Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

  Places like Whitby and Kingston, I said. Who knew they were the same size as St John’s.

  I slept with a married woman once, David said. She was from Kingston. The husband was big. One time he took my skull in his hand. He pressed it and said:What are you doing to my wife?

  David gripped his hand around a skull of air.

  Me:What were you doing.

  I was thinking about how much you’d disapprove of that comment.

  I’m lonely and I’m thinking about Nell.

  I’ll tell you your problem, Gabe. You think everything can be told. You think you know everything, every thought Nell has. The secret life and it’s not always devious. Sometimes you get caught in things that are impossible to find words for.

  She’s caught up in an impossible thing.

  That’s what she’s doing.

  I wanted to take a ceramic insulator and bash him in the temple. Then I breathed deep and tried to forget about it. I adjusted the stock-car rearview mirror to get correct and very wide angles. It was encouraging me to enjoy myself and so I rolled down my own window and let the empty heat of the early summer pummel us. But now I had to think of Nell caught up in an impossible thing. I sank the gas pedal and we throttled our way out of the bottleneck of the Lake Ontario basin and zipped along the grey fields of tarmac past the very modern power lines on towers that looked like columns of newsprint. We overtook transport trucks. How invigorating, David said, staring up, like we’re involved in a greater economy, a taller scale.

  There was that night when she did not come home. A phone call from a man I did not know. Your girlfriend has to get out, the voice said.

  Girlfriend, I said. And then thought of Nell. And then the realization Nell was my girlfriend. It was the same realization I had one night hearing David talk about Sok Hoon. And understanding she was leaving him, that she wasnt his wife any longer.

  I took a cab over to Bloor and Bedford and the cab driver did not know the address. It is hard to think in a taxi, or the thoughts are more mean-spirited than the thoughts you have on a streetcar. I said wait and realized I had never asked a taxi to wait before. The numbers were erratic, as though the city planners panicked when they came to this neck of town and just threw the jumbled numbers from a passing loader. It was a penthouse off Bloor Street. The disarray quickly turned neat and gentrified. A doorman, a fountain in the foyer. I took an elevator up to the top floor and did not knock but stepped in. There were plush white carpets and two grand pianos. One entire wall just glass overlooking the city. There were photographs of Castro and Churchill. In a green library three men were playing cards. They were in dinner jackets, but there was a staleness of cigarettes in their clothes, a wilted boutonniere. I’ve come for Nell, I said. But the men were exhausted, they looked like they’d been playing straight through several nights. They ignored me. In a deeper room, a long white couch and Nell’s bare legs. She was passed out. It looked like the couch had come with Nell. She was barefoot and I did not want to look for her shoes. They were where the couch used to live. Which one of you called, I said. But the men couldnt hear me. I felt like I was entering a stranger’s dream and could not communicate. There was a chunk of parmesan the size of a cinder block. A knife. A birthday cake with one piece removed. Then a man of about fifty came out of a bedroom wearing a tuxedo shirt. He had his thumb in a health prevention book. He said directly to me, Youre a lucky man. I was prepared to swing at his face but he looked slightly familiar and not at all mean. The fact came to me, some kind of verdict, that Nell had been on a bender and had pushed these men past what they were capable of or cared about. They just wanted to play cards now and eat cheese and read about how apricot pits can prevent cancer. I had been lucky to get a phone call. It was a call meant to get rid of a difficulty. The night had been complicated and intense but now, at eight in the morning, they all wanted to calm down and revert to the simple gear. I took Nell by an arm and bent her over my shoulder. I’ll get the door, the man with the book said. I did a fireman’s carry down the elevator and into the cab. She slept for five hours. When she came round she said Richard Text had been in town. I described the men and the one who was fifty sounded like Richard Text. I asked if he liked cheese and she said just about as much as an average person. She said she felt okay, that nothing bad had happened, it just looked bad. But it shook me.

  Remembering that made me exhale and I waggled my head. I’m not good at waggling, there’s a hard ball in my head that rattles, like when you shake a can of spray paint. It hurts. It made me want to lead a simple life. Those men. The simple gear. I’d had enough. You should have kids in your twenties. When youre older you can’t withstand the same torment. God had I ever gambled in life? And too late now. David was leaning against the door post, he was feeling the vibration of the car, cutting out the middleman of the ear. The weather had turned hot and then there was a short gallop of rain that pelted the window so hard it was like looking through grease. Some music is like that, like trying to read vaseline. Then the sun again. An hour later the radio began to weaken. Battery dying on us. I slowed down. Just check under the hood, I said.

  Dave looked and called me out. I dont know what to look for, he said.

  I saw it. The alternator had cracked through the casing. I am my father’s son and I know about the integrity of structure.

  We veered into Whitby and followed signs for Nick’s Salvage. I parked where we wouldnt put a hole in a tire, and we walked into the busy yard of flattened, rusted wrecks and men peering for parts. David found a blasted Chevy with a newish alternator. I stood behind him, just breathing deep and slow.

  David:You got a wrench.

  We made a paper copy of where the mounts were and I walked back to the Matador with the paper to compare it to ours. Our car shone with objects—it looked like a piñata. The alternator matched, so I fetched the adjustable wrench my father had given me. It was made in West Germany. It has my father’s initials stamped on it, from when he worked in the Hawthorn Leslie shipyard of Newcastle.

  Seeing David in the distance, in this field of ruined commerce.

  David went at it. He hammered at the crankcase like you bang a lid on a jar of new pickles. When we get to Montreal, he said, I need to get glasses.

  You require glasses.

  I keep trying to look around something.

  You need an optometrist.

  What I need is an ophthalmologist. But a new pair of glasses would help.

  He joggled off the alternator and we walked up to the salvage yard office swinging it.

  David:You got something like this but in better condition?

  What we got is what we got.

  Better than what we’re bringing you here?

  Put that thing on the waste paper if you dont mind.

  David had landed it right on the wood counter. He picked it up and held it like a shot putter.

  Go take a look, the man said.

  What if I just chucked our old one at you.

  The man gave Dave a cold stare.

  Well then we won’t bother you.

  And we walked out with the alternator.

  Me: So what is it about not paying.

  David:The guy just pissed me off. Now you know how to slot one of these in?

  Not without a belt winch.

  We drove into Whitby and received directions to a back-yard mechanic named Tyrone Gill. His shop had a sign that read My Autobody Experience. Tyrone Gill was training a black puppy to retrieve a goose wing. He had the wing tied onto forty feet of twine. He had nothing to do. He stared at the car. That’s about the ugliest car I’ve seen come in here. Which made me want to drive it over his face. But when in Whitby, do as the English do. We let him look under the hood. It’ll take an hour, Tyrone said.

  David:You mean it’ll take an hour or youre charging an hour.

  It’s a unit of work, he said.

  We ate in a three-star place Tyrone recommended out of spite in a mall across the road. Dave opened hi
s pebble and retrieved the restaurant review that hung in the ether outside the restaurant. He said the review was not good. Well I’m hungry, I said.

  There was a sign below the regular menu that advertised three different sizes of gravy. A man dressed in new leather and boots of bright yellow. He too had detoured off the main route. Biker gear, ribbed leather that had a bubble of air at his lower back. Like he’s wearing a scuba suit that doesnt fit him. David was tapping his black card nervously.

  I’ve never seen, he said, a more gormless group in my life.

  You havent left the city much.

  It’s true I’ve lived in cities.

  The meal and Tyrone’s fee and the filling up of the gas tank made me aware of how quickly the road erodes money. And I wasnt prepared to embark on a cycle of theft. I tolerated paying for things, though I admired David’s impatience and his decision at times to walk out of a store holding an item he couldnt be bothered to wait and pay for. When I was a boy my father brought home a second-hand pool table and the cues needed new tips. I went into a sports store and removed the tips from two cues in a rack. When my father noticed he asked where I got the cue tips. I told him. That’s odd, he said. I looked all over town for cue tips, and you can’t get them except if you buy the whole cue. No, I said. You can get them downtown. He thought about that. He said, Gabe we should get a couple more, for when these ones wear out. We should get them now because theyre hard to get. Let’s take the car down now and get them.

  I was in the porch, putting on my shoes, my father waiting at the open door. And I told him, I told him I’d stolen the cue tips. And he pushed the tops of his fingers into his front pockets. He knew I had. And there passed between us a sense of shame but also respect. He wasnt going to give me a lecture about this. He knew I’d learned something, a transference of moral conduct had occurred. And I have maintained that stance, often as a default mode, so that when I see someone like Dave in action, it shocks me, a bell rings in my spine.

  I had built up a year’s buffer of money, but now I was eating into it. I was down to nine months. That joyful feeling of a newly printed balance was now replaced with alarm. I didnt mention this to David, for David was made of money and he hardly spoke of it. Although it came to me that he’d mentioned he was on the verge of financial collapse. It’s true that we can feel very rich and very poor at the same time.

  We kept driving. We had averaged, on this our first day, about twenty miles an hour. We may as well have been travelling by horse. I shoved a flattened towel behind my back and hammered the gas. We passed a barn that was rusty red and beside it, a billboard the same size of bright red and yellow.

  We could save money, David said, if we had a tent.

  Since when have you needed to save money.

  I’ve got money because I save money.

  In Montreal we’ll stay with Lars Pony.

  David thought about that. I could see he wasnt sure if Lars was the type of person he wanted to spend time with. How about Sok Hoon and Allegra, he said.

  Allegra.

  David stated this without pleasure.

  Who’s Allegra.

  She’s a friend of my ex-wife’s.

  I was trying to put the name Allegra to something I knew, something about Montreal. And then I remembered. She isnt the Allegra, I said, from the radio. She isnt Allegra Campinghorst.

  I didnt tell you about Allegra?

  I’m with Lars, I said. Saying this made me feel pure. I was excited by my early infatuation. It wasnt just David who had written her those letters. I’d put myself into them.

  Elsewhere, he said. In New Brunswick are we on our own.

  My god are we ever going to get out of Ontario.

  LEAVING THE PROVINCE made me think of how I’d come to it, how I’d left Newfoundland rather hopeless, or, better, that possibilities in Newfoundland had been rammed up against a wall and I should nudge my craft around and try elsewhere. Sometimes a stock forms a head and shoulders and is on the way down, and that’s how my fortunes looked. I’d spent time touring the storage facilities for natural gas and I had grown tired of commercialism and energy and hoarding. It was the immigrant’s impulse, and while I flew to Toronto and accepted the IKW windfall that managed to keep the wolf fed behind the Niagara Escarpment, an ember blurred to life and I became happy again. I felt as if I were made of kindling and some creature had bent down and blown life into my wooden bones. If I had a proper Global Positioning System, and if I had tagged Nell with a chip, I knew I’d find her in a rented car zooming south. She would have gone to Richard Text, not Vegas. I had been mean and she had thought to herself a safe thought. A safe haven. She was on the phone to Richard saying that he understood her. And what I’d said to her, the badness of it, would have made her want some consolation. Or maybe she flew for it’s a long way to New Mexico. She’d have driven to Santa Fe from the airport in Albuquerque, passed fences with tires hung on them. keep out brushed on in sloppy white paint. The hills dotted with sage green bushes like the coat of a leopard. The road signs flared up as she hit a rise, the sun behind her. She was driving like we were driving. It is hard to imagine that for thousands of years we did not drive. She ate in a café next to a Bail Bonds and ended up on a road that visits a corrections facility. The glass in her watch fell out on the plane, because of the altitude. At least that’s what happened at her wedding. It’s all there in the charred pages of her green journal. Nell ordered a rice milk drink with ice. A tuna taco. A sign near the jail: DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS, PRISONERS NEARBY.

  I adjusted the stock-car mirror again. When Nell first moved to Santa Fe, she was startled when the rear-view mirror fell off the windshield. Because of the heat. But it was commonplace, no one was surprised.

  She had been in Santa Fe for five months and then a small wedding. They had to get married if she was to stay in the United States. They were clear on the fact that Richard was gay and that they would have an arrangement within that marriage. Nell spent the day before the wedding walking around Santa Fe, staring at roofs and walls and entering the foyers of museums. Then they drove out to Galisteo and over to Madrid for a lunch like this. A dirt road. They saw a tornado and a piece of tumbleweed smack up against a wire fence. Then to the wedding rehearsal. They stood under cottonwood trees. Richard’s best man flew in from London. Algren Leonard. Algren doesnt use the tube, it says here in the diary. He wore a pale short-sleeved shirt and slacks and light socks and brown shoes. Sunglasses. Posh hand gestures. He sat down to talk to Nell. They have two houses, he and his wife. Where is she. She’s the one with the broken arm. One house in Notting Hill, the other about twenty-five minutes southwest. Algren mentioned the latter first, and did not say southwest of what. His teeth were slightly long. He’s aghast at the British cops acting like LA cops.

  Nell’s aunt out there in a floral top. Both her aunt and uncle were there. They stood at a wire fence trying to feed a llama some greens. Her aunt dyes her hair. Has laryngitis. It’s the air, she said. Her aunt wanted the wedding in Burlington. She had brought dried silver dollars she’d picked from Nell’s mother’s garden. She had rung on the bell and asked the new owners if she could. The peeled silver dollars on the desk where they signed the register. When Nell had gone to take care of her parents’ house she came home and a neighbour said he was so sorry. They knew something was wrong because no one had closed the curtains.

  Nell said I do and then they heard an explosion. Richard drove them past the Los Alamos National Laboratory, written in a large globe on a tower. Streets named Bikini Atoll and Oppenheimer, where he worked. They drove northeast out of Santa Fe to Chimayo. Stopped into a church and dipped their hands wearing wedding rings into the dry grey dirt in a hole—said to have healing powers. Twenty-nine aluminum crutches and one wooden crutch hanging in the shrine. Three other aluminum crutches leaning on the wall. Pictures of Jesus done in thread, collage and paint.

  I WAS TALKING about Nell’s experiences before she knew me. That’s how badly I
missed her. I’d grown sick of remembering all our events. Now I was imagining the ones she’d told me about or had written in her diary. And it worked. I often felt like I’d lived in New Mexico. In a way, part of me was Richard Text.

  We drove into Kingston and found a Canadian Tire, because David Twombly had shares in Canadian Tire. I asked him what made him invest in Crappy Tire.

  I saw a woman, he said, who was helping a service person fix something. That’s loyalty.

  Let’s get the three-man.

  The two-man is on sale.

  There’s never enough room, I said, for two men in a two-man.

  We passed a Value Village and realized with a tent you need two foamies and sleeping bags and a frying pan and four plates made by Grindley with little sailing vessels as the maker’s mark on the bottom. That was the nicest thing about the plates. They look better while youre washing them, upside down, in a stream. We bought a Coleman stove for nine dollars and a fishing rod. I got a gallon of white gas at the next Ultramar. There’s a certain level of accoutrements you have to build up in order to camp.

  Let’s talk about money, he said. I’m going to say a little prayer here that everything will turn out all right. Or for the best. What are the right words.

  That we won’t be hurt.

  That’s negative, Gabe. How about that we’ll accept what happens to us.

  And he put a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.

  I didnt know you believed in God.

  His eyes flashed open. I can’t shake this hunch that there’s a God, he said. Everything I’ve prayed for has come through. Though I’ve got rules about what I can pray for.

  Sometimes vague rules.

  That we’ll be happy, he said, angrily. I’m telling you this now so you can judge for yourself if what I say about anything is influenced by the God-hunch.