Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  “These are likely treasured heirlooms I’m ridiculing.”

  “Didn’t E.P. Thompson say something about saving the dead from the condescension of the living?”

  He smiled. “So you know your Marxist historians. I’m happy to be forgetting them.”

  Silences made him uncomfortable. He described a Belgian movie he’d read about, then Warhol films and Tarkovsky and what he called “the dignity of boredom,” and how “mind-numbingly dignified” he felt during long, static movie shots. He quoted a study on the growing illiteracy of new university students (“they call them ‘incoming,’ like shellfire”). He admitted to being “a revanchist” about his lost territories in the department and complained about younger colleagues protesting police patrols on campus.

  At one point he looked down and seemed mystified by the food on his plate.

  “You think he had a dark complexion.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “It’s in the police report.”

  “I didn’t say dark. I said dark white. I didn’t see his face. I don’t know where I came up with that. Maybe his hands.”

  “Mediterranean? North African?”

  “Dark white is meaningless. Even if I’d seen it.”

  They were never together in strange spaces like this. At the moment they were trapped in this one. Like the fear itself, her aversion to talking of the assault with her father, of all people, was physical.

  “You think you were followed.”

  “It’s just a feeling I had.”

  “I know these are hard moments to relive, but have you considered the possibility that he might have followed you all the way from your apartment?”

  It was as if he’d never spoken about it until now.

  “No. I came from Mom’s house that night. Remember?”

  “But you rode by your building. He might have been there, or anywhere along the route. It was the same route you always took. The lock on the gate was already broken. As if he knew you were coming and he planned for it.”

  “It wasn’t broken, it was open. No one cut it. And if he’d followed me I would have noticed him.”

  “Maybe he was a stranger. Or maybe he knew you.”

  Here it was, then.

  “Or maybe he was a stranger who knew me. Is that your theory?”

  “I’m sure it’s occurred to you. That maybe he was one of the rejects.” He raised his hands in apology. “Sorry. I don’t know what to call them.”

  He wasn’t sorry. It was what he’d needed to say. And there was more. As if to slow himself for emphasis, he started back into his dinner, and then resumed.

  “What if it was someone you turned down? Some guy you turned down at GROUND because he was dangerous, which is why he was rejected by the Review Board. And he targeted you.”

  “The police don’t think so. I don’t think so. Only you do. There’s no reason to think the man who attacked me isn’t fourth-generation Canadian. I wish you’d see that there are other mysteries to solve here.”

  He finished his glass of wine and held it out to her. She filled it and put down the bottle within his reach. He shifted to the matter of her recovery. Any experience that marked itself, he said, lapsed immediately, distorted, degraded, into memory, language, story. The process was true of everything in history.

  “I’m sure the attack is still close to you. It will stay vivid and immediate unless you consciously process it. It unfolds in real time in memory, in dreams. It confronts you in absolute detail. You have to cast out the details, as it were, by describing them. Find the words and describe them. If you wait too long it’ll be too late.”

  You couldn’t always tell with Harold when he was speaking from his researches and when from his experience. For a moment she thought she’d ask him, but he would close down, and wherever they’d arrived now would be lost to them.

  “But I can’t describe them,” she said. “I don’t have the words. And so trying just compounds my sense of helplessness. If I say he seemed sure of himself, like he’d done it before, then I sort of believe that’s a fact. But then, you know, his mask wasn’t on straight, and I got away from him, so how slick was he? And so I doubt myself as a witness. And I feel powerless all over again.”

  “So keep trying. Maybe take it from angles. Find the smaller composite truths within the larger one. You need to make it something to share. It’s the hopeful idea of two or more people seeing the same thing. Disarm it with scrutiny, as if it happened long ago, to someone else.”

  “Who’s my audience? I wouldn’t want anyone I know so-called sharing this with me.”

  “Tell it to yourself. Your older self. She looks in an old journal some day far off and finds the examined details. And they seem very real and very distant all at once.”

  Did he keep a journal? she wondered. This was not a précis of some article he’d read or the usual hectoring about resuming her studies. He was telling her something he’d discovered.

  “Have you told your mother what happened?”

  “Not all of it.”

  “You can, you know. You can tell either of us, if you need to.”

  “So now we’re sharing our worst moments?”

  He pretended to look directly at her but his eyes took in only her forehead and then dropped back down to the food, his shoulders now set slightly forward.

  “You’re very aware of my worst moments, whatever you imagine them to be. I think you’ve let them shape you.”

  “Really. What do I imagine them to be?”

  “Well. The marriage had its worst moments. You were there for those. Or in nearby rooms, and the aftermath. And you’re angry with me, for her sake and your own, and –”

  “Yeah, I know. So I sabotage my could-be career to disappoint you. Isn’t psychology simple.”

  There had been not a sabotage but an awakening. Her first two terms in New York had gone well enough. She had a title for her proposed thesis – “Homeless Truths: Pluralism in Postwar North America” – and a lengthy reading list, but in her second year she began wondering what wasn’t in the studies, theories, and source documents. To Harold’s distress, her inspiration had always been those historians whose work admitted speculation – Donald’s interest in the Battle of Quebec began when she’d given him Simon Schama’s essay-fiction about Wolfe and Montcalm. As her second winter there began, and she realized that New York had covered her in a mood of broken promise, she returned in her reading to fiction-inflected histories. She became dreamy, stopped attending classes, and wrote nothing but vignettes, scenes that came to her unbidden, written all in one sitting. She was adrift, on other people’s money. And so she dropped out and went home.

  They’d entered the brief pause before finishing their meals. Kim noticed how they mirrored each other, each with the left hand on the table, holding the stem of a wineglass, and the right resting on the edge. Harold pressed his palm against the table, spreading his thumb and fingers as if measuring the span of a thought.

  “There’s no use denying the force of large events,” he said. “If we’re awake at all, we spend our early adulthood discovering that the world is more complex than we thought, and the rest of it discovering the main human themes have been the same for thousands of years. You can name each one in a word or two.”

  “You know, you’re right that I was in nearby rooms. And I remember what I heard you two say to one another.”

  “That was just dumb emoting. Mostly meaningless.”

  “Well then maybe that explains my directionless life, because I thought I caught some spit wisdoms.”

  “I can’t imagine which ones.”

  “That some people live their lives inside a single ambiguity. You said that. All the yelling stopped and there it was. I don’t remember the context, I likely wouldn’t have understood it. But I’ve come to think of the statement as hard-won truth, maybe a confession. And I’ve always wondered what it was, your single ambiguity.”

  “I don’t r
ecall saying that. And I can’t imagine what I meant.”

  “So then it’s left to me to imagine. And you’re right, after all. I guess what I imagine has shaped me.”

  They had never talked at such length about anything that mattered, not that he’d opened up newly for her. He was still the sly interlocutor, defending not just his positions (his colleagues found him suspiciously apolitical, at best; she knew some of them were handy with polite recriminations) but something in himself, something she had never been able even to glimpse whole. And there it was again, the particular mystery of him. She could almost touch it.

  The next morning he was gone. The day was clear, the light through the pines lined the cottage. Now that she was alone again the place felt not empty but pristine.

  What she’d been waiting for was a line of address, and in the wake of Harold’s leaving it finally appeared. She needed to discover what she already knew.

  She began with a blank computer screen, facing the windows and lake. The first pages covered the day of the attack. She found a space above the story from which to tell it, neutrally, in the first person but a little outside herself. She tried not to invent or speculate, and ignored moments that only seemed true and ironies she couldn’t have known at the time. She wrote of her ride to work that night. As she drew it out, as if to delay the occurrence, the moments began to build more acutely with each line, and she found that if she stayed in them long enough, there were returns. The rust on the panel above the rear wheel of a parked car she’d locked her bike beside, the way the door to the café stuck a little, the smell of the spilled mint tea she’d stepped in near the entranceway, and the wet tread prints from her shoes on the sidewalk as she looked back to see if she’d dropped a napkin from the tray. A man walking ahead of her in jeans and a fitted blue shirt. He entered a house and was gone.

  Then, the moment when she’d passed by the door of the brightly lit improvised church and a chill fell upon her. She was seeing herself on the page from a ground-level distance. She was seeing herself from the cold.

  Every day she wrote to this point and no further.

  One crisp morning when the fire wouldn’t catch, as she lined up the same moments the same way, a breakthrough. She’d made a mistake. There were tread prints, yes, but not hers. It was the night before the attack that she’d stepped in the tea. And this small error admitted the possibility of others. It showed up the deficiency of her method. On the night of the attack she would have looked back and seen the prints and known they were someone else’s and been reminded of her own on the previous night. She might even have felt an echo of the disjointed time she’d experienced minutes earlier when she’d pictured herself riding in the morning, going home in the opposite direction. And wouldn’t she then have felt an eeriness? If not consciously, then in some part of her? And mightn’t this feeling, and the footprints behind her, have prepared her for the sense that she was being followed?

  She began over now, allowing for her interiors. The writing ran deeper, and though the account was sliding to speculation, she felt herself returning in the prose. If a misremembrance could lead her to a fact she’d overlooked, then maybe so could other variations from the narrow-seeming truth. And so she half remembered, half invented the night.

  One morning she wrote,

  I left dinner with my parents and rode south through the dark towards work.

  She stopped. The words that made distances were wrong. She realized that the “I” itself was wrong, for whoever she was now was not who she had been, and one letter could not be them both.

  Then she wrote,

  Before the shift that night she left dinner with her parents and biked south in darkness past her apartment building, along into her usual path. The afternoon storms had broken the heat and departed without trace. The air was drying, late-summer cool. On the side streets near campus were weakly haloed car headlights and shadowed figures waiting to be briefly illuminated.

  She wrote for almost three hours without stopping, finally deep into something true, without any sense of present time and place. Then she turned off her computer. Some minutes later she found herself outside, at the woodpile. She split six pieces of elm and lay them in the handled canvas. She smelled the wood and a sugary scent that she followed around the back of the cottage. On one of the maples a bucket had been knocked off a tap that had begun to drip sap. There were bear tracks all around. She stepped away, seeing everything.

  Back inside, she sat by the fire, stared out at the lake. The animals were waking from their dens. Seeing the prints had brought forth the smallest things. The faintest yellow in the grey of the dormant beech buds. The weather seemed no different but it was already spring in the ancient systems.

  All moved forward from here. It was time to go home.

  Her thoughts returned to the half-written story. She was still standing outside the church and she couldn’t go further without confronting what she couldn’t. Fear had stopped her, but also an incapability. How to think of him? He was faceless, without even a name to hold the substance of him in place. She wanted him known, not named, not by her. Any name might skew her sense of him one way or another. And so instead she designated him with only a letter, and for reasons she didn’t speculate upon, the letter that seemed right was R. A letter rolled on some tongues, though she didn’t roll it now. A letter that sounds like are. Her attacker, a plural state of being.

  A verb in English, she thought, at which point her intuition that he didn’t speak English was useful to her. The man had language, but not hers. The detail opened up more of the globe than it closed in her conception of him. And it isolated him within the city, which made sense, she decided. And thinking of him without English, in fact, meant she could attribute to him any life she wanted.

  She expected he would come to her like this, that one day she’d call up her narrative, and begin writing, and there he’d be, fully present and named.

  3

  It had been six steady weeks on the new job and it paid the best of any work he’d ever had. Rodrigo worked for a man about his age named Kevin, who bid on contracts from insurance adjusters and then phoned Luis, who called him, and they had to be on-site within an hour because of sitting water that would ruin everything left to ruin if it wasn’t pumped out and the carpets and walls stripped away. The work was hard and dirty, and sometimes Rodrigo came across burned-up things he wished he hadn’t seen. Last night it had been a child’s doll lying in a hard black pool of its melted head and back. One time it had been a dog that the firemen hadn’t found. The heat had curled its legs in front of it stiffly, as if it had died in an instant, running, though it had not died that way.

  He didn’t say much at work. Kevin got them going and then spent a long time on the phone. He brought all the tools and wanted them put back as soon as they were used. Rodrigo and Luis were not to talk to anyone but Kevin or Matt, the other crew member, who took more turns than Luis with the worst of the work.

  Most fires were at night. The hours they worked were backwards to the lives of other people. He showered before bed and slept until mid-afternoon. His one daily event was the walk to the internet lounge where he’d check for news from his cousin Uriel in Cartagena but there was never news. Uriel had written only once, after Rodrigo’s first message to him, to say that there had been no reprisals yet against the family. Then silence for over a year. Nearly every day Rodrigo sent a small note into the silence.

  He felt a great need to lie a little about his days, to make the stories better than they were. He wanted to write that he had a job selling TVs or coaching football, they called it soccer, that he was in school learning business, that a woman he loved was in love with him, or even that their love was impossible, that she was married to a rich man who treated her cruelly. In one version of his life he played a Mexican on a TV show. He imagined these stories at work and at night before bed. But so far he had never written them to Uriel. To write them would be to feel the full difference between
his life as he imagined it and his life as it was.

  He tried to describe his two thick work shirts. A shirt here could be described in terms of shirts from home, but not the need for them against an October morning in Toronto. In winter he wrote about the snow, but he knew Uriel could never imagine it, and he couldn’t write it into imagining. Instead he just wrote, “The days are very cold and there’s snow and ice. I have good boots,” knowing Uriel wouldn’t picture the right kind of boots.

  He put down his thoughts as they came to him. He could never allow himself to be questioned by police. He’d met his girlfriends at a language school before he stopped going. It was important not to get hurt on the job and once when a stairway collapsed he’d fallen on his hand and hurt it badly but he didn’t tell anyone and now there was a ridge between his knuckles and wrist and it still hurt him and was useless by the end of the day. The first girl was named Halia, she was from somewhere in Africa and he couldn’t even kiss her because of what had happened to her in her country. The other girl was a woman, a teacher at the school, named Julie. She wouldn’t go out with him while he was in her class and so he had quit and they went dancing. When she had broken up with him, it was only because they could never be married. He was illegal and could be sent back at any time. He didn’t tell Uriel that this was the first time he realized that his future here was small.

  Now it was Rosemary who helped him with his English. Whenever they ate together she had him read out loud to her from the newspaper and then asked him questions about what he’d read. The stories she chose for him were about deportations and cruel governments and black boys shot dead in the clubs. The news was full of warnings and he felt it made his English more serious than his Spanish. She asked him once which language he thought in and when he couldn’t answer her, she asked if he was mostly full of feelings and pictures. His only problem was expression, she said. Maybe she felt she’d insulted him, that she’d made him feel stupid. She said only that he should use English in his thoughts, and it should sound like his voice when he lowered his head at dinner to recite English grace.