The Garneau Block Part 1

The Garneau Block.

Todd Babiak.

For Gina and Avia.

1.

the coldest morning in recent memory.

Madison Weiss woke to the smell of scorched dust and nearly wept. Though she had lived in Edmonton her whole life, and knew well that with September came the first blast of the furnace, Madison felt the cityat least the five houses on her blockdeserved a year off. Summer had ended poorly, by anyone's estimation, and lying in her garage-sale bed, in the suite her father had built in the bas.e.m.e.nt of 12 Garneau, Madison could see no romance in autumn.

The previous night, reading a new collection of nineteenth-century haikus, Madison had forgotten to close her curtain. Now the heatless sun splashed on the upper half of her bed, informing the engines of worry in her brain that a new day had begun. She would have preferred to construct a fort of darkness with her pillows, but she had to be at work in a few hours and the dizziness had arrived.

In the tiny half-bath, as she finished throwing up, Madison remembered: First autumn morning The mirror I stare into Shows my father's face.

And she threw up some more.

The secret to a comfortable pregnancy and an agreeable postpartum experience is regular exercise. Madison had learned this from Dr. Stevens, a former cla.s.smate at Old Scona. Of course, the fact that one of her teenage peers was a doctor, with an Audi and a husband and her own two-storey clinker-brick house overlooking the river valley, was reason enough to search the clinics of Edmonton for an aged gentleman with a British accent, loose jowls, and cold hands. But Madison trusted her doctor, Dr. Stevens, and by way of consolation she did have fat ankles and dry hair.

Madison put on her tights and shiny yellow running jacket. Now that the explosion of hormones in her body had begun its slow work on the size of her behind, Madison appreciated the utility of the rear flap that extended nearly to her knees. She ate a banana in the dimly lit kitchenette and watched a spider st.i.tch its web outside the small window with a view of 10 Garneau's mustard-coloured vinyl siding. Mid-banana, she wondered about her baby's father, where he might be at this moment. Trois-Rivieres? Prison?

At the door, Madison paused. The furnace had warned her that it would be the coldest morning in recent memory, so she took a moment to prepare herself. Madison closed her eyes and pretended it was February. In February a morning like this would be a miracle.

She stepped out into the September-February morning, breathed in the crisp air, and hurried back inside. Television beckoned. Surely there was something on besides bland cartoons and that program where they talk about Jesus and ask for your credit card information.

Soon, Madison would be thirty. She knew, from literature and television shows, that this was no way for a thirty-year-old single mother to behave. So she burst out the door again and down the cobblestone path to the sidewalk. Madison did not linger next to 10 Garneau, with its grey flowerbeds and small jungles of dandelion and chickweed. Potato-chip bags and Styrofoam coffee cups had blown into the yard, and were now trapped under the apple and plum trees Benjamin Perlitz had planted. Benjamin Perlitz, once the most patient and committed gardener in the neighbourhood. A two-week-old strip of yellow police tape, coated with dust, hung in the shrubbery. Madison glanced up at the second-floor window, into the darkness and silence of the room where he died, and turned away.

Leaves had already begun to change. Soon the North Saskatchewan River valley would be a brilliant orange and yellow, and her morning jog would smell of decomposition and moist soil. The air was clean and the long shadows cast by neighbourhood trees were like old friends.

Madison turned to press against the mountain ash tree in front of her parents' house for a calf stretch, and discovered a sheet of fresh white paper duct-taped to the bark. Since the night Benjamin Perlitz was shot and his wife and daughter disappeared into the secret grief of the city, Madison and her neighbours had become less likely to be surprised. But this was something. In all her years living under the regulatory shadow of the university, where it was strictly forbidden to affix advertis.e.m.e.nts, notices, and flyers on historically significant trees and lampposts, she had never seen such mutiny.

Laser-printed in capital letters, in a cla.s.sic font: LET'S FIX IT.

Underneath, a date and time and the address for a downtown office tower. Madison knew instantly what Let's Fix It referred to, and understood she was implicated in the "us" of the apostrophe s.

Across the street, the philosophy professor, Raymond Terletsky, ripped a sheet off the tree in front of his house, 11 Garneau.

"What is this?"

The professor crossed the street, waving the sheet like a flag. He was dressed unfortunately, in a turquoise sweater that didn't quite cover the pink of his stomach. He was a tall man, with a slouch. His snug black pants, like all of his pants, displayed too much sock. Madison averted her eyes from Raymond Terletsky's ensemble and saw that identical sheets of paper were duct-taped to every tree and lamppost on the Garneau Block.

"What is this?" said Raymond. "Is this new? 'Let's Fix It'?"

"They weren't up last night when I came home from work." Madison turned to study the sheets in silence with the professor.

He stood a little too close for her taste. The professor's woody-fruity cologne was so powerful it threatened to give her a nosebleed. Raymond Terletsky smiled. "Someone is going to receive one h.e.l.l of a fine for this." He turned and raised his voice, though no one seemed to be about. "One h.e.l.l of a fine." Birdsong erupted, during which the professor waited for a response. Then he slapped the sheet of white paper with >the back of his hand. "What does it mean, do you think?"

Pressing once more against the mountain ash, Madison released her left hand from the bark to point at the second-floor window of 10 Garneau.

"Well, obviously," said Raymond. "But what does it mean?"

2.

philosophy of death.

Let's Fix It.

This was just the sort of romantic naivete Professor Raymond Terletsky despised, even if it originated in a place of warmth and decency. A man, their neighbour, was dead. So? Twenty-five hundred years of philosophical history had proven, beyond a doubt, that human beings were incapable of accepting and understanding death, let alone fixing it.

Walking past the eco-house on the east end of campus, wherein the environmental fanatics recycled their own p.o.o.p into T-shirts or somesuch, Raymond reached into his briefcase and pulled out a notepad. The notepad, a birthday gift from his wife, featured a merry bit of African cave art on the cover. By now, it should have been filled with insights and aphorisms. But, apart from a couple of phone numbers and a grocery list, the soft yellow pages remained blank. Raymond stopped walking and pulled a pencil out of his briefcase.

The blank page lulled him into a sort of trance. Trees at the top of the river valley gave off a pleasant aroma, and a team of cyclists was pa.s.sing. The thought of Madison Weiss, her voice and round cheeks, her legs in those black tights, inspired a shiver of l.u.s.t. If only she hadn't been wearing that jacket with the long flap in the rear, he might have admired her behind, too. Perhaps he would see her again tonight at the opening of this season's theatrical soap opera, without the vexing yellow jacket.

Raymond wrote: The neighbour was bad. Two weeks ago, the police shot the neighbour. He breathes no more. His shadow is long.

Then he sketched a jack pine with a giant squirrel on one of the branches, making love to another giant squirrel. Or a bear, depending on interpretation. Raymond closed the notepad, slipped it back into his distressed leather briefcase, surely one of the best briefcases in Western Canadian academe, and continued along. There weren't many cars on Saskatchewan Drive yet, shortly after seven in the morning. At this hour he liked to pretend that instead of these walk-ups and parking lots and eco-houses there were a few hundred teepees in the valley. The river water so clean you could drink from it, or at least bathe your steed. No bridges or power plants or running paths or pitch-and-putt courses. Just sweet wilderness, the contrary of philosophy departments.

Inside the Humanities Centre, Raymond took the stairs to the second floor and considered the elevator. His office was on the fourth, which meant two more flights. The elevator was slow and smelled, mysteriously, of boiled cabbage. But it wouldn't bother his knees or cause his lungs to burn or his heart to hammer in his ears; the elevator wouldn't remind him, quite so poignantly, that he was an old man nowsix years from sixty.

The previous evening, Raymond had told his wife, Shirley, that he was off to Save On Foods. They were out of kosher dill pickles and he wanted nothing more than a kosher dill pickle as he brawled with Heidegger. "Okay, darling," Shirley had said, without looking up from her Alberta Views magazine. Raymond loathed Alberta Views because its editors had rejected his latest essay on the philosophy of death in the context of Pope John Paul II, calling it "not right for our readers."

What readers? Shirley Wong? Raymond knew his wife and knew her heart, and she had adored his essay on the philosophy of death in the context of Pope John Paul II. The ma.s.sive gathering in Vatican Square had been a giant call for help. "Help," said the Catholic people. "We're scared to die!"

In the new darkness of September, Raymond had driven across the river and east, under the ornamental arch and into the as-yet-ungentrified regions of Chinatown. It had been a relatively warm and clear night, and the women in their tight jeans, little leather jackets, and poofed-up hair had been out in great numbers. They waved to him from the sidewalk. Three times he flirted with the idea of shifting his foot to the brake pedal, but he didn't stop. He turned left and started back in the direction of Grant MacEwan College, Save On Foods, and Bubbie's Pickles.

It had been Raymond's fourth trip to Chinatown, and each visit had been the same. He wanted to speak with one of the women, to undertake a vigorous intellectual and s.e.xual quest, to accompany her to Denver or The Hague or Whitehorse. As he pa.s.sed through another heavy door onto the fourth floor of the Humanities Centre, Raymond vowedlike the great Montaigneto reveal himself to himself. "Help," he had said the previous evening, "I'm scared to die."

Raymond walked down the hallway, past the office of Claudia Santino, the new thirty-seven-year-old chair of the philosophy department. Of course she was in. "Raymond. You're here early."

"Oh, I'm always here this early. Unless of course I'm doing some reading or marking or writing in my home office. I have a home office, you see. Perhaps I should leave the number with you, in case you ever need to get hold of me. If you ever need help or whatever. Not that you need help. But..."

Claudia stood up out of her chair and adjusted her heavy black-framed gla.s.ses. "Thank you, Raymond, for the offer. Just leave the number with the secretaries." And with that, Claudia Santino closed her door.

The hiring committee had been so smitten with postmodern Claudia, her master's degree from Harvard and her four languages, her post-graduate work at the Sorbonne, that they had neglected to see what Raymond so plainly saw: she hated men. At least she hated men like Raymond, obvious intellectual threats from the more cla.s.sical, more rigorous side of criticism. If she lasted more than a couple of years in Edmonton, Claudia Santino would destroy the fine reputation of the department he loved. She was nothing more than a precocious child wearing grown-up spectacles. A child that practically slammed the door in his face.

In his office, looking out at the valley and at the sandstone Legislative Building on the opposite bank, Raymond took the folded sheet of paper from his back pocket, the sheet that had been affixed to the trembling aspen in his front yard. Somehow, in the process, he cut his pinky finger, which left him only one option: to kick his waste basket.

Let's Fix It.

Raymond sucked the salty blood from his pinky and marked the date on his calendar.

3.

sparkle vacations.

Madison's first customer of the morning was a mouth breather. A mouth breather with sideburns and a head cold. Like most clients, he had already looked up his all-inclusive package trip to Cancun on the Internet, and wanted Sparkle Vacations to beat the price. Madison found the identical booking and lopped five dollars off. The man, whose name was Les, took the seventh tissue from Madison's desk without asking, and blew his nose. Then he placed the soiled tissue, with the others, next to Madison's tiny black Buddha.

"So that'll be $1,240 each, for you and your wife."

Les shook his head. "You said you'd beat the price. Sign on your window says you beat any price."

"You were quoted $1,245 on-line, sir."

"Five bucks? You're saving me a fin?" This time, Les didn't bother with a tissue. He addressed his nose with two hairy fingers. "That don't seem like any real savings to me. How about you make 'er an even twelve?"

Madison graduated with a master's degree in comparative literature in 2000, and sent hundreds of resumes to businesses and government departments in Edmonton and Calgary. She could write. She could think. She had received the Edith Mummler Humanities Prize for her thesis on the future of the haiku, for Christ's sake.

After eight months of searching and mailing and phoning and faxing, Madison received exactly one reply, from the Public Affairs Bureau of the Alberta government. Yes writing, yes thinking, yes Mummler, terrific, but why didn't she sign up for the PR diploma program at Grant MacEwan College, where she might learn some actual skills?

The service industry, she discovered, was only too pleased to have her. On account of Edmonton's labour shortage, Madison had her choice of hotels, restaurants, shoe stores, American big-box shopping outfits, and, it turned out, travel agencies. Madison's parents had written her a cheque at graduation so she might purchase several tasteful downtown outfits for her new professional life. To honour these outfits, Madison chose the closest thing to a tasteful downtown job she could find, even though it was located five and a half blocks south of the Garneau Block on Whyte Avenue and paid less than an a.s.sistant manager position at Wendy's. Sparkle Vacations: get away today. Five years later, the outfits were out of style and she was too scared to tell her boss, Tammy "Sparkle" Davidson, let alone her mother and father, that she was almost three months pregnant.

Madison had just finished printing Les's itinerary when her parents, David and Abby Weiss, walked into Sparkle Vacations with Garith, her father's Chinese Crested dog. Upset that Madison wouldn't "make 'er an even twelve," Les had gone silent but for his sniffing, mouth breathing, and sighing. He s.n.a.t.c.hed his itinerary from Madison's hand and looked down at Garithdeep brown and completely hairless aside from cream-coloured tufts on his ankles and the top of his head. Garith returned the stare, c.o.c.ked his head, and released a rare, high-pitched yip.

"What is that thing?" said Les to David Weiss, retired high-school math teacher, former champion amateur wrestler, and president of the Strathcona Progressive Conservative Riding a.s.sociation. As if to prove something, Garith shook his head and bounced, and the bells on his collar chimed. Les bent down. "Is that a dog or?"

No doubt sensitive to his daughter's position at Sparkle Vacations, David didn't deliver his stump speech designed for fat men in windbreakers who insulted Garith. Instead, he pointed at the line of moist, crumpled tissues on his daughter's desk. "Is that your rubbish or?"

It took Les a moment to figure out what David was referring to. So David raised his eyebrows and cleared his throat until Les picked up the tissues and scuttled out of Sparkle Vacations. Madison called Garith up onto her lap. The dog shivered and licked the air while her parents sat down. David rested for a moment then sprung up. "Blech. That seat is warm."

Abby Weiss dangled one of the Let's Fix It sheets. "Did you see all these?"

"I did."

"Rather a waste of paper, I'd say. It isn't even recycled stock. But the sentiment is wonderful." For most of her career, Abby Weiss had taught grade one. It had instilled a gently pedantic tone in her out-of-cla.s.sroom speaking voice. "Why should we sit around and allow ourselves to be emotionally tortured by what happened in that awful house?"

"It's bunk," said David. He was flipping through the thick brochures displayed along the back wall, advertising southern getaways. "Probably a pyramid scheme. Honduras. They speak Spanish there, right?"

"Yes, Dad."

"Back to Hawaii for us this year."

Abby waved the paper in the air again. "This isn't a pyramid scheme, David. It's what we need, as a community. That family's tragedy will destroy us if we let it."

"Garith needs moisturizer, Dad. His skin's a bit dry."

"Honduras. It sounds druggy, doesn't it?"

"We owe it to Jeanne and Katie Perlitz to take this seriously." Abby swiped the brochure from her husband's hand, replaced it on the shelf, and pointed at the chair.

"But the seat's warm from that slob."

"So sit in the other one."

Her parents sat. Abby straightened her posture. "I think we should go to this meeting. As a family. I think we all agree the air isn't right since Jeanne and little Katie left. We can either do nothing about that and let the block fade into a sad and scary place where a man was shot, like some street in an American town that used to build Buicks, a place where ghosts toss buckets of blood around while good families are trying to enjoy dinner. Or. Or we can fix it. For G.o.d's sake, we're human beings. We're Albertans. We're full of can-do spirit!"

Madison exchanged a glance with her father, a glance that had acquired subtlety and significance since her teen years. As much as they both loved and respected Abby, as much as they appreciated the sincere, boundless, crusading warmth in her heart, Madison and David found her hilarious.

4.

the price of coffee in paris.

A Cadillac Escalade pulled up, its alloy wheels gleaming in the morning sunlight. Tammy "Sparkle" Davidson hurried around her SUV and walked into the agency, thanking someone enthusiastically on her little silver cellular phone. In a black denim ensemble and red scarf, Tammy waved at the air in front of her as though she were a queen visiting the colonies, swarmed by mosquitoes, bad architecture, and bad smells. "It'll be a delight, an absolute delight."

Madison stood with her parents near the door, unsure whether to release them. A few months earlier, the proprietor of Sparkle Vacations had read a self-help book that contained several rules of etiquette designed to cultivate powerful friends and allies. From time to time, Tammy asked about David's position as president of the Strathcona PC Riding a.s.sociation. Did he know many of the provincial cabinet ministers, or even the premier? Could he get her invited to some events that might be advantageous to her, both as a small businesswoman and as a gorgeous single woman in her mid-forties looking forhow do you saya not-too-ugly, not-too-stupid, not-too-boring man with a lot of pre-boom oil stock?

Tammy finished her call, looked at them, and screamed. "Oh my goodness, the Weisses. And their little sweetie!" Tammy pulled up her black denim skirt and bent down daintily. "Come here, girl. Come to mommy."

Garith looked up at David, with a blend of confusion and horror. The dog didn't move until David said, "Go on, boy," and gave him a gentle nudge with his sneaker.

For the next few minutes, the hairless dog squirmed while Tammy mauled him and baby-talked him and called him a girl. There was a conquered look in his eyes, the look of a gazelle just as a cheetah takes it down. Madison knew what her mother would say before she said it. "Do you have children, Tammy?"

Tammy froze just long enough for Garith to escape her clutches. She inhaled and shook her head. "No. No, I don't, Abigail."

The social error hung in the air like a cloud of unclaimed flatulence. Madison lifted her arms. "Wasn't it cold this morning? Brrr."

No one responded. Garith jumped at David's shins.

"Um." Madison cleared her throat. "I'm going to the soaps at the Varscona tonight, in case anyone wants to join me. It's opening night."

Seemingly revived by the opportunity to talk about herself again, Tammy rolled her eyes. "That was my sister-in-law on the phone. She has these tickets to some sort of fundraiser at the Winspear tonight, with cla.s.sical music? I had to pretend to be excited. The mayor'll be there, I guess."

Madison snapped her fingers. "Dad, Tammy was wondering if she could join you one night for an a.s.sociation meeting."