Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  “Diplomacy is another way of lying, John.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  She closed her mouth tightly. Stepped around him and went over to the north window. “This was all water up until 1890. We’re standing on top of the lake from 1889 right now.”

  “David talked about that.”

  “He talked to you a lot.”

  Marianne was staring at him and it made him feel oddly seasick. After a few seconds, she seemed to lose interest in him, and drifted back to the window. It had felt, in that moment, that the truth was going to be towed out of him. He watched her watching the excavation, and he realized that for her, he was no longer in the room.

  THREE

  WHEN THE FUTURE still had David Hollis in it, John and Bridget were living together in a part of town called Riverdale. David had educated them (whether they wanted to be or not) in the history of their neighborhood. He explained to them that at the turn of the century, when the land to the east of the Don River and its deep, almost impassable valley was first developed, the acres of thick forest gave themselves up reluctantly to cutters and road-layers. Access south to the lake was not as direct here as it was from the middle of town, and the promontories not as pleasant. A road had been cut in the valley, but if you wished to live in Riverdale, your horses had to be strong for the uphill slogs to and from town. It was said that if you stood at Yonge and King streets at nightfall you could hear the curses of the tanners and the coopers and the housewives beating their way back into the dark part of town.

  Now, of course, Riverdale was almost gentrified, and the city extended so far east that it changed names several times before it subsided to country again.

  They lived on a pleasant avenue south of Danforth Avenue called Hogarth that went down between a church and a coffee shop — so you could have any part of you woken up, David had once joked — and there was even a good bookstore across the way in case Jehovah or mocha Irish cream failed to do the trick. North of the main thoroughfare, the big houses that had been subdivided into apartments in the fifties and sixties were slowly being returned to their original forms, with two-career families snapping up the properties at second-best prices and refurbishing to their hearts’ contents. But south, the houses were smaller; they were still better earners than sellers, and the area was full of tenants. John and Bridget were on two floors — a half-floor with a bedroom and an office, both with slanted ceilings, and a main floor with a big open plan and a hard bright view of the street. Old chestnuts and oaks and silver maples up and down the street, where Norway maples hadn’t taken hold and sucked off the top of the water table. He loved it there and was happy enough when Bridget suggested her kitchen table and newish Ikea drinking glasses and side tables were probably suitable, and so down into the shared storage area went John’s scratched cobalt blue drinking glasses that he’d bought at Honest Ed’s discount emporium and his mispainted yellow-and-green wood table that he’d carted around from apartment to apartment when he’d gone to university. Bridget had better taste than he — they both admitted this — and when they set up the apartment he felt a little more sophisticated and he liked that.

  “They called it Riverdale, and the Playters even came up here and built a little enclave, so people started buying up the land. Even before there were streets.” David was talking to them both as they buzzed around him, getting the place ready for a dinner party with three couples from the office at the ministry of the attorney general, where Bridget was now articling. He’d begun dropping in on them once or twice a week; he wasn’t one to call beforehand. “I had plans all my life, now I’m flying by the seat of my pants.”

  He was talking to them from the living room as they milled about in the kitchen. “Go see if he wants anything to eat,” Bridget said.

  “Why don’t I bring him some of the soup.”

  She flung a hand out toward the stove to ward him off. “We’re having six people here tonight, John. Make some toast or something.”

  “One-eighth a bowl less each won’t make a difference.” He made his point by ladling out a generous serving for her father and bringing it to him in the living room. She heard her father’s surprised exclamation of gratitude. There was a carpet under the table and she imagined the soup dripping onto it.

  “Come and be closer to us while we cook,” she said, going out and carrying his soup back into the kitchen. Sitting level with him at the kitchen table, John saw the glassiness in David’s eyes, the “drugged” look that Marianne had once or twice referred to, but rather than giving him a soporific expression there was a shine in the man’s eyes, a pleasant, vague sheen of something one might even have been tempted to call health if one didn’t know better. It was, John thought, a luminousness that came from knowing something.

  He listened to David free-associating on some of his pet topics, rates of erosion and bicycle lanes, and at one point, when he was in the middle of a sentence — “This is why you get so many willows at the edges of promontories” — Bridget recoiled from a crisper drawer in the fridge and muttered, “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have no lemons,” she said, and she stared wildly around the room as if she might find one dangling from a corner, an expression of full pre-party dementia on her face. “You go,” she said to John. “Go to the Loblaws on Broadview. They’ll have the big ones.”

  “No problem,” he said, patting David on the forearm. “Hold that thought.”

  “Take him with you,” said Bridget.

  David put his palms flat on the table. “Him?”

  “Sorry, Dad.” She threw John the car keys from the bowl on the sideboard. “Don’t be long.”

  IT TOOK SOME effort to settle David into the passenger seat, and once John let go of him the older man released a long breath. He drove slowly, but David said, “I won’t break if you change lanes.”

  John left him in the car in the no-parking lane beside the doors and ran in to collect the lemons. A quivering pyramid of them stood at the head of the fruit-and-vegetable aisle, glowing unnaturally. He couldn’t recall if it was oranges or lemons that were artificially colored before being sent to market — maybe it was both. Oranges were green, he thought, as green as limes. He carried six lemons in the crook of his arm to the shortest queue, his thoughts jumping. He couldn’t see the car from the checkout. He should have brought David in; it was an insult to leave him in the car like a dog. The clatter of cash register drawers was getting to him. He strained to see out the front of the store.

  “Sir?”

  He put his purchase on the conveyor. If someone tries to give me a ticket, David will probably attempt to move the car himself, won’t he?

  “One ninety-eight.”

  How had David got to their house, anyway?

  “Three-oh-two your change. Your lemons, sir?”

  “Right. Thank you.”

  Back in the no-parking lane, there was a ticket under the windshield wiper, but David was gone.

  “Hey!” he shouted as if he’d been robbed. “David!” Spinning in a circle, panicked and sweating, already deeply into the frantic conversation he would have with Bridget — “You’re the one who insisted I take him!” / “I didn’t insist, John, I suggested” — but then he saw David in the checkout line of the little liquor store attached to the Loblaws. He was reaching forward and holding on to the counter, almost leaning against the man in line ahead of him. John pushed the ticket back under the wiper and went into the store.

  “Yeah, we got a ticket,” David said. “I would have run out —”

  “What are you doing in here?”

  David held up a mickey of Jack Daniel’s. “Will you begrudge me a drink?”

  “I don’t think you should get that. Come back to the house and have a beer or something.” David shook his head. “Won’t that interfere with the medicine you’re taking? I mean, it’s not my place to —”

  “No, it isn’t,” David said. “Go wait in the car.
”

  Maybe it was eminently sensible. To drink in the face of dying. Go ahead, John thought, take that old medicine.

  David lurched back to the car and directed John out of the parking lot. He asked him to go south, and they drove to the tail end of a forgotten street. John imagined that the squat red-brick buildings were probably lofts now, or were about to be. David passed John the mickey and asked to be taken out of the car, and John put the little bottle into his back pocket and helped him out. He held the weight of David’s body in his arms until he could feel the man’s spine engage with gravity, and then followed him to a strip of grass at the top of a hill that went down fifteen feet to the parkway. It was a desolate place, with the sound of cars sweeping by in both directions. Across the asphalted valley the city was a flat mirage of towers above a hem of trees. David descended the incline a couple of feet, standing high above the traffic, tilted back to stay plumb, and John could see his pale white scalp under wisps of hair at his crown. David pointed to where a pedestrian bridge spanned the Bayview Extension. “That was the edge of town for sixty years — the necropolis is right behind those trees. And you go down here” — his arm tracked slowly south — “and that was the middle of town. I guess it still is. Generally, you moved into the necropolis by the time you were fifty-five. That was old age. That makes me a lucky man, doesn’t it?”

  “If you feel lucky.” John waited a moment, making an effort to see the place as David was seeing it, to grasp the connections. “We should go back.”

  “I’d like a drink.” He turned to see whether John would dispute drinking out there in the open, but John drew the bottle out of his back pocket and cracked the cap in his fist. “You can make the first toast,” David said.

  John thought: Life has not made me smart enough to know how to deal with a situation like this. Does one give a man with a degenerative motor disease a shot of hard liquor while he is teetering on the side of a hill overlooking traffic? He passed the bottle to David. “To the future?” he said.

  “A brave toast to a dying man.”

  “Something else then . . .”

  “No,” David said. “That’s good. Thank you for it.” He raised his arm stiffly, weak even with the faint weight of a thirteen-ouncer in his hand. “The future, whatever it is.”

  “Whatever it is,” said John. He listened to the whiskey plunge in David’s throat, and then accepted the bottle from him. David was staring out at the city, his eyes blank.

  “The future is nothing, though,” he said. “The present is nothing. It’s already gone.” He stumbled, turning for the bottle, and John caught him by the elbow. “I’m not drunk.”

  “I know.”

  “Yet.” John passed him the whiskey and David drank, more deeply this time. “What do you imagine the average person thought about? Back then?”

  “Probably what we think about now,” said John. “Food. Work. Sex.”

  David considered that for a moment, shaking his head a little, although John thought it might have been a tremor. “Maybe it’s a mistake to think they were like us. We have no idea, really. What they were like when they were alone, how their shoes felt on their feet. How food tasted to them. No one cares about this. They want a list of wars and casualties, big numbers, historical roll call.” The whiskey went into him like water. He held the bottle tight to his chest. “Do you think you’re awake, John?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Aren’t we just dreaming? All of this? Living in some agreed-upon fantasia?”

  “If we are, then I guess I’m asleep.”

  “Would you wake up if you could?”

  David was staring at him, his gaze flicking from one eye to the other. “I don’t know,” said John. “I like the dream I’m having.”

  “Good answer,” David said, his smile lopsided. “Plus, it’s hard to get back to sleep.” He considered his feet, pushed the toe of one shoe into the yielding dirt. “My wife humors me, you know? And your fiancée thinks I’m a fool who should be dying in bed.”

  John shifted back up the hill a bit and found himself suddenly looming over David.

  “That’s not what Bridget thinks. She’s just worried you’re exerting yourself too much.”

  “And what do you think?”

  The specters of the three Hollis women stood behind him, waiting for him to deliver the company line. But John said, “If I were you, I’d want a drink and whatever freedom I could get my hands on.”

  “There you go.” Tilting the bottle into his mouth. They stood gazing down at the traffic, the silver-and-gold flashing cars speeding by in packs where salmon had once run.

  “Should we go back?” The man’s eyes were wet. “David?”

  “Never mind me.” He poured out the rest of the bottle into the grass and turned away from the scene. “You’re a good kid.”

  He’d never been called that in his life. A good kid. An unexpected boon to be loved, after a childhood of dutiful care under his aunt Cecilia’s roof. Her family had done their best to enfold him in their lives, but he was an only child with dead parents, a cursed child, and he knew he was a raw wound in their home. He’d never dreamed of another family.

  He watched the only true father of his life struggle back toward the car, and after a suitable moment of leaving him to his dignity, John stepped back down into the grass and put his arm around David’s waist. He brought him to the passenger door, and braced him as he opened it. David’s skin smelled like wet cardboard. A death smell. John’s cellphone rang and both men looked at each other with dread.

  “You answer that and we’re both in deep shit.”

  “It’ll be worse if I don’t.” He let it ring twice more, then opened it. “Hi.”

  It was Marianne. He passed the phone over with as apologetic an expression as he could and David put the cell up against his ear.

  “How did I get here?” he said to John.

  “I drove you.”

  “There you go, he drove me.” He listened, apparently bored. “No, I walked to Bridget’s.”

  The word walked erupted from the phone and David passed it back to John.

  “Mrs. Hollis?”

  “Put him back on.”

  “It is springtime,” David said to no one in particular.

  “John, you put him in a cab right now, do you hear me?”

  He felt the blood pounding in his rib cage. It made him feel faintly sick. “I’ll drive him,” he said.

  “People should be out smelling the flowers, Marianne!” David was trying to turn in a wide circle, like they did in some commercials, but he was beginning to gasp for air. “Not being prostrate. In bed, dying. But . . .” He stopped and leaned over, holding his thighs. “If it’s any consolation, I didn’t walk all the way.”

  Marianne hollered into John’s ear. “I don’t care how far you fucking walked!”

  “David, I think you should —”

  “Oh, give me the bloody phone.” He snatched the cell away and John stood aside, running his hand over his scalp. His forehead was slick. “I didn’t walk, okay? Are you crazy? You think I could walk all the way from . . . what? A nice lady picked me up. She gave me candy and I got into her car.” John could hear Marianne roaring on the other end of the connection. “You do not get to tell me how to spend my time on earth,” he said. “Do you understand me? No, I won’t calm down. Yes . . . yes, I know, but I’m not going to disintegrate out in the spring air! Well, better that than rotting in a mechanical goddamned bed. . . . If you’re planning on ditching me at home with nothing but a television and a pill-holder to mark the time, then you’re damn well right I’ll be making my own fun.” He snapped the cell shut, then leaned over and put a hand on his thigh, laying the phone in John’s palm. “She wants me in a cab.”

  “I told her I’d take you.”

  “Not if you cherish your life.” He turned his grayish, gleaming eyes to him. “I’m to die like a moth in a bottle, did you know that?”

 
John offered a half-nod.

  “Should I sit at home?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was shaking his head, snapping his jaw for air. “I’m awake,” he said. “I’m awake and I’m alive, and it hurts like hell.”

  FOUR

  MARIANNE OPENED THE door for him and stood there momentarily, looking at him with — if anything — amusement. It was the day after his first visit, and yet he saw she wasn’t the least bit surprised to see him again. She walked back into the room. “So?” he said.

  “So, you’re impervious to hints.”

  “I mean them.”

  She waved a hand in the air. “Oh, them. They dig. Dig, dig, dig. Busy as beavers.” She was wearing a robe she’d brought from home, and walked barefoot on the hotel carpet.

  He sat on the end of the unused bed. Housekeeping had more or less been barred, but apart from the clementine peels under the beds, the room was still clean.

  “I see the trucks making new groupings in the back there,” she said, and he thought she was deigning to make conversation with him. “They must be getting ready to pour.” Her shoulders went up, bearing the weight of her body as she leaned into the glass. “I read all about construction sites,” she said. “They’ll put down an iron grid first. Then they’ll drown it in cement, and that will be that.”

  “Why don’t you go down and talk to them?”

  “And say what? Dig a little more for me? Just in case?”

  “Someone might be willing to investigate a bit. It wouldn’t harm anyone to ask.”

  She regarded him with mock pity. “John, if I go down there and they get one whiff of me, they’ll pour the concrete that instant. You think they want someone making a claim on their dirt?”