hands and introduce themselves by name. Ralph Dennis says he works part-time as a volunteer for the Council to Aid War Resisters, and Fife says that’s who he came to see.
I figured. You speak any French?
Not really. I can kind of read it. From a year of high school French.
Level of education?
Again he hesitates. A little college. Not much.
No degrees then. You got a trade? Some kind of professional skill?
Fife shakes his head no.
So you’re one of the guys with talents, but no skills. You don’t speak French. And you don’t own any property here?
No.
It don’t look good, brother. You need to get landed status to stay in Canada, and you’re not going to get it in Quebec. You’ll have to go to an English-speaking province, where they have a use for Anglos with talents but no skills. After you get landed, you can pretty much go anywhere in the country, if you want. Ralph says that during the summer months he manages a truck farm in Gagetown, New Brunswick, for an absentee owner. Mostly it’s cucumbers for pickling trucked to Fredericton, the provincial capital. The owner runs a big canned food corporation out of Ottawa, he says. Ralph likes working in winter with the Resisters here in Montreal, but he’s in the process of opening an office in Fredericton and from now on will stay up there in New Brunswick year-round. A lot of your fellow New Englanders have started coming over from Maine, he says.
An hour later Fife has a job. He follows Ralph Dennis back up to Gagetown and goes to work that summer as a labourer on the cucumber farm. In his downtime, he studies French from a high school textbook, and at Ralph’s suggestion that he try to shape his talents into a skill, maybe journalism, he borrows Ralph’s portable Sony cassette recorder and starts taping interviews with Ralph and his neighbours.
Most of their conversations keep coming around to the mysterious waves of silver mist that in the last year have begun drifting off the base whenever the wind shifts to the east. Crops and gardens and animals have begun to sicken and die, and all the locals are convinced that it has something to do with the mist. The Canadian military has admitted that in order to clear the brush for manoeuvres they’ve been spraying some kind of defoliant, but no one at the base will tell the locals what’s in it. Ralph loans Fife his 35 mm Leica Rangefinder and asks him to take pictures of the dead fields and gardens and the stumbling, maddened calves and sheep.
We may need a record of all this someday, Ralph explains.
Fife visits the farmers and farm workers in and around Gagetown in Ralph’s pickup and spends endless early-morning and evening hours out by the fence that surrounds the vast acreage of the base, where he shoots black-and-white stills of the helicopters, the famous American Hueys, while they spray the land below and the Canadian troops reconnoitering in the dense brush and among the low conifers. He shoots pictures of the empty orange barrels of 2,4,5-T dumped into bulldozed ditches near the fence. He works alone and tells no one, except Ralph Dennis, what he’s recording, because he doesn’t know yet what he’s recording.
He could tell Sloan and Vincent and Malcolm and Diana and the rest of the world that it isn’t until four years later, hunkered down in his rented room in Pointe-Saint-Charles in Montreal, that he finally figures out what he taped and photographed in Gagetown. Ralph Dennis and his neighbours have long since stopped trying to grow anything in their poisoned fields. Ralph fell in love and married a local woman. He gave up his work with the Resisters and moved with his new wife to Winnipeg, which he calls Tulsa North. He’s homesick, and Winnipeg is as close to home as he can get without going to jail, he explains. He lets Fife keep the photographs and taped interviews that he made back in the summer of ’68.
Fife is no longer trying to write a novel and poetry by now. Most of his friends and lovers in Montreal are aspiring writers and artists and folksingers and filmmakers, and all of them seem more talented and purposeful than he. He supports himself, barely, by writing English-language book reviews and freelance cultural essays for the Montreal Star and the Gazette. He likes to say that he dabbles in several of the arts, but practises none. As when, on a borrowed Cine-Kodak Model B-16 editing viewer, he merges the taped interviews and black-and-white stills from Gagetown with archival newspaper and TV clips and charts pilfered from the Grande Bibliothèque and a soundtrack of pirated Byrds, Dylan, and Doors songs. He thinks he’s making an avant-garde metafictional film with nonmoving images and tape recordings and TV news footage, a covertly autobiographical cinematic collage about his first months in Canada, more or less for his own amusement, he claims. Six months into the project, alone in his room one night, discouraged and frustrated and about to give up on anything that can be called creative, he runs the hour-long film from start to end. He pretends that it was made by a stranger, and suddenly he realizes that it isn’t autobiographical at all. He sees that, if he doesn’t think it’s by him or about him, he can nudge it rather easily into becoming a suspenseful, dramatic exposé of a crime. Without intending to until he’s nearly abandoned it, he has made In the Mist, the film that kick-starts his career as an investigative documentary filmmaker, the film that five years later, once he gets it shown on Canadian TV, becomes an unacknowledged inspiration for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
He can tell all that to Malcolm and his crew. It’s the story they want to hear from him. And he won’t have to mention that his story of the origins of In the Mist is paved over a lie. He can let the lie stay buried beneath the truth, and it will continue to be his guilty secret. And why not? It’s still stable enough to support the truth. He’s gotten away with it for fifty years. He can easily keep it buried for the few weeks or days he has left to live, and no one will be the wiser.
It’s the cancer that has freed him to dig up and expose the lie. There’s no longer any undone future work to protect and promote. No unrealized career ambitions. No one left to impress. Nothing to win or lose. He hasn’t a future anymore, and without a future, there’s nothing his past can sabotage or undo.
Nothing, except her. Emma. Her love and respect and admiration. Acquired illegitimately and under false pretenses, starting with In the Mist, which first brought them together. At Concordia, where she studied under him, her final thesis was “In the Mist” and “Man with a Movie Camera”: Metacinema and Reflexivity in the Films of Leonard Fife and Dziga Vertov.
This is his last chance to stop lying to Emma, his last chance to hand back to her in public everything she gave to him in private. If he dies without having told her the truth of how he came to be the man she thinks he is, the man she has loved and worked with all these years, and tells it in public like this, before the world, on-camera, miked, to be edited, soundtracked, packaged, sold, and distributed all across Canada and even in the States and maybe Europe as well, if he dies without having told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, then she’ll have loved and married and been the forty-year partner of a purely fictional character. He’ll have turned her into a fool. He will have taken everything from her and given nothing back. Her love and marriage and professional partnership will have been wasted.
He mustn’t let that happen to her. Not after everything else he’s done to her.
Fife speaks into the darkness. Emma? Are you still here, Emma?
We ready to go, Vincent? Malcolm asks.
Ready.
Malcolm claps his hands in front of the camera. Okay, Leonard Fife interview. April 1, 2018. Montreal.
Fife speaks into the darkness again. Emma? Are you there, Emma?
Yes, Leo. I’m still here.
