The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  §

  Inside, Audrey swam in night, standing in long, wide blackness. Her eyes buzzed in the dark. Windows that could let in the white moonlight were all too deep in the building. She felt at the wall beside the door for the light switch and of course it didn’t work. No one had paid any bills here in years.

  Her memory worked to create details in the blank space. Ahead and all around her would be the wide open foyer, reaching out on either side under the high, faraway ceiling. An open mezzanine looked down over a long rail from the second floor. If she walked straight ahead she should reach the brass-railed staircase, wrapped upward squarely around a copper-caged elevator shaft, the back spine of the building reaching up, away to the higher floors. The memories came back to her gradually in the dark.

  The dark space stunk, rot and mildew, and damp despite the dry deadness of the air. She felt the cold floor through her boots. She listened for the sounds a building makes: hot water whistling in pipes, buzzing fluorescent lights, the thrum of forced air rushing through ductwork. The Crash Palace was quiet. No drips in sinks, no televisions on faraway floors, no laundry machines or pipes rattling in their brackets.

  ‘Hello,’ she said loudly in the dark. ‘Hello, it’s Audrey. Audrey Cole. I haven’t been here for a long time.’

  She took a few steps in the dark, shuffling her feet, careful of her toes, arms out ahead for obstacles.

  ‘It’s my key anyway,’ she said, at normal volume, to no one. ‘He left it for me and fuck him anyway and it’s mine now.’

  There was a parlour over to the left, she remembered. Bay windows and sofas, and a fireplace. She moved cautiously, anticipating furniture in the darkness, low chairs or tables lurking to trip her. She realized she was trying to be quiet, so she stamped her feet on the stone floor to hear the sound slap in the big space. Listened for responses, for scuttling animals, burrowed into the dry shelter of the walls and floors.

  There could be black bears. Grizzly bears. Denned in the basement for their winter sleep. There are different kinds of bears and some of them you have to run away from at first sight, as fast as you can, and for some of them you need to just drop and play dead and hope for the best. Someone once explained to her these different bear responses that a person needs to know and she remembered cold horror in her stomach listening and imagining the fateful meeting someday in the future, face to face with a bear, and how she’d spend her last moments trying to remember which bear required which, making of course the wrong decision.

  ‘Bears, be fair. Say which sort you are. Give us an honest shot.’

  Something crunched underfoot. Tracked-in mud maybe. Dried bird shit. Upstairs there would be broken windows or vents. Chimney flues. Plenty of magpie and crow access for generations of brave bird explorers. The pine trees all around the lakeshore might sport nests lined with beak-stripped copper wire, kitchen silverware, shoelaces, fridge magnets.

  In the cold parlour a wide bay window allowed enough light to make shapes. A sofa and heavy easy chairs. A coffee table. Piles of vague junk: bottles, boxes, books. And a brick fireplace, open, lined with black ash. She knelt and put her hand into the maw and felt a cold breeze from the flue. In an iron rack were logs and newspaper, and a box of matches.

  Audrey crumpled newspaper into balls and made a little fire. Fed it with wood splinters and shavings until her fire was large enough to put a proper log onto, then stood and walked back to the couch. Rich orange light made the parlour an island of colour in the night. She watched the fire and felt the heat push into the room, chasing the chill that had worked up inside her from the wind, the concrete cold soaked up through her boot soles that had numbed her toes, her heels and calves. A fuzzy knitted afghan was folded in a corner of the couch and she pulled it around her shoulders, staring into the fire, feeling the heat fill the room, drawing dampness out of the wood and plaster, activating the air. The new light shrank the space around her, turned empty mystery into a room with couches and chairs and a view through the arch of a dark, empty lobby.

  If there were residents, they stayed away. No small, clever locals drew in to the fire: weasels or porcupines burrowed in cupboards, nested in ducts. Badgers and blackbirds dragging straw, mud, burr bristles, pine-cone scales into the warm corners and dark crawl spaces. Leaving lucky stinkweed or thistle seeds around the building to grow out of any cracks they had the gumption to root down into.

  She’d had a Christmas cactus, which sat on the radiator in her room upstairs. She’d had a few plants, she remembered now. She tried to remember the day she left, tried to remember if she’d thought of the plants while packing everything up in a rush. The day she left was a hectic sprawl of memories, but she was pretty certain she didn’t think about the plants. There was a Christmas cactus, and a little ponytail palm, and a sprawly, scrawny thing with pale green heart-shaped leaves. She’d found them around the building in other rooms, and as people came and went she took to watering them and eventually moved them all upstairs to the bedroom.

  They’re dead, Audrey. They died long before the power went out and the heat was shut off. Died as soon as you weren’t around to water them. You left with Wrists and that was it. Maybe if you go up to the bedroom you’ll find some sticks of naked wood in a dried-out clay pot.

  Outside, a coyote howled. Two notes and the swoop in between, the higher pitch a single solid tone. No vibrato, no waver. It echoed and stayed true, like two harmonics on either end of a just-intonated guitar neck. She shrugged out of the afghan onto her feet.

  A second howl answered. Audrey ran into the mezzanine, away from her fire into the dark where she knew the stairs were, and she took the steps blindly. Leaned forward with her hands out, grabbing the upcoming step lips and pulling herself into the dark. She grabbed the bannister to round corners, brass cold in the ball of her palm, and ran up all six flights. At the top she wheezed, her legs and hips burning.

  Upstairs the moonlight was sudden and full. An uncovered concrete floor spread uninterrupted to all four walls, the space broken only by a few skeletal steel wall studs at irregular intervals, too sparse to indicate their never-got-built floor plan. A few sheet-metal pillars, big strange polyhedral trunks stretching from the floor that had been the ceiling up into the new roof above them. All around, ten-foot-high windows showed the full panorama of the long valley outside, aluminum grey around the fat moon. In the distance a tiny blue flame wavered in the sky, the only flake of colour in sight – the flare of the gas plant stack over on the far shore of the lake. Audrey stood at the window, looking, trying to catch a glimpse, watching for any motion. The grey cylinder of a theatre spotlight on a steel truss stood in the corner of the room.

  Another howl went up into the night. Somewhere west, across the lake. But no motion. Then another call, this one farther out into the hill. A wait and then another. Then long quiet. She waited, but the coyotes were quiet and didn’t show themselves.

  She looked down at the beach, at the snow-covered outbuildings and the car, already powder white with snow.

  You should build something into the landscape, Audrey. Go out there and install something on the lakeside. Something permanent, or at least as permanent as this heavy, empty building. A little ‘Audrey Cole Was Here’ marker. Before they send the bulldozers.

  §

  Outside, she picked her way carefully through the snowdrifts with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, down to the lakeshore. The gravel was thick and cold under her boots. She stood at the ice lip of Two Reel Lake. Wind blew off the flat white lake expanse and sanded her with tiny stings of ice.

  She took careful steps with her hands out wide on either side for balance, until the gravel gave way to snow-slick rocks, and she stopped, wrapped her arms around her chest, and stared out over the white lake.

  There was no sign of morning in the thick dark sky. No sign, but soon. It had taken longer to get here than she’d planned. Longer through the narrow forest road out from the village.

  It took you f
our hours to get here, Audrey. It will take you four hours to get back. You’ll be on Highway 2 in the middle of morning traffic. You will be exhausted. You will fight to stay awake.

  She gathered the flattest stones: load-bearing stones and platform stones, and feature stones, flecked and veined, fracture-sided or water-smooth. She stacked up stones into a small inuksuk until the cold pulled the mobility necessary for grasping and stacking from her fingers.

  Audrey stood up to admire her marker, but then she was very, very tired. First with light-headed, risen-too-quickly vertigo, and then with deep, thick exhaustion throughout her body. You can’t drive back, Audrey, she realized. You will fall asleep. You won’t even make it back to the highway. You’ll drift away and slip off the ledge of the road. Clatter through space. Crash and over.

  ‘Car,’ she said, ‘we’ll leave tomorrow. First thing tomorrow after we get some sleep. But we can’t leave tonight because I’ll fall asleep and crash you.’

  Inside she stirred and fed the fire. Curled into the itchy blanket on the couch. Sleep for a few hours, Audrey, and then head back. She scrunched up as small as she could under the blanket. East at Highway 11 to get back to Calgary. Back home.

  East. If you go west you end up in the mountains. You’d end up at the Athabasca River Crossing, halfway between Lake Louise and Jasper. There’s a truck stop. You could stop for a bottle of water and a sandwich and a full tank of gas. You’ll be able to go a long way on a full tank. The Engineers from Munich pride themselves on it.

  Yes, Audrey, say the Engineers from Munich, we pride ourselves on it.

  There’s a lake on the way out there, Abraham Lake, she’d only ever seen it on maps, a long cut just inside the front range, and Highway 11 lips the edge for kilometres. She’d always wondered what colour the top of that lake would be on a winter morning driving west.

  Did the Audi have a cassette deck? It used to be you parked at a truck stop and they had a swivelling wire rack of cassettes by the door. Today’s Top Country Hits, Countin’ Down the Oldies, K-Tel Presents. Swing through them. Odds are against Link Wray, but you never know.

  Audrey, this is a modern luxury car, the Engineers from Munich tell her. It has a CD player. It has bluetooth wireless connections.

  Right, says Audrey. Bluetooth.

  Audrey, a full tank, you can drive all day, regardless of terrain, the Engineers from Munich tell her. Regardless of terrain or inclement weather. You are a thoughtful, defensive driver, always aware of her changing situation on the road, no?

  I am, she tells them.

  Then drive as long as you like. Snow, ice, high mountain roads, rapidly shifting conditions – we built this car for you to overcome any of these situations without material impact to your comfort or experience of the road.

  Thank you, Audrey tells the Engineers from Munich.

  They smile and clank their beer steins. It is nothing, Audrey Cole. Enjoy your drive.

  5

  DECEMBER 2005

  TWO REEL LAKE

  She brought the van around the corner and stopped, staring over the steering wheel. The mid-afternoon sun, early-winter low in the sky, reflected white gold off the windows set into the six red-brick storeys. A huge, incomprehensible building, alone on the lakeside, nowhere near anything, like a turn-of-the-century Canadian Pacific hotel that had wandered off and gotten lost in the distant wilderness. A little cluster of outbuildings huddled near the lake, none of them square to each other, and a houseboat sat two-thirds of the way up on the beach, the bottom few feet of it wrapped in lake ice.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Audrey said, leaning forward, as if being closer to the windshield would help her believe what was on the other side. ‘This isn’t even possible.’

  ‘Well, it’s possible enough to walk into and get a drink,’ said Rodney. Rodney and Dick and Hector got out of the van and started heading toward the front door. Wrists was scribbling on an index card in the seat beside her.

  She tried a few different questions in her head, and eventually she just asked, ‘Why?’

  Wrists shrugged. ‘Alex will give a different answer depending on the time of day you ask him.’

  The heavy wooden door opened into a cavernous mezzanine, floored in grey-veined marble, wrapped in dark-panelled wood, with a staircase wide enough for six people to climb abreast of each other, lined by a brass and wrought-iron bannister that swept up in a long curve to a second-floor balcony. It should have been stately, but the floor was patchworked by mismatched carpets and a green-wire tangle of Christmas lights wrapped around the bannister and railing. Extension cords ran around the room, duct-taped to the floor every few yards. The air smelled like cigarettes and roasting meat, sizzling over a charcoal fire in some hidden kitchen.

  In the middle of the open room, two men stood behind a pair of folding tables. A linebacker-thick man with four days of rough black beard cut up a pineapple with a long-bladed chef’s knife. He had a white apron tied around his bulky middle and held the knife in big hands furred in black hair. The knife blade rang on a bamboo cutting board buried in fruit: pineapples and melons, oranges and lemons, grapefruit and limes, whole or in stages of disassembly, slices, wedges, cubes. Extension cords ran to the table from the walls, and power bars sat on the table, out of which ran blenders and juicers. Bottles with steel speed spouts stuck in their necks: coloured liqueurs, tall clear vodka bottles, and stubby blue and green gin bottles. Lemon zesters and paring knives. Two-litre bottles of tonic and soda water. Champagne bottles, the foil peeled off their necks.

  ‘You put it together like this,’ said the other man. He took a pineapple round and cut it into two crescent halves. He slid one onto a long bamboo skewer, then an orange wedge, then a red maraschino cherry out of a jar.

  ‘When you serve the rum punch, this sits on top of the glass,’ he said. ‘Just lay it right across there. Hey, Rodney,’ he shouted without looking up from the table. ‘You want a rum punch? Koop, make Rodney a rum punch.’

  The big man picked up a bottle of rum in either hand, one white, one dark, and free-poured an up-and-down ounce and a half from each bottle into a tall ceramic tiki mask, a glazed face with ball eyes and an open O mouth. He poured red and orange and green juices out of plastic pitchers and scooped ice in with a steel scoop, splashing out a lot of the just-poured-in juice over the sides. He stirred it all with a steel spoon.

  ‘Sure, but next time put the ice in first,’ said the other man. ‘Come here, Rodney, try this. Put the garnish on it, Koop.’

  Rodney walked across the floor and took the tiki drink from Koop. He lifted the fruit skewer off the top and took a long drink.

  ‘That is a hell of a good drink, Alex,’ he said.

  He was blue: vein-blue through tissue-paper-thin skin under the far-above-him lights. He had a young face changed by deep lines around his mouth and eyes. The blacks and pales, the whites and pinks in the wrong places, displaced by a long succession of sleepless nights. All made paler by a mop of peroxide-blond hair. He wore a white dress shirt over a black T-shirt, half-buttoned with sleeves rolled up, unkempt but not dishevelled, not wrinkled, as if he had put some care into the way he left it half-finished.

  ‘Wrists, Rodney, tell me this is a long-lost daughter.’

  ‘Alex Main, this is our driver, Audrey Cole.’

  He shook her hand. ‘Your driver. Fuck me. Welcome to Two Reel Lake, Audrey Cole. I’m Alex and this is Jerry Kopachek. What’s ours is yours. And not just our rum punches. You guys, get your shit in here. They’ll all start coming up in an hour or so, and I thought it would be cool if you guys were playing here in the foyer when everyone arrives. We’ll prop the door and they’ll hear music when they pull up. Some “Welcome to the Crash Palace” music.’

  ‘It’s going to sound pretty lousy down here, Alex.’

  ‘Come on. Nice high ceiling, lots of space.’

  ‘Hard reflective surfaces. Conflicting echo lengths.’

  ‘You’ll adjust.’

 
‘I need a carpet,’ said Wrists.

  ‘Koop, find Wrists a carpet.’

  ‘Just something that sits in front of a door to set my kit up on, so I’m not sliding around on this stupid floor every kick.’

  ‘Extension cords,’ said Dick.

  ‘We’ll find some. We need these ones to run the blenders. Audrey,’ said Alex, looking up at her, ‘go upstairs – go to the … fourth floor and find yourself a room. When you do, take the picture off the door and that way people will know it’s taken.’

  She pressed the round black elevator button and listened to the car rattle down the shaft toward her. The brass birdcage door slid open and she stood inside. Marked the thickness of the concrete floors as she passed upward from one to the next.

  Audrey felt light-headed. It’s just weird, is all, she told herself. It’s weird and not what you expected. Driving through the landscape north of Nordegg past the village of Two Reel Lake, she’d gotten herself ready for some hidden-away ski resort, someplace that hunters and snowmobilers would spend a week over Christmas. Cedar and stonework in riverbank colours: rust reds and quartz whites. She expected two-handed lumberjack saws and crossed snowshoes mounted on the walls above rock hearths. Black iron wood-burning stoves and exposed timber beams. Painted saw blades: farmhouses in winter, orange light from the window highlighting blue snowdrifts, white snow-frosted pine trees, people on a sleigh ride with single-brush-daub faces. And a room half-full of not-really-interested elk hunters sitting around a fire after a long day out in the cold, not really paying attention to the music.

  The elevator opened on the fourth floor with a ding. Vacuum cleaner brush-marks ran in alternating furrows down the long red carpet in the empty halls. On each door there was a photograph, stuck up with scotch tape or wire-hung in little wooden frames from nails. She walked between the doors looking at them all: flash-glare snapshots of groups, young people with bottles and plastic cups, arms around each other’s shoulders, grainy in the dark. Or young girls and boys smiling against white portrait-studio backdrops. Little black-and-white square portraits clipped out of junior high school yearbooks, with braces and pimples. There were clippings from magazines, heavy metal singers with teased yellow hair, or skiers caught mid-air against brilliant blue skies.