The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf, page 29
Or it could have been weeks before. It could have been when his phone went silent. Maybe that’s what he thought of that morning with the gulls screaming as he wound it up through the RPMs over the crest of the Lions Gate Bridge. He could have caught the shock of cold air shouldering down off those blue mountains, wound westward, uncorked the Ducati at the Eagle Ridge bluff and wound it out up those famous curves. The water below, the sky above.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that he didn’t think it through beforehand at all. Frankie was a man of impulsive action, after all. Perhaps he only made the decision in the split second before there was no taking it back, in the flow. That would have been a few feet before he reached the gap in the concrete barricades, according to police estimates of his speed. There was a gap at the curve where he left the road. And the rider would have had to aim carefully at that opening to make it cleanly through.
Vehicular suicide, subsection rocket bike. Dude checked out off that highway at 150 feet over the forest below. Estimated speed 180 kilometres per hour, given the distance he flew. That’s what the policeman said.
Frankie in flight just that one more time. He was in all the papers. He was burning white-hot on every social platform. Frankie was trending hard. Trending up and falling down. Frankie arcing through the night, Ducati screaming, crashing into the cedar trees. He broke to pieces, my old friend Frankie did. He passed in an instant through those final layers. I can’t say I know that he came to rest. I’m not sure you could call it rest. But he didn’t move again. That much, we do know for sure.
“Frankie didn’t pay much attention to the press,” Kiyomi said to Eater. “Until they started telling all those awful stories about him. Until his friends stopped returning his calls. After that he cared. He cared about that silence. And he cared about what you wrote, what you printed. Because he knew that both together meant he’d never work again.”
There’s about a ten-second pause in the video here. I can report that because I’ve watched it many times.
Then Kiyomi picks up again. “Frankie couldn’t live without working. Are you going to include that detail? He couldn’t live without the thing that you all took away.”
* * *
Hugo called. We were in the dwindling days. But the press was very much still around. Hugo said to me, “Listen, we’re not going to ask you to do any more of these. I’d just like to do the New York Times and that’s it. And yes, I’ll be right there with you.”
I was sitting there in the boardroom at Magic Wolf. Magnus slipped in with one of his lawyers. He shook his head at me, then dropped his forehead to the polished wood in front of him, groaned.
Then he sat up straight again and looked unruffled, as if a mood had passed.
“Véron is done,” he told me. “I have an offer on the building, fixtures. The Otto too. I loved that thing.”
I hadn’t heard. “Who?”
“People who bought Duke’s,” he said. “Fucking hate that. But it’s the right move.”
“Are we good?” I said. “Like did we lose a lot?”
“A lot?” Magnus said, like he didn’t know what that meant.
“What about Orinoco?”
Magnus looked at me like I was simple. Of course they’d shut that down too. “Sunk cost baby,” he said. “Hey, better get that phone.”
The console phone in the centre of the table was ringing, all the lights lit up. Green lights. Red lights. So there I was sitting with two reporters from the New York Times who asked me, maybe their second or third question, how I felt about Kiyomi Sakaguchi quitting Magic Wolf, leaving Oishii. Who would be her replacement? Could there even be a replacement? And here I looked down the table at Magnus who, even though he shrugged like — of course, sure, this was clearly coming — was just as clearly hearing it for the first time.
Kiyomi had given the Times her thoughts already, though she seems to have been brief. She had made the one short statement, then declined to say more. Frankie had dated a lot of people before they were married. But he had never dated anyone at Rue Véron other than her. And he had never raped anyone anywhere in the world.
Then she went on to say that her own recent split from Frankie had been a long time coming, but unrelated. She also said that she thought it was unfair that a big organization like Magic Wolf, with all of Magnus Anders’s billions behind it, would try to pin this whole thing on her late husband when there had been far worse behaviour from others in the organization. People with whom she had herself closely worked and travelled, who were themselves in positions of power and should have known better.
At which point Hugo leaned in and asked the reporters for a second, muted the mic. Then we all sat there, stunned, staring at each other. Waking up fast.
* * *
As my father lay dying, I made my way slowly into Gastown. I got on the elevator and rode it to the top. I was taking accounts. I was trying to reassure myself. We’d managed pretty well, Stephanie and I, hadn’t we? We’d built a nice home together. I really liked the flat-iron look of our building. I liked the location. When I got off the elevator and made my way to our front door, then opened it, I took in the high expanse of glass. I always liked that high window. And standing there, I was able to remember vividly the post-purchase satisfaction all those years before. Look at what we’ve done. Look at us. The two of us.
As my father lay dying, Stephanie was in the loft, packing for Spain. I heard her doing that. And I remembered how after Magnus’s phone call came in at two in the morning on that tragic night, Stephanie had sat up in bed next to me and we’d cried together. It was very black out that night. We couldn’t understand anything. But strangely, after what had been a long hiatus, in the grainy darkness that night, after tears and more tears, we’d wiped our eyes and surrendered to what was then the terrible mystery of Frankie’s suicide. Then we made love. Gently, very gently, like we didn’t want to make a ripple that extended beyond our own bodies, these two bodies here that we had chosen to join.
When I came in that afternoon, as Stephanie packed upstairs for the trip that we had known was coming, as my father slipped into that most peculiar of dreams that comes before the end of all dreams, I was thinking about that New York Times meeting, cut short by Hugo and the lawyer simultaneously. I was thinking about the heated conversation with Magnus that had followed later on the bluff at Belmont Farm. And coming in, there was the sound of drawers opening and closing. There was the sound of my wife calling down.
I went upstairs and sat on the bed and watched her folding shirts and skirts, underwear, bras.
She spoke, finally. She asked how it went.
“It’s over,” I told her. “Magic Wolf.”
She turned around, caught my gaze. But she didn’t say anything, just stared for a short time, then went back to packing.
“Rue Véron is dead,” I said. “They closed Orinoco yesterday. Oishii was the last one standing after everything, but Kiyomi’s just quit. Nobody deserves any of what’s happening and real estate is hot right now so Magnus wants to sell the buildings. Oishii could have saved us. It really could if only …”
“Stop,” she said.
This time, she did not turn to look at me.
“Just stop,” she said. “Don’t go through it. Don’t torment yourself.”
Finishing the packing. Fixing the suitcase clasps now, cinching those belts in a bid to get it all into the overhead compartment and not have to check bags.
“Hard not to,” I said.
And then, “I called Kiyomi.”
I breathed in deeply. I held my breath.
“Somebody had to,” Stephanie said.
I waited.
“I called to say sorry about Frankie,” Stephanie said. “I called to give condolences.”
I let my breath go slowly, slowly.
“You know, part of me thought that we would have a good talk about him,” Stephanie said. “Part of me thought that I’d tell her no way Frankie raped anybody. And I expected that she’d agree with me. And then we’d have some kind of a moment agreeing, two women who chose that particular guy as a lover, who loved that guy during the time that we loved him. Do you understand what I’m saying here, Teo?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Stephanie sighed. “What I’m saying is that those two women I’m talking about ended up talking about you instead.”
Stephanie shook her head, standing over that suitcase. “Why the fuck, under all these circumstances, would Kiyomi and I be talking about you.”
And here you took your hair back and put it into a band. Then you had your phone out because flights were flights and taxis were needed. Spain was coming. Spain had to be done, whatever part of your work the trip would involve this time. But I could also tell that you wanted to be there differently now than you had before. Now it seemed necessary, urgent even.
I started to talk. I started to tell you. Apartment visits. Sleepovers going way back. Late-night texts. Tokyo, of course. Tokyo. Brainless distress. One more time afterward. But I remember so clearly how you were shushing me the whole time I tried to get through this.
There was no need to go over it again. There was no need to explain.
“I left you a note on the kitchen table,” you told me.
“Can I kiss you goodbye?” I asked.
You didn’t have to. I would understand now if you’d said no then. But you didn’t. And so with dry lips, that’s what we did then.
The kiss done, you said goodbye.
Tiradito
“I have a question,” Lilly, my mother, said. “I mean, an important question.”
“Ask,” Arthur said. “Ask anything.”
“Tell me again about your work.”
He told her. It was with a different outfit than he had with been on his earlier travels. But the work was much the same. And then he stopped because it was clear she was heading somewhere else with this line of questioning.
“You must travel with this work,” she said.
“I must,” Arthur said. “But I also want to.”
“And how long do you intend to keep trapping around?”
English was her fourth language, Arthur had learned recently. It came after German, after a pretty good grasp of French, after picking up near-fluent Spanish.
“Traipsing,” he said. “The word is traipsing.”
“Answer me,” she said, though she smiled. He had a stern face but it melted entirely when you looked at him a certain way. She’d noticed that. Cedro, the boy she’d been dating before this one had arrived, had never softened once as they kissed or talked. Cedro was good-looking, but with hard edges. With this Canadian, Arthur, well, he looked stern. His eyes were cool, protected. And then they lit up. Lilly had even registered that Arthur’s eyes seemed to light up when they landed on her.
“I intend to traipse around a little farther,” he said. “Then I intend to find a beautiful young woman to marry. And then I want to have children. And then, I don’t know.”
“Oh, I see,” Lilly said. “Just like that.”
They’d been dating three weeks, if you could call it dating. At the party where they met and had their picture taken by the photographer, they’d only danced, hardly talked. But at the end of the evening, Arthur asked her where she lived. Of course, she refused to tell him.
“But how will I see you again?”
Did she want to see him again? Cedro would be furiously jealous. But Cedro was turning into a bigger bore every date they went on, every trip to the beach with his friends. Cedro was a beautiful young man. But sadly, he knew it.
“You can pick me up at work and drive me home tomorrow,” she said. “Then you’ll know where I live.”
Five o’clock sharp. The dingle of the bell at the bookstore. And there he was standing next to the front shelves, dust motes descending. But what Lilly noted most strikingly is that the first thing he did was pick up a book, not even look around the shop for her. She peered from behind a shelf of German fiction. He was leafing through black-and-white plates of Picasso sculptures.
One whole week of that, driving her home from work. Then, on the Saturday he took her to dinner at a little restaurant near the apartment he was renting, where they ate a red snapper prepared tiradito, with spicy chiles and onions and lots of lime. They ate other things too. But neither would ever remember that part of the evening. Just the snapper. And then the conversation, which went way past midnight until they heard the owner of the little restaurant, which was, after all, attached to his house, quietly clear his throat as he snuffed out candles at nearby empty tables.
“I will see you for church tomorrow,” Arthur told Lilly. “And on Monday, I’ll pick you up and take you to work also. Then I’ll take you home. Or perhaps for dessert.”
And so two more weeks unfolded, very much like the first except he was driving her both directions now, to home, to work, back again. It was his way, Lilly reflected. He quietly suggested what he clearly believed to be already laid out before him, an indelible set of directions on a map in his mind, footsteps plotted out into his future. She’d been pushed out of Germany. She’d been pushed out of beautiful Paris where she would have happily stayed. Pushed out across the ocean to the place where her family had found refuge. She was grateful to be alive. Oh, grateful, ever grateful.
But she was grateful for this, too, this possibility of a new direction.
At the end of three weeks, she finally asked him the question, which was very forward of her, as it suggested a judgment, like she thought traipsing around the world was something that had to come to an end at some point. Like maybe traipsing was something Arthur had been allowed to choose by the very same vast and unknowable forces that had prevented her own choosing.
“I have a question,” she had said.
And then, after other things, after other discursions in the conversation, he returned to that.
Arthur said to Lilly, “I don’t think I answered your original question honestly.”
She looked at him a moment. “Well then?”
And Arthur said, “My traipsing is over when you marry me. Lilly, will you marry me?”
Now this, Lilly did not expect. And for all her spine and moxy and strength, for all the terror she’d seen, the way it marked her with secret knowledge that made her different from those around her, she could not suppress the tears that surged.
Hands to her face, sobbing.
Arthur had no idea. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Did I say the wrong thing? Are you already engaged? Have I done something terrible?”
“Stop,” she said to him. Then she blew her nose into a hankie that she’d carried all the way from Pforzheim. Münster, Telgte, Albersloh, Pigalle, Genoa, Curaçao, Baranquilla, the Gatun, and Pedro Miguel Locks. My God, would it never stop?
Then she composed herself and Arthur himself sat back an inch, still obviously worried he’d said something impossible, something that would end everything. He looked very afraid, and Lilly saw that plainly. The man with a future who had offered to share it with her. Nobody had ever done that before. Most people she’d known in the past ten years hadn’t had much of a future themselves. And most boys, if they were lucky enough to sense that they did have a future, had no clue how to share anything, much less that.
She breathed in. Breathed in deep, held it a second. Arthur appeared to mirror her. He appeared to do exactly the same. Up went his shoulders and out went his chest. They were frozen there opposite one another. One thousand, two thousand.
“I need to know why,” Lilly said to Arthur. “I’ve known you three weeks. Why would you ask me to marry you so quickly? Why would you ask me at all?”
Out went his breath. But it was not a deflation. Lilly could see that immediately. It was resolve. It was what you did when you were determined to take another breath, and another, and another one after that.
As my father lay dying, he saw that he was crossing a great canal, but he was going across it on a bridge and not through it along the water as was the more typical transit. I think he saw other things, too, that moment. I think he saw someone approaching, lights under the water and circling overhead into the heavens above. I think he saw the way that north-south and east-west met right at that spot and in that moment, and how it became a sphere in the middle of which he was suspended. But not alone. He saw these things and saw that it was not a crossing at all, but a rejoining, a closing, a coming home. Someone was there. Someone was drawing close.
Because… Arthur said, though not just Arthur, another voice too. Two voices now, criss-crossing and weaving together in the silver current, in the never-ending mercury flow, a sentence that would never be finished.
3 Afterward
Taberna do Bispo
We made it to Zaurautz all the way from San Sebastian. I say we, though I was technically alone. There’s something about the solo long walk that puts you into a silent community of other walkers. So there would be people you pass on a bend in the trail as they stop for water, standing in a patch of shade. And you nod. Then you see them again on the rocky downslope into town. Another face you saw that morning. You nod again. Bon Camino. Maybe you’ll even exchange a word on the terrace in Orio, sipping the best tasting Coca-Cola you’ve ever had in your life.
“Con hielo y lima?” the bartender asked me in the café.
I could hardly speak with fatigue, but I managed. Si, si. Ice, please; lime too.
Then I went outside and there were some of those same Camino faces.
“How are you making out?”
“A little tired.”
Laughter all around. Sipping that Coke and staring straight up to the skies overhead. Westward, westward and wondering why.
I couldn’t have explained to anyone what exactly I was doing. I read the note from Stephanie on the kitchen table. I sat on the sofa and read it again. It was extremely short. So I read it several times more and tried to imagine what Stephanie had hoped I would do with it: not a statement of her feelings, not a question about mine, not an order or a request.
