Architects Are Here (33 page)

The hospital called me, he said. My father’s not doing well. They need me there. They need to know my blood type. They want to look at my kidneys.

I took the wheel all day and then, after we crossed the border back into Canada, I put Bucephalus in the front seat which she loved and folded myself out in the back while Dave drove. I’d lean up sometimes to see what we were passing, the homes of the unemployed and then through the junctions to valleys where millionaires lived. Those little upside-down Vs in the pavement slipped by. What were they called. Every three weeks I remember the word. The same as stripes on a sergeant’s sleeve. There was a noisy hay operation and then a town dedicated to selling you back your hubcaps. The surnames here would start to be solid and go back generations. The land felt older even though I know that’s not true. We’d driven over the Canadian Shield and now it felt like we were heading back in time. Booth Tarkington’s novel came to mind, his musings on automobiles, for
The Magnificent Ambersons
is nothing if not an examination of what the automobile has done to change civilization. With all their speed forward, Booth Tarkington wrote, they may be a step backward in civilization—that is, spiritual civilization. Booth Tarkington thought the car would alter both war and peace. And that our very minds would be changed because of the automobile. That’s true of most things we feel apprehensive about—we know they will change us but we’re not sure how.

The road smoothed out which meant a politician had a cottage in a pine thicket and then there was a field of school buses almost as if that was a retirement home for school buses, and then that thought of school buses growing old while children remain the same age. My eye opened to these fast-forward colour fields that David drove through at a constant speed and it felt as if the world were on a spool that reeled out rough edits devoted to panels of colour and it made me realize that we all do things that will be undone. You hammer a painting to a wall that, if left, will fall off before a hundred years pass. So on another scale, say a hundred years to the second, you stick something to the wall it will fall off the wall. It’s a futile, temporary act that only seems permanent and then a neon sign rages across the slant of that thought, followed by the rough hills of abandoned rubber tires and a stinky teepee of a camouflaged smelter operation followed by the gradual buildup of a pulp mill’s spruce farm making way again to pasture as we hit the sun’s porch off the Nova Scotia causeway, the Scottish success and mowed gardens and well-painted fences and David yanks us up to a halt at a coffee shop and unclicks his seatbelt. Who knew at this juncture that we had hundreds of miles of windowless taverns and rain to get through yet.

Chevrons, Dave said.

This comment allowed wide associative leaps. Youre playing in a field, Dave, about which you know nothing.

Dave: Should I be hesitant to show my disapproval?

It’s like youve got an army of disapproval lined up, but theyre in foxholes right now.

We drove on with the coffee all the way to the ferry lineup in North Sydney with the gas gauge warning us. It felt right to get on a ferry with an empty gas tank. The land seemed to pour away from us, like there was a drain to the west and it slurped down land. A couple ahead of us let out their dog and so we took Bucephalus out to greet them. You got your papers, he said. We forgot ours, we’re going to sneak our dog back in.

I told him we had no papers. What papers, I said.

That she’s had her shots, the man said. They won’t let her in for rabies. I’m just going to bury the dog in the back and chance it.

Should we do the same?

You can put your dog in with ours. Wife, are you fine with that.

His wife thought that was acceptable.

So in went Bucephalus. The other dog was friendly enough and Bucephalus could sense some kind of favour was being done. Then the
Joseph and Clara Smallwood
, tall and stable, let down its backside and we got our tickets and drove deep into its belly like a pair of Jonahs. Ferries are like bridges, a huge investment that is nothing when it’s only a dollar from each taxpayer. The government had just bought a squadron of helicopters and a fleet of cargo planes and the price tag was fifteen billion dollars. Which is five hundred dollars for every man, woman and child in the country.

We rushed up to the deck and watched the sun sink over the dreg of land and then ahead of us the sea shone before it darkened. The thing about the sea is not that it’s the edge of land or that it delivers a boundary. It’s a third way, a middle ground between land and air. If the sea could freeze it would lose its charm. We cannot stand on it, and yet it does not mix. It is a slave to gravity. The sea makes the world avoid the base choice between matter and spirit.

FOUR

ONE

W
E SLEPT IN A CABIN.
It was nice to have Joey Smallwood, in the form of a ferry, bring us home to Newfoundland. Four bunks, with the married couple in their sixties who were gentle, who had our dog. The man had soft hand gestures, like a magician. They were from Daniel’s Harbour and had been in Nova Scotia. They’d darted down to Maine to take advantage of some tax-free merchandise in a cross-border shopping spree. We filled the truck too, he said. He meant with gas and I wondered how much on earth he had saved on gas. Three dollars? He wore a baseball cap with a brim of five inches. It was worn with many fingerprints, it looked good to garden in.

In the dark we started up the Matador in the belly of the ferry, shot up our lights and rolled over the nippled metal surface of the drawbridge. See you later, Joey. There were small lights that indicated a shoreline but nothing of a town in the four
A.M.
darkness. There was nothing here, not even road signs. We pulled over and collected our dog. Their dog was nowhere in sight. Asleep, the man said. And we put Bucephalus in the back seat and said farewell. We drove behind a transport truck with its encouraging red lights and it seemed we were following a scout to some destination, a bad one. Finally the white rectangle of a gas station sign, and the green panels of the building and we pulled off for a cup of coffee and a piece of lemon meringue pie that was surprisingly fresh. When we got back in the car I noticed the mouth of Bucephalus was red, it was as if the taillights had stained her fur red. She’d been wiping her mouth on the fox coat, streaks of blood.

David: Is she injured.

We checked her. I think she did the injuring, I said. There wasnt a mark on her. But we were both worried, was she a mad dog. The word
rabid
hung in our teeth.

We got to the Corner Brook exit signs by eight in the morning. Home.

We drove down the old way, avoiding the new off-ramps which I had presided over in my small part as an economic geographer ten years before, development that had destroyed the view of the bay. I judged Corner Brook the way people from St John’s often judge it. I had become critical. Corner Brook was one of the little Canadas that had been seeded by Canadians and which St John’s despised. English Canada had split its government and its economic heart between two cities, and so had the French. Nothing grand could happen, no flagrant tragedy, no dictator or revolution because the power was in Ottawa and Quebec City, while the business and culture were in Toronto and Montreal. But St John’s possessed both, and St John’s looked at Newfoundland as its country. So Corner Brook, a milltown, the largest pulp mill ever built in the world, made St John’s vulnerable. It was wealth that was not controlled and so it was seen as uncouth and an upstart. If you were from Corner Brook, as we were, you were looked upon as a traitor, as the Canadianization of Newfoundland.

We took West Valley Road and then hooked up O’Connell Drive. The hill that had the new police station, the junior high and then the high school. On top of the hill, past the Arts and Culture Centre, was the university. It was on this hill I received my education. We were driving home the way we had driven home eighteen years before, when we lived together in St John’s and were coming home for the summer, the summer David’s parents split up. In a way, we had finally arrived home in Zac’s car.

The regional hospital is in the centre of town, and you can see it from a mile away. There was a crane over the hospital, with a large object hanging there. Hospitals in Toronto are hidden in amongst other buildings. They have big signs near the top that are revealed when youve found the block. They surprise you in their suddenness. In small places like Corner Brook the hospital is seen from a distance, it stands, usually, amongst residential housing.

We tied Bucephalus to the bumper, her fur stained with dried blood, and went inside.

I’m a little nervous, David said. I might need to get something to eat.

I got him a bag of chips from a vending machine, then we found a nurse and she directed us to the proper wing. David asked her, Do you know Maggie Pettipaw.

She’s a friend of mine, she said.

I’m a friend too.

We followed a yellow line down the hall then turned a corner to the wing that held David’s father.

My mother might be here, he said. My parents. Did you know they still see each other? Dad can be sharp with her, and she can be right back at him. They seem to be momentarily curt and sick of each other, then they say some other thing and laugh and push each other around.

Me: I want to be pushed from a plane.

David looked around. What, when diagnosed with an incurable disease?

Or from a scandal so huge you can’t recover.

My parents, he said. When there’s nothing sexual you can have a deep friendship without the fights.

And then we saw the edge of David’s father in bed. Mr Twombly. His skull stapled together. The hair had been split open and he had a moulded plate below one eye. He was alone here. His vulnerability made me think I did not have an invitation to see him this way. It was wrong of me. I took a breath and saw the machinery that was trying to save his life. Then the doctor came in. It was Dr Manamperi, David’s stepfather of sorts.

We had to remove a piece of his skull, Dr Manamperi said, to relieve the pressure. Once it’s gone down we’ll put it back. He has another lump on the back of his head.

David: He’s always had that.

It’s a subcutaneous cyst and he should have it removed.

I remember as a kid, David said, asking him about that lump. He said it kept his hat on.

I hadnt seen Dr Manamperi since I was a teenager, refinishing his furniture. And here he was, the attending physician in charge of Arthur Twombly. He was living with Helen Crofter. He said they’d put David’s father into a stable coma and that he could be kept this way indefinitely. But there was damage to his kidneys and he was bleeding internally. He’s O negative, Dr Manamperi said. If David wouldnt mind giving some blood, for it was the rare type.

I thought, David said, O negative could donate to anyone.

Dr Manamperi: It’s receiving that’s the trouble.

There may come a time when a kidney might be needed. His father was being fed through a tube in his throat, and, while his breathing is erratic, a ventilator was placed in his nose.

Keep him that way, David said. I mean, keep him getting better.

He looked terrible. I knew he was in a coma with machines and a tracheotomy, but seeing it was worse. There were too many beige machines and not enough human being to garner the attention. It was as if Arthur Twombly was keeping the machines alive. He had no colour and he did not move. He could not even turn to look out his window.

I’m going to get them, David said. I’ll get them.

If we could just get some blood, Dr Manamperi said.

I
LEFT DAVID
with his father and drove home to my own father. He was having breakfast and my mother was in the garden. We got your strange postcard, he said. And I could tell what he was thinking, that signing my last name was beyond him. He was beyond trying to figure me out.

My father used to be a schoolteacher, and he had taught David and me and the Hurley boys and Randy Jacobs. He’d even had Anthony just before he retired. My mother had a part-time job as a clerk at the Bank of Nova Scotia. I remember having to go in after school, to see her. And they’d call for her. And she’d come to the front desk, both pleased and a little distracted. She was wearing lipstick. There was a world going on here that I was breaking her away from. The next-door neighbour, Mrs Jacobs, also worked at the bank. It was as if they were pretending to be clerks and were getting away with it. Once, when I was four, I was left alone by my mother. I’m only across the street at Mrs Jacobs’. While she was gone the phone rang. Hello? And no one was there. Then the oven timer went off. My father’s lunch cooking in the oven. I could feel it overcooking. So I put on my coat and boots and walked across the street and rang the doorbell. The two of them appeared to be sitting in large chairs in a dark room. There was not even a radio on. The chairs swallowed them.

They were happy to see the dog. They loved dogs, and their last one had been put down a year before. They werent ready for a new one, but enjoyed the company of visiting dogs. My father hooked the dog to the old lead out back and she made for the dog house, the old dog house that all my family dogs had used.

I told him what happened to Lars Pony. He had already heard. He had liked Lars. He had brought his car to Lars to fix and he respected people who were trying to begin anew, as he had done. But at the same time he could not agree with what Lars had done to himself. In the end, in my father’s eyes, that was not just unfortunate and a sin, but weak and should have been forestalled.

I went to bed for an afternoon nap and I slept in the bedroom that I had grown up in. I dreamt that I was hunting with my father. The dog was with us. There was a bear sleeping on an island. And my father put a knife in his teeth and swam over to the island. He crept up on the bear and slipped the knife in his jaw. The dog and I watched. He was so quiet about it that the bear did not wake up. He skinned out the jawbone and the bear was killed with very little pain. Then I woke up and knew that my tooth was hurting and that meant I was tense. I looked around my old bedroom. I realized Nell doesnt have this, this return to parental life. She did not talk much about her parents, just the small time with her aunt and uncle in Burlington. My parents were not modern. They were old-fashioned parents who had gone through the war as children and the war would always affect them. They were careful with things. Anything wood in the house my father had made. All the food in the fridge was in the process of being turned into food you could eat. They were unlike David’s parents. Who were modern, who embraced the modern ways. But I preferred my old-fashioned parents. I wanted to be the modern one, and yet appreciate the old ways of the previous generation. David was competing with his father’s life, and this was best described by his relationship with Nell.