“I understand,” Gwen said when I told her I needed to leave, but not why. “Do you know where you’ll go?”
“No,” I said, stuffing my laptop into my backpack again and dropping the hatbox into a large shopping bag she’d given me filled with several sandwiches and bottles of water. “Not yet. I need to figure out a few things … The story still needs an ending.”
“Forget the story,” she said. “It’s time to let it go. Just … let it all go, M_____.” She pulled from her pocket a small roll of bills – twenties and a few fifties – tied with an elastic hair band and handed them to me. “A gift,” she said, “from me and Aud. For the bus.”
“The bus where?”
“Home.”
* * *
††
My location has changed. I’m in room 1201, at the Howard Johnson just off Manchester, about ten minutes from LAX. There’s no sense in hiding where I am anymore – by the time you or Ezra arrives, I’ll probably already be dead and gone. The money Gwen gave me would have gotten me home, but as I was standing in the bus depot ready to buy my ticket, I felt my heart swelling uncomfortably in my chest, my pulse racing at the thought of crossing the border again – of seeing Louise for the first time in so long. There was so much between us … so much I wanted to say but didn’t know if I could. I’d run away from that place and made my way here. Going back … and like this … I didn’t have enough to book a room for more than a few nights but that didn’t matter – I figured that was all I had left anyway.
When I look in the mirror now I no longer see myself or anything I once pretended to be – with D____ or on my own, as a teenager, standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom in my parents’ house, trying on the faces of all the neighbourhood children one after the other. What’s there now, staring back at me, is sick, a poisonous agent made flesh, with spaghetti string arms and legs and xylophone ribs jutting harshly out from beneath weathered cheesecloth skin. When I exhale my entire body trembles and I feel my fragile legs quivering like they’re about to give away. To think I once did this to myself, wilfully, consciously. I’d seen myself a certain way then – not as the person I was but as the person I wanted to be, an image I wanted to attain but couldn’t. I tried to become that. I’ve spent my life trying to be that, whatever that is, this impossible to pin down ideal. That’s how it is, though. All things, fiction or otherwise, bring with them the baggage of history. My history is one of impermanence. Of not knowing who I wanted to be and letting someone else choose for me. I don’t want this, though, not anymore – not my body or any other, and certainly not this tiresome, one-sided conversation.
From the bottom of Gwen’s shopping bag I removed the hatbox I’d taken from my apartment and opened it for the first time in more than two years. Folded neatly inside was the loose-leaf skin of Malorie Marcello – a dozen or so hastily typed eight-and-a-half by eleven pages, Courier font. I took out the black-and-white simulacrum I’d created and tried to sheathe myself in it as I once had, back when we first met, but the pages weren’t enough anymore – they no longer covered my body as they once did. When I looked down at my hands and saw only my skin – the remnants of Malorie having collected at my feet in a scattered pile of ideas – it appeared weathered and worn out, looking dry and pale and altogether lifeless, and I knew then that it was over.
39. Rethinking the Future
Posted: 07/16/2014
I love learning new things. Even as I near the end, I still feel as if this world has so much to teach me. Four days ago, for example, I learned what family really means.
A visitor showed up at my hotel room the day after my last post, arriving early in the morning. I got scared when I heard knocking on my door – I’d been half-expecting the building to come down around me at any moment, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying upon hearing a fist just outside my room. I knew it had to be Ezra on the other side – everything inside of me was telling me to run, to somehow get out of there before she called hotel security to open the door and drag my pale, barely ninety-pound ass to the lobby where we’d wait for the nice men with the guns and handcuffs to carry me out the front door and put me on a one-way plane to the other side of the Canadian border.
Then, a muffled voice from the other side of the door: “M_____? Open up. It’s me. It’s Louise.”
And I was somehow more frightened than I’d been only a moment earlier.
“M_____, I just want to talk.”
There was tenderness in her voice. I recognized it immediately – I’d last heard her sound like that when she was saying goodbye to me in the early morning hours so many years ago, pressing a wad of cash into my hand and urging me to run away from home and go make something of myself.
She knocked again. “M_____, please, I know you’re in there.”
There was nothing I could do. No place I could run to and hide. And I knew my sister well enough to know that I would lose in a war of attrition. I took a deep breath and opened the door.
And sure enough she was there, looking older than I remembered but still as beautiful as she’d always been. She was dressed head to toe in navy blue sweats and was carrying a small red overnight bag over her right shoulder. Her hair had thick streaks of grey in it that weren’t there the last time I saw her, and heavy crow’s feet that had been enduringly stitched beneath her narrow, sleepless eyes. Upon seeing me in person for the first time in more than a decade she flinched, tightened her grip on the strap of her overnight bag. I heard a sharp intake of air like a punctured bike tire.
“Oh my god …” She started to cry.
And then I started to cry.
She dropped her bag and pulled me forcefully into her arms, damn near pushing all the air out of my lungs in the process.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” she said.
“I … H-how did you find me?” I asked.
She pulled back and wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand. Her face was red and tear-streaked. “You posted your location, you dummy.”
“You … were reading?”
She nodded. “Since January. I didn’t say anything before now because … I didn’t know what to say. There was just too much.” She looked down at my body, at the hotel bathrobe that nearly doubled my girth. “I had no idea you were so … Oh god, M_____, I’m so sorry.”
She pulled me into her arms again, gently, carefully, and said she was foolish and stubborn to have let things fall apart as they had. She begged me to forgive her and I did the very same, and we held each other for what seemed like hours and –
And that’s all you’re going to get – you and everyone else reading this. Because Louise is real. She came to me that day, and she showed me that she loved me – that no matter how much shit there is between the sheets, family is family. I’d long believed that not all blood is family, and that not all family is blood. I still do – people like Aud and Gwen were there for me in ways few others have ever been – but Louise had, in that moment, done more than I ever anticipated. I had selfishly left her to bury our mother alone because I’d fallen in love with an idea I didn’t know how to quit; she’d come back to me because she wasn’t willing to let that happen again.
What Louise and I said to one another that afternoon will never be written, here or anywhere else. Those moments were ours and ours alone. They die with me.
That was four days ago. Today, while slowly scraping away at a plate of scrambled eggs and toast in Louise and Mark’s condo overlooking Vancouver’s English Bay, I learned a second new thing: I learned the true definition of irony.
What did I see when I returned to www.risefromthegrave.net? They’d taken down D____’s Jesus clock. As a matter of fact, the site’s entire home page had been overhauled, changed from its gothic-black predecessor to a soft milky white, like a shower curtain or a freshly laundered sheet had been draped across. It was a full minimalist
redesign with only a single all-text news story posted right smack in the centre of the page:
David Ericcson, star of nearly 800 feature films and television series, will be starring next as Dr. Irving Merchant on the upcoming NBC drama Merchant of Mercy.
“We’re delighted to offer David this once-in-a-lifetime star-making turn,” says executive producer and showrunner Seth Wildman. “David has proven himself more than capable as an actor, and we think it’s about time he got his moment to shine.”
When asked whether or not Ericcson’s recent acquisition as a first-time lead on a weekly drama was, in fact, a response to the unprecedented growth of his cult celebrity status as the unwitting star of the scandalous Die First, Ask Questions Later blog, Wildman responded by saying, “Whatever David’s past with that individual is or was doesn’t matter to us or to the viewing public. We see him only for the powerhouse of raw talent he really is. We’re proud to have him join our team.”
Star. Of nearly eight hundred features and television programs. It’s official: the dead are now more memorable than the living. Though I suppose that’s always been the case – we do better remembering those who’ve changed the world only after the fact, when they’re gone and we’re left to ponder their existence. I feel like I should congratulate David, but I’m simply unable to wrap my mind around this: him, on a weekly series, to be watched and recognized by millions. Tens of millions. As far as commitment is concerned, this one-eighty is, to say the least, impressive. A lesser person might try to take credit for his sudden excess of wealth and attention, and I might have done just that were I not so sure he was taking this job to once more try to prove he’s something he’s not and never will be. Inside, I imagine, he is scared to death. For that, I take no pleasure.
These entries are getting harder and harder to write. The space between, though, is filled with memories unwilling to slow to my body’s pace. While lying in bed this morning, I remembered a brief conversation we had while he was between takes on The Buddy Holly Incident. I’d just brought him his coffee – oh, the glamorous life of a set runner with delusions of ambition and talent. He told me, in a rare moment of transparency, arms folded on top of the camera between us with his face mere inches from mine, how he never really wanted to get his “big break.” “They’re for people who want to live in the world,” he said when I asked how long he wanted to keep going like he was. “Those people … they want the world to change them. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be just another product of my environment.”
“You want your environment to be a product of you,” I said.
And he nodded, and smirked knowingly, and went back to work. And you know what, fuck that sly, I’m-so-brilliant grin. That line’s from The Departed, you unoriginal asshole.
And now he’s going into it – the big scary world – to be changed by an audience now watching his every move, where before they’d been oblivious to his existence. Well then, maybe congratulations are in order.
Meanwhile, here I am, dressed all in white and ready to death-do-us-part and he’s gone ahead and decided to live without me.
Okay, so maybe I do take some pleasure in it.
It’s complicated, though. There’s pleasure, knowing that maybe I’ve forced his hand at change, but there’s hope, too. There’s always been hope. That maybe this will be the right fit for him. That maybe he’ll start to see things, and me, differently.
That maybe I made an impact. That maybe I was someone special after all.
There’s hope, too, in death. There has to be, otherwise we’d lose ourselves to despair. Hope that we’re lucky enough to leave something more than a footprint so easily covered in our absence. That we learn and have learned from all the little deaths we die each and every day. The thousands of times we die each year, only to get up and die all over again because that’s what you’re fucking supposed to do. That’s what we’re all supposed to do. Every single knife in the gut, every shred of pain and humiliation and anxiety and envy that shears us to the bone, they’re how we know we’ve been a part of something. The world, places in it, people’s lives. Our lives. They’re real, those myriad deaths. Maybe they don’t feel it when we look back at them from the end of the final reel, but they happened. They happened all the same. They were lessons, all.
Your deaths were not. Are not. They’re immaterial. They’re nothing, because you haven’t actually owned them. They’ve been extravagant, sure, sometimes; sometimes they’ve been subtle and unexpected. Always they have been art. But art is nothing if an artist chooses not to live in this world. To be of this world – which you now are. Ostensibly. Hopefully.
Your deaths, like us, like you, David, and like me, were and have always been a fiction.
I want to know: Are you out there now? Are you receiving me? Are you hidden among my audience like I imagined you were that night I went to the Galaxy and saw, with my own eyes, just how loved you are? I hope so. I do. I really do. And for what it’s worth, I hope you enjoy your life, David. Your new life. I hope it is everything for you that I could never be. That death never was.
I hope you know how special you are.
I hope
I hope
40. Remembering What Was
Posted: 08/20/2014
*Louise’s note: I found this next to M_____’s bed on their last day. They’d been working on it here and there for a few days, when they weren’t … I’m not sure if it’s finished, but here it is anyway:
* * *
††
Morgan Alexander Farris (1981–2014) died in the early morning hours of August 15th from complications resulting from a malignant brain tumour.
They wanted more than anything for you to see them before they died, to just see them for who they truly were, when the lights were on, but you never did – you never came. You never took the time to look at what was there, beneath the surface, how similar the two of you were and yet how completely, utterly not.
They are survived by their older sister, Louise Elizabeth Farris.
Thank you for the flowers.
Acknowledgements
A novel doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Behind every word of this book is an entire community of friends, family and loved ones who’ve had my back from minute one, and who, for some strange and unknown reason, continue to stand by me through all my anxieties, obsessions, sarcasm and garbage sleeping habits that no intelligent human would endorse.
The team at Wolsak & Wynn/Buckrider Books: to Paul Vermeersch and Noelle Allen I owe a debt that I will never be able to repay. They saw something in this story that they thought worth championing, and I am beyond grateful for their confidence, in both this book and me. And thanks as well to Ashley Hisson, for her amazing edits and for helping to shepherd this book across the finish line.
The Death Scene Artist would not be what it is without the incomparable Jen Sookfong Lee. Her edits, kindness and support throughout this process helped transform this book from something I was happy with to a thing of which I am immeasurably proud. Jen, you are amazing, and I am so fortunate to have gotten the chance to know you and work with you.
Of Michel Vrana, I am in awe. With a single image he managed to perfectly capture the look and feel of my story. Michel, your cover is thoughtful, beautifully rendered and above all a work of art, and I am privileged to have it.
And of course no one would be reading this were it not for Kelvin Kong, who stuck by this book, and me, through two years of rejections – the sting from each felt as much by him, and sometimes more. I’m lucky to have him as my agent, but even luckier to have him as a friend.
Speaking of friends (and family, and friends who are family), there are many more yet to embarrass, all of who played a part in bringing this story to life.
My thanks to Sandra Kasturi, who edited a much earlier, skeletal version of this novel, and helped me to see all the ways in which it wa
s simply not ready for prime time.
And thanks, as well, to Michael Matheson for being a constant, caring, encouraging ear for this book and all things writing (and so many other things as well); to Julia Horel, for her unceasing friendship, at-all-hours pep talks and for celebrating this book with me every step of the way; and to beta readers Tan Light, Raivenne McKinnon, Monica Miller, Angel Vats and Heather Toler – for your friendship, your honesty and your willingness to point out all the ways my work could improve, including but not limited to pulling my own head out of my ass.
To my family: my parents, Darrel and Ross, who’ve provided me with an incredible amount of love and support for my creative endeavours, without fail, my entire life (even when it was not financially prudent to do so); and my siblings, Elizabeth and Blair, who are almost entirely to blame for my sense of humour and various pop culture obsessions.
To my partner in crime, Jaime Patterson, who entered my life shortly after I first started work on this story and has been by my side the entire way, I give my thanks and my love. I could not have made it this far without you.
And to Carol Diana Patterson, my cheerleader. You are loved, and you are missed.
About the Author
ANDREW WILMOT is a writer, editor and painter living in Toronto, ON. He holds a BFA in Visual Arts (with a minor in Film and Video Studies) and a master’s degree in Publishing, both from Simon Fraser University. He has won awards for screenwriting and short fiction, with credits including Found Press, The Singularity, Glittership, Turn to Ash, Augur and the anthologies Those Who Makes Us: Canadian Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories and Restless: An Anthology of Ghost Stories, Dark Fantasy, and Creepy Tales. As an editor, he’s worked with Drawn & Quarterly, ChiZine Publications, Broken River Books, ARP Books, Playwrights Canada Press, Freehand Books, Wolsak & Wynn and NeWest Press, and is a freelance academic editor specializing in matters of body dysmorphia and eating disorders. Books he’s worked on have taken home multiple awards from the Sunburst Awards, the Eisner Awards and, most recently, the Shirley Jackson Awards. He is also co-publisher and co-EIC of the online magazine Anathema: Spec from the Margins. The Death Scene Artist is his first novel. Find him online at: andrewwilmot.ca, anathemaspec.tumblr.com and on Twitter, hating everything about Twitter, @AGAWilmot.
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