I put my hand on the door, on the doorknob, and try to turn and push my way out. But I can’t. Because I’m in the memory palace. Because I’m on the other side of the door, aren’t I?
Before I came back to see Mother I was beginning to lose myself in the lack of drive to do my work. My life had turned consumptive, based purely on the detached external. I started to drink over my dosage from my Mnemosyne flask, to go to more shows, movies. I gave myself into the criticisms I offered to Ess and the rest of my students, others I advised whose long summers of intense work had just begun, or whose years of suffering had finally finished and loosed them into the terrifying post-grad life. I wandered out into the streets more, did more planning for the collective, booked shows for other artists, helped draw lines from one to another.
I also stopped looking at myself in the mirror. And I’ve stopped doing that again.
I couldn’t create. I was jamstuck with an uncertainty of conviction stemming from an uncertainty of who I was. I didn’t look in the mirror because I didn’t know who I’d see, and I got sick thinking about pointing a camera at myself again, to try and get that sort of distance. Why waste the frames documenting a mundane absence?
Despite all my movement, despite all my chatter, I’d lost my voice.
I spent more time with Genny and Karen and my other friends. I turned inside out: charming, a vacant social shape. I circumvented the darkroom in my house, my darkroom that is across the hall from my bedroom, as well as the cabinet where I keep all my equipment. I left Mother’s camera on the shelf, quiet, only getting near it when I went into my bedroom to sleep.
There’s a sweet spot to doing art: when you’re a bit uncertain of yourself but not so uncertain that you’re not sure you’re anyone at all. The best place you can be is on the brink, negotiating the details of your existence while still believing in its intrinsic presence. You need to be able to believe that your body is your body, your life your life, despite feeling a bit of a stranger in them.
Just before I got the call from the doctor, I was starting to think that it was too late to regain my voice. My drive. But when Mother stopped speaking, that girl knocked on the side of my head and climbed behind the wheel and we just went. We felt a sort of communal effort in returning to her, to Mother, and with that found a semblance of conviction. We were so ready for it, and came together over how disconnected we each were from Mother. Face-to-face with the absence of her, the steady and predictable and terrible lack of her, we somewhat filled up. We turned back inside. The wind, through the gaps in us, sang from floor to floor. We heard it.
We picked up the camera from our chest as soon as we entered the house, and we began to re-insinuate our presence here. Her presence here. And despite the lack of Mother, the house was all here waiting for me. For us.
I leave the darkroom and head up to my bedroom, leaving the door open and the red safety light on, because I don’t want that toothed darkness to come back. The smoke finds me, gusts from room to room, creaking, obscuring all movements, rustling the house into a wooden wail at me. I close my eyes and cut through the memory palace, the relative peacefulness of its chaos, until I get to my bedroom door. I open the door and my eyes at the same time, and as I fall out of the palace, I am inside my real room, rifling through my luggage for a pair of scissors and one of the extra rolls of film I’d packed: ISO 400 Tri-X, black and white. I put the film in my pocket and keep the pair of nail scissors I find in my fist. I grab the packer and the binder, and when I turn to leave the room, there it is—the cloud of smoke, of dark stonegrey ash—staring at me. I wonder if its face is mine and I just haven’t been able to recognize it. I wonder if it’s Mother’s. All I know for sure is I feel stronger with the scissors in my fist.
So I walk through it, heart pounding. Walk through the real house as its dark swims around me, showing off so many different faces, so many faces I don’t want to see. I hold my breath until I make it downstairs, until I make it to the red light spilling from the darkroom. It does not follow me in, and I leave the door open. I stand at one of the counters, take Mother’s camera off my neck, open the bottom, and pull the film from my pocket. I open the canister, pull a few inches of the film out, and trim the lead longer before I can wind it onto the spool—an accommodation for old mechanics.
I realize that this moment is symmetrical to the night I left this place: door open, red light on, Mother’s camera sitting and waiting to be filled. Only I didn’t; I just walked out of the house, out of this life. Now I tip Mother’s camera upside down and gently slip the film inside.
When Mother was doing photography full time, she would disappear into this darkroom for hours on end. I’d often stand outside the door, when I was little, and listen to the ventilation sucking chemical fumes and blowing fresh air, to the sink turning off and on. When I was little and wanted to talk to her, when we were talking so often, about small things—like nothing would ever change—I’d always have to wait.
There is a sound at the top of the stairs, cushioned.
One summer, when I was nine, I broke my wrist, because I’d thought it would a fun to slide down the stairs on a pile of my clothes, like sledding down a snowy hill, like I’d done once or twice the winter before at Garbage Hill.
I hear feet above me, a short sprint, and a brief moment of hang time, followed by a whimpering tumble.
The clothes went with me for about four stairs—until they didn’t—when I rolled the rest of my way down, knocking my nose to blood, scuffing up my limbs, and—luckily—only breaking my left wrist.
At the end of the hall, at the bottom of the stairs, in a canopy of the grey cloud, is me: crying. The sounds of the darkroom are blaring—though I don’t have the fan turned on, though I don’t have the sink running, their sounds are here. I start to crawl toward me on three limbs, down the hall, down the so-long hall, out of breath from crying, mouth moving in a shape, a sound I can’t hear. But I know. I can feel it in my throat: Mother, Mother.
I look around the darkroom and I’m all alone. Then I am on the ground, outside, sitting up and pawing at the place where the door should be. I can’t see the cloud around me, because the cloud is not there. Blood drips from my nose. I can’t tell if the safety light is on, or if Mother is inside in complete darkness. I just put my good hand on the door and try to knock, try to say her name between sobs. The door flickers in and out. I flicker to either side of the jamb where a door could close the world out.
She doesn’t hear. Eventually, I’m sitting up against the wall, my shirt covered in dry blood rivered from my nose, exhausted and hoarse and shivering and holding my swelling wrist, and I hear the fan go off, and the light switch on, and the door open outward.
Three bodies walk out from the dark: Mother’s carrying prints, mine following her with the camera in my hands, and another composed of the grey, smouldering and widening.
When Mother sees me she throws the prints onto the floor, kneels down beside me, apologizing, probably. I can’t hear, standing behind her, watching me hold up my little wrist to her, face so pale, blood snaking down lip and neck and chest.
All I can hear is the wind howling. Mother puts the small human in her arms and carries them out of the house. And I can’t follow them, can’t move, can’t go along to see the quiet intensity Mother had at that time, as she put me in the car and drove, that quiet intensity that seemed so cold and efficient but I later realized was actually silent adrenalin. Passion. Because I came out to the waiting room with the cast and the lollipop, and there she was: waiting and inconsolable, a two-seat buffer of discomfort around her.
I stand here, unmoving, with Mother’s camera ready at my chest, until the smoky arms unwrap themselves from my shoulders, and the grey wind stops howling. Silence fills the hole, and the cat comes down the stairs. The grey dissipates through the gaps in the walls, the empty places where so much used to be, as the cat sits down a few feet ahead of me. The cat meows, a soft, breaking sound.
But all
I want is the voice of that grey again. That noise, that inflected, meaningful nothing.
As soon as you see yourself emerging from Mother’s head in the upstairs bathroom you’ve set the sequence of these memories in motion. There’s no getting out now, and there’s no changing the order. Things focus in and the experience loses its breadth of possibilities, trading variation for intensity. Instead of the lack of control you have on the first floor of the memory palace, where things sometimes happen one way or another, here you have a deeper lack of control. No matter what, as soon as you choose not to surrender by reaching out to the door of your old bedroom first, you can’t take the rooms in any form other than as they are. You know exactly what is coming, and the dread of the inevitable is enough to ruin you. Because who said remembering is easy? Who said that you should be able to waltz through life nodding to the things you’ve passed by? No. That’s not what remembering is. Remembering is being dragged through the waist-deep rubble of the whole of your life—what you’ve lived and what you are living—without being able to get free. Or turn around. It’s seeing what’s already happened, all that reality that you can’t do anything about but watch pass.
The cat evaporates back into the creaky and whispering wood of the house. Before I open the door for the realtor, I adjust myself in my shirt. From the top of the neck, cleavage shows, and I’m not sure what I was thinking.
The realtor is a middle-aged woman in an electric-blue, kneelength skirt and a blazer. She is carrying an umbrella and the sky is clear. I introduce myself, correcting her assumption that I’m Hedwig.
“I’m her daughter,” I say, even though I don’t feel like it. I do not say what I want to say: I am her son, and she is no longer with us.
I show her the house. She steps over the pry bar wrapped in the negatives on the floor in front of the living room window, makes notes, and tells me what the great features of the house are, and what we would want to change. The darkroom should be brightened up. The living room should lose the old, dusty furniture that makes the room feel like it’s stuck in the eighties. The kitchen and the cabinets should be updated with fresh paint. I don’t take notes myself. I’m overwhelmed and envious of the coldness with which she surveys and prescribes for the house. My eyes get tight, edging.
I take her through every room, the same way that I would take her through the memory palace. A few times I want to point to the place on the walls where we’ve set up the photos but catch myself. She would not be able to see them, and if she did, she wouldn’t be able to care. As I take her through the house with a sort of natural order, I wonder what she is placing there. What her own life, maybe only ten or fifteen years longer than mine, would look like superimposed here.
I take her upstairs and try not to imagine all the people cluttering the steps. She marvels at the charming old sounds the house makes as we move and marks that down. I take her past the armoire, past the litter box and the food and water dishes that sit on the bare floor beside it, through Mother’s bedroom—where I avoid at all costs making eye contact with the mirror, where I don’t want to see myself trapped—and finally arrive in the doorway of the dusty studio. We step inside.
The realtor stops breathing, staring at the huge scar blackening the floor, the burnt-through wallpaper, and the ceiling in an expanding darkness. I stand behind her, looking at the hair on the back of her head, sprinting out in every thin direction from her part at the crown.
“What happened here?” she asks.
“An accident,” I say, not looking. The statement reinterprets and rearranges reality, and I try to believe in it. “A candle kicked over into a trash can. The power was out.”
She walks up to the wall, her hand over her mouth, as if she is shushing the whole house. The house doesn’t listen. It creaks at her feet the whole time she walks. I imagine the candle, the trash can, the fire eating away the dark, trying to confuse the walls, the floor. The realtor doesn’t seem to notice the house getting louder and louder and louder.
“This,” she says, stepping nearer to the wall and opening her arms to it. “This will have to be fixed.”
After the realtor leaves I sit down in the chair at the phone table. The number she quoted me for the house is nothing but digits. I think about Mother in the home, and all the digits involved in keeping her there. This is an exercise in practicality, a concession to the end of something.
The cat comes back, stands in the opening to the kitchen. They are rough and dusty from rubbing up and nestling into the places in the house they’ve been hiding, their fur a mat of weird clumps, a pointy collection of grey directions pinned to a skeleton. They stare at me and I stare at them, into them, into their nameless dark eyes.
I get up from the chair and the cat doesn’t run away, so I take a few steps toward them. I kneel and they let me pet them. I pet the grey cat and try to think of a name for them. I’m not sure that I’ve ever named another living thing since Darius. The cat begins to purr under my shallow rubbing, shallow in my hesitance to scare them away. They put their paw on my hand beside them on the floor and clench. No claws come out. I stop petting them and I grab their little paw and squeeze it.
I think of all the walking I’ve done around the neighbourhood since finding the cat and do not recall any posters looking for them. A few times, walking around here, I’ve noticed the poster for the missing teenager, the one I noticed on my first night here and thought might have been me—a girl. The one I haven’t been able to look at for long, because the picture on it is a black-and-white photo of a painting. The idea that a girl has disappeared before she was photographed is too much. The world is a horror, and it is coagulating in this city, in this house.
I let go of the cat’s paw as their nose edges toward my hand because I don’t want them to bite me. The cat is bones—curves and angles. Jagged. I do not have a name for them. The cat looks up at me, and then I go to the stairs, and up.
Outside the house is air. Inside the house is old layers of time. I dream in coats of paint and re-upholstered lives.
In Mother’s bedroom I don’t look in the mirror, not right away, but eventually I do. I see myself, in stride toward leaving the room, head and feet cut off from the frame. In the middle is paused movement, a genderless intention to put myself back into motion. I cannot tell who I am in the mirror, but whoever I am, they look ready to move in a decided direction.
The middle in the mirror looks determined.
10
MOTHER’S ROOM
This is the end of the beginning of the end of the tour, where the order and construction of the rooms are firmly set. The mirror is sitting in the corner of the room, and in the mirror you can see yourself in the bed, but when you look over to the bed itself you see Mother—younger, as she was once; sitting in bed, as she is now. But she is looking you straight in the eye, a gaze you can’t hold for long, until you look back to the mirror, where the you in the bed is meeting your gaze. Lenses breech the walls, tearing the wallpaper, lenses of different cameras—taking lenses, viewing lenses, large format lenses, and little Leica lenses just like Mother’s Summar. You can feel them focus, hear the faint buzz of a thousand shutterclicks and five hundred mirror flaps, the combination of which sounds like bugs scratching through the walls. Everywhere is the gleam of light crossing glass. You look back and forth between the mirror and the bed. You don’t look into the lenses.
Quite frankly, you don’t know what you even remember here. Every time, you’re unsure; you have no words to shape its importance. Instead of tangibility, this room stands more as a place where you go and feel shame, all that shame that has built up after years and years of pushing it away, of keeping it behind the camera instead of pulling it out front—where it should be—where it could go to be expressed and maybe, somewhat, silenced. Or at least understood.
The room gets louder and louder. Mother looks deeper and deeper into your eyes and you—in the bed in the mirror—begin to grimace. You find it harder to hold that bounce
d gaze than it is to hold Mother’s, though you keep looking back, and there you are, fuming, inverted, furious, deadly. You don’t want to look, but you’ve got no choice. This is you in your memory, not you in your life. A firm hand is on your head, turning you, curating the experience, and all you want is out.
Mother starts to look sorry for you; she starts to cry. You start screaming on the bed, and even when you’re looking at Mother, you can hear her, them, him. Your head is overcrowded. You want out and you want out and you want out—and you don’t get it, do you, the point of all this? You can’t know it. This is why you’re here! you scream at yourself from the mirrored bed. You can hear the spit flying from your fucking mouth, can’t you?
You can. You feel it—swelling like an island collapsing in on itself. The walls shake. The house creaks. Mother can’t stand the sight of you anymore, so she stops meeting your gaze. You want it back because you don’t want to be forced to look in the mirror. You scream for it: Look at me! you scream. Look at me!
And so you do, look at you, in the mirror. The bed is empty. The mirror turns to face you, but as it turns, you realize that the doorway is empty, too.
Leaning against the jamb of the darkroom’s door, my shoes on, my coat over my arm, I use my cell to call the number the realtor gave me for a friend of hers who often does last-minute fix-up work for her clients, and he tells me that, from the sounds of it, it would take him four days to do the job: paint the kitchen, paint the darkroom, and replace the wallpaper in the studio.
“I just had a job sniped from me. Could start as early as tomorrow.”
I thank him and give him the address, the numbers for both my cell and the landline, and the name of the paint the realtor suggested for the kitchen: Moonstone.
I do not tell him about the smoke, billowing room to room. I do not tell him that the house has grown so loud. That there is a cat, slipping in and out of view. I do not say any of that. I thank him again and hang up.
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