The crawl space opened into a wider room, split in the middle by ductwork and electrical conduit. An old mattress lay across the ceiling beams, a tangled sleeping bag on top. A two-by-eight plank sat across a pair of cinder blocks holding a little lamp and some books. Balled-up tissue paper, an overflowed ashtray. Crumpled white paper. She picked up one of the paper lumps and unfolded it: a pharmacy bag. Dozens of pharmacy bags with addresses from Edmonton, Vancouver, Red Deer. Tylenol 3s and codeine, Percocet, lorazepam.
A metal panel with a speaker grill hung on the wall: an apartment lobby door buzzer, pulled out and brought up here, bolted crookedly into a beam. Wires ran into it from an opened conduit. A row of white buttons, each with a black dial-punched label:
MEZZ
KITCHEN
KOOP
LOOCH
OFFICE
BALLROOM
BEDROOM
She pressed ‘Mezz’ and held the button, listening to the nothing that came over the speaker. She pressed ‘Office.’ But there was no electricity to bridge her across the wires down to the space underneath. No crackle or static, no linked-up distance.
‘So this is where you were, all those nights we couldn’t find you.’
She shone the flashlight under the plank shelf and saw a set of keys and a plastic zip-lock bag. It was full of cash: wrinkled $20 bills, almost an inch thick. She took the keys and the money and crawled around to orient herself back toward the ladder.
‘Well,’ she said, and she couldn’t finish the sentence. She sat there holding the keys and money and her breath caught and she choked a bit.
‘Well, I’m in your nest here,’ she said, ‘and I want to say exactly the perfect thing that will, I don’t know, I don’t know what.
‘I don’t know, if you walked through the door, if I’d have anything to say.’
Then it was dark: complete black dark all around her. The flashlight was in her hand and she flicked the button up and down but no light came back. She shook it. A blue afterimage of the room’s shape in the white flashlight beam hung in her eyes for a moment like soap film on a window and then slid slowly away. Her breath was loud in the small space. She breathed loudly in the thick blackness and listened carefully around the sides of her breathing to make sure it was the only sound.
Her breath caught and she thought she’d panic but instead she laughed. She laughed and it surprised her because it should have been frightening but fuck him anyway, right?
‘Fuck you anyway,’ she said in the dark.
She sat there in the dark, and that’s how he felt after all, alone up here. Sure, he had his lamp and the electricity worked, but when he nodded off up here it was like this: perfect thick smothering darkness. Nodding off listening to the other people in the building out of his tiny mesh speaker. This was what it was like to be him at his bottom-barrel worst, and she was glad she’d driven all the way up here and glad the Audi slid off the road and glad she was stuck for the night, glad for all of it, to feel like him at his worst.
She thought about a time she’d been looking for him. She’d been living there for four months and the lake finally thawed out. Early April? She stood out on the lakeshore and saw a fish jump out of the water. A walleye. She assumed it was a walleye. Someone had told her that the lake was so full of walleye that they’d called it ‘Two Reel Lake.’ Something about fishermen needing to bring an extra reel, for all the fish they’d be catching. Alex had probably told her.
She got excited. Because she’d always assumed it was just another load of bullshit. ‘Bring your extra fishing reel, sucker.’ That’s what she’d always assumed, those first four months while the lake was still frozen.
It was a really beautiful night – near sunset and the lake was quiet, and the fish jumped out and glittered in the sun like it was a postcard.
She ran inside to find him. She wanted to tell him about seeing that fish. To share her excitement with him.
‘But I couldn’t find you,’ she said out loud. ‘I mean, of course I couldn’t. When could anybody ever find you, if they needed to? And I guess this is where you were.’
She sat in the dark holding the flashlight.
‘It probably wasn’t this cold though,’ said Audrey.
She put the bag of cash into the pocket of her jeans. She put the dead flashlight in her other pocket. Crouched over these full pockets pressed into the tops of her thighs.
Walk on your hands and feet, Audrey. Feel for those ceiling beams with your hands. Take them one at a time and only go ahead when you’ve found the next one. Each time you reach forward you’re going to feel for the top of that ladder. It will probably be on the fifth or sixth beam.
She breathed carefully in the dark, then reached forward with an open palm for the first ceiling beam.
9
DECEMBER 2005
On the third morning at the Crash Palace, she lay under the pheasant-pattern sleeping bag and watched the plaster ceiling turn grey and then white in the slow morning. Stayed in the sleeping bag as long as she could stand the growing wet heat before finally standing up.
Outside, the world was still brilliant white with snow, the road still undisturbed by any snowplow. Footprints ran all around the snow outside, from the front door down to the beach, criss-crossing, running around, doubling back, to the outbuildings, right out onto the lake top. The snow dug up and rolled around in, snow-angeled, trenched and piled, balled-up into intermittent snow figures, some of them wearing black leather jackets or checkered flannel lumberjack coats. Audrey stared out at the snow and the white glare of the just-risen sun hurt her eyes. She pulled on her pants and carried her bag down the hall to the bathroom, to brush her teeth and take a shower.
She opened the door and found a young man with a shaved head, mismatched earrings in off-centre parts of his ear cartilage, sitting on the tiled floor with his arms wrapped around his knees, crying. He sat and cried wetly, his nose running, breathing in fits and starts, and didn’t look up when she came into the room.
Audrey stood there for a minute, thinking about whether she should stay or go, and then he looked up and saw her. His breathing caught and his eyes were panicked and he choked trying to catch his breath.
She put down her bag and knelt down across from him. ‘Hey. Hey, it’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’
‘I … I … I can’t … I can’t …’ he wheezed and sniffled. He probably wasn’t more than nineteen, thought Audrey. His eyes were red and crusted around the edges and his nose looked raw and painful.
‘Take it easy. Take some deep breaths.’
The door opened and a girl in a snowboard hoodie and sweatpants poked her head in. ‘Nick! Oh my god, I looked all over for you. Nick, come on, come back to bed.’
Audrey grabbed her bag and stood up.
‘Nick, come on, get yourself together. You just need a little sleep. Just a little sleep and you’ll be okay.’
‘I can’t … I can’t …’
Audrey squeezed back out the door. She went downstairs to the third floor and showered in the empty bathroom there.
She thought she’d slept in, but downstairs the mezzanine was still empty except for Koop unpacking his bar. She took one of the coffee percolators to the kitchen and filled the tank with cold water out of the sink. Carried the heavy pot back slowly, careful not to let any water slosh out the top.
In the kitchen, she flipped up the icemaker lid and reached in with a steel scoop. Filled an empty bucket with fresh-made ice cubes. The scoop was moist from the thick air in the lobby and grew white with crystals in the cold confines of the icemaker bottom. She dug it through the ice and cubes stuck to the damp steel like children’s tongues.
‘How come no one pays for anything?’ she asked Koop.
Koop had cartons of salt and ground black pepper and shook them out with either hand onto a dinner plate. He jostled the plate back and forth to blend the salt and pepper together.
‘Huh?’ he asked eventually.
‘No one pays for any drinks.’
He ran a lime around the lip of a glass and twisted it in the salt and pepper to rim the edge. ‘It’s like a … a what-do-you-call-it. An all-inclusive.’
‘An all-inclusive,’ she said.
People came slowly down the stairs and she shook Tabasco and Worcestershire sauces into the salt-and-peppered glasses. Koop lift-lower poured vodka and Clamato juice.
They drank all the coffee and she made more.
§
‘Audrey Audrey Audrey,’ said Alex Main, walking up to the bar while she poured ice into a cooler tub. ‘Audrey, you’re killing me. They’re playing cards upstairs. Go play cards. They’ve got one of the TVs hooked up on, I think, the third floor, they’re playing video games. Go outside and play in the snow, when was the last time you played in the snow, Audrey Cole?’
‘I haven’t played in the snow since I was a kid, Alex,’ said Audrey.
‘See, that’s the whole point. Get a drink, go play in the snow. You’re up here to get away. You’re on a retreat. A vacation. You and everybody else, you’ve left everything behind. There’s nothing to worry about, all the booze you can drink, so just relax. Just relax, Audrey.’
She looked past him, out the window. A group had built snow forts, walls of packed snow several feet high, facing each other forty yards apart on the wide slope down toward the lake. They knelt behind the snow, packing snowballs together.
‘Why is any of this even here?’ she asked.
He cocked an eyebrow at her. Turned around to look at the window with her. People were throwing snowballs at each other behind packed walls of snow. In the middle of the stretch between the two forts, someone was lying on their back, staring up at the sky, smoking while snowballs whizzed by overhead.
‘You ought to come out when we have a real party, Audrey Cole. I mean, nothing against Wrists and the band. Rodney Levermann is a goddamn legend and we are happy to put him on, and obviously there’s a crowd for it. But you ought to come when we have a real party in the summer. We have a DJ up in the ballroom and another downstairs on the main floor and I like to set up a PA out on the beach for a party out there. We’ll have four hundred people up here. The tents wrap the whole beach. And we will go four days straight, everyone dancing twenty-four hours a day, non-stop. You ought to see that, Audrey Cole.’
She looked over at him. He was watching the snowballs fly overtop the smoker lying in the snow. He was older than she’d first thought. Maybe. It was hard to tell. He might have been Dick’s age and he might have been Wrists’ age. But he wasn’t as young as she’d thought at first.
She watched him and he stayed looking out the window.
‘I guess there’s two answers, Audrey Cole.’
‘Two answers.’
‘The first answer is, my great-great-grandfather saw a map on a wall in Toronto. A long time ago. Alberta isn’t a place yet. He sees a map on a wall that purports to show where the Canadian Pacific Railroad is going to run through.’
‘The Canadian Pacific Railroad.’
‘A long time ago, I said. He sees this map and has visions of the opportunities such a thing would bring about, for a man with the means to capitalize on the knowledge. And being a man of means, he heads out west to acquire just the right piece of land to start to build the amenities that all of those soon-to-be-arriving railroad passengers would surely desire.’
‘But the railroad runs …’
‘In the family folklore, it is still a matter of debate whether the ultimate route changed in the intervening time or whether the old man just didn’t know how to read a map.’
A snowball landed a foot from the smoker’s head. They did not flinch.
‘What’s the other answer?’
Wrists walked up to the bar. He looked at the two of them. Then turned around to have a look at whatever they were both staring at through the window. Audrey pulled the cap off a beer for him.
‘Well, Alex,’ he asked, ‘how about we take everything upstairs to the ballroom? Play on the stage tonight?’
Alex Main thought about this for a while, then turned to Koop. ‘Koop, what do you figure? Want to set up upstairs tonight?’
‘Well, it sure is a lot of trouble moving all this shit up and down the stairs twice a day when there’s a fully functioning bar up there.’
‘We do have the new PA all wired up there,’ said Alex, scratching his chin. ‘It’ll be good to hear it in action.’
Koop stood behind the bar in the ballroom and turned on the lights. The black cylindrical theatre lights pointing at the stage came up gradually, the bulbs taking time to heat up. Halogens hanging above the bar dropped circular spotlights onto the counter. There were lights set into the glass shelves behind the bar that lit the bottles from below, casting shadows in the colours of the liquors inside: honey brown, melon green, cherry red, smoky orange. Lights diffused behind etched glass shades hung over the tables and sat in wall sconces. They shone on the black leather banquettes and stool cushions, on the long black wood bar counter, on the black-lacquered stage floorboards. A spotlight up in the rafters pointing at the big mirror ball made spots of light turn in a slow season around the room’s hemisphere. Koop lit little tea-light candles and set them in rocks glasses on the bar top. He set a couple of them on either side of a little plastic hula girl who bobbled on her spring stand when he picked up and set down bottles.
The Lever Men moved their gear gradually up the stairs, a drum and amplifier at a time, and Koop and Audrey relocated the bar in cardboard boxes.
‘Rodney,’ said Wrists from the stage, ‘get up here, let’s get you set up and checked.’
Rodney sat at the bar with a glass of whisky at the end of his arm, staring at the stage. The skin in his face was white and damp and his eyes stared through a film into nothing in particular.
‘Wrists is looking for you,’ she said.
‘Rodney, get up here and give us some guitar volume,’ said Wrists. Rodney set the glass down on the bar, a few fingers of whisky still inside, and slid off the counter. Took a few steps toward the stage, then turned around to pick up the glass again.
Later in the day, when the sun went down and the crowd moved up into the ballroom, they couldn’t find him. The crowd filled the space with noise and heat, made the trapped air in the big space humid and full of chatter. They smoked the air blue and peppery.
‘Audrey, have you seen Rodney?’ asked Wrists. She shook her head.
Koop scooped ice out of his well into steel shakers. Poured and shook, strained and poured. He slid orange wedges and cherries onto toothpicks and laid them over glass tops.
‘Audrey,’ said Hector.
‘I haven’t seen him, Hector.’
She walked through the crowd looking at pairs and crowds and couldn’t find him in a conversation. People sunk in the banquette seats over their drinks and he wasn’t around any tables. In the back corner, men cut white powder on a tabletop with the edge of a credit card and he wasn’t one of them.
She poked her head in the men’s room. The big man with the black leather vest stood at the sink beside a skinny kid in a rock-band T-shirt. The kid’s eyes were glassy and his nose was bright red and running. The man in the black leather vest glared at Audrey and she shut the door again quickly.
Audrey was walking through the ballroom looking at each table for Rodney when the lights went out.
The lights went out and the room plunged into dark. For a second everything was quiet, as a hundred people stopped talking all at once in the sudden darkness, then the black room erupted. Everyone talking, gasping, a few people shouting. The ballroom was pitch-black, cut off from the moonlight by thick walls, the deep black heart of the building, and Audrey stood frozen like a bag had been dropped over her head.
A few seconds passed and then lights appeared. People lit their cigarette lighters and held them over their heads. On the bar at the far end of the room, Koop’s little tea lights flickered, then moved and
floated upward, as people at the bar picked them up, raised them to try and extend the range of their glow.
From the stage Wrists shouted as loudly as he could, ‘Hey, quiet, everyone. Quiet for a second.’
The crowd rumbled and muttered and tittered.
‘Koop, I think you blew a breaker,’ shouted Dick Move.
‘I’m on it,’ yelled Koop, his voice moving across the ballroom. ‘Everybody stay put and don’t hurt yourselves.’
Audrey walked carefully through the crowd, between the dark lumps of people without enough light for faces. People walked slowly, following the red cherries on their cigarettes like the phosphorescent lumps at the end of antennae on the kind of deep-deep-sea fish that sunlight never reaches.
‘We’re on it, everyone,’ yelled Koop. ‘No need to panic.’
‘Everybody stay put and we’ll have the lights back on in no time,’ shouted Dick.
She walked carefully through the crowd, feeling for chairs, high tables, people. She found the ballroom doors and stepped through them. Outside on the second-floor balcony, white moonlight streamed through the windows, bright after the darkness inside, bright enough to see. She stepped over a couple sitting on the floor of the open elevator, their shirts open, arms wrapped around necks kissing, and neither of them was Rodney.
A tall, skinny man leaned on the brass bannister at the top of the stairs, looking down into the open moon-silver mezzanine. He looked over at her when she came near, and nodded, recognizing her in the moonlight.
‘You’re this Audrey Cole who’s been looking after them the last few weeks,’ he said.
He was a rail-thin man with an old, gaunt face, wearing a wide black cowboy hat. Long silver hair that was tied into a ponytail under the hat brim. The white full moon lit him up on the balcony and she could see roses stitched in silver thread into the shoulders of the old leather jacket he wore in spite of the heat.
The Crash Palace Page 18
