At any rate, dude wasn’t making a whole lot of sense, to the point where I actually stopped recording. But he just kept on talking about how he liked that particular film—that particular bunch of films—because they were all in such bad shape you kind of had to look at them at an angle, side-on, just to figure out what was happening. How if you looked at it straight on, it just hurt your eyes. Like there wasn’t anything there? I asked him, and he laughed. Said, oh, there was something there, all right, something the person who made it didn’t want you seeing. So you kind of had to sneak up on it, romance it a bit. Wait till it poked its head out when it thought you weren’t watching and trap it.
Eventually, Leonard Warsame turned up, took one look at Wrob and rolled his eyes; he grabbed Wrob by the arm, told me he needed an early night, and that was that. So I called another cab and went home.
“So what’s his angle?” Simon asked me later that night, as we got ready for bed. Clark had gone down comparatively easily, as he often did, with Daddy playing good cop; I was flossing over the kitchen sink as Simon brushed his teeth, since our bathroom wasn’t really large enough to accommodate two adults at the same time. I rinsed, spat, then replied—
“Seems to me like he wants to present himself as some sort of activist, maybe seed the interview, get his side of the story on record as a counterpoint to something Mattheuis is building up to: a press release? That big a batch of silver nitrate, all digitized and catalogued, so it doesn’t ever have to be screened physically again . . . that’d be something. You could do an exhibition at the Lightbox, or even an installation at the AGO—big fundraising bucks, potentially. Great cultural cred. I can see why he’d want to get in on that, ’specially if he feels like Mattheuis shut him out.”
“Sort of the same way you want to get in on proving Mrs. Whitcomb made that film,” Simon pointed out, gently.
“Well, yeah,” I agreed. “Except how I’m not doing it mainly to piss off my ex-boyfriend—”
“For which I’m very grateful.”
“—and playing the victim, putting on a show for the media, if you can even call me ‘the media,’ these days. And I’m just not interested in helping him out with that sort of petty personal backstabbing, seriously.”
“So you’re not going to talk to Mister, what’s his name, Matthias?”
“Mattheuis—and oh no, I’m definitely gonna talk to Jan, if he’ll see me. ’Cause I need the other half of this, given it might help me build my case.”
“That’s what I thought.”
I snorted. “You know me so well.”
“It’s almost like we’re married.”
So he went to bed while I synched my iPhone to my laptop, got the sound-file all squared away, then stayed up transcribing my notes and listening to the soundtrack from Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain on infinite loop. My eyes were burning, probably from all that residual smoke. Around 3:00 A.M. I saved, shut down, and lay back on the couch for “a minute,” then almost immediately found myself deep in a dream: winter light, a light dusting of snow on the ground, yellow tape marking off a safe distance from the same pit Wrob had described to me—a jagged-sided, split-lipped mouth full of black soil and coiled, shimmery loops of film, gummed together by an iridescent, stinking muck of wept-off emulsion. Firemen in full drag stood by with sand-buckets, their faces obscured by respirator masks and helmets, as Ontario Provincial Police uniforms held the crowd back. Somewhere in there, I knew, was the boy Wrob Barney had once been, protesting this injustice to his father, but I couldn’t pick him out. Instead, my eyes went to a figure standing on the farthest outskirts, under the trees and black, overhanging branches, almost hidden by jostling spectators. A dim blur dressed all in white from top to toe, every part of it—her? But how could I know that?—equally shrouded as though enveloped in a massive bag, a beekeeper’s costume without the broad-brimmed hat, a bleached-out Afghan chadri complete with grille . . . a veil.
Of course I know now who she must have been. Let me remind you, though—this was before I’d spoken to Hugo Balcarras, before I’d seen the only extant portrait of Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb, in her peculiar version of full mourning. Before any of that.
Yet there she was, burnt on the inside of my eyelids, wavering at the very edge of my sight. Raising one fine, slim, white-gloved hand, to shape a gesture I found singularly hard to interpret, especially at a distance: was that her palm turned outward like a warning—halt, go back, this it not for you? Or was it the back, beckoning me closer—yes, come here, don’t be afraid, show yourself—and be shown. I know your face, Lois; I know you. There is . . .
. . . something . . .
. . . I want for you to see.
One finger extending then curved and sharp as a twig, as a claw. Pointing downwards, toward my feet.
And when I looked, helpless, unable to stop myself from following that finger’s angle, I saw that the fire inside the pit was already lit, the film cache already burning, bright as a hundred thousand candles. There was something else blooming in its centre, brighter still, so much you could hardly stand to look at it: a curled absence, a hole in the world’s hide, throwing off sparks. Something that shone solid, less an eye than a doorway through which a void could be glimpsed.
Curled until it wasn’t. Until it spread and resolved, growing limbs. Until it reached out, four-legged, to grasp the pit’s sides, its unstable rim. Until what might have been its shoulders bunched, arms flexed and pulling. Until the part that must have been its head tipped back, assessing, reckoning how much force it would have to exert to free itself. Until, slowly, so horribly slowly—
—it began to crawl,
carefully, up. And out.
I woke in an instant, choking on my own spit, goosebumped all over; my temperature had fallen during sleep, the way it always does, chilling my sweat till it slicked me like ice. Turned on my side, foetal, and coughed so hard I felt like I was retching. When I finally recovered enough to make my way to the bathroom, my eyes were glued together with sleep so thick I had to scrub at them with a moistened facecloth—at which point I looked in the mirror and almost screamed, because my sclera were suffused with what looked like classic petechial haemorrhaging: no whites anymore, just creamy pink, inflamed every micro-millimetre or so with broken threads of pure red.
As I sat in the doctor’s office the next morning, waiting to hear his diagnosis (“Looks like you’ve been crying too hard,” he remarked, with what I felt was a startling lack of sympathy. “They’ll go away eventually.”), I checked my phone only to discover a message that’d probably arrived just after I turned it off for the night and hooked it up to charge—one of those creepy ones that starts out as a text, then ends up a robot voice reading the text back to you on voicemail, like if Stephen Hawking did telemarketing. The thing itself is lost to time, since I deleted it automatically after hearing it, only later realizing that might not have been the best idea. However, I believe it said:
jan can tlk bt I think I always hd more right to tht film than him
not least cause he still dsnt even know what hes got
like he even pt the wrong name on it.
“Did you ask Dr. Goa about the migraines and the insomnia?” my mother wanted to know. “I did not,” I replied, still deeply engaged in Googling Hugo Balcarras’s contact information—a thankless fucking task from the get-go. The only thing listed was his publisher, Houslow, who hadn’t been active since the early 1990s. So I was eventually reduced to calling up a former colleague of mine who now wrote jokey celebrity commentary for the Toronto Star’s Saturday edition, and begged her to reverse-directory it; that got me his latest phone number, which got me the interview excerpted in Chapter One. But I wasn’t about to get into all that right then and there, not with Mom already on the metaphorical warpath.
“Oh, Lois, you were already in the clinic, for God’s sake. Why wouldn’t you?”