by Don Gillmor
Gladys was partly dressed, wide awake. “He lives here?” she said.
“Apparently.”
“So he can just come through in the middle of the night? Harry, that is too creepy.”
“We have a lock on this door.” Harry had wondered why there was a lock for the door to the loftish space at the front of the apartment.
“Harry, I’m never going to be able to sleep. I mean the streetcar, the cockroaches, and now some freak basically lives with us.” Gladys was on the verge of tears. “What does he even look like?”
“Some thin guy who listens to Supertramp.”
“Oh, Harry.”
This catastrophe was largely Harry’s fault. He had thought that the location would lend an unearned bohemian quality to their lives, would outweigh the apartment’s obvious shortcomings. He imagined going to Emilio’s on Sunday for espresso and huevos rancheros, and then picking up the newspaper to see which eventless Eric Rohmer film was playing at Cinematheque. He imagined dinner parties and learning to play an instrument.
In the next few weeks, his battles with LeMay sharpened, and their relationship with Oatley got uglier. The man wrote a music column for a counterculture newspaper that was given away free around the city. So he listened to every new album at concert volume and clumped around in his oversize construction boots like a clog dancer. And Oatley had a surprising social network. A conga line of people who looked sort of like him—thin, disaffected, unhygienic—trooped through their apartment, attracted to Oatley’s endless supply of new music, some of it still unavailable in record stores, and his endless supply of killer pot. Harry and Gladys lived like hostages.
“Harry, we have to get out of here.”
But they had signed a one-year lease; they were on the hook. Harry’s head was filled with revenge fantasies that ended with LeMay and Oatley under the wheels of a streetcar.
After they had been living there two months, their relationship was like sliding down a razor blade. Harry bought all three papers every day and went through the apartment listings with scientific purpose. He thought about all the apartments he coveted: places that friends had, or parties he’d been to. Spacious, cool, affordable. All these things were more or less impossible to find, though everyone he knew seemed to have them. On the eleventh day of his intensive search, he lucked upon a one-bedroom above a deli. It was newly renovated: the blond oak floors gleamed, the appliances were unused. It was small but beautiful, and it was only eighty bucks a month more than the one they were in. Harry signed the lease and gave the woman a cheque that he knew would put him into overdraft.
When he took Glad over to show her, she was overcome with joy. In that first glimpse, that snapshot, she saw tranquility and stability, romance even. Harry saw sex (which had disappeared—the spectre of Oatley killing any possibility) and the clean middle-class world he deserved.
“How are we going to get out of the other place, Harry? LeMay hates us. He’ll sue if we break the lease. He told me last week. He wants to keep us there and make our lives hell. He is fucking Satan.” Gladys rarely swore, and it bolstered Harry slightly.
“I have a plan,” Harry said. “An evil plan.”
When he told Gladys, she laughed out loud. “God, Harry, you can’t do that,” she said in a voice that encouraged him. They kissed and then made love on the pristine hardwood floor of their new place.
On Saturday nights, Oatley always had a party. They seemed to be impromptu, people just drifted over, but they kept drifting, thirty or forty people every weekend, and they smoked pot and listened (as Harry had predicted) to Supertramp, and the noise above them was unbearable and lasted till three a.m.
Harry had tried reasoning with Oatley, had screamed at him, threatened him, and on one sleepless night jammed the end of a broom handle into the ceiling plaster, making fifteen small holes that had no effect on Oatley’s party whatsoever. He’d finally called the police, who came and gave a warning that resulted in the new B-52’s album being turned down for fifteen minutes, then cranked up to a new, vengeful volume.
But now he was beyond all that. Harry had a plan. On the appointed weekend, he bought rubber door skirts designed to stop draughts and put them on the kitchen door. He peeled back the pink linoleum (which he would oddly miss) in places where he remembered seeing holes that went right through the floor to LeMay’s antique store. He lifted the linoleum so the holes were exposed. He took a large bag full of oregano and some glue and mixed the two and poured it carefully into the already slightly plugged drain. He put the stopper in and knocked on Oatley’s door, and when Oatley came down, stoned and dim, Harry said, “Look, Oatley, Glad and I are going away for the weekend. Just so you know. We’re back Sunday, probably early evening. Anyway, if you’re having people over, just—you know.”
“We’ll be cool,” Oatley said. Harry could see that he was already calculating just how many more people he could have over and how much louder the new Wings album could be played.
On Saturday night, he and Gladys made love in their new, shining, hopeful apartment, and afterward she kissed him and whispered, “Public Enemy Number One,” and smiled and fell asleep. Harry watched television with the sound down until two a.m. He went onto their deck and smoked a cigarette and looked down to the street and felt like a character in a Raymond Chandler novel. He drove over to the old place and parked a block away, then walked to the rear entrance. Music was coming from Oatley’s apartment. It sounded like Patti Smith. He opened the door and looked up the empty stairwell, then quickly ascended to the foyer, where the door to Oatley’s was. Their bathroom was already an appalling mess, drunkenly used by Oatley’s friends, and he took three towels out of it. He unlocked the kitchen door and closed it behind him and locked it again. He pressed the towels firmly around the bottom of the door, sealing it as thoroughly as he could. He put the stopper in the sink and turned the tap on and watched the sink fill. When it began to spill over, he stood back. The water pooled in the natural dip in front of the sink where a century of standing had worn the floorboards down. Then it moved slowly to the stove, pausing for short investigative forays along small wrinkles in the lino. The water found a hole and gathered around a smaller opening. It spread in logical yet surprising patterns that were bewitching, elegant, inevitable fingers that probed for weakness. Harry opened the kitchen window and stepped onto the useless fire escape. Above him, two people smoked a joint and talked about what kind of genius Rickie Lee Jones was. He quietly slipped through the railing, lowered himself until he was hanging, then let himself drop, landing hard on the patchy asphalt of the lane. He stood frozen for a full minute, but there wasn’t any detectable change in the conversation above him. He drove back to his new apartment and slept the sleep of the righteous.
Harry went back at eleven on Sunday morning and unlocked the kitchen door. Water had seeped out into the foyer and into the bathroom. He put the towels on the floor of the bathroom, which had, as he expected, become a much more disgusting mess. The toilet was backed up, a bonus. He went into the kitchen and took the stopper out of the sink and put it on the counter. Looking through the hole in the floor, he could see a minor flood in the antique store below. He pressed the lino back into place, covering the hole. He waited to make sure that the oregano/glue mixture was working as a plug, then disabled the kitchen door lock and used a knife to carve out small pieces of the door jamb. Then he left, with the water still running. He guessed it would be close to two o’clock before Oatley would emerge to go to one of the (many) nearby restaurants that offered all-day breakfasts. He would see the mess and turn off the water. Then he would do one of two things, depending on how stoned/paranoid/wasted he was: he would either phone LeMay, or he would go back up to his apartment and light a joint and try (unsuccessfully) to think everything through and hope that it would all just go away. Harry was betting on the latter.
When he and Gladys arrived at 7:30, coming back from what they decided had been a weekend at a friend’s cottage, the w
ater was shut off but there was no sign of LeMay. Harry could hear Oatley padding around above him. He hammered on the door and yelled. “Jesus, Oatley, what the hell!”
Glad was standing beside him, smiling broadly, her hand over her mouth, surveying the glorious damage.
Harry picked up the phone and called LeMay’s number and said he’d better get over there right away.
“Why would I come over on Sunday, a day of rest, man?”
“Because there’s a flood over here, Noah,” Harry said.
When LeMay arrived, Oatley still hadn’t emerged from his apartment, though he was pacing overhead. Harry imagined he could hear Oatley’s stoned brain going over the events, trying to come up with something that wouldn’t make it seem like one of his toasted idiot friends had somehow caused this.
LeMay looked at the wet floors, the apocalyptic bathroom. He quickly ran downstairs and opened up his antique store, and Harry heard his defeated cry from the kitchen. “Oh Jesus. Jesus!”
It was five minutes before he came up the stairs, walking heavily. He stood in the foyer.
Gladys cried out, “We go away for one night.” Her eyes welled up convincingly.
LeMay glared at them and then hammered at Oatley’s door. “Open this fucking door, Oatley!” All of his soft body was primed for something primitive. He took out his landlord’s key and unlocked the door, and Oatley was standing at the bottom of the stairs in his socks, looking like an illustration from a Dr. Seuss book.
“What the FUCK happened, Oatley?”
Harry went into the kitchen to check that he had patted the linoleum back into place.
“I turned it off,” Oatley offered.
“You turned it off,” LeMay repeated. “Who turned it on?”
“You turned what off?” Harry asked. “The bathroom tap?”
“Kitchen,” Oatley said weakly.
Harry walked over to the sink and looked at it. It was full of water. He took a knife out of the drawer, stuck it in the drain and came up with a small blob of the oregano and glue.
“Why were you and your friends in my kitchen?” Harry asked, staring at the knife.
“We weren’t.” Oatley said. “I mean, I don’t know. There were a lot of people.”
“We told you,” Glad said. “We said, we’re gone, keep an eye out. Jesus, the bathroom is so disgusting I can’t even look at it. And the smell.”
LeMay looked at the kitchen and the damaged door jamb, at Oatley and up to the ceiling.
“One of your friends emptied his bong in the kitchen sink,” Harry said. “That would be my guess. Then he forgot to turn the water off. Didn’t you notice when you went to bed? You come down to lock the door …”
“I didn’t go down. I mean, I crashed. People just let themselves out.”
“Christ,” Harry said.
“Our place is ruined,” Glad said. “Our things are ruined.”
LeMay looked at them. “My business is ruined. Take a look at the furniture. Take a fucking look.”
Harry felt a pang of something for LeMay, but he guessed that the damage was localized and probably only affected a few cheap, shitty things. He’d sell them anyway, and maybe there was some kind of insurance.
The next day there was a fairly rational shouting match between Harry and LeMay, with LeMay finally agreeing to let them out of the lease and refund their damage deposit, and Harry agreeing not to go to small claims court. Harry’s argument was that having third-party access to your apartment, particularly when that third party was roofed on Colombian pot, was a recipe for disaster. What if it had been a fire instead of a flood? And there was the fact that LeMay hadn’t disclosed that a neighbour had access to parts of their apartment, that they had to lock themselves into their own bedroom at night.
A cloud fell across LeMay’s annoying, sparsely bearded face, a sudden sense that, with an argument so well articulated, Harry might somehow have had a hand in this. But LeMay had Oatley to consider, a bud-brained twit whose liability extended to twenty unaccountable friends. Their conversation ended with a stirring chorus of fuck-you’s, and Harry walked away with a feeling of accomplishment that had thus far eluded him in grad school.
He walked down the street, thinking he could run for office or put a man on the moon. His relationship with Gladys—framed now by their criminal collusion, their escape from hell and their well-deserved apartment—had never been better. They celebrated with discount Spanish sparkling wine, and he took Glad’s hand and led her out to the deck, and they made love on a blanket and lay on their backs and stared at the moon.
And where had all that gone? Who could trace the incremental losses of the last twenty-five years, the tiny defeats, the lengthening silences? What forensic accountant could sift through all that and show them the moment their marriage had tipped into the red? Here, the accountant would say, pointing to a spreadsheet. October 14, 1991. You can see right there, at that moment when your colicky son kept you both awake for three consecutive hallucinogenic weeks, and if you look closely, see right there? That was the moment when what had been exhausted silence took on a tone of resentment.
For one thing, the average cost of raising a child to (relative) adulthood is $243,660. So there is the financial pressure. There are dozens of other negatives: emotional drain, unfortunate genes, discipline issues. There is a physical toll, a psychic toll. Once they are teenagers, they are a threat to everyone and everything. Teenagers end up in the back of police cars. They belong in the back of police cars. They shoplift, burn down cottages, drive your Volvo into a telephone pole. They paint their bedrooms black, steal loose change, water down your Scotch, follow the herd, dress to annoy and govern themselves according to lyrics written by a rapper who is two years behind on his child support. Teenagers are not mowers of lawns, they are not drawers of water. They use your credit card to order things from the Shopping Channel when they’re stoned. They need $200 jeans and unprotected sex. They are unemployable, addicted to video games, believe in the lasting power of graphic novels, speak English as a second language and think life is better in Japan.
Anyway, you can see that once Ben arrives, your Hundred Day Moving Average is a dead man walking, your EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) is negligible. You see those small upticks—you can see one right there when you had sex after an almost seven-month post-partum drought. But that was a dead-cat bounce. It fell again before the month was out. See? Right there, it goes down. If you go year to year, you held almost steady, but if you factor in inflation, then in real-dollar terms you were actually losing. And the modest decline we see in this last decade shows that while you are protecting certain core assets, you are not producing anything the market recognizes as valuable. This is a holding pattern, not unusual. If this were a loan covenant (and what marriage isn’t?), then it would have been called in June of 1996. Numbers don’t lie.
NINETEEN
HARRY DIALLED and a woman picked up. “Dr. Nathlett’s office.”
“Hi, it’s Harry Salter. I’m calling about my test results.”
“I’ll have to put you on hold.”
A Beatles song played annoyingly, an instrumental version of “Here Comes the Sun.” “Hi, hi, hi, sorry,” the receptionist said three minutes later in her little girl’s voice.
“I was in for a colonoscopy a few weeks ago. Some polyps were removed. The biopsy report. Harry Salter.”
“Salter … Salter … Salter. Hang on. No, that’s not it. How long ago was this?”
“Two weeks. Two and a half.”
“Hang on … Here it is. Salter.” Harry heard muttering. She was scanning the text. “Hyperplastic,” she said. “Wait. Okay, so six of them were hyperplastic.”
“Which means?”
“Benign.”
“And number seven?”
“Well, this is the odd thing: it’s listed as adenoma. So there was some cancer found there.”
Harry felt the air punched out of him. A
shroud fell across part of his brain. “You found cancer.”
“Well, in one polyp, and it was removed. There’s a note that Dr. Nathlett wants you to come in for another colonoscopy next year. I can book it now.”
“That’s it? Are you saying there’s no cancer now? That it was removed?”
“Well, there are no guarantees in this business, Mr. Salter. But Dr. Nathlett doesn’t think it’s urgent.”
“But he thinks this is the only sign, that there isn’t—”
“Hang on, I have to take this.”
Harry listened to the orchestral sweep of “Like a Rolling Stone,” though it took a few bars to identify it. The song ended and another one started that he couldn’t identify.
“Madhouse. Total, madhouse,” she said.
“I’d like to book an appointment with Dr. Nathlett.”
“Okay, sure. We’d be looking at …” Pages flipped. “We’re into February. The fourteenth. Valentine’s Day. Ha ha. Three o’clock.”
“Beautiful.”
Three hours later Harry was walking along the Bloor Viaduct, staring at the darkening valley through the elegant cables of the suicide barrier. It was cold, and he walked briskly toward the centre of the city. At a point in his life when he needed to marshal his resources, when he needed money, patience and wisdom to deal with his various challenges, none of these were available. In their place was a growing fear.
His city itself, he reflected, had been born in fear: in 1793, a threatened American invasion prompted British officials to establish a naval arsenal and build Fort York. The capital was moved from Niagara, which was too exposed to the U.S. border. Merchants arrived to supply the military, and the town grew while the American threat subsided (though never entirely disappeared).
But by 1841, the city was in danger of losing purpose; it wasn’t going to be the country’s capital, after all. It could have withered then, a cold outpost between a gloomy lake and the endless pines. Yet it survived—flourished, even. Its simple grid grew outward, and more than a century later it was the largest city in the country. Though the nation was slow to embrace cities. Poets wrote about the land; painters turned out forbidding landscapes by the truckload: prairie vistas, naked pines, dark lakes. The collective soul was wilderness.