TWELVE

RICHARD DIDNT KNOW a thing about Arthur. He’d heard that Nell was in Los Alamos looking for a piece of hi-tech machinery. Richard’s involved in the biggest secrets on the planet and yet he’s not informed about the people that are deep in his life. The rain abated and Bucephalus did not seem perturbed so Dave and I drove and slept then kept on to Newport, where we watched a movie for nine dollars. David judged the screen was forty feet wide so we sat in a row forty feet deep. That’s how you pick a seat, David said.

There was a fear, in one scene, of gum disease. When you have a sore jaw, all art looks like it’s about gum disease. It’s an honest selfishness, whereas David.

He said, When I saw the president, I wanted to shout out, The architects are here. You dont know what I’m talking about.

You were thinking about killing the president of the United States.

As you know I’ve had a quiet ambition to be president.

So if youre never to be one you can at least kill one.

In the old days the future king usually killed the old king.

There was something untruthful about this tapping into feeling.

Dont ever lie to me, I said.

David: Only lies of omission.

You didnt have to say that.

He was selfish. It’s true he didnt talk much about his son. I mention his son because the old king is the father and the young king is the son. Once, when Owen was four months old, Sok Hoon said to Dave, Take him. And at eleven oclock Dave woke Sok Hoon up. Youre going to have to take him.

The more demands Sok Hoon made—after the separation—the more easygoing Dave got.

We skirted the Canadian border and then decided to head south to get clear of the dirty old weather, like a bum stock (Dave’s words). We avoided low pressure fronts in newspapers. We pitched in a state park and cooked on our fireplace. We were delighted with ourselves: two whole tilapia, corn in their husks, tuna steak with onion and garlic, corn tortillas toasted right on the flat steel—the fish grilled on the bars. We ate in the dark with a flashlight balanced on top of a paper towel roll. Pancakes and bacon for the morning. The tent on hard ground and it wakes me up, the dog trying to sleep on top of me. Stars, bright Mars. A man came by to see how we lit our fire—his just smoke. He admired it with one of those big battery flashlights. Then the morning. It was hard to sleep in long, as the tent fabric allowed a lot of light and Bucephalus got anxious and her tail began to motor. The floor was thin. A clear sky last night, so no rain fly. The wind blowing through the nylon. I felt the wind and perked up and saw dark clouds from the west. I made coffee on the stove while David sat up on his blue foamy and watched the sun intensify on the green fabric. I just want to hang on, he said, to see if this will be one of those moments that change my life.

It wasnt.

So we collapsed the tent. All of our clothes smelled of smoke. That’s when David came at me with his pebble in hand.

The hospital called me, he said. My father’s not doing well. They need me there. They need to know my blood type. They want to look at my kidneys.

I took the wheel all day and then, after we crossed the border back into Canada, I put Bucephalus in the front seat which she loved and folded myself out in the back while Dave drove. I’d lean up sometimes to see what we were passing, the homes of the unemployed and then through the junctions to valleys where millionaires lived. Those little upside-down Vs in the pavement slipped by. What were they called. Every three weeks I remember the word. The same as stripes on a sergeant’s sleeve. There was a noisy hay operation and then a town dedicated to selling you back your hubcaps. The surnames here would start to be solid and go back generations. The land felt older even though I know that’s not true. We’d driven over the Canadian Shield and now it felt like we were heading back in time. Booth Tarkington’s novel came to mind, his musings on automobiles, for The Magnificent Ambersons is nothing if not an examination of what the automobile has done to change civilization. With all their speed forward, Booth Tarkington wrote, they may be a step backward in civilization—that is, spiritual civilization. Booth Tarkington thought the car would alter both war and peace. And that our very minds would be changed because of the automobile. That’s true of most things we feel apprehensive about—we know they will change us but we’re not sure how.

The road smoothed out which meant a politician had a cottage in a pine thicket and then there was a field of school buses almost as if that was a retirement home for school buses, and then that thought of school buses growing old while children remain the same age. My eye opened to these fast-forward colour fields that David drove through at a constant speed and it felt as if the world were on a spool that reeled out rough edits devoted to panels of colour and it made me realize that we all do things that will be undone. You hammer a painting to a wall that, if left, will fall off before a hundred years pass. So on another scale, say a hundred years to the second, you stick something to the wall it will fall off the wall. It’s a futile, temporary act that only seems permanent and then a neon sign rages across the slant of that thought, followed by the rough hills of abandoned rubber tires and a stinky teepee of a camouflaged smelter operation followed by the gradual buildup of a pulp mill’s spruce farm making way again to pasture as we hit the sun’s porch off the Nova Scotia causeway, the Scottish success and mowed gardens and well-painted fences and David yanks us up to a halt at a coffee shop and unclicks his seatbelt. Who knew at this juncture that we had hundreds of miles of windowless taverns and rain to get through yet.

Chevrons, Dave said.

This comment allowed wide associative leaps. Youre playing in a field, Dave, about which you know nothing.

Dave: Should I be hesitant to show my disapproval?

It’s like youve got an army of disapproval lined up, but theyre in foxholes right now.

We drove on with the coffee all the way to the ferry lineup in North Sydney with the gas gauge warning us. It felt right to get on a ferry with an empty gas tank. The land seemed to pour away from us, like there was a drain to the west and it slurped down land. A couple ahead of us let out their dog and so we took Bucephalus out to greet them. You got your papers, he said. We forgot ours, we’re going to sneak our dog back in.

I told him we had no papers. What papers, I said.

That she’s had her shots, the man said. They won’t let her in for rabies. I’m just going to bury the dog in the back and chance it.

Should we do the same?

You can put your dog in with ours. Wife, are you fine with that.

His wife thought that was acceptable.

So in went Bucephalus. The other dog was friendly enough and Bucephalus could sense some kind of favour was being done. Then the Joseph and Clara Smallwood, tall and stable, let down its backside and we got our tickets and drove deep into its belly like a pair of Jonahs. Ferries are like bridges, a huge investment that is nothing when it’s only a dollar from each taxpayer. The government had just bought a squadron of helicopters and a fleet of cargo planes and the price tag was fifteen billion dollars. Which is five hundred dollars for every man, woman and child in the country.

We rushed up to the deck and watched the sun sink over the dreg of land and then ahead of us the sea shone before it darkened. The thing about the sea is not that it’s the edge of land or that it delivers a boundary. It’s a third way, a middle ground between land and air. If the sea could freeze it would lose its charm. We cannot stand on it, and yet it does not mix. It is a slave to gravity. The sea makes the world avoid the base choice between matter and spirit.