Experimental Film

But mainly because I finally know better.

Hindsight being predictably twenty-twenty, the point of getting Safie to bring her camera soon becomes clear, once I take a moment to contemplate it—on some level, I must’ve known something like this would happen. That I’d more than likely be felled under the Regenmöhme’s heat-stroke once more, and need some sort of record made, to give me a clear idea of what’d happened while I was out. Smart thinking, me. I’ve always been kind of cunning that way, at least when it comes to covering my own ass.

Of course, it would’ve also helped if I’d actually been left in any sort of position to be able to watch said record, later on.

I remember dreaming that time, which was different. Not the smash cut to black and sudden splice that connected the trip up to Quarry Argent with waking in St. Mike’s, heart all stuttery, eyes glued together and throat like a desert. Instead, there’s a sort of . . . soft dissolve, fading from me in the van to me back at the Fac, either late at night or early in the morning, following those directional traffic arrows painted on the walls through its creepily carpeted corridors. That building was a serious petri dish, sick to its core; every fall we’d all get the same cold, like grade school kids, and pass it around till the new year. Not to mention how the whole place was laid out like a prison, with umbilicus-linked checkpoint doors only accessible with card keys, like contact gates. The studios were all nude concrete, which made it a lot easier to build and strike sets, and there was one particular classroom I always seemed to end up in, right in the centre of the place—triangular, glass on all three sides through which you could glimpse either eddying crowds or a lonely expanse of empty hall, classic J-Horror style; a haunting waiting to happen.

So: in the dream, I’m back in that classroom, standing at the board, giving a lecture. And as often happened in such cases, I’ve forgotten what the point of the exercise was—have to look up at my own handwriting to remind me, these scribbled notes done in dry erase marker. But suddenly even I can’t read them. Is that my handwriting, or someone else’s? The whiteboard’s cool, slick gleam, familiar as my laptop monitor, or a stretched expanse of paper browned with age, liver-spotted like the back of a hundred-plus-year-old man’s hand?

Oh, ah: Mr. Sidlo, I presume. How unexpectedly nice to find you here.

He’s sitting in the front row, space cleared for his wheelchair, those filmy eyes “looking” up over my shoulder once again—at my words on the board, unintelligible though they might be. I turn, and of course now they’re perfectly clear, or clear as anybody who spent ten years taking notes in the dark can really be expected to write. My own loopy shorthand: “th” reduced to a symbol like a crossed upper-case “L”; “and” consistently translated as a plus sign; “e’s” and “o’s” almost indistinguishable aside from context. A tree of observations, half blank verse, half equation, like so:

technology = blessing + curse

only way t/ make dreams palpable, but overwhelms/flattens in process

inherently reductionist

universal = myth

dream to image = disappointment

Is it now? I wonder. Is She coming? I look at Sidlo, who shrugs.

How can we ever know? he seems to say.

Then there’s a thump on the glass, from just outside: Don’t bang, there’s no reason to bang! And I glimpse Clark in the hall beyond, dancing and jumping, spinning in an endless circle. Singing, as he does: Backwards, forwards, more and more/Every image is a door—

A door, yes. My plan, or all that’s left of it. Memory to film, dream to image, image to key, key to lock. Turning. Opening.

But doors open both ways, by nature.

This is how it happened, Safie would tell me, after everything. Had to tell me, just like she did about everything else—reminded me, I suppose, since I’d obviously been there, at the time. Summing up what I would’ve seen on the digital footage, if I’d only been able to.

Safie was already rolling when we set Sidlo up in front of the windows in our “living room,” Simon hefting the ottoman aside, re-angling the couch to clear a path for his wheelchair then parking him with his back to the windows. Soon enough, Sidlo sat there sun-haloed, calm as a king enthroned. Since he claimed he’d need me close enough to touch, for an “anchor,” I hauled one of the dinner table chairs over and set it down in front of him, while Simon pulled the blinds—flat, cream-coloured roll-ups, amusingly reminiscent of old-style movie screens.

“Not sure how much help I can be,” I told Sidlo, voice kept low, as I deposited the silver nitrate reel’s case on his lap. He simply smiled. “I mean, this is Mrs. Whitcomb’s memory we’re supposed to be imprinting, right? And between the two of us, you’re the one who knew her.”

“Certainly. But you share her experience, as I never did. You saw Her.”

I shook my head, almost a shiver. “Something, maybe—I don’t even know what.”

“It doesn’t matter. I feel the mark She left on you, as I did the one left upon Iris. More than sufficient impetus for a reading, allowing me to follow your own experience back into hers.”

I bit my lip. Asked him, softer yet, “And . . . to open the door? Putting Her and me together, can you still do that?”

“Better to have more fuel than we need than not enough to build that fire. Wouldn’t you agree?”

I nodded, slightly: sure would, I might have been thinking. Not that I’ll ever know.

“Not much film on that reel, by the way,” Safie leaned back in to caution me, pointing to the reel, unaware she’d even caught all of the above till she looked at it after. “Maybe ten minutes’ worth at most, so if this doesn’t work, I guess we’ll have to go back to my studio for more.”

Simon looked up from what he was doing, his mind boggling once again, at least a little. “Just how much of that crap do you have?”

“Not that much,” Safie began, but stopped when Sidlo raised his hand.

“Ten minutes will be more than sufficient, Miss Hewsen,” he assured her.