Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

  I went online and looked at gold. I had enough for a hundred-ounce bar. Theyre pretty, these Engelhard bars. They look like something out of a pirate movie. The shipping was only thirty dollars. But when I clicked to purchase a bar I received an email. What if you need to cash some of it out. You can’t very well cut ten ounces off your bar and sell it for five grand.

  I spent three days emailing this woman, trying to convince her to part with a bar. But she directed me to the coins. I could get one hundred one-ounce maple leaf coins. And so that’s what I bought. It cost thirty dollars to ship almost seven pounds of gold.

  It came on a Tuesday. The doorbell. A security man in sunglasses. Another standing outside of a grey Securicor truck. I had to sign for it, and the man opened a canvas bag and lifted out this small green box trimmed in silver. Very heavy. Thank you, I said.

  The gold was not in coins, they were wafers. They had sent me little squares of gold. It was like a precious box of chocolates. I showed them to Nell. We lifted them out of their stacked column and they made a scraping sound I had not heard before. I guess a metal has to have a certain density for that sound. The light shone over their pocked surface. They possessed a rough inner glow. I feel, Nell said, like putting one in my mouth.

  Where should I keep them, I said.

  Nell:That’s what banks are for.

  For a few days I left them in my desk drawer. I carried a wafer in my pocket and pulled it out to look at it. Five hundred dollars. But Nell was upset with this. I’ll pay, she said, for a safety deposit box.

  But I like them close at hand, I said.

  Stash them someplace, she said. They make me nervous. Put them in the freezer. Your freezer locks. Put them in that.

  I slipped the wafer of gold back in its slot in the box and put the box in a waterproof pouch meant for whitewater rafting. I shifted a few ziplocked packages of caribou and stuck the pouch of gold in between roasts and pounds of ground meat. I locked the freezer. I had a hundred ounces of gold in my freezer.

  THAT CHRISTMAS Nell took me to visit her aunt and uncle in Burlington. On the pelmet above her guest room window, the track trophies and the one medal. How can anyone live in Burlington, I thought. But Nell had lived here. Even in the time since she’d grown up here, the city had changed. There was nothing geographic to anchor the city. You drove past a steel mill and an auto parts factory that supplied the Big Three in Detroit and you knew you had left Toronto and were on your way to Burlington. Her uncle worked for StresCrete, a company that makes utility poles. Cousin Howard was working there too. All over Burlington, light fixtures and power lines and the new receivers for cellular transmission. They were involved in that and it was Uncle Charles really who made her do a communications degree.

  One night in a movie theatre we saw the guy she’d lost her virginity to, John Mennie. When she was fifteen she had been home sick from school and he’d phoned her up. He was twenty, Nell said, and I knew his brother Carl. This is John Mennie, he said on the phone. I was wondering if you’d like to come over and play cards.

  She had walked over to the Mennie house. It was the only house she knew of with aluminum siding. She was fifteen though she looked older. You could tell she was fifteen by the size of her head. John had a motorbike that he drove in the snow, long blond hair and tinted glasses. John Mennie smoked and she took a cigarette from him and they played crazy eights on the kitchen table. There was music coming from upstairs and then it stopped. The side of a record. I’ll show you my room, he said. He worked maintenance at the auto parts factory, he worked the night shift and he had just gotten up. His brother, he said, had a crush on her.

  His bedroom was in the attic of the bungalow, there were posters on the angled wall of models hauling themselves out of the surf. The posters leaned down on them as though the models aimed to pull up on the beach which was John’s bed. He had Playboy magazines and cars made of plastic that ran on batteries. He was bored, he said, and needed someone to talk to.

  They lay on his bed and listened to a band from Vancouver, a band he was fond of, and they watched the snow fall over the white bungalows.

  FIVE

  ON THE WEEKENDS through that first winter we bought live carp wriggling in wet styrofoam boxes and barbecued them on the cold roof. Small lines of snow fell from the wires. We walked into High Park to visit the cold llamas and the indifferent American bison. A few nights she stayed over and we fooled around without taking our clothes off. I felt like the side of my head had been blown off. But Nell needed convincing. Duration is the great convincer. We cooked meals together and listened to the radio and browsed through Korean grocery stores and, in spring, rented a car and shook the city off our backs and drove through the Bruce Peninsula. It was rural but it did not remind either of us of Newfoundland. We fished in the Credit River. I caught her staring at me hard while I was singing a song on my guitar. It was one of those heartfelt songs. The heart can sneak up behind you and bowl you over. She came to me one day with her hair cut off. It was dark short hair, a little long at the back but shorn around the ears. I held her ears and talked to her and she couldnt hear me because I was ruffling her ears.

  Okay, she said, I’m willing to try this.

  A heat travelled through my body, a heat of responsibility. She was saying yes to me. That meant that the future was locked down. I had willed something into being. I couldnt believe it. I blinked and touched the little lines around the corners of her mouth. They were delicate, like the folds around the eyelid. It was as if her mouth could see.

  We abandoned my apartment and moved in together near High Park and lived as a couple. We pranced down the hall like fan-tailed deer. She got up early and jogged then went to work and on the weekends she wore different, older clothes and became a homemaker. She made broth from bones. She had plastic containers of broth in the freezer. But there was a surfboard quality to Nell’s soul that she clung to. A softness leaked out and then hardened over again to the spine of a surfboard that is confident and durable and entertaining to be around, if not deep and vulnerable. This can happen to anyone in their thirties.

  One night she did not come home. And then I got a phone call—I had to collect her from a bad party. It levelled me. She was drunk in a penthouse condo off Bloor. She hardly remembers this night and I grappled hard with my Wyoming, which allowed her to be depraved and hungry. She went to work promptly at eight and came home that night with a stuffed fox. Meet Toby, she said. What’s that, Toby? Toby whispered in her ear and then Nell made his head go wonky with sorrow, with mea culpa.

  Toby was her promise to me that she was going to be good, she was to have no cold heart and no wildness without my knowing it.

  In the mornings I felt Nell get out of bed and I knew it was six-thirty. Nell wears a watch for the deaf, so the alarm does not wake me. But I can sense the motion of the bed. I heard her making her quiet breakfast sounds, little packets of tinkering like the frozen plastic lid of the espresso coffee unpuckering, and the scour of an egg in a hot pan with fat. She likes one fried egg and one cup of coffee and no toast. She left the dishes, the small zip of her purse, I have told her to leave them. The satisfying slip of the deadbolt as she inserts a key behind her. In case anyone should attack me in bed. I tell you I live for things like that, the sound of her brass security key protecting my back.

  An hour later I would get up and make coffee and take a coffee up the ladder to the roof. There is a billboard sign up here, with an advertisement for Cuba. I liked to drink the coffee under Cuba and stare out at the city and the planes taking off from Pearson, some of them, I guess, on their way to Cuba.

  Sometimes Nell had trouble sleeping. Her legs kept her awake. Nell had caffeine or glucose in her legs. But it was her mind sending chemicals to her legs as a by-product of all her thoughts, that was my opinion. We’re hiring subjects, Nell said, around the world to wear sensory devices hooked by satellite to computer terminals so you can stand at a kiosk and feel like youre in the other place. />
  She was staring at the ceiling in the dark, her legs slowly rotating at the knee or a swimming motion with a foot. You can’t be there, but you can sense it. Fly on the wall.

  Two of the projects my wife was working on.

  Her little aluminum laptop has no keyboard—another IKW prototype. She works on a black table, and the screen illuminates a keypad on the table. She types on this keypad of light. It reminded me of the brilliant cluster of white stars that forms the cat above the jewellery store where I was contemplating a ring to make Nell my wife, the cat’s curled tail breaking the face of the sign. Arrogant, sexy and rich.

  Her fingers curled up and she tilted her head down and spoke aloud to a corner of the room and then occasionally looked up at me, as though the space between the corner and me was what separated humanity from the man-made world. Last year, according to the quarterly reports, they sold data to make accountability features on a Taser. Though not in one of the reports or request sheets handed to her did she ever see the word Taser. Disgust, but there is an awe attached as well, like some ascending submarine and we are breaking open the hatch to the conning tower, to be baked in the direct sun.

  SIX

  ONE MORNING, Nell came up to my side. I could feel her by the bed, the texture of beige and turquoise stay-ups. She was dressed for work and she wears very sexy things. But this last-minute visit wasnt something she normally did. I’m quick to wake up. I can be up and out the door in under a minute. But I took it calm and stroked the inside of her thigh. What is it, I said.

  I’ve heard about my son.

  I stretched the face around my eyebrows.

  He’s in Corner Brook. As you know the Hurleys adopted him. He’s eighteen and his name is Anthony. They think, or his brother thinks, that Arthur Twombly isnt doing right by him.

  I hauled up the file on Nell’s Corner Brook life, the one that I’ve presented to you. And did I already know this little wrinkle, some form of extortion. Youve heard trouble, I said. Youve heard of your son because of trouble.

  Gerard Hurley called me.

  I know Gerard.

  I went out a few times with his brother.

  Yes I’m aware of Joe Hurley.

  Gerard says Anthony needs money and Arthur Twombly is not being as generous as he could.

  I blinked some more. Was he asking you for money.

  I think that’s what he was asking.

  Was he asking on your son’s behalf or his own.

  Could you just listen, Nell said. And not treat it as if you can solve it.

  She became tight and impenetrable and anything I said was going to be used against me. So I closed up and, in a selfish gesture, thought how inconsiderate of her it was to blurt this out when I wasnt even awake. I had no fuel and then, instead of getting up for a slight pause, she actually left the apartment and went to work. I called in the afternoon and left a message but she didnt return it, and when she came home she said it was nothing, that in the morning she’d thought it was large but now it was just information and a light bubble of joy was back in her chest. Nell knew where her son was and her son knew her. But even though she had the bubble she didnt look me in the eye, she was staring low at a corner of the room.

  That talk happened maybe six months ago. It was as if the talk never happened and we resumed the life that we were meant to be living. Nell. When she’s alone, she goofs around the apartment. She daydreams, making up stories of helicopters and gangs and the searchlights of police. I caught her once peering around an invisible wall. Sometimes, in mock frustration, she will run away from me and jump on the bed with Toby in the jaw of her elbow. And wait for me to come. She’d murmur into the pillow. And then we’d hold each other and mutter the names from the news we loved to say, Hosni Mubarak, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the mujahadeen. We spoke as though we were on television.

  Murmur, I learned, used to mean rebellion.

  I was in love and happy although the modern world did perplex me. I wasnt sure if I could keep up. Nell tried to keep me up-to-date. I wanted to know her things. She was good at it, she was never condescending. A timestamp, Nell said, is a shared secret. We’re in bed when she tells me this. I find it soothing, for her to smooth out her calf muscles with that rotating massage, and recite the new information that fills her business head. A salt is a private comment known only to the server. If a timestamp is modified, the hash will be corrupted. If an attacker tries to recompute the hash, he will need the salt, and he can get that by bruteforcing.

  It’s about here that my feet begin to float away and my head bumps lightly into a corner of the room. My head is full of helium and I can only think of emotional things. There was the time on the subway last winter, when a young woman got up to let Nell sit down. Nell thanked her. Then we both saw it: Nell looked pregnant. She had pushed her big gloves into the pockets of her coat, she had a bulge. And suddenly I wanted her to be pregnant. But she wasnt going to have a child with me. She had a child. She felt ruined, she has told me, to that kind of domestic living.

  But now that I look back on those months I remember that Nell was going through something. I wasnt alert to it, but she was more willing to talk to me about her Corner Brook life. Sometimes I had a strange desire to back away from her, thinking, as I had thought of her, that she’s only with me because of this connection to our youth.

  SEVEN

  THE GOOD WEATHER made us walk home from the movies and sometimes after the sushi we cut down to College Street and had a drink at Ted’s Collision. It was warming now and I admired the first cluster of drinkers who pushed a table out onto the street and preferred to drink in the cold open air full of exhaust fumes from the traffic, and while the music was smaller here you had to contend with the streetcars and the pedestrians who might brush your shoulder accidentally and not say they were sorry.

  We ordered the local microbrewery beers and occasionally just a plain old-fashioned beer our fathers drank and we always drank from bottles rather than the pints that were poured from hoses. I was convinced draft beers were home to mould in the tubes and also the mixing agents were not as clean as a bottled beer, especially during the warm months. In winter I’d give in and order a pint of Guinness.

  From Ted’s we often met up with David Twombly. In the past year, David and Sok Hoon had separated and then David had lost the company and Nell had heard about her son. It made Nell and me think how lucky we were not to let the world cleave us, that we understood and were both in our thirties and had survived early relationships when jealousy, ambition and your own boredom crept in and destroyed the apple orchards.

  We clinked bottles and waited and David Twombly arrived. His house was around the corner on Grace and he often popped in to look around to see if anyone was there he could talk to. He was happy to see us. David didnt do that Toronto thing where people kissed, he was too affectionate for that, so you had to settle for his big happy face and how silly he could be at seeing you. He hadnt wanted Nell and me to get together but then resolved himself to it, and I had that feeling you get with confidence that made Nell a filter to my own emotional landscape. I preferred a man to be intimate with me through the agency of a girlfriend. They had known each other a long time. They had worked together. That’s an entire world to share and sometimes I found them commiserating. They liked to hold hands. They did not, actually, have much to do with each other these days, but David understood the assholes and tension and elevator Nell was working with every day.

  David ordered a red wine, a bottle of it. He put his communication box in front of him, it was called a pebble, and I touched its soft chrome surface. It was one of his new projects since leaving IKW. It felt like rubber, like a sex toy. It was a device that connected him to anything man-made that he owned, he just had to think of it. I’m field-testing it, he said.

  Me: It’s not as small as I’d imagine.

  They can make them smaller, but what’s the point.

  Theyre making them to fit the hand again, Nell said. />
  David was on wine because he didnt want to get fat. I was the opposite. David had always been fat but now was working out and there was a pinched quality to his face. I was broadening. When youre skinny all your life you enjoy the thickening that happens, and I was giving in to my slowing metabolism.

  He drank the wine carefully and Nell switched over to the wine. He was the only man at Ted’s Collision to be drinking wine. I think we talked about potatoes, and how you boil red potatoes and fry yellow ones. Or is it the other way around.

  In the mornings David swam and then came home to work on his laptop. He traded call and put options. He invested in thirteen junior mining stocks, juniors that he had visited while working for IKW, or he’d met management at the Spoke Club or flown over property in a helicopter and knew that one of the thirteen would strike it big. Those arent bad odds. Only one junior in three thousand ever turns into a mine, he explained. If you have success with the drill bit, David said, there was the factor of ten thousand. But David wasnt looking for an operable mine. What he cared about was a mine with sizable opportunity. Where there was tremendous upside only in the ability to attract capital. Then you had to time the rise of share price and tabulate volume and get out before the price faltered. David realized he had a facility for stacking plates into piles and recognizing when those plates teetered too wildly and selling before that moment and buying back later at the very instant that other traders were shitting their pants and reeling in the panic of a throat-slashing, bottomless, no-buyers vacuum, and as soon as they had sold to you out of tremendous relief for your foolhardy risk, that’s when plates were again being stacked and faith restored in markets, in the idea that objects and raw materials and services could actually be looked at as money. You traded on consumer confidence and trader sentiment. Sometimes though all the plates were smashed and someone went into the warehouse and took a sledgehammer to the crates of stock still in their boxes and then someone lit the corner of the warehouse and the side of the town the warehouse was in was blown off the earth. David learned to read the signs of men lifting their sledgehammers or a warehouse prone to fire and shorted everything. He borrowed stock from anyone who was holding long and returned the stock seventeen minutes later. He worked in financials and housing and then when the flavour was sucked out of those equities he’d trade over in technology and commodity futures, in wool and cotton and precious metals.