Experimental Film Read online

  “Oh, mmm-hmmm. Very.”

  “As I can be, yeah.”

  Dryly: “I could debate that.” Her gaze shifted up over my shoulder, pinning Simon, one eyebrow lifting. “And you, you’re all right with this?” He nodded. “Health issues and everything else, you’re fine with her going out of town with someone you don’t know from Adam, where anything could happen.”

  Simon gave her his patented earnestly placatory look. “Honestly, Lee, I really don’t think it’s as sinister as you’re making it sound. It’s Northern Ontario, not Beirut, and they both have cell phones; no worse than going up to a friend’s cottage for the weekend. Lois and Safie’ll be fine.”

  “I could care less about this Safie person.” To me, again: “You’re not well these days, Lois, in general. Would you agree with me on that at least?”

  I snorted. “C’mon, Mom. I mean, I’ve had some trouble sleep-ing. . . .”

  “Constant insomnia, migraines. That’s not nothing.”

  “It’s inconvenient, sure; annoying, absolutely. In practice, though, it’s just—so I don’t get a lot of sleep here or there, what’s the difference?”

  “Did you go back to Goa yet?”

  “No, I did not. I haven’t had a migraine for weeks, seriously. Haven’t had time.”

  “Right, because you’ve been too busy driving yourself to distraction.”

  “I’ve been working, and this is what I’ve been working on. An actual job, just like the old days. Freaking finally.”

  Mom opened her mouth to refute me, but right at that same moment—behind us—Clark bounced extra-high, gave a whoop, then stumbled against the front window, ankle turning; he started to buckle, skull angled toward the glass. Luckily, however, Simon was there to catch him as he came down, fast enough he didn’t get exactly how close he might’ve come to disaster. “Whoa, doggy!” Simon exclaimed, and Clark laughed maniacally, hugging on tight.

  “Clifford is SO big!” he sang-yelled in return. “The Big Red Dog, wooof!”

  I looked back at Mom, who sighed before gathering up her purse and coat.

  “You have a job already, Lois,” is all she said as she turned to go.

  “Am I being an asshole?” I asked Simon that night, snuggled up in bed together—a rarer occurrence than I liked these days, as my insomnia usually kept me up well past his latest. “To her? To Clark?” This close, I could almost see his face clearly, even without my glasses. “To you?”

  Simon shrugged. “I think you’re in a lot of pain, and that makes it hard to be patient. But I don’t think a four-day trip counts as material for a heartbreaker country song.” He abruptly grinned. “‘My wife, she done left me with an autistic son/He sings on the YouTube while she’s on the run!’”

  I snorted. “I’m trying to be serious.”

  “This is se-wious,” Simon said promptly, in a toddlerish falsetto lisp. Then he yelped as I ran my hands up under his armpits, proving once again how Clark’s helpless ticklishness didn’t come from me; I stopped after a moment, to let him get his breath, and he rolled onto his side to face me. “You want serious, hon? You’ve looked happier these last few days than I’ve seen you in months, which I think is worth a few headaches.”

  “Mom doesn’t think so.”

  “She’s just worried about you. ’Cause that’s her job.”

  I closed my eyes. “Yeah, that would come off more plausible if she didn’t phrase it to sound as if me taking a research trip means deserting Clark, somehow falling down on my responsibilities to him. Because nothing I want matters anymore, right?”

  “Well, nothing either of us wants matters if it conflicts with what Clark needs . . . but I honestly don’t think this does.” He tilted his head. “Besides, and no offence—you don’t really have a record of knowing when to downshift gears for your own sake. Maybe she’s just taking any tactic she thought you might actually listen to.”

  I nodded. “Manipulating me, you mean, since I’m genuinely too thick to know when I’m not physically up to something.”

  He breathed out in the dark, sharply—that last part must’ve gotten to him, more than usual. “No, that’s not it either. What I mean is, she cares enough about you that she’s never going to give up trying to get you to take better care of yourself. Is that so unforgiveable?”

  I sighed. “I just wish she’d get it through her head how important this is, and not just to me. It’s not the money, not even really the fame—I mean, Jesus, it’s the Canadian film industry. I just want to feel like I’ve accomplished something. Like there was some point to being here, in my life.”

  Simon’s pause was longer this time, and again I belatedly realized how that might have sounded to him. I wanted to wince, but knew he might feel it as a withdrawal; his eventual response was dryer yet, but nothing worse. “A man with lower self-esteem might take that amiss. Fortunately, I’m protected by an impenetrable bubble of arrogance.”

  I felt my face heat. “You know what I mean.”

  “As it happens, yes, I do.” He tightened his arms, wrapping us closer, furnace-warm. “Look, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with needing more in your life than just one vocation. Lee’s erring in favour of Clark because she loves him—loves both of you—so much she can’t see that just yet, but she will. And while you might have to put up with some nagging in the meantime, that’s just par for the course between you two.”

  Unarguably true, so I let myself relax, much as I could with my shoulder already beginning to whine at me. “I love you,” I told him, without planning to.

  “I love you. So does Clark.”

  “I hope so.”

  Sleepily, but firmly: “I know so.”

  I was tired—and smart—enough to know not to say: I’m glad you do. Because much as Simon’s own family, and Simon himself, were evidence for the assertion, I’d never quite bought into the idea that being someone’s parent or child automatically guaranteed their love or yours. Mom hadn’t been able to stand her own mother by the end, as I’d pointed out to her more than once.

  Gamma couldn’t stand me, you mean, she’d said. I loved her, always. I couldn’t help it.

  That sounds healthy.

  That’s family, Lois. Healthy doesn’t come into it.

  And Clark . . . God help me, helpless bedrock affection notwith-standing, we just made each other so uncomfortable, him and me, all the time. For someone on the autism spectrum he was amazingly persistent at seeking out contact, demanding your interaction, but only on his terms: he’d play up to me while I struggled to keep myself even, pretend I didn’t feel resentment at the interruption or frustration at so often not being able to follow his skittering attention shifts until it became impossible to ignore him. If he loved me at all, I sometimes thought, it was only because he could still be so easily distracted into forgetting our last quarrel.

  Similarly, if he really did notice that I was gone during this trip, it’d probably only strike him as a bonus. More time to spend with his “friend Daddy,” without that annoying, ever-pushy, ever-insistent-on-making-people-use-their-words Mommy around. . . .

  Simon’s breathing had dropped into his usual snore, body gone limp. Pain throbbed steadily under my collarbone and looped through my capsular ligament, rotator cuff puffing; I shifted, felt the blade flare uncomfortably, and cursed, but only mentally. I stayed still another few minutes to make sure Simon would remain asleep before extracting myself, slipping onto my desk chair and turning on my computer, knowing the light wouldn’t wake him.

  I sat there in the dark and watched Lady Midday (Version One) again, with the sound turned down, till I felt tired enough to go lie on the living room couch. To stare up at the ceiling, glasses still in place, before finally closing my eyes against my throbbing temple, the grind-anticipating ache in my back teeth, and the only slightly dimmer knot where my arm met my torso, trying my level
best to simply slip away.

  No dreams that night, however unsettling—mere dreams would’ve been too simple, too homey. Instead, I had a full-blown night terror episode for the first time in . . . well, not years, but enough consecutive months to make it seem so. If you’re lucky, you don’t know what I’m talking about, so here’s some background on the concept.

  Night terrors, or pavor nocturnus, are a classic sleep disorder whose universal feature is inconsolability on awakening plus apparent paralysis and pressure on the sleeper’s chest, chased with intense feelings of terror or dread. Sometimes, especially if the sleeper somehow manages to force their eyes open while trying to wake themselves up, this is accompanied by horrifying hypnagogic visual hallucinations: floating, crawling, and looming phantom figures with rictus-frozen faces, eyes in the dark, orbs and auras, threatening shadows, and nonexistent insect swarms. Typically, night terrors tend to happen during the first hours of Stage Three non-rapid eye movement sleep and coincide with periods of delta or slow-wave sleep arousal, but they can also occur during daytime naps.

  During bouts, patients often bolt upright with their eyes wide open, a look of absolute panic on their face. They scream out loud, sweat, exhibit rapid respiration and heart rate, thrash and flail. When woken, they’re confused or unresponsive, unable to recognize familiar faces. Sometimes they lash out further, kicking and punching; I’ve never done that, but then again, I’ve also never experienced the one positive side effect of this syndrome—while most people with night terrors become at least partially amnesiac about their incidents the following day, I remember each iteration with almost grotesque clarity.

  They used to call it being hag-ridden. In ancient Britain, it was the province of the literal night-maere, which rode men, women, children, and even animals through their sleep, sometimes to their deaths. Even trees were thought on occasion to be subject to this sort of bewitchment, resulting in their branches being entangled, their roots knotted, strangling each other.

  My first night terrors happened in Australia, when I was still going to visit my dad every year. He and his significant other met me in Sydney and took me to the house they’d arranged to stay in—a cool, modern, single-level beach house that sat at the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. From the outside everything looked great, if not exactly designed with the acro- or agoraphobic in mind, but once we got inside I realized that this woman apparently collected Polynesian art, which meant that every part of her home was crowded with leering, life-sized statues made from dark wood with inset shell eyes and teeth, the largest of which depicted a giant shark-god swallowing a man whole. In order to make it more habitable, Dad moved all the masks and what-not out of the main bedroom and into the living room, which was where I was going to sleep, in a window-seat bed surrounded by massive looming Polynesian death-gods on one side, and on the other the open edge of the cliff seen through windows full of unfamiliar Australian stars. I was so frightened I woke up later that same night in the throes of a classic maere, certain I was having a heart attack while being sexually assaulted by a ghost.

  Time softens all things, however, which may explain why this particular event was gentle by comparison, if no less disturbing. At roughly 4:30 A.M., my eyes opened with what sounded to me like an audible click, and I found myself looking upwards; the room was silent, the whole apartment likewise, which was its own brand of unlikely—no snoring, no dryer, no ambient noise or traffic outside. The air in my lungs felt heavier than water, turgid, like jelly. No light—Simon must’ve gotten up to use the bathroom, then turned everything off on his way back—and my glasses had slipped off in my sleep, probably ending up on the floor, smeared all to hell. But I could see nonetheless. I could see everything.

  And how I wished to Christ I couldn’t.

  Above me, something leaned in, shrouded in layers of white-turned-grey. Where its face should have been was a lace grille, fine-holed as a bee’s eye; it hung limp, whatever lay behind stiller than stone and had been for years. For almost a century. And still I heard a voice, small and fleshless—a murmur, a buzz, faint and fainter. Words ant-crawling up through dirt.

  Don’t go, Lois. I beg of you now, face to face—not warn, not threaten. I beg, sister; please, oh please. Please, please, no.

  (no)

  (oh, no no no)

  I wanted to shut my eyes again but couldn’t. Wanted to flail out, to punch and scream—no such luck. Instead, I simply lay there, chest on fire, drowning in my own fear; felt each breath catch on the inside of my throat, scoring it with a thousand fish hooks. My tongue was a choke-stone, gone rough, dry and cold in a dry, cold mouth, spit gummed and bloody.

  The fear mounted, mounted, mounted, till I thought my heart would burst. But . . . it didn’t.

  It never does.

  When I woke it was morning, full sun and the normal bustle. Clark was reciting along with Match Game as Simon shoehorned him into his clothes. For a split second, I had no idea where I was, or who, or why—till he noticed me staring, that is, and smiled at me. “Hey, hon,” he said, almost unbearably cheerful. “Sleep okay?”

  I swallowed, painfully. Then managed to repeat—

  “. . . Okay.”

  “That’s good.” Checking his watch: “Well, bus time. Clark, say ’bye.”

  Clark made a noise somewhere between a buzzer and a burp, as he’s wont to do when asked to participate in something uninteresting. “Aaaarp! ‘No match. King-size, or king crab?’”

  “Neither,” I rasped back, swinging myself up and beckoning. “Kiss, please.”

  “No kiss.”

  “Oh, I think yes kiss.”

  “No kiss, you’re silly! The Mommy should listen.”

  “Listen to who, bunny?”

  This last was from Simon, but Clark just turned his head sidelong, eyes meeting mine instead—a rare enough occurrence to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.

  “The lady in the bag,” he replied, without prompting. “Listen, don’t go—she said so. Please, please, please . . .”

  No.

  In retrospect, it’s probably not too surprising how little I remember about the trip to Quarry Argent, given what eventually happened when I got there. When I try to think about it now things begin all right, then get smeary and unreliable—after a certain point, I have to take other people’s word almost entirely for what I did and said, with one very notable exception. Their memories, their records, trump mine. So yeah, not surprising as such, but not exactly a comfortable thing to admit, either; this goddamn world’s empirical enough as it is without having to worry about your own experiences seeping out of your head like a sieve, no matter what trauma might have perforated it.

  And yet, as I’ve said so many times before, with just the same impatient tone I hear it spoken in now, looking at it on the page—to my mom, to Clark, to whomever. To myself.

  I remember dragging my travel suitcase downstairs, out the building’s side entrance, then crossing the street to where Safie waited in a van she’d borrowed from a friend. Remember her looking up as I approached, turning down the radio and remarking, “Knew it was you when I saw you coming, Ms. Cairns. You walk like you know where you’re going, I ever tell you that?”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  As we pulled onto the highway, Safie switched iPod playlists, trading Kanye West’s greatest hits for some Tracy Chapman; something from the more recent part of her career—“Telling Stories,” maybe. I wondered who’d introduced it to her—a friend? A boyfriend? I never thought to ask, or wanted to. I didn’t even know if Safie was straight or gay, or what. Irrelevant, for my purposes.

  I remember sitting beside her, van humming beneath me, eyes kept level so my vague nausea wouldn’t take over. Because yes, on top of everything else, I’m also prone to car-sickness, possibly as a side effect of the many medications I’m taking, prescription and otherwise.

  “So,
that fairy tale,” she said. “‘Lady Midday.’ That’s some pretty wild stuff.”

  “I’ve read her whole book, and they’re all . . . eccentric, by modern standards,” I agreed. “But I guess that must’ve been the one she liked best, considering she filmed five separate versions of it.”

  “Five? Shit.” I nodded as she continued: “That veil . . . I mean, it was a costume, right? Those pieces of mirror, making herself look as much like the story as she could—but not really. It almost looked like she was hiding, from somebody she thought might be watching. Like she wanted to keep what she was doing a secret.”

  “Yeah, I get how you could think that, but she was just in mourning; wore it all the time, apparently, ever since her son Hyatt disappeared. And while she’s definitely playing Lady Midday in the Untitled 13 clips, she’s in a lot of the other films as well, in the background sometimes, and she always wears the veil. It’s possible it’s somebody else, but I really don’t think so.”

  “Wouldn’t she have to be working the camera, though?”

  “Not necessarily. Méliès starred in almost every film he made. She was already the director, the designer—the sets, the masks, they’re all probably her handiwork, just like that backdrop. We’ll probably find some of ’em still out at the Vinegar House, if we’re lucky. And anybody could’ve run that kind of camera: just point and crank, make sure the light doesn’t get in the wrong places.”

  She nodded. “Plus, she was rich, so it makes sense she would’ve had crew.”

  “I’d be surprised if we can’t locate some of them, or their descendants. Small towns are like that, right? Everybody knows everybody.”