Floating City

by Kerri Sakamoto

  “The advent of metal alloys has brought us to the advantage of structural lightness. That is at the heart of all ephemeralization. That and this.” Not for the first time did he place a small pyramid-shaped stone in Frankie’s palm. A tetrahedron, the most stable and flexible form in nature. “You remember that, don’t you?”

  Yes, of course he remembered. The day they’d sat by the dry garden together. He took the stone, squeezed it and put in inside his pocket.

  Just weeks later, Frankie saw pictures of the finished pavilion in the newspaper. Five million people came, up and down, on foot, on monorail, and on moving staircase to the highest point in the dome, to the Space Observation Deck where sat the Surveyor, the spacecraft that had landed on the moon.

  * * *

  —

  The first thing Frankie did when he returned was to halt construction on one of his lots and to build a garden criss-crossed by multiple paths to the lake. He built a maze of hedges that led to a Minotaur’s see-saw at the centre.

  Annie took the children to visit the new garden. There they scrambled through the maze and clambered onto a geodesic climbing structure that Bucky and his students had erected. Instead of monkey bars, it was an all-surrounding web spun from one continuous rope.

  Annie climbed up too, and found herself near the top with one of the older boys.

  “Stand up, Miss!” he urged. He tried himself, but tumbled down a rung through the dome’s centre. “Stand up!” he shouted from below, tilting up his face to her. “You can do it!”

  Frankie noticed her lifting her hands off the rope.

  The other children stopped playing and looked up at her, crouched on a rung like a timid monkey. They began to clap and cry, “Up, Miss Annie! Up!”

  “No, no,” Frankie warned.

  The wind ruffled her grey blouse and dark trousers as she squinted into the sun. There was her island across the harbour. She held her arms out and looked down at the tops of things: of trees and flower blooms, the children’s heads, their silken, shining crowns.

  She felt light, even her pendulous breasts. She gazed down at Frank, who’d begun to wave his arms. Love is metaphysical gravity, a Bucky-thought, came to her.

  She stood up. The lake was smooth and lucent as her mother’s silk chiffon. “Be careful, Miss!” one of the girls called up. The wind rose; she wobbled, reached for the air and slipped down past rung after rung. She thudded to the ground.

  Annie woke in a hospital room. Frankie leaned in close. She was fine, the doctor said: a little bruised and scraped, and with a child sprouting in her womb.

  * * *

  —

  Hannah pressed Annie and Frankie to move to the Kidney. Hannah, the grandmother-hen-to-be, fluttered about, exhausted and joyful. Annie wondered if her mother would hang on or simply cede to what was to come. She suspected that Hannah’s wishes would exceed, as they always did, what was possible. But a child would come of this, and that was more than enough.

  Annie stayed on the island, and little by little, Frankie moved more than a frayed suit there too.

  Annie rode the ferry often to visit Hannah and Uri, or to sit in Frankie’s flower garden by the water while the children played under the sun. Only her belly grew, thankfully; her breasts were already plumped for the job to come. She didn’t mind: her body felt useful, housing and labouring for two.

  Overhead, the Chairman’s expressway was collapsing bit by bit; a falling chunk of concrete narrowly missed a bus at rush hour.

  Annie and Frankie rode the ferry to shore, weathering the blustery wind on deck. She held tight to the rail while her insides sloshed. The wind lifted the tails of her coat; nausea bent her over the railing toward the water. Her feet were just lifting off the deck when Frankie clamped onto her and pulled her back.

  She slipped his hand under her blouse and onto her belly: hard and soft, gelatinous, fragile as glass. It was an egg, a planet moving inside her.

  More than anything, no matter what other forces intended, Frankie meant for this child to be.

  * * *

  —

  Behind the Kidney, the entire yard had been neglected since Frankie left: overgrown in patches and parched in others. The gravel waves of the dry garden had long been overtaken by dandelions and crabgrass. Where the iris isle once lay, a profusion of wildflowers and ferns had taken root. In the midst of it was planted a delightful lark of a thing: a house of glass. Big enough to sit in (a wooden stool had been placed inside) but small enough to graze your head on its ceiling. A simple cube. You had to look carefully to distinguish between the living things fluttering in and around it, and their reflection.

  It struck Annie that she was standing in her own house, her first architectural feat, drawn as a girl with a No. 2 graphite pencil and her father’s slide rule. How she had longed to colour it with Laurentian Peacock Blue, Poppy Red, Emerald Green, Deep Yellow and Blush Pink! But Uri had snatched the sheet from her sketch pad before she could. Now he’d built it.

  “For my Annie,” he said. “Welcome home.” He hadn’t called her Annie since she was that girl. She hugged him with child-like abandon.

  He’d been right: let the sky fill it.

  Uri and Annie waltzed belly-to-belly in the living room to Coltrane’s bebop “My Favourite Things.” One of Bucky’s favourites. Annie consented to one martini that sent her spinning. She collapsed on the couch.

  Uri was now fat and Hannah thin, with hair dyed a paler shade. She wore beige instead of the purple that now had more life in it than she did, so she said. The two of them spoke and moved slowly and in concert, holding out a hand to the other or lending a word to finish a sentence.

  “If only the irises would bloom again,” Hannah sighed, “now that Frank is back and my Annie is home.”

  “If only,” echoed Uri, patting her hand.

  The next morning Annie sat opposite her mother at the renal clinic in the seat Uri normally occupied. Blood, her mother’s, trickled into a tube. Annie felt light-headed and full-bodied. She swooned and fainted to the floor.

  The nurse was holding a cool cloth to Annie’s forehead when she came to. Hannah was drowsing beside the humming, pumping machine, the tube looping like a red skipping rope in and out of her mother’s arm.

  * * *

  —

  Frankie spent hours watching Annie sit in the Glass House cradling her belly. She let her hair grow longer and wilder, like the surrounding bluebells and buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace.

  He went walking alone at the lake one night. He’d had a stone pathway built in front of the lakeside buildings. More gardens to come, including beds of roses. The water was unriled. Above, a full moon. He sat down on an abandoned couch, a rolled-up carpet by his feet, clothing strewn about. Owners and their belongings cast adrift. He thought of Mr. Fujimoto and his family in the Regent Park tenements, the walk-ups that were too cold in winter, too hot in summer, and sunless all year round.

  Farther along, parked in the empty middle of the rubble, sleek in the moonlight, Frankie came across a black Cadillac, rusting, tires flat, front bumper crushed. Inside, a woman slept across the front seat, doors locked. A coat clutched tight around her, calves tucked close. A half-eaten box of chocolates sat on the dashboard. Suitcases piled in the backseat. Nowhere to go.

  He passed Captain Jim’s land. Smoke billowed from a garbage can. Cardboard boxes sat on their sides and clothing hung from a line strung between two sticks stuck in the ground. One of the boxes stirred; a man snored. His mother was no doubt asleep in the boat, the Captain too.

  She didn’t know about the baby. Not yet.

  He reached the terminal just in time to see the ferry depart. He sat down for a long wait.

  Bucky then appeared just above him, hovering on Cloud Nine in the dim light. His glasses were strapped tight to his head as always.

  I was thirty-two years old when I lost my child. I was penniless and unknown: empty and bankrupt. Bucky’s broad hands held loosely onto the struts.
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  “What do you do with nothing?” Frankie asked.

  Do more and more with less and less. Then do everything with nothing.

  * * *

  —

  Bucky adjusted the first watch on his wrist twelve hours ahead. Beside him, on a small boat ferrying them across Tokyo Bay, Mr. Minamoto pointed above the grey city blocks to the stark orange and white of Tokyo Tower. They sailed by the future site of Tokyo Sky Tree, the latest project of Minamoto Industries. It would surpass Tokyo Tower as Japan’s tallest structure, though it would fall short of the Cloud Tower by eight feet.

  His country was small in land mass but surrounded by sea, Mr. Minamoto told Bucky. His people were small in size but were growing taller now with improved nutrition. The population was ever increasing. “Buildings must be bigger and taller,” he said. “Doorways higher.”

  After hearing Bucky lecture at Meiji University a decade earlier, Mr. Minamoto knew the future of his Japanese empire lay not on land but at sea. Three-quarters of our planet Earth is covered with water which may float organic cities. Floating cities pay no rent to landlords.

  Japanese knew how to construct modest islands. They were now passing a small bunker isle built in the days when Japan guarded its borders from foreign invasion with samurai and cannons.

  “A city to house a million people is technologically and economically feasible,” Bucky had told Mr. Minamoto. “So light, it can float and withstand an earthquake.”

  Bucky spoke of floating cities dotting the oceans, enabling flying, sailing and stepping stone travel around the globe. Each tetrahedronal city might start with a thousand occupants and grow symmetrically to hold millions. So much new to do with the old: seemingly obsolete buildings, ships, airplanes, submersibles. Weaponry converted to livingry! So much to be gained: efficiencies distributing raw and finished cargo; bottom-of-the-ocean intelligence of marine life and oceanography.

  Aqua City was the name Mr. Minamoto already had in mind for the million-person community he would eventually build in Tokyo Harbour. Harbour Town, Water Town, Ocean City. These were more floating cities he and Bucky could build elsewhere. Stepping stones, in Bucky’s words, for world-around travel. In the future, almost everyone would have to live on water as land became used up.

  * * *

  —

  A week went by, then another and another. Annie was long, too long, overdue, said the doctors. They’d warned her, of course, of difficulties that might come with pregnancy at her age. She lumbered slowly and stiffly by Frankie’s side around the island paths. Walking soon became too difficult, with her weakened joints and swollen ankles.

  One morning she woke with a peculiar sensation in her skin. Hour by hour, little by little, it tightened over her joints, then her whole body, compressing the child in her belly. By nightfall, she could barely expel or take in anything. She could hardly swallow because the lining of her esophagus had hardened.

  Annie could not eat, drink, pee or move her bowels. Her body was frozen. The baby could not move either. At the hospital, doctors detected its steady heartbeat, though it wasn’t as strong or constant as before. By the next morning, Annie could not speak. She was trapped inside herself, her cries unheard, even by Frankie, leaning in as close as he could, desperate to receive. He whispered, shouted, clapped his hands; prodded her lips. He massaged her from head to toe. No matter how awkward, how foolish, how helpless he felt, he did whatever he could think to do.

  Annie! My Annie! But she could only gaze back at him, imploring him.

  To do what?

  The doctors called it morphea, a word for hardening, but was it localized morphea or morphea profunda? Systemic morphea? Which was worse? They could not say. For any of these conditions—diseases—there was no cure. The body was simply taking Annie’s fate into its own hands.

  Her face became a mask, as when he’d glimpsed her in meditation through the window of her island shack. Frankie searched for a window inside that window, for the Annie he knew who’d pulled him from sleep out to a burning moon.

  The doctors could do nothing for Annie, much less the unborn child. When Frankie insisted on bringing her home to the island, they prepared him for what would or might come. He spooned water into her mouth, propping her head back and torso upright to receive it. He chanted whatever chant came into his head; whatever prayer, whatever he found in her books.

  Uri visited. He patted his daughter’s stiffened hand and read to her. First Alice in Wonderland, showing her wondrous pictures along the way, then Sleeping Beauty, both books he’d read to her when she was a child. She didn’t stir.

  The Priest, the God named seventy-two times over: all the world was against Frankie. Always had been. It was inescapable, a fact he was born into. He wailed on the outside as he had on the inside, throwing himself on Annie’s unmoving body. He wailed as if he were inside the Ladies’ stifling bedroom, wailing as he should have, as he hadn’t done, to rescue himself. He found Annie’s eyes fixed on the door, not moving. There was a knock.

  He rose slowly and opened it to find Aki there, with his mother.

  * * *

  —

  They sat with a bowl of warm water, Frankie and his mother, gently bathing Annie’s body. Her eyes followed their movements over her motionless limbs and her swollen belly. Slowly his mother began to chant a prayer he’d never heard. She lit a stick of incense and waved her hand to put out the flame. She passed the incense near to Annie’s face and gave Aki a piece of paper to read from.

  Aki looked to Frankie then to Annie, her one eye weeping.

  In the morning, we may have radiant faces. But by evening, we may turn into white ashes.

  Each of us can take refuge in the Buddha of Infinite Life who promises to embrace all beings who recite his Holy Name: Namu Amida Buddha.

  * * *

  —

  Momoye returned with Aki to Captain Jim’s boat. She sat in her chair on the deck and took out the old photograph of the Priest and some incense which lit easily in the still air. The picture was older than old now, fading into the nothing it had come from. She propped the picture on a table beside her and left incense to burn in front of it.

  She’d been struck by how Frankie’s face had settled into its bones, its natural contours. He’d come to unmistakably resemble her, for better or worse.

  “Who was he, Mama?” Aki asked, looking at the picture.

  “Someone who tried to help others,” she answered.

  * * *

  —

  Far away in the Sea of Japan, a tidal force was growing, out in dark and light waters, currents tightening into fists in shoals and great depths. High tides were rising higher, low tides ebbing lower. Several ships were drawn aground, a few houses carted to sea.

  In the small, dark apartment where the Fujimotos lived, the stems of tea leaves turned in their cups, standing up and then tilting down. The stems in Momoye’s tea were swirling, and the waters of Lake Ontario began to rise and rock Captain Jim’s boat.

  It was nothing like the time of the storm, but ferries were stopped and a general alert was sounded for anyone on the water.

  On the island, Annie lay in her bed, pale and rapidly thinning. Frankie remained night and day by her side. The wind grew fierce, and the island began to rock beneath Annie’s bed, like a boat. As it did, pent-up sounds and words blew from Annie’s mouth. Frankie sprang up. Annie howled and, bit by bit, she unfurled: her pouches and passageways; her fingers, toes, then her legs creaked open. Water gushed from between them, bursting from a dam. The water slowed then with a new gush, a small reddish head poked out, then a shoulder, another shoulder, a tiny hand and then another, then a torso, then legs. Frankie knelt at the foot of the bed to catch the baby in his hands as it crested out on a final wave. He grasped the child and didn’t let go.

  The boy was tiny and creased. He cried a little to show he was alive and fine, then sucked up the air. Annie’s arms reached out. “Is it all right?” she rasped.

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p; “Yes, yes!” Frankie assured her, summoning the memory of what the doctor had instructed. It was simple, really. Then he placed the slick little body into Annie’s arms. Annie was drained, her flood subsided, but she was alight with joy. She wept as she held their tiny boy.

  As she succumbed to sleep, Frankie lifted the baby in his arms and gently turned him. There was the spot, neither watered down nor blacker than he’d expected. As if a sooty finger had mysteriously reached down to touch.

  Frankie covered and swaddled the baby. He ventured outside and held him under the giant moon. By the light of it, Frankie could see everything helpless and wilful in the face of his child.

  He was once this: a newborn. Frankie’s father might have wanted this moment too; might have wanted everything for his son that Frankie now wanted for his; might have felt this same fathomless swell inside that took his breath.

  Since he’d met Bucky, Frankie had lived the experiment of Guinea Pig F: a test. It wasn’t until this moment that he understood he’d been daring the world to give back to him all it had taken away.

  * * *

  —

  Frankie called in the new Chairman, who in fact was old, having been in office for some years now.

  “Sir,” Frankie said. Bucky and Uri stood by his side. “The city is shrinking at the core and bursting at the seams.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” said the Chairman.

  “Welcome to Torosa,” said Bucky, leading the Chairman to the model displayed on Frankie’s desk.

  It felt good to hear the name Torosa on Bucky’s lips. A name Frankie had invented for an isle he’d do everything to keep afloat.

  Torosa would be a neighbourhood encompassing the shore and harbour of Toronto, the meeting place of waters. A floating module to house one thousand people that could grow symmetrically to accommodate as many as one hundred thousand—maybe more. It would provide each family with two thousand square feet of high-quality living, at a rental cost barely above the poverty rate, yet still enough to sustain the enterprise.