Vanishing Monuments

by John Elizabeth Stintzi

  When you walk into the kitchen, you like to imagine that you have full control over all of your remembering, that you have the capacity to keep things bright. You like to think that while you go to the cupboard to fix the broken glass of the photo from the landing you stepped on, while you attempt to reprint a photo from the living room so it won’t have Mother in it, watching. But you know that as good as the print looks in the bright kitchen, as soon as you retrace your steps to bring it into the living room, Mother will slowly burn her way into the composition. Just like you know the stove is there, in the corner that you don’t want to look at, spewing its deep, red shadows. Just like you know there are holes in the walls, around the windows, under the door, where the wind sneaks in. When you stop to look around, you can feel it encircling you.

  It was May then, too, that night when I was fourteen and came back to the house and the living room lights were off. I remember Tom walking me to the door, equally surprised that Mother didn’t seem to be up and waiting for me. I figured Mother was in bed. It was after four in the morning, a bit later than I was usually out. Tom and I had spent the night listening to records while he painted the fifth painting of a banana in a week, the same banana in the same spot, only getting riper and riper. The music we played while he painted was loud, but we could still hear the bed creaking in his mother’s room.

  When I got inside I went upstairs and went to sleep. All the lights in the house were off.

  In the morning, I went downstairs to the phone and saw the tape in the answering machine was full. I rewound it and played it back. A crackly voice came on and said, “I’m calling about Mrs Hedwig Baum. Don’t worry, she is okay.” That was how the message started.

  The voice was a doctor who said that Mother had been admitted to Selkirk Mental Health Centre that afternoon—the previous afternoon, Friday—after she’d tried to climb over the fence at the Assiniboia Downs. She’d been hysterical. The voice said she was stopped before she could make it over, had been weeping and yelling in German. I could hear the hooves stomping the dirt in my head. He said that she had been placed under full-time watch, as she seemed to have broken into a severe depressive state. He said she was going to begin receiving therapy that evening. He left a number and said to call as soon as I got the message.

  But I didn’t call back, not right away. I rewound the tape so that the answering machine could record over it again. I sat down on the couch. I stopped sitting and stood up on the couch. I went up to Mother’s room and checked her cameras. The Rolleiflex and her old Leica were still there, which meant she’d taken the Nikon, which meant she’d been at the Downs to shoot for the newspaper, since that camera was the most dependable for action. I slung the old Leica around my neck, went back downstairs, and called the doctor; I thought if I didn’t, they’d send cops. I was surprised they hadn’t already.

  But they must not have known that I was alone.

  The man I talked to, who wasn’t the doctor—the doctor was busy—told me that Mother was resting. They’d given her a round of therapy the night before and would give her another that afternoon.

  I told him I would be staying with my friend Thomas Roux. I gave him Tom’s address on Home Street and phone number, told him the good times to call if they needed to get in touch with me. Then I hung up and went to the darkroom, took Mother’s film out of the Leica, and loaded it up fresh. I didn’t call Tom; I just went over.

  I stayed with him for three days, watching him paint that banana again and again, the last time almost fully black, before deciding I had to leave.

  “I called the hospital and she’s coming back this morning,” I told Tom on the Tuesday. “I won’t make it to school, but I’ll call you later.”

  I went home and listened to the answering machine. There were some clients calling about scheduling portraits, mostly for students graduating from high school that spring. They’d seen Mother’s ad and liked her price.

  When I showed up to photograph these kids, kids who were older than me, the parents were a bit confused, but I handled the camera well. I had watched Mother do it. It wasn’t so hard, and they were clearly too uncomfortable to ask if I was really her. I’d introduced myself: “Hey, I’m Hedy Baum—sorry for being late!” They paid me the upfront amount, and I went home and developed and printed the good shots in the sizes they wanted. The next day I called them and said they could pick them up: “Already?” Of course. I was a professional.

  I did that for a few days. Then, I don’t remember what.

  Next thing I knew, I had a buzz cut and Tom was yelling at me in my living room, for lying to him. The hospital had called and told him that Mother was going to be released on Monday. It was Saturday then. He ran to my house as soon as he got off the phone. He was still panting as he yelled.

  Tom stayed with me until Monday. We didn’t go to school; we just waited. I took lots of pictures. I liked using Mother’s darkroom, her camera.

  When she came home, driven by one of the nurses, she looked tired and blank. The nurse gave me the keys to her car and said that an outpatient nurse would be visiting her daily to make sure she was doing fine and taking her medication. Tom stood in the doorway and helped Mother into the house, guided her upstairs to her bed. After the nurse left, I sat beside her while Tom went downstairs and made her some tea. Her camera was around my neck. Her keys were in my pocket. I don’t know if she noticed. We didn’t talk, but she did. A little bit. What she said was very quiet and I couldn’t make out most of it.

  Later, Tom and I took a bus to the Downs and he drove her car home. That night, he slept on a pile of clothes on my floor.

  According to Ovid, after Icarus did not heed his father’s warnings to fly the middle way—melting his wings and falling into the sea—Daedalus just kept flying. Had he followed Icarus down, Daedalus would have also broken from the middle way, and the spray of the sea water would have weighed his wings down, drowning him alongside Icarus. He saw his son falling from too high, calling out to him—but what could he do? He had a course to keep. How could he join Icarus when there was a pathway, a jet stream, a method of breathing possibility stretched out ahead of him?

  Ovid writes that once Icarus was dead, Daedalus was no longer a father. Icarus was, then, no longer a son. Who was punished by this identity stripping? Who lost their identity first, and then entangled the other in that loss? The blame is murky; they were victims of each other’s hubris. One drowned because of the other’s invention; one robbed the other by means of rebellion.

  As his son plummeted, Daedalus kept flying, kept course. But every day following Icarus’s screaming and gurgling in the sea, Daedalus probably imagined himself as a huge bird, swooping in and saving him, grabbing his body with his feet like an eagle. At night in bed, unson’d, he would put his wings back on and, in his dreams, go circling, diving, invincibly putting his toes around his son’s spine, lifting him up, carrying him face forward through the wind, so that he might look at the life ahead of them, as Daedalus pumped his way to the mainland, stretching out to the unreachable horizon. With his toes inset, Daedalus would feel his son’s heartbeat, the heartbeat keeping Daedalus a father. Daedalus’s protection keeping Icarus a son.

  And every time, before he could reach the mainland, Daedalus would wake up, his arms broke-tired and grounded, tipped with featherless fingers, his face sea-swept and weary.

  I let my burnt hand run under the water at the sink and look out the kitchen window to Mother’s car sitting patient in its spot. My palm in the cool water has that shrinking feeling of slapped skin. I feel it, feel very here in this body, drown it, look up toward the cupboards above the sink and remember this is where Dorothea hid the keys: behind a coffee tin on the near-empty top shelf. I turn off the water, grab a chair from the kitchen table, climb up onto the counter, and look behind the empty can. And just like that, here they are.

  It’s exactly the same place I hid them, when Mother came back from Selkirk and couldn’t be trusted driving yet.
/>
  I walk out through the back door to her car. Of course, of course, it doesn’t start. Nothing happens with the key in the ignition: no lights, nothing. I sit in the driver’s seat and sink back to the day Tom drove me and the car back from the Downs. That was one of the last times I was even in this car. It has hardly changed, though it smells of mildew and there are little explosions in the back seats from rodents chewing through the cushions. There’s also that dirty fog that windows get from static time. This car probably hasn’t been driven in nearly a decade.

  I pop the hood, stand in front of its open chest, and stare down at the battery, the stopped heart. I put my hands on it, where the lead clamps onto the nodes. Positive. Negative. Ventricles.

  An older man walks by in the back lane. I catch his eye for a second and know he’s one of those old men who wander around life looking for someone with an open hood. He stops walking and smiles at me. His blue eyes are tight mouths of wrinkled deltas, his smile wide and kind and fake-toothed. His shirt is longer than it needs to be, his raincoat too short, and he’s in black rubber boots that go all the way up to his knees. I look down at his hands: in one he has a repurposed grocery bag with the wooden hat of a large nutcracker coming out the top, eyes wide and staring and blue, too, and in the other hand is nothing but a grip that could hold the ghost of a leash. A clear and palpable absence. It’s Saturday, just past noon. This man has probably been to a yard sale. I smile back at him and lift my hands from the battery.

  “You her son?” he says, shuffling over, nodding to Mother’s house and looking at the hood.

  “I am. Al,” I say, waving, not wanting to offer my hand to shatter the memory in his grip. I also don’t want him to put down the bag.

  “I’m Blaine,” he says, pulling his face from years ago back to here.

  Blaine comes over to the hood and looks in, tells me he used to see Mother walking west on Wolseley every few mornings—toward Asha’s, I know, for yoga, but do not say. He lives just down the street, he says, across Wolseley, where Mother’s street changes its name, curling off into an avenue—like the Forks, where the Assiniboine River loses its identity to the Red.

  He asks me how Mother is and I tell him she moved a few years ago, to Ste. Agathe—the name of a town south of the city that I passed on my drive in—because we have family who can take care of her. The truth is we don’t have family anywhere.

  I tell him I think the car’s battery is shot, and he says of course it is, that’s what happens. “If you’d like, I can go get my car and we can try and jump it up.”

  I nod. Blaine goes off, and I just wait here. Staring for a long time at the back of Mother’s house, at the second-floor window that seems so much lower now than when I scaled down from it a lifetime ago. Studying the folded mat of the back lawn’s grass before Blaine makes it back with his truck, chugging along slow, squelching through puddles in the rough back lane. He pulls up as close to Mother’s car as he can, doing something like an eleven-point turn, and gets out so that we can string his cables to both car’s hearts. We stretch them out between the two and they aren’t long enough, but I rifle around in the back of Mother’s car and find hers. Both cords lock teeth in the middle, then Blaine gets into his old truck—as old as Mother’s car, the bed filled with plastic totes, the passenger seat peaked with bags—and revs it up. I get in Mother’s car and turn the ignition over and over. It coughs. It screams. It knocks and shudders. But eventually, it comes to life. I let the key stop starting it and it stays, snorting. I get out of the car and give Blaine a thumbs-up.

  I smell smoke, a little, and can’t quite tell if it’s coming from the car or from inside my head. I want to ask Blaine to come over and sit in here and smell, but I don’t. I unhook the cables from the battery, go over to his truck, and thank him.

  “My pleasure,” he says, winding his cables into a loop. After, his free hand returns to its leash grip.

  “I’m going to drive the car around to make the alternator recharging the battery more entertaining,” I say, and he smiles at me through the window as he puts the truck into gear.

  “I’ll see you around, Al,” he says, then pulls out down the alley and away.

  I get back in Mother’s car and go, hit Portage, turn west. The car curdles along the street, and I can tell from the way it drives that the tires are probably low. The gas is old, the oil too settled in its old head, but it’s moving. I keep going west toward the edge of the city, and when I cross the perimeter, for a moment, I feel technically out—but only out enough to make it to the Assiniboia Downs.

  My whole life feels like I’m retracing steps.

  I pull into the empty parking lot, into an estimation of a place where Mother parked the car before Tom and I came to take it home. It’s around two in the afternoon, and there are no races today because of the weather. Running the track would be sprinting through deep muck. The place is vacant.

  I picture Mother watching the seamless ease of the motion of the horses. I try to place myself in the destructive quality of it.

  I turn off Mother’s car, get out, and look at it sitting there. I don’t lock the doors, and I leave the keys on the seat. Around the Downs, huge posts hold spotlights high like a ship holds cannons. Chain link frames the parking lot, keeping people from getting out to the track without going through the building, past the line of betting tellers.

  Here, contained but open-aired, is the place where firm beasts ran tight circles. Where firm beasts still do. Where short men stand up on glazed backs and beat forward, forward, forward, faster. The place where, years before she went to Selkirk, Mother brought me with her while she took photos for the paper and then led me up to the sides of the winning horses, asking if it would be okay if I reached out to touch their hips, their shivering, hot flesh.

  Here, contained in the loop behind this fence, is the place Mother, alone, sadfrantic, tried to throw herself under the hooves of beauty and power and God.

  I turn away, from the car and the Downs. I want the things that the Downs remembers to stay here.

  I start to walk back toward Winnipeg—the city of puddles—along the wet highway. I cross again into the perimeter and walk east until I make it to a gas station where a taxi is filling up. I wave to the driver and he nods to me. I approach and ask him if he’s working.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he says, so I keep walking until I find another, ten minutes later, spitting, as the bound pressure on my chest no longer feels like a natural phenomenon at my ribs, as the packer becomes nothing but a blank weight.

  When I finally make it back to Mother’s house, I open the door to my memory palace.

  I was around ten years old when Mother started doing yoga, and I started to spy on her. She turned the empty room beside my bedroom, the room that had been Ilsa’s, into her studio, and if I climbed up onto the rickety loft bed—which I was not supposed to do; Mother didn’t trust it—I could see her through the grates of the air vent that came up through the wall between us, breathing fresh, tinny air into both rooms. I’d sit up there, wary and still, not wanting to make the bed creak or crash, and watch her bend, fold, and pause in the naked dawn light. For a lot of my life I connected the smell of circulating air with that image of Mother. When I hear a heat vent blow or an AC unit turn on, I can see her, through the vent’s bars in my head, turning and stopping and writhing in the light.

  Around the same time, I began to be bashful about going out into the hall to dress in clothes from the armoire. I stopped on a morning when I woke up late, just after Mother had finished her yoga and shower. I opened my door and found her in front of the armoire. She was naked. She didn’t notice me standing in my room, staring out. When she’d started to practise yoga, she seemed to lose her ability to sense my presence in her world. So I just stood there, stalled in the dark opening as she dabbed herself with a yellow towel and pulled out clothes. She was a tight, unabashed form, and I was completely blown apart at the sight. Her muscles were ready yet reticent, her breasts
enviously small, and she had gotten a control over her body that I only later—many years later—realized was a clue to how her mind was chaos. I recognized it in her when I first saw it in myself. She started doing yoga around the first time I remember her going silent, when her depression began to overtake her. But even so, and perhaps because of this—this dark shadow that had been chasing her, that had finally gotten its dimness on her, and that was trying its damnedest to destroy her, to minimize her into nothing—she was completely beautiful.

  I remember that moment vividly, her standing in front of the armoire, the way her long hair spun and curled behind her, how she rested her weight on her left leg. How the scar on her stomach, curving, insinuated that I’d been difficult her entire life. I felt ashamed. I felt like a poor copy of her. That image of her seemed to stand there forever, until it didn’t, until it turned back to her bedroom without noticing me.

  That felt like the story of our lives: one of us turned away while the other, unbeknownst, stared from the corner, sharing our nerves in the quiet hurt.

  THERE

  A heavy thunderstorm has drowned out the light, turning dusk to near-midnight as I climb out of the 10 bus and open my umbrella. Earlier this afternoon, to the west of the city, the last hours of the light were stabbing at the belly of the far edge of the thunderheads as they rolled in, allowing only pinholes to break through. The storm horizon was buzzing and flashing artificial, was the same as the sky is now only farther away, was someone else’s weather. But not anymore. Now this wet, thundery climax has become mine.

  I’m dressed in black, umbrella to toe. When I got back from leaving Mother’s car at the Downs, I walked into the gusty, creaky house and made my way to the closet in her bedroom, where I ransacked the few clothes that remained and found a black silk scarf and a long-sleeved black blouse to wear over my black jeans, matching my tar-black boots and black cotton gloves. No raincoat, no protection from the slanting wet but the umbrella. I can’t protect myself from it all.