I had several main concerns while it was all going on, but the biggest one had to do with the damage their Mobile Command Centre—essentially a tricked-out RV—had done to my lawn when they rolled up. I was thinking about the levelling and reseeding I was going to have to do.
It was embarrassing, too, I have to say. It felt like an unwarranted level of scrutiny. They’d managed to evacuate the neighbourhood, but not before that awkward half hour or so when all the neighbours were standing around in a tight arc that cut across the street, which I guess they’d closed, and onto the sidewalk out front of Jerry’s house. There was a whole lot of milling about and, I don’t have to guess, gossip taking place. They were probably saying this had to do with my being laid off, but it truly didn’t. Springer Electric had dumped a nice severance in my lap, and I was kind of enjoying my time off. It gave me time to putter, fix a few things that had been bothering me, to reorganize the tool room and, you know, to build the device, which I had nicknamed Fat Albert for the sake of avoiding clunky monikers like “The Device.”
My only motivation, if I even had one, was to prove to myself that it could be done with simple household materials and a well-stocked toolbox. And guess what?
When I realized that I’d done it, I began to think that I ought to write it down somewhere so I didn’t forget how I’d managed to do it. Then I thought, you know, this might be useful to others, or at least impressive. I thought maybe I would start a blog.
There was no cause. No Cause. No political statement, save my belief in self-reliance, a can-do DIY streak that usually looks like changing your own oil, performing your own renovations with or without the prescribed permits, and not expecting government handouts to see you through life’s rough patches. That, and the feeling that what happens in my garage is really only my business and nobody else’s.
The joke is that one stray comment to the mailman was all that was required to let the world in on my secret. I was working one warm spring morning with the garage door up, just putting some finishing touches on Fat Albert, a bit of paint mostly, and he came by with a handful of junk mail. He doesn’t usually say much, just a curt hello, but he saw the box and wires, and he stood puzzled for a moment, that floppy hat on his head, his twin saddlebags by his sides, bulging with envelopes and flyers, and he said, “What on earth is that?”
And I, feeling prideful, had to boast, “It’s a bomb. A nuclear device. Crazy, right? I just figured I’d give it a shot. Just a thing to see if I could do it.”
“Come on,” he said.
“Seriously,” I said.
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. A thermonuclear bomb.”
“Really?” he said. “Like, really?”
“It was pretty easy, actually. You could do it yourself, I’d bet. With stuff you have lying around the house, like old smoke detectors, and a couple of hours on Wikipedia.”
“Right,” he said, and he laughed a kind of thin, nervous laugh.
“I mean it,” I said, but he was already halfway across the lawn to Mrs. Gale’s house and, I’d bet, by the time he reached the corner, by the time he figured he was out of earshot, he was digging his phone out of his pocket and notifying the relevant authorities.
At that same moment, here’s what I was thinking: it’s the kind of thing he’ll laugh about later.
But soon all hell broke loose. And while I sat in the garage trying to convince the negotiator that I wasn’t going to send us all to meet our maker and that my only demand was that I not be shot when I left the garage, I got to thinking that Carolyn, my ex, would have a field day with this once she heard.
With all that time just to sit and think, I also found my mind settling on good times, on the absolute nuke she’d been, once upon a time. About how explosive we were together, and how that was a way I knew I’d never feel again. The red-and-blue strobe was what did it, the silent flashing of the lights on those emergency vehicles, the cruisers and SUVs parked out there on my bluegrass and creeping thyme. I closed my eyes and was reminded of camera flashes, Greek discos, fireworks displays, sparklers atop her twenty-fifth birthday cake. I got wistful.
Once, in Mexico, I pulled a burning Roman candle from her long auburn hair. She was twenty-four and had the power to stop my heart. There was a brass band standing atop a wall. The wall surrounded a house that had never been built. They were playing fast and loud, wearing matching purple suits. All of the lean, pouty boys of the town of San Juan Cosala were carrying small fireworks in their pockets. The would take them out, and four or five of the boys would huddle around one cigarette lighter or book of matches, and once the fuses were lit they would run shrieking in every direction until theirs went off. We were in a procession of people—townspeople, visitors—and we had no idea what was happening. We were being herded down narrow, uneven streets. Above us effigies and Catherine wheels hung on wires. Carolyn laughed the whole time. There came a whistling noise that grew terrible and big in my ears, and all of a sudden, while she was still laughing, a ball of fire settled in her hair, just near her right shoulder. We were beneath the band then, loud oompah-oompahs thudding in our ears, and she didn’t hear me shout, “Your hair!” I just reached in and grabbed it, flung it to the ground, and stomped on it.
“Wow!” she cried. Our noses were stuffed with the smells of sulphur, liquor, the jacaranda trees. Our hearts were crammed with too much regard for money, for ourselves, and for our own love, which we believed to be made of carelessness and hope, all of which would come to play hands in our eventual dissolution. But not yet, no no. The truth is that our erroneous beliefs would sustain us for several years yet.
And in the bright, fresh morning we found her singed hairs. She brushed them painfully out, our ears still ringing with music and explosions.
In Athens, a couple of years earlier, there were riot police for something we didn’t understand, and we watched the armoured men move a crowd back a city block while the flashing lights bounced off the empty, unfinished highrise across from our third-floor room. We had been on the balcony, but she said she thought she saw someone preparing a Molotov cocktail, and so we moved inside. She was two months out of Queen’s with her masters degree, staring at a lifetime of student debt, but she said we had to go to Greece, and so we went. This was our first night in Athens, and we were pinned in our tiny hotel room by whatever was happening in the street below us.
When finally we grew bored of watching we pulled the drapes, finished a bottle of retsina, and then made love. This we did with the intensity of a street battle. She said, “Don’t you ever try to get away from me.” The noise outside was like a physical thing inside of which we had become lost, consumed. I thought for a moment that we were in the middle of the riot, that the windows had fallen away or the door had been blown off its hinges; there were voices that sounded like they were next to us in that room, standing over us. That anticipation of a club coming down onto my head heightened everything. We deserved to be arrested, detained. There were violations of decency, decorum. It was uncivil.
Afterwards the flashing lights were still coming through and around the thin brown curtains. Carolyn sat at the end of the bed with her legs drawn up to her chest. The lights made her red hair even redder. I said, “I love the colour of your hair.”
She said, “You’ve never seen my real hair colour.”
In the morning, in the dingy restaurant on the second floor, over bitter coffee, we asked the waiter what the excitement had been.
“I don’t know of anything,” he said.
“Outside? Last night?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, and then explained that young people were upset over a plan to close the nightclubs of Athens earlier, at 4:00 instead of 5:00 in the morning, I think he said.
“They riot for that?” Carolyn asked.
“Oh, for anything,” the waiter answered.
And yes, sure, while I’m picking scabs here, there was my father. The flashing lights on the lawn of my parents’ house, my ho
use, when I was nine years old. They lit up my mother’s face and her long brown hair. I saw grey where I had never noticed it before, at her temples and forehead, and I wondered if it had just appeared there, that evening, in the time between when she and I had returned from visiting Mrs. Curtis down the block, and I had heard the car running and opened the door into the garage and seen Dad there, the driver’s seat tilted back, his face waxen and blank, and when they had loaded him into the ambulance and driven him away. It was the seventeenth of April. There was a mist in the air, the grass was wet, the air smelled like mud. After the ambulance left the police car remained, its lights still bouncing off the shining lawn and the slick pavement, the house’s aluminum siding. I left my mother’s side for a moment and walked, in a daze, toward the house. I don’t think I had yet taken in what I had seen, I hadn’t made sense of it, that he had meant to do that, meant for us to find him. That he had been waiting until we were gone. I sleepwalked around the side of the house, slowly, dumbly, and saw there the garden shed that he and I had begun building the previous autumn, started and not finished, a frame without walls or roof, appearing ghostlike in the stray arms of the flashing blue-and-red light.
I turned again and looked across the street, at the houses there, and the great, dark forest behind them. That was the end of the known world. I had thought that the night we moved into that house, when I was six. That night, I remember very clearly thinking that none of the world was known to me, and that it might never be.
They took us in a police car, its lights no longer flashing, to the hospital to confirm what we both knew, mother and her only child. She did not speak, not a word. They towed away the car, a white Ford Pinto. Mom sold the house, and we moved into a townhouse in another neighbourhood. She cut her hair short and wore it that way for the rest of her life. It seems to me that she wore that same expression, too, the uncomprehending one she’d had on the front lawn, in the damp, electric air, maybe staring across at that same forest, until she died last year. My poor mother.
And let’s not forget Springer Electric, where I’d put in fifteen years, me sitting in my little cube there, and the red light on my office phone that flashed for an incoming call. It was a Monday morning, and the layoff rumours were flying fast. And then it started, 9:00 AM sharp. By 9:30 everyone knew what was happening, that Deb, the HR woman, was calling people into her office to give them the news one at a time. So we all just sat dumbly by our phones, waiting, we hoped, for nothing. All morning. You’d hear the phone ring a cubicle over, or down the hall, and your heart would catch in your throat. At a quarter after eleven my red light began blinking, the quiet, synthesized bloop-bloop of the ringtone. In the moment I thought that maybe it was someone else, but the call display window said INT-OFFICE: HR.
That was eight months ago, and I was already hurting thanks to the payments to Carolyn. But the severance helped things, really. Put me on a different course, gave me reason to think that I’d find myself in a new life that fit me better than the old one. I got to read a stack of books I’d been meaning to get to, I got to finish some projects. I woke those mornings after the layoff marinating in the belief that the world rewards a patient man.
All of these things make quite a list, I agree. Divorce, job loss, the death of my father. Add it all up, right? It’s all there. Well, whatever. Who hasn’t suffered traumas? Who’s coasting through this life unscathed?
This is what I said over the phone to the negotiator after he brought up these well-researched facts about my life. “We know what you’ve gone through,” he said, “with your marital troubles, losing your job, the way your father died…” Probably they’d been talking to Carolyn.
“This isn’t about that,” I said. “Any of that. This isn’t about anything. It’s just a thing I did.”
“Of course, Mr. Wardell,” he said. “I understand, Matthew. Can I call you Matthew?”
“I’d prefer not.”
“Of course.” He was trying very hard not to upset me, which I found kind of funny. I figured, in a town like Cavanagh, Ontario, he probably didn’t have a lot of opportunity to use his negotiator skills. He was probably just a guy, a cop, who got roped into a two-day seminar or something, just got the qualification, and here he was. That made me laugh. But it didn’t make me like him, and it didn’t change the fact that here I was, penned in my own garage with a marvellous bit of work that should’ve earned me an entirely different sort of attention. Look at this, I wanted to shout, I did this myself! How great is that?
I hadn’t calculated megatonnage or anything like that, but I’m pretty sure Fat Albert would have rendered most, if not all, of this town uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. It’d be marked on maps as CAVANAGH EXCLUSION ZONE, or something like that. You’d have to sign your life away to walk down my street in a radiation suit.
In the end, at about three or four in the morning, I took the negotiator’s assurances that the tactical guys weren’t going to shoot me or grind my head into the driveway if I came out, and I just pushed the button for the opener and waited for the big door to go up. The flashing lights filled the whole space then, the red-and-blue light dancing on everything: on the lawnmower, on the cases of empties, on the mountain bike I’d bought last year and hadn’t really used. It danced on the birdhouse I’d begun the week before.
Their bomb guys—I think they had to come in from Toronto—got a pretty big kick out of Fat Albert. “He could have done it,” they said, which added to the charges, actually. If it had been a hoax, if Albert had been an empty box with a few wires sticking out, a prop, then at worst I’d have been looking at mischief.
There’s a chance I’ve overstated how easy it was. My electrical engineering degree certainly helped, and it didn’t hurt to have had access to certain materials when I was still at Springer. But I’m still kind of in awe over how easy it was.
Why, why, why, they wanted to know. I kept trying to impress upon them that it wasn’t some great design, it wasn’t pushed along by belief, or zealotry, or anger. “I just like projects,” I said.
“You weren’t really going to press that button, were you?” one young guy wearing his dad’s suit asked me. I waved my hand dismissively.
What I didn’t tell him, of course, and what I’m not telling you, is that I not only thought about pressing the button, but I went ahead and did it. A couple of hours before I walked out of the garage. I was so tired, you know. I closed my eyes and squeezed the big, red trigger. I wanted to know what it would be like at the centre of that enormous flash. But nothing happened. Something in the wiring, I guess, some small thing, a screw I hadn’t sufficiently tightened. It left me with such a deflated feeling, to be honest. Like, oh, hey, great, here’s the rest of my life and it’s all still laid out in front of me. All the broken things. All the missing parts.
Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks to the crew at Invisible—Robbie, Megan, Leigh, and Nic—for believing in this book.
Many of these stories, in their initial forms, needed to be beaten into shape, or stripped down and rebuilt altogether. I’m grateful to my editor, Michelle Sterling, for her keen eye and her patience.
For publishing earlier versions of several of these stories, and for the guidance and input of their editors, I’m grateful to the following publications: Little Fiction, PRISM international, The Puritan, Hobart, This Magazine, The New Quarterly, Scrivener Creative Review, Found Press.
To the readers—Rick Taylor, Eric Fershtman, and others—who’ve offered me their eyes and their suggestions, I say thank you.
And lastly, thanks are due to my family, for their unending support and understanding.
“Well, it’s better, anyway.”
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