I walk south toward the rivers, reach an intersection, and wait for the light, crossing a few seconds after it tells me I can, because I can’t not imagine my car careening through the intersection the other day, with me inside it. I make it across the street, the unfinished Canadian Museum for Human Rights lurking in the raindark to the left, flashbulbing into view, and continue toward the Forks.
I did not bring Mother’s camera. As soon as I got home from the Downs—before I raided her closet, finding also an enlarger under a towel, and her old radio—I walked down to the end of the hallway to the darkroom’s door and opened it only enough to slide the camera in, along the floor, and closed it tightly after.
The flashes come and the thunder follows instantly. I know how to measure the distance of lightning by its separation from the sound, and this lightning might as well be striking us. Those who are gathering at the Forks, despite the weather, for the vigil.
I walk past the market to the rivers, to the pitch-dark Assiniboine and the pitch-dark Red, knocking heads and spilling over, turbulent, at the feet of the small crowd. A sea of umbrellas, grey in the dark, some lit into colour by flashlights, or cellphones, and some bravely guarding flickering candles, but many just monochrome roofs bouncing back the darkness.
Most of the umbrellas have at least two people underneath them. Some have more. I may be the only person here who is completely alone. I pause, looking out over the crowd, small but determined. I stand there for a while, just watching, just feeling all that pain. All that weather.
I wrap the scarf around my head and lower the umbrella so that nobody can see me, so that I become little other than a legged torso in the dark, then walk toward the little people in their little dry islands.
I walk through the crowd, stopping sporadically to place my gloved black hand softly and quietly on someone’s shoulder. I don’t speak. I don’t squeeze. I just set it there, one person at a time—so briefly—and then move on. Some jump, some point their flashlights my way, others are quick and place their warm, soaked hand on mine. Some speak toward my silence. Sorry, stop, thank you, why. Many don’t. Many just stand, faces toward the dark in the quiet and the pummelling rain. I weave through, slowly, toward the rivers and back out, to the fringes, to the stragglers and passersby. Short shoulders. High shoulders. I find people by their feet and the sound of the rain on their umbrellas and think about the rivers I grew up near and all the stories of their hunger, of the people who joined their flow, by their own choice or by another’s hand, stories that happened again and again, with different names and dates and bodies. Stories that could almost be clichés if they weren’t about real breathing people dying, stories that slowly prod a deep-tissue bruise you develop even if you never knew any of the people who died. Most of them vulnerable people, most of them Indigenous people, like this boy, many of them murdered.
I walk, reaching out. I let my old city’s grief, a segment of my old city’s grief, flow over me.
The first time I did this was back in 2007, when the westbound lane of the I-35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River at rush hour, killing 13 and wounding over 100 more. When people gathered there for a similar vigil, drenched in bug spray instead of cold rainwater, I reached out to the hurt in my adopted city. I wanted to feel present in the reality of the moment with them, with each of them, and hurt alongside them, to try and understand, while knowing it is always impossible to fully embody someone else’s hurt. But I tried to imagine it.
I move through the crowd like a sort of monument, but one that does not declare itself as a monument, and does not declare its intention. A monument that stands for no real motive but what it invokes in context, a monument that’s here as much for itself as for anyone else. I walk through the crowd, remembering hugely the void that I carried around so heavily when I ran away to Hamburg. The void that I still have, of course, but have grown better at carrying.
I wander through the crowd, remembering and forgetting and getting distracted as much as anyone here. But every time I stop and rest my cold, gloved hand on someone, I feel here with them. At every touch, the grief swells back into me, and I still try at every point to do the impossible: to understand. But the thing that makes me a good monument is that I don’t understand—that I don’t pretend to know, or to know any better. I am nothing but here. I am nothing but here, with them—with us—trying.
An hour passes, maybe less or maybe more, and I’m fully soaked. I pull the scarf down from my face and put down my umbrella, because there’s no reason to fight the wet, and I walk away, alone, back toward the bus stop. The thunderheads have moved on, and I can measure the distance of the lightning in miles—ten, fifteen, thirty—as I wait for the 10 bus. By the time the bus shows up, there are a few people with umbrellas I let get on before me. The bus is warm enough to make me realize how cold I am. How empty I have been, and for how long.
I dig my hand into my pocket and find the small packet of transit tickets I bought when I got groceries the other day. They are soaked, flimsy, dimly bleeding. I look up to the driver and hold them up. He shakes his head and smiles.
“You can dry those in your microwave at home,” he says, closing the door behind me and pulling away from the curb. He looks tired, and I grab the bar nearby, trying to drip away from the aisle.
“Just don’t do it too long. I did it once with a page of a letter the mailman left on the step in the rain and it worked just fine but was still a little damp after. So I tried it with the second page and set it for just five seconds longer and left the room, and when I came back the page in the microwave was on fire.”
I think of Mother’s hands, the letters she used to get from Germany. And then I think of the letter Genny left for me in the mailbox just before we ran away to Minneapolis together, the letter I did not open and read until it had staled to poison.
“Did you put the fire out?”
“Yes,” he says, making the turn onto Portage.
The light ahead, at the intersection of Portage and Main, goes from yellow to red. The warmer I get, the more I start to shiver; the more I shiver, the more water drips down.
“But I never did get to know what that second page said.”
5
THE DARKROOM
There’s one room in your memory palace, at the end of the hall, where you never go—one door you wander past without being able to turn to it. You like to think this is because going in the room would ruin the continuity of the stream of remembering, but you stumble back and forth over your own paths anyway, so that’s hard to believe. You think you know what’s in there, but the truth of that thought is impossible. The door cannot open. The door is warm. You like to think that the room holds the memories from before your first solid one, a swollen room of fluxing sensations and fragments you’ve lost access to. You like to think that’s where the memories are all in German and too foreign for you to live now. But you don’t often believe this, because as you sit in the real house and take the memory tour, you place your hand on the wood and sense that maybe you’re on the other side, mirroring yourself. But this sort of contemplation of the room only happens when you are a certain version of yourself. Only sometimes, when you’re most boy or most girl, do you feel that negative presence, only then do you see the knob, do you try the knob, do you push the door. You know that the door never locks, that the lock was broken before you came to this house, and that the force that is holding you out of the darkroom is a kind of Newtonian resistance. Equal and opposite. While you stand at the door—when the door is there—you can picture it, on the other side, paper thin, twisting you at bay.
I first learned about the Monument against Fascism in March of 1991 from a boyfriend of Karen’s, a couple hours before she dumped him. His name was Eros, and he and Karen had been dating for a few weeks. Karen’s interest in him stemmed partly from the novelty of his name—Eros—and partly from the fact that the Minneapolis winter made it hard to meet new people.
We met Eros for th
e first and last time when Karen brought him to an opening for an exhibition in a chilly warehouse where some members of the collective had pieces. I was showing a few prints, and Raya—an installation artist, and the third brain of the collective’s founding triumvirate—had built short, bulging, phallic sculptures on the floor, which everyone tripped over less the drunker we got. When Eros and Karen showed up, Raya refused to shake his hand. Raya saw men as significantly lesser beings, and nearly all of her work externalized that. The unavoidable phallus was almost always a central image in her work, which I always respected, even though she was the kind of feminist who thought genitals were key to defining a person. As I grew bolder in presenting myself—on occasion—as a man, that belief became one of several major tensions between us.
By the time Karen arrived, we already knew that she planned to break up with Eros after he drove her home. She had kept dating him an extra week because she didn’t have a car, and she wanted to make sure she had a ride to the show, not wanting to try and trust the bus like Genny and I did. Eros was short and quiet with dark hair, long eyelashes, and a square jaw. A few weeks before, Karen told us that he worked for the city as an assistant to the public art manager. Karen gagged when she said the words “public art.”
When Karen introduced Eros to us, he smiled. “I’ve heard a lot about you all,” he said, unzipping his coat in the cold warehouse, then zipping it back up.
As soon as we were introduced—Raya, Al, Genny—Karen grabbed Genny by the arm and followed after Raya, leaving me with Eros. At first, he took a quick step to follow them, then stopped abruptly and looked over at me, as if he were about to ask me what he should do next. I felt a kinship with him, with the way he moved and was unable to move, with how I knew his fate.
“Women,” I said to him, pointing a thumb and shaking my head.
Karen spent most of the night hanging out with Genny, and I ended up talking to Eros. We wandered through the exhibit and I asked him questions I knew the answers to, and he told me how he aspired to climb the ladder until he had the power to commission public art. While we wandered past explicit, queer art of all mediums in a non-venue far from the centre of things—navigating a smattering of phallic sculptures on the floor, sipping wine—Eros talked about being involved in making art as accessible and approachable as possible to a general public. He felt it was important to connect people, and mend the wounds of society, through art.
Then, Eros started to talk about monuments—about the Monument against Fascism that he’d studied in a class on public memory in university. The Monument against Fascism was a twelve-metre-tall, one-metre-wide aluminum column clad in a thin layer of lead that was installed in Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, in 1986. The point of the monument was to let people inscribe their names with metal styluses tethered nearby, and pledge themselves against fascism. Once the section of the monument within reach was filled up, the column would be lowered farther into the ground, so as to offer a fresh canvas.
Eros said the monument was already halfway gone. “The point is that the monument won’t be there forever. Once it’s gone—vanished —the people will be responsible for keeping up its memory. I’m not sure a monument that disappears works, but it’s interesting.”
I couldn’t help but feel sad at the irony of a vanishing boyfriend telling a guy he’d probably never see again about a vanishing monument. I couldn’t help but feel sad about how part of me didn’t really want him to vanish, not because he was particularly interesting, but because of how much he reminded me of Tom. I felt that Eros carried himself with a similar resignation to being a man. As if he knew he was a man, that it was fine, but it wasn’t really all that important to him. I always had a sense that Tom was uninterested in trying to defend or police being a man, in himself or in others. It was what he was, not what he was invested in.
I think Eros already knew something was up with Karen but had resigned himself to that fate, too. We met back up with our girlfriends after maybe an hour. Raya continued to ignore and avoid us. I got tipsy enough to trip over the sculptures on the ground less. Everyone got tipsy enough to be comfortable in the world we were in. To forget, maybe, that time was so limited. That, like monuments, people could also vanish into nothing but a fading stain in the brain. Like the fog of our breaths in that cold, warehouse air.
At the end of the night, Eros offered to give Genny and me a ride home, and we crammed into the cab of his three-seater pickup. Karen sat in the middle and Genny sat across our laps, yelping quietly whenever the truck hit a bump. I couldn’t see Eros as he weaved over dark ice and snow, slipping occasionally but not crashing. We all talked, but we didn’t talk about anything.
I never saw Eros again. When he dropped Genny and me off, I got out of the truck first, and as I started making my way to Genny’s door in the sub-zero night, she grabbed my arm and held me to wait on the sidewalk with her. The door to the truck was slightly ajar, and the windows were too foggy from breath to see through. It had started to snow, transforming the moment into one that felt too much like Winnipeg. After a minute, Karen climbed out of the truck and closed the door behind her, Eros pulled away. She looped her arm in Genny’s and dug her chin into her scarf. Before we walked into the oasis of Genny’s apartment, I looked over to see the tail lights disappearing into the falling snow a few blocks down.
Karen never mentioned Eros again. She got into a new relationship a month later with a man she’d sold drugs to, who ended up stealing from her before breaking her heart. I didn’t think of Eros much after that night, but I’d find myself thinking of a monument being lowered into the ground, of the challenge to remember things removed from view.
I would think of Eros again the day the past rushed up to meet me, to undermine me—when the running girl came back and decided that we should go somewhere far, far away. When she decided that monument was something she wanted to see.
According to Genny, the first time she remembers ever seeing me she was very drunk and fucking Tom. I walked in on the two of them, having come over to Tom’s to see if I could borrow a pair of his boots, to try and while away the night. Tom—furious and wasted, too—proceeded to yell at me, telling me to give him back his clothes, which I was wearing, and leave.
I was sixteen, then. That was one of the times when my hair was buzzed. Mother had bounced back from her time in Selkirk, and I’d slipped back out to the end of the line, to the far edge of my unstable orbit.
That moment seems like something I’d remember, but I don’t. From that day, I only remember fragments, when I stood in the hallway of Tom’s house, wearing an overly long white dress several sizes too big that I’d taken from the mess of Del’s room. I also remember the walk back home with nothing on but that dress and my winter coat in January. I remember, the short spectre of Genny, swaying, with every article of her clothes half-on, tugging them as if she had to fight her clothes to get them on. Then I remember she vomited in her hands.
And I remember the aftershocks of that night, when I went over to Tom’s the next morning to apologize and return his mother’s dress. I brought a garbage bag with the rest of his clothes that I’d taken over the years, just in case we were actually through. I let myself in his house again, as I always had, and went up to his room to find him: bloodshot eyes bagged, and painting. He didn’t say much as I came in; he just stood up, patted the sides of my arms as if verifying I was real, and led me over to sit in the diffuse light that beamed into the room. He replaced the canvas that he’d been dabbing at since waking up hungover.
As soon as he sat down behind the blank canvas on his easel I opened my mouth, but he said, “No” and picked up his brush. He said he didn’t want to paint me with my mouth open. I sat there with the apology welling up inside, the violent shame that arose from what is now a dark gap in my head reconstructed by hearsay, the hearsay of two people who were trashed at the time. I had to have remembered it, then.
As Tom painted, he told me about Genny, about the mistake he’d ma
de bringing her back after the party he’d gone to. He’d been a virgin.
“She was so passive,” he said, putting the wood tip of the brush in the middle of his forehead and pointing the bristles toward the canvas, tracing in the air. “She was like a corpse.”
I gave him a look.
“I mean, I’d assume.”
We laughed.
“Fuck,” he said, slashing the painting with the brush, his red eyes squinting. “Now you’ve got some laughing in your portrait.”
By the time Tom was finished painting, the words of the apology were gone and we were balanced again. He turned the easel and I stared back at me from the canvas in a dimly grieving way. The anatomy was as skewed as it always was for Tom, the colours more impressionistic than flattering, but it contained me in a way that I loved, contained my image like oil held in a fist of water. Me, removed from fleshy congruency. And somehow, at the last moment, my laughter had snuck in.
Everything is looping as I wake up shivering and sweating in bed. I sit up and feel dizzy, look around to the rainy mid-morning light slanting in at the window and realize that I am not Hedy Baum. I’m not, no. I am Alani. I’m in Hedy’s bed, but I am not her.
My sinuses are full, my brain too heavy. I am boiling alive in my own body.
I lie back against the pillow and open my mouth: “Too much rain. I can feel every bone.” The ceiling is a blank white swirling. My scratchy throat drips. “I got here a few days ago. Hedy is my mother, not me. I am in Winnipeg,” I talk myself out of her and back into my skin.
“Genny is not in Winnipeg, and she is not talking to me. I am not an engineer, like Genny. I’m a photographer, but not a photographer like Mother. I’m a photographer like me. Annie. Annie? I’m sweating. There was a dead boy in the water, and I don’t think I’m him, either. I’m a monument.”
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