The High-Rise in Fort Fierce Read online

  Tommy’s mind wandered into the spaces above him, the sixteen storeys of high-end apartment real estate, and briefly he was beset by images of men and women from the future, supine in their beds as they themselves wondered about the connections and contradictions in their own lives. Then he saw himself up on the roof, exposed for miles in every direction, from the middle currents of Little Raven Lake to the forest clearings on the edge of town. He saw himself shivering up there, standing on the ledge and teetering in the wind. Then he saw himself fall.

  He woke up on the cement floor, hip throbbing from impact. He completed a set of forty push-ups and eased himself into his suit. He took the town’s only taxi to the airport, where there was a piffling souvenir shop and a coffee stand, and there he bought an Inukshuk for William. The lady working the cash smiled in an almost mocking way and told him it was meant to be a warning: the lands beyond this point were hostile and barren. Tommy paid her and gathered his things and walked across the tarmac. He climbed into the cockpit of his Cessna Skyhawk. He flew toward home, scanning broadcast frequencies as he travelled south and stopping to fuel up in Saskatchewan and again in Manitoba.

  At dinner back in Forest Hill, rings of pineapple slid off a glazed ham. Emily asked about the trip, and he showed her the Inukshuk and told her it was meant as a cheery sign of welcome. William was excited to see an Indian artifact. He’d been playing cowboy in the yard before dinner and he’d shot Geronimo in the chest, third time that day. He said their three-bay home was built on top of a burial ground, but he’d defend them no matter what the devil dispatched.

  In the kitchen after dinner, Tommy poured scotch into a tumbler. He craved that airy space between mild intoxication and shadowy abandon. The first sip stung with relief, but the longer he held the glass, the riskier the feeling became. As always, he erred on the side of control and dumped the booze into the sink when Emily wasn’t watching. Then he turned on the tap to flush away the smell.

  She looked old that night. She always did when he came back from his trips, and Tommy knew that William was actually two boys: orderly and respectful with his father, insolent and wild with his mother. But that wasn’t the whole story. It was like substantial amounts of existential time had passed since he’d been north. Her hair hung lifeless and drab. Her eyes were sunken and the flesh around them creased. She bent over the dishwasher—a huge expense but they didn’t have servants, couldn’t trust them—and when she stood up again he got a good look at her face, drained and ashen.

  “Oh, Thomas,” she said, wrapping him in a feeble embrace. “I miss you when you’re away. You’re so committed to your building.” She squeezed him and he felt a tremor in her arms. “We know that, but we miss you.”

  Later, in the living room, with his legs crossed in front of the hearth, Tommy watched William play on the red shag rug. A caravan of toy cars curled out from between his legs to the base of the Inukshuk, which cast a small shadow on the floor. In the kitchen, the dishwasher thumped into its cycle.

  Seen through the window, the canopy of stars made Tommy scared. In the north, because the sunlit evenings made him feel exposed, he thought he missed the spangled night, but now, with it yawning over him, he worried about his terminal insignificance and the likelihood of satellite espionage.

  “Son,” he said, lowering himself to the carpet and placing one of his hands on William’s shoulder. “Do you behave when I travel?”

  William’s eyes were black and fluid. They gave him a wise aspect that made Tommy proud. Dressed in a collared shirt, his back straight and stiff even while crouched over his toys, William seemed to humour his childhood, waiting it out because biology left him no choice, and this filled Tommy with a sense of security he couldn’t always muster alone.

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “And do you keep track of your mother’s tremors? Of their severity?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  Tommy nodded. “And how would you assess the development of her illness, William?”

  The boy frowned. “Billy. Call me Billy, remember?”

  Tommy grinned. “Yes. Billy. How would you assess the development of her illness, Billy?”

  “She dropped a teacup.”

  “I see.”

  “Does that mean she’s worse?”

  “No,” he said. “Just that she’s tired. Adults get tired. That’s all.”

  But he wasn’t so sure. Her tremors had come on a few years ago, starting with a tic in her index finger, then very quickly affecting both her arms and sometimes even her tongue. Doctors didn’t know the cause. It was a brain problem, but they couldn’t be more specific. Tommy, on the other hand, had his suspicions. What if it was the same thing interfering with the radio frequencies?

  He turned his head to the kitchen. Was she still in there? Was she steadying herself before joining them? He mussed his son’s hair. The house was too big. All three of them could be inside, but each oblivious to the other. He imagined Emily rattling away in a darkened hallway. His knees cracked when he stood up.

  She was wiping the counter next to the sink. He put his arms around her waist, buried his nose in her hair, and was softened by the smell of her shampoo. She wriggled around in the crooks of his arms and kissed his cheek. “Thomas, my Thomas.” She caressed his cheek, no mistaking the twitch in her wrist. “I’m sorry, I ... I broke your mother’s china.”

  “We’ll sell the house.” He kissed her forehead and thought of the scotch he’d poured down the sink. “I want you to be comfortable.”

  III

  There was a severed finger in Billy’s corn. Imagine that. Imagine even the thought of that. A finger, preserved in a can of vegetables, shipped on a pallet of selfsame cans, labels rubbing and scuffing as the truck rattled over potholes and gravel stretches, geared up in the northlands, meandered down the long road from Alberta, and eventually backed into one of the snow-encrusted loading docks at the grocery store in Fort Fierce, after which some high school student on a part-time evening shift unloaded and shelved the can behind still others, and each of them, one by one, were scooped into grocery baskets, tossed into carts, this particular can then sitting in Billy’s cupboard for months, a finger suspended in its darkness, until finally he opened it and poured its contents into a small pot on the rear element, which he covered while checking on his caribou steaks, only noticing the finger, with an astonished lift of his eyebrow, after he sat down to eat, way up on the top floor of the high-rise, in the exact same spot he’d sat in growing up.

  It was hard to believe at first. Maybe, like his grandfather, he’d lost his grip on reality. Maybe that kind of thing ran in the family, because look at his dad—his dad hadn’t been well. But then again, he’d heard of this sort of thing before, maybe from one of his tenants or maybe down at the pub or maybe just on TV. But he’d heard of it. A story about a little old lady and her hatchback floated around his brain. She’d been to the food bank in some city down south. The roads got wet and the temperature dropped. The accident shook her up, but she escaped unharmed. At first, mechanics at the garage weren’t going to tell her—they were going to spare her something gruesome—but it was just too strange to conceal: they’d removed the passenger door panel to replace it, and inside they found dozens of bones, and one of the mechanics said they were from a human hand—he just knew it. He could just feel it.

  During coffee break, the mechanics huddled and smoked. They connected the dots and developed a theory: the bones were from a factory worker’s hand, amputated in a machines mishap. The story got weirder when the little old lady said her son, estranged five years previous, was rumoured to have lost his hand working in a car factory. The hand, said the universe, was his.

  Which made Billy wonder if this was his own son coming home. Norman, gone now for years, and just this little piece of him returned, pointing a finger: you never came to find me. Billy marvelled at the symmetry of things, the layers of events and the mobility of objects. It would’ve been fitting for Norman to come home
in pieces, haphazardly, by fluke. He’d been nearly in pieces when he left, a furious young man, motherless and exhausted. All the bullying. All the terrible grades. The clumsy body. The endless acne. Even adults got in on the fun, a youngish teacher openly smiling as Norman’s classmates volleyed prank after prank. But that was the thing about community, wasn’t it? People gathered around anything they could, good or bad. And when Norman came home and asked about his mom, who she was and where she was and all that sort of thing, Billy thought about lying, probably should’ve lied, but what he did was worse. He gave out some information here and there, then told his son to drop it. He said they didn’t talk about his mom. He said they never would.

  Norman blamed Billy as much as the broader community. How could he stand a chance when his dad collected rent from so many of the other kids’ parents? Most people hated Billy, said he was an awful landlord, cheap and weird and incompetent, and what fun to involve the children, to use them as proxies, to rally them like a militia against the son of a man they despised. Norman sensed this, and he flung his accusations both near and far, from the community to his father, from his father to the high-rise, from the high-rise to the whole of the Territories.

  It was a lot to bear, Norman’s childhood, especially for a single dad. It made sense that he left, even if he never explained why or where, even if he hadn’t called or written. Billy figured he’d gone to find his mom. Maybe she’d kept in touch with someone in the building. Maybe she’d used that person to communicate with Norman. He was jealous, but he didn’t resent his son’s escape. He wanted to flee when he was young.

  His father moved them into Franklin Place after selling the home in Forest Hill. The building was still a premier location at the time, still full of the town’s most successful, educated, and wealthy residents. The Franklin family settled into the top floor and kept to themselves. His dad sent Billy around to collect the rents, take work orders from tenants, and get groceries for home. Whenever repairs were needed, his dad would bring in a contractor, and when he wasn’t in school, Billy would greet these guys and show them around. When he was in school, his dad would do it, and once, after meeting his father, one of the contractors asked Billy if he was being abused, and when Billy insisted he was not, the man showed him how to punch open a ceiling, then patch it up again.

  His mother’s tremors worsened dramatically after the move. She was a shuddering stack of need and submission and medication made no difference. She was no help when it came to looking after the building and no help when it came to dealing with all the kids in town. The white kids picked on Billy. The Indian kids. He fought back once, punching a Dene kid in the lip, and that was a great feeling, to smash someone’s face, exhilarating, just the way this dumb shit’s head snapped back and the little grunt he made on impact. But there were consequences, and they were that kid’s older brothers.

  So he hated Fort Fierce. Hated everyone in it, and everyone around it. He dreamed of moving south, Edmonton at the very least, but maybe Calgary or Vancouver, maybe even Seattle. He’d mention this to his father, press him for a summer vacation, if not the whole family, then why not Billy by himself? But his dad said Billy had to learn how to look after the building, and besides his mom needed help when his dad went south on business, and that could happen at any time, so no, a summer vacation wasn’t practical.

  When he was seventeen, his dad had to fly to Churchill to look into a shipping concern, and he crashed his plane into boreal Alberta under mysterious circumstances. His body was never recovered. Investigators said it might’ve burnt up in the fire or been scavenged by animals, or maybe he survived and wandered off, but died in the endless forest, far from the debris field. His last radio transmission had been panicked, unintelligible because someone else was screaming. But there was no second body either, and that was that. There would be no closure.

  Billy had to take care of his mom. He tiptoed around the apartment, always afraid to wake her up, and he stayed focused at school, because he didn’t want anyone calling her to complain about his behaviour. He kept the place neat and clean and organized, brought her meals to bed and never complained about the building, which had its problems: the furnace and the garbage chutes and a million smaller concerns, bubbled plaster, leaky faucets. He’d become handy enough to address the small stuff by this point, and the bigger problems he outsourced. Every morning and night, he guided his mom from her bedroom to the bathtub, sponged warm water down the mottled slope of her back, and washed her while they listened to the callin radio shows: birthday shout-outs and fishing reports and some guy who hated the premier. His mom jerked and bucked, chattered and trembled. For two years, he made her as comfortable as he could, and very often he remembered what his dad had told him, that adults just got tired, that was all. Then, when Billy was nineteen, his mom had a seizure and died.

  It was hard to be in the apartment after the paramedics took her body away. The place was so empty. It felt so fragile, and everything he did seemed so loud: sitting on the couch, opening a cupboard, flushing the toilet. He slipped out and trudged through the snow to the pub, where he slumped at the end of the bar and got so drunk he couldn’t remember leaving, nor falling into the snowbank and just lying there, the weather so cold he lost the lobe of his left ear and a piece of his cheek, and if it hadn’t been for his legs in the road, no one would’ve found him until spring. A cop picked him up and took him to the hospital, and a couple days later he was busy patching drywall in a ground-floor unit. What else was there to do?

  Billy inherited the high-rise. He’d come to love the place, especially when his mother was dying. All the hallways and stairwells, the vacant units with their simple repairs. The building was like a green zone of peace between two fronts of all-out war, the battle in town and the one with his mother’s illness. Then, after the initial shock of her death, the top-floor unit started to feel comfortable again, like his own proper home, as long as he kept the curtains drawn and sort of ignored the fact that it was so high up, so visible to anyone for miles around.

  Plus, it was good to have a job. He was grateful for that. His dad’s fortune had been nearly bankrupted by a pattern of increasingly weird investments, the oddest a collection of arctic greenhouses he’d kept in operation despite several seasons of crop failure. There was still money coming in from the shipping company, but less and less, because the board of directors was imprudent and prone to wild gambles that seldom paid off, and although Billy had a legacy vote, he never used it, because what did he know about shipping? Nothing.

  He’d become a northerner, then. Somehow. Which was kind of funny, because when he was growing up, all he wanted to do was leave. Now, when he imagined the south, he thought of things unknown, of the huge distances he would have to travel to get there, and if he couldn’t hack it, which was likely, how would he get back? He’d become repulsive, deformed, laughable, and that was a hard truth to recognize, but at least he had a building up here, a role to play. At least he had a say in things. Down south, he’d be nothing. He’d be powerless. If living in Fort Fierce came with a certain amount of persecution, then so what. At least it was predictable. He’d been curious when he was a boy in Toronto. He’d been bold. He’d even been that way for a little while after the move up north. But something had changed, and now he wasn’t. Now he was a guy who’d passed out in a snowbank and lost some of his face.

  And yet, if he had to pick a day it all turned over, it wouldn’t be that one, nor the day his father died, nor any of the mornings or afternoons he’d been bullied at school. It would’ve been when both his parents were still alive and his dad caught him trying to open the heavy trap door at the back of the maintenance room in Franklin Place. It was hidden under a huge rubber mat, but Billy already knew that. He’d come across it not long after they moved in, because back then he’d been on a rug-lifting kick, at home, at school, and in the grocery store, too, always checking underneath for pennies or bugs or anything else that liked to be flat. He’d trie
d the handle dozens of times but always found it locked. When he was fifteen, his dad started sending him to do checks on vacant units, which meant Billy had master keys for the building, but none of them fit the trap door lock. So he decided to ask his dad about it. Why shouldn’t he have known what was down there? He was helping out, after all.

  This little episode of curiosity triggered a rare blast of anger from his dad. He grabbed Billy by the shoulder and squeezed and when Billy squirmed to break free, his dad took him by the other shoulder and squeezed that one, too. His dad said the basement was dangerous. His dad said it wasn’t time for Billy—for William—to go down there. There would come a time, absolutely, but it wasn’t then, and was that clear?

  Crystal clear, said Billy, but he didn’t mean it. He brought a handful of paper clips home from school and after supper one night he slipped out of the apartment and went to the maintenance room. He rolled back the mat and tried to pick the lock. He’d seen this sort of thing on TV, thought it would be easy. He had no idea what he was doing, just poked and stabbed at the keyhole, trying hard to see in the dull, flickering light.

  His dad caught him in the deed, like his father had a sixth sense for the door and just materialized over Billy’s shoulder and smacked him before he even had a chance to stammer an excuse. Billy dropped the paper clips and slumped against the wall. His dad slapped him again, barked something about the necessary training first, and then he grabbed Billy by the wrist and yanked him so hard his shoulder popped. He had to wear a sling for a couple weeks.