Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  Jeremy got there in the afternoon, just as the pediatrician made the call: Kawasaki disease. It was a reasonably rare thing, with no known cause (although according to Dr. Singh, the smart money was on some kind of bacterial toxin). Even so, the source was unknown; it was one of the things medicine blames on “the environment,” for lack of any more specific agent.

  The symptoms, on the other hand, were well known, and Trout was doing a life-threatening favour for the interns on rounds by offering up a suite of the most typical: fever, lymph-node swelling in the throat, a full body rash and steady, dehydrating diarrhea.

  He might have stopped there. Not many parents (or godparents) are prepared to think of a heart attack as being a risk at this age. But arterial inflammation followed. There was a coronary aneurysm with blood clotting. His heart stopped at about 9:30 p.m. while Jeremy and Olli were sitting together with him. Margaret was in the hospital chapel crying.

  Trout disappeared into intensive care in a frenzy of clinicians. They formed a valence ring of icy professional intensity around the stainless steel gurney as it careered down the centre of the hallway. Nurses and patients jumping to clear a path.

  Olli ran off to find Margaret, his hair standing straight up on one side. He’d been napping when the monitor lines went abruptly flat.

  Jeremy went back into the empty hospital room. Stunned. He remembered sitting back down heavily in his chair. His face dropping into his hands.

  It was a prayer, he supposed in retrospect, though it had just two words. His face hit the palms of his hand, found that comfortable personal place that permits pressure on the eyeballs and the sealing off of all light. And he said aloud, muffled, hot on his hands: “Oh, God.…”

  “Hello,” Jeremy said when he got to the top of the spiral staircase. Trout was sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor of the first loft. His newly painted dollar was lying on the floor next to him, and Jeremy could see past him into Olli and Margaret’s bedroom area. There was the sleigh bed.

  “Howdy,” said Trout, not looking up. He was pumping the keys of a Game Boy, using body English to influence the movement of his onscreen character. Jeremy sat down cross-legged on the floor across from him and put his glass on the hardwood.

  “Christ.” Trout let the Game Boy flop to his side.

  “Hey, language.”

  “They’re all dead,” Trout said with a frown, checking the screen again. “Nowhere near the high score.”

  “Let me try.” Jeremy took the hand-held computer game.

  The game consisted of a burning building on the right-hand side of the screen, and two fireman with a catch mat between them, who moved across the remainder of the screen. When the game began, little babies in diapers were thrown from the various windows up the side of the building. You manipulated the firemen to run back and forth across the playing area and catch them. A dropped baby produced a tiny bleat, the same sound you’d get from stepping on a squeeze-toy.

  Jeremy looked up at Trout before beginning. “Your dad gave you this?”

  Trout nodded.

  “OK,” he said, launching the game.

  It was harder than it looked. While Jeremy scuttled his firemen back and forth across the screen, babies vaulted out the windows of the burning building, falling in their different arcs towards the pavement. He caught one in three at the very most, and within fifteen seconds the screen faded to black to signal his failure. Trout was laughing at his elbow, holding his arm and squealing.

  “Is that funny?”

  “Yup,” Trout answered. And then, no doubt parroting Margaret, he added: “Although macabre.”

  Jeremy put the game aside. Trout still held his arm, but grew thoughtful. “Peggy says I can’t play soccer this year,” he said finally, dealing with something that had apparently been on his mind.

  “You’d better not call her that,” Jeremy said, lowering his voice. Impulsively, he got up and went over to the loft rail. Leaned far over and looked down at her. She was finished trussing the quails.

  “How you doing down there?”

  She leaned her head back and looked straight up at him. She smiled. “Fine. You?”

  He made a face. Not bad.

  Trout had gathered up the game by the time Jeremy turned around.

  “I can’t play soccer because I have a damaged heart,” Trout said. “When I was little, I got sick with a sickness and part of it made a small damage in my heart. Mom says I can’t feel it but I still have it there.” He put his index finger in the middle of his chest to show Jeremy where.

  “Right,” Jeremy said. It made him think of how the imprint of the sick kid made Trout who he was. There was a quiet mystery learned in hospitals, impressed by rough, dry sheets, chrome bars, random pains and intravenous needle bruises. Picked up from the vibration of inarticulate prayer, who could know? Jeremy found himself, on occasions like this one, thinking of Trout as wise. Wiser than an adult.

  “You’re my godfather,” Trout announced.

  “I am indeed.”

  “You were there.”

  Jeremy nodded slowly. “I was there. But you’re here now, so we made it.” He stuck out a hand, which Trout shook.

  “I feel it sometimes,” Trout said. “Like a wobble in my heart.”

  “I think I know what you mean.”

  “Why, do you have a damage in your heart?”

  “Oh, well.…” Jeremy stalled on the question. “No, not seriously.”

  “Does it ever beat funny?”

  You had to watch what you said with Trout. It was a bit like being interrogated. He quietly pressed, and before you realized it he was getting somewhere.

  “Not any more,” Jeremy said. “We should go downstairs.”

  “I think I remember it. When I was little and I got sick.”

  “You were very little. People don’t remember things from when they’re that little.”

  “I do. I remember things.”

  Jeremy frowned. Did you encourage this line of fantasy by asking questions? There were undoubtedly books on the subject, cookbooks for child rearing.

  Trout was looking at him evenly, appraisingly. Then, like an adult might if they thought they were boring you or confusing you with a certain conversational angle, he changed the subject. “I’ll show you something in my room,” he suggested.

  He led the way, clutching his game in one hand and his painted dollar in the other. Jeremy followed him up the narrow side-stairs to the second loft at the rear of the building, glass in hand, wondering when Benny would get there.

  It was a tall, square room at the top and back of the building, where the huge freight elevator had once been. This structure had been incorporated into the warehouse conversion, with each suite in the building getting a slice of the elevator shaft, the outside wall of which was then replaced with a large, paned window. Since the top of the shaft had housed the elevator winch and motor, the penthouse had a taller, even more dramatic room, below which Vancouver’s False Creek stretched out at your feet. The room was dark now. Trout walked to a spot on the wall and pulled a heavy switch that brought on three lamps hanging on cords from the twenty-foot, iron-beamed ceiling.

  Jeremy took in the familiar sight from the doorway. The metal walls, planked halfway up. Trout’s bunk bed against the left wall. His overflowing toy shelves against the right. Strewn between, across a huge Amish rope rug that covered the polished concrete floor, a drifting chaos of toys and games, childhood equipment across a truly impressive range. Toy cars, a train set, board games, a basketball hoop, an arsenal of Nerf guns, floor-hockey sticks, a soccer ball, monkey bars built into one wall, bubble hockey, foosball, super-destructo dudes of an impossibly wide variety. Plus the tools and the output of Trout’s artistic project: watercolours and brushes, an easel, smocks and clean-up clothes, dollar bills strewn through the room randomly. Dropped where they had been finished.

  The fourth wall was the window, which started at a low sill and stretched in foot-square panes
up to just below the ceiling. Here was Trout’s small desk and chair, set up in front of the glass. Empty but for a pad of paper.

  Jeremy shook his head. When visiting Trout’s domain, he often found himself wondering if the room in total spoke more to the indulgent inclination of parents at this particular point in history, or the scattered, broadband enthusiasms of their children. Both, doubtless. Olli would buy the toys, not Margaret. Trout would play with them in short bursts, curious as to what they had to offer before laying them aside. He would paint when in the mood, and then, for some portion of the day, Jeremy imagined, the boy would drift on his own thoughts in front of the window.

  Trout was pulling the soccer ball out of a rubble of Lego. “Jeremy,” he called out sharply, snapping Jeremy from his thoughts.

  Part of the room against the left wall had been cleared of toys.

  “You play goal,” Trout instructed, dribbling the ball inexpertly between his feet. Jeremy saw that a goal had been paced off against the wall, with the bed and a stack of books serving as posts.

  “Trout,” Jeremy said, remembering what he had been told about Margaret’s take on soccer. Physical exertion was obviously still a concern.

  “Go on,” Trout said, waving his hand towards the goal. “Chicken.”

  “Hey! Me, chicken?”

  “I think so.”

  “Just one shot. Don’t run around. Just shoot the ball.”

  “I don’t need to run around.”

  “And just one shot, right?” Jeremy reminded him.

  “I don’t need more than one shot either.”

  Jeremy put his drink down next to the door and moved across into the goal mouth. When he was standing roughly equidistant from the bed and the stack of books, he turned around to face the boy. Trout was regarding him seriously, motionless, some feet back from the black and white ball.

  “All right,” Jeremy said.

  Trout didn’t move, didn’t take his eyes from Jeremy’s. Like he’s trying to hypnotize me, thought Jeremy. Like he’s trying to read my mind and guess which way I’m going to move.

  “Are you really ready for this?” Trout said.

  There were another few seconds of silence during which his godson continued to hold him, locked in a stare. It brought to mind not the psychological battle between goalie and penalty-kicker, but the sense he had known once before of having been selected. Acquired. Trout had turned his head in the womb and regarded him much as he did now, with some kind of steady certainty and knowing.

  “Come on, shoot,” Jeremy said. “Chicken.”

  Jeremy didn’t play soccer, but he had to guess that the shot Trout then unleashed was somewhere near the top of the power bell-curve for shooters between three and four feet in height. Trout took a two-step run up and fired, his leg making a compact arc. His instep struck the ball squarely. The ball rocketed towards Jeremy. It might have taken half a second in total, but as he raised his arms to catch it (to defend himself, really; it looked like the shot might take his head off) the ball spun sharply to his right, diving down as if guided on wires, and slammed into the plank wall with a dull, resonating boom.

  Jeremy hadn’t moved. His hands were still up in front of his face. Trout was now circling the room at a sprint, aping the curious vaunting behaviour of soccer players the world over, arms outstretched in front of himself, gesticulating to an invisible crowd, ululating.

  “All right, all right,” Jeremy said. He was unreasonably winded.

  “You have to move one way or the other,” Trout said when he stopped running. Not winded. “Right or left. You can’t just stand there.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jeremy said.

  “Well, the other guy won’t shoot straight at you. That would be dumb.”

  He had a point. Jeremy retrieved his drink and they went downstairs.

  The quails were good, Jeremy thought, although he ate methodically. Not thinking about the food very much at all until he was finished and he remembered to compliment Margaret.

  “Excellent,” he said, nodding at his plate. She could handle herself fine in the kitchen, although Olli was a little slow to remove the plates after eating. It was something Jeremy drilled into everyone who worked for him: Remove the remains. He believed what Claude had once told him: “The finished meal produces a period of natural reflection: Am I full or am I still empty? All this carnage, this evidence that we have tried to fill ourselves, all of it complicates our reflection.”

  Jeremy was reflecting. Fortunately, Benny and Margaret were hitting it off, and Olli was distracted. By Redmond, Jeremy thought when he caught his friend eyeing the wine bottle.

  The conversation swung to Trout in due course, just after he had been sent to bed. About a new school he was attending. About his illness. Margaret explained Kawasaki’s to Benny.

  “Systemic inflammatory mucocutaneous lymph-node syndrome,” she said. “In most cases it passes entirely after a single acute phase. In some it lingers, a persistent chance of recurrence.”

  “Tell her,” Olli said, chiding.

  “One and a quarter percent chance of recurrence,” Margaret said. “That happens to be the number. After six years, the probability drops slightly.”

  Across the table from Jeremy, Benny shook her head and made a sympathetic face at Margaret.

  “What about a warning if it’s about to recur?” Jeremy asked.

  “None. If it happens, it happens,” Olli said, and he picked a piece of radicchio from his plate. “He turned about this colour the first time—I really don’t want to go through that again.”

  “Does he remember it, do you think?” Benny said.

  Jeremy lifted his head from the remains, which continued to complicate his reflection.

  “He thinks that he does,” he said, looking at Benny, then Margaret. “He told me.”

  Olli got up to clear plates. “We circumcized him too. I hope he doesn’t remember that or things are going to get complicated between him and me.”

  “Seriously,” Jeremy said. “I believe him.”

  “He’s a kid,” Olli said, stopping with a plate in each hand.

  “He’s a strangely wise kid.”

  Olli frowned at his friend. He got weird on you sometimes without warning.

  Benny cut the silence perfectly by getting up to help with the dishes. In the process of scraping quail carcasses into the garbage, she generated an exchange with Olli about which would taste better: seagulls or pigeons. Jeremy stopped listening.

  “Why do you believe him?” Margaret said to Jeremy, leaning across the corner of the table and talking under the foghorn of Olli’s laughter coming from the kitchen.

  Jeremy wasn’t sure. But as he considered his answer, he also got a strong, familiar feeling. The slightly cold feeling of Trout bearing down directly on him, and in a rolling instant he was wondering if Trout was at the loft rail directly above his head. Jeremy had to fight the urge to look upwards.

  “I guess I don’t really know,” Jeremy said.

  Margaret didn’t pursue this; she didn’t know either. She wasn’t even sure it mattered, although it made her curious. But now Olli and Benny were back, setting liqueurs on the table: grappa, Drambuie, white port, Essencia, Bushmills for Jeremy. Olli was leading the conversation into work by talking about his trip to Washington State. Benny was handling herself with utter confidence, asking questions about the project that Olli described as “Building Libraries of Everything.”

  Jeremy had lost the thread. He poured a glass of grappa for Margaret and a Bushmills for himself. He settled back in his chair.

  “Massive-scale data architectures,” Olli was saying. “We have these tape robots, multi-terabytes each. A little compression software and you can take a snapshot of virtually every page of information the world has ever known. From the Book of Kells to the entire Hooters website. Whatever you can think of.”

  Jeremy reflected on what seemed like a monomaniacal task. The difference between Jeremy and Olli, it might be said,
was scale, that and the fact that Olli had an uncanny sense for making money in the natural orbit he established around such obsessions.

  “The thing is the money,” Olli continued. “And that’s always where partners come in.”

  “Enter Redmond. Enter Bill,” said Jeremy.

  “That’s right,” Olli said, launching himself again through the spectacular constellations of the project. Now he was explaining what it meant to work with this galactic volume of data. Terabyte-sized data clusters. His personal underlying objective: the contents of every library, every museum, every church vault from today back through the mist of recorded history, disseminated freely. “Because we can,” Olli said.

  “Kewl,” Benny said, her eyes glistening.

  “It gets me hot,” Olli said. He poured Benny another Essencia and Jeremy saw it again, a hiccup in the physical releasing of the bottle. There was moment where he poised behind the words, Just one.

  “Olli wants to know everything,” Margaret said. “All knowledge, all places, all the time. Isn’t that right, darling?”

  Olli defended himself. If it could be done, it should be done, he argued. Feasibility was the imperative. “If it weren’t for that drive, we’d be sucking our thumbs in the shade of the Tree of Knowledge, blissed-out in fig leaves.”

  Margaret rolled her eyes. Benny looked curious.

  “It’s our project name,” Olli explained. “Tree of Knowledge. Remind me later and I’ll give you a sweatshirt.”

  “That’s Adam and Eve and the apple, isn’t it?” Benny said, wrinkling her forehead.

  “A strange myth,” Olli said. “The sin should be not knowing what is knowable.”

  Margaret was shaking her head. “The point is, there are some things you can’t know. This is part of the architecture of knowledge Olli doesn’t like so much.” As in seismology, she went on, the use of animal behaviour to predict quakes. It worked on occasion. Haichen, 1975. A 7.3 quake predicted with unprecedented accuracy by watching the sudden migration of monkeys. They evacuated an entire region twenty-four hours before the quake. “A year later in Tanshan,” Margaret finished, “no warning of any kind. A 7.6. Two hundred and fifty thousand people dead. No peculiar animal behaviour.”