Architects Are Here (31 page)

Dave:That’s what made her go bad.

Me: It’s more likely she’ll head Mexico way.

This here’s a Matador, isnt it.

You might have driven one yourself.

He stood back to admire the flank of our old ghost car.

Before my time. Heard good things though.

Those were the days.

Yes sir those were the days.

Those were the days when you could have shot us on the spot.

Those days are back, he said.

W
E WATCHED
all the traffic that we had industriously passed smooth out along the border and zip off into New York like shorn sheep. We sat in two flexible plastic chairs, the maker of which Dave noted so as never to invest in, and I counted the triangles in a puzzle on the back of a kids’ magazine. I was counting to give my mind something to do, but then the triangles turned into a firing range with men hurdling the triangles carrying Tasers. That he snuck that into the car and put me in that position. But the entire room was monitored and so I sat there and watched, through the window, our dog. The border guard was letting her sit with him in his booth, like a police dog. And then back to the kids’ magazine. I was glad not to have kids. To have them stranded here at the border knowing dust was being inspected from Dad’s bags. That sort of suspicion shouldnt be allowed to be born in children. It’s like exotic foods. I wouldnt feed a child extravagant things. Let them get old first and really enjoy the astonishment of their first mango. Let them think they were deprived. Being deprived is an excellent kick in the pants, to make a body want to search.

Then Bucephalus came back and David was rubbing her down. He used to have a dog. But it was like an arranged marriage, he said. They didnt hit it off.

That was Wolf, I said.

I had that dog for his entire life. I saw it being born. We respected each other, Gabe, but no deep love. I think for me to love something it has to be either half-broken or full of enthusiasm. This dog here. I could easily fall in love with this girl. Though she looks a little too full of the world now to be reined in. She’s experienced and loves too many things to be loyal.

So a dog has to be a bit broken, or full of enthusiasm, but in either case he must not have too much experience in the world.

He can’t be a slut before I get to him. But together he can do what he likes as long as he comes back to me.

T
HE DUST WAS NEGATIVE
and away we peeled into New York. We drove on down Highway 87 to Plattsburgh. David wanted snacks so we pulled into Plattsburgh and found a grocery store. Trail mix is what he wanted. Nuts raisins and licorice. I said I was more in line for a sandwich.

I’ll get you a sandwich, he said, you get me the trail mix.

I had to ask the guy at the deli counter, Where are the peanuts?

David: In the baking aisle.

Where are the chocolate bars.

In the aisle full of potato chips.

The deli guy looked at us. My friend here is looking for a job, I said.

Have you noticed, Dave said, the Americans stock the eggs right beside the bacon.

W
E DROVE THROUGH PLATTSBURGH
. We were in a new country and that seemed to call for a different attitude. It was like leaving a lover and realizing you could try to be less of an asshole. Youre too stubborn to admit youre one while youre in the old relationship. I was going to begin again with David. I was going to be honest and not persuaded.

David was rubbing his temples. I’ve lost half my brain, he said. Can’t concentrate like I used to.

Then he blinked a number of times and searched the ground we were covering.

I look at the world, he said, pretending my eye is someone else’s eye. Someone with integrity.

We switched the driving again and he was quiet while he drove. But once we got to the slow roads he wanted to talk. He said, I want you to know I’m in love with my son. I love him. I love nothing else. I’m not going to go on about it. I might not talk about him. I’m not that kind of boring dad. I take care of them financially. Sok Hoon doesnt have to worry. She pretty much takes care of herself as it is, sometimes in fact she sends money my way. But if there’s a gap she knows how to fill it in. She doesnt need to ask me, there’s an account. Anyway, Sok Hoon is possessive and she could have lived in Toronto. I can’t live in Montreal, there’s no work in Montreal. I could live in Montreal but I’d be broke. So she went to Montreal. Good. I love the Oven and that’s the end of it.

We came to a river and David wanted to look at it. He parked the hot car up on the grassy bank and I unfolded the tent to air in the sun and Bucephalus took a bead on the river. We went down to the river with the fishing rod. Did we need a permit? There were no posted signs. All the rapids glinted in the bright afternoon. I strung up our rod and the dog watched me cast, up to her tail in water. The trout were hot and lazy. David stripped down and folded his new glasses and put them in their case. Then he waded into the pool I was fishing in.

Just to cool off, he said.

Well thanks.

You werent going to catch anything.

Then he tested the bank and got out and lay on the grass with the dog and both of them watched my fly, their bellies breathing in tandem.

David: Do you smell a burning.

Maybe theyre doing a controlled burn.

It’s like a grass fire.

It smells close by.

We looked behind and the air around the car had that wobbly look to it.

The Matador was on fire.

We ran up with the blankets and threw them over the car. It was weird, superficial burning. A man came out of the house and judged the car and asked what our plans were. David said we’d like to camp. You can do that, he said, but not where you were fishing. He said it as though we might catch the river on fire. He pointed to a flat spot amongst a copse of willows. That’s a fair spot, he said. Then he looked under the car.

It was your catalytic converter, he said. That’s what caught the grass on fire. You shouldnt park a hot vehicle on dead grass.

We slept on the banks of the Au Sable River and the moon turned the inside of the tent green and the green reminded me of Allegra Campinghorst and her iridescent costume. I thought about being inside the green dress, a tent of beetles, which felt like crawling into a radio. I became Allegra. I was trying to think of how she could speak so disparagingly of Sok Hoon, but I guess she liked David. I think it’s good to know that you have a reserve. Out of David’s ashes Sok Hoon had made a bigger life. It’s both foolish and a relief, but we all rely on backup plans to our current predicament. Women especially. Most often, in the end, when it’s over, the women win. They live for hundreds of years. But the world looks upon them as the support behind men’s work. Even these days.

ELEVEN

B
UCEPHALUS CLIMBED ABOARD
us and wedged herself in and slept between us. In the morning I let her out. I watched her tail hover in the air. Then she was off towards the cows.

There’s this theory about the butterfly wings, David said, waking up. Flap of a wing in Brazil causes a hurricane in Srebrenica. It’s wrong. We thought it was right for maybe fifteen years. Do little things and the big changes will come. We powered a lot of technology on that wrong thought.

That’s the power of a strong image, I said. It can overpower reason.

We had camped in the lee of a dairy farm. We had watched the owners feed the cows and sit under an awning with cheese sandwiches and a bottle of cold wine. Then slept. Now this morning.

David: Our computers at IKW told us you can flap all you want, no hurricane. So the truth is a little more refined. You have to get all the butterflies flapping. If you can encourage all this flapping, then you might rev up a hurricane.

David Twombly confessed he was working on a book but had been staring too much at the computer. Then he gets an email and bam.

Me:You have email on the computer that you work on?

He looked at me.

You have to get rid of that. You have to work on a machine that isnt alive.

More looking.

If you walked into a room and there was a dead dog in there. And say there’s this happy dog wagging his tail as well.

And with that Bucephalus returned to the zipper of the tent.

Youre going to pat the happy dog.

We patted our happy dog. The pink valley of her tongue.

Youre going to roll around and play. There’s nothing more distracting than an alive dog.

David:You have to work in a room with a dead dog.

Who can resist?

I
THOUGHT
of how close I was to Nell, but then, how much can you know of someone. How much of a relationship is dead-dog and how much alive-dog. The little assassins arrive and snip the connections or store information in little pockets and you end up looking at each other guessing and saying okay to the mystery but deciding that if there is an afterlife it must involve these secret compartments, which are more like sacs of fat stored around the body. And perhaps all David and Nell were doing was working to make an afterlife appear in this life. The next world, they were bringing the secrets of the afterlife into ordinary reality, and I wasnt ballsy enough to accept it. Nell and David were having an affair.

I felt like I’d chewed over the power of the feeling I’d been having and it was okay to leave this place. We bid adieu to a dairy farm, where an American artist I had written about had once lived. He had died here. We turned our backs on him and then we booted it towards the east, and although we were done with the man he sort of kept us company, as I knew he had taken this route ninety years before on his way to Newfoundland, and perhaps not that much slower as we were only doing sixty kilometres an hour towards Bethlehem, New Hampshire. Just coasting easy, a canter. David Twombly was checking his stocks on his pebble. The pebble, he said, runs on the heat of his hand. There was a grip on it, and it matched his hand. It was like a mouth guard that you boil in water then set in your jaw to imprint your teeth. David is the sole operator for the pebble, his signature handgrip and his method of thought. He was invested now in ethical funds.

More was sure to come.

This thing called Sunleaf, Dave said. They tap into photosynthesis. It’s a light leech and theyre buying thousands of acres of meadow. They will use trees as a solar panel.

When we stopped for gas he checked his whole portfolio using his eyes to scroll the screen.

A meadow, I said, implies treelessness.

Theyre growing the trees. In the meadow.

So what they havent even grown the raw material?

All our hydro, he said, is coal fired. The heart of the economy is still run by the nineteenth century.

I
DOZED AGAIN
while David drove. We were on our way to his sister’s. Driving makes me sleepy. I set up a scenario where Nell is leaning on an elbow, reading. She’s calm and well spoken, wearing smart wool pants and a blue top that gives her a thin waist, because she’s tall. Then Richard arrives. They’ve been eating.

Nell: I ate so little with you. Once a day it averaged.

Richard:You can go a long way on beer and cigarettes.

I embraced her in the car. I moved Richard out of the way and held her. And I was holding David’s shoulder. His eyes were on the road, blinking softly for he was tired too, and he’d grown very sad and loving. I wanted to kiss him on the cheek but the seatbelt wouldnt allow it. He has a boy’s face, until you kiss him. It’s his unshaved chin. It’s hard and sharp and old. And then the skin of chemicals and no-heat and inside-inthe-dark skin, awake with inside light.

That’s enough now, he said. Which woke me up. It was still afternoon and I had that feeling you get when youve been in a bar in the daytime and you get drunk playing pool and leave and it’s still not dark. A sodden feeling of unworthiness.

David: The thing I miss with this travelling is often I pull down the blinds at the office and take a nap. It’s three in the afternoon, I’ve got the sports page, a glass of ginger ale, three fig newtons and the Argos on my portable radio.

Youve been let go, I said.

Let me just think it’s the travelling.

W
E DROVE HARD ALL DAY
and arrived in Bethlehem by early evening. Sasha Twombly was at the university and we could see from monitors in hotel lobbies that the president was visiting the campus. We found a room and checked in, then David called Sasha and she said if we knew how to get to the college. The hotel had a map.

Sasha Twombly had married a man who studied economics and set up a wing of research at the college that studies nuclear power. In the seventies, when they let go of the gold standard, they tried to use power as a standard for money. How much power a thing had. The Bethlehem public school had a whirling atom for a logo.

Sasha was excited to see us, and then the excitement focused on its true cause: the president’s visit. Her husband, Kenneth Mosado, had been in Washington sponsoring a lobby group to downgrade the latest environmental bill passing through congress. The opposite of progress? Congress. The president got wind of the college, the Middle East was tightening oil production, Iran was considering getting rid of the dollar and pegging the barrel to silver. Hydro was a hard issue with Canada and the Quebec separatists, and the high-grade unpolluting coal was vanishing from Virginia railways. Nuclear, the president had decided, was the fuel of the future, and Bethlehem, New Hampshire, was the birthplace of nuclear. He had arrived on Air Force One that very day to take a tour of the facilities, and David and I could go through the clearance wands and pat-downs and meet him.

Jesus, we just met the Prince of Wales.

Perhaps, David said, this is our time to visit heads of state. Remember when we played puddies?

And, while I had thought of those days, neither of us had mentioned them out loud.

Remember what our names were? You were the King and I was the President.

That’s right, I said. Is the Prince the head of England?

David: He’s the head of faith.