“Story’s the same pretty much everywhere,” Simon told me, which wasn’t much of a surprise. I nodded, eyes never leaving the news anchor’s face as the fifteen-minute mark passed, and the tale regurgitated itself once more:
Though their investigation has yet to be completed, Metro Toronto Fire Department spokespeople believe the fire broke out around 3:00 A.M. By 3:15, reports of the NFA offices being “engulfed in flame” were pouring in, and firefighters arrived on-site within minutes. It took until six this morning to extinguish the blaze, which appears to have started while a silver nitrate selection from the BFA’s Ontario Film Recovery Project was being screened. Silver nitrate film is highly flammable, especially once it’s reached what experts call “the vinegar stage,” a stage of decay at which the film can literally combust if you attempt to screen or copy it. . . .
Three A.M., I thought. That would’ve been right about when I woke up, first noticed Clark looking ill, or makes no never-mind. A moment before he vomited up what looked like half of Mrs. Whitcomb’s garden and kicked this whole trip off.
“You know what this means, right, Miss?” said Safie, over the phone.
It meant that everything was gone, all Mrs. Whitcomb’s films in one fell swoop—the Hell Hole cache, the Japeries. Up in a puff of noxious, toxic smoke, as though they—or she, for that matter—had never even existed. And why? Because some fucking idiot just had to open the box. To run Schrodinger’s Cat through a projector and see with their own eyes whether or not it was alive, dead, or (somehow) both at fucking once.
“Why the hell would they have been screening one of those films in the first place?” I asked. “Jan told me they’d all been digitized already, half of them by Wrob Barney, remember? Totally unnecessary to look at them again.”
“Maybe it was from a new cache, nothing to do with our project at all.”
“Maybe, yeah. Christ.” I paused, poised to relax—but at that very moment, something else occurred to me. “Wait, though . . . where are those digital copies, anyhow? They’re okay, right?”
Safie took an uncomfortably long beat before answering. “Well . . .”
“Oh, you have got to kidding me.”
Though I couldn’t actually see her pained shrug, I knew it was there, nonetheless. “Jan kept it all on the mainframe, which was in the NFA offices. He told me that the last time we talked, right after your—whatever-it-was. When I asked about backup. Said it was the safest available option.”
“What? I . . . didn’t an off-site backup make more sense? I mean, I’m not exactly an expert, but—the fuck?”
“Budget cuts.” Adding, as I made an almost-indescribable noise: “Man, I don’t know. But I’m guessing they probably weren’t expecting that to happen!”
I nodded slightly, only then noticing I must have been unconsciously rubbing the middle, ring, and pinkie fingers of my free hand across the area between my eyebrows for some time—half grooming and half scratching, trying my best not to get obsessive with it. “Well, we’re gonna have to get in touch with Jan, obviously,” I made myself say, after a moment. “Set it all up again, the presentation; we could do it at Malin’s maybe, right? Yeah, that’d work. Gotta think, gotta plan, gotta . . . gotta figure out . . .”
“Miss Cairns—” Safie broke in, gently, as I babbled on. “Miss, Lois, just listen, okay? Please.”
Took a bit more effort, but eventually, I stopped and did. “Yes,” I said, finally, while Simon and Mom watched me do so—equally still, equally careful. Equally worried by what they saw. Safie seemed to know it as well, which might be why she took a few beats more to let me calm down even further. Before she finally sighed, and explained—
“Jan was in there, Lois. When the fire started.”
“. . . Yes?”
“That’s right, yeah.”
“Uh huh, okay. And?”
“He’s dead.”
“I’m so sorry, Lois,” Mom said, and I nodded, slightly; it was good of her, especially considering what a bitch I’d been not a quarter hour previously, but I could barely feel anything. Too many climactic revelations, I guess, with God only knew how many more yet to come—a kind of Hollywood shell shock, all plot twists and car crashes. Like the third act of a Michael Bay movie.
“Thank you,” I replied, numb from the heart on down.
Remember, I didn’t know about Wrob Barney’s previous boyfriend at this point—the guy before Leonard Warsame, who told Leonard he suspected Wrob of having essentially burned down a section of Queen Street West just to force him out of Toronto. The guy who heavily implied that when pressed against the wall—or even sometimes when not—Wrob had little compunction about using any method that came to mind to get whatever he wanted done, with arson probably not plumbing the full depth of that particular bag of tricks.
As I stood there studying CITY TV’s looped footage of the scene at the NFA, however—first engulfed in flames, then sodden, black and smoking, and eventually hollowed like a scooped-out gourd made from melted glass and heat-bent steel—all I could see was what they weren’t showing: Jan Mattheuis’s blistered corpse under a sheet, or shoved in a body-bag; Mrs. Whitcomb’s life’s work as a filmmaker wiped away like ash. Twelve thousand dollars’ worth of grant money I’d already spent at least five of developing a documentary whose subject matter would now be even more difficult to “prove” than before—and how the hell I was going to pay that back, if the government decided to demand it after whatever enquiry was to follow, I simply did not know. Et cetera, et cetera.
Two weeks ago, I’d been high on potential, possibility. I’d gotten into a territorial pissing contest with Wrob over the phone, and then slapped his face with my metaphorical dick long-distance and run away laughing. And sure, within a few more days I’d been convulsing on the glass-house floor listening to my brain sizzle beneath the unbearable weight of Lady Midday’s hot, invisible regard, but much like poor Art Whitcomb, I really hadn’
t known any better, not even then. And none of the weirdness I’d encountered along the way since had really ever challenged that initial sense of elation, of god-touched transfigurative ekstasis, of seeing and being seen . . . right up until the moment I realized I might not end up being the only person who suffered for being reckless and arrogant enough to drag the former Giscelia Wròbl’s long-buried, literally damned art up into the pitiless noontime light, that is.
I could have borne it with equanimity if the only person paying the price was me—because on some level, I’d been expecting to pay a price for something, sooner or later. Knowing on some level that I didn’t deserve any better, and never had; believing, on much the same level, that I probably deserved worse.
When did you figure out you hated yourself, Lois? I wondered yet again. Or better still, and far more relevantly, in context . . . when was it you started thinking you were essentially unlovable, even by yourself?
I mean, what the hell kind of person can’t even manage to be their own friend, for Christ’s sake?