Vancouver: A novella (Wisdom Tree Book 3)

by Nick Earls

  We did lecturettes early that day, straight after rollcall, since Miss Krebs told the class, an edge of criticism to her tone perhaps, that she couldn’t see us concentrating while my friend was in the room. Our desks had fixed bench seats for two, but there was no way Knut could shoehorn himself in there, so he found himself a spot by a side wall, standing in front of a map of the world, trying to look inconspicuous while his shoulders spanned from Brazil to China and his head blocked out all of Europe.

  I opened with my version of his distinction between pituitary giants and people who were born to be big. I had copied a picture of the pituitary and its location deep in the head from an encyclopedia, and coloured the pituitary pink so that the class could make it out from the surrounding brain and the bone it was perched on. It was not a picture any of us could make sense of, but it seemed important to begin with some solid facts. I talked my way through historical giant tales, corroborated and otherwise, but my audience were all waiting for my own giant to step away from the wall and become part of the action.

  ‘We still have giants among us today,’ I told them, ‘though some people doubt it. And I have brought along as evidence a young giant from home. Knut Knutsen is twelve years old. By high school, he tells me, his older brothers and sisters were too big to fit in their classrooms and would listen to lessons through the windows. By grade ten, they were tall enough to listen at the windows on either the first or second floors.’

  Knut nodded. The class stared at him, scaling him up to picture someone too big to fit in the room, someone who could walk past our second-storey windows, face as high as the fronds of the palm trees outside. Miss Krebs leaned against the edge of her desk, her arms folded, fixing me with a hazelnut frown that I pretended not to see.

  From my manila folder, I produced my final piece of evidence. ‘And here is Knut’s father in their home town in Minnesota,’ I told them, and held the photo up.

  It was indeed Knut’s father, and in their home town, but at a model village. All the houses were thigh-high and he was standing nonchalantly with his hand on a chimney. The photo was black and white, and his braces were pulling his baggy grey pants as high as a nearby shopfront.

  In the front row of the classroom, mouths actually gaped. People from further back left their seats to get a closer look. Miss Krebs’ eyes were on the photo, too, and I could see the muscles of her face working beneath her make-up, though no clear expression broke through.

  ‘All right, all right,’ she said, signalling for everyone to sit. ‘I think all that remains is for us to thank Paul and his friend, Newt, in the customary way.’ She held her hands ready to clap, as she always did, and waited for someone to start.

  From that day on, no one at school doubted me. I could lie to my friends about my uncle’s pet gryphons, and the baby Loch Ness monster that we kept in the downstairs bath. One well-placed giant gives you all of that.

  Decades later that would be my plague story, though it could do with a little more structure and a stronger sense of through-line. What is it about? ‘About’ always seems to come later than I expect when I write. It’s about my life, or a period in my life when things changed in unexpected ways and then, in most respects, changed back again. ‘About’ would be relevant if I sat down to write it for the Paris Review. When people ed disease-racked Florence for the safety of the hills, it was better to tell stories than not.

  We’re off the prairie and well over the Rockies before I’ve worked it all through. The guy in C is dozing, his glasses clenched in his hand, his cup of water vibrating in the recess on his tray table. Nothing has gone wrong and nothing is going to go wrong.

  Within a month of the lecturette, Knut Knutsen was gone. The television deal for the league had failed to come through and all but two of the franchises were still unclaimed. My father had committed himself to a half-share in the Brisbane Bandidos and sold the Gold Coast Gladiators to a property developer, but his interstate trips with Knut had yielded nothing. He lost a lot of his money, but got out before losing money he didn’t have. He sold the Benz and bought the Holden he actually wanted. He went back to a job and realised life felt better with the pressure off. It was as if the two extremes of his luck, Poseidon and American football, had cancelled each other.

  Knut’s room stayed as it was for a while. On the dining-table desk he had covered with letters and the pages of stories, there was now only a lamp, a pair of wooden bookends pushed back-to-back and two patches where the surface was visibly darker than the rest. He had written there, typed there, leaned his forearms in those two spots and sweated there, literally, while waiting for the right word to arrive. It was a writer’s room, a place where sleep was forsaken as stories came together or fell apart. In that room, Knut’s shoulder didn’t matter to him, football didn’t matter. All the time my father had been in pursuit of one dream, Knut had been doggedly following another.

  Eventually my mother uncoupled the bed extension, unpicked the velcro and turned the granny at into a place any visitor might stay. The last sign of our giant was gone.

  Poseidon was taken down from the boards of the stock exchange in 1976, leaving others to pick through its nickel deposits, which were not of the quality everyone had first thought.

  Knut continued his degree by correspondence, shifting from one US state to another, without ever accounting for his moves in the postcards he occasionally sent us over the next few years. I pictured him, our restless giant with his beaten-up suitcase and typewriter, crossing deserts, taking rolling green hills a step or two at a time, striding through the Rockies with snow- capped mountains by his sides. In his absence, I had almost come to believe the story we told the class, and with time I saw him growing only larger, beyond human scale, surpassing his father and closing in on the clouds.

  We never heard from George Darrow again.

  Much later, I found out that the American Football League had merged with the NFL in 1969, four years before George Darrow turned up using its surplus letterhead paper. And the colours Knut had trained in, back in his teens when his shoulder had been perfect, were not those of the famous Dallas Cowboys but of the Dallas Texans, the fledgling AFL team of the sixties that, after only three seasons, left town and became the Kansas City Chiefs. Knut never looked at ease in the Cowboys uniform.

  I kept a framed photo of the two of us: Knut in that uniform, his palm capping my shoulder, fingers reaching most of the way to my elbow. He’s smiling as though nothing else matters in that moment—not his shoulder, not the Cowboys deception, not his thwarted drive to get his thoughts down and published on the other side of the planet. I’m grinning as though he’s all mine, my own personal giant, all looming height and stories and great questions about the world.

  For the rest of the seventies, as the postcards arrived, I waited for the one of Manhattan, telling me he had made it there and had the conversations he needed to about Hemingway with the Paris Review crowd—its famous editor, George Plimpton, and others. The postcard that said he was a writer now. In the last one, though, he was heading to Iowa. He didn’t say anything about why.

  I had read some Hemingway myself by then. When my mother asked me what I wanted for my twelfth birthday, I gave her a list of three of his books. I was hoping for all three, but ended up with a new watch and a copy of The Old Man and The Sea. My parents opted for it since it was the smallest and they weren’t sure Hemingway was going to work for me. I can’t say it all stuck on the first read, but I remembered something Hemingway had said about it to Time magazine. He hadn’t written the book planning to put particular symbols in it. He had tried to write a real man and a real boy and a real fish and, if he could write them truly, they might symbolise a lot. That was the essence of it.

  ‘That’s how a writer thinks,’ Knut told me. ‘A real writer.’

  He copied the quote onto a card and stuck it on a wall near his desk.

  I made it to New York myself as a writer in the northern spring last year, maybe twenty years af
ter we got the last postcard. My one novel had landed me an agent in Chelsea and, through her, a meeting with St Martin’s Press in the Flatiron Building.

  ‘Let’s keep our expectations low,’ she said as the black cage doors of the elevator closed behind us. ‘Let’s work on it being just a meet-and-greet.’

  Eight people turned up to the meeting when we expected one. All eight seemed to have the word ‘publisher’ somewhere in their job titles. It felt as if they were pitching to me. They thought I was having meetings like this one all over town.

  That afternoon, I bought a black-and-white photo of the Flatiron Building from a stall in Central Park. It was the typical image, shot from further up Broadway with the aim squarely on the building’s most acute angle. I counted up floors to the cockpit office I was in two hours before.

  ‘No, that was genuinely positive,’ my agent had said afterwards over a chopped salad. ‘That was no meet-and-greet. I don’t want to...it’s no sure thing, but eight people read most of your book in the last two days. Eight people...’

  In the photo, the viewer’s eye is drawn to that famous wedge. There’s no way around it. It’s only recently that I’ve noticed the World Trade Center towers rising in the distance, two faint strips parallel in the thick Manhattan air.

  They bought my book, and another I was about to start writing. They talked about doing events.

  ‘I wouldn’t call it a tour,’ the executive publisher said over the phone, early one morning my time, late one afternoon his. ‘But it could be good to get the right people in a room in a few places, maybe line up some readings, too.’

  The right people. I instantly thought of George Plimpton. He was seventy-three years old by then, but I saw him in vintage mid-century black-and-white, smoke trailing up from a cigarette in one hand, a scotch in the other as he looked me in the eye and told me my novel had taken some gumption.

  It was that vision of George Plimpton that put Knut Knutsen back in my mind. I got onto Alta Vista on my computer and tracked him down, though it wasn’t as easy as I’d expected. Knut Knutsen was a famous Norwegian architect, the founder of a shipping company, a rheumatologist, at least two lawyers and more.

  Our giant was not even the only Knut Knutsen in Washington State. But I found him.

  He is a professor at a liberal arts college in Bellingham, a small city between Seattle and the Canadian border. He teaches fiction, and his bio on the college website calls him ‘the author of a novel, two acclaimed collections of short stories and some of America’s most lauded micro-fiction’.

  The novel is a fictional account of his great grandfather’s time as a doctor in Alaska. The first of his collections seems to be pieces that appeared in journals over time, with the sheer weight of one-off publications bringing the book about. These were the envelopes that made their way across the Paci c and across America to influential Upper Westside apartments or offices in Midtown Manhattan or Boston. Perhaps not the across Pacific, but later pieces, certainly, from those years when he was on the move. In the second collection, the stories are linked, set on a college campus and focus on a melancholy protagonist with a thyroid problem who can’t get a date.

  All of these books were published by the late eighties, though the precise chronology is unclear. Since then he seems to have trimmed his fiction back as far as it will go and settled on the shortest stories possible. Now companies and civic bodies commission him to write fifty- and hundred-word stories that they stamp into concrete or etch into the railings of new bridges.

  There is a picture of him on the college website—a man not quite the size of a pylon, hunched mid-span on a concrete bridge, grey hair buffeted by wind, pointing a gleaming black cane at a winding line of text, face showing creased bemusement. He looks something like a time lord or Gandalf, and I can tell myself he is a giant still, that it has not been my imagination.

  When the invitation to the Canadian festivals came through, I sent an email via the college telling him I would be in Vancouver in the fall. It seemed like an American way to put it, and I had an American conversation in mind. It was all those days under our house that did that, him talking journals and magazines, and an American literary world that had muscle and scope and meaning. He never said it but I could tell then that he wanted to be in people’s pockets in the way Hemingway was in his. He wanted to challenge the great editors and be challenged by them and come away belonging. It made no sense to me at the time, but there was a lot I couldn’t make sense of then.

  From what I could find online, I got the impression he hadn’t quite made it to readers’ back pockets. He hadn’t become one of those writers we’ve all heard about and there were no Pulitzers on his CV, but he had found a place for himself, some renown in his genre and his share of, as the Americans say, good notices.

  Weeks passed. I imagined my email lost in the Montgomery College system, or flicked on to Professor Knutsen and stirring no memory at all. Then he replied and we made plans.

  The last mountains give way to a narrow coastal plain and a city, Vancouver, and the guy in C jerks awake as the ight attendant locks his table into place for landing. He looks around, blinks, checks the aisle.

  Knut Knutsen stands behind the barrier, a head, a pair of sloping shoulders and more above the crowd. He is not the size of a hill, but he is big enough. He is less than eight feet tall, but well over seven. It’s more of a relief than I expected that he is actually a kind of giant.

  He is peering in the direction of the airbridge, his head tilted like the head of a giant wader bird, his hand on the shoulder of a much shorter woman in her late forties. She is tanned, with wavy ash-blonde hair gathered by a clip. From our emails, I know that Knut married Janet in the late eighties. She was a recent graduate, though not one of his.

  Knut is wearing a cable-knit jumper and Buddy Holly glasses that, because of the position of his head, appear to be sitting askew. He is an oddity who is making no effort not to be. If Jeff Goldblum ended up as a small-town college professor, stopped cutting or combing his hair and gained a foot or so in height, he would look a lot like Knut.

  I lift my hand to wave, but plenty of people are doing that and Knut hasn’t seen me since I was ten. He’s looking past me, a half-smile fixed on his face, ready to go all the way when called upon. I catch Janet’s eye and point to her, then Knut, then myself. She waves, and reaches up to touch his hand.

  He sees me and points, his index finger extending ET-style, his forearm telescoping out of his sleeve. His relationship with clothes looks no easier than it ever was. His muscles seem less rm now, less defined. He looks like a giant rod puppet whose elbows should have sticks guiding them and whose shape is not quite like the rest of ours, papier mâché stuck over a wire frame maybe, then dressed to go out.

  ‘Paul,’ he says, reaching over the barrier to clasp my shoulders. ‘Paul Coates, look at you. Look how tall.’

  He says it with no irony at all, though for him to make eye contact his chin is almost on his chest. I’m six two on the old scale, taller than most.

  ‘I look away and you’re a man. And a writer, of all things. Of all the crazy things.’ He gives me a big asymmetrical grin. The young Knut’s face is still there, worn and folded but still his, almost every wrinkle, I’m sure, the fault of his curiosity working the muscles again and again. ‘Do they not have medication to prevent that in Australia?’

  ‘I thought being a writer was an incurable disease,’ Janet says, thrusting her hand, straight as a blade, towards me. Her smile looks more orderly somehow.

  I am already making assumptions about both of them based on these first appearances, already liking them both, the fifty-something lived-in version of Knut and Janet who’s spoken seven words to me. Knut still has a grip on my left shoulder as Janet and I shake hands. His arm is bent as if he’s ready to elbow away anyone who might approach us.

  As we move to clear the space for other passengers, his hand stays there. It feels as though he’s steering me along the
barrier, but then I realise it’s for him, for his balance or to carry some of his weight. His other hand is on Janet, the black cane I saw in the photo hanging from a loop on his wrist and tapping against her calf with each stride, though she appears not to notice. He is a rod puppet after all, and we are his rods.

  The arrivals hall is clad with timber and rough-hewn stone that I’m sure is local. It has the feel of a hunting lodge, or at least these pieces do, though they’re dispersed among the unavoidable features of a modern airport. There’s a totem pole against one wall, with its story in English and French.

  I thread my way through the crowd forming around the baggage carousel, ready to search again for my black suitcase among all the other black suitcases. Knut and Janet stand over to one side. Knut has both hands on the top of the cane and the tip of it on the tiles a metre in front of him, and he’s gazing over all the heads towards the windows and whatever lies beyond. Standing there, he is more like the totem pole than he is like the rest of us—tall, separate, still, something to pause and note on your way past as you string together the tasks that amount to an airport exit.

  My case turns up early. Janet squeezes Knut’s arm when she notices me coming. She points and he smiles abruptly when he sees me, as if I’m new to him, fresh off the plane again. He was away in an idea, in a tiny story perhaps, a fifty-worder coming together.

  Janet heads for the doors and I fall in beside her. Knut’s hand is back on her right shoulder, his cane tapping the concrete, legs swinging in stiff precise arcs, like the movements of robotic limbs in factories spot-welding cars. My girlfriend, Megan—fiancée now, but I’m still adjusting to the term—is a physiotherapist, and I think she might call him a quadruped, though he’s cunning about it. He makes his best progress when he’s working four points of contact with the ground.

  Cold air billows in through the doors as we get closer, and with it comes the smell of aviation fuel and the noise of traffic, taxis and shuttle buses jockeying for position. Janet steers us to the right, towards a crossing where people are head-down trundling suitcases towards the car park. We make slower progress than most and a few push past, talking on phones, reporting in.