Nico, Kensington Gardens, London, March 1970 by Barry Plummer.

Your eyes will show me where to cut.

My father twice allowed himself to be with a woman. The first, when he spent frivolous summers flip-flopping around Europe, was the famous German model and signer so instantly charmed by his boyish loveliness, she knew she’d devour him that night. They met at a summer party in Paris; she willed herself onto him, cozied up beside him, pinned him, sitting inches taller than him, wrapped her long arm about his, black widow silk coiled around a termite. They all saw it, the troupe, her hunger for him. Despite his saying “I don’t know how to do it with a girl! What am I gonna do?” she could not be stopped. Nico took what she wanted. My father couldn’t resist. She liked men of all kinds. Tough guys, artists, fashionistas, princesses like dad.

It’s a lifelong pursuit to seize the look. I freeze the frame just at the exact moment, so your eyes can show me. 

The second woman was my mother. Ten years later. Spitting image of Nico, but shorter. Same eyes. Same cheeks. Father saw the thing he saw a decade before. They met on an empty train to New York. She got on after him and chose to sit right beside him. Beside him she transmuted his nerves into embers; her eyes sucked a part of him out permanently. My mother had the same tormenting eyes as Nico. Nearly the same ghostly voice. So my father told me. They were married for three months, until he forgot how to love this imitation. She wasn’t the real thing. He had lovers more his speed to return to. A year later she tracked him down by train, with me in a baby-vomit-stained blanket. Materialized right at his door, handed me to him, and was gone.   

If I freeze the frame in the right fragment, I can see you looking into the camera, as you walk.

5-year-old me asks, “When will I meet mommy?” He sneers and rolls the film from La Dolce Vita. That first moment she steps on screen, when Mastroianni calls to her like he would a prowling cat. His face lights up under the shades. There, she is born. I look at father, his face lit up exactly the same as dashing Marcellino.

I rewind the VHS one and half seconds and press play, and then pause. I’ve missed it. I try again. 

Nico said of Bob Dylan “He should not wear sunglasses. His whole personality is in the eyes.” My surrogate mother had the same thing. She was speaking of herself. I stop the tape again. I see in these eyes scorched desire. Preordained junky eyes. A life once lost. A yearning that could find no earthly release.  

Father catches me cumming to this frame, sitting on my carpet floor, the VHS paused, the streak of semi diagonal static slicing through the black and white, my surrogate mother’s eyes almost, almost, locked on mine. He doesn’t say anything. He closes the door. 

My father tells me that Nico used to sleep with Brian Jones, and that he would abuse her in the bedroom. Beat her, stick pins and needles in her. He we cause her all kinds of traumas, his consciousness bombarded by nonstop cocktails of drugs. But still, it was him that was afraid of her. Short little man like all the Stones, she a tower beside him. When he was sober, or close to it, he was her best lover she ever had. Years later I will ask myself how my father knows these details, and why on earth he thought to tell me. And I will remember. He was obsessed, until his death.

If I were my father, I would want to ask me, why this frozen frame? Why is this the image I choose? If I flip through his shrine of magazines, his amassed clippings, there’s dozens of full color pictures of her. And I wouldn’t tell him anything. 

Father has a date with a short man with fading blonde hair. The man is German. I hear them laughing together in the living room. I hear the clinking of their glasses as they cheers over and over. I sit above them in my bedroom, pretending to be asleep. I rewind the tape.

Nico’s face looks down. She looks forward and off to the crowd. I try to make her eyes see mine. I never met my mother. Father said she died in a train derailment last year. Father has pointed to this black and white screen and said this is your mother, on drunker nights when I try to ask him again about her. 

I flip through all the magazines. I slowly cut pages out over time. I use a boxcutter because my idiot father has that, but no scissors. A page here, a page there. Father would kill me. Her face desecrated. I stash them under my bed. I glue them together in parts. The scene on the TV is frozen in time. She watches as I work. Her eyes are just right. My floor is covered in glue. My surrogate mother’s face breathes beneath my bed, in multiples, in endless variations of cascading light and dark. I feel her lungs at night. I breathe her into me.

Derek Fisher is a writer from Toronto. He is the author of Container (With an X Books, 2024), and Night Life (Posthuman Magazine, 2023). He has work published in Maudlin House, X-R-A-Y, Wigleaf, The Harvard Advocate, Fugitives & Futurists, SARKA, Vlad Mag, and more. To see more of his writing, visit derekafisher.com