The Towers of Babylon

by Michelle Kaeser

  Ben grips the sides of the pulpit and, casting a sweeping gaze across his audience, vaults into the crescendo.

  “The Christian tradition is one of revolution! Of dissent! Of defiance! Of rage! Jesus raged against Empire when he raged against Rome. As did the long line of prophets who came before Him—each stood up to defy the empire of their day. We need only look at our Old Testament reading today to find another prophet—Jeremiah, who heaped his righteous rage on Babylon—to see how far back this tradition stretches.

  “What is Babylon anyway? What does it signify? How does a millennia-old civilization relate to our own?

  “Babylon is a thread pulled through the Bible, from Genesis right through to Revelation. It is a civilization so degenerate it has come to stand as the archetype of imperial decadence. A civilization apart from God and apart from righteousness. It is so drunk on its own sins that it topples over. Babylon is a civilization that cares about idols, not morals. About things, not citizens. About the illusory bounty of material wealth. Not the true wealth of the spirit. It cares about endless gadgets and disposable toys and having twelve kinds of cream cheese stocked up at its local sandwich shop, and it cares nothing about the workers who make those gadgets and who staff those sandwich shops.

  “What is Babylon? Babylon is Empire. Babylon is Rome. Babylon is America. Babylon is here and now. This is it! Look around you, brothers and sisters! We are living in Babylon!! And Babylon is going to fall!!!”

  BOOK FOUR

  1

  “TAKE A LOOK at this banknote,” says Bourque. He slides the bill across the table to Yannick, who’s on the last bites of his lunch. Rigatoni with pancetta and burrata. Fucking delicious. Best burrata in the city. “You know what this is worth?”

  Yannick picks up the bill. It’s an Iraqi note. 250 dinars. “Yeah, idiot. It’s worth 250 dinars.”

  “Yeah, but you know what that’s worth? Know what a fucking dinar is worth?”

  “I dunno. Couple pennies maybe?”

  “Twenty-eight cents. That’s this morning’s exchange rate.”

  “All right. So what.”

  “Twenty-eight cents, eh?” says Anosh. “Seems steep for a few hundred dinars.”

  “It is steep,” says Dave. “That’s hardly worth the paper it’s printed on.”

  There are four of them at lunch today. Yannick and Anosh; Bourque and Dave. They all work within a few blocks of each other, so lunchtime meet-ups happen on the regular. The latter two are currency traders. Same field as Yannick and Anosh, different discipline. Worse discipline. Less lucrative. Yannick feels bad about it sometimes … like, guilty. Because he owes his career to Bourque. He’s known Bourque since way back, since elementary school. When Yannick didn’t know what to do after high school, it was Bourque who told him which universities to apply to, which programs to apply for. It was Bourque who decided they should go into business broadly, then finance specifically. It was Bourque who announced which investment bank in New York they should be aiming for. But a few years out of school, and out of banking, and out of New York, their trajectories diverged. Bourque fell into currency trading; Yannick into private equity. Yannick’s path is better, smarter—his base salary just now is 300k, while Bourque’s is still stalled short of 200. To say nothing of the gap in their bonuses.

  “What are you doing with Iraqi dinars?” Yannick asks.

  “It’s not what I’m doing with them,” says Bourque. “It’s what my mother is doing with them.”

  “All right. So what’s your mother doing with them?”

  “My fucking mother. I’ll tell you what she’s doing with them.” Yannick watches Bourque set his fork down on the plate as he gears up to tell whatever story he’s about to tell. He’s still got half his lunch left, half his angel hair pasta dish, with peas and cherry tomatoes—a dish he special orders and claims to have invented. This is a chronic problem with Bourque. He eats slowly. Always the same painful trudge through his meals regardless of venue or food type. Like they’ve all got time to sit around savouring. And now he’s going to hold up this lunch further with some shitty story about Iraqi dinars? Fuck it. Not today. Yannick doesn’t bother waiting for him to finish; he waves for the bill when the waitress passes by. He’s got plans to meet Lou in twenty minutes—a quick how-do-you-do before he heads back to the office for the day—and he doesn’t want Bourque to cut into that time. It’s short enough as it is.

  “So I go up for dinner on the weekend,” Bourque is saying, “and my mother brings me into her bedroom, all hush-hush, like she’s got some big great secret to tell, so I’m like what the fuck is this about, and then this woman, this crazy mother of mine, she shows me shoeboxes, literal fucking shoeboxes, stuffed full of Iraqi dinars. I’m talking cash, man. Banknotes. Bills and bills and bills.”

  “I don’t get it,” says Yannick.

  “Is this the lead up to a joke? Are you telling us a joke, Bourque?” says Anosh.

  “I wish this were a joke. But instead, this is my mother’s new fucking investment plan.” Bourque stabs his finger at the bill on the table. “Some idiot friend of hers, some retard from whatever stitch-and-bitch circle she’s part of now, tells her she read some article somewhere that said the Iraqi dinar is set to revalue. It’s really gonna take off, Michael, she says. So right now you can buy the notes for pennies. And in a year, less than that even—less than that she says!—the currency will surge, and anyone who got in on the ground floor will be a millionaire. Or a billionaire. I researched it, Michael, she says to me. It’s practically guaranteed, she says. So I say to her, I say, Mom, are you out of your goddamn mind?”

  “Who told her this? What kind of company is your mom keeping?”

  “Sharon. Sharon from the sewing circle. Apparently I’ve met her.”

  “Sharon sounds like an idiot.”

  “Of course Sharon’s an idiot. But what is my mother doing listening to this idiot? When her son is a goddamn currency trader!” His wrist, in one of a series of animated movements, whacks the spoon resting on his plate and sends some of the cherry tomato sauce flinging. A dollop lands on Anosh’s tie.

  “Aw, for fuck’s suck, Bourque.”

  “Sorry, man. Happens.”

  Anosh dabs a wet napkin at his tie. “Look at this. Your faggy little angel hair got all over my tie.”

  “You can barely see it. Relax.”

  “You know what this tie costs?”

  “Fifty bucks?”

  “I’m wearing a fifty dollar tie? Go fuck yourself.”

  “Looks pretty cheap is all I’m saying.”

  Anosh flips him off as he gets up. His tie requires further attention, which he runs off to the washroom to provide.

  “Guy’s that touchy about his clothes and I’m the faggy one?” says Bourque.

  “That’s a three hundred dollar tie, at least,” says Dave.

  “Doesn’t look it.”

  “What would you know? You dress like an accountant.” While the two of them bicker, Yannick looks at the Iraqi banknote. The image on the back is of a low tower, almost a cone, with a strange, spiralling ramp defining its exterior. When Yannick squints at it, he can just make out a few tiny figures on various elevations along the ramp. “Who’s even selling your mom straight up banknotes?” he asks.

  “Ha! That’s the best part,” cries Bourque. “Some fucking guy in Oshawa. With a website. She’s buying them off the internet from a fucking guy in Oshawa. I mean, who does that? It’s a whole racket these assholes have going. They write articles about the inevitable rise of the dinar. Then they hawk this shit to widows and idiots. I can’t even tell you the kind of fees she paid him. Exorbitant fees. Scam artist fees. It makes me want to murder these assholes. But she doesn’t see the scam. She just keeps buying. So now she’s got almost five million—can you imagine?—five million Iraqi dinars in shoeboxes in her bedroom closet!”

  “Yeah, but that’s only like five or six thousand bucks,” says Dave.

  “Yeah, fi
ve or six thousand that should be going to real shit. Mortgage payments. Car payments. Or you know, an actual investment fund.”

  Bourque pays his mother’s mortgage. So he takes these imprudent deficiencies personally. He’s kicked up money to his mother since he first started making any.

  “I try to reason with the woman, you know. I ask her, I say, Mom, why the hell would the dinar revalue? Think about it. Iraq is a complete fucking mess. So she starts giving me a history lesson. About how the Kuwaiti currency revalued after the Iraqis left in ’91. Which I guess is what Sharon-the-financial-advisor told her. Like Kuwait in the ’90s is the same exact situation as Iraq today. I tried to explain that, but then … then … this crazy woman, she starts telling me about post-war development. She starts talking about fucking Europe after fucking World War Two. Because development is inevitable after war, Michael, she says.”

  “Jesus.”

  “She won’t listen to me. She says she’s going to ask Jay when he comes in. Says Jay will know better because he lives in Dubai. Like Dubai and Iraq are the same fucking place.”

  Jay Bourque is Bourque’s little brother. Baby Bourque. Yannick has always preferred Baby Bourque to his brother. Everyone prefers Baby Bourque. The little brother is likeable. Funny. A good time. Bourque, the elder, has some oddities, some social malfunctions, a history of curious behavioural derangements that make him unpleasant to be around. Not that that stops Yannick from being around him. What’s he supposed to do? Bourque has always been in his orbit. You get dealt the friends you get dealt. Sometimes they turn out kind of shitty, but that doesn’t mean you get to cut them loose.

  “When’s Jay coming?” asks Yannick.

  “Flying in tomorrow. We’re gonna hit up the rooftop at Blitz. Jay wants to get lit. You coming?”

  “Can’t,” says Yannick. “I got family shit all week. Karen’s gone mental about the kid’s baptism. This thing has mushroomed. It’s almost as big a production as our wedding.”

  “Well …”

  “Well what?”

  “Well it is a sacrament,” says Bourque.

  Yannick sometimes forgets that Bourque is Catholic. Because it never comes up. Until it does. “What is it with you Catholics? I don’t hear one word, not a goddamn word, about God or church or anything for years. Then suddenly, everyone’s fucking devout.”

  Bourque shrugs. “It’s in the blood, man. It’s tribal.”

  “Not my tribe.”

  “And you know … it is the One True Faith.” Bourque is grinning as he says this, so Yannick doesn’t know what to take from it. It seems ironic, both the substance and the tone, yet it can’t be—not wholly ironic—because the guy is still a card-carrying Catholic. He goes to Mass on holidays. He takes his mother.

  It’s hard to digest, this latent religiosity in those around him. Yannick used to think he was cruising along in a mostly secular world and that the religious people he did know were religious only in a cultural sense, not an ideological one. But that was a mistake of perception. Because once you scratch the surface of people, there are decades’ worth, centuries’ worth of inherited religious bullshit. And here he is, about to foist this bullshit onto his kid. He fought against the baptism. He fought it hard. But Karen was persistent and he grew tired.

  “Tell you what,” Yannick says, just as Anosh makes his return from the bathroom. “Bring Baby Bourque to the baptism. Karen’s already got about fifty people coming to the reception. I’m sure she’ll be happy for an extra Catholic.”

  “What’s this? Baby Bourque’s in town?” says Anosh, re-taking his seat. His tie is wet, but the tomato tinge has vanished.

  Bourque says, “Tomorrow. He’s coming tomorrow. And he’s been talking about the rooftop at Blitz. You in?”

  “Yeah, all right. I wouldn’t mind hanging with the better Bourque for a change. My tie is fucked, man. You’re paying the dry cleaning.”

  “Invoice me.”

  The server arrives with the bill; she slides it onto the table and disappears again before they can offer her a credit card.

  “Hey-oh, what’s this? I’m not even done eating yet,” Bourque says.

  “That’s because you never shut up,” says Yannick.

  “Someone’s gotta make the conversation.”

  “Let’s go. Hurry up.”

  “I eat at my own pace. That’s how I like it.”

  “Well then you can eat by yourself. The rest of us have to get back to work.”

  “All right, all right. Just trying to enjoy it, you know?”

  Dave flattens out a cloth napkin onto which they each drop a credit card. He folds the tips of the napkin together and tosses the cards around inside. This is how they decide who pays: credit card roulette. Whosever card gets pulled pays. It generally evens out over time. Except for that beautiful months-long stretch when things stayed lopsided, because they all figured out how to make things stick on Bourque. His card had a little nick on the side, which they’d feel out before they pulled. That card, and only that card, got pulled for months. Bourque must have put up thousands of dollars for lunch before he worked out the con.

  “I’ll pull,” says Bourque, and with a characteristically irritating flourish, he draws a credit card. His eyes land on Yannick. “You’re lucky today, Yan-Man. Your treat, buddy.”

  Yannick flips over the bill to take a look at the damage. Not so bad today. Beside the bill, on the table, is the Iraqi banknote, which Yannick looks at again; he studies the strange, spiralling tower. “What is this?” he asks. “On the back here?”

  “The building? How the fuck should I know?”

  “It’s your banknote.”

  “Yeah, but what do I know about Iraqi landmarks?”

  “Nothing, it seems.”

  Bourque pushes the banknote toward him. “Hey, hey, you keep that. Maybe it’ll be worth something in a year.”

  2

  THE BOUTIQUE HOTEL where Yannick meets Lou provides an ideal setup. Three reasons: it’s small enough to make it unlikely that they’ll run into anyone they know; the rooms are top-tier; and the price is right: free. Yannick worked out an arrangement with the manager, Tommy Boscarino, a friend of his from B-school days. A guy who owes him.

  He and Boscarino were good buddies through university and even afterward, so when the guy came to him a few years back asking to borrow money, Yannick said all right. But he did figure, even as he wrote out a cheque, that the loan would end up a write-off. Abstractly Boscarino knows about saving and investing—he’s a smart enough guy—but he just can’t stop throwing his fucking money away. On clothes, on cars, on gambling. Always wants to be a big shot. It’s a pattern of behaviour that helps explain why he manages a hotel, but won’t ever own one. Still, Yannick lent him the money; someone had to. By the time Boscarino came asking, he looked like absolute shit—said he’d lost a pile on a sports bet and wasn’t sure how to get out from under it.

  As expected, Boscarino hasn’t paid it back, not a dime, but he’s always been grateful to Yannick for lending him the money when no one else would. So when, one afternoon, he happened upon Yannick and Lou in the lobby of a seedyish downtown hotel (fucking in cars in parking garages had become tiresome), Boscarino took one look at the two of them and, being an astute hotel manager, understood the situation. A week or so later, when he and Yannick and some of the B-school boys met up for drinks, Boscarino quietly reproached Yannick for taking a woman like Lou to so dumpy a hotel, and suggested that instead, should the need arise again, he bring “that hot Asian piece” over to his hotel, where he’d put them in a room more commensurate with a woman of her calibre.

  “Mmm,” murmurs Lou as Yannick eases himself into her. He’s got about thirty minutes—twenty-five for the sex and post-coital lingering, and five for the showering and throwing his clothes back on.

  “Mmm,” she says again. She doesn’t say words during sex, not unless she’s directing him toward specific action. But she articulates her pleasure or displeasure throu
gh a nuanced series of purrs and moans, which he’s adept at interpreting. This particular “mmm,” with its two notes, high-low, means good, like that, keep going. So he does.

  He didn’t want to be this guy. The guy who cheats on his wife. He promised himself he wouldn’t be. When other guys, married guys, guys in relationships, were picking up stray women at clubs or fucking hookers on work trips, he kept things straight. For his first few years with Karen he didn’t throw so much as a lusty glance at another woman. But one Sunday last summer, after the baseball game at Christie Pits, when Joly had gone over to Ben’s, and Karen was up in Thornhill with the kid, he wound up giving Lou a lift home. His dick was at half-mast the whole ride, just on account of the proximity. Just to be alone with her. They stopped to get sandwiches, which they ate leaning against the trunk of the car, and when Lou pressed herself against him … well, what was he supposed to do? It’s Lou. He’s always fucked Lou. And he fucked her that night, too. In the car. Down in Bond Park in Don Mills, where they used to go when they were kids. That night, in the back seat of his car, fucking Lou, fucking someone other than his wife, he still didn’t feel like that guy. What exists between them belongs to a different time and place, outside of life with Karen. It’s quarantined. It doesn’t count.

  Lou’s on top of him, riding him hard. His pulse picks up, but it’s she who’s close to coming. He knows her body better than he does anyone else’s. Much better than his own wife’s. But Karen has never really let him get to know her body. She doesn’t like him seeing her naked in the daylight. Or in any strong light. Even before the kid, which, yes, okay, did a number on her body, distorting her hips and stomach and tugging out her thighs, and even somehow altering the shape of her arms … even before all that (none of which he particularly minds by the way), she never liked him to study her. But Lou doesn’t hide. Right now, with her back arched and her chest thrust forward, she’s presenting herself to him, daring him to find a fault.