Keeping Things Whole (24 page)

If I couldn't succeed professionally…
Even
with jangly Voodoo at my side, each step on my long walk back to our apartment tallied my losses. Time, money, and Kate. But failure can be good for the eyesight. My work clothes were dusty, yet my vision was sharp. If I wasn't going to stay with her, I had to leave her. Yet every hour I spent with her was one more before a final split.

A walking epiphany in the motor cities. Kate's decision to keep the baby had tripped us up. We knew we were falling, but it took us months to hit the ground. Parenting is early sexual retirement. Call me selfish, call me insensitive, but make sure honest is on your list too.

Yes, Kate had booked passage to sail away from us, from sex, but as the years piled up, wouldn't one of us have done that anyway? Odds are, one of us would have become another cheater who needs a bright flame in addition to a steady bed of coals. Could she have always resisted the advances of some charming associate in Austrian glasses and a bespoke suit? Everyone wants to be special. But, like the war on drugs, the war to be special never ends. Kate or I would have needed to impress somebody else. In my books she was already doing that.

Or, tethered to domesticity too early, either of us might have sabotaged our own sexuality with drink, diet, TV, or sleep. Ah yes, the affair with sleep. In the beginning I had thought that getting Kate's sleep, dropping thousands on the bed and bedding, would get her. Yes, but only for a while. Even before I started sleeping at Gran's I was another lover lonely in bed. So many big box stores are devoted to bedding because for many the first affair is with sleep.

Half of marriages end in divorce. More men cheat on their wives than don't. A recent DNA study in England found that nearly one-third of men who thought they'd been parenting their own children were not—a third! I'm quoting a feminist here, so cut me some slack. Not the fish on a bicycle one. Greer. She has written about a spiral love life (not to be confused with a spiralling vibrator). Rather than one big lifelong relationship, each of us will have a series of significant romances over a lifetime. Five years here, eight there, each of them love, absolutely. Your character, your strengths, what you chase, and what you run from. The two of you sharing power, trading experience, levering that Venn diagram to expand each other. But then, but then. Who really keeps ripping each other's clothes off as the years pile up? Ask around. You'll hear of women who forget their knees can bend and men who essentially stop dressing themselves.

Glore once told me about a book reviewer she knew (biblically, I'm sure). He was English or American, one of those countries where someone can actually make a living reviewing books and the books have sex, humour, and plot. In two decades of reviewing, he had 2.5 big conflicts. First, whether or not he had the “moral courage” to pan a friend's book. Simply ducking the review wasn't an option for him. In his late twenties (when, you'll see, you fully meet your taste) he chose his path: no friendship without honesty. He reviewed his friend's book, negatively, and lost the friend. Dilemma No 1.5, a variation on the first, whether or not he could skewer the novel of a woman he was attracted to yet still ask her out, be sniper and surgeon both. (Duh, other than money, what do you think women want? Ah, the flattery of criticism.) He could indeed ask her out, attract her, marry her. Married, she wrote better books, at least for a while. After fiveish married years, the second full-sized dilemma:
the
or
a
? Paraphrasing some midlife crisis novel, with its drift from youthful wankfest to yuppie angst test, the critic was torn between describing it as
a slide
from romance to routine or
the slide
from romance to routine. Love isn't love without hard truths. He went with
the
. Less than a year later they divorced. Her novels improved again.

Why are we so afraid of the truth? Across a lifetime, we're sure to be needed more than we're loved, endured more than we're adored. Kate repeatedly told me, “Love is a behaviour, not a feeling.” True dat. What woman keeps up the porn-star head once she knows every piece of underwear you own, when you bought them, and where you leave them around the house? Can men really think a woman prefers the pounding of a man she once loved compared to that of a man she
might
love? The woman you worship with your mouth, ultimately she just feels spit, not sex. For a while, you lick ecstasy. Eventually, she starts inspecting the ceiling paint and thinking about which of her clothes need washing.

Consider The Beatles. Talented, driven, and in the right (televisable) place at the right (globalizing and baby-booming) time. Quite possibly the most exciting lives ever lived.
Look up
what George Harrison called his first solo album post-Beatles:
All Things Must Pass
. Bill's tunnel/crypt lasted (sort of). European farmers are still digging up ordnance from either war. Plutonium sure the fuck lasts. Things aren't fragile; emotions are, relationships. Sad but true. Does money last? You be the judge. Go make a cappuccino on a twenty-first-century machine made by a company still rolling forward from its nineteenth-century cannon fortune and wonder whether money lasts longer than emotion.

I would have lost Kate anyway—to time, more kids, or the corner office. That one-in-two failure rate for marriage can get worse. A contemporary marriage that started at twenty-five? Our odds of failure were three in four. Eventually, no matter how you start, you're just the guy who kills the spiders, takes out the garbage, and carries the heavy stuff. In memory, Kate and I are still perfect—young, beautiful, and promising. No haemorrhoids, no RRSPs, no baldness, or gravity. All things must pass.

I returned to slinging at the casino and kept limping along with Kate (thank you, second trimester). We even tried hanging out with our clothes on a little, a movie one night then some live dykey twang rock over in the D. November is vicious and ugly even if your love isn't drying up. River valleys can be wind tunnels, and we were bitten by frigid winds on both sides of the river. Over there, the steaming sewer covers showed me what a fool I'd been. If Bill's air pipe was still intact, it was all the tunnel I needed.

I explicitly tried not to keep staring out at one of Detroit's dragon-nostril sewer covers, but Kate still caught me out. That Special Glow, PI.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Ant.”

“Look, it's…work.”

“Super-duper-doo.”

Instantly, the Detroit club became tedious, not fun. The spilled beer on the floor became just spilled beer, not the holy oil of microbrewing mixed with collegiate indie rock. Well, at least the tiptoeing was over.

“We're going to need money. However this rolls, we need money.”

“Please. Legitimate house painters and casino workers have kids.”

“On credit and bad nutrition.”

“They still get by.”

“On someone else's dime, dancing to someone else's tune.”

“So that's what this is all about, your need to swing your dick around?”

I could feel my lips press down into the same little rage-line Gloria makes. “Don't be reductive.”

She quietly sang, “Macho-macho-man. He's got to be, a macho man.”

“Thanks, we haven't had enough theatrics lately.”

Now she too looked around disappointedly. She was halfway to game day, and we were sitting on ripped vinyl chairs listening to excessively loud music.

“Be
macho?
No. Be
me
? Yes.”

“You still just want to have the highest score at the arcade. A-N-T, fifty-fucking-whatever-thousand.”

“Doesn't everyone want that? At least everyone you'll ever love?”

She stopped the nearest waiter, not even ours, to ask for our bill. After he'd left she hit me with, “What, you wish you could just
catapult
me home?” Malice hammered her eyes into flat obsidian.

The air pipe. The air pipe. The air pipe.

Where there's my kind of
smoke, there's breath. Bill's tunnel was filled with water, but his air pipe could still have been clear. The gods punished Prometheus for stealing fire. Bill and Co. stole air and dragged it with them underground using hoses, fans, and pumps. On one side of the Atlantic, the government taught and paid him to steal air. He didn't forget when he got to the other side. He crawled under his (new) enemy with air pipes. I used fibre-optic cable.

Seeing inside my pipe was half surgery, half porn. With its stainless-steel head the size of an avocado, the fibre-optic camera was ludicrously sperm-shaped. A crown of LED lights surrounded its one eye, and a flagellar cable snaked out behind. I topped it off with a magnetized transponder and a second tail of nylon cord. Cylindricality had never been more beautiful. The pipe's interior, untouched dust was piled gold. Each cobweb was a necklace fine.

My damp recce on the rusty rails had already shown me that every six feet the pipe had a snub-nosed T-joint and a valve for air. On today's plastic pipe those joints are glued on in two minutes. Each one of Bill's cast-iron joints would have taken him twenty times as long, but he had put them in at regular intervals. In the event of a cave-in or partial flooding, they had a good shot at getting air. So what had gone wrong?

When I finally saw the grainy, grey-scale sight of the air pipe taking a right-angled bend up at around 1,200 metres, I kicked my heels with joy. My hands wanted a steering wheel, that local birthright, ASAP.

The trebuchet money had been fine, but it was still small change compared to three decades of a lawyer's salary. Then the mule bags at the casino had really started bringing it in. Not quite a bike gang's three million a week, but I still had green up to my hips. But the casino gig was noisy and parasitic. Sending the camera up the other end of the pipe, I looked at something that could be mine alone. Victimless crime, return me to your sweet, fragrant bosom.

The camera had been on double duty, giving me a view and carrying the small payload of a magnetized transponder. Following my withdrawal of the camera, the transponder and its tail of nylon cord would chime away for up to a year. If I could locate the transponder in Detroit, fish down and pull up the cord, I'd have a conduit into the largest drug market the world has ever known.

Ever since I laid the sledge to the basement wall I'd been re-grateful for the social failures of drive-by capitalism. The car is
the
thing of the twentieth century, and its birthplace is in ruins. No other Western metropolis would have allowed me to think of a tunnel into its downtown as a viable career opportunity. But you grow up looking over at a ruined city, where some of the most beautiful buildings in the world sit abandoned, you've got a very different map for commerce.

Once again I loaded Vood into the truck for a drive we shouldn't have been taking. I missed Kate like crazy when I got over to the D. Despite the last spat, we often had a little more glue on the other side. It
is
a different country. In Windsor, we'd spend all day enduring fellow Canadians, then on the other side we'd get a little warm relief to hear the voice of a fellow Canuck. In a restaurant, we'd hear someone order
paws-TUH
, not
PASTE-uh
and splash a little more wine into our glasses. Shopping for clothes, we'd reflexively throw someone a smile if they said
en-SOMME
instead of
en-somme-BULL.

Voodoo helped me cross and that made me miss Kate all the more. Generally, he was quite the little diplomat. Occasionally an officer would squint at him and hold his vaccination card out as if it were an insultingly bad forgery, but most were delighted. He's border collie and what? A few, not always female, absolutely melted.

In our second, different downtown, I missed Kate, the old Kate, like oxygen. She'd expanded Vood's little heart, could cup both his ears and scratch him in a hairy duet of pure pleasure. Missing her washed me out with a deflating, leaking kind of sadness. I had loved her, loved her, and was now so much smaller.

I cruised the planet's strangest mixture of wealth and war looking to accelerate the beep on my transpo. Stalin must have been smiling in his butcher's grave to see how Detroit's “arsenal of democracy” had fallen to infighting: Achilles and Agamemnon off to the riots. I drove around an intermittent downtown amongst the car companies that had stolen intermittent wiper technology from its rightful inventor before getting billions in public bailouts. Expensive boutiques alternated with boarded-up storefronts down one half-inhabited block, while another was punctuated by the burnt-out shell of a 1930s office tower. Each blackened skyscraper was an exclamation mark in social failure. When designing the city's major roads, Augustus Woodward prophetically created five “spokes” for a grand wheel. Woodward, Michigan, Gratiot, Grand River, and Jefferson Avenues still radiate from the hub of Grand Circus Park. But the wheel—as a wheel—rolled on. The Motor City isn't accidentally a ghost town.
Drive-by shooting
is a redundant phrase.

The chirping transpo kept me close to the river. I passed a new brew pub opposite the site of a recent double murder and drove under an empty monorail car carrying nothing more than good intentions and lacklustre graffiti. All that ghostliness made my plan viable, but not necessarily inviting. I'd never been so keen to have what I was doing already done. Breaking and entering, Bert and Ernie as the kids call it. Barbarian work. Daytime B&Es may go undetected in the 'burbs, and it's not uncommon for someone to stroll out of a mind-blowing afternoon at the Detroit Institute of Arts to find a car window smashed and their stereo stolen, but still. One errant cop car or an onlooker with that rarest of cellphone plans—a sense of civic duty—and I'd be fucked. Still, when the transpo started chiming out its jackpot trill, excitement shot down to curl my toes and raised my skull an inch. As hoped, my signal went off outside an abandoned building, another non-storefront with plywood instead of windows and open-air former offices and apartments above.

If you're going to break in during daylight, make it official. My disguise was a white hard hat and a reflective safety vest. I concealed my cordless drill beneath a clipboard and left Vood in the truck to bark if anybody approached. All those spinning minutes with my back exposed—God bless American ruin.

Then again, if I got in easily, so could someone else. The second I stepped inside, my reflective vest would become a phosphorescent bull's eye in a nation flooded with guns. These buildings were forsaken by taxes, laws, and most of humanity, but not all. You live outside the law, and, well, you live outside the law. Before going in I returned the drill to the truck and collected Voodoo.

Immediately inside, I dropped the reflective vest (but kept the hard hat on). Any one of the dark midden heaps I saw with my flashlight in that stale, reeking dark could have been the homeless living dead, a rag man sleeping off a crack high or a Listerine drunk ready to leap up with a flashing blade.
Skels,
metro police call them.
Skeletons
, urban zombies. Vood was crucial there in the darkness, a second pair of eyes and ears and a keen nose close to the ground. With the homeless and trench soldiers, their feet start dying first. Vood would know they were coming before I did.

Darkness can declutter the mind. Sweat lodges, isolation tanks, drugs taken at night—each capitalizes on the way darkness can sweep small objects from the shelves in your head, clear the coffee tables of worry, hide the dirty plates of duty. The flashlight gave me only cones and columns of vision—leprous patches of fallen ceiling plaster, dusty clothes in a corner, an overturned filing cabinet—while my ears concentrated on what I hoped would remain just a four-piece band: my breathing, Vood, the chirping transpo reader, and the erratic percussion of my own quietly crunching footsteps. Any change to that could have meant company. Eventually I was able to concentrate a little in the darkness. The sister pipe was still a plumbing pipe, and it'd probably be toward the back of the building, not the front. Of course, it was almost certain to be in the basement.

Horror movies do have a point about basements. The bowels of a building. The dungeon. In a basement, you are unseen by the outside world, less likely to be heard, and considerable distance from an exit. Even decoration gets abandoned in basements. To some, bald utility and exposed pipes and beams are already violent. But a fortune might have been waiting down those (potentially rotten) basement steps. Crowbar in one hand, flashlight in the other, I followed my genes on down.

Turned out, the only threat was me. I smashed open a plaster wall, threw around the dust and spores, all to the near panic of the beeping transpo. No junkie has ever been more grateful to hold a needle than I was to get the other end of that pipe in my hands. I just barely had the good sense not to kiss it. My lifeline. My artery. The umbilical cord I was more than happy to cut.