Vanishing Monuments by John Elizabeth Stintzi

Author:John Elizabeth Stintzi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

8

THE TOP OF THE STAIRS

You get to the top of the stairs. Blank walls and doors—four of them. It is almost serene, a breath of fresh air. Nothing but closed doors and the armoire.

You are always worried by this part of the memory palace, because it belies what is to come. It is the essence of the calm feeling before being pushed from a tall place, thrust into exile—the tranquility before the peace of terminal velocity is interrupted by solid ground. The top of the stairs is the precursor to a new level of memories, the memories you’ve kept up here because you don’t really want to remember them, not often, but you know you must keep them.

What is in these rooms are not so much memories, exactly, but a preservation of sensations that have wrapped themselves deeply and darkly in the bundling of your nerves. Sensations that if excised from your memory, might dismantle the whole shaky logic of your life.

When I get off the phone with the realtor, I take an inventory of the house. I go upstairs and grab a pile of blank paper from my luggage and start to walk through the whole house, deciding what is still here. I keep my eyes open as much as possible, so as to not let slip in the furnishings of the memory palace.

I mark everything. I go through every cupboard in the kitchen, account for every item in the living room, the dark of the darkroom, the closet under the stairs. Everything on the walls. I go up the stairs, to the bathroom, account for the towels and an old owl carving sitting on the windowsill. In my bedroom is the bed, the loft bed, and the pry bar. I scratch at the sheet of paper, doing my best to account for it all. The unlined paper is unruly, and my lists waver and wave across the pages.

On a fresh sheet, I note every piece of furniture in Mother’s room. The mirror, the empty hangers in her tiny closet. On the floor in the closet is an enlarger, one that is newer than the one she used to have, safely stored from the accumulation of dust under a sheet, sitting next to a little bag filled with accessories. I rifle through the bag and write everything down, including one red bulb (safety light), then go back out into the hall and stare at the armoire.

I flip onto a new page and write across the whole of it: armoire (old, maple wood, handmade in Manitoba, decent condition, just too huge). I do a new page for the armoire, for the leftover clothes in it, so that it feels like the contents of the house take up more space than they do. Despite the house’s emptiness, I want to feel like there’s more that could be carried away from it. I want to fill up this pile of too many pages.

Every door is wide open but the studio. I go

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