Altogether Now
“The Cannibal’s Cantabile” by Jay Daugherty
After months of advertising and negotiations with the city council, at last Paragon Builders had begun construction of the new downtown condominium complex. Despite some objections from proponents of more social housing, small-scale minds, and those generally opposed to change, Dormin Tower would soon rise above all other structures to offer not just a new perspective but a new way of living. Twenty-four storeys of elegant apartments for young professionals, equipped with a full gym, laundry services, lobby security, and all regular maintenance. When the question was raised about who in such a depressed economy and lower-income part of downtown was expected to buy these condos, it briefly hung in the air until it drifted away.
It was mid-May, just a few days after work on the site began, that everything halted. Excavation for the underground parking garage had struck something: a solid surface of some kind, not natural. It then came out that developers had omitted the necessary archaeological surveys of the site and there was another minor tempest in the city council, but it turned out that the city council was itself as much to blame and there were hints that certain councillors had connections to the project that they had not thought to disclose earlier.
While that storm raged, an archaeological team was assembled and got to work. The surface they slowly unearthed was large, over twenty feet beneath the ground. When the team, two trained archaeologists and two students, petitioned for more members, given the scale of the find, the council shrugged and suddenly remembered the depressed economy. Paragon Builders had their lawyers watching everything, murmuring to city councillors about contracts, responsibilities, possible lawsuits.
One June morning came the announcement: though the depth of this subterranean structure, composed of steel, glass, and reinforced concrete, still remained uncertain, its roof surface took up exactly the same area as the proposed Dormin Tower. Blueprints were compared with tape measures and notes on the dig, checked and rechecked. The modern materials could not be explained by local historians, who could find no record of any such construction: the site had previously been a century-old hotel, just five floors high, knocked down a few years before as an unsafe structure and an eyesore. Reporters looked at councillors, councillors looked at archaeologists, archaeologists looked at reporters, and lawyers murmured. Everyone was thinking the same thing but no one wanted to say it – because it was impossible, and no one wanted to be the one responsible for suggesting the impossible.
As the digging continued, the large letters spelling DORMIN TOWER gradually became legible, at which point Paragon Builders abruptly offered generous funding to expand the archaeological team and its budget, loudly adding that the city council ought to do likewise, which it did, eventually, to a lesser degree. Ultrasound and carbon-dating tests were ordered to determine how far down the structure went – one of the new students brought to the team caused a flutter by inadvisedly letting slip the phrase “how tall it is” within a reporter’s hearing – and, even more disquieting, how old it might be. The first question produced a clear answer: it matched the height of the proposed tower exactly. The second question was a greater problem: equipment failure was the verdict. When new equipment was brought to the site, it too failed.
Now technicians and a couple of scientists joined the crowded site, surrounded by the many on-lookers shouting questions, holding signs, filming and photographing, kept back by law enforcement. International media had now taken notice of the excavation, just in time for some cunning hackers to expose correspondence in which city officials were successfully, even handily buttered up by Paragon. It turned out that the mayor himself had secured, at a reduced price, one of the luxury suites for his mistress, who happened to be his wife’s hairdresser.
With midsummer came its proverbial madness, as the city newspaper could not help remarking because the combined allure of both cliche and alliteration was simply too great. One filed lawsuit caused an immediate chain reaction: the architectural firm sued the builder and the archaeological team; the builders’ union sued the architectural firm and the city; the owners of neighbouring buildings sued the builder and the city; a few citizens’ groups, including proponents of more social housing, small-scale minds, and those generally opposed to change, sued the architectural firm, the builder, and the city; the mayor’s wife sued for divorce. The excavation was effectively and abruptly halted.
Parallel to and as numerous as the lawsuits came the theories and explanations. They came from everywhere, and their only shared quality was their being unproven and unprovable. The unearthed structure could not be dated because it wasn’t from the past at all, but from the future. A hoax, a vast hoax was being played by the media or by the government or both in collusion, and the whole excavation was an illusion, at best a publicity stunt of some kind, at worse, well, something too sinister to contemplate. It was a divine warning, an infernal temptation, a benediction, a gift, witchcraft, something to do with past lives, a sign of the end of days. Aliens, or maybe some sort of mole-men, were behind it all. There was almost certainly, underneath this tower, yet another submerged tower, and another, and another, you can bet your bottomless dollar.
After an ugly incident of being publicly pelted with eggs, the mayor and a number of city councillors resigned, and as the gears of an election cranked into action, an unassuming councillor known for her diplomacy assumed the interim role of mayor. She invoked force majeure to cancel all deals with the builder, which put a chill on most of the other pending lawsuits, while promising them exceptional favour in consideration of future contracts. At the same time she extended emergency funding to the archaeologists while appealing to the national government to do the same. She spoke of the underground tower as an extraordinary discovery. She smiled in a way that politicians generally do not manage. Even jaded civil servants were smitten with her. At least two documentary crews followed her nearly everywhere.
The first snow fell as the ninth storey of the building, or what was assumed to be the ninth storey, was unearthed. The archaeological team, now international in its membership and flush with experts and volunteers alike, enjoyed excellent morale. There was less chatter about hoaxes and perdition and aliens and more bright-eyed variations on extraordinary discovery, though of course without much elaboration. A pair of folk singers stormed the charts with their ballad of the buried tower.
Paragon Builders ended their silence that had begun with the interim mayor’s quashing of their suits by stating their ownership of the underground tower. After all, it matched their blueprints and plans exactly in every detail. It clearly bore the name Dormin Tower, and that was the name of their project. This claim was not, they insisted with placating tones, intended in any way to hamper the excavation, which they had always fully supported. But the reason became clear soon enough: they sensed there was a market for the apartments in this extraordinary discovery – an extraordinary market, you might say.
And they were not wrong. There were bids before any prices were named or even hinted at, before the city could frame a response to Paragon’s claim, before anyone but those bidding could judge what to make of the announcement. And the bids were outrageous, coming from all corners of the globe. The luxury suite corresponding to the one allegedly secured by the former mayor for his mistress received a bid that exceeded the tower’s proposed building costs. If even a few of the wildest bids were accepted, the fortunes of the entire city would clearly change dramatically.
When at last the interim mayor was asked about this dizzying development by reporters at a press conference, she stood besides an amply decorated Christmas tree and smiled her earnest, artlessly winning smile, but it was apparent that something was wrong. She tripped over her own phrase, extraordinary discovery, and when she seemed to recover her usual poise she gestured to the glittering star at the top of the tree and said huddo yam wiskolet, or at least that was how the reporters eventually agreed to spell it. Asked to repeat her unclear remarks, the interim mayor cheerfully did so, huddo yam wiskolet, zomperlasking zaita, before one of her assistants stepped forward to whisper in her ear. A look of incomprehension was on the interim mayor’s face when she was gently led out of the room and the press conference was closed.
A stroke, editorials guessed. In response to the news coverage of this event, many calls were made and letters sent to both the city offices, many expressing sympathy for the interim mayor, and the news media offices, many expressing resentment at the unsubstantiated diagnosis and sheer presumption. However, many of the calls and letters received expressed neither – or rather, it was impossible to determine what they were expressing, composed as they were of unrecognizable words and inexplicable sounds. Bashy bashy-o lumsud. Omeeno quatzpailers. Eggan ruid wex rondatadon lebby.
A pair of psychologists brought together to compare these various messages eventually broke into a violent argument that ended with one smashing the collarbone of the other with a chair. Neither was afterward able to explain what had happened: both spoke rubbish. Voke rurr rurr chep swoo. What could the police ascertain? Gengezep, degh, isson jeedwash plodds.
The excavation, now at what was presumed to be third floor of the tower, came to a halt. Ulk quasp liff-liff porporyiggstromple. No one working on the site could manage to utter a full sentence that could be understood by anyone else. Dossomona fitty erm brougler. All news reports, save for some independent blogs that no one could make head or tail of, ceased.
And the snow fell, stemolessly, daksingly, on all of the blank faces, totcha geen iornabaw, the disused tools, rews onolash, and all of the unfinished labours of sdorkenfee amsh emvasfottingers, dest uk dest, cradwen, mor, sgooplunk.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Conley's latest fiction collection, Some Day We Will Look Back on This and Laugh, is forthcoming in fall 2022. He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario, in Canada.
About the artist
After a disaffected adolescence, Jay Daugherty (b.1985) was homeless until he discovered Tibetan Buddhism. Since then he has studied Fine Arts at Purdue University, Art History at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, and Tibetan & Himalayan Studies at the University of Oxford. He's also studied the Tibetan language in Kathmandu, Nepal and art history at the University of Washington in Seattle. Inspired by philosophies of perception, psychology, and the phenomenology of pictorial space, his distinct abstract surrealist style features biomorphic figures and architectural structures within mysterious dreamlike landscapes.