The Glass House Read online

  As a younger man, WJ had tried to understand what was happening to him. Everyone else seemed to be finding partners and solace—and more than that, joy!—in the company of others.

  He’d listen closely to the lyrics of love songs, but couldn’t understand what it was they were singing about.

  English literature had been his Waterloo in high school. He’d read what everyone else read, but he got nothing from the words on the page.

  Movies left him cold whenever the plot degenerated to the love between the two leads. Even the hatreds in the films escaped him. He literally didn’t get what the problem was. Sure, he saw the logical outcomes of being cheated or betrayed or abandoned, but he saw no joy in retribution, or hate, or love, or sex—or anything.

  He was left especially cold when musicals, for no discernible reason, broke into song. Glee was the bane of his existence, and he’d smashed two expensive HD LED monitors when he turned them on only to find Smash mid yech. Yep, he’d smashed Smash—twice. He knew he should find that humorous. He didn’t. He knew it was funny—had even read and annotated the Bergson book, Laughter, in an attempt to understand “funny”—but he never felt the joy of the joke.

  Most confusing was that women found him attractive. At first he thought it was just because he had money and the things money can buy. But, much to his surprise, they found him a good bed companion. This stunned him, since he seemed more and more divorced from the act of sex as time went by. He seemed to float above it, marvelling at the look on his partners’ faces—what he could only assume was a kind of ecstasy, but from what he couldn’t begin to guess, let alone partake in. Yet the further he abstracted himself from the reality the more they seemed to adore him—so sexy, so alive, such a great lover!

  The other cello player turned the page a moment late, which brought WJ crashing back to the present. He ventured a look at the man. The guy liked to interpret the music. WJ didn’t approve of that, so Mr. Interpreter wouldn’t be a member of the ensemble much longer.

  WJ held his bow above the strings and allowed the bass, violins, and the violas to lift him—like the young monk he’d seen on the synaesthetes’ website who sang single notes up to the dome of the chapel and then seemed to rise—no, did rise, encased in the music he sang.

  And such a look of glory on his face!

  WJ knew from the moment he saw him that that boy was the key to opening the door that all his life had been closed to him. Even as he put his bow back on the strings and joined the andante finale of the piece he knew that it was worth every penny he’d paid, every law he’d broken, every risk he’d taken to entice and then kidnap the monk from the video.

  The monk: Seth Roberts.

  He remembered nights before he’d captured Seth. After a concert, back in his three-storey loft, he’d turn out the deco lamps and stare at the towers of San Francisco, which stood out like beacons against the incoming fog.

  He’d push aside the floor-to-ceiling glass sliding door and step out on the wraparound deck. He’d breathe in the dampness—and feel so entirely empty that the thought of simply jumping and ending it all would flash across his mind.

  He’d quickly retreat to the warmth of his vast main room and turn on the six-foot-wide gas fireplace embedded in the west wall. Turning his back to the flames he’d take in his existence—he’d had the loft completely redecorated by the very best Bay Area designers every three months for the past seven years. It always pleased him at first—he’d get the sense that he was really seeing. But the pleasure always faded—and it faded more and more quickly with each new design.

  He knew that eventually he would get no pleasure whatsoever from it—or anything else.

  But now he had hope.

  He had Seth Roberts.

  Nine months ago on an idiot shrink’s advice about “dreaming being a potential access portal to feelings,” he’d started the Wellness Dream Clinic in San Francisco. It quickly drew a wide assortment of wackos, lookee-loos, and hypochondriacs—and even the odd surgery freak. A few people were genuinely interested in exploring dream healing. These folks were brought by his interviewer teams to speak to him. The most interesting of these was an elderly indigent man who claimed that, after being hit by a car, he was plagued by odours—odours that he’d smell every time he saw a primary colour.

  “When you see what?”

  “Primary colours, like I said. Hey you’re lookin’ funny—”

  “No sir, I am not,” WJ responded. “But if I was to show you a primary colour . . .”

  “I’d smell a particular odour. I’ve become a synaesthete. Haven’t you ever heard of synaesthesia?”

  He hadn’t and acknowledged as much.

  “Well, educate yourself,” the old man had said.

  “And how would I do that?”

  He spoke of a website for “people like me.”

  “But how does a—”

  “A man like me? Libraries. This country still has libraries, and those libraries have computers for poor people.”

  WJ nodded and, after a little financial prodding, the synaesthete gave over the URL of the synaesthetes’ private website—and after a bit more financial prodding, his password.

  • • •

  That first time on the website WJ saw the videos of Daniel Tammet and the Human Camera, and although impressive, they seemed no more important than a person able to keep a dozen plates spinning on sticks. He was about to abandon his search when up popped the video of the young monk singing notes up into the Duomo. And suddenly he knew there was a path—a way out of his “dark room.”

  After that WJ spent hours on that site hoping to see the young monk and that look of glory again. But no matter how often or at what hour he logged on, there was no monk video. Then one day he used the old man’s password and the knowledge he’d gained from his hackers to get into the webmaster’s section of the site. And although he didn’t find any details about the young monk, he found something most peculiar—another person who seemed to be accessing the website exactly the same way he was, searching for the video of the young monk. And this user was also looking for three other people: a Viola Tripping, a Martin Armistaad and a Decker Roberts.

  WJ began to search for the searcher. It took him a bit of time, but he eventually found the searcher’s home URL and then a name: Leonard Harrison. This ghost in the machine was Leonard Harrison, the head of the NSA.

  Now why would the head of the NSA be investigating synaesthesia? And why would he be using his own computer? he’d wondered. These questions occupied WJ’s thoughts for an evening before he came up with the only possible answer: Leonard Harrison, head of the NSA, was using his own computer because he didn’t want anyone at the NSA to know what he was doing. Yes, but why and what exactly was he doing? WJ asked himself.

  He left an encrypted message on the site for one Leonard Harrison. Much to his surprise, he quickly got a reply. So he appended another note and shortly got a second reply. A fellow traveller, WJ thought. Then he thought, I really ought to get to know you better.

  It took some doing to find Leonard Harrison and his daily routine, especially his 9:00 p.m. evening coffee at Seattle’s Best on Wisconsin Avenue, but the rest was relatively simple—especially the musically inclined barista.

  One night he even followed Harrison back to his house in Georgetown. It was a quiet house on a quiet street. A private place for a man with a private obsession. Unfortunately for this man, W.J. Connelly thought of the young monk in the video as his—and his alone. And W.J. Connelly never backed down from a competition—in this case a rival for the possession of the young monk, Seth Roberts.

  6

  A WORLD OF WONDERS—BEFORE

  HE HAD EXPECTED SOMETHING, BUT never something like this. It was all there, worked out for him. Yes, Leonard Harrison, head of the NSA, had shown him the way—the answer to all those questions that had haunted him since he was a boy attending Mass every morning with his mother.

  He felt like laughi
ng, but he didn’t.

  He turned on his hooded flashlight and slowly allowed it to bring this secret place to life.

  Unlike the rest of the house, which he’d explored earlier, this hidden room was a relative mess. Well, not a mess, but not as anally clean and meticulously put together as the rest. As if Leonard Harrison had been somehow drunk when he—he didn’t know what verb to use—“created” this place. Yes this place was a creation, a world of wonders.

  The ceiling was painted black and had patterns of iridescent stars on it. The walls were bare, while the floor was covered by an unusually shaped map of the world upon which sat a heap of female clothing and possessions.

  He lay on his back and took a wide-angled shot of most of the ceiling. He then entered it into an astronomy data bank and was surprised to see the response: An accurate depiction of the sky of the Southern Hemisphere August through September. He took more shots and identified some planets and constellations: the Southern Cross, Venus rising, and Scorpio with its third star blood red.

  Finished with the starscape he moved to a corner of the room and pressed his considerable bulk against the wall so that he could see the entirety of the floor map. Africa was huge, while Europe seemed like a tiny afterthought.

  He adjusted his camera with a perfectly manicured fingernail and shot the floor map, entered it into another data bank, and got back a surprisingly simple answer: World Map from Southern Perspective. Most world maps are looking down on the Northern Hemisphere; this one is looking up at the Southern Hemisphere. Made sense, he thought. Southern sky, southern map.

  He wiped the sweat from the back of his liver-spotted hands.

  Then he saw the chalk marks—no, chalk lines—spreading from beneath the pile of junk on the floor to various points on the map. One of the chalk lines led to the west bank of the Missouri River, on the Kansas side of the border. At the end of the chalk line was the number 4. Another chalk line led to southwest Africa and had the number 2 beside it. A third line led to a large circle that enclosed almost all of the U.S. Plains States and had the number 3 beside it.

  He looked for the number 1 and finally found it up in the heavens beside the red star in the Scorpio constellation. With a large question mark beside it.

  He moved from the corner towards the things on the floor and noted them: a handbag, a pair of high-heeled shoes, sweatpants and other articles all on a wooden pallet. Unlike the rest of the room it seemed incomplete—a work in progress. Something that Harrison hadn’t finished, was still investigating.

  He stepped back and tried to make some sense of the thing but couldn’t. He photographed it from various angles and sent it to dozens of data banks—no matches of any sort were reported. He stepped back. All the chalk lines converged beneath the articles on the wooden pallet. He gave it a push with his foot and the thing slid easily to one side, revealing a circle on the world map from which all the chalk lines emanated. The circle was on the north shore of Lake Ontario on what seemed to be the west side of Toronto.

  He photographed that and entered it into a general data bank. The response came quickly: Toronto, Ontario, Canada—Exact Area: The Junction.

  He didn’t know what to make of that bit of information. Most of the rest he thought he understood. Long before he’d broken into Harrison’s house he’d spent exhaustive hours reviewing Harrison’s searches on the synaesthetes’ websites. From those searches he knew that number 2 was a man named Decker Roberts, number 3 was Viola Tripping and number 4 was Martin Armistaad.

  He circled the room twice more before he satisfied himself that he had seen everything there was to see.

  Then he noticed them—the vector arrows on all the chalk lines, all pointing towards what he now knew was an area of Toronto called the Junction.

  All pointing?

  Were Decker Roberts, Viola Tripping and Martin Armistaad—and perhaps the woman whose articles these were—all heading towards the Junction? And what would happen if they were all there at once?

  It was then, at Shakespeare’s proverbial “witching hour of the night,” that he’d gone to the synaesthete website and up popped the video of the young monk singing single notes up into the ceiling of the Duomo—and down came chords of music that seemed to wrap around him. When the young monk turned to the camera, he gasped. The smile on the boy’s face was so intense—so profound, so real—that he realized that all his life had led to this. All those early mornings in the church, then the cathedral. All those silences—and finally here in Leonard Harrison’s hidden room, his world of wonders, there might finally be an answer. No—the answer.

  7

  DECKER AND PIES

  DECKER FOUND HIMSELF SMILING. HE used to think that repetition was the bane of his existence. Awake every morning at six o’clock, sit-ups, morning supplements, flossing, cleaning the mirror with a damp tissue of what the thread had dislodged and deposited on the glass; steel-cut oatmeal with blueberries and almonds; coffee; morning paper. Margaret Wente first just to see what mischief she was trying to stir up; then the top editorial followed by world news; a check on the Jays fatal flaws; the TV and film reviews to see which of his students was doing what; and on Friday the real estate section to see what his empty burnt-out property in the Junction was worth.

  Day after day.

  He’d treat himself to pancakes on Sundays with his copy of the New York Times (which arrived on Saturday in the Junction), but even that was just a weekly rather than a daily routine.

  And every day older, and although not deeper in debt, deeper in other ways—like in the ground, somehow deeper in the ground.

  That was his regimented routine before he got to Namibia—to Solitaire—to Linwood. Routine was chains. But here, in the heat, in the bakery, every day precisely the same—exactingly so, because as Linwood proved to him, baking requires precision. In the routine and precision he’d found a freedom he’d never known.

  As his hands measured and weighed and kneaded and rolled and folded, his mind was unleashed, free to roam the memory chambers of his deepest secrets.

  And roam it did. Memories of his mother were the first to flood him. By his bedside calming his fears, telling him that it didn’t matter what others said, that they’d moved houses three times in six months because they wanted to, not because of “what happened.” And your father will come around, he will, he’ll come around. He remembered asking her why she loved that man, and her funny response: “He always kept so clean, his shoes, all of them always polished.” He remembered her refusing to let him play ball hockey in the summer—“Hockey’s for winter, Decker. Is it winter out there?” She’d put his hockey equipment in a cedar chest in the basement—with a lock. But on Labour Day, with school looming and Decker’s anxiety about returning to class on the rise, she’d bring him into the basement and give him the key. He’d open the trunk and take out his hockey gloves and skates, and the smell of the cedar was on everything, in everything. To this day that smell brought a smile to his lips. Some years he’d open the chest and there’d be new hockey gloves or pads—those were special years.

  His mother was in her forties when she gave birth to Decker, and when it came to musical taste their age difference was most acute. He’d catch her singing from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. When he’d mention that these two were just a bit racist, she’d scoff and remind him that she’d sung The Mikado in high school with Wayne and Shuster.

  Memories of his father were often less pleasant—and often intruded on other memories. A boy seldom forgets being called a freak by his father. Then there was the time he applied to five medical schools for Decker—without Decker’s knowledge. He got acceptances to four. When he refused to go, what little communication he had with his father came to an abrupt halt.

  He remembered the day he read them a short story that he had written. He was fourteen. It was about an autistic boy who threw a beggar a coin that landed on its side—and stayed there. The boy quickly gained intelligence until the beggar picked up his
bowl and the coin fell, and the autism returned. He’d never forget their grim faces when he finished reading the story. It would be twenty-two years before he’d put pen to paper to try his hand at writing again. And although his parents loved the arts—especially the theatre—they were appalled that his career path headed in that direction.

  And then there was the fact that there was no love lost between his wife and his parents. Even as she walked down the aisle to him he saw his mother shake her head.

  And she had been right.

  Sarah and he had made a child—made a life but only remotely clung to love. And when the ALS had set in—well, Decker had much to apologize for. Then he’d found Eddie sitting in the snow on Yonge Street trying to sell jewelry that he’d made. He’d brought him home, and Eddie and Sarah were almost instantly deeply in love. One night he had to cut class short because there was a blackout in the studio. He’d arrived home two hours early and opened the door to his bedroom—Eddie and Sarah were in bed. He was holding her. She was smiling. He’d carefully closed the door and never mentioned it to either of them.

  At the funeral he really wanted to go up to Eddie and say, “Your love was the most important thing in her life—it allowed her to hope and carry on.” But before he could even contemplate doing that he felt Seth’s small hand drop from his as he said, “You’re happy Mommy’s gone.”

  “No Seth—”

  “Don’t lie. I can always tell when people lie. You’re happy Mommy’s dead.”

  And Seth wasn’t completely wrong. “Happy” was the wrong word—but how much difference is there between happy and relieved?

  Even here, with his hands buried in the dough, he could still feel Seth’s small hand in his. It was the last time he’d held his son’s hand.

  He remembered touching his own father’s hand in those final days in the hospital. How angry he’d been with him. A doctor who had made no peace with the idea that his life, like all lives, would have to end. Then that one lucid moment after the months of gibberish, when his father had looked him in the eyes and said, “All my life I denied the gift. Feared it. Then I saw it in you.” Then no more—the clarity left his eyes and never returned.