by Gemma Files
“And he remembers Mrs. Whitcomb?”
“That’s all he talks about, most days, apparently. She definitely left a mark.”
Of course she did.
“So,” Simon said—and it was weirdly fascinating, listening to him audibly wrestle to keep his voice from sliding into disbelief—“you’re thinking if you go interview the oldest man in Toronto, he’ll tell you the magic formula for stuffing Lady Midday back in her box? Or . . . field, I guess?”
“Maybe.”
Simon leaned forward, intent. “But what if he doesn’t know? Or he’s wrong? Or you’re wrong about what’s really happening here? Have you thought about what you’re going to do then?” When I didn’t answer, he laid one hand on mine, eyes soft, almost begging. “Why don’t we just go back to the hospital, okay? You and me, so we can be there when Clark wakes up, with my parents and your Mom. They’d appreciate it—him too. Safie could check this out then get back to you . . . right, Safie?”
For a moment, Safie looked as though she wanted to agree, but I shook my head. “I get that you don’t believe in any of this,” I told Simon. “And that’s okay, you don’t have to; probably better for you if you don’t. But I do, and I’m going—so unless you want to try and physically restrain me—” I pulled my hand out from under his “—nothing you say or do is gonna make me stop.”
He drew back, sat there a second, dead silent; I caught the hurt flicker in his eyes before his gaze hardened. Then—
“You know,” he began, carefully, “the one thing I’ve tried absolutely never to do in all our time together, ever, is give you an ultimatum. Which is why I’m . . .” a long pause “. . . very . . . disappointed . . . that you just gave me one.”
“I understand. But if this works, I won’t care . . . and you won’t either, frankly.”
Simon blinked. Clearly he’d been expecting me to backpedal, say something like No, no, of course not, that’s not what I meant. “You’re sure of that, huh?” he said.
I drew a breath then took his hand back. “I’m sure enough that I’m willing to count on you forgiving me.” I could hear the hoarseness in my own voice. “Because you’ve been the one thing in my adult life that I’ve been absolutely sure I can count on. I don’t see that changing. Do you?”
After a beat, Simon put his face in his hands and let out a long, tired sigh. “Okay then,” he said, eventually. “Here’s my ultimatum: I’m coming with you. I’m still pissed as hell,” he added, as if either of us thought for a second I didn’t know that. “But I’d never let you do this alone.”
“Better call Mom and tell her then,” I replied. “Or maybe your folks, because she’s probably not gonna want to hear it from me.”
“Probably not.”
He didn’t quite smile, and I didn’t quite smile back, but the mood lifted, just a bit. Enough for me to turn to Safie and ask, “So. You okay with all this?”
Safie gave a small, tight grin. “I’m the one who found him, Miss, remember? You bet your ass I’m in.” She held out her hand.
“Good,” I said, shaking it.
I think back, remembering that old narrative-logic exercise of mine, the one I used to walk people through in class: the man, the tree, the apple, the bruise—gravity. There’s only so many ways to tell a story, linearly or not, and that was something Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb always seemed to know, long before anyone else in her field.
So: knowing what I know now, or at least what I think—
(what I believe)
—I know, then perhaps this explains why Mrs. Whitcomb shot her films in ever more oblique, concave, complicated ways; through scrims and veils, cut-outs and paintings on glass with the empty spaces acting like a second lens, or even (in one case) a tank full of water with things floating around in it, paint and ink dropping down, unravelling, diffuse and sublimate. Reflections of reflections in mirrors or sheets of polished tin, cunningly bent to replace one image with another, or show two things at once, shimmering and slick and odd.
She did stuff other people wouldn’t think up for decades, and none of it in service of making things explicit, making things easy. More like . . . the exact opposite.
I think I’ve said before how it was as if she didn’t want you to see what she was looking at, or maybe as if she didn’t want to see what she was looking at, let alone want it to see her. Yet to my mind, it’s an observation that bears repeating.
In the end, I suppose, this will always be a story about the limits of what’s known, or maybe of what can be known; one open to interpretation, not so much because it has missing pieces, but because missing pieces are all it was ever made from.
And if that’s true, then I was a lost cause from the beginning, because I have a pattern-maker’s mind—like Mrs. Whitcomb, like Hyatt, like Simon, like Clark. It’s just how we’re wired. Thus making me perhaps the single worst person who could’ve tripped across this stuff, with Safie running a close second. Because she could see what was around Mrs. Whitcomb’s film, in total detail, and I could see what was behind it, eventually. But the thing itself, the trick being played? The shell-game signifier?
Which of us could ever have seen that coming, at least in time to warn anybody?
Then again, maybe there was no “thing itself,” not really. Maybe there never is. Maybe there’s just a shadow, a stain, a projection—a crude visual mimicry of something literally unimaginable moving behind the walls of the world, scaled down till it fits inside the limits of human perception. And when all’s said and done, in the final analysis, all that good shit . . . the very hoariest of any and all possible hoary clichés . . .
Well then, maybe it isn’t so much that you see what something is, but that it—
(or in this case, She)
—is what you see.
The place in which Vasek Sidlo had spent his last twenty years was a classic old-age home, indistinguishable from any other assisted-living facility you’ve ever run across: bright and airy, open spaces, light salmon walls, the vague smell of bedpans covered up with Glade. It reminded me of this really awful micro-job I’d had the summer I was nineteen, working for two hours every Saturday afternoon serving pre-wrapped kosher meals at a small Jewish hospice in Toronto’s Bagel Belt. It involved wearing a hairnet, scrubs, and a lot of standing, while trying to simultaneously tune out the residents enough to stay sane yet keep alert enough to know when they wanted something from you: a napkin, more coffee, their tray taken away. By the end of my shift everything hurt, which I guess was sort of like being them for one day a week—except obviously far better, because I at least got to go home. Come late August, I was beginning to think they could not only tell that I thought this, but kind of liked it that way, too.
The woman to whom Safie had spoken ushered us down a long hallway, pausing by Sidlo’s door. “He was awake the last time I looked in, but that was ten minutes ago, so I’m not making any promises,” she told us. “You may need to be prepared to wait.”
“We understand,” I said.
“He’s over a hundred years old, you know. It’s amazing he’s even . . .” She trailed off. “At any rate. I’m just down the hall, if you need me.”
“Thank you very much, ma’am,” Simon said. “We’ll keep that in mind.”
The door opened slowly on some sort of a restriction lever, probably to keep it from slamming. Vasek Sidlo sat in a wheelchair by the window, angled toward a shaft of light, dozing like an incredibly old, incredibly fragile cat. He was crepey everywhere you looked: skin worn so fine we could see through to his bones, where it wasn’t covered by the green striped cotton pyjamas which were clearly all he ever wore; the shadows of sockets ’round his upturned eyes, cataract-blue and ticking slightly from side to side in his sleep. A few scant locks of hair still folded over his scalp, not so much white as colourless; blue veins bulged at either temple, and his Adam’s apple pressed pai
nfully against the front of his throat.
It was hard to watch, hard to be in the same room with him—mortality’s naked presence pressing down on us like a weight, a full-body, lead-lined X-ray cloak. The kind of spectacle that made me want to fill out and sign my own DNR form, right then and there.
“Oh . . . wow,” Safie apparently couldn’t quite stop herself from remarking.
Simon nodded, wincing.
“Lois, this is cruel,” he said, careful to pitch his voice low. “I mean, look at him. What can you expect to gain, aside from just . . . disturbing the poor guy unnecessarily?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Well, then we should go, right? Let’s go, hon.”
“I can’t do that, Simon.”
“Yes, you can. It’s easy: turn around, leave, don’t come back.”
“Miss, he might be right,” Safie chimed in.
“I can’t,” I repeated.
“Oh,” Sidlo said softly, at almost the same time; together, we turned to find him staring at us—me—with his supposedly useless eyes wide, an odd sort of yearning in every line of him. Smiling and trembling at the same time, as something wet spilled down his cheeks: rheum, maybe. Or tears.
“Oh,” he said, again, re-angling his head to stare up over my shoulder, where nothing should have been except empty air. “It is you, after all. After all this time.”
Yes, something replied from deep inside me, seemingly as glad to be recognized as he was to recognize it. That’s right, Vasek; you always did know me. Oh, my poor, dear boy.
(Yes, it is.)
“Mister Sidlo,” Simon began. “We’re, uh . . .”
Sidlo nodded, eyes still on “me,” or whatever stood behind me.
“I know what you’re here for,” he replied.
There’s a VHS tape in the Freihoeven Institute’s library that none of us would get to see until long after all this was over, and watching it can be an oddly wrenching experience, especially for those who happen to have met its subject in person first. Dated March 16, 1975, it’s of an interview conducted by Dr. Guilden Abbott, now the Institute’s acting director, who was then an intern working for its founders, the married parapsychologists Doctor and Mrs. Doctor Jay: Vasek Sidlo being put through his paces, asked to demonstrate whether or not his classic party trick would translate to a whole new type of technology—and what do you know, it actually does, with genuinely unsettling results.
The forty-years-younger Sidlo is still a gaunt old man, soft-spoken, with the same childlike intensity in his large blind eyes, though much thicker iron-grey hair, an upright posture, and wire-muscled forearms. The camera is focused on him, with Dr. Abbott nothing more than the half-seen back of a head and a pleasant voice whose clinical professionalism only barely hides his earnest enthusiasm. By contrast, Sidlo seems ill at ease—part annoyed, part bored. When I watched it, later, it took me a while to realize why his affect comes off so strangely: on the tape, Sidlo doesn’t maintain the steady open-air stare you see in most blind people—instead, he casts his head around in small, constant jerks, like he’s desperately trying to identify a noise he can’t quite make out. Yet despite all this movement his eyes never once fall upon the camera lens itself; he seems, in fact, to avoid it reflexively, like he knows exactly where it is. Like he’s afraid of . . . well, not of seeing it (being, you know, blind), but afraid of what might see him through it.
The transcript, which comes attached, runs like this:
DR. ABBOTT: Mister Sidlo, I’d like to begin by saying it’s truly wonderful to meet you, on a personal level. I’ve been a great admirer of yours for years now, ever since the Institute began researching Kate-Mary des Esseintes’ Ontario Spiritualist enclave.
SIDLO: Oh yes, the Mysteraeia.
DR. ABBOTT: I’m sorry?
SIDLO: That’s what she called it, what she preferred to. In reference to the Delphic Mysteries, but also the Orphean Mystery cults. The descent into the Underworld.
DR. ABBOTT: . . . I see.
SIDLO: It sounds silly, I realize. But Kate-Mary was a firm believer in what she called Old Truths, which is why she used to give everything around her these . . . ridiculous sort of pseudo-Greek names. That cabinet of hers, for example, where she met with her spirit guide . . .
DR. ABBOTT: The Thanatoscopeon, yes. We’ve been trying to track that down, actually.
SIDLO: Her husband sold most of her things away, after. “Fripperies,” he called them. And worse.
DR. ABBOTT: Very sad, of course, Miss des Esseintes’ death; so young. The child died as well, if I remember correctly. [Sidlo nods] But you’d left her group—the Mysteraeia—by then, I believe, hadn’t you? You were—
SIDLO: Staying with Iris—Mrs. Whitcomb, I mean—in Quarry Argent; she’d seen me at the meetings, asked me to consult on a project she was contemplating. When I agreed, she made all the provisions for my travel and upkeep. She brought me from home, put me on staff, and gave me a room on the ground floor of her house. Mrs. Whitcomb was . . . very kind.
DR. ABBOTT: Consultation. On a psychic matter?
SIDLO: She had something she wanted removed, but preserved. From her mind.
DR. ABBOTT: An image?
SIDLO: A memory.
DR. ABBOTT: Of her son, no doubt.
SIDLO: [After a long pause] No.
Simon broke the silence first. “Mr. Sidlo, I’m Simon Burlingame,” he said, half reaching out a hand as if to shake before realizing Sidlo couldn’t possibly know what he was doing. He let it drop. “This is my wife, Lois Cairns, and her colleague, Safie Hewsen. They wanted to ask you some questions about your work with, uh . . .”
“Iris,” Sidlo half-whispered. “Giscelia. I could never call her either to her face, Mrs. Whitcomb, not so long as she was another man’s wife. We collect names as we get older, don’t we? Too many, sometimes . . .” His voice wavered, then firmed. “Come in, please, all of you. Sit where you like.” A trembling hand lifted, swept around the room; I took the only other chair, next to a small end table, while Safie parked herself on the end of the bed. Simon, visibly uncomfortable, stayed by the door, arms folded.
“Mr. Sidlo, I . . .” I began. “I’m—that is, my family and I—we’re in a pretty bad place right now, which means I might as well cut to the chase: we need help, and I’m really hoping you can give it, ’cause . . . you’re our only option, essentially. So if you can’t—”
I stopped there, however; cut myself off as Sidlo reached across to grasp my hand, deft and sure, as though he already knew where it was. The feather-light fingertips, trembling slightly, felt papery on mine—cool, dry. Strangely soothing.
“You’ve been touched you, haven’t you?” he asked. “By Iris, yes—but not her alone. By her, that other. She, Herself.”
Capital “S,” capital “H.” I heard Safie swallow; saw Simon’s jaw work, as if he was biting back words. I opened my mouth to answer and suddenly found I couldn’t; the thickness in my throat was as much relief as anything else. Somebody else knew, somebody understood. I wasn’t insane. Not completely.
“Mr. Sidlo—” Head down, I couldn’t see Simon anymore, but I could hear the sudden wariness in his voice, maybe spurred by my reaction. “When you say ‘Her,’ who are you talking about?”
“I think you know very well, Mr. Burlingame.” Sidlo angled his head in Simon’s direction, again with uncanny accuracy, and Simon recoiled. “You mock, since you have not been touched yourself; if you had, you would not ask at all. So tell me, will you play Arthur to your own Iris? Will you leave when the worst of it comes, your loyalty not worth admitting how little you understand?”
Simon flushed; his jaw set. “Never,” he said, without hesitation. “I’d never do that.”
I cleared my throat and looked up, meeting his eyes. “I know,” I managed, and Simon gave me a painful sketch of
a smile. From the corner of my eye, I saw Safie turn her head, deliberately staring elsewhere, while Sidlo nodded, slightly.
“Good,” he replied. “After all, there’s the child to think of.”
“How—?”
“Because you came here, to me. You would have to be truly desperate to do that, far more so than on your own account. Someone else would have to be involved, someone you both care about more than you do yourselves.”
“It’s my son,” I told him. “He’s . . . special, like Hyatt Whitcomb.”
“And has he seen Her, as well?”
My voice thickened once more, the words almost choking me. “I think so, yes.”
“But he wouldn’t know what he’s seen,” Safie quickly added. “Not really. He’d never know how to respond, or what she wants from him. If she does want anything.”
“Oh, always—but what? That was Mrs. Whitcomb’s question when I first met her. Some things simply want to be seen; Kate-Mary told me as much, in my very first days with her. But She, Mrs. Whitcomb’s Lady . . . she wants more, far more, in return for her attention. A tithe, a payment for gifts received, whether those gifts were wanted or not.” Sidlo laughed, a hollow, half-cracked sound, eggshell crunching. “All muses are cruel, some say, but She—She may be the cruellest. At least, so Mrs. Whitcomb contended, having studied the matter.”
“Was Hyatt Mrs. Whitcomb’s tithe?” I asked.
“She thought so, yes. It was . . . one reason. An understandable one.”
“Because Lady Midday touched him in the womb, in the field. Chose him.”
He nodded. “She fought the idea a long time, she told me. But then he was gone, and—there seemed no point in fighting it anymore. Better to proceed according to what one feared might be true, to assume it was true, than hope in vain for better.”