I close my eyes and try to fall back asleep, but I find myself thinking of the memory palace, dragged by a dark hand through room after room, and every room is on fire. There is so much smoke, so many hands, so many versions of myself that I’ve tried to keep straight over the years, that are laughing and screaming and turning to ash. I am being pulled by my scalp, through the first floor, then up the sweltering stairs until I’m thrown into my bedroom. The pry bar is still there, in the corner, so I wrench off the boards holding the windowpane among the flames, pull it out, and try to climb free, but as I do my foot catches and I can’t get out of the grip.
I don’t want to turn around, so I do, and open my eyes to me drowning. There is water in the room with me, over my nose, in Hedy’s bed, in the house.
Or else I’m stuffed up and crying and just forgetting to breathe.
After Mother tried to kill herself, after she came back from Selkirk, I woke up in the house every day to less of myself, but no fewer versions of me. The bed felt crowded, yet nobody spoke, nobody looked at one another. Every morning after that—when I would have to drag Mother out of her bed and draw her down the stairs and pull the blinds closed and sit there, watching her take her medicine—I felt a generalized sensation of lessening. I got smaller. Loose ends shrank and broke off, and then there were only more of me. I was a collection of frayed ends, ends that had no communication with their roots.
I fed Mother. I pulled her up the stairs. I put her in the tub. I told her about school, about my classes, about what I was reading and all the lessons that I hated. Her face was there when I talked to her. I put her to bed and sat there with her for a little while, breathing. And every time I sat there with her I thought about smothering her with her pillow. I loved her too much, and not enough. As a concession, I kissed her on the forehead, and as I did I pressed her head into the pillow. When I pulled away, a blank print appeared, and by the time I turned out the lamp, I could see the place where my lips had been rouge up with Mother’s blood.
The same blood that had sprinted from me.
That heavy, mute time was when Tom and I started to drink. Not because we were cool, and not because we were interesting, but because we had to do something. We mostly siphoned from Del’s various stashes, particularly the stuff that Tom stole to try and force her to be dry for a few days. I drank less than he did, mostly, and he talked more than I did, but we both took turns wearing each other’s wounds. Some nights I’d drink too much, and when we went to parties I’d dance too close with too many girls. And sometimes he would be sober but completely silent. Other nights we were on a level, both half sharing, both half-drunk.
We were trying to understand our mothers by shadowing them. We rebelled by following suit. They were the lit room and we were the dark world behind glass, staring, unstared.
Eventually, Mother got back into herself. Slowly, she regained her capacity for locomotion, played at agency, started working again. Wore a personality and had enough energy to fend for herself and, finally, to fend me off. Then she started trying to talk to me again, but it was too late. Someone had walked away with my throat.
I could barely say a word. When we were out alone, Tom would tell me about things that were going through his head. When we were out on the streets, when we often couldn’t see each other besides as the negative space of bodies blocking lights behind them, he would talk about Del, who was in a vicious cycle of falling into new men and then falling out of them into drinking. She was either too hopeful to give Tom the time of day, or she was too drunk to see him. We both loved our mothers so much, if only because we could not reach them or do anything to help them. We cared about them and watched them break themselves down. I didn’t talk about Mother. Not much. I mostly just muttered irrelevant things, or communicated by touching Tom’s arm, or simply followed him around as he lorded over the streets as the thin, stooping giant that he was. I’d started reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses around that time, basking in the gods, their petty lives, their vengeful transmutations—relishing in Actaeon, in Pan, in Bacchus—and one night, when we were throwing sticks into the Assiniboine, I told Tom that I thought he might be some kind of willow tree given human form. He might have smiled; it was dark. I felt heat. We stood there in the quiet of after, throwing dead limbs of him into the river’s midnight tumult.
I started to drink more. I stayed out later and later and stopped avoiding strangers at night. Not that they were much of a true danger, anyway. I did less and less at school. I stopped taking pictures. I skipped school more and was alone more often, wandering the streets of Winnipeg’s midday. Downtown, the Exchange, Broadway. Tom was never as willing to cut school as much, never wanted to stop learning. He cared about everything: about his future, about himself, about me. I felt like a string of film with no lens to gain focus, no cage to keep light from burning me blank.
At the parties we stumbled into, I was the one people were wary of. I was a bad influence. I was unstable. Nobody knew if I was going to come in a skimpy dress or an old, ratty suit I’d nicked from a thrift store. Nobody knew how to address me, to reach out to me, without making me angry. So people parted a path, nodding, whenever I came through a door.
I don’t remember many of those parties. Not now. When I stepped into a party, I stepped into a largely unrecorded state. I was too lost, too abstracted from my centre—or else I was already too drunk. Once, I ended up breaking a rib dancing because I’d bound myself up too tight and flat with hospital bandages I’d stolen from Mother’s old nursing supplies, which transitioned into a month of hiding all the clues from Mother, which transitioned into a month of Tom holding me down, dragging me to his house or to the edge of the river, trying anything to make me settle down enough so I could heal. There’s a calcified bump there now, from the breaking and half healing and half breaking again, just below my left breast.
I couldn’t look at myself half of those days. I wanted the many-ness of me gone. I was everything, but I wanted to be one simple fucking thing. I was sick of manoeuvring between. I never felt welcome in my body, except for the moments when I did, and by then I didn’t even want to be. I wasn’t welcome at some of those parties because people were afraid of me. Of who I was and who I could be. Of how uncomfortable I made people, people who wanted to feel chaotic without having to be in the presence of a purer essence of it.
I was always out late, but no matter what—no matter how drunk I got, no matter how bad I wanted to disappear—I’d always show up back home, and Mother would be waiting for me in the living room. Sometimes, before going to the door, I’d just stand on the sidewalk and stare into our house, at Mother staring out the window toward me but not seeing me. I knew she could only see herself reflecting off the night. The look on her face was tired. She would be wearing anything from a dress to next to nothing. Sometimes I’d stand there for a few minutes, until I caught wind of something walking down the sidewalk toward me—some dark other at the swelling edge of night—and then I’d run to the door.
The door was always locked, and I’d always have to dig my key out of an inconvenient pocket of my jacket. It took a lot of fumbling, but I never once knocked. No matter what, though, no matter what evil ridiculousness my mind could conjure bearing down on me, I turned the key just as reluctantly. Opened the door with the usual hesitance. Hung up my ratty leather coat with just as steady a hand, and then walked upstairs, into the dark skull of the house, with my feet knocking deliberate and hard. Echoing.
I have the duvet, I have the old radio from Mother’s closet—cord wound around my neck—and I am sliding down the stairs on my butt, one at a time. Every time I stand up, I feel like I should fall over. I want to be downstairs without having to go downstairs. I want water, want to be on ground level, want to keep my eyes open so as to keep the fire in the palace out of this real house. I slide down, stair after stair, saying, “Excuse me, excuse me” as I pass by the other versions of myself that have come back here. Then a little breeze comes down the stai
rs, grazes my hair matted to my sweathead, and I turn around—nearly at the bottom now—and all the legs I just scooted past are gone but hers. Mother.
She is walking up and down the stairs, one hand on the banister and the other holding the papers, envelope-freed, forgiving their two folds flat. She comes all the way down and steps through me, turns back up. Words, Mother’s mouth moving, noises coming out without her being able to stop them, words that I can’t hear. Words I could have heard, words I did hear but couldn’t have known. A language I’d then lost sense of.
I’m at the end of the hall, coming out of the kitchen, standing by the darkroom door. I’m maybe nine. Or eleven. I’m either on the brink of blood splitting my body open or surviving in the wake of it, surviving and deaf to her, deaf to all but the creak of the stairs while she reads aloud. Like she always did, sucked up and immersed in language in a way I could never be, because I’d already lost that language.
I watch her come down to the bottom of the stairs, watch her turn around. Mother is so young, my age. I can hear her get to the top of the stairs, and then I see her at the bottom, her old radio’s cord wrapped around her neck, sweaty.
I hear the papers waving as she goes up and down, hear the house move with her, hear her feet on the stairs, her butt as she scoots down—or, as I do—but the rest is her secret, her life, a ritual she will keep up for years yet. Until before Selkirk, until we started going to the liquor store for cardboard boxes, to hold the river of letters that have stopped coming.
The house’s wind is trying to get my hair out from the sweat. I’m stuck inside me at the bottom of the stairs, wrapped up in cordage and duvet. I’m growing, stretching to the sky like a thistle stalk, wearing boy clothes at the other end of the hall—hand-me-downs from Asha’s son.
Everything is too short on me and life is too long. Mother is at a different level of existence, out of sight, and I am down here, scooting along the floor toward me, growing into the way the world wants me. And then, just like that, I slip back into the kitchen and the house goes quiet. When I scoot my way into the kitchen, I’m nowhere to be found.
I pull myself up to the sink and put water in a tea-stained mug. I drink it down hard, gripping the counter like a cliff edge. I drink two mugs’ worth and then grab a third and let myself down and scoot to the living room. As I go, I can feel the photos, whispering. I plug in the radio and stretch it up near the couch, where I lie, with the duvet. I turn on the radio and then look out the window to the grey morning.
Looks like we’ll be getting a small amount of rain tomorrow and Monday, but we may see the sun again starting Tuesday! And boy howdy, do we need it. Back to you, Joan.
I want the sun, not the fever. I try to remind myself that the sun is still shining out there; it’s just unable to break its way to the ground. It is tripping along the tops of the clouds. But the idea is ruined by clouds framed in plane windows, light coming in as beams so hot until the plane turns to fly into them. Away.
“Boy howdy,” I say, closing my eyes, breathing hard through my mouth and reaching down to the mug I set on the floor.
“Howdy-boy-howdy, back to me.”
What I count as my first real memory of Genny makes no sense without the story of me walking in on her and Tom. On the way home from Tom’s place late one night, in a state of sad lightness, I decided to stop at a small playground. Nobody was around and it was snowing fat flakes. I climbed the slide, hands hovering over the sides as I slipped the slow descent through the tiny snowdrifts that were stacking up on the sheer metal. I reached the bottom and scooted off.
But I still didn’t want to go home, so I went over to the children’s swings and thought, Yes, I can fit in the tiny harness if I try. I climbed up on the seat, braced myself between the chains, and slid my legs down to above the knee before I finally got jammed in, lost my balance, and fell over. The snow continued to fall in a quiet, blanketing laughter as I wriggled on the ground, trying to escape.
Moments before I was going to begin calling for help, small gloved hands appeared and pulled the swing from my legs. Attached to those small hands was Genny. Once I was free and upright, we looked each other in the eye, both of us completely conscious and sober for the first time, and embarrassed, not because of the absurdity of that moment but because of our recognition of having met before—the anchor I now can’t grab hold of, the demolition I know only by the presence of the rubble and the rumours of the blast.
On the short walk over to her idling car, to the little heat that we would sit in together for an hour before she dropped me off at home, we offered each other our names. The air was so cold that we watched them as they migrated across the distance, like little boats drifting into the path of a storm.
It’s morning, I suppose a new one, and Mother’s landline just rang with her doctor. When it rang I was lost to the noise, still feverish, half sleeping but back to myself. I was able to stand up from the couch and step over all of the memories stuck to the floor to get here, to the little table in the corner, where this same phone has always been sitting.
The doctor is saying that he meant to ask me, when he met me at the home the other day—“Nice to finally meet you, by the way”—if I could sign off on him putting Mother back on antidepressants, since she’s certainly no longer capable of communicating the consent herself. He thought that, considering her case, and especially with her history of severe depression, they might be able to help her. “Some studies show that antidepressants can help with some of the more aggressive and agitative aspects of the disease,” he says. “It’s impossible to tell, actually, which parts of her suffering may be dementia and which are symptoms of depression. Perhaps the aphasia is purely a side effect of the depression. Perhaps we could get her to communicate again, at least.”
I sit here in Mother’s old house, listening to him, watching the memories pop in and out on the empty walls, still feverish and growing dizzier the more I sit upright, and realize he’s paused to hear what I have to say.
“Oh. I don’t know. She really hated them before.”
“Things have changed,” he said. “She’s not the same as she was, and the drugs are better.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“You can think about it if you want. You have my number, you can ca—”
“No.” I remember the months after I started them, before I quit. I remember the incontinence, the lack of appetite, the weight gain, the excessive dissociation. “No, let’s not do that.” The numbness, the anger. “I don’t think it’s worthwhile. Not at this point.”
“Oh. All right. Well, do let me know. I have colleagues who say it’s worked wonders for similar patients, and I can recommend an excellent medication.”
The rain outside won’t stop. I remember boy howdy. I remember the weatherman’s crackling promise.
“Let me know,” he says again, after a moment.
“I have. I have.” I knock on the door of the palace. “Oh, an old friend of mine is knocking at the door. I completely blanked about him coming over. I’ve got to go, sorry. I have to go now.”
I hang up the phone, stay sitting there at the little table and look out the window, to the front yard, to the empty walkway. I am hungry and nauseous.
At the end of the call, the mailman stuffed soaked flyers into the mailbox attached to the little fence in front of the house, and then kept walking down the street. Waddling.
I get up and stumble to the couch, flop back to horizontal bliss. I wrap the duvet around my neck and close my eyes and the door opens and I take a step into the burning house, lower my head at the landing, and get dragged through the fire and the flames again.
Most times, when you go into your memory palace, the door to the darkroom simply isn’t there, and you don’t think about it at all. As a rule, you don’t like darkness in the palace. You don’t trust it. You think of film, and how when you open a camera’s shutter, the darkness is mapped into a complete transparency, a lack of opacity
created by the light of the scene not choosing to burn those portions of the film black. How when you develop the negative, darkness becomes the empty space between the images, between the opaque transcriptions of light.
In the negative, darkness is a lack of information, which is why you tend to overexpose your photos by at least half of a stop, to try and encroach some form onto the darkness, to get more information. Because you know that most darknesses are not total, that most darknesses have some slow wiggles of light eking around in them, that you would just have to stare long enough into to find.
But you’re afraid that the darkroom is the place where the things you don’t know, can’t know, or don’t want to know, stay. It is a room housing a very rich lack, an abyss you know would only repay your patience in pain.
My stomach wakes me up and drags me away from the couch, away from the talking radio, to the kitchen, to the cans of soup I bought the other day. My body is weak. There’s a dirty pan from the last can of soup, from before the vigil, before this sick, still on the stove, and I open the easy tab of the new can and pour it in, turn on the burner, and move along the counters with my hands, in case my body decides to fall over. I get to the sink and turn on the tap to fill the mug I brought from the living room and drink the water up. Then I pour a mugful into the soup. I breathe through my mouth.
I look out the back window, through the rain of the afternoon leaving, and notice the space where Mother’s car was. Where my car could be. For a second I wonder where she is, where she could be driving to, whether she’ll be coming back. I remember doing the same thing after listening to the answering machine the morning Mother never came home.
There’s nothing in the backyard but the bad grass and the old charcoal barbecue. I don’t think that was even ours, and doubt it was Ilsa’s, but it has always been there.
Vanishing Monuments Page 11