Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

  For once, someone else’s display of temper didn’t spark my own; I was too far into terror for that, so far beyond anything I’d felt before that it lent its own weird clarity. So I squeezed back, replying, “Simon, baby, yes—you are clear, absolutely, but you’re wrong. You still don’t really get what you’d be in for.”

  “And you do?”

  “Well, yeah. Like you say, stuff’s happened. You saw it happen, some of it.”

  “I saw stuff happen to you, which is exactly why I don’t want you near it again; no more, Lo. No more.” He released my hands, rising, bag heaved over one shoulder. “I’m going to go settle up. When we get back, we’ll take a cab up to this place and Safie and I will shut this down while you wait outside.” To Safie: “Might be a good idea if you called Detective Correa, keep her in the loop. . . .”

  She nodded and he turned away, rummaging for his wallet as he rounded the next corner, heading for the bar. Left alone together, we only had to glance at each other—a blurry twist of what I assumed was her head—before I stood, too, coat already half on.

  “You in?” I asked her. “Tell me quick if you are.”

  “Lois, c’mon. All you have to do is wait.”

  “Yeah, sure—and then he runs in half-cocked, so Lady Midday can pick her teeth with him. Screw that noise. Plain truth is, if Clark has to lose one of his parents, it’s better if it’s me.” Saying it out loud sunk a phantom needle through my chest; she tried to protest, and I cut her off mid-word. “No, just shut up, okay? I may not be as shitty a wife and mother as I think I am, but if I’d only agreed to leave well enough alone, we’d be laughing; Simon’ll gladly kill himself getting me out of all this, and that’s not something I’m willing to live with. So help me, please.” I held out my hand shakily, barely able to see where it went. “Please, Safie.”

  Safie let out a long, stuttering breath. “Going by every horror movie ever, there’s no possible way this can end well, for either of us,” she said at last. “But . . . my Dédé always told me it was important to stand up, fight evil wherever and however, whether human or something else. Not to mention I guess some of this is on me, too.”

  “Hey, no fair,” I retorted. “I got funding, remember? Which makes your part of the proceedings a job, not an obsession.”

  “Least I’m getting paid,” she agreed. “Hell with it, though—let’s just do it, and call it even.”

  Up and out, through the back door and onto the patio, Safie steering me into the alley. We emerged northbound onto McCaul at a sort of loping run, pausing to hail a cab. We’d only been in it for a few minutes when my iPhone began to ring: Simon, who else? We headed up through tree-lined side streets toward the Kensington area. I hit the “ignore” button once, then again, and one more time. After that, he switched to a series of texts heralded by impatient chimes, text-to-talk’s vocal software growling at me in all-caps like a pissed-off Wookiee: LOIS DONT, LOIS STOP LOVE YOU, JUST FUCKNG WAIT GOD DAMN IT. I finally raised it to my lips and dictated three messages in quick succession: Sorry, I have to, Love. “Now send to Simon,” I told it, before I turned the whole thing off.

  The Saturday-night traffic was heavier than expected. I swore under my breath. “What time now?” I asked Safie, barely visible against the window, what with Chinatown’s lit-up heart whipping by outside.

  “Seven fifty-three.”

  “We’re not going to make it.”

  “We might. Hey, you know Wrob; he likes to waffle. If his introduction runs long enough, then maybe . . .” Safie sighed. “Then again, maybe it won’t even work for him. He wasn’t ‘touched,’ not like Mrs. Whitcomb, or Sidlo, or you; probably doesn’t know Lady Midday from her picture on the Vinegar House wall. If so, then for him, it’ll just be a film.”

  For a moment, I wondered what the cab driver thought of all this, if he was even listening.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t want to bet on it. Shit, he stole the thing She wanted to use as Her bible, Her doorway, then claimed it for his own—that’s gotta piss her off. Hell, this world’s going to piss Her off, the level of disrespect She’s going to face on a daily basis.”

  (Big “s,” big “h,” without thinking twice about it. Christ, I was starting to sound like I came from Dzèngast.)

  “I don’t think it’s about disrespect,” Safie replied. “Not really. I mean, yeah, She doesn’t like it, but it’s more people who aren’t . . . doing what they’re supposed to, neglecting their responsibilities. People with no vocation.” She paused. “Then again, how many people in that room—any room—know exactly what they’re meant to be doing?” I heard her swallow. “I mean, I sure don’t, and Lady Midday, She’s not exactly Jesus; no Hail Mary rain cheques in Her church. She doesn’t forget, or forgive.”

  I took a breath, felt it tremble in my chest, resonating: all fuzz, like some cordless speaker. Then whispered, the sound barely audible outside my own skull,

  “Well, fine—can’t really blame Her, not all that much. I was never very good at any of that crap, either.”

  By the time the cab let us out at the bottom of Augusta Avenue, into the unseasonably bitter November cold, it was already two minutes past eight. The streets were empty, and all I could see around me was a shifting black background pierced by blurred squares of yellow light. Safie paid, and the cab peeled away with unnerving speed; maybe the driver had decided he didn’t want anything further to do with the crazy-talking ladies . . . or maybe he could sense the same thing I could. Something in the freezing starless air felt strained, like a weak spot in a balloon where the rubber looked uneven, splotchy and thin.

  “Come on,” said Safie, and I felt her grab me by my wrist, the same way I’d grabbed Clark a thousand times or more: Enough fucking around, let’s move. I ran as best I could, blindly, trusting Safie’s path and stumbling from time to time. Once I tripped and went down completely, banging the hell out of my knee, but the adrenaline stifled the pain and I was back on my feet before Safie could fully stop. “No, I’m fine, I’m okay,” I gasped, and we resumed our run. The noise of College Street came over the rooftops, nearing as we closed in on the Ursulines, but strangely distant. If we passed anyone else, I never saw them, or heard them; all I could hear was Safie’s ragged breathing, and my own. We might have been alone, the city as empty as every post-apocalyptic vista ever: The Walking Dead’s Atlanta, 28 Days Later’s London . . .

  (Neither of which were really empty, of course. Which was the point.)

  I recognized the Ursulines not by the shape or colour of its light but by the quality: the rattling flicker of a film in motion, leaking around black squares of drawn shades on the upper floor of the big square building. We staggered to a stop below those windows, staring up in dismay. “Shit,” I choked, trying to get my breath back, “they’ve already started. Come on!”

  Safie let go of my hand, ran to the front of the building; I heard rattling, banging. “Doors are locked!”

  “That’s the bike shop! You go up the fire escape, ’round the back—I think it’s to the left . . . no, right.” I raised my voice as footsteps scampered past, startling myself: “Safie, don’t leave me!”

  “Shit—sorry!”

  Her hand seized mine again and I clutched it hard, too scared for shame.

  We clattered up cast-iron steps to the landing, turned. A tall rectangle of lead-coloured light hung before us: the doorway to the studio was propped open. The short hallway beyond led to a set of double doors between whose seams the flickering light danced.

  This is taking too long to tell. Longer than it took to happen, by far.

  What I heard next I recognized from my “dream”: the brazen bell, a slow, awful tolling; the fast, terrified breathing, thick and raspy with the air it gulped. A racketing thunder, more like a train hurtling along tracks than a film chittering through a projector’s reels. And all with the faraway tinny sound of a gramo
phone recording, despite the fact that I knew, knew, the film should have been silent—the silver nitrate stock we’d given Sidlo had no track for recording sound. And somehow beneath, around and surrounding all this noise, the utter, hypnotized stillness of an audience caught completely in a film’s spell—the stillness of a mouse before a snake, a rabbit before a stoat.

  Oh God, I thought, while beside me, Safie was whispering something in a sibilant, guttural tongue. None of it made sense till I caught one name—Malak-e-Tâwus—and realized she, too, was praying. I shook her by the elbow.

  Our first step forward felt like we were lifting our feet against gravity ten times that of Earth, the barely visible doors stretching away in a classic Vertigo push-pull zoom. Then we were past the threshold.

  A thunderous WHAM of light and heat smashed against us, almost knocking me on my ass, but the noise that followed pulled me right back up, like a cord.

  Screaming.

  The first person we found as we fought our way into that sudden inferno was Leonard Warsame, who’d been doing doorman duty—unobtrusively helpful to the last, like a good boyfriend should be. He was collapsed on the floor near the doors, hands over his ears; we helped him up, turning our faces away from the horrible radiance pouring out of what had once been the screen. I remember shouting, but I don’t remember what; later, in a Toronto Star article about the “disaster,” he was quoted as saying: Lois Cairns told me, “Don’t look,” and I said, “Believe me, I won’t!” At the time, all I saw was him nodding then following us back in, hunched over to stay below the smoke rapidly collecting against the ceiling. The air tore at our lungs as we bent, again and again, stumbling over knocked-down folding chairs, hauling up people lying limp or shaking in spasm, bleeding from noses, ears, eye sockets. I wound up with bloodstains on my palms, warm and coppery, as I had to feel my way over people for a handhold. Some bore bright, shiny burns on their faces and hands, eyebrows and eyelashes gone as if they’d been cooked. One man was having what looked like a full-bore fit, flinging himself up and down; it took me, Safie, and Leonard together to drag him toward the doors, and when we got there I collapsed, coughing.

  “Got to stop it . . . at the source,” I wheezed to Safie, who nodded, hacking up black phlegm. “The projector. Can you see it? Don’t look at the screen!”

  Safie nodded, covering her eyes with one hand and tilting the bottom edge up slowly, head ticking slow from side to side. At last she pointed, shouting: “There! Straight ahead. Lots of chairs in the way, and people. I’ll yell when you get near! Go!”

  I plunged back in, the smoke so thick it almost masked even the burning screen’s light. Faceless shapes stumbled past me, vanished. I tripped over a chair and just stayed down, crawling over the hot hardwood floor on hands and knees. For half a second, the slightly cooler, cleaner air was a blessed relief, till somebody crunched what felt like a size-sixteen boot down onto my left hand. I screamed, curling ’round the injury, then forced myself to straighten and kept crawling, sobbing, this time on only one hand, the broken one sweeping side to side. When it smacked into the projector stand I gave another yowl but didn’t stop—grabbed on with other hand, got my knees under me, then my feet. Forced myself up, tear-blind, the projector’s rattle a deafening roar. And then—

  The noise stopped.

  Everything stopped.

  My eyes snapped back into focus, clearer than they’d been since I was five. Like I was wearing glasses with an absolutely perfect prescription. My hand—red and swollen, one finger bent sideways at an angle—stopped hurting. I took a breath but tasted no smoke even though I could still see it everywhere around me, frozen in mid-air like blackish-grey wool muffling moviegoers caught in impossible poses, still trying to escape. Plus, cringing against the wall with one eye peeking through his splayed hands, Wrob Barney himself, paralyzed, appalled. Like Todt before the lost Ark of the Covenant.

  The moment between the minute and the hour, Vasek Sidlo seemed to say, in my mind. And the screen’s light shifted, brightening till it glared down from overhead, furious: the stark and pitiless noonday blaze of the fallow field, the wasteland, turning everything around it to a cut-out silhouette—reflecting something entirely outside the world I knew.

  I did then what I’d ordered Leonard not to—what I suppose I’d always known I would do, anyway: I looked.

  It was only a film, after all. Right? A permanent record of a single string of linear time, “cut” in camera to pull seconds together, to create a reality of its own, encapsulating a larger one. Its emulsion scored by nothing so crude as waves of lens-bent light, but by thought itself, because nothing else could part reality’s layers deeply enough to reveal what truly lay beneath: what was even now stepping down from that screen, towering up impossibly far beyond what the smoke-shrouded ceiling should have permitted.

  For two or three heartbeats, I tried to pretend it was nothing but Iris Whitcomb’s ghost again, in full Lady Midday drag—but all that stopped when the figure lifted its hand, simply wiping away that illusion, that glamour-shroud cocoon. What emerged was a thousand times more vast—the face, not the mask, or even the mirror: the Eye of the World, the still point, the muse. The thing that opens your own eyes from the inside, killing you with its glory.

  The truth, plain and simple: that every idea—good or bad—comes from someplace entirely other, knocking on the inside of your skull, trying to get out. And not everyone survives its scrutiny.

  (what sad damage she’s done you, that daughter of mine, in her raging. and all to keep you from me)

  (a thankless task)

  (your curiosity draws you to me, like moths to light. you see. you are seen)

  Not words, so much, but their meaning, placed directly into my brain by something for which speech was an impediment, not a tool. And on the same level I thought back, desperately:

  The hell do you want, anyhow?

  (what is due, only)

  (feed me. love me, and die of it. feed the earth, make it grow)

  (do your duty)

  Yeah, no, I thought back, before I could think better. Fuck that mediaeval bullshit, right in the fuckin’ ass.

  Then cringed, expecting annihilation. But it didn’t come; only stillness—a long, long no-moment. Followed by something I hadn’t expected, at all.

  (then choose another duty and know my favour, for those who serve will be blessed beyond dreaming)

  (ask, and you shall receive)

  Like . . . what?

  (let me show you)

  My brain peeled open.

  There’s this dream Mom has sometimes, and in it, Clark is an adult: tall, handsome, able to talk in complete sentences. They have a long, satisfying conversation in which he answers all her questions—he tells her he’s happy, tells her he’s always understood what we were saying to him, that he knows why we did the things we did and that he doesn’t blame us for anything. He tells her he loves her, always has, always will.

  It’s a beautiful dream, and it obviously means a lot to her, but I’ve never had anything like it, and I never expect to. Which makes me sort of sad, considering I’m Clark’s mother—what the hell does that say about me, in the end? After all, it’s a hope, not a lie; it might even turn out to be true, eventually. One day.

  And . . . here it was, at long last. Close enough to touch, or be touched by.

  Like a memory of the future, a history-to-be: I saw days blur into years, like frames in film—the sudden breakthrough, Clark’s speech and social skills exploding, years of delay caught up on overnight. I saw Simon promoted at his job, rich yet unchanged, still the same man who’d persuaded me to marry him by making it impossible to believe he’d ever leave. Rows of books, all with my name on them. Myself on stage, reading aloud to massive audiences, utterly pain-free. My mom, bragging proudly about me; people telling me what a difference my writing had made to their lives, how much I matt
ered to them. And then Clark onstage, too, performing, singing, his music spilling out of him, touching the world. Saying I love you, Mommy, with perfect clarity, perfect eye contact. I’ve always loved you—this is for you, because of you, all of it. Thank you, for my life.

  But—no.

  I put my hands to my eyes, felt the tears pouring down. Felt myself tense, suddenly head-to-toe rigid.

  That’s not my son.

  Because sure, She could show me something like him, maybe even give me something like him, like what he might have been—but it would be forever a fake, nothing but a doll, made from dreams and dead flowers. And I won’t let you back in, not for that, I thought. Not if it means I’m responsible for everything you’ll do after, sitting on a throne made from the bones of other people’s kids—whoever you think is useless—to save yourself from being forgotten.

  All gods who receive homage are cruel, Zora Neale Hurston once said, and, Christ, wasn’t that still true, like it always had been. All gods dispense suffering without reason, otherwise they would not be worshipped. . . .

  But what is equally true, today as it was then, in that one second, is this: that I will always want to earn what I get, however much it hurts; that I want it because it hurts, because pain gives life a point, and without it life isn’t even death, just . . . nothingness. And I will always want my son to be who he is, not how I’d like him, because it works both ways or not at all. Because if I’m not me, then who the hell am I?

  I may not love myself, I thought, but I do know myself. And you—don’t.

  All of this I flung back at Her, Lady Midday, in far less time than it took to write it down. Which may be why the pause She took before replying lasted longer than almost anything that had gone before.

  (but i can make you . . . better)

  (if)

  Yes, of course. If.

  Small gods tempt, like Safie’s Dédé said; they take what’s already ours then offer it back to us at twice the price, bountiful and cruel at the same time, for no good reason. The sort of gods whose attention brings inspiration inseparable from torment. And if we see too much, if we feel too deeply, are exalted, are set apart—we will never be comfortable, only blessed.