Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

  I can send the work to the shop, but half the time, if I’m riding by Auto Trader, I’ll make the detour and deliver the pictures straight to Tessa Walcott—she enjoys my walking into the shop. They are not the first unit in the plaza, but in Unit 15 between Pro Choice and JK Parts. Tessa believes car honkers should be lined up and shot with a blank.

  I shot a Mazda pickup north of Eglinton and then a snazzy coupe just at Kipling station. My last stop for the day was Alice Stebbins. I took the bus to Jane and Finch. It had been three months but I remembered the lane into the back of an apartment tower. I angled the light off the windscreen to avoid glare. I’d been by once before to take pictures for Alice, but the car hadnt sold and she wanted to blame it on the photo. I knew the car because it was a Matador, the same kind of car Zac Twombly had driven, the one David and I hit a moose with. It was nice to visit the car, I sat in it and remembered my youth. The car had been Alice’s father’s, he was on the force in Los Angeles. When he retired he bought his own cruiser from the LAPD, and they moved to Canada with it. It was an unmarked ghost car. He died one night six years ago when he volunteered to break up a gang fight near here in the Jane and Finch corridor. In the will Alice got the car. What I like about it is the paint. It’s the original deep blue paint, and there’s something satisfying about factory car paint that’s thirty years old. I tapped the fender with my fingernails, it was a hard enamel, like teeth. Alice Stebbins works at a swimming pool and has had no luck selling the car because she’s asking too much. She blames it on the photo I took but the trouble is she’s in love with the car. She formed a bond last winter when the snow was bad and the cruiser pulled her through some slippery roads on her way to the Royal Yacht Club. Developing a bond with a car is a severe condition. And since the spring she’s put a third of her income into the steering and pinion mounts. The shocks, she said, are shot.

  What did you love about this car, I said.

  Alice didnt mind this question. It was as if it was customary. I know I’m being unusual, I said.

  And we both admired this service vehicle, a police cruiser that was in retirement, loyal and game. It was a car from that era when people bought vehicles by the pound.

  I loved this car, she said, for the triangle on the dash by the fuel gauge.

  That’s a good feature.

  A lot of cars dont have it.

  Indicating the side of the car with the gas tank.

  Were things truly built better in the past, with more care, or do we just build things differently. And we mistake difference for care, because to make that difference now, intentionally, we’d have to be careful.

  That’s a dangerous gas tank, I said. There were recalls.

  She said, I dont trust cars with LCD readouts.

  They’ll last longer than anything else on the car. LCDs are good and accurate for forty years.

  I dont trust things that I can’t pick up and turn over.

  Alice Stebbins walked down the back alley while I took the pictures. She’d dyed her hair since I last saw her. She has great posture, I noticed. Then I concentrated on the camera. I could hear Alice singing. The alley was the cement backsides of houses and stores. Then as she came back she quieted to a hum.

  You won’t be offended if I ask you if you sing?

  She looked at me as though I’d said something about her face.

  Because you have a real singing voice.

  Alice Stebbins:Youre being sarcastic.

  No, youre good.

  You dont interrupt someone who is singing to ask them if they sing, especially couching it with the words “you won’t be offended.”

  Me:That puts them on the side of suspicion.

  Youre better than me with words.

  What I’m better at, I said, is unmasking intention.

  I clicked through the pictures but she didnt care.

  Did you know, she said, theyre building cars in modules now? If you dent a quarter panel they’ll just stick on a whole new chunk of car.

  Her brother, who made jute-back carpet in Mississauga, had told her that.

  A car like this, she said, it begs to be driven.

  And with that she fell onto the hood and hugged the car. She was, of course, hugging her father.

  I collected the pictures and showed her the window on the back of the camera. This one, she said. And this one.

  I TOOK THE STREETCAR back to the shop. I gave myself time to think about the term pathetic fallacy. Nell had used it the night before she left. It was what she loved about me, but often it repulsed her too. That I would have a talking chair, and that I’d animate Toby and speak to her in a Toby voice. It is hard not to think the world and its contents are full of human thought. I guess, in a way, rather than reducing the world to the numbers one and zero, I prefer to ramp up the material of the world and infuse it with love and intellect. And yet, I also knew that everything in the apartment I tended to animate, and I realized that if we had a child, I would probably give up that tendency, I would devote the impulse to understanding another human being.

  Auto Trader. I pulled the cable and jumped out at Parliament and King. I dont use the garage door, but instead what Tessa calls the man door.

  Me:Time for a drink?

  Tessa: I’ve got eighteen pages left to set up.

  I can’t go home yet theyre discovering a natural gas field and selling shares in a private offering.

  She asked after Nell and I said she’s left me.

  I’ve had drinks with Tessa and she’s told me her story. I have it here in the notes. Her husband told her once, joking, that theyre incompatible. They dont live together—two houses. They dress the same way but Raoul’s place is a fussy Victorian because, as Tessa puts it, he’s interested in a lot of things.

  She swivelled in her chair and took my knee. She made my knee bend. I’m sorry, she said.

  For a second I had forgotten I’d confessed that Nell had left me.

  Tessa tapped in another line of text with her lively fingers and then stared at the screen as though it were about to tell her something. There are over two thousand listings in each issue of Auto Trader.

  I’m monogamous, Tessa had said once, by default.

  She also said (but I’m not sure if my notes are correct) that lesbians have it figured out.

  THEN I WALKED HOME in the disappointed sun. I realize I have a warm relationship with Tessa, a warmth that began at a weekend ATV and Motocross race school out in Havelock. That was two years ago. I had arrived late and Lars was already there, photographing the moving parts of machines. Tessa’s husband was introducing her to people, and she was kissing them in greeting. When she saw me she was excited and leaned in for a fondness kiss. She put her arm around my neck to kiss me. The heat from her neck and the opening of her shirt, she was wearing one of those western shirts with the pearly clasp buttons. And instead of kissing on the side of the cheek, we kissed on the mouth. It was an alarming kiss, or a feeling ambushed me. It reminded me of my first good kiss, from the girl I’d had a crush on in high school. Maggie Pettipaw. She had lived in the Bean, a series of multicoloured apartments on the hill above where I grew up. Maggie is probably part Micmac. But one New Year’s Eve at midnight, in a party at David Twombly’s house, Maggie Pettipaw, who was someone else’s girlfriend, walked over from the stereo and gave me a kiss on the lips. Wonderful.

  Since meeting Nell I’ve reserved lip kisses for her. If I met you and wanted to welcome you I’d give you a hug or shake your hand. No kisses. And thinking of Nell, of the shape of her happy mouth, it broke me up a little. Then in a store window I saw the little tops Nell favours. Tan, flared pants. In winter she wears a fake fur hat—white—that makes her look like she’s ice-skating. She puts a product in her long black hair that creates a shine, like an animal’s pelt, and the edges feather up like eyelashes. She’s confident, and can walk into a restaurant and eat by herself, or have a drink in a bar and be left alone. I noticed these things during the first few months when
we played around, before we moved in together.

  It took an hour to get home and I let the streetcar trams and taxis overtake me as I walked. Everyone should have a thinking place. Here in Toronto I dont yearn for parks or nature. I like visiting the wastelands of ill-advised city planners. There’s something amusing about disaster and neglect. That this city will never be right because they buried the subway line under University rather than Spadina or Bathurst. The crink of political indecision is on every map of the underground. There is no centre to Toronto, you can’t concentrate a rally if your blood runs to protest. All the buildings near the perimeter sit lightly as if to say we are not here long, especially if anything tax-wise happens to piss us off.

  They were tearing down Regent Park, which is the area of town where Auto Trader is located. It was where Lars had lived. The excavations made me think of the wreck of a car David’s father had been in. I’d known that car from youth, he’d had it for twenty years. A smart, white European vehicle. Indicating off the arterial road while a bunch of the Hurleys had reeled over a rise in a van. It was five oclock, the sun setting behind Arthur Twombly. Happy, he made the turn into Corner Brook. Arthur was leaning towards the driver side window when his skull cracked through his ears. He felt the movement of the trunk of his body as if it was being stacked into a filing cabinet. His arms elongated. His sternum shifted back twelve feet and the crack roared like a jet plane through his eyes. And then the shell of his body whipped back to follow his chest. Now the whump of the cage of the car and he had become a part of the car. He understood composite materials. It struck him that all this time he had never known he was the car. This division was like a Matisse painting, lines around things, but instead it was Cézanne. Cézanne was right, he thought, and then he climbed into a soft air mattress and sank deep into it face-first and became part of the mattress too. That was something. Airbag powder in his nostrils. He had looked himself up at ratemyprofessor.com and there were a lot of postings, most of them rated him hot and an excellent communicator. Arthur Twombly had changed lives.

  I GOT BACK to Roncesvalles but the police had cordoned off the sidewalk around the apartment building. I sat in the coffee shop across the street and stared at the cuba sí billboard. Then a flash and shower of orange from a welder’s torch.

  This kind of life has been going on now for three years, since I moved to Toronto and chose this photography work. You dont need me to tell you that when you leave an environment, it changes in ways that you dont change. And so, the similarity I had with both David and my wife was beginning to alter. I had spoken to Nell about this a total of three times. I have the notes.

  Time one: Oh dont be silly we’re the same, Gabe, we’re immutable we do not change not in any intrinsic way.

  Time two: I love what you are. (Pause) What are you?

  Time three Nell brought it up. She said, Do you think we’re different? Her feet moving in the sheets, as if she’s running. Are we getting any different?

  TEN

  THERE WAS A CONCUSSION of air. It powdered itself through the gaps between the buttons of my shirt. Then the three tall windows of the café crinkled and shone and collapsed in a shower of wet ice. A wall of boom forced its way in, a buckling gulf of heat and wind. It was a bank of startled atmosphere in the city that made the glass tinkle, but then I saw it wasnt glass at all making the sound, but the pressure had blown jars of coffee beans from their shelves, coffee beans were alive on the floor. The hot buttons pressed into my chest and then the pelting of hard, dry coffee beans. I exhaled with the force of it. Then the light, the brightest light that sheered off my body, it burned away the bridge of my nose and the orbital cavity and I touched my face and was surprised to feel that I was whole. I was made of cold light. I thrust my hands out to shield my eyes but my hands vanished in the intensity.

  The stripped building across the street, the top half shuddering with mad flame that peeled up the brick and then a white ball leapt into the low clouds and was gone, as there was nothing to eat but the tar on the pebbled roof and the roof was consumed. There was a sound, too, that felt like it was living in the top of my ears. A torn roof was on fire, the windows, my windows, busted out and a dance of delighted light on all the bald ceilings.

  Here then, Nell, was the third bad thing.

  THEY GAVE ME A HOTEL at the Days Inn. I lay on the bed and then felt bad being inactive so I stared out the window at a billboard on the Queensway advertising an eye-gaze system. Arthur Twombly, if he ever hauled himself out of his coma, would have this system. IKW had sponsored the billboard, their initials in the corner.

  The police suggested I return to the apartment at four the next afternoon. But the foundations kept breaking into fire and three trucks doused the embers. You’ll have to wait another day. They dumped seventeen hundred gallons of water on the building, they have a meter on the hoses. I got to talking to one of the firemen. He had a black eye. The temperature had reached a peak of two thousand degrees, he said, I dont know in what scale. I dont know what kelvin is, but maybe it was in kelvin. It was like the eyelid of a waking volcano. We werent allowed to search through the charred debris. When I say we I mean myself and Irene Loudermilk. Irene rents the apartment below Nell and me. Rented.

  So the following day I walked up Roncesvalles to a stain of brown on the sidewalk. This, a good two blocks from the apartment. Like tracking sign from a wounded animal. Then firemen in their tan coats and trousers, green reflector tape, their names on the tails of their coats, as if their mothers had sewed them on. One man, with the visor on his red helmet pulled up, was applying torque to a large silver wrench on top of a hydrant, like something giants use to open preserves. Six fire trucks, then five more further up the street. They are waiting to see if the building will crack open again. The hull of the building, all three storeys, a scorched shipwreck pulled out of the sea and left to drip. The landlord was talking to the firemen, it was the first time I’d seen him since Nell and I moved in and signed the lease. He had become old. Or maybe it was the shock of his expired real estate. He was alarmed at the thought of loss of life, which I found touching. They were talking next to one little white fire truck, an older model. They’d sent that too. In fact it looked like the brains behind the brawnier fire trucks. Six firemen were at the door next to ours, breaking in delicately. Rummaging a hackapick through the glass door, trying to release a hapse. The slow movement of firemen. It’s as if they know they couldnt possibly keep up with the friskiness of fire. We were to have ten minutes to search for personal articles, said a policeman in a flak jacket and black shirt. He was rerouting pedestrian traffic. He was one of two officers at the Bloor and Dundas intersection, senior men, called in to perform an old task, of directing traffic. The flourish of their white hands, movement at their elbows. They enjoy this, like riding a horse.

  It was safe, engineers had walked through it. We were asked to wear forensic garbage bags on our feet. Myself and Irene Loudermilk. We had a laugh at the bags. Then I walked up behind her and I felt the heat still in the walls. I peered into the monochrome darkness of her flat. It felt like a Russian submarine. I watched her in there with her hands behind her head, tallying, like she was surrendering to the blank charring forces around her. She did not notice me. Then I took the stairs up to the sky. Our apartment was no longer an apartment. There was a lot of light from above. The fire had turned our apartment into a convertible.

  Cadaver dogs had found a dry skull in the back room. A child’s skull.

  Me:There were no children in the apartment.

  It was in your apartment, an investigator said. As if he hadnt heard me. Tone too. I can’t imagine accusing a stranger of anything.

  But even as I said it I doubted it. Perhaps we had children, or perhaps one stowed away. It’s true that I’m often surprised to realize that ten years have gone by, and I’m no longer twenty-five. I knew that I wanted a child and that Nell had been stout in saying she’d had one child and she was not interested in going
through that again. Secretly, or in my own secret manner, I knew I was trying to make her pregnant. Perhaps this was proof, this skull.

  My ordinary unconnected laptop. A plate of melted circuit board. The books on the bookshelf torched. Toby’s face singed off. I picked him up, savaged. Something had melted in his eye, it gave him a mad look. I stood at my desk and stroked the charcoal laminate, the roofless study where I took my notes and read my books. I liked this room and now it all had been reduced to carbonized shells of a blind and deaf material. I opened a drawer for a pair of scissors. And there was Nell’s green diary. Every page blackened. The scissor handles had melted but they still worked and I shanked off Toby’s burnt fur. I cut him down to the nub and stuck him under my arm like a shorn poodle and waded through the shale of the hallway. It sounded like loose china. It felt like I was walking through a midden at a rich archaeological dig.

  A large flat section of the roof had fallen on our bed and flattened the melted foam of our queen mattress. The blackened ridges of heavy burning. Imagine if we were under that. The roof had metal brackets. Then I saw a faint trace of beach and that patented blue sea.

  It was the CUBA SÍ billboard.

  Cuba had crushed us in bed.