In the Skin of a Lion

by Michael Ondaatje

  In all of his imagining Caravaggio sees Patrick move with the light glancing wildly against the sides of the pipe. Whereas Patrick, having crawled through the iron bars, nearly unable to because of the tank, having done that and begun to swim, has discovered the lamp slows him too much so within seconds he has discarded it and it sinks to the foot of the pipe, the light still on, burning out an hour later. Patrick swims in darkness, just the pull of the water to guide him, clenching and releasing like that fist Caravaggio imagines, but banging his legs and hands against the sides of the pipe, doing this so often they are already bleeding from the blows and scrapes. Grease moves from his hair down his cheeks into his mouth. Most of all his body fears no air if the tank runs out, and the danger of silence among the pumps a mile away so he will suddenly move only at human speed. These fears are greater than the fear of no light or the remembered nightmare where he embraces the lost corpse. So his body, moving without thought, listens for silence. If the pumps stop, Caravaggio has told him to dynamite the pipe and climb out, leap from the water and yell. He will be there. But both know there is little chance of climbing out of that gashed metal while the whole lake pours in.

  The searchlights from the filtration plant glance over the water. Now Caravaggio has to leave Patrick. He changes direction and rows towards Kew Beach a half-mile further west. The lights of the amusement park are slowly being turned off, past midnight. The outline of the Ferris wheel disappears.

  Patrick swallows the first flutter of the dying tank.

  He heaves faster along with the current and he takes deeper breaths from the tank. In the middle of the third breath he crashes against bars. He is almost there. Gasping, the mouthpiece dry, empty, torn out of his mouth. He is almost there with an empty tank. Now he needs the light. He slips off the tank, an arm painful from the crash, and dives through the bars and swings up, no air in him, no light, up into the brick of the well, avoiding the suction of the side-screens built into the walls. If these catch his body fully the suction can hold him and never release him. He swims up by feel till he reaches the barrier screen. Thinking where should he go, down again? How to get up further? For precious seconds, his chest vacuumed and almost imploding before he realizes he is in air. His shoulders and head and forearms are in the delicious air. This is the screen he is supposed to cut himself through. He can breathe if he opens his mouth. He is in the natural air of the waterworks.

  He hangs, his fingers hooked through the wires of the screen, everything below his waist in water. The wire-cutters must have fallen in the crash against the bars or when he unstrapped the tank. For a while he doesn’t care. He has air now. He knows he can never fight his way back against the current, down to the foot of the well. He is caught.

  He hangs from one arm. A very small explosion to dislodge the firmly rivetted screen and he will be out. He has five detonators. Sacrifice one location. How small an explosion can someone make? He attaches a blasting cap to the screen with a clip fuse, sets it off, and dives down as far as he can go. He does not hear the sound at all, he is just picked up and flung hard against the brick and then sucked upwards in a hunched ball with the water towards the buckled screen so his back and face are lacerated. Then he falls back down. There has been no sound for him, just movement, sideways and up, skin coming off his cheek and his back. There was, he remembers, temporary light. He can taste blood if he puts his tongue outside his mouth. And he can taste blood which comes down his nose through the roof of his mouth.

  Patrick climbs out of the well and stands on the floor of the screen room among the grey machines, touching them to see if any are hot, a faint light from the main pumping station coming through a high window. He begins unwrapping the sticks of dynamite from his body and lays them in a row on the floor. Finding some cloth he wipes them dry. He removes from his pockets fuses, crimpers, timers, and detonator caps, which are wrapped in oil cloth. He unwinds the electrical wire and begins to assemble the blasting-box and plunger.

  Stripping completely naked he squeezes the water out of his clothes and lays his shirt and pants against the hot machines. He lies down now and tries to rest. Trying to control his breathing, even now he desires to take large gasps in case this will be his last air. King Solomon’s Mines. He smiles up in the darkness.

  Harris, half-asleep on the makeshift bed in his office, has heard the thump, one thump that didn’t fit into the pattern of noises made by the row of water pumps. He walks onto the mezzanine of the pumping station. It is brilliantly lit and stark. In his dressing-gown he descends the stairs to the low-level pumping station, walks twenty-five yards into the Venturi tunnels, and then returns slowly, listening again for that false thump. He has seen nothing but the grey-painted machines. On the upper level he looks out of the windows and sees the military patrols. He relaxes and goes back to his room.

  Patrick rests without closing his eyes, his gaze on the high window that brings light into this dark screen room. Soon he will go along the corridor where he had searched for her and found her, bathing beside a candle among all those puppets … years ago. He cannot touch his own face because of the pain. He has no idea what he has broken.

  After twenty minutes he gets up, puts on his clothes, and begins to attach the blasting caps onto the dynamite. He walks into the humidity of the pumping station. As he settles and beds the explosives he can see what will occur. A column of water will shoot up seventy feet into the air and break through the glass windows of the roof. The floor buckles, other pumps overload and burn out in seconds. When the settling basins explode, the military tents on the lawn above them will collapse downwards into twenty-four feet of pure water. He picks up the wheel of wire and lines the electrical fuses through the Venturi tunnels.

  “On the golf course I’m under par

  Metro-Goldwyn has asked me to star …”

  The machine roar drowns him out as he half mutters half sings, unaware that the song from the boat has attached itself to him like a burr. He wades across the raw water of the filter pools with the wire wheel in his outstretched hand, selecting the key columns on which to lay the dynamite. The water from here will burst through the wired glass into the corridors of rosy marble.

  “I’ve got a house – a showplace

  Still I can’t get no place – with you …”

  He lays a charge with its electric detonator over the plaque that says Dominion Centrifugal Pump. The last ones he nestles under the ferric chloride tanks, and beside the rose marble tower clock with its code lights. He runs the wires into the blasting-box.

  Barefoot, he walks up the staircase trailing the live wires behind him, around the mezzanine gallery and into Harris’ office.

  Harris sitting at his desk, the gooseneck lamp on, happens to be watching the door when it opens. Even if he had known the man before he would not recognize him now. Black thin cotton trousers and shirt, grease-black face – blood in the scrapes and scratches. The man’s knuckles bleeding, one arm hanging loose at his side. He notices the shirt ripped open at the back when the intruder turns to close the door.

  He walks towards Harris, the blasting-box carried like a chicken under his right arm.

  – Do you know me?

  – I worked for you, Mr. Harris. I helped build the tunnel I just swam through.

  – Who are you? How dare you try to come in here!

  – I’m not trying this, I’ve done it. Everything is wired. I just press the plunger on this blasting-box.

  – What do you want? Who are you?

  – I’m Patrick Lewis.

  There was silence. Patrick leaned forward and rubbed his cut fingers over the smoothness of Harris’ desk.

  – Feldspar, he murmured.

  Harris watched the eyes darting in the man’s dark face. He walked over to the sideboard and returned with a decanter of brandy and glasses. He was thinking. Then he began to speak. He talked about how he hated the officials of the city but how he loved City Hall.

  – I was practically born in
City Hall. My mother was a caretaker. I worked up.

  – You forgot us.

  – I hired you.

  – Your goddamn herringbone tiles in the toilets cost more than half our salaries put together.

  – Yes, that’s true.

  – Aren’t you ashamed of that?

  – You watch, in fifty years they’re going to come here and gape at the herringbone and the copper roofs. We need excess, something to live up to. I fought tooth and nail for that herringbone.

  – You fought. You fought. Think about those who built the intake tunnels. Do you know how many of us died in there?

  – There was no record kept.

  – Turn off the light.

  – What?

  – Turn your light off.

  Harris pulled the beaded cord on the gooseneck lamp. So the room was dark.

  Patrick moved in shadow now, the blasting-box still under his right arm. He needed to stretch, to walk. He had been drowning in Harris’ eyes and sleepy hand-movements, felt hypnotized by that calm voice, the solitary focus of the lamp. Without light he felt more awake, discerning shapes, the smell of a bed somewhere in the room. Harris spoke out of the darkness.

  – You don’t understand power. You don’t like power, you don’t respect it, you don’t want it to exist but you move around it all the time. You’re like a messenger. Think about it, Patrick.… No answer. I’ll keep talking. But turn the light on before you decide to plunge that thing. Allow me that.

  – I will. Just keep talking, Harris.

  – What you are looking for is a villain.

  Harris knew he had to survive until early morning. Then a column of sunlight would fall directly onto his large desk, the pad of grid paper, his fountain pen. His gun was by the bed. He had to survive till the first hint of morning colour came through the oculus above him, eight feet in diameter, made up of eight half-moons of glass. He leaned forward.

  – One night, I had a dream. I got off the bus at College – it was when we were moving College Street so it would hook up to Carlton – and I came to this area I had never been to. I saw fountains where there used to be an intersection. What was strange was that I knew my way around. I knew that soon I should turn and see a garden and more fountains. When I woke from the dream the sense of familiarity kept tugging me all day. In my dream the next night I was walking in a mysterious park off Spadina Avenue. The following day I was lunching with the architect John Lyle. I told him of these landscapes and he began to laugh. “These are real,” he said. “Where?” I asked. “In Toronto.” It turned out I was dreaming about projects for the city that had been rejected over the years. Wonderful things that were said to be too vulgar or expensive, too this too that. And I was walking through these places, beside the traffic circle at Yonge and Bloor, down the proposed Federal Avenue to Union Station. Lyle was right. These were all real places. They could have existed. I mean the Bloor Street Viaduct and this building here are just a hint of what could have been done here.

  You must realize you are like these places, Patrick. You’re as much of the fabric as the aldermen and the millionaires. But you’re among the dwarfs of enterprise who never get accepted or acknowledged. Mongrel company. You’re a lost heir. So you stay in the woods. You reject power. And this is how the bland fools – the politicians and press and mayors and their advisers – become the spokesmen for the age. You must realize the trick is to be as serious when you are old as when you are young.

  – Did you know a woman named Alice Gull?

  – No … should I?

  – Yes.

  – Is she dead?

  – Why do you say that?

  – You said did.

  – Yes.

  Patrick turned the light on and saw Harris’ eyes looking directly into his.

  – Have you decided?

  – Not yet.

  He switched off the light. Again they disappeared from each other.

  – Alice Gull, Harris said very slowly, was killed by an anarchist.

  – No.

  – She was the actress. Is that correct?

  In the darkness Patrick heard Harris sip his brandy and return the glass to the table. Patrick sat on the floor, his one good arm resting on the blasting-box.

  – I think I saw her once, Harris said.

  – She used to perform here. There used to be meetings in your unfinished waterworks. That’s where I met her, after many years.

  – What meetings? What do you mean?

  – Then I lost her.… Someone gave her the wrong bag. A simple mistake. Picked up the wrong bag. So she was carrying dynamite with a timing device, a clock bomb. She was walking with it through the crowds along the Danforth, near Broadview, walking towards the centre of the city. Who knows what she thought she was carrying. They knew she was in danger as soon as it was discovered.

  Patrick was almost inaudible, whispering. If he were writing this down, Harris thought, his handwriting would be getting smaller and smaller.

  – I don’t want to talk of this anymore.

  – Then it will always be a nightmare.

  – It will always be a nightmare, Harris. She had a line, an old saying. “In a rich man’s house there is nowhere to spit except in his face.”

  – Diogenes.

  – I don’t know.

  A silence.

  – Patrick, talk to me.

  – They found me at the tannery, screaming to me about what had happened. And I ran. I ran north along the edge of the valley, no streetcars, all the demonstrations had caused chaos that day. I passed the Geranium Bakery and grabbed her friend Temelcoff to help find her. And the two of us ran all the way up to the Danforth where the crowd was, where she was supposed to be. By the time I got there, I had nothing in me to shout. Alice! I couldn’t even whisper it. We kept leaping up to look for her over the heads of the crowd. She was carrying the clock bomb, not even knowing what it was, and soon everything she held would rocket out into her. Temelcoff and I jumped up and down, the mob around us, now and then seeing each other’s frantic faces.… Then I heard the explosion. Not far away, near enough to have found her and picked up that bag and flung it anywhere else on the street.…

  Then nobody moved, Patrick remembered, the whole crowd locked in stillness. There was already a distance between Alice bent over, holding her ribs, and the jolted people twenty feet away. As he came towards her she recognized him, her eyes indelible, the wound at her side.

  He cradled her gently, he could hardly touch her without causing pain. Most of all he was holding her eyes with his, terrified they would close, would shut him out. One eye was flickering up and down, then the other, as if stuttering. Then the bag ten feet away exploded again.

  Harmless. And when he looked back her eyes were closed. Her dead hand gripping the side of his jacket.

  He got up and ran, her blood on him, along the horrified corridor in the crowd. The groan subconscious, slubbering out of his mouth. He banged into something very tough which brought his eyes back into focus.

  He looked into the face of Temelcoff who held him and wouldn’t let go. Not to capture him but to calm him. Patrick struggling from side to side. The former bridge-builder’s face held together only by the formality of two clear tears. Two little silver coaches.

  Then Nicholas Temelcoff let him go and walked over to the body of Alice.

  – Patrick …

  There was a permanent darkness to the room. A permanent silence. Harris was still, quiet, unable to see. All he knew now was where the voice had been.

  On the ceiling high above him was the window with eight half-moons. If he looked up in a while there would be a suggestion of blue. My god he swam here, Harris suddenly realized. That’s how he got in, through the tunnel. What vision, what dream was that? He pressed his repeater watch and it struck five. The sound fell clearly into the room.

  The knowledge it would be daybreak soon kept Harris awake. He remained where he was during the next hour and by then the first
light was in the room. It nestled in the corners of the ceiling, suggested cupboards, the damn herringbone that seemed to irritate everyone, and then it clarified the alcove where his bed was, where Patrick lay strangely – the lower half of his body crouched, knees drawn up, and the top half sprawled out, head back. There was blood across his neck and shirt. He had cut his throat in the darkness. My god. Harris got up. Then sat down again. No he was asleep. He was asleep! The cuts old. From the journey here. Harris realized that he was relieved. The blasting-box was on the floor. Earlier Harris had understood why the man had chosen him, knew he was one of the few in power who had something tangible around him. But those with real power had nothing to show for themselves. They had paper. They didn’t carry a cent. Harris was an amateur in their midst. He had to sell himself every time.

  He stood over Patrick. “He lay down to sleep, until he was woken from out of a dream. He saw the lions around him glorying in life; then he took his axe in his hand, he drew his sword from his belt, and he fell upon them like an arrow from the string.”

  There was a knock on the door. Six o’clock. He said nothing. A knock again. Harris was concerned that Patrick would wake suddenly. “Come in,” he whispered. An officer efficiently stepped in and saluted. Harris put his finger to his lips before the man could bark out information. He pointed to the man on the bed.

  – Take that blasting-box and defuse it. Let him sleep on. Don’t talk. Just take it away. Bring a nurse with some medical supplies here, he’s hurt himself.

  – Patrick?

  He woke slowly, Hana’s hand on his shoulder.