Will often dreamed of what a skateboarder Marcus would’ve been if he’d stuck with it. His low center of gravity, his quick reflexes, his pure abandon and clever, resourceful mind. He would’ve been incredible, maybe even better than Jonah, like a comet streaking across the city. Will’s one hope was that there were skateboards wherever that lakeboat had brought him, and some other fearless, lost children for him to ride them with.
When summer was over, Jonah and Will sent their footage away to be developed, and to their astonishment most of the reels came back usable. After a tutorial from his mother, Will threw himself into editing, using her old dusty machine that spliced and taped the clips together. Will began with the skateboarding footage, cutting the usable clips in which they actually landed their tricks into one pile, and placed their more gruesome falls into another, including the one where Will hit the ground so hard both his shoes flew off and Jonah’s near castration on a handrail a month earlier. The rest of the footage he put in a box in Toronto.
Since it only added up to a few minutes, he cut other clips he’d shot (he’d got the idea from his mother’s films, which he’d finally watched and found unnerving and occasionally beautiful, even though nothing happened): interactions with people on the streets of downtown, clips of buses and seagulls and bright-yellow fire hydrants, shots of Angela grinning in her hospital bed and decrepit old Pool 6 guarding the lake. He even put in a flash of Charlie’s hardened face—the only time he’d ever allowed Will to film him. When it still didn’t feel substantial enough, Will cut up films he used to watch when he was Inside, including the scene of the Creature swimming inches beneath the unaware woman in the Black Lagoon, and distributed these randomly throughout. For the last scene, right after Jonah rolled away from the handrail he’d miraculously slid, a feat so impossible and precarious it still seemed like special effects, Will inserted the shot where the front of a barn nearly fell on Buster Keaton, his tiny body narrowly passing through the open window, unharmed, cyclones swirling around his unconcerned face.
“I love all the other stuff you put in there,” Jonah said when he saw it. “Makes it more arty.”
“You don’t think it’s too weird?” Will replied. “Like it should just be skateboarding and that’s it?”
“No,” Jonah said, “it’s a masterpiece,” and Will gave him a shot in the shoulder.
For his thirteenth birthday, Will asked his mother to watch it. He dragged the card table into Cairo and set up the old projector on it.
“This is going to be radical,” she said, winking when she came in and sat down with a mug of black tea.
“Please don’t say radical ever again,” said Will.
“I was quite radical when I was young,” she said, with a mock scowl and a fist raised straight in the air, fingers forward, thumb tucked inside.
“I’m going to have an aneurysm,” Will said, as he attached the take-up reel to the projector and started winding it manually, so it wouldn’t break the fragile, hand-edited strip.
“What’s this feature entitled?” said Titus, from the doorway in his fur-trimmed parka, though it was late summer.
“It’s called: If I Fall, If I Die,” said Will.
“Doesn’t leave much to the imagination,” said his mother.
“Jonah thought of it,” Will said. “It’s because we put our worst falls in there, too, along with all the tricks we ride away from.”
“But why put the falls in?” his mother said. “I thought movies like these were made to convince people that you’re an expert. To get sponsored? Right?” Whenever his mother talked about skateboarding, it made his neck shrink like a salted slug. It remained the only Outside thing he hoped she’d never understand.
“Because falling is a part of it,” Will said. “We don’t want to lie and make it look like we don’t fall. Because we do. All the time.”
Will flicked on the lamp and sharpened the focus.
“I believe this is going to be a spritely rollerboarding presentation,” said Titus, sitting down with a bowl of some viscous black soup he’d made steaming in his lap.
Then Will went and killed the lights. From across Cairo, Will watched them sitting together on the couch, two heads silhouetted, his mother and his uncle, the last surviving Cardiels, their little clutch of busted souls, almost enough to call a family.
“But promise you won’t cover your eyes,” Will said, his hand on the projector. “Remember when you said you’d watch The Creature from the Black Lagoon on my birthday?” Will said, trying to maintain a joking tone. “We all know how that turned out.”
The air turned tense. His mother sat staring at the projector’s white light, where a hair was magnified to garter snake size on the wall. She was about to say something, then held it, and then let it go. “I can cover my eyes if I want to, Will,” she said. Even in the dark, he saw the Black Lagoon’s ripple in her jaw, though only a twinge.
“Not for this movie,” Will said. “With my movie, I make the rules.”
She took a deep breath in the careful way that seemed as if she normally breathed some other substance, but this one would do. “All right, Will,” she said.
Then she reached up and propped her eyelids open with her fingers, exposing a lace of red vein surrounding the green marble cores of her eyes.
“You can start it now,” she said. “I’m ready.”
As he watched the specters of his film flicker over their similarly constructed faces—his mother steeling herself against the bracing vision of her only beloved son crashing down staircases and hurtling unprotected through the sharp and dangerous world as Titus’s eyes went wild with some delight not necessarily attributable to what befell the screen—Will considered how, more than anything else, the Outside had taught him that there wasn’t much difference between loving someone and being afraid of them. Loving a person meant needing them to stay: alive, around. But the shadow that love can’t help but cast is fear: fear they won’t stay alive or around—fear they’ll be reckless, or doomed, or just walk away and not consider you ever again. With love, you’re scared it will disappear. With fear, you’re scared it never will. The trick, Will understood now but would never quite manage to put into practice, was getting used to both of them at the same time. It was living in between.
Acknowledgments
Immense thanks to: Bill Clegg; Zachary Wagman, Sarah Bedingfield, Molly Stern, and everyone at Hogarth and Crown; Anita Chong, Ellen Seligman, and everyone at M&S; Laura Bonner, Chris Clemans, Jason Arthur, Scott Pound, David Peerla, Amy Jones, Neil McCartney, Alexander MacLeod, Alexander Schultz, Jane Warren, Francis Geffard, Jackie Bowers, Arnie Bell, Shayne Ehman, Jean Marshall, Christian Chapman, Socorro Woodman, Rick McCrank, Dylan Doubt, Benji Wagner, and Eric Swisher; the Ontario Arts Council, particularly the Northern Arts granting program; the Canada Council for the Arts; everyone at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery; Lakehead University, including its Northern Studies Resource Centre; and David Christie and Jason Christie.
And to Cedar, August, and Lake, who make me brave enough.
And to Linda Christie, who taught me to love the Inside, and who lives Inside me still.