The Towers of Babylon

by Michelle Kaeser

  “Say …” says Elliott, bent over the open dishwasher, “d’you know why the window screen is in the yard?”

  “What?”

  “The screen from your old bedroom window.”

  Oh right. The screen. “Uh—”

  Fuck!

  “It’s in the middle of the lawn. You know how it got there?”

  “No. Why would I know that?” She stands up and wipes stray bits of grated parmesan off the table. “Maybe a squirrel ripped it off?”

  “A squirrel? No way.”

  “A raccoon maybe?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Aware that she’s fidgeting, she grabs a dishcloth from the sink to give her body a purpose. She turns on the faucet full-blast and wets the cloth under its roaring stream. “Raccoons are very industrious.”

  “It doesn’t look clawed at, though. The screen. No scratches. No marks.”

  “Raccoon break-ins get reported all across the city.” Louise wipes down the table, trying to stabilize her shaking hands against its hard surface. “It’s pretty common. That’s probably what happened. Yeah. That must be it.”

  “Mm,” he says, sidling up to her, his voice—even on this one syllable—showing infinitely more composure than hers. “The thing is … I don’t think that’s what happened.” He sets a hand on top of hers, arresting her motion mid-wipe.

  Louise’s heartbeat surges up her throat, choking her speech. Oh god, what’s this? Is he wise to the whole thing? Not as oblivious as she thought? His faculties not entirely blunted by the wedding photography? Maybe he has been paying attention to her, careful attention. Maybe he knows everything.

  As Elliott picks up one of her hands, kisses the fingers, bites on them, her body whirs with exhilaration. He used to do this all the time, as a preamble to sex, to a second or third round, when they used to just lie in bed with each other for hours and hours. Elliott used to like to study her body, all of it, in detail—the shape of her shoulder blades, the exact placement of her few moles, the forms of her knees. He told her once he wanted to be sure that he would always know her, even by the smallest part, just a fraction, by a hipbone, or an earlobe, or a thumb. By the time she met Elliott, she’d had sex with a few dozen people, a good variety, a nice range of touches, masculine and feminine, but none of them felt anything like he did. He distinguished himself in the simple touches, the way his skin felt against hers. Like the physical structure of their skin cells were in perfect complement. When he touched her, her cells perked up—they purred. Even now, her skin buzzes.

  Except he’s not touching her anymore. He’s kicking up the dishwasher door and shrugging as he says, “Well … the mysteries of Don Mills, huh.”

  “Oh …”

  “I’m gonna do some work.”

  And just like that he’s off again. Back into the arms of his deranged brides.

  Standing alone in the kitchen, Louise taps her fingernails against the table. She scans her body for signs of relief, but all she finds is a burgeoning irritation. She lets this build and build and build until it carries her across the hardwood floor and into the dingy study, ready to fight! To yell and scream at him about his idiotic career. Or else to demand he pay attention to her. Touch her. At length. With care. Like he used to do. Or else to call her on her shit. To foist accountability on her.

  But once she steps onto the dull pink carpet of the study, her focus shifts. It’s the photograph up on his screen—it catches her off guard. It’s the same one he was working on last week, the couple mid-kiss, the stained glass Jesus on the cross … except … something’s different. Jesus’s expression has changed. She blinks hard several times and looks again. But yes, something has definitely shifted. This Jesus no longer has the look of a man gracefully resigned to his fate. The corner of his mouth has been pulled up so that he’s … grinning.

  “Is that … did you … did you Photoshop Jesus?” she says.

  Elliott swivels around in his chair to face her. “Like I said … I thought he needed some work.”

  10

  ON THE EVE of her thirty-third birthday, Louise can’t sleep. She lies awake beside Elliott, acutely aware of the slight ache in her right breast—that’s where it started for Mother Mai. Ground zero.

  Over and over, she presses her fingertips into her breast, moving up and down, left to right. A dozen times her fingers locate a problem; terror soars through her, awakening every cell in her nervous system. But then she checks again, to confirm her grim fate, and finds instead a normal clump of cells, the edge of a muscle or a rib bone, and the dread abates. The early hours of the morning drag on in this cycle of spiking and dissipating terror that leaves her exhausted, but unable to sleep.

  3:06am. She forces her hand away from her breast, hoping her thoughts will move elsewhere. They turn to a rapid string of familiar late-night fantasies: driving her car into a tree, drowning herself in the tub, setting herself on fire, blowing off her head, crushing it with her own hands. It’s a paradox: fantasizing about suicide while being terrified of imminent death. Paradoxes make her irritable, and the irritability makes her anxious, and the anxiety makes her want to kill herself, and this endless cycle traps her in a bleak cage. Maybe there really is something wrong with her brain.

  The pills. She’ll try the pills again.

  Where’s the clonazepam? She can’t find it amid all this shit in the medicine cabinet. She grabs the Xanax bottle, but it’s nearly empty. She must have taken more of these pills than she realized. Or were there fewer to start? Her head is so foggy, she can’t even keep track. She takes one pill and tries again to go to sleep.

  11

  “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LOU!” Elliott stands next to the kitchen table, proudly waving at his breakfast creation. “Pancakes!”

  “Oh.” Louise, still in her short silk nightie, plops onto a chair and stares at the small stack of raspberry-banana pancakes in front of her. “But I said I didn’t want to celebrate this one.”

  “It’s just pancakes,” he says, tossing cutlery onto the table.

  Louise is still exhausted. Her face is hot, her mouth dry, her jaw half-locked. It’s hard to chew. Chunks of pancake linger inside her mouth for minutes before she forces herself to swallow them whole.

  Elliott watches this weak attempt, then says: “Let’s do something fun today.”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you take the day off?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. I’ll play hooky from the shop.” He steers a chunk of pancake through a puddle of syrup. “I’ve got a meeting with a new client this afternoon, new wedding—but we could take the morning off.”

  “I already took a half-day for Joly. And I logged a sick day on Tuesday. Remember?”

  “Oh, right right. You were sick. I forgot.”

  When they finish eating, Elliott gets going on the dishes while Louise pretends to get ready for work. She takes a short shower, blasting herself with cold water, slips on her silky Benetton blouse, her grey Banana Republic trousers, sits on the edge of the bed combing her wet hair and feeling annoyed that circumstances are forcing her to enact this charade. Especially on this day. D-day. Thirty-three. This is it. Boom.

  “Hey, what’s wrong, Louie?” Elliott asks when he finds her like this, sitting on the bed, staring at the floor. He crouches in front of her with his hands on her outer thighs.

  “I don’t feel well, Elliott,” she whispers.

  “Mm. You never feel well. But you’re always fine.”

  AROMA IS A shrill buzz this morning. The queue at the counter is a mile long—dozens (is it hundreds? thousands?) of people. They’re multiplying. All spies, Marguerites and Mr. Fangs, threatening her. And it’s not just them. Everything is a threat! This heavy perfume in front of her, crushing her lungs. The giant behind her in line, breathing fire down her neck—right down her blouse! A hyena laugh erupting to the left. Mugs clattering and banging. She flinches against it all, this coordinated attack on her senses
.

  A sudden rush of terror rises up from her belly and snakes around her throat: a panic attack.

  In front of her is a garish red display for Zing® tea. She zooms in on it, recalling her preliminary research—an article buried in the back corner of the internet about how Zing!® sources its tea from plantations in India, where the tea leaves are harvested by virtual slaves, living in shit and filth, dying from malnourishment and dysentery, earning pennies a day to pick tea that bounces its way along the supply chain and comes out the other side wrapped up in these bright red packages with a cartoon bird shouting “ZING!”

  “What would you like, ma’am?”

  Her head twitches to find the voice. The barista? She’s already at the front of the queue? When did that happen?

  “What?” she says.

  “What can I get you?”

  But she can’t even make out his face. The world has tipped sideways.

  “Ma’am? Are you all right?”

  No! Flight! She races out of the shop, knocking into the patio chairs and patrons on her way into the open Town Square. No no no, it’s no better out here. Her chest is a gnarled rock, her hands and fingers humming electrically. A thousand sounds, smells, sights pierce her edges. She looks up and down, left and right, spinning in frantic circles around this citadel fortified by commerce on all sides. There’s no air in her throat. Is this it? She’s going to die? Right now? Jesus, on this fucking Astroturf? Let’s go then. She wants to be dead. Oh god, the relief of it. To be free of this feeling once and for all.

  She lurches toward a raised stone garden bed and pukes onto the mulch.

  BRRIIIIINNG! Her phone surges to life. In a full crouch, hanging onto the edge of the garden bed, Louise wipes her mouth and catches small breaths.

  “Lou,” Yannick barks. “We got a problem. Hotel’s booked up.”

  “Uh …”

  “Yeah. Conference. So what do you wanna do here? Meet in the parking lot?”

  “No.”

  “Well where then?”

  “I can’t come downtown.”

  “You’re not downtown already? Not at work?”

  “Day off.”

  “Well shit.”

  Her breath is thin, her back sweating, her whole body a messy network of seized muscles and strained nerves. She needs one moment, any moment of pure relief. “You can come here if you want.”

  “To Don Mills? Your house? Bad form, Lou. And I don’t have time for that.”

  “Okay then. Next week maybe.”

  “Fuck. Fine. Let me see what I can do.”

  12

  YANNICK’S HANDS CLOSE tight over her tits. Straddling him on the bed in the downstairs bedroom of her house, Louise presses his hands against her harder. She wants his fingers to work the tissue, to explore, forcing him to perform a pseudo examination. If something’s wrong, any disruptions in the even softness of her breasts, he should notice—even if she missed it.

  “Do they feel good?” she whispers.

  “Yeah, fuck, Lou. You feel so fucking good.”

  He raises a hand to her neck, to the back of her head, which he tries to pull down toward him, his mouth open, poised. But he was too gentle with her tits. There could be something lurking deeper, a buried problem that won’t be found without a rough touch. She returns his hands to her chest, mashing them against her. “Come on, harder. Hard.”

  He does as she commands, first thrusting his palms into her, then pulling her breasts, twisting them. She winces, but says, “Yeah, yeah, like that,” so he keeps going.

  “Fuck yeah, Lou.”

  She can’t concentrate. She’s exhausted from the episode at the mall. She hasn’t eaten enough today. She’s dehydrated. And the wooden bedframe won’t stop creaking. Yannick looks at her, confused, concerned, but the pressure just isn’t building in the right direction. And suddenly: Ding-ding. They’re out of time.

  “You okay?” he asks, slowing his upward thrusts.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  With their time ticked down to nothing, he flips her over and fucks her hard from behind, trying to compel the orgasm through brute force. He finishes off like this, one hand wrapped around her, still kneading her tits.

  WHILE YANNICK BOLTS for the shower, Louise pulls on her underwear, bra … where’s her blouse? Where did he throw it? She flips the pillows, flings back the duvet, checks under the dresser, and finally spots it by the closet, its sleeve slipped between the folds of the broken accordion door. As she jiggles the door to free the sleeve, she peeks inside the closet: crammed with shit. She doesn’t remember it being this chaotic. She remembers her old baseball gear, school textbooks, her father’s forgotten coats. What are all these boxes? These bags? What is all this shit?

  Annoyed by the clutter, she yanks out a box, rips off the lid and finds herself looking at rubble. The topmost photograph in the box shows a muddled heap of concrete, wood, fabric, and scattered clothing tags—and there, oh dear god, a bare foot sticking out from the debris. Elliott’s series on the factory collapse.

  The photographs are horrendous to look at. It must have been almost impossible to witness this event first-hand. When Elliott first came back from Bangladesh, Louise thought his brain had been broken by the experience. He had nightmares, garbled thoughts; she’d find him staring at nothing for minutes at a time.

  Kneeling over the box, Louise peels one photograph after another off the stack until she’s halfway down and staring into the face of the Bangladeshi woman whose expression of perfect exhaustion so unsettled her the first time she saw it. The effect remains; Louise might as well be looking directly into the Void.

  But what’s this … looking closely now at the pile of rubble over the woman’s shoulder, in the upper corner of the shot, Louise picks out something she hadn’t noticed before: the recognizable green rectangle of a Benetton clothing tag, presumably sewn into the shirt by a doomed worker just before the factory ceiling caved in on her head.

  Louise shifts her gaze from the photograph to the blouse at her knees. Her breath turns shaky again as she looks from one to the other. Cause and consequence are spread out on the floor, coalescing before her into a direct indictment. Jesus fucking Christ! What can you touch anymore that doesn’t make you complicit in something heinous?

  “Hey, what are you doing down there?” asks Yannick, cruising back into the bedroom after his sixty-second shower.

  “Oh … nothing. Just—” She waves the blouse and forces herself into it; it feels corrosive against her skin. She watches him chuck his towel onto the bed.

  “So Karen tells me you’re listing the house.”

  “No. Maybe.”

  “Okay. But just don’t move away … like out of town or anything.”

  “Did he tell Karen we’re decided? We are not.”

  “I don’t know what he told her. She hasn’t been talking about work much. She’s been too busy planning this baptism. It’s blowing up into a whole goddamn function.”

  “What baptism?”

  “Yvie’s. I’m sure I told you.”

  “No. I’d have remembered that.”

  “Well, she’s having the kid baptized. She’s sending out invitations next week. She special ordered invitations. Expect one. There’s a reception afterward. You’re supposed to bring a gift.”

  “What kind of gift?”

  “I don’t know, Lou. What do I know about baptisms? I don’t even understand why—” He shuffles through her pile of clothes on the floor. “Where’s my sock?”

  Louise watches him flatten out on his stomach, peeking under the bed. The stray sock is interrupting his highly efficient process of re-robing. “Do you ever feel guilty?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “Guilty. About this. About anything.”

  The sock retrieved, he does a quick push-up and bounces to a stand. “Of course I feel guilty, Lou. I feel fucking terrible.” He puts on his sock. “But I’d feel worse if we stopped. Wouldn’t you?” For a moment he paus
es his brisk movements to look at her: “Is that why … you couldn’t … uh … get there?”

  “Jesus, Yannick.”

  “What?”

  She throws on her pants and leaves him in the wood-panelled bedroom.

  “What?” he calls after her.

  AT THE FRONT door, Yannick touches a knuckle to her cheek. “Here,” he says and pulls a pair of Blue Jays tickets from his jacket pocket. “Happy birthday.” An oddly thoughtful gesture. Too thoughtful. Someone—a colleague or client—must have comped him these tickets.

  “Hotel next week. Hotel works better,” he says.

  The moment the door closes behind him, she beelines to the kitchen, to the stash of pot in an upper cabinet. She’s running low again. Strange, she thought she was still flush. She must be smoking more than she realized.

  She rolls the joint on top of the pocket bible, which she ventured back into after her morning blunt, hoping an altered consciousness might provide more clarity. It did not. Before she can seal up this second joint, she’s interrupted: another knock at the door. Yannick must need a more robust reassurance of his virility. Only instead of Yannick, she finds Ben on her front stoop, his arms laden with a box of homebrewed beer.

  “Oh. Hey.” She scans the street and spots Yannick a few houses down, swaggering in his financier hustle, phone to his head, his barking audible. He parked in front of his old house—his parents’ old house—whether out of habit or caution, she’s not sure.

  “Joly sent me over. Birthday beer,” Ben explains with a nod at the box in his arms. “Is that Yannick?”

  “Uh … I guess.”

  Louise steps back to let Ben in, catching sight of herself in the mirrored closet door. It’s her mother’s reflection, exactly like the pictures of her mother she used to study for hours and hours after she died. The aging process has worked identically on both of them. If she could Photoshop Mai’s severe bangs, oversized glasses, and a shoulder-padded sweater onto her own portrait, she could very well be her mother, a few months before she expired.