by Doretta Lau
When I first saw this image at the Vancouver Art Gallery, I suddenly knew what photographs could do. I would never look at contemporary art in the same way again. The Destroyed Room was created the year I was born.
VII
During my first months in New York, I spent hours in the darkroom. I liked that I didn’t need to talk to anyone when I was there. In the dark there is no need to socialize and fewer opportunities for awkward interactions. Although other people had conversations or listened to music through headphones while making prints, I preferred silence.
Perhaps because I have descended from a long line of manual labourers—butcher, janitor, tailor, nurse—I set aside writing for photography. I was quite sure that some members of my family thought that academia and writing was an excuse to avoid real work. Real work involved heavy lifting or standing, relied on action instead of thought. And although photography had a cerebral element to it, while I was printing photographs I felt like I was labouring: I was doing real work.
The irony that photographs—which rely upon light and exist only because of its presence—must be printed in a darkened room was perfect to me.
VIII
After a phone conversation with Goneril, I had to rethink A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October 1947.
Red, orange, white, yellow and green helium balloons are touching the living room ceiling, which has a rough texture to it. This is October 1947, the year and month of my father’s birth, in muted colour, lit by two lamps. There is not a television in the room. Goneril explained that this was important because the first television broadcast occurred in October 1947.
“This is a time when a ventriloquist was still an impressive birthday entertainment,” she said.
Later I read an essay about the photograph. The woman’s voice was supposed to be filtered through the dummy, but because all action was stilled, there was only silence.
I couldn’t remember an impressive birthday party of my own, though I knew my parents did their best each year and there were cakes and presents. Even at age twenty-six, I thought I might like to see a ventriloquist perform.
IX
I got off at Columbus Circle, double-checking the address and directions I had written down. I was looking for the Marian Goodman Gallery.
I checked the time, calculating that I’d be five minutes late when I reached my destination. As I walked across Central Park South, avoiding the horse manure on the street, I marvelled at the fact that I was in New York, a city that had once existed only in books, television and movies for me.
The Marian Goodman Gallery was located in a building that housed a number of other art dealers. As I rode the elevator, I realized that I had read an article about Goodman in The New Yorker a few months earlier. All I remembered from the piece was that she had refused to relocate to Chelsea. At times, her staff had no choice but to remove the front windows of the gallery in order to accommodate works too large for the industrial-sized elevator.
The elevator doors opened directly into the gallery. Curtis and three other men were crouched next to a small piece, which was on the floor on top of a sheet. The larger works were still mounted on the wall in their lightboxes. A few of the photographs were unlit and I worried that they had already shut off the power.
Curtis saw me and flicked a switch, restoring the electricity. The room became illuminated by scenes from the Pacific Northwest. The photographs contained the landscape and architecture that defined the city I called home. I had not known that I was capable of feeling homesick until then.
I walked to a photograph of a Stó:lō excavation. One man was digging while another was looking on. My thoughts on bones and culture and excavation and history and the place I was from loomed before me, in a succinct image. I thought of Robert Pickton, the serial killer who had preyed upon women who lived or worked in the Downtown Eastside. There were so many bones and teeth scattered across his pig farm that it required a large team of forensic anthropologists to excavate the site.
I slowly made my way through the rooms of the gallery. Curtis pointed out a controversial photograph of a bloody rag situated on the ground outside Wall’s studio. Critics at the European show had hated it. In my state, I was enamoured with the piece.
When I was about to leave, I thanked Curtis for letting me into the gallery. I told him I was excited by the fact that I saw the photographs in both their dark and illuminated states. We talked about an essay a film scholar wrote about Wall’s photographs when they were not lit. Then Curtis led me to a lightbox containing a photograph of two boys crossing into a graveyard. The sides of the lightbox frame were off, allowing us to look behind the transparency. There were dozens of fluorescent light tubes lined up vertically.
Curtis looked at me, and in a moment that sounded scripted he said, “You’re looking at the bones of the piece.”
Sad Ghosts
“Unscientific,” Gene said, smacking his hand against the bar top. “Do you really believe it’s necessary for film crews shooting in Hong Kong to make offerings to placate the gods? That a roast pig and a bottle of cheap alcohol will keep the doctor away? Don’t try to bring up The Dark Knight and Heath Ledger’s death and Edison Chen’s sex scandal as proof that omitting a superstitious ritual will result in tragedy. If you were building a house upon this sorry excuse for a foundation, the structure would disintegrate within a year of completion.”
“Science is just another way of telling a story,” I said. “It’s a narrative. Conflict and resolution. Man versus nature.”
A shadow ghosted itself across Gene’s face, something like doubt.
“I find that cities by water seem most haunted,” I said, knowing this statement would provoke him.
Gene snorted.
“That’s an ugly sound,” I said. “Have you not experienced something inexplicable? Something beyond measurement and calibration?”
“Are you a Creationist? A Holocaust denier?” He sneered. The man sitting next to him glanced over at us, mouth open as if he was about to speak, but he chose to say nothing.
“This line of reasoning is unbecoming,” I said in an even tone of voice, not wanting to succumb to indignation.
“I have never experienced a supernatural disturbance, and I have spent my life living in cities situated near bodies of water: LA, New York and Hong Kong,” Gene said to me. To the bartender he said, “Another round.”
“Do you remember Andy?” I asked. “We once ran into him at the movie theatre at ifc when we went to see Black Swan.”
“Is he that lanky sneakerhead who gives the impression that he’s afraid to live?”
“That’s not a very generous description, but I suppose you’re right. He lets fear dictate all his decisions. Once, he asked me to help him break up with a girlfriend—a very good friend of mine—because of his aversion to conflict. Anyhow, I don’t think I’ve told you that Andy can only hear ghosts rather than see them. I guess instead of yin yang eyes, he has yin yang ears if that’s even a thing. Once, he was standing in a kitchen in an apartment on the sixth floor of a tong lau at 65 Peel Street and a knife slid across the counter and someone was whispering in Shanghainese—the speaker’s syntax and vocabulary seemed to indicate that he had died sometime during the early 1940s. Andy said he knew that the ghost had a moustache—a full beard, even—and that the spirit wasn’t malevolent, just lost.”
“That seems anachronistic,” Gene said. “None of the Shanghai emigrants to Hong Kong during that era had facial hair.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I just know. I read.”
“So do I.”
“Did you know that most so-called hauntings are likely due to infrasound?” Gene asked.
“What’s that?”
“It’s when the frequency of sound is less than twenty hertz per second. One study suggests it causes some people to feel awe or fear, or t
o interpret an environment as being somewhat odd or inhabited by supernatural entities.”
“Interesting,” I said. “But it doesn’t account for instances of seeing spirits. Just last week Stephanie and I were at the dai pai dong on Elgin waiting for our food when a man sat down and said to me, ‘I have not been here in over twenty years.’
“‘What brought you out tonight?’ I asked because I had the feeling he needed to talk and he had no one to talk to. He told me he had just visited a friend, and that he used to live at number seventy-seven. I told him I hadn’t eaten there either since I left the neighbourhood just shy of a year earlier.
“The man told me his apartment at seventy-seven Elgin was haunted. When he first moved in, the mirror in the living room was painted over. He said he should have known that because it had been intentionally covered up, something was wrong. Yet, despite his reservations, he removed the paint. The process took three days—the paint was layered on, red and foreboding. Then he started seeing things in the mirror. First, it was just mist: dark patches that could be blamed on night vision or dirt. One evening, he saw a ghost with long hair, a white dress and no feet hovering in the glass as if she was standing next to him.
“Although I was fascinated with this story, I ran out of language to interrogate the man further, plus Stephanie doesn’t understand Cantonese so it seemed kind of rude for me to continue to talk to this stranger. The food arrived and I waited for the man to leave before I translated the conversation for her. I hate the feeling of being talked about in a language I don’t speak.
“Stephanie told me that while she was watching us talk she felt as if she was experiencing a scene out of a Wong Kar-wai movie. Although the man didn’t get into it, I imagined that the apparition’s hair was thick and black, but the strands separated at the end so that if you weren’t too afraid to look closely, you could count each strand one by one.”
“I wouldn’t be afraid to look because there would be nothing to see,” said Gene.
“So anyway, Andy was telling me a story about two of his colleagues, a married man and a single woman,” I said. “He loathed both but had to work closely with them on a marketing project. Something dull—I’ve forgotten the details. He described them as two people with little imagination and a crippling inability to tell a story. I think Andy would have preferred it if they were pathological liars, because then at least their conversations would have been thrilling and unsettling.
“But one night this pair was working late or having some sort of clandestine affair under the guise of industrious productivity. Their office was located in a mostly empty industrial building on the eighteenth floor. They entered the elevator a few minutes before midnight. The elevator began to descend, but before they reached the ground level, the doors opened up on the fourth floor. The space had been gutted some months before and was partway through a renovation.”
At this point, the bartender delivered our drinks. I took a sip of mine to quell the itchiness I was feeling in my throat.
“So what was on the fourth floor?” I continued. “Nothing. There was only blackness; no one was waiting for the elevator. Then a bluish light appeared in the distance and it began to grow until the couple could see that a blue-hued woman was flying towards them. Her hair and clothing flowed behind her as if the speed she was moving at was creating its own wind. They screamed like little schoolgirls and hit the ‘close’ button rapidly. The doors shut just as the spirit was about to enter the compartment. I don’t think they’ve worked late since then.”
“At best, your description of what happened is something out of a third-rate Japanese horror film, and at worst it is some kind of banal moralistic tale in which two people having an affair are punished by supernatural forces.”
“Sometimes I wonder why I subject myself to your company,” I said.
“I keep you honest,” he said.
“Were you living in New York when the Met had that exhibition about photography and the occult?” I asked. “I think it was called The Perfect Medium. Put your phone down—don’t Google this. Can’t we have a conversation where we rely solely on our memories?”
Gene scowled at me, but he complied with my request. “Yes, I was in New York at that time and I saw that show,” he said.
“What did you think about the spirit photographs from the 1860s?”
“They’re proof that a grieving person will believe anything. That genre of photography peaked shortly after the American Civil War, and regained popularity after the First World War. Wives and daughters were willing to overlook the possibility of double exposure. They believed that their departed loved ones were really appearing in spirit form in photographs with them. Photographers such as William H. Mumler were just opportunists preying upon people who lost husbands and fathers and sons.”
“See, I knew that your powers of recall would be up to this challenge.”
“I have science in my corner. Meanwhile, you have yet to sway me with any of your anecdotes.”
“Would it help if I told you a personal story?” I asked.
“Why not? You’ve failed so far, so you may as well try a new tactic.”
“When I was eight,” I said, “my parents sent me to an art day camp that was located near a lake. By the lake was a cluster of Edwardian country homes, including one called Ceperley House, which was designed by the English architect R.P.S. Twizell and built in 1911 on land adjacent to a strawberry farm. Henry and Grace Ceperley named their home Fairacres. At the time it was the biggest house in the area, and it proved expensive to run.
“Once Grace died, the mansion served as a tuberculosis ward for Vancouver General Hospital—a fact that is omitted from official literature on the history of the house—then was home to a Benedictine order of monks. Some years later, an American man named William Franklin Wolsey was on the run from charges of bigamy, assault and extortion and he ended up in Burnaby and bought the house and started a cult called the Temple of the More Abundant Life. This too is not part of the official narrative about the house. Wolsey fled the country in 1960. A few years later, Simon Fraser University repurposed the building as a dormitory. At that time, students organized a series of sit-ins. Once, during a protest, someone set a bonfire upon the hardwood floor of the billiard room.
“I knew the house as the Burnaby Art Gallery. As part of the art camp, we went to see an exhibition at Ceperley House. I think it was a show of paintings—I’m not too clear about that because the work didn’t make an impression on me. We left to go back to the sculpture studio. As I was walking across a field, I turned to look back at the house. A greenish figure with long, dark hair was standing behind a window, waving at me. I looked away, and when I glanced back the apparition was still there, waving.
“That day, I didn’t tell anyone what I had seen, but some years later I returned during a class trip and asked a gallery assistant whether they had ever placed anything in the windows of the house and I was given a strange look and told, ‘No, we would never do anything like that.’”
“I believe that you believe that this happened,” Gene said.
“Okay, it’s your turn,” I said, unwilling to surrender without mounting one more offensive. “You must have had an experience laced with horror—everyone has at least one story.”
Gene paused. A chill came over me. I looked up and saw that I was sitting directly below an air-conditioning vent.
“Last year, one of my young cousins died very suddenly,” he said, staring into his tumbler of whisky. “My aunt was destroyed by her death. Her doctor put her on antidepressants and she was sleeping all the time. My dad was really worried, but he was manifesting his anxieties as anger towards me so I didn’t even call him on Father’s Day. It didn’t help that two of my cousin’s high school classmates also died on the same night. Three families were grieving, and you know how I get when there’s so much emotion—I’m uncomfortable. It
gets so bad I don’t even know where to put my hands when I’m trying to have a conversation. I just wanted to do something to make things right again.
“I was looking at pictures on Facebook from the last week of my cousin’s life,” Gene continued. “She and her friends had gone to a flat on Lantau for a weekend and they had taken a lot of pictures. The strange thing was that there were all these warped photos—their faces were all distorted like they had been messing around with effects on Photobooth. So I decided to visit that rental flat to see if I could find any answers about her death. It was a crumbling sort of place littered with Jurassic technologies. Instead of a dvd player, there was a vcr. On the first night it rained and I was stuck indoors, bored and cursing myself for forgetting to bring a book. At the time I was in the middle of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. If you haven’t read it, you must.”
“I’ve read it,” I said. “It’s an incredible book.”
“So this was how I came to search through the vhs collection for something to watch,” said Gene. “There were a number of trite romantic comedies. You know how much I detest that genre—I find it so juvenile. I was drawn to an unmarked tape in a plain white box and soon I found myself watching what I can only describe as a weird short film.”
I shivered and wrapped my shawl over the top of my head.
“The opening shot is of the moon, obscured by clouds,” Gene continued. “Then a mirror shows a woman who is combing her hair. There is a jump cut and then the woman is looking behind her. Her body language communicates fear. From there, the visuals become even stranger. Chinese characters drift around the screen. Then there is a scene with people crawling along the ground. A man with a sheet over his head and face appears, his right arm stretched out as if he is giving directions. Then, there is a close-up of an eye. The film ends with an image in a forest. There are dead leaves blanketing the ground, and in the centre of the shot there is a well…. The screen went snowy at this point, as if the film had been interrupted. Right when I turned off the tv, the phone in the flat rang. But there was no one on the line.”