Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  He heard Bridget throw off the covers and pad out of the bedroom. Her eyes were shadowed; she was asleep. He’d seen her do this before when he’d stayed up in the kitchen reading at the table or trying to write something — this was her animal self: beautiful, uncivilized. The person he’d meet for mere seconds if he woke her up too early, or on these rare midnight sleepwalks when he himself wasn’t asleep. Once, before her father died, he’d followed her out and stopped her on the way back to the bedroom and kissed her, slipping his hand down the back of her pajamas, and she’d returned his kiss deeply, never waking. Now she passed across the hall, the firelight playing against her, and went into the bathroom, where she sat and peed with the door open, and then plodded back, facing him, her eyes open but unseeing. The dog raised her head briefly, scenting her, then dropped it back down and he was alone again.

  He fell asleep on the couch, his head slumped against the back. He woke up before sunrise with a stiff neck and drool on his cheek, and the dog was back in the other room under the covers. He went to the bed and got in, folded himself against Bridget. When he woke again, she had already left for work and the dog was stretched against his chest, her back against his ribs. The clock said 7:30 — she’d risen without waking him. He could only imagine what she must have thought, going to bed alone, perhaps aware of him in the night, out there where he did not belong, then finding him insensate beside her in the morning. He got up, washed, made a coffee for himself, and brought out a sheaf of paper he’d started keeping in a junk drawer below the cutlery and the tea towels. He read the pages over and drank his coffee. He made a correction here and there, but otherwise felt that increasingly familiar trance overtake him in the presence of those words, this thing emerging from darkness. An hour passed. He was beginning to discover what Howard must once have felt: something blossoming under his hands. And a sense of betrayal, as he turned his attention away from the world he supposedly lived in.

  He was back at the hotel by ten. “You’re late,” said Marianne, taking her coat off the back of the door and bodying him out into the hallway. “Let’s get down there.” He went and pushed the button for the elevator.

  THREE

  TORONTO’S CENTRAL REFERENCE library had been built during a dark moment in the civic architecture. Made of red brick and glass on a design that seemed to be dreaming of cinder block, the structure rose on its street corner in ever-expanding layers, like an inverted rice paddy. Whatever professional life John had had, he’d spent it in this hangar for books and he was used to it, but he hated it just the same.

  Marianne was an interested amateur, which was worse than just being a hobbyist, and John had already, even before that morning, intuited that she would almost certainly and by instinct do the wrong thing. Her failure to outsmart a grown man with braces on his teeth was confirmation enough. If people with professional interests weren’t involved soon, she’d lose whatever chance she had to explore what was in that pit. He went up to the main reference desk and Helene was there, as ever in her thin pink sweater, in front of the computer, staring at the screen over the tops of her glasses. She greeted him and examined his accession slips. “Howard’s changing tack, is he?”

  “It’s not for him this time,” he said. “I’m looking into a few things for someone else.”

  She riffled the little papers. “Shipping records and early photography . . . and council Hansard?”

  “I think the subject of local heritage laws came up in the council. I just want to see what they actually said.”

  “Well, it’s a change of pace, at least. A couple minutes, John,” she said, and went back into the stacks, what the workers there called the tombs.

  He sat down at one of the scarred wooden tables near her desk, and cast a look around at the others bent over books and papers. There was always the feeling here that those people who haunted libraries were all working together on some mysterious work of revelation that, once completed, would blow the lid clean off reality. He knew that the man sitting at the table near the back wall, Yuri, was working on something like that, a book that cross-referenced the Old Testament with the Al-Khwarizmi’s arithmetics. He’d once asked the old Jew a question about the Zohar and gotten a wide-eyed lecture about opening the heavenly guf and letting the bad spirits drop down. “These spirits will change the nature of our rational numbers,” he’d said, and John avoided him after that.

  Helene brought his books and set them down lightly. One of John’s searches had brought up city council Hansard for the second half of 1995, but he had no idea where in the volume he should start. The definition of an awning had been hotly debated in March, it appeared. Could a huge papier-mâché nose over a door be considered an awning? Yes, it could. He lifted about five pounds of pages and pushed them over. In July, it was determined that there would be a public competition to name a new park to be built on Augusta Street in Kensington Market. He’d been down that street many times and couldn’t picture a park at all. The books contained all the minutiae of the day-to-day workings of the city, but there was nothing, as far as he could tell, that could predict the fate of a boat lying in the ground.

  He pushed the book away and drew a history of photography toward him. In the period David had been interested in, they’d figured out how to print a photograph on just about anything. Pictures could be taken quickly, and the chemicals weren’t as deadly — the previous chapter had described men dying of mercury poisoning, and pariah photographists with hands and mouths turned blue from silver. A small outfit, or even a single man, could have photographed an entire city — David’s monograph hadn’t been far-fetched on that account — but the likelihood that the man would have shipped his glass plates anywhere, never mind England, was laughable. The plates were expensive, fragile, and reusable, and a person could easily get a thick stack of paper positives out of one glass negative. If David’s diarist had existed, his entire portfolio would have fit into a large envelope. It was a detail no one — not even David’s academic tormentors — had caught, and seeing it himself made John feel that he held David’s fate in his hands.

  He stretched his neck, feeling utterly lost. He should have gone to the historical board, or right to city hall, but he was worried he’d somehow set something in motion that Marianne would murder him for. His eyes caught an older man’s across the table. John had never seen him before and he gave him what he hoped was not a pained smile.

  “1995, huh?” said the man. “They lost their minds in October.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Bike paths. For a few days there it sounds like punches were going to fly.” The man scanned the spines of the four volumes. “You don’t have October.”

  “No,” said John. “I’m not sure I need it.”

  “What is it you’re seeking?”

  John flipped randomly, hoping somehow an answer would appear, but the page he turned to presented only a swarm of numbered subparagraphs, and the word WHEREAS, which appeared boldly here and there. “I don’t know how to describe it,” he said.

  “Maybe you have the wrong years?”

  “You don’t know how right you are.”

  The man half-stood and tilted his head so he could read what was in front of John. “Disposal’s a huge issue,” he said. “That what you want?”

  The page John had turned to was concerned about subcontracting for waste disposal. Suddenly he remembered the mayor on television talking about barges carrying trash across the lake. “No,” he said. “I’m actually interested in . . . I don’t know what you’d call it. Local archaeology.”

  “Ah!” The man retracted into his chair. His exclamation was judged too exuberant by a woman one table over and she gave him a forceful little shh. He lowered his voice. “So old liniment bottles, that sort of thing.”

  “Maybe,” said John. He leaned on his forearms. “Like, for instance, what happens if you decide to build a new concert hall or something, and while you’re digging the hole, you find, like, an old statue or some
thing? What happens?”

  “You dig faster and hope nobody noticed it.”

  “What’s supposed to happen?”

  The man glanced over at the woman behind the desk. “Is this what you asked Helene for and she gave you orders in council for 1995?”

  “One of the things.”

  “Maybe’s she’s in on it.”

  “What?”

  The man got up and strode to the stacks facing the table area. He ran his finger down a list of subjects posted on a shelf end, moved to his left, read another list, and then confidently disappeared between two rows of shelves. When the man stood, John noticed ink streaks on his pant legs. He waited for him at the end of the row and shortly he returned with a slender unmarked book bound in red boards. “Anyway,” the man said, handing John the book, “it’s not even up to the city. This is the Heritage Act — it’s a provincial bill. It sets out what’s protected in the province, whether it’s on provincial, municipal, or private property. If you want to know the truth, it’s a toothless bill and most of it’s about how many appeals you get if you really, really want to tear something down. March of progress and all that, good luck if you’re an Indian burial ground or a nice old house standing on some expensive dirt.”

  Now patrons in the carrels near the half-wall overlooking the atrium were casting glances their way. “How do you know all this?” John asked.

  “I’m a regular.”

  John nodded. “I’ve never seen you here.”

  The man leaned in toward him. “I’m going to run for mayor,” he whispered.

  John nodded. “Okay. But now let’s say this thing’s a boat,” he said. “Something that was originally in the lake.”

  “You found one? That’s good — if it’s in the water —”

  “What if it’s in the ground?”

  The man pulled his head back, confused. “In the ground?” He thought about it for a minute. “If it’s wooden and still in one piece then it’s probably too new to be of interest, and if it’s old it’s probably too rotten to be of use. Now, if you found a German U-boat, then you could probably get someone to take a gander. You got a U-boat?”

  “No,” said John. “I don’t even know what it is. But I guess — from what you’re saying — that an old wooden boat would probably not be enough to get work stopped on a construction site.”

  “I doubt a four-foot piece of the True Cross would be enough to stop work on a site in this city. You find a three-week-old potato chip in Montreal, they raise a velvet rope around it and have a minute of silence. But here, no. If you’re hoping for a work stoppage, you’ll need a lawyer.” He waved the Heritage Act in the air. “This thing doesn’t make any noise without a mouthpiece attached to it.”

  “I get it.” He looked down at the thin red book. “Um, what is it, exactly, that Helene’s in on?”

  “Helene?”

  “You said she was ‘in’ on something.”

  “Who’s Helene?”

  John nodded without looking up at the man again. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks for your help.” Libraries and madhouses. He walked away. He knew a lawyer, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t be happy to volunteer her services. As he descended the carpeted stairs, the capsule elevators across the atrium rode the rails in the wall like two pills sliding down a huge throat.

  MAIL IN HER mouth, cloth bag under one arm, and a knee up against the door, Bridget keyed the lock to the apartment and pushed in. He could see from her instant turning toward the bedroom that she’d expected to arrive home to empty rooms, and John stood in the kitchen, stirring a pot of sauce as quietly as he could, hoping she wouldn’t jump out of her skin. He heard her singsong greeting to the dog — Where’s my little girl? How come you didn’t come out? — and he thought to himself, Because Dad’s been home for an hour and all is well with her world. He dinged the side of the pot quietly and she called out from the room, “Hello?” with just an edge of fear in her voice.

  “It’s me,” he said. She stepped into the hall that led to the kitchen. “I guess you weren’t expecting me.”

  “The past week or so I seem to be living here alone.” She went back into the bedroom. “I did your laundry.”

  “I made you supper.”

  “I guess we’re even.”

  She came and kissed him, but the tone of her voice told him his endless day wouldn’t be over anytime soon. After the morning spent trying to rein in Marianne, and the afternoon at the library, he felt that nothing would have pleased him more than to simply board something bound for any other place. But instead he’d collected the makings for dinner and come home. Bridget went and changed into jeans and a white T-shirt, then stood beside the fridge with her hands tucked into her back pockets.

  “So, what’s the special occasion?”

  “It’s just supper.”

  “Well, now I don’t believe you.”

  She sat down and he went back to his burners. He poured the pasta from the colander into the pot of sauce and kept the heat on it. Ghosts of her cooking flocking near — she’d taught him to let the pasta cook in its sauce.

  “Knife on the right,” she said. He looked over his shoulder and she was shifting cutlery around. “You’re still a bachelor in the kitchen after all these years.”

  “And the plates?”

  “Those are fine. But we have proper spaghetti bowls, you know.”

  He brought the pot over and dished them each a serving. His movements felt artificial, as if someone were directing him in a scene — a bad domestic moment from one of Howard’s plays. She watched the food. “That smells good. How’d you learn to make this sauce?”

  “Osmosis,” he said.

  She picked up her fork and paused, then tilted her chair back and got them both spoons from the drawer. “How did you spend your day?”

  “The library.”

  “Something for Howard?”

  “Various things.”

  She squinted at him. “Uh-huh. What’s going on, John? You’re talking like you’re afraid I might actually be listening.”

  “I’m sorry.” The pasta and the different colors on his plate struck him as too complicated. “I’ll start again.” She twirled a few strands of pasta onto her fork. “Can I ask you something?”

  She held up her hand and displayed her engagement ring. “I already said yes, but you can ask again.”

  “Why haven’t you gone to see your mother?”

  “You want to ask me about my mother?” She lowered her hand to the table. “You were in the room when I attempted that, remember? You were the one who told me to leave her alone.”

  “Not permanently.”

  “It’s been, what? Ten days?”

  “You’ve turned your back.”

  “I haven’t turned my back. Don’t say that.”

  “You don’t talk about her.”

  Bridget slowly turned some spaghetti on her fork, and he watched the strands meld together into a ball. “Just because I’m not talking about her doesn’t mean she isn’t on my mind. I’m not heartless.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “I can barely sleep these days, John. You know that.”

  He reached for her, put his hand on her arm, but it frightened her and she withdrew. “It’s just strange to me that after that phone call you had with her, it’s like she’s the one who’s died. You were angry at her, but you’ve said nothing about it since. I find that strange.”

  “My father is the one who’s dead. My mother is something else. She’s chaos. I don’t need chaos right now, you know? I’m hanging on by my fingernails as it is, and if I let her, she’ll pull me right through her looking glass.” She let the pasta fall from her fork back onto the plate. “You have no idea what she’s capable of.”

  “I have an idea.”

  “You might think you do, but you really don’t.”

  “I do, though, Bridge.”

  She frowned, trying to read his tone, and then turned toward the living
room, as if he’d said don’t look now and she couldn’t help herself. “Has she called again? It’d be like her to call during the day. Leave a maddening, cryptic message.” She wiggled her fingertips in the air. “Do not go gentle into that good night. Something like that, right?”

  “She hasn’t called.” She’d had a hopeful, amused expression on her face, but now it vanished. “But I have spoken to her.”

  “Oh no,” she said. She closed her eyes, then stood up and her chair shot back and hit the wall. “Don’t say another thing. I don’t want to know.”

  “It would help the both of you, if you would —”

  “No no no.” She put her hands out in front of her as if to ward off blows. “We are not having this conversation. I am not having this conversation with you.” He sat still. “You’ve been to the hotel!?”

  “I understand why she’s there.”

  “What’s to understand, John?”

  “Don’t shout at me.”

  “This is sick.”

  “There’s a point. You need to listen to me.”

  “My God, what are you doing down there with her?”

  He didn’t answer. It was unwise to defend himself from even the faintest suggestion of impropriety. He got up from the table. The dog rose, ready for the customary leavings. “There’s nothing for you, Bailey,” he said quietly, and took his and Bridget’s dishes to the stove. He scraped their meals back into the pot and covered it. He thought for a moment that he should tell Bridget everything he knew — about the diary, about her father’s resolve — but he realized that even if he could say it all, she wouldn’t hear him. She was standing in the middle of the room, shipwrecked. “There’s something down there,” he said at last. “Like your dad thought there would be.”

  “He was guessing.”

  “And what if he was? And what if he was right? Isn’t that better than everything they said about him? We have to talk about this, Bridget. I know I’ve gone about it in the wrong way, but this should matter to you.”