This is a memory that I hate that I have. The symmetry of this memory scares me to my core, because it is how I know that I’m far too similar to Mother.
Erwin drove me an hour out into the country, near where we let those mice go, upstream on the Elbe. It was broad daylight, and we pulled over near a place where one could launch a boat from a trailer.
“I’ll just be a minute,” I said. “Honk if you see someone coming and want us to go.”
I took out the paper bag of letters I’d written when I first got to Germany, the many letters that said all the things I had needed to say. Things that had spilled out. I took the bag down next to the water, poured a whole can of lighter fluid into it, and then dropped a lit match inside. The bag went up like nothing, huge flecks of paper, huge flecks of who I’d been, rising in the hot air. A boat slowly trolled along the far shore.
I didn’t want to bring them back with me. I didn’t want to be able to look at and remember all that leaving, the permanence and resolve of that decision.
I watched the bag of paper burn down into nothing. Into a fluttering bloom of ash. Which I kicked into the water as it was smouldering out. All that pain, all that life no longer worth keeping hold of. I was finished with all of it.
But of course that wasn’t the end of all of that. Much of the wound that act was trying to forgive has been bleeding ever since then. Will always be bleeding, no matter how hard I might try to cauterize it.
I hate this memory because it means that Mother probably didn’t get past anything by lighting her box on fire in the studio, either. She just got rid of the proof, and whatever wanted to stay probably just migrated into her head, where it would have started living a life, changing itself to her new shapes, floating atop the current of her mind without any concrete thing to haunt.
I stop at a red light and remember climbing into the passenger seat, beside Erwin, remember the quiet drive home. Erwin told me that when he got rid of the photos that we were re-creating, instead of burning them, he dropped them in a heavy box in the Elbe.
“The same way you stop a vampire,” he said, smiling at me, and I smiled back.
Back then, I still thought that what I had done would work. Even though Erwin was sitting there, driving along, the smiling proof that it didn’t. He was trying to drag the lost past back into the material present, so that it could be stuffed into a drawer rather than be held in the grey folds of his mind. But I didn’t think about any of that yet. I just smiled.
Stopped at a red light, I look over at the passenger seat and see me, at twenty-three, smiling back at me. And sitting on their lap, me at ten, smiling, as if I have a hand on a horse’s flank.
I look away and grip the wheel hard. I can feel the past climbing up onto the back of the car, into the wheel wells. I can feel the sun getting slapped around by the black. I can feel the whole city turning in on me. I grow terrified that the light will never go green.
I grow terrified that no matter how hard and how long I drive, I will only ever end up here.
But then the light goes green, and I start moving again.
The next morning, Helena drops Hudson off in their little Japanese truck. She idles out front, her side of the truck nearest us. I come over to the window and she puts her hand on my bare arm as Hudson pulls his tools from the back. Drills and screwdrivers and saws and all. All those things I should be able to handle on my own. He hoists them with his deceptively strong body and carries them into the house as Helena pulls away.
Hudson is wearing overalls and a clean white shirt this time. As soon as he comes through the door I hear the cat scurrying around the hardwood, hiding from the stranger. I show Hudson to my old bedroom, to the loft bed. I can hear the cat moving slowly in the house, coming up the stairs.
Hudson’s eyes behind his glasses study the way the bed is constructed. “It’s actually pretty nice wood,” he says. “It’s mostly the parts holding it together that are making it dangerous.”
I carry the thin remains of the flat mattress downstairs and stuff it into a garbage bag. I don’t catch sight of the cat on my way, and I figure they’ve slipped into the memory palace. I hear Hudson moving around upstairs. I carry the bag outside and stand at the curb, not wanting to go back into the house. I close my eyes and see the palace from outside, feel the sink of flesh at my feet, like a wet lawn. Or quicksand.
I open my eyes and stare the house down, think about Hudson and Helena, wonder what it feels like to be driven around in a right-hand-drive car. It must feel strange to sit on the left and be without control, to have all the visual advantages but no ability to turn the wheel. To feel like you’re marooned on the wrong continent. I try to picture the sensation of surrender. It comes naturally. I feel it.
When I get back upstairs, Hudson is bent over his tools, looking for something. The loft bed is on its side in the bedroom and he has already knocked most of the sagging supports for the mattress from the bed. He has a little sledgehammer in his hand.
“I forgot my claw hammer,” he says, making a levering motion with his hand. “You wouldn’t have one, would you?”
“You may be in luck,” I say.
I go downstairs and look for it—in the closet with the vacuum, in the kitchen. I forget where I last saw it. I close my eyes and see all the photos on the wall of the living room and remember holding it above my head. Remember the realtor stepping over it. I open my eyes and it’s there, on the floor, in the light: the little pry bar wrapped in negatives.
I go up and see Hudson crouched outside the room, stretching his hand out to the cat, who is licking it. The cat is a real cat, not just in my head.
I hand Hudson the pry bar. He looks at it, adjusting his glasses, questioning.
“Some art has its uses,” I say.
The cat stays outside the room. They don’t run away anymore. They’re used to this world, my world, its people.
When Hudson finishes, I go downstairs and grab the vacuum and a pail from the closet. The same pail, presumably, Dorothea used to fight the fire. Hudson has turned the bed into long planks of unrecognizable wood that he carries downstairs. The house moans under the weight of the removal.
I clean the place, and then stand on the other side of the room, lift Mother’s camera, set the exposure, and hit the shutter. It’s that easy.
7. The Loft Bed
Hudson brings his tools downstairs and calls Helena to pick him up as I come down. As Helena begins to make her way to us, from whatever corner of the city she is driving the mirrored truck through, I take Hudson back upstairs one last time to look at the armoire. He puts his hand against the wood, just like he did with the loft bed. As he does, the cat crawls out from underneath it—a place that I had no idea could fit a living thing. The cat comes up to Hudson and rubs against him.
“They’ve really taken a liking to you,” I say.
“What’s their name?” he asks, reaching down to pet the cat.
“I don’t know,” I say, leaning against the wall, dwarfed by the armoire. “They haven’t told me yet.”
Helena knocks on the door, and we help Hudson get his tools and the wood into the back of the little truck. I try and give him more money, but he just says: “I can come the day after tomorrow and do the armoire.”
In my old bed, I dream.
I have removed all the windows and doors from the house. All the city has come to the house, each person walking or flying inside, each person carrying a single piece out. The house is gutted and then dismantled, board by board, nail by nail. Eroded.
I wake up and can’t move. It is an all-white room. I can feel smoke holding my body down, paralyzing me. And so it comes up to my face—its face—and looks into me.
I know I’m still dreaming, but I want to scream, but I don’t want to, and I don’t want to and I don’t want to, and then just as I open my mouth, the smoke flies inside and I’m awake, breathing fast.
The cat is sitting beside me, looking at me. I try to move my arms, an
d they do. I scratch the cat’s neck.
There is thunder but no rain, no lightning. A storm circling, but not entering, the city.
I close my eyes and there it is, yes, the storm pounding down on the memory palace.
I open my eyes and am on my bed, feeling the dark sun setting in the calm after anxiety has burnt you down. And then I get up from the bed, grab my purse filled with the loose paper containing the list of all the things in the house. I go downstairs and get a marker from a drawer. I turn one of the pages over, the page that reads: armoire (old, maple wood, handmade in Manitoba, decent condition, just too huge), and on the back scrawl:
YARD SALE, SATURDAY MAY 24.
NAME YOUR PRICE!
EVERYTHING MUST GO!
Then I turn the paper back over and write, in small letters: Especially me.
WHEN
I stayed out pretty late yesterday. The day the painters came back to fix the studio, spreading a thin layer of plaster on the ceiling—because they figured that would stick better than paint—and tearing down and putting up new, simple wallpaper. We’d negotiated possibly removing the wood panels and replacing them with drywall, but I said no, because it sounded like it would extract too much from the house.
I don’t really want the bones of the house to go; I just want it to be re-skinned.
I drove around Winnipeg, seeing how everything has changed: neighbourhoods going from cute to crowded, downtown getting taller and taller. I just drove, circling Assiniboine Park, hitting red lights on the one-ways of downtown to reach and lurch through the veins of the Exchange district. Even there, despite its preservation, feels different. Perhaps in juxtaposition with the construction zone of the looming downtown wannabe-scrapers, the old buildings, with fading advertisements painted on their sides half a century ago or more, feel quaint. Like the city is not so much upholding some tradition as it is clinging to nostalgia.
I’ve begun to think that the past is not worth keeping around simply because it actually happened.
When I grew sick of the stop-and-go of the heart of the city, I went to see Mother. The nurse let me have a bit of their lunch, but I lost my appetite while I watched her feed Mother in bed.
After the nurse left, I let Mother hold her camera again. She rubbed her hands on the coated brass skin, occasionally looked at it. I watched her hands move, thinking of the flaming box in her studio, thinking about the people working on that room at that exact moment. Then I picked up her camera and left.
I kept going north. I remembered the dead boy as I drove along the river. I thought how something occasionally singeing the fringes of one life must be an inferno in others. The nearness and farness of human suffering. How quiet it can be. I thought about bridges reaching out from one shore into a wet, ever-empty dark.
I kept going north until I got to Selkirk. It wasn’t really my intention to go there, but I drove around, in and out of strange streets, until—around sunset—I found the red-bricked, sharp-roofed building. The thickly divided, probably barred white windows staring out and bouncing back the sun.
The mental health centre, where Mother went—years and years ago now—to be fixed.
I’d never seen it in person before, but it was far less jarring to stumble upon it in person than to stumble upon the idea of it in my head. It looked sort of like a nice old university campus, a collection of old dormitories. It looked like some of the aging buildings I’d lived in cheaply in my life, like the building in Hamburg with the tiny rooms, like some of the old buildings that still stand in the Exchange, in Osborne, in Wolseley.
It did not look like a place worth fearing.
I didn’t stay very long. I couldn’t. As uncompelling as it was, I couldn’t stop imagining Mother being endlessly carried in and out of those buildings, even though she’d only been there once. I kept seeing horses rushing through the streets and Mother trying to throw herself under them, as if to become one with them, only to be stopped and dragged into more life. Into Hell.
I could not stay there long because I kept seeing myself breaking out of every single one of the windows, leaving her alone there, only to walk back in the front door, backpack filled with anchor and rope.
As I turned on the car and left, sun eking out its last wisps over the horizon, I felt sick. I’m tired of the forever trap I’m in, the guilt I’m shawled in from reacting to the world in the only possible way I could in order to survive it.
The world only ever told me to do one thing—run—and I’ve done it again and again.
I haven’t called Genny in more than a week.
Before I made it back to Mother’s house, parking in my spot in the back, where her car once was, I did a loop around the city via the perimeter highway. In the dark, Winnipeg was mostly just a dim glow. I drove all the way around, without stopping before passing the Downs, slowly getting a sense of the city’s scope as if I were a snake gauging its size for possible consumption, and then I slipped back into it, south.
At Mother’s house, I turned off the car and went in the back door. The kitchen walls—freshly repainted days before—shocked me. For a moment, I thought I had used my key to get into a different house. Feeling displaced, I went up the stairs to the studio and saw for the first time in a long time—between the windows, in the middle of the night—blankness.
Then, I went through the house and started carrying everything downstairs. For the sale.
12
YOUR BEDROOM
At the end of the tour of your memory palace is your own bedroom, the bedroom you grew up in, where you watched Mother do yoga, where you lie awake at night trying to find steady ground for yourself.
In your room is turbulence. The turbulence gets in because the window in your room is gone. Whenever you imagine your room, you imagine the window being gone, even though you were only inside with it gone for a few minutes before you’d lowered yourself down the side of the house on the rope you tied of blankets and old shirts. The rope is still there, too, draping out the window, because that is how you always remember it. The turbulence of the room includes no pictures. It is not like the other rooms. Instead, it includes odours and bodies and screaming and names and smiles.
This is the room where history enters to be sorted; this is the room where you stand and let things enter and swirl and overcome you as you decide what to focus on, what to care for. You are pushed around by fragments of senses and selves and stories that knock into you, bruise and bolster you. When you walk into the room, the door closes because of the wind that is blowing all of this in, and now you can’t open it to get out.
If you closed the window, this wouldn’t be a problem, but then you would have never been able to escape.
This room is the gift shop you must always pass through. And when you are done with the room—where you take precious things from the swirl and place them in your pockets, which are openings in your chest because you are always naked when you go through the palace—what do you do? You go to the window and look out, out at the silt of the future coming toward you, pieces of sound knocking into other pieces of sound until they make up a word. Touches grabbing onto other touches, knocking into a familiar hand and reaching for yours. Reflections refracting on new ideas for old hunches. Staring into the slow progression reminds you of how whenever you stare into the night sky, at the stars, you are staring into the past. Only this time, you are the stars. You are the past staring into the now and into becoming.
So when you’re done with the memory palace—which is really just a house in a different mouth—you let yourself down on the rope. You always remember the way that feels, that escaping. But at the end of the rope, you find nothing, because you never get to the end. You just pretend that you do, as you open your eyes, stand up, and shake yourself out of your vanishing.
I carry the last of the empty boxes, from the liquor store on Burnell, from my car into the house, into the living room, and start putting things inside them: cutlery, dishes, empty picture frames. T
hings for the sale.
The living room has everything in the house in it, everything but the armoire, the bed in Mother’s room, and the bed in mine—since the person who posted the ad wanting a twin bed told me they didn’t want one that was so old.
In the corner, again, is the mirror, reflecting the corner at itself. I carried it downstairs backwards this time so that I wouldn’t be distracted by my reflection. Then I went upstairs, cleaned the spot in the corner where it had stood, lifted Mother’s camera, and took a picture.
8. Self-Portrait of the Child in the Full-Length Mirror in Their Mother’s Bedroom
When I carried the mirror, I imagined the house watching me going down the stairs and seeing only itself.
I don’t want the house to see me in it anymore.
I grab one of the empty boxes and carry it upstairs, to the studio. I point Mother’s camera into the box and take a shot.
9. All My Mother’s Precious Things
Then I pick up the box, throw it out of the room, and take a photo of the repaired wall, between the windows.
10. Mother’s Box of Things on Fire, the Wall on Fire, Her Hands on Fire, Too
The more I’ve gone back to see Mother at the home, the easier that act has started to become, because the more I go back, the more I realize that she isn’t even there.
I walk into her room and the light—bright or grey—always spews across the tile floor, and I go over and I sit beside her and I look at the body obscuring her. There’s almost nothing left that I can cling to, that can remind me of her. She hardly looks like her. She can barely move or operate herself, but when I look at her I don’t see her struggling; I see someone else entirely.
She has started to get blurrier in my head. She has slowly whittled down the her that she was in my head. She has gotten easier to see because she has slipped away.
One of the clearest similarities left is the silence, but there’s a difference to it. Before, when she was most quiet, she was always moving: around the house, in the darkroom, in her bedroom—in rooms that were closed off to me. The creaking house was a concerto of her, and I could not catch any glimpse of her in these moments except through the bars of the vent in my bedroom, where I watched her bend and pause and bend again. A regular, cyclical, methodical interpretation of pain.
Vanishing Monuments Page 24