by Mark Foss
— You’ll be back for the ceremony?
— Expect me when you see me.
— You’re the one quoting now. I just can’t quite remember what.
The image is so beautiful — passing from an abandoned editing machine in a somber barn into the fading light of a summer afternoon — that I simply watch her walk out of the frame. Then, in the baroque manner of a Eugène Green film, I remain still to record the vibration of her absence.
CANDY'S DOOR IS ajar. All is quiet and still. I pull up the baseboard, reach into the past to retrieve Phebe’s message to the future. It’s gone.
24
WILL CANDY TALK? I MEAN, with a voice. I believe so. After travelling all this way — frame by frame, mile after mile — she will be ready to tell us what happened. What was the catalyst? Why did she keep silent for so long?
Upon her arrival, my hands will be shaking, my eyes watering. Pathetically transparent. On rainy days, when we played Old Maid, I would hold the offending card a little higher than the others in my hand, thinking I could fool Candy into picking it. Her poker face had a thousand shades, depending on the character she adopted. Even Molly O herself is a creation. It’s pointless to imagine who, and how, she will be, but I do anyway.
Her voice will be tentative at first, both from the physical act of talking and the emotional strength required to share her story. There will be hesitations and pauses; she will circle back and jump ahead. She’ll wink in my direction. Anyone so immersed in deconstructionist erotic cinema would not tell a story front to back. A beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order. She may hide behind euphemisms, avoid our glances, laugh nervously. We must let her shape her own narrative, free of Mickey Nailand’s obsessive demands, of any need to reveal anything she wants to keep private. Small lies might creep in. Lies she has told herself. In voicing them, she may stop, do a double-take, question the truth of her own experience. All is permitted. If her words fail, I have images. There could be details of the film productions she’s forgotten. I will nudge her memory, gently. Who am I kidding? Candy could conduct a master class in the cinema of Mickey Nailand. She doesn’t need a two-bit scholar to warm up the crowd with a pretentious introduction.
Upstairs, her wardrobe of vintage dresses is all dry-cleaned. There’s a bottle of Candy eau de parfum on the nightstand — the special collector bottle with the hot pink wrist band that says “Give me Candy.” Cheap marketing ploys are not beneath me.
She will need time to recover from the news of Joseph’s passing and acclimatize to us again. We will not spread his ashes in the field right away. She may hold a grudge at how I manipulated her to return or resent I didn’t mess with her head sooner. There is no accounting for every possible reaction. All I can do is set the stage as much as possible. Candy may be skittish, ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. A flash of anger on my face. A look of indifference in Hoss. That’s all it could take for her to dart off again. What’s important is for the three of us to be blank slates. We don’t want to frighten her off, not after all this time. Not again.
I won’t be surprised if she’s become an expert in feng shui and can tell us which direction to face before we spread the ashes. It would certainly mend some fences with Hoss if she has a spiritual bent. She may also be a traditionalist. Let her bring a member of the clergy to say the words that fail her.
25
I WAS BENT OVER THE Steenbeck, speeding up and slowing down until the motor kicked in properly and the film stopped stuttering. Behind me, Hoss leaned over Flicker, counting to three before releasing the spring-loaded plunger — long enough for his tingling fingers to pass on an extra lucky electrical charge to keep the ball in play, but not long enough to get burned. The Steenbeck grunted and ground where it should have run smoothly, while Flicker’s bells and whistles — such an integral part of the pinball experience — no longer rang. Hoss provided his own bevy of sound effects, yelping, cursing, cajoling, and hooting.
As my machine settled down and the film stock followed its predictable journey through pulleys and rollers, Hoss watched his ball shoot off rubber bands and buzzers on its mad free-for-all across the faces of early Hollywood stars like Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, and Edward G. Robinson. Ignoring the manufacturer’s instructions, Hoss tilted Flicker to gain a few seconds of precious leverage and guided the ball towards the double bonus score.
Hoss prided himself on his rebellious nature, scoffed at my milquetoast attempts to curry favour with Candy. Whereas I accepted the universe was unfolding in the only way possible, he fought fate every inch of the way with his superstitious plunger rituals, illegal tilts, and last-ditch flipper action. Except that Flicker never kept proper score. The numbers stuttered backwards and forwards at will. No matter how many times Hoss made the lights flash or released captive balls, he could only track his success by how long the ball was in play. This heightened the stakes, as if he alone were judge and jury. He set up a clock on the wall, agonized when he didn’t match his previous best time. I never looked at his clock, so immersed was I in the intricacies of editing on the Steenbeck. Time has no meaning for me.
STRANGE THAT I should end up intensely devoted to the past and the future. Hoss is now the ostensibly easy-flowing, non-judgmental one, trying hard to live in the moment and make everyone conform to his Candy-less view of the world.
IT WAS OUR first Christmas at the Wasteland with Joseph since Candy had disappeared seven years before. I was in graduate school writing a thesis on Back to God’s Country, and Hoss was preaching a “Living Lightly on the Earth” regime, which he’d picked up from his first guru in Scotland. While I was researching a classic slice of Canadian silent film history, Hoss was exhorting Joseph to jettison the Steenbeck as a way to expunge the past.
I suggested Hoss could start his expunging with Flicker and the four milk crates of records in our old bedroom. He had no comeback because he could not reveal his true agenda: to rid the Wasteland of any last remnants of Candy. But why? His resentment of Candy remained unaltered. Or maybe some part of Hoss was actually sad, and he turned his sadness into anger so he didn’t feel the pain.
Joseph wouldn’t throw anything out that might one day be useful or valuable. I suspected he also wanted to preserve the Wasteland as it was to help forget how many years had passed since Candy left. At least, that’s how I would have felt in his shoes. For the same reason he never cleaned out her bedroom. On New Year’s Eve, Hoss got high with old stoner friends rather than suffer through “Auld Lang Syne” with me and Joseph.
AFTER A TOUGH breakup in his thirties, Hoss came to Montreal so I could witness a ritual burning of photographs and letters from his ex. I was immersed in archival research for my doctorate on the personal cinema of Stephen Dwoskin. Destroying the past was the last thing I wanted to do, but my heated resistance only upped the stakes for Hoss. He sniffed out two shoeboxes of postcards and notes from my closet, and insisted I toss them into the fire. I called him a neo-fascist and he cut short his visit.
HIS NEW LOVE interest, Tasha, got him to try channelling universal life force through his hands, something he only ever did before with a television remote. I was roped into being the guinea pig for their reiki workshop. The four of them had their hands all around me, and were so utterly serious that I started to think they could actually tell me something interesting. An old hippie with a ponytail could see my aura, but was blind to the shimmering presence of Candy whom I’m certain was behind my shoulder; the redhead in her twenties heard voices, a completely useless talent to detect my silent sister; Tasha, whose long hair tickled my nose, had an innate sense of “knowing” but brought no news of Candy from beyond the beyond. And then there was Hoss, the dumbass Sergeant Shultz on Hogan’s Heroes. He saw nothing. He heard nothing. He knew nothing.
In pursuit of Lindsay, he embraced Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. I suspected he took a shammy to his heart, wiping out all traces of his anger and hurt about Candy. He tried to
get me interested, but I did not want to be desensitized or reprocessed. On the contrary, I was looking for more ways to bring Candy to the surface, and this “openness to possibility” was the very reason I discovered Molly O.
ALL THIS TIME I’ve been expecting Hoss to react to my presentation of Molly O with mild scepticism. He might actually be hostile. The sister who disappeared is back to steal the show once again. But an angry response might be a good thing: it would demonstrate that Hoss believes I’ve found Candy. And that would quell any of my own doubts that might bubble to the surface.
26
I INCH FORWARD, CHIN DRAGGING against the ground, head brushing against cobwebs and the underside of the boards, fingers clutching at dry earth. The crawlspace under the stage is still the coolest place on the property in summer, especially when I strip down to my underwear. I can’t move my head, so I’m stuck staring out through the knothole into the empty space. What I’m doing here I’m not sure. I’m uncomfortable, claustrophobic, and dirty, and feeling stupid. There is so much of Candy in Molly O I can fairly say my sister will be too dignified to come back in here. If the crawlspace makes it onto her short list of childhood haunts to visit, she will simply cast a glance through the cracks or gently caress the boards.
No screeching brakes or blasting horn to mark its arrival, just a softly purring, eco-friendly coast into the front yard to nestle up behind my own rental. A discreet entrance as befits my silent sister. A door closes, followed by the slamming of the trunk, and then another passenger door shuts firmly. Candy has brought so much stuff it has overflowed from the trunk to the back seat — clothes, mementoes, gifts for all of us. She has come back to stay.
She’s taking advantage of Joseph’s absence to inspect her old home. The living room sofa, the new flat-screen television, the beanbag chair, the crocheted afghan, the Formica table, the kitchen chairs with the stuffing pushing through the cracked vinyl, the chalkboard with her prescient words — nothing escapes her scrutiny. It strikes her how so little has changed, how Joseph has been living in suspended time. She has an inkling of how her unexplained departure and prolonged absence have drained the life out of her family. No regrets for her choices, no remorse that we have paid so dearly for her freedom. She is overcome by the loss of never knowing her mother, the magnitude of her decision to leave all those long years ago. Yet I doubt she breaks down in tears at the threshold of the house.
By now she’s spotting the cremation file on the kitchen table, and — ever the sensitive artist — is taking in the presence of death. No, it can’t be! Joseph is simply planning ahead to take the burden off his children. She calls out to him with a plaintive cry. She stands in silence. If he’s ill, the shock of hearing her voice at long last might push him over the edge. She heads up the stairs to disprove her worst fears, each step heavier than the last. More confusion: the master bedroom in disarray, her brothers’ bedroom showing signs of occupancy and her own room apparently awaiting her arrival. No time now to make sense of it all. Without thinking, she slips on the pink “Give me Candy” bracelet.
The screen of the back door creaks open and slams shut. Her feet run towards the barn and the blur of her blue jeans crosses my line of vision. The knothole gives me a knee-high view, and she is not wearing Flapper-like rouge today. My first sighting is oh so brief!
— Joseph! LJ!
Candy’s voice sounds remarkably like Hoss’s high-pitched squeak.
— Where are they?
A woman’s voice, hoarse, painful to take in. The first voice must in fact be Hoss, the second Candy. It explains so much. Out of shame for a voice damaged at birth Candy has embraced silence.
— They must have gone for a walk.
— Maybe something happened.
This is not Candy, only a new conquest from the island retreat. I’m equal parts disappointed and relieved to have my hopes dashed again. Perhaps the interloper will explore the field, lose her bearings, run in circles. Collapsing on the earth she will lie parched by day and dewy by night. We will dump her body into the quicksand later, after the wind dies.
— This is where you fell, right? Where it all started?
This is Hoss all over, sharing family intimacies with imperfect strangers. What stories about Candy has he carelessly revealed? A flash of white t-shirt and a yelp as he slips on a board and lands pretty much on the spot where he fell all those years ago. The past is never far behind. The woman bends over him, kneeling at knothole level, and the tattoo of a bird — maybe a cardinal — comes into view above her sacrum. Her sandy hair is gathered loosely in two bunches under a straw hat, making her look like a nine-year-old on her way to the waterhole. As she turns, her face is almost mime-white. I can’t see her eyes. With powerful arms, she hauls Hoss off the ground. She is not one to wallow helplessly in quicksand.
Hoss places his hands a few inches from his back in some kind of energy-healing manoeuvre.
— Where the fuck are they? My bare toes don’t work the same way as my fingers. I wiggle left and right, and back and forth, but this only jams my body in tighter.
— Did you hear something? Hoss bends with some difficulty to look through the knothole. I can’t tell if he’s happy to see me. Having been desensitized and reprocessed, his eye movement is difficult to read.
— Anthea, meet Little Joe, my little brother who seems to be having a little trouble.
Her pupil is dilated. Fatigue or pharmaceuticals?
— Janardan told me to expect anything and everything at the Wasteland.
— Jann Arden told you that?
— Janardan is Sanskrit for “one who helps people.” Your brother just got anointed this weekend by our leader, Ashok.
— A shock for me, too. I prefer Janardan’s given nickname.
— Sorry?
— Don’t listen to LJ. He’s not himself.
— That makes two of us. Maybe three.
She doesn’t know he’s gone by Hoss all his life, and doesn’t get the M*A*S*H reference. I give their relationship until the fall TV season.
— If you’re such a helper, get me out of here.
— We might need the jaws of life.
Anthea’s voice is solemn. Possibly mocking. The jaws of life won’t help Joseph. Why hasn’t Hoss asked about our father? Why has he brought a date two days after his death? My voicemail was clear. Something about the need to come home urgently. Did I have to spell it out? He understands too well. Knowing Joseph is dead means there is no need to rush home. No need to inquire after his health. Every reason to bring a love interest for moral support because he does not want to be alone with me and the ghosts.
— I’ll find something in the barn. Keep an eye on LJ.
I can see myself reflected in Anthea’s right pupil — a film professor trapped in the earth under the auction stage peeping out a knothole, desperate to connect with the spores of his childhood.
— We came as fast as we could when we got your message. I don’t normally sound so raw. I lost my voice with all the screaming at the retreat. Do you mind if we just wait quietly? Or you can talk, if you want. Tell me his other nickname.
My identity-rich brother returns a few moments later with an axe.
— Stand back.
His squeaky voice lacks all authority, and Anthea doesn’t budge.
— Maybe you should aim away from LJ.
— Do you want to do it then?
The vibration from Anthea’s first blow pushes my head higher against the boards. It takes another four swings to break through the wood. I scramble out into the fading afternoon light, the two of them towering above me. Awaiting explanations, no doubt. I stand there, bare chest and legs dusty with dry earth, knees wobbly from lack of circulation.
— Don’t tell me Joseph is down there with you.
— Joseph is dead.
27
HOSS'S STORYLINE FOR OUR FAMILY is unwavering, fixed for all time with the word “disappeared” carrying its own beginning, middle, and en
d. In a hundred workshops and retreats, he has processed, shared, and resolved. Sufficiently recovered from his own trauma, he helps others, using the unique healing qualities he has managed to harness in his hands. He will deftly brush off any turn in the conversation that’s heading towards Candy as Kwai-Chang Caine wards off blows in Kung Fu. If not, if unsuccessful, the protective bubble so painstakingly constructed through endless therapies, gurus, and guides might burst, and painful feelings about Candy will leach out.
So now is not the time to talk about Candy, although in my dreams his shock over Joseph’s passing will incite him to speak about her, and I will be able to give him the happy news. Hoss has seen every episode of L.A. Law and, despite any nuances between the American and Canadian legal systems, or any differences between television and reality, he will dismiss all my evidence about the Candy connection as circumstantial. Not because he disbelieves, but rather because he does not want to believe. To accept Candy as Molly O, and to embrace her return to the fold, will demand more than Hoss can manage. We will have words. If Candy does not arrive in a timely fashion, he will push forward with Joseph’s funeral, whatever my own wishes.
He will cross-examine me, and I have made a thorough list to counter every possible objection. Yes, Nailand might have shown up at the auctions to witness Candy’s silent performances, and then stolen her essence for his films. It’s possible he found an actress who resembled Candy and taught her to walk backwards and wear white gloves. Or perhaps Porky really is a Lester Young aficionado, hoping to come across some original recordings of Prez on Aladdin or Savoy at our auctions, and Mickey Nailand never set foot near the Wasteland.
But then who came up with all the names? The girl squatter in Tess of the Storm County is Rox, the man in Daddy Long Legs is Joseph, the amorous nephew in Oh, Uncle is Lewis. One name might have been a coincidence, but all three?
And what about Candy’s fascination for Tin Pan Alley, how she starts playing “The Bad in Every Man” over and over, the tinny sound passing easily through our shared wall? That song is a draft for the more celebrated “Blue Moon,” a few bars of which appear towards the end of Nailand’s Little Princess. I wonder if Nailand and Candy plant all these clues to amuse themselves or to lay breadcrumbs for me. I have played the album backwards at different speeds, ears tuned for clues among the jumbled sounds. If the Beatles could plant secret messages, why not Rodgers and Hart? What will seal the deal for Hoss, however, are the snippets of King Crimson and the homage to our family theme song in Little Red Riding Hood.