Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  Marianne shook her head. “You’re letting a corporation tell you what to do with your own history.”

  “Mrs. Hollis, the city is a corporation as well. The citizens are our shareholders. And the vast majority of people in Toronto would not want to risk their investment in Union Arena for something like this. And I want to tell you: if all the little local lobby groups and environmental subcommittees hadn’t delayed the groundbreaking for as long as they did, then something unexpected like this wouldn’t be quite so difficult to accommodate. But as it is, three or four days of work stoppage down there could result in a hefty bill for us. I’m sorry.”

  Marianne rose slowly from her chair and pushed it in against the desk. “Thank you for seeing us, then,” she said, without offering her hand. Thomas nodded. He disappointed people daily and he was used to it.

  “What about the province?” said John.

  “What about it?”

  “Can’t the minister of culture do something?”

  “Yeah,” said Thomas, already moving papers around his desk. This boy was not his problem, the widow was his problem and she was leaving. “The minister of culture can cut ribbons. He’s got nothing to do with this development.”

  “I thought heritage issues were a provincial thing.”

  Thomas helicoptered a sheaf of papers into a recycling bin. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “John Lewis.”

  “John Lewis, whoever told you the minister of culture for Ontario had anything to do with a hole in the ground owned by a consortium of private businessmen told you incorrectly. Their permits are municipal, their licenses are municipal, all variances are processed through city hall, and all guarantees come straight from the mayor’s office. The only thing the minister of culture has to do with Union Arena is showing up on opening day, if he’s lucky enough to get a ticket.”

  “I thought there was such a thing as a transfer order,” he said. Marianne was waiting in the verge of the door with her coat over her arm.

  “Come on, John,” she said. Thomas waited behind his desk with a fixed smile on his face.

  “Isn’t there a transfer order?” John repeated.

  “Like I told you,” said Jack Thomas. “The provincial minister of culture has nothing whatever to do with city business.”

  THEY RODE BACK down to the lobby in near-silence. It was midday now, and outside the wind was biting, speeding up without impediment through the square. “I’m going to go and pack my things,” said Marianne. “I don’t want to be there when they pour the foundation.”

  “I’m sorry,” said John.

  “Don’t be.”

  “I am, though. For everything.” He made a hopeless gesture with his shoulders and she mirrored it, questioning. “For upsetting you.”

  “Do you know that I once would have denied you could have any effect on me. But I won’t say that now.”

  “Then I hope you’ll accept my apology.”

  “I will,” she said, and she left it at that.

  John offered to come back and help her in whatever way she wanted, but she refused his aid. She went to the cabstand and held her hand up for a ride.

  The sudden emptiness of the afternoon was jarring; it felt, as John walked back through the nearly empty plaza, that his mind was bled. Where to go? He was hungry, he was thirsty, but his body felt full of something and he knew he’d change his mind the moment he chose to do anything.

  He walked idly toward Bay Street and thought he would go down to Queen. His eye, however, registered movement and he realized he was seeing the form of the dying sparrow again, lying in the middle of one of the concrete panes. He went over to it and leaned down, hoping it was over now, that its earlier spasms were the last firings of a system shutting down. But then he saw its eye roving round and it spread its clawed feet and gaped silently. How could something be this nearly dead for — what was it? — half an hour, and in all that time it hadn’t worked out this simple thing, this dying. “What is wrong with you?” he said aloud, and the bird’s skyward eye stammered. He straightened and backed off, standing powerlessly before it. The square was as empty as it had been before, as if no proper citizen would have truck with the business done there. Behind him was a garbage can; he retreated to it and fished out a sheet of newsprint, went back to the struggling form and covered it. He took a deep breath and stepped as heavily as he could bear to on the faint rise, the sound of a heart in a shirt, and he crushed it and hunched over, his eyes stinging, and vomited onto the clean surface of the white plaza.

  HE WALKED WEST along Queen Street, away from the center of town. On the northwest corner of University and Queen sat a little building called Campbell House. It occupied a postage stamp of grass and looked out on nothing that had been there when its lawns had first been laid. At some point in its past, some cherishing landowner, now dead, had fought off the parceling of his little estate to an interest of some kind. Maybe a tiny hermit’s cabin on his grounds had been put forth as hallowed, a place the loss of which would spell the end of something important. That battle was lost, of course, as so many battles to save buildings had been lost in this city, and it was worse in all directions from that place where a little blot of history in the form of a house still remained. Buildings raised in the fifties thundered up in places where there were once familiar landmarks: toll booths, favorite old shops, cooperages with big working grounds under which lay the bodies of horses loved and worked to death. Brands and logos, private meeting places, corners everyone knew by nicknames, flakes of color falling from the brickwork of a painted letter in a name on an advertisement for a cure. Voices heard from the street. A century ago, there was no past to abandon. Maybe that was better. Those citizens had only wanted to live, among their people, in places they had built for themselves.

  He worried that his true way of being in the world was embodied in this disconnectedness he felt now. Other human beings had a gravitational pull, but he was not magnetized to it. It was a force that could be negated by heartsickness, and he felt that perhaps he would scatter into the higher air now, like a smoke ring. And then he had a lifting-up thought, the kind of thought that could presage despair, and in a flash he saw everyone he knew busy in the act of making, himself included. Heads down, brows knit, eyes turned away from the great dark. Making a life, making hope, creating forms to live in: houses or books or stories for telling, for passing down. To make something was good: it was an acceptable form of paying incomplete attention. A perfectly human thing. He felt what must have been real love, thinking of Marianne surrounded by her talismanic ephemera. To have been permitted into her kind of making — that was something, wasn’t it? And Bridget struggling along with the everyday despite what must have seemed to her like cruelty on his part — that also was a gracious thing to show him. All this willingness to live despite and without was a thing he had never actually chosen, and he’d been watching these women struggle in it with something — it now seemed quite clear to him — that was close to grace.

  He felt himself finally grieving for David. Like all the dead, he had towed behind him into that other world all his instincts, all his beliefs and plans. The pictures, or whatever was down there, were husks of something that emanated from David Hollis. John had nothing like that, no last things.

  He could, if he chose to, go despite and without and find what these absences held. He could go somewhere and be on his own — think the rest of this through. David had told him the prints of the original photographic panorama were in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in England. Those pictures, at least, existed. They were the fuse that had lit David’s thinking, his dangerous thinking. It had continued to burn down in John’s mind.

  He’d gone another two blocks when his cellphone rang.

  “Something’s happening,” Marianne said. “They’ve started again.”

  He imagined that Thomas had picked up the phone the moment his door closed behind them. “Are you all right?”

  “It’
s not the same people.” Her voice was different again, and he recognized that she had turned to him.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Digging. With little shovels. Handheld shovels.”

  He broke into a trot and hailed a cab and kept her on the phone as he was driven south. People were pacing things off. By the time he got to the doors of the hotel, a roll of yellow tape had been produced. “I’m in the lobby,” John said, running to the elevators. A moment later he was standing in the window with Marianne Hollis, staring down at the scene she’d been describing. Two of the people down there — young women, it appeared — had begun to hammer thin wooden stakes into the ground at regular intervals around the wooden rib. They watched the women trace the outline of a rectangle around the exposed shape. One of them brought a line of jute from one stake and tied it off against the one directly opposite: the beginning of an archaeological grid.

  Marianne put her hand on his shoulder, and leaned against him a little. His stomach flipped. “My God, John. Did Thomas change his mind?”

  “No,” he said. “He lied to us about the minister of culture. He didn’t realize we’d done our research.”

  They stood in the window, watching. By the late afternoon, the whole area had been measured off and squared with jute, sixteen lengths of it slicing the air above the boat into one hundred squares. By five, the first two squares had been cut down, the dirt moving along a conveyor belt into a hopper, with three people on each side of it, sifting. A wonder.

  Neither of them moved from the spot. At six o’clock, Bridget showed up, still in her office clothes. She took in the sight of the room calmly, shaking her head only a little, and set down on the desk the transfer order with the minister’s signature on it. Then she moved to the window, and as John slipped his hand into hers, she took in her first view of the world below.

  SIX

  HALLAM OF TORONTO

  SUMMER 1856–WINTER 1857

  ONE

  THE TOP OF Ennis’s head was gone.

  “That’s unfortunate,” he said. “A poor collodion layer that time.” Hallam stared at the picture, a stillborn thing unable to say its flaw or purpose. Ennis’s eyes were clear in the picture and Hallam could even make out the evening’s stubble on his chin. But above his eyes, his brows flared up like black smoke and vanished into featurelessness where his forehead and hair ought to have been.

  “I poured it over the entire plate.”

  “Yes,” said Ennis, “but it flowed back. It’s not a science at this stage. It’s an art and you need to develop a feel for it.”

  “I don’t see how a person could make a living at this.”

  “It isn’t gilding, Jem. As you know, the materials are relatively inexpensive.”

  He looked down ruefully on the malformed results of his many attempts at creating a likeness of his patron in photography. In them, Mr. Ennis appeared variously like a troll emerging from beneath a bridge, or a ghost evaporating at sunrise. Hallam’s ministrations had helped Ennis somewhat (he had added a decoction of sarsaparilla to Ennis’s diet of pills and gargles, and although not held in much esteem by his contemporaries in England, the decoction fairly jolted Ennis upright), but these pictures suggested the man was in final decline. Once or twice the exposure was right, but the image would not register beyond faint pinpricks, and another time the collodion was properly set but the silver was streaked and Ennis appeared in a fragmented blur, as if he were rushing past a window. Hallam found himself with nothing but second thoughts.

  “They are not true likenesses,” Hallam said.

  Ennis coughed hard and reached for a chair. “It is hard to make a picture of me I’d send home to Mother.”

  “Your mother has passed on.”

  “One of the signal difficulties. We have a generous hour of June light left, Mr. Hallam. Shall we try again?”

  Hallam prepared another plate behind the curtain. The strong smell of ether made him want to sit down. Mr. Ennis hobbled into his other room and returned with two cups of refreshment, and Hallam tried to decline but took a small draft on strong advice. Ennis had considerably watered Hallam’s down with cider, which delayed its brutalizing effects. They toasted the late senior Mrs. Ennis, and then Hallam silvered his plate, put it into its holder, and slipped it into the camera. Mr. Ennis took his place below the skylight and, through the glass, Hallam made to center him.

  “Think out loud, Mr. Hallam. About the variables to consider.”

  He stood straight and answered in a clear voice. “The light. It’s bright and direct on the subject from two sources. No extra illumination needed.”

  “All right. Exposure time?”

  “Maybe half a minute. Focal length of ten feet. I’ll set it up.”

  “There’s one more thing.”

  He couldn’t think of it.

  “What’s your frame? What are you going to put in it?”

  “You. What else?”

  “But what’s the point of treating the camera as if it’s nailed to that spot on the floor? It’s not a window, Jem. Move it around.” Hallam put his hands on it, as tenderly as possible, and turned it a little. “Good lord,” cried Ennis.

  “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  Ennis took his teacup out from under the chair and took a long swallow. His condition strictly proscribed drink of any kind, but this was not the right moment to broach the subject.

  “The camera is not an eye. It’s a dumb machine. The human eye is a mechanism for seeing, with the operator built right in. With the camera, the operator must be attached. The camera has no interest in anything. Your choosing what to make it see is the only human thing about it.”

  Hallam lifted the tripod off the ground. The whole apparatus was heavy, much more solid than an instrument of light had any business being. There was good wood in it. He held it in his hands and moved to his right, then stood it back up. In the viewfinder, the illusion of Mr. Ennis’s set burst apart, and he rotated into profile as the rear of his studio room came into view, along with the jumble of newspapers in a pile by the wall, a broken cartwheel, a mirror, and the muslin curtain that led to his bedroom. “I guess this is more interesting,” said Hallam.

  “You guess.”

  “It’s more like the way you’d stumble on something . . . a scene of some sort.”

  “Take it then.”

  The light was both dimmer now and more aslant than it had been when he’d made his last abomination of Mr. Ennis. But there was light reflecting off the muslin, however soiled it was, and he intuited that he would have to be careful not to expose the curtain too much lest the light burn the plate. A fair impression of Sam Ennis would take . . . twenty-five seconds? Thirty. He moved the table into position and placed the camera on top of it.

  “You’ll have to refocus,” Ennis said. Hallam had been on the verge of ruining another plate. He got the viewing glass and focused with it, pulling the lens out and pulling it in until he supposed he had it, and then replaced the plateholder. “Are you sure?”

  “I must admit —”

  “You’re not seeing clearly yourself.” Hallam nodded. Ennis stood to demonstrate something but immediately took his seat again. “As the test is one of relative comparisons, just ensure that I am as blurred in the glass as I am when you look at me without it. Then I will be in focus.”

  An odd science. “All right, completely still now,” Hallam said, and his subject took a deep breath and became motionless. He took the cap off the lens. “Thirty seconds is my guess,” he said. “My calculation.” Hallam imagined the light traveling from Mr. Ennis to the plate, and the plate drinking it in, the silver changing state, the image from the real world lodging itself in a strange permanence. He counted down the seconds, then replaced the cap as quickly as he could.

  “Forty-five is what I would have said,” said Mr. Ennis, getting up from his seat.

  “I accounted for the reflection off the curtain.”

  Ennis turned and t
ook in the scene from the camera’s point of view and then regarded the younger man with an equable expression. “See? A dumb machine run by a clever one.”

  In the exposure room, Hallam uncovered the developing tray with its acrid bath of pyrogallic acid. It was dark, like a moonless night, and the now-familiar smell of the acid rose in their nostrils. “You really need to vent this room, Mr. Ennis.”

  “You should have been with me five years ago when I was making my pictures on copper. This little room was a chamber of mercury fumes. This is a sea breeze compared.” He choked on a laugh and Hallam felt the air crossing his face from Ennis’s waving his hands in the vapors. “Anyway, it’s the bromines you have to be careful of. The angel of death, some of my fellow picture-makers call it. You spill your bromine and you might as well rip up your floors.”

  “I wouldn’t think there’s anything in here you’d care to get too close to,” said Hallam, although he was certain that Ennis had already been exposed to too much of at least one of his chemicals. On top of his pleurisy, his dropsy, and whatever undiagnosed venereal complaints Ennis already had, he’d noted the classic symptoms of mercury poisoning. When he’d seen Ennis yawn once, he noted small leukoplakias on the inside of his cheeks, red-mottled sickly white sores. And the older man’s teeth were loose in his head; they frequently hurt, although knowing a chemist was a great boon to him (caraway seeds added to his pipe tobacco were an anodyne, although he preferred his other additives). His mercury symptoms had been eclipsed by his recent diagnosis, but nothing could disguise the damage his way of life was doing to him.