Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

  “Listen, hon,” Simon began, quiet enough that hopefully none of them would overhear, “I really do get this has been a pretty bad day for you, in more ways than one—but considering it hasn’t exactly been all wine and roses for me either, before you go ahead and take nebulous responsibility for all the drama in our lives, you maybe need to explain exactly what you just said.”

  I looked at him for a long moment, feeling a sort of existential despair at the very prospect. After which I pulled myself together, nodded, and replied, “You’re right. It’s . . . past time, really.”

  He blinked, possibly surprised by the ease with which I’d agreed with him. He nodded, jerking his head back toward the family group. “You take a john break, splash some water on your face or something—I’ll beg some alone time, meet you wherever you want after that. What’s your preference, Starbucks in here or that Tim’s outside, on the corner?”

  “Let’s say Tim’s. We need a bit of distance, probably, if I’m going to tell you everything.”

  “All right.” Shrewdly: “And are you?”

  “. . . I’ll try.”

  “Good enough,” he said.

  I had my stuff with me, of course, in preparation for that presentation I was now never going to give: the Mr. and Mrs. Whitcomb material, all ready for Jan’s perusal, while Safie supplied the visual component. So I spread it out on the table in front of Simon instead, and walked him through what we’d discovered thus far. The basics took about twenty minutes, by which time Safie—who I’d texted from the SickKids’ bathroom—had arrived, and my husband (poor Simon, as dead Iris Dunlopp W. would no doubt have called him) was starting to look more than a trifle existentially bitch-slapped.

  “None of this can possibly be true, though,” he protested. I just smiled a little grimly.

  “That’s exactly what I said, and more than just the once,” I replied.

  Simon opened his mouth again, but was distracted when his phone beeped. While he checked his text messages, Safie and I exchanged glances, one of her eyebrows hiking in a weird mixture of sympathy and humour—we were both used to this shit by now, at least halfway, which was kind of a scary idea in itself.

  “Who is it?” I asked as Simon looked back up. His face had gone blank, white, apparently even more gobsmacked than before.

  “Mom—Lee, I mean. Your mom. Says the doctor had an update on those tests.”

  “Great. And?”

  “Um, well, the stuff he threw up? They say it was dirt, and, like, some sort of bulb—a flower, probably. Those can be poisonous, right?”

  “Dirt, like, soil? Earth?” He nodded. “Simon, that’s crazy; Clark doesn’t eat that sort of shit, ever, not even when other kids do. I mean, we can barely get him to eat real food.”

  “I know.”

  “And flower bulbs? Where the hell would he have found those, in our neighbourhood, our building? In the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t know, Lois. Not from the ghost of Mrs. Whitcomb, though, I’m pretty damn willing to bet, or some kind of fucking not-so-dead pagan god—”

  “Lady Midday,” Safie put in, helpfully.

  I hissed at her to keep quiet, almost automatically, but it was too late; Simon exploded. “Holy Christ, what’s she supposed to be, Lord Voldemort?” he snapped, then caught himself, brought his voice down as people at neighbouring tables glanced curiously our way. “Lois, c’mon, here! You think all the blood vessels in your eyes broke because the Poludnice put her hand on you in your sleep? Think you had a seizure because you saw something you shouldn’t have, something that doesn’t even show up on regular film?”

  “Not that time,” I agreed. “But what we saw on Clark’s iPad . . . that looked fairly visible to me. You and Mom sure thought so, anyways.”

  “That was a glitch, Lois—bent light, or something. Clark fucking around. It reminded you of this other thing, you freaked out, end of story.”

  “Don’t you think I’d love to think that? But what about what happened to Clark, then—his seizure or whatever. A stomach full of mud and tubers, all over our bed sheets and floor—that’s not an optical illusion, exactly.”

  “Not exactly, no, but it’s not what you’re saying it is, either. ’Cause it damn well can’t be.”

  “Can’t it?”

  Simon sighed, frustrated. “No, Lois. It just can’t. Because the alternative . . .” He trailed off then wiped his face and began again. “Look, God knows I don’t write off the supernatural by default; I can’t and believe what I believe. But even the supernatural has rules. Take demonic possession, right? There are patterns, stages—infestation, obsession, spiritual corruption, personality shifts, and then full-on pea soup crap. Look at it afterwards; it makes a certain sort of ill sense. All this stuff, though . . . it’s contradictory, paradoxical. There’s no logic to it.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe magic’s like that. Metaphor made real.”

  “Fucking magic? Listen to yourself!”

  “Well, what would you call it?”

  “I’d call it you being already in recovery, overextended as all hell, upset over Clark getting sick, your project being derailed, your friend—this guy you pinned all your hopes on—being dead; traumatized, and understandably so! And trying to take control of everything, the way you usually do: by making up a reason, some problem to solve, something to fight. Making yourself—”

  “Crazy?” I asked, toneless.

  Simon looked at me then looked away, obviously struggling to choose his next words carefully; Safie simply sat there, silent, studying us both. “. . . I didn’t say that,” he eventually replied.

  “You just think I’m making it all up, that’s all.”

  “Miss Cairns,” Safie hastened to point out, “he didn’t say that, either.”

  A lag followed, during which I stared at my own hands clasped loosely in my lap. Thought vaguely about the odd fact I’d never previously noticed how my fingers and Clark’s fit together in almost the exact same way, from crossed thumbs to slightly crooked little fingers; wondered if he, too, would have twinges of arthritis in his knuckles by the time he was my age, if he ever got there. Then wondered how it was he could have ended up with both Simon’s long second toe and my own s-curved, squashed fourth one, so bent it almost fit underneath my middle, which I’d inherited in turn from Mom and she from her father. Genetics really are an amazing thing.

  “All right,” Simon began again. “Say what you’re saying has some validity—”

  “Say it does.”

  “—even then, what’re the odds? Mrs. Whitcomb had a direct encounter with Lady Midday back when she was a kid, right? She was touched, chosen—gifted. All you did was watch her films, find out her story, and Safie, here—she did those things, too.” Switching focus: “Back me up, Ms. Hewsen; been seeing evil angels, hearing ghosts? Puke up any tubers recently?”

  “No,” Safie admitted.

  “Okay, so there we go. Maybe the films aren’t cursed, after all.”

  “Why’d she try and throw them down a Hell Hole then?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “You said she probably wasn’t happy with them—that they didn’t do what she wanted them to. That’s enough reason, I guess.”

  “Uh huh, sure. And then a fucking tree just happened to grow out of the hole around them, to make sure somebody like Jan Mattheuis could stumble across them. . . .”

  “It’s not impossible. Unlike some other things I could mention.”

  I blew out a breath, impatiently. “Holy shit, you can be a stubborn ass, Simon Burlingame,” I snapped, which actually made him smile, at least slightly.

  “Takes one to know one,” he replied.

  I’m not sure where the conversation would’ve gone from there, if anywhere. But luckily enough (for—as ever—certain values of luck), that’s when my phone rang.

  I picked it
up, cleared my throat, pressed Accept.

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, Lois,” Wrob Barney’s voice greeted me, all too familiar. Gleeful.

  “Thought I blocked you,” I said.

  “My old number, sure. This is a burner. I’ve got a drawer full of ’em.”

  “Very gangsta. What do you want, Wrob?” At the name, I saw Simon’s eyebrows shoot up while Safie’s face fell, appalled. I switched to speaker, so they could both hear what I was hearing. Wrob must’ve known, but he didn’t seem to care; that didn’t bode well.

  “I’d like to meet. Face to face. Talk things out.” Wrob’s voice was smug, so relaxed he sounded almost benevolent. “Now that I know where you stand, and you know where I stand—or you will in a minute—there really isn’t any reason we can’t be more cooperative on this, right? I mean, given the amount of work you’ve already done, I’d be an idiot to cut you out completely.”

  “Out of what?”

  With a theatrically heavy sigh: “The project, of course. All I ever wanted was proper credit, and now that that’s all fixed, there’s no point in being vindictive. If this is the only way forward for both of us, I’m willing to let bygones be bygones if you are.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from reflexively rolling my eyes at his arrogance, no matter how oblique it might be. “Seriously, Wrob, what the actual fuck are you talking about? Yeah, this thing with the NFA—with Jan—it’s a setback, but the material we’ve put together is still way ahead of anything you could’ve possibly . . .”

  But here I trailed off as some sort of oh-shit realization signal suddenly popped up behind Safie’s eyes; she began shaking her head frantically, pulled her laptop from her bag, flipped it open. “Hold on a minute,” I told Wrob, curtly, while she dug out the DVD I’d seen her and Malin working with yesterday, popped it into the laptop’s disc drive, and waited till the media-player program activated. With a glance back at me, she clicked PLAY, and I leaned in to watch, with Simon—intrigued despite himself—angling to look over my shoulder.

  For a moment, the screen showed nothing but blue. Then it flashed to a stuttering, staticky ghost image of washed-out negative colour that broke apart in great swathes of smeared pixel clouds, then flashed back to blue, over and over again. Intermittently, I’d catch sight of a distorted image that looked familiar—Safie’s face, the Vinegar House’s outlines, a page of Mrs. Whitcomb’s handwriting stretched out into spaghetti, a blur that might have been a painting of Lady Midday. Abruptly, however, everything cut to black, after which three words appeared onscreen in a large, white sans serif font, like a PowerPoint caption on an empty slide:

  TEXT ME

  WROB

  “Shit,” Safie blurted, slumping; Simon covered his eyes with one hand and turned away, muttering under his breath. I just stared, numb, face rigid. I picked up the phone again.

  “How . . .?” I began.

  “Same way as always, Lois—money.”

  He was gloating now, unattractively so, though I suppose that in a weird way, he had every right to. After all, he’d won.

  It would be more than a year—summer after next, in fact—before Safie, who’d been fruitlessly trying to phone, text, and email her ever since she’d first reviewed the DVD, ran into Malin by sheer fluke on Yonge Street one afternoon, outside the Eaton Centre. Confronted, Malin would admit that when she’d left the studio that night she’d found Wrob outside, literally waving his wallet around. Ruining our DVD and turning over our files had netted her enough to finally pull off a long-planned move to Los Angeles, and she saw no point in lying about it, let alone apologizing. Frankly, she’d never expected to see any of us again.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Jan, by the way,” Wrob added after a moment. “Hell, I’m insulted you’d even think that, Lois; Jan and me . . . we had something. I’m gonna miss him every day. But I understand. You’re not very a trusting person, I’ve found.”

  “Don’t trust you, that’s for sure. Which seems to have been a pretty good call, considering.”

  “Yes, well; that’s all behind us now, or can be. And one advantage of working with me, by the way, amongst many—I’ve got a far bigger budget than the NFA, but not even a quarter as many rules about how best to spend it.”

  “Working with you,” I repeated.

  “Yup.” He paused, probably for effect, before adding: “Well, okay . . . for me.”

  At that, Simon threw up his hands. “This is Simon Burlingame, Mr. Barney,” he spat. “Lois’s husband. I—” Here he stopped, and I could hear Wrob’s voice cut in, tinny, snarky; I couldn’t quite make out the words, but the mocking tone was clear. Simon’s face reddened. “Yes, well, seeing you just boasted about ruining someone else’s work, I’m not surprised that’s your opinion—but it’s also not much of an incentive to enter into any sort of business arrangement, either. So here’s my offer: stay the hell away from my wife, or I’m getting a restraining order. And don’t call this number again.”

  He slapped the phone back on the table and sat there fuming. Safie’s eyes were wide; she shot me a look that could’ve been labelled “the fuck?” But I simply leaned forward, and asked, “What’d he say? The thing that got you so pissed off, I mean.”

  Simon huffed. “I don’t see the point—”

  “Humour me.”

  “All right. He said, ‘Oh hey, Simon, nice to finally meet you. Too bad you married a full-on bitch.’” I laughed, which made his eyebrows lift. “This is funny to you?”

  I felt like saying Funnier than everything else, for sure, but ended up simply shaking my head instead.

  “Simon,” I said, “I could give a flying fuck about Wrob and his drama—or the project, at this point, believe it or not. Right now, it’s about one thing: doing what I can to get Clark out of harm’s way. Whatever I can. You’re with me on that, right?”

  “Of course,” he snapped back. “Look, whether I accept all this haunted film crap or what, we could still stand to spend a week or two away from here, in Florida, maybe; I could use my extra vacation days, the ones I was saving for Christmas.” I shook my head again, making him trail off, groaning. “Oh, come on, man . . .”

  “No, Simon. Look at the evidence—Mrs. Whitcomb changed continents, twice, and that didn’t turn out to be a goddamn bit of help in the end. Besides which, the absolute last thing we need is Clark getting sick south of the border, down where health care’s a pay-as-you-go game your insurance won’t even cover!”

  My voice rang in my own ears with this last part, and I suddenly realized just how loud I must have gotten, yet again—enough so that other Tim’s customers were either turning around to look at me or trying to ignore me by “studying Mars,” as my dad would’ve said. I rubbed my face and found it wet, felt a surge of guilty, painful rage that lit up my cheeks.

  Christ, I thought, I would cut this useless, stupid excuse for love right out of me this very minute, slash this choke-hold knot around my neck with a rusty fucking knife if I had to, if I believed doing it’d help, even a little bit.

  “Lo,” Simon began, softer, but I raised a hand to stop him. “No,” I replied. “Don’t you get it? This is my fault, right from the start: me. Clark, fucking Jan—the Vinegar House, the NFA. My mistake, my . . . error. I kicked it off, I kept it going, I didn’t listen, and here we are. So I have to do whatever I can to solve it, because it has to stop, all of it—it just has to. Because it is my fault.”

  “No, Lois.”

  “Yes.”

  “No, Lois. It’s not.” Beside him, Safie seemed to be nodding as well, but it was hard to tell; my eyes were too blurry, the light too strong. “Lo, honey, look at me. This didn’t happen because of you. Nothing that happens to Clark . . . nothing Clark does, or is . . . is specifically because of you. It doesn’t work that way.”

  How do you know, though? I wanted to throw back a
t him. How can you? ’Cause I know I don’t, and can’t. Nobody can.

  Then again, who fucking knew, right? Maybe it was that whole “faith” thing he was thinking about. Maybe that’s what made him sound so sure of himself, the bastard.

  “This does,” is all I could manage by way of a reply—soft and choked, head bent, tears spilling over once more. “This does.”

  (This is.)

  He rose then, pulled me up, folded me in; Safie stood too, putting one comforting hand on my shoulder. And we stood like that for a while, all three of us, me shuddering in the centre.

  “Jesus, if only we could figure out what Mrs. Whitcomb was actually trying to do with those films,” I said once I’d calmed down enough to resume my seat, “why she thought it wasn’t working—maybe we could . . . finish it, somehow. Make it work.”

  “Complete the circuit,” Safie said. Simon snorted.

  I nodded. “Something like that, sure. I just wish we could ask her, directly.”

  Safie cleared her throat. “Well,” she began, “we still can’t do that, but I might’ve found something almost as good. I meant to tell you at the meeting, you and Jan, back before I saw the news: I found him, that guy, the kid Mrs. Whitcomb thought was gonna help her make the ultimate Lady Midday movie. Vasek Sidlo.”

  My mouth dropped open. Simon frowned. “Wouldn’t he be like a hundred years old?”

  “Over a hundred, yeah—checked it out, though, and it’s definitely him. Started with whitepages.ca, then cross-referenced; there’s only three V. Sidlos in the entire GTA, and of those, only one’s listed as an interview subject and ‘asset’ over at the Freihoeven Institute’s ParaPsych Department.”

  “The what with the what, now?” I said.

  “Toronto’s very own home-grown think tank for the Study of Weird-Ass Shit, basically. I got their name from Soraya, in case you’re wondering.” Which made sense, given Ms. Mousch’s personal involvement in the general area of Weird Shit. I kept nodding as Safie explained further. “He’s in assisted living at this point, paid for out of that trust Mr. Whitcomb set up for him; was asleep when I called, but the receptionist connected me with his personal nurse-practitioner. She says he’s frail, but still pretty sharp, able to get around on his own . . . It’d only take us about forty minutes to get there in my van.”