The Towers of Babylon

by Michelle Kaeser

  “But maybe I do want her.”

  Joly climbs out of the car, picks up the orange peel, and chucks it into some nearby bushes. She wipes her sticky hands on the leaves of the bush. When she turns back to him, she feels the full force of the sun. “Life can’t be this difficult. We’re conjuring up all kinds of difficulties.”

  “We’re not conjuring them. They exist.”

  “But this is one of the richest countries in the world! I mean, just the other day … okay, I was reading this article about this skyscraper slum in Venezuela, this tower. And families, good honest families, with kids and stuff, are living there. And they’re making it work. I’m not saying that’s ideal or anything, I’m just saying—well, our perspective is a bit skewed up here. Our perspective about how much we need to get by.”

  “Venezuela? You mean that Tower of David? In Caracas?”

  “Yeah!” she says, startled that he knows what she’s talking about. “That’s right.”

  “But they cleared out that squat. No one lives there anymore.”

  Joly’s brain functioning slows. “What?”

  “Yeah. The government went in and threw everyone out. Relocated them.”

  “When? To where?” The news punctures something inside of her. She can feel the deflation in her lungs. Her breathing turns shallow.

  “I don’t know. It was news. Some time ago. You’re the one talking about it. Don’t you know?”

  She only read the one article about the place. A feature article, several thousand words, plus a slideshow, but just the one. And she didn’t check its date. Ben reads the news every day, multiple outlets. “But how could they just evict them? There were thousands of people—they’d built up a whole community in there.”

  “Well. It’s gone. That’s how things go. Not that it matters anymore anyway. Since millions of people have fled the country in the last few years. That’s what you should be concerned about.”

  “But Jesus.” How stupid she is. Romanticizing a movement, drawing real-world inspiration from a situation that already doesn’t exist anymore. How terrifically fucking stupid.

  “I don’t know why you’d expect anything different. This is the way of our world. This is Babylon, baby. We’re all living in Babylon.”

  Over Ben’s shoulder, Joly sees Yannick plodding toward them on what must be a beer run. She shakes her head through the heat. “But wait, hang on, this is crazy. Where did they put those people?”

  “Housing projects. In towns outside the city, if I’m not mistaken. I forget exactly where. But outside the capital. So that it was entirely inconvenient for them to get to work.”

  “They just split them all up?” She can hear her own voice hitting shrill decibels. “They scattered them?”

  “Look, why are we talking about this? Can we focus here?” Ben’s voice bumps up in volume as it chases hers.

  This moment of raised voices coincides with Yannick’s arrival at the car. “What are you two fighting about?”

  “Nothing,” she says.

  “Let me guess: which brand of communism to shill?” He laughs at his own joke.

  “Shut up,” Joly says.

  “Which communist dictator to worship?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Lenin or Stalin?”

  “Fuck off, Yannick.”

  “Maybe Mao?”

  “We’re fighting because I’m pregnant, you fucking asshole.”

  Her brother faces her, emitting residual laughter for another second. But then his face morphs in the most abrupt change of expression she’s ever seen from him.

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me, Joly,” he says.

  She keeps stone-faced, but offers a slight shake of the head.

  “What the hell are you thinking?”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose!”

  Yannick scrunches his eyes and when he opens them, he shoots them straight at Ben. “And you, Ben! For Christ’s sake, what business do you have getting anyone pregnant? How the hell are you going to support a baby?”

  Ben’s big head drops an inch and waves of his long dark hair flop forward over his face.

  Nobody wants this baby. Nowhere is there a flicker of excitement. And really, maybe she doesn’t want it either. What she’s feeling might be nothing more than a biological mechanism firing off, like hunger pangs or a circadian rhythm, and like these, it can be overridden for the moment. It’s not like she’s spent her life pining for children. She’s never been sure which way she wanted to go with that. What if she has the baby, over all objections, only to discover she has no aptitude for motherhood, no interest even? Then with no money, no house, no job, no prospects, no talents, she’ll come to resent the kid—a little boy after all. And the stress of having the screaming, unwanted infant will, of course, annihilate any love left between her and Ben, who will disappear into a monastery, where he can spend the rest of his life alone and atoning. The kid meanwhile, starved right from the get-go for affection and security, will grow up to become one of the world’s wretched. A kid that turns out fucked. It will happen just like Ben says it will. Or it could at least. It’s conceivable. And doesn’t that make it too great a moral risk?

  “Don’t worry, Yannick,” she says, unable to look at Ben. “I’m not gonna keep it.”

  Her brother false starts on a few sentences, but finally he goes with: “Jesus! I just came up here to get beer. I need a beer.”

  He takes a can from the cooler in the trunk, cracks it, and slugs half of it in a go. The few remaining cans he drops into a cloth shopping bag and without another word, disappears back toward the hill and ball game.

  When Joly finally looks at Ben, his cheeks are puffed out, but slowly deflating. He exhales his enormous relief.

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, after Ben has left, after Joly told him to get lost, she’s back on the grassy hill next to Lou—the other side of Lou this time, as far as possible from her brother. The whole configuration of the group has changed, in fact. In her absence, Anosh seized on the opportunity to move to the very centre of the beach blanket, either to better protect his jeans or to get closer to Lou. Yannick and Joly are out on the flanks now, both on the bare grass.

  Joly lies on her stomach, hiding her face in the grass to mask the tears that go unnoticed by Lou, who’s busy disputing some fundamentals about women’s athletics.

  “No one wants to pay real money to see women’s professional sports,” Anosh is saying. “That’s the bottom line. So there’s no point to them.”

  “That’s insane. Plenty of people like women’s sports.”

  “Then why don’t they make any money?”

  “They do. Just not as much. And that doesn’t mean there’s no point to them.”

  “It does. And more than that, it means there’s no point in even funding amateur programs for women. It’s a waste of resources.” He crushes his beer can and tosses it onto the grass. “And it gives false hope to those girls.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Lou says. She looks at his discarded can and adds, “And can you not litter in a public fucking park?”

  Anosh kicks the beer can her way. “Look, it’s simple supply and demand.”

  “Sports aren’t just about economics.”

  “Of course they are. All the good ones anyway.” Anosh stands up, with a grin, like he’s won this idiotic argument, and he marches down the hill to the bathrooms.

  “Hey!” Lou calls out to him as he goes.

  He turns back to look at her. “Mm?”

  “Your jeans look really fucking stupid.”

  Joly wipes her wet nose and cheeks on the grass. Lou will have to take her to the clinic; Ben’s presence would make it unbearable. It will be a simple inversion of their last visit. Although she and Lou are twice as old now, a baby still seems no more feasible than it did then. This time Joly will be the one called upon to display a stoic determination while she is freed of this spark of life. But she won’t take it nearly as well.

  13


  ON THE CAR ride home from the park, Joly stares out the window at the passing city and listens to rap music she doesn’t recognize while her brother drives. The satellite radio in the car is forever tuned to this channel, rap being Yannick’s preferred genre since he was a preteen and blasting Young MC in his bedroom, busting out the lyrics in front of the mirror while Joly looked on in stitches. She never got the hang of rap. She and Lou grew up into grunge music and flannel shirts.

  Although Yannick stopped drinking after that fourth beer, and although they stopped to grab tacos down at a place on College St., his blood alcohol level is still definitely on the illegal side of the limit. But he’s in much better shape to drive than she is. So he’s behind the wheel, heading south toward the Gardiner Expressway.

  “Hey listen,” Yannick says, “I reacted badly. It’s not like it’s terrible news.”

  “It’s not good news.”

  “It could be, though. If you wanted it. You don’t have to get rid of it.”

  “I think I do.”

  “But if it’s just a money thing, we can help, you know that, don’t you?” His elbow hangs out the open driver’s side window, his fingers mindlessly tapping out the beat against the frame. “You should do whatever you think is right. Obviously. But if it’s just about money. We have money …”

  “You help me enough,” says Joly.

  “You’d help me if situations were reversed.”

  “But they’d never be reversed. That’s the thing.”

  “No,” he says flatly. “That’s true.”

  They travel on southward until Joly can see the lake shimmering up ahead.

  “It’d be good if Yvie had a little cousin,” Yannick continues. “They could grow up together. She needs someone to beat up on anyway. It’ll toughen her up.”

  His kindness is threatening to bring on a fresh batch of tears. Joly stares hard out the window, working to suppress the flow. She can feel Yannick sneak glances at her. “What’s that shitty grunge station you like?”

  “Lithium.”

  Yannick fiddles with the satellite radio console, adding distracted driving to impaired driving. But he is practised in these arts. Soon angsty ’90s rock music pours from the speakers.

  Once up on the Gardiner, they set forth through the corridor of condos that rise up alongside them. It’s one after another glass and concrete tower, built so close to the expressway, within metres of it, that you can see people in their living rooms, can even make out their haircuts. Up and down these towers, people are sectioned off into little units, never having to speak with their neighbours, never being called upon to form a neighbourhood.

  “I hate these condos,” Joly says.

  “No one likes them.”

  “Well some people must. There’s, like, a million of them.”

  “Yeah, but nobody likes them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Karen says average occupancy in these towers is like two years. So no one really takes care of them. Upkeep on them is shit. And construction isn’t even good to begin with. They’re built to fall apart.”

  “Really?”

  “Makes sense though, right? Who would live here long term? Right by the highway? Fucking nightmare.”

  “Huh,” says Joly, feeling the heavy fuck-you thump of a Rage Against the Machine anthem in her chest.

  “Yeah, some realtors have called them slums in the making. Fifty years from now, this whole corridor will be one long, shitty, waterfront slum.” Yannick is becoming talkative. Maybe it’s the alcohol. But more likely it’s the relief of having hit on a topic of conversation free of emotional strain.

  A Honda makes an abrupt move into the lane ahead of them, forcing Yannick to tap the brakes. “Fucking dick,” he mumbles, then rides his horn until the Honda veers back over to the right, chastened.

  “But look at all these buildings,” Joly says, gesturing with both arms to the row of condos moving past them on both sides, the walls of glass fired up by the evening sun. “That’s a pretty big slum you’re talking about.”

  “People keep flooding into this city. With no money and nowhere to go. I could see it. I could see it happening.”

  “Just fifty years?” she asks.

  “Yeah, but hey, on the bright side, in fifty years, you and I will both be dead.”

  Joly looks up at the buildings and imagines them transformed by time and circumstance from the aspirational homes of the young and (sort of) financially solvent into towers of vertical squalor. She pictures denizens leaning out of broken windows in the summer heat, because the A/Cs have long stopped working. Or standing side by side on their crumbling balconies catching the breeze off passing trucks. Fifty years doesn’t seem like a long time for a booming sector of the city to turn into a slum. But maybe that’s just how things go. They fall apart.

  Book Two

  1

  LOUISE WATCHES THE firm pads of his fingertips run up the insides of her thighs. When he reaches her hips, he brushes his thumbs across the mouth of her cunt, before he switches directions, drawing his thumbs down along the outside of her legs, with decisive pressure, digging deep into the muscle the way she likes. She focuses on the path of his thumbs as they approach her knees. When she was younger and still playing baseball, she used to have power in her limbs, a defined musculature that could easily be traced and marvelled at. She flexes her quadriceps against his hands to feel what remains of that strength. She’s still fit, she keeps in shape, but she’s no athlete anymore. She’s aging.

  Yannick keeps with this up-and-down business on her thighs, punctuated by the teasing brush at the centre, and by the time he rises to fuck her, she is well past ready for it. As, clearly, is he.

  “Oh god, yeah,” he says upon entry. “That’s fucking good.”

  Yannick’s chatty during sex. He likes to update her on how it’s all going, how it’s all feeling for him, and he likes for her to reciprocate this running commentary, to validate his efforts. But Louise prefers sex without dialogue.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” he says.

  “Mm,” she says.

  “You like that?”

  “Mm.”

  The hotel sheets against her back are soft, very soft, high thread count. It’s a small boutique hotel that serves as the location for these extramarital trysts—Yannick knows the manager. She doesn’t know what Yannick’s exact arrangement is, but they get this room in this pricey hotel for an hour or so whenever they want it. Nobody raises an eyebrow. The place is a huge improvement on the venues of their earliest fucks, when they were teenagers stealing moments in the backs of cars in empty lots.

  YANNICK WAS ONE of Louise’s first lovers. Not the very first—that distinction, unfortunately, went to a pervy baseball coach. Nor was Yannick the second or third—those were a short-term high school boyfriend who, astonishingly for a teenage boy, had erectile difficulties, and the butchy centre fielder on her baseball team who browbeat her into believing she might be a lesbian. For all those early experiences lacked, they stoked a profound curiosity. She experimented. Widely. She does well with men. They like her.

  But Yannick was the first to introduce her to any real sexual satisfaction. He sought to please her. And he didn’t treat her—the way many of the white guys she later fucked did—as a novelty. He didn’t look at her a little too wide-eyed when it came time to undress, wasn’t a little too curious about what shade her nipples would be, what her cunt would feel like, a little too expectant for some unknown but definitely extant cultural difference in the imminent sex. That sort of thing happened on the regular, but it wasn’t until the second time a man playfully remarked on his “yellow fever” that she recognized this attention for what it was. After that she took precautions. She devoted hours to the effort to play down her Japanese-ness and highlight the British and Spanish heritages instead. Not that it did much good. She’s inherited all of Mai’s features. Her half-Japanese mother is present all over her face. And althoug
h this ancestry makes up only a quarter of her genetic code, no matter what she does, how she cuts her hair, how she dyes it, styles it, what kind of makeup she puts on, leaves off, she always skews at least a little Asian.

  “Jesus Christ, you’ve got my dick so hard,” Yannick says.

  “Mm.”

  “You’re gonna make me come, Lou.”

  “Mm.”

  “Wait, wait, slow down.”

  But it’s not Louise who’s setting pace at the moment, so he must be talking to himself. That’s fine. Better to himself than to her. And he does slow down. Also fine. It’s always a series of fast and slow, fast and slow, with Yannick.

  They’ve been fucking on-and-off for over fifteen years. In their teenage days, it was simple clandestine physical exploration, never anything close to coupledom. And although no romantic bond ever developed, neither did the physical chemistry ever wane, and so they kept screwing each other through the years, breaking off for long stretches when one or the other of them moved out of town, or started a new relationship, or just got sidetracked and lost touch. She thinks of Yannick sometimes as a forgotten, but familiar food. A food that trends for a while, then falls out of favour, only to be resurrected a few years later and put back into the rotation. Like a mango. Uncommon enough to be interesting, but not so uncommon that it ever seems wholly new. That’s how it is with Yannick. He’s a mango.

  The clandestine nature of their relationship has endured too. Louise has never mentioned it to anyone, not even Joly. She thought it was a simple fling at the start and so saw no point in creating any weird tensions around the situation. Then too much time passed to mention it without awkward and lengthy explanations. And now that the affair is adulterous (on both sides) … well, she’ll never tell anyone about it now.

  “Hang on a second,” Yannick says. “I want you up like this.” He pushes himself up to a kneel and drags her hips up onto his thighs, her legs over his shoulders, for a different, deeper angle. “You like that?” he asks.