“You mean how they left home in the first place,” said Mr. Slonemsky.
“The wind and the Japan current carried them away. Navigation brought them back, with into-the-wind know-how.” Bucky waved his stick.
Mr. Slonemsky motioned to Frankie to join them, patting the grass and offering wine. It was bitter and dark, unlike the sweet sake he was used to. But it warmed him.
“Son, did the current bring you here too?”
Frankie shook his head. “It brought my father.” He’d never before said my father.
“Are you a water or a land dweller?”
“Both,” Frankie said, though he felt half untruthful. “Whenever we lived on land, they made us leave.” He’d never uttered this before either. The bittersweet wine fuelled him. Bucky fixed his eyes on him, encouraging him further.
“Who are ‘they,’ Frank?” Mr. Slonemsky asked.
“Finance capitalists, of course,” said Bucky, before Frankie could answer. “Those caring only for monetary gain. Am I right, Frank?”
It was the government, the politicians who called out the Yellow Peril, the evil Asiatics, the sneaky Nips, thought Frankie. But then there were those who wanted land cheap that had been owned by Japs. Land that someday could be worth a lot.
Bucky asked for Frankie’s story. So he told it, from the house uprooted and set on water to the landlocked camp. He even described his garden of wild roses and the sinking hotel. Coming here instead of where the Mounties told him to go. Telling it like this, one thing after another, and to be listened to—he felt some bile in him stirred and stewed.
“He lived on the sea! You see, Uri?” Bucky’s eyes ballooned behind his glasses. “Our Frank was pushed off by those vying for five per cent of the Earth—a few little dry spots. They devalue the three-quarters of Earth that is saline and fresh water.”
“I, myself, am merely a dry-spot specialist,” Mr. Slonemsky remarked.
“But the pond, the island.” Frankie was looking in awe at the swell of water in the middle of this big city he’d come to, and the flowers floating in it.
“Bucky built it. With his land-on-water ingenuity.”
“I’d like to learn that,” Frankie blurted. Like a fool, he thought a second later, his face hot.
“Frank, you are a New World Man,” Bucky said. “One of those able to establish himself on oceans. To navigate with anticipatory vision. We don’t expect to own the water we sail through, do we? Do we have to own the air to breathe it? Why must anyone own the land,” Bucky went on, “and then say who stays and who goes?” His eyes shone bigger and brighter than ever while blurring into two white flames behind his glasses.
Were they mocking him, Frankie wondered, or just drunk? But Bucky was right, he thought, cursing the men who’d demanded the deed for his floating garden and his dock licence.
Mr. Slonemsky sighed and downed his wine. “Too many questions.”
New World Man? He’d start with Man of the House. A house of his own.
* * *
—
Frankie received a letter from his mother in her broken English. She had a new money-making idea. More families from the camps were making their way to Toronto, leaving the small towns where they’d been assigned to settle, just as Frankie had. They needed places to stay until they could manage on their own. His mother watered the grapevine that wound from camp to camp to Toronto, while Frankie contemplated how he would pluck the fruit.
That night, he slept fitfully. He was back on Alberni Strait, rowing toward the house from shore. Each time he neared it, the house was carried away from the harbour farther down the inlet until a wave pushed it out to sea, out of sight. Then, from behind a cloud, the moon appeared briefly, illuminating the house where it crowned the horizon. On he rowed through the darkness, each time to exhaustion, until the moon reappeared. He stood up, raised his arms and his whole body began to lift. When he woke, his arms ached.
He found Bucky exactly where he and Mr. Slonemsky had left him the night before. Lying down and looking up, still in his suit and buttoned white shirt. “We have more in common than one might think, Frank,” he said, resuming their conversation from the night before.
“We do?” Frankie scoffed to himself. The two of them: he in his dirt-stained overalls, Bucky in his suit and starched white shirt and taste for fine wine. They couldn’t be more different. Bucky was clearly a man who owned his life, whose ancestors no doubt had owned their piece of North America for generations.
Bucky jumped to his feet. He handed Frankie his old rake with a new rectangular base. “A remodelled tool for the New World Man.” On the base were large tines of wood, spaced widely. Only then did Frankie notice a handsaw, chisel, hammer and crumpled sandpaper sitting among the empty wine bottles.
“In the future no one will labour in this way. Machines will carry out the work, and you’ll be free to think and design those machines.”
From top to bottom, Bucky’s suit was coated with sawdust; there was the musty smell of sweat. He looked down and dusted himself off. “I never cared how I clothed myself,” Bucky said, divining Frankie’s thoughts. “Years ago, I decided if I dressed like everyone else, if I became an Invisible Man, then I would be better listened to.” He tugged his lapels and buttoned up his jacket.
“Do you have a family to provide for, Frank? a wife, a child?”
“A wife,” Frankie said. “A child on the way.” It was good to declare that fact, to get used to it.
“A child,” repeated Bucky.
* * *
—
An object came sailing out the glass doors and landed with a crunch at Frankie’s feet in the dry garden. He dropped his rake and carefully lifted the object, like an injured bird. It was one of Mr. Slonemsky’s architectural models, crushed: the towers of pleated gold panes. Now it was splintered, flattened, with a tiny person poking out of a cracked window.
“I hope it missed you.” Mr. Slonemsky emerged from the living room holding a wine glass. His hair was not the usual neat hedge and his suit was rumpled, like Bucky’s after he’d spent the night in it. “Sorry about that, Frank. I’m not quite myself today.”
“No harm done, sir,” Frankie said.
Mr. Slonemsky went inside, then came back out. “Will you have a drink with me, Frank?”
Frankie nervously made his way up to the house, proffering the damaged model to his employer, who set it on the coffee table.
“Thank you, sir,” Frankie said, accepting a glass. He shifted awkwardly on the sofa in his dusty coveralls.
“Call me Uri. Or Captain Fincap, as Bucky does. He claims I’m a finance capitalist, enslaved to the whims of millionaire developers.”
Frankie smiled. “He’s an interesting man.”
“So you agree?”
Frankie shrugged. Capitalists, millionaires, developers. What did he know? “You can’t do anything without money,” he said. That much he knew.
“We architects design the buildings, but someone’s got to pay for them. In fact, a millionaire developer has asked me to design a bank. As tall as possible. The tallest.”
“In the world?” Frankie thought back to the turreted house in Port Alberni that, at three storeys, had seemed so high. A rope of hair dropping down for him to climb.
“Yes, but what I want is beauty. Glass and steel.”
Frankie tried to imagine such a structure, its surface smooth and silvery, reflecting whatever was near. “Like the sky and the lake.”
Uri looked twice at Frankie. “Precisely,” he said, refilling their glasses. Then, with a long sigh, he lifted his glass in the direction of his wife’s bedroom. “My Hannah, she’s not coming out today. Or any day.”
He drank deeply. “She doesn’t approve of my building,” he said ruefully. “She hates it.” He glanced toward the heap on the coffee table. “Only this, the Kidney.” He gestured all around. “She could stay here forever.”
He downed his glass and refilled both of theirs again. “You
haven’t met her yet. But when you do…Well, then!”
Frankie sat back in the sofa. The wine was colouring everything a soft rouge. Mr. Slonemsky’s face—Uri’s—was pink. His eyes bloodshot. The sun cast an orange-red swath across the sky above the trees.
Mrs. Slonemsky had been watching him from her window, Frankie swore, while he tended the iris isle. “Yes,” he said, “I look forward to meeting her.” His lips and tongue felt slow and sloppy. He thought he should go before he made a fool of himself, and started to rise.
“No, stay a little longer,” Uri said. “Please.”
So Frankie stayed into the night. Another bottle came out, then another. Until he finally left Uri asleep on the sofa and stumbled down the stairs to his room.
He felt woozy, but his mind was a hive of thoughts—Uri’s thoughts.
How do we better shelter the human body? Uri Slonemsky had asked. How do we bring the outside in? Frankie had to laugh. He knew a lot about that. The sea air rising between the floorboards on the inlet; the ice between the slats of their shacks in Tashme; the wind cutting like a knife through tar paper. The morning sun too, winking through the cracks. Really, it took only a few planks to shelter the human body.
Hannah, my Hannah, Uri had lamented. From the beginning, she’d been his inspiration. She would hold me, curl around me like a vine. When I drew, she would guide my hand.
But one day, she couldn’t. She was too weak. After chasing ghostly aches all over her body, the doctors finally cornered her ailment: it was her kidney. Even a transplant—Uri’s own kidney—would not be a cure.
Uri Slonemsky wanted not just to shelter, but to protect, even heal the human body with what he built. With this house, the Kidney.
From then on, she closed the bedroom door. He retreated into the study. To no longer have her at my side! To be without her inspiration, her guidance.
Every morning he looked up at the closed door, hoping it would open. He couldn’t help wondering, he told Frankie. Was she glad to be without me? Relieved? Was she suffering?
Uri Slonemsky himself was surely suffering.
Frankie was not. He was practically penniless and uneducated, a citizen of nowhere in particular, but he wasn’t suffering. His eyelids began to droop. He had a roof over his head, was now employed, and was strong and healthy, as was Reiko. How far apart they were from one another! Two thousand miles and then some. He missed the closeness of her body; the tickle of her curls against his cheek. Her scent. How little he knew of what she was feeling these days, with the baby coming.
* * *
At Union Station, he greeted the Honda family, newly arrived from Tashme. As promised, he met the mister and missus and their young son on the platform and helped to unload their suitcases and boxes knotted with twine, their all-you-can-carry.
“Ah, thank you so much!” the missus exclaimed. How relieved they were to see him, Frankie Hanesaka, who could get you anything in the camp, and now would do the same in the Big City! They gawked up at the columns of Union Station and across Front Street at the grand Royal York Hotel with its rich red awnings and gold-tasselled doormen. They cricked their necks to gaze up the thirty-four storeys of the Bank of Commerce. Frankie rode the streetcar with them to their temporary home in Cabbagetown.
When they handed him his fee, he carefully folded the bills into his pocket. The wad was thickening. He smiled into their uncertain faces. “Lay low, and everything will be fine,” he said.
CHAPTER 7
Below, Above and Beyond
Fresh news slipped under the door. A letter from Reiko.
The baby was dead. It had died inside her and been taken out at the hospital in Hope. Taken out. From inside her body, the dead body, taken out.
Frankie couldn’t breathe. His throat, his chest clogged. Then his heart hurtled forward on its track, chugging, unstoppable. He pressed his head to the wall, then threw up.
The day after, a soft knock at his door. It was Noriko, eyes averted and mouth pursed, beckoning him to the telephone in the kitchen. He didn’t want to answer. Still, he followed her upstairs. It was Reiko calling from across the country.
Frankie. He barely recognized her voice, arriving amid the rustle of Noriko in the kitchen behind him.
Yes.
I’m sorry.
It’s not your fault.
Yes, I know. But—
They listened to the sound of each other, without much to say. She’d be calling from the camp canteen if it was still operating, or the post office in Hope. It would be early morning for her.
He wanted to ask for his mother. Instead he said goodbye, cradling the receiver at his end.
In the evening, he sat down to watch the irises, but their petals dangled too precariously in the breeze. He didn’t know what to do with himself.
He jumped on his bicycle and rode south to the lakefront, then west following the water’s edge as the road rose up. He glimpsed a Ferris wheel in the distance below, motionless in the falling darkness. A grand white building with huge columns and gaping walls. He rode down and parked his bicycle. He walked past shuttered booths and carousels with festooned horses, frozen and riderless. All closed down except for the lake and its waves slithering into the rock-strewn shore and slithering out under a feeble moon.
He rode back north and found himself in the old neighbourhood, walking his bicycle through the Necropolis. He sat among the gravestones. This—death—was the worst that could happen, and it had.
How? Frankie had cursed himself—that was how. For all along, wanting to be relieved of his burden and for feeling relieved now, in spite of himself. He sighed, then choked. As if he were sinking again, with no one to pull him up.
* * *
—
A week later, Frankie, to his surprise, received a letter from Bucky, mailed from Tokyo. It was typewritten. Dear Frank, it began and went on for pages and pages—
I find myself on the islands of your ancestors and thinking of your life experience so far. You have lived on land and on water, so you have seen that a house is not so different from a ship. In fact, houses may be considered aerodynamically as little ships whose standard cruising speed roughly equals the average speed of wind over the United States. If accelerated, planking begins to fly off and flat boards develop lift with the wind.
Frankie read the passage twice. Was Bucky saying that houses could not only float, but they could fly? Yes. Roofs of houses could be the keels of ships, paddling in air instead of water. If not to fly, then to be airlifted with ease from one spot to another, anywhere across the globe, from Lake Ontario to the Arctic Ocean to Tokyo Harbour. Frankie had asked to be taught, and here was his first lesson.
The letter went on with words that touched Frankie, yet dangled out of his reach. There was magic in them, and intelligence beyond him. There were words of Bucky’s own making, Frankie was sure. Invented words. Bucky had sketched pictures of other worlds and creations: a house with the mast of a ship and an airplane in its garage, a shiny round aluminum dwelling with bubbles inside for washing and sitting. There was a strange three-wheeled automobile, and a city on water, a city on land, and one up in the air under a dome. The moon was a sky companion; the rotating Earth, a spaceship. He, everyone, was an Earthian aboard for the ride.
He wrote, too, of priest-navigators, wielders of magic and notched sticks held to the stars, who set out for distant waters carried by the wind and then found their way back.
Could the Priest be one of those who’d set out from Japan and safely returned?
Bucky had included an old photograph of himself as a young man standing high in the sky, taller than in real life, yet floating among clouds, it seemed, with a spired building rooted behind him. On the back, he’d written: Guinea Pig B with Empire State Building, 1932. Bucky looked strong and less stout, a young, smooth-faced self ready to climb the skyscraper behind him—a stairway to the stars.
Frankie pored over the letter. Especially the part that told of a daughter,
Alexandra, who had died when she was four. Died because Bucky hadn’t housed her properly, healthfully. His business had failed and he’d had no money. Polio, he wrote, and meningitis, which Frankie knew of because a boy had died of it in Tashme. We aren’t so different, Bucky had said when they’d sat together in the yard. Now it was as if Bucky knew about Reiko and the baby.
Bucky had failed his family, failed in business, and one night took himself to the shores of Lake Michigan—one of the Great Lakes linked to Lake Ontario—to end his life. But instead, strangely, he resolved to make a lifelong experiment of himself, to see what an Average Man could do to help all of humanity. He called himself Guinea Pig B, for Buckminster, and declared it to all who would listen.
Bucky’s letter—and the photograph with it—became the one thing Frankie could sit himself still to study, even when it confounded him. He kept it in a box. Whenever he brought it out, it was Bucky visiting him, teaching him to be smarter—better, even, than an Average Man. Bucky was no ghostly form flitting through his dreams, no Priest: Bucky was real, even as a memory. His eyes magnified by his glasses, his musty smell, the chipped tooth revealed when he smiled, the spittle on his lips when he spoke, even alighting on Frankie’s own.
Already Frankie was using his new rake with greater ease in the dry garden, and already his shoulders ached a little less at the end of each day. He’d been ladling Miracle-Gro onto the iris isle and not a bloom had withered. He was carrying out Bucky’s process of ephemeralization: doing more with less.
Seemingly impossible feats could be accomplished by humans if they simply joined hands, Bucky wrote. For example, all the humans on Earth could form a chain to reach the moon and loop back, nine times!
Could he, then, lowly Frank Hanesaka, do more with what he’d been given? Couldn’t he be Guinea Pig F?
* * *
Floating City Page 9
