Floating City

by Kerri Sakamoto

  From the highest office suite, Frankie saw the lake as a great sea. Soon he would hear the city loud and clear because of the broadcast tower and its signal bringing news of the world—of the universe!—to everyone.

  Uri Slonemsky was, of course, its architect. If Cloud Tower was to tower over his own Towers of Finance, his U-Building, he didn’t mind. It was new ground to break and a vital addition to his modern lexicon: a towering, unequivocal, singular, self-declaring, capital I. There were the construction triumphs: the hexagonal concrete shaft at its core, the tapered contour. The engineering wonder! Marvel of telecommunications bringing the clearest reception of radio and television in all of North America.

  On the observation deck level, a solid glass floor would overlook the ground from 110 storeys up. Whoever dared could cross the floor with only a pane of glass between them and a plummet to earth.

  The Chairman was proclaiming Cloud Tower soon to be the World’s Tallest Free-Standing Structure, a boon for tourism, a landmark to stand the test of time. Again, it was the Chairman who had spread the loam at City Hall. No roadblocks so long as 1,500 workers were working twenty-four hours a day, five days a week. With half the country watching on television, a giant helicopter flew into the city to lift the forty-four pieces of antenna into place.

  * * *

  —

  If he could, Taiji would chop down Cloud Tower, and in its place, plant a forest of spruces. Frankie had asked him and the rest of the family to meet him there on a Sunday afternoon, for a private tour before the building opened to the public.

  Taiji had gone first to shop in Chinatown. Now he waited at the lobby elevator, and waited. The place was empty of workers, who often rode the elevator with him. The building site was quiet with only the occasional rumble and hiss of trains pulling into nearby Union Station. It was some special holiday, and for once Frankie had given them the day off.

  The elevator didn’t come. Taiji waited for several minutes with his bags of groceries balanced in each hand, then made his way to the stairwell. He began to climb, slowly. From the bottom, he shouted out each number to echo and spiral to the top. He would make sure Frankie hadn’t been cheated of even one of the promised 2,570 steps.

  He climbed on. Surely he had stepped this many steps and more while rolling logs; surely he had walked more steps from Hanesaka Mountain to Desolation Sound to Port Alberni. Surely, he had balanced as many footsteps on rooftops in the camp. This was nothing to him, he thought, climbing faster, if only one step at a time. He pushed himself faster yet, not noticing that the eggplants and cucumbers and rice cakes were tumbling from his bags. Down they rolled as he rose, first to land on step 4, then 44, then 444. Taiji was toting nearly empty bags at his sides, lighter than air as he climbed. One thousand! he shouted up. Everything was growing lighter. The air in his lungs he could barely feel; there was nothing to breathe, it was so light. Each heartbeat touched the other so that there was no beat, just a hum in his chest. He must be travelling downstream instead of up; this must be how Yas had felt, carried along the current.

  When he reached the top, he called: two thousand, five hundred and seventy-two! Two more steps. Momoye wouldn’t like that, he chuckled to himself. Digits adding up to sixteen, divisible by four. But he’d have to tell Frankie, who was always after a good deal: he had gotten two extra steps for his money.

  CHAPTER 11

  Up and Down

  It was Frankie who found him. In the foyer near the stairwell door. He crouched down and tapped Taiji’s cheek. His eyes were open, looking beyond Frankie, much as they always did.

  “Look at me!” Frankie whispered. He touched Taiji’s neck: cold and slack. He drew a tremulous breath and passed his hand before the eyes: gone.

  He closed the lids; that was what to do, he knew. Cold stole up Frankie’s middle and burrowed in.

  A Buddhist prayer came to his lips, then he crossed himself; then, remembering something Hannah had told him, he rent Taiji’s already frayed collar. Or was it his own he was to tear?

  Taiji was wearing the same shabby coat he’d worn back in Tashme. Frankie should’ve bought him a new one long ago.

  He thought to drape his own coat over the body. To call whoever was to be called. Then the elevator doors dinged and opened: his mother stepped out.

  Her eyes went to the floor, to Taiji. She dropped to her knees, her mouth open for a few seconds before a wail rose up.

  She fell atop Taiji wailing, pounding at his chest, locked and still. She wept and cried out. Each time she grew breathless and quiet, she started up again, howling.

  “Mama!” Frankie couldn’t bear to see her in such anguish. He squatted helplessly among the torn shopping bags. She howled and howled, not to be consoled. That she’d let so much out!

  “Shush, Mama,” he said, coming near. He patted her shoulder, pulled her to come away, gently at first, then more forcefully. She pushed back, shielding Taiji’s body from him. She glared fiercely.

  A swish and click-click started up. Was it Taiji? Body parts could tick on while the rest expired, couldn’t they? Underfoot, nearly tripping him, was Baby Yuri, knees swishing, the buckle on his shoes clicking, but not crawling: he was swimming across the unfinished cement floor, raising his short arms, taking gulps of air with a gaping fish mouth.

  “Oba, Oba,” he called. When he reached his grandmother, she pushed him back too.

  Frankie was no consolation; nor was Baby Yuri.

  Frankie picked up his son and left to call an ambulance.

  * * *

  —

  As the tower neared completion, noise from above and below thinned. Fewer trucks rumbled over the site; workers who remained wielded screwdrivers, wrenches and whirring drills to render finishings. When Frankie looked up from his desk to gaze at the lake, he heard for a while the tapping of a lone hammer.

  He came home to find his mother lying on a rattan mat. Frankie carried her to her room, her arm flopped over his shoulder.

  “Fu-ranki,” she murmured, suddenly squeezing his neck, in gratitude or protest. He took in her musty, sour scent—no longer the burnt sweetness of brewing sake. Splotches darkened her cheeks.

  “Did you count the steps? Did you?”

  “Yes, Mama,” Frankie said, as he’d said a hundred times before. “There was no bad-luck four.”

  “Count again,” she muttered. “Again.” He set her on the mattress and box spring he’d bought. She’d find her way back to the mat on the floor in the middle of the night, he knew.

  In the few months since Taiji died, the fleshiness of her body had seemed to dry and harden without him. In her head, always, endlessly: numbers. But not as before, calculating shrewd barters and Frankie’s odds of success. No, the numbers—however random, however sky high—nowadays and -nights came tumbling down the steps Taiji had climbed, dwindling in seconds to four. She only glanced up to pull the miniature Baby Yuri to her breast. The boy could wrench her back to her old cares. She held him in the sunlight streaming through the front window to see whose traces he bore.

  But there were no traces. He was like none of them. Still as small as a three year old; still nothing the doctors could point to or treat. He stared too long but never into anyone’s eyes, and barely blinked; he stood and swayed as if at sea, pinned to the bow. Momoye liked to bathe him; at eight he was too old for it but not too big. Recently, Momoye had noticed something else strange about him: he liked to pull himself under the bath water and stare up from the bottom for long spells of time. When she tried to haul him out, he stayed under water, bubbles escaping between his few teeth. Minutes ticked by, it seemed. When he surfaced, his breathing was calm and even.

  Now Momoye insisted on bird-bathing him, scrubbing him down with a washcloth in the sink. But one day, she found him with his head in the toilet, his legs kicking high in the air, trying to tunnel through. She hauled him up and smacked him—she still had strength enough for that. Baby Yuri simply giggled and pinched her cheek.

&nbs
p; “Mother, he smells,” Reiko declared one night as she was preparing dinner. “He needs a bath.” Reiko dropped the knife with which she’d been slicing radishes. She held out her arms for her big baby.

  Momoye whisked him away.

  “Give me my son!” Reiko shouted as Momoye disappeared with Baby Yuri into her bedroom.

  Frankie rushed into the kitchen. Reiko’s entire body was arched with a fury he hadn’t seen before. Her lip bled from her own teeth biting down.

  “I am the mother!” Blood trickled to her chin. She approached the bedroom door. “She is not!” Reiko shoved it open. Baby Yuri lay on Momoye’s big bed beside his grandmother. A plank of light crossed his face.

  When Frankie took hold of her arm he felt the current surging. That first time in the graveyard he’d seen it in the air around her; it had spread to him from inside her and onto the grasses on which they’d lain. He’d forgotten.

  “I am your wife, Frankie,” she said now, bristling in the narrowing light, her small, bright eyes flaming. She turned abruptly and disappeared into their bedroom and in he went after her. That night, they lay down on their queen-sized bed from Eaton’s department store as if it were the prickly grasses of Tashme.

  The next day, Frankie ordered an apartment in the building vacated for his mother. Aki would join her.

  “I’ll take care of her,” his sister told him. “Don’t worry, Frankie.” He expected his mother to resist or scold or shame him, but she didn’t. It was the second time he’d taken a side apart from her, even if it was just across the hall and down.

  * * *

  Frankie placed his mother’s chair by the window and there she clung to it like a snail in her shell. She sat jittery and lonely for Taiji and only Taiji. She barely looked up when her son came in with Baby Yuri, who immediately dropped to the floor.

  “Get up!” Frankie commanded. The boy knew how to walk, to run, to jump, yet he was crawling like a sand crab. The boy was not right. Frankie yanked Baby Yuri to his feet. “Time for school.” The boy rose only to drop back down once his father’s back was turned. Frankie could barely look at him. It embarrassed him, the boy acting like a dog or a monkey. The teachers at his school didn’t know what to do.

  When Momoye dozed off, Baby Yuri climbed onto his grandmother, straddling the single mountain of her breasts and belly. He bounced and yelped and she began to babble, first in hoarse whispers, then in a deep, guttural growl—sounds, Frankie realized, mimicked by Baby Yuri. The boy paused to listen before climbing down and crawling toward the bathroom.

  She woke startled, and her hand flew to her mouth. Her hair, turned snowy in the season since Taiji’s death, fell over her eyes even as she pushed it aside.

  Number four?

  She was lost.

  “No, Mama, it’s thirty-eight,” Frankie said, choosing a safe number. He left her to add digits, divide and multiply her Old World worries.

  Frankie found Baby Yuri in the bathroom, gurgling, just as Reiko had reported: head in the toilet with his legs bouncing. Baby Yuri raised his head with a giggle upon hearing his name called, spewing the toilet water. Frankie wiped him roughly and scooped him up in his arms, only to have him wriggle free and bound back to his grandmother’s lap.

  Momoye held tight to Baby Yuri until the last possible moment. She babbled furiously even as Frankie led him out the door.

  * * *

  Lately Reiko had begun to feel the oddest sensation of their apartment building leaning to one side, maybe even toppling. Just what was anchoring it below?

  “Don’t be silly,” Frankie said with a laugh, as he put on his new silk tie. Tonight was the opening of Cloud Tower. “It’s steel and concrete.”

  “You know I never liked heights.”

  Did he know that? He did notice that his wife quivered with each creak or whistle of wind at the window. That she rarely stood at the window, and she often rapped her broom on the floor and walls at echoing voices and footsteps.

  Frankie had shown her pictures of sprawling, luxurious houses he was building in the suburbs, the winding, irregular roads they sat on with wide drives. She didn’t want that either. She’d have to learn to drive, and the lots were too big, the houses, big as they were, marooned within. Oh, so lonely.

  She missed Tashme. She missed her father, whose spirit lingered there, she was sure. She did not like this big city where there was no place to feel sameness and order; no Tashme Town Hall, no Japantown, as in Vancouver. Men on the streets careened too close with grimy outstretched hands. She had always been a no-nonsense kind of girl, and Toronto held too much nonsense for her to bear.

  When she walked down the street people stared, not admiringly or with envy. At the corner grocer’s, the man spoke loudly and slowly, as if she weren’t Canadian-born and bred, as if she couldn’t understand English just fine, thank you very much.

  She had thought of Frankie as no-nonsense, like her father, like herself. But he’d changed. Changed his name—and hers. She didn’t look like a Mrs. Frank Hanes!

  Before it had been Momoye, now it was the Jewish woman filling him with this nonsense. She who sat in her purple pyjamas never getting properly dressed day or night, who stroked his hands and called him Frank.

  “Please,” Frankie said, with a hint of pleading. He wanted her by his side this night of all nights, high among the clouds. He looked into her small, bespectacled eyes and touched her curls. He carefully led her to the window where Cloud Tower was lit up. “Look how far we’ve come,” he said.

  It was true. She was proud. But then she’d felt proud parading down Tashme Boulevard with Frankie’s arm around her shoulder. She’d always loved to dress up, especially in the camp. The rose pin Frankie had given her on her collar, lipstick from the drugstore in Hope, red on her lips.

  “Whose silly idea was it to build the tallest tower in the world, anyway?” she said.

  So they set out, Frankie in his finest tailor-made suit and Reiko wearing a dress made of jade silk her father had brought years ago from Japan. Though Tomorrow Living for Today Apartments were walking distance from Cloud Tower, they arrived by limousine with Momoye and Aki and Baby Yuri.

  Inside the tower, Reiko’s high-heeled foot wavered over the elevator’s threshold. She could not step on. She insisted that Frankie, Momoye and Aki go on while she collected herself.

  Frankie watched her seat herself on a bench opposite the elevator, holding on to their son. But just as the doors were closing, the boy bounded aboard.

  * * *

  —

  It was April and all day the sun had shone, but by evening, the sky had knit up with clouds. Guests stood on the revolving deck, clinking their glasses beneath the broadcast tower as blackness pitched back their reflections from the windows. Frankie cued the dimming of the lights so that the city sparkled back to a collective ahh.

  He settled his mother on a window seat. She accepted a glass of wine from him. Beside her on the ledge sat purses, while the ladies who owned them rotated ever so slowly past. Filled with strangers, Frankie’s office was transformed. As was the foyer where Taiji had died. The floor he’d fallen to was now laid with polished marble. Momoye held onto Frankie’s sleeve for a moment, then let go. She shooed him off to attend to his business.

  Frankie headed into the press of guests, his face shiny and sheepish. Uri Slonemsky was on one side, Hannah Slonemsky on the other, enfolding him in her purple wings. They seemed about to carry him up into the sky: their Rising Son!

  “I!” Uri Slonemsky was declaring above the din to whomever would listen. “The tower is an I! Ninth letter of the alphabet.”

  Frankie looked back to his mother. Nine, she was sighing with relief, no doubt. She cupped her hands around her eyes to see out onto the lake. He caught a glimpse of Baby Yuri standing at the glass near the door. Uri saw him too, and met Frankie’s eyes. The strange boy was bumping up against it, gently, rhythmically, refusing its existence. But for that glass, the boy would slip over the tower’s lip
and down. His small, round face with its round eyes was pressed to the window; his open mouth, a hot circle on the glass. He was staring, like his grandmother, at where he thought the water was down in the darkness. To Frankie’s relief, Aki pulled him aside.

  The muffled din of the party went on. The door to the stairwell squeaked. Aki just missed noticing Baby Yuri vanish behind it.

  Down, down, down Baby Yuri flew, his legs cycling, then flying over steps at a time, and spiralling from the two-thousandth step to the thousandth and then hundredth, round and round, his giggles ricocheting against the cement walls. It was better than a train ride. When he reached the bottom step, he bolted out into the night and the cold wind.

  As soon as Aki realized where Baby Yuri had gone, she stumbled into the too-bright stairwell. The stairs went on and on. Her one eye couldn’t locate him, but she could hear his steps, or was that the echo of her own? She could hear his burbling, or was that the muted roar of the trains nearby? When she burst outside, the wind blew snow into her face. She could barely make out a figure in the distance that had to be Baby Yuri. She called his name but the gale tossed her cries back to her. She tried to run but was pushed back and back again. Yet the tiny figure inched forward, snow collecting around it. Baby Yuri? How could it be? Finally the wind pinned her to the concrete wall that rose more than a hundred storeys above her.

  Momoye had not stirred from her spot at the room’s perimeter. She glanced at Frankie every so often, straining her neck to find him rotated to a different point, still guarded by a Slonemsky on each side. Outside, a sudden dense curtain of snow closed over the window all around, only to clear momentarily into blackness.

  Frankie joined her at the window. Snow in April! No one else seemed to notice.