Radiant City

by Lauren B. Davis

  It is the smell, finally, that makes him open the door. He is hungry and the scent of meat is too much for him. Anthony smiles as if they have seen each other yesterday and holds out a heavy Dutch oven.

  “Smells good,” Matthew says and his voice sounds as though it comes from someone else, from somewhere else.

  “It’s a three-beef daube. The trick is the cloves and nutmeg. It’s like a perfume, you know, it brings out the scent of the flesh. Plus the orange zest. You can leave it out, but it doesn’t taste right.”

  In the kitchen, Anthony tucks a tea towel in his belt and serves up the stew while Matthew watches him from a chair. Anthony moves quickly. He opens drawers, looking for cutlery; he opens cupboards, looking for plates. He has brought salad in a bag and a crusty loaf that he cuts into thick slices.

  “See,” says Anthony, “you have to make the daube the day before and let it rest so you can get all the fat off, but leave the flavour.” The scent of thyme and bay, oranges, nutmeg and onions mingle with the beef and fill the kitchen. Matthew finds his hands are shaking and is afraid he might faint before the food reaches his lips.

  They are quiet while they eat. Billie Holiday sings about blessing the child. Matthew is not ready for spoken words yet. All his words are scribbled on the pages strewn around the room. It is not until Anthony puts coffee down in front of him that he is wholly back in the residence of his body.

  “This is wonderful,” he says. “Thanks. I don’t get it, though. Why bother? Why sit outside my door?”

  “Because you wouldn’t open up.”

  “Ah.”

  “Didn’t want you getting lost. I’ve been lost. Not such a good place.”

  “True.”

  “Paweena left me.”

  “Aw, shit. I’m sorry, Anthony. Here I am all wrapped up in myself.”

  “No, it’s all right. I think I would have ended it myself soon. Doesn’t matter what I gave, it was never enough. I don’t think that girl’s ever going to be satisfied. She pitched a major fit about me being late one night, but I think she was mad ‘cause I wouldn’t buy her some furniture she wanted. Just came to the end of the line on this one. I think it surprised her that I didn’t cave, you know? I’d bet she thought threatening to leave would scare me into paying up.” Anthony laughs softly. “But you have to know when to call it quits.”

  “Sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  Anthony shrugs, as though trying to shake off the hurt. “Nothing to be done. Gotta suck it up. So, looks like you’ve been working.”

  “Yes. I’ve been working.” Matthew is still trying to figure out the complicated process involved in moving his teeth and tongue and lips and producing sound.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Well. I got past the graveyard this time.”

  “What’s it all about?”

  Matthew holds the coffee mug in his hands, looking down into the liquid, as much a mirror as a well. “It might be about what you said. Getting lost. Losing things you didn’t know you could lose.”

  “Things get lost, things get found. That’s what I learned when I got my head whacked open.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The world looked different after, let me tell you. The first few years I was like a kid, emotions all over the place. Like a thirteen-year-old. Depressed as hell, most of the time. My people, they didn’t understand. I wasn’t the same person. My personality had changed. I knew that, just couldn’t do anything about it, and I couldn’t reconcile myself to life the way it was. That kind of shit just wasn’t supposed to happen to me. Only thing I ever wanted to be was a cop. Had to deal with a lot of rage. Still do, some days. Rage and confusion.” Anthony stands. “Come on, let’s clean up while we’re finishing the coffee.”

  Matthew follows him into the kitchen and pours apple-scented liquid soap into the porcelain sink, runs hot water over it until the sink is half-full. He pats the bubbles, liking the feel of buoyant, springy softness. “So, how did you finally come to accept the way things are?”

  “Some days I don’t. But, believe it or not, there’s a trade-off. It’s like looking at things from a different place. Maybe not better, but not worse. From the top of a different mountain, is what my auntie used to say. I used to look at my fingers and see them, right? See them clear. Four fingers and a thumb.” He holds his hand up in front of his face, but looks past it, at Matthew. “What was beyond was there, too, but …”—he pauses, looking for a word—”unnoticed. Now I sometimes don’t see my fingers, but I see you.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to forget about myself. Truth is, maybe I wasn’t that squeaky clean before. Maybe a personality change wasn’t such a bad thing. Seeing the truth hurts, man. It always hurts. I left some damage in my wake, back in the day. I look back on who I was, and I don’t recognize that dude. Well, most of the time, anyway. I mean, I know he’s still in there somewhere, but long as he stays where he should, well, that I can reconcile myself to.” Anthony laughs softly as he dries a plate. “Truth is, I consider my accident a sort of redemption. Something like a back-assed state of grace.

  “The only thing I remember about the attack was a light, like an explosion of light, inside my head. Streaks, shooting out every which way. Zigzagging. I kept seeing it, this map, this design, like a city of light. Maybe that’s why I came to Paris.” He laughs softly. “City of God. City of Lights. Something dazzling. Something that radiates. Something sending out rays of light.”

  It is somewhat surreal, the comfort Matthew takes in the washing of a dish, the shine of a clean glass, the feeling of a full belly and the conversation of a friend. “You ever heard of Le Corbusier?” he asks.

  “Nope.”

  “An architect who developed a plan he called The Radiant City. He proposed razing the centre of Paris, building skyscrapers and turning it into a ‘vertical city,’ free of the bustle, the congestion, the dirt. Everything nice and clean and orderly and regimented, full of happy, smiling citizens.”

  “Vertical city? Sounds like the projects.” Anthony chuckles.

  “Exactly. It’s what North American public housing was based on. He imagined Utopia and created blasted neighbourhoods, social destruction. His idea of saving us all. Sorry, Anthony, but I just don’t think I believe in redemption.”

  Anthony smiles. “To free from distress,” he says, as though quoting from the dictionary. “To remove the obligation of payment, and to exchange for something of value.”

  They finish cleaning the kitchen. Anthony insists on spraying the counters with Javel and running first a broom and then a damp mop over the floor, which is how, he says, a good restaurant kitchen always does it. The kitchen is now cleaner than it has been in weeks, maybe months.

  “That’s fine,” Anthony says, proudly surveying the shining surfaces. “So, can I read it?”

  “What?”

  “What you wrote. Can I read it?”

  It is absurd, of course, that he has not considered this, not considered that someone must read what he has written, that someone other than he will render judgment. “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “I’d like to.”

  Who better, really, than Anthony?

  “Well, all right, then.” Matthew hands him the papers.

  “Have you read it over yet?”

  “No, actually, I haven’t.”

  “So, let’s do it this way. You read it to me.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Sure you can,” says Anthony. “It’s better that way.”

  He will have to read it sometime, he realizes, and what better place than here, what better time than now? His mouth is dry and he pours them both a scotch before he begins.

  The fire dream had come back. It came back after Rwanda. The narrow bed was hard and damp. My hair was plastered to my skull and my sinuses throbbed from the smell of disinfectant in the room. I hadn’t slept much the past few nights. In fact, I hadn’t had a good sleep in so lon
g it was hard to remember what being rested felt like. I was thinner even than normal, and there was a patch of festering skin on my right thumb, at which I coudn’t stop picking.

  I got up. Urinated. Splashed water on my face. Threw back the curtains. Light helped.

  An hour later Josh Anderson and I sat on a small terrace. Josh was a photojournalist, and not happy to be in Hebron. He had allowed me to talk him into shooting this story about the Christian Peacemaker Teams only because nothing else was going on at the moment. “No photo ops,” he said. Photo opportunities or not, tensions ran high in Hebron, and the air was thick with random anxiety, but this was the way of things in the West Bank. We sipped coffee and talked, wasting the two hours until our scheduled meeting with Susan Carver.

  The Christian Peacemaker Teams had arrived in Hebron, as they put it, to put themselves in the way of violence. A nonpartisan group of mostly Quakers and Mennonites, they came to Hebron not only to try to calm the tensions, but also to document human rights violations, and I admired them, even if I thought they were too idealistic for their own good. They had been escorting both Palestinian and Israeli children to and from school.

  A Palestinian suicide bomber had blown up a bus in the area two weeks before and died, along with five other people—including three from the same family, one of them an infant. The next week Israeli settlers had attacked CPT volunteer Susan Carver and two Palestinian schoolgirls. They kicked the girls to the ground and dragged them through the streets by their hair. The settlers hurled threats and abuse at them. A man knocked Carver’s glasses off, threw her down and kicked her repeatedly in the back. Another pointed an Uzi and said, “This is my country and any foreigner who comes to be with these Nazis will pay with their life.” Now the Israeli soldiers had arrested one of the settlers, a teenaged boy, for taking part in the assault.

  There was to be a trial. I wanted to do a story on both sides of the incident because it seemed to me to be the perfect metaphor for the insanity of the unending conflict.

  It was hot and dusty and my skin felt gritty. Josh had just told a joke involving a cameraman, a camel and a cactus, and I was in mid-laugh when I heard gunfire. Shrieks came from the balcony above us. Looking up, I saw a man pointing and when I followed the sightline I saw an Israeli soldier, who looked to be barely out of his teens, standing with his foot pressed against the neck of a young Palestinian. The soldier put his gun against the boy’s forehead. At the same moment, a stone hit the soldier solidly in the mouth, producing an instant bloom of blood and teeth. He stumbled backward and the boy got up and ran. The soldier fired and the boy fell, screaming. Other soldiers shot into an alley that led to a mosque.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” cried Josh, clicking off shot after shot with his camera. “I don’t know if I got that. I don’t fucking know.”

  We ran toward the action. The soldiers were taken by surprise by a number of youths armed with slingshots, weapons that are far more deadly than they sound. Think of David and Goliath. The Israelis, some no older than the rock-hurling Palestinians, turned to defend themselves. Women screamed and ran for cover in every direction. The soldiers took refuge behind a building in which the shutters quickly slammed shut. I imagined the occupants cowering behind upturned furniture in darkened rooms. There were Palestinian gunmen, at least three of them, on the rooftops and the air rained stones. I grabbed a couple of trash-can lids and tried to shield our heads. My ears buzzed with the lethal whine of gunfire, the ping of ricocheting bullets and the thud-crack of stones. The soldiers moved back to the marketplace, trying to make it to the army post. We followed them, Josh with his camera up to his eye. I attempted to keep us under cover while at the same time making sure Josh didn’t stumble.

  “Holy fuck,” said Josh and pointed across the square. There, huddling behind a low concrete partition wall, was a man and a child. The little girl looked no older than seven. She wore a red thob and had a white scarf on her head. The two were trapped in the crossfire. The man screamed and took the little girl’s scarf to wave like a flag over his head. He kept his right arm and leg extended, bent backward around the little girl, trying to pull her behind his body. The concrete wall offered little protection. Bullets zinged around them, hitting the ground in soft puffs of dust and stone shards.

  “Oh, shit,” I said, as Josh and I crouched behind the corner of a market stall.

  It went on for a long time. Both sides were entrenched, well covered and unyielding. Minutes ticked. The man never stopped crying out, calling that there was a child there, his daughter, don’t shoot, don’t shoot. It was unclear whether either group of shooters could hear him over the sound of gunfire. More time passed. The man tried to make more room behind his body for the little girl. He was crying. For a long time she shrieked, her tiny mouth wide open, her eyes shut, her hands at her ears. There was a momentary lull in the shooting and the man tentatively raised his hand, began to stand.

  “Come on,” I urged them under my breath, “come on.”

  A volley of bullets made the man duck back down. A body fell from the rooftop, landing on the ground nearby with a thud. A Kalashnikov automatic rifle clattered next to it, the strap still wrapped around the wrist. Puffs of brown dirt floated in the air. The ground changed colour as blood, dark as garnet, seeped from mouth and ear and nose.

  “Stop fucking shooting, you assholes!” I yelled. “Stop! Stop shooting!”

  The little girl went silent, and for a moment, I thought she had been shot, but no, she was probably so terrified she’d gone catatonic. The man waved the white scarf again, crying out to both sides to hold their fire, just for a moment, just a small moment.

  They did not hold their fire.

  Fifteen minutes went by like this. My heart raced, my stomach clenched in a knot of futile rage. I looked at the gun lying in the sand. Now and then I yelled, but it was useless. I couldn’t bear it. Again, the rifle lying near the body of the Palestinian drew my eyes. I couldn’t stand by and watch. It was impossible, when the answer was right there in front of them, so simple, so perfect. I decided that if someone explained it to them they could not fail to see the rightness of it.

  I stood up.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Josh tried to pull me down, but I shook him off.

  “They’ll get killed.”

  “You’ll get killed!”

  “I have to make them stop,” I said, stepping into the open space. I held my hands up and turned slowly. “Stop!” I shrieked, my voice sharp with fury. “If you bastards want to blow each other to kingdom come, be my fucking guest! But leave these people alone. Do you hear me? Leave them ALONE!” The gun was so near my foot. I wondered if I would pick up the gun. I wondered what I would do with it if I did pick it up. Part of my brain told me that reporters do not pick up guns; another part of my brain told me that these petty distinctions did not matter in a world such as this one. If I picked up the gun I could shoot the shooters, never mind which side. They all deserved to die for what they were doing to the little girl.

  I heard a noise and turned to see Josh stepping behind me, the camera swinging around his neck, Josh’s hands outstretched toward me.

  “Matthew, for Christ’s sake!” he hissed, as though speaking softly would draw less attention.

  “Leave me alone. I’m okay,” I said. “They’re going to fucking stop, I tell you.”

  For a moment, it seemed as though they would. There was a pause, perhaps because both sides were in shock at the sight of lunatics in their midst. It was a choice between gun and girl. I turned and smiled at the man and the little girl. The man’s eyes were glazed and frozen and his face was drenched in tears. He made an infinitesimally small move.

  The shock of the impact sat me down on my ass in the dust. It was as though someone had jammed a hot iron rod into my middle. I heard screaming, a lot of gunfire, and then less screaming. And then, only I was left to scream, the sound—the squeal of a pig being slaughtered—came from my own mouth. I raised my head and
looked toward Josh who lay in the dust and blood, next to the Palestinian and the gun. Whatever I had intended, I would never reach the gun now. Then I turned my head, which took a great deal of effort, and looked at the father and daughter, crumpled in each other’s arms. They were as still as the stone wall behind them.

  And nothing was the same after that.

  Matthew begins to cry.

  Anthony reaches over and pats him on the shoulder. “Hey, Matthew,” he says, as he pats him. “Hey there, hey there.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The next night Matthew goes to the Bok-Bok to celebrate the breakthrough and to buy Anthony a few drinks by way of thanks. He feels lighter, as though the world is crisper, clearer. The wraith light of memory that had blurred his vision is no longer so powerful. He has spent the day editing, and is convinced the centre will hold. He has spoken to Brent. His future is, if not aglow with possibility, at least not such a lump of dark coal. Although the burden of guilt has not lessened, he feels, for the first time, as though he may be capable of shouldering his share.

  It is early in the evening and the bar is not yet as full as it will be in a few hours. Anthony and Matthew sit at a table past the bar. Anthony talks of his new morning ritual. He walks up to Sacré Coeur each morning and watches the sun rise. He talks of how the city glows and how even on days when it rains there is a moment as the sun comes up over the horizon when, below the cloud cover, a band of gold appears under the metal-grey blanket above. Matthew listens and considers getting himself such a ritual, something to set him up for the day, to put it in perspective.

  Anthony nudges Matthew and points with his chin to the door.

  Jack comes in with Suzi. She looks worse, much worse, than the last time Matthew saw her. Although she wears no wig, which usually makes her look younger and fresher, she now looks like a prisoner of some sort. Grey and hollow-cheeked. Her eyes are wide and scrambled. Muscles intermittently jerk, and even beneath the oversized coat she wears, her body shivers.