Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  Once the possibility of an origin beyond the veil is broached, the most seemingly unexceptionable images take on an eerie cast. Early film footage is uncanny enough in its own right to give an audience the feeling that they are watching a crew of pallid revenants rehearse with stiff and unaccustomed movements the half-remembered rituals of their former lives. Even under the best conditions, footage of this vintage is often grainy and flickering, and the passage of time commits new depredations from which the Moedeker archive has hardly been exempt: emulsions cracking or blooming with mildew, the film stock itself shrinking, sprouting buboes, and at last disintegrating into a little heap of brown powder.

  But is this decaying footage any less faithful to its subject? A disintegrating image might even capture the nature of death more precisely than a well-preserved one. We could liken film decay to the chemical changes effected by light in the photographic emulsion: the gradual registration of an image; what we lament as destruction might in fact be the culmination of the process, a perfect likeness. Likeness of what? Of death, of course. In which case we already have extensive documentation of our expiry, more than we could ever need.

  Moedeker’s life’s work would then be superfluous, and this is exactly the conclusion to which Moedeker himself came. But far from casting him into a melancholy humor that would eventually drive him to self-murder, as some melodramatic chroniclers have suggested, it opened up new avenues of exploration. Moedeker seems to have experimented with speeding up the process of decay with heat and humidity, deliberately destroying thousands of feet of film. The thirty-nine envelopes and sachets of brown powder found among his papers, carefully dated and numbered, but notoriously dismissed without laboratory analysis by an early cataloguer as “possibly soil samples or medicaments,” were of course films in their own right. How Moedeker intended us to watch those films is not at all clear; however, we are free to use our imagination. Perhaps we are to take them like snuff, or sprinkle them on our porridge like a digestive powder, or throw them by the handful into a strong wind. Or simply weigh the packets in our hands, imagining that in them an articulated world of moving light and shadow has been rendered, like suet, into a substance that retains all its former beauty, truth, and testimonial power in a more essential form—one closer to “the first and final stuff of being,” as Moedeker once wrote.

  A few years ago, an undeveloped roll of film was discovered in a corner of the basement that Moedeker had once praised for the “viscid” quality of its darkness. No one very seriously suggests that it is not Moedeker’s, but its precise vintage is contestable; still, the possibility that it was the last footage he ever shot is tantalizing. Until recently, however, investigation was paralyzed by a debate over whether or not Moedeker actually intended to develop the film or indeed ever to remove it from the rusty tin in which it has reposed for the better part of a century. Perhaps for Moedeker to leave it in obscurity was to “show” it to the darkness itself, or something of the sort, and the developed film would be a different work whose authorship must be reckoned unknown unless we ourselves wished to claim it. Despite the protests of purists and mystics, however, curiosity finally had its way with the reel.

  What can I say about this tantalizing footage? It is very long, but almost entirely taken up with a fury of visual snow that coheres, now and then, into short-lived patterns—white Catherine wheels against a white sky. The figural glimpses are very brief. We see what appears to be two persons, one bent over the other, engaged in some uncertain activity. It seems too much to ask that this footage show the Headmistress during (or after) her final moments of life, but if those hastening to tie two loose ends into a granny knot are correct, it is fitting that to unbiased eyes it is impossible to determine whether we behold murderer and victim, parent and child, or two friends meeting for the last time before one of them departs on a long journey.

  It is assumed that Moedeker left the school during the upheaval that followed the Headmistress’s death. The last undisputed evidence of his existence is a cobbler’s claim check, dated four days before her death, for a pair of shoes that, newly resoled, must have remained empty for ever.

  Where did he go? I do not have the answer, but I believe that he became at last so confused about the difference between life and death that it did not exist for him and he wandered freely between the realms. Perhaps when his body gave out he did not die, or at least not so you’d notice. Perhaps he himself did not notice. Perhaps that quiet buzzing you sometimes hear very late at night is Moedeker, turning and turning the crank of his old movie camera, though the film has long since run out.

  I like to think that he has found his lape.

  Letters to Dead Authors, #12

  Dear Herman,

  Something is going on in my school that I don’t understand. The students gather in groups that disperse when they see me coming. At night, the halls pullulate with sleepwalkers. One of them fell down the stairs and was found in the morning, bruised but complacent, staring at the ceiling with a bland and dreamy smile. In class, they look at me with that same smile. The dead pour through them without impediment. The ectoplasmoglyphs pile out at ever-shorter intervals as if with growing desperation, like pleas for help or warnings that are falling on deaf ears, and today, two different children addressed me in what seemed to be my mother’s voice.

  That at least is nothing special. Lately everyone speaks to me in the voice of my mother. Mr. Medlar, Mr. Whit, the children, the cook, visiting parents, police investigators. For a comprehensive list please consult the rosters archived in my office: second floor, first right, second door, first cabinet, second drawer, first file, A for Administration: an unexceptionable taxon, bespeaking the shining normalcy of our dealings. I insert this remark for the inspectors, but enough of them. Perhaps in any case I will burn this file before. Before what? Say on. My mother! Imagine my profound lack of surprise at hearing her voice issuing from the blue jaw of Detective Munch, rhymes with lunch, badge number 12345 (a little suspicious, that; someone has been careless about the details), who has taken to hanging around, waiting for someone else to die.

  I wonder if others hear her? Of course they hear her, absurd question. But do they recognize that inimitable gurgling moan? Probably not, she died before most of them were born, though I am not sure about Munch-rhymes-with-lunch. It is nice to hear from her, of course. I say this, but is it nice? Not at all. Not at this late date. And what surprises me, too, is that she can get a purchase in all those throats, many of them completely untrained, for what purpose is there in all that we do here if any Munch can open his mouth and emit a message from the dead?

  Rubbish, it does not surprise me in the least. What is speech but the endless prattle of the dead? Now what would surprise me, really surprise me, would be if someone actually said something new.

  I am beginning to suspect that I do not want to explain about the voice of my mother! I must be rattled. Well, you would be rattled too, if a mouse had just issued from the wainscoting, fixed you with an eye like a fresh black drop of blood, and said in your mother’s voice, “Sweet pea, it is getting late.” And if a minute later a moth—I am not completely crazy, I know most moths don’t have mouths, and not one has a voice box. But if in the dry bustle of its body against the lamp glass, you heard the soft clearing of a familiar throat, would you not fumble for the paregoric? It is at the very least surprising, at last, yes, something I can fairly call surprising, that an animal can channel our human dead. Would they not more plausibly channel their own, emitting squeaks first squeaked by an ancient Mus musculus in a little toga? And perhaps I am hearing things, but it seemed to me just now that even the squawk of the desk drawer has something human in it. Go to bed, Sybil.

  Next day. It was not my mother. Why would my mother take an interest in a shortage of Graham flour in our kitchen? A bad example, Mother was always trying to feed me. It is, I believe, the principle function of mothers. But that she would concern herself with the national cen
sus or the best method of finding the longitude at sea is more doubtful. Henceforth I will refuse to listen.

  But say that I’m wrong, say it is her after all: if this is the sort of thing she’s come back for, I will miss nothing by ignoring her. Nothing so juicy as an apology for being so weak-willed as to allow my father to foist me upon a body.

  “Foist me upon a body,” that is interesting, for who is this “me”? That a smear of personality builds up around the mouth is well known, but sometimes I suspect myself of recidivist egoism.

  Incidentally, I would like to repudiate the suggestion that the principles of my science are the mere sequelae of a morbid melancholia or what you might call a “hypo” with its roots in early childhood. This to say that while I have my humanities, as you wrote of another, they serve my vision. Not the other way around.

  Adamantly,

  Headmistress Joines

  13. Final Dispatch, contd.

  I am down at the swampy verge of our lawn, near the run-off ditch up which in flood weather the river washed garbage up onto the lawn, to the indignation and disgust of my father. I can see an eggshell bobbing like a coracle. Squatting in the thistles and milkweed, I am forcing my fingers down my throat, tasting mud, sap, tears, bile. Eventually also blood. Some sour sort of word is coming out of me.

  See how the void colors itself. See how it slops like water when with slimy fingers I pull off my shoes and wade in to catch the eggshell in my cupped hands. See how the void that is shaped like an eggshell bobs on the little pond I hold in my hands, then settles as the void that colors itself water drains through my fingers; see how my finger dents the rubbery little membrane inside the eggshell, pressing it down, until it bursts. See how I thrust my finger straight through the bottom of the shell. See how the shell cracks. How I crush it.

  We call this “remembering.” It is not very pleasant.

  I start up the damp lawn where the rubbery knuckles of mushrooms, nestled among the sparse grass under the chestnut trees, cry out as I tread on them and thus remind me that I am not living though I am walking, what I call walking, what is walking because I say so, which (saying) makes a path scroll underfoot, although a short while ago, if one may speak of whiles, I began to notice that my walking had the feel of creeping and then of crouching motionless inside a small dark place and listening as if for something I feared and expected.

  Death is not dark, ordinarily, has not hitherto been dark, for behind all specific things and even through them, I have seemed to see the glare of the page. But now death does begin to seem a little dark to me, while still remaining basically white; it is as if all I can see is the ink, and the chinks between these crudely pegged and wired-together pinewood splits let in only a little light.

  In the shafts float dust and rabbit hairs. When I exhale they somersault slowly. Then there is a smell. This is unusual, in death, we often forget about the smells, forget to describe them and thus forget to smell them. As soon as I smell smoke I know that I have been smelling it for several minutes already, and am all at once terrified. More terrified than the situation warrants, for I am in death already, and if I were to stay on, and thus die, it would be merely to accede to a condition already my own, and to a disaster, if it is one, that happened a long time ago. Though, as I tell myself this, my understanding of the land of the dead deepens suddenly, for I see that it is not necessarily true, though I have believed it and may again, that I am in control of where I go and what I do when I am dead, for someone else could write my story for me, as I have conceived writing it for others, and this Someone might not wish me well.

  I try to reassure myself with the thought that I have no enemies, but see at once that this is scarcely so. Why just last week I beat two children, fired a maid I suspected of burning, instead of darning, a threadbare sock, chased away a tinker, and adopted a supercilious tone with the town librarian, knowing full well that it would enrage her. Four, no, five people who might wish me ill, and that is not even counting the dead, some of whom have even better reasons.

  Thinking this I noticed a brightening of the darkness, an orangeing and yellowing and flickering and above all a changing. Suddenly the nothing was burning, is burning. I am not complaining, merely remarking. I am as calm as a wick. I stand in the furor, just like I did before, and wait to know what to do, which I will very soon, I am sure.

  You may take this moment to curl your hands into fists to warm your corpse-cold fingers.

  Do not worry unduly. It is a friendly fire, in a way. It is familiar. (From family, etymologically.) The nothing is woody and sheddy, sheddish, so it burns readily, and I burn inside it. As I would have burned, that other time, had I not leapt like the hare through the fire, coming out on the other side—of death, you might say—with smoking braids, no eyebrows, and crimped lashes. This time I shall stay put, being already on the other side. I shall think about walking calmly away, or about cold water rising, or about you, uncurling your fingers and taptaptapping, making the only sound in the quiet room except for the tick of something, probably a deathwatch beetle, in the walls.

  I would like to be telling a different story, secretary. Yours, say. You are more real to me at this moment than fire, though I suppose you are a kind of fire yourself. Do we not burn all our lives long, mixing fuel with oxygen to light our cells, and emitting waste like a kind of solid smoke at the other end? If so, you are a cool fire, friend, cooler than I am. I cool myself against you. I sleep alone, but you would discover, if we shared a bed, a purely hypothetical scenario, that I am like a furnace, that anything pressing against me would grow intolerably hot and begin to smell of smoke, until your eyes burned and you choked, your lips turning bluish gray, no, I am letting myself become confused, you would grow hot and wet, I mean with sweat, no matter how cold the night, no matter how dry the roaring wind, in which sparks and flecks of ash and charcoal fly, dotting your dress with eyelets ringed with expanding circles of fire, stinging your cheeks and neck so that you clap your hands to your face, crying, no, no, no, no—

  No.

  Compose yourself.

  Resume.

  Your story. You have a nonregulation black shawl draped around your shoulders, with my express permission; my office is not well heated. I do not require it, for reasons we have just considered; I could melt a tunnel through a blizzard. This building suits me not although but because it is damp and cold and dark and still as a tomb. Nothing orange and leaping here. No heating stove may more than smolder, as all the housemaids know—I stay out of the kitchen and choose not to know if other rules obtain there.

  You are wearing a black pinafore, flammable but not scorched, over a white blouse with long ink-spotted sleeves and a high neck to hide the burns. No, that is wrong, you have never been burned, dear listener. I assert it. Even if you once seized the handle of a cast-iron frypan that was sliding off the range toward your little sister and scorched the entire palm of your right hand, so that pale, plump continents of blister rose up on it—didn’t they?—you have never really burned. Not like—

  It speaks. Fire, I mean. It howls and sings and harangues and cajoles.

  You don’t know what I’m talking about, of course. Of course! Ha ha! It is so restful to talk to you. I would give you a raise if I did not know you would save it up toward your independence; and I prefer to keep you. But I shall get you a rug for your lap and a tasseled cushion for your feet or perhaps a hod of coal for your personal use as you taptaptap and listen to me, tap and listen all night long, coal to stoke the fire beating orange against the glass until it shatters—no! Your feet are not visible under your skirts but I can hear your narrow boots knocking against the runnels of my chair. That is certainly not the sound of nails exploding from the twisting wood or of a plank falling outward, crashing onto its burning side, to make a narrow blackened runway, edged with flame.

  Would you dare to walk that runway through a seethe of flame? You have the look of a deer about you, or perhaps a hare, na
rrow and wary and strange. Still, but prepared to explode into motion. To leap over or through a fire, if you needed to.

  You would leap! I applaud you. I too leapt. I do not need to leap this time. Though now the roof has caught. Of the shed. The sheddy nothingness that is all around me like a horrible womb. What a very absurd and tasteless phrase that is, dear listener. Let it stand; every stylist must have her peccata.

  All around me but tiger-striped. In every fire there are places where fire is not. Stripes of fire, stripes of the absence of fire. To escape a fire one need only organize the blaze so that all that is fire is in one place, and all that is not fire in another, balled together, as it were; then one may walk through an inferno unscathed, and out of it. This, rather than hare-like leaping, is the approach of the rational demiurge, the approach I now prefer. I do not even look back to check whether the roof fell in, as it had to, the moment I leapt, I mean stepped through the break in the wall, placing my feet one after the other, walking the plank to safety. Now there is just a little heap of nothing burning behind me. Smoke is twirling up into a question mark; now it is thinning, now it is gone.

  You, too, did not panic, I am sure of it. You are cool. Competent. And compliant. Of course you are, or you would not have the job you have.