The Garneau Block

by Todd Babiak

  This was Madison’s special horror. It bestowed certain rights upon her. The right to feel victimized, to sulk dramatically, to surf the Internet for something more substantial than crib prices. How could these people in stiff blue cotton uniforms bleach, rake, mop, and shovel it away?

  15

  the block party

  Soon, the sidewalk in front of 10 Garneau was congested with the curious. Shirley Wong and Abby Weiss insisted on filling a cooler with German beer and Costco pop. David Weiss suggested pizza and Raymond Terletsky agreed it was a brilliant idea, as long as pepperoni and mushrooms were involved.

  It took several minutes for Jonas Pond to appear, his short brown hair twirled by the pillow. He stood next to Madison and yanked her ponytail. “Toot toot. So is there an exorcism going down or what?”

  “It’s four in the afternoon. Did you just wake up?”

  “Don’t judge me, woman.”

  “Did you just wake up?”

  “I had a rehearsal last night, absolutely gruelling, for a two-hander about–you guessed it–coming out of the closet. What we really have to do is ban stupid people from getting theatre degrees. In fact, let’s set up checkpoints at all roads leading into Old Strathcona and downtown. That way…”

  “They’re in the house.”

  “Who are?”

  “Cleaners.”

  “What house? This house?”

  “You know what, Jonas, maybe you should grab another fourteen or fifteen hours of shut-eye.”

  “Are those men Bolivian? The ones picking up the garbage?”

  “I have no idea, but they only speak Spanish. Abby tried to get some info from them, but all they can do in English is apologize.”

  “Well, at least they’re adapting to Canadian culture.” Jonas shook his arms, rolled his shoulders, and initiated a mouth-stretching exercise: “Pah-Teek-Hah. Pah-Teek-Hah. Joowish. Joowish. Kansas City Rollers. Boooomtown.” Then he started up the grass to speak to the workers.

  “What’s he doing?” said David Weiss, who sat in a lawn-chair with Garith on his lap. He had just returned from playing eighteen holes at the Mayfair with a party donor. “Does he know those guys?”

  “He’s practising his Spanish.”

  “That seems inappropriate.”

  Madison shrugged.

  “Sit down, have a beer. It really strips some of the macabre out of this.”

  “I don’t want a beer, Dad.”

  “Hey, you love beer. Come on. Tell your old man a story.”

  Madison watched the women moving rhythmically behind the upstairs window. It took two of them to mop the wood floors. On the night it happened, she hadn’t been able to see Benjamin up there with the gun. It was too dark, and the tactical unit kept everyone back. Residents of the Garneau Block weren’t allowed to be in their houses, so they huddled behind roadblocks with the media and local bystanders, drinking Sugarbowl coffee and trying to hear what Benjamin was screaming out the window.

  The last Fringe play of the festival had been earlier that evening, and afterward she and Jonas had sat in the Casa Radio Active tent drinking with a table full of actors. Since she had been nursing a cranberry juice, the competition for speaking time and attention between the drunken performers had been almost too much to take, so she daydreamed about her baby. Names she might give him or her, and whether or not she could afford one of those running strollers with the big mountain-bike tires.

  When Jonas lost the ability to deliver a coherent sentence that Sunday night, she helped him up and they started home. Four blocks away, with the flashing lights visible behind the Garneau Theatre, it was obvious something had gone wrong. Madison’s first worry was that her parents were dead. A break-in, a fire, a violent left-wing reprisal against David Weiss.

  They reached the roadblocks as fast as Madison could drag the stumbling, mumbling Jonas, and the policewoman guided them to a safe place to wait out the ordeal. Madison was pleased to see her parents and Jonas was pleased to see a soft patch of grass. Luckily, one of the ambulances had several extra woollen blankets. Madison covered him up.

  So what did they know? They knew that Benjamin, who Jeanne had kicked out, was back in the house. They knew he was drunk and raving and that he had a gun. What was he thinking? Well, no answers there.

  Now, more than two weeks later, Jonas concluded his exploratory interview with the Latin American men working in the front yard by shaking their hands and kissing their cheeks. He reported back to Madison with a cringe.

  “What did they say? Who hired them?”

  “Their accent is strong, their vocabulary is quite advanced, and they talk really fast. I’m only in level two Spanish.”

  “But you spoke to them. In Spanish.”

  “I did, I did. But I opened with buenas tardes so flawlessly they must’ve figured I was bilingual. After the first bit I just nodded and said si, si.”

  “So you don’t know who hired them?”

  Jonas attempted to flatten the pillow swirls in his hair. “I didn’t catch anything like that. But I think they’re looking forward to Christmas time, and they enjoy living here in Canada.” He turned around, southward, and raised his hand to block the sun. “Hey. Hey, hello to you!”

  On the opposite sidewalk, in a suit and carrying a stiff black briefcase, stood the young Indian man from across the street. The young Indian man from across the street looked around to make sure Jonas was speaking to him. Then he waved and started up the red stone walk leading to 13 Garneau.

  “Now that is a good-looking gent.”

  Madison nodded.

  “Have you ever heard him speak? Or seen him with anyone?”

  Madison shook her head.

  “Do you think he’s a member of India’s secret service?”

  “No, Jonas.”

  “Let’s ask him right now if he wants to go on a date with you. Unless, of course, there’s a language barrier.”

  Jonas began pulling Madison’s arm. She resisted, and eventually kicked him. “Absolutely not.”

  “Did you see that briefcase? That means he’s employed. You have to ask him out.”

  “Why, because I’m such a sweet catch? I’m sure he’s looking for a pregnant travel agent who lives in her parents’ basement.”

  “Sometimes you’re just miserable, Madison, and I have to say it affects your degree of attractiveness.”

  “You go talk to him. You can practise another pretend foreign language.”

  Jonas started to push Madison across the street. She was just about to get a hand free and slap his heavily moisturized face when Garith barked. The cleaners inside 10 Garneau were coming out.

  16

  massage therapy

  Raymond Terletsky didn’t understand what they had all expected to learn from the cleaning crew that had been inside 10 Garneau. Surely they knew blood was nearly impossible to remove from hardwood, especially after settling in for two weeks. Had they hoped to extract some deep human truth or even Jeanne’s new address from Sandi, the only person among the cleaners who spoke fluent English?

  The neighbours seemed particularly disappointed when Sandi raised one eyebrow and answered their concerns with a query of her own:

  “Yeah, any you guys got a smoke I could bum?”

  Sitting on the sidewalk in lawnchairs, drinking two Heineken and talking about peak oil with David Weiss, had been somewhat comical, especially when David started quoting from the street paper. But after the cleaners drove off, when Raymond’s wife and neighbours decided to have a final drink at the Sugarbowl and, according to Jonas Pond, “decompress,” Raymond decided to go his own way, and his way was clear.

  He needed a massage.

  The masseuse was a former student, a divorcée from Kamloops who tried a year of philosophy courses in 2001 to see if they might make her life more meaningful. Apparently, knowing a thing or two about the trial and death of Socrates, cogito, ergo sum, and the central argument in Mill’s On Liberty merely strengthened her de
termination not to think so hard. She decided there was no shame in daydreaming about Cozumel while she pressed her palms into flesh.

  Charlene the masseuse lived in a two-bedroom suite in Windsor Park Plaza, with a partial view of old Corbett Hall. Before he knew she was available, Raymond made his way westward and called her on his cellular phone.

  “I don’t know, Dr. Terletsky. Thursday’s my TV night.”

  “How about I pay double.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I just will. Say yes.”

  Charlene sighed. “Yes.”

  In the elevator, Raymond grew nervous. He always grew nervous in the few minutes before seeing Charlene. Though she was not beautiful or even pretty, Charlene had a focused stare and a disarming way of speaking that he knowingly mistook for flirtation. The door was open when he arrived, and Charlene had already changed into the loose, nursey white shirt and pants she wore when she worked.

  Instead of saying hello, Charlene bit her bottom lip when he came through the door. “I was thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “How am I supposed to fill out your receipt if you’re paying me double? I bet your health plan only covers about sixty bucks an hour.”

  “The rest is a tip.”

  “You’re gonna give me a sixty-dollar tip?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  Charlene crossed her arms, tilted her head, and left him to change.

  The massage room was Charlene’s second bedroom, so the sliding closet doors were mirrors. Before he covered himself with the towel, Raymond considered his naked body in reflection. To live authentically, says Heidegger, we must learn to confront death. We must welcome it here, alone before the mirror, in the jam-and-jelly scent of our aging skin. We must appreciate that despite our broad consciousness, despite our instinctual specialness, we were born to die.

  Heidegger’s secular update of Kierkegaard’s leap of faith produces a deep and irrevocable transformation in anyone who manages to make it. In front of the mirror, relatively certain he had made the leap, Raymond comprehended the totality of existence. Then he grabbed the loose flesh around his waist and wished beyond wishing that he could just slice it off with a butcher knife.

  Charlene knocked. “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  The shades were down and the lights were low, the miniature fountain tinkled and The Goldberg Variations played on the tiny stereo in the corner. Charlene didn’t speak as she worked, which made Raymond think naughtier thoughts than he might have if she’d chatted about her parents or her fear of squirrels. With her slippery fingers digging into his back and then–sweet daisy–his front, Raymond had to work like an Egyptian slave to maintain decorum.

  Then, remembering Heidegger, he relaxed. He was born to die. This was an opportunity for adventure, and he really didn’t have that much time left. If he wasted this, he would waste everything.

  “Charlene.”

  She said nothing.

  “Charlene.”

  “Shhh. No talking. It ruins the healing.”

  “How much extra would it be, I mean just theoretically, if someone wanted more than a massage?”

  Charlene’s fingers halted. She cleared her throat, walked to the light switch, turned it on and exited the room. On her way out, she slammed the door.

  Raymond suspected this adventure was over.

  Dressed again, and with some time to absorb and appreciate his humiliation, he checked the window. Charlene was on the eleventh floor, far too high to jump. So Raymond sighed, and opened the door.

  “Charlene, I was just…”

  “Out.”

  “I was conducting an experiment.”

  “Zero tolerance policy. Out.”

  Raymond opened his mouth twice more, but Charlene interrupted him sternly. She picked up her cordless phone and dialled three numbers. Nine-one-one? He hurried out of her apartment, down the hallway, and into the elevator. Four men in T-shirts and baseball caps were in the car, and they didn’t stop talking when Raymond entered. It seemed the young men were on their way to Whyte Avenue, where they hoped to meet like-minded women, bring them back to Windsor Park Plaza, and do what comes naturally to drunk people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one.

  Perhaps Shirley and his neighbours were still at the Sugarbowl. Perhaps he could catch them there, take his wife’s hand and apologize in silence, secretly beg forgiveness. For the first time since 1967–or was it 1968?–Raymond ran.

  17

  bison with fancy bacon and blueberry sauce

  Downtown sidewalks were crowded with noon-hour joggers and their opposites, the grey-faced cigarette people banned from office complexes. Young men and women in shorts and wrinkled T-shirts wandered down the promenade of lofts, not long ago a ghost town of deserted warehouses. Pimply high-school dropouts in giant pants and crooked baseball caps stood in front of the old Bay building, now home to a television and radio station, and swayed to the dull rhythms pumped out of little speakers on Jasper Avenue.

  It was Friday and summer had returned in earnest. Edmontonians smiled and laughed into their cellular phones, adjusted their sunglasses, flipped through newspapers, sipped coffee on patios. The everywhere construction workers, putting up yet another condominium, told each other blue jokes and stared at passing women.

  David Weiss wanted to kick every one of the idle workmen, with their hard hats covered in union stickers. If you love communism so much, why don’t you go to China, or Quebec? Get to work! The dominion of Alberta isn’t going to build itself.

  Every Friday, he dressed in a black suit and took lunch with three other riding association presidents. Instead of paying six or nine dollars to park in an underground garage downtown for a couple of hours, David nearly always left his Yukon Denali in a Save On Foods lot and walked twelve blocks to the restaurant.

  The previous evening had been difficult for his wife and daughter. Abby and Madison had hoped to discover the whereabouts of the remaining Perlitzes, Jeanne and Katie. But the cleaning crew that had been in 10 Garneau consisted of inarticulate dim-bulbs, working for someone else who may or may not have known anything.

  Of course, the resonance of his family’s disappointment explained David’s failure to phone in a lunch reservation the day before. He didn’t like to flaunt his power, but David had called the Hardware Grill as soon as it opened that morning and mentioned, casually, that he needed a table to discuss PC policy. The premier would likely join them this afternoon.

  David arrived at the Hardware Grill and the manager was summoned. He shook David’s hand and called him Mr. Weiss and asked if there was anything he could do to make the premier’s experience an enjoyable one. There was a line of sweat along the manager’s hairline, and a faint twitch in the skin beneath his right eye. David realized it would be immoral to break the news to the poor man now.

  “We’ll let you know. For the moment, just the table and a wine list.”

  “Right away, Mr. Weiss.”

  David felt he had made the best possible choice in restaurants. The air conditioning was at a civilized level, and the baroque chamber music inspired him to sit with excellent posture. Somewhere, he knew, a chef was wrapping fancy bacon around a hunk of bison and drizzling blueberry sauce over it.

  David had spent his working life as a high-school math teacher, with a high-school math teacher’s salary and pension, so the Hardware Grill and its pleasures should have been at least two notches above him. How barren and middling would his retirement be today, David wondered, if he hadn’t joined the party? Why, at this very moment he would be slouching over a plate of grilled tofu at the Roots Organic Market with his wife and Maddy.

  This is what vexed him about Edmonton: the city’s tragic habit of voting against its interests, of settling for grilled tofu when it could have bison with fancy bacon and blueberry sauce. Calgary had a better airport and more head offices than Edmonton simply because its citizens voted as a Conservative block. In the nine
years since he joined the party, David Weiss had come to see himself as a walking and talking Calgary. If he hadn’t joined, he would be a plain old Edmonton–needlessly complicated, unsure, artsy, and angry.

  David waved when his colleagues entered the restaurant. That morning, he had tipped them off about the premier ruse. He watched the manager of the Hardware Grill bow before them, and hoped his friends wouldn’t spoil the man’s day with the truth quite yet.

  All week, David had been eager to meet with his fellow riding association presidents. Though he would never admit it, David had grown somewhat concerned about the notion of oil running out. His research on the Internet had only inspired further anxiety, as Barry’s warnings and conspiracies were only heightened and expanded on American web sites. Since reading the street magazine, he had stared at the ceiling each night in the darkness, listening to his wife’s gentle breathing and thinking about a world without oil.

  David wanted his colleagues, especially Grant, a former executive with Suncor, to tell him this peak oil stuff was left-wing hocus pocus. The middle-class Canadian lifestyle was invincible. It would last forever.

  Right?

  They shook hands and sat around the table. David’s three colleagues each motioned to the empty chairs. Grant leaned forward. “You didn’t tell the manager yet?”

  “I didn’t have the heart.”

  The four men turned to the manager, who smiled and nodded enthusiastically from across the room. Grant offered a thumbs-up and turned back to the table. “It’s sort of sick, what we’re doing here.”

  “Who’s going to tell him?” said David.

  Grant and the others laughed. It was obviously David’s job to tell the manager, as he had fashioned the lie. The server passed and Grant ordered a bottle of Australian Cabernet. David borrowed a cellular phone from Al, president of the Mill Creek riding association, the only one among them to have a winner in the legislature.