Suture Read online

  Praise for Suture

  “Suture is Nic Brewer’s transgressively taut storytelling. The notes in these pages write desire, connection and art from the body’s vivid capacity for tenderness where the hard stuff tears. A nimble, fearless debut.”

  Canisia Lubrin,

  author of The Dyzgraphxst

  “Suture is a daring, visceral debut that examines the painful side of the creative process. Blending body horror with meditations on love, art, and forgiveness, this novel will startle and captivate you.”

  Catriona Wright,

  author of Difficult People

  “I read this book with wonder — Brewer’s confident prose swept me along. Hers is sure, sharp writing that doesn’t flinch from tenderness. I felt this book in my body. I ached (in my heart and bones, along an old, spidery scar that split my chest in two) long after I set it down. What a privilege to read this work.”

  Gillian Wigmore,

  author of Glory

  Suture

  copyright © 2021 by Nic Brewer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Suture / Nic Brewer.

  Names: Brewer, Nic, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2021025985X | Canadiana (ebook) 20210259892

  ISBN 9781771667029 (softcover)

  ISBN 9781771667036 (EPUB)

  ISBN 9781771667043 (PDF)

  Classification: LCC PS8603.R74 S88 2021 | DDC C813/.6 — dc23

  The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Book*hug Press also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.

  Book*hug Press acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. We recognize the enduring presence of many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples and are grateful for the opportunity to meet, work, and learn on this territory.

  For Tab,

  and for anyone who needs it.

  I love you.

  A map of your journey

  The women were three storeys tall and the police were trying to shatter the crowd. They couldn’t find the projector. So these twenty-foot-tall cunts and bushes played the whole time, right on the side of the station. The baton sticks so appropriately phallic while these ghostly Amazonian women sat naked and read police reports to each other over a pot of peppermint tea. Some days I hate that that’s my legacy: cunts and bushes and a blushing riot. Imagine, your edgy undergrad thesis haunting you for the rest of your career. I love it, I love what we did . . . but I wish it didn’t show up on every list of great feminist film projects. They have all been feminist, you know? Not just the one with naked giantesses.

  A woman falls in love with women.

  My right eye was still in the camera when they arrested me. They knocked off the eye patch when they pushed me into the back — you should have seen it. Have you? An empty eye socket? It’s disgusting. Everyone thinks it’s going to be black, but they don’t remember the blood. It crusts under the eye patch after a while, this ring of scabby brown right where your makeup would smudge. Clumping the eyelashes. And the eyelid sags dreadfully, with the extra weight of the blood, the eyelashes. Into the concavity, a little wrinkly, too soft without the eye there to support it. But if you lift it up out of the way, the inside is more white than anything. A slick white with smears of the brightest red. Not like when you bleed; brighter. Almost translucent. Shiny. It’s not dark at all in the socket — it’s eerily light. Light and wet.

  A woman falls in love with injustice.

  People started yelling “cunt” at me everywhere I went. It felt like I had accomplished something.

  A woman falls in love with rage.

  I learned to fight after the third time someone tried to take my eyes.

  A woman falls in love with justice.

  My aunt’s best friend gave me her son’s camera for my thirteenth birthday, but she didn’t tell me how to use it. She didn’t tell me anything. Her son had killed himself at film school a few months earlier, and how do you tell someone that? Maybe the way I just told you, or maybe you hand over a used $3,000 video camera and say “careful, honey,” and “sorry we don’t have the box anymore,” and you let the memory harden just a little bit more and you hope it doesn’t happen again. This was before the internet, remember. There was nowhere for me to go to learn how to use a real camera. But there was a movie being filmed just around the corner from my friend’s house that summer, and I snuck onto the set every day to try to catch the directors in the act. Eventually I saw them, calmly popping their eyes into their palms, slipping them into their cameras; there was a lot more blood when I tried it.

  A woman falls in love with potential.

  I went blind for the first time shortly after I had finally mastered taking my eyes out and getting them back in. Now I was ready to use the camera, I thought. But cameras are custom made, and this one was custom made for a dead kid. I shoved my eyes into the battery slot and started filming. I pointed it ahead of me and turned in a circle in the middle of my room. A crushing pain in the back of my head cut the adventure short, my view dark around the edges and getting darker. When I took my eyes out of the camera, they were smaller, wrinkled, almost dented in places. And when I put them back into my own sockets, I couldn’t see anything but a soft, borderless grey. Shapes appeared after an hour, blurry and greyscale, sharpening slowly; I didn’t move the entire time. Colour took a day or two to come back. My perception was off for a week. As soon as it was all back to normal, I tried again.

  A woman falls in love with beauty.

  The longest I ever went without my eyes was three days. I hoped maybe I would die. When I didn’t, when I put them back in and could still see, I shook it forever — that itch to know if death might be better. No matter how meaningless it was, at least it was in vivid colour.

  A woman falls in love with a woman.

  Colour went first. I could still see everything when my eyes were in a camera — for a while — but once they were back in my head it was greyscale. It happens, from time to time, so I waited a few days, and then a few weeks, and then I realized it wasn’t coming back and I disappeared for ten days. I gave away all the art in my apartment, all my furniture, painted my walls white, ordered a whole new apartment from IKEA online in white and grey and black-brown. I asked my wife to buy me grey and black sweaters, shawls, dresses. If I was seeing in greyscale, I was living in greyscale. I almost lost everything. My next films weren’t black and white because of some artistic vision, although I liked that people thought so. They were in black and white because I didn’t know how long my eyes would still be able to film in colour.

  A woman falls in love with a life.

  It was all more painful than I could ever have imagined. No fool thinks ripping their eyes out will be painless, but I suppose we are all just foolish enough.

  A woman falls in love with loss.

  I could use the camera for about six months after I went completely blind. Maybe it would have lasted longer if I’d been more responsible; I’ll never know. I don’t really care. Once I lost sight altogether and the only way to see was by filming
, I filmed constantly. That documentary, as they ended up calling it, was for nobody except myself.

  A woman falls in love with grief.

  They couldn’t decide how to arrest me. That’s the trick: be sure to rebel naked, and they will be afraid to touch you. Forty years later and my cunts were off causing trouble again, that goddamn clip playing on the sides of buildings all over the city. Being Eva Hudson-Smith has its advantages; people will do most things for you, if you ask. And my very own cunt front and centre this time, my soft and folded body, everything I had ever been told to shut up about. Blood on my face, blood on my hands, eyes back on the bedstand, my naked ass walking blind across the Ambassador Bridge. But how do you arrest a famous, naked, blind old woman?

  A woman falls in love with her past.

  We are so loud. Loud and fragrant. We betray ourselves: too much cologne, not enough soap, fresh lipstick, rustling clothes, tapping feet. There is so much more to us than we would like to admit. I can hear how people’s lips move when they talk. I can hear if they are talking with their hands. If they are looking at me, past me, at their phone. We are so used to this shield we have and we’ve never even bothered considering it a shield. But without your makeup and your hair and your clothes and your posture you are just bones and blood and muscle and it is an orchestra underneath it all. Sometimes it is an orchestra playing an entirely different symphony from the cacophony you selected that morning, week, year. Mine was.

  A woman falls in love with herself.

  I haven’t been able to go to the movies in a long time. It is too intimate; I hate the way I cry, the way everyone else doesn’t. I don’t know how we are all expected to leave the theatre so cracked open like that.

  A woman falls in love.

  I was surprised to find out there was more to life than making movies.

  A woman falls in love.

  The Beginning

  In which you meet a story

  Finn: the heart

  The heat from outside had managed not only to find its way into the studio, but to intensify and revive the years of old blood and sweat that had seeped into the walls from every artist who’d ever passed through. A half-dozen oscillating fans moved the blood and sweat and heat from easel to easel, providing as much relief as the breeze from a sidewalk subway grate on an August afternoon. Sweat had collected under Stephen’s sunglasses and in the small of his back, rivulets slipping over his skin and under his belt. One of the last to arrive, he hurriedly picked out a smock from the rack, gratefully pulled off his sweat-stained shirt, and pulled on the button-down smock, eyes downcast and still shaded.

  “Are you okay to stay over here while Daddy works?” Stephen asked. Finn didn’t seem bothered by the heat at all, already skipping toward the prop closet, swishing her tie-dyed dress around her as she went. He intercepted her, pushing his sunglasses up onto his head and kneeling down to catch her eye. “You can’t play with those here, Finn. That’s why we brought your art supplies, remember? How about you sit at this desk and make something we can show Mommy when she gets back, hmm?” He reached around to pull the backpack off her shoulders and set up the tiny canvas and toy organs on the desk. Finn stared lovingly at a purple feather boa heaped on the floor just outside the prop closet, smiling widely when a tall woman in a dark purple smock swept it up off the floor and held it out toward Stephen.

  “Another artist in the family, Mr. O’Brien?” The feather boa cascaded out of her hand, glittering and swaying in the various fans’ crossfire, complementing her smock. She joined the pair of them, bending down on one knee to hold out the boa. “I’m Deanne. What’s your name?” Finn clutched her dress and swayed from side to side, looking from the boa to her father to Deanne and back again. “It’s okay, you can wear this while your dad works tonight. It’ll go really well with your dress.” Deanne reached out to help wrap the enormous boa around Finn’s small frame, which still swayed. Stephen looked at his daughter, eyes deliberate, head nodding. What do you say? Now swathed in sparkling purple feathers, she looked back at Deanne.

  “I’m Finn,” she said. “Thank you. It matches your dress, too.”

  “What a beautiful name. And that’s very nice of you to say, but I think it looks best on you. I can’t wait to see what you create tonight, Finn. And it’s just about time for your dad to get to work, too.” Deanne smiled and walked to the front of the room, where she started writing a numbered list on the whiteboard. The room filled with the hurried silence of a small number of people settling into uncomfortable chairs and abandoning their small talk. Stephen kissed Finn on the top of her head — Finn ignored him, already settled at the desk and focused on mixing her various shades of paint for the evening’s project. He slid into the chair beside his usual easel and set his eyes on Deanne.

  “Small class tonight,” she said. “Honestly, I’m kind of relieved. It’s a bit of a tough week, and the fewer the better. If anyone needs a refresher on blood toners or organ shaping, or if you missed last week’s session on texturizing, feel free to call me over after the demo. We’re going to learn to work with skin tonight. Anyone here already worked with skin? A few, alright. That’s good. Guys, feel free to help out your neighbours if you see something weird going on. For the majority of us, I’d like to focus mainly on the use of skin, blood, and just one organ — keep it simple tonight, since it is new territory. If you want to challenge yourself a bit more than that, you can work with texturizing and tone. I brought some extra toners and liquefiers with me tonight that you’re welcome to use, just pour some into a personal container for yourself. Sound good? You guys go ahead and get yourselves ready as per usual, and I’ll come around with some extra materials. Please, even you folks who have worked with skin before, please don’t start working until I give the go-ahead.”

  The room rustled again, stirring up the heat and the sweat as everybody resettled, unbuttoned, reached for their scalpels. Nobody looked at anything but their own hands, except for Finn, who watched her father closely. It was her first time, after weeks of begging, accompanying him to a class. Her mother was out of town — easier than calling a sitter, he’d said.

  Whenever they were home, he wore high-collared or crew-neck shirts that hid the long scar that halved his torso, but sometimes when he tucked her in at night, it peeked out from under a partly unbuttoned shirt.

  “What’s this from?” she asked every time, pushing her palm softly against his chest. Sometimes it was freshly stitched, sometimes healing, sometimes healed.

  “It’s how Daddy makes art.” She would look under her own pyjamas and see if anything had appeared on her chest. It never had.

  “But I make art. Why don’t I have one?”

  “Because you have to make art for a long time before you get one.” And he would look over his shoulder dramatically, back and forth between Finn and the doorway, pausing until she giggled. “Don’t tell your mom, but if you keep on making your art the way you do, you’ll get to learn about marks like this one sooner than you might think.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Stephen turned his back to the corner where Finn sat, rapt. Deanne turned on the speakers at the front of the room, a rough-edged instrumental album this week. The music was loud, always loud, as loud as she could reasonably make it, considering the neighbours, but the sound of the artists preparing themselves was always louder. Lip-bitten gasps, and the horrendous sound of students splitting open — cold metal nails on a brittle fleshy chalkboard, if you were attuned to it. Overall, the sound of the room was always wet: hands slipping on the edges of skin, trying to get a grip on the underside of a chest to heave it apart; hearts beating sloppily out in the open, slowing in their suddenly cool surroundings, comparatively; the slap of a lung hitting the workstation, still slick with the insides of whoever it came out of; the erratic drip of the artists collecting blood in their sets of tiny stained jars, ready for mixing.


  As the aural atmosphere began to dry, Deanne turned the music down and dimmed the lights, bringing everyone’s attention to the projection on the whiteboard: a canvas practically drenched in crimson, but wrinkled in places, mountain ranges of either nearly black or fleshy pink staggering their way through the frame.

  “You may be familiar with the work of Hélène Deschamps, a visual artist who practised in the early 80s but left us only a few short years into her career. She was the first artist to bring skin into the mix in a major way, and her early work was reviled by contemporaries and critics alike, originally decried as an affront to the integrity of art itself. Not only was she bringing skin into the mix, but she was bringing the politics of her dark skin into the sanctity of a predominately white culture.” Deanne paused to slowly flip through a few more slides.

  “Toward the end of her career, she had essentially abandoned the traditional use of the heart and lungs in favour of unique blood blends and an emphasis on her skin, often leaving large sections of the canvas completely blank. But you didn’t come here for an art history lesson! I just wanted to show you a bit about how skin can be used in your compositions — these next few are from the first copycats, a couple of years after Deschamps died. And here you can see how the form progressed, how artists started to learn how to incorporate the inherent sloppiness, softness, of skin.” In the corner, Finn went between watching the slides closely and watching her own fingers, pulling gently at her skin. Deanne walked to the far corner of the room to bring the lights back up, revealing all but two of the students also pawing thoughtfully at the skin of their arms and hands.

  “Now feel free to move your chairs closer,” she said after a moment. “I’m going to take a little skin off my forearm for the demo, but it can scar pretty gruesomely after a while so most people like to take from more hidden areas.” She sat down at a long table at the front of the room while stools scuttled tentatively closer. A dark purple towel, matching her smock, was already laid out beside a scalpel and an empty palette. She talked the class through each motion as she first drew a light rectangle, a little smaller than the size of a playing card, in the skin near the top of her wrist. A thin line of blood appeared in the scalpel’s wake. She went over one of the short edges again, pressing hard enough that the skin to either side of the incision whitened, taut, until finally splitting apart. She then deepened the incision around the corners of the rectangle that touched that same short side, along the top centimetre of the longer sides.