When I hear Hudson’s feet on the stairs I come back to life, turn my head to him. He has large pieces of the reclaimed wood of the armoire in his arms, and he puts them down at the bottom of the stairs. He looks so tired. I stay where I am, on the table, and he comes over, clears the sofa, and curls up. I look at him, as he falls asleep, uncovered, and then notice the crowds from the palace circling us in the room. Populating and stuffing it.
As I nod awake I think I hear the darkroom door open. Hudson is walking out of the living room, toward the hall. The cat is in his arms, looking at me over his shoulder.
“Morning,” he says, pausing to smile at me before disappearing down the hall.
I look outside and, yes, it is.
The story of Tantalus and his son Pelops is only alluded to in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Tantalus—a mortal son of Jupiter—cut up and cooked the body of his son Pelops and served him in a stew as a sacrifice to the gods. Horrified, the gods did not eat Pelops—all except Ceres, who was blind to the truth of the meal in her despair over the loss of her daughter, Persephone, to the underworld. Ceres ate Pelops’s shoulder before realizing what she’d done.
Jupiter instructed Clotho, the thread spinner of the Fates, to bring Pelops to life again. Meanwhile, Vulcan forged a new shoulder out of ivory.
Tantalus was punished with a fate of eternal dissatisfaction. He was placed deep in the underworld, where he still stands imprisoned in a pool of fresh water with a branch of fruit hanging above him. His hell is perpetual thirst and hunger, with the pool ever-receding from his cupped hands and the luscious fruits always just out of reach.
There may be nothing more terrifying than being shackled to a doomed action, than waking up in the morning and knowing that there is never going to be any sort of end to your desire. The scariest thing in life is living with a desire or a hope that will never be realized.
Like Pelops, who, despite the magic of the ivory, will never be complete again—sometimes stories don’t come clean. Sometimes “why” is a piece of fruit, smoothly pulling away.
In the morning I go upstairs and clean the place where the armoire used to be. I stand there, staring at the space, remembering Mother standing there with her long, lost hair swirling down behind her, staring nude into the armoire’s gut. I hit the shutter and take the last frame of Shadows of the Prison House.
11. The Armoire
Then I take the sheets from Mother’s old bed—the only piece of furniture that is probably going to stay—out to the yard, where Hudson and I spread everything out. I carry the mirror out looking at me again, but this time I am carrying myself out of the house. I feel, in my skin, the places where my past is pressed in. I see, for the first time, in that mirror, the unmediated farness of sky.
A few older women show up as Hudson and I are setting up and I tell them they don’t have to wait; they can take what they want. They stand in the yard, watching as Hudson and I carry the house outside of itself. They look at it all and don’t buy anything. After we set everything up, Hudson goes to pick up Helena.
I walk between the sheets, looking at everything set up. I have a sign taped to a chair that says, Everything must go, name your price, because I do not want to put a value on any of these things. I want to take someone else’s evaluation of their worth.
A clock strikes ten: the time the sale is meant to start.
The weather is clear and the traffic slow. A few people come by, walking dogs or strolling. Some stop and look; some glance as they pass and keep moving. I try not to put any pressure on anyone because I don’t want them to know how heavy any of these objects are, how much they are a part of my life.
Hudson and Helena make it back. The bed of the little truck is empty. He must have dropped off the pieces of the armoire.
We all three loom around the yard. There is not much here, but enough. Helena makes conversation with people, and when someone makes her an offer on something, she takes it and tells me what she got, putting it in the cash box. I crouch on the dew-touched yard and write the price next to the item on my list.
Hudson sells the table and the chairs to a nice young woman. I watch from across the yard, near where Mother’s phone is sitting, unplugged, on the sheet. He takes their money and points to his little truck; the young woman nods and smiles. They put the table and the chairs in the back and drive off.
He is back in twenty minutes, with sandwiches. People slowly draw their way to the yard. Some carry away pieces of Mother; others just come and touch them, then leave. Both actions cleanse the place. The more strangers handle Mother’s things, the less they feel like hers.
Just past noon, the boy from the Neighbourhood Café comes by and looks at everything. As soon as I catch him noticing me, he doesn’t look at me again. He crouches, grazing his young finger around the old, boring things: boxes of forks taped together, plates, a few lamps from the living room. Finally, he comes upon the little owl carving and picks it up. He stands, stares down at it.
“If you want that, you can have it,” I say to him.
He doesn’t look up at me, but looks over in my direction.
“My mom loves owls,” he says.
For a moment, I can see his whole life stretched out in front of me on old bedsheets.
“Well, she can have it then.”
As the afternoon progresses, things slip away more and more. The box of cutlery disappears, as well as one of the lamps, and both the couch and the loveseat.
When the time on the sale is running out, everything fits onto one sheet. All the big things are gone, and now there are just small, outdated things: the phone, a cracked jade lamp.
With an hour left, Helena and Hudson say they have to go. When they first arrived, Helena took a pile of picture frames, both empty and full. That was all she wanted. Hudson took nothing. As we stand on the sidewalk, I ask him what he would like to take, and he says he’s not sure. Then he holds up his hand, says he’ll be right back, and goes into the house.
The light in Winnipeg oranges through clouds. The wind seems to come out of the house when Hudson goes inside, and it runs through the leaves of the trees lining the street. It’s like a loose spirit, searching for something in the green.
Helena says nothing, until she asks: “So you’re not leaving too soon, are you?”
I imagine Hudson walking through an empty skull. I hear the saw and the humming. I wonder, Do I ever really need to lie again?
“I am, very soon. In the next few days, I think.”
Helena, the beautiful young woman who does not know me at all, pouts. “It would have been nice if you could stay longer,” she says.
I hear the door of the house open behind me. I see Helena’s eyes light up, meeting Hudson.
“Hedwig,” he says, and I turn to see him on the porch, glasses on, with the cat in his arms. “May I?”
I cannot speak for the lump in my throat, so I nod my head, hard. He carries the cat to us and I put my hand out to their little grey face and they lick it. Helena oozes over them.
“But what will you name them?” I say, finally.
Hudson looks down at the cat in his arms. His hair, tied back, spirals beyond the elastic holding it down. “I’ll wait for them to tell me.”
I walk them all to the little truck and thank them both for their help. I do not tell them that I will see them again soon, because I know that I won’t.
“Have a good one, Hedwig!” Helena says from the open window.
“It’s actually Alani,” I say. “Hedwig was my mother’s name.”
“Whoever,” she says, smiling as they pull away.
Hudson puts his hand out his window and waves—forward, as if he is waving at the future.
I turn back to Mother’s house in their wake.
I wait with the last of the things. I try not to imagine the emptiness of Mother’s house, as much as I also try to imagine it. I consider keeping these last things. I think about backing my car onto the lawn and filling i
t up. I imagine myself going to see Mother with all those things, and then walking out of the home with her, too, as if she were an heirloom.
Around the time the sale is supposed to end, an old man comes by: Blaine.
He smiles at me, but I’m not quite sure he recognizes me this time.
“Is this the last of it?” he says, standing up against the crick of his spine. I nod and he looks down at everything on the sheet. He looks up at the sign on the chair.
“The chair, too?”
“Everything.”
He comes over to the chair and wiggles it, side to side. It’s hard to tell how sturdy something is on soft soil. He turns back to survey the last sheet of things again.
“I’ll give you fifty for it all,” he says. “But you’ll have to help me get it home.”
“Of course.”
I take the money, get some empty bags, and fill them with everything: the phone, the cracked lamp, old playing cards I found in a drawer, odds and ends. Blaine says I could just tie up the sheet and carry most of it that way, so I do. The fragile things, he carries. I take the bundled sheet and the chair. I crumple up the yard sale sign and let it fall to the lawn.
So we go. He asks me why I’m selling all these treasures, and I say because Mother moved to Ste. Agathe. When I say that he looks over at me. He squints at me and knows.
“My luck,” he says, shaking slightly the bags in his hands.
We get down to the place where the street turns west into an avenue, along the Red. I think of the dead. How many times Blaine has probably heard these stories.
Eventually, he points to a house. It’s old and the lawn is covered in bird baths filled with dirty water and clusters of old figures: gnomes, nymphs, plinths, flamingos. I recognize his truck in the driveway. There’s almost no room for anything else on the lawn, even grass, though it’s started to grow up in scant, long tufts. I follow Blaine as he navigates the worn path between them. He is so careful about not hitting any of them, and looks back as we go, perhaps to be sure that I’m being just as careful.
When he opens the door I’m hit with a wide, weighty smell: mildew, mould, dust, age. The sun is beginning to red on its way toward the horizon. Blaine turns on the light and everywhere are things. He turns to me and smiles, raising his arm with the bag to show his collection. He stops in the hall and I put the chair down behind me, with the bundle on it. He pulls out the cracked lamp from one of the bags and walks over to a place in the open, stacked living room that is a huge corner filled with lamps. He puts it there carefully and comes back. From the other bag he grabs the phone. Mother’s phone. He cradles it, looks beyond me to the chair and the bundle of old junk.
“Can you bring that chair?” he says, smiling and moving along the little path through the house. I nod, pull the bundle from it, and follow him with it.
I hold my breath, not wanting to breathe in the mould, or the dust, or whatever spirits haunt these cherished-then-unwanted things. I oxbow through the rooms behind Blaine until we reach a door, free of clutter. He opens the door, turns on the light, and shuffles in. A bathroom. The toilet is free and seems to be functioning, but the sink is filled with what appear to be pewter ashtrays. The walls are covered in silk scarves tacked in with staples. In the bathtub, in a pile almost to the ceiling, are phones. Old phones through which so many people probably spilled their souls. He turns and gestures to me to bring the chair in, and I put it down next to the pile. Blaine climbs the chair with Mother’s phone under one arm and adds it to the top. It fits there; it doesn’t tumble down.
He lowers himself to the floor, puts his hands on the chair, then seems to decide to leave it there. He looks up at the pile, hands on his hips.
“Beautiful,” he says.
13
NO EXIT
Sometimes after you’ve come back into the world from touring the memory palace, you can’t stand the idea of the palace’s existence, and you close your eyes and stand outside the front door again, only this time with a jerry can in your hand. Sometimes you just stand outside and watch it burn down. Sometimes you pull a tornado from the empty sky, bury it in a blizzard of ice, or quake the foundations. You never go in the palace when you do any of this, never let it crumble around you. You just watch and listen as all the lives and moments you’ve trapped there rise into an abstract concerto. You grimace in a fury as you watch your life go up, or break down, or get pulled away in the wind. You want to feel free of it, of the way that it defines you, haunts you. A lonesome house on a lonesome street on a lonesome planet, destroyed by the nature you brought to it yourself. You break it with your control, because the control you have of your memories in it feels so insincere. There’s no getting out—the labyrinth falls into the maze falls into a pool, with neither air nor bottom. And so, once the palace is destroyed and the memories have let out their final cries, you come back out to the world, and you know that when you close your eyes, there it will be again, as usual. Which feels right, that your mastery over it is just another facade, that you’re just your own history’s angel being dragged back across this wasteland of yourself. You’re relieved, even, that the destruction doesn’t stick. Because wasteland or not, this is yours and this is you. When you open the door, to the first memory on—or not on—the floor of the landing, you sigh yourself into being. You’re someone.
The sun is setting, and I’m tired of the drive, tired of pulling open the door of the home, tired of being struck by the lifeless, lavender smell of the building, of the smile that I give the nurse at the desk who says that Mother’s asleep. I don’t mind; I just go in and see her. She’s breathing, peaceful, but foreign, too.
I have her camera, of course, but I take its burden from my neck and set it down on the bed, near her sleeping hand but out of her sleeping reach. I scoot a chair close to her and look at those hands, again. In their sleep, they don’t move, though I can see the veins on the pink, scarred backs, like the dried-up delta of an old river, a river that has finally streamlined itself over the eons into her swollen, pulsing veins.
These hands lead up to a wrist, which leads to the mother who’s gone, my mother.
This body is a memory of her, a memory that she’s forgotten, that the disease has taken to pouring fuel atop and burning down. I abolish the rivers coming from my eyes, and feel a bit free, sitting beside her like this—asleep, free in the way that only your own death can grant you. Free in the way that taking off her camera and placing it between us does. Through Mother’s dying, I feel partly untethered from a past full of guilt, of my leaving, of my own silence and my complicity in hers. Through the annihilation of her ability to recognize me I’m somehow cleansed of it all, in a sort of existential baptism. When her remembering hands are asleep, there’s nothing left to regret. Nobody left to pull forgiveness from.
I pick up the camera, twist the knobs to grab the light proper, and frame her up.
I sit there, staring at her through the viewfinder, finger twitching at the shutter that is so desperate for her—then stop. I put the camera down on the bed again and just look at her. For a long time, taking her in, her breath rising and falling like waves, like the calm waves of the lake that one summer when we stayed in a cabin Asha’s family owned, stilted on a slope with a far view of the water, the waves almost a mile away. They were unable to crest against us. I just look at her and I remember that summer, driving back to Winnipeg from the cabin, south toward the city in the evening through fields of sunflowers, millions of sunflowers curling their petals in over their eyes against the glowing, set horizon to our right—and I don’t know if I’ve ever remembered this before, don’t really recognize this part of my head.
I pick the camera up again and take her picture. Just like that. I take her picture over and over again, filling the roll, which was half-full of the frames of Shadows of the Prison House. I suppose she is part of that now.
12–24. Mother
She doesn’t move.
I stand up, wipe my face, and go
over to the window. The vertical slats of the blinds draw their prison on the grid of the floor, which slips over Mother. I rewind the film in the camera while looking out through these slices of window to the courtyard where I stood, trying to resuscitate myself in Mother’s head.
It’s not often a pretty sight, this world. I think about all the one-way roads, the cars, the buses, and the brutality that winds out and eventually meets a heartbeat that meets a street that arrives at the river. The Red. I think of the trees leaning into the river from the bank, their deep, old roots hanging on for dear life while it sucks at them, think of the little rivers that the Red consumes on the way to its end, consolidating. The big rivers, too: the Assiniboine.
Everything seems to arrive there, in that river, at its single end. The living. The dead. I think of it all as a sort of whole as I stand by the window, opening the bottom of the camera and removing the film. The little tapering tail wags from the cartridge like a tongue.
I turn back to Mother and put the camera down on the bed with her. I hold the film cartridge up into a bar of the afternoon sun that crosses her, and I pull the tail of the film out, exposing all the undeveloped shots: shots of her, shots of empty places in the house, shots that after all that effort, that intention, would now develop into a complete line of utter negative blankness—negatives which, when developed, would darken, and when printed, would become full white. But for now the film is a median blankness. There is nothing to see, and there never will be. And when the film reaches its end, I rewind it back up into the cartridge by hand.
I pick my camera up from the bed, and replace it on my neck.
It’s heavy, but it should be. It remembers her and me both.
I sit down beside Mother again and breathe for a while.
“I’m leaving,” I tell her without telling her, without saying anything, because she’s not here to listen.
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