Vanishing Monuments Read online

  The door is open a crack, and beside it is an aging piece of card stock printed with Mother’s name.

  “Thank you,” I say, trying to place a smile between us as I stare over her to the door. I start to move around her toward it.

  “Would you like me to come in with you? Help you? I’ve worked with Hedwig a long time, and I know all the little tricks to get her to notice me.”

  I grab the door handle before that girl starts to panic, tries to tell my body to run away. “I’m fine,” I say, forgiving her duty with a half wave of my free hand. “I still remember all the tricks.”

  I push the door in.

  When I think about Mother, the first thing I remember is her body. Small chested, a dim scar on her belly from where I blew through her. Tall. Her long bright hair—brighter than mine. As much as I try not to, I can see her in my height in the mirror. Which is why I don’t own a full-length mirror. Which is why I avoid them. Why I rarely try on clothes in a store.

  When I think of her in motion, I imagine her body doing yoga. I imagine it through the bars of the vent between her studio and my bedroom.

  After her body, I remember the feeling of her presence, the gravity she held in our creaky house. The gravity of the noise and the silence both, depending on the year, the month, the day. I remember being pulled back to that house after those long expeditions at night with Tom. Every time—every time but one—finding her there. Waiting up for me. And every time, not a single word between us.

  What I don’t remember is the sound of her voice. I’ve been trying not to. It’s easier to believe she never said a word, that she was mute, than to think of her falling in and out of her muteness. First, because of the electric storm of depression. Now, because her brain has lost so much of its charge.

  But as I’ve driven closer to her, I’ve heard her a little. Not the words themselves but her voice stacking upon itself in an unintelligible cacophony. Into static.

  I walk into Mother’s room, and there she is: a silhouette against the grey light of the window. She’s sitting in a chair in a baby-blue blouse, and her hair is very short—manageable. Her back is to me. I don’t know if she’s actually looking out the window, and if she is, if anything is registering. I’ve never seen her stare out a window from behind before; I only ever saw her staring out a window toward me, at night, waiting for me to come home.

  My eyes adjust from the dimness of the hall. I squint, try to make a distinction between her skin and the light. The door behind me closes with a click.

  I approach, slowly, counting down the tiles between us. As I get closer, my memory of her body minimizes to meet reality. She’s so small. Her shoulders are like wire clothes hangers, her wrists like thumbs wrapped in wrinkled pink leather. Her scarred hands are two collections of raw, bubbled webs. They’re wriggling on her lap, the only part of her that’s moving. When I stand over her, I can see that she’s wearing a restraining belt that keeps her from getting out of the chair.

  I stand over her for a while, taking her in, fascinated and hurt. Time has brittled her. Twenty-seven years gone, turning her long hair blank white, letting it be chopped off for convenience, to make her seem more put together. Letting it all be thrown away. No strand of hair on her head was there ten years ago. I imagine the nurse from the front desk, armed with scissors and grasping those long, drawn-out strings of Mother’s dead cells. I imagine her clipping them all off.

  I look down at Mother and I can smell her, that clean, hospital soap smell that lacks any breath of humanity. I could move my hand four inches and touch her shoulder. Just four inches and I could break through decades of gone.

  I don’t move. I stand in her soft shadow and forget completely what she used to smell like. I’m muddled as to how precisely her hair used to tumble down her back. Suddenly unsure what colour her hair used to be. Standing near her like this, silent, I hear my heart beating and realize the cacophony of her voice is gone.

  Mother’s old camera hangs off my neck. In the perfect dark of the camera’s head the film stands dormant. The camera’s eye jammed shut, capped, and collapsed into the body. The camera is a promise, weighing down at my belly, the thin leather straps digging into the sides of my breasts. As I breathe in, the camera gets closer to Mother. As I breathe out it gets closer to me.

  Four inches.

  I step back, quietly, even though I’m sure she can’t hear me. I’ll come back tomorrow. Someone in this body will. I turn and walk back toward the door, and as I go, I can sort of remember her again. As I near the door to her room, I remember my little hand buried in her tight palm, remember walking back from the liquor store with an empty wine box on my head. As I get back into the hall, I remember the smell, just a little, of chemicals and sweat and her when she came out of the darkroom, exhausted but sometimes smiling. The darkroom where faces, bodies, and angles all began to appear on wet, blank paper.

  At the nurse’s desk I somehow tell her, “Mother is asleep right now” and make for the door. Mother is asleep, her eyes open. She’s enjoying letting the day into her head.

  As I step out the door, into the cool air, I remember when the car stopped outside our house that morning and they carried Mother in—the man from Selkirk and Tom—to the bed where she would mumble. I remember the heat of the sun on my skin as I stood there on the lawn and watched. I wasn’t wearing shoes. The dew was nearly gone, but the grass was still cool. I could smell it. Mother’s hands were limp and one of her slippers sat empty on the sidewalk.

  The light rising in the grey eastern sky is a false prophet. I get in the car. My bones fit back into the lumps of the seat better than they fit my body, as Mother’s camera floats on the waves of my uneven breathing. As I put the keys in the ignition, I remember the man handing me Mother’s keys and a bag of her personal effects—her purse, her Nikon with her fast 85 mm lens, her small coat—and telling me that she should not drive, but that someone should go and pick up her car from the Downs. Then, he handed me a bag filled with her medication.

  I turn on the ignition, crank the heat, and drive, slowly, out of the lot and toward her house, away from the home where Mother is unaware that I just stood behind her, that I was only four inches away from her. I pull away from the home, south, toward the place where I grew up and ran from, the dark from which my light-thirsty stem grew wide, seeking the warmth of the sun. The horizon to the southeast of the city is dark and tall and endless. Widening. The waters of the Red and the Assiniboine are high enough, but more rain is still coming to drown us out.

  History is, too.

  2

  THE HALLWAY

  As you step across the landing and into your memory palace, the door always closes behind you with the same hollow sound. You can try to slam it, and you can try to slip it in slow and silent, but the sound of it closing never changes. You’ve even tried leaving the palace door open, but as soon as you turn away, it always falls back into place with that hollow gonging. A sound so unlike any other you remember Mother’s house ever having made, so unlike any you’ve heard other doors make. You have met so many different closing doors in your life, but the door of the palace has a sound all its own.

  To your right, once you’ve made it past that sound, are the stairs, and in front of you is the hallway. The hallway is bare because you think of it as a sort of memory thoroughfare, because you walk through it again and again as you navigate the palace. You must go through the hallway to get to any of the other rooms, so you think the only thing this hallway could really effectively remember is distance. Not the distance between the door of the palace and the door—which is only sometimes here—to Mother’s old darkroom, not the distance between the door and the opening to the kitchen and the living room, not the distance between the kitchen and the stairs, or between the stairs and the front door.

  Not these distances but the distance between people: the distance between you and Mother now, between you and Mother back when you still lived here. The distance between you and Genny n
ow, or you and Genny when you disappeared to Hamburg, or you and Genny when all was well and good. When your days would string along, one after another, harmonized by care. Or the distance between you and Tom—then and now—or Karen, or students like Ess, or all the more often: between you and yourself.

  The moment you hear the sound of the door closing behind you, you are already walking one of these distances. Some longer than others, some fluctuating depending on when and where you sit down to close your eyes to start your tour of the palace. Every time you come to the hallway, from any direction, the distance changes. These distances, unlike the rest of the house, lack event. Lack story.

  But each of them is very important to yours.

  I’ve known for a long time that I probably had no choice but to come back. I knew it the day I heard about Mother from Asha—her yoga teacher, someone who helped keep me in Mother’s loop. Asha had taken Mother to the doctor because she’d been acting strangely agitated, forgetting to come to classes, answering the phone when Asha called with a voice that seemed unconvinced that they knew one another. That was when it started, almost ten years ago now. But I decided not to come back then, as the coil wound up, and hired Dorothea over the phone to take care of Mother and make sure she was taking care of herself, taking her medication. Doing that kept me away, kept me informed. And then, when Mother had the accident three years ago—when fear overtook the place where pity had been nesting—she could no longer stay in the house. I felt it so much then—this place tearing up the things I had left behind, trying to lure me back.

  But then Dorothea told me about the home, a nice place that was not too expensive and not too religious. So I let the energy stay inside me, building up, and made a few calls and moved money around, and then Mother was transferred straight from the hospital to the home. She has never been back to the house, not since the paramedics carried her down the stairs and through the front door. They carried her out forever.

  Since then, again and again, I almost came back here. I would be driving back from the university at night and stay on I-35 a few extra exits before looping back. I’d be downtown at a bar hanging out with Genny and some friends, and I’d step outside to get some air and walk onto a city bus that was heading toward the airport, only to get off after a few stops. I once sent my portfolio to a faculty member of the School of Art at the University of Manitoba—Cathryn Logan, an abstract painter—to see if they could find a place for me, even as a visiting professor. Three weeks later, after I’d contained myself, Cathryn called and told me that they’d love to have me visit the campus and teach a course for the department, and I told her sorry, something came up and my future looked a little less open-ended than it had. Two months later, after I’d learned that Mother was no longer able to move around on her own because she had fallen one too many times—trying to climb out of her bed at night but no longer knowing how to use her legs—I tried to call Cathryn back. But it was the weekend and she was not in her office. I left a long message on her voice mail, though I wasn’t able to utter a word, except a whisper on the far edge: “Sorry.”

  It has been coming a long time, this return. I think I started slowly making my way back the day, the moment, I climbed out the window on a rope of old sheets and clothes and left in the middle of the night, at seventeen. Over the years, I’ve felt like Ariadne guiding Theseus through the labyrinth with a thread, only it was made of rubber instead of silk and was far too short, so after a while it just started stretching and stretching, to a point where it would either snap, marooning them, or finally amass enough energy to drag both her and Theseus out of the labyrinth completely. Back to the start.

  As time has passed, I’ve felt like everyone in this scenario: Ariadne, Theseus, the Minotaur they are trying to slay, and the labyrinth itself. I have even been the thread.

  So when this new silence of Mother’s was placed before me, by the call from the doctor, the moment came. The running girl put Mother’s camera around my neck, and as she did, the thread didn’t snap. The force that had been building up was too much and I was pulled back here, to where I have known—in the back of my mind—for a very long time, that I would end up. No matter how well my life was going, with Genny. No matter that I knew how much impossibility was living in these river waters, in the walls, in the wet streets, and in each and every one of the strangers in this city, this city that misses no one yet makes sure to mark you permanently should you ever try to run away. This city that, as soon as you think about it after having abandoned it, you’re doomed to—one day—find yourself dragged back to.

  Because it’s not done with you, oh no, not at all. Not yet.

  Parked in the lot of a dollar store halfway down Main—a break on my way from the home in Kildonan to Mother’s old house in Wolseley—I turn my phone back on to a half-dead battery and a roaming signal. Beside me, beside the bundle of the packer and binder and clothes, is a plastic bag filled with a few boxes of granola bars, two bottles of water, and a cheap book of sudoku puzzles I bought—an excuse for loitering, for letting myself be briefly marooned here. I look down at my phone and send a text, sit, and answer the phone when it rings.

  “You’re not sorry,” Genny says. She lets that dangle. She’s right. “

  I am sorry, you know. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to.”

  She breathes. I decide to breathe too, staring at the various signs advertising how cheap things are in the store.

  “All you had to do was call. Karen fucking called, right away, right after you texted her. Only her. You can’t just do that. You shouldn’t just do that. Running off alone without letting anyone know where or why.”

  I watch a hunched old man make his way out the door, arms full. I worry I won’t ever make it all the way to the house. It is so close; the air is so dense.

  Genny keeps up the pause, and I know when one of Genny’s pauses is building up to saying something she wants to say but also doesn’t want to. That’s what this is. “I could have gotten time off. It wouldn’t have taken any time to pack.”

  “Stop.”

  “I would have. You should have let me.”

  I know that Genny is relieved as much as she’s hurt. She doesn’t want to come back here any more than I do. She does not have things to tie up here. Being back here would simply be existing among the sharp rubble of her past. There’s nothing left for her to salvage. It’s a city of pure emptiness to her, but the emptiness of my Winnipeg is what I’ve come back to try and save.

  “You need me,” she says, and it’s true. There is nothing in the world that I need more than Genny. “I can drive up. I can fly.”

  “I don’t need you,” I say. “It’s just a matter of figuring out everything here. With her, the house. It’s just a matter of tidying up.”

  Genny breathes. So do I. “

  And how is Hedy?”

  “I haven’t seen her,” I say, thinking of the short-haired old woman sitting in the chair. If it weren’t for her scarred hands, and her name on the door, it could have been any old woman.

  “If I fly, will you come and pick me up from the airport?”

  “No.”

  “If I drive, will you answer the door?”

  “No.”

  Air. Dollar signs. Concrete. Time growing wide. I imagine that the phone against my cheek is actually Genny’s face. Its warmth is hers. She is speaking directly into my ear. Whispering, whispering the same way she whispered in my ear the night I crawled up into her window after breaking out of mine, almost thirty years ago, when we drove all the way to Minneapolis together to start a brand-new life.

  She hangs up the phone.

  When Mother was diagnosed with dementia, I began researching things that are good for the brain. I started taking vitamin B12 and magnesium, running three times a week, eating more avocado and greens, as well as doing a sudoku puzzle every evening. I loathe sudoku.

  I would wake up every other day at six, run three miles, and make us a breakfast of avocado on
slices of roasted sweet potato. While Genny showered and dressed, I stood sweaty against the wall with a cup of coffee and had her quiz me: “When did we first meet?” “How many times have we broken up?” “What colour collar did my dog Hamm have?” I tried to answer as quick as I could. I tried not to guess. “Dark green,” Genny would say, after too long a pause, peeking her head around the steamy curtain. Smiling softly at me before asking for a kiss.

  Once, maybe a year after Mother’s diagnosis, I was at a bar with Genny, Karen, and some other artists from the collective and went into the men’s washroom and found an article pinned to a corkboard above the hand drier about how drinking whiskey can be good for your memory. So I dried my hands and became a whiskey drinker.

  The next day I walked down to the liquor store at the corner and bought myself a bottle of rye, prescribing myself at least a bottle a week. The whiskey also helped me tolerate the nightly sudoku. A few days later, after work, I went to the mall and bought a stainless-steel eight-ounce flask and resolved to drink one flaskful per day, to portion my intake. I got it engraved: A Prayer to Mnemosyne, the Titaness who had—with Jupiter’s help—mothered every single Muse, and whose name represents memory.

  Isn’t there something pretty about that? About the ways that memory itself can beget everything?

  I can’t afford to forget anything because I’m not finished begetting.

  After sitting in the car after the call, not feeling ready to turn the ignition back on, not wanting to touch the steering wheel, not wanting to look in the rear-view mirror, not feeling ready for anything, I finally turn the key.

  The rain has started up again. I back up the car. My head is fog, though I’m no stranger to this feeling. I have learned to trust that my body can make its way where it needs to go without my head’s directions. So my car’s nose turns, comes to the end of the parking lot, and when it’s safe, pulls south onto Main Street. A hand turns the windshield wipers back on and the radio sings a song I don’t hear.