Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

We heard the dog bark, softer and farther away. I knew this was not where my mother had lain down — no clearing, no beech. But still I tried to picture her there, the way she was at the end of her life, slow and old from the drugs and pain but also pretty like a baby, with pink cheeks and that soft hair. I tried to picture what would make the mom who sang us “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and let us take turns warming her hands between two of ours crawl out into the woods to die alone. I tried to see what this place would offer. The dark trees and the blackberry thorns and the cold dirt gave me not a single clue.

“I can’t imagine it,” I said to Sophie.

Her eyes were shut. “I can,” she said, and then she smiled in a way that wasn’t very happy but was completely and totally sincere.

And when people ask me why I married her that September, even though I’d only known her for three months and I knew it wouldn’t last, I tell them that a life is a heavy burden and imagine if someone just carried it for you for a while, just picked it up and carried it.

A Music Video That Doesn’t Suck

R. B. Martin

We don’t usually write about music videos here, especially not ones by artisanally bearded purveyors of indie faux-etry like Jacob O’Hare. We’re making an exception for the video for “Deep,” because its director, Sophie Stark, is rapidly making a name for herself among people who still know and care about good movies. Seriously, turn the sound off on this video and just watch it.

It’s easy to feel like all the good art has already been made, like everything you grew up loving was gone before you got there. It’s especially easy to feel this way if you always wanted to be a writer and then, by the time you finally started to become one, writing was valued so little that you were apparently supposed to give it away for free. And you saw the same thing happening with music, and you realized that movies would probably be next, until the only things assigned any worth anymore were the shittiest, schlockiest, most actually worthless. If you’ve seen all this, then it’s hard to understand why smart people would keep trying to make good work, why they don’t burn their laptops and their guitars and their cameras and move to Antarctica or something.

And then you see a three-minute video of a girl sharpening a rusty knife, drawing it across a whetstone with tiny chapped hands, then kissing her sleeping grandfather and canoeing out into the middle of a still lake in the dead of night and stepping splashlessly into the water. And the lake closes over her head, and you wait while the canoe bobs, and a bat flicks across the sky, and the trees shiver in the light breeze, and you wait some more, past when you think it’s a joke, past when you think the video is broken, past when you think this is some bullshit arty thing where nothing happens, past when you start to get actually sort of mesmerized by the tiny, tiny movements of the waves, and then you see her head, her shoulders, her arms. She’s coming ashore, and she’s dragging something: a fat, glittering fish the size of a man. And as soon as you have a chance to see it, it’s over, and you have to play the whole thing again just to be sure you didn’t imagine it. And then you remember that making something like this is its own reward and that isn’t enough, but also it is.

IN A WAY I GUESS I FORGOT ABOUT SOPHIE. IT’S TRUE THAT I didn’t think about her much for a long time — there were years in there when her name probably didn’t cross my mind at all. But it wasn’t the kind of forgetting where you lose something forever, like the capitals of all the countries in South America, where if you want to know it again you’ve got to relearn it from scratch. It was the kind where something’s just hidden below the surface a little bit, but it’s there. I know that because in 2008 her movie Marianne came on the indie-movie channel, and my wife, Lauren, and I watched it. We were trying a lot of new things then. Lauren liked the movie and thought it was beautiful but hard to understand. I told her I liked it too, but really it got under my skin. It wasn’t the plot so much as the way everything looked, all closed up and closed in, like when Marianne was cooped up with her family and she couldn’t get a breath of fresh air or enough space to lie down safe in, even. And the only time you get a break is at the very end, when she stabs Bean and then you see the whole empty parking lot and the trees and the street, nobody on it anywhere.

That feeling stuck with me and bothered me, so finally I looked up the movie on the Internet, and that’s when I recognized Sophie’s name. At first I was just so surprised I had to tell somebody, so I called Lauren in.

“Look,” I said, “we went to school with her.”

Lauren didn’t remember. “How did we know her?” she asked.

“She was that kind of alternative girl with the camera. She’s a director now.”

Lauren looked at me funny. “I don’t remember anybody with a camera,” she said.

That’s when I remembered that Lauren wouldn’t have known Sophie, that the only way I knew her was because she made that movie about me and then we dated — or hooked up, really — for a couple of weeks our junior year, before I ever dated Lauren. And I couldn’t really tell Lauren that, because I was cheating on CeCe at the time. I treated CeCe like shit, I’ll admit it; I went behind her back with so many other girls I can’t even remember them all now. I kept telling myself I would stop, but every time there was a new reason to keep going, mostly that CeCe would never find out, and so it would be like it hadn’t happened, except that she did, and it did. I’d never cheated on Lauren in seven years of marriage, and I’d managed to keep her from knowing about that side of me. So I just said, “She had a crush on me when we were juniors.”

“Yeah?” Lauren asked. “Did you like her back?”

“No,” I said quickly, and it wasn’t completely a lie — at first I hadn’t liked Sophie. She wore weird clothes and she wasn’t pretty, or at least not the kind of pretty I liked back then, the kind CeCe was and Lauren was and is. And believe it or not, I didn’t really like attention. Don’t get me wrong — I liked being on the court, people cheering, girls flirting with me. But someone asking me questions about myself, with a camera right there — I didn’t want that. I didn’t want her listening to me so closely, staring at me with her big eyes. I did like her later, more than I knew what to do with, but I didn’t tell Lauren that.

“She was pretty weird,” I said instead.

“Like her movie,” said Lauren, and I laughed and nodded, but I was thinking about the other movie, the one she made about me. I’d never seen it, and now I wished I had. I wanted to know how I came off.

Lauren went to bed early that night. We had sex first — after the accident I’d been afraid she wouldn’t want to anymore, but as soon as I was off the hardest painkillers she started reaching for me, maybe to prove to both of us that she could. I knew she was probably scared of my left leg, of the stump below the knee that still freaked me out every morning when I got out of bed. She never looked at it or touched it, but I didn’t want her to anyway. I was glad she’d still touch the rest of me. But I sometimes felt like I was far away when we had sex, like I couldn’t feel it the way I used to. That night I couldn’t go to sleep, so I stayed up at the computer reading sports blogs.