I hear, in the lull of the soft rain, the sound of a cat, far off, meowing. Hungry, lonely, elsewhere. But perhaps it is my stomach, because the soup is burning—I can’t smell it, but I taste it in the air. I stir it with a spoon and turn the burner off.
It is with great skill and no grace and all the energy I have left that I make it to the kitchen table with the full pan, that I sit and wait for it to slowly cool and then start to eat.
I was twenty-seven when I started taking antidepressants. I’d been working hard, as a cover. I carried my cameras around with me all the time and spent so many hours in the darkroom, chemical fumes settling into my skin. Genny thought that I was working, that I had stumbled into a brutally encompassing idea that was threatening to slip past me, but I was just trying to make it through. I was terrified. I slept badly and woke up and went to the darkroom and talked to myself all day. I thought about jumping off Hennepin Avenue Bridge with a small boat anchor in my backpack. I bought the anchor and the backpack and the rope, but I couldn’t do it, and the only reason was that I couldn’t do that to Genny. She would have thought it was about her. She was too much in love with bridges, and with me.
I thought about lighting a fire in the darkroom with the door locked. I had a wide array of ideations, and when they got too strong, that was when I stopped taking photos, moved almost exclusively into the darkroom, and started printing photos without film. I did it with grave focus. I enlarged light onto blank paper and pulled prints of various grey tones from the baths. I took my camera out empty and set it up on a tripod. In the studio I set up massively elaborate shots: insinuations of violence, insinuations of release, insinuations of blankness. I spent hours fussing over an empty camera. Every time I wound the camera I felt the complete lack of tension, as huge strings of the efforts of my days slipped on undocumented. I didn’t want anyone else to know. I spent about a week going in and out of the darkroom, hardly eating, printing and printing, and then I tied a noose in the rope, tied the rope to the anchor, packed my backpack with the anchor and the rope, drove to the centre—the same centre I would drive Ess to so many years later—and told them to please help me.
The fourth day I was there I called Genny and she came. I could tell that the first thing she wanted to do when she saw me was slap me. She brought Hamm with her and we sat on a bench outside and I watched her cry. I watched myself watch her. I watched Allie watch her. Then Al. Everyone was there, and nobody could empathize with her. So we pet her dog. So we kissed her skull.
When I eventually surfaced, blowing back and forth with the dissociative numbness and incontinence of the medication, seeing my therapist two times a week, being watched by Genny, I called the show of near-blank photos simply 1997. It was my first solo exhibit since Shavasana; the others were all with the collective. The photographs set in borderless frames in three rows lined the entire gallery. Some were grey, some were pitch black, but many were completely blank. I’d numbered them, counting down to the first, which was the only one I’d done with anything other than the light. For one brief moment while exposing the paper, I had put my hand between it and the light of the enlarger, then pulled it back, horrified by the gesture. Looking at the print, all you can see is a slight lack of uniformity that’s not in the others, which were done in such profusion to try and wash the taste of that first reaching from my mouth.
6
THE STAIRS
As you go up the stairs in the memory palace you are a ghost passing yourself—yourselves: at different ages, in different clothes, with different expressions. They bump into each other and push at one another as you ascend. Alani, at five, is digging through the floor at the bottom of the stairs. A girl at fifteen, with fists, is yelling at a nineteen-year-old boy, who bites his lip at her. Someone, who you somehow know is twenty-seven, is punching the wall very quietly, blood coming down her knuckles. Most of the youngest ones are yelling, laughing, loud. The teenagers are either screaming or completely silent. One of you cries at all the commotion, near the bottom step. They are the first one you step through, and as you go up, you keep turning to look back at them. They are so sensitive that you wonder how they ever survived so long, so softly, among all these stiff phantoms. On the walls, lining the way up to the second floor, more and more of you jump out of picture frames. A long-hair boy, a hoodied elsewhere, a short-hair girl, older and younger. Every permutation is you.
Many pick fights with one another, and you want to stop them, but you’re translucent. You have no agency here. All you can do is look and walk forward, one step at a time, through them, feeling what it is to be each of them.
The opportunity to have any effect on your life has passed. At this point in the tour—should you make it this far—you often think of the quotation about how life must be lived forward yet can only be understood looking back. Something like that. You watch conflicts boil between your parts as you take your steps up and up. When the conflicts peak, the players explode into ash and are reborn, mumbling their way back up into their climaxes. You want to break them up, but they are stuck, stuck on repeat. You take another step. Sooner or later, you will make it to the top, though sometimes, like the hallway, the summit never gets any closer and you collapse. But if you remember not to look at the empty frames on the wall where they each climbed out, you have a better chance of making it. If you look, the staircase will spiral out into empty bone. The wind will pick up and a door, somewhere, will slam—with a sound you never get used to. And you’ll end up trapped, by one side of the door or another.
It’s my seventh day here, a Monday, and I wake up in Mother’s old bed, with all the covers chucked across the room, naked. It’s barely day. My fever broke sometime last night, but the cranked radiators gave my fever to the house. I woke up into a hot world and thought the fire that had been moving through the memory palace had made its way into this house. Had sparked from my body, which was moving through both. Then I heard the radiator knock from its place up against the wall and remembered veins of iron, of brass, remembered hot water and that first cold night here. So I got up from the bed and walked through rooms opening windows so that the house could breathe.
As the weatherman promised, it’s still raining. The window in the room is open, and the rain is dripping down the sides of the roof like sweat, and somewhere nearby a cat is yowling. Their throat sounds dry and hoarse in the rain.
I sit up and stretch. I breathe into the bends and snap myself out of the ache of waking and into the sore of being awake. Into the sore of being awake here, in Mother’s bed, having survived the worst of the fever. I hadn’t slept in this bed since the nights I spent here alone, at fifteen, when Mother was in Selkirk and I didn’t know when or if she was ever coming home. And before that, it must have been at nine, when there was a storm so bad several small tornadoes were gouging at the outskirts of the city. Mother and I watched the clouds from my bedroom—those tight dog-nipple clouds—as they began to explode the horizon. I was brave until night came and I could only see the world in flashbulb bursts. I’ve always wanted to do a portrait that way, with a camera open in a dark room, waiting for the sky to pop. Several times I’ve set it all up and sat in a room in the dark, waiting, as a cloudy evening went off into a dry night. Every time, I remember that night when the hail threatened to break our walls in. How Mother held me so tight while we slept in her bed.
The cat is yowling as I blow my nose and dress myself loose. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror across the hall and hate it, go back into the bedroom and put my hair up and bind myself up prairie flat. I kiss the light lipstick I’d thought was right onto the corner of my fist, bend down to my luggage for the packer. Even now I can feel wrong a few times before I even start a day.
I go downstairs and start closing windows so it doesn’t get too damp or cold. The air in the house has gotten a little fresher since I got here, diffusing the old stink of stale dust. A smell of abandonment, of piled time.
When I’m closing the kitchen windo
w I hear the cat again. The rain is there, but it isn’t compelling. I look out to the backyard, and beyond the overgrown, blown-over grass and under that rusted old barbecue in the corner, near the hole in the fence—which has become one of many holes—the cat stares at me, mouth half-open. It yowls. I yowl back—at pitch—close the window, and open the back door. The cat and I stare at one another around the falling droplets of rain. I leave the door open, go to the front hall for my shoes, and grab one of Mother’s umbrellas.
Before I got Darius, my first and last cat, I hated all of them. There always seemed to be something insidious about them. I met Darius because of Karen, the first Minneapolis person I’d clung to. She’d worked at this shitty café that barely sold coffee and I’d loiter there while Genny was at university. Karen did performance art and I kept trying to get her to pose nude for me. She also sold drugs in the art scene, and is about the least gay girl I’ve ever gotten close with. One day, when we finally became friendly enough, she brought me over to her place and there was this fat, white Persian cat there. Darius had been her roommate’s cat until her roommate moved out and left him there. I hated him. He was such an asshole, hissing at everyone, running off, then coming up and rubbing against your leg when you finally stopped cursing at him. Then as soon as you’d give in and pet him, he’d just run off again.
I unfurl the umbrella at the back door and go halfway to the barbecue. The cat is a deep ratty grey, thin. I kneel and put my hand out, half the backyard away, and the cat disappears through a gap in the corner of the fence where the boards have rotted out. I stand up and go back inside.
Whenever I went over to Karen’s place, Darius was there, battling it out with me in a game for attention I never quite learned the rules to. Eventually, when Karen finished running a draft of a performance by me where she was trying to read verses of the Bible with a mouth full of thumbtacks, she told me I was very much like that cat. I told her that was bullshit and she spat blood into her kitchen sink and put down her Bible, moving her long ponytail from one shoulder to the other. She just stared at me, quiet, with a little red trickle down the side of her lip.
I pick up two chairs from the little table in the kitchen and take them outside, trailing along the back lawn to the barbecue in the corner. Little oases. I go inside and find masking tape in a drawer and a box of garbage bags under the sink and use them to construct a long canopy leading up to the open back door between the chairs, end tables, floor lamps, whatever legged thing I can find in the house and bring outside. The sun is rising over the houses now, a thin fog wisping through the wavering rain. The cat is quiet.
I knew Karen was trying to get rid of that cat, but I still decided to take him when she asked me to. She was moving and didn’t want to have to take it to a shelter.
She told me, “It’ll teach you something about yourself. About loving yourself. About what it feels like to love someone like you.”
I open a can of tuna, one of the relics from the mostly barren pantry, and put it on the kitchen floor. The cupboards were usually bare even when Mother and I lived here. It never quite felt like we’d settled into the house in a forever sort of way. I go and sit on the couch in the living room and wait. Then I notice Mother’s old standing mirror in the corner of the room, reflecting the darkness of the corner to itself. I set it up so that I can sit on the couch and watch the door for the cat. I look down at the floor at my feet, at a small collection of dead flies tangled in a dust bunny nebula, which must have been under the coffee table before I carried it outside. The cat has not yowled in a while and I wonder if it left. I should have put out some water, even though the little animal is probably soaked to the skin. The rain picks up again, and then slows. I hear it spatter the garbage bags outside. Soon, shadows start in at the doorway.
When I took Darius from Karen, I was barely scraping by, and so was Genny. She was busy with her studies and I saw less and less of her. We lived apart, like we always had, and I was feeling like my life wasn’t quite right, like I wanted to disappear, back to Winnipeg, or farther, into some different flat, strange world. Iowa or Saskatchewan or Texas. I wanted to look out my window and see nothing but sky. But then, just like that, I had this asshole cat to deal with. He scratched up my legs until they looked like the hash marks of a prisoner growing weary of noting down his days. He peed in my shoes. He gnawed open my feather pillow one day, so when I came back the whole room was fluttering. I yelled at him. I cursed him.
I named him Darius because he didn’t have a name that we knew, and because I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t stupid. That I knew things about history, since history and art were the classes I skipped the least. He was a Persian cat and I wanted to feel Spartan against his aggressions. I hissed at him a lot whenever I was home during the day, and when I went to bed, he snuggled up beside my skull. I woke up with my face in his hot belly and scratched him awake, and we would sit there on the floor as he ate and I counted up my dollars and wondered which store nearby I could go to and snag some film. Then, most of the time, he’d scurry under the bed and swipe at my ankles as I got ready. All my socks had bloodstains.
Every day I came home to him, and years later, when I tried to move in with Genny, Hamm—her Blue Heeler–Doberman mix—got in a fight with Darius and snapped his ankle. I realized how deeply I loved him when I broke up with Genny over that, for a few weeks, despite the fact that Darius had asked for it by swiping at Hamm’s nose. By the time Genny and I got back together, Darius and I had already moved into another shitty bedroom on our own.
The cat is standing in the hall, in the corner of my eye, like a scarecrow. They’re looking through the house, wary. I don’t move. The cat goes past me like a wet ghost, and I get up quick and move for the open door in the kitchen. They bolt the other way, up the stairs. I go outside and bring the furniture, dripping, into the kitchen. I close the door after each piece so that the cat can’t leave. When I’m done, I see no sign of the cat and wipe it all down with a stiff, dusty towel.
The house is dead still. Hot toward feverish and surrounded by the cool spring day. The rain is tapping the shingles of its crown. The only thing different is that now, somewhere, there’s another heartbeat hiding.
The first time I saw the sinking Monument against Fascism, at the tail end of the summer of 1991, I thought I’d never leave Germany. Whoever had just arrived that day in Hamburg as me, whoever was standing there in the mid-afternoon summer heat believed that what surrounded them was the strange landscape of their new life. That all the people they’d been fractured into, all the people they’d loved, all the people they’d destroyed and left behind on another smoky continent, were precisely that: left behind. I’d removed myself from my life so forcefully to find myself there, a stranger in a pedestrian mall in a country so foreign to me yet somehow intrinsic to me, looking up and down that dark lead monolith.
The skin of the monument was scrawled with names, sentences, scratched images carved in with the metal styluses tethered nearby. There was graffiti. The markings stretched from where the monument met the ground to the highest reach of the tethers. There were many empty spaces between the names, still bare and waiting. More room stretched toward the sky, out of reach. There was still time.
I stood near the monument for a few minutes but didn’t add myself to it—unsure what name might come from the twitching of my hand. Fortunately, the cab driver, who had understood enough English to get me to the monument, was still there, idling. I got back in, beside the kennel that held Darius, and he drove me to a hotel that charged by the week. We crossed tiny bridge after tiny bridge to get there: short spans over the trickles veining the huge city. Every time we drove over a little bridge, I felt like I was transcending my previous life, transcending Genny. I remembered her and felt beyond her reach. The cabbie sang along softly to the radio. When we got to the hotel, I tipped him, unsure how many deutschmarks would be too generous. He got out and dragged my single piece of luggage to the door of the tall buil
ding. The same piece of luggage I have with me here.
The rooms of the hotel were closet-sized and ancient. Each floor had a mixed bathroom on either end, each with a thick-curtained tub to insinuate the possibility of private bathing. But the rooms were very cheap. The woman who rented them out had a necklace of keys and a languorous German tongue in contrast to her sharp, hopping English one. She muttered everyone’s name as she passed the doors—names rooted in many different languages—flicking through the numbered keys on her necklace.
“Alani Baum,” I told her, when we reached the door whose key was the first on her necklace that had two copies. The name had slipped out before I could catch it and hold it in. The passport’s name, the name I signed bureaucratic documents with, the name that was used to demarcate the official body but that was rarely ever used to identify the flesh. But I didn’t know who else I could have been.
She opened the door to the tiny room and I put Darius down on the counter. He whined. I muscled my luggage up onto the tiny bed beside the tiny window looking out north, toward the sea. When I turned around she was gone. I heard her muttering the names down the hall, their order reversed.
I closed the door, opened Darius’s kennel—though I knew he wouldn’t come out until he’d acclimated—and looked out at the overwhelming strangeness that my world had so thrustingly become. A day before, I was not here. A week before, I had not even entertained the chance.
It felt like there was much less of me, after leaving Genny. I sat there, in the tiny room, trying to acclimatize to that, too.
For a long time while I was in Hamburg I felt as if nothing from before could reach me. As if the distance from both Mother and Genny allowed for a brutal slash-and-burn kind of reprocessing. As if I’d become pastless. That first day, I stood there and looked out toward the city that was nothing to me, nothing but a vessel holding little known but the monument, nothing but a single thing I learned about from a man who skirted briefly along the edge of my life. Hamburg was a landscape I felt I could fill with a new life, unencumbered by my many concentric pasts.
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