“Better call Mom and tell her then,” I replied. “Or maybe your folks, because she’s probably not gonna want to hear it from me.”
“Probably not.”
He didn’t quite smile, and I didn’t quite smile back, but the mood lifted, just a bit. Enough for me to turn to Safie and ask, “So. You okay with all this?”
Safie gave a small, tight grin. “I’m the one who found him, Miss, remember? You bet your ass I’m in.” She held out her hand.
“Good,” I said, shaking it.
I think back, remembering that old narrative-logic exercise of mine, the one I used to walk people through in class: the man, the tree, the apple, the bruise—gravity. There’s only so many ways to tell a story, linearly or not, and that was something Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb always seemed to know, long before anyone else in her field.
So: knowing what I know now, or at least what I think—
(what I believe)
—I know, then perhaps this explains why Mrs. Whitcomb shot her films in ever more oblique, concave, complicated ways; through scrims and veils, cut-outs and paintings on glass with the empty spaces acting like a second lens, or even (in one case) a tank full of water with things floating around in it, paint and ink dropping down, unravelling, diffuse and sublimate. Reflections of reflections in mirrors or sheets of polished tin, cunningly bent to replace one image with another, or show two things at once, shimmering and slick and odd.
She did stuff other people wouldn’t think up for decades, and none of it in service of making things explicit, making things easy. More like . . . the exact opposite.
I think I’ve said before how it was as if she didn’t want you to see what she was looking at, or maybe as if she didn’t want to see what she was looking at, let alone want it to see her. Yet to my mind, it’s an observation that bears repeating.
In the end, I suppose, this will always be a story about the limits of what’s known, or maybe of what can be known; one open to interpretation, not so much because it has missing pieces, but because missing pieces are all it was ever made from.
And if that’s true, then I was a lost cause from the beginning, because I have a pattern-maker’s mind—like Mrs. Whitcomb, like Hyatt, like Simon, like Clark. It’s just how we’re wired. Thus making me perhaps the single worst person who could’ve tripped across this stuff, with Safie running a close second. Because she could see what was around Mrs. Whitcomb’s film, in total detail, and I could see what was behind it, eventually. But the thing itself, the trick being played? The shell-game signifier?
Which of us could ever have seen that coming, at least in time to warn anybody?
Then again, maybe there was no “thing itself,” not really. Maybe there never is. Maybe there’s just a shadow, a stain, a projection—a crude visual mimicry of something literally unimaginable moving behind the walls of the world, scaled down till it fits inside the limits of human perception. And when all’s said and done, in the final analysis, all that good shit . . . the very hoariest of any and all possible hoary clichés . . .
Well then, maybe it isn’t so much that you see what something is, but that it—
(or in this case, She)
—is what you see.
The place in which Vasek Sidlo had spent his last twenty years was a classic old-age home, indistinguishable from any other assisted-living facility you’ve ever run across: bright and airy, open spaces, light salmon walls, the vague smell of bedpans covered up with Glade. It reminded me of this really awful micro-job I’d had the summer I was nineteen, working for two hours every Saturday afternoon serving pre-wrapped kosher meals at a small Jewish hospice in Toronto’s Bagel Belt. It involved wearing a hairnet, scrubs, and a lot of standing, while trying to simultaneously tune out the residents enough to stay sane yet keep alert enough to know when they wanted something from you: a napkin, more coffee, their tray taken away. By the end of my shift everything hurt, which I guess was sort of like being them for one day a week—except obviously far better, because I at least got to go home. Come late August, I was beginning to think they could not only tell that I thought this, but kind of liked it that way, too.
The woman to whom Safie had spoken ushered us down a long hallway, pausing by Sidlo’s door. “He was awake the last time I looked in, but that was ten minutes ago, so I’m not making any promises,” she told us. “You may need to be prepared to wait.”
“We understand,” I said.
“He’s over a hundred years old, you know. It’s amazing he’s even . . .” She trailed off. “At any rate. I’m just down the hall, if you need me.”
“Thank you very much, ma’am,” Simon said. “We’ll keep that in mind.”
The door opened slowly on some sort of a restriction lever, probably to keep it from slamming. Vasek Sidlo sat in a wheelchair by the window, angled toward a shaft of light, dozing like an incredibly old, incredibly fragile cat. He was crepey everywhere you looked: skin worn so fine we could see through to his bones, where it wasn’t covered by the green striped cotton pyjamas which were clearly all he ever wore; the shadows of sockets ’round his upturned eyes, cataract-blue and ticking slightly from side to side in his sleep. A few scant locks of hair still folded over his scalp, not so much white as colourless; blue veins bulged at either temple, and his Adam’s apple pressed pai
nfully against the front of his throat.
It was hard to watch, hard to be in the same room with him—mortality’s naked presence pressing down on us like a weight, a full-body, lead-lined X-ray cloak. The kind of spectacle that made me want to fill out and sign my own DNR form, right then and there.
“Oh . . . wow,” Safie apparently couldn’t quite stop herself from remarking.
Simon nodded, wincing.
“Lois, this is cruel,” he said, careful to pitch his voice low. “I mean, look at him. What can you expect to gain, aside from just . . . disturbing the poor guy unnecessarily?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”