Experimental Film

CAIRNS: Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the only reason, but yes. This is the sort of stuff we came here to learn, and I’d rather it be interesting than boring. Wouldn’t you?

HEWSEN: Yeah. I guess, yeah.

CAIRNS: Don’t guess, be sure, or we might as well just go home—no money, no film, no book, nothing. You want that?

HEWSEN: No.

CAIRNS: ’Course not. So. Are you sure?

HEWSEN: . . . Yes. Miss.

CAIRNS: Good.

It’s definitely my voice—I hear myself say the words, and they sure as hell sound like the sort of bullshit I pull out when there’s something I want that I don’t want to be made to feel bad about wanting. I know it’s Safie, too. But . . . no, otherwise there’s just a hole, a blank. No sense of time or place. Just . . . empty.

Similarly, Simon tells me I phoned home that night—spoke to him at some length. Tried to speak to Clark, or get him to speak to me, but all he’d do was jig up and down on the bed yelling some rhyme Simon didn’t think he’d ever heard before. He couldn’t tell where Clark might’ve picked it up from, but thinks it went like this:

Inside out and outside in

This is how the world begins,

Outside in and inside out

Is how you blow a candle out.

“Dude, so loud,” I observed, and Simon laughed, or so he says. “He’s been like that since you left,” he told me. “Maybe he does miss you after all.”

I snorted. “Chance’d be a fine thing.”

“Aw, now, hon. Stay positive.”

“Well, I would, except for the fact that doesn’t sound a thing like me, really. Does it?”

“Nope, you’re right. Unfortunately.”

Inside out and inside out

Knock at the door then turn about.

Outside in and outside in

There she stands so let her in.

I hung up the phone, and then Safie and I had supper before going to bed. Her notes say I told her I thought the air pressure was shifting, that I could feel it in my temples. Something about how there were faces moving around in the paintings back at the museum, but I didn’t expect she’d noticed, ha ha. Sometime in the early morning she says she woke up to the sound of me yelling something she couldn’t make out, and when she snapped on the light it seemed to hurt my eyes; I jack-knifed into a foetal position, palms slapped to shield them, covered in sweat. Asked me: “Are you okay, miss?” and I just said yes, yes, it was nothing, I was fine.

“Should I call somebody?”

“No! No problem, go back to sleep!”

She didn’t, though, for which I can hardly blame her. Sat up instead, cataloguing what she’d done so far, till the sun came up and I woke for real, apparently unaware that anything at all had disturbed either of our rests.

The Vinegar House tour began that day—October 23, almost the last visit of the season—the way it always did, with an 11:00 A.M. sharp meet-up at Quarry Argent’s Town Square Pub, owned and operated by Val Moraine’s husband Stewie. Moraine does volunteer work for the Folklore Museum, and has been running the Vinegar House tour since she got her tour guide license from Ontario Parks and Rec in early 2000, shortly after the museum finally managed to have Whitcomb Manor declared an official Heritage Trust site, deciding to use the small annual easement this gave them to fund educational excursions around its grounds. As the house was already in an advanced state of decay, the museum’s board of trustees decided against attempting anything more than minimal upkeep on the site as a whole, especially since they probably weren’t going to get any more government funding to help defray the expense. Instead, they’d use it as an additional revenue source, hoping to attract just enough sightseers to keep the Manor from falling into irretrievable ruin.

We told Moraine what we’d been working on and, according to Safie’s notes, “her eyes lit up.” Like Balcarras had originally told me, it was no surprise to her that Mrs. Whitcomb had made films—indeed, one of her great aunts turned out to have been a staple player in the Japery movies and might even have appeared in Lady Midday (Version One), though the likelihood of being able to prove it was slim, since she’d died a mere month and half earlier. If we were right, this would make Mrs. Whitcomb not only Canada’s first recorded female filmmaker, but a technical and artistic savant as well. As her home and, almost certainly, her production studio, the Vinegar House would therefore be a candidate for classification as a site of “great historical significance” (my exact words) whose promotion might potentially bring Quarry Argent and surrounding townships a fair deal of welcome interest—and better yet, money. Carried away with enthusiasm (or so Safie describes me), I offered to show Val my Lady Midday clips on my laptop, since we were still waiting for the rest of the tour-goers for that day to show up.

You may or may not believe this, but Val Moraine was the first person to watch those clips who actually stopped the first one before it finished, and not more than twenty seconds in. “Thank you, that’s more than enough,” she said. According to Safie’s notes she looked either sick or scared. “I see what you mean; those do look a lot like the paintings in the museum. And the ones on the walls, too.”

“Walls?” I asked.