Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

We’ve put a stop to it.

  WE ENDED UP drinking all over Montreal and I let my crazy heart unravel. A round at the Ritz-Carlton. This lobby used to be filled with white Rhodesians, David said. And I thought he meant flowers. We racked it all up on Dave’s black card that was soon to be taken and snipped in two by a judgmental stranger in a blue apron. After the seventh drink I got close to a truth: David was bad and he wanted me to be good. He was upset about Allegra because he didnt want me to have the same licence to be bad as him. And I’ve accepted this, over the years. I’ve let Dave get away with murder.

  David:We were so private, me and Sok Hoon. We told each other the very private things.

  Such as.

  Childhood things. Weaknesses. We admitted them. Our heroism, he said, quoting another preface, does not entail withholding harmful information.

  Me:You were not reserved.

  We were careful. We didnt bash about. But it was good, cleansing, to speak of everything. We went to Holland for ten days and watched those performances. Three people on a white bed in a room with red walls. We stared at it and realized we were in the Canada room. They were doing Canadian things. There were snowshoes on the wall.

  There were snowshoes?

  It made us think there were snowshoes on the wall. Everything, it made you think everything, Gabe.

  I’m not sure I know what everything is.

  It’s more than everything.

  Nell.

  He looked as though that were another topic entirely. That, he said, is a separate thing. That is hermetically sealed from—he searched for the word—noise.

  How often did you see Nell.

  He leaned back and looked over at a couple paying their tab. He realized that I had him on the everything front. It averaged about twice a year, he said.

  So twice a year does it.

  I thought we were through this.

  David had an inward look. As if he was working on something inside. It gave him a reckless appearance. And it was attractive when your presence broke his inwardness. If he was attentive to you, you fell in love with him. Receiving his attention meant that you were important.

  When I say everything I mean weakness. Admitting the wrong things that you feel.

  In the washroom. We judged our faces in the mirror.

  Shit, he said. Didnt we used to look hot?

  That was fifteen years ago, David.

  You know I could fly to Seoul and get a pair of glasses for less than what theyre going to cost me here. In South Korea theyre twenty dollars.

  He was just going on with things. And if I pursued it I’d ruin something. I was exhausted and didnt have the reserves to push up the subject again.

  So what is it, I said, with Sok Hoon.

  It’s port in a storm. Mother of Owen. I’m an optimist by nature.

  Really. And how’s that done for you.

  Pretty shitty actually.

  What’s your ideal age.

  David stared at his washed face. I could pass for thirty-two, he said. I often think I’m twenty and fifty at the same time.

  Even that’s not enough.

  Gabe I’m glad youre not fucked up.

  ON OUR WAY BACK to Sok Hoon’s we passed a chalkboard with a quote from Wilde.

  David: When that happens, it makes me want to look up the writer. It’s a sign. But I’ve never liked Wilde. Once, Sok Hoon gave me a copy of De Profundis and I thought well that explains everything. She doesnt understand me. When she was leaving I threw it on the front lawn.

  De Profundis, I said. Have you read it?

  It’s Wilde.

  You think the title is satirical but it’s not. Wilde wrote that—and I described the events that brought Wilde to his most serious work, his grappling with God.

  Oh god, David said. And we walked, understanding that he’d fucked up royally with Sok Hoon. She understood Wilde the way he understood Mahalia Jackson. That Sok Hoon could have been the breakthrough event to a full life. I feel, he said, more isolated from the world of people.

  Isnt that strange.

  I always thought I’d have a house, he said, where people’d come in and pick up an instrument.

  You mean like Sok Hoon has now.

  We rounded the corner and saw the Matador. Something was different.

  There’s a pool beneath the pursuit vehicle.

  It was a surprising pool that was not rainwater—you could tell from the surface tension of its edges that it was thicker than radiator fluid. There was an Esso, a man said, up on the main road. So we started up the Matador and drove down to the oval sign. We were not entirely sober. A man in a wheelchair wheeled himself around the car. He looked under it. He did a lot without getting out of the chair. In fact it looked more comfortable being a mechanic in that position. We can have that by Monday, he said, and it’s five hours’ work.

  Five hours is a lot of units to pay. So we drove back to Sok Hoon’s and David picked up the Land Rover and drove behind me. We went over to Lars Pony’s. He was on the porch with our dog. I said Lars can you help me. The dog didnt seem to remember us. Very happy there with Lars. Lars looked at the engine. That’s a recent alternator, he said.

  I told him it was replaced in Whitby.

  How much it cost you.

  I dont know, I said. David paid for it.

  David: I seem to recall it was very inexpensive.

  I can fix this, Lars said. A hundred dollars. When you need it.

  How about Sunday.

  DAVID DROVE US HOME and we went straight to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door and kept it open and drank all the beer the Prince had left. The fridge had food in it. I love to see bounty and I hate to see rot. Something about that made me think about Lars Pony. Perhaps it was that we were involved in disarray. We were supposed to have stayed with Lars. I realized that David liked the best of things and was soon put off by anything less than the best. And who was I to turn my back on a friend, was I worse because I wanted David to like me.

  There was a water bottle on the dishrack and David remarked on it. Sok Hoon has things like that, he said. A sports bottle. That she reuses. I dont want to see Sok Hoon, he said, until she’s drunk. She’s nasty when she’s sober.

  David’s son woke up and came down the stairs and closed the fridge door, as if it was the door that had woken him up. Owen, just seven years old. They called him Oven. Oven sat on a kitchen chair and waited for something to happen.

  David:You want me to fix you a sandwich, Oven.

  Naw I’m not hungry.

  Me:You have Sok Hoon all wrong.

  Youre basing Sok Hoon on the—and he thought about it—on the fifty times youve met her.

  That made Sok Hoon come down. She was just like Owen, removing the two beers from our hands. They were both very reasonable and fixing fixable things.

  Your sister called, she said.

  Dave: My sister.

  She was expecting you yesterday.

  I’m trying to save my father.

  Your father is not going anywhere. There’s no rush on your father.

  The pursuit vehicle, I said, is in the hospital.

  Dave said he knew of a bar that we could have a last call in. Then he changed his mind.

  You go, he said. You two. As if it was one of us who’d suggested it. I’m going to call my sister and tell this youngster a bedtime story. He pulled out his chrome pebble.

  It’s one in the morning, Sok Hoon said.

  He was about to say something like, then I’ll change what the time is. But realized even his pebble could not do that.

  Okay, he said, then I want to stay here with my son. I’m going to have a conversation with the Oven.

  Owen: I want a brother.

  David: If we can get one cheap.

  Owen, pointing to his privates: Sex is how you get them, right Mom?

  Yes, Owen. But we dont have that any more, instead we have two houses.

  THERE WAS A RED HEART in the window. The bar with a
video hookup to other bars on the West Coast, bars that were just opening up for the night. You could compete in trivia with people you’d never met.

  I know Dave drinks a lot, Sok Hoon said, but if he ever gets to that point where he has to sit down to sing karaoke—shove a bread knife in his throat.

  Sok Hoon, rough and boisterous until she orders a drink at the bar, as if she’s asking for a favour. A bourbon sour please?

  It’s sweet, I say.

  They use Wild Turkey and bar mix. The guy mixes his own.

  Were they made today?

  Sok Hoon slurps on her straw.

  They were made this afternoon.

  I asked her flat out. I said, Sok Hoon you have to answer me this. About Dave and Nell.

  His affair, she said.

  You knew about Nell.

  You know and you dont know, she said. When you have a kid and work and payments and a front porch to repair and ill parents and good friends then there’s only four minutes in the day when you can let your mind wander into that kind of territory. And to be honest I wasnt all his either. So yes, I knew about her.

  You knew it was Nell.

  She looked me deep in the eye in a way that made me forgive her. What would I have done in her shoes.

  I’m sorry Gabe.

  Dave told her about Nell back in McGill. She thought it was over. Then Sok Hoon was getting their taxes together and found receipts. It was like a clock had fallen off the wall and the battery, she’d found the battery across the room.

  Me: Nell and Dave.

  Do you think that’s fucked up.

  I know I’m supposed to assume all that veneer of feeling betrayed.

  Sok Hoon:You have complicated windows you look through.

  It’s damaging and deflating, I’m going to go through two years of feeling betrayed. I’m old enough to know that. But at the same time it’s curious and arousing.

  I think it’s fucked up and brave.

  Hurtful though.

  It’s unthoughtful, she said.

  Though I’m sure a lot of thought goes into it.

  I dont think, Sok Hoon said, she’s seen him since you guys.

  She has seen him since we guys. Now I wanted to hurl things. And then hurling gave way to the ridiculousness of hurling. I think, I said, in ways she’s tried to tell me, but when youre older you become less careful. Less precious about it all.

  She must love you, she said. I mean youre lovable.

  We’re all lovable.

  She laughed at that. For a long time, she said, David would say things to me. Mean things. He’s garrulous in both directions: loquacious in love, loquacious in hate. But hate is hard to forget. It sullies love. It made me feel leavable, when I want love to be supersonic. I asked my brother, I said does your wife like me? And he said Sok Hoon I’m not going to tell her you said that.

  She’d be hurt if she knew you doubted it.

  We talked until four and then we tried the corner depanneur for fresh rolls and cheese.

  This is what I missed most when I lived in Basel, she said. Fresh chausson aux pommes at the dep.

  I really wanted a piece of orange cheese. When I want something it appears above my eyes as a vivid photo. The sky was light blue, the streetlights still on. A couple of people about, people who’ve been up all night. Some traffic down on Sherbrooke, a cold wind. That time in the morning, it’s as if the city has flushed itself out and anything still alive can own it, though all that’s left is a creaky vessel low on power. We zipped up our jackets. I slipped a newspaper out of the middle of a bundle and left a dollar on the stack, under the plastic band around the waist of the bundle. Now the sun was shining directly along an alley.

  On the front page: Four Murdered in Moosonee.

  Are you far, I said.

  We’re far.

  We waited for the light on the head of a taxi.

  We met this man, I said.

  Sok Hoon asked who.

  This murderer.

  I snapped the front of the newspaper.

  You know a murderer.

  He’d never murdered directly before. Maybe he ran out of money to hire someone else.

  Sok Hoon said she feels she’s exposed herself in public. That she didnt leave David really. That he fired himself from the job of husband. People have said how daring to leave David but in private they think to themselves, how embarrassing.

  You should have talked to the Prince of Wales about that.

  I did, she said.

  EIGHT

  I SLEPT FOR TWO HOURS and then got up. Often when I drink a lot I get up early in the morning. It feels like it’s just me and the morning, the two of us. As if we’re equals, this one human being and the universe. Instead of feeling small I feel as big as everything else combined. I thought about what I was killing and what I was cultivating. I was fixing myself a sandwich in the kitchen, burning up whatever reserves I had in my muscles. I turned around. Owen on the staircase.

  You hungry.

  He shook his head.

  What are you doing.

  I’ve been looking at you to see what you did on your own.

  I heard you liked sandwiches, I said.

  I made him a sandwich just like my own, I didnt make a kid-size sandwich. Yum or yuck, I said. And instead of ignoring it he kept up with me on the eating of it.

  Owen: Can I have the car keys?

  There’s no car, I said. It’s getting fixed.

  I just want to open the trunk to the Land Rover, he said.

  Then he put on a pair of socks. He put them on like he thought socks would make him appear more serious and therefore able to operate car keys and make the car materialize out on the road.

  Me: It’s the weekend right?

  It’s Saturday, Owen said.

  Okay then tell me someplace I should see.

  We left a note and took a bus. We get a transfer, Owen said, and we stand at that corner.

  There was a panel of double mirrors near the wall of a bank. He’d noticed it one day and had wanted to try it out. You dim the light by narrowing your eyes, so your faces merge. Our noses, Owen said, theyre almost the same.

  Then he did this thing with his biceps, a bodybuilding pose, and a distortion in the glass made him look powerful.

  He was my son. I let myself be his father and a flurry of heat fizzed in the top of my neck. Owen opened his mouth to make a face. He was alive and I did not know what he would do. The tiresomeness of promises and commitment. The constant renewal of faith. Instead of just knowing. But then fathers leave all the time. Jesus, David Twombly.

  Let’s walk a few blocks, I said. Let’s just follow our noses.

  And I cheered at the thought that I was moved.

  We walked around and I bought the Oven a comic book and I got an American newspaper and a couple of postcards. Three people were sitting in the grass at McGill, in a bowl of shade under a tree. This was David’s alma mater. I hadnt thought to go to a school off the island. No one really told me I could.

  We went to the café where I’d been with David when the mirror had fallen on him, and I ordered a coffee and Owen had a lemon soda. I told him to watch for people ordering sweet things and then meat. Let’s write out these postcards, I said.

  Who for.

  Write one, I said, to your dad. We’ll mail it to him in Newfoundland and when he gets back there he’ll see the sneaky thing his son has done.

  I handed him a pen, a good one, and he ruined the nib on it with his concentrated printing. I wrote to my parents. Coming home, I said. And then signed it with both my first and last names. Why had I done that? What other Gabriel would write them and say, Coming home?

  We passed the McGill students in the grass. The shadow had moved on and the sun was glancing off their bent elbows now. It felt like the sun was their system of power, they controlled the sun and let it pour energy into their joints. They were refusing to let the sun shine into David.

  We found a post office and sto
od behind a man who was short and balding. On his skull, at the boundary between scalp and hair, was the tattoo 666. Did he ever think those numbers would show up. What would his father think, or his son? Well, I guess Owen still can’t see them. Maybe that’s it. Maybe evil is not concealed from everyone, only the victims.

  I bought two stamps and got Owen to lick his own. Then I found Helen Crofter’s postal code in the book and wrote that in and gave the postcards to the clerk. He said to take it outside and use the box.

  But I want to give it to you.

  If you give it to us, I’ll put it in this tray here where it’ll sit all afternoon until one of us brings it outside to empty in that box.

  WE ROUNDED A CURATORIAL BUILDING and heard the rumble of bees. Cars over a distant bridge. We walked up Mount Royal and came upon a lookout point with a ramp to the sky. A man was receiving instructions at a hang glider. I thought that was something to watch with the Oven. The man and the guide were wearing puffy bags with tails. The man was barefoot and his wife carried his shoes. I pointed the shoes out to Owen. The men clipped into the kite on a running board over the cliff, two handlers holding the guy wires. Then off, and out and up, he waved back at us. He became a very small thing in the air. And his wife was still holding his shoes, the only thing left of him.

  What about a museum, I said. Can you handle a museum.

  Owen seemed easygoing and he knew where one was though he didnt know the name, the Musée des Beaux-Arts. I like free museums. Let’s find one thing, I said, and concentrate on that. Part of the enjoyment is ignoring the rest, is saying to the piece, youre the reason I’m here. It’s faithful.

  Owen:What does that say.

  It says archaeological.

  What does that mean.

  You dont touch anything.

  I’m just going to sit on this bench, the Oven said, and look at everything.

  I let my eye wander. And there, a crucifix. I pointed it out to Owen, but he was looking at his comic book. I walked up until my nose was an inch from it. I marry you, I said. I’d seen Nell once waiting for an elevator at IKW and she was so keen she was as close as I was now. In a hurry, I said, and she laughed. Thanks for laughing. Well, I feel like you now, I feel like I’m trying to make this crucifix open.