The Garneau Block Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 the coldest morning in recent memory

  2 philosophy of death

  3 sparkle vacations

  4 the price of coffee in paris

  5 that warm thing

  6 lacumseh and his daughter

  7 his name was carlos

  8 fear and scotch whisky

  9 madison and jonas partake of an expedition

  10 the rabbit warren

  11 life after oil

  12 understanding godlessness

  13 not a rotary meeting

  14 a white van arrives

  15 the block party

  16 massage therapy

  17 bison with fancy bacon and blueberry sauce

  18 jonas has a stalker

  19 the young indian man from across the street

  20 dancing with herself

  21 louis chopin of armstrong crescent

  22 spaceship sounds

  23 leduc, leduc

  24 an authentic conversation

  25 a little progressive in that conservative

  26 the newest member of the party

  27 another national tragedy

  28 temper

  29 death and the tropical typhoon, revisited

  30 the next hit at sundance

  31 convincing david

  32 cute and rumpled

  33 light rail transit

  34 six guesses

  35 the thirty-eighth floor

  36 the young indian man from across the street

  37 the story of rajinder chana, part one

  38 the story of rajinder chana, part two

  39 several instances of arrogance

  40 the river is deep

  41 name that father of confederation

  42 cowards that jump

  43 the queen of the night

  44 self-concern

  45 best friends unto the end of time

  46 cultural designations

  47 mythic power

  48 shirley wong acquires billets

  49 a dance with mr. goober

  50 universal health care

  51 not staying out late

  52 sick people

  53 hunting

  54 fear and wonder

  55 almost guilt

  56 the m-bomb

  57 a real talent

  58 appraisals

  59 a fire in october

  60 the second first date

  61 northlands

  62 amigo, amiga

  63 the power dinner

  64 non-psychotic desires

  65 complete honesty

  66 suburbia

  67 the wild things

  68 the screening room

  69 groove is in the heart

  70 revolver

  71 quietude

  72 a vision in the blizzard

  73 a rediscovery of hands

  74 the future of 10 garneau

  75 the crying men

  76 the press conference

  77 the science of snubbing

  78 american or japanese

  79 the god of all that is good

  80 carlos’s last stand

  81 drunk on risk

  82 higher education

  83 the documentary

  84 surrounded by bizet

  85 the edmonton remand centre

  86 the political life

  87 the national

  88 an alliance of book clubs

  89 mob rule

  90 mythic furniture

  91 small objects

  92 fitfamily

  93 the symphony orchestra

  94 the terletsky-wongs

  95 the last jog

  Acknowledgements

  An excerpt from Todd Babiak’s…

  About the Author

  Also by Todd Babiak

  Acclaim for the Garneau Block

  Copyright

  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 city–at least the five houses on her block–deserved 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 basement 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 classmate 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 stitch 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-Rivières? 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 advertisements, notices, and flyers on historically significant trees and lampposts, she had never seen such mutiny.

  Laser-printed in capital letters, in a classic 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 hell of a fine for this.” He turned and raised his voice, though no one seemed to be about. “One hell 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 naïveté 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 poop 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 passing. The thought of Madison Weiss, her voice and round cheeks, her legs in those black tights, inspired a shiver of lust. 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 now–six 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 massive 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 sexual quest, to accompany her to Denver or The Hague or Whitehorse. As he passed through another heavy door onto the fourth floor of the Humanities Centre, Raymond vowed–like the great Montaigne–to 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 glasses. “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 classical, 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 Cancún 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 resumés 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 assistant 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.