Architects Are Here (17 page)

You lost your temper.

I probably said something sarcastic about blowing up the plane and now I’m grounded.

What do you mean youre grounded.

I’ve got a no-fly caution in my profile.

Youre banned from airports.

I’ve been with security all day. I’m allowed in airports I just can’t get through departures. It’s like I’m allowed to read the preface to a book on airports.

You fly forty times a year.

I flew. I’m unemployed now, Gabe.

So what now.

He wanted to see me in the morning. So I tried to summon up the good side of me, the unhurt side that could help him now that his father was dying. I felt like perhaps I should have known about David and Nell, and that he was doing his best under the circumstances. He was greedy but then men can be greedy. I didnt want to let David Twombly know what Nell had told me. I wasnt ready yet to receive the emotions I was bound to go through with him. And I was anxious that night and in the morning too until I heard him come through the door. He was beside himself with anger. I could see he had a right to talk to me about it, about the injustice being done to him. I had my own fierce feelings about his role in Nell’s life and yet I wasnt mad at Nell, I was worried for her. I wanted her to be alive. I had called the hospitals and begun a file with the police. This was the start of the changing of my life, where I no longer felt in control—that big machinery was grinding around me and I had looked up to see myself in the bottom of an elevated cone erected at dawn, with wet cement peering over the lip of the cone, churning like ice cream, a threatening ice cream.

He wanted some breakfast. I melted a chunk of butter and stirred up six eggs while he looked through the books on the kitchen table. I like to leave books in every room. David doesnt have books. He reads things from his pebble. He was proud that he had a friend who had written books, was perplexed about why I never tried to write something popular. How Canadian books are so literary and, in his mind, boring.

I made the eggs loose and scrambled, the way my father would make them on mornings when we were up early to hunt or fish. I shrugged off the animosity and decided to postpone the anger I had towards David. I would get him through this rough spot with his father. I hunted for my slippers then realized they’d be where I left them. Nell had this thing. She’d wear my slippers in the morning and then sling them off, perhaps violently, when she left for work. I’ve found them behind books on a bookshelf, and I enjoyed the little hunt I had to do to find them. But here they were in their little compartment in the shoe rack. That made me sad, that she hadnt even worn my slippers.

I served up the eggs and tore the bread in half. We would eat like Europeans. David was drumming his thumbs on the table, waiting.

Why not write a good old-fashioned mystery, David said. He wasnt the only one. Everyone who loves you will get a narrowing of the eyes and a pursing of the lips. They are trying their best not to tell you what to do. They want to see you on American talk shows. To shut him up I said okay I’ll write a mystery. I’ll write about a Canadian who tries to become the president of the United States—for that was David’s private wish. He was, by birth, an American. He was born on a US army base.

He was hauling the scrambled eggs into his mouth now, dousing them with hot sauce. He didnt know I was in the room any more, he was eating privately, like a rich man. Maybe they were all rich. Both he and Nell had made, for a time, a shitload of money. David ate his eggs and asked for more coffee and then we took the ladder up to the roof where we stood straight and saluted the Cuban beach above us and then just stared out over the top of the city.

Hey you can see IKW from here, he said. And he looked further, as though he might discover the rim of Newfoundland sitting out there two thousand miles away.

There’s trouble, he said, in Corner Brook. It has to do with Nell’s son. With his adopted family. There was a threat.

So youve talked to Nell, I said.

She called me a few days ago, he said.

Okay, I said. I understood this. Nell called you.

I’ve got to see my father, he said.

Me:They hit him really hard.

They nailed him in a van. A moose bar, Gabe, it had a moose bar. And he’s strung up to all these machines.

It looks like they might have been over the limit.

They were given breathalyzers.

I mean the speed limit, from the damage to his car.

Do you remember Maggie Pettipaw? She’s a nurse now. I was talking to her at the hospital, she’s on that ward.

Maggie Pettipaw, I said. She was very kind to me in biology.

She’s on the ward and she was almost married to Gerard Hurley.

It’s a small town.

She said Gerard is capable of that. She wouldnt put it past him.

And with that he looked over the vast new city of Toronto, the roofs of all the buildings. He looked like a conqueror. Or someone about to conquer.

Have you ever met him, I said.

Who.

Your half-brother.

I didnt know for years. It was never talked about. I heard the rumours but what Dad had told me was the boy was Joe Hurley’s.

So when Nell left Santa Fe and came here.

I was curious.

Your dad told you and you felt kind towards her.

Well and she’s sexy.

He was toying with me. He did not know what I knew. That’s a real twisted—

Men are beasts, Gabe.

Me: Nell’s disappeared.

This was my way to get David to mention the affair. I’d meant to talk about his father, but it was hard to separate it from his situation with Nell. I looked straight at him and his eyes were honest and clear. What an asshole. He was dealing with me in the same manner as he dealt with troubles in business: He was just a heavy in an environment that needed charming, physical men to act as their receivers and their protectors.

I told him we’d had a fight. That she had mentioned her son. I did not explain that she had confessed her affair.

He reached into his pocket and tossed me his pebble.

Call the police, he said. Ask them for an update on Nell.

What do I do to start this thing.

Oh yeah, he said. Pass it back.

The warmth of his hand turned it on. It was powered by solar and thermal heat. He thought of the police and handed it back. A staff sergeant from 44 Division on Dovercourt. You could see that building too from the roof. There was no update on Nell.

David: Have you called the hospitals.

I’ve spoken to every hospital in Toronto. It seemed like, in the background of every conversation I had, there were men restraining patients.

Hospitals are full of police officers.

I didnt know what to ask. I said, Hello. And this woman said: Emerge. She said, Name please. I said, My name? The patient’s name, sir. So I gave her Nell Tarkington. And she said, There’s no one under that name, sir.

David:Was she implying that Nell could be using a pseudonym.

That never occurred to me.

Did you try Toronto General.

I called every Emerg, Dave. And every one had a background struggle of calm prevailing. No one had a Nell Tarkington.

Nell grew up straight, David said. The coffee and eggs had made him arrive at a thought confirmed.

She’s allowed me to be wild, I said. I’m her little acre of wild pollinate-the-wind garden.

Youre wild because your parents were restrained.

We were deciding on children, I said.

So she told me.

I listened to this.

We’re colleagues, David said. We yabber.

Is Nell aware that you know about your half-brother.

We’ve talked about it.

D
AVID SAW HIMSELF OUT
and I watched him, from the roof, walk down my street looking determined, hunched a little, big and yet not that threatening. Maybe threat was a power that had to be consciously turned on.

NINE

T
HE DOORBELL WOKE ME EARLY
. I bent over to discover the clothes that I’d shrugged off onto the floor. They were clothes that had done me well the day before, so why abandon them. I took the stairs down and there was a man in a thick grey shirt with a military patch sewn on the arm. We’ve had a report of a gas leak, he said.

I dont smell gas.

Our instruments indicate missing gas.

The man was absorbed by a handheld chip device with a probe antenna. A bead was pulsing. I could sense a bank of propane, feel the nuzzle of it. The smell registered as a softness.

It’s nothing much theyre just switching off the gas and they’d prefer the building—he looked at the corners of the ceiling—empty for the morning. We’ll relight your pilot lights. I mean absence isnt something, you know what I mean?

Could this happen on another day. My wife has left me.

He checked his chip device and said, We have to empty the building.

M
Y JAW ACHED SO
I sprayed my back teeth with medicinal cannabis. It was the tooth I’d cracked at David Twombly’s party, and so I associate the pain with meeting Nell—I’m realizing that now.

I grabbed my coat and my
Auto Trader
camera and a lozenge for my throat. I made sure the freezer was locked and I put Toby on the shelf above the books. I patted his head, as if I may never see him again. I didnt even brush my teeth. Outside the light felt different. It was warm. They were digging a hole and laughing. There was a big white truck and hired police. A man with a cement cutter—a white metal box the size of an ice-cream vending machine with a revolving thirty-inch blade at the front and wheelbarrow handles. I tried to look greatly inconvenienced. There was a hose to wet the blade as it zipped through the sidewalk. It was just him and the machine with a hose connected to a generator and a water pump in the back of a green cube van. The man with the probe rang the next doorbell.

Youre just cutting through the cement here.

I’m a cutter.

The blade zipped at the cement in a brittle, angry way. There were splinters of concrete and sparks and I noticed the unconcern at the twist of unpainted pipes that led to the natural gas. A leak and my god but hey theyre pros.

It was early and I had three cars to photograph. I had a life and then I had voluntary employment. It’ll take your mind off Nell, of course it will. So I walked to the first client. I do not show up in a car. Long ago I realized this can give off the wrong odour—you never know the reason for the car sale until you arrive. It would be like inviting someone to your home in order for them to sign over their mortgage, realizing they are doing it to finance the medical bills of an ill child. So I arrived on foot, after taking the subway. I like this, and I enjoy mapping the city, discovering how it is bulking out at varying edges. That degree I did in economic geography. We know that the spilling lip of a city is governed by many trickling advances and interests that affect votes on re-zoning. They are extending the Toronto subway system to the northeast.

My advice to you? If you have money for real estate get a list of the ravines and a chart of the subway stops and overlay them on a map of the city. Find a neighbourhood near to these and when mortgage rates dip near prime, you will make money.

A client to
Auto Trader
can supply their own photo, but often people who want to unload a used car fast dont have the means. And who has a recent picture of their car? I approach the photo-taking as an artist, as a trapping of the car. The man I learned from was that way, Lars Pony, and I do it partly in homage to the retiring Mr Pony’s taste. Everything can be done with taste. I like to place a vehicle so the hood is acknowledging the sun. If a car has to go down, let it be sold facing the sun, like a bull. I bank the light off the front window, I catch a ten percent angle on the flank of the car facing the camera. I crouch sometimes, other times I’m on tiptoe. I try to work for the client, to eke out some enticing quality from the car and when they see this effort they are more inclined to open up and tell me a small story from their lives. This I use in the column. I shoot in colour, I shoot digital, I frame it so there is space for Tessa to drag in a yellow price window and overlay a startling zigzag frame. The frame is meant to make the vehicle look like it’s alive, that it’s gone to bed early after doing its homework and is ready for a long day in the field.

I can send the work to the shop, but half the time, if I’m riding by Auto Trader, I’ll make the detour and deliver the pictures straight to Tessa Walcott—she enjoys my walking into the shop. They are not the first unit in the plaza, but in Unit 15 between Pro Choice and JK Parts. Tessa believes car honkers should be lined up and shot with a blank.

I shot a Mazda pickup north of Eglinton and then a snazzy coupe just at Kipling station. My last stop for the day was Alice Stebbins. I took the bus to Jane and Finch. It had been three months but I remembered the lane into the back of an apartment tower. I angled the light off the windscreen to avoid glare. I’d been by once before to take pictures for Alice, but the car hadnt sold and she wanted to blame it on the photo. I knew the car because it was a Matador, the same kind of car Zac Twombly had driven, the one David and I hit a moose with. It was nice to visit the car, I sat in it and remembered my youth. The car had been Alice’s father’s, he was on the force in Los Angeles. When he retired he bought his own cruiser from the LAPD, and they moved to Canada with it. It was an unmarked ghost car. He died one night six years ago when he volunteered to break up a gang fight near here in the Jane and Finch corridor. In the will Alice got the car. What I like about it is the paint. It’s the original deep blue paint, and there’s something satisfying about factory car paint that’s thirty years old. I tapped the fender with my fingernails, it was a hard enamel, like teeth. Alice Stebbins works at a swimming pool and has had no luck selling the car because she’s asking too much. She blames it on the photo I took but the trouble is she’s in love with the car. She formed a bond last winter when the snow was bad and the cruiser pulled her through some slippery roads on her way to the Royal Yacht Club. Developing a bond with a car is a severe condition. And since the spring she’s put a third of her income into the steering and pinion mounts. The shocks, she said, are shot.