Floating City

by Kerri Sakamoto

  Combine the Pleasures of Suburban Living with the Convenience of the City and Beautiful Lake Views Open House Today 2 to 5 p.m.

  She sighed deeply, and murmured out the rest, each word in her English broken in two or three: “Mar-ble walls and flo-ors.” She laboured on through “air-conditioned laundry rooms with automatic washing, drying and ironing machines. Rooftop sundeck overlooking lake.”

  It took a long time for her to be done, but when she was, she patted her son’s hand.

  * * *

  —

  Frankie moved his family in first. Every unit was rented. There was now a waiting list. Concrete and sawdust was everywhere, unsettled, but it was magic dust and the magic light streaming in over the lake held it afloat. Frankie guided his mother to the large windows Uri had insisted on and watched her take in the view. Reiko followed, with Baby Yuri in her arms. Momoye glanced down at the old fishing boat whose owner would not sell. “Who lives there?”

  “No one,” he said hastily. Instead, Frankie steered his mother toward a view of the new expressway rising in the west. “Mama, look at that!” It was an unravelling ribbon: that unobstructed strip for only cars was a manmade miracle, a miracle made by the Chairman and named after himself. Frankie had never seen anything like it: six lanes hugging the lakeshore, then rising above it, an archway of asphalt and concrete, speeding people in and out of the city, lit by night with lamplight torches.

  “Oh, Frankie,” said Reiko, overwhelmed at his side. She bounced Baby Yuri to get his attention. “Your daddy built this.”

  * * *

  —

  The Chairman kept paving the way for more of what he named Harbour City, spreading west along the lake in tandem with his unfurling expressway. Frankie and Uri kept building, one tower financing the next, each the same as the tower before it. Uri admired the uniformity of them, he told Hannah and Frankie. Like sentinels guarding the shore identically at attention.

  “Build ’em!” the Chairman liked to shout while slapping a back or two. “Build ’em high!” He’d down a gulp from his flask and offer one to Frankie and Uri.

  The streetcars to and from the quays were full each morning and evening, office workers elbow to elbow with the dock, factory and construction workers. Cars rumbled past fresh excavations with cranes perched high above them, and in front, large signs read HANES DEVELOPMENTS.

  Business was booming, and yet Frankie’s coffers still needed filling for the next project, and the next. It was the way of the world, he’d now learned. At the end of each month, Aki brought to him her earnings from the garment factory, as always, and his mother deposited High Hope’s Theatre’s profits. Because only Frankie knew what to do with money: he was growing it, every last penny.

  Baby Yuri was not growing. It seemed to Frankie that the Mongolian spot had sprawled wider while the boy’s behind itself had not. He rarely walked. He gargled words but never spoke them. Momoye and Reiko both claimed to understand him, but hardly ever agreed on what was being said. The doctor referred them to specialists who told Frankie and Reiko to be patient and let nature take its course. But where would nature lead?

  “Bad luck, bad luck,” his mother fretted. A bad-luck number four must have figured somewhere along the way to stunt him. That was her reasoning for everything that didn’t go the way it should. Yet they’d been blessed by the slimmest of margins: he’d been born early in the morning of the fifth of May.

  “He’s just stubborn,” Reiko said. “He doesn’t want to grow. He wants to stay on his mother’s lap.”

  “Nonsense,” Frankie snapped. As the years passed the boy still preferred crawling to walking, babbling to talking. His gaze was forever darting, never resting eye to eye with anyone’s, not even Reiko’s. In their spacious apartment, Frankie heard his mother chanting at all hours behind the door of the bedroom she shared with Taiji. She mumbled calculations of dates and times and other numerical factors, multiplying superstitions he could not keep up with. The small altar in the corner of the living room became more and more cramped with oranges, pears, cups of tea, bowls of rice and flowers offered to Buddha. Behind its photograph of Yas, Frankie discovered, lurked the Priest in his robes, snipped from the old picture of him and Momoye as a young bride. The room began to smell briny, sour and sugary all at once.

  * * *

  —

  The small compact case held a crescent of pale, sweet-smelling pressed powder inside, instantly familiar when Frankie opened it. It was the scent of the Ladies: he was stepping inside their house once more, with tiny Jesus on the cross above his bed, and the view through lace curtains of the road home to Port Alberni. It felt heavy in his hand, but he suspected it was only plated in gold.

  In the bathroom, he slid down his pants and bent forward, twisting his neck to see the compact mirror behind him. Yes, there was spot, the same, it seemed, no smaller, no larger. Maybe a shade lighter, something that happened with age, he’d heard, as the body starts to run low on its resources. He smelled the sweet—sickly sweet—powder and remembered the Ladies’ hushed breath and soft touch as they examined the spot.

  The door cracked open door and there was Baby Yuri, standing, his fists bunched, his nose scrunched at the sight of his father, pants down, hunched over. The boy’s eyes fixed brightly on the compact in his father’s hand. He grabbed the compact in his own quick paw. “Mine!” he gargled and scooted away.

  Frankie hitched up his pants and scrambled into the hallway, shouting after him. “Come back!”

  He found the boy in a bedroom corner behind his crib among a growing collection of balls, twigs, leaves, stones. Toy cars, tiddlywinks. He was trying to pry open the compact with his chubby fingers. Frankie tried to take it from him, but Baby Yuri wriggled under the crib and out the door. Frankie had never seen him move so quickly. “Give that back!” he called. Finally he cornered the boy and yanked the compact out of his fingers, but it slipped and fell open to the floor, splintering the glass and sprinkling the powder like pink snow into the air. “No, no, no!” Frankie cried. The boy’s face went pale and frightened and he scampered away.

  Frankie gathered the bits of glass and the compact, now unhinged in two. The smell was everywhere, sickly sweet. He nearly gagged as he was cleaning it up. The powder covered his hands, making them pink and pale. He remembered discovering the compact in a drawer beside the bed in the Ladies’ house, how he’d used the powder to try to cover the spot. To make the Ladies believe the bruise had disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  “You see there, my dear boy?” said Bucky, leaning over him toward the airplane window. “More signs of humans’ colonizing activity.” Again Frankie was rising into the sky with Bucky over Lake Ontario, taking off to the out there. His first plane ride. He spied his own Tomorrow Living high-rises shrinking, as if into the long ago and far away.

  On a napkin, Bucky quickly sketched the sphere of Earth with spikes and boxes jutting out from all along its rounded surface. He scribbled a plane, a bird and inexplicably, a baby hovering just above the planet. “Your child already sees planes crossing the sky as natural to him as birds.”

  The lake shimmered and then melted under clouds that hid everything below, and the plane passed through them like nothing. They must be impossibly high up—or out, as Bucky would say. Frankie could almost believe that heaven—the heaven the Ladies back in Port Alberni had spoken of, where Yas, his first baby and Bucky’s child might’ve gone—was not much farther out.

  “Here you are, Frank, with a young child. As I was. A chance to look after this new life. This is the beginning of impossible things happening. Where people live now needs attention. The way we build. We don’t have to build with tons of heavy bricks and mortar compressed into earth. We can use the kind of technology that we use at sea and in the sky and see how it works on land. We can build houses so light they can be picked up and carried wherever, whenever we want.

  “Here’s the real news, my dear boy,” Bucky said. “I
t is feasible to take care of all of humanity at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever experienced or dreamt of; to do so without having anybody profit at the expense of another.”

  Bucky stared at him for a long moment with his big, blurred-behind-glasses eyes. “Now, is Guinea Pig F going to make money or make sense?”

  Frankie didn’t know quite what to say. He wanted to make money; that was truer than ever. He never wanted to be told where he could or couldn’t live. Didn’t that make sense? He turned to Bucky, but he’d already settled back in his seat, closed his eyes and spread his hands to meet at their fingertips.

  Frankie closed his eyes too.

  Moments later, it seemed, there were domes flying this way and that outside the plane window, Bucky’s domes, each dangling at the end of a line suspended from helicopters, one after another along a vast white plain. A reverie, straight from one of Bucky’s letters. You see, my dear boy? Lightful houses. Stepping stones. Set down anywhere.

  * * *

  One newspaper called him Frank Hanes, Rising Son on the Waterfront, brightening the blighted shore. Another warned of the Concrete Wall he was building with his high-rises in a row. It was true his buildings hoarded their view of the lake, but why not? Wasn’t that view what his renters’ money was buying them?

  Storeys below along Lake Ontario, Frankie surveyed the giant cranes perched over holes gouged in the ground lifting great and unwieldy loads made possible by Bucky’s octet truss invention of some kind of triangulated tension. The high-rises were being rented out faster than he could build them.

  Frankie opened the drawer in which he stored everything Bucky had ever sent him and took out the napkin. He carefully smoothed out the rumpled Spaceship Earth sketched by Bucky’s hand, fringed with his own high-rises and one lone spike jutting farthest out: the Empire State Building. Frankie riffled through the drawer until he found the old photograph of Bucky in 1932 atop a building in New York City with that tallest of spires behind him. Who had taken the picture and from where? His face was tilted to the sky, open to the future.

  And yet, Bucky confided, he’d felt unmoored at the time. His significance in the universe still obscure to himself.

  * * *

  —

  Up they went, all of them rising together. It felt like the elevator was inside him, instead of him inside it. Like a rocket about to tear through the top of him, soar out of the building, into the sky. Frankie looked to his mother and Taiji. They both stared at their feet, as if unconvinced they could be rising so rapidly when the floor was staying put. The doors opened. One by one they stepped out, Reiko tottering on new, higher-than-usual heels.

  There was New York City, the mighty megalopolis, spreading out, growing on every side of them, even as they stood there. If you watched carefully, you might see movement in each square inch of space way down there. People inside buildings and on the streets; machines starting, stopping, carting, dumping, all below the drifting clouds. And to think, all the while the whole ship rotating at a thousand miles an hour and, as Bucky would say, as all the while the quadrillions of atomic components of which man is composed intergyrate and transform at seven million miles per hour. You couldn’t see it, but it was happening. He felt it inside himself. The roiling in his head and his belly, the tilting and pressure on his one foot. He was movement, like all Earthians: a verb sailing forth, as Bucky wrote, not a noun.

  But was it all mystery or all knowable?

  Reiko held tightly to her husband as the crowds jostled for a position at the perimeter. It was like they were on a ride at the old amusement park at Sunnyside, thought Frankie. She smiled at him, her teeth chattering, though it wasn’t so cold. Her Frankie had brought them on this adventure and wasn’t it something, she was surely thinking.

  After she’d gone inside, he walked around the observation deck. On an adjacent building a short distance below, he saw a man standing on the rooftop, looking up. Could it be Bucky, the young Bucky in that old picture? Younger than Frankie was now, but already a father who’d lost a child, yet determined to make impossible things happen. Suddenly, the man moved, appeared to twist as if about to dance, then dropped out of sight. Frankie’s heart froze. But in a second the man reappeared, walking toward the rooftop door.

  When they arrived back in Toronto, Frankie took the napkin with Bucky’s sketch and carefully drew another building on Spaceship Earth, a tower dwarfing his own high-rises, climbing out over Uri’s Towers of Finance and the Empire State Building. The spire reached beyond the clouds, and there he saw himself, at its peak.

  * * *

  Give me something to do, Taiji’s drooping face seemed to say after he’d set a fresh orange and a bowl of rice in front of Yas’s picture. Now that there were no logs to roll, no sawmill or hungry mouths to feed.

  Of course he’d never ask that of Frankie.

  Not in those words, at least.

  Taiji surprised him that afternoon. The new tower was almost finished on the outside, but inside, much remained to be done. Frankie had already set up his office. The site at ground level was busy with trucks rolling in and out. The foreman had sent Taiji straight up in the elevator, tote bag in hand.

  “We’re higher than the Empire State,” Frankie said proudly.

  Taiji sat himself down by the window. He silently gazed at the lake far below.

  Ahh! He remembered why he’d come. He wanted to show Frankie the book he’d brought with him, but the bag was no longer on the ledge beside him. He glanced around in confusion. It was still on the ledge where he’d left it, but the room, with him and Frankie in it, had rotated forty-five degrees. The view out the window now faced southwest instead of south.

  “The room is moving,” Frankie explained. Rotating like Spaceship Earth itself. One could enjoy the view, all 360 degrees of it, without shifting seats. He couldn’t wait to bring Bucky aboard.

  “Can you make it slow down?”

  Frankie laughed. “It’s not going that fast.”

  Miraculously, Taiji had found this book in the library. He’d never known there were such places freely lending such a book. He opened it in front of Frankie. There was Canada. There was British Columbia. There was Vancouver Island. The north of Vancouver Island. The scratches of rivers and creeks grew larger on each map. Taiji traced his way from the capital city, Victoria, as he had those years ago, to the upper reaches of the island. He turned the page to one on which the creek and river, mountain and valley were large on the page.

  “See?” he jabbed at the book four times.

  Frankie turned the book to see. “Yes, yes, Papa,” he said. “I see.”

  “Mine. I own. I claim.” Taiji jabbed his thumb at his own chest. He watched Frankie’s face.

  “Are you sure, Papa?” Frankie said. They both looked at the map and the name: Hansoke. Hansoke Creek, Hansoke River, Hansoke Mountain, Hansoke Valley.

  “Yes! Before you were born.” Didn’t Frankie see?

  But he wanted to tell Frankie more, to warn him to be careful, as he had not been.

  On the island, he’d followed a small creek through towering forests to the foot of a mountain. He found the nearest town and hired the only men who understood him: young Japanese loitering in the local bar, some gambling at cards. A few others too, local Indians who resembled untouchables back in Japan.

  He found a Japanese bookkeeper who knew English well. The man had been in Canada for years. Smart man. Stake your claim, he said. At the registry office they took it all down: the creek and river, the mountain and the forested valley. Hanesaka Mountain, Hanesaka River, Hanesaka Valley. He wasn’t the first to discover these places, but he was first to claim them.

  The camp prospered. The men were happy; women arrived and one-room cabins were built in Hanesaka Valley for young families. He was saving his profits to take back to Japan.

  The bookkeeper danced down Hanesaka Lane with the ladies on their way to the bath. The way to keep the men working hard, he told Taiji, was to spar
k the spirits of their women.

  The forests were endless; no sooner had the men felled them than another leafy wall rose before them. Taiji rode his horse among the workers, just as his father had ridden in the rice fields.

  The trees kept falling. The men kept chopping until one day the ocean was before them. They dropped their axes and saws. The endless forest had ended. Taiji was scaling his mountain at the time, and watched from above. The wall had been shaved bare.

  The men were dumbstruck, but quickly began packing up their homes. Where next, Boss? they asked. Taiji ran down to see the bookkeeper. The bookkeeper would know what to do, where to go.

  But he was gone, along with his wife. The book was blank save for a few scribbles. The lacquer box where the bookkeeper kept the money was empty.

  Taiji stood abruptly, straightening himself. “Be careful of this man you think you can trust.”

  “Mr. Slonemsky is a good man. I know,” Frankie said.

  “Yes, yes,” Taiji nodded thoughtfully. “Probably so.” He put the book in his tote bag and got up.

  “Just remember that if you keep building, the land will run out.”

  * * *

  —

  It was beyond Modern, beyond Tomorrow: it was The Future. Once completed—which it almost was—it would be the tallest in the world. Cloud Tower would be 117 storeys tall (a number to which Frankie’s mother did not object), including a broadcast tower and antenna. Higher than the Eiffel Tower, Tokyo Tower, and one storey higher than the Empire State Building. Beyond -er: it was -est. He and Uri had found the best engineers to design the tallest, sleekest tower; its elevators zipping up the sides at 1,200 feet per minute: the fastest. They could take you highest quickest, surpassing take-off in even a jet plane. You’d have to swallow the most times during the seventy seconds of the longest elevator ride of any elevator ride in history. It would have more stairs than any other structure: 2,570.