Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

  Yeah, David said, that’s me. I’m Jason Linegar.

  David recalled talking to a Russian technician, Petra. He said it was a safe ship, but didnt have enough ballast. It was unloaded and could handle rough water. The ship’s agents won’t be returning calls.

  Al Spratt was passing his warmth over to him. Trawlers and bulk carriers at this age, Al Spratt said, they seem to have a habit of breaking up. We want to make sure there’s compensation for your families.

  It made him feel dead. David was at a picnic for the dead.

  THEY ENJOYED HIM. There were too many men helping with the stretcher. Both feet in thick white bandages like some cartoon of injury. His hands bandaged to the elbow and his head wrapped in white. He held his hands up, look at these hands. These hands move. They hustled him from the ambulance through a bend in the drive to the automatic Emergency doors that were not yet open. They had all wanted to see him, the only survivor. The heavy doors slid open and he was transferred to a trolley parked against the plaster wall. The Canadian cook, Jason Linegar.

  HE SPENT FOUR DAYS at the Grace Hospital in St John’s recovering from frostbite and hypothermia. His true identity leaked out and he was now under police custody. They understood his situation but they could not pretend he was Jason Linegar. He hired a lawyer and was granted bail of fifty thousand dollars. David called me. He didnt have his passwords, he’d lost his pebble, he couldnt open his trading account and sell five thousand shares of Sunleaf. My father needs me, he said. He needs blood and he needs a kidney. My kidneys are a match.

  You mean you have to return to Hurley territory.

  If I want my father alive, he said.

  This made me pause and he heard the pause.

  You think, he said, this might be the end for me.

  I dont think you should come back here.

  You must help me to it, he said.

  I walked down the road to the constabulary building and was led into the pound where the Matador had been cleaned and inspected and photographed. I checked the trunk and all of our gear was in there, even the box for the Taser. Toby was on the back shelf. They had kept the rifle, was all.

  I showed Toby to Nell. She touched him. His shorn fur, the seams showing. He’s heavy, she said.

  It’s the gold, I said. And I told her about the heat. David, I said, needs to be bailed out. I have to bring this gold to St John’s.

  Okay, she said. I’m with you.

  We drove the Matador across the island. It felt strange. It was Zac’s car. And now I was in it with Nell. I drove fast and we stopped in Badger and ordered pea soup and cheeseburgers and then Nell drove and she kept driving until the headlights lit up the rounded curb to the Health Sciences Centre. Six and a half hours. We found Dave not in bed but in a visiting room drinking coffee with a plainclothes police officer. David’s feet and hands were sensitive. He was leaking from one of his feet.

  You got that Taser, he said.

  God youre relentless, I said.

  He took us by the elbows. He said, You guys I love you guys.

  We dealt with the cop. I showed him Toby. I said Toby is our Fort Knox.

  We went down to the lockup in the basement of the old courthouse on Duckworth Street. I opened Toby up. Out clunked the little bar of gold. That’s worth fifty thousand dollars, I said.

  And then some, David said. Gold has gone up.

  They took it. They weighed it and they checked the price of gold online and we filled out the paperwork as though bars of gold were exchanged for prisoners all the time. It was about ten oclock then and we drove to the Newfoundland Hotel and booked a room. The three of us in the room. David slept in the second bed. It felt like this was it now. The three of us were going to be together for a long time.

  I woke up early and had a coffee and walked around St John’s. I loved this city. I walked up to the Basilica and saw the new museum built right beside it. The Rooms. The secular competing with the religious for skyline. There were tourists, like me, staring at both. An old guy passed them and stopped to see what we were all looking at. That’s the Basilica, he said, and that’s the box it came in.

  Someone opened the door to the Basilica so I went in. It’s a good place to think in. The last time I was in there was when Joey Smallwood died. There was a procession past the casket and it was an open casket. He was in a suit. But the strange thing was, he was wearing his glasses. They had him laid out in those black-framed glasses. Like he slept with them on or something. I guess people like to have the dead look exactly as they do when theyre up and around.

  We drove back to Corner Brook that day. We passed tractors embedding fibre optic cable and an underground storage facility where a red hose was pumping in a billion cubic feet of natural gas. The world was preparing for winter, though the world only ever had enough reserves for three weeks of deprivation. Nell turned on the radio and a dictator was shouting in court.

  Saddam, David said. He was born the day after Guernica.

  We drove past Grand Lake where Zac had drowned and David said how he’d like to someday get over to that island on an island in an island. He said he knew he wouldnt drown.

  I’d made a promise a long time ago, he said, not to go the way Zac went. So I just pushed through it. When that trawler sank I refused it. I willed myself to find the Gulf Stream and stay alive. So what say we do this. I want us to take a boat across Grand Lake. We’ll bring the tent. We’ll put a little punt in the boat and drag it across the island and then row to that little pond on Glover Island. And then we’ll camp there, in the middle of the planet.

  I thought about my own middle of the planet, which is my childhood. I thought about the summer I fished on the Humber River. I tied flies in the basement. My father had taken me to the Arts and Culture Centre when Lee Wulff was in town. Lee Wulff was an American outdoorsman who loved Newfoundland. We tied flies that were named after him, the White Wulff and the Grey Wulff. So I was excited to see the man. I remember Dave came with us. He didnt fish, he just enjoyed theatre. Lee Wulff stood on one side of the stage and flicked a fly rod into the air. He was demonstrating proper casting techniques. At the end of his line he had fastened a red bow. And the tackle unspooled from his reel, floated over the audience, and the red bow landed like a feather on top of a man’s head deep in the back. The audience exploded. They stood around us, clapping, and then my father got up and we got up too and madly applauded. To this day, theatre is connected, in some odd way, to fly fishing.

  We stopped in Gander for dinner. The trout looked good, though Nell wanted something basic. She hadnt told David she was pregnant. You know who I’d have to dinner, David said. He was tearing open a package of vinegar to douse on his trout. The guy, he said, who invented x-ray specs. It was the same guy who made sea monkeys. Harold von Braunhut.

  Nell:You know his name.

  He also managed that Frenchman who dove forty feet into a children’s wading pool, remember him?

  We drove into town in the dark and up the hill to Western Memorial. I signed the paperwork for him while they treated David on a floor directly below his father, in intensive care. They had performed small grafts from David’s thigh and lower back. They shaved coins of dead skin from the ball joints of his feet and hands. While they did this they took his blood. David was allowed up and he walked gingerly on his bad feet and he used a walker and the elevator to visit his father.

  NELL WANTED TO TALK to David alone. I read a magazine article about a Canadian tortured in a foreign country. I figured she wanted to tell him about the pregnancy. I gave them twenty minutes and then I went back in and David looked at me with a sorry look. He was sorry. The two halves of him had caught up and they both had to appear in front of me. It’s all right, I said. It’s over with.

  FOURTEEN

  HIS FATHER WAS READY for the box. Dr Manamperi had practised how to position it and how to manage the power it required and they were just waiting for the family to sign a waiver. David was the family. Arthur would n
eed the kidney, Dr Manamperi said. The machines could not cleanse his body after using the machine. So the operation was scheduled for a Tuesday morning and David spent the night beside his father, giving transfusions, and then he was allowed to go home. I drove him back to his mother’s. He said, My mother wants to meet Nell.

  Nell and I had been staying in the spare room at my parents’. I told her about Helen Crofter. Okay, Nell said. I’ll call her up. I watched Nell’s face on the phone. We had all, I guess, matured. Helen, she said. Can I call you Helen. It’s Nell Tarkington.

  So I drove her there and Helen answered the door. It must have been similar to how she had opened the door almost twenty years before, when she’d allowed Nell Tarkington into the house for that first dinner party. Come on in Nell, she said. It felt like it was all over, it was to be okay. In fact it felt wise that a drama from twenty years ago should not come to haunt us. Everything was calming down. There were bigger issues to manage. David saw this and opened the freezer door and grabbed a bottle of vodka by the neck. He poured himself a shot, straight from the freezer. You shouldnt be doing that, his mother said. Then he poured one for Nell and asked if I was in. I’m in, I said, and he poured another. This was something Nell did too, guzzle vodka straight from the freezer, and now I see she got it from David. It was a delight they both shared, a comfort that perhaps I could not offer. It depressed me. The fact that David had almost died exonerated him a little, or, the one-sided feeling had turned into a complicated mix that meant that if Nell tilted her head the right way, she could be warm to David. She was forcing herself to be kind.

  But then I saw she did not drink it. She was pregnant. And David either did not know this or had forgotten. No, I could see—she hadnt told him. She looked at me, with this secret. She was with me more than she was with David. It made me rise on my toes. It made me notice things high up on the walls.

  We sat down to eat and David took off his glasses. Everything was going to be okay. I didnt lose my glasses, he said. The one thing. I woke up in the sea with my glasses still on my face.

  I remembered that Nell, in private, liked to remove her watch to eat. She’d lay it next to her fork, as if it were another utensil. But she’d lost her watch, she’d left it in Las Vegas or Santa Fe. The two of them, bare of the man-made objects that improved vision and time, and I saw them living together. But that was a history, rather than a future. David has a great resilience, I realized, though a coldness.

  I’ve called the police, Helen said. Youre to check in tonight. If they dont hear from you in an hour then they’ll be coming to get you.

  And so we ate in the calm of this little time together. All you heard were soup spoons. Then we saw headlights flash through the living room window and a car door, a second, and then the front door opened. David stood to welcome the police—they were early, though police usually use doorbells. I could tell from the sound of the engine that it was not a police car. Then there was another car. David leaned out of the hallway but he could not see well as he had left his glasses on the table. He looked vulnerable. I saw who it was. It was Gerard Hurley. Then it was Randy Jacobs.

  Randy: I’m sorry about this, Dave.

  David said, calmly, The architects are here.

  Gerard and Randy backed David up and were looking around for things. Gerard was holding a small crowbar called a cat’s paw. Just move that chair, he said to Randy. It was as if he didnt want to harm the chair. Randy moved the chair aside. David reached into his pocket and tossed me the keys to the car.

  I got up slowly and pushed Nell towards the patio doors. I opened them and we slipped out together. Helen was trying to intervene. She was holding up her dinner plate.

  Get in the car, I said to Nell. Just get in the car.

  I found the right key and popped the trunk. I could see through the open patio doors, Randy bending down to roll up an area rug. It looked like they had come to steal an area rug. They were careful about it. Then they approached the table with the rug and David could not get by the wall of rug. He was still lame in the feet. Helen threw her dish at Gerard and then picked up another one. She said, David get out the door. I looked for the Taser box in amongst the camping gear. I found the key on the ring that opened the box. A crash. David’s mother was throwing soup plates off the buffet and the men had run through the plates as they clattered and rimmed on the hardwood floor. Now there was screaming. Helen was screaming and Nell got back out of the car. They rushed David and threw the rug over him. The rug was heavy, the canvas backing, and David fell against a chair. Then they tipped over the chair and knelt on the rug over the chair and David. They were being deliberate and guessing. They rolled the rug around the chair a little, just to box him in I guess, and the chair was cracking. Helen had reached into the buffet and was throwing all the china at Randy Jacobs.

  I unclasped the two snecks and opened the box to its plush green felt and picked up the Taser, which weighed about six pounds, and smacked it into my left hand. I ran inside while looking at the red trigger mechanism and a power switch. The switch was like an old stereo button.

  Hey! I yelled.

  Gerard put down the cat’s paw and reached for his belt and unsheathed a filleting knife. He pointed it at me and I squeezed the trigger to obliterate him but nothing happened. Then he shoved the knife into the carpet and jiggled it until the carpet ripped. He pulled it out.

  Randy:That’s enough now.

  Gerard punched it through the back of the carpet. This time blood pulsed out the first hole and a low groan. Then he grabbed the cat’s paw and swung it at the carpet and tore into the side of the chair and then he hit out again and this time it was softer.

  Jesus, Gerard said, it’s like opening a can of tomato juice.

  Randy:That’s enough!

  Gerard held down the carpet with his knees and the carpet flexed and then went slack.

  Gerard:That’s for Anthony.

  That’s what unfroze me, the mention of Anthony. I flicked buttons until a whirring sound filled my fist with a powerful heat. I aimed the Taser at Randy and nailed him with the current and then I swung my aim over to Gerard and I kept nailing him, for he was the one with the crowbar and he had continued laying it into the rug and somehow a crowbar felt worse than a knife, even though a knife does the damage. I drilled them with juice until Nell was saying okay okay and I found the little switch because I’d jammed the current on. I ended up zapping the curtains and a scorch line across a piece of furniture I had refinished when I was a teenager. The jolt travelled up my arm and into my shoulder and then my ear. It was rattling the jawbone, the one with the split tooth, as if it was trying to fuse it back together again. Helen was on her son, but she wasnt screaming now, though there was still a ringing—it was the little glass panels vibrating in the light shades.

  FIFTEEN

  BREATHE IN, she said. Take a deep breath.

  It was a nurse. I calmed down. Then the tooth was pried out and I had a gauze pad in my mouth, a hole between my teeth. I paid at the counter and Nell held my waist and directed me out of the glass doors. We walked along Main Street. I felt old, and asymmetrical. We were heading up to the hospital. I felt sad and realized that the height of my own strength had just passed me. It was my old dentist, he was seventy-three now and still practising. He did not seem to mind being seventy-three. He took x-rays with film that I held in my sad jaws, and he looked at the film and said the molar was cracked clean through. The Taser jolt had split a filling as well, a filling he had put in when I was eleven. That made me think of myself as a boy, in this chair, with this man. Getting that filling put in. And now I had lost it, one of the first artificial parts of my body.

  We walked up to the hospital and met with Dr Manamperi. I did not want to drive, I wanted to lean up against Nell’s shoulder while I got used to not being my full self. I wanted to see David’s body after having walked. Then I heard what Dr Manamperi was saying. David’s come back, he said. He’s going to make it. Can you believe
it.

  There was a real youth in Dr Manamperi and he enjoyed the miraculous. It seemed David could survive anything. We had driven him to the hospital and they had tried to resuscitate him and they had used paddles but the blood transfusions had weakened him and they could not tear him back to life though they kept working on him another thirty minutes. This is what Maggie Pettipaw had told me. Then Dr Manamperi arrived and wheeled him into the transplant unit and they fished out his one good kidney—Gerard had ruined the left one with his filleting knife. They scooped this out and brought Arthur into the theatre and performed the transplant. They did this roughly, as they were sure David was dead. Then they began the neglect of his body in order to save his father. But there was one machine still attached to him and a bright blip appeared on a screen. Someone saw it, for they had the volume down. Hey look at that. They turned to the body and they pored over him. They wheeled more machinery around the body and tried to coax a larger flame out of it. They found a pulse. He had come back from some deep distance all on his own. He’s going to pull through, Dr Manamperi said. He’ll have to go on dialysis, but what a miracle.

  WHEN I CAME OUT Randy Jacobs was in the waiting room. I have to take you in, he said.

  Get someone else to take me in.

  Look I was only there to make sure Gerard didnt go berserk.

  Good job.