Architects Are Here by Michael Winter

self-conscious, as if they each knew the tricks the other generated to be convivial. David’s mother, they both realized, helped shape themselves around each other, the way Zac used to. They sat at meals and ground out conversation. They were too much like each other.
    My parents have split up, he told me. And my father’s been having a fling.
    David and I had been taking a philosophy course, a course I found very difficult for the dense reading. He said, Youre reading the books?
    Everything except the introduction, I said. He looked astonished. That’s all I read, he said, is prefaces and introductions. And I realized he read short philosophical books like the maxims of Rousseau, Pascal’s Pensées and the aphorisms of Nietzsche. When he had an argument it was usually coloured by the sayings of whatever philosopher was open on his night table. But he was also good at knowing who had written what, even country songs. Once he heard a singer say he loved “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers. And David said, quietly, That’s not a Kenny Rogers song. Don Schlitz wrote that. Don Schlitz was twenty-four when he wrote it. And then he’d leave the room. There was something anxious in David to succeed early.
    David woke me up at three in the morning and we pulled the plugs on several appliances and drove home for Christmas. It was Zac’s old blue Matador. David liked to start well before dawn and have the sun come up in your rear-view mirror and arrive in Corner Brook by noon. His calfskin leather gloves left on the dash to dry. He liked saying to coffee vendors that he was in St John’s that morning. The air vents in the dash sprayed out frost.
    We fell into a lull, the hypnotic lush of snowflakes in the dark speeding past us like we’re some spaceship drifting through the spackle of a solar system. The ground we drove over, I now understood its geologic makeup. One of my professors had published the first tectonic map ever made in the world. It was of Newfoundland. The land we were driving over was a mix of North American rock and African rock and the first ocean this world ever had, a precursor to the Atlantic: the Iapetus Ocean. That’s what we were driving over now, the world’s first ocean. This sense of the past made me conscious of who we were. We were living our brothers’ lives. We were in Zac’s car. We had grown up in a time when we missed the major cultural events. We had the second-best of things or the sequels to the classics. We watched Rocky II and Grease , whereas our brothers had seen the original Rocky and Saturday Night Fever . This sounds trivial but it can affect the level of importance one gives the world. Ali was past his prime so Dave and I settled for other boxers to champion, in the lighter divisions. We followed Salvador Sánchez and Alexis Arguello. We loved the sound of their names, but also the intensity of having to make weight. It was like reading the minor poets, even preferring them to Shakespeare and Donne. David said if he ever had a son he was going to call him Salvador and suddenly this thought of a child hurtled us into the future. This was a time when our future was up for grabs. We still believed in the childhood truth of comic books. We read comics. I had British comics and David had the richer American comics. My grandfather sent the English comics overseas, rolled up, with the hollow of the roll filled with a bunch of red-and-white ballpoint pens. The pens were from Ladbrokes the Bookmakers. And I thought Ladbrokes made books, that my grandfather knew people who produced books. I read of Captain Hurricane who flew into a raging fury, and bullets bounced off his chest. David’s DC Comics showcased Sergeant Rock. Rock was lugubrious and ambivalent. He was in colour. David looked at my black-and-white English comics and touched the illustrated panels. As if the whole point of comics was colour. But then a realization struck him, that black-and-white was the best that England could