Experimental Film

“All right, good. So why am I talking to you, again?”

“To find out what we know?” she suggested. “If you really can’t remember, that is.?

??

“I can’t remember, anymore than I can physically see this shit you’re supposedly showing me. Where’s Dr. Harrison?”

“I’m right here, Ms. Cairns,” the man in question answered, tone level as ever. “Since you detectives sound as though you don’t believe she’s really suffering, let me set your minds at ease to the extent that I can: yes, my diagnosis of conversion disorder spins on the assumption such a thing exists, and yes, it’s extremely difficult to prove. It’s also very hard to fake, however, and from what I’ve observed, Ms. Cairns is to all intents and purposes blind, though hopefully only temporarily.”

“That sounds . . . very traumatic,” Correa agreed, though in her mouth “traumatic” sounded almost exactly like “dramatic.”

“It can be. Imagine yourselves in the same situation.”

“Yeah, I can’t see—” Valens shot back, or started to. To which Harrison retorted, coolly: “—that happening? Exactly. And neither can she for the moment, let alone anything else.”

Now it was Correa’s turn to sigh. “Very well. We’ll check in with you later, Ms. Cairns.”

I resisted the urge to shoot them a double finger, simply nodding instead. “I’ll be here, probably,” was all I could think to say.

Then I heard them all step out, Harrison softly shutting the door behind him, leaving me behind. I lay there in the not-exactly-dark, probably looking like I was staring at the ceiling, trying to think, to figure some way out of all this—my skull’s domed confines, the sheer froth of monkey-mind frenzy making my brain chase its own mushy grey tail so fast I could practically feel sparks getting thrown off, only to fizzle wetly against the blood-slick sides.

And maybe I fell asleep then, drifting from one increasingly drown-heavy wave of panic to the next, because the next thing I knew I wasn’t alone anymore. Somebody was there, breathing, slightly damp and cut with the occasional hitch—no corpse perfume, or weird floral stink of Soraya Mousch’s installation, so not Mrs. Whitcomb, thank Christ. Not Lady Midday, either—by all appearances, she’d be anything but quiet.

“Hello?” I rasped, reaching out. Waited a single held breath of my own, till somebody took my hand: warm, soft, familiar. Like coming home after a long absence, so long your adulthood peeling away.

“Lois.”

I gasped.

Voice almost cracking: “Mom?”

She drew me in, and I came, willingly. We rocked and hugged a while.

“I’m sorry,” I told her at last, when my tear-closed throat had widened enough to let me. Felt her hair stroke me lightly, back and forth, as she shook her head.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s okay, Lois. Everything’s okay now.”

Aside from the whole hysterical blindness thing, I thought but didn’t say. Because yeah, in that one moment, it really did seem like it almost was.

“Simon Senior, Bella?”

“They went back up to Mississauga—he has something tomorrow, some deacon thing . . . and Simon’s not back yet either, though he texted me a few minutes ago, said they were letting him go. Still, there’s somebody out in the hall I kind of think you’d like to s—uh.” She broke off, momentarily flummoxed. “I mean . . .”

I opened my mouth, probably to say I know what you mean, Mom, or something similarly on-the-nose. But a second later, I forgot whatever it’d been when Mom raised her voice, calling, “Okay, bud, c’mon in.”

Footsteps thumped over the floor to the accompanying beat of high-pitched hoots, and someone—small but heavy, and hot enough even now that I felt his warmth long before he actually reached me—clambered onto the bed. “Well, everyone, we hope you had a great time singing and dancing,” Clark announced, his cod-Aussie accent echoing the end of one of his favourite Wiggles DVDs. “But there’s one little problem: Mom’s asleep!” Then, in a slightly different voice: “Oh, no—she must be tired from all that dancing! Let’s wake her up to say goodbye. One, two, three . . . WAKE UP, MOMMY!”

I mock-jerked awake, blinking ostentatiously, trying to focus my gaze his way. “Oh!” I exclaimed, feeling the words wobble in my mouth. “Why did you wake me up? I was having such a nice dream—”

(I dreamed I had no boy—those were the words I usually finished with, bending my simmering resentment into an in-joke, and Clark had picked it up as quickly as any other. No boy! he usually replied, triumphantly. But not today; today, the words locked in my throat.)

Instead, I shifted to Dr. Seuss, oldest standby besides Mother Goose. “Here, in the dark,” I said. “Say, would you, could you, in the dark?” And felt him nod, my hand still touching his cheek, blessedly cool and fever free. “Look what we found, in the park, in the dark,” he responded. “We will take him home. We will name him—”

“Clark,” I agreed, voice gone suddenly ragged. “It’s me, bunny. Do you see Mommy?”

“I see her,” Clark replied. “And now, it’s time to kiss him.”

“Sounds good. High-five?” I held up my hand.