Best Canadian Stories 2020

Beneath the Ruins Maxime Raymond Bock ^{Translated by Pablo Strauss}

The heat wave was all over the news and the city smelled like a backed-up sewer. When the traffic ground to a halt, a wheezing from under the hood of Xavier’s old Civic made him worry it might be overheating, and he turned off the engine. It was so hot the figurine left on the dash by his niece had melted into a puddle of plastic from which only the tip of a witch’s broom poked out. With the windows rolled down and no air conditioning, Xavier too was roasting under the punishing rays of the midday sun. Not one micron of air moved. Fanning himself with the torn flap of a cardboard box salvaged from the junkyard on his car floor only made it worse, hitting his face with excruciating drafts of heat and pungent wafts of whatever lay rotting between the seats—the now flapless box held fried-chicken scraps, the dregs of a latte sprouted fungal growths that stretched fingers toward the light, and a plastic bag left by his niece last week oozed with the sludge of what had once been grapes. Moving his arm made Xavier sweat more, in drops that trickled from his armpits down along his ribs. He had unbuckled his seatbelt when the Turcot Interchange turned into a parking lot that morning, and could sense that this day would be an ordeal. A band of sweat ran diagonally along his chest. His T-shirt was soaked. He opened the door, less to get the air circulating, as he was well aware the air would do no such thing, than to foster the illusion that he was not trapped in this sauna. What a moron he’d been to paint this old beater black. He could have kept it powder blue. The rust had only returned to claim its due. And, anyway, who even cared about the colour of their car?

To his right, in an immaculate white 4x4 with its windows rolled up, a small family consisting of a husky guy with Oakleys on his forehead, a pony-tailed blonde, and two kids bent over their respective screens, was waiting to get back to the safety of their South Shore suburban home. From time to time Xavier stole a glance in the rear-view at the car behind him, and more specifically at its driver, whom he imagined was pretty, and his age, based on nothing more substantial than her sunglasses. They were similar to his own knockoff Ray Ban aviators. Hers might be real, he guessed, but she didn’t look like she could afford them, so he was betting fakes. Her car, like his, was a heap of scrap metal held together by a few coats of paint. The hood wasn’t the same colour as the body, and an accident had left her car with a broken left headlight and dented bumper. She gathered her hair up into a loose bun and blew away the strand that fell onto her nose. Behind her, Mount Royal shimmered in the heat. In front of Xavier’s Civic, four young people emerged from a red sedan whose back window was almost completely obstructed by luggage, smoking cigarettes to mask the smell of the joint they were sharing. All around, drivers and exhausted passengers were killing time, spilling out of their cars, chatting and cursing the orange cone mafia. The owners of an RV had taken out chairs and a folding table and sat playing cards in the shade of an unrolled awning. Traffic had been rerouted into the wrong lane. To the left lay the shoulder, the parapet and, beyond, the city skyscrapers. Every half hour a helicopter hovered over the gridlock a while, and then flew off in search of other stories. A convoy of three police motorcycles, sirens off but red and blue lights flashing, rolled slowly between Xavier’s car and the parapet, and then weaved its way through the cars, indifferent to the smell of weed.

Xavier had been on his way to do some hiking in the Montérégie mountains, though he hadn’t decided which one yet, and he’d been planning on pitching his tent in the Eastern Townships. But he’d lost interest, macerating in this traffic jam as his exasperation moved past anger into weary resignation. Why pick the Turcot? When traffic finally got moving again, he’d take the first off-ramp and head back through the city to Rosemont. To pass the time he occasionally turned the key a notch and listened to some music on the radio, his sole option since his niece broke his CD player by jamming coins into the slot. The ads were as inane as ever, the traffic reports weren’t improving; nobody was moving, and no one, not even the Ministry of Transportation, could say when they might get moving again, or whether they had been immobilized by a fatal accident or a bridge shedding chunks of concrete. Xavier turned off the radio, determined not to turn it on again, put his key in his pocket, and got out of his car, just to move his legs a little.

He did some stretches, rotated his torso to crack his vertebrae, and tried sitting on the hood, but the metal was too hot. He looked straight ahead, then behind, and even stared off into the interchange’s lower reaches where countless flashes of sunlight refracted off the windows of immobilized cars whose passengers had dispersed. Some had gathered next to trucks or buses, to enjoy what little shade these tall vehicles cast as the sun reached a few points beyond its zenith. He couldn’t see the cause of the gridlock. They were stuck here under a cloudless sky. There were no ambulances, no firemen, no road crews.

The woman in the car with the broken headlight got out and went over to the parapet to stare out at the city. Over the past couple hours he’d caught glimpses of her in his rear-view—standing behind her car looking for something in the trunk, or talking on her phone or to the people in the car behind her—but this time she was right there, just a few metres away from him. They did have the same glasses. Like him, she had hair so soaked with sweat it looked like she’d just climbed out of a pool. He couldn’t even have said what colour it was.

Under normal circumstances Xavier wouldn’t have approached her, but these weren’t normal circumstances. Thousands of people were stranded in this non-place where none had stopped before, and this unaccustomed density rendered visible things that were concealed at full speed—cracks in the concrete, a plastic bag buried in warm, gooey asphalt, a shoe smashed and crushed a hundred and fifty times a day under flowing traffic, a strip of rubber hanging like a snake’s skin from the steel rod connecting two sections of parapet set dangerously far apart. While children ran between the cars and strangers flirted through lowered windows, a group of men off in an especially tight knot of cars began to raise their voices a little, and the helicopter hovered motionless above them like a dragonfly over water, waiting for the next mosquito to leap. Xavier walked over to the woman, so he too could look at the skyscrapers. When they’d been standing in silence so long he thought he’d be better off retreating to his car just to escape the awkwardness, she spoke.

“We’ll be stuck here a while. They don’t know. They said it on the radio.”

Xavier searched for something to say. The metropolis sprawled out in suspended animation, and while it was possible to imagine a hive of activity, from Xavier’s vantage point it lay still and empty. A nauseating, organic stench rose up on the roadside, stronger even than the backdrafts from the city sewers. Xavier imagined that once this heat wave dried up the waters of the Lachine Canal, all that it normally concealed beneath its surface would be revealed, from fish carcasses half-buried in the festering silt to bikes, grocery carts, and tires. The police might turn up clues to open investigations. He edged toward the parapet and leaned over to look out below, his face scrunched up against the reek. Twenty metres below, in the deserted worksite, the dump trucks and diggers poised atop their mounds of rubble seemed tiny. The arm of an excavator was resting on the top of a wall, one of a series of staggered quadrilaterals that looked like disinterred foundations. Rusty pipes ran through the heaps of stones and concrete blocks pierced with drainage wells. The girl had also come forward to look. Xavier was still looking for something to say. She beat him to it.

“Know what they’re doing down there? It’s an archeological dig. Really old stuff, from back before the English came. And they’re paving over it all for a new highway. It’s kind of our last chance to see what’s down there. We should take a look. I’m Sarah, by the way.”

Xavier looked at her for a few seconds, startled by her boldness. It never would have crossed his mind to do anything but wait for traffic to start moving. He gazed out at the side of the highway, in search of a way down. To the north, the length they were standing on extended in a gentle curve, then descended by a few degrees under the cloverleaf. Perhaps a couple kilometres to the south, though it was hard to say for sure from this distance, the next off-ramp emerged like an outgrowth covered in stopped vehicles, before tucking back under the deck, only to fold back into the interlaced ramifications further on. A roaring helicopter hovered overhead.

“How are we going get down there? You just said we were stuck here till next week.”

She pointed into the distance, beyond the parapet.

“See that, over at the base of the pillars. Some of them have little doors.”

“Like an emergency exit?”

“Could be. I don’t know. A little closet, maybe an electrical room. I had a look, to see if there was a door up there, or some kind of access, a platform, something…. Not too far off, there’s a manhole. I could see rungs through the grid. It might all be connected. Want to check it out?”

Xavier took another look down. Orange cones were scattered around the worksite, which was bordered to the east by a row of porta-potties. Further off in the distance, heavy trucks sat parked. The site was deserted: no workers, no one scoping out the materials, no protesters demonstrating to save the heritage site. A flock of seagulls flew under the highway. He watched them until they broke formation somewhere over Little Burgundy.

“What were you going to do? Before you got stuck here?” asked Xavier.

“Meet some friends and go climbing. In Saint-Hilaire. But now it’s too late, I’m not going.”

Up to that point, Xavier had done his best not to check her out too closely. Now he noticed her muscular shoulders and prominent triceps. Another strand of hair had slipped out of her bun and was clinging to her neck, wending its way down to her black tank top.

“We don’t know each other. You have no idea who I am, or if I’m dangerous. And in the middle of the traffic jam of the century you’re asking me to follow you down into a twenty-metre cement pillar. To go see some rocks. From back before the English came.”

“You look pretty harmless.”

“What if it’s locked?”

“We’ll come back. Sit here all week till the traffic gets moving.”

“Okay. Let’s do it. I’m Xavier.”

Their clammy palms slipped so the handshake was little more than a clumsy finger grasp. Under normal circumstances, Xavier’s pride would have made him do the shake over. Clearly, these weren’t normal circumstances. They both laughed at their own awkwardness, and then kissed on the cheeks to conclude introductions. Feeling that this was a moment to embrace the unexpected, coincidence, and maybe even magic, Xavier was already on his way back to his car to close and lock the doors, and rummage through his camping gear in the trunk for his flashlight, needle-nose pliers, multi-head screwdriver, and Swiss army knife. While he was at it he finally did the thing he’d been dreaming of for hours: changed out of his soaked T-shirt and into a technical hiking top, which involved twisting his body to ease the cotton shirt loose from his sticky skin and get it over his head, with his back to Sarah, so she wouldn’t see his chest. He wasn’t in his best shape since he’d stopped working as a garbage man a few years ago, when the city privatized the service. It was demanding work, requiring stamina and the ability to stomach the stench of trash, but of all the blue collar jobs he’d held, it was his favourite. He’d never been in such good shape.

As he put his T-shirt in the trunk, he noticed the bag of emergency food he always kept, and remembered that, in with the first aid kit, candles, waterproof matches, sardines, and crackers, he would find two litres of water. He asked Sarah if she’d like a drink, then and there. The water was the temperature of warm tea; it was the most refreshing drink of their lives. Then he with his small climbing pack of tools and half-empty water bottle, and she with her rope around her shoulder, powder bag, and a couple of carabiners clipped to her harness, set off together in search of a path to the ruins.

The grill over the manhole Sarah had spotted earlier, maybe 30 cars behind them, wouldn’t budge, and Xavier’s little tools were no help, but they found another not far from the Civic, a few metres in front of the pot smokers’ red sedan. It lifted off easily.

A series of rungs ran down a curved wall, deep into the foundation pit, until they receded into darkness beyond the flashlight’s range. The heat in this shaft was even more intense than outside, concentrated like a chimney’s blast, and it carried with it an altogether different smell—watery yet sharp, with a hint of rot. Rank, really. Curious onlookers had gathered around them. Xavier took a coin from his pocket and dropped it down the hole.

A few seconds passed before they heard the tinkling of metal—the coin must have hit a rung—followed by the irregular sounds of it hitting the walls. Two drops of sweat fell from Xavier’s chin and down in a straight line, without making a plop.

“That smell,” he said. “There must be a dead animal down there.”

“You chicken?”

Sarah was already clipping her sunglasses to her tank top, tying her rope around a carabiner, kneeling down to clip it to the first rung, adjusting her headlamp, and powdering her hands. She disappeared down the hole. Xavier followed, after attaching his own sunglasses to his collar and doing his best to secure the rope she’d lent him around his waist. He carried his small flashlight between his teeth, which made him drool, and clung fast to the rungs where Sarah had left traces of powder, endeavouring to avoid the spinning rope that interfered with his descent. The view above changed, and Xavier looked up to see a few backlit heads blocking off the circle of blue. Their yells were audible, but so distorted by the tubular concrete chamber that he couldn’t understand what they were saying. He was finding it hard to breathe with his headlight between his teeth and his saliva dribbling onto his chin, and so he took a moment to put the light in his back pocket, then continued his descent by feel, sweeping each step in search of the best hold, and then stretching his foot out into the emptiness until it found purchase, which he gingerly tested before transferring his weight. It was getting hotter and hotter in this chimney. The smell was changing: it was now so thick it felt like they were actually climbing down into it, and he kept drooling even though his mouth no longer held his flashlight, an atavistic secretion reflex caused by the fetid air that made him choke and want to vomit. He was starting to feel trapped, the tunnel so narrow he could rest his back against the wall behind him. Responses kicked in that he thought he’d outgrown. The claustrophobia that hadn’t bothered him since adolescence made him feel like he might not survive this arduous expedition. He had no idea whether he should turn back or follow it through to the end. He began to worry he might slip. He was soaked down to his socks, and now each rung was covered by the paste formed by his sweat and the powder from Sarah’s hands. Xavier wiped his own hands on his damp shorts, on his shirt, and on the concrete wall. He stopped a moment, trying to figure out what it would take to climb back up to the surface right now, when a yell from below—“There’s a door down here!”—helped him get ahold of himself.

Xavier’s climbing skills couldn’t rival Sarah’s, and it took a few minutes to reach the alcove she was illuminating with her headlamp. It looked like a cell, one so tiny any prisoner would be sure to go mad. Yet with his feet back on the ground, Xavier felt suddenly free. He undid the knot at his waist and pulled the flashlight from his back pocket and the water bottle from his bag. They did their best not to finish it in two gulps. They’d be baked alive if they didn’t get out soon. He looked up. At the end of the tunnel, high above, a small white point. Sarah, headlamp in hand, was examining a strange metal door, a thick hatch out of a science fiction movie. The door harboured a sticker with an indecipherable message and a fleur-de-lys, suggesting the Quebec government, and it looked heavy enough to challenge even the strongest garbage man. Under their footsteps they could hear concrete chips and other unidentifiable debris that must have fallen through the grill over time.

In the centre of the room, on the ground, was another grill, a drain for rainwater, and in the corner there was, indeed, a desiccated animal carcass. The relief of its skeleton could be seen through its ruffled, patchy coat flecked with garbage and dust. The creature had found the entrance, but not the exit. Judging by how its huge scaly tail had been flattened like a Ping-Pong paddle, it looked like this massive rodent had been run over on the highway above and then, like them, come down through the open grill. Sarah, squatting on the ground, examined the mummy by adjusting the angle of her lamp.

“How long have beavers have been extinct around here, you think? Centuries, right?” she asked.

The smell engulfing them was turning acidic, stinging their eyes. Next to the corpse, Xavier saw a coin, and leaned over to pick it up. He thought he’d tossed a quarter. It was a dollar. He picked it up, turned the doorknob, and pushed the door. It opened with no resistance. Light flooded into the alcove. He smiled at Sarah; she smiled back.

“My lucky day,” he said, and walked through the door while she undid her harness. The door shut behind him.

In his ten minutes in the shaft he’d grown so accustomed to the gloom that the sunlight hit him like the lash of a whip. He pressed his eyes shut as hard as he could and covered them with his hands. He could feel the heat on his face. The smell had changed. As before, it was pungent, but it now stripped his throat raw, dashing any hope that it might be less concentrated once he got out into the open. The humidity was unbearable, far worse down here than up above. He walked blindly forward, giving Sarah room to open the door, but she didn’t seem to be coming. Slowly, he unclenched his hand, and when his sight returned, he noticed that he wasn’t in the open air, as expected. Sunlight poured in through a large window in the wall, on the second floor of a sprawling wooden warehouse.

It was hard to believe he could have missed this building from the parapet. He figured the door must lead to a space under the overpass, and the warehouse could be used to store excavating equipment. But in this recess of the warehouse all he could see was an arched entryway over a dirt floor. There was no machinery. His view to the right was blocked by an outcropping of wooden planks, and behind this blind corner men shouted curt instructions that lay somewhere between encouragement and orders. The fear of getting caught gripped Xavier. Site access was surely reserved for the demolition company and civil servants with clipboards and checklists. He nonetheless managed to take a few steps out of the sunbeam to see what lay beyond.

Five metres off, a few men were bent over wooden vats dug into the ground. They stirred the contents with poles and used long metal pincers to pull out what looked to Xavier like wet hides, saturated sheets which were then piled in heaps on a wooden wheelbarrow dripping with a viscous white liquid. The men’s dress—billowy blouses with rolled-up sleeves that had once been white, pants held up with suspenders, and crude boots—was both peculiar and too loose for their work, and their splattered, shiny leather aprons were clearly unequal to their task, as they were soaked. The men worked like dogs wrangling the revolting hides. When the youngest, slightest member of the crew, no older than thirteen, lost his grip on the tongs and dropped one of the hides onto the clay beside the wheelbarrow, a brute with abscess-covered arms and neck cursed and shoved him to the ground. Another few centimetres would have sent the youth into the tub. Xavier’s reflex to step forward was idiotic—he would have never dared try to reason with these men—but at that moment a cart came in, drawn slowly by a horse swarmed by flies, pulling a load of verdigris hides stacked like blankets and hanging with clumps of fur and chunks of bloody fat, tails, ears, and horned scalps. Two burly men left the tanks to receive it.

What a horse pulling a cart of cattle hides was doing in these ruins in Saint-Henri, Xavier couldn’t say, but his gut told him he had no business in this humid warehouse redolent with rotting carcasses, and that he’d made a mistake, and he should have just waited up above in his old car until traffic got moving again, so he turned back toward the heavy wooden door he had come in through, and when he yanked it toward him he found not Sarah but a rough tool shed with shelves full of unfamiliar implements reminiscent of medieval instruments of torture: pincers, curved-blade shears of black iron, bungs, knives, clamps, combs with outsized teeth, and mallets; the whole thing stank atrociously and made him salivate once more. He closed the door and opened it again, but nothing on the other side had changed. He went looking for the metal hatch with the fleur-de-lys, but everything he saw was made of wood. In a panic, he backed out of the corner, stood still, and saw that the cart had reached the part of the warehouse where the hides were unloaded onto trestles to be sheared of ears and tails by two Black men. Then they were tossed into a pile, while other men transported the trimmed hides in little wheelbarrows to a stream that flowed right through the warehouse. At the water’s edge, men with long double-sided cutlasses gathered up ever more skins, spread out onto easels to drain off thick, lumpy ooze which pooled onto the ground. A child came by with a scraper and pushed this molasses-like mixture back into the stream.

The husky man who had thrown the boy down earlier noticed Xavier and yelled out.

“Right, Étienne! About time! What’s you doing in that gear? In your togs now! We’ve got to fill the lime bath before Barsalou gets back from town.”

The man hesitated, slowed a little. Then he moved faster, and his voice rose a third.

“Mother of—that’s not Étienne—who are you, now?”

Xavier took off toward the open double doors the cart had come through. Outside there were no ruins, or piles of gravel or heavy machines, but a dirt road lined by rows of country cottages and pastureland dotted with grazing cattle; above there were no concrete pillars or interchange or helicopters, but a cloudless sky and pounding sun, and Xavier ran with no clear sense of direction, his knockoff Ray Bans tucked into his collar.

After trying to open the door, knocking, yelling, and just waiting for him to open, Sarah had given up. She was now halfway back up the ladder, hurling abuse at Xavier specifically and his entire generation in general. It’s not like things were better before. She didn’t give a shit about empty gestures of gallantry. But she’d always thought only true degenerates didn’t bother holding the door open for the ones who come after.