Vanishing Monuments

by John Elizabeth Stintzi

  That’s the thing my life has been missing, the reason why I haven’t been making photos. Why the first roll I’ve shot all year is the one I took when I walked into Mother’s house. I haven’t even put film back into the camera, but I can smell a little bit the smoke, here. I know there’s something here that will cause me to ignite.

  I want it to happen, and I am terrified that it will.

  It’s nearly two in the morning by the time my car runs out of gas here on Ethelbert. Over the last six hours or so I turned the car off only a few times, because I saw police driving down the streets. I didn’t want someone to come to the window and ask me questions I couldn’t answer.

  I have been sitting here, with the overhead light on, reading Ovid. Leafing through to passages underlined or marked with questions, by me or whatever kid checked it out before I stole it, whose name is probably still on the library card. Medea, Bacchus, Midas, Philemon and Baucis, the creation, the epilogue. I’ve been picking up the book, opening it, reading a little, then putting it back down, overwhelmed. As the engine died, as the gas light beeped for the last time, I opened it to Daedalus and Icarus. Exile, hubris, and open sky. Daedalus was telling Icarus to follow him, to fly the middle way—not too high that his wings would melt, or too low that the sea’s spray would weigh them down—as the engine stopped and it got so quiet. So I put the book down, letting Icarus live on a little longer, and turned off the ignition to keep the battery alive.

  The rain has let up, and the neighbourhood is dead. I get out of the car. I don’t lock it. I put Mother’s camera under my jacket and hide under the umbrella. I head west, away from Mother’s house. Every step I take I feel like I slip five steps back, but my body moves forward, and I try to pretend it is carrying me even farther away.

  These streets at these hours are years of me, quieter and lonelier than I remember them. My feet hitting the curbs, feeling the rise and fall of the sidewalks—it is a tempo I once had, that I used to slip into with Tom every chance I could.

  Tom. The body knows, and walks me north onto Home Street: blocks starting and ending, most of the windows asleep.

  I stop and tilt the umbrella back so I can see the dark rectangular building with the tiny porch light at the tip of a short awning: windows, darkness, angles.

  This is where Tom’s house used to be. I didn’t know, of course, that his house was gone, torn down—with the houses of his neighbours on both sides—to put in this little apartment building. The address misappropriated and split into unit numbers. I haven’t talked to Tom since before I jumped continents for Hamburg, back when he was someone I had keeping a loose eye on Mother. I didn’t call to tell him that I’d left the States, that the phone number and address he had wouldn’t be any good, even if I ever came back. And when I did, it was only to find that his phone number—Del’s number—was gone, too.

  When I started to construct my memory palace, I went through a few houses before I ended up at Mother’s. I tried mine, Genny’s, and even Erwin Egger’s in Hamburg, but none of those really felt right. I used Tom’s house for a long time, though. It was a house I always knew as a mess, a house so old and poorly built that almost every single floor was drooping in at the middle, or tilting to one end. The door to Tom’s bedroom couldn’t even close all the way because of the way the house leaned. So it wasn’t possible for him to lock it, and most of the time he had no reason to. It wasn’t so different from Mother’s house, except for the very important fact that it was not Mother’s house. Which, for a long time, was a very important distance for me to preserve.

  Tom’s house worked well as the palace, particularly because it was well suited to holding early memories of Genny. But eventually, when I went into the palace I started thinking more and more about Mother’s house, about Mother, and as soon as I heard how much further she was slipping away, I started adding more memories about her. And as I did, Tom’s house began to get blurry. I stopped being able to picture the walls that held the things I had put there. Instead, the memories themselves stretched over the gaps and became the walls, but that became too much. You need the empty space between memories to make a memory palace work. After Tom’s house failed, I decided to try using Mother’s, and it was then I realized the ways memory can have a life of its own. Memory itself has the power to tell you what you will remember. The remembering place makes such a difference when it’s the place where the memories were made.

  But Tom’s house is gone. Where those beautiful old wood walls once stood, there are now four storeys of cinder blocks and concrete. The building obscures the light milked sky, which on cool nights in the summer we would sometimes look up at, our backs on the dewy, unkempt lawn, while Del was inside, drunk and angry, or soberly not-alone. We would watch, Tom and I, as a small collection of the brightest stars slowly burned their way through to us.

  “Only the best,” I say, looking up at the ceiling of clouds I cannot see.

  I stare at the blackness, a blackness I must make sure not to fly too close to. I walk away from the place where Tom’s house was and try to imagine that nothing has changed, that no time has passed, and that by the time I get to the corner of the street, I could turn around and see his lumbering silhouette waving to me, walking toward me, as we readied for a night in the dark together, stumbling these streets.

  I don’t turn around to see him waving. I drag myself down toward Mother’s house, but when I’m about to cross Ethelbert, I put all the force in my bones into turning, into making my way back into the gasless car. But I can’t. The turn happens a street too late, onto Mother’s street, so I try hard to pull back and end up walking up the back alley, to the rear end of Mother’s car—a brighter shadow in the opening of the dark fence. I pass the car, rusting in its little back lot, my hand grazing the wet white paint as I walk toward the back door of the house that leads directly into the kitchen. I freeze. Distinct parts of the memory of this door reconnect: hand, stove, tines, a sharp and furious pain in my left thigh.

  By the time I’m going again, I’m walking around the house to go in through the front door instead. I’m taking off my raincoat, hanging it up, and holding the camera like a bowl of warm soup as I climb back up the stairs to Mother’s room. I recall pain burning into my thigh. I stand in the doorway, looking at the rough sea of the covers on the flat world of her bed. I feel wings on my back, a melted worthlessness, heavy, like a backpack filled with an ending.

  I have not made it very far, have I?

  I could say this out loud, but it wouldn’t make a difference. The house can hear me even when I don’t say it. Silence is the language this place knows best.

  When you come into the kitchen with memories, you pull them out of your head like canisters of film. You slip them into the dark-filled sink and work them with touch, only. You work them until you can feel that they have taken the shape you want. You work them until you can hear the memory’s noise resonating up from the sink. Until you can smell it, taste it. Until it is as good as happening in that exact moment. Then, you yank it up from the dark, hold it up to the scrutiny of light.

  When you underwork them, you pull the memories from the sink and it takes a while for you to see the full picture. The memory doesn’t make enough noise, doesn’t move quite fast enough, to seem like real life. Framed and placed on the walls of the living room, these underworked memories would simply fade out. You would skip over them with your eyes. You would not hear them participating in the cacophony of the room.

  Sometimes, though, you overwork the memory, and it is too perfectly re-created, which means that the second you pull it out from the sink you find yourself engulfed by it and it alone. It becomes too immersive to be able to be housed within the palace, so when you pry yourself out of it, you are back in your life rather than the palace.

  To make a memory right and ripe for the task of being remembered, you must bring it to the brink of being fully realized, just under a perfect re-creation of life. That way, you can climb into the memory, r
elive it, and still be able to climb out into the palace.

  I lie in Mother’s bed, thinking about the dead boy in the river and feel the gap where that distinct, innocent piece of me has been missing for so long. The piece of me that went grey and fell off when I ran away to Hamburg.

  My phone is in the car with Ovid, and I am naked here, thinking about water. Sinking. Exhausted by life.

  I stop breathing, try to forget my body exists. But Mother’s camera is around my neck, strangling me to remind me that it does.

  The first night I went over to Tom’s, the first night we took to these streets and stayed out late, I was still a few months from thirteen and Tom was going on fourteen. We had met about a year before, when he was sitting in Mr Whipple’s art class, still at work on a pretty bad painting, and I walked in at the tail end of the group of classmates for mine. His painting was bad partly because he was working with his left hand. His right was in a cast because he’d broken it that week on the side of a kid’s head, a kid who was probably at least two years older than him. But Tom was already a giant. He overheard the kid saying some things that he didn’t like, things that Tom refused to repeat to me, so he just snapped and went nuts on him.

  It was mid-January that first night, deep into winter. Neither of us really wanted to go home after school. Del was drinking again, and Mother had slipped back into quiet for the last two weeks. That was about as long as she’d ever stopped talking, the usual maximum that her eyes slipped behind the grey veil and she turned ghost. But I couldn’t stand it, and each time I could stand it less. She’d stop scheduling portraits, stop leaving the house, stop doing much of anything besides wandering room to room, doing yoga, and sleeping. I hated it, hated how it drew me out and toward her, such that I would talk to her about all the pointless, stupid little things in my head in hopes of hearing her voice, in hopes of being addressed and acknowledged. I wanted her to listen to me. I wanted her to tell me to shut up. It made me feel stupid, how much I tried to bait her out of it, how much I tried to bait her toward talking to me. I couldn’t stand being in the house with her silence, and after those last two weeks, I decided I wouldn’t stand it anymore.

  Tom and I stayed after school, in the art room, for as long as Mr Whipple was willing to stick around with us. I crammed myself into the school’s tiny leaky darkroom, trying to remember the timings of the agitations, and Tom sat at an easel nearby. We talked to one another loudly through the door, while I tried to string the rolls of undeveloped film onto the spool, and he tried to paint a self-portrait. By then, I’d been shooting for a while, with cameras I borrowed from the school and film I either bought or lifted from drugstores. I’d mostly take pictures of myself through mirrors, or set up the camera on a desk and make dramatic faces at it. I was obsessed with looking at and archiving myself. I made no sense to myself; my limbs felt unlike my limbs, my neck not my neck, my lacks not my lacks. I’ve always been enamoured with the stranger of myself. Sometimes I’d also take photos of Tom, painting or sitting around. Every shot had people in it.

  When Mr Whipple had to kick us out, Tom and I scrunched deep into the heat of our coats and wandered around. We went downtown—down Portage—and walked to the Red. As it got dark, we wandered down to the Forks and out onto the thick ice. People were skating up and down, and we walked on the trail beside, going up the Assiniboine. We didn’t talk about what we were doing, why we were doing it—we just did it. I distinctly remember the night progressing, and slowly losing feeling in every piece of my body but my heart and my head—though my face was good as gone. We ended up following the Assiniboine’s windiness to the edge of Omand Park, climbing off the ice, and turning back into Wolseley.

  Eventually, we did make it to Tom’s; we were too cold. But by the time we got there, Del—tall, looking so much like Tom but sallower—had passed out on the couch. Tom went to the kitchen and ran his hands under lukewarm water to get the feeling back, and then picked up the bottles surrounding his mother. He got a chair and put any bottles that still had alcohol high up on the top of the kitchen cupboard.

  “I want to give her a chance to realize what she’s doing,” he said, holding back the emotions from his face.

  Once the feeling came back to my hands, I went draped a blanket over Del. Tom fixed the blanket so that it was double layered over her feet. “She’s got bad circulation,” he said, to the sound of us ascending the uneven stairs to his bedroom.

  When Tom and I got into his bed to warm up, I thought that maybe I’d never go back home. That maybe I would just no longer live with Mother, that it was clear she did not care about me, did not love me. That she was a dangerous thing to be near, that the middle distance I needed to keep was too far from her. How could I help her if she couldn’t even say a word to me, couldn’t tell me what she was feeling? I warmed up next to Tom, feeling at war, and then got out from the covers to raid his closet for his loose, faded Iron Maiden shirt. I climbed back into bed, resolving to stay with them, with Tom and Del. Resolving to become Tom’s real brother.

  “Tom, I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go back, not ever.”

  “Then stay.”

  His bare arm was next to mine, our arm hairs tangling, our bodies yet unmarked. I wanted my skin to open up and tie itself to his. I wanted to no longer be myself, I wanted to be Tom, I wanted to feel straightforward and clearly cut. But I couldn’t. My lot was trapped a few streets down.

  “Tom, will you walk me home?”

  “Of course I will.”

  I had this sense, walking back that night, around two in the morning, that our house knew everything about Mother, knew her, and I believe that it still does. Just like the story in Ovid about the reeds that whisper the secret of King Midas’s ass-ears on the wind, like spores. Only instead of reeds, it was the walls of our house, it was the walls that were already built but were rebuilt by our living inside of them, by our having stormed and infected them with our breathing, with our quiet proximity. They knew everything, those walls, knew us each better than we knew the other.

  I knew, walking with Tom, a very short walk, holding his hand through our gloves, that by choosing to go back home that night, by returning to a house that did not feel filled with love so much as sorrow, that did not feel like life happened in it at all, I was losing myself. I knew that I had made my choice: to come back forever.

  When Tom and I walked down that street, the living room light was on and the curtains open, and Mother was sitting on the couch, staring out toward the night. I went to the door, unlocked it with my key, went inside, and hung up my coat.

  The second choice I made that night, knowing that I would be forced to repeat it again and again, was that I didn’t go into the living room to see her, to confront her, about how my love for her was destroying my ability to stand being around her. Instead, I went straight up the stairs to my bedroom, where I sat with my back against the door and listened to her flick off the light, lock the front door, come up the stairs, and go into her room.

  I didn’t realize then that Mother’s silence would continue, past those two weeks to another six months, to when she went to shoot photos of horses at the Assiniboia Downs and ended up in Selkirk.

  The air outside the house is silent this morning, but the wind inside is howling at my back again, pressing me close to the gas range, turning it on to boil the kettle for tea. I slip in and out, remembering, pressure breathing as if a window is missing in the palace and the front door is ajar. I’m double exposed here: standing near the stove with the kettle and—at fifteen—heating the tines of a fork on the burner. The exact same burner. No matter the water, the tea, I can’t stop the kid from heating their fork the same way they saw their mother do it, heating it until the warmth wanders up to undermine their grip on the handle.

  The kettle is starting to rumble, preparing to whistle; the kid lowers their jeans to the knees with their free hand. Then, Mother is there, possessing them, overflowing them, hiking up her skirt. The inner th
igh that the kid presses the steaming metal of the tines to is both their thigh and their mother’s thigh at once. I feel the sizzling flesh, too, the teeth biting hard the bottom lip, the wailing inheld, the kettle uneasy and beginning its scream. They are both here with me, burning and squirming, attempting to feel, attempting to feel alive after coming back from the dead into a numb life. I’m leaving my belt on; my hand grips the buckle, to either guard it or be ready to yank it off. I see the wounds on the kid, on fifteen-year-old me. I stare at them, at Mother’s flesh superimposed there, which we only saw happen through the window one night, at fourteen, in summer, when I was coming into the house from the back door—a few gargantuan months before the kid does it, too. Even though I’m standing here beside Mother, I can only see her filtered through the grime on glass.

  I don’t take off the belt and peel off my jeans. I don’t want to see the scar again, from one of the first times I tried to wear Mother’s pain, to follow after her. The kettle, the kettle—Yes, I hear you. I remember when I was fourteen and Mother came back from Selkirk, remember helping her into the bath day after day, and counting the collection running along the inside of her left thigh. I knew the number then but cannot recall it now, can only recall the depth and the leather of hers, a testament to her commitment to containing pain, the tine of each scar like a bar in a prison cell. I remember her going over to the sink and washing that fork as I walked in the door, remember again her wailing soon after she came back from Selkirk, her dam burst, having returned from the dead by taking pills that seemed mostly to make her more erratically and visibly despairing. I’d sometimes find her wailing in her sleep, hot steam bursting from the roiling hell in her chest. Sweat draws rivers down the side of my face: her long skirt dropping back down to a knee, a pair of jeans hoisted back up to a wincing belly, tears running down my face. Water running from a tap, boiling hot. No soap.

  Three hands kill the burner at once, but only mine lets a belt buckle free to reach for a kettle’s handle as the whimpers cease, and only one mouth yelps at the grasp of the too-hot handle, only one brain reminded of the lesions caused by reaching out when it is already far too late.