Vanishing Monuments Read online

  “Where do you live, ma’am?”

  “Minneapolis. I’m from Winnipeg.”

  “What brings you to Canada?”

  “Visiting family.”

  He scans my passport into the computer and looks down at me, taps it against his desk under the window, glances in the back of the car. Softens a little.

  “Cool camera you’ve got there. Some sort of special occasion?”

  “Just haven’t been back in a while,” I say, suddenly feeling the weight of Mother’s camera hanging against my belly.

  “Busy, busy, busy,” he says, tapping my passport. “Any drugs or alcohol?”

  “No.”

  “Firearms?”

  “No.”

  He stops tapping my passport, hands it down to me, eyes already on the car behind me.

  “Have a good night.”

  “Thank you.”

  As I pull away, I realize the packer has shifted from under the jeans and binder I took off in Fargo and sits in plain view on the passenger seat. I pick it up with one hand and stuff it down a leg of the jeans.

  Ess came to my office hours the second week of the first of my classes ze’d taken. The class was a studio course in portrait photography, and it was Ess’s first year in the program. My office hours were from 2:00 to 4:00, and I showed up at 3:50. Ze was sitting on the floor in front of my door, fidgeting, working frantic on hir phone, and nearly fell over and hit hir head on the wall when ze noticed me come around the corner. As I apologized for being late, Ess talked over me, telling me how much ze liked the class. Ze cut right to the chase before I could even sit down at my cluttered desk: “Would you be willing to be my advisor for my thesis?”

  I smiled at hir. I’d felt paternal toward Ess as soon as I’d read out the names for attendance and ze said: “Present, but I don’t go by that name. My name is actually S.K.! People,” ze said, turning side to side, to include the rest of the class, “just call me Ess.” I’d felt paternal toward hir again at the second class, when ze had specified hir pronouns.

  “I’m only visiting faculty, so I don’t advise very often,” I said. “And I don’t really know your work yet.”

  As I said this, ze put hir hands on my desk, gripping it hard. It wasn’t until then that I noticed all hir little tattoos, stick and poke, hardly visible on hir dark skin. I never asked if ze gave them to hirself.

  “I know. I know. But I know your work. I’ve googled you so much. I stayed up all night looking at stuff. I tried to listen to lectures online. Your work is about bodies and mental health. Depression. Like in Shavasana—”

  As soon as ze mentioned Shavasana I put my hands up, as if to slow Ess down a little, but actually hoping to stop hir in hir tracks. Ze’d not yet disclosed to me that ze was bipolar, but I could feel hir manic energy. But Ze continued hir sentence, saying things about my work I didn’t want to hear, as I gestured, stopping only when ze hit the end of hir point.

  “Okay. I’ll talk to the department head and make sure they’re fine with it. Send me your portfolio and a little write-up about what you have in mind for your project, okay?”

  Ze jumped up from the chair, pulled off hir backpack, and took out a folder of photographs printed on cheap paper. Nearly slammed it onto my desk in hir fervour. I smiled at Ess, and picked it up. Ze stood staring at the folder.

  “I’m not going to look at this now,” I said. “My office hours are up. I’ll email the head, okay? I’ll let you know in class.”

  Ze stood there for a moment before realizing that I was asking hir to leave. Ze threw hir backpack over hir shoulder and beamed as ze backed out of my office. After a moment, I got up, went to the door, and called out: “My work—it isn’t about mental health! It’s about memory!”

  From down the hall, at the stairs, I heard hir call back: “What’s the diff?”

  Sometimes when you come to your memory palace, the grass has grown over the concrete path to the door, writhing and hungry, and you can’t bring yourself to take the first step. Sometimes the path is clear, and you walk down it—staring at your feet, trying to avoid stepping on the cracks—and then after a long time, you stop and look up and realize that the path has become a circle on the front lawn, with no exit and no entrance. So you have no choice but to open your eyes and leave the palace for the world.

  But most of the time you do make it to the door, and lying out front like a welcome mat is a picture frame that holds a photograph. Inside is your earliest memory. Depending on the day, this memory changes. Before you open the door, you look down at it, and try your hardest to remember and relive whatever it is that you see there. To orient yourself to yourself.

  Sometimes you get to the door and you don’t look down. You forget, or refuse to, and you just open the door. Sometimes when you don’t look, you step on the frame and break the glass with your bare feet, tracking bloody footprints into the palace.

  Sometimes you look down and the frame is empty, or gone. But when the memory is there, after you look down at it and live through it for a moment, you open the door and take that long first stride up over the jamb. As you step over the memory and into the palace, try not to imagine the glass of the frame being cracked and stained from your previous failures to recall it.

  Every time you enter the palace should feel like the first time.

  I’m about an hour south of Winnipeg by the time I switch the radio to a Canadian station. Outside the car, between the little towns I pass through, the night slithers across the prairies unhindered. The water in the ditches keeps getting higher the farther north I go, my headlights bouncing off the surfaces in the dark. Flood waters are following me north because it’s been raining in northern Minnesota and Manitoba pretty steadily for the last few days. I know this because my weather app has three saved locations: Minneapolis, Winnipeg, and Hamburg.

  The rain is heavy and slow at once, and I can see no more than twenty feet in front of my headlights. Because of the darkness, I can’t see behind me at all. All I have is forward.

  A weatherman on the radio talks about the seasonal flooding that Manitoba is slipping into, talks about how this is not uncommon for May, and I grow tired of the talk, the monotony of the punctuation. I switch the radio to FM and stop at a Winnipeg station playing rock music. As I get closer to the city, the music gets crisper. The blurry road signs show fewer and fewer kilometres between me and the city, and the clock reads 1:24. In the end, the trip will have taken about nine hours instead of the estimated seven.

  Eventually, the city arrives. I reach the perimeter highway and merge in an anticlimax that takes my breath. I turn onto the loop, counter-clockwise, and the city is little more than a short glow in the leftwards rain. I keep going, trying not to look left, until I hit a red light for my turn onto Saint Mary’s Road, which will take me to the heart of the city. As I move into the turning lane, I can feel my momentum begin to wane. I am so tired. The turn signal is clicking. The rain is battering the roof. The whole highway is for no one but me.

  As I wait for the light to change, as the sound of the turn signal bores through me, I scan radio stations and land on a new one, playing a song in French I can make no sense of.

  I don’t teach full time or tenure track because I don’t have any kind of degree. When I was thirty I took a GED night class for a few months and passed the exam to close that conversation, but otherwise, I never went to school. The department head hired me as a visiting professor after I’d gotten a lot of attention locally, and more than I cared for nationally. A visiting professor who refused to stop visiting, who could run back to where they came from anytime.

  I didn’t want to teach full time. I had the collective, I had Genny, I had grants. I got by and lived lightly. My cupboards were bare but for whiskey and coffee beans. My fridge was empty but for beer, creamer, as well as 35 mm, 120 mm, and large format film. I took a lot of freelance jobs. I shot unconventional weddings unconventionally. For a while, I received a nominal salary as the executive director
of the collective.

  The only course I audited at the university was a seminar on Ovid, walking into the little lecture hall with my worn, stolen copy—the wrong translation—of the Metamorphoses under my arm. I had no interest in going to school for photography, or art history, or anything like that. My knowledge of the history of photography mostly came from stumbling upon it. I learned as I went: running into a colleague in the lounge who had a pile of photography books on the table and flipping through them. Picking up some famous names I hadn’t known before—Weegee, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe—and striking up conversations with that same colleague, often as they were trying to take a break, scribbling down book titles to search the library for later. Delving deep into each photographer from there.

  The only famous photographer I knew when I was hired to teach was Ansel Adams, because Mother hung a print of his in the hallway. It was the only picture hanging in the whole house: the moody landscape Tetons and Snake River. Though I didn’t know it was his until I ran away to Hamburg and met Erwin Egger, a photographer who held Adams—especially that print—in high esteem.

  I didn’t really have much interest in learning the many different ways photography was done before I first picked up a camera. I gleaned what was important from modern photographers like Wegman, Mann, my colleagues, or even the students in my classes. From Erwin Egger and Mother. I gathered the scraps of the history of the form, of technique, like gossip. My contemporaries carried that history forth with them, corrupting it, bending it, and augmenting it in ways that worked better for their purposes. I learned everything I needed from that.

  When I get to the door of the memory palace, the earliest thing I can remember—the beginning that I find in the frame—is often a sample from several kinds of memories.

  Most often it’s a memory of me making some definitive childlike action: like digging holes with a gardening trowel in the backyard of what would become our house. Other times it’s a moment of fear: like sitting in Mother’s arms, asking her where Ilsa was, the woman we lived with, and Mother was hired to care for, now that she had died. Sometimes it’s the moment I came home from my first day of school crying to Mother because my teacher had informed me I was exactly a girl.

  Sometimes the earliest memory has nothing to do with me, has nothing to do with a moment, but is simply the image of something I saw at some point, or something routine that my mind sampled or boiled down into a single, invented instance: Mother doing yoga in her studio, Mother taking photographs of happy couples in the living room. Sometimes it’s a memory of being in a place, the feeling of sitting in that living room, of sitting in the hall outside the closed darkroom, of being beside a river, each without an event. Without any story to let the memory move.

  Sometimes I get to the door of the palace and there’s a memory from far later in my life, like the moment Genny found me stuck upside down in a child’s swing in a playground in winter. Never the moment I got stuck in that swing, or the minutes after, but the moment she showed up, seemingly from nowhere, and pulled me free. Our first real moment together.

  Sometimes the memory is even later: me removing my bedroom’s second-floor window with a pry bar and climbing out of the house on a rope made of old clothes and bedsheets.

  But sometimes when I sit down to remember it all, when I close my eyes and go to the door of the memory palace, I realize that my life never began at all. That the door into the palace is not there. Or that I am outside the picket fence, and the fence is fifty feet high and impermeable, with a huge NO TRESPASSING sign painted on it in letters taller than me. The lid of the metal mailbox opening and closing high above, laughing me out of my head.

  When the light changes to green, I don’t turn left but merge right and keep moving north on the perimeter to orbit the city. The weight of the day, of the distance, is crashing into me, and I tell myself that I want to try and find a weaker spot to break in, though I know that if I can make it all the way around the city, I’ll drive all the way back to Minneapolis.

  I drive around Transcona, cross the fat Red River I can’t see in the dark and the rain, watch the blinking lights of the last planes of the night drooping onto the airport tarmac. I keep driving around the city until—two-thirds of the way through the circuit—in the dark ahead of me, I can imagine what I’m going to pass. Blurred orbs rise into my head, refracting through the rain: the huge stadium lights.

  The Assiniboia Downs.

  I slam on the brakes, thankful the highway here is dead. Ahead of me, I know there’s an exit, that I can turn there without getting close enough to see the Downs, which of course would not be illuminated. But instead, I find a dirt access road over the median, where police cars probably station themselves. I break the law because it’s closer.

  I’m afraid that if I get any closer than I need to—if I get close to that huge mud circle where the horses race—I will be devoured by it. I’m not ready for that. I can barely make it as it is. So I drive across the lumpy access road and retrace my way along the perimeter, no longer fighting against the stream of time. As soon as I get to the exit that I know will take me toward Mother in the home in Kildonan—not to her house in Wolseley—I take it.

  Slowly, after a few more turns, the home—a smaller than I’d imagined from the pictures online—shows up just beyond the intersection. The light at the intersection is red. The building is barely lit. There are bricks, windows, people inside I cannot see. Mother. Visiting hours are still at least five hours off, but I’ll wait in the parking lot, in my car. I will see Mother first, before I go back to that house. Her house. Our house. The memory palace.

  Ess took nearly all of my courses after I agreed to advise hir. Ze was starting hir thesis project earlier than most students—the first semester—and often made huge bursts of messy progress while manic. Sometimes, though, ze would miss a week or two of classes because ze wasn’t able to get out of bed.

  Ess’s original project was about growing up queer and black on the outskirts of a small town called Peculiar, south of Kansas City, Missouri. Hir project—titled Outside Peculiar—was largely landscape photos from the surrounding area, with self-portraits crudely spliced into them. Many of the landscapes were themselves several photos stitched together roughly using Photoshop, because Ess used the camera on hir old, cracked Samsung cellphone. “A queer choice,” Ess called it, by which ze meant one made out of necessity as well as against photography’s normativity, against the fetishization of megapixel and sensor size and their conflation with “quality.”

  In the pitch for the project at the beginning of our work together, Ess wrote: “These open spaces and small towns in America are not often thought of as being black or queer. They are where the white and the cis and the straight are assumed to flourish. And they do. They are crabgrass in the spaces. They overtake. But if you stop and look at the soil, you see they are not the only weeds that grow.”

  I wake up in my car in the parking lot outside the home, Mother’s Leica still around my neck, its old Summar lens folded into the body and capped, gut filled with the roll of film I’d been failing to fill for the last two months. Film that’s empty because nothing of note came my way. No idea. No image. No body or variation in my psyche that needed to be pasted onto the reactive plastic. Nothing came to me but the old, thick fog of dissociation, the feeling that I was not myself, and if I were, I’d rather be dead.

  My neck itches from the weight of the old leather strap. My packer and binder and clothes sit tangled beside me on the passenger seat. When I parked here last night, I didn’t make a pillow out of anything; I just leaned my seat back and closed my eyes and eventually opened them to today rising into the grey sky.

  Morning in this new place, clutched by the same old place.

  It isn’t raining right now, but it will. I open the door and stand beside the car, stretching, breathing out my popping muscles, shaking out my stiff legs, straightening the dress that feels wrong.

  Exh
austed. Terrified.

  All I want to do is give up, get back into my car, and drive away. Turn on my phone and text Genny: just kidding! be back soon. But I know that I won’t be able to make it. I’ll just slow down and turn around again, get back here and turn around again, again and again. Slowly making it through the labyrinth of back and forth before my inertia surrenders to here. To her.

  As I walk toward the home, the time between myself and Mother shrinks. Her camera hangs at my belly like a pit. The door opens and there’s a nurse at a desk, in scrubs that are not supposed to look like scrubs, in the same way this home is not supposed to look like a hospital.

  “I’m here to see my mother? Hedwig Baum?”

  “Oh, of course,” she says, standing up behind the desk and handing me a clipboard where visitors sign in. She’s short, a good foot shorter than me, hardly taller now than she was sitting down. “She woke up a little early, but she’s usually sharpest soon after waking,” she says, while I finish writing a name that doesn’t quite fit over me—Allie Baum—and put the clipboard down. I follow her down the hall. She walks so slowly.

  “How long has it been since you visited again?” she asks.

  “Sometime around Christmas,” I say, because it’s a shorter sentence than: Never.

  “Well,” she says, quiet, as we inch along a hallway of closed doors and cold tiles. “She’s changed some since then, as you know. She has more difficulty hearing, especially lately, so you will want to talk a little louder than last time. But you will want to make sure to use a conversational tone. She responds better to tone. We also cut her hair, so don’t be alarmed. She was having trouble with it being so long—getting it tangled up in things, tying it up in knots, trying to braid it. Things like that.” She stops, looks up at me, smiles in a way that is supposed to feel warm. I don’t tell her that Mother had never once braided her hair. “It’s a lot more manageable now.”