Floating City

by Kerri Sakamoto

  When he slept between her rose-coloured sheets, Frankie dreamed his old dream of drowning in dark water. Of being taken to the other side and returned just in time. He lay in bed, later than he should, staring into the strange face of his mother’s ivory carving: that half-human, half-feral animal face. He felt foolish and clouded by his mother’s superstitions. Here he was perched in Rosedale. What will you, Frank Hanesaka, make of Guinea Pig F?

  As if in answer, Hannah handed him the keys to the car. First, Guinea Pig F would learn to drive, with a little instruction from Noriko. As the flood waters ebbed, the need for countless repairs was revealed and there were errands to run. How had this hurricane and flood come to be? How could such a force rise out of nothing to destroy houses and forests and lives?

  Then, as if brought by the flood, a telephone call. Frankie heard the tinny ring. Somehow he knew.

  “We’re coming soon, Frankie,” Reiko said. Her father had died. Her voice was different this time. Deeper, stronger.

  “I don’t have a place for us yet. Just a little longer.”

  “Anyplace will be fine,” she said, then added: “Your mother says so.” No more putting off what Frankie had been promising for so long.

  The whole sky was pouring into the house. Soon the droppings of starlings and sparrows, robins, cardinals and blue jays cast splotchy shadows onto the living room by daylight.

  One morning Frankie and Bucky looked out to see the larger rocks surfacing in the still-wet dry garden.

  “The water giveth,” said Bucky, “and the water taketh away.”

  * * *

  —

  A knock came at his—Anne’s—door early one morning. It was Hannah, her hair and sleeves fluttering high and wild: she was properly dressed for the first time in days. She closed the door behind her and clamped his wrist. “I need your help, Frank.”

  He and Hannah drove along the lake, passing house after house whose walls were water stained halfway up or higher. Yards were muddy swamps strewn with debris and sand bags piled uselessly around them. Motley things lay on lawns and laundry lines in the weak sunlight: bits of furniture, books, clothing, blankets, stuffed toys.

  They drove north into a warren of streets, still puddled here and there, where the houses were modest boxes. They slowed along a clearing where the land sloped down toward the Humber River. A footbridge lay on the grass twisted and splintered like a slain dragon.

  “There!” Hannah pointed and stopped the car. She ventured down to the riverbank. Her mink coat grazed the mud and the wind caught her hair. A few caravans lay mired in the shallows. A truck pulled onto the grass behind them. Guided by Hannah, it backed up toward the only caravan still upright. It stopped and Mr. Fujimoto got out. With a nod, he handed Frankie a shovel and took another from the back of the truck. They dug a gentle slope out of the riverbank and towed the caravan to higher ground.

  Hannah took hold of both Mr. Fujimoto’s hands, the hands she’d praised for the dirt in their pores. “Thank you for coming to help,” she said breathlessly. “The family has nothing but this caravan. Now they can clean it out and move back in.”

  Mr. Fujimoto’s house had been mostly spared by the hurricane, but of his chrysanthemum forest only bent stems remained. He bent his own head now, in telling the tale. It was bad fortune, terrible fortune. He and his family would soon have to leave; their house was being bulldozed to make way for Regent Park—some new kind of Modern City Living. They could live in Regent Park once it was built, in a small apartment.

  “Come back to us, Mister F, if you like,” Hannah said, clamping his arm. “Take a corner of our yard to regrow your chrysanthemums.”

  Mr. Fujimoto shook his head and bent it lower. “Thank you just the same, Mrs. Slonemsky.” As she turned to leave, he glared at Frankie, got into his truck and drove away.

  When they returned to the Kidney, Uri was just home from his office.

  “Thank you, thank you,” Hannah whispered to Frankie.

  “It’s good of you,” he replied quietly, his wrist gripped in her fingers.

  “I’d do the same for you, Frank. Whatever you need.”

  * * *

  Hannah sent him back to clean the caravan, along with Noriko. Miraculously, the inside was intact, though they would need to scrub away the muck and stench of old food and mould and a film of dirt over every surface.

  Noriko picked up a photograph of a woman with a young girl and a boy: “Mrs. Slonemsky’s friend,” she sighed. The widow and her children.

  Other caravans had been towed to the same riverside spot by the time the family settled back in. Within the next few days, they’d have to move again to a caravan park on the far eastern edge of the city. Frankie looked hard into the faces in the picture; they seemed worn, thin and sullen: aged—even the children’s. He recognized the look: they were poor, cast out. They stared back at him. Is this how he looked to the world when he walked down the street? Even worse for being a Jap?

  The woman in the picture appeared just then at the caravan door. Both Frankie and Noriko stepped back sheepishly.

  “Please thank Hannah for me,” the woman said brusquely as she climbed up.

  “Mrs. Slonemsky’s arranged for the electrical and water hook-up,” Frankie told her.

  The woman was silent for a moment. “Thirty-five people died here,” she said. She flicked a chapped hand in the air. “Washed away.”

  Stories of these people had filled the papers, the radio. “But they’d been warned,” Frankie said, repeating what Uri had said to him. “They knew it, but they went down with their homes.”

  Along the street, several FOR SALE signs had appeared in front of the water-stained bungalows. “Do you know how much they’re selling for?” asked Frankie after a moment. He felt his heartbeat thicken.

  “A pittance,” the woman said. “They’ll sell for a pittance.”

  * * *

  —

  City Hall came calling and the Slonemsky dining room table was soon covered with maps of all kinds. Historical: some twenty, fifty, a hundred years back. The streets, one-way, two-way, multi-lane; the topography. Another was a map with rivers, creeks, streams—above- and underground. Watersheds, wetlands, breakwaters, bridges. The table became the city in all its dimensions, with the shores of Lake Ontario dropping off its edge. City Hall wanted Uri Slonemsky’s expertise, his foreknowledge—his anticipatory design sense, Bucky would surely call it—to help plan and rebuild, not simply in the wake of the storm, but with an eye to future comings. After all, he’d called himself a dry-spot specialist.

  Uri’s finger traced the waterways of the city over the high and the low lay of the land. Frankie’s eyes followed.

  “They built too close to the water,” Uri concluded.

  “Everyone wants to be close to water,” Frankie said.

  “Or course,” said Bucky. “The water carries us to our destination, to our original home.”

  “Wherever that may be,” said Frankie.

  So the precious land along the riverbanks would become parkland, open to all and owned by none, so that people and their homes would never again be in peril. Uri’s map of the city sat on the table with properties marked for expropriation. Frankie knew the word, and knew what it meant. Expropriation had sent his family from the shore to the strait.

  “The City will pay more than fair market price,” said Uri when Hannah protested. “Fair, as in before the storm,” he assured her as Frankie listened. “You’ll make sure?” asked Hannah. “Yes,” said Uri, “of course.”

  * * *

  Of course. Fair market price. Before the storm. Frankie took his bicycle out early the next morning and rode past the boarded-up houses, the downed fences, the abandoned chesterfields, tables, clothing, toys on soggy lawns and gardens. Cars. Splintered off bits of houses, STOP signs leaning or downed.

  His heart was pounding, chugging.

  * * *

  —

  So Frankie paid the pittance asked for one p
roperty, then another and another and another, until his bank account was drained. The worst on the street, closest to the creek, the lots Uri had circled on one of his maps. Four properties for less than it would cost him to buy one. Bad-luck number four, but he couldn’t stop himself at three. He didn’t even talk to his mother first; he didn’t talk to anyone. He spoke only to the sellers, and as little as possible at that. Some were tearful, but what were tears, spent so freely?

  “This was our home for twenty years,” one woman lamented. “It’s worth more.” She held tight to his hand even as he slipped it free. He figured the woman lucky, all of them lucky. He was giving more than he’d ever gotten. Twenty years in one fine, spacious house!

  He was using anticipatory vision, land-on-water/water-on-land ingenuity. He bought, and when City Hall came calling, he would sell it back to them. This time, he’d profit from expropriation. Ease the uncertainty of owners. He’d be saving these people time and worry, taking on that debt. In exchange, he’d be repaid once the expropriation went through at City Hall, just as Uri had described. Like a good businessman, he’d earn a profit for that time and worry taken on.

  Frankie offered to help an elderly couple move their things. “There’s nothing to take,” they said. They carried two suitcases each, their all-you-can-carry, and left the rest behind.

  “Where will you go?” he dared ask. The man said nothing. “We’ll be fine,” the woman answered with a weak smile.

  They would be fine, Frankie told himself. With better chances than Taiji, his mother and he had ever known.

  * * *

  —

  As Uri’s Towers of Finance went up, Frankie’s houses went down. Waterlogged, they slunk and sunk until the ground froze. At night, Frankie rode his bicycle to see the progress of Uri’s skyscraper. On days off, he rode through slush to the riverbank. He watched neighbours squint at the sky, praying for sun and dry winds while chipping away at ice frozen to their doorsteps. They shook their heads at him for his foolish investment. Water stains had begun to fade from their walls four, five feet up, but handmade FOR SALE signs were sprouting from the snow. He told no one what he knew of the expropriation to come, and began to wonder if men from the City would, in fact, arrive with cheques in hand. He didn’t dare ask Uri.

  The Towers of Finance rose into the clouds. Frankie watched in awe as each floor was topped by another, then another, each capped with snow, taller than the Bank of Commerce, with clear views to the lake. He felt dwarfed by the ambition of it.

  “Twenty-four-karat gold baked onto its panes of glass,” Uri told him. “You’ll see. More glass than in any other skyscraper in the world, and more gold.” Enough to dust the glass reflective and turn the reflected sunset pink. Something never done before.

  The towers glittered like the light at dusk in the graveyard near Tashme that he swore was gold dust from the banks of the Fraser. Now, in the sky cast in the same magic hour, Uri Slonemsky’s towers gilded the sky.

  The Priest began to appear in Frankie’s dreams, saying nothing, always in white robes. Frankie stood himself before the large mirror in Anne’s pink bedroom and pushed back his overgrown hair. Was Guinea Pig F cursed or blessed? He slid down his pants and twisted to see the Mongolian spot.

  It was as dark and unfaded as when the Ladies of the Sisters of Mercy first glimpsed it.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Hannah sat Frankie down and gave him a haircut. Her fingers dug into his scalp one minute, then flew off the next. When she finished, she held her hands to his cheeks and made him look in the mirror. There was no turning away.

  “How do you do, Frank!”

  His face was not a handsome face or a kind face; it was neither this nor that. The Priest lurked there, not quite willing to show all of himself.

  Still, with his hair trimmed away, Frankie was out of hiding. He looked fine; respectable, at least for what he was. No one would think twice except for those who already did.

  A few days later, Hannah presented him with a suit, one of Uri’s that she’d had altered. She made him try it on. A perfect fit.

  “You see, Frank?” she cried, inhaling her own excitement. She smoothed his shoulders.

  He thought of asking her, then and there, for the help she’d said she’d give him.

  But then he looked in the mirror: it wasn’t any ordinary suit. Nothing like the one he’d lined up to buy Saturday morning at Honest Ed’s or the ones he’d seen in the window of Tip Top Tailors. The cloth was fine, inside and out. It was as if he’d stepped into someone else’s sleek skin.

  “Oh, Frank!” Hannah said again, clasping her hands. Then she reached for his. “When you shake someone’s hand, you give them something to hold on to. Not this.” She let his limp, clammy hand drop.

  “You give them your word.” Now she gripped his hand again and held it firmly, squeezed it until he squeezed back. He listened closely to her for she was—wasn’t she?—sharing with him the secret of the Jews. Be smarter. Do everything faster, better, cheaper than anyone else. From his mother he already knew to be a scavenger. From Bucky, he was learning to do more with that scavenged less.

  Frankie practised handshaking with Noriko. Firmly and vigorously.

  The day of a dental appointment, Frankie donned the suit and walked the Avenue of Finance. Past the Bank of Commerce, under Uri Slonemsky’s growing skyscraper. Past the construction workers. No one shouted at him this time to get out of the way. This time was different. He was neither invisible nor alien. He strode taller, straighter. His gaze was met by those who passed, some with a deferential nod or tip of the hat; a woman with the slightest hint of a smile, he was sure. Doors were opened for him. In a restaurant, he asked to be seated by a window and he was, though he slipped out without ordering.

  The suit was magic.

  Bucky was wrong: a suit didn’t make a man invisible. It made Frankie visible, important, or at least important enough.

  He lay in bed in Anne’s pink room, gazing up at the night sky through the splotched ceiling at the piercings of stars. His mother and Reiko would very soon be arriving. To what? Hannah had said they could all stay, but he could not imagine it. She had also offered Mr. Fujimoto a home and a garden plot—all in her Kidney.

  She had looked into Frankie’s hands and told him they were not the hands of a gardener. No, the future of Guinea Pig F lay elsewhere.

  * * *

  He’d been back in the basement for a week when he woke to shoes shuffling outside his window in the dark of night. Then the clatter of high heels. Was he dreaming? The bottoms of suitcases grazing the walk, the sound too grating not to be real.

  At least they’d known to come to the back door.

  He lay in bed for a moment before the knock came. Sharp, impatient raps.

  He rushed up the stairs and opened the door, face burning. There was Reiko: cheeks as red as her lips, hair tightly crimped instead of waved, the clenched white-gloved hand ready to knock again. The brooch he’d given his Rose Queen was faithfully pinned to her lapel; it scratched his neck as she embraced him. Behind her, his mother stood; and behind his mother was Taiji, smaller even than he remembered. Aki peeked from behind; blinked to take him in with her one good eye.

  They stared at him for a moment; the hair didn’t cover his face as it used to.

  “You took too long,” his mother said, greyer but not so changed. She took hold of his hands and saw the dirt in his nails, then pushed them away.

  “Yes, Mama,” he said and sighed. He was relieved to see them here; more than he’d realized.

  “I told you we were coming soon,” Reiko said. She’d adopted some of his mother’s sternness. She was tall in her high-heeled shoes, purchased on Hope’s main street, no doubt. But then she glanced at him shyly, unsure; she slipped off those shoes and came down to size beside him. She slipped her hand into his.

  “Welcome,” he said, and led them down the stairs.

  * * *

  How
good it was to hold a body—Reiko’s body—close and to plunge inside. He was a man after all: still young, strong; an Average Man like Uri Slonemsky or Bucky or any other walking down the Avenue of Finance, and now he was reminded that Reiko could give him that feeling. Her eyes caught a spit of light in the dark between them. “I missed you so, Frankie,” she whispered while the others slept—on the newly replaced carpeting, atop bedding laid out by Noriko.

  * * *

  —

  The most glorious sight! Hannah fluttered her purple chiffon wings the next morning as she pointed out the window down to the mucky marsh that was once home to the iris isle. The wonders your Frank worked! The gift of it!

  His mother nodded in return. Taiji stood silent behind. Reiko was quiet too, staring down at herself, at her dress and shoes and fingernails: too red; lips curling back from a red-stained tooth. Aki slipped outside to the edge of the murky waters and gazed up to trees she’d never imagined could grow so tall in the city.

  Frankie did not belong there. Shame on him for the dirt under his nails, on his pants—dirt from someone else’s land. He’d asked them to wait. Coming from the train station to this clammy basement, Momoye had seen men striding with purpose, in and out the revolving doors of soaring office buildings, fine hotels and automobiles.

  Then he brought out the suit. “Look, Mama.” He put it against him to show her the Frankie who was becoming Frank. Hmph. She fingered the fine cloth and studied her son, his short haircut and the chin he was holding higher than before. She saw the initials inside too: U.S.