Vanishing Monuments Read online

  VANISHING

  MONUMENTS

  VANISHING

  MONUMENTS

  a novel

  John Elizabeth Stintzi

  VANISHING MONUMENTS

  Copyright © 2020 by John Elizabeth Stintzi

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  Suite 202 – 211 East Georgia St.

  Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6

  Canada

  arsenalpulp.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program), for its publishing activities.

  Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, speakers of Hul’q’umi’num’/Halq’eméylem/hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and custodians of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories where our office is located. We pay respect to their histories, traditions, and continuous living cultures and commit to accountability, respectful relations, and friendship.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

  Front cover design by Jazmin Welch and Oliver McPartlin

  Front cover illustration by John Elizabeth Stintzi

  Back cover and text design by Jazmin Welch

  Edited by Shirarose Wilensky

  Proofread by Alison Strobel

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

  Title: Vanishing monuments : a novel / John Elizabeth Stintzi.

  Names: Stintzi, John Elizabeth, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190228989 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190228997 | ISBN 9781551528014 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528021 (HTML)

  Classification: LCC PS8637.T55 V36 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  “No, there’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem—well, like you. Like you did something, all right, and now you’re suffering for it. You know?” I said nothing. “Well you know,” he said, impatiently, “why do people suffer? Maybe it’s better to do something to give it a reason, any reason.”

  —James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

  CONTENTS

  HERE

  1. The Memory Palace

  2. The Hallway

  3. The Living Room

  4. The Kitchen

  THERE

  5. The Darkroom

  6. The Stairs

  7. Memory Tripping

  8. The Top of the Stairs

  NOW

  9. The Upstairs Bathroom

  10. Mother’s Room

  11. Mother’s Studio

  WHEN

  12. Your Bedroom

  13. No Exit

  Acknowledgments

  HERE

  When the doctor calls I’m standing in the kitchen in my little house in Minneapolis, drinking the microwav’d ends of this morning’s coffee, and as soon as the doctor says the words about Hedwig Baum—about Mother—the girl who runs away comes back into my bones. She takes over, like a surfer on a wave of fear. The first thing she does is put down the coffee and move me into the bedroom, to grab the old camera from its place atop the cabinet where I keep all my gear. As soon as she makes my hands lift that old, coated brass machine, and as soon as she’s slung its strap around my neck—something that I do most days, without her—I know she’s built up too much momentum to stop. To stay.

  This camera, this old Leica III, was hers. Mother’s. The mother whose dementia the doctor is telling me appears to have taken completely her already dwindling capacity for speech. The dementia she’s been living with for about half as long as the seventeen years she had with me.

  While the doctor talks into my ear, the running girl pulls out from under the bed the piece of luggage—luggage I don’t think I’ve used since Genny and I went to Chicago, in 2007, for a talk I was giving on the body as an indirect object in figure-based art. The talk that came after I’d watched the I-35W bridge collapse into the Mississippi from the bridge beside it—the 10th Avenue Bridge—that I was driving across, watched the bridge and Genny’s trust in engineering and infrastructure and our whole world fall out of sight. Luggage I hadn’t used since I’d tried to take her away from here to pull her out of that.

  “We’ve been keeping an eye on her,” the doctor says, as the packing continues, “and she hasn’t spoken, as far as we can tell, in roughly a week. Her responsiveness to being addressed has also decreased. She has had accidents. Well, more.”

  This is the first time the running girl has come to usurp my body since I ran away to Hamburg, Germany, in 1991, to escape Genny and the relationship I’d thought I was in, to try to get away from the me that I’d been living as, which had suddenly felt like a lie. The first time the running girl ever took over completely was when I ran away from Mother, from Winnipeg, with Genny, when I was seventeen. In the middle of the night, having removed my bedroom window with a pry bar. That was the last time I was there, in Winnipeg—almost thirty years ago.

  That night was the first time the running girl grabbed the camera. The first time that girl got her way. Mother was not speaking then, either. But for a different reason.

  I’m sure I’ve said things to the doctor. I’m sure I’ve been asking questions, for clarifications. I’m sure some part of me has, but I haven’t been there to take note of them. The longer the conversation goes on, the more I’ve been following the hands, the more I’ve been using my legs to move my body through the house to let the running girl’s hands grab what they want to. Bedroom to bathroom to bedroom to kitchen to bedroom to living room to bedroom. I cannot figure out what to focus on: the hands grabbing from my gear cabinet a lens for my Hasselblad and my old copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that I stole from my high school library, or the doctor who is talking about a recent study about similar aphasia in patients with dementia. I focus on neither and fade into a relative peace, focusing instead on the breath in the body, until eventually the luggage is zipped up, ready, and I’m standing over it with my phone still pressed to the side of my face. I listen to the doctor, but there’s nothing, just silence, because the phone call has already ended in one way or another without my realizing. I pull my phone from my ear and the side of my face is left with a rectangle of sweat.

  I text Karen to tell her that I won’t be able to make it to the collective’s board meeting, that I have to go out of town. When she calls me a minute later, as I knew she would, I’m stuffing the luggage into the back of my little car. I stop to stare down at the vibrating phone in my hand until it stops, until Karen goes to voice mail. Then I close the trunk and climb in. I know that Karen won’t call again, that she’s going to rush to my house, to try and catch me, to try and get more information from me, but as I turn the car on I also know there’s nothing anyone can do to stop me. The studio is a seventeen-minute drive away, in good traffic. I’ll be heading in the opposite direction.

  As I pull my car away from the curb, not knowing when I’ll see this little house of mine, but not really caring about this house at all, I look across the street at Genny’s house. I tried not to look, every molecule I own was instructed not to look, because I knew how much it would hurt, and
I knew there was nothing I could do to stop that hurt from coming—for me, and for Genny. She will not understand, and she will also understand too much. I don’t call her to let her know that I’m leaving, that I’m going back to Winnipeg for the first time since we ran away together. I know that if I called her to explain before I’d made it too far to turn back, I’d never make it.

  And I have to. Some ancient signal has been sent up to rally me back. Some signal has told me that the road to Winnipeg, to Mother, will be too overgrown if I stay away any longer. The call from the doctor has proven that it has just turned from late to too late. The running girl has a history of doing things far too late, of running from one burning building into another’s sparking start. But if I’m going to close any of the windows to my past, if I’m going to fight against the drafts, I have to go back right away. To make it to Mother, to that city. To pretend I’ve come back just in the nick of time.

  As I head north, toward Winnipeg, I try not to think about Genny, sitting oblivious in her office, evaluating plans for this highway or that bridge, while I drive. I fail. I throw my phone into the back seat, out of reach, as I look at the clock and imagine her at this moment getting a call from Karen, as she drives toward the empty parking space in front of my house, letting her know that her partner has run away. Suddenly. Again.

  While I drive, I keep telling myself not to look back at the phone, and by the time I fail I’m already too close to Winnipeg to turn the car around. This is happening.

  Just north of Fargo, parked at a gas station, I finally pick up the phone from the back seat. The sky is dark, spitting softly on my car. There’s a voice mail waiting for me from Genny, six missed calls, and a string of texts. It takes all that I have to text her back:

  —I’ll call you tomorrow

  —It’s Mother

  Then I turn off the phone. I don’t need it for directions. I’ve already memorized the route from all the times I stared at the map and traced my finger along the here-to-there. From all the times I put the addresses into Google Maps the last few years. From all the times I zoomed in and used the farthest tip of my body to trail all those highways north, all those directions. Transcribing that journey into me.

  Home.

  But before I pull out of the gas station I look down at myself, bound up and packed, in black jeans and a dark T. I go to the trunk and pull out a dress, a bra, and my makeup bag. I ball it all up and go into the station’s bathroom and make myself that girl.

  1

  THE MEMORY PALACE

  You close your eyes and turn around and there it stands, two storeys tall, board-and-batten siding, painted white too many years ago: your memory palace. The concrete walkway, with weeds growing through cracks from so many winter thaws, snakes up to the grey-blue door. A big portrait window stares out from the first floor, from the living room. Two small windows glare down at you from the floor above. Sometimes when you turn around to face the palace, you are outside the old picket fence, where the metal mailbox hangs, but most of the time the fence is not there, and you can walk right up to the front door without opening a gate that you never really knew closed. So you can go up the single step onto the landing, open the door, and go up the half step inside.

  The rest of the street, the rest of the city—the world—is not here. You have to approach the palace excised from its contexts. Alone, as the house has never been. Without distractions, without other places to go to instead, this is the only place there is. There is only weather, if you choose to have it, but there is always wind. Sometimes blowing you toward the palace, sometimes blowing you away. The grass out front is long and wispy, moving with the wind like tendrils. Like a pit of snakes. When you approach the palace, you do not step off the concrete path, and on the path, you try to avoid every single crack. You fail.

  Inside the palace—should you make it there—is everything in your life that you need to remember.

  Twenty-seven years.

  It has been twenty-seven years since I last drove across the border between Manitoba and Minnesota, to follow Genny as she started school in Minneapolis.

  It has been twenty-seven years since I stepped on the sidewalks in Wolseley. In downtown Winnipeg. Since I stood on the bank of the Assiniboine River. Or the Red River. Or at the Forks, where the two rivers merge.

  It has been twenty-seven years since I stood on the landing of the house, put my key in the door—since that key lifted the pins in the lock and turned.

  It has been twenty-seven years since I saw Mother’s chest rise and fall. Since I could not feel my fingers while I hung my coat in the hall.

  I have carried the key for Mother’s house with me every day since the night in August when I last walked away from that house—without locking the door behind me. I’ve carried it every day for twenty-seven years.

  It has been twenty-eight years since I looked up at that Winnipeg sky, in the middle of the night, lying beside my best friend, Tom, on his lawn, trying to find stars.

  It has been thirty-two years since I heard Mother laugh, thirty years since I heard her cry—horrible, deep, unhelpful sobs—and thirty years since I told her that I loved her and she mumbled incoherently into my ear.

  Fifteen years ago, Genny and I had a connecting flight in Winnipeg when we were coming back from her father’s wedding in Edmonton. But we didn’t leave the airport. We waited there for six whole hours, watching tired but happy people—happy to be home—filing off flight after flight.

  For twenty-seven years, the little key to Mother’s house has sat next to the keys of apartments, offices, studios, and cars. Each of the other keys has changed, been replaced, each one but hers. It dangles beside the wheel. Clinking, probably, only too quietly to hear, as I drive.

  It has been four days since I saw a photograph of Mother. Three weeks since I last called the home to get an update on her—when she’d still been speaking, somewhat. Eight years since she was first diagnosed with dementia. Three years since I coordinated with Dorothea, the day nurse I’d hired about eight years ago, to move Mother to the home. After she’d had what we’d agreed to call an accident and had to be placed in a controlled environment. One year since I started needing to take out loans.

  It has been twenty-seven years—twenty-seven years—since I drove on this highway, the I-29. Only last time, I was going south. It’s dark and I’m passing Grand Forks and I can almost see, behind the headlights I pass in the dark rain: them. Genny Ford and me: Alani Baum. Two kids escaping two untenable worlds. The staticky radio program playing, from a station back in Fargo, could well be the same exact one from that night. I know that if I don’t listen closely, I can convince myself of that.

  And behind Alani’s eyes, in the car that passes by? The running girl. Inching away with the determination to stay away, but all the while starting the long, long odyssey that I’m now completing.

  Before I got the call from the doctor, my life had gotten into a steady routine. I woke up, made Genny coffee, walked across the street from her little house to mine, made myself coffee, answered emails, went to teach, or to office hours, or to work on an exhibit at the collective’s gallery, then came home and walked back across the street to Genny’s.

  After years of relative chaos, I finally felt like I’d turned my life into a machine. I took a step every day, at a set pace. I paid bills on time. I submitted grant applications weeks before they were due. I didn’t miss the meetings with Ess to review hir thesis portfolio and the long essay ze was writing to accompany it. I didn’t run to my office to find hir, frustrated yet doe-eyed, still sitting outside my door—under the nameplate that read MX. A. BAUM—forty minutes after I was supposed to be there, like I had throughout the first half of the fall semester. Instead, Ess began arriving to find my office door open, with me sitting inside it, ready to talk to hir about the folder of prints clamped under hir tattooed arm.

  I wasn’t myself is what I mean. I’d become a clearer-cut version of myself. I’d figured out how to a
ppear ordered, found a way to make my body become a thing I could hide in again. I was stowed away. Exiled. My photography was suffering, by which I mean that—between teaching two courses and advising Ess and working at the collective—I wasn’t doing it. My photography suffered because I didn’t have any me to give, to pour into its form. Genny started distrusting it, I think—the new clockwork me. The spring’s tension building up, clicking along to the time. She had never known me to be like that, not for so long.

  That prolonged dissociation felt like a sort of vacation, as if my body was getting ready for something to happen. Something that you know is coming without actually knowing it, or without actually admitting to yourself that you know it. Like you’ve crouched down and put your hand on railroad tracks but can’t feel the vibrations of the train coming around the bend.

  But the whole time, some part of you knows that it is.

  And then it hits you.

  A few miles south of the border, static overtakes the voices on the Fargo radio station, and I switch through the channels, searching for another signal to the south of me. I listen just long enough to hear someone say where they’re from, switching quickly away from any that strike me instantly as Canadian. When a station tells me it’s in Thief River Falls, I stop. The signal has already started to lose itself to the buzz, but I can still make out the words. A woman talks about how the rain in northern Minnesota is probably going to continue for the next week.

  The whole drive, I’ve been doing this: changing stations, mostly talk radio—to Sioux Falls to St. Cloud to Wahpeton to Fargo to, now, Thief River Falls—and sticking them out until they fade away. I want time to slow down, to convince me that I have more time to get ready to see Mother. I’m using the rain as an excuse to drive five miles under the speed limit.

  At the border crossing in Pembina, I inch forward behind two SUVs and a pickup. When my turn comes, I roll down the window, letting in cool, wet air that chills me in the dress. A young man with pointy blond hair looks down at me sternly from his booth as I hand him my Canadian passport, my German passport safe in the glove compartment. The officer squints at the photo, looking back and forth from it to me.