Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  He’d slowed the car to give David time. Time to look around and see the place behind which everything that mattered to him flickered. Almost everything David told him John already knew, but hearing it the same way twice reaffirmed the presence of that world. Now David was telling him (again) that the land they were on had been built of garbage. All through the end of the previous century, they’d trucked soil and stone and unwanted building materials down past Front Street and dumped it into the lake, and the city had pushed forward onto it, as if it were walking onto a bridge as it was being built.

  “The city grew by five hundred meters,” John said. “Right?”

  “About that. Maybe closer to seven hundred.”

  “Why do you think, in all the time your guy was in Toronto after his boat went down, did he not find some way to get that box out of the lake? I mean, the wreck must have been sitting there in the harbor. How deep could it have been?”

  “Impossible to know how deep it was,” said David. John took his eyes off the road long enough to look at Bridget’s father — his eyes were bright, as if his face had been overexposed in some chemical bath, and of course it had been: the medicine that flowed through David’s veins could probably change your name.

  “Maybe he was lying,” said John. “Maybe there were no pictures. Or boat. Maybe there was no man, even.”

  “There was a boat, John. You traced it in the records for me.”

  “I know.”

  They came out onto Lakeshore. A hulking black Russian ship was taking on sugar at the bottom of Yonge Street. They were driving now over the old wharves; the splintered remains were mixed in with crushed stone and old planking that lay under this part of the city. The Jarvis, Brown’s, and Evan’s wharves — these places where almost everything the city had worn or eaten or survived had landed. Brown’s Wharf was where the Commodore Walker had been swamped by the worst storm in a century — so violent, it had severed the harbor’s ancient peninsula and created the Toronto Islands. All of it, all of this unquestionable fact, swam through John’s mind.

  “If you want to ask me a question, you should ask it,” said David at last.

  “Will you let me take you home?”

  “I don’t think that was the question.”

  “If you come home, I’ll take it as your answer.”

  David shifted in his seat. He had to use both hands to push himself upright against the seat back. “I’m not ashamed of myself, John. Or anything I’ve done. You can’t be direct with people if there’s something important you want them to understand. If you say to them, There is something here of great value, they will stare at you until you produce it, and then they will wait for you to name it and catalog it and square it away for them. But if you say, I believe there may be something here, then there is a chance, however faint, that they will want to look to it for themselves . . .”

  “So there’s no diary. Just say that to me.”

  “There is a vast part of this city with mouths buried in it, John. Mouths capable of speaking to us. But we stop them up with concrete and build over them, and whatever it is they wanted to say gets whispered down empty alleys and turns into wind. People need to be given a reason to listen.”

  John swung the car across the opposite lane and stabbed it into the curb facing the wrong way. A cold wave had passed over his scalp. They were now at the base of the Harbour Light Hotel. A path beside the hotel led to the lake and the ferry docks. “You’ve given them a reason to care even less. That’s what your legacy is going to be, David. A lie in an empty hole.”

  “They’re going to find something there. And it will matter to them simply because they chose to look. Something different but worthwhile.”

  John stared out the windshield at the road curving along the lake. He’d had the instinct, even as a small child, that the world may be made up of things you cannot see, people who are gone, knowledge you may not speak of. And if that was most of it, then the day-to-day was just skipping along on the surface of an accord, an agreement about time and place.

  He had his hand on the seat-belt catch, but he moved it to the door and pushed the lock button, not taking his eyes off the middle distance. “Let me take you back to Marianne. Please.”

  David unlocked the car from his side and pushed the door open. He said, “Don’t get out,” and a moment later John felt David’s hand, light against his face.

  TWO

  THE HOTEL DOORMAN stood at his post, the pane of glass a cold white flare. Marianne pushed through into the light, John behind her. He nodded at the man in his uniform, in league, as ever, with the fallen world of helpers. Marianne’s wide back blocked out the sun beyond her, a late-fall sun with a hint of the last of the good weather in it. The sweet leaf-rotted air was disorienting, its crispness so unlike the stale air of the room. She stood in it, not moving, and John thought she’d suffered a sudden return to her senses. He even prepared himself to give solace, to answer What am I thinking? with solicitous murmurs. They’d go back to the room and he’d help her pack it up. But then she pushed on, crossing as the light turned yellow, as ever a woman out of phase with the rest of the world.

  “Wait up,” he said.

  “Keep up.”

  “Where is it you’re going? The site is huge.”

  “I’ll start with the closest gate,” she said. He imagined tugging on an invisible leash to haul her in. If she showed up at the site and started flinging commands left and right, they’d have the cops on her instantly. At the very least, he should be able to control her most immediate impulses. This was a talent he’d never developed with Bridget, who wore her impulse receptors on the outside where they could be activated by passing breezes.

  “Marianne? We should plan what we’re going to say.”

  “We’re going to ask them why they’ve stopped the excavation.”

  “Why should they tell us anything? It’s a private site, they can do whatever they like — please wait for a moment.”

  She stopped short and almost seemed to recoil backwards. The hem of her coat swirled around her legs. “Look, this is what I’ve been waiting for, for two weeks in that stinking room.”

  “A few more minutes won’t make a difference.”

  “They promised to act responsibly if anything of interest came up; the dig got delayed for two months while citizens’ groups got them to agree to a code of conduct.”

  “You don’t really think that means anything, do you?”

  “It better.”

  People crossing with the green light passed on either side of them. His mind sidestepped the problem of the moment and saw through the eyes of others that a young man was arguing with his mother. “Listen,” he said, bringing his attention back to Marianne, “just think — if we go over there and give them any clue that we’re interested in whatever that thing is, they’ll shut the whole place up and start digging double time. We have to be curious bystanders.” Two little girls, twins in white coats, drifted past them like falling stars.

  Marianne dismissed his concerns with a wave of the hand.

  The night before, they’d watched the two workers track around the object with flashlights and it immediately had confirmed for her that this was the beginning of the truth appearing, this was the utterance she’d waited for. They stood in the windows watching, but nothing had happened. After another hour, the woman who’d been operating the backhoe switched off the machine’s headlights and she and her partner trudged back to one of the two trailers at the edge of the site. They both emerged without their hard hats and reflective pinnies and went out through the gate, and as the next shift started no one went near the stilled backhoe or approached the object in the dirt. Marianne told John he should go home, that nothing would happen until the main superintendent came in at eight or nine the following morning, and they could wait until then. She would not agree to call the historical society first: she wanted control, wanted to be the first one to speak her terms so that even if some group took over th
e investigation of the object, her desires would be on record.

  As midnight came and went, they stared down at the edge of the object as moonlight played over it, picked it out like the rim of a huge cup and gave it a dull glow. Marianne muttered, “My God,” and shook her head with slow wonder. “That’s really it.”

  She continued toward the Lakeshore gate, walking past the huge hockey greats rendered in unlikely pastels. At street level, the whole construction site was much larger, like a walled city. Even the gate was not a simple opening: there were two walkways on either side of a large steel-post door reinforced with fencing, and a man stood beside a windowed box signing people and trucks in and out. Even approaching at the tightest angle to the wall, they could not see the southwestern corner of the excavation, although John marked that none of the motion on the site was directed over there. Little meshed windows were cut into the wall every fifteen feet or so, and he peered through them in passing, seeing busy tableaux beyond, the moonscape of digging and scraping, machines scattered purposefully, the perspective changing in each cut-out.

  Looking through holes in other construction walls over the years, John had had the thought that buildings seemed to emerge out of a process of discontinuous specialties. In all the buildings he’d watched go up, the likelihood of a finished structure with working electrical outlets and stairs that led to the right floors always seemed like a stroke of luck. How could the guy with the nail gun on ground level be making the same building as the guy sixty feet away and two floors up pulling a pallet of glass through a gaping hole? And where was all the paper, all the maps and instructions telling everyone step by step, diagram by diagram, what to do? He’d thought of the time-lapse film he’d once seen of a dead fish being eaten clean to the bone by bugs: that film in reverse — bone fulfilled with muscle and flesh — was how the making of a building appeared to him. Fanciful. Impossible.

  They were at the gate. “We’re just curious citizens,” John whispered urgently to her. “We’re only going to get one first chance here, Marianne.”

  “I’m doing the talking,” she replied.

  They waited as a worker handed a clipboard to drivers and walk-throughs, checked ID cards, and issued stickers. He was in his late thirties, but he wore braces on his teeth. John wondered if the company had posted him here for maximum humiliation. Neither John nor Marianne seemed in the least official, so the man ignored them. Finally, Marianne stepped right up to the vehicle gate and looked through. “Can I help you?” he said.

  “Yes.” She stepped back. “My husband’s in there. He left his cellphone at home.”

  The gateman inspected his clipboard. “What shift is he? What’s his name?”

  “He’s actually doing an inspection. He’s a representative of one of the rights-holders’ groups and he’s supposed to call in some specs, but I have his cellphone. Well, John here has it.” She shot him a look, and John jiggled his empty hand in his coat pocket.

  “He has a name, though?”

  “Daniel Hass. He’s with Hass, Logan, and Munny.” It was not safe to be around an inventive person; John knew this about himself and perhaps he even already knew it about Marianne, but it surprised him unpleasantly. Marianne had leaned in and was speaking quietly to the gateman. “His visit is supposed to be under the radar, if you know what I mean. I’ll just go in and give it to him.”

  “He still had to check in.” The guy was flipping pages, going back and forth between two to see if the name popped out at him. “Closest I got here is Danny Ng, but he’s a crane operator.”

  “That’s probably him.”

  He closed the clipboard pages and stared at Marianne. They weren’t going anywhere, and now if they showed their faces here again, someone in one of the trailers with a gun in his belt would be getting a call. “Your husband shows up incognito at construction sites pretending to be a Chinaman, huh? What’s he do, squint?”

  “Do you see any cranes on the site yet, young man? Why would there be a crane operator showing up to work when there’s nothing to be lifted or laid? Explain that.”

  “I don’t know, ma’am, but if you want to leave your husband’s cell with me, I’ll make sure Mr. Ng gets it on a break. How’s that.” He’d crossed his arms now, and would unleash his best language pretty soon. John had stopped listening. Instead, he stared despairingly through the gate at the measured chaos beyond. Most of the work was still dirt disposal, but there were a few men going around with cables or long iron shafts. Things were going to be put in their right places, in preparation for the pour. They’d lay a gridwork of shafting through concrete posts first, then pour the foundation, flowing it through the grid for interior stability. Everything moved at an easy pace, despite the deadlines and a late start. It came to him that this was just one hole of many hundreds these men and women would make and fill in their lifetimes. What was here or not here would never matter much, or for long, to them. The appearance of a strange hunk of wood had no weight at all: uncovered and filled in, it was so much waste no matter its shape. He and Marianne were the only people who cared at all about this insignificant thing buried in the ground.

  Marianne had crossed her arms now as well, full engagement with the enemy. How many times had he seen her like this at the Hollis house, mad at someone and puffed up like a goalie. She could be immovable if she wished to be, but the gatekeeper was having none of it, this woman was staying out. It was bullshit that there was any kind of expert disguised as an Asian taking notes somewhere on the grounds anyway; he’d know. But he’d also seen this type before. She wasn’t going anywhere unless she won something. This talent he had, for running the right kind of interference, was surely why he was at the gate, not because his dental hardware would make him a laughingstock. He switched on his walkie-talkie and murmured something into it. The thing cleared its throat at him. He showed them his back and talked quietly, listening to the squawky replies. John watched the man give a good show — nodding, protesting, acquiescing — but he was sure that he was talking to static.

  “The super says he’s expecting a walk-through later today, not this morning. So maybe you got your husband’s schedule mixed up. He’s probably at home right now wondering where he left his cellphone.”

  Marianne nodded. “I think your super’s wrong.”

  “Yeah, he wasn’t sure,” said the gateman. “He told me to give you his card and you could call in if you liked.”

  THE NIGHT BEFORE, John had got back to the apartment well after midnight, his mind pulsing with the image of the bone-colored shape in the dirt. Bridget was asleep, the sound of her long breaths intermingled with the dog’s. He was cold, and he unwrapped a log to put in the fireplace and sat on the futon-couch waiting for it to catch and glow. After a while, it started to burn with that slight odor of creosote that he had come to like: it reminded him of lovemaking. The little store-bought logs would burn for the better part of a night, and the scent of their bodies and the fire was a uniquely private thing to him.

  Bailey came out of the bedroom and stretched her front legs, then stood at his feet, shaking her rear end. The constancy of dogs. He patted the couch and she leapt up, turned around twice, and settled against his leg on her side. He put a hand down and held her ribs and belly.

  When they’d first taken the apartment, the dog had urinated in all its corners and they’d discussed getting rid of her. A good rug her parents had given them was another of Bailey’s favorite spots and now the tassels at one end had been stained a stiff yellow and would not come clean no matter the effort. But it was the dog that had actually brought them together, one afternoon in a park (how many times had they told the story entitled “The Dog Introduced Us”?), and sending her away would have felt like daring the gods. That first sense of permanence. Choosing the hard path meant, to him, that they could weather a lot. They could deal with her mother’s truculence toward him, her father’s illness, his own general sense of homelessness, which intensified even as he appeared to all their f
riends as more settled than he’d ever been. A job, a girlfriend, a home, a real life in the making . . .

  Even so, he couldn’t ignore a sensation of restlessness that had possessed him since David’s death. He went back endlessly to the image of the man making his slow, deliberate way to the turnstiles at the docks, fishing clumsily in his back pocket for his wallet. Why was it that of all the moments of that strange morning, it was witnessing David following the rules of common commerce that stayed with him, that wounded him? That he’d had to pay to get onto the ferry where he’d spend his last few moments on earth . . . shouldn’t that trip have been free? John felt he should have gotten out of the car, even if he’d been told not to. Either dragged David back against his will or gotten on the boat with him. Why pretend that he was not a full accomplice, no matter the outcome? Not having followed David in reality, John found he was following him now in a waking dream of that morning that went on and on. He was on the boat, ceaselessly. Looking over into the blue-black water and thinking about what was down there now.

  In the last few weeks, his distraction had finally breached Bridget’s force field. “Where are you right now?” she’d asked him.

  “You want latitude and longitude?”

  “Just a planet will do.”

  To these anxious questionings he’d reply by pulling her closer, or laughing, or turning it somehow back on her, but privately his blood would go surging in his chest.

  And where were they when this had happened most recently? It might have been last weekend. Her hair blowing across her brown eyes. A little tin cup of gelato in front of her. Their coats still on even though they were sitting inside. “Are you angry with me?” she asked.

  “I’m furious,” he said, smiling broadly.

  “The new John Lewis.” She tilted the melting remains of her ice cream into her mouth. “Inscrutable and entertaining all at once. Should I get used to it?”

  Yes, he thought now, his hand on the dog’s belly, his fingers moving gently up and down with her breath. Whatever “it” was, they might both have to get used to it.