Floating City Read online

  ALSO BY KERRI SAKAMOTO

  The Electrical Field

  One Hundred Million Hearts

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2018 Kerri Sakamoto

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Alfred A. Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  this page is a continuation of this copyright page.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Sakamoto, Kerri, author

  Floating city / Kerri Sakamoto.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780345809896

  eBook ISBN 9780345809919

  I. Title.

  PS8587.A318 F56 2018 C813’.54 C2017-905124-5

  Text design by Kelly Hill

  Cover design by Kelly Hill

  Cover images: (man with umbrella) © Marco Lamberto / EyeEm / Getty Images; (dome) © meunierd / Shutterstock.com

  v5.2

  a

  For Daniel Tisch Echevarría

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Kerri Sakamoto

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Port Alberni, Vancouver Island

  Chapter 1: Secret World

  Chapter 2 The Mongolian Spot

  Chapter 3: Floating Garden

  Chapter 4: The Place Next to Hope

  Toronto

  Chapter 5: Under the Chrysanthemum Forest

  Chapter 6: The Iris Isle

  Chapter 7: Below, Above and Beyond

  Chapter 8: The Place Left Behind

  Chapter 9: The Vapour Sphere

  Chapter 10: After the Flood

  Chapter 11: Up and Down

  Chapter 12: Man in the Tower

  Chapter 13: The Man Who Couldn’t Cry

  Chapter 14: Eclipse

  Chapter 15: Metaphysical Gravity

  Torosa: Floating City

  Chapter 16: Afloat

  Quoted Sources

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  The timeline of Floating City coincides loosely with real historical events, including the internment of Japanese Canadians in World War II and various incidents and landmarks in the development of post-war Toronto. It is not intended to follow the precise history of what was, but rather to imagine a story that might have been.

  “LONGING…is EXPANSION and INCLUSION.”

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Nine Chains to the Moon

  PROLOGUE

  “Mr. Industry!”

  Bucky held out his arm to hoist Frankie from the frigid waters of Lake Ontario. Frankie clambered onto the quay in his sodden woollen jacket. Water streamed down his neck and sloshed from his shoes.

  “Out there, my dear boy!” Bucky shouted in his musty dark suit, pointing across the harbour. A line of tugboats was pulling one twenty-by-twenty-foot hollow concrete block after another, each ten feet deep with enough air inside to make it lighter than the water it displaced.

  The floating blocks soon filled a quarter square mile of Toronto Harbour. Workers jumped onto the floating surfaces, hooking them with cables to hitch the blocks together.

  “We will soon see, Frank,” Bucky said, his eyes large, blue and blurry behind the thick glasses strapped around his closely cropped head. Frankie shivered.

  When Frankie Hanesaka was a young man, it was Bucky—R. Buckminster Fuller—who told him that he must dream and dare. That everyone is born naked with no external equipment and no experience. We are all on the frontier, on a great mystery.

  Workers in coveralls and helmets began hauling equipment off the boats. Before long, torches flamed on the horizon as welders set the joints.

  Bucky had a way of casting Frankie’s doubts to the wind. As a young man, Bucky had himself almost given up, he’d told Frankie. Instead I sought to discover what, if anything, can be accomplished by a penniless, unknown individual—operating only on behalf of all humanity—in attempting to produce sustainably favourable physical and metaphysical advancement of the integrity of all human life on our planet.

  Bucky now smiled his smile of delight. He clasped his broad hands together. “Next week, the ships will haul our preassembled living units here and cranes will lift and drop them into place. Slope-faced, omni-surfaced, terraced!”

  Each unit of uniform dimensions fronting on Lake Ontario, each tiered level sloped back from the one below to overlook a garden terrace. No sheer face or drop to tempt an ill wind or dark soul on a calm day.

  Frankie gazed across the harbour. He hadn’t fallen into the lake on his own. The air was still. His feet had been steady on the quay. The Priest, he mused. The Priest had conjured a single gust of wind to topple him. But Bucky, of robust flesh and blood, had pulled him out.

  Soon enough, they’d see the doors of those apartments opening wide onto Streets in the Air. The streets would spiral up the Floating City to the very top, under nothing but sky. Home for four hundred penniless unknowns, maybe more.

  PORT ALBERNI,

  VANCOUVER ISLAND

  CHAPTER 1

  Secret World

  For a moment, Frankie balanced perfectly above the water. Ta-dah! He looked down the inlet. Beyond was the sea.

  Then down he went. Logs under his feet, now closing over his head. Blood snaked before his face in the water, light worming through then disappearing. Fu-ranki! his mother cried from the world above.

  Water filled him to bursting. He kicked and thrashed until there was no air and no up. He was sinking like any creature taken by the sea. He closed his eyes.

  Then, a tug on his arm and he was dredged up, back up between parted logs and into the light, sputtering into the air.

  * * *

  —

  Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu, babbled Momoye, half-asleep at his side, prayer beads spilling between her fingers.

  Mama. Frankie gagged and woke.

  His brother, Yas, stirred beside him in the moonlight but slept on. Aki, Yas’s twin, along with their sisters Julia and Augusta, slept in another bed; their father, Taiji, lay in another across the room. The ocean swell beneath them lulled their floating house. How Frankie ached all over: his ribs, his chest, his head, his throat—even his fingers and toes.

  At dawn, he watched through the window as Yas and their father stepped onto the logs tethered outside their house. Without a word, they rolled the timbers beneath their feet, poles held easily across their chests, and glided effortlessly away, like Frankie never could. How did it feel, Frankie had to wonder: that sureness; Taiji’s shadow always at his back, strong and tall? When they reached the dense cluster of logs in the middle of the inlet, they poked and pushed with their poles while hopping from one trunk to another, urging the swarm toward the sawmill for skinning and slicing.

  Frankie could only lie back in his bed, every finger bandaged, his ribs bound, his breath wheezing through bruised passages. Frankie had nearly been a goner. But no, not Yas. He’d roar when he rolled the biggest log faster than anyone. I rode the Colossus! The girls scrambled after him, crying nooo! Others might go down like deadheads, like squashed jellyfish, but Yas would laugh, drunk from the sea.

  If only Yas would
go down just once. Frankie couldn’t help wish it. Just once.

  Momoye sat beside him. She’d been brewing sake and he smelled the burnt sweetness amid the ocean salt. If only she would hold him like she did when he was little, if only to lift him from here to there. She raised a bottle to the window to let the early morning sunlight glance through. You see, Fu-ranki? She tipped the bottle back and forth. Green, blue and white light swilled within.

  This is how we came across the ocean. In giant ships riding giant waves. Before you were born.

  * * *

  When he opened his eyes next, the house was dark. He felt his mother there, smelled her there, as if the two of them were below decks of the giant ship on its long journey instead of drifting in their floating house.

  Momoye leaned in with her hot breath, words pouring like lava in his ear. One night, a man fell into the Sea of Japan. Down into the deep, dark water.

  Frankie’s aches flared and burned with cold anew. “Then what?” he asked, though of course he knew the story. Shush. His mother’s eyes widened, her thick brows arching in the faint moonlight; she hunched her shoulders and drew up her arms.

  The Priest swept down into the water, his robes like wings.

  She sighed, shoulders drooping, eyes narrowing. It always exhausted her telling this part, as if she’d rescued the man herself. Frankie shivered and tingled. “And then?”

  The Priest crossed to the other side and brought him back.

  She stared so hard at Frankie that he had to look away. Did you?

  “What, Mama?”

  Did you cross to the other side?

  * * *

  —

  On his way out, Taiji gazed down at Frankie with a pitying shake of his head. One by one, Yas and the girls passed by his bed and did the same. Only Aki lingered to give him a gentle squeeze and kind eye.

  “Bye, Frankie!” they called from outside, voices fading as they rowed to shore for school.

  His mother settled in beside him, ready to tell another story. The one about the rich widow and her son and daughter. The widow had heard of the Priest and the miracles he’d performed, of walking on fire, purging dark spirits, bringing a dead man back to life. She wanted a miracle of her own.

  The widow wanted her son brought back—not to life because he wasn’t dead—but home to Japan from the New World where he’d ventured.

  Take my daughter to the New World and find my son, the widow told the Priest. When they all three returned, she would build a shrine where followers could flock to see the Priest perform his miracles. The daughter, who was only a girl, begged her mother not to make her marry the aged and gnarled man.

  Momoye held up the bottle with its swill of white cloud, sea green and sky blue inside.

  “They never found the son?” Frankie drawled, though he knew. He was weak with fever again.

  His mother leaned in to pat his forehead with a cool cloth, then disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  She returned hours later, wobbling over him. The stink of sake leaking out as she murmured. The embers were red. Red! Yet the Priest walked slowly across them.

  His feet turned black on the bottom but stayed smooth as a child’s. Momoye reached under the blanket to squeeze Frankie’s battered foot. He sprinkled salt to cool the coals, but the followers screeched and jumped off!

  Now she tugged at Frankie’s pyjamas to check his behind: that bruise-like splotch at the top of his buttocks. They all had one from the moment they came out of their mother’s body. Like a well of special paint; some peoples had it, not just their own. The Chinese, and the Indians on the nearby reserve, had it too.

  Yas’s and Aki’s spots had faded and disappeared by the age of four. Julia’s and Augusta’s too. But Frankie’s had only darkened.

  She helped him up to pee into his bucket. When he was done and settled back, she drew something from her dress pocket. It was a photograph, cracked and grey, creased in four as if to be thrown away. Bad-luck number four, she’d often warned him. A girl in a kimono stood pigeon-toed on a dock by the hull of a great ship. Beside her was a man in white robes—robes that could turn to wings. His face blurred.

  Frankie stared at the photograph, at the girl: the eyes, the brows; the purse of her lips. Puffy hands dangling at her sides.

  Momoye pressed a calloused finger under the man’s chin.

  “The Priest?” Frankie blurted. The face dissolved to dust the longer Frankie looked. “You knew him?”

  Momoye fell silent and wrapped her arms around herself. She searched Frankie’s face and eyes—for what? As if he might know the why of it all, which frightened him. Frankie understood that the girl, not so much older then than he was now, was his mother. Married off by her own mother. Sent away. How unwanted she must have felt! Her brother the favoured one. Just like Taiji preferred Yas.

  Frankie struggled to sit up, close to his mother. He began to cough; gently she pushed him down, brought him water and then drew away. The photograph slipped back into her pocket. Sleep, sleep, she urged.

  He dreamed of the powerful ship that could sail from one side of the world to the other. Waves like clouds below his mother and the Priest, and clouds like waves above them: white and billowing like the robes the Priest wore in the photograph. He heard the voice of the Priest as if it were his own, chanting the same blessing Momoye had chanted for Frankie; someone tugged at his arms, whether down to deeper waters or up to the surface he couldn’t tell.

  * * *

  —

  If only these quiet days could go on. Momoye flapped her arms to make her boy laugh. Caw! Caw! It was the Crazy Birdman, one of the Priest’s followers, left behind. Momoye pinched her nose and swatted the air: it was the Man with the Terrible Smell. She laughed hard and so did he, in spite of his sore ribs. He almost peed in his bed. But when she drew her arms up into her sleeves to show him the Soldier Who Lost His Arms, he became sad and then frightened by the ugliness he imagined: the Peach Man with the tumour growing on his forehead, the Hunchback and the lepers. His mother had stopped laughing too. Frankie secretly envied the Sad Girl because, unlike him, she could shed endless tears. So many that salt dusted her cheeks.

  “Did he help them?” Frankie asked.

  The girls burst in.

  “Tell us your secrets,” little Augusta demanded, dancing around.

  Aki, with her glistening marble eyes, glanced at Frankie. “Then they wouldn’t be secrets.”

  She led the girls back outside. He heard them giggle, chasing each other around the edge of the house. Water splashed the window. He looked to his mother, waiting.

  She shrugged. “He wanted to save them from suffering.”

  * * *

  —

  The house shook, the door flew open and Taiji stumbled through with Yas in his arms.

  “Make room!” he shouted, and Frankie shifted aside as Yas was set down beside him on the bed. Aki rushed to dab the blood streaming from her brother’s nose and mouth. Momoye and Taiji knelt beside the bed.

  “Bring water,” Taiji ordered.

  Julia stood hushed beside Augusta, who murmured, incredulous, “He fell, he fell.”

  Yas fell. Frankie heaved himself up, his rickety breath, arms and legs doing, surprisingly, as he told them. He fetched water and held it to Yas’s swollen lips even as it dribbled down his chin.

  He stood with the others encircling Yas, waiting, wondering. Hadn’t he wished this on his brother? Frankie cringed with shame.

  His mother bundled Yas in blankets, her prayer beads looped tightly around her fist. Yas was shivering, his eyes squeezed shut. Frankie lay down and closed his eyes too. Just hours ago he’d been the one doted on, fed and watered. He opened his eyes to find Yas gazing at him: his furious smile flashed with gritted teeth.

  “Frankie,” he rasped. “I caught an octopus.”

  Not a deadhead, not a goner.

  * * *

  —

  That night, their mother lay in be
d, snoring beside Taiji. Yas was asleep; they all were, except Frankie. He looked from Yas to Aki, Julia and Augusta, their faces lit by a fierce full moon. They all had the same straight slender nose like Taiji; the same proud rounded forehead. He pinched his wide flaring nostrils, rubbed his flat sloping forehead. Strangers. He threw his arms back and slept for a while.

  His finger began to sting as if pinched between the logs. Julia and Augusta were giggling in their pillows.

  Go back to sleep, hissed a voice.

  A shriek: His blood is black!

  There was a stain on his pillow, a trickle from his finger.

  So it’s true, Julia giggled.

  I always knew, whispered Augusta.

  The blood was as black as his spot. His spot: that splotch of spilled ink. Black blood.

  He was sure he felt tears on his cheeks, down his neck. He reached up to touch.

  “What is it, Frankie?” Suddenly Aki was there, surprising him, his hand held in hers.

  He was sobbing his dry sobs.

  “Crybaby,” Yas muttered and went back to sleep.

  “A silly prank,” Aki told him. She showed him a needle and a bottle of ink by Julia’s pillow. “You see?”

  Frankie held his finger up: a drop of red trickled down. He was the stranger. The one with the spot that never went away; the tears that stayed stuck inside.

  * * *

  —

  That was Yas: he might go down but he’d always bob up, faster than anyone. Yas got back on the logs again with Taiji in no time, cuts and bruises halfway to healed overnight by the same salt air and water that had made Frankie retch. Why was Frankie born this way and not that?