2

We found out how long our documentaries were supposed to be on the day we handed in our communications essays. The subject of my essay was “net speak,” specifically as employed on MSN Messenger, and how it wasn’t “degrading” language (as I’d heard a lot of — mostly older — people claim) but adding “an additional register,” aping the language of an article I had read in the paper several weeks prior. I thought I’d made some good points, even if the essay was a bit rushed, and I had been hoping for an A. Walid finished writing his in the library at lunch. He said his essay was “hot garbage,” but that so was Wright. I liked Wright, but I agreed with Walid because it was more fun to continue the joke than it was to shut it down. I liked imagining hot garbage walking the streets in the shape of a man, shadowed by a squadron of hungry seagulls.

But anyway, I felt good about my essay, for once, and I wanted to get a head start on the next project, so when I got home from school that day I headed straight to the attic. There, in a box marked APRT: Msc was a dusty JVC camcorder. From the late eighties, I think. The tapes were about the size of a pack of cards and they fit into an included master tape (which was also inserted, weirdly, inside the device) that fit into any VCR. The camera itself was about the same size as half a cheese wheel, maybe twice as heavy, was just as conspicuous raised to my shoulder, and probably got about as good a picture, all things considered.

Jeff and I found the camera six summers ago, when for twenty bucks each we cleaned out all of the junk in the attic, swept a bit, and put everything else into some kind of rudimentary order. We found a bunch of things we hadn’t expected, including a stack of old letters from my parents that we were too afraid to read, though I think we both read them, anyway, in secret, or at least I did, as much as I could stomach. There was also a stack of old film cartridges buried in an adjacent box.

Most of the tapes contained a weird and uncanny vision of a trip my parents took to Nova Scotia sometime after Jeff was born. Before me. I’d heard about it only because my grandfather was living in a place out there when they did the drive, and it was one of the last times my mom saw him alive. On the tapes, younger, thinner versions of my parents addressed each other, in turn, following shaky-cam monologues and extreme long shots of waves breaking on the ocean (as seen from the window of their inn). It was weird because even though I’d seen photographs of him, older and more recent, I didn’t really have a great image of my dad in my head. In the video there he was, reclining on chairs, on couches, in front of the en suite television, my mother popping into mirrors holding the camera, which proved that she hadn’t always disliked it as much as she now claimed (maybe only because it was tied to him). Most of the video was a montage of shots of the drive, terrain becoming progressively rockier, tired parents eating at road stops, hope, teased hair, signs in English, French, English, and the same procession again, but in reverse order, at the end of the tapes, on their way back (fewer shots of the countryside, subdued tone, mournful even, talk of picking Jeff up from Aunt Wanda’s, Welcome to Ontario, my father cursing at the wheel, a near miss, black car rapidly passing through the frame, camera switched off in the midst of a violent outburst, Mom telling him to calm down, hyperventilating herself).

A brief shot of my grandfather, which Jeff and I rewound and played back multiple times, saying, with his slight accent, “What is that stupid thing?” before the camera was turned off again. Then a sneaky five-minute cut of him working in his garden, shot through a window. We told Mom about it and she watched it with us once, asking herself how she could have forgotten. Then it cut back to Dad and her and she said, “Oh, yes,” and went back to whatever she’d been doing, making sure to let us know that she wanted us to give the tapes to her when we were done so she could put them somewhere safe.

There was a blank in the box, too. Jeff and I spent a few weeks using it to make movies with old action figures, movies about the neighbourhood, its fictional underbelly, movies that used that old stop-camera trick, movies about falling down in one place and getting up in another, movies about disappearing in the blink of an eye (following a moment of anticipation, a tension, as we froze in place, waiting while the ancient camera ground to a stop). Something was always threatening to revoke itself in our movies. We screened them, at most, once or twice, and only for ourselves, sometimes for Mom, then we rewound back to the beginning and started again, callously destroying all of our hard work in the name of future production, just to save the cost of a new blank. Our rationale was, I guess, that each new video contained the seed of the previous ones, so that if we wanted to look backward we only needed to look at what we’d just done to see everything that had come before it. We must have thought that we would keep making those videos forever.

But, of course, we didn’t. We kept on rewinding and recording until one day the little tape exploded, shooting out little black threads that got tangled so badly in the stupid master tape that they had to be cut out. Then we put the camera back in the attic and no one’s touched it since.

I wish I had that tape now, that it hadn’t exploded, so I could watch the Jeff caught there and remember him in greater detail. Instead just the camera, filled only with his traces.

*    *    *

I see Jeff everywhere. It’s hard not to. Even when I close my eyes. There are pictures of him all over the living room and kitchen downstairs, so maybe I am exaggerating when I say that I don’t remember what he looked like. Or that it is hard to. But looking at them only makes his absence larger, since they don’t really show who he was, just his physical characteristics. If that makes any sense. It’s him, but without him the images feel like so much less.

Mom still hasn’t done anything with his room. I’m not sure she’ll do anything until after I move out. Or when she does. She vacuums it out every once in a while, but that’s basically it. The door stands half-ajar, inviting, as if he were home and felt like talking or as if the room itself was waiting for him to come back. Sometimes I will walk to the bathroom in the partial darkness and see him in the mirror before I turn on the light. Nothing spooky — just my own face, our resemblances, which evaporate without darkness to smooth over our differences. I’m a lot smaller than him, my face is thinner.

I’m alive.

A while back I started leaving the house in order to get away from his ghost, and now I do that just to be alone. There is a place I like to go in the forest near where we live. A spot that is quiet and lonely and where only I am allowed: moss and needle carpet; ceiling of low cedar limbs; fifty yards away, downslope, the soft trickle of a brook. And me. That’s it. It looks like a long time ago the clearing belonged to someone else — when I first found the place there was a folding chair sitting by itself in the centre of the clearing, plastic worn and tattered. Like it had been waiting thirty years for someone to fill its place.

Maybe it’s stupid, but I feel something like Evie when I sit there. Evie in the moments before she embarked on her quest to do away with Llor. Evie preparing for her journey. Taking in the quiet like a potion. Using it like a whetstone on her sword. I feel like I’m preparing myself for something, too, except what I’m preparing myself for isn’t a battle or a long journey.

It’s just life.

*    *    *

Maybe I’m preparing myself to talk about how Jeff died.

Maybe not.

Lauren asked me about that once. Long after we got to know each other. Why I never talk about him. Or about it.

We were sitting in the cafeteria. It was during a free period, after an assembly or something. We both had time to kill. Everyone else we’d been hanging out with had left, I can’t remember why. But they rose in a huge flock, leaving their napkins and cans of pop or whatever behind. Then we just looked at each other, really looked, like we were seeing each other for the first time, and she asked me that question.

I didn’t know how to respond. I felt slow, and stuffed up, and for a moment — though I didn’t, I didn’t — I felt like I was going to break down. Which is weird. Because people do ask me about him sometimes and I don’t feel that way. I just ignore it — or I respond to them, but I go somewhere in my head and it feels like I’m ignoring it.

I know I should talk about how he died. I know that. And I don’t know why I don’t want to. But I don’t. And I can’t explain why.

I just don’t want to.

And that’s all.