before 1967 when there were only six teams and every player was a star. He had no idea what teams out of Tampa and Pittsburgh were called. He could name every player on the women’s Olympic team that won in Nagano. He was the only person in Canada who had never played hockey, according to Miranda, who used to play shinny on the Ice Pond outside Waldron — called that because ice had been harvested there long before she was born.
There were two doors from the heated garage into the house. Both were locked. The one he tried opened easily enough with a little persuasion. From an efficiently rectilinear space that smelled of machine oil, he stepped into a musty confusion of brick work and stone, muffled odours of other times, shadows converging, the air ominously still.
As he made his way among the convoluted inner foundations, he had the sense of walking outside the boundaries of history. The original structure of the house was virtually intact, though on the exterior it had been tarted up with Victorian turrets and verandahs and gingerbread trim. He knew he must be on the same level as the garden out back and the den, but this was a world apart.
Morgan stopped beside a great oak door with huge hand-forged hinges. He sat on a makeshift bench in the bleak light of bulbs strung sparingly between hand-hewn beams, their illumination barely extending through the darkness from one pool of light to the next. Here were remnants of a Toronto beyond his experience.
This city was his place of origin, his genetic source, not Ireland or Wales, as his name would suggest, or Scotland, where his mother’s people originated. He came from nowhere else. In the motley assemblage of clay brick, rough plaster, and stonework over a cobbled floor, in the adze marks gouged into the squared oak beams, the hammered ironwork on the door, he saw the residue of a past that was strangely familiar. Like discovering a fingerprint embedded in the surface of an ancient relic; it wasn’t someone else’s history he sensed, but his own.
His ancestors had built these walls, or maybe they had owned them. Class and money had a way of sideslipping in Canada every few generations. He was at home here, connected to cobwebs and dust, though there were surprisingly little of either. The echoes of dead artisans’ dreams resounded around him, and he rose to go about his silent business, moving by stealth, it would seem to a ghostly observer, to take in the emanations that might be clues to the mystery of their lives.
He returned to the oak door. Beside it was a control panel with a thermostat and humidistat, the keyboard to an alarm system, and a light switch. There was a small window in the door. When he peered through the glass, which was two layers thick with a space between, he realized the oak, despite its mighty appearance, was a facade for a thermal door. He flicked the switch, but the room remained dark. He could make out rows of bottle ends in a rack opposite the door, which was securely locked, though the alarm, oddly enough, was disarmed. This was what a real wine cellar was like.
Wandering through the subterranean maze, Morgan was surprised at the images that popped into his mind, some of them curiously macabre, some strangely erotic. He thought of his first encounter with sex, with Francine Cardarelli in the janitor’s closet near the end of grade eleven at Jarvis Collegiate. He thought of a severed head in a garbage container under a sink. Frankie married Vittorio Ciccone. They sent him a wedding present, but he was working homicide by then and returned it despite Lucy’s objection. Nothing was proven; the Ciccone family might not have been involved.
A strange underground concatenation of opposites, he thought — it was warm but cool on the skin, bone dry and musty, darkness striated with light, sounds reverberating in the hushed air, closed in and endless … endless. It was like walking through the inside of somebody’s brain, maybe Griffin’s, maybe his own, or the collective mind where disparates converged.
Approaching what he estimated to be the back corner of the house closest to the garden wall, he came to another oak door. It, too, appeared to be elaborately bolted and locked. Backtracking to the near side of the labyrinth, he discovered two more massive doors. One had to lead into the den, perhaps through the hall where the bathroom was. It seemed to be bolted from the inside. The other was at the bottom of a further descent into the depths of the earth and, to his surprise, it swung open with a tentative touch.
Walking through he found himself in what looked like the inner workings of a submarine. There were pumps and pipes and tanks in profusion. A symphony of small motors and the muffled gurgle of water moving against smooth surfaces filled the room with the aura of inspired efficiency, like listening to Rimsky-Korsakov at low volume.
Morgan slid back the cover of one of the cylindrical chambers that narrowed to a cone at the bottom and observed a vortex of water with a pump-like contraption at the centre that seemed to filter particulates from the flow. He had read about filter systems when he took up virtual koi, but since he had no experience with real fish, he generally glossed over the details of polishing water to absolute purity.
Moving methodically about the room, he traced the flow from a series of three converging intake pipes coming through the outer wall below the frost line — these would be from the bottom drains in the formal pond — into the self-cleaning filter in the first vortex chamber and the other chambers, through a two-speed pump into a huge bead filter where little nubules devoured nitrites and ammonia from fish waste and released harmless nitrates back into the water, past a sequence of three ultraviolet lights enclosed in chrome tubes the size of torpedoes, and finally to an outtake pipe leading underground back to the pond.
There were various configurations of short pipes and shut-off valves whose purpose he couldn’t quite divine, a couple of tanks that looked like hot water heaters that were on a bypass, a completely separate smaller system to activate and flush out the skimmer, and an outlet accessed from the main line by a series of valves that led in the direction of the lower pond, perhaps to top it up if the natural system broke down.
Against the wall beside the door he had come through there was a computerized control console, and beneath the raised window that looked out through shrubs at ground level across the garden there was an old-fashioned concrete laundry tub. Draped over the brass waterspout, inconspicuous in its everyday utility, was a rag that on close examination might once have been lingerie.
A door leading to outside steps up into the garden was sealed. He had noticed the low window partially obscured by shrubbery the previous night but had assumed it accessed a closed-in crawl space. The cellar stairway outside must have been filled in. One could only get to this plumber’s fantasy through the den or the garage, which seemed a little inconvenient, though with everything run by computer and insulated from the winter cold, there would be no need to spend much time here. He expected the computer could be monitored from somewhere else in the house, probably the study on the second floor where he had noticed a daunting array of electronic paraphernalia that stood out from the shelves of books like zircons on a platinum ring.
Turning to leave the way he had come in, Morgan noticed a scrap of yellow notepaper pinned against the edge of a shelf above a workbench. He leaned over the small array of power tools and read slowly, finding it difficult to decipher the smudged script:
Jacques Lacan suggests language is an essential precondition to the development of the unconscious mind, without which there could be no consciousness, and therefore no sense of the self.
There were a couple of lines he couldn’t make out. He pulled the note from the pin and took it to the window, holding it slantwise into the light. Several sentences were intentionally obliterated, as if half-formed thoughts had been deleted, then it continued with a certain obstinate obscurity that Morgan found pompous and provocative:
It seems reasonable to suggest that in the evolution of the species it was the emergence of language that led to consciousness, and not the reverse. Signifieds in the environment had to separate from signifiers before signs became possible —
The text stopped
