Vanishing Monuments

by John Elizabeth Stintzi

  I was interviewed for magazines and the exhibition was extended. It went to Chicago and then New York, a mid-sized gallery in Manhattan where the likes of Richard Avedon had once exhibited. With the recognition I got a teaching job—despite my having never finished high school—at the University of Minnesota’s fine arts program. After a year, all the prints had sold, twenty-five copies each at a very good price. With the money, I bought my house across the street from Genny’s and invested in a bigger, better studio for the collective, with an attached gallery for our exhibitions.

  Eventually, I stopped. I started denying interviews and secluding myself, because I’d begun to feel an intense shame, the kind of shame that only an artist can feel when they believe they’ve succeeded while misrepresenting something that, albeit invisible to others, makes them feel like they violently obscured a kind of personal, intrinsic truth.

  The project, as most are, was a failure. In Germany, Shavasana was a project of ideals, of optimism, and perhaps even of wish fulfillment. It was naive. But in the end, the images seemed to blur over the complications between myself and Mother. There was a sentimentality to them, which I had intended but wasn’t true to our relationship. But worse, I had put my images over the bare shots of Mother’s negatives, whereas she was an obsessive revisionist in the darkroom. She never let a print get past her without some sort of modification, however small, but here I’d shown her direct, unfiltered vision, which was, in fact, not her vision at all. I don’t think she ever believed in the truth of the thing being as it seems, and by showing the raw image—because I could not modify as she had—I showed the false one that she would have formed into a kind of truth. I’d completely, utterly, painfully rejected and demolished every aesthetic vision that Mother had in her work.

  So I sold off the remaining reprints to buyers as far away as I could find and donated my negatives to the University of Minnesota. I mailed Mother’s negatives back to her, with a letter. I didn’t tell her about the exhibition, didn’t tell her about the money I’d made stealing her work. I just said I was sorry I’d taken them, and she should have them back.

  The return address on the envelope was her own.

  Helena wraps her arm around mine and we walk into the next room in the gallery, dedicated to Logan’s work, which feels like walking into a traumatized vision. Along all the walls are huge paintings in an abstract expressionist style. The paintings are slaps and splashes, the painter’s gestures swiftly mapped onto canvas, but the canvases are deeply busted, slashed, broken apart, and stitched back together crudely with thick gut, wire, and nails. Some are in such bad shape that I can’t make sense of the paint for all the seams.

  “I took a class with her once,” Helena says, as we wash up in front of one of the huge paintings. “She builds these canvases in her house, which she uses as her studio, and if she has to show them somewhere, she has to cut them into pieces so that she can take them out the door. Every time a painting is in a show, she cuts it apart and puts it back together. Some of them have been taken apart so many times,” she says, pointing to a painting that seems to be almost nothing but seams, “that you can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be anymore. It’s all worn out.”

  We walk around and eventually find ourselves in one last, small room. In the middle is a small painting, busted to pieces, with a small hatchet tethered to a table nearby. A girl in a vest waves to us and comes over with a clipboard. On the placard screwed to the table is nothing but the title: Unfinished Portrait of an Unfinished Portrait of a Dead Girl (Finish It).

  The girl shows us the clipboard. “If you’d like to contribute to the piece,” she says, lifting the hatchet from the table and wiggling it in the air, “you just have to sign this little waiver.”

  “Shall I?” I ask Helena, at my arm.

  “Absolutely,” she says, taking Mother’s camera from around my neck. I feel a sudden shift in the weight of the world and think of Genny. I miss her.

  I sign the waiver with Mother’s name, pick up the hatchet, and look down at the mess and then over at the girl, who nods to me. Helena stands beside her, eyes a little puffy, smiling.

  I kneel down to the wreckage and raise the hatchet and start chopping at it, wood splintering off, canvas tearing. I wonder what the portrait looked like before it got destroyed. I think of the painting of the missing girl on the poster, the girl who may never have been photographed in her life, and then I stop thinking about that because I’m chopping at it, at the portrait that does not look like a portrait, that doesn’t seem like it ever looked like a portrait, that never could have, but how can I tell? I chop, thinking of dead girls. And the dead boy in the Red. And Helena getting married on it. And Mother and me walking along and atop it. And Mother now existing farther north but still near it.

  Finally, I stop, stand, put the hatchet back on the table, and look down at the mess I’ve contributed to. I can’t really tell what I’ve added or taken away—it still looks about the same—but I can feel the hitting take residence in the muscles of my arm. I can feel it setting into a real ache in my flesh.

  Then I realize there is a line behind me, that I might have been at this for far too long.

  “There’s no fixing that,” I tell the girl with the clipboard, as I massage my arm and join Helena, who puts her ringed hand on my aching shoulder—the truest medium.

  The girl with the clipboard smiles at me as we go. “There never was.”

  I look at her until we’re through the door. My mind is a clean slate.

  Two months before I left Germany, I called Genny. She’d moved since then, so I didn’t have her number or her address, but eventually I got to her through the University of Minnesota, where she’d been working before I left. I kept asking for her—Genny Ford—and people kept sending me to other people in different departments they thought might know her. At the end of it, I paid the Eggers’s phone bill for that month because it became an excessive list of long-distance charges.

  Finally, there was someone who knew Genny, who said that she could give Genny my number, who said she didn’t feel comfortable giving hers to me. She hadn’t heard of anyone named Alani from her conversations with Genny. That hurt, and I luxuriated in that hurt. I gave her Erwin’s number, explaining that I was in Germany, explaining country codes and international dialling.

  Then I sat by the phone for three days straight. I hardly ate. I dragged the phone from the hall into my room sometimes. Sometimes I’d sit with my back to the door, the phone cable snaking under, quietly crying. I answered all the calls, because I didn’t want the Eggers to get to Genny first, not merely because I’d become so desperate for her—because I had suddenly and once again hinged myself on her—but also because I knew she was going to ask for Alani, and that wasn’t who I was. I had been Sofia for so long that I didn’t think I could come clean about it—Sofia would be who I remained to them.

  It went on like that for those three days until I thought I couldn’t handle it anymore. Then, when I was about to give in and give up, and felt myself open up to actions I didn’t want to fathom, Genny called, around three a.m.—eight p.m. for her. The phone barely had the chance to ring.

  For the entirety of that call, I covered my eyes with my free hand in the pitch-black dark—to isolate the senses, maybe, or because I didn’t believe that we were talking, not after so long. Her voice tremored into my ear, unlocking doors, closing windows. The many stagnant pieces of me began to move again like tectonics. I reactivated.

  “When are you coming home?” she asked.

  At that moment, and for the first time in the longest time, I realized that she was right: Germany was not home. Germany was a ghost whose back I’d climbed. Germany was shadows, a crowd of foggy idealisms. I realized that if I stayed, it would get too easy to live there and become Sofia.

  I knew I had to go back.

  I told her, “Soon.” I told her I’d call her. I told her not to call me, and if she did—ask for Sofia. “Long story,” I
said, tears streaming down my face because I knew that I would tell it to her.

  For that first call, we pretended that nothing had happened. We pretended that I’d never found her letter, that I’d never used it as reason to run away, without telling anyone where I was going. We ignored the terrible things I’d called her when I found out. I just told her how hard my depression was back, how it was disconnecting me from myself, how I was again feeling as I’d once felt, how recklessness was going to take over, the kind of recklessness that’s so hard to survive. I just told her that, above all else, I fucking missed her.

  “Don’t worry, Al,” she said then.

  I couldn’t breathe, and I lifted the hand away from my face enough to let the wave of tears I’d been cupping make their way down. I told Genny I’d call her again, the following day, at a more humane hour.

  She laughed and said, “Okay.”

  After we hung up, I sat there for a little while, the phone on my lap, my eyes and my mind drying out, and I just stopped worrying.

  After dropping Helena off at her house, after hugging her in the middle of her street for what felt like a long while, I thought about going to the sinkhole. But I drove past it, around it, and came back here: the home.

  I get out of the car, then go back for my phone, where I left it while Helena and I were in the gallery. There are four missed calls. They are from the home, so I don’t shut the door of the car, don’t let the waiting room slow me down, and crash into the front desk.

  The nurse jumps in her scrubs and puts her hands up, recognizing me. “Don’t worry,” she says. “Your mom is fine. The doctor is with her.”

  “What happened?”

  “She fell from her bed an hour or so ago and hit her head.” She is standing up behind the desk, her warm hand on mine. “We think she probably figured out the buckle and wanted to get back to the chair. We found her on the floor, crawling toward it. We tried to call,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine, just has a cut above her eye, on the brow. The doctor is just giving her a few stitches.”

  “I’m her son. Can’t I see her?” I say.

  She stands back and puts her hands on the desk and looks down the hall. This place is more hospital than home. “Of course you can see her.”

  I follow her as she walks calmly down the hall to a little room that does not seem to want to deceive anyone into thinking it is not a hospital room. The doctor has his back to us, standing over Mother sitting up on the bed. All I can see are her hands beside her.

  The nurse taps the doctor’s shoulder. “Her son is here,” she says, gesturing to me with a sympathetic smile.

  He looks over his shoulder and is confused for a second, and I hate him, and also float in the brief pleasure of feeling so confusing.

  “Good afternoon,” he says, turning back to Mother. “Just finishing up.”

  The nurse tells me to let her know if I need anything and leaves. I look over the doctor’s shoulder at Mother as he is cutting off the end of the stitches he has done on her right brow.

  “Just going to clean her off and put a bandage on this and she should be good,” he says.

  Her face is covered in smears of dark blood, the tips of her short white hair rusted up with it, and she is staring through the doctor’s chest. She seems unfazed. The doctor gets an antiseptic wipe and starts to clean her face. I sit in a chair by the bed and take her hand in both of mine. I don’t say anything to her.

  Mother’s hand moves around in mine, but she doesn’t look at me.

  The doctor puts a bandage on Mother’s face, says something about how there’s little chance she’s gotten a concussion considering the placement of the hurt, but they will keep an eye on her.

  I almost want to say, “So you can watch her fall next time?” but my mouth is too dry.

  Finally, he leaves and the nurse comes back with a wheelchair. I help the nurse lower Mother into the wheelchair, even though she weighs nothing and the nurse is strong. I push her back to her room, following the nurse in her slow, salmon scrubs.

  Mother’s room smells intensely of cleaning products. The green curtains are closed, casting a grassy light across the tiles. There is a new belt across the bed.

  The nurse picks Mother up from the chair and puts her back into the bed, pulls the covers up to her chest, locks the belt with a key, and leaves.

  I sit down on the edge of the bed and hold Mother’s scarred hands. I run my fingers along them and can’t tell which parts are scars and which are wrinkles. Which come from pain and which come from time, as if there is a difference, as if one isn’t the other, just stretched out more.

  “Why did you do it?” I ask. “Why did I do it?”

  She looks at me, holds her eyes on me. Her camera is still around my neck, I realize, and I put it back in her hands. She looks down at it and then puts her fingers on the shutter button, and when it makes its tiny sound, she flinches.

  I take the camera back. I put my hands on her face, swollen a little from the fall, and look her in the eyes. She returns the look, but I know that she doesn’t know who I am, that nobody really knows anyone because we spend so much goddamned time trying to figure ourselves out. That if she knows anything about me at all, she’ll know less tomorrow. And the next day. And so on.

  I kiss her on the forehead, far from her new bandaged wound, put her camera around my neck, and go. I don’t look up, but I can feel that some part of the sky is pocked by a dark sun.

  When I was younger than the boy they found in the river—maybe ten years old—Mother and I took a long walk down the clear path on the Red. It was the tail end of winter and the ice was thick. Mother had let the pinned legs of my snow pants down twice already. I remember coming down for breakfast and finding her winding a scarf around her neck—overtop the old Leica—and looking up at me.

  “Come, kid, get your clothes on. You’re old now.”

  She smiled, then. Smiled so hard.

  It was March, my birthday. Yes, I was turning ten and it was a weekday, but she didn’t take me to school. She helped tie my scarf and tightened my boots and took me out, for pancakes first, and then to the river.

  I don’t remember much of what we talked about that day, because so little sound between us remains, but I remember being near Mother. I remember laughing and pointing and huddling together to warm up. I remember feeling special, feeling happy that I did not have to go to school, where I felt so different. I remember walking through snow to our knees to get down to the cleared path on the thick ice of the Assiniboine, heading toward the Red. It was windy, but I trusted the rivers then. We walked all the way to the Forks, bought foot-long hot dogs and hot chocolates at the market.

  “Where next, Alani?” Mother asked, and I pointed north, toward the bridge that someone would find a body pinned to thirty-four years later, the bridge that so many other bodies have probably passed under, unnoticed. A river hitting a brick wall, a sequence of photos unfinished because no more film remained on the roll.

  Mother took three photos of me that day. The first was of me standing on the house’s snowy stoop, bundled up beyond recognition. The second was of me sitting in the market, coat open, toque-less and toque-haired, with the hot dog buried in relish. Smiling, at her.

  The third photo she took of me was under that railway bridge, with a train trundling along overhead. I was standing with my arms up. She captured the train right as its CN-marked engine was nearly overtop of me, creating a wonderful visual tension—on a different plane of existence, it would have hit me.

  I remember her taking that last photo. I remember taking off my gloves and using Mother’s light meter to get a reading for her, even though I don’t think she needed it. I remember Mother hearing the train and looking over at it coming, pushing soft at my shoulder and telling me, “Hurry!” as I sprinted down the half-cleared path to the bridge. I remember the sound of the train when I turned and raised my arms. I remember seein
g her, sixty feet away, looking through the camera, her knees clamped together to hold her mittens between her thighs.

  All the while, the water moved deep under the ice.

  That day on the river with Mother, I realized exactly what it meant to love her. We stopped under every bridge we passed to huddle together for warmth away from the wind. The same bridges I would wander under years later with Genny, who would be obsessed with them in the same way that I would be obsessed with her. There was something about bridges that would hold Genny’s attention, draw her eye into circles that on every rotation still marvelled, trying to figure out exactly why. For most of my life, I’ve been trying to do this with Genny, with Mother, with myself: figure out what exactly fascinates me. I haven’t figured it out, but I keep trying.

  That day with Mother, that good day—whose contrast created our worst days together, my worst days alone, days filled with personal and impersonal tragedies—seemed to have the brightest sun. The few photos Mother took that day showed otherwise. I can tell the amount of ambient light from the depth of field of those images, under those bridges, on that ice path, that ice path where we shared a mitten because we wanted to hold hands without freezing, where she took the photo of the man who called, “Passing on your left!” while he speed-walked past. In the photo, he seems to be sauntering into the future—a procession of blurring, dark-swaddled bodies. But in my head, that day was brilliant.

  This incongruence of our memory of light has something to do with the amount we can hold our eyes open, I think. When we are young, dumb, energetic, naive—before our minds start to inseminate our pain with some invented narrative—we can keep them open wider, less sensitive to sucking in more light at once. But as we age, and break down, and fix up, and stop reading books in school and start reading stories in newspapers—about murders, about suicides, about international atrocities, about how big the world really is but how tiny gestures of either violence or kindness can still shake it—we start to squint. The darkening is us, stacking up dense filter upon dense filter, trying to keep what’s bad out and hold what good we still have in, in. We start to see the world go to shade, lose its saturation, vignette our lives into a tunnel.