The Towers of Babylon

by Michelle Kaeser

  “Sorry. My phone’s off.”

  “Why would it be off?” Karen stomps past him, her heels stabbing into the concrete; she fumbles with the car door handle. “Why is this locked? Open the fucking car!”

  Yannick opens the already unlocked door, and Karen roots around in the back seat for her mother’s (ornamental) knee brace. Once she finds it, she lingers, sniffing around for signs of misdeeds. Then she pulls her head out of the car, grips the top of the open door, and looks at him, and at Lou who’s still leaning against the trunk.

  “Are you fucking her, Yannick?”

  “What?”

  “It’s pretty fucking strange to find you two here together.”

  “How is it strange?” asks Lou, floating back over to her shitbox and away from the marital dispute. “How … is it … strange?”

  Karen spins to face Yannick, turning her back on Lou, who disappears behind the curtain of orange.

  “Joly told her to park here,” he says. “Because this is where we always park. How—”

  “D’you know how embarrassing this is for me? That I literally have to come down here to collect you.”

  “I thought you came to collect the knee brace.”

  “I shouldn’t have to do either.” Karen slams the door and leads the return march to the tower. “And don’t say sorry. You’re always fucking sorry.”

  As they cross the parking lot, leaving Lou behind, Karen keeps two steps ahead of him. Yannick follows, trying not to get his feet caught in her billows.

  “You’re never around, Yannick,” she shouts over her shoulder. “You’re never taking part.”

  “Not taking part? I didn’t want this baptism. Remember that, Karen?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Remember how we agreed not to do exactly what we’re doing today? No Catholicism. No religion. Why don’t you be fucking sorry for a change?”

  Karen stops short at the far edge of the parking lot. “Are you out of your goddamn mind talking to me like that? Right now?”

  He blows right past her, onto the sidewalk beneath the Gardiner Expressway.

  “We had this day for Yvie,” she says, trotting behind him in her heels. “And now you’ve missed practically the whole thing. Which isn’t surprising. You miss everything. You missed the rehearsal. We barely saw you yesterday.”

  “I was working! Making money! Paying for functions like this one!”

  The narrow strips of grass that run alongside the sidewalk are browned and brittle, dotted with litter: cigarette butts and candy wrappers tucked between blades of dying grass, an old glove that must have lain here since winter.

  “You know what it feels like when you just leave me alone like an idiot. I feel like a single mother sometimes, do you know that? I can’t be raising these kids by myself, Yannick.”

  “Kids? What kids? We only have the one!”

  “I could already be pregnant! Mom’s been asking me where you are. All weekend she’s been at me about it. And today the rest of the family has started in, too.” She catches up to him, grabbing at his elbow until he turns to face her. Behind her, he sees Lou, returned to the hood of her own car, peacefully staring out at the lake. “What am I supposed to say? He’s off fucking Louise?” She studies his features to determine how this remark has landed.

  “Tell your mom I’m paying for her next renovation.”

  Karen glances back toward the parking lot, like she knows evidence of his infidelity exists in that concrete patch, but can’t quite pick it out. Or maybe she doesn’t want to pick it out? She’s deep into her thirties. No time to dissolve one relationship and find a new one before the window of fertility closes.

  Is that how it’s always been? Did he just happen to meet her at the right time? Was there anything about him—the unique network of characteristics that make him a distinct person—that she wanted? That she ever loved? Or would she have married anyone with money and sperm enough, because she was at the age when women start to chafe under the pressure?

  “I’m working, Karen! I have a career!”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t have a real career? I’d love to be focusing more time on my career. But I’m busy being our daughter’s primary caregiver.”

  Their path follows the shadow of the Gardiner, its ugly concrete bulk bearing down on them.

  “If I hadn’t been raising Yvie alone these last three years, I might’ve already started my own firm,” Karen continues. “Or made the move into commercial. And then maybe I’d be the one skipping out of family functions whenever I felt like it, fucking whoever I felt like. I’d love to be the one who gets to work.”

  “Well Karen, I’d love that too.”

  “Would you, though?”

  They come to a red light. A squeegee kid hustles the queue of cars, but no one’s biting.

  “You think I like working? I am literally counting down the minutes until I can retire.”

  “Oh please.” Karen knocks the pedestrian button, again and again. “We both know you’re not going to retire at forty.”

  “I am. Yes I am.”

  “That was a dumb dream we had long ago.”

  The squeegee kid finally gets a biter from a Toyota stopped directly in front of Yannick. The kid works at lightning speed, lathering the windshield with one hand, squeegeeing with the other.

  “What would you even do with yourself?” Karen shifts impatiently from one three-inch heel to the other. “Without your power lunches? And your power friends? Your important phone calls that excuse you from your family? You’d take care of the kids? Look after the house? You, who can’t even make the dishwasher work? You’d hate it.”

  “I would love it.”

  “You love being a big shot, that’s what you love.”

  But Yannick has stopped listening. Up above he catches sight of something moving … falling … plummeting. As if in slow motion, he watches a chunk of grey plunge downward from the underside of the Gardiner. He flinches and shoots an arm out to shield Karen … BAAAAAAANG!!!!

  One blasting thunderclap; it rattles all the earth. The squeegee kid drops as if shot. The windshield of the Toyota beside them splinters. A million cracks radiate, like a crudely drawn sun.

  What the fuck was that?

  “Shit, man,” says the squeegee kid, flat on his stomach on the sidewalk. Drivers are stepping out of their cars.

  “I saw it!” shrieks a woman on the other side of the intersection. “It fell! It fell and hit that car.”

  “What fell?” Yannick says. “Something off a truck?”

  “It was the Gardiner!” squeals the woman. “A piece of the Gardiner fell!”

  The driver of the Toyota crawls out of the car, a dazed middle-aged woman. Her passenger, a young man, maybe a son or nephew, emerges to inspect the damage. Yannick approaches. “You all right?” he asks the pair, the squeegee kid.

  A crowd has formed around the car. Drivers, pedestrians, witnesses, saying:

  “Did you see that?”

  “Holy shit!”

  “Everyone okay?”

  The excitable woman has joined as well; she’s alternating her open-mouthed gawking between the broken windshield and the Gardiner looming above them. “Look, hey look! Right up there! You can see where it fell from!” she cries.

  She points to a noticeable imperfection on the underside of the expressway, an irregular groove from where a piece might have dislodged. Yannick looks over at the squeegee kid, who’s scratching the back of his head and staring at something on the grass beside the sidewalk. He follows the kid’s gaze. Beside a discarded pop can sits a chunk of concrete about the size of a loaf of bread. A piece of the Gardiner Expressway that broke off the structure, crashed against a windshield, and came to rest on the dead grass.

  15

  HIGH UP IN the CN Tower, Yannick watches the city below, tinged a sickly yellow by the migrating wildfire smoke. The height makes his stomach flip. So he’s got a drink in hand.

>   He can’t detect any residual commotion from the Gardiner accident. Traffic along the expressway is moving right along, as though there’s nothing wrong with the road, as though a massive piece of the city’s infrastructure isn’t collapsing on its citizens’ heads.

  What else down there is breaking? What pieces of the city that appear strong and healthy are fracturing inside?

  “Did you know the world’s tallest tower is being built in Saudi Arabia?” says Joly, edging up beside him at the window.

  “No, I didn’t.” He turns to look at her, then scans the reception room: Karen in conference with her mother at one of the expensively-dressed tables, Joe hovering nearby, along for the ride; Babylon Ben leering over the roast beef at the carving station; the Bourques squabbling boisterously; Anosh shamelessly hitting on Karen’s cousin (the new godmother); clusters of friends all around—they have so many friends, it seems; and weaving between them all is Elliott, documenting the day for posterity. But no Lou. She must have gone home.

  “Yeah, it’s in Jeddah,” says Joly. “It’s called the Jeddah Tower. Or the Kingdom Tower. And it’s supposed to be over a kilometre high. Isn’t that something?”

  “I guess so.”

  “That’s twice as high as the CN Tower. It could be the highest tower that ever gets built.”

  “There will always be a higher one.” A dull red ache sits behind his eyes and pushes outward toward the edges of his skull. He wants to get out of here, but there’s nowhere to go. The windows don’t open. There’s not even an outdoor deck to withdraw to. No way to fall. Or jump. But his cells detect a possibility for self-annihilation anyway. It wouldn’t even have to be a jump. Just a step. A regular step, the kind taken thousands of times a day. A gentle forward tilt into oblivion.

  “But Ben said that cities will start to contract soon. Then it’s only a matter of time before financing for big construction projects dries up. So this Jeddah Tower … it really could be the highest ever.”

  Joly rattles on about this Saudi Arabian tower, listing off facts and design features that she’s reading from her phone, and he’s left with the familiar task of trying to block out the sound of her chatter. But the reception room is so loud, he can’t block out everything. If he’s not listening to her, he’s listening to something else. To Karen, behind him, recounting for the millionth time the Gardiner incident, which has been transformed in the telling into a near-death experience from which she was lucky to have escaped. Or to Adele picking up on the thread of hysteria to suggest that Karen sue the city, for the emotional distress. Or to Ben, who has ripped himself from the buffet and joined their conversation, declaring the Gardiner breakdown to be a chilling harbinger of a coming doom. The voices start to blend into a sharp confusing clatter—it’s all around, this orchestral mix of nonsense.

  “Daddy!”

  The kid’s voice breaks through the noise, and he turns to find her running his way, arms outstretched. He sweeps her onto his shoulders, from which post she steers him a step closer to the windows, close enough for her to put her palms right on the glass. Her face too. She puffs out her cheeks and blows.

  “Daddy!”

  “Yes, Yvie.”

  “Guess what, Daddy?” Her tiny hands drum the top of his head.

  “What, kiddo?”

  “I get to go to heaven now.”

  “You sure that’s true, Yvie?”

  “Yup yup,” she says.

  They look out the window together, westward this time, Bayfield-ward. Visibility is terrible. But the town is there, just behind the smoke and beyond the horizon. Bayfield, Ontario, where it’s always a perfect summer evening. There’s a place for him there. On a dock by the water, sitting in a quiet peace. That’s how it’ll be at the end. He’ll get his win.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, kiddo.”

  “There’s whales in heaven,” she says, kicking her heels into his chest. “Nonna says I can pet them. Nonna says they like it.”

  “Okay, Yvie.”

  She squirms for him to put her back down—she’s spotted a gaggle of kids under a table, and she zips over to join them. So Yannick returns his focus to the city below, to the expressway that is slowly shedding pieces of itself.

  His phone buzzes in his pocket. Adam, again. In text form this time—expletives and exclamation marks spelling out an insistent demand for him to call back.

  “Trouble?” asks Joly, watching him stare blankly at his phone long after he’s finished reading the text.

  “Just work.”

  “But you’re almost there, right?” Joly looks up at him, with her big, needy eyes. “Just a few more years, right?”

  “Yeah, Joly. Sure.” He contorts his face into something like a smile. “We’re almost there.”

  Yannick holds off on the Adam call—not forever, which is what he’d like—but for long enough to finish his drink and get another, and another after that. He gets enough of them in rapid succession so that the edges of the room, and the babbling voices inside it, and the city below him, and the suburbs beyond the city—and the whole great empire sprawling out around him—all turn fuzzy. And then he gets on the phone. Why wouldn’t he? The casino’s still open, and isn’t he beating the game?

  MICHELLE KAESER was born and raised in Toronto, and currently lives in Vancouver. Her fiction and essays have appeared in anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers across the country. She was a finalist in the inaugural HarperCollinsCanada/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction (2013); the runner-up in the Edna Staebler Essay Contest (2017); a finalist in the Edna Staebler essay contest (2013); an honourable mention in the Prairie Fire Fiction Contest (2012); and an honourable mention in the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award (2013 and 2009).