The Canal (10 page)

"Well, c'mon," grunted the man as he split
open the mouth of the elevator door. "I'll put you on the schedule,
special, seeing as you're a new account and all."

Joe looked inside. It was a condemned latrine
in there, a snuff film paradise. Damp as an armpit and the walls
were hairy with dust.

"This better not be a joke," said Joe.

The man chuckled. "I look like I'm
laughing?"

"Yeah, actually. Like you think this whole
thing is funny. Like I'm stupid enough to get in there."

"Aw, c'mon Charlie..."

"That's not my name, mister."

"Oh. Oh sorry then. Motherfucker it is, then.
Look -- all what happened between you and I, that was, uh, a
miscommunication. There's rules, sir. There's business hours. But
we're friends now, baby. You and I, we're both paying
customers."

"I'm not anything, you hear me. I just want
answers. And you can start by telling me who the hell you are."

"Well, every going concern needs a secretary.
Someone's gotta answer calls, take appointments, welcome guests. My
resume runs long, believe me."

Joe figured...he didn't figure anything.
Nothing for it. No point anymore. He took a step toward the shallow
cave of the car. He wondered if this same man had been waiting for
Rose all those years ago.

The secretary moved in front, blocking
him.

"Tut-tut, gingerbread. This trip ain't free,
see. We got maintenance and salary, expenses and fees, habits and
thirsts. We got needs, motherfucker, NEEDS. You want to ride, you
got to give. And don't go cheap on me, Charlie."

Joe reluctantly dug into his pocket and
withdrew a dollar bill. He threw in some cigarettes.

"That's real good. Give it all, don't be
mean!"

Joe pushed his way inside the car, settling
in a chow-smelling corner.

"This better not be some shit," said Joe.

"Oh, this is some shit, let me tell
you..."

The halves of the freight door rumbled shut,
taking the remaining light with them. In the dark, Joe put his hand
back on the gun. The elevator lurched alive with a startled
screech, an oh-my-god whoop from the attending pulley works as the
small closet began fizzling upward, a junkyard rocket gagging into
the five-story atmosphere.

"Can you hear it?" came the man's whisper.
"Klank klank... Hear it in the walls?"

Joe heard it. The rattling of the elevator.
The klank klank. And strangely, it reminded Joe of being
underwater, in the canal. It had been dark there too. He had been
searching, grasping at floating nightmare shapes that were slick
and cold. While the mud below kept sucking on his feet, tasting
him...

The elevator collided with, possibly, the
roof. The door opened and in breathed a skeletal wind, a gust of
expired air and dying mortar. And there was something else,
overpowering -- the smell of canal water.

"C'mon, lawman. Last stop."

The entire floor was a single large room,
crowded with a grid of pillars that flowered into crude arches. Joe
followed the secretary and they passed a bank of windows that would
have overlooked the canal, but they were covered with newspaper,
the sunlight diffused to a whisky hue. One of the windows had been
removed completely, the bricks at the edges chipped away and the
opening of a large metal cylinder had been mounted in its place.
Faint wisps of acrid vapor wafted from the opening, it emitted a
steady, audible static. The secretary stopped here and smiled.

"Fresh supplies," he said.

As he watched, Joe realized that this opening
was actually the start of a pipeline. It must have run the length
of the entire building. It looked cobbled together from the
industrial-sized air and exhaust ducts that branched through these
old factories like veins. The secretary leaned almost entirely
inside and, using a mechanical winch, brought up a rusted, leaking
bucket. This pipeline, it ran straight into the river.

The secretary carried the bucket toward the
center of the room. They came into a camp of sorts. With campers.
Residents. Spaced around an enormous, four-legged bathtub. Everyone
was scattered about in a loose circle, as if tossed there by a
bomb, snarled up in their own arms and legs. The dopes of the round
table. They all looked like Rose, pale and wasted, prisoners of
war.

No real furniture, only punished mattresses,
rat piles, milk crate settees, beer carton beds, a makeshift
kitchen with a propane stove, stains of ill discharge everywhere.
Retching was the soundtrack here, fever the culture. All eyes were
closed, all concentration went inward, all brains danced on hot
coals.

The fact of it was, these people were sick.
And what they, and Joe, and anyone else who came too close to that
cursed canal had discovered, was that sickness contained an
essential truth. That it was a form of self-awareness. Memory. It
was the mind made to concentrate on the bodily condition. And the
bodily condition is one of place and time, of space occupied, of an
object. Pain, being an unedited experience -- an excruciating mode
of moment to moment where seconds come together jarringly, fitting
roughly like poorly matched puzzle pieces -- serves to remind us of
exactly how long the days really are, and most humbling of all, how
the world is solid, lasting, and heavy, but yet we are soft,
vulnerable, and finite. So sickness was remembering. Remembering
that which we would rather not.

And if sickness was memory, then health was
forgetting. Health was a cushion between the bodily condition and
the brain. A cushion that allowed the mind to play its games of
abstraction and device, so that existence becomes selective, it
becomes a construction, ideas as opposed to actualities. Life
becomes a dream, the dream of personality. So to be healthy is to
forget, or at the very least, to ignore. It was escape. And nobody
here wanted that. Rose hadn't wanted that. They all wanted to
remember. Either the past, or a past yet to be -- anything was
possible.

"Meetings in session," said the secretary.
"Make your proposal."

"There was somebody here..." croaked Joe,
speaking in the general direction of the group. She was, her
name... Rose, she--"

"Yo, Charlie. Might I suggest, before you
negotiate, that you assume the, uh, proper frame of mind..."

Joe knew he meant the tub. The secretary
poured the contents of the bucket inside. Buckets, everyone in the
room had them. Kept either close at hand, or hunched over, held
tightly like it were an inner, secret part of themselves. Because
when it came to remembering, one sickness outdid them all.

The tub was nearly full. A rumpled, oily
crust had hardened on the water's surface, resembling the terrain
of a monstrous and charred mole. The whole thing emitted a moist
heat.

"Jump on in, boy," urged the secretary. "Be
all that you can be."

"I'm not... That's not why I'm here," said
Joe.

The man snorted. "It was you who wanted top
floor. And you paid the fee, so you get to see. What did you think
was gonna happen? We all, uh, unionized in here."

"Just give me what I'm looking for," said
Joe. "Start, start with Rose."

"Okay then, Charlie. But if you don't
mind..." The secretary sat on the edge of the tub, daintily
crossing his legs, suddenly straight from the society pages. He
rolled up his sleeve and then plunged his fist through the water's
crust, into the wet insides. A smile slowly formed on his shining
face.

"Did she have anything to do with the
bridge?" pressed Joe.

"Dammit, gingerbread," scolded the secretary.
"Let a man concentrate... I mean, do you really want to know about
that chick? For sure?" He removed his arm, shaking off a watery
curd. "Well hear me -- she just does whatever she feels. 'Me, me,
me,' that's all she is. This is a collective, privately held, we
the people and all that shit. We ain't got time for those who see
only what they want to see. Who won't listen to consensus.

"Look, like all things, it starts with our
best friend and deepest associate -- that singular stream, that
terrible tributary..." The secretary reached back into the tub and
pulled up a handful of water. Joe watched it squeeze, jelly-like,
through the man's fingers. And in a whisper, one appropriate to
churches, or a lover's ear, the secretary then said: "The Chairman
of the Board."

Joe looked at the man. "...The canal?"

"Don't say the word!" hissed the secretary.
"Not in here, motherfucker! Someone could have an ear on us! ...But
yeah, yes, Mr. Old Man River, and you're a baptized SOB, so don't
pretend like you don't know!

"Now, as I was saying, The Chairman is always
looking to expand market share. You hear me? Likes a return on its
money. And let's just say one of the Chairman's pet projects, a
rather capital venture, a certain Enterprise, has exceeded most
expectations. This project is a new thing, brother. A trade secret,
been kept under wraps for a long time, pending copyright and all.
But it's too big to stay quiet -- we've begun to see it here and
again in our, uh, internal forecasts."

"This project, the Enterprise, although
profitable, has begun to upset market stability. It has caused
certain trouble within our financial community. It is detrimental
to the operation of the...of the you and me. The us. The economy.
Hear me? Because this particular operation takes a lot of
investment. And you see, we have become investment. And investment
hurts, motherfucker. It hurts bad, believe me -- you and me, us, we
don't want to be invested, because once you're invested, you're
gone. You get deposited in the local branch, underside the
motherfucking bridge. Even a healthy motherfucker. This, uh,
particular concern is set to go worldwide."

"It's the truth," murmured someone in the
circle.

"Now, we all respect the Chairman, we are
all, uh, consumers of its product, but if this Enterprise succeeds,
there won't be a 'we all.' So in the interest of our own continued
job security, we'd prefer to assure this Enterprise's financial
failure. And then that crazy what's-her-face is gonna disagree with
our market analysis? She thinks our forecast to be inaccurate? Like
I said Charlie, she sees what she wants to see. She doesn't see the
enterprise for the Enterprise, got it all mixed up, know what I
mean? She isn't welcome here anymore. Pink slipped, Charlie, that's
what she is."

Joe abruptly turned toward the pipeline -- he
had heard something, a metallic thud, a bending. The secretary must
have heard it too, he leaned forward, his face tightening. Everyone
in the room, in fact, they all seemed to be straining to
hear...

There was a gassy murmur from the water in
the tub. But that was it. The secretary relaxed. "With the industry
being so volatile," he said, "it pays to stay alert."

Joe put a tired hand to his forehead. He
recoiled at the touch, his fingers slipping in his own sweat, his
skin feeling more like hide, like pelt.

"Take me back down," he said, his whole head,
humming. It was a mistake coming here. These people had been
steeping in fever for too long, they were fried, overcooked.
Deranged.

"What? Speak up, gingerbread."

"I said, take me back downstairs. 'Cause I'm
hearing a whole lotta talk about enterprises and bullshit and none
of it means a goddamn thing."

"Aw, but you just got here."

"You people...you people are sick."

A queasy, sticky laughter went through the
group.

"That is rich," giggled the secretary. "You
know, for a cop, you ain't so bad, Lombardi."

"...What'd you call me?"

"Let's not play this game, baby. You think we
don't know you? You think your Rose wouldn't shut up about it? And
if I may, sir, you and her -- the two of you suffer from the same
symptom. She chooses what to see, and you choose what not to
see--"

He was cut short by an echoing growl, like
the sound of a capsizing ship. The pipeline began to shudder in its
mooring, hesitantly at first, but then with greater urgency,
thrashing from side to side, fissures of light beginning to show
where it was pulling away from the wall.

The secretary bounced from his perch. There
was a chorus of fearful gasps as the residents began to come fully
awake, pulled roughly from sickly fugues. A snort of sea spray
burst from the opening, showering those nearby, as if the tide
itself were coming up the shaft, to overwhelm them all.

"Incoming," someone kept rasping. Over and
over: incoming incoming incoming...

The pipeline continued to twist and buck.
There was a tin-sounding crackle, a sound like popping joints, as
bolts snapped free, as metal ruptured. And then came a slithering,
subsonic growl, one that drew itself into your ears and pooled
there, thick like a sap. It wasn't a sound of wreckage, or
instability, or collapse. It was a voice, and it called a name.

The secretary looked at Joe, his eyes
flashing panic. "You..."

Joe stared at him, open-mouthed.

"It said your name, motherfucker!" screeched
the secretary.

Joe's voice was vague, pleading, "What-- No.
This is--"

The secretary began to back away from him.
"The Enterprise, lawman. Can't be anything but. It knows you're
here! And it wants a word!"

*

Closer to the river the outer frontier of
liquor stores and check cashing emporiums finally gave way to the
wilderness -- stripped cars and coal depots and garages and
bonfires and hooded wolves who played with pistols.

Alan followed Joe in his car. He let Joe
stretch out a lengthy lead, assuming he was headed for the bridge.
But to Alan's surprise, Joe passed the bridge without so much as a
quiver in his ape-gait. Instead, he went deeper, deeper into the
wasteland.

Joe finally stopped in a particularly godless
corner of town. The road was dominated by jagged cess-filled
potholes, graffiti frescoes were spattered along every available
wall, doorways were kept barred and bolted. At the end of the
street was a null space where the canal lay. And beyond that -- a
gorgeous view of mangled construction machinery, mud dozers and
land pounders put to pasture. All in all, another stunning
candidate for the wrecking ball.