The Towers of Babylon

by Michelle Kaeser

  Lou grabs her by the upper arm and steers her to the built-in bench. “Calm down. Let’s think.”

  Lou pulls up a metal patio chair and sits directly across from her, studying her with care, but also with an almost scientific detachment, like a nurse evaluating a newly admitted patient. There has always been something remote about Lou’s nurturing instinct, like she doesn’t quite understand how to do it. Joly attributes this quirk to the early death of Lou’s mother, who kicked it when they were kids. Twenty-five years on, it’s still one of the saddest events Joly can think of.

  “Do you want a Xanax?” Lou asks gently. “Clonazepam?”

  “What? No!”

  “Some pot maybe?”

  Joly gapes at her belly, its vulnerable contents.

  “One pill or joint won’t make a difference,” Lou assures her. “Besides, my doctor says stress is the worst thing for your health. Silent killer.” Expertly, Lou rolls a joint on her lap, her hands resting on the light cotton of her peach summer dress. “So you want to keep it then? Is that what we’re thinking?”

  “No! How am I gonna do that? I have no money.” Ben has no money either. Social anarchists rarely do. “I’m completely broke, Lou. And practically unemployable. I have no marketable skills. I had an interview at a coffee shop yesterday! Barista, Lou!”

  “Aw Jesus.”

  “And I don’t even know if I made it to round two!”

  “Round two? How many rounds are there?”

  “Who knows!” Joly stares glumly out at the huge yard that backs onto the ravine, where she and Louise used to play as kids. They grew up together, on this very street, spent hundreds of evenings and weekends and endless summer hours running up and down that ravine, picking up neighbourhood kids as they went, playing legendary games of hide-and-seek or building forts in the ravine with scraps of wood swiped from parents’ garages or just sitting in the bushes telling stories until enough mothers hollered “Dinner!” and the games broke up. Joly’s parents sold the house a few years ago, when they decided to return to the motherland. Shortly after that, it was Lou’s father who wanted to downsize. But Lou couldn’t let the house go, so she and Elliott bought it themselves.

  “I’ve wasted my life,” Joly declares. “I’ve got nothing to show for the last fifteen years. They’ve just whooshed by. While I’ve been churning out these stories that nobody ever reads. Whoooooosh!” Joly sweeps an arm over the entire width of the table.

  “Pffff. You wanna know about a wasted life, try working in marketing.” Lou is supposed to be at work at this exact moment, but when Joly called with the pregnancy news, Lou said that she was taking a sick day and instructed Joly to come here for a debrief.

  “You know what I’ve done every day for the last five months?” Lou lights her joint with a long pull, then offers it to Joly, who waves it away. “Meetings. About audio billboards.” She stretches one leg after the other up onto Joly’s lap. “That and take anti-anxiety medication so I don’t kill myself.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not broke.” Joly gives Lou’s ankle a quick squeeze. “It’s important to be not broke, I’m starting to realize.”

  “I don’t know, Joly. Our jobs are revolting. Elliott’s is worse than mine. He’s down a rabbit hole with this wedding photography garbage.” Lou’s left eye flickers and Joly wonders, not for the first time, about the health of their marriage. “Every dollar you make with your writing is worth a hundred of ours. Besides, your stories are hilarious. They have social value.”

  “Yeah,” Joly says pensively, “they’re funny.” Since grad school, she has been working on a collection of side-splitting, madcap stories that perfectly encapsulate the wacky uncertainty of modern times. But although she has managed to publish a handful of them in fringe magazines and websites, she hasn’t gotten any nibbles on the collection as a whole. The dour industry gatekeepers just don’t like Funny.

  “Social value,” Joly repeats.

  “I send your stories around at work,” Lou says through another deep inhale of the pot. “Every time one comes out. People fucking love them. You have fans. That one about the amateur detective investigating those decapitated sea lions? Solid gold.”

  “Yeah,” says Joly, for whom praise of this sort goes down like candy, “that one is a minor masterpiece.” Talk of her writing has an eclipsing effect. It sends a manic buzz through her body. She can’t sit still. Her legs start to bounce on the bench, making Lou’s feet bob up and down. “You should get a load of this next one I’m working on,” she says. “It’s about a man who—okay, get this—his back hair suddenly turns into porcupine quills! Ha! Hahaha. Which pisses his girlfriend off, because his sharp quills keep puncturing her hands when she tries to fuck him!” Almost doubled over with laughter now, Joly smacks at Lou’s shins. “It’s like Kafka … but even funnier!”

  When she manages to straighten up again, her laughter subsiding, she sees Lou smiling with her head thrown back on the chair, staring up at the lazy branches of the maple trees with goofy eyes. Joly wipes at the sweat on her forehead. “Seriously, I need an actual job. Yannick is threatening to kick me out.”

  “He’ll never kick you out.”

  “He might. Or Karen will.”

  “Yeah, well, Karen’s a cunt.”

  “Hey now. She’s all right. She’s good, actually. Great, really … once you get to know her.”

  “Well …” Lou stubs out the joint in the pale green plastic ashtray already full of butts. “What kind of jobs are you looking at? It shouldn’t be this hard for you to get hired. You’re smarter than everyone at my office.”

  Whipping out her phone, Joly pulls up the bookmarked job postings page. “Okay … best I’ve seen lately is an opening for a technical writer at Holt Renfrew.”

  “Holt Renfrew!” Lou laughs hard, in big bursts. She reaches forward to grab at Joly’s faded and sweaty grey T-shirt, which years ago belonged to Yannick, and her plain no-name jean shorts. “I don’t think you’d do well there. You’re not a high-end department store kind of person.”

  “I don’t think I’m qualified. Listen to this, this is one of their qualifications: ‘Be extraordinary.’”

  “What?”

  “That’s what it says. Under qualifications. ‘Be extraordinary.’ What extraordinary person wants to be a technical writer at Holt Renfrew?” Joly chucks her phone onto the glass patio table and flings herself back on the bench, her arms above her head. She looks up at the canopy of maples. “Everywhere you go now, you have to be extraordinary. Even that stupid coffee shop wants me be to be extraordinary. It’s meaningless. Where are all the ordinary people supposed to go?”

  “Maybe they’re all technical writers for Walmart.”

  Lou swoops the phone toward her and scrolls through the job postings, muttering her confident contempt for what’s on offer. But it’s all so much easier for Lou, this work stuff. Lou, although she hates most people, understands them much better than Joly does. Lou would never blow a job interview. She charms people. She draws attention easily. And expresses it easily. Even today, on a sick day, in her $5 summer dress from a consignment store, she looks amazing.

  Joly never charms people. They don’t even notice her. Not until she was twenty-two did anyone notice her long enough to kiss her. She’s plain, average, a Jane Eyre. Where Lou, being of Japanese, British, and Spanish extraction, displays an ethnicity that’s striking and hard to place, Joly’s pallor and features suggest nothing but a deep, deep-reaching Western European ancestry. In her early teenage years, Joly used to lock herself in the bathroom and study her face in the mirror, tugging at her eyes, pulling the edges outward, convinced that she would be way more beautiful, way more desirable if she had even a hint of Asian heritage, something to offset the hundreds of years of Swiss peasantry in her blood.

  “Your phone’s dying,” says Lou.

  “What? I just charged it.” Joly sits up, grabs at the device, and jams her fingers into the screen. “What a hunk of junk.”
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  “Cobalt,” says Lou, wagging her hand at the phone.

  “What?”

  “That’s what makes the battery work. Cobalt. Mostly from the Congo. Where kids dig around for it in open pits. With their tiny little hands. Until they die from toxic fumes. Or in tunnel collapses.”

  “Jesus.” More and more frequently, Lou has been briefing Joly on these choice bits of news from around the world. She used to send an article a week, now it’s one almost every day—just yesterday, she sent her the piece about the Venezuelan slum.

  With a shrug, Lou sends the phone sliding down the glass tabletop. “I need more fruit. Ooh, and some nuts.”

  While Lou is in the kitchen, Joly turns to face the ravine. She looks at her bike pitched on its side in the grass. Everything in this huge wooded yard is just like it was when they were kids—the stalwart army of maple trees, the few sleepy willows, the lush undergrowth of ferns and bushes, the fat black squirrels and dumb rabbits and flitting birds. An idyll.

  Lou returns, carrying a wooden fruit bowl, overflowing with offerings, and a bowl of whole walnuts. But Joly can’t eat.

  “I should probably get rid of the baby, right? Obviously. That’s the answer, right?”

  “It’s an answer.” Lou cracks a walnut with enormous attention.

  Joly studies her quietly. “Do you ever think about it?”

  Lou’s pregnancy predicament struck at sixteen. But her resolve back then was immediate and unshakeable. She didn’t even discuss it with Joly, just announced that she would be needing a ride to the clinic, because she didn’t want to tell the father (Joly never did know who it was), nor did she want to tell her own father. So it was Joly who, fresh off her driver’s test, chauffeured Lou to the clinic. Lou endured the process well, with unwavering determination from start to finish. But Lou is so much stronger.

  “Never,” says Lou, though there’s a stiffening in her features as she wrestles bits of the nut from its shell. Joly’s not sure she believes her.

  “I think I would. A lot.”

  “You should talk to Ben.”

  6

  IT’S ALMOST DUSK by the time Joly steers her bike off Bloor and onto Ossington: Ben’s neighbourhood. The doorbell doesn’t work, it hasn’t in the eight years that Ben has lived here, so she hammers at the door, which, after a few minutes, is opened by one of Ben’s roommates. One of his five roommates. The house is a sort of commune, made up of students and strays, anyone interested in cheap rent and zero amen-ities. The roommate who answers is Runkle, a guy in his forties, whose life, Ben has told her, is in free fall.

  “Ben around?”

  Waving her in, Runkle says, “Probably. I think they’re brewing today, actually. Check for yourself.”

  She passes through the living room, on to the kitchen at the back of the house, and out onto the stoop, where the giant brew kettle sits boiling on its propane-powered burner. Ben’s happiest when he’s brewing; he finds religious fulfillment in the task. “It takes monkish discipline to make good beer,” he told her the first time she watched him brew. And true enough, the operation dragged on the whole day, much longer than she’d anticipated and far past the point where she could sustain even a feigned interest.

  Ben is down in the chaos of the yard, to the left of the irregularly-shaped vegetable garden patches, and to the right of the home-built cinder block fire pit, inside of which he roasted an entire pig last May Day. He’s sitting in a lawn chair amid the overgrown grass with his back to her, tossing bagels at a garden gnome about twenty feet away, trying to land each around the gnome’s pointy red hat. Egged on by Marko (another roommate, another ex-grad student), Ben chucks bagel after bagel, and when he finally lands one, his huge frame erupts out of the chair with a roaring cheer. The first time she ever caught sight of Ben, his big build, his full black beard, magnificent waves of dark hair, already streaked grey, Joly felt her whole body stir. A Viking! she whispered to herself. And his ragged clothes only added to the effect: a shipwrecked Viking. He seemed to have been dropped into this world from another time and place.

  At the sight of him now, steeped in this jubilance, Joly’s composure cracks. A raw panic pumps through her, bringing a burning flush to her cheeks. She hesitates on the stoop.

  Ben approaches the target zone to retrieve his cache of tossed bagels, catches sight of her, and throws up a hand with happy surprise. “Hey there, doll!” He strides up the steps to meet her and kisses the top of her head. “What are you doing here?”

  “In the neighbourhood. D’you have a few minutes? I have some news.”

  “Oh-ho. News over the wires? How exciting.” He grabs a few bottles from the outdoor beer fridge and waves her down to the backyard.

  “Look, Marko, we have ourselves a guest. The woman comes bearing news.”

  “Bagel toss?” Marko asks, offering a sesame seed bagel on a hand covered in dark bike grease. His loose T-shirt and jeans are similarly stained.

  Joly looks at the scattering of bagels around the gnome. “This seems wasteful.”

  “Ah, but it only seems so,” says Ben, who routinely steals bagels from work. “These are week-olds from the pit. I thought I could try to make breadcrumbs with them, but … young Geoffrey broke the blender this morning. So … repurposed!” He sends his bagel flying, missing the gnome by feet, a failure that draws hoots from Marko. They are both plastered, clearly, as they always are on brew days.

  “Grab yourself a perch,” Ben says.

  So she drags a plastic chair from the cluster by the fence. She picks the best of the bunch, but it still only has one armrest. The whole lot are found chairs, treasures from curbsides and alleyways, the backyard littered with scavenged street finds.

  “What news now, my little dove?” asks Ben, squeezing her knee absentmindedly.

  “Um. What are you brewing?” Joly asks.

  “A red ale.” Ben pumps a fist. “A deep, strong red. We’re calling it the InternationALE.”

  “The working man’s beer,” adds Marko.

  “Because it’s so red, get it?” Ben and Marko chuckle delightedly. But Joly has trouble finding her way to the punchline. The pressure in her head is thick.

  “What’s wrong with you, woman?” Ben demands. “That’s funny.”

  “Um … I’m pregnant,” she says.

  Marko slides out of his chair with a low whistle. “God speed,” he says, slapping Ben’s shoulder before he disappears into the house with a fading chuckle.

  Ben grips an armrest and draws in an enormous breath, which he doesn’t seem to exhale; his chest stays frozen on the strained inhalation. “No,” he says, at last releasing some air. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. You’re not pregnant.”

  “Right. Except I am.”

  “But your system?”

  “Malfunctioned.”

  Slowly, he rises from his chair, twirling a bagel between his fingers. “Okay,” he says, pacing erratically. “Okay then.” He stops in front of her. “I am at your service. What do you need from me? A ride to the clinic? I’ll arrange it. I’ll borrow the good Reverend’s van. Whatever you need.”

  From his full height, he stares down at her; she manages to hold the gaze for just a few seconds before dropping her eyes to her tensed fingers.

  “Joly,” he says.

  “Ben.”

  “Joly, did we not talk about this very eventuality?”

  “We did. But I don’t feel … quite as abortion-y as I expected to. So I just want us to think about it for a second. Because we’re both getting older. And I mean, this is the sort of thing people do, like biologically. They have babies.”

  “An infant child?” Ben whips out an arm that catches the back of his flimsy lawn chair and sends it flying. “Into this decaying and brutish world?”

  “Don’t be so hysterical, Benny,” she says.

  “Hysterical?” He stalks the grass between her and the gnome. “This civilization is collapsing around us! The whole world will be warring over wate
r in a few decades! You want to expose a child to that kind of future?”

  It’s all doom and dystopia with Ben. When she first met him, he still had some modest hope for the future, a hope that manifested in personal ambition. He was a Ph.D. student then, on track to becoming a professor of history. But that plan was abandoned last year when he declared academia to be morally bankrupt, a body no longer interested in challenging power or seeking truth, preferring instead to fall in step with the corporate interests that fund it. He paced around his bedroom one night saying he would have to be out of his mind, right out of his goddamned mind, to throw more time and treasure into an institutional system that had become corrupted by the capitalist machinery. But he doesn’t seem much happier now, working for minimum wage at the bagel shop.

  “Joly,” he says, pausing his march right beside the grinning gnome, “as you may have noticed, I’m hammered. But let me try to take a look at what you’re suggesting. Logically.”

  Oh boy, she hates when he applies logic to arguments. And he’s all harsh edges; she doesn’t do well with harsh edges. Tears appear on the horizon.

  “Who will pay for this child? Where will it live? Will you and the offspring be moving into the Sanctum?”

  She looks back at the lopsided house, with its sinking roof. Full of roommates. And mould on the bathroom walls, and mice in the bedrooms, and sketchy plumbing, and the old stove that has at least once caught fire. “No. Not here.”

  “Ah-ha.” He rests a bare foot on the gnome’s red hat and rocks the ornament back and forth. “With your brother perhaps? The high-powered financier bankrolling our little family forever?”

  “I obviously don’t think that.”

  “I’m not sure that’s obvious.” She’s a few stern words away from a descent into sobs. Drawing her knees to her chest, she curls into a tight ball, her chin resting on her knees, and she stares at the high parched grass. When she next dares to look up, she finds his eyes rapidly scanning her scrunched body, his mouth agape with a concern that borders on horror.