The Towers of Babylon

by Michelle Kaeser

  “What?” she says.

  “Can you even carry my mighty seed?” he croaks, genuinely flabbergasted by the idea. “Look at you. Look at me. Your runty frame would split right open!”

  Okay, that’ll do it. Here come the tears, in full streams.

  But in a second, Ben is kneeling in front of her, his big hands cupped over her bony knees. “Hey, hey now.” His voice gets soft, but it retains its deep register, so that it seems to surround her in a shell of protective sound. “I’m sorry.”

  He wipes her tears with his thumbs and holds her cheeks. His hazel eyes, with their swirls and speckles, bore into her through his glasses. She looks away from them, down an inch or two, first at the breadth of his face, then at his rough beard, which she touches with the back of her hand. In their early days together, after she told him how much she liked the sensation of his beard against her skin, he used to spend full minutes passing his bearded cheeks and chin across her back, up and down her spine, along the sides of her body and her thighs and her calves. He does it still, when he’s feeling sentimental. He does it right now. He presses his bearded chin into her forehead and says, “I’m sorry, doll. Please. Don’t cry.”

  7

  LATE THAT NIGHT, on Joly’s bike ride home, she passes one construction site after another, each abandoned for the night. It seems like every few blocks there’s a crane looming above her, a net of scaffolding spun up from the ground, a tower half-built. Ben told her recently that this city is leading the world in condo construction, with hundreds of projects planned or already underway. Hundreds of towers of Babel all across the city.

  She rides by a site along Bloor St. and tries to imagine it slowly filling with squatters, as did the tower in Caracas. There’s something captivating … no, glorious! … about what those Venezuelans are getting up to. A mass takeover of a skyscraper! People uniting! Creating their own extra-legal community. One that’s functioning, even with all its flaws. The slideshow she scrolled through earlier showed image after image of families inside the slum, their rooms sometimes jazzed up with a brightly painted wall or a collage of posters or makeshift curtains. Bare concrete spaces transformed into cozy little homes. The more she thinks about it, the more communal passion and momentum she imbues into the project. Squatters gaining in numbers each year. Advancing ever further upward, skyward, heavenward. What solidarity! What spirit! The same spirit that inspired Babel itself.

  She’s always loved the story of Babel. A group of people terrified of being alone in the big wide world. What’s more relatable than that? They tackle their terror by building themselves a city. And a mighty tower—a beacon for them all, forever marking the place where they belong. A tower that says: welcome home. It’s a story about nesting. She hadn’t realized that until now.

  8

  JOLY MOVES HER way up the levels of the house, bathroom by bathroom. It takes almost two hours to clean them all—a half hour more than usual—because she takes breaks in each bathroom to study herself in the mirror. She’s sure her breasts are already bigger. They feel bigger. And tender. She forces her stomach outward and imagines how it will swell if she lets things run their natural course. The idea of the swell pleases her. She’d like to feel heavier, curvier. Womanly.

  By the time she finishes with the ensuite on the top floor, the odours from the various cleaning agents—the Lysol all-purpose cleaner, the extra astringent toilet bowl cleaner, the Windex—are making her throat hurt. She’ll need to talk to Yannick about getting some natural cleaners. She can’t be breathing in this toxic shit anymore. This is the kind of thing that leads to birth defects.

  With her dirty rags and towels gathered into an unwieldy clump, she trudges down to the laundry room, but an obstacle on the stairs blocks her path. Three-year old Yvie is splayed out on the third step from the bottom, where she’s reading a book, or pretending to.

  “How’s the book?” Joly asks, flicking the cover with her toe.

  “It’s about a whale.”

  “Ooh, good stuff.” She drops the ball of rags onto the stairs and sinks down beside Yvie, resting her chin on the little goober’s sandy hair and reading over her head.

  “You’re not even a practising Catholic!” shouts Yannick from the living room.

  “I practise all the time!” Karen hollers.

  “When was the last time you went to church?”

  “That is not the point!”

  “Karen! No way. We’re not baptizing the kid.”

  This argument, which has been raging throughout the home again lately, first reared its head when Yvie was in utero. Karen mentioned a baptism, but Yannick dug in his heels, a rarity for him, and Karen agreed to leave it be. Something, though, has since tweaked inside of her and made her revive the bid, this time with vehemence. And this time, Yannick will relent, Joly knows he will. He doesn’t have the stamina for prolonged fights.

  “I’m going to get bap-sized,” Yvie whispers. Even she knows it’s inevitable that her dad will cave. But she’s wary of her fate.

  “It’s just a ceremony!” Karen yells. “What do you care about a little ceremony? Why are you making such a big deal out of it?”

  “Because! I’m not Catholic! And Yvie is not Catholic!”

  “Oh yes she is!”

  Yvie cuddles up against Joly’s side. As Joly cradles her, she glances up at the staircase wall, decorated with dozens of framed photographs of Yannick and Karen—their engagement, their big white wedding, their tropical vacations. She’s seen these vanity walls, or ones like them, in the homes of most of Yannick and Karen’s married friends, but she’s still confused by the concept. Where once a couple might have hung a painting, they now go with a mosaic of themselves—sometimes a single blown-up photograph—elevating their love to the status of art.

  “You don’t just get to change your mind, Karen!”

  “I was hormonal. It was coerced.”

  “Oh bullshit.”

  Abandoning the dirty rags, Joly scoops up the goober along with her whale book. “We need some fresh air, Yvie-bug,” she says. “Let’s go outside.”

  “But it’s so hot outside.”

  “Nah, it’s just right.”

  Joly carries her out to the backyard, into the impossibly humid heat, and sets her down on one of the big rocks by the water feature: a wide-mouthed waterfall that cascades from a stone wall into an immaculate pond. It’s the focal point of the landscaped yard. Rock gardens, in elliptical shapes, edge the perimeter and a small patch of lawn fills out the centre. It’s all very pretty, but Joly prefers the wild backyard of her childhood.

  “Were you bap-sized?” Yvie asks. She clambers onto Joly’s lap and squishes herself into a ball.

  “No.” Joly crosses her hands on top of Yvie’s head, securing it like a helmet.

  “Was Daddy?”

  “No.”

  “Mama was.”

  “Yes. She was baptized.”

  “And I’m going to be.”

  “If you say so, Yvie-bug.”

  “No, not bug.”

  “What then?”

  “A tiger,” she says and pounces around onto Joly’s back.

  With careless effort, Joly tips her over her shoulders, pinning her to the grass amid delighted squeals. “You’re too little to be a tiger. You’re tiny. A teeny tiny Yvie-bug.”

  “—don’t give a shit what your mother says!” Yannick’s voice flies out through the open door. “Why does your mother get a vote on the baptism?”

  Joly moves to close the door, but before she is allowed to stand up, Yvie yanks at her hand. “What’s bap-sized mean?”

  “It means someone dunks your head in water.”

  “Like at swimming?”

  “Pretty much. Only you’ll be wearing a dress. Your mom’ll probably get you a pretty white dress.”

  “No-oh!” The absurdity of this is too much for Yvie, who explodes into laughter. “The dress will get all wet!”

  “Hi Yvie!” calls a voice from
the fence. It’s the neighbour boy with whom Yvie sometimes conferences, his face half-visible through the crack between the fence boards. But she’s not supposed to play with him—Yannick and Karen think he’s a delinquent.

  Straight away, Yvie races to answer his call, leaving Joly alone on the lawn. So she checks her phone for the hundredth time today, hoping to find an email from Greg at Nature’s Grounds. She finally filled in the supplementary form yesterday—with paragraphs of beautifully crafted bullshit. But so far, no response.

  If she gets hired, she’s looking at what … maybe $250 a week. Plus tips? Add in Ben’s meagre earnings. They could sponge all of Yvie’s hand-me-downs. How bad is it really? True, they can’t afford their own place, but is it the end of the world if she and Ben and their little one squat in the basement for a few months or a year? Could be a romp! A year of screwball comedy and crazy pranks, the whole lot of them all camped out in this house together, up to their armpits in impish hijinks!

  A few problems do come to mind. Yannick, for one. It would take some convincing to get him on board. But he might come to recognize the advantages of communal living—permanent babysitters, that’s a plus!

  At the fence, Yvie and the boy are engrossed in earnest discussion. Maybe this boy’s parents are looking for a babysitter too? Loads of parents must be struggling to find suitable childcare. It’s an opportunity. Joly could welcome all the neighbourhood kids to the house, open up a daycare in the backyard. She’d charge only a small fee, or ask to be paid in kind, with prepared food items or with knitted wares for the baby. It’d be the start of an old-fashioned neighbourhood exchange. A great community initiative! And once everyone gets a taste for it, for all this camaraderie and neighbourly spirit, they could go a step or two or three further and transform this lot, and the adjacent ones, into a housing co-op or something. And over time, as the co-op grows to be an indispensible anchor for the entire neighbourhood, a model for the entire city, the necessary management and organizational duties could fall to Joly, and this could become … well, a career! Why not? Is that so insane?

  “Catholic priests are all psychopaths and pedophiles!” bellows Yannick. Hmm … he’s trying out a new attack. He must be on the ropes.

  “That is a low blow, Yannick.”

  “Low blow? Every week it’s in the paper. Every fucking week! It doesn’t stop. It’s your whole organization.”

  “My—?!”

  A minute later, her brother charges out onto the deck, whipping the sliding door shut behind him. He stands for a moment, staring at the water feature with his hands in his hips, then walks over and drops onto a rock beside Joly.

  “So the baptism battle rages on,” Joly says.

  “You agree on things. That should be the end of it.” Yannick grabs a pebble from the rock garden and flings it into the pond. Plunk! Then he seizes a whole handful of pebbles and hurls them, one after another—plunk, plunk, plunk! The noise disrupts Yvie’s chatter; she swings around, follows the arc of a few thrown pebbles, then returns to her own business.

  Joly watches her brother fume. How opposed he is to the idea of religion! However restrained the dose. They didn’t grow up religious, no, but neither did their parents instil in them an animosity for theological exploration. And if … let’s just say … she and Ben decide to have the tiny little baby-bud incubating inside of her … she wouldn’t object if Ben, devout in his own strange way, wanted it baptized. Her. The baby girl. She’s started thinking of it as a girl—that happened sometime over the last couple of days. It seems impossible that she could be mother to a son. But a daughter … a little girl! Joly can see the little buttercup. She’s about seven, with long dark hair and thick bangs shielding her freckled face; she’s sitting on the floor somewhere, leaning over her crossed legs and reading an encyclopaedia. She has Ben’s weak eyes, so she reads through thick glasses. Who cares if she’s baptized or not?

  “Is it really such a big deal?” she asks. “You’re making it too religious.”

  “It’s a fucking baptism. How is it not religious?” Yannick stands up with a dismissive sniff. “I’m gonna get dinner. Karen says sushi tonight. Want anything particular?”

  “Nah. Whatever. Oh wait, actually … maybe just veggie rolls.”

  Before he leaves, he takes a look at Yvie still deep in it with the boy at the fence. “Make sure she doesn’t spend too much time with that kid, will you? He’s a delinquent.”

  9

  HUNCHED OVER HER laptop, listening only to the clickety-clack of her fingers flying across the keyboard, Joly churns out page after page depicting the misadventures of this poor guy with the porcupine quills. Ha. Hahahaha. She’s busting a gut!

  This story is almost as good as that one she wrote last month about a rhinoceros who becomes a bureaucrat, only nobody notices! Oh boy, that one cracks her up! This latest batch of stories is killer.

  Hope swells in her as she conjures a vision of a rejiggered collection made up of a perfect combination of these new titles and some of her older work. She’ll have to comb her archives carefully, pull out only the gems, spiff them up, and work out a wicked pitch for the whole shebang—but the talent is undeniable. Lou is right. There’s Social Value here. This is Art.

  Amid this burst of creativity, Joly hammers out more pages, pausing only to accommodate her own raucous laughter (boy oh boy, this poor guy!), and when she next looks up, she’s surprised to see that it’s already evening and she’s way late for a date with Ben. Hours and hours have passed. As years and years have passed. Whoosh!

  10

  “SPOILS FROM THE pit,” Ben says, pulling a plastic bag of six bagels from his smelly backpack. “There’s a rosemary in there.”

  It’s Saturday evening at St. James Park, and they’ve settled on a shady picnic spot far from the cathedral. Ben had business at the church earlier, a meeting to expand the community dinners he runs through his own parish.

  “Dill cream cheese too.” He tosses her the container plucked from his bag, but the cream cheese, which she usually likes, today looks like a sickening slop that she can’t imagine ingesting.

  “So good day at the office then?” she asks.

  “Of course not,” he says, cheerily enough.

  This park is where they first met. Back then it was filled with tents and protestors, with posters and chants and a blend of ideologies. A spirit of solidarity and possibility. Of history. The park was Occupied.

  It was fall and already cold when the Occupy movement rolled into the city. But Joly didn’t mind the weather then, nobody did. Legions of protestors huddled together in the rain, standing shoulder to shoulder in the trenches. Oh boy, the excitement of those days! It soaked into her bones. But that energy is hard to tap into now, with the quiet heat smothering them all. Not a lot people are around tonight and those who are move slowly. Even the homeless guy collecting bottles is languid on his beat.

  Ben stuffs a cream cheese-smeared bagel between his teeth and fiddles with the portable radio he found in his church’s basement a few months ago. The reception isn’t great, but a classical station sputters through. This is the sort of thing they do. Budget dates.

  “So … matters stand before us,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “Did you make the appointment?”

  “I’m thinking about it.” She studies the rosemary flecks in her bagel.

  “And what, exactly, are you thinking?”

  “I think it’s a girl.”

  “That is not what I meant.”

  “I don’t know why. I had this, like, vision of her the other day. A little girl, she looked like you. Dark hair and glasses.”

  “Ah yes. And who paid for those glasses?”

  Joly rips off a small piece of the bagel and tentatively places it in her mouth, where it sits. “I don’t know. That wasn’t in the vision.”

  The homeless guy has wandered their way, flashing a smile that reminds Joly that her vision also failed to account for dental care.<
br />
  But this barista job will stanch the bleeding. Until her reconfigured story collection sells. And once she gets that first book deal, it will be a cinch to get a second, and a third. Each deal more lucrative than the last, as her fan base turns legion. And in five, ten years, when the financial end has finally sorted itself out, she and Ben will gaze upon their little bespectacled, encyclopaedia-reading child and think back on the stress of this time and at their waffling and they’ll laugh, with a wild mirth, knowing that they dodged a bullet, because what would life be without their little buttercup? And who knows, who really knows, maybe the little one will grow up and do something amazing for the world, lead a revolution or something, and Joly will end her life soaked in the twin happinesses of having had a career of great passion and acclaim and having bred a charismatic revolutionary who ushered in an age of utopia. That kind of thing happens.

  “I’m worried that you’re not looking at this reasonably,” Ben says.

  “I definitely am.”

  “What stability can we offer a child? We have nothing to offer.”

  She tries to get back to those heady Occupy days, when she and Ben first met. She came down to check out the demonstrations, thinking she’d stay a few hours, but then she saw him—the Viking, emerging from his tent, readying himself for a raid. His old green Canadian Tire tent was on the opposite side of the park, much closer to the church. She spent several nights in that tent, inside its closed confines, buzzing with nerves each time. She was afraid to touch him, awe-struck—and love-struck. It was like petting a lion in a cage, equal elements of danger and exhilaration.

  And now his Viking blood is alive in her. Already she can feel it making her stronger and bolder. How necessary this baby feels. If only Ben appreciated the necessity of his own propagation. They could work out a path forward, a plan. And there must be a way forward. It can’t be that procreation has become a privilege allotted to only the wealthy.