Some Great Thing

by Colin McAdam

  since nineteen-forty-six

  —a fella there named Rick.

  I owed my pride

  I owed my hope

  I owed my brags

  I owed that Jer that said,

  Keep Kathleen, she will not drive away.

  My mind was prepared to recognize a certain amount of money, a certain level of debt that I might possibly repay, and as long as I could distract myself with work I could occasionally greet that sum without emotion—just a daily face, walking the other way, “mornin,” and nothing more.

  SO WE SAT THERE, the three of us, a picnic on a blue carpet, and Jerry’s got her eyes, the latest model, and I’ve got a coffee or something, and proud am I, my friend, yes, velvet warming the back of my heart because I am part of a three-folk island looking human and safe, looking so much better than the sea we sat in.

  No one is caring about the carpet. Jerry’s got a strand just on his eyelid there, but we can get that for him later. Kathleen just kissed me of her own free will.

  “I’m gonna build you something, Kath.”

  “That’s nice, Jer.”

  I didn’t know what I meant.

  Jerry holds up a cup with Mickey Mouse on the outside and orange juice within; he’s a little priest sitting down there on his rump, cup up high in both hands. Not that I had seen a lot of him, but it struck me at that moment that I had known this person Jerry for almost three years and had yet to have a conversation with him. I felt close to him and I knew he knew what I was thinking, but I had yet to hear an adequate account of what was occurring to him.

  Kathleen had her hand low on my stomach and she kissed me again, so things were looking good for tonight. I’m playing it cool, watching Jerry while she’s watching me. Jerry starts talking while he’s holding up the cup.

  “Mickey, Daddy, walks on top cause heeess.”

  “What’s that, big guy?”

  “Issy?”

  “Sure he is.” It was important to laugh when you didn’t understand the guy. “Huh huh.”

  “Hee!”

  He had a happy face when he spilled that juice, very happy, a proper smile, interesting, like he just became a person.

  And Kathleen turns her head when she hears the wet sound of the juice pouring on the carpet, watches the stream from the cup.

  I suppose what we have to imagine, you and I, as we look at Kathleen watching Jerry pour his juice out from up high, is that Kathleen was in a jungle. She was an explorer, like me, totally lost, a surprise around every corner, never knowing where to go next. There she is in this jungle, and she’s had a rare moment of rest, when she turns her head and sees a terrifying waterfall, raging fuckin orange, and maybe she thinks for a second that she is a drop of that orange and she’s falling with no air in her lungs and she wants to get back up, but she’s falling.

  Whatever we imagine, there she was punching the cup from Jerry’s hands so it flew across the room, and the look on her face sees nothing but horrors—no people—and then . . .

  “THE CAARPET!

  “RUIN!

  “THE NEW

  “FUCKIN

  “CAARPET!”

  The back of her hand hits me in the mouth, the other hand hits my nose.

  I had never seen anyone that angry, and by the time I could realize that humiliation of being hit in the face, she had screamed a new world into being. That was not the room I had built.

  “How MANY fuckin messes will he pour?! The beautiful FUCKin carpet! You, never, fuckin, see!”

  She ran over to the corner to Jerry’s box of toys, picked one up, threw it down, picked another up, threw it down, over and over like she was demonstrating something, and her anger just grew.

  Sometimes when a person’s angry you can keep yourself removed, be a little superior, laugh at them a little. Not Kathleen. All you can do is worry about what she’ll do next.

  “That orange will never come out! It’s like . . . fuckin paint! And the two of yuz are standing there looking so fuckin stupid. If you were a man? . . . If you were a man? . . . If you were a man? . . . you wouldn’t let me get like this. I’m fuckin sssick.”

  She threw that word like a silver knife at me.

  “FUCK.”

  The three of us were moving slowly into the hallway shuffling to the drums in her head. When I tried to hold her arms down she hit mine out of the way. Lunge, slap, shuffle, dance, slap, reverse, “Ssshit!”

  Then, the doorbell rang.

  You should have seen her.

  It was like one of those miracles you can work on babies with a silly rubber pacifier. She just stopped.

  And she walked toward the door, opened it, and I heard this man’s voice saying,

  “Hello, I am Simon Struthers.”

  And that was when Jerry started crying.

  Part Three

  1

  THEY WERE Two minor bureaucrats approaching middle age, trying to forget themselves in tragicomic frottage. She even said his name, “Simon!,” when they rubbed and fumbled, as though he were transporting her; when naming him would only remind him of where he was—here, now, in this silly office (you should have seen the blue of the cut-price carpet).

  It was obvious from Renée’s face that she did not have hope, that she was pretending as much as he was. It was probably her pretending that called to mind his own.

  “Simon!”

  They giggled when they finished.

  THERE WAS A CRUCIAL difference between the parkways, the building restoration, the heritage designations—all these minor projects—and the one major project that dominated his career: possibility. Possibility in the form of undeveloped land, you see, in the form of a huge green space that had yet to be used for anything. Museums, parkways, old estates were built. It is an obvious distinction, but it is worth spelling out since Simon, at the time, could not himself pinpoint what it was that made this other project so exciting.

  Simon, Renée, Leonard and the others determined what would happen to a broad swath of the city in the south, forming an arc, quite elegant, from west to east, approximately three miles wide throughout. The city had expanded to the inner border of this arc, with a few unregulated exceptions, and beyond its outer border were farms and other unspeakables.

  Developments, clusters of construction, necessarily arose. People needed houses. Local councils (which many in the Division, including Leonard, had sat on early in their careers) were responsible for allowing these developments. But their numbers had increased to a level that excited the imagination of the Division, eager to use its powers, eager to seize the opportunity to give the capital a distinctive shape.

  The idea of taking control of this green space had occurred to someone in the Division fifteen years earlier. At first the idea was relegated to the Dreambook, but after rounds of new appointments, changes to the constitution of the Division, the idea was crossed out of the Dreambook and given serious consideration.

  Leonard and Renée had begun to prepare preliminary briefs when Simon arrived in the Division. Leonard had conceded that his voluble mind could not be accommodated on the pages of memos, so, as Chairman of the Division he took a consulting, supervisory role while Simon worked with Renée on getting things down on paper.

  The noblest aspect of a bureaucrat’s realm is the distance between him and his subject. Although Simon and Renée determined the uses of this land, it was months before they ever looked at it. (Renée, in fact, never did.)

  Simon’s greatest mistake was setting foot on that land.

  Early on, now, at this point when the hair on his temples was still brown, they knew the land from the 1:25,000 topographical map, which, as far as any of them knew, told them all but the smell of the flowers. Leonard contributed some knowledge that he felt was important. Because of his expertise in agriculture and foodstuffs he was well positioned to commission surveys and fieldwork. There was a period when he even squeezed into the galoshes he hadn’t worn since university and ventured into the field himsel
f. His observations, shorthand “Field Notes” that Simon later translated into a memo, were invaluable:

  March 29, land wet, probably melting snow

  March 30, patches of snow here and there, puddles, “a plashy place” (Byron?)

  March 31, have observed various native trees, though few, viz

  Birch, Maple, Oak perhaps (not a botanist)

  April 5, but it is mostly grass, mud, etc.

  Surveyors’ reports filled in many of the gaps, as did those of land-use consultants and others, but they were largely technical.

  Information, infrastructure, science, man-hours, abundant, irretrievable costs soon mounted to the point where a preliminary official decision had to be made. The land was formally declared to be under review.

  ON THE EVE of that declaration, late at night in Simon’s office, Renée was straightening her skirt after a fairly goatish session.

  “Simon,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I am not getting any younger.”

  “I know.”

  “Neither are you,” she eventually added.

  “That is true,” he said. “Have you eaten?”

  “When would I have eaten?”

  They had been at Simon’s desk for hours.

  “I think we should make a decision,” she said.

  “Well, that’s what I had thought before you . . . before we . . .”

  “I think we should make a decision right now,” she said.

  “I myself am not hungry,” said Simon.

  “I wasn’t talking about dinner. I was talking about this land.”

  “Can a decision be made on an empty stomach?”

  “Yours is not empty.”

  “But yours is.”

  “That is irrelevant to me.”

  “But is it irrelevant to this decision?”

  “To the decision about the land, yes. Simon, I find you a little evasive.”

  “About what?”

  “Everything. I think we have a number of decisions to make, the least important of which is dinner, Simon. What about us?”

  “What about the land?”

  “Which would you like to focus on?”

  “I would like to focus on you.”

  “Well, I am not in the mood for that again, and it only raises the same question. What about us? Quite aside from the demands of this project, Simon, I don’t think we can go on like this forever. On your desk like this . . . and going to your place. I don’t . . . I am not an adolescent.”

  “I don’t know what we should be discussing in that case,” Simon said. “I don’t think that we would arrive at anything but more questions. I don’t mind questions, but are questions what we need? That is why I asked about dinner. I myself am not hungry. There is an answer. I do not have answers about us.”

  “Well, I am not relying on you to have answers. I am not expecting you to tell me how l should behave with you, or to decide on my behalf. That seems a little arrogant of you.”

  There was silence for a while. Simon must have affected some pathetic look or other, some sort of pout, because Renée reached for his hand and held it.

  “We needn’t make a formal decision,” he said, almost as a question.

  “Not making a decision gets us nowhere.”

  “Well, I just don’t think a decision like that needs to be made. After all, we are colleagues, we are working closely together, we . . . I am still attracted to you. Our involvement on this project will continue for a while. Dispassionately speaking, I think such a decision is unreasonable. And that is not to say that you are unreasonable. Just the decision. Granted, some distance might do us good.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let’s make a decision on the land.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. I think we should. We are on the verge of it. It is all there.”

  He tapped on the desk.

  “We should act,” he said. “You think . . . you have said, and I have agreed, quite consistently over several months, that something must be done. We wouldn’t be here if there was not a decision to be made. How will we use this land? we ask.

  “Well, that is getting ahead of things, being hasty, and perhaps should not be the issue at all. The issue, at this point, is, simply, that a decision needs to be made on this land. So, why don’t we decide, officially, that this land needs to be decided upon?”

  “What?” she said.

  “Decide, mark on this map, that this land needs to be decided upon.”

  “And that is progress?”

  “Yes. What have we done so far? We can’t decide. But something has to be done, something will be done, developers will move, take it over, for good or bad. And since we can’t distinguish between good and bad, yet, let’s decide to be indecisive. It’s so marvelous, I can’t believe that it hadn’t occurred to you earlier!”

  “To me? Oh, no. To you. No, no, Simon, you are the clever one.”

  1:25,000.

  They seem to be mapped minutely. Twenty searching fingers (1,000,000 inches when still) quickly reached their boundaries.

  They needed a bigger map.

  Simon and Renée’s decision of indecision meant several exchanges of title. They could enforce their review more confidently if the government owned as much of the land as possible. If that meant spending an unprintable amount of revenue and removing a few farms, it was excused by the nobility of the exercise. The arc of land would be a rainbow, each band of color serving a different public need—this for industry, that for housing, this for the recreation of putty-limbed children.

  Leonard, more than once, saw Simon coming out of Renée’s office after the hour of five, and Renée coming out of Simon’s. He seemed rather jealous of Simon.

  “I see you two are working late.”

  “Your voice seems shaky, Leonard.”

  “There is nothing shaky about me, Struthers. Perhaps you have some time, Renée, to go through a few things with me?” asked Leonard.

  And Renée, having been through much with Simon, would have to excuse herself.

  “Well, things do not get done at this pace, Renée.”

  “I SEE YOU two are working late.”

  “Have you been crying, Leonard?”

  “I have been concentrating, Struthers. Do you have a moment, Renée, to look something over with me?” asks Leonard.

  And Renée, whose knees are shaky, would have to delay on account of her health.

  “I hope it is nothing serious, Renée. Nothing you might pass on to Struthers.”

  “I SEE YOU are working late, Leonard.”

  “That’s right, Renée.”

  “Well, Simon and I have come to a decision. Simon more than me.”

  “I hope it is the right one.”

  “We have decided that action should cease.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No development should take place.”

  “Have you written the C9?”

  “Simon has.”

  “Is that what he has written? That development should cease?”

  “Not that it should cease. That it should be in abeyance.”

  “Well, I disagree.”

  “But it’s too late.”

  I SUPPOSE SIMON might never have explored love with Renée if he had known the scale of it. There were clues from the beginning that she was fingered, elbow-pressed, browning at the edges; but the real limitations of love cannot be measured by signs like those. Deciding from a wrinkled eye that love has so much time to run is the business of desperate emperors looking into livers to determine the length of their reign. A bit of plumpening, some unexpected joy, will renew that wrinkled eye. Sometimes tragedy, even a lingering illness, can firm the skin just so.

  Love can be measured by a strict rule of inches, which Renée used thus:

  1 “You wear the most elegant suits, Simon.”

  2 “It’s what I love about working here, all the people from such interestin
g backgrounds. Your father was a great politician.”

  3 “You don’t say much, Simon. I feel like I am always the one talking.”

  4 “Perhaps you should wait till I’ve finished brushing my teeth.”

  5 “I sometimes admire your mind, Simon, but . . . are you really saying anything?”

  6 “There’s something to be said for getting things done.” And so on. She may not have reached twenty-five thousand, but she might have. Before they could ever really know each other, before Simon could have any idea, really, who Renée was, he ended the affair abruptly, pfft, like a match dipped in water. She was beginning to voice questions about his character.

  WE MOVE ON. We all move on. Simon moved on. He had never really stopped. Run, run, run, run, run. He chased his travel agent for a while. His accountant. And the unions in his mind . . .

  One sweaty session over the sink brought the image of Eleanor Thomas to mind, and that led to a deplorable interlude. Simon timed his trips in the elevator to coincide with Eleanor’s, and first with a series of looks, then with this series of words— “I love you, Eleanor”—he coerced her into a bony kiss.

  Shock, bites, unspeakable confusion accompanied many of their subsequent meetings. Later she put his hand on her breast, no larger than a Brussels sprout.

  It was the beginning of real complication in the workplace. Simon’s affair with Eleanor was due simply to his curiosity about death—that is the only way to make sense of it. Certainly, he could learn from her. She was fascinating—as profoundly attractive as repellent people can be, as long as they are slim and clean. It was, as I said, just an interlude, some trips in the elevator, but the complications became obvious during a plenary meeting, when the C9 had been submitted. Leonard liked to call an Assistant Deputy Minister from Land and Environment to meetings whenever an important public decision was to be made.

  Eleanor, Leonard, Simon, and Renée were present, along with a few others. Simon scarcely opened his mouth to say the following, “You will notice . . . ,” before Eleanor said, “I don’t understand you,” her voice shivering like an autumn leaf, and Leonard barked, “There are flaws in this report!” while Renée murmured that Simon had written most of it.

  The voices all arose at once, and then Simon began again.