Mount Pleasant (25 page)

I’ve been there
, it said.

Where?

Buckingham Palace. 1991. In the pocket of a man named Terkel. He went to see the changing of the guard. When he pulled out money to pay for the taxi, I fell on the floor. Picked up by the cabbie who went to Omaha to visit his brother a year later. They fought like badgers. He bought a Hershey bar at the Piggly Wiggly, and I moved around that town for a dreary decade. I’ve seen a lot
.

You’re almost worthless
.

Glass houses, Harry
.

You’re endangered. Black rhino
.

But I’m still here
.

Isn’t your whole life spent in the dark? In pockets, in cash registers
.

That’s what makes the light so glorious
.

And now you’re mine
.

That’s what you’re supposed to think
.

TWENTY

H
ARRY DROVE WEST PAST THE ROW HOUSES
that had been erected for railway workers more than a century ago, now mostly renovated and filled with hopeful young families who lived alongside the original working class, a dwindling crowd of urban hillbillies who sat on their porches and smoked resentfully.

He was on his way to meet his students and observe the Occupy movement first-hand. The windshield was briefly bleached in the sun’s glare, then the streets were suddenly eclipsed by a dark cloud. He got stuck behind a streetcar. In the back window, a small boy waved and smiled, but when Harry waved back, the kid gave him the finger. Harry turned south, parked and walked toward St. James Park. The Occupy campers had received eviction notices but were standing fast. His class was waiting for him near the gazebo, as specified. Harry did a head count. One short. “Who’s not here?”

“Davis,” Verma said.

“He’ll find us,” Harry said. “So, as we discussed in class, we split up, move around. Talk to people. Record your impressions. I want a sense of not just what the people here are saying, but how the media is working it. How will this history be written? What is this moment? Is this the beginning of a revolution? And if not, what is it?”

They nodded and moved along, a few staying in pairs, nervous about integrating and approaching strangers, even these open-armed Woodstockians. There was a chant in the background that involved Afghanistan. The clouds were low and flinty. Stained blue and orange tents were staked around the park. Sleeping bags lay in heaps. A radio journalist that Harry recognized moved through the crowd like a predator. Harry guessed he was looking to interview the mentally ill to use as clips for the drive-home show.

Money had congregated around privilege, hard work and luck, but it would never embrace this collection of kaftans, down jackets, Sherpa hats, hand-knit sweaters and
CRUSH THE BANKS
placards written unevenly on cardboard. The scene was medieval, the layers of clothing and makeshift tents, the hygiene and beards and feudal demands: a Breugel fair. Harry passed a circle of people playing guitars and singing raggedly about justice for the earth. A woman held a sign that read,
WHAT DOES MONEY MEAN
?

A form of kinship, Harry thought. Money established hierarchies and punished the unlucky. He thought of those lottery winners who ended badly. They gave Corvettes to everyone at their high school reunion and were back repairing dishwashers before the year was out. Money conferred a sense of power to those who had it and a sense of possibility to those who didn’t. At least, it used to. As long as everyone believed life would get better, the plutocracy was celebrated.
But when that necessary fiction crumbled, you were back in the fifteenth century.

Most of the protesters were too young to have experienced capitalism’s golden moment. Harry had grown up in lockstep with the first suburbs; both he and the suburb had been so perfect in their conception. The city’s first real shopping mall had appeared in an optimistic suburb. And here was the miracle: in those stores, in that mall, they sold washing machines and refrigerators and candies and cosmetics that were manufactured ten blocks away. The workers drove to the factories in cars bought from the local Chrysler dealership and then assembled the Frigidaires and made the chocolate-coated raisins and Pink Lady eyeshadow and had coffee breaks and flirted with co-workers and went bowling together, and on Saturday they drove to the mall and bought the very things they had manufactured themselves and then had them delivered to their modest, perfectly kept-up homes, and on weekends they barbecued burgers and drank beer, and theirs was the best system in the world, and if the Russians could just take a break from that depressive drinking contest they called an economy and drop by for a barbecue, they’d give communism the heave-ho. But economies aren’t static. Another mall was built. A bigger mall. The old one withered, though it didn’t die. It gravitated toward bargains (discount clothes), then junk (Chinese toys, appliances that didn’t work). The original mall anticipated the poverty that would come.

Now the city, like other financial centres, no longer manufactured much. It moved paper around in complex swirls, it shovelled money from building to building. The economy was fragile and opaque. The world of his youth had been gone for decades. All those gleaming Bel Airs being washed in driveways, outdoor hockey, two brands of jeans, Presbyterian cooking—all
of it breathing its last. The factories quietly leaving, moving offshore, the workers losing their jobs to Malaysians. The suburb losing its way.

Who was next? Would the sons of Rosedale find themselves scalding pigs in ill-lit abattoirs, standing in puddles of blood? Would they seek solace in beer and large families? Every empire collapses eventually, Harry thought. They lose energy and die of heartbreak.

He saw Verma interviewing a woman in her forties, recording it on her phone camera. Briscow was passing a joint to a woman with dreadlocks wearing an ironic ill-fitting pinstriped suit. Harry approached an earnest-looking man in his twenties with a Hutterite beard and introduced himself. The man was a Christian, representing the faith community, he said, committed to non-violence. His name was David, and he said he came from a small town no one had heard of.

Harry asked one of the questions they’d decided on in class.

“What do you hope to accomplish, David?”

“To raise awareness of a dangerous and growing economic inequality.”

“Do you think you’ve done that?”

“Definitely. The key is sustaining it. I mean, this isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve been arrested four times. Everything peters out. The media moves on. It has its own agenda.”

Are you hoping to get laid? Harry didn’t ask this. This man was pure of heart. But even God’s soldiers had needs.

“We believe another world is possible. This is what the Reign of God looks like,” David said, sweeping his hand. “People talking, dialogue, sharing.”

Harry moved on to a man who wanted to talk about the evils of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the need to put baking soda in the drinking water to soak up the radioactive
dust that had blown over from Fukushima. Harry thanked him for his views and walked on past other snatches of conversation that drifted toward him.

“The global rising of the human spirit …”

“The mainstream media doesn’t want to tell you about Argentina.”

“Make money real.”

“Two words: Arab Spring.”

“Banking used to be a crime—read your Bible.”

Capitalism has become a carnival, Harry thought. Every week a new scam was revealed, some of them so complex that armies of accountants were needed to sort them out. But others were remarkably crude. The simple dream of a greedy child, boldly acted upon; a company made of make-believe.

And still we line up to be hustled. Harry remembered the amusement park he went to as a child, an itinerant midway set up in a small town near their cottage. There were rides and rigged games run by northern Ontario hillbillies, their lean rural faces and natural suspicion, bad teeth hidden by tight, thin-lipped smiles. One summer, a ride malfunctioned and a girl was crushed when the giant teacup she was sitting in spun off its moorings and flew twenty feet and landed on its side. Harry couldn’t remember if she was killed or not. The next year, when the hillbillies set up their rides, almost no one came, and Harry remembered looking at the deserted fairground and those workers staring at him with a look of what he knew to be hatred.

The sun broke through in optimistic bursts, but winter lurked. Whatever solidarity existed here would leak away as the cold set in. There were some who would stay, and that would create hierarchies—the hardy and faithful sharing their disdain around oil lamps at night in the tents. Those who had left bringing them food and flannel shirts with a feeling of guilt.

He walked up to a yurt that housed a library, but it was barricaded against the eviction order. A Native tent with a sacred fire was also barricaded. The eviction notices had been handed out politely, and the police were on record as saying they would enforce them, the first hint of steel from the city. Harry noticed police cruisers lining the street. A few cops in yellow jackets walked through the scene.

Harry stopped to talk to a group who were roughly the age of his students, and asked them about leadership: Did they have a spokesperson?

“We’re not into hierarchy,” one of them said.

“We’re all free to speak our minds.”

“Does that make for a fractured message?” Harry asked.

“Leadership makes for a fractured message, because it doesn’t represent the people—it represents the leader and his interpretation of what the people want.”

“What do the people want?” Harry was genuinely curious.

“What they’ve always wanted,” one of them said cryptically.

“And what is that?”

“Justice,” said one of the girls. She was very pretty, pale in a black wool hat, the kind of girl Harry would have fallen for as an undergrad.

Are you enjoying yourselves? Harry wanted to ask. Instead, he said, “Could you burn Rosedale down? Burn it to the ground?”

They looked at him like he was a police plant, then shuffled away from him suspiciously.

His cellphone rang and Harry picked up.

“Harry.” It was Dixie, calling to threaten exposure or offer sex or inquire about money.

“Dixie.”

“Harry, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I mean, I know you aren’t trying to cheat me out of anything.”

Harry nodded. Why was she changing her tack? Perhaps her lawyer had given up. If she’d actually had a lawyer.

“We should work together, Harry. I mean, it makes sense. Pool our resources.”

Harry wondered what resources Dixie had. If they were useful, she wouldn’t have called him. She had her unnamed source, she had a rumour. But maybe she now grasped the hermeticism of old money. Trying to gain entry to it was like re-entering the earth’s atmosphere; you had to approach at precisely the right angle. If you didn’t, you’d either bounce back into space or burn up. Dixie, with her harsh tan and suburban highlights, didn’t know what that angle was. So she’d come back to Harry.

“I mean, it had to be someone he worked with, don’t you think, Harry?”

“That would be my guess.”

Dixie mentioned a few names. Harry imagined she had a list of suspects that she was crossing off, the way a television detective might. Her voice had dropped slightly, a forced huskiness, a phone sex voice.

If it did turn out that there was $3 million in Dale’s estate, and it was all recovered, this relative stranger would be receiving more than half of it while Harry settled for roughly a million. This bothered him, he realized. It hadn’t bothered him when there was only a few thousand at stake, but a few million was another story. It also bothered him that one of the reasons Erin hadn’t been much help in all this was that she, as the wife of a quasi-investment banker (and with a successful design business of her own, she would add), would rather that nothing was found. Because it would kill her to see Dixie receive a fortune, even if it meant Harry would receive one as well. Erin didn’t need the money and would probably contest the will in
court and spend the next three years tying it up and severely reducing the total through ongoing outrageous legal fees. There might even be legitimate grounds: Harry had thought it was odd that Dale had chosen such arbitrary, non-rounded percentages, and perhaps it could be argued that this in itself was evidence of an unsound mind.

After working through some uninformed conspiracy theories, Dixie finally said, “We need to hire someone, Harry.”

“Didn’t you already hire someone? What about your lawyer?”

“Oh, him,” Dixie said. “I mean someone who knows about these things. A detective or something.”

Harry didn’t want to let her know he had already hired Tommy Bladdock, even if it meant Dixie might offer to split the cost. She would start calling for daily progress reports. She might even sleep with Bladdock in an effort to gain the advantage. He wanted to keep contact with her to a minimum and resented that he was bound to her by that arbitrary fuck.