The Towers of Babylon

by Michelle Kaeser

  She just needs a little more time to develop a reasoned defense for the surprising position she has almost settled on: keeping her.

  “Benny, do you think we could talk about the pregnancy another time?” she says, reclining onto her elbows.

  “Another time? This creature is growing.” He places a giant paw on her stomach, the spread of his fingers covering the width of her torso, and he stares near-horrified at her body beneath his hand. “As we speak, it multiplies its cells.”

  “I know. Just not tonight.”

  “When then?”

  “Soon.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Fine. Yes. Sure. Tomorrow.” Gathering a firm fistful of his beard, she tips his chin down toward her.

  “But for real, Joly,” he says before he kisses her.

  “Okay.”

  THEY TAKE A long, but easy meander through the city toward Ben’s place, for a double-feature of Marx Brothers movies he borrowed from the library. When she can, Joly watches their shadows, elongated in the evening light, and she chuckles softly to herself at the cartoonish size disparity between her and Ben. The sun sinks as they go, but even in the fading dusk, the heat sticks. For a few blocks at a time, they walk hand in hand, but it’s too hot for contact and soon they let go. But then a short while later, one or the other of them forgets and reaches out a hand again.

  About a half hour into the walk, Joly feels a blister forming on her toe, and fifteen minutes after that, on a quiet residential street, she stops to inspect the foot. She sits down on the curb and takes off her shoe.

  “Whoa mama! Look at the size of this thing!” she says. It’s the sandals, these cheap flip-flops. The strap’s been digging hard into the side of her foot, just beneath her big toe. She’s wearing the wrong shoes for a cross-city distance. She looks at Ben’s feet, in his Army Surplus boots. He always wears these boots, one shoe for all seasons. He has no other pairs.

  Ben takes her foot in his hands. “I might have a bandaid.”

  He rifles through his backpack and she through hers; her hands find her phone and reflexively check for messages. No calls, no texts, but there is one email. From Greg at Nature’s Grounds.

  Hi Jolanda-Lydia,

  It’s with a heavy heart that I write to inform you that you were, unfortunately, not selected to advance to the next round of interviews for a position here at Nature’s Grounds. :(

  Competition this time around was stiff. We had many extraordinary candidates, but sadly only two can advance. I know how discouraging this must be for you, but we appreciate your interest in being part of the Nature’s Grounds family and always encourage applicants to apply again in the future. You never know what tomorrow will bring!

  Don’t forget to think of us for all your caffeine-infused needs!

  Sincerely,

  Greg J. Baals

  Joly lets the phone fall through her fingers and clatter against the sidewalk. “I didn’t get that job. That stupid barista job. Didn’t even make the next round.”

  “There’s a second round?”

  “I know!”

  “Well … fuck ’em.”

  Not even extraordinary enough to make coffee! With her bare foot, she punts a garbage bin, which wobbles, but doesn’t fall.

  “Hey, don’t worry, doll.” He’s found a single bandaid, much too large for this purpose. Setting her foot on his lap, he rips open the wrapper. “There are millions of coffee shops in the city. Or fast food joints.”

  Fast food. How can her job prospects have dwindled to fast food joints? When she was younger, people used to remark on her potential, both hers and Yannick’s, like the world was just waiting for them to take hold of it and shape it. But the world, although it’s been receptive enough to her brother’s will, keeps rejecting her attempts to mould it.

  “Maybe I should’ve gone to business school,” she says, looking at the chipped tangerine nail polish on her toes. “Like Yannick. I should’ve just gotten a job in finance.”

  With squinty-eyed attention, Ben applies the band-aid to the inside edge of her foot. “The financial sector is where the worst of humanity go to fondle each other. Everyone knows that.”

  “Yannick’s not smarter than me. I could do what he does!”

  “You want to be like your brother? Whose job is morally bankrupt? Full of gross exploitation and theft.”

  “Hey,” she says, jerking her foot free from his grip, “you’re the one stealing bagels all the time.”

  Ben shakes his head, didactic in his manner, and pulls her foot back onto his lap. “It is not immoral to steal from Caesar.”

  She shouldn’t have brought up her brother. Ben and Yannick manage to get along, for her sake, but they don’t understand each other. There’s no point talking with one about the other. The guy whose wardrobe consists of exactly one pair of boots, two pairs of pants bought from the Salvation Army, and T-shirts bought in packs of three will never see the world from the same perspective as the guy who chooses which of his two-hundred-dollar dress shirts to slip on in the morning.

  “Your brother is soul sick, Joly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s drinking all the time …”

  “Only on weekends.”

  “He looks five, maybe ten years older than he is.”

  “Because he’s tired. He works a thousand times harder than you or I do.”

  “A slave to his greed.”

  “Greed? He plans to retire in a few years. Freedom Forty! How is that greedy?” She shoves her foot back into her flip-flop, even though the bandaid isn’t sitting right.

  “Wasn’t this originally a Freedom Thirty plan?”

  “Yeah. But that was a bit unrealistic.”

  “And then a Freedom Thirty-Five plan?”

  “There were unforeseen expenses.” She collects her phone and the bandaid wrapper, and chucks them into her bag.

  “Soon it’ll be a Freedom Fifty thing. Then Freedom Sixty. Those golden handcuffs will shackle him until his death.” Ben stands up beside her. “And he won’t even mind—because his soul is sick, Joly.”

  “Maybe everyone’s is.”

  AT BEN’S PLACE, they skip the movies and drop straight into his bed, his nest—a thin foam mattress that sits directly on the floor. No sex tonight, no one’s in the mood. It’s too hot up here anyway. Ben, as ever, falls asleep within a minute, but the heat keeps Joly awake.

  She fidgets next to Ben for about an hour, then pops right out of the bed. There’s an A/C at home, and a better mattress, and no looming breakfast conversation about the state of her pregnancy. She leaves his house before the subway stops running, and Ben sleeps too deeply to notice her go.

  11

  THE LIGHTS ARE on in the kitchen when Joly gets home. Under their beaming glare, on the wooden floor, is Yannick, lying face down in front of the stainless steel oven. Drunk from the look and smell of him, and trying to cook a frozen pizza. But he must have passed out during the wait, because the oven is starting to smoke.

  “Jesus, Yannick.”

  He stirs, but not into consciousness. She turns off the oven and leaves its door open to let the heat and smoke escape. He used to do this sort of thing all the time when he was first starting to drink. At seventeen, he and his buddies made their first fake IDs—they scratched out the last digit of their birth year on their driver’s licences and edited in an earlier year with a marker. A crude job, but one club or another always let them in. After a night spent lighting up some dirty club, Yannick could rarely find his house key when he got home, so he’d shuffle in through a window. Or, when the degree of his intoxication precluded this feat, he’d rap-rap-rap on Joly’s bedroom window until she staggered down to unlock the back door. Then came the stumbling clatter in the kitchen. This thing with the pizzas burning in the oven—it’s happened at least a dozen times. But not much since their teenage years. Must have had a rough night.

  “Hey Yannick,” she says, more softly this time. She k
neels beside him and shakes his shoulder.

  “What? Eh? What is it?”

  “You burned your pizza, dummy.”

  “Ughghgh.”

  His eyes squint open. As he pushes himself to sitting, Joly notices the crushed lei around his neck. That’s right, it was a bachelor party tonight—Hawaiian themed. She remembers him saying something about it. About how “fucking stupid it is to have a bachelor party for a wedding still three months away.” The Hawaiian wedding is in September and he, Karen, and Yvie are all making the trip. To Hawaii. Just for the weekend.

  The skin on Yannick’s face, around his eyes, looks discoloured, almost haggard, way beyond the ordinary flush of drunkenness.

  “Well shit.” He rubs his eyes, focuses them on the blackened pizza and decides to give it a go anyway, attacking it over the sink so that the charred bits don’t crumble off onto the floor.

  “Hey,” he grunts, then stretches a fist out for a bump. “Baseball tomorrow?”

  “What? Yeah!” She jumps up and bumps his hanging fist. “I thought you had to work!”

  “Breakthrough with the vinegar assholes.”

  He looks like he’ll be in bad shape tomorrow. But it’s hard to tell with Yannick. He has remarkable bounce-back potential. From the pit of drunken depths, he can rise almost miraculously, clawing his way back into competence through an act of brute will. Even now, as he stands yawning over the sink, she can see some force returning to him. His eyes are still wonky, but he’s shaking himself into strength.

  He yawns again, a chasm opening up in his face, one big, gaping, disgusting expansion of his polluted mouth, and a story idea pops into Joly’s head. About a dead hippopotamus. And an overworked businessman, who climbs inside its rotting mouth, just to get a little peace and quiet. Quickly, she grabs a notepad from the clutter on the island and jots down a few notes, a soft cackle breaking out from her throat despite her glum mood.

  “What? What are doing?” asks Yannick, waving his last slice of pizza at her notepad. Apart from the scraps in the sink, he has inhaled the whole thing.

  “Nothing. Just … some notes to myself.”

  “Job ideas, maybe?” He picks off a burnt pepperoni chunk and flings it into the sink.

  “Heh. Sorta,” she says, stifling another hearty chuckle. “A story idea.”

  “Oh dear god.” Yannick lets his entire upper body collapse onto the marble countertop.

  “What?”

  He pulls himself together and points his rigid, half-eaten pizza slice straight at her. “For fuck’s sake, Joly!” he bawls. “Can you please, for the love of Christ, just get a real fucking job?”

  His voice comes out in such a desperate cry that her pencil drops. The backs of her eyes flood with tears.

  “I’m going to bed,” Yannick throws the pizza slice into the sink and lurches out of the kitchen.

  “Hey!” she calls out after him, when she’s sure her voice will hold. “I have fans!”

  But he’s already halfway up the stairs, headed for a crash landing into his giant king-sized bed.

  12

  THE DAY, AS EXPECTED, is hot, very hot, one of those Toronto-in-the-summer days where it’s almost impossible to be outside, where all you can do is lie still where you are. Even the baseball players are sluggish; the game has barely any action.

  Joly sits in the shade high above right field amid a small group spread over a single beach blanket. On her right is Lou, who always comes to the ball games. She used to pitch as a teenager. A real hotshot too. To Joly’s left is Yannick, who rallied just fine after last night. And beside him sits Anosh, one of his work buddies, making a first-time appearance at Christie Pits. The beach blanket was Anosh’s idea. He’s wearing designer jeans that he doesn’t want “all fucked up with grass stains.” He’s been complaining about one thing or another since he got here.

  “What’s with these slow pitchers?”

  Joly watches Lou tighten with a thinly suppressed anger.

  “They’re not slow,” says Lou.

  “Slower than the Jays pitchers, that’s for damn sure. And the Jays aren’t even good.”

  “The Jays have been really good. And this isn’t the majors. This is a semi-pro league. That’s why it’s free.”

  “Well these guys fucking suck.”

  This is the problem with Yannick and his friends. They’re all cocky and belligerent, made so by their money and by the alcohol they consume. Anosh and Yannick are already on their third beers and it’s only the top of the fourth.

  “Gotta be hard to play in this kind of heat, though,” says Joly.

  “It’s their fucking job,” says Anosh, adjusting himself on the beach blanket—he’s at the edge after all, and perilously close to having a partial buttock of designer denim fall into direct contact with the grass.

  Out on the field, a full count adds some pressure to the no-run game. The next pitch curves to the outside, and after a checked swing, the ump calls it a strike. The call is met with lackluster cheering from the dehydrated, over-heated fans.

  “What? Get the fuck outta here,” Anosh says. He waves his half-empty can at the field. “That was a ball. By a mile. I guess the semi-pro umpires suck too. Good to know.”

  “The pitch was good,” says Lou.

  “You’re dreaming.”

  “Hey, you’re talking to an ex–Team Canada baseball player here,” says Joly.

  “Yeah, buddy,” says Yannick. “Lou knows baseball.”

  “Oh you used to play, did you?” Anosh asks, his tone mocking. He tilts forward to better see Lou at the other end of their little group, and Joly wonders if, in this deranged, combative approach, he’s trying to flirt with her. Guys often flirt with Lou. Her wedding ring seems only to encourage them.

  “I did,” Lou says, the words clipped with irritation.

  “You mean softball? Don’t girls play softball?” Anosh says.

  “No. I don’t mean softball, asshole. I mean baseball.”

  “Whoa, easy there, Lou,” says Yannick calmly.

  “Well they must not have taught you about good pitching in your little lady league. Because that last pitch was garbage.”

  Sometimes with Lou, it’s like Joly can see inside her brain, and watch the tethers that restrain Lou’s rage. She can see when they weaken, when they snap, and right now the tethers are mighty frayed. Lou leans across Joly’s legs. “I think you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, cool guy.”

  “Easy, Lou, easy. He’s just fucking around,” says Yannick. He puts a gentle hand on her shoulder and leaves it there.

  “Whoa-ho, touchy, huh?” says Anosh.

  It’s not a comment that encourages Lou to simmer, and the situation seems poised to devolve into real unpleasantness, but a well-timed distraction usurps the group’s attention. Ben. There he is, coming at them with his heavy, lumbering gait.

  “Oh hey, hey, look here,” Yannick says. “Hey Ben. How’s it going?”

  Ben shrugs. “I maintain.”

  “Want a beer?”

  “I wouldn’t say no to a beer.”

  Yannick nods him around to his other side, where the bag of beer and the Dixie cups are stashed. Ben pours a can of beer into a cup and heaves himself down behind Joly. His presence must trigger in Yannick thoughts of low-wage, low-skilled jobs, because it’s right then that Yannick says, “Oh hey, Joly, you hear back about that shitty barista job yet?”

  “I did, in fact.” She takes a slow sip of water.

  “Oh my god,” he says, glaring at her while she hides her face behind the water bottle. “You didn’t get it?”

  “It’s a very competitive job market.”

  Yannick drains his beer and burps. “Well hang in there, Joly. Soon enough I’m sure you’ll manage to land yourself the exact same job you had as a teenager.” He laughs. So does his buddy.

  Ben sets a comforting hand on her back, rubbing gentle circles over her shoulder blades. Then he leans in close. “You vanished in the
night,” he whispers.

  “It was hot. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Matters are pressing, Joly. We were supposed to talk this through today.”

  “Now? I’m watching a game here.”

  “Joly,” he says, firmly enough to draw a look from Yannick.

  If there’s going to be a scene, it’s better that it happen in private. “Okay, okay, I gotta go back to the car anyway.” She’s low on water, she’s hungry, and there are oranges on the back seat.

  So they climb the hill to the street, an arduous few minutes’ journey in the pounding sun. At the car, she sits in the back seat so her head is shaded, but keeps the door wide open for air and lets her legs hang out. She peels an orange.

  Ben stands on the sidewalk a few feet away. “I thought we were having breakfast.”

  Joly piles the orange peel onto her lap and bites into a segment, which squirts and drips. She leans forward to let the juice fall onto the pavement.

  “Now look, doll, I know you don’t want to talk about this, but that’s not an option. This is time-sensitive.”

  “Mm-hmm.” But she’s distracted by the dribbling juice. It’s all over her hands, every finger sticky. She’s never encountered an orange this juicy. Does heat cause the juice inside the fruit to expand and act up?

  “Joly. Can you look at me? Can you pay attention?”

  She drops the whole mess of orange onto the ground and looks at him. “You want me to abort it. I get it.”

  They stare at each other. It’s a contest that lasts at least a minute before Ben yields to his mounting frustration.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he says. “It’s your decision, that’s how this works. But I’m on the record as a strong, very definite no.”

  “Yeah, I get that. Loud and clear.”

  “It is irresponsible.” He puts a hand on her shoulder and looks her dead in the eye. “We are not in any position to be having a kid.”

  “But people in far worse positions have kids all the time,” Joly says, wriggling free from his grip.

  “Yeah, and everywhere I see the result of people who had kids they were unable to provide for. Kids they didn’t want. Those kids turn out fucked, Joly.”