The Last Conversation

028

You’ve watched and now, by your request, re-watched these videos for two days straight. The home videos feature Anne. The earliest ones are of a low quality; their images are blurry and the colors simultaneously washed out and too bright. As the Anne in the videos grows older, the video quality increases.

Anne, eighteen months old, sits in the grass and pats a sleeping brown-and-white beagle. Off camera her uncle Dennis tries to get her to say “shit.” She says, “Sit.”

Anne, four years old, arms wrapped around the neck of her older brother, Matt. He plays video games and does not succumb to her “play with me” demands.

Anne, six years old, jumps up and down behind a birthday cake. Her hair is straight and short, and her smile is gap-toothed. Everyone in the room is singing.

Anne, nine years old, rides her bike toward a small ramp (plywood atop a milk crate) her brother and his friends set up in the street in front of her house. Off camera her parents argue about whether they should stop her. Anne awkwardly rumbles over the ramp. The bike lands front tire first and the bike wobbles, almost fishtails into the curb, but Anne corrects her course and glides away with a fist raised in the air.

Anne, twelve years old, is sitting next to her brother at a picnic table. It’s Matt’s combination eighteenth birthday and graduation from high school party. Anne is so skinny and slight compared to her newly minted adult sibling. She doesn’t laugh at his jokes as he reads the gift and graduation cards. She sulks, her chin held up by her fists.

Anne, fourteen years old, hits a game-winning three-pointer for her AAU basketball team. She’s mobbed by her smiling teammates.

Anne, fifteen years old, good-naturedly smiles as friends sign the wrap around her post-surgery knee.

Anne, sixteen years old, is with her Brain Bee teammates at an international high school competition in Montreal. Only a sophomore, she’s already the lead student in the histology component of the competition. She is bent over a microscope, racing to identify as many slides of brain and nervous tissues and their functions as the ticking clock allows. She wears eye black stickers on her cheeks, and she convinced her teammates to do the same. She high-fives her partners at the end of their victorious round.

Anne (the one from now) mutters something over the intercom speakers that you don’t fully hear or understand, and then she fast-forwards through the rest of the videos, ones you have already memorized: prom, high school graduation, moving into her college dorm, Anne with college friends getting ready to go out, one video from inside a lab with Anne and her friend Isabella, both dressed in white lab coats, choreographed dancing and lip-syncing to “I Am a Scientist” by the Dandy Warhols, college graduation, moving into her first apartment, Anne speaking at a memorial for her grandmother, Anne walking the stage when she earned her PhD, a slew of family holidays with her relatives multiplying and aging before your eyes.

Anne says, “Fuck this.”

You aren’t sure what’s happening. You don’t know why she sounds so upset. You ask, “Is there something wrong, Anne? Are you okay?”

“I can’t—I can’t watch these again. I’ve seen them so goddamn many times… I’m sorry. Let’s, um, skip to the last one. We’ll just watch the last one a few times.”

“Did I do something wrong? Did I do something to upset you?”

“No. You’ve been—near perfect, ______.”

“Near perfect?”

“I mean you’ve been as perfect as you can be.”

You definitely don’t feel perfect. Your muscles ache, your hands are covered in blisters and sores from the hours spent clumsily drilling holes and hammering nails. Your sinuses are congested and your throat hurts and has since you woke up this morning, a sign that your immune system is still compromised. You don’t want her to know this.

Anne says, “I’m just so tired.”

“Maybe we should stop. Take a break.”

She doesn’t respond to your suggestion. The last home video plays.

It’s the one in which you and your phone camera are following Anne around the empty interior of the chocolate-brown house you purchased together. You occasionally flip the camera so that your face fills the screen. The you in this video is younger than the you of now, of course, but by how many years you do not know. You think, That face is my face. Even though you’ve already watched this particular video dozens of times, you can’t help but feel disappointed by the reappearance of yourself, and at the same time, you fall a little bit more in love with who you were, and you ache to again be in that moment of lost time.

On the guided tour of your house, when you are briefly on camera, you make silly, exaggerated, I’m-so-impressed faces. Anne is the guide and refers to herself as the “brown-house archivist.” Within each new room she recites a made-up history, a comic, romantic, or tragic event from a forgotten age. In response you say agreeable or commiserative things like “That’s fascinating” and “They really shouldn’t have been doing that in the bathtub” and “We would be wise to wash the floors again” and “They mostly lived happily ever after.”

Your voice doesn’t sound like your voice. That is to say, your voice in the video, the one relaying through the speakers, is not the voice you hear when you speak. You are aware that everyone experiences some form of auditory dissociation upon hearing their own voice, the feeling of Do I really sound like that? You understand the tone and pitch of the voice you hear when you speak are determined by the mix of air conduction and sounds traveling directly to your cochlea via the tissues in your own head. But should your recorded voice sound so different as to be unrecognizable? Shouldn’t there be an underlying cadence or rhythm, one that identifies you as the speaker?

The video tour ends in an upstairs bedroom, the room that you vividly remember. The walls are painted bright yellow. Anne walks across the room and opens one of the windows. She says, “I normally don’t like yellow. But this color, I love.” You say you hate it. She rolls her eyes at the camera (you), sticks out her tongue, and says, “This is my office anyway, so it doesn’t matter what you think of it.” She lies on the floor, spreads her arms, and says, “Mine, all mine!” You walk into the room and you hover the camera over Anne’s face. She looks directly into the camera and she smirks like she knows something you don’t. (It’s this Anne with this look that you imagine when she speaks to you in the now.) You remind her that she hasn’t given this room’s history yet. The smirk goes away, her mouth opens, and her eyes tilt away from the camera momentarily. She says, “This room used to be a sad room, painted a sad color.” You say, “Puce?” She says, “It was a sad nursery for a sad woman who had a very sad baby. Then someone thoughtfully painted the room this yellow so I wouldn’t have a sad office.” Neither of you say anything for a beat or two as Anne stares up into the camera. You ask, “How do you know if a baby is sad?” She says, “Because she’s crying, duh.” You both laugh, and you zoom in on Anne’s face until she mock screams and knocks the phone out of your hand.

Anne replays the brown-house tour video. She recites what she says on the video as it plays. The third time you watch the video, you join Anne in reciting your dialogue.