Vanishing Monuments
Page 27
I grab her hand. She doesn’t wake up. I pinch the rivers and can feel the surge pushing at me, pumping her up and forward, treading water. I let it go. My hands are slick and I’m smearing them all over her. My hands feels like the hands of a crowd. I pick up her hand again and kiss her fifty times at once. Mother. I kiss you on the head, lightly. I step back and watch you breathe.
I think first to myself, and then say aloud, looking down at your hand: “Whatever you wanted to tell me is whatever I wanted to hear.”
The last photo I helped Erwin re-create involved the burning of a real house. He was going to light the house on fire and take a photo of me standing in front of it.
“I got a lot of flak for this photo,” he said, as he stood behind the tripod, trying to find the composition he wanted. “Because I didn’t capture the soldier correctly. Both the soldier and the court were separately upset that they couldn’t tell who he was.”
For this shot, he decided to use Mother’s camera, because it was the exact kind of camera he’d used in the war. After Erwin got me where he wanted me, he stood up from behind the tripod.
“That man was my friend, and I watched him kill people, and I did nothing but shoot him with the camera.”
Erwin walked past me to the house and I could hear him rustling things around, getting it ready to catch fire.
After a bit, Erwin came back around to the camera. He stood there, looking at me, and past me. I could hear the crackling. I slowly felt the heat hit my bare skin, a tickle until a wave.
“Almost,” Erwin said. “Don’t move, Sofia.”
Sofia didn’t move. The fire licked at the back of her arms and her neck.
In one split second, it was done. The photo was taken. He didn’t take any others, not even in case the first was wrong.
He ushered me to come forward and I joined him by the tripod. We watched the shack turn into an inferno. Within twenty minutes it was gone.
“I exposed for the light of the fire this time, so you’ll become a silhouette, Sophia.”
That’s what Erwin said to her then.
A camera works very much like an eye does. The aperture blades act like the pupil—the wider they are, the more light gets through, and the darker the things you can see; the tighter they are, the less light gets in, so you can keep your life from overexposing in the brightness. Both the eye and the camera are regulators attempting to make your life into a flatline exposure. But despite the efforts of the eye and the camera, sometimes there’s too much or too little light. Engineering and anatomy fall short. When it’s too bright, both the eye and the camera see everything. The focus is sharp; everything is noticed, everything is brought in. But when the light is too low, when you are trying to witness or document the darkness, the pupil must be wide, and the subject isolated in a sea of blur. In the darkness, there is only a sliver of focus in the field. Nothing else matters, nothing else can, if you want to see anything at all. Vision, human or photographic, is nothing but a transcription of light. Things do not disappear when light is absent, they’re just not cooperating—not conversing in the universal language of light. In the dark, things do not communicate; things do not expose themselves. Things hush. In the light, in too much light, everything is screaming sharp. The brighter it gets, the harder it is for your eyes to discern one object’s light from another.
So we slip between too dark and too bright, pretending we are getting it all.
I set the camera in the passenger seat, drive away from the home and toward Mother’s empty house. I hit a street that strings along with a view of the river, and I follow it. I look at the bony shadows of the treeline that the setting sun is throwing into the river. I notice the greenery of summer coming in strong.
Finally, I make it to a thin park and get out of the car, walk toward the water and watch the Red run. In the distance, I can see the railway bridge, where the body was found. Where Mother took the photo of me as the train passed overhead, years and years ago. I look at the bridge, the speed of the river, and I realize: every river is long, and every river has an opposite bank to the one you find yourself on.
So I turn around, get back in my car, and drive to Mother’s house. I pack the car with what’s left of my things in my old room. I don’t take a last look around the house; I just lock the front door, get in the car, text Genny, and drive.
My hands grip that cartridge of burnt, blank film all the way through the fallen, developing dark. The hours pass by unaccompanied, and the distance shrinks and widens. The farther I get, the less blurry Mother becomes, and the more and more I am no longer there with her, the more and more she comes back to life. The night has long overthrown the sky by the time I make it to Minneapolis, and in the rear-view mirror—and in the light bouncing on me from the headlights of cars behind me, from street lights—I can see in my skin the remains of the memory palace.
I look away from the mirror. I choose not to look at it.
The car gets to my house and parks. Across the street, the living room light is on. Genny is there, asleep, with the blinds full open. I leave everything in the car and go over. I imagine Mother in my house, pacing, standing in the dark and looking out at me, waiting, loving me far too hard and being loved by me even harder. I step over her slipper on the sidewalk, shaking.
When I get to the door, I don’t knock. I take out my keys and unlock the door, like I always did Mother’s, but I leave the door closed. I can see her shape rustle up in the light through the bubbled glass. She moves toward me, a shadow. Genny opens the door. I fall into her arms.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It’s difficult to look back and untangle to what and to whom you are indebted, but I will attempt it anyway.
This book has been with me for a long time, and I would like to first thank the friends and colleagues who have read this book (or excerpts from it) along the way. The biggest thank you to my partner, Melanie, who has been a kind and generous (and tough) reader for several different versions of this book. I would not be the writer I am without you next to me.
Thank you to my parents for endlessly supporting me along this strange journey.
Thank you to my thesis advisor at SBU, Susan Scarf Merrell, who encouraged me as I pieced together this book in its messiest, first-draft form. Thank you to my thesis readers, Sara Majka and Meg Wolitzer, for the kind and critical words that helped light the way forward.
I don’t know that this book would ever have gone to press without Tony Wei Ling, who read the manuscript at a pivotal moment with such transformative care. This book would not be this book without intervention from your sharp, editorial mind.
Thank you to Arsenal Pulp Press—Brian Lam, Shirarose Wilensky, Jazmin Welch, Cynara Geissler, and the rest of the team—for helping this book become a reality in its leanest, meanest form. Thank you to my US publicist Alyson Sinclair at Nectar Literary for helping it find readers on this side of the line.
Joshua Whitehead, Chelsey Johnson, John K. Samson, Sara Majka: I cannot fully express my gratitude to you for spending time with my book, and for giving it such kind blurbs.
The version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses referred to, and quoted from, in this novel is the Oxford University Press edition translated by A.D. Melville (first published in 1986).
Also, I would like to acknowledge that the character Erwin Egger took direct inspiration from the real historical figure Franz-Peter Weixler, who served as a war propaganda correspondent for the Wehrmacht. He was accused of high treason against Nazi Germany for leaking uncensored material that documented atrocities German paratroopers committed in the village of Kondomari in Crete. Weixler was arrested by the Gestapo, court-martialled, and imprisoned from 1944. After the war, he testified against Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg trials and, later, paid a visit to Kondomari that inspired the one described in this book. Although inspired by Weixler, Erwin Egger’s similarities do not extend beyond these biographical details.
Finally, thank you to Winnipeg for fucking me up
like no other city ever could. I will never get you out of my head. And thank you to all the trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people whose work, or care, has helped educate me both on myself and in my writing. My highest hope is that this book might, in some small way, pay that gift forward.
Photo Credit: Melanie Pierce
JOHN ELIZABETH STINTZI is a non-binary writer who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. They are the 2019 recipient of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, and their work has appeared in the Malahat Review, Kenyon Review Online, and Ploughshares. They are the author of two previous chapbooks of poetry, as well as the poetry collection Junebat (House of Anansi). Vanishing Monuments is their first novel.
johnelizabethstintzi.com