The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [139]
Then a motel that used to be called Journeys End. I suppose they were thinking of “Journeys end in lovers meeting,” but not everyone could be expected to get the reference: it might have come across as too sinister, a building all entrances but no exits, reeking of aneurysms and thromboses and emptied bottles of sleeping pills and gun wounds to the head. Now it’s called simply Journeys. How wise to have changed it. So much more inconclusive, so much less terminal. So much better to travel than to arrive.
We passed a few more franchises – smiling chickens offering platters of their own fried body parts, a grinning Mexican wielding tacos. The town water tank loomed up ahead, one of those huge bubbles of cement that dot the rural landscape like comic-strip voice balloons emptied of words. Now we’d hit open country. A metal silo lifted out of a field like a conning tower; by the roadside, three crows pecked at a furry burst lump of groundhog. Fences, more silos, a huddle of damp cows; a stand of dark cedar, then a patch of swamp, the summer’s bulrushes already ragged and balding.
It began to drizzle. Walter turned the windshield wipers on. To their soothing lullaby, I went to sleep.
When I woke up, my first thought was, Did I snore? If so, had my mouth been open? How unsightly, and therefore how humiliating. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask. In case you’re wondering, vanity never ends.
We were on the eight-lane freeway, close to Toronto. That was according to Walter: I couldn’t see, because we were stuck behind a swaying farm truck top-heavy with crates of white geese, bound no doubt for market. Their long, doomed necks and frantic heads poked out here and there through the slats, their beaks opened and closed, uttering their tragic and ludicrous cries, drowned out by the racket of wheels. Feathers stuck to the windshield, the car filled with the smell of goose shit and gas fumes.
The truck had a sign on it that said, If You’re Close Enough To Read This You’re Too Close. When it finally turned off, there was Toronto up ahead, an artificial mountain of glass and concrete rising from the flat lakeside plain, all crystals and spires and giant shining slabs and sharp-edged obelisks, floating in an orange-brown haze of smog. It looked like something I’d never seen before – something that had grown up overnight, or that wasn’t really there at all, like a mirage.
Black flakes flew past as if a mound of paper up ahead were smouldering. Anger vibrated in the air like heat. I thought of drive-by shootings.
The lawyer’s office was near King and Bay. Walter got lost, then couldn’t find parking. We had to walk five blocks, Walter propelling me by the elbow. I didn’t know where we were, because everything has changed so much. It changes every time I go there, which is not often, and the cumulative effect is devastating – as if the city’s been bombed level, then built again from scratch.
The downtown I remember – drab, Calvinistic, with white men in dark overcoats marching in lockstep on the sidewalks, interspersed with the occasional woman, in regulation high heels, gloves and hat, clutch purse under the arm, eyes front – is simply gone, but then it’s been gone for some time. Toronto is no longer a Protestant city, it’s a mediaeval one: the crowds clogging the street are many-hued, the clothing vivid. Hot-dog stands with yellow umbrellas, pretzel-sellers, hawkers of earrings and woven bags and leather belts, beggars hung with crayoned Out of Work signs: among