The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company

1915

1915 I n the forest, high above the lake, I imagined that I was, far below, trapped beneath the black ice. I gathered sticks for kindling, pressed them close to my chest, then brought the bundle, like a gift, to the edge of the woods. I looked down at the lake and saw that Mister Lesko and his horse were already on the ice, clouds of steam pouring from the horse’s nostrils. Beside the small fire, my Uncle Ben was unwrapping the camera from its blanket—lifting it tenderly, as if it were an infant—then setting it upon the tripod: a sign that we would soon begin. I closed my eyes and prayed that I wasn’t too late—that I had not stayed in the forest too long, and that there was still time for me to help make up our new story. I could make a story out of anything back then—a nail, a glass, a shoe, a tree, a mirror, a button, a window, a wall—and for every story I made up and gave away, I also made one up that I told no one about—one I stored inside me, in the rooms where I kept my most precious memories and pictures. Below me, Mister Lesko was hitching his horse to the ice plow, and when he urged his horse forward I climbed into his head and saw that he was hoping the horse would resist him so that he might use his whip. The sleighs—pungs, we called them—were on the land, next to the ice house, and while I The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company / 4 was gone, Mister Lesko and his son had cut a runway into the lake’s shallow end for floating the cakes of ice to shore. I closed my eyes, made a picture of the lake, and I labeled the picture as if I were back at our studio, printing out an opening title for one of the moving pictures my family made: FORT LEE, NEW JERSEY NOVEMBER 17, 1915 I opened my eyes and the lake was still there. My Uncle Ben was fishing inside his suitcase for his lenses and film. My mother was lifting dresses and hats from the clothing bag my father held open for her. My Uncle Karl was talking with Mister Lesko, showing him where he wanted the ice cut. I made my way down the hill, and started across the lake to where the fire was burning below the camera. I had helped build it there—lit the first match to the greasy newspapers— so that, the heat rising steadily, the oil in the camera would remain soft and the gears would not freeze. I looked down into the black ice—the first ice of winter —veined like marble, clear like glass. In the space between land and snow, I knew, small animals and insects lived all winter long. I wondered if there was a space like that between water and ice where I might lie down. Ben held a blue lens to his eye, so he could remove colors from the world and know what our story would look like in black and white. In ancient times, Ben had taught me, men would build memory palaces inside their minds, and in each of the palace’s rooms they would keep furniture, and on the furniture they would place objects. They invented systems and conjured up images by which they could name the rooms, and recall which rooms contained which objects and how the rooms led to and from one another. Sometimes they did this to remember the objects themselves, and sometimes the objects were there to remind them of other objects, or of lists or texts they wanted to set to heart: of the words to the Psalms, 1915 / 5 or the names of the saints, or where all the stars in the universe were located. In our own times, Ben said, people still organized their memories in similar ways, but now instead of being kings, priests, or philosophers, they were magicians, memory artists , or idiot savants working in vaudeville, or at county fairs, or in circuses. My father’s three suitcases, like steps leading to an invisible stage, sat side by side on the ice, next to the sleds on which we transported our equipment, and inside the suitcases were his accordion, his...