Falsework

by Sean Michaels

She knew they were going to demolish the warehouse on

the other side of the lot, she just didn't know when. The
notices had been up for weeks. Fluorescent pylons, warning
fences. She was at the studio yesterday when the demolition
officers appeared with spools of hazard tape. Late
afternoon on a November day, sun closing like an eye,
masked figures in coveralls on the ground below. They
gestured and touched, stepped over shards of masonry. They
twisted hazard tape across columns. There was nothing
destructive in the workers' movements but in a certain way
there was: quiet and deliberate, with gloved hands and
secret signs they would bring the whole thing down.
Today the site was empty. No trucks in the lot, no
movement on the derelict floors. She was sketching prisms
on a slanted piece of paper and still she kept glancing out
the studio window as if the warehouse might have suddenly,
soundlessly disappeared, collapsing into silver dust and
orange light.

Her phone buzzed.

Made soup. xx

She tapped back:

Thanks, studio's freezing. Sleep OK?

Shivering, she plugged in the kettle. It sat on the

floor under rows and rows of plywood shelves. Each shelf
was crammed with her ceramic sculptures - geometric shapes,
boxes and pyramids the size of teacups. They had sunrise-
like glazes, dark greens and golds and pale roses, half-
matte. Tubs of clay sat nearby, buckets of chemicals and
tincture, two small workspaces that seemed grimy but were
in fact clean, useful, perfect. There was a photograph of
Sade and a creased poster for Bjrk's album Vespertine. The
window that faced the lot, the abandoned warehouse,
dominated the entire northwest wall.
The kettle boiled and he still hadn't answered. He
must already be underground, she thought. In his semi-
automatic train, in his subterranean tunnel. She looked at

1
her clock: 5:23, in stunted red lines. No, it was too
early. He was at home, eating, doing the dishes, showering,
biding time before the night shift. They lived together but
she hadn't seen him in three days. Leading opposite lives.
She stared at the phone screen, willing a reply.

miss you, she wrote.

Something new had opened at the end of their block,

where the dry cleaners' used to be. One morning she left
for the studio and the sign was gone, NETTOYEURS CLAIR,
which had always reminded her of when he and she had met.
Nothing seemed to be able to stay in business any more.
Everything seemed to be failing. The new owners didn't
replace the sign; they just put up black panels, and hung
black curtains, and painted a symbol on the opaque door:
something elegant and mysterious, in pale blue. It looked
like a clock, maybe, or like a human heart.
She assumed it was some kind of ritzy boutique but
then one night she got home late from the studio, almost
midnight, and there was a light outside the door and a glow
from beneath the curtains and she could hear music inside,
throbbing reverberations. It was a nightclub, she realized,
without a name.
She wanted to tell him about her discovery but of
course when she had locked up her bike and climbed up to
their apartment, on the third floor, he was already gone.
An empty space where his boots had stood. A bare hook for
his coat. A novel lay folded open on the table, beside a
plate just dusted with crumbs. He had made the bed, left a
lamp on. She remembered that fall in Victoria, the
lampposts on the boardwalk, how they had walked in the hazy
gas glow and then played hide and seek, shouting their
laughter down a promenade.

The next morning she deliberately slept late; didn't

set her alarm and then when she finally awoke, eyes closed
then eyes open, he was there beside her. Curled away,
turned on his side, breathing soundlessly. He was still
wearing his metro uniform. His back seemed so vast, so
reassuringly wide. His ribs expanded and contracted with
his breath and she watched him from where she lay,
fascinated, through the gentle air.

2
 She was careful not to rouse him, got up, dressed,
biked to the studio. She came home that night and it was as
if he had never been.
The last time they had had a conversation, face to
face, it had been an argument. It was about the news. He
said he was trying to ignore it - that it was all bad news,
always bad news. That it just made him unhappy. She told
him that was wrong, that you couldn't ignore it, shouldn't;
that this was their world, they were part of it. You should
know if the bombs are about to fall. Or if you need to go
out in the streets and march. And he said she was right but
that it made him unhappy; and she said that they couldn't
behave as if they still lived in the wilderness, students
alone in a weather tower, falling in love. He said, "Why
can't we?"
But despite what she pretended, she too was avoiding
the news. She didn't check the paper and she left the radio
at the studio turned to a station that played only dance
music and Prince. Online, her friends posted messages about
the attacks, or the flu, or that breach in the gulf, and
she tried to filter past it all; tried to feel fearless and
loose, scrolling through, a weightless body.
One evening she came home and he had left her
breakfast, breakfast for dinner, pancakes and sausages warm
in the oven. And toast, buttered, cut into little strips.
Soldiers, she remembered from her childhood. Toast in
strips is called soldiers.
She lay in their bedroom, in darkness, and she thought
she could hear the nameless club pulsing on the corner.
Like a low persuasion.
Her phone came alive in her hand.

They want me to work on monday after all, he wrote.

fuck

i know. maude has pneumonia.

can't they find someone else?

so many people are already off. i'll try.

ok

I love you, he wrote. Sleep well.

She imagined him in his train. Outside their window it

was raining.

3
 She got out of bed.

The club had a name after all. She learned because she
asked someone, "What's this place called?", pushing past
the knot of loiterers and the smoked glass door, past a
plastic curtain to keep the heat in, and then the narrow
corridor lined with canvas curtains and heavy coat racks,
parkas packed like a thriftshop aisle, into a crowded
corner staircase, figures close and hot, bodies freed from
winter gear, the smell of sweat and vapourized nicotine,
with shivering music everywhere.
"It's called 'Enfin,'" said a boy who sipped from a
bottle of beer, and who had chestnut eyes that matched his
hair, and who slipped down past the stairs and through a
doorway.
She went. Following the boy and the sound into a long
basement of bulwarked brick, gold strobes and an arcing red
light, music everywhere, crashing everywhere, the crunch of
techno that seemed to meet her at her waist and knees, her
neck, the bones behind her ears. It wasn't easy, being
here. It wasn't dart and play, drunken lolling to karaoke
hits. There was a gravity to the dancers' movements, borne
out of the circling ruby light. But the music was
beautiful. It was like a pummeling jewelry.
Soon she was dancing.
The room was like a body, hot like a body.
She was sweating. She took a breath. She was moving,
breathing, moving. She touched her mouth with the back of
her wrist.
In the flickering light of the club, each of the
dancers took their own separate breaths.
She lifted her arms. She did not know what time it
was.
The dancing was like losing.
Like giving in: finally, under crossing ruby light,
she was giving in. She took a breath. Snare and bass drum,
snare and clap, synths, voice, drums.
A breath, another breath. She could feel the dancers
around her. The heat of other people: at the blades of her
shoulders, the base of her spine, along the edges of her
ribs.
She took a breath. He was there, she saw. The boy with
chestnut eyes, reaching, arching his back, pivoting on the
balls of his feet. He seemed to change shape with every
strike of the bass. And she, in the shadows, yielding to
each snare.

4
 The music lifted and then came down again just the
same.
She had not moved and yet now here she was at another
part of the dance-floor, beside the boy with chestnut eyes
and hair, where shadows seemed to lie fainter on the
ground. They lay fainter, longer, bowed into strange
shapes. They seemed like fictions, the folding shadows. She
and the boy touched.
In the music she found she was watching him take a
breath.
She touched him again, in the buried room.
.
*

"It was like a hideout," she said.

It was two days later. At home, in quiet. Her partner
was half with her, half-not, reading a postcard that had
arrived in the morning's mail.
"A hideout?" he said.
"Somewhere secret. Sort of secret."
He nodded from his chair. He had found someone else to
fill in for his sickly colleague and now there they were
together, sitting at opposite sides of their living room,
among books and records and paintings, under a brass
fixture they had bought at a bazaar in Izmir. The afternoon
was still. The sunlight so white it felt almost blue.
He looked more tired than she remembered. Bags under
his eyes, limbs hidden in his sweater sleeves.
"It sounds fun," he said, setting aside the postcard.
"Will you come with next time? "
"Sure." He smiled. "Sure I will. Do they stay open for
the graveyard shifters? 8am to noon?"
She looked down at her hands. No, she realized.
There was something heavy in her throat. She
swallowed. She was angry at herself, messed-up.
She looked at his face and something there was poised,
unsaid. It was not anger nor suspicion. She stared at the
line of his jaw. She wanted to clamber over the coffee-
table and climb across his knees and thighs, insisting. She
said, "Who is the card from?"
He picked it up again. "Stuart."
She remembered Stuart, from his hometown. From the
woods, from the street, from the trouble, before she knew
him. "How is he?"
"Dying," he said.
"What?"
"Leukemia." He barked out something that was a little
like a laugh. "Six months."

5
 "Oh no."
"It's OK," he said, then quickly, "He's out travelling
the world, seeing everything, before he's done."
She was going to ask if Stuart was coming here, going
to say something, anything, but already he was wrenched
forward in grief and she was climbing over the coffee-table
to reach him.

Alone at the studio she listened to her own even

exhalations. There were voices in the floor. Kids shouting,
shrieking. Was it a school downstairs? A nursery? Hidden on
the sixth story of an old office building? She pushed a
bamboo knife through clay, shape and shape and shape on the
desk, in a row, while underneath her children screamed.
The warehouse across the lot was still standing.

At night, in first snows, she cycled in the smudged

aurora of headlights, red brakelights, wind stinging her
face. Snowflakes caught in the parts of her hair that
trailed her tuque, in her lashes and on her lips. She
carried a backpack full of prisms packed in paper towel,
ready for the kiln. Five people were gathered outside the
window of a sports-bar, watching the news on the TV inside.
She put her head down and pedaled. She mouthed words to
herself, the same line over and over again, half-remembered
from a song that night at Enfin.
We're no good.

She went back to the club and she did not seek the boy
with chestnut eyes and if he was there she did not see him.
She moved alone, deliberate and apart, as if she were
trying to retrace her own steps.
Every beat seemed to tremble.
Somewhere nearby, her partner glided along a silver
tunnel.

Once, years ago, they had stood at midnight above a

shaded wood. They hardly knew each other. Their hands
rested at their sides; not touching, close. They had been
hired to watch the storms from an outpost above the
treetops. In each of their tiny wooden bedrooms was a peg
for a pair of binoculars, a peg for an official
meteorological logbook. There was a narrow captain's bed.
The two cabins were the same but mirrored. She would lie in
her bed, lids shut, and imagine him in his.

6
 Now they stood above this shaded wood and stared into
an invisible sky. The night was blue-black and
outstretched. Their hands rested at their sides, not quite
touching.
"Look." His voice cracked. He had not spoken in many
minutes. "A meteor," he said.
He pointed and there it was. A scorching bright light,
piercing the atmosphere, and then another and another:
shooting stars, pink, eerie, dozens of them blinking into
existence, plunging.
They stood before the night and asked themselves if
they would ever see something like this again.

One morning she woke and the electricity had gone out.
None of the lights turned on, the baseboard heaters, the
toaster. She stood in the cold at the foot of their bed,
while he slept. She wrote a note, Power out, left it on the
dresser. She ran hot water over her hands.
On her phone the headline read, STARS REACT TO MARKETS
CRISIS!
She tied her boots, tied her hair behind her head.
Four hours later, buying lunch at the Slovenian deli,
she heard two old men talking about air raid shelters. "You
need reinforced concrete," one said. "You want building
crumble on your head?" They ate their grilled-cheese
sandwiches folded in half, like tacos. She realized this
was the only conversation she had heard or overheard all
day: her only moment of public contact, human beings and
other human beings.
She coughed, once, sharply. The men looked at her. The
cough felt like a kind of strength, a superpower that made
her visible.
The men went back to their conversation and she
thought, Is he alone too, in his train? The old men talked
about apocalypse, spearing coleslaw from paper plates, and
one of them said, "If the government don't build, you build
yourself."

The power was back that night. She stood at the sink,
washed three plates, two knives, a spoon, the evidence she
had that he was still alive.
The next evening, he texted her from work:

Made us do a workshop on emergency procedures. Good news:

metro is 'quite safe' in the event of an explosion.

7
 whats the bad news

haha. xoxo

Then, a few minutes later:

Your studio still have that big window?

Yes, she tapped.

Think you could cover it?

She danced alone at the club called "At last" or "in

the end", Enfin, where each beat felt like the tiniest
variation on its antecedent, a world changing only by
miniscule, perceptible degrees, second by second, one
comprehensible song. Around her some people drank, some
others took pills, but they didn't speak. She too was
silent. Everyone was wordless in the pit of night. Everyone
was shaking under the red siren light.

In their barren bed she pulled the comforter all the

way over her head and imagined a dream that she might have,
later that night, or on another night this winter. He was
alone in the front compartment of the train when the
explosion went off, underground, the darkness ahead of him
sprayed with yellow fire.
She imagined the dream but she didn't have it. She lay
hidden in the bed with open eyes, seeing shades and shades
of gray.
When she fell asleep, her dream was simpler: he was
there on the mattress, home, huddled beside her.
She woke and went to work and he texted, early, just
as he too must have arrived home, peeling off his clothes
and crawling into their bed, to the same space under the
same comforter; he texted, Stuart died.

He surprised her that night, came into the studio

after dusk, with Thai take-out. They sat together on her
two flat stools, beside a bin of clay. She leaned her head
on his shoulder. They ate from the boxes on their laps. As
she listened to his voice she was reminded how sturdy it
was, how sturdy it had always been - low and somehow wide,
level and unshakeable. She had left the radio on and it was
singing songs from a different time, before there was a

8
nightclub on the corner. He laughed at something she said
and she laughed too, easily, gratefully.
They looked out at the faded city, the blank sky, the
derelict warehouse. "Didn't you say they were going to
bring that building down?" he said.
"They were," she said. "I think they still are."
They sat, barely touching, the right edge of her
shoulder and the left edge of his, a single point in all
the whole world. They looked at the building that was still
standing.