Floating City

by Kerri Sakamoto

  “So sad.” Reiko’s lips brushed his ear. They both lowered their heads. One row over, there was the Blackwell grave, the old stone leaning as before, with its collection of bad-luck fours. Behind it, their special place. Glancing over, they began to giggle and then snuck away.

  Frankie pictured Reiko in the Kidney. He pictured himself bringing her there, into the biggest room she’d ever lived in, no doubt. Even if it was in the basement. The half-windows allowing a slice of sunlight to shine on the waves of her hair as she lay on their bed. He thought of her on the grass with the irises behind her in perfect purple bloom.

  * * *

  —

  He and his mother had come and gone to and from Hope so many times selling and procuring items, stopping in pawn shops, white elephant sales, wherever people left things to sell or trade. But why would people come from there to here, to Tashme to pay to sit in an old barn?

  “To be entertained, Frankie,” Augusta said. “For song and dance, adventure, romance and heartbreak!”

  Frankie shook his head. Foolishness. “Who will get you your red satin and black shoe polish?”

  Julia, who’d been playing the silent sidekick, stepped forward. “I will, and I do.”

  “By hook or by crook,” said Augusta. Julia was tending gardens in Hope, tilling the soil to earn the money.

  “I’m doing the same thing you are,” Julia said.

  “It’s not the same,” Frankie scoffed. “I’ve already got my eye on a big house where all of us can live.” He was shrinking into his little boy self, back in the world where everything was big and he was small. “You’ll each have a room to yourselves. There’ll be a garden with flowers for Mama. A big garden.”

  No one said a word. Frankie looked to his mother, sheepish. “It’ll be ready by fall,” he assured her. “You won’t spend one more winter here.”

  * * *

  —

  He sat in his mother’s old chair that night, looking out the window at her view. It wasn’t especially beautiful; it just looked onto other broken-down shacks and the base of mountains. Frankie felt as if he were alone with his mother despite Reiko’s father lying nearby. The old man’s groans had begun to mingle with the muted howls of wolves and coyotes.

  He wondered where in the woods Taiji and the men of the camp had taken Yas’s body to burn it.

  “Mama.” Frankie didn’t have much else to say. He wanted to cry to her, to hold and hang his every need and worry of the past years on her and the word coming from his mouth. Mama. Momoye stood beside him, her waist at his shoulder.

  The brows she used to arch in disapproval now draped tiredly over the corners of her eyes. It frightened him. Time was passing, life was passing. He owed her a better one.

  * * *

  —

  He said his goodbyes. He even ventured into the dim corner where his father-in-law lay, though the man didn’t remember him. He barely remembered Reiko from day to day. He rested under a layer of blankets, his head on a hill of pillows, his eyes sunken in their sockets. Everything shrinking back. Out of his mouth, a dark open tunnel, came that gurgling sound of faint life. Frankie didn’t know what to say, but patted the mound where it seemed the man’s shoulder lay.

  Reiko came to his side. “Shush. Rest, Papa.”

  They walked the path from Tashme Boulevard to meet the bus. Taiji and his mother and Aki. Augusta and Julia trailed behind. Reiko walked by his side, arm linked in his, their footfalls dull in the hard dirt and still air.

  Taiji patted his shoulder as he had at his arrival and Frankie was reminded that there was strength left in the old man, in spite of his withering grief.

  The bus pulled up. “Frankie, you do what’s best,” Aki told him. Augusta and Julia each gave him a hug and a peck, more fleeting than when he’d arrived.

  Then his mother, with whom he’d spent so little time, passed him a handkerchief of bills so that no one could see. She pressed it into his hand and at the same time pushed off from him, like a ship unmoored.

  He embraced Reiko, wrapped his fingers in the waves of her hair. “I’ll send for you,” he said. “Your father too.” Though they both knew her father could never make the journey. He’d have to die here before she could leave.

  From the bus window he called out to all of them. “A room for every one of you! You’ll see!”

  * * *

  —

  He slept much of the way back, through days and days, and endless tunnels into night. He felt the train lift off its tracks, veering into the air like one of Bucky’s strange vessels. He smelled Hannah’s lavender perfume in his dreams, and rolled a pebble the shape of Bucky’s tetrahedron, nature’s building block, between his fingers. He woke with a start. Home, he thought, when he emerged onto Front Street with the solid edifice of Union Station behind him and the towering Bank of Commerce ahead. He held his arms out, closed his eyes, and imagined the tilting of the Earth on its axis as it spun, the slight pressure at the side of his one foot. Or maybe it was just the rumble of the night workers digging out the subway tunnel below.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Vapour Sphere

  “Take hold and climb aboard, Frank!”

  A pair of legs dangled from a cloud, low above the shore of Lake Ontario. Frankie grabbed hold of them just as the rain began, the wind lashing at him. The laced black shoes, scuffed, dusty; the musty smell of the wool pants: Bucky!

  The head belonging to those legs wasn’t in a cloud: it was inside a balloon—of sorts. The skeleton of struts the students had bolted together into triangles upon triangles in the Slonemskys’ yard. A billowing sheath tethered to it. Bucky’s Dome. Not supine. Alive, afloat, airborne!

  Frankie felt the tips of his toes leave the sand. A gust of wind lifted the dome higher. He grabbed hold of a strut, let go of Bucky’s legs and swung himself up. Suddenly there were the streets below he’d walked from Union Station; there was the gaping hole dug by the workers for the new underground city. “Join me,” Bucky called.

  Frankie stood and balanced gingerly on the lower frame, then hoisted himself onto the small platform in the middle of the dome where Bucky sat, cross-legged.

  With a gust of wind, they rose up and away.

  “Welcome to Cloud Nine!” Bucky boomed, his cropped white hair unmoving in the wind beneath the scaffolding of his glasses.

  Frankie looked down as the Bank of Commerce shrank to a flat square. “But how—?” His voice was quavering; he was trembling. He’d never been up so high.

  “We’re aboard a geodesic floating sphere, my dear boy,” Bucky said. “The air need only be heated one or two degrees.” He pointed to the small gas stove sitting in the middle of the platform. “We could anchor ourselves to mountains and live up among the clouds. Or we could simply drift and see the world.”

  See the world. Yes, he was beginning to fathom how much there was.

  “Have you ever flown before, Frank?”

  Frankie shook his head. Below passed a city of more than one million and counting. He could easily fall headlong into it, spiral down onto one of those squares as it grew quickly under him, then splat.

  “A famous architect once claimed that as long as humans can’t fly, moving horizontally is natural. He built horizontal skyscrapers.” Bucky laughed. “Man was meant to fly high as the moon. Higher.”

  They went with the wind. Why not? What was to fear? He and Bucky were Priest-Navigators.

  “I took my first flight in 1922 and I’ve been to-ing and fro-ing ever since.”

  Frankie squeezed the aluminum bars in his hands. He could almost see himself in one of Bucky’s drawings, floating just out from the planet Earth, rotating in tandem with it. There was no up or down. Just an in and out, as Bucky said. Of course: as they went up—or out—the world grew smaller, yet more vast and smooth across its surface.

  From north to south ran streams like twigs, creeks like branches flowing into the trunks of rivers—the Humber, the Don—rooted in the expanse of Lake Ont
ario.

  “The Earth is three-quarters water,” said Bucky. “Yet ninety-nine percent of Earthians vie for five percent of land.” As they dipped down again, Frankie could make out houses and caravans parked near the riverbanks that themselves were melting into the water.

  “We could plop ourselves down right here, say, and float a city. Or in the Arctic, or the Amazon. We could live anywhere, on land, sea or air, serviced by planes and boats, connected as one world-around network.”

  Bucky patted Frankie’s back. “Do you see that?”

  The sphere caught a blast of wind that returned them to the east. Rain began to fall harder and the wind rose, but even as they were tossed about, Bucky seemed not to notice. Frankie tried not to stop looking down, or anywhere. The wind whipped at the lake as it rumpled and erupted. Its waves were churning high and fast, festering at its gashes, then gathering and rushing upstream along the rivers and creeks, engulfing the banks, sloshing over the land. The lake rose into a mountain of black water gliding across the land.

  “To survive a hurricane, we need only follow nature’s design,” Bucky shouted. “A spider web can float in a hurricane. Compression elements in a sea of tension.”

  Hurricane? Below them, hydro poles toppling, bobbing like toothpicks, cars, houses crumpled and carried along, trees blown horizontal. People were clinging to the roofs of cars and houses, or whatever remained of them. It was a tide of things, the built world overtaken. Battered by the wind, Frankie and Bucky watched the furious undertow claw back chunks of the city. A firetruck overturned helplessly as its siren screeched then was snuffed as the men inside struggled to get out.

  The sphere rocked and swirled but Frankie, shivering, clung to the aluminum frame more tightly than ever. He thought of Yas riding the river’s current. He couldn’t die, not yet.

  “Hold fast, Frank,” Bucky called out. He turned the flame higher and their geodesic airship rose above the brunt of the gale. They floated back over the thick of the city, over Union Station. Streets had turned to canals, cars and benches to rafts.

  Then, abruptly, the wind died down. “Ah,” sighed Bucky. “There now.” He doused the flame and they began to drop, bit by bit. Frankie tumbled off onto a rooftop.

  “I’ll be on my way, now, Frank!” shouted Bucky with a salute. He tapped the third of the three watches on his wrist. “You’ll receive a missive from my next destination.” Bucky stoked the fire and Cloud Nine rose up and up and bobbed out of sight.

  Frankie closed his eyes and opened them. The moon was high and bluish white. So close it seemed he could climb there and back all by himself. He was atop the Bank of Commerce, thirty-four storeys up. South a block or two, he saw, for the first time, Uri Slonemsky’s partially built Towers of Finance, their steel beams reaching to catch and surpass the bank. A true Colossus, unsinkable.

  Frankie was soaked to the skin but felt warm. All was calm. Distant sirens rang down the still waters of the streets below. He and Bucky had easily survived, like spiders in their webbed dome. He thought he glimpsed the constellation Lyra, which Bucky had once traced for him in the sky. There was its brightest star, Vega, one point drawn on the celestial sphere of the northern hemisphere, the Northern Triangle. When had the day passed into night?

  * * *

  —

  A hurricane in Toronto? A tropical hurricane? Not in a hundred—two hundred—years, people said. But Frankie recalled Uri poring over the morning newspaper when a storm had first begun to stir in the Caribbean. He’d mentioned it in fact, how it was whipping itself up over land, gaining mass over the sea and ocean, gathering power. He showed Frankie a map or two, pointing out the changing form of the thing.

  It had rained over Toronto the day and night before, but that was all. The creeks and rivers were rising, but they’d risen before; the ravine at the bottom of their property had grown soggy. Uri had gone to bed that night curled around Hannah.

  But he couldn’t sleep. That was a sign. He slipped away and sat down to sketch for the first time in years. The desk pressed into his newly acquired paunch; he felt the warmth of his flesh lap moistly upon itself and he was thirsty—he would remember those sensations. The cool, dry angles of perpendicularity between himself and the built world were no longer. He sighed. Nothing, as usual, was as it had seemed. As with this storm. As with Hannah’s Blue Period. Of course, he didn’t try to stop what he could see coming.

  It had begun with what would be his first major building, the Towers of Finance. A modern building, one of the first in the city—in the country. But in order to build it, a block or two of storefronts needed to be done away with: a pawn shop, novelty shop, cigar store and others. A narrow huddle of decrepit buildings with slumping roofs and cracked, crumbling walls. Families ran the shops and lived above. Some were veterans come home from war, some were elderly; one was a widow with bedraggled children. Hannah had begged Uri to fix up the places and let the people stay: People before buildings! But Uri was not to be blamed or looked to for a solution. It wasn’t him doing away with them. It was the city, the developers, the banks. He was no Fincap. He had been hired simply to design the building, to make something beautiful from this blight. Hannah befriended all forty of the residents, tried to find them homes. She did, for some: a Salvation Army shelter, and for the widow and her children, a caravan by the river. But not for others. She wanted to bring them home, to their home. They would come calling for some time after, knocking on the door of Hannah’s heart at all hours, day or night. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t keep up with all of them, their displaced lives a hive of stinging worry.

  It was the first of his modern buildings, of his Alphabetical Architecture. U-Building, he liked to call it, would comprise two towers connected by a two-storey-high corridor across its base. His life’s project that he could not relinquish, not even for Hannah. Before the bedroom door had closed and the great Blue Period had commenced, she’d sobbed to him: We have so much, Uri, so much! Others so little! What could he say? How could he answer? Still, work on the Towers of Finance started and stopped as the Fincaps hemmed and hawed at escalating costs. But Hannah closed her door for three years. Three years that had ended, thanks to Frankie and his wondrous ever-blooming irises. Frankie, at whose feet he’d sent the tiny model of the towers crashing.

  The night of the hurricane, he sketched a bit of nothing, then climbed up the stairs to slip back into bed beside Hannah, curling around her, letting her hand clamp his wrist in her sleep. As usual.

  He dreamed. The bedroom door was opening and closing rhythmically. She loves me, she loves me not. She loves me…The valves of his heart opening and closing. Was his heart giving out?

  When he woke, fully, his mouth was dry and Hannah lay beside him, crooked in his arm, but he was cold, freezing: the blankets and sheets had been ripped from their bodies, their slack, middle-aged forms mercilessly exposed—to what? He looked up to the sky. For the first time, he could feel Bucky’s universe in full motion: the tilt of the Earth as they turned and rotated around those stars that deceived with their own motion. Other things flew past, things that belonged to them: papers, plans, books, a chair, Hannah’s hairbrush, a rake and the rest of Frank’s garden tools. Sucked up and out to the darkness of the night sky, and after it, improbably, a car bumper, a wheel, a small maple. Was he still dreaming? Were they leaving Kansas?

  Hannah woke and cried out, trying to sit up, but the wind and Uri pushed her down. He held tight to her, climbed over her to shield her body. “Stay, stay,” he bade her, and they burrowed into each other and watched all the worldly things swirl over and past them, disappearing into the night.

  And that, he told Frankie in the morning as they collected his sodden belongings from the basement, was how the hurricane had lifted the roof off the Kidney.

  * * *

  —

  The ravine was flooded, the dry garden no longer dry. With Frankie’s basement apartment full of water, he moved into the living room. When he looked out the windows f
rom the chesterfield where he slept now, he was at sea. The old dankness crept under his skin; he felt it in his hair, in everything he touched. It depressed him to be on water once again.

  To Hannah it was a wonder. She was buoyed, even though her iris isle was submerged. In the mornings, she lit a cigarette and then cast a fishing line out the bedroom window. She reeled in a hat, a teacup, a toy train. Each item was an intercepted missive, a message in a bottle. Uri joined her, casting his own line out to sea. They called themselves shipwrecked vagabonds, never changing from their pyjamas and rubber boots.

  Bucky’s half-built dome had washed away. “It might make it out to sea,” he brightly told Frankie.

  “Maybe,” Frankie said with a deep sigh.

  “It can land where it pleases,” Bucky declared, untucking his pants from wading boots. “No rent to pay at sea.”

  Upstairs, he cast a fishing line out the window beside Hannah. “An oceanic utopia—that’s what we need. A community afloat with all essentials onboard, accessible by boat or front crawl.”

  Why not? thought Frankie. He’d lived in a house on the sea: he’d swum to it, rowed to it. But not for him. Not again.

  Hannah’s line snagged; she tugged and tugged until she reeled in a soggy iris bulb. She lifted it to her breast. “Remember how glorious they were, Frank?”

  Temporary struts were installed across the top of the Kidney and Plexiglas sheets bolted on. Hannah wanted to see the sky.

  Frankie was eventually given Anne’s room while the basement dried out, though even the upstairs was damp. He stepped into a festooned wonderland of pink walls, pink bedspread and pillows. Shelves of dolls and teddy bears and books, ribbons and trophies. An outsized mirror cast back his reflection, startling him. Photographs lined one wall: Anne riding a horse, on a bicycle, in skates, in ballet slippers, posing awkwardly as a teenager. He studied her class pictures. How different she looked from the others: the untameable hair, the undainty features, the wary eyes.