Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories

by John Robert Colombo

  I had not.

  “You must have also noticed,” said Benoit, “that in spite of your obvious failure to resolve matters, we have not taken steps to replace, or indeed even supervise you.”

  That, I had.

  “Don’t worry. I am not doing so now. You can continue where you are — as long as you wish — to do what you wish. You will be compensated. You may leave. Or stay. You may also, of course, do the thing you came to do. But I will remind you, my friend…”

  And we made it through gardening supplies, and stood by the tall glass doors that were wide enough to haul a house-frame through, and Benoit extended his hand.

  “…Marisse shot herself in the eye.”

  And with that, he turned and stepped into the brilliant Sunday afternoon sunlight. And that was the last that I ever saw or heard of Benoit.

  One evening not long after, Scott Neeson stopped by Ridgeway. No beer this time. He came with a single bottle of red wine. It had no label and he bashfully admitted that was because he had made it himself, using a kit he’d obtained from the wine-making outlet next to the building supply store. He suspected that it might not be adequate. I suggested we try it and see.

  We took it to the back deck and sat beside the barbecue, now hidden by a form-fitted cover I’d found in the garage. Scott drew a breath at the view of the woodlot, orange and red over a carpet of pale yellow and dark brown leaves that had fallen the past week, all set alight as the sun set over the rooftop of #37.

  I poured the wine, and sat beside him. He didn’t speak for a long time, and I didn’t prompt him. He finished his wine. I poured him another and topped up my own. As the light faded, so did the hard lines of his face, the slack flesh beneath his eyes. The shadow of #37 Ridgeway erased years. I watched them vanish, one by one, until finally he was ready.

  “I used to know what to do,” he said, in a voice that trembled, looking me with eyes that were wide, and wet. “I used to be sure.”

  I put my hand on his arm.

  “Not now, though,” he said. “Now, I have no fucking idea whether I’m coming, or going.”

  We spent time deciding which of the houses to inhabit next. Scott had not put all the touches on Twilling Row’s elaborate rear deck; the plumbing and electrics for the hot tub installation were barely roughed-in, and the covering for the grill area was up but needed shingling. We talked about remaining there; the winter would not treat the unstained decking kindly, and he’d done so much work already, it seemed a shame to abandon it now. But he insisted he didn’t care anymore. He wanted to be away. So we tried a few nights at Ridgeway, and that worked well enough, at first. We slept curled together on the king-sized bed in the cavernous master bedroom; took turns cooking and clearing dishes in the bright kitchen; in the sitting room, we watched the classic western and noir and science fiction films that were shelved under the entertainment console.

  But that didn’t last either. I woke up on more than one occasion suddenly shivering, alone in the bed, to find Scott, standing by the open bedroom window, naked, arms wrapped tight around himself as he looked north, up the gentle slope, to Sandhurst, and wept. Or once, finally, in the bathroom, looking blankly at the open medicine cabinet — filled with razors and sleep-aid medications — hands on either side of the sink, muscles in his forearms tensing, as though he were readying himself to leap into it. That night, I went to him, put my arms on his shoulders, and gently, drew him back to the bed — thinking all the while of Marisse, and the bullet that Benoit said she had put through her eye.

  And so in the end, with Stephan’s help, we found a new house: a genuinely new one this time, near the southern part of the subdivision — #60 Wyatt End. So new the drywall in the family room was still unpainted. The basement bathroom was only roughed in.

  No one had lived there since the firm moved in. It was a blank slate.

  At Christmas, we had a party there. I invited Stephan and Lynette and some others I’d met over the months; and Scott invited some of the others who worked with him — the Sandhurst Crew, they called themselves. They all brought bottles, and threw them in with Scott’s batch of home-brewed wine, and we carried on through the night.

  I had too much to drink, I have to admit. Stephan and Scott had to help me up to bed. Early Christmas Day awakened by stale wine in my gut and off-key caroling a floor below, I found myself standing naked by the window, looking through thin snowfall to the few, dim lights in the city many kilometers to the south.

  Thinking of Larchmount.

  Children. That’s what was missing.

  Larchmount was the kind of street that was lousy with them: infants and toddlers and teenagers, sullen and giddy and beautiful and awkward; fat moms and dads, going to work and coming home again, where they chased diaper-clad little fatties from room to room, catching sleep in precious moments until they did it again. If Mr. Nu sat next door, in a chair beneath a light bulb in a house nearly empty … well, the people of Larchmount had other things to bother about.

  There were no children on Wyatt, or Cathedral, or Twilling or any of the others here. Nothing came from Stephan’s friendship with Lynette — nor, obviously, Scott’s and mine — nor any of the other half-dozen couples who’d coalesced around Sandhurst over the days … the months…

  The years.

  Even without children, we got fat.

  It happens. All you have to do is sit still for long enough. And that is what we did. Trips to the building supply store grew less frequent — a combination of its diminishing stocks, and our own waning interest, the growing complacency of our house-pride. Power wasn’t reliable enough to keep watching DVDs, but we enjoyed reading. Anything to sit still.

  It’s not always a bad thing, being fat. The roundness of it smoothed Scott’s skin, took the worry from his eyes, the knowledge from his mouth. Combined with his less and less frequent visits to Sandhurst, it allowed a measure of innocence to return, or perhaps just emerge. He smiled so easily, and I envied him. I was the ugly fat man, a furtive gray toad that couldn’t even meet its own eye in the bathroom mirror.

  But I don’t blame the fat.

  We kept having parties. Smaller parties, but more of them.

  Smaller, because of the subdivision’s shrinking complement. Early on, it was simple departures. The medical station in #4 Battleford Avenue lost a surgeon; Linguistics in #52 Burling Street lost their Russian and Farsi specialist — a serious blow, that one; and at least two cleaners.

  The flow was finally stemmed when Stephan announced that the firm had established a covert perimeter around the subdivision. He went in to no further detail about what that perimeter entailed, but enough understood the implied threat, to need no further encouragement to stay put.

  Yet still, we diminished. There were some suicides, three of them among Scott’s former team-mates at Sandhurst. Some didn’t die, but locked themselves in their houses and refused to communicate or co-operate when Stephan sent in rescue and medical teams. They remained in flesh, but truly, were no longer present in the subdivision.

  Smaller parties. But far more frequent.

  Never properly sodded, our yard was soon taken over by tall wildflowers and thistles, vines that could tear flesh. So we limited our celebrations to the concrete-tiled back deck, where perhaps a dozen of us would sit on resin chairs, heads tilted back to look up at the froth of stars that gathered into prominence over the ever diminishing glow from the city, a hundred more stars each year than the last. We would drink Scott’s wine and talk and stare at outer space.

  Enough wine in me at some of these and I would bring myself to wonder, would tilt my head from the Heavens down, to the top of the subdivision’s hill, and Sandhurst.

  One night, helping Scott up to our bed, I posed a question:

  “Who is looking out for Mr. Nu now? Is he even still alive?”

  �
�Nu.” Scott lowered himself to his bed, and let out a long, labored sigh. We were both drunk; drunk, fat old men. “You asked me a question, a long time ago.”

  “Okay.”

  “When we first met, and the time after.”

  “The time after. In my yard. With that beer.”

  “And steaks. ‘What did I learn?’ you asked me.”

  “And what did you learn?”

  He looked at me in the dim candle light of our bedroom, my happy old fat man.

  “When you go into a dude’s house — make sure you’re invited,” he said. “Make sure the dude knows you’re coming, and is cool with it, and has taken the steps. Steps not to show himself. And if he’s in the basement—” and in his slurry, drunk, innocent voice, Scott whispered:

  “Leave him be.”

  What did you learn?

  The question doesn’t come easily. I don’t think it can come easily.

  When I can’t sleep, I take out Marisse’s notepad, and look at that doodle she did, in the meeting room in the Marriot, in her last debrief — a stack of cubes, either made sturdy like a pyramid, or impossible, precarious, boxes stacked on ceilings. Ball point perspective makes both true. Both a lie.

  And both a lousy answer to the question: why would you search every room but the one you knew that Mr. Nu was in? Lousy answers, but as it happened, the only answer forthcoming.

  Not everybody puts a bullet through their eye but everybody dies.

  Stephan’s Lynette, for instance. Dead. Cancer, started in her left breast. Undiagnosed. Spread all over. And so. Dead.

  Stephan took it hard. The two had been together for decades when it came, and as Stephan told me: “There’s no one now, forever.” He was right, and I gave him a long hug — although silently, I thought (perhaps unkindly) he ought to have prepared himself, she was so much older than he. But I didn’t argue when he announced he wanted to turn the faux Tudor mansion on Wellington Way into a mausoleum, for “the beloved departed” —Stephan’s code for those who died not from suicide or escape attempts, but simply in the course of things. So we worked to seal off some rooms in the basement as crypts. And into the first of those, we bore Lynette — her boney cadaver wrapped in 600-thread sheets from an upstairs linen closet — and by the light of a dozen candles, listened to Stephan as he sang her praises, and wept, and said a prayer. Then Luis, who’d volunteered, stayed downstairs with trowel and cement and bricked in the crypt.

  Stephan could have expected to bury Lynette. Burying Scott, now…

  Yes. Scott Neeson. Heart attack. Too fat. Too drunk, maybe. So a massive coronary, while I snored beside him. And yes.

  Dead.

  I took it hard too. But who would have thought? I’m a fat old man. Fatter, older, and I never was a Marine, and I never was strong. Scott should have been burying me. But there he lay, eyes wide and wet and empty in the morning light. Soon to be the second resident of the crypt, the catacombs, beneath Wellington Way.

  I could leave. I could stay. I could do the thing that I came to do.

  I put on my parka, a pair of boots. I fished around in back of the china cabinet until I found the latch, and opened it, and from there pulled out the little Russian automatic pistol that Scott favored, and a clip of ammunition. The kitchen, where I found an LED wind-up flashlight. Then I went upstairs one more time, to look at Scott, make sure I wasn’t tricking myself with ball point perspective, then left as fast as I could to the front door, and into the street.

  It was tough going. A week ago there’d been a heavy snowfall, and then it had been cold since, so the road was rutted and icy. And uphill, around and around, in a gentle and exhausting slope. It took me until the noon hour to reach Sandhurst Circle.

  I nearly turned back. The whole street was choked with high drifts of snow, rising in places to the tops of first-storey windows. There was, simply, no path to or from #12. I couldn’t see how I could make it to the front doors, which were buried in snow up to the handles. But I thought, I could do the thing that I came to do. And, there’s no one now. Forever.

  I pushed through the snow, nearly fell as I climbed over and through the drift to the door. Pulled aside the knocker, and spent some time recalling the access code before entering it. The doors swung inward, and the snow fell inside along with me.

  There: the same vestibule. Dark, but for what light filtered in through snow-covered windows.

  No one was vacuuming. The house was icy cold. But there was a sound of running water. A burst pipe? That’s what I thought, too.

  I might have stood there again, for hours, guessing at where the sound came from, losing myself in the rhythm of this place. I might have just fled. But finally, I was done with guessing; done with fleeing, just so far. My thumb found the switch on the flashlight, and soon the three blue LEDs cast a circle on the floor ahead of me. I thought only a minute about looking upstairs first — and thought about Marisse — and decided not to. And so I stepped through an archway, wallpaper peeling from it in wide strips. From there, I passed through a high living room, floor-boards creaking underfoot. At one time, this room had been used for conferences; there was a long table in here, and at one end a projector with a bay for a laptop computer. Chairs everywhere.

  “Mr. Nu,” I shouted. “What are you up to?”

  The water — perhaps just a tap left on, in one of the bathrooms? No. I passed into a wide, short hallway, and through the archway beyond, where one might expect a kitchen, but over the decades I had become savvy to the architecture of the subdivision, and didn’t get my hopes up.

  “You have associates,” I said, “isn’t that so? Tell me who they are, and we’ll give you back your clothes.”

  I was right. The next room had a sunken floor, high shelves on every wall but one, and where the floor dropped, a big metal fireplace, open at every side. That fourth wall: tall windows of leaded glass. Mostly snow-covered now, so what light came in was a creamy gray. Some of the shelves had books on them.

  “No one’s coming for you,” I said, in a threatening tone. “I’m your only hope. Now tell me: What are you up to, Mr. Nu?”

  Not a tap, not a broken main. The water sounded nearer now, and more elemental. It made me think to times long ago, sitting on rocks on a hot summer day, by rapids, mist making my breath cool.

  “Our operative — never mind what her name was, you don’t need to know that — she shot herself in the eye. Dead. Why did you make her do that?”

  Next to this room, was the kitchen. A fine kitchen, but not the finest in the subdivision. I reached into my parka’s pocket, and pulled out Scott’s gun. I stood there for I don’t know how long. Then I lifted it high, flipped the safety off and shot the refrigerator.

  “You think I put that bullet in my eye? You are wrong, Mr. Nu. That was your friend. He wouldn’t talk to us. Now he’s dead too.”

  Beside the refrigerator — a doorway. Not as grand as the others, but why should it be? It only led down to the basement. I put Scott’s gun down a moment on the butcher block, gave the flashlight another cranking and opened the door.

  “Why do I want to go upstairs right now, Mr. Nu, not down? Is it you?” I asked, as I shone the light down the long flight of metal stairs. The light caught rust like moss growing on the edges where the paint had scraped away, a rime of frost that coated the banister. The beam hung ahead of me in thick, icy mist. The sound of running water turned into a racket; it was close by now. It sounded like a river.

  The stairway was long — so long it switched back on itself once and then bent out at 90 degrees for the last five steps. Slow going, too; the mist and the frost made the metal treacherous for a young man. Fat old men carrying guns and flashlights had to take particular care. I passed the time asking more questions. Some were questions I’d come to ask: more about Marisse and her team, and as it followed the things th
at might have happened to the transport team, and to the firm’s government liaison. And more that had occurred to me in the months and years that followed: What of Scott? Of me? Of the world? What have you done, Mr. Nu, Mr. Nothing, Mr. Null — to cause us all to so badly recede? Is it you, now you and your associates, that walk the world you persuaded us all to so easily abandon?

  Why us? Why not Larchmount?

  I stood alone, finally, in the basement of #12 Sandhurst, playing the flashlight beam across the wet, icy stone — looking for some sign of the interrogation room; the three-piece bath, with the Italian tile that had so pleased Stephan. Were there any remains of the seven cells in this cavern? Would Mr. Nu somehow still be in one of them? Alive? After so long?

  There was nothing that I could see. The place was all ice and rock, flickering in dim reflected light.

  I took care as I moved along, but it was no good. I slipped, and pinwheeled, and landed hard on my behind. Nothing was broken, but in the fuss of it all, I let go of the light and the gun. I listened to them both, skittering down rocks as might lead to a fast-moving stream on a summer’s afternoon. There was a splash, and then another.

  A stream. Was that what had happened here? An underground stream, an aquifer, broken through the thin layer of concrete that the bankrupt builder had spread over the ground, and flooded the basement, over years perhaps corroded the foundations; swept away the neat, leveled chamber here, the seven cells and the interrogation room and the three-piece bath … leaving only this cavern?

  This cavern, where a man might sit, under a single lightbulb, on a canvas lawn chair, in a brown T-shirt, pale green underpants and socks of a material that drew moisture away from flesh. Looking with a hollow, knowing eye at another: this one an old man, fat, blind, freezing cold, looking for purchase on the slippery stone…

  …finding some, finally, on a ledge of concrete, just inches above the icy, flowing earth-water. I might have stood; there seemed enough space. But I tucked my feet close under my knees instead, stayed low, because I knew, if I stood up, I would turn, and try and scramble away, flailing in the dark until I found the base of the stairs. Then, I would haul myself up those stairs, fast as I could, and run. Flee.