Experimental Film

“All the more reason to mention it, I’d think. I’m going to need to talk to your physician.”

I gave her Harrison’s contact info from my phone, which she copied down. She told us there would be tests, surprising exactly no one, then cast disapproving eyes on me and walked away. In her wake, Mom looked my way like she definitely wanted to lodge some criticism of her own—but thankfully, Simon’s phone chimed before she could.

“That’s Mom and Dad,” he told us, checking it. “They’re coming down, should be here by ten. They’re taking Dad’s car.”

Mom nodded. “Good.” To me: “I still don’t understand why you wouldn’t—”

“Yeah, I get that, Mom.”

“I mean, come on, Lois. Didn’t it seem . . . pertinent?”

I looked at her for a long moment. “No?” I said, finally.

“Lois . . .”

Simon raised his hands, placatory. “Not all autistic kids have seizures, Lee; very few, in fact. The ones who do, it usually starts early, before diagnosis, even. And Clark’s never done anything like this before, not even when he was a baby—remember that ear infection, back when he was three months old? That’s the highest fever he’s ever had, until now.”

Mom shook her head, clearly frustrated. “There’s no consistency,” she said. “‘One kid with autism . . .’ Oh, shit.” She turned away and sat down abruptly, burying her face in her hands. Simon sat down too, and put his arm around her, saying nothing.

I’ve never been able to figure out if that was a guy thing, a Burlingame thing, or just Simon—that reflex instinct to distract yourself from your own pain by trying to console someone else—just like I’ve never been able to figure out whether I find it more endearing or off-putting. Right now, though, even as I fell back into myself in my own autonomic response (always to shut down, hard), I realized that more than anything else—I envied it.

Simon was right, I told myself: our presenting symptoms were wholly different—Clark never blacked out, never acted as if he had a migraine; I’d had no preliminary fever, no nausea. And up till last week nothing like this had ever happened to either of us, so what was the likelihood we shared some neurogenetic time bomb that only went off now? It was stupid; it was impossible. The two things couldn’t have anything to do with one another, really. . . .

Unless they do, a small, flat, pitiless voice from the back of my brain said while I stared as though hypnotized at the empty chair across from me. The same way whatever happened to Hyatt Whitcomb had something to do with what happened to Mrs. Whitcomb, in her father’s field, or that town, Dzéngast—because she thought it did, didn’t she? So much so she spent the whole rest of her life trying to set that story straight, record it, like a warning: making the film over and over again, writing down the fairy tales, telling and re-telling it. Like she was trying to get something right . . . trying to fix something.

But no. Because even if she had thought that, all it me

ant was that she was wrong. Or crazy, like so many brilliant, creative people. Or desperate, like anyone in her place would be. Because stuff like that just didn’t happen. Ever. And even if it did—

(even if it does)

—it surely didn’t happen again.

And now I really did feel something—not just annoyance, not just emptiness. I felt cold, ice-filled. I felt . . . scared.

Slowly, over this mounting sense of horror, I gradually became aware Simon was murmuring to Lee, his voice oddly threaded with laughter. For a moment I found myself flashing back to long childhood rides stuck in the backseat of my parents’ car, telling myself stories to live inside while Lee and Gareth argued, focusing so intently on the pattern of the seats it felt like I could fold myself down inside it and disappear for hours. More than once, they’d had to yell at me to get me to re-emerge. But then Mom laughed, too, a chuckle, watery but real, and I relaxed.

I leaned forward, turned my head slightly, and saw that Simon was flipping through photos on the iPad—the latest photos Clark must have taken in his endless ongoing series, fifty to a hundred mostly repeated images in a row: dust-bunnies under the bed; close-ups of the slightly decayed wicker trunk in the bathroom where we kept our towels; the too-bright smiling faces of his Thomas the Tank Engine shelf buckets; light through the window of his fire engine bed-tent. Then, some reverse shots he’d obviously taken on my laptop’s webcam, posing and chatting away, flirting with himself: Disney prince faces, Disney princess faces. Sometimes he applied effects. He was particularly enamoured of the psychedelic colour shift that made everything look like a Kirlian photograph, all vibrant lime green and purple auras, but he also liked the doubling mechanism, which made one half of the screen mirror the other.

“What’s that?” Mom said, suddenly.

I was already drifting away again, expecting Simon to answer her. But the seconds stretched out and he didn’t, until—finally, he did.

“I . . . really don’t know,” he said, tone unnerved enough to jerk me awake. “That’s weird.”

“What?” I asked.

They both glanced over, startled. Mom opened her mouth, but Simon forestalled it by handing me the tablet. “Have a look,” he said, and sat back.

I studied it a minute, maximizing the photo in question—Clark, dancing in his bedroom, the iPad propped on his bed, angled to record while he watched himself in his screen—and turned it in my hands, this way and that. Trying to figure out exactly what I was supposed to be looking at beyond the obvious: my son’s bony chest and flappy, jigging limbs, his welcome crocodile grin . . .

And then, all at once, I saw it—recognized it. What it had to be. It, her: She.

She, with a big “S.”

In the corner of Clark’s room, by the door, stretched almost two-dimensional—so flat, somebody who didn’t know his room might’ve mistaken it for a painting on the wall—was something almost exactly like what I’d seen on the monitor with Safie and Malin: the sound-file image, Safie’s PixelVision spectre. Except instead of shades of grey, it was in brass and gold and fierce, bright silver-white, so pale it was almost blue tinged.

Lady Midday, standing in the corner of Clark’s room with her wings hanging down around him, looking in at him, eyes fixed and inhuman, sharp as a stooping hawk’s. Every angel is terrible, as Rilke says, with her no exception to that rule.