Floating City

by Kerri Sakamoto

  He sputtered awake that night and looked out his window: the moon was waning. Under it was Bucky, standing in the yard quite still and alone, the prickles of his white hair glistening. A megaphone dangled from his neck. Abruptly, he began to flap his white shirt sleeves like a conductor leading a crescendo. Frankie waved instinctively, but of course how would Bucky see him at his dim little window?

  In the moonlight, Bucky’s glasses glinted like stubby antennae on his head, like some otherworldly alien. He raised the megaphone and spoke:

  We are merely a statistical cartoon showing that if all the people of the world were to stand upon one another’s shoulders, they would make nine complete chains between the Earth and the moon. If it is not so far to the moon, then it is not so far to the limits—whatever, whenever or wherever they may be.

  Across the yard, Frankie saw what Bucky had been flapping his arms at: a human pyramid rising into a tower alongside an old maple. Several bodies at the bottom, and farther up, two bodies facing each other propped atop those below: a totem wobbling up, up, up into the sky, straining moon-ward.

  Frankie might’ve hopped out his window and clambered aboard.

  We are not trees rooted to the land. We can conquer the vapour sphere, expanding ever outwards. To the moon and back!

  Bucky let the megaphone drop and instantly the totem toppled, leaving bodies strewn in the grass and one or two hanging from a branch. Laughter broke out.

  They were from the architecture school, all young men, all younger than Frankie. He was struck by their erect posture. They had long limbs; all tall and with good teeth, he was sure. He’d heard somewhere that if you looked at the bones of an Asiatic, they were different from those of a Caucasian. Asian bones were flat and broad instead of round and trim. An Asiatic’s teeth were wide and hollowed out on their backside for shovelling rice; yes, he could feel it with his tongue.

  These young men—no one ever had to say to them things like, Chin up, look on the bright side. No, their chins were already up. They’d come into the world chin first. They’d walked in their crisp whites and neat pleats on the swell, sunny side ever since. They clustered around their teacher before dispersing into the night.

  Frankie settled back to bed but Bucky’s words floated up before him, collecting at the ceiling of his basement room. It was as true for him as for any of those students: he wasn’t rooted to the land, to anything. He could climb, as his mother always said. He could ascend.

  In the morning they were back with their notebooks and pens, clothes fresh and pressed, sitting before Bucky, who stood in his musty, rumpled suit with the megaphone still dangling from his neck. Frankie performed his usual duties but cocked an ear to what was being said, catching all he could, bundling it to sort later. He heard parts that were familiar: Do more with less. I named myself Guinea Pig B. In and out, not up and down. Ideas Frankie had thought were meant especially for him, to give him a leg up. Because he, Frank Hanesaka, was a New World Man; son of a Priest-Navigator; able to establish himself on land and water through ingenuity, unlike these young men of good fortune.

  Frankie raked away at the gravel, digging too hard and wide into the dry garden as Bucky’s lecture went on. By noon, it hadn’t stopped. All morning long, the students had listened quietly, and now they were even more attentive, looking down only to scribble in their notebooks. What were they writing? Every last word was a lesson in itself. Frankie came closer. They began asking questions.

  Bucky turned his megaphone around and out to the students, scooping up their words into its horn, funnelling them back into his ear through the mouthpiece. He called out a word: anticipatory. Frankie scooped that up and let it float in his imagination.

  The next morning, Frankie emerged to find a giant net of bolted aluminum strips collapsed on the grass, flat, limp and glistening with dew. Beside it perched a miniature dome made of the same strips, like a robust baby birthed beside its spent mother. Bucky sat writing in a notebook, then staring at the inert web. He stood when he saw Frankie. His glasses were clouded, his clothes more rumpled than usual. He seemed not to have slept at all.

  “You only succeed when you stop failing. That’s what I tell my students. Remember that, my dear boy.”

  Frankie nodded.

  “We’ll call it the Supine Dome.” Bucky patted Frankie on the back before retreating to the coach house, silvery head bent in thought.

  Frankie did not believe for one moment in failing; nor, it had seemed to him, did Bucky. His successes were light, bright shining inventions conceived of nothing but possibility. His every word was blown up with success. He’d spoken and written of his early failure, but Frankie couldn’t quite imagine it. Yet there was the deflated evidence on the ground. Supine.

  Two mornings later, Frankie emerged to a strange sight. A webbed sphere, maybe eight feet in diameter, perched on the grass where the nest had lain, and inside, dangling like giant geckos, human bodies—the students—holding on to the bolted nodules, testing its strength.

  “Frank!” Bucky called out. “Success, my dear boy!”

  * * *

  —

  Guinea Pig F was not progressing well. Frankie didn’t have enough money yet for the grand house, nor any house at all. But in April of the next year, he became Citizen F.

  “You’re one of us now, Frankie,” Hannah said as they sat by the fireplace one evening. She raised her martini glass to his and clinked. “How will you vote?”

  She spread the newspaper on the coffee table and showed him the faces of three men. “This one?”

  He shook his head. He’d made up his mind weeks ago, even before he’d even seen the faces, heard the names that went with them, or even known there’d be an election.

  “This party voted you into the camps. That one did the same and made you pay your way to boot.”

  Frankie knew that. But while the third might’ve kept him a free man, he would not help Frankie become a rich man.

  * * *

  —

  On his lunch break, Frankie rode his bicycle downtown to watch construction crews with their jackhammers break up the road a few blocks up from Union Station. He’d read about it in the newspaper: they were building a new subway line. They were digging a giant tunnel under his feet while the city’s one million bustled on the streets above, business as usual.

  A giant digger lowered its bucket into a dump truck in the middle of Yonge Street as crowds tramped along the timber walkways framing the road. Amid exposed utility pipes and the muck of the city’s crust, Frankie inched closer to peer beneath.

  “Watch your head,” a worker shouted out as the bucket swung near.

  Frankie returned late at night the next week to find vertical pipes driven into the ground, steel beams lowered onto the piles below, timbers crossing the gap in preparation for the road to come. Cut and cover, cut and cover: that was the method. Below and out of sight, the rest of the work continued. Eight-car trains would deliver passengers from northern Toronto all the way down to Union Station at twenty miles per hour from morning to night. Like the train that had brought him here, tunnelling through the mountains, through darkness and out into light, only stopping at station after station instead of town after town.

  The middle of another sleepless night, he was back. He hopped over a barrier and squatted to peer between the timbers under the street lamps. Soon there’d be a grid of crossroads and hubs down there. There’d be stands where people could buy newspapers and peanuts, stalls to get their shoes shined. Another city beneath this city.

  He thought he heard a siren and quickly jumped out, immediately feeling foolish. No, the sirens were to the south, by the harbour. In the night sky above the buildings between him and the lake, smoke seemed to gather and glow faintly orange. He hopped on his bicycle and cycled toward the water and now the stink of fire. He rode faster as a keening hum opened to a scream of sirens. The air warmed and thickened with smoke and noise the closer he got, and above the sirens, human cries. It
was a docked ship, a raging fiery spirit spiralling higher and higher out of its black billowing hull and all around, tufts of flames like giant fireflies swooped and dived that he realized were human bodies on fire, some landing in the water, some thudding onto the pier, not far from where he stood.

  He was pushed back by policemen, told to leave as more firemen and trucks arrived. But Frankie could not look away.

  He saw it in the morning paper. Over one hundred people—they were still searching and counting—mostly Americans on a leisure cruise along the Great Lakes, in the night while they slept. A ship, old but grand. It seemed all the more sad and impossible, water all around yet consumed by fire.

  * * *

  —

  Reiko called. Her father was stricken with tuberculosis.

  Frankie could not go back. He would not. But what could he say?

  Frankie. That was all she whispered into his silence.

  Mr. Fujimoto would fill in while he was gone.

  Hannah squeezed Frankie’s hand and gave him a hug, her floral perfume settling on him. Uri patted his back and shook his hand. “We’ll see you before long, Frank.”

  He sat on the train and watched the city back away from him. As they picked up speed, tall buildings shrank away, flat ones sank into the ground until there was nothing in his view but grass and trees.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Place Left Behind

  Tashme was a ghost of a ghost town. The shacks crumbling to the ground. The hospital deserted. There was no gate, no guard.

  Stupid boy, his mother had called to say the day before he departed. To make him stay put, not waste time and money. Yet here he was: the first time he’d not listened to her.

  He stepped off the bus from Hope and there was Augusta running down the dirt road to him, followed by Julia and Aki.

  “Frankie, welcome home!” Augusta—a young woman now—hugged him, as did Julia. Aki listed toward him, took his hand and squeezed, her one eye meeting both of his. They walked up Tashme Boulevard with him, Aki on one side, Augusta on the other, both holding his arms, while Julia tagged behind.

  “It’s so good to have you back, Frankie.” Augusta squeezed his arm tighter. “My, but you’re looking swell.” She was the same as ever, and then some.

  Up ahead, Reiko was standing with an apron tied at her waist, her hands clasped, then waving, then clasped in front as she stepped forward. He dropped his suitcase, ran and then stopped himself, then ran right to her, picked her up and swung her around, surprising himself. She filled his arms and pressed into his body and that felt like the most natural thing in the world. For so long, she had been only feather-light words in letters and a mere voice on the telephone.

  He set her down, both of them flushed and warm. Like salmon pulsing red as they push upstream, he thought and laughed.

  “What?” She pinched him.

  She was the same: her lips red, her hair wavy. Longer and less curly than he recalled but glossy as ever. He couldn’t help but glance down at her belly, as if he’d see some trace of the loss there.

  “Well?” Reiko raised a hand from behind her back and slipped on a pair of glasses. “I could barely see myself in the mirror,” she said, peering up at him. “Do I look different?”

  “No, no. The same.”

  “The same good or the same ho-hum?”

  Good, of course. She was still his Rose Queen. She hadn’t changed. Had he? He reminded himself that it was meant to be, his wife by his side. When she caught him staring, she leaned in to give him a kiss.

  “Oh, Frankie. All this time.”

  * * *

  —

  His mother was bending down to feed the stove with wood as he came in. She struck him as a little thicker and just as sturdy. The shack was the same but seemed to him, after living in the Kidney, all the more a cramped, crumpled box. The old stove, the cots, the sunken armchair by the window, the dusty light streaming through. Propped on a small table was a picture of Yas, with a stick of incense, a bowl of rice and an apple in front of it.

  “Mama.”

  At last she squeezed his shoulders with her strong hands. “Fu-ranki. You are too thin.” Of course he wasn’t. But only her cooking would do.

  “Sit, sit,” she said and Frankie did. It was Taiji who was too thin. His face gaunt, his body drooping from its bones. He paused with a hand on the back of Frankie’s chair before settling into his own. Sighed so, so, so with a resigned smile. This was something new: parsing time between small actions.

  From the far bed, a rattling cough that subsided into light snoring: Reiko’s father.

  “Come see our place after, Frankie,” Augusta said. Our place. He’d set her straight on that when the time was right.

  He was pulled along by her and Julia to Sixth Avenue, turning this way and that among old shells of the RCMP barracks, the nurses’ station, the canteen. The look-alike streets he couldn’t distinguish from one another even when he lived here, dwarfed by the green mountains. They pointed out the shack they’d begun to fix up with new curtains and such, but hurried him along to the old town hall.

  “Stay here,” the girls told him. Julia slipped inside to flick a switch and in a second, a string of Christmas bulbs lit up a lopsided sign: High Hope’s Theatre. Augusta pulled him inside and tried the lights there, but they didn’t work. No matter: he could see everything well enough, at least in his memory’s eye: the dirt floor under their feet during the dances, the very ramshackle stage he’d stood on in his grass skirt, built with planks he’d scavenged.

  “Frankie, you’ll see. When the lights are on, when everything’s ready,” Augusta chattered on. To which he simply nodded. No lights and no Frankie to scavenge supplies. High Hope’s was dashed. His sisters would be in Toronto just as soon as he could get his show up and running.

  As they walked farther along past Sixth to Seventh and Eighth Avenues, odd sights began to appear. Two- and three-storey shacks, no longer shacks, but fortified constructions, built up into miniature mansions on the government-granted plots. They had front and even side doors, covered porches. Wood siding for warmth, even some brick here and there. Grand in their own way. It was near evening, but Frankie could still hear some hammers hammering and saws sawing amid a gramophone playing swing. There was free timber in the surrounding forests, as much as anyone could want, so the sky was the limit.

  The sisters showed Frankie another kind of dwelling too, outlandish on this valley floor but familiar to him. Tall masts up the middle and each end of the house lengthened into bow and stern, atop trailer wheels. Augusta waved up to their owners, “Ahoy there!”

  They belonged to the fishermen who’d lost their fishing trawlers and were now reclaiming them, even if on mountain shores. They reminded Frankie of Bucky’s drawings, those strange vessels that were land-, sea- and air-worthy. An all-you-can-carry, in itself. Bucky would approve.

  * * *

  —

  After the lights had gone out across the camp, and after Reiko had bird-bathed her father and tucked him in, she came outside to join Frankie. She hummed “Stardust” in his ear and they waltzed down Tashme Boulevard in the dark. He felt his heels sink into the dirt between the grass patches and the song seemed truer than ever. Lonely nights with only a dream of a song, a reverie; a memory. A paradise where roses bloom.

  She tied her scarf over his eyes and led him along, step by step. Then ta-dum! They were on Pig Alley, where he’d rarely ventured, named for the pigs that were once kept and slaughtered there before Tashme became Tashme, when it was Fourteen Mile Ranch. The barn was a dilapidated, cobwebbed heap.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “Silly.” She turned him to the doorstep of a cabin. “This is the where the Mounties stayed.”

  It was a log cabin, solid. He felt it under his feet as he stepped inside; he heard it when the heavy door shut behind them. Reiko lit the lamp. The floors were nicely finished, if dusty. No cracks in the walls. No outside let in.

&n
bsp; This was how the other half had lived. There were counters, a sink and faucet. Reiko turned on the water to show him. Cupboards, a closet. And a big, high double bed.

  “Just for one night. Nobody comes here.”

  Reiko had made up the bed with a quilt she’d sewn herself. He recognized one patch from a red polka-dot dress she used to wear. They fell onto it as if it were the grass in the graveyard. Her body was the same, her muscular legs curling around and gripping his thighs.

  “Let’s make another baby,” she whispered. “A strong and healthy one.”

  Why had he waited so long to come for her? This unspent drive and haplessness had gathered in his core as if he were a teenager again: of course. All longing and mere consolation. How could he not have understood? He needed her—in the flesh. All along he’d needed her; just as Uri needed Hannah.

  He woke in the night wrapped up in her, smelling his own stale breath. She slept on. He felt where their bodies came together and where they cleaved. She rustled. He remembered this sensation of being closer than close but sealed apart. The mystery of it.

  In the morning, they lazed in bed as the sunlight glowed behind the paisley curtains. In the cupboards, Frankie found some rusted cans of beans, and at the bottom of the closet, a uniform. A Mountie uniform, ragged and moth-eaten with a sleeve dangling by a thread, no longer that proud, sparkling red. Frankie marched around the room in nothing but the jacket.

  “O Canada!” he sang, clicking his bare heels and saluting.

  “Oh, Frankie!” Reiko laughed.

  They spent the day together like it was another time. They wandered to the graveyard, but when they arrived, someone was being buried. They crouched behind nearby bushes. A handful of mourners in black huddled amid the soaring mountains. A mound of dirt, a waiting coffin and a hole in the ground: a doorway deep into the earth, far beneath the valley in which Tashme sat.