Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

Gerard’s saying self-defence.

  You fucking asshole. He voluntarily came in with a filleting knife.

  He wants to report the Taser. He’s looking to press charges against you.

  And I realized what was going on here. The way that Randy and Gerard were swinging it. You think, I said, youre going to be clear of this?

  I was just following a suspect, Gabe, and breaking up a possible homicide.

  They had come in two cars, not one. Randy, a little after Gerard.

  I filled out a report in the new RCMP building at the bottom of the hill. I wrote down everything as it happened, and I wrote down my involvement in David’s boarding a trawler. I had lost the gold. The bail gold was gone now. I didnt care. It was windfall gold. It was gold from David’s company. It belonged to him, or at least it didnt belong to me.

  The policeman from Saskatchewan asked me about Randy.

  Randy says he saw Gerard driving up to Helen Crofter’s, the cop said. Randy knew Gerard doesnt have a reason for going up there. He said when he entered the house you went a little gonzo with a Taser.

  Me: Gerard knifed David first and then I opened up.

  Youre sure now about that sequence of events.

  They would need material to lay a charge, my father said. It was shaping up to be about whose word can you believe. Were there any witnesses, my father said, not related to David.

  They let me walk, for the moment. I had other things on my mind. Nell was pregnant. Nell wanted to finish her business with Arthur. I pushed through the grief and exhaustion. It was exhilarating in a strange way to be pushed so hard. It made everything clear. I went to see Dr Manamperi. He had heard of the box at a conference in California and he needed clearance to use it from his medical board and this would take another three weeks so he was going to use it without permission. It was a ninety-million-dollar piece of technology designed for high-altitude pilots and deep-sea divers and for several divisions of the US Army, but now being used on coma patients. There was a green button and one dial with a red mark for maximum. It looked a bit comical, Nell said. She felt like if she had unscrewed the housing there’d be nothing inside. They had built it so an astronaut could use it.

  Dr Manamperi had studied the software. Nell and I sat and took in Arthur Twombly, slack yet there was presence. Arthur had never remarried, and yet the doctor working on him was living with his ex-wife. Arthur was concentrating. The mouth and neck and eyes of Arthur Twombly as Dr Manamperi set up the box. Nell’s father was a doctor. She told me of her first memory, when she was three. Her father hauling chairs out into the back yard. Then he carried out the television and fed out yards of orange extension cord. It was summer and it was past her bedtime. It was dark and there were people up and down the street pointing to the moon. Her father switched on the TV and there were astronauts, the interior of a module. Then Neil Armstrong testing the ladder. Her father watching the television without sitting down. He was standing on the picnic table, rolling on the balls of his feet. He would have liked to have been on his roof. He wanted to be as close as he could to the moon. He looked up there often and then back to the television, as if you could see the men up there, leaping in that slow motion way, a slow motion that implied significance.

  Nell looked at me and I knew that we could do it. Next twenty years, I said.

  Nell: Plant it there, babe.

  And we shook hands, like basketball players. Then we kissed and I held her waist, where our little one was. Somehow all the complications that we had gone through would secure us. There was an electric current to her kiss, a kiss I loved for it often felt like we had never kissed before. We were not wedded, we were welded.

  She wanted to drive down to visit Loyola Hurley. She had called and asked and Loyola had said yes. So I took her. He was in the yard in his wheelchair. Gerard now gone to the lockup. His foster son Anthony, dead. And Joe Hurley, the good son, killed in Afghanistan. He’d wanted to bury Anthony in the back yard but they wouldnt allow him to bury on private land. You can burn him, Loyola said to us, and scatter his ashes. Apparently that is allowed.

  From his wheelchair he was spreading a wheelbarrow full of kelp and caplin, to prepare the ground for winter. I just wanted to thank you, Nell said. For raising my son.

  Loyola:We’re all emperors over our own lives.

  I WAS SLEEPING in the spare room with Nell when they took him that night. I was safe in my childhood home. They walked into the hospital—they dont know who yet—about four of them, and unhooked the machines and wheeled him into the elevator and towed him to the back of the hospital where the new generator was. They hot-wired the ghost car and opened up the front doors and propped David in there, between the driver and the passenger seats. They drove him down to Bottle Cove in the Matador, two others in a car behind. They veered down off the breakwater onto the beach. They stopped there for a bit, then revved the motor. Their tires ruining the clam beds, their breathing holes under the moon. Then they drove that car deep into the sea. They plunged into five-foot waves. They got about thirty feet in and then someone turned on the dome light. A witness saw water up to the dash. They punched him in the car and they beat him up, half of their punches were underwater. Then they pushed David’s head down and they continued to punch into the water. There was a lot of splashing. They drowned him in that car. They opened the doors and walked up out of the sea.

  SIXTEEN

  DAVID WAS AS BIG as Goliath, I said.

  Perhaps we’re all Goliaths, Nell said. Struggling to break free of our inner, delicate Davids.

  SASHA ARRIVED and I picked her up in Deer Lake. I drove my father’s car to the airport. It’s hard to love my father, she said. I dont want to meet Nell if I can help it. But I loved my brother. He was like the sister I never had.

  She went with Helen, and Nell and I followed the hearse as it drove out to Rocky Harbour. I let my head shake back and forth, a bit like a Parkinson’s patient, something like Muhammad Ali would do, because in the end it’s Muhammad Ali I’d have to dinner, not some guy who invented x-ray specs.

  We used the plot meant for David’s father. I had slept on this ground in Rocky Harbour with David and now he was being laid into the ground reserved for his father. Goodbye David. You are the biggest man I’ve known, a strong big man, funny man. Generous guy you are. Fucking asshole too but what can you do with appetites. In fact you were restrained. You could have been worse, but you tried hard to be good. For some people it’s hard to be good. The coffin lowered down on three ropes. I held a rope. I held it wearing white gloves. Marks on the gloves. Then we dropped the gloves on the coffin.

  My own father came and he looked around the graveyard and thought Rocky Harbour had not improved since we’d been there to buy fish thirty years before. I love my father but he did not much approve of David Twombly.

  WE SAT IN VIGIL. We were going to pull him out of the medically induced coma. We’ll see if he reacts to pain and to light. Some of the machines were shut down, and they applied feeling and they operated a laser and then Nell’s machine was taped to his temples. His eyes moved. Then, one moment, his eyes clapped open. He stared at Nell, then at Sasha and then at me. I could tell it confused him, then he realized where he was, that a lot of time had passed. Gabe had travelled with Dave, and Nell was here for Anthony. But Sasha. Did Sasha forgive him? His lips opened and Nell opened a bottle of water and moistened a pad of gauze and leaned over to wet his lips. He took in a tremendous breath of air. Nell. His tongue on his teeth and his eyes widened. But he could not speak. He worked his hand, his thumb moving like a mouth, and he looked at his hand. I thought of those hand puppets Dave and I made up as kids. Puddies. Am I crazy? He didnt know anything about those. He was making a writing gesture with his hand.

  I took out my notebook and pen. I bent the notebook open for him. And he wrote with a blue tube coming out of the front of his hand, as if it was his own blood the note was written with.

  Where are my sons.

  SEVENTEEN


  WE FLEW TO CUBA. We spent a week there, on a beach near Havana. We needed this, Nell said. The sun sort of burnt everything away. Bright blue jellyfish, the water spilling up over the bank of sand and surprising us. It soaked our towels and shoes. A man emptied his boots and socks. A boy of fifteen, they were Mexican, was sharing a white earphone with his grandmother. He leaned over so the wires reached.

  This was before Castro died. Kids were flying kites beside the underpass. Small white kites. It was a Saturday. Kids playing baseball, using a square piece of varnished furniture for a bat. We were both looking a lot at children.

  We bought tickets for the Museo de la Revolución. It was full of pyjamas shot through with blood, ponchos that fought in Spain, and letters. The boat Castro beached in a modern glass garage in behind Batista’s house. Nell was impressed with the embroidered 26 July badges. And how much of the museum is devoted to others, not Fidel. It must be the only museum in the world that has nothing made of gold, Nell said. There’s a slumped, shrunken spacesuit of the first Cuban cosmonaut.

  Birds in the rafters of the airport. I bought a box of cigars and gave my suit and sneakers to a young man who saw us on our mopeds. He was wearing a white undershirt. He loved the jacket. He had probably never worn a suit jacket before. He looked beautiful.

  We slept on the plane and I woke up as we made our descent over Newfoundland. The island is drenched with lakes. It looks like it’s sinking. As a kid, I thought they had towed the island across the sea when we joined Canada. People did that with houses, why not islands. If only they had anchored us a little further out in the Gulf Stream, we’d have weather like Cuba.

  Nell woke up. She was moving a hand over her belly.

  I thought I felt something, she said.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Readers: Larry Mathews, Lisa Moore, Christine

  Pountney, Claire Wilkshire.

  Editor: Nicole Winstanley.

  Agent: Anne McDermid, with Martha Magor and Jane Warren.

  Funding: Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council.

  Words appearing in the novel without an apostrophe: arent, couldnt, didnt, doesnt, dont, hadnt, hasnt, havent, isnt, oclock, shouldnt, theyre, wasnt, werent, wouldnt, youre, youve. This is intentional by the author. Please dont send letters to the copy editor, Shaun Oakey.

  To the seventy-one people like Shima Aoki who helped make this book, I thank you.

  THE

  ARCHITECTS

  ARE HERE

  MICHAEL WINTER

  For the Readers Guide and more exclusive content visit www.michaelwinterbooks.com