“Mr. Chairman,” Frankie said, with a nod at Bucky, “a floating city pays no rent to landlords. It is water-worthy and dollar-worthy.”
It was beautiful too. The Floating City was neither ship nor edifice but hive for living, anchored at its shore with schools, supermarkets, light industry; with adjacent flower and vegetable gardens. It could even begin to generate the energy necessary to sustain itself with a floating wind turbine farther out on the lake—the first of its kind. The gateway to Torosa would be a university built by Uri: a glass pyramid echoing the water and sky, and the triangular building blocks of Bucky’s Floating City; it would be a Temple of Learning.
We’ll soon see, thought Frankie, as he handed the Chairman a glass of Scotch.
TOROSA:
FLOATING CITY
CHAPTER 16
Afloat
Arnon had started out no less a mystery to Frankie than Baby Yuri had been. But the mystery was unfolding to him bit by bit as the boy grew.
Every morning, through three seasons, Arnon swam from the island to the city. He was, true to the Hebrew name his mother had given him, a rushing stream. His eyes were sea green and his long, wild hair streamed like seaweed in the water. His aunt Aki rowed her boat just ahead of him as he swam guided by two beacons: his father’s Cloud Tower and his aunt’s one eye.
“He’s a genius,” Bucky proclaimed when he saw Arnon’s free-standing, triangulated toothpick and dried pea structures. Bucky made Frankie and Annie promise not to de-genius the boy.
He barely went to school. Teachers told him the sun sets, the moon rises. Yet there were the sun and moon in the sky at the same time, one lit to light the other. Arnon swam each morning as the world slowly turned toward the sun, and swam home each evening as the Earth rolled away from it. His body curved ever so slightly with the shape of the Earth, held in the water by gravity as Spaceship Earth spun its spherical form. The boy’s Mongolian spot had faded early on, washed clean away, but his father was ever wary.
Frankie left on the ferry an hour before Arnon, but when he reached the Kidney, his son was already there, on the chesterfield next to his napping grandmother, his wrist clasped within her spindly fingers. Slipping from her grasp, he joined his grandfather at the dining room table.
Uri had built a model of the city—his future wished-for city. Along its familiar streets were unfamiliar buildings, some beautiful, some strangely sculptural. It was his Alphabetical Architecture from A to Z scattered throughout. Arnon placed tiny figures at the windows. But something was missing.
“Your father would like to tear down Cloud Tower,” said Uri, bouncing on his heels. “I wanted to show him the city without it.” Uri couldn’t bear to lose the anchoring I of his alphabetical architecture.
“But you can’t,” Arnon protested to Frankie. Even though he’d never been allowed inside, never mind climbed its steps. How could he be without his father’s beacon?
“We need less tonnage and more light-weight space for people to live in,” Frankie said. The tower clouded his head and weighted his heart. He wanted to undo it. But neither Arnon nor Uri would lose their beacon: the highest perch in the land, like the wall, could not be toppled. No one would let him: not the Chairman, not the Fincaps, not the people tuned to their radios and televisions.
He would have to settle for doing what needed doing that he could do.
* * *
—
“Are you ready, my dear boy?” Bucky called out, seconds before that scolding gust of wind swept Frankie off the wharf and plunged him into Lake Ontario. The sky was bright and cloudless, the air calm.
The Priest’s doing, of course.
As Bucky plucked Frankie out of Toronto Harbour, tugboats were pulling hollow blocks of concrete into it. They would form the floating foundation of Torosa’s triangular atoll. It would be a honeycomb with cells facing outward on all sides. Each unit’s glass doors would open onto a promenade winding up and up and up to the rooftop under the sky. As people boarded, they would naturally make their way up there to the air, or down to water level to dip a toe or a fishing line into the harbour. Utilities and supplies would be delivered to an underwater service station by submersibles tethered to land.
Bucky and Mr. Minamoto already had ideas for another floating community connected by bridge to Torosa, and another after that. But one Torosa was enough for Frankie—for now, at least. Waves of people were washing over this New World city or waiting on distant shores to come here. On the water, in the air, there’d be room enough for them all. When Toronto Harbour was full, there’d be space above for Bucky’s Cloud Nine, an elevated, domed, climate-controlled, pie-in-the-sky habitat whose science would be perfected in the Crystal Pyramid which first took shape with a single sheet of paper folded by Bucky at Uri’s dining room table. A glass tetrahedron, eight hundred feet on each side by four hundred feet high, housing the University of Air and Water. Open to anyone and everyone, Annie liked to say: to people young and old, herself in the middle. Who might be saved from dingy firetrap sweatshops or from dark nights of the soul.
“Are you ready, Frank?” Bucky asked again, smiling. How did the man sustain such buoyancy at his age, this can-do optimism? Bucky had saved him with his old sailor’s know-how and inventor’s ingenuity, his unwavering belief in realizable reality. A home on Spaceship Earth that could not be taken away because there was only water underneath it.
* * *
—
Uri rubbed Hannah’s hands and feet to warm them. Her circulation was never good. He drew back the shutters and opened the windows. “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”
Isn’t it? was appended in good faith to everything he uttered to her these days. It was the arm circling her shoulder, bringing her along. Never again would he neglect her, let her fall into the shadows of his buildings. Like -msky, isn’t it became essential to who he was and how he would live out whatever days were left with his love.
In the chilly early hours, they rose for their tea and toast, then made their way to the clinic in a taxi, Hannah wrapped in her balding black mink, which still kept her warm. After one kidney transplant that had lasted her a few years, it was back to Hannah and the Machine.
She sat with the machine humming in her heart, thumping at the walls of her veins as Uri drowsed. She was thinking of Frankie. Something she had to remind him to do. She pinched herself as her own reminder. She closed her eyes.
Torosa, the Floating City, was almost complete. The beautiful isle she’d been waiting for, its glass gateway clear and open. Along the path, flowers—roses, irises—bursting and abounding. They would cross the bridge together, she and Uri, with Arnon beside them. The crowd pressing in.
One morning, she summoned Frank to the Kidney. She had him come up to her bedroom. She was seated, her purple sleeves folded around her tiny frame. He recognized the smell that was shadowing Hannah’s usual lavender scent; he’d smelled it on his mother after Taiji died. It was the scent of life closing in on itself.
She held out her hand, but he offered his arms to embrace her, then sat down. He looked into the fierce green eyes that the old sum of her had shrunk down to.
“Frank,” she said, holding out her hand once again. It was thin and brittle in his, like a bird. But the hand gripped his firmly and shook it with vigour. She pulled their entwined hands close to her sunken breast.
“You remember this, don’t you?” The green eyes held his gaze. “The word and the handshake?”
He nodded his head, yes. “I remember.”
“Good.” Her hand slipped away from his. She made motions of fatigue. Frankie stood.
“You won’t forget?” Hannah said.
“No,” Frankie replied. “I won’t.”
* * *
—
The week before Torosa’s grand opening, Frankie stood on the Observation Deck of Cloud Tower. From the Crystal Pyramid, paths lined with a thousand roses and hundreds of irises converged at the walkway crossing onto the Floating
City. He’d made his dream into a realizable reality.
Yet, his mind still picked at the sore—the snag of land with its wreck of a boat. Beached and grounded, neither afloat nor rooted: the home his mother had chosen over his.
Surely the boat was rotten, Frankie thought. Unsafe. He said the word aloud. The fisherman was old, no doubt not right in the head; his mother had been old for some time now. Why not do now what would need doing sooner or later? Frankie’s last pulling out from under.
He picked up the phone and called on City Hall, one or two still there whose plots he’d fertilized those years ago.
* * *
—
With his sad, drooping eyes, Mr. Fujimoto surveyed the roses and irises and cast Frankie a fleeting smile. One after another, each of the clan bowed as they passed, clutching boxes and bags of their belongings from the cracked desert of Regent Park. More than the all-you-can-carry brought to the camps. Frankie would soon show Mr. Fujimoto and his son the deep, dark soil heaped at the top of Torosa’s Floating City—deeper than he could ever have heaped on his floating garden in Port Alberni’s harbour. There they could grow a new chrysanthemum forest.
Of course, there were the children and families of the sunlight Frankie had stolen, older now, some all grown. There were raggedy men who’d been camping out under the crumbling Chairman’s expressway.
But his sisters remained back in Hope. They had cashed the cheque he’d finally sent.
Frankie hadn’t expected his mother to come, either, and yet he’d hoped. He’d seen Captain Jim’s wreck of a boat being tugged across the harbour headed for the scrapyard.
He didn’t see her, but she was there, seated on a bench in view of the entrance to the Floating City. She’d grown exhausted somehow, cold and hungry. She was waiting.
Momoye had never truly worried for Frankie. Even when she was pregnant and starving, she’d trusted in her body and the child she was carrying. She and the Priest had left one logging camp for the next across the island and gotten lost. By nightfall, they’d found a rickety shack at the foot of a mountain. He left her there and went in search of kindling for a fire. Snow kept falling through the gaping roof to blanket her belly. Momoye heaved herself up, the door creaking as she opened it. She called and called but the Priest was nowhere.
Through the whirls of snow, she’d glimpsed something, someone. A man with a horse pulling a rickety cart. He approached the shack and found her. It was Taiji who’d come for her, just in time.
Just then, at the edge of the harbour, a familiar face. After all these years? Nobu? He wore a hat as she guessed he would, a cowboy’s. He was smaller, but she was too—bent. But he didn’t look that old after all; his hair was still black, his chest robust—a young man! She raised herself, painfully, and started toward him, his name on her lips for the first time in fifty—more!—years. Nobu, brother! But he seemed not to hear, and she was too slow, too tired, and she sat back down.
* * *
—
By day’s end, Torosa was almost fully inhabited. It barely bobbed under its new weight. Bucky was there, directing the loosening of reins so that the city might sway on the water instead of fighting the waves and tugging at its moorings.
From the island, Annie watched the honeycomb turn golden in the dusk. Arnon lit a fire in the backyard.
Frankie left Bucky and went ashore to sit alone on a bench among the thousand roses of his garden. These days, the profusion of scents and colours could go to his head. The Queen Elizabeth rose in his lapel had wilted. He imagined how Mr. Fujimoto’s chrysanthemums would look above the top deck of the Floating City.
The Earth was tilting into darkness. In that darkness, he made out a slow-moving mass on the water; it was dotted here and there with lights. Frankie stepped up onto the bench.
It was the city unmoored with Bucky at a makeshift helm waving wildly. “I had to try her out, Frank!” he shouted through his megaphone, his silver hair glinting. “We’re a sea-stead, Frank. We can go where we want, come hell or high water!”
Frankie waved, speechless, struggling to see as Torosa moved past, picking up speed it seemed, making its way beyond the harbour.
By first light, the city was back in its dock, and Arnon was swimming toward it. The honeycomb of Torosa was pale, its form faint in the mist and morning light—too faint to make out awakenings in any of its cells.
Frankie got up and stretched, stiff from the night spent sitting under the waxing moon that was still in the sky. Slowly he made his way toward the water, stopping here and there to sniff at the roses: sweet, spicy, fusty. One full blossom hung from a limp stem, so he plucked it. There on a bench, he saw his mother staring out at the harbour, waiting, her all-you-can-carry suitcase on the ground beside her.
In 1968, Richard Buckminster Fuller, visionary architect and inventor of the geodesic dome—most notably the American Pavilion at Expo 67—was commissioned to create a plan for the future of the city of Toronto. Fuller, along with his partner, architect Shoji Sadao, presented Project Toronto to City Council. The proposal included a plan for three self-contained floating neighbourhoods in Toronto Harbour. They were never built.
QUOTED SOURCES
Buckminster Fuller developed his own idiosyncratic vocabulary to express his visionary ideas. Throughout Floating City, dialogue spoken by the character of Buckminster Fuller is inspired by, or drawn directly from, Fuller’s actual lectures or published works. I am grateful to The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller for allowing me to craft his character in this way. Following are sources for specific quotations appearing as dialogue in the novel:
“LONGING…is EXPANSION and INCLUSION.” Nine Chains to the Moon (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois), 10.
“I sought to…on our planet.”
Critical Path (St. Martin’s Press: New York), xii.
“Fincap”
Nine Chains to the Moon (Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, Illinois), 181.
“houses may be…with the wind.”
“Designing a New Industry” (Fuller Research Foundation: Wichita, Kansas), 32.
“priest-navigators”
Tetrascroll: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairytale (St. Martin’s Press: New York), 88.
“What is it…and the spiritual.”
4D Time Lock (Lama Foundation: Albuquerque, New Mexico), 33.
“all the people…they may be.”
Nine Chains to the Moon (Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, Illinois), vii.
“You only succeed when you stop failing.”
Buckminster Fuller made this remark while teaching at the summer institute at Black Mountain College in 1948. While there, his first geodesic dome was constructed of venetian blinds, but it collapsed due to the thinness of the material. He dubbed it the “Supine Dome.”
“We could live…one world-around network.”
Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity, (Overlook Press: New York), 411.
“To survive a…sea of tension.”
Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller, (St. Martin’s Press: New York), 180.
“Spaceship Earth is…miles each day.”
Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects For Humanity (Overlook Press: New York), 348.
“It is feasible…expense of another.”
Critical Path, (St. Martin’s Press: New York), xxv.
“make money or make sense?”
Grunch of Giants, (St. Martin’s Press: New York), xv.
“Are you spontaneously…everything you have?”
Critical Path, (St. Martin’s Press: New York), xxxvvii.
“The things that you see need to be done…to be done.” Critical Path (St. Martin’s Press: New York), xxxviii.
“Just give me…your own time.”
Buckminster Fuller: An Autobiographical Monologue Scenario, documented and edited by Robert Snyder, (St. Martin’s Press: New York), 153.
“The advent o
f…of all ephemeralization.”
Synergetics 2: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, (Macmillan Publishing Company: New York), 174–75.
“Love is metaphysical gravity.”
Critical Path, (St. Martin’s Press: New York), 156.
“weaponry…to livingry!”
Critical Path (St. Martin’s Press: New York), xxv.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My family and my friends have kept me afloat all these years of living and writing. I love you and thank you.
To Danito, querido, for days and nights of reading, listening and loving that kept me on course.
To Eric, for seaworthy lightness, levity and wit.
To Teo, my brave vanquisher of the seas.
To Edie and Fedor Tisch, Mark Slone, Karen Tisch and lovely Isabella, as well as Laurie Sakamoto for the safe harbour of family. Thank you, Edie, for your loving care of Eriquito and Teito through the years and always being there for us.
A special thanks to my father, Gordon Hideo Sakamoto, for his constant faith in me. His exemplary strength, can-do optimism and lifelong practice of doing more with less are truly in keeping with Buckminster Fuller’s philosophies.
To my sisters-in-arms of the Saturday night moms, kids & prosecco collective: Anita, Dalia, Helen, Kathy, Sally, Susan and Van. Thank you for shared guffaws, tears, and sustenance.
Thank you, Janine Lawford, for wisdom and refuge.
For astute comments on drafts early, late and in between, I thank my cherished and talented pals Richard Fung, John Greyson, Mike Hoolboom, Anita Lee, Helen Lee, Ruth Liberman, Karen Tisch, Kathy Wazana and Lynne Yamamoto. Rebecca Toyne also read an early draft.
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