Vanishing Monuments

by John Elizabeth Stintzi

  That day in my memory is brilliant, and from there the dimming started.

  I don’t want to remember that day on the river with Mother anymore. I can’t handle it, how it insinuates that if nothing had changed, if that day was exposed onto every one of our other days, we would have had a perfect, perfect life. Mother would have smiled. I would have run toward her. I would not have put a pry bar to a window and demolished a house, a life.

  On the way back to Mother’s house, I take a detour to the sinkhole, barricaded by pylons and tape, an oblong darkness inset into the pavement. I look down into its maw, and it looks straight down into me.

  At the bottom of the sinkhole: all that I really know about Mother.

  11

  MOTHER’S STUDIO

  After you’ve disappeared from the doorway of Mother’s bedroom, you find yourself in the doorway of Mother’s studio, where there’s nothing but a cardboard box. The ash is not on the studio’s ceilings and walls in the memory palace. There is no smell. Once the door is closed behind you, you open the box and look inside. You pull out an empty cardboard box, followed by another—more and more until the whole room is filled with them. Once, these boxes held wine or bourbon or gin. You can’t get to the bottom of them. Every time you make it into the studio, you try and try and try and try to get to the bottom of them, and you never do. You just try. You look inside each of them to try and find the things Mother put inside them, the things Mother now and again transferred from them into brand-new boxes, but all you find is more and more corrugated lack.

  When you’re in the studio, gutting the box of all the other boxes, trying to reach the bottom, you do not remember the fire. You were not here for the fire. If the fire were allowed into the palace, perhaps all the missing pieces would make sense. The full box that slipped away. The last straw that led Mother into the home, into being locked down for her own safety. Into receding from being at all.

  The room is nothing but the boxes, and you swim desperately through them, abandoning the first box and looking inside the rest, knocking on each like the empty skulls they are. On and on. The room is dead quiet. The boxes do not relinquish any sound when you move among them. You can only hear yourself breathing.

  You want out, and eventually, just as you think you’ll never find the door, there you are, outside the studio. You breathe. You breathe again, even though the air doesn’t help.

  There is only one room left: your bedroom. All the other pathways have disappeared, and it is just you and the door.

  At this point, you always feel flammable. You take a step.

  I wake up in my little bed, in my old bedroom, with Mother’s camera still around my neck, strangling me. At the other side of the room, on top of the creaky loft bed, is the cat. They are staring at me. I can hear the rest of the house storming with the grey, the grey with its many faces.

  I slowly climb up to where the cat is sitting, looking at me, clawlessly pawing at the stiff foam mattress crumbling under the fabric.

  The bed feels like it’s going to collapse. But it always has.

  The cat comes to me. They rub their head along my bare hip.

  I look through the vent, into Mother’s studio, and feel a gust of wind and ash blow through me, into me. I remember the smell of air moving, and Mother is there again, young, in the middle of the room. I don’t move, not wanting the bed’s creaking to give me away, to break her meditation.

  She is breathing in and out, bending her body into shapes my bones have never been able to comprehend, despite the months of classes I’ve taken. She is nude to her undergarments, sweating. Sweating so hard, because just a few feet from her—pushed up against the wall—is a cardboard box filled with fire.

  The wall is burning, and there she is—in the middle of the room—twisting. I can smell the smoke as it vibrates in the walls of the house. I can feel its eyes as sound, no longer afraid of the camera, since once again it is emptied of its film. Mother continues folding and unfolding herself, like an anxious jackknife, trying to pick out its tool. Eventually, her body chooses to become nothing. Lies in the middle of the room. Shavasana. Only she’s not breathing and the cat is pawing at my leg with no claws and she’s still not breathing.

  I remember all her photos that I stole onto which I exposed my own body—trying to be hers. It still didn’t help me find peace in my body.

  I can’t move. The fire doesn’t spread, but it seems to get brighter and brighter. Flecks of burnt paper flutter through the sky like snow, begin to vortex around Mother’s body in the middle of the floor until the body gets up, still not breathing, and goes toward the fire. I am watching as Mother slowly places her hands inside the box and pulls out the fire. I watch her hold it in her hands, watch them scarring over. As she holds the fire, the vortex of ash and smoke increases the room’s opacity, and I watch her body fade, grow old, watch her beautiful long hair go white and suck up short into her head.

  Then I watch her put the fire back into the box, almost tenderly, stand up, take a step, and fold herself slowly into the flames. As she disappears into the fire, one of the boards of the loft bed snaps under me, and I fall flat to the mattress. Flat in fear. As I look to see if the bed is falling, I watch the cat sprint through the door and down the stairs. But the bed stays up.

  I turn over onto my back. Bright light shoots through the vent onto the ceiling of my room. Then the world darkens a bit.

  On the ceiling, in a widening circle: the burnt sun is blooming.

  Everything. Everything must go.

  It’s warm, and I sit on the stoop flicking away email notifications on my phone: from Ess about revisions for hir thesis essay, from other students asking me for advice on putting together their portfolios. The house is closed up behind me, and the painters are coming by today, and Hudson is coming over, too. Because I called and asked him to help me dismantle the darkroom.

  —I’ll be there in 20, H, Hudson sent, twenty-six minutes ago. Either signing off or addressing me: Hedwig.

  I’m starting to think he’s not going to show up, but of course, just as I think that, there’s a little flat-nosed Toyota truck pulling into an open space a few houses down. The passenger side opens and Hudson steps out, in open flannel over a black T, jeans, and steel-toed boots. He waves to me as he grabs a rusty tool box from the truck bed. I wave back.

  I get up and go toward him, try to ignore the eyes of the house following me. The tendrils trying to yank me back in. As I reach the truck, I can see he is alone, and the truck is right-hand drive.

  “Didn’t know what I’d need,” Hudson says, smiling, then putting a hand out to shake, because he’s a stranger still, isn’t he? “That sundress looks great. Been a while since I’ve seen a sundress.” He gestures to the sky, as if that sky were not steadily darkening from a black, widening aperture.

  “Thank you,” I say, and we walk to the house.

  I want to tell him that the house is on fire. We walk in and I want to ask him if he can smell the fire, if he can hear the house wriggling in its skin.

  “You can leave your boots on, of course,” I say, and direct him straight down the hall to the red-headed darkroom. He goes and starts inspecting all the ways the counters have been attached to the walls.

  “I just want to get these removed so that it can get painted this afternoon. I’m also hoping we can get that toilet up and running again.”

  “Easy,” he says, putting down the tools and looking up at the red light hot in the sky. “And maybe a new light?”

  “That’s an idea,” I say, remembering the shadow birthing from that room and dragging itself to me. Sinking its teeth into my shoulder, which is still sore from the hatcheting at the gallery.

  I leave Hudson to work, go upstairs to my bedroom, get out one more roll of film, snip its lead to size, and spool it into Mother’s camera. I put it around my neck again; there’s no getting away from it.

  Shadows of the Prison House.

  Light is spilling into the wi
ndow and I walk over and look through it. I think of Mother burning in the next room. I think of taking every single thing from the house and taking photos of the places they leave behind—their shadows but without the shapes to cast them. I want to rub it in, to prove the place I knew is gone, even though it isn’t. To trick myself into thinking that even our shadows have left the building.

  A gentle knock pulls me back, and Hudson is there. Behind him, the cat is crawling up the stairs and looking at me, scared.

  “Sorry to startle you. The painters are here. I let them in. They’re waiting in the kitchen. Bathroom is all fixed up, too.”

  “Already?” I say, walking past him. He follows; the cat is gone again.

  “It doesn’t take long to unscrew a few things from the walls.”

  I turn down the hall and see the darkroom open, its landscapes reshaped. The red light is off.

  “And the toilet?” I ask, standing there, paralyzed.

  “Seems to work just fine,” Hudson says, walking past me into the room and flushing it. “Just had to turn on the water.”

  I try not to panic at the idea of the dark rallying around him, possessing him and trapping him here forever. As he walks out, I reach into the darkroom, turn the red light back on, and close the door.

  I make my way to the kitchen. The two painters have stepladders, paint cans, and paint-speckled white shirts.

  “Hi,” I say. “Thanks for coming.”

  I hold on to Mother’s camera and feel the house getting furious.

  When I came back to Minneapolis from Hamburg, I stayed with Karen. She’d finally gotten a place to herself—a tiny place with the most finicky radiator in the city, but her own place. She was finally doing okay. She was still working at the café, but she’d gotten a small local grant for her performance art, which broadened her network in the art world, which also increased her ability to sell drugs—mostly pot and elementary hallucinogens, but she could get you anything you wanted. While I’d been away, she helped Genny get heroin for a dying friend.

  I felt the lack of Darius in my life when I got off the plane and met Genny by the baggage carousel. I didn’t even have a checked bag to grab, but we held each other while it spun, slowly spitting out the things other people brought from one side of an ocean to the other.

  I didn’t move in with Genny, despite the fact that with Darius gone there was nothing keeping me from living with her and her dog, Hamm. Instead, I worked on Shavasana while crashing on Karen’s couch, and eventually, I moved in with Archer, who’d just had top surgery and needed some help with paying rent and living life while they recovered. I sat on the side of the bed, made them food, brought them their guitar, listened to them pluck out a new sonata in chaos with the instrument nestled at a weird distance so as to not hit the stitches. We shared Archer’s double bed and I wandered around the apartment feeling oddly electric in their presence. I was in the room when the bandages came off, and we stared at the beautiful coils of the swollen, stitched scars, which I’ve always wanted, and not wanted, my body not agreeing with itself long enough to commit to any permanent modifications. I considered getting scars like Archer’s tattooed under the overhang of my breasts, so that I might be able to cup them in the mirror and believe them gone when I needed to. But whenever I walk by a tattoo parlor and think of it, I fear that it could throw me into a new imbalance, and imbalances like that have historically led to me disappearing.

  Once Shavasana was done and Archer was working again, I bought my tiny house kitty-corner to Genny’s. My excuse for not moving in with her was that she didn’t have enough room for me and a darkroom, that it was my dream to live with one.

  A soft truth with a sharp lie in the middle.

  I didn’t tell her that I also felt obligated to cloister myself from the intimacy of living a life with her, the happiness and the comfort that could allow. I felt an obligation to be alone in a house with a darkroom and my thoughts, thoughts of Mother and all my other darknesses. The pain Genny had inflicted on me and the pain I had inflicted on her. On Mother. On Tom. I felt that she would not make room for my demons in her house, so we kept dating, spending all our excess time together but living separately, albeit only across the street. I felt like I owed it to the world to be miserable, and I wanted to feel pain every morning, wanted pain to absolve me of all my guilt. A wound that must forever stay open.

  The street between our houses felt like a river bisecting my life. I’ve always felt like I have to cross so much turbulence to reach anyone.

  After coming back from Hamburg without Darius, life in Minneapolis felt simpler than it had been, less strict. I could leave home for days or weeks and nobody would tear my house to pieces while I was gone—in Brooklyn or Chicago, or wherever it was I was dragged to for this conference or that talk or the workshops and residencies and shoots on location. The house would be fine, alive, still watching Genny’s across the street. Nothing was pissed on or torn apart. There was just a little dust, a few dead bugs to vacuum away—a few little reminders of how time was coagulating.

  When I came back to the house, I felt like it had missed me, instead of resenting me for leaving.

  Without Darius, though, I sat around quiet. I could no longer pretend that someone could hear me, so I stopped chatting with myself. Some nights I sat in the living room and looked out across the street to Genny’s house. Some nights I ran over desperately and knocked on the door and spent the night. Sometimes I invited Archer or Karen to stay with me, after fetching a few bottles of booze. And some nights I was carried up alone to my darkroom—which I’d made in the bathroom on the second floor—and got locked in with all my demons. Transported, strangled.

  I used my darkroom to teleport to Mother’s house, long before it had become my memory palace. I would feel myself sitting beside her on the couch, looking out the wide front window and waiting, as the demons—both our demons—took up their siege engines to remove the front door. We were quiet. We didn’t look at one another. Eventually, I felt their hands on me, trying to drown me in the riverine gaps, as they finally broke into the house. They billowed. They bared the shadows of their teeth.

  After Mother was diagnosed and her house finally became the memory palace, all the demons trying to reach me wore the many faces of myself.

  After Hudson leaves, waving, with the wood he’d reclaimed from the darkroom stacked in the back of his little Toyota, I leave the painters to their work and go back upstairs to find the cat. I can see their paw slipping under the closed bathroom door, and I kneel and hold on to their paw for a moment. They don’t pull away, until they do, and I open the door and slip inside. I sit down in the tub and call to them, and they come to me and we sit like that, while the painters bury the old walls downstairs. In the tub, grasping the stone-grey cat, I feel like we’re hiding from a shooter, or a tornado. The house makes its noises. Mother’s camera is still around my neck.

  The cat jumps out of my hands and stands on the edge of the tub before falling out of view. I look around at everything in the bathroom and imagine a crowd of people coming to carry it all away. I imagine myself picking up every single thing in the house and putting it somewhere else.

  In the tub, I think about all the things that are in the house, all the things I could move, all the things I could document.

  Shadows of the Prison House; or, These Photos Are Too Late.

  I start to list the things off in my head, trying to come up with enough frames to fill the last roll of film: the phone, the couches, the loft bed, the mailbox, the armoire.

  The studio’s scar.

  The cat somehow loses themselves in the bathroom. We are very similar, us two—we can be locked in a closet with a mirror and still lose sight of ourselves. I lie back in the dry tub and close my eyes. I think of the house emptying out, imagine myself picking it up and turning it over and knocking it empty like a glass bottle of ketchup. I imagine myself leaving it bare, removing everything that the house could ever possess and persi
st through. Everything.

  I imagine folding myself into a box and being mailed back to Genny. Imagine scrawling on the outside of the box: FLAMMABLE.

  With my eyes closed, I end up slipping into the palace, and there’s the cat, at the door of the darkroom. I cut my feet on the memory on the landing and walk down the hallway and it takes so, so, so long. By the time I reach them, the cat is so old, but they are reaching their little clawless paw under the door again. I put my hand on the knob and the darkroom—which never opens in the palace—opens.

  So much comes out, so many shadowed bodies walk past me and push me and crawl around me. They are palpable darknesses. The cat goes into the room and turns around and looks at me, through so many dark limbs, as if they are asking why I haven’t made it into the room yet. And so I do. I swim through the bodies and make it into the darkroom.

  I turn on the light and, as the dark figures are annihilated, they are replaced with wind. Throughout the house the doors in their jambs start to shake and knock, and I am pushed into the darkroom with the cat, and I look down the hall and there she is—Mother—walking down the hallway toward the darkroom, aging a decade with every step, until she falls. Until her hands scar over with the fire. She crawls the rest of the way, toward the door. Her face is bleeding. Then she loses her face and she is just a surface with blood streaming down. Her details simplify, abstract, until she is just a suggestion of a face with a brushstroke of blood set into a rectangle, a frame of 35 mm film slowly fading clear. It reaches the door and the door slams and I come out of the palace coughing.