Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

  “The paramedics came with the fire department, Ms. Cairns, responding to an alarm from inside your unit.”

  I half-rose, wobbling, only to find somebody—Harrison, it turned out—there to take my arm, pressing me back down while I struggled, panicked. “A fire alarm . . . something caught on fire? Is everything okay? Our place, all our stuff . . .”

  “All that’s fine, no casualties,” Valens told me. “Except Sidlo.”

  “You need to tell me what happened, RIGHT the fuck now. Or we are done here.”

  “Calm down, ma’am—”

  “Don’t you tell me to calm down! Holy shit, what is wrong with you people? I wake up and I can’t see, you tell me the guy I was talking to what seems like ten minutes ago is dead, my home might’ve burnt down, my son’s still in a fucking coma—”

  “I have to agree,” Harrison said, from beside me. “I’m not sure just what you’re trying to get my patient to confess to, but you’re going about it very childishly, and I won’t stand for it. Cease and desist, or I’ll have you removed.”

  “Listen, doc—”

  “Eric,” Correa said, “he’s right; that’s enough. Drop it.”

  Ms. Cairns, you have our sincerest apologies. It’s been a very long day.

  The facts, as they told them to me, were these:

  The Toronto Fire Department station that took the alarm at our building was #333, located on Front Street, less than a block from Sherbourne. The truck dispatched was probably the same one that seemed to turn up at our building every other week during the summer, when the change of weather plus the always-late switch to air conditioning meant stoves and grills started randomly overloading some apartments’ capacity to process trapped heat. After checking in with security at the front desk, the firefighters ran upstairs, where they surprised Simon at his station, “on guard”—sure, the loss of light and the fans turning on had been a bit of a shock, but there was no way he thought we had anything to do with it. In a way, though, it’s lucky he was there: they were all set to kick the door open till he reached in and demonstrated it was already unlocked.

  Inside they found three things. Those were, in quick succession:

  —Safie down on her knees, hands cupped under my head, desperately trying to keep me from knocking it on the floor as I trembled through another seizure; her camera, knocked over in the corner, was still recording.

  —Sidlo slumped in his wheelchair in front of the drawn blinds, dead but not relaxed—taut all over, limbs slightly contracted as though electrocuted. The silver nitrate reel, clutched in both frail hands, seal intact and unbroken.

  —Behind him, a scorch-mark spreading upwards across both blinds, like some giant, yellow-ashy pair of wings.

  (Simon tells me the inmost part of it is still etched on the glass, black and slightly puffed, impossible to clean away. As though the very composition of its molecules has changed forever.)

  Simon was the one who called the paramedics, once he saw what was happening with me. Your eyes were all rolled back, he’d later tell me. Tonic-clonic, looked like; the full deal. You . . . pissed yourself, maybe more, I don’t know. It smelled weird, like you’d been eating asparagus. Flailing everywhere, and this time you were chewing; I think you got your tongue a couple of times—

  Feels like it, yeah. Raw.

  Well, there was blood, that’s all I know. I almost . . . Here he stopped, had to, till he’d gathered himself enough to go on. The paramedics waited till it stopped, then they rolled you on your side, got you onto a stretcher. Elevators were all unlocked again by then, so we took you down that way. And that’s when we realized Lee and my mom and dad were already there, with Clark—had been since the alarm went off. They couldn’t go up, obviously, so they just stuck around in the lobby, waiting.

  Turned out it was Lee, Simon Senior, and Bella who came with me to St. Mike’s, though I couldn’t remember them doing so. Simon and Safie would have come along, but they were prevented—one of the firefighters had tipped off building security, told them about Sidlo’s body, and they were held till the cops got there. After which they got carted off to 54 Division while our place was cordoned off, Sidlo removed, with everything judged potentially relevant taken into evidence.

  Correa insisted on playing what Safie had recorded for me on her iPad, once it’d been emailed over by the on-site techs. “There we go. Ms. Cairns, if you could—well, I suppose you can’t look, but please listen. Tell me if any of this rings a bell.”

  I listened, hard. Straining for anything that would make sense.

  On the file, in what passes for the dark of our apartment, Vasek Sidlo grips my hand tighter as his other set of fingers slips to touch the silver nitrate reel. He closes his eyes, or tries to; can’t do it all the way, not anymore, thin lids straining together over bulging, occluded corneas. I simply sit there, Safie would later tell me, when we were going over it ourselves—my own eyes raising by very long degrees, seeming to focus on something over his shoulder this time. Something she can’t see, and her camera doesn’t register.

  “The field . . .” Sidlo whispers, eventually, so low Safie’s mic almost fails to catch it. “Light, heat . . . the insects, singing. That smell.”

  “Yes,” I reply, my voice all of a sudden gone equally slow, equally sleepy. “I see it too.”

  “Oh, and that voice.”

  “Her voice, yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “And . . . the sun, high above. The noontime sun. You see it?”

  “Feel it, yes. The dust cloud forming. Far out, where the stalks bend. Above the harvest.”

  “Yessss . . .”

  A silence then. Probably not as long as it sounded.

  Is it still playing? I asked Safie after a moment. What happens next?

  Unable to see her shrug, I nevertheless still heard it shadowing her words when she finally spoke: I’d say ‘you tell me,’ except you can’t, apparently. But . . .

  This is where everything starts to go wrong, my brain supplied, as she hesitated once more. Knowing from the ever-so-slightly increased length of this next pause, that I must be right.

  “Okay,” Correa said, surface-patient as Valens tapped his foot somewhere behind her, arms probably crossed. “Explain again what’s supposed to be happening with you and Mr. Sidlo, because that doesn’t look like an interview to me.”

  I sighed. “He was psychic, or claimed to be—used to pal around with a Spiritualist group in the early 1900s, so that’s how he met Mrs. Whitcomb. Supposedly, he could imprint images on film with the power of his mind.”

  Valens scoffed. “And you believed that?”

  “I believed he believed it, and it’s hardly the weirdest method I’ve used to get interview subjects to open up, either. We thought it’d be like . . . self-hypnosis, maybe; take him back in the moment, make it easier for him to talk. So we didn’t have to do it again.”

  “Yeah, well, second kick at the can’s not exactly gonna be an option now.”

  “You think I don’t feel bad about that? He was a nice guy, from what I could tell. Not to mention I’m also not real happy about the idea of anybody dying in our apartment, no matter who he was. . . .” I trailed away. “But you can’t think we made this happen, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Can’t we?”

  Could they? I seriously didn’t know; not only was I not a lawyer, it suddenly occurred to me I didn’t even have one. Nor did I know what my rights were under the Canadian Charter, how they might or might not differ from your average Law & Order episode.

  “Are you charging me with something?” I finally asked. “Or my husband, or my friend?”

  Correa answered, “Not at this moment, no.”

  “All right, good. So why am I talking to you, again?”

  “To find out what we know?” she suggested. “If you really can’t remember, that is.�
��

  “I can’t remember, anymore than I can physically see this shit you’re supposedly showing me. Where’s Dr. Harrison?”

  “I’m right here, Ms. Cairns,” the man in question answered, tone level as ever. “Since you detectives sound as though you don’t believe she’s really suffering, let me set your minds at ease to the extent that I can: yes, my diagnosis of conversion disorder spins on the assumption such a thing exists, and yes, it’s extremely difficult to prove. It’s also very hard to fake, however, and from what I’ve observed, Ms. Cairns is to all intents and purposes blind, though hopefully only temporarily.”

  “That sounds . . . very traumatic,” Correa agreed, though in her mouth “traumatic” sounded almost exactly like “dramatic.”

  “It can be. Imagine yourselves in the same situation.”

  “Yeah, I can’t see—” Valens shot back, or started to. To which Harrison retorted, coolly: “—that happening? Exactly. And neither can she for the moment, let alone anything else.”

  Now it was Correa’s turn to sigh. “Very well. We’ll check in with you later, Ms. Cairns.”

  I resisted the urge to shoot them a double finger, simply nodding instead. “I’ll be here, probably,” was all I could think to say.

  Then I heard them all step out, Harrison softly shutting the door behind him, leaving me behind. I lay there in the not-exactly-dark, probably looking like I was staring at the ceiling, trying to think, to figure some way out of all this—my skull’s domed confines, the sheer froth of monkey-mind frenzy making my brain chase its own mushy grey tail so fast I could practically feel sparks getting thrown off, only to fizzle wetly against the blood-slick sides.

  And maybe I fell asleep then, drifting from one increasingly drown-heavy wave of panic to the next, because the next thing I knew I wasn’t alone anymore. Somebody was there, breathing, slightly damp and cut with the occasional hitch—no corpse perfume, or weird floral stink of Soraya Mousch’s installation, so not Mrs. Whitcomb, thank Christ. Not Lady Midday, either—by all appearances, she’d be anything but quiet.

  “Hello?” I rasped, reaching out. Waited a single held breath of my own, till somebody took my hand: warm, soft, familiar. Like coming home after a long absence, so long your adulthood peeling away.

  “Lois.”

  I gasped.

  Voice almost cracking: “Mom?”

  She drew me in, and I came, willingly. We rocked and hugged a while.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her at last, when my tear-closed throat had widened enough to let me. Felt her hair stroke me lightly, back and forth, as she shook her head.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s okay, Lois. Everything’s okay now.”

  Aside from the whole hysterical blindness thing, I thought but didn’t say. Because yeah, in that one moment, it really did seem like it almost was.

  “Simon Senior, Bella?”

  “They went back up to Mississauga—he has something tomorrow, some deacon thing . . . and Simon’s not back yet either, though he texted me a few minutes ago, said they were letting him go. Still, there’s somebody out in the hall I kind of think you’d like to s—uh.” She broke off, momentarily flummoxed. “I mean . . .”

  I opened my mouth, probably to say I know what you mean, Mom, or something similarly on-the-nose. But a second later, I forgot whatever it’d been when Mom raised her voice, calling, “Okay, bud, c’mon in.”

  Footsteps thumped over the floor to the accompanying beat of high-pitched hoots, and someone—small but heavy, and hot enough even now that I felt his warmth long before he actually reached me—clambered onto the bed. “Well, everyone, we hope you had a great time singing and dancing,” Clark announced, his cod-Aussie accent echoing the end of one of his favourite Wiggles DVDs. “But there’s one little problem: Mom’s asleep!” Then, in a slightly different voice: “Oh, no—she must be tired from all that dancing! Let’s wake her up to say goodbye. One, two, three . . . WAKE UP, MOMMY!”

  I mock-jerked awake, blinking ostentatiously, trying to focus my gaze his way. “Oh!” I exclaimed, feeling the words wobble in my mouth. “Why did you wake me up? I was having such a nice dream—”

  (I dreamed I had no boy—those were the words I usually finished with, bending my simmering resentment into an in-joke, and Clark had picked it up as quickly as any other. No boy! he usually replied, triumphantly. But not today; today, the words locked in my throat.)

  Instead, I shifted to Dr. Seuss, oldest standby besides Mother Goose. “Here, in the dark,” I said. “Say, would you, could you, in the dark?” And felt him nod, my hand still touching his cheek, blessedly cool and fever free. “Look what we found, in the park, in the dark,” he responded. “We will take him home. We will name him—”

  “Clark,” I agreed, voice gone suddenly ragged. “It’s me, bunny. Do you see Mommy?”

  “I see her,” Clark replied. “And now, it’s time to kiss him.”

  “Sounds good. High-five?” I held up my hand.

  “Whoo-hoo!” said Clark, utterly deadpan, whacking my palm with his. “He will live in our house, he will grow and grow. . . .”

  (Will our mother like this? We don’t know.)

  Once more, he smashed his lips onto mine without any warning but an exaggeratedly theatrical “MWAH!” Brief as a branding iron, hard enough to almost hurt—but only in the best way. I gathered him up and hugged him fiercely, trying to calm myself by matching his febrile heartbeat to mine, till he finally started to squirm. “You’ve to let me go!” he ordered, sounding like a Hong Kong movie subtitle.

  “I might,” I said. “But there is a price, pretty boy, there is a price. Do you know what?”

  Reluctantly: “The price is hugging . . . and kissing.”

  “Exactly.”

  Clark had learned to accept these bursts of affection phlegmatically, but this time he resisted even less than normal, just letting his heavy, hard head rest on my breastbone. I could feel his grin, though; he knew this game, and liked it, as long as it didn’t go on too long. So he kissed me again, lips smacking, and I managed to extort a third one before the door banged open again, causing him to break free.

  “Who is it, Clark?” Mom called out, well aware he could tell even from here.

  “Daddy!” he yelled back, scampering over. I heard Simon’s grunt of effort; probably swinging him into the air.

  “That’s right, it’s your friend Daddy. And topsy-turvy means . . .”

  “Upside dowwwwn!” Clark yelled, and it was almost as if I could see it, imagining Clark arching back as Simon steadied him, making sure his hair only brushed the floor, instead of his skull colliding with it.

  “Family happens at Swiss Chalet,” Mom commented sidelong, echoing another longstanding piece of echolalic emotional shorthand. To which I simply nodded, reduced to silence once more, throat tight, eyes burning.

  “Yup,” I agreed, eventually.

  It was a good day after that, (lack of) eyesight issues aside. One of the best.

  But all good things come to pretty much the same end, if you only wait long enough.

  A week later, I woke cold and shaking in the middle of the night. I pried myself out of Simon’s grip and rolled to the bedroom floor, landing on hands and knees; the apartment seemed to reel around me, contracting and expanding, a seasick Hitchcock focus pull. What vestige of sight I’d regained over the last few days made everything around me just a series of vague lines and angles, but it was better than nothing. Good enough to navigate by, at any rate, as I felt my way up and into the living room, pulled my iPhone off its charge cord.

  I thumbed it on, password disabled since Simon had been kind enough to download some voice-activation software, and coughed, clearing my throat. “Call Safie Hewsen,” I told it.

  She picked up on the fourth ring; saw my caller I.D., obviously, since the first thing she s
aid was: “Miss Cairns?”

  “That’s right, yeah.” I coughed again then swallowed. “We, uh . . . I mean . . . well, we might’ve made a really bad mistake.”

  There was a pause.

  “Oh, you think?” she said.

  Later, I’d realize I didn’t remember falling asleep that night, not per se. Just what came after, and after that.

  I knew it was a dream the second I raised my head and could see again, unoccluded. But I knew even more quickly that what I was dreaming must be a memory—a lost memory, the lost memory. My most recently lost.

  First, a sort of light seed in the darkness, just beginning to bloom—the very start of an old-fashioned iris shot, unfurling outwards. And then I was back in the living room, my hand in Sidlo’s, at the moment of breakage—the same micro-instant, before my second trip down into buzzing, burning absence took hold. We were still murmuring together, he and I, but somewhere to the left of me I could hear Safie, stuck behind her camera; maybe I was making a noise she didn’t like, my words starting to slur, wincing as though in pain: oh, ah, fuck meeee. I couldn’t hear what she heard, what might or might not be coming out of me. Couldn’t do, or think, much of anything.

  It was slowing down, all of it—everything slipping sideways into a kind of a pocket, a funnel twisting slickly. Like the gap where your tooth used to be, where your tongue longs to go: stick it in, twist it, taste the blood. Because you know you shouldn’t.

  Free will, that bitch of a thing. Given the freedom to choose, we human beings will always make the wrong choice, every damn time.

  And then there I was, right there. With—

  (Her?)

  In front of me, over Sidlo’s slumped shoulder, a figure was taking form, shouldering aside the blinds like two bloodless flaps of skin—an autopsy’s Y-section, cauterized from within. Extruding out into the world head first, dragging its train through behind, its floor-skimming veil sewn with dangling mirrors, tinsel, and glass reflective from every angle.