Vanishing Monuments

by John Elizabeth Stintzi

  But though an ocean is wide and can keep most flesh away, it’s hard to hide for long from the ghosts of the things you’ve pushed to the edges of your mind. An ocean may be inconceivably vast, but a brain is composed of nothing much but inches.

  There’s nowhere to run.

  Once I’ve towelled off everything in the kitchen, I look at the mirror in the living room—see half of myself reflected by the closed door—and realize that so many things in the house are out of place. The mirror, the kitchen table, the few remaining magnets on the fridge. Things that are no longer where they were—or where they are, at least, in the memory palace.

  The first thing I do is go to the sink and turn the tap on just a pinch so it drips water a few times a minute like it used to, before Mother must have had it fixed. Then, I go to the fridge and start moving magnets around, back to where my gut tells me they should be. The magnets I don’t recognize I set aside to throw out. One of the new ones—a photo of Niagara Falls, someone else’s souvenir—holds a piece of paper with phone numbers for emergencies: ambulance, police, poison control, Dorothea, and Asha. I listen to the sink drip, throw the magnet out, and put the page in my pocket. Then I remember the pad of paper that used to sit beside the phone in the living room, where I would sometimes doodle when I was talking to Genny or Tom, so I go and I put it there. Beside the phone is the answering machine, which no longer has a tape in it. The phone is no longer plugged into it—a skull that nobody tells stories to anymore.

  I hear the sink drip but cannot hear the cat roaming the house. The house’s creaking has not given them away yet. They must be hulking, hidden somewhere. I blow my nose into a wad of tissue.

  I pick up the mirror, take it back to the stairs, and start to carry it up to Mother’s room. Dorothea probably moved it down. Perhaps Mother no longer wanted to be confronted by herself first thing in the morning.

  As I climb the stairs, I watch myself in the mirror and have to slow down so I don’t trip over my feet. All I can see is me and everything behind me.

  Even if my muscles still know exactly how to steer through this house, even if my legs remember the height of each stair with precise accuracy, even if my body remembers the exact number of steps, navigating the house with the mirror—and myself—in front of me is harder than it would be if my eyes were closed.

  So partway up the stairs, I close them, and make my way to Mother’s bedroom. Before I reach the corner of the room where the mirror used to live, I trip on my luggage, the contents spilled out on the floor. I nearly drop the mirror as I fall sideways onto the bed. My eyes open into a surprised look I don’t want to see. I’m staring down at myself, two bodies sandwiched between mattresses. I get up and put the mirror back where it goes.

  With the mirror restored, the room is hostile, different, so I make the bed, then stuff my luggage with all my things and carry it out of the room. I stand in front of the armoire and look over to my bedroom and then over to the stairs. I sneeze. I feel the cool, wet air enter the house from the windows, rehydrating the dry, radiator-heated air.

  I could leave, couldn’t I?

  But I can’t. My car is on Ethelbert. It’s out of gas. By the time I fill it up, it will already be too late.

  I carry my luggage to my old bedroom, imagining the surroundings of the house only as they pass me: life as a delayed reaction to having lived.

  If my life were this house, I’d know exactly where I was going without having to look at where I’d been. But instead, all I do now is scratch out a semblance of who I am, with no foreknowledge of the way forward through the fog.

  I don’t remember my first kiss with Genny, and I’m not sure I believe her story. According to her, we kissed at the New Year’s party of a mutual acquaintance. I don’t trust that I would have done that, kissed a girl out in front of people. I also don’t trust that she would have done that. All I remember from that night was that Tom was supposed to show up, but he didn’t, because Del was angry at him for coming home late a few nights before—because we were out trying to steal street signs with pry bars we had smuggled from the hardware store—and said he had to stay in. So when I went to the party alone, a lone girl, among people I didn’t know at all, or had hardly spoken a word to in my life, I went straight for the alcohol.

  It’s strange to feel as if you do not share the same beginnings with someone, when their first memory is inaccessible to you. All I know for sure is that the first time I kissed Genny, inarguably, was weeks later, in her car, three days after she saved me from that swing set.

  Sometimes the stairs in the memory palace are empty, and sometimes they’re too full. There are times when you disbelieve in the many forms you’ve taken, when you believe you are one thing and always have been and always will be. And there are other times when you don’t believe you’re anyone at all. When it’s the former, your path is unhindered and the walls are lined with mirrors capped in photo frames. You just go up the stairs, like in the real house, and stop at the top. When it’s the latter, the stairway is like a crashing sea, a river nameless and sourceless, nothing but turbidity and power. The walls are torn blank, the frames shattered, your memories drowned out of their angles. You forget how to float, your transparency is no safety, and you are simply accommodated in the moment, feeling your skin turn wet and other. You become a tincture, dissolving into the unlabelled mass. Teeth clenched, furious at believing that there is any such thing as an identity at all, you don’t believe in you or in anyone else. It’s just a tsunami of images. You break from the palace and mock the many names you’ve used, the many costumes, the many gestures you still drape over yourself in attempts to signify a shift inside. A shift from one vast nothing into the same. From one scream into its synonym.

  I go to the armoire and open it: dust and muted detergent, polishedwood touch, hinge-creaking. Mother’s unrecognizable clothes hang in its familiar gut, where my clothes used to be. So many places she could place herself, so many places she was placed in, so much so far from her. I let my hand snake toward them, grazing. I let it shop. Long, quietcoloured shirts; dry, stiff leather jackets; blouses that have forgotten Mother and moulded to the hanger’s shape.

  As I hear the wind coming up the stairs, I find myself sixteen or seventeen, and Tom and I are heading into a thrift store in Saint Boniface. I cannot read the name of it, sprawled above the door in redacted blackness. I probably forgot the name by the end of that year, when I was waking up every day in Minneapolis.

  “I like buying clothes that have stories I don’t know,” Tom says, or said once and the sounds are just replaying in my head, as we walk from Del’s car to the store’s door.

  We’re either swaddled in fat coats for heat or dressed as scant as we can get for summer. I’m a boy, bound up but not packing, not yet. If it’s summer, I’m sweltering; if it’s winter, I’m shivering.

  We’re inside the store now. Tom is wearing dark sunglasses we snagged from another thrift store, west on Portage, not far from the camera shop I’ve been working at part time since Mother came back. Tom has his arm looped in mine, pretending to be blind. A French-speaking mouth has greeted us, and their eyes drag along after us. I smile. Or I did. We are at the men’s racks. My hands are losing themselves in the fabric.

  Tom is bigger than me, as thin as me but so tall. He stands behind me, muttering, “Hey, that button-up, the blue one. What size? Grab it for me,” and I take it and model it against him. He feels the fabric, presses it to his chest. Perhaps his other arm is full, his winter coat slung over. Perhaps mine is, too. His head looks straight out, pretending his world is blank, but his eyes look straight down at me. “What do you think?” I can see the dim pupil’d blueness peeking.

  I pull shirts and jeans. I avoid shorts and anything that shows any flesh but my arms. Crewnecks, turtlenecks, slacks, button-ups, everything in blacks and greys. I feel the eyes floating around the store, surveilling, mistrusting, trying to unfold me. My heart has revved up by the time we have armfuls of clot
hes, hangers clanging, and head into the biggest of the two change rooms together. We’re undoing our boots, and I am as close to the far corner as possible, half-naked. Tom is shirtless in his own jeans, still wearing his sunglasses. He is holding an arm span of blue.

  I dress and undress and re-dress. I do not turn to the mirror until most of my skin is hidden, not wanting to see my wrapped-up chest. Tom occasionally asks, as I’m trying on men’s clothes, “So, how does it look?” projecting his voice as if on a stage. And I say, “Those black jeans look good on you,” or “This blue button-up looks very dashing.”

  I’m sixteen, or seventeen, stuck in other people’s stories in a tiny room with my best friend, playing blind. I am the man in the mirror, costumed in pre-worn histories, feeling an ache to get out of here and go see Genny. Either we have been seeing each other for a little over a month, or we are getting ready to run away together. Either I am keeping my only secret from Tom, or creating the environment in which to do that.

  The store is quiet and it might be mid-afternoon. It’s either summer, or we’ve cut from school early to come here. But no, it would have to be winter. I’m still sixteen, as a draft of winter hulks under the dressing room door when someone comes into the store, or leaves. It is winter because Tom is still here, integral to my time.

  And because it is winter, we can get away with stealing a good portion of the clothes I want, stuffed into the arms of our puffed jackets. I put some of the clothes I want to buy back on the racks: “Too short, what was I thinking?” I say, as Tom holds on to my elbow. We buy the blue shirt. Eyes, thank-yous, a faceless “Salut.”

  We leave the nameless store and shore into our huge coats again, jeans stuffed against biceps, shirts balled in inside pockets.

  “Mon garçon,” Tom says, climbing blind into the driver’s seat, into the dull lingered heat of Del’s car.

  I’m sitting beside him, farther on the drive toward home now. He’s still wearing his blind man shades as he unzips his coat and pulls out the clothes. The heat of the car feels like the tickles of the house’s radiator. Tom hands me clothes, clothes that must exist but that I can’t see. They are just empty insinuations until they take the shape of Mother’s clothes, in the armoire. I’m gripping them in the seat, the music on the radio waning, gripping them so hard, as if worried that if I let them go, then I’ll forget who I am, forget who I want to be. Tom is whistling along, quieting down, looking over at me. His face isn’t there but for his eyes. His eyes and those sunglasses.

  The doors of the armoire close. Faceless Tom echoes away into wooden silence. I am standing in front of a closed armoire, Mother’s hanger-shaped blouse in my hand.

  Meeting Genny, falling in love with her, changed the order of things. As I got closer to her, I spent less time with Tom. I don’t think he could get over the fact that I walked in on them, and I believe he would have preferred Genny to have disappeared from his life after that moment so he wouldn’t be reminded of it. I understood. I was so much more embarrassed, back then, about anything that related to my body. I hated thinking about my body, hated acknowledging that it wasn’t as malleable as I wanted it to be. I felt like I could never fully make a home in it, like I would always be trapped there. It was a classic teenage condition to have, only it was compounded for me by my gender trouble. I could never have the man’s body or the woman’s body I wanted. That hasn’t changed, but I’ve realized over time that feeling like a prisoner in your body is what being human feels like. That you aren’t your body, that you’re not defined by it. But back then, I put a lot more names on all the different gender spaces I was feeling as a way of having a sense of agency. Of coherence. Of order.

  With Genny around, though, things became a different kind of slurry. Parts of me began to connive, to get excited, and less and less was there the full sense of dread at waking up as someone who was myself but kiltered just enough not to feel very much like me. Genny’s manner was quiet in a goading way; it created a silence different from the silences that Tom and I held. The silence between Genny and me was one I could spill more of myself into.

  Soon, she was the one I’d run off with at night. And it became clear to me for the first time what it felt like to love someone you could communicate anything to, instead of someone you could be anything with. My many disparate bits started to rally, commingle, and coalesce into fewer, more sizable parts. The shifts I felt were more dramatic but less strange. I knew those parts of me, and they were all tied together in that they were all in pure love with her.

  During the time—when I was tailing out of my junior year, when I was considering dropping out, and Genny was graduating with honours—Mother, I think, started to suspect something had changed in my life. Reeds had grown from the seeds of my secret life, and the wind in the house hinted at it. In the middle of the night, my key started to hit the lock different. The front door opened with a new creak. I showed up earlier sometimes, and walked with a different weight of my feet. I even stayed home some nights, and used the phone in the living room—the only phone in the house. Slowly, my routine broke. She saw me, Mother.

  I spent half my nights at home, ate there for the first time in what felt like years. When one of us made dinner, we started to consider the other mouth in the house. We began to account for each other again. Sometimes Mother would even ask my opinion on photographs. She would hand me a sheet of film and a magnifying glass, and I’d lean against the window in the living room, as the last hours of the day’s light were leaving, and tell her which of them I thought looked the best. She didn’t know then that I, too, was taking pictures. That I ran off with one of her cameras every now and again, when she was out working, and shot rolls and rolls. That sometimes I would skip school and come back home when she was doing a shoot or visiting Asha’s for a lesson, and work in the darkroom. We spoke every now and again, not too deeply or with too many words, but we did.

  We were aware of each other, and I was aware of myself in relation to her. We were in some ways overlapping again, as we hadn’t in years.

  And that was why I had to leave.

  I don’t know why I chose Hamburg exactly, but I know why I left Minneapolis: I found Genny’s letter.

  I woke up the day after—on the mattress I was intending to abandon but had left in the corner of the collective’s first tiny studio space downtown, above our little gallery—and it seemed like the time to go. The darkness had found me, had got its hands on me, pushing. I had no control over myself, and I just had to go. The girl that comes to pack our bags came, helped me dress. From a phone booth, we called the airport and asked them when the first available flight was to Hamburg. They told us—me—that there was a flight that night, a red-eye, that still had a few seats. I went back to the studio, took off my clothes, and pulled my camera out of my bag, Mother’s camera. I set up the small travel tripod, screwed the extra-long cable release into the shutter button, and stood against the blank white wall, naked, with my hands pointed from my groin. In the shot, I’m looking down and appear to be grieving. I don’t know why. At the time, I didn’t really know who I was, who I’d become after reading the letter.

  While the shutter was open, for a long second, Darius sprinted across my legs to paw after a moth that was fluttering low against the wall. His running smeared the frame with a soft Persian white that almost made it look like I was levitating, or the photo was fading from the bottom up.

  There were reasons why Hamburg made sense, mostly because I wanted to see that monument, the Monument against Fascism, which was at the midpoint of its vanishing. I also wanted to go to Germany, since that was where Mother came from, and where I was born. The closest I’d ever come since then was when my face was inlaid in my German passport. Mother had been vehement about renewing them, just in case she ever wanted to go back. She talked about doing that fairly often—before Selkirk, before she didn’t talk about it ever again.

  After I took the photos, I was running on a kind of autopilot, not really knowi
ng what I was doing. All I knew was what I wasn’t doing—like telling Genny where I was going. I left a note in the studio asking Karen to watch over my things, and to be safe, I didn’t tell her, either.

  I took a taxi to the airport, paid for my ticket, and flew. When I finally developed a contact sheet of that roll of film in Germany, a year later, the photo I’d taken of myself before leaving Minneapolis was right beside a photo I’d taken of Genny while she was drinking a glass of red wine beside her window. I’d somehow missed and focused on the tree some ten feet outside the window. The photo of me wasn’t out of focus, but I’d moved, so my form was soft. We both lacked definition.

  The whole time I was in Germany, I never called Tom. When I finally came back to Minneapolis, I found out that the phone number I always reached him on—his mother’s—was dead. I decided that this was a sign, that I shouldn’t try to find him. Tom had been so formative for me, for the way I carried myself when I was a man, but at that distance I realized how much I’d failed him. How much I’d always depended on him. I didn’t think I had anything to offer him, and I didn’t want to take anything more from him. There was too much guilt piled up between us, and I felt the least I could do was let him go on without me.

  As I pull the vacuum out of the closet under the stairs, I keep the darkroom’s door in the corner of my eye. Mother’s camera is on the other side, pulling its limbs out in the dark.

  I vacuum up the new wave of dead bugs. My body is tired from the fever, but I float through the house. I vacuum the hallway. I vacuum the living room. I vacuum the kitchen. I vacuum the hallway again on my way to the stairs. There aren’t as many bugs as there were when I got here, but there are many in places I’ve already removed them.