A lucky coincidence brought me my chance. I Googled Safie’s name to see what else she might be attached to locally, and was pleased to find her listed as one of the contributing artists in the upcoming Nuit Blanche art festival: a free event that takes place every October in Toronto, featuring dozens of interactive art installations all over the city on display from sundown to sunup. Safie was providing technical support for a “sound collage installation” by Soraya Mousch, Max Holborn’s old partner—another former filmmaker who’d supposedly sworn off the medium entirely in the wake of . . . whatever the hell had happened to Holborn, and (one assumes) to her.
Safie’s alliance with her made sense in hindsight—she’d done a biographical essay on Mousch for my Canadian Film History class, I now recalled, actually looking her up in the phone book and calling her directly rather than relying on Wikipedia like most of the other quote-unquote “kids” in her class. It’s yet another way people fail to realize Canada isn’t like Hollywood: Canadian industry types tend to be far more accessible, providing you’re polite. Then again, given the size of the community overall, it probably did help that they were both Armenian. Mousch invited Safie over to her place, showed her the old-school flatbed rig in her living room she used to do reel-to-reel editing on, and became a bit of a mentor to her—if I recall correctly, she actually gave said rig to Safie as a present after whatever happened with Max Holborn, not that I think Safie ever used it. They kept in touch, Safie consulting with her on a variety of professional issues. When Mousch phoned her up with the outline for her Nuit Blanche piece, Safie jumped on board. As she later told me: “It’s not like I had anything better to do.”
“That’s a rousing endorsement.”
“Yeah, well: she was paying, at least.”
Previous to that, Safie had just wrapped final edit on a film called Drink Me, an artsy softcore that wanted to crossbreed Hammer Horror with Alice in Wonderland. “Thirty hours of boobs, blood, and blurred-out privates compressed down to seventy-six minutes, and I’m not even getting official credit for work done,” she complained; their Internet Movie Database page still had her listed as “3rd Camera Assistant,” even though she’d apparently been the de facto editor ever since the real editor “went literally crazy” in post-production—stopped coming in, changed all his contact info, dropped off the map. But they’d kicked her a few thousand extra under the table, if nothing else, and she’d plugged the money straight back into making Mousch’s aural “vision” as fully realized as possible.
Since I already knew I’d be up, and it was close enough I could walk there from our condo, I got to the area indicated on Nuit Blanche’s official map—an office building lobby just off Yonge Street, about ten steps down from Yonge and Adelaide—at roughly 2:45 A.M., when attendance was just starting to taper off; we were entering the “dead hours” between three and five, the event’s last spasms before sunrise. I’d emailed ahead to tell Safie I was coming. Opening the door, I found myself immediately confronted with a twisty grey structure made from sound-retardant materials, a tunnel whorling inwards like something caught halfway between either the world’s most massive ammonite fossil or a human ear blown up large enough to crawl through. ENTER HERE, a sign instructed. After a moment’s hesitation, I bent my head and did so.
Inside, the passage beyond curled back and forth across itself, a mini-maze. I was forced to bend in increasingly creative ways to gain access. I soon began to wish I hadn’t brought my backpack, especially when the ceiling shrank even further. Eventually I slipped it off and pushed it in front of me through the narrow canal, soldiering grimly on. Behind me, the entrance first muffled, then effectively cut off all trace of ambient noise—distant traffic, weather, the hum and clank of machinery, the chatter of passing crowds—and scrubbed my mind’s palate clean, opening me up for the equally subtle intrusion of Mousch’s sound-mix, which seeped up through speakers set in the floors, meeting more layers of noise sifting down from the roof, now on my right hand and on my left, now making me shy from whatever lay ahead, now driving me forward with an awful sense of mounting pursuit.
It wasn’t music, exactly. Just tones and drones and spatters of muffled dialogue; conversations filtered through the walls, noise and effects overlaid to create some sort of ever-moving internal landscape of almost-glimpsed sequences. And when the passage finally widened, giving way to a room beyond, things didn’t much improve: the blackness was total, womb-like, with no hint of which direction to turn. I stumbled with hands out, feeling my way, constantly afraid I was going to encounter something else that would grip me and pull me into . . . what, I don’t even know. Another dimension, some dreadful night-time abyss. The silent, dust-piled bottom of some long-dried ocean full of skeleton fish and glowing, floating jellies, blind seekers with mouths open wide, waiting to bite down and swallow.
Like the Orphic Mysteries, conducted in Grecian caverns, my brain told me, while I shuffled blindly about. Like that cave in the jungle, the one they’ve identified as the working model for Xibalba, the Mayan Underworld. Quite fascinating, really; you’ll be okay, I’m almost sure. . . .
And then—at the edge of my total lack of vision, a waft of scent, borne on some invisible breath. It broke over me all at once, weirdly familiar: green shoots, turned earth, burnt hay. A hint of perfume—something musty and antique—impressed upon old clothing like sweat. Was that tuberose, perhaps? Lily of the Valley?
Don’t move, a voice seemed to say, right against my ear, warming the lobe. Keep your eyes shut, stay still. Don’t look. The risk is great; avoid it. Do not—look—
Spurred, I reeled back, arms flailing; touched the wall on one side and spun toward it, gripped hard, almost fell. Reached out in the darkness, only to feel another hand meet hers.
“Ms. Cairns?” a familiar voice asked.
“What’s with your eyes, Ms. Cairns?”
My hand went reflexively up to touch my glasses. “Oh, shit—is it that obvious?”
“Well, in here, yeah.” Safie and I had adjourned to a nearby Starbucks, which like many local shops was staying open all night to take advantage of the Nuit Blanche crowds; compared to the darkness of Safie’s display, it had seemed dazzlingly, tear-making bright.
“Crap. I thought they were looking better.”
“Um, well. Depends on how they looked before, I guess.” A beat. “So how’d they look?”
“. . . Worse.”
She shot me a look, like: You don’t change, man, do you? Which was valid, I guess; I’ve always been prickly, and teaching brought that out in me extra hard, especially when people got really stupid. I remember this one guy in my general film history class who literally didn’t seem to understand the distinction between star and director, who thought Cast Away was a film by Tom Hanks rather than a film with Tom Hanks, thus making Robert Zemeckis and his crew just, what—friends of Hanks’s who got on-screen credit for standing around admiringly while he simply dreamed the whole movie into existence, or spun it out of his ass like a spider? And yeah, if you’re wondering, I did say that last part out loud, in front of all the other students—Safie included. I can still see her trying not to laugh, and failing miserably.
“I can see fine,” I reassured her. “Not that that was much help, back there . . . you had anybody freak out, yet? Nobody’s been an asshole and dared their claustrophobic significant other to try it?”
“Not so far. We did put a warning sign up at the front, you know,
‘People with Phobic Responses to Darkness or Enclosed Spaces Strongly Cautioned Against Entry’—I guess you didn’t notice that. But just to be safe, we’ve got night-vision cameras in a couple of places, and there are sections designed to lift straight out if we see anybody about to lose their shit.” Safie sipped her cappuccino. “Once you get past the opening flat, most of the structure’s just wooden frames with sound-baffling foam layered three or four sheets deep on chicken-wire backing. The foam’s the most expensive part, weirdly, just ’cause we needed so freaking much of it. We rented the speakers and the board, and Soraya and I did the sound mix ourselves on her home system.” She brushed her hair back from her brow then asked, with slightly too casual a tone of voice: “So how’d you like it?”
“Honestly? It scared the crap out of me.”
“I seem to recall that’s a compliment.”
I grinned. “Yup. I mean, I’m not even phobic about this stuff, mostly, and I was still seriously creeped out. How’d you do the scents thing, by the way? Atomizers, set up to pump stuff in at key places?”
“No, we didn’t include an olfactory component. What did you smell?”
“Um . . .” It was surprisingly hard to put words to it now. “Organics, mostly. Warm. Like flowers in the countryside, maybe. But if you really didn’t do it, it obviously doesn’t matter. Some neurological thing, probably; memories firing, et cetera.”
“Maybe you should go see a doctor,” she suggested, unknowingly mimicking my mom.
“Not unless one of the things I smelled was burnt toast.” I finished my chai. “Anyhow, what’s next for you after this? You planning to go on with that project you’ve been blogging about—the Seven Angels sequel?”