Consolation Read online

  Copyright © 2006 by Caribou River Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

  First eBook Edition: February 2007

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  First published in Canada by Doubleday, 2005

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-1654-0

  Contents

  ALSO BY MICHAEL REDHILL

  ONE: THE HARBOUR LIGHT

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  TWO: BALSAM OF PERU

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  THREE: THE EARTH MOVERS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  FOUR: IN CAMERA

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  FIVE: THE WORLD BELOW

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX: HALLAM OF TORONTO

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN: CONSOLATION

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  Dedication

  THANK YOU

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY MICHAEL REDHILL

  Fiction

  Fidelity

  Martin Sloane

  Poetry

  Light-crossing

  Asphodel

  Lake Nora Arms

  Impromptu Feats of Balance

  Drama

  Goodness

  Building Jerusalem

  The man who commits suicide remains in the world of dreams.

  Seven Nights, Jorge Luis Borges

  In my solitude I have seen things That are not true.

  “Proverbs,” Don Paterson

  LATE SUMMER, the August air already cooling, and some of the migrators are beginning south. Hear the faint booming high up against windows before sunrise, pell-mell flight into sky-mirrored bank towers. Good men and women collect them and carry their stunned forms around in paper bags, try to revive them. Lost art of husbandry. By the time the sun is up, the reflected heat from the day before is already building again in glass surfaces.

  A man is standing by the lakeshore at the Hanlan’s Point ferry dock. Cicadas in the grass near the roadway, cars passing behind the hotel. The ferry rush hour is over already at 8:15, and the Hanlan’s Point ferry is the least frequent of them all, as it takes passengers to a buggy, unkempt part of the Toronto Islands. But it is the most peaceful ride, ending close to wilderness. The Duchess. He sees it departing for the city from its island dock, on the other side of the harbor. He stretches his arm out at eye level, like he once taught his daughters to do, and the ferry travels over the palm of his hand.

  At the kiosk beside the gate he buys a Coffee Crisp, struggles with the wrapper. He hands it to a woman standing near him at the gate. “My fingers are useless,” he tells her.

  She neatly tears the end of the package open. Such precision. Gives him the candy peeled like a fruit. “Arthritis?”

  “No,” he says. “Lou Gehrig’s. Sometimes they work fine. But never in the mornings.”

  She makes a kissing noise and shakes her head. “That’s awful.”

  “I’m okay,” he says, holding a hand up, warding off pity. “It’s a beautiful morning, and I’m eating a chocolate bar beside a pretty girl. One day at a time.”

  She smiles for him. “Good for you.”

  The docks are two hundred and forty feet out from the lake’s original shoreline. Landfill pushed everything forward. Buildings erupted out of it like weeds. The city, walking on water.

  All aboard. The woman who helped him with the chocolate bar waits behind him — perhaps politely — as he gets on, but says nothing else to him. There are only six passengers, and except for him they disappear into the cramped cabin on one side of the ferry, or go up front with their bikes or their blades slung over their shoulders. He stays on the deck, holding tight to the aft lash-post, watching the city slide away.

  The foghorn’s low animal bellow. The ship moves backwards through the murky water fouled with shoes and weeds and duckshit. This close to the skyline, an optical illusion: the dock recedes from the boat, but tiers of buildings ranging up behind the depot appear to push forward, looming over the buildings in front of them. The whole downtown clenching the water’s edge in its fist.

  The lighthouse on Hanlan’s Point has been there since 1808. It marks the beginning of the harbor, and in the days of true shipping, if the weather in the lake had been rough, the lighthouse signaled the promise of home. He can’t see it from the rear of the ferry, but he can picture it in his mind: yellow brick; rough, round walls. A lonesome building made for one person, a human outpost sending news of safety in arcs of light. A good job, he thinks, to be the man with that message.

  Five minutes into the crossing, he removes a little ball of tinfoil from an inside pocket and unwraps four tiny blue pills. Sublingual Ativan, chemical name lorazepam, an artificial opiate. Four pills is twenty milligrams, at least twice the normal dose. He puts them under his tongue and they dissolve into a sweet slurry, speeding into his blood through the cells under his tongue, the epithelia in his cheeks, his throat, up the mainline to his brain, soothing and singing their mantra. You are loved. He’s taken this many before, and ridden the awesome settling of mind and soul all the way down into a sleep full of smiling women, bright fields, houses smelling of supper.

  Marianne is still at home, in bed.

  He can see the whole city now, a crystalline shape glowing on the shoreline where once had been nothing but forest and swamp. After that, the fires of local tribes, the creaking forts of the French, the garrisons and dirt roads and yellow-bricked churches of the English and the Scots. It’s overwhelming only if you try to take it all in at once, he thinks, if you try to see it whole. Otherwise, just a simple progression in time. Not that far away in the past at all, even — the mechanisms that make it seem to be are simple ones. Just a change in materials, a shift in fashion.

  This joyous well-being holds him. He doesn’t mind that it’s chemical: everything is chemical. Happiness and desolation, fear of death, the little gaps between nerves where feeling leaps. He holds tight to the lash-post and shimmies around to the front of it, drinking the moist air in ecstatic gulps. The vague slopings of the deck are transmitted to his brain as an optical illusion: the city pitching up gently and subsiding, up and down, his senses marvelously lulled. Water moving under the boat. Sky, city, blue-black lake, city, sky. The peaceful sound of water lapping the hull. He lets the swells help him forward and up. More air against him now, his thin jacket flapping, his mouth full of wind, the sound of a long, deep breath —

  ONE

  THE HARBOUR LIGHT

  TORONTO, NOVEMBER 1997

  ONE

  MARIANNE HELD THE phone to her ear and waited for her daughter’s voice. Outside the hotel window, the dark was coming earlier than it had the night before, a failing in the west. There was, at last, a slow exhale on the other end
of the line: unhappy surrender.

  “And you really wonder where Alison gets her drama gene?”

  “She gets it from your father.”

  “There’s a difference between passion and spectacle, Mum. This is spectacle.”

  “I’m fine.” She scuffed her bare feet on the hotel carpet, thinner here, at the side of the bed. She lifted her face, breathed out quietly toward the stuccoed ceiling with her mouth wide. “How is your fiancé?” she said.

  “Like you care how he is. Don’t change the subject.”

  “I do care.”

  “So you want to talk to him then? I’ll put him on.” Bridget lowered the phone and Marianne heard the close, hollow sound of the receiver being muffled. Under it, John’s voice saying, “Me?”

  Bridget came back on the line. “I’m just going to come down there, okay, Mum? I’ll bring you something to eat.”

  “They have room service.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “And you know what I mean.”

  “You want to be alone.”

  “Yes.”

  “And watch a hole in the ground.”

  “That too.”

  “And is Alison coming?”

  “Your sister’s in Philadelphia.”

  “I know that, but is she coming? Did you ask her to come?”

  Marianne had thought of calling Alison, but her younger daughter had a second child to worry about now and didn’t need to know her mother was having an interesting reaction to the death of her father. “I haven’t spoken to Alison,” she said.

  “She’ll freak.”

  “Bridget, your opinion of your sister’s —”

  “She will.”

  “She’ll understand. It would be nice if you could do that too.”

  “I understand but that doesn’t mean I —”

  “I’m glad you understand,” said Marianne. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, I promise.”

  She hung up before Bridget could say another word and kept her hand closed around the receiver as if pressing her finger against those lips. She took the phone off the hook and laid it on the bedside table. They charged two dollars for a local call here, but at the kiosk on the ground floor you could buy a phone card and, for eighty-five cents, talk to someone in Lithuania for an hour. She didn’t know anyone in Lithuania. She hardly knew anyone here, except for the room service people, and they never said anything but “Will that be all?” and “Thank you, Mrs. Hollis.” She stared at the silenced phone, imagined Bridget calling back and getting the hotel operator again, being asked if she’d like to leave a message. She didn’t want to hear it. This silence was necessary.

  Through the room’s north-facing window she looked at the upper halves of downtown buildings that ranged up into the center of the city. At her feet, the room was tight with clutter, like something shattered and held in a fist. She got up and stepped over discarded newspaper sections and books splayed open on the floor where they’d fallen, their dustjackets loose. As she moved closer to the window, the object of her attention hoved into view: a slowly deepening hole at the foot of the hotel. From where she stood, she could see what anyone on this side of the hotel above the fifth floor could see: the whole expanse of a construction site, congested with yellow machines twenty-four hours a day, and the busy bodies of men and women ranging over the acre or so of dirt, with its steel framing, PVC piping, and heavy wooden beams. But to the occupants of room 647 or 1147 or 3447 — the room directly above hers — the busy excavation was just some faint hint of the future, like all the holes in this city were that eventually generated condominiums and shopping centers and bank towers. Marianne was the only person in the hotel for whom the pit at the foot of the hotel meant the past.

  They were digging out the foundation of a new arena. A boondoggle of municipal and private money had been dedicated to the creation of an unnecessary new hockey palace. They’d broken ground on the new arena just as fall began in earnest, the leaves radiating back the whole spectrum of light they’d absorbed since April, fading out yellow, orange, red, and the builders were already three months behind schedule. They’d started gutting the old post office in June but had spent the rest of the summer wrangling with the municipal government, fighting with the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, the neighborhood associations, the seeming swarms of local citizens’ groups and area historians, all of whom wanted their say, and who were finally dispatched with reassurances that the local ecology (crushed Tetra Paks, rotting blankets and parkas, pigeons) would be respected, and any finds of interest turned over to the correct authorities. If she had learned anything from her husband’s life work, however, it was not to trust the promises of developers.

  That bed of dirt was nothing more than landfill honeycombed with a century’s debris, but it had been of great interest to David Hollis. He’d spent his working life teaching “forensic geology” — a field he’d invented that combined landforms with sleuthing. He took his students out to local fields or caves with little hammers and corked phials of sulphuric acid to hunt down specimens and take note of various topographical events. They became adept at following old river paths, and learned to date settlements, when they found them, by overgrowth. Abandoned cemeteries presented fascinating opportunities for in situ casework: he’d ask them to determine the year of the last burial by comparing different stages of gravestone erosion and making calculations. All of this was actual geology, and by the third time he brought the same group out, they all came to within three years of the date of the last burial. Standing there, among the living, he felt the beautiful and numinous relationship of his young students to the community of these dead, whose last official moment they’d teased out of the silent witnesses to their lives. The forest that those people had built their houses and coffins out of now gave testament by counting out the hours and years since. There was (it had come to him in a flash, he later told Marianne) a science to determining how time passes. Human beings interrupt the natural cycles of growth and decay with their communities and their structures, but they don’t stop those cycles. Rather, the processes continue, like river water flowing around a stone. Except the river water is made of cities and buildings, and the stone is pushed underground and lost forever. Unless.

  Before his death, he’d published a monograph about these shorelands that Marianne looked out on from the hotel. The booklet suggested there was greatness in that anonymous dirt, but his colleagues had ridiculed him, had accused him of inventing his source. These people (“those fuckers” was their official designation) had paraded him in front of committees, and only the intervention of his oldest colleague at the university had saved David from complete ignominy. But not, of course, from death. The lakebed accepted all manner of discards.

  David’s source had been a diary he’d turned up in the rare book library at the University of Toronto. Pyramids of Bankers Boxes there held the barely cataloged papers of perhaps eight defunct archives dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Squinting academics had stroked the John Graves Simcoe papers with cotton gloves (the city’s founder! the holy grail!) and taken down every last bon mot muttered by him or any of his bucktoothed relations; Simcoe and Mayor Howland and William Lyon Mackenzie and Timothy Eaton had spawned biographical industries. And yet, David had somehow ferreted out an unknown eyewitness with a story of early Toronto.

  But David refused to produce this diary — Let people show some faith, he’d said. His dean, Gerry Lanze, had all but begged him to produce it — or at least, for God’s sake, a call number — but David had declined. Proof lacks the power of conviction, he’d said.

  He’d been made a laughingstock. The abandoned post office, still owned by the city, remained unexplored and the area was a hodgepodge of expressways, steakhouses, railway lands, breweries, shipyards, and printing plants. Faith in the “city before we arrived” did not hold any allure to the municipal klatch. Hockey and basketball did. Ten weeks after the publica
tion of his monograph, they dredged him out of the lake.

  SHE CAME to the hotel as October ended and requested a northwest corner room on the thirty-third floor. She wanted to plug in her own lamps and use her own linens. She would take care of the place herself, wanted to be undisturbed — intended to finish a novel there, she said, and she required the utmost privacy. Once the manager determined to his satisfaction that his hotel would be home to an artist (and was told he would personally be thanked in the acknowledgments), he admitted her on her terms. Five porters accompanied her to the thirty-third floor, moved her things into the small but comfortable room, and then clogged the little space in front of the door like Keystone Kops. She handed the one in front a twenty.

  It had taken her a few hours to pack a bag of her things at the house and then two boxes of books and papers from David’s library. Some of these were his writings — older monographs, or books including chapters he’d written, books on urban development at the turn of the century, pamphlets done for the Department of Earth Sciences on specialty subjects such as archival practice before 1920, reverse erosion (a computer program that retro-modeled shorelines based on historical snow- and rainfall measurements), and air-to-ground cartographic reconciliations. He’d also written a textbook on forensic geology and topography that was the standard in many American schools (and as a result was coming into use in Canada). Marianne gathered up her copy of his damning monograph, a maquette of the city in 1856 that one of his students had made for him, and a tower of photocopied newspaper pages. Lastly, she took two art deco standing lamps from the front room (David had hated these lamps), some blankets and pillows, and called two cabs to bring it all downtown.

  One of the lamps she placed beside the bed, a trilight that provided mood, reading, and daytime settings. She put the other one near the door, beside the bathroom, to give the impression of a larger space: when lit, it made the little entranceway look more like a foyer. Hotels never wasted lighting on entranceways, but she hated the darkness of exits and entries. They’d installed key-lights on a track down the middle of the front hallway at the house to make that space glow with welcome.