Experimental Film

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.”

“No offence, Miss, but you never struck me like a small-town gal.”

“You either.”

“Well, should be fun. Who knows, I might be the least white person they’ve ever seen. Like, not on TV.”

“I’m not sure I’d go into the situation thinking that.”

“You might if you were me, but don’t worry. I’ll be good.”

A couple of minutes elapsed, the ground spinning by beneath us like the fields outside, the sun already halfway up the sky—it’d be noon soon, it occurred to me. Lady Midday’s time. But the steely grey October overcast seemed worlds away from the burning white air of the clips, and the radio had switched to the twenty-first-century electronica of Daft Punk. Last night felt like it’d happened to somebody else.

(The Mommy should listen.)

“I wonder if any of the original notebooks are up there,” said Safie. “The ones the book’s afterword talked about. Be interesting to see if she drew on any other stuff, besides the Wendish material.”

“Like what?”

“Well, maybe this is just me connecting everything back to my pet obsessions—” She gave me a wry eyebrow lift; I snorted, nodded a silent touché. “—but Lady Midday and some of the things in the other tales, they reminded me a lot of figures that pop up in Yezidi myths as well; it would just be neat if maybe there was actually a direct connection, somehow. I talked about some of this in Seven Angels, I don’t know if you remember. . . .”

I shook my head. “You might have to recap. It’s images, names, and characters that stick for me; backstory detail tends to kind of slide.”

“Okay. Well . . . you remember the part where my Dédé says how in Yezidi thought, God basically entrusted the management of the world to this heptad of Holy Beings, who’re sometimes called angels, sometimes heft sirr—the Seven Mysteries?”