Architects Are Here (16 page)

Me: So does he know I do that act where I pretend I’m on television.

I might have mentioned that.

So he knows the private stuff.

He knows everything.

Does he know about Toby.

I told him about Toby.

I asked her to be quiet and I walked around the apartment finishing glasses of water that Nell had half drunk and left. My mouth was dry. It seemed like that was the only good thing I could chalk up for her now, that she was a leaver of fresh glasses of water.

Too good to be true, I thought.

I couldnt help looking at her as if she was someone else. As if it was not honest and I’d been made a fool. But I tried to pull back the actor that wanted to voice betrayal. I wanted to be myself and perform in a unique way for this original moment. All of her life now seemed coloured from what I thought it was and I decided to be mean.

Youre used goods.

She closed her eyes and fixed her mouth in a disappointed firmness and I left her in the living room under the little painting she did of her ex-husband that I thought would be cute to have up on the wall. Now I looked at Richard Text and felt an affinity. I felt I knew what he must feel about Nell right now.

You’ll always be used goods, I said. To any man living or dead.

Whatever that meant. I had a fury in my head and I put on my shoes and remembered when I was young and my parents fought, and how my father would leave the porch and I’d hear the car start up and the side of the house all red from his parking lights, my father driving someplace.

That’s what I did. I walked around the neighbourhood. I walked past the mosque on Boustead where the line of taxis idles, their vacant lights on. The taxis are not waiting for customers, it’s the drivers who are in the mosque. A little white dog made for me and then stood and barked, his pink nose. And the dog represented the ridiculousness of domestic strife. It made me turn around. I was about to go back to the apartment and apologize and do some work on the ground to instill a sense of love, but then a streetcar slid down Roncesvalles and stopped and so I got on it and let it carry me towards the lake and then twist east along King Street and I watched the benignly crazy people get on and off as if there was a movie happening, and I made up a story that happened in a room much like this room on a streetcar. You could see the dome of City Hall and I remembered the afternoon I ambled in there, to take in a council meeting, and was surprised how much the place looked like a spaceship. The streetcar took me a long way east, out past the old racetrack. I was on it for an hour and it only cost a token. I got off at the last stop and found some yellow store lights. A man had his mouth inside a shopping bag full of gasoline. I walked into an orange diner. I ordered a pint of beer and a small order of fish and chips and it was okay and my spirits rose. I heard the fat cry out as it doused the fish. I knew I’d be all right. I could withdraw three hundred dollars from the bank machine and keep going. I was hard in ways, though I had opened up to Nell. It was better to be alone and I could do that. I laughed at the position. I’m happy with looking at little things, these people in this diner. I’m very good at feeling sorry for myself and then laughing at my small complaint. I’ve got enough money and I can enjoy looking at a tree. In the end I’ll be one of those men dying in a hospital bed laughing at a memory of a tree. I’ll be okay. What I need is to evacuate, but then I remembered I’d evacuated Newfoundland and perhaps part of living the human life is learning from past experience.

I
WALKED PAST
all the churches I could think of and stared at the stone and brick, trying to soak in some of the solidity of those faiths. There’s a new Baptist church and an older, Catholic one that took confession fifteen minutes before mass. There is a Buddhist temple that was built when we first moved into the neighbourhood, so I felt a kinship with the Nepalese. It was wintertime when we moved and we watched the Buddha arrive, a gold figure on the end of a crane hook, being lowered through the roof. And he sat in there all night with snow on his shoulders.

I looked up at the apartment and the lights were still on. But there was no activity, no shadows moving on the wall, no flicker of a computer monitor. It was about four in the morning and I was cold and tired but full of the fried food I’d eaten on the east side of town. The bed was big enough and I knew I could just slip in without touching Nell. If, in the morning, I felt the same way then I could gather some things together. I walked up our stairs, past the second-floor apartment where Irene Loudermilk was asleep. The top door was locked. Nell wasnt in the apartment. Which was worse. It made me worried. I slept a few hours until the recycling trucks came by and I got up to look at the men vigorously emptying blue and grey containers.

I went back to bed without Nell Tarkington in sight. I took up her great-grandfather’s book, the novel
The Magnificent Ambersons
, which we kept by the bed and often, as a form of horoscope, opened to a page and read out a line. I did it this time for myself: An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.

I sank ninety feet into the mattress and thought of Las Vegas, the dryness, the wet lights. Nell had gone to Las Vegas. That was where she had begun the affair with David. They had attended a conference at the Bellagio on police security and the new software. There were men operating Tasers and CCT cameras for both private use and for distribution through airport terminals and casinos. I remember her saying she wanted to go to Vegas, whereas I had wanted to go to Cuba. She was a betting woman. She was betting on the proper future for herself. Perhaps she was having the same impulse that drove her to leave home all those years ago.

I
SLEPT THEN WOKE
and it was still early but I had to go out for a walk. Grief is smaller when you make yourself small. Streetlife is big. A takeout booth with seven lit chickens rotating on a spit—who eats chicken at six in the morning? A variety store with thirteen varieties of phone cards. There was an argument outside of a nail, wax and toe joint. It was the butcher who specializes in halal meat. A car pulled out and jerked into early traffic and the butcher ran after it with a wooden chair. He threw the chair and it caromed off the rear window and clattered onto the road. The butcher walked into the traffic, yelling at the car, and picked up the chair. He dragged it by its two rear legs. He brought the chair inside his shop and sat down on it and he seemed now to be looking at me. These were the businesses with adjacent property taxes on a mixed-use parking lot.

I went back home but I didnt sleep and then at about nine in the morning the telephone rang and I heard, in the receiver, a big room, a noisy atmosphere. It was David Twombly. Can you speak up, I said. He was using his pebble. His father was in an accident. I’m flying home, he said. David was in Terminal 1, punching his way through the express check-in, that faraway boarding call. His voice was rattled.

What kind of accident.

The Hurleys, they T-boned him.

The what. They what.

David, patient: He was hit by a van with a moose bar.

Then I remembered what Nell had said six months before, that precipitated all of this. About her son. I did a moment of heavy concentrating.

He was driving the Audi, David said.

Where is your father.

He’s in Western Memorial. He’s in hard shape, Gabe.

He meant the hospital in Corner Brook. I pictured the Audi, the safety features and the reinforced cabin. An Audi, I said, it gives you a lot of protection.

David wanted Nell to know that he was flying there now. She’d want to know.

My hand gripped the receiver hard. Nell isnt here. You fucker, I thought. You red-arsed fucker.

If you see her.

I
NOTICED NELL
had left her newest diary in her green purse hooked on the doorknob to her study. If she doesnt show up, I said to myself, I’m going to have to look through it. For her own good. But here I am, ordering the notes this way to give them some cohesion and I’ve injected a narrative where no narrative exists, but I’ve imagined no emotion or detail. I’ve knitted them together using my Wyoming, which is the dream life that cannot be mentioned in the born world. It is a world of the head, a land of web and light, imagined things. Occasionally I’d sort the chaos of life out loud, as I’m doing here, until Nell told me to shut up with my Wyoming. That’s how it got called Wyoming—because I often began with a question, Why, and then an answer, Oh.

Nell:You and your Wyoming.

I could not sleep on that final morning, waiting to hear Nell return. I’d shut my eyes and then realize I was forcing them shut. My ears were perked. Then I heard an asthmatic sound and I tensed my ears to locate the sound and it was coming from the living room. I’d heard it all night but was too tired to move. Nell. And then, during that morning’s small hours, I tried to turn it into a radio or a telephone line or the little bubbles underneath a glass drying on the counter, and it sounded right until I knew it was too loud. I walked out to the living room and he was sitting there on the back of the couch, in profile. Mr Pigeon. I leaned over him and he batted his wings. I opened the window wide and he knew his way out. I thought, if a pigeon can creep through a one-inch gap, what sorts of animals can creep through us. There’s no logic to this thought, just the wild associative leaps one makes when one is in Wyoming.

I waited for ten oclock and then I phoned IKW. She wasnt at work, Massimo said. At least he hadnt seen her. I thanked him for that weekend. He said, You guys. You guys should have a kid.

I
MADE COFFEE
and then walked down to the library. I spend one morning a week on the second floor of the public library. I associate green carpet with study, that’s why golf courses seem like a good place to read a book. I link to the internet and discover all sorts of world activity. I choose a monitor that faces the wall, so I can discreetly look up sites like a Japanese artist who, naked except for a pair of white sandals, slowly climbs onto a plexiglas cabinet. Under the cabinet a naked man is stretched out as if waiting for an operation. There is a trap door at his face and this is open. She crouches and defecates on his face. You can see her sphincter muscles contract and the blat of urine and feces. He looks like he’s in a coma.

Then I searched for the Corner Brook paper online. I used to deliver this paper and now you could read it, if you wanted, anywhere in the world. I found a photo of Arthur Twombly’s accident. It was a plain white Audi sedan, demolished on the driver’s side, not a bad shot. A policeman stood in the foreground and I knew him, it was Randy Jacobs. I thought of David, on his way back there now, an executive first-class seat reclined, orange earplugs in, his own personal DVD player scrolling through graphs of force, williams percentages and Wilders DMI. A glass of champagne on a blue tablecloth. A pulse of anger at his temple. Getting to the bottom of the Hurleys. The newspaper said Arthur Twombly was in critical condition.

An old superstition kicked in and I waited for the third bad thing.

I realized the truth as I walked back home, a truth about the Japanese artist: I dont know which person is the artist. I also know that the world that I visit at the library will soon become the dominant world, it is the world David and Nell participate in, and it’s a world I wish would only exist for half the year, or maybe a season, or on three of the seven continents, but it will come and supplant all other worlds.

I
CALLED THE POLICE
and felt that I’d done all one man could do. And in that I relinquished some of the burden of worry. Or it was more like putting my concerns aside for a time. I knew worry was there, panting in the corner. I went across the street to the coffee shop and had a coffee in the window. I took in the building I lived in and the
CUBA SÍ
billboard that stands on the roof. I say “took” because I like to think of it as a degree, this looking, that I’ve earned it with my study. The only degree I have is in economic geography, which has allowed me to paint crosswalks and inspect natural-gas storage facilities. Cuba sí. We were scouting flights to Cuba, because of this billboard. Someone had secured our roof rental, the permit for air rights, followed the approved building standards and stress tests, hoisted up lengths of steel, erected a billboard tower (we saw them and heard them, it took three days) and then pasted this aqua-dune advertisement. It must cover eighty square feet (the scale is hard to gauge, even from the roof). Now it was dictating what we do with seven days of our winter. Such influence!

I took the stairs and checked for messages, then climbed the ladder to the roof. I ducked under the Cuba billboard and put one foot on the lip of my building and stared deep into the city, at the top of the building that houses the offices of IKW. It’s just beside the Canada Life building, the one with the lights that ascend and descend depending on the temperature. I began my Wyoming. How I’m easy to like and Nell both admires and resents that. Her self-worth rests mainly on the respect of her incredible head. But Wyoming is halted by the shape and sturdiness of the IKW building. It looks made of soapstone. The power of strong buildings like that makes you realize how a place like London England will never lose it. Teach durability and thoroughness, and might will maintain itself, especially in a world where all the best talent is devoted to making arms and entertainment.

F
OR THE REST OF THE DAY
I stared at the phone. First it was an hour and then three hours and then I left a note and went to a movie but even during the movie I was worried and could not escape into the white face of the film. I called from the cinema and there was no answer.

I tried David in Corner Brook, even though I knew why she had left. I knew she wasnt hurt in a hospital, for I had called the hospitals. But David wasnt in Corner Brook. He was still in Toronto.

Me:What happened to flying.

I wouldnt give up my pebble, he said. They said the pebble was unusual and could not be brought aboard. I was at the departures gate, you know where the last thing you read is a sign that dares you not to say anything that could be construed as violent.