up with the real sun and eclipse it for days, for weeks, for much, much longer. Sometimes I wake up and it is there, in the wall, rays of a darkness so thick you could swim in them if they didn’t burn you. It is a sun that is a problem even if you don’t look up.
We pay the person at the desk, get our hands stamped, and make our way inside the gallery. A panel on the wall announces the exhibition:
THESE SUTURES:
Michael Wynne//
//Cathryn Logan
I recognize Cathryn Logan as the name I wrote to when I was trying to get a teaching job at the university here.
Life is a circle. Or an egg that needs to be smashed to its yolk.
Helena puts her hand on my shoulder and ushers me into the first room, which is very small, and where we are confronted in the middle by the single, long, dead face of a moose. A cow moose, or a bull without antlers. It is the head of a moose added onto the body of what must be a wolf. Along its back, large black wings, its legs wrapped in fish skin.
“The Canadian griffin,” Helena says, kneeling at the placard at its side, eyes glimmering in the lights. She reads: “Moose, timber wolf, muskellunge, and turkey vulture.” She stands up and comes back to my side. She doesn’t open the sketchbook. “How bizarre.”
“Yes,” I say, and we eventually move forward, into a bigger room filled with more of Wynne’s monsters, each one made from North American animals—versions of all sorts of classic folk monsters, as well as creatures of his own making, titled things like The Thing I Saw Last Winter on the Ice of Ramsey Lake, or One of the Many Things I Saw When My Boyfriend Kissed Me in My Neighbourhood for the First Time. A panel on a wall describes Wynne’s work as a form of transrealism, merging the natural with the imagined, where Wynne’s imagined, subjective world is constructed with well-documented natural creatures stitched together.
On the other side of the gallery Helena closes her sketchbook with a slap and I look over. “You know there’s a sinkhole just a few streets up. On Princess. There have been a few this spring so far.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Did you know that I grew up in a place called Gameland in northwestern Ontario? And that every morning, until I was too old for the school I went to, I had to walk five minutes to the house where the bus driver lived at the corner? And that when I moved away to Winnipeg my parents couldn’t stop crying whenever I called them on the phone?”
“I didn’t know.”
“And that when I brought Hudson home when we first started dating, when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-six, and my dad answered the door, he looked at us and told me he wasn’t going to let dykes into the house and just closed the door? And that it was already getting late, but we just turned around and drove back, not talking on the four-hour drive except to the border agents?”
“I’m sorry.”
“We went back for the first time since then a few months ago, after Hudson and I got married, which we did in a little warming station on the Red. Just me, Hudson, and our friend who was marrying us. The day after we did that, I called my parents for the first time since that night and told them I was married now, to a man named Hudson. He wasn’t going by Hudson when we went the last time. He named himself after that polar bear at the zoo. And when we went back, my dad didn’t recognize him at all. He smiled at us and shook Hudson’s hand. Then he stepped aside and let us walk through the door.”
I don’t know what to say. I think of Hudson, splitting logs. I think of that sinkhole, blocks away, a hole in the fabric that needs to be stitched up.
“We didn’t tell them that we were the same two people, that we both knew the whole story that they refused to acknowledge had happened at all. We were there, trying to be welcomed home, after being abandoned on the other side of the door.” She pulls a piece of paper from the sketch pad and wipes her face with it.
“What I mean to say, Hedwig, is that everyone’s childhood home is haunted. And everyone goes back.” She folds the paper and puts it in her pocket. A mobile of chipmunks with fruit-bat wings hangs above her, looking down at her, looking a little scared of something. “And it always sucks.”
She smiles at me again, surveys the room. “Now let’s see some more art, and hopefully the rest isn’t so interested in watching us cry.”
Every time you open Mother’s bedroom door, you want something else to happen. You even want there to be something worse, if only for a change. But there’s no escaping. Every beat is the same, precisely, every surprise is so surprisingly unsurprising. It all hits you harder because it hits you in all the same places. The sore spots. There’s no way out there’s no way out there’s no way out, you could say, about your life. From the moment you walk into the bedroom you want nothing more than to be free, to not be forced to confront the aches of another life which, in terms of proximity, dangles far off on the sinews of yourself. But the past mishandles everybody, forces everyone’s present to be tinged in its dragging of the past along with them. Life is a string of photos on a roll of negatives, not a single frame. You’re a pile of your life’s prints, fading in the thunder of the moodless sun.
Just before I left Germany I started a suite of photos called Shavasana, based on Mother. While I was in Hamburg, I thought about her more than I ever had since leaving Winnipeg, wondered at each step whether I was walking in her shadow, or casting my own ahead of her. I allowed myself to begin to wonder about Mother: what
she was doing, how she coped, what she coped with. Why she did what she did.
Why.
Perhaps this was all because I was going by the name Sofia. Perhaps I had more of a distance from which to view and to judge. The experience of living a life under another name in Germany was probably also how I learned to accept Alani—as much as I have. I learned that, sometimes, I felt proud to be misunderstood. To be convoluted and conflicted felt most honest. I realized that a name is a word, not a thing, and that a thing cannot be properly named because a word cannot smile or weep or fade. But I was still a stranger, so when I looked back at Mother as Sofia, I didn’t feel the same guilt, pity, or anger. I just thought about a person who had, at one time, made impressions upon me—Alani, her only kid.
Perhaps what I was feeling was respect, if not the dimness of calm love.
Shavasana was originally an attempt to mimic Mother through her obsession with yoga—with her own silence and the tightness of stasis. I was going to take images of myself attempting—poorly, though not for lack of trying—these poses, shot with very tight lighting on a dark, unreflective background, to try and isolate the figure, which I would then—ideally—double expose onto images that Mother had taken over the years. I would use that binder of her negatives that I’d stolen when I left Winnipeg—not out of preparation but out of spite. They were the negatives I was in most. I took them because I wanted her to feel their absence.
In the beginning with Shavasana, I wanted to have my body, and my failure to control it, mapped onto her compositions, in juxtaposition to the scenes—many of which were the B sides of family portraits, or weddings, or—sometimes—me: in the backyard or in the street with a cardboard box on my head or posing naked as Mother tried to get the lighting right. I wanted to impress my artistic vision onto hers, and show my poor attempt to imitate her.
When I came back to Minneapolis, I finished the project. Sixteen poses over sixteen of Mother’s photos, ending, of course, with Shavasana—corpse pose.
A friend of mine framed the prints, and I submitted them to a gallery that accepted them after seeing only half. People came to the gallery and read the artist’s statement and went through the exhibition. Some wept; many told me it was gorgeous, that it was gothically haunting. The reviews compared me to Sally Mann, who was beginning to get more attention, and to Henri Cartier-Bresson. The latter comparison, of course, had nothing to do with my work but was because of Mother’s ability—much like Erwin’s—to catch that decisive moment, that moment that bridged both the moment before and the moment after.
Vanishing Monuments Page 20
