Ash Cinema Read online

  ***

  Over the following five years of your life we met only a few times and the last has already been told. Genevieve's birth brought Terry and me closer but every time you returned a wedge was shoved deeper between the two of us. A gulf that we hadn't the foresight to close. And you and I never found a reconciliation but only drifted further and further from one another. We were strangers that knew the other too intimately for our lives to ever reunite as we both yearned. You left stains on my soul and if your words are to be believed then your very soul only persisted in order to see my smile. It's not the same when I write it. Nothing comes out proper or the way you meant it.

  'Why don't you make a movie?'

  Miho cracked a smile and you laughed, 'I'm not talented enough to make one.'

  'You love the movies.' I stared at my hands and tugged at my hair because you made me a child perpetually.

  'I belong to them. We both do.'

  At first I thought you meant me but you looked at her. Miho. Helena coughed quietly and you put your hand on her thigh.

  All these women for you and you only wanted the one who couldn't return all the love you carried inside. But you told me once that you refuse to settle for love and would rather die alone than settle for good enough. I think you wanted to die alone but Miho wouldn't let you. She saved you the way I never could even though you believed I would.

  ***

  'There's no saving me,' you were nineteen and we were sharing the bottom of a bottle and the last cigarette. Another long night of depression but we were together at least.

  ***

  'You should make a movie, though.' I looked at you and at the women with you. The restaurant was full and I felt underdressed beside Helena from France and Miho from Japan. I sat there only Virginia from nowhere in America who talked to trees. 'You spent your whole life searching for them. Do you remember what you told me?'

  Your eyes flashed and you were with only me for a moment that Helena missed but Miho didn't because she was the one who truly loved. 'I remember everything with you.'

  'You told me you were on a journey through time and across continents.'

  'I remember.'

  'What was it for?'

  You leaned close to hide it from the others I think. Slack, gaunt, your eyes weighed by years you would never live but you appeared aged like you would never be. The words never met soundwaves but you said it all the same by simply mouthing it and looking at me so, For you.

  I didn't understand. Not until I read The Death of the Sun and The Birth of the Moon would it become clear. These two novels dealt closest with me though never was a word uttered that had anything to do with me or any conversation we had. But I was on every page and I know they were the ones that you meant most for me. In other works I destroyed but in this I created and brought you peace. But also they were about running and you spent your life escaping me who you believed was always only around the corner waiting for you.

  I could have been.

  ***

  I don't love you. I never did. Not the way you wanted. Not the way you want.

  ***

  Sebastian Falk gave Marcel hope and something to believe in that wasn't caught up in the wake of our collective memories. There was no escape for him nor was there for me though I always did think that it didn't sweep me away the way it took him. I know now how much I lied and for how long. It's funny how important it seems while it happens and became so meaningless when I grew older. Those youthful days with him that meant everything became only the blissful schooldays that everyone grows nostalgic for but that loses its weight and intimacy. I saw it as simply youth acting as youth acts. Many years later when he was buried and all of his books read by me and millions of other did I understand how much those days meant. One day in particular when we were truly perfect.

  ***

  Christmas is fast approaching. Marcel, my son, wanders the woods now that vacation has started. He dresses like him. Like Marcel. He found an old coat of George's and he refuses to wear anything else though it's threadbare and smells of attic. Never was he one for hats the way my son is. He wears fedoras at all hours that his grandfather gave him. Genevieve returned home and will spend Christmas day with me and Eve with her father.

  My family together but it sometimes leaves me hollow. Genevieve grew so different than Terry and me but I blame that on the divorce. Marcel, though. We allowed him to be peculiar as a child and so he never grew out of it, I suppose. He plays with his camera all day taking pictures of everything he can find in the forest.

  He spent the summer capturing images of dead animals. The trees told me because they worried for him.

  Often times I do not know him. Neither his father nor me nor anyone else. Bold like the dead Marcel and fiercely himself.

  My children one day stopped being mine and grew into you. I never meant it but a part of me has missed you my whole life and so I spent their lifetimes raising you from the earth.

  You should have given Miho a child.

  George always is more affectionate round the holidays so he paws at me more these nights. The opposite of a bear in that he hibernates all year until the snow falls.

  I don't want to talk about George. He's a kind man. You'd like him.

  ***

  I wait for the present from Miho. At times, especially the months I have spent writing you back to life, her gifts consume every single one of my thoughts for days. I wonder who she is and who she was before all of this. Before she met you and got pulled along by the memories you and I shared because I know we set this all in motion together that night we walked home covered in gasoline and I saved the forest from you and saved you from it.

  She searches for him still. I know. Sebastian Falke. Without that first night I don't believe Sebastian Falke would ever have even existed. Not for you and not for me and not for Miho. If not for that first night maybe we would all have found happiness.

  'Promise me you'll be happy.'

  I tried.

  ***

  George asked me this morning what this notebook is for. He read parts and I felt alone. Fifteen years of marriage and I would have assumed or known that he trusted me but maybe this is strange of me spending all night walking around writing about a man I never loved.

  When I met George, Genevieve was already ten and I was getting old and cold. He saved me from myself and brought Genevieve back to me. He's a kind man with deep blue eyes that always do remind me of twilight during summer. Separate from the rest of the men in my life, he doesn't love me. Not the way Terry did or Marcel does. He's ten years my senior and his first wife died having their child who died along with her. It's hard for a mother to let go.

  The lonesome blues. That's what I thought when I first met him and he turned those eyes in my direction.

  We had Marcel a year later and were married soon after. Happy accidents.

  I never told him but he must know now. Know about you.

  ***

  I wonder if you will keep being an ending. If you will end George and me the way you ended me and Terry or the way we ended. You gave every beat of your heart to me but the last one was for Miho. That's what I believe.

  You gave so much that parts of me started giving in return on accident. Genevieve all fiery and artistic with that determination that you had to be perfect and that unbridled genius she carries between her shoulders. And Marcel not only in name but somehow in all the ways that matter. The power of a name.

  Can a name make a person someone else? If I changed my name would these memories fade? If I forgot yours would you cease to be real?

  Never has the guilt stopped and that may be why, I suppose.

  ***

  All things fade is something that Marcel always talked about. Impermanence and futility. I go to his grave every year on his birthday still. In truth, I spend every year near.

  Marcel never could do anything normal and he left Miho in charge of every aspect of his death and afterlife. No cas
ket or tombstone. I don't know how she found it but I believe it's where we first met and on the very ground I lied on top of him for the only time when I believed he would kiss me and make our life what it should have been. Buried right beside the forest with a tree planted on top.

  Impermanent but would remain as long as that tree lives. I didn't come home right away and wasn't at his funeral. Moved back in with mum and pap after the divorce with Genevieve by my side. Like me she spent the days amongst them but I never asked what she heard there but I believe she talked to them and they spoke back in that language of trees.

  I hope she never hears them cry. Hope even more that she never has a reason to make them.

  She's out there now smoking Red Puffins and leaning against him. It was always her favorite tree.

  I didn't think so at first but it is why. Why I came back and why I have stayed.

  He has a home to which he can return.

  Genevieve and I walked there this morning. Christmas Eve. Snow boots and high steps and Red Puffins. Not many smoke them here and George doesn't know but Genevieve and me keep this one thing secret. We came to his tree.

  'Do you know who planted this tree?'

  Genevieve shook her head and exhaled loud the way she does when she smokes.

  'The woman who sends me gifts every Christmas.'

  She nodded not saying anything.

  'Do you know why?'

  'You guys are friends.'

  I pointed to the base of his tree, 'A man is buried there.'

  'Shut up.' She looked at me then and her face opened, 'Shut up.'

  'He was my best friend. You met him.'

  Her face returned to its original expression which is a mix of boredom and regret. For what, I don't know. 'Marcel,' her loud sucking inhale and louder exhale of smoke.

  'Your father told you.'

  'He didn't have to.'

  'I didn't love him.'

  She dropped her cigarette in the snow and smiled, 'You didn't have to.'

  There were tears in my eyes and she hugged me not knowing if she understood what I tried to tell her and not even certain I told her anything but I lightened as if I carried round his carcass for all these years only to have my daughter cut the strings.

  'I've done some things I want to forget,' I whispered over her shoulder.

  'Keep writing.' And I don't know if it was her or the trees but I wept anew holding onto my daughter to keep me from falling through the earth to lie beside you.

  We stayed out there with him and his tree for another Puffin and then walked through the trees. Silent in winter the way they always are but Genevieve's eyes wandered and she craned her neck back and forth.

  'What?'

  She shook her head, 'It's nothing.'

  I almost asked then but didn't. I will if we come out here again.

  ***

  I woke this morning and went to the front door because that's where it is every year. I opened to find not a package or a letter as usual but to see Miho staring back at me somehow unaged from the last time I physically saw her over twenty years ago.

  'I'm sorry to show up this way but I felt that this needed to be delivered in person.'

  My mouth agape and me feeling embarrassed still in my pyjamas staring at Miho dressed so well and still looking twenty six and before I told her to come in I wondered for a bit if she had waited out there for me to open the door or if she had just gotten here and was about to knock.

  I led her to the sitting room, 'Can I get you some tea or coffee? Sorry the house is such a mess.'

  A slight smile pulled across her young face and she didn't speak but I knew what she said.

  'Sure? It's not trouble. I'll set the pot on.'

  The look on her face told me No and then it told me to sit with her and talk and I did even though I wanted to change and do my hair. There I was an old woman past fifty worrying what a stranger thought about how I looked at daybreak on Christmas day.

  I sat in the chair beside her, 'I want to thank you for everything you sent me over the years. You have no idea how much it means to me.'

  She smiled and lowered her head a bit which caused her black hair to fall over her face but she corrected it, 'It was no trouble. He wanted it this way.'

  I felt hot and the air thickened somehow like the humidity rose here in the dead of winter. My voice faltered and maybe I was already crying, 'He planned everything, didn't he?'

  She nodded but stopped smiling as if the mention of him from my lips was too much for her because, like me, she kept him close to her heart and secret the way only women can. She didn't say but I knew.

  We knew one another though we never spoke till today. She from him and me from her book about him. And all this time we never spoke about him and even now spoke in codes and whispers and never saying the words aloud.

  She touched a hand to my knee and handed me an envelope that was too thin to be full of one of his letters. 'We found him.'

  I took it in my hands and opened it to find a single piece of paper. The first thing I noticed was the name Sebastian Falke written in big letters and fancy script. I stared at it for a long while not even seeing it. 'What is this?'

  'The end.'

  I frowned and looked back at the paper seeing it now. An invitation to a screening. Who Do You Run To? a film by Sebastian Falke screening for the first time in more than half a century at Cannes.

  I read it again and again trying to understand.

  'He's real,' I said but didn't ask. My voice kind of falling out of me and then she hugged me and she smelt like the snow from a mountain in a country I never have heard of.

  She hugged me till I hugged her back and I believe she cried but I don't know because I was too busy with my own tears to worry about another's.

  'How,' my voice cracked and she separated only enough for us to be eye to eye with our noses almost touching.

  She kissed me on the nose and then the forehead and stood up and was gone or at least that's how I remember it. Since then a daze has been on me and it was hours before I did anything other than clutch the invitation addressed to me and my children.

  Marcel shook me when he finally woke. No one else had noticed or had cared to understand but Marcel came and woke me.

  'Mom, what are you doing?' His laughter high and musical.

  I turned my eyes to him, 'We're going to France,' I heard myself say and handed him one of the four tickets that was in the envelope. We leave in May.

  ***

  It's night now and sleep cannot find me because you finally did.

  I hear your voice:

  I say your name and pray it's true for all these days I think of you.

  I died but returned for you.

  Gina.

  I love you.

  THREE

  The ghosts were a pre-existing condition. No one likes to hear that and most never believed me but even still they're with me. Maybe even worse than before.

  Today I watched the sun drip from the sky, right into the skyline and then on into the ocean. It didn't stop but just kept dripping. Dripped onto everything, into everything. Into me. Like watching water trace a path down a pane of glass, the sun was red, a furious shade, but the color began to drip, fall off, and it wound its way to the skyline where it turned the tops of buildings red then ran down their side into the ocean at the horizon, spreading like a ripple through the water. The waves carried it back to the shore and far out to sea until the red touched every corner of water like all the blood of the past had been collected in the sky and poured into the ocean until, to the very depths, the blood of those billions gone before covered every molecule of oceanwater. The sky didn't turn red, though, not like here below. And, like I said, nothing was spared. I watched the sun, that big spiteful disk, turn and hover right above me on the balcony. A single line as if it were hanging down saliva from its lips the way we used to do when we were kids. I kept waiting for it to suck it back up and pull the red from the world but it didn't.
It dripped right on into my mouth. It was cold and stung like shards of glass were pouring into me or like I swallowed a gallon of bees and I felt the cold hit me in the center, here, right above the navel, and start spreading out the way it spread through the ocean. Looking out over the city, the red was moving fast, climbing over cars, running up walls, sliding down stairwells. The city stained red, a coldness coming. I could barely move my body, my hands frozen to the railing of the balcony. Watching my breath condense in front of me I remembered him. Never had I felt so alone as the last time I saw him, his body gone cold and his eyes gone vacant. I thought maybe he was coming back for me or was reaching out to me through the sun but didn't know where I was or how to find me so he just cast himself in all directions. Maybe now that he was inside me again, that he found me, he'd collect himself, all the red, and come to me, fill me up the way he used to, maybe then I'd feel warm, but he didn't. Or maybe it was never him. The ocean reminds me of him, though, and I know, if he finds me again, he'll come from the ocean.

  They do studies now, ways to communicate with the past, Creation Compositions. If you reach out they'll feel you and they can find you. Hansel and Gretel dropped breadcrumbs and it's kind of like that. After what happened earlier, I thought, maybe, yeah, I'll try it.

  It's not that I wanted to forget but that I didn't want to remember. Life leaves holes in you and remembering too much or dwelling too much is kind of like how kids play with a hole, accidentally filling it up or making it bigger. I never want to lose it but too much and it may be me who gets lost.

  ***

  Delicate hands, alarmingly small, clutching at my dress in the dark, pawing my breasts, fingers between my legs and I was ready. I can smell you, he said, and I was already moaning but trying not to. He was vulgar sometimes like that. I hated it but, now.

  He was too big for me at first but just about anyone would've been then. Probably thought I was much older, too. Forty years my senior but it never felt that way. Never felt wrong or out of place.

  'I'm going to hell for this.' His hand brushed through my hair, his other cradling my chin.