Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  Only once had she asked him to tell her his story from beginning to end. He’d been downstairs when she’d come home and he called up hello but she hadn’t answered, and then he heard her crying in the kitchen. He let her be. Soon she came down and explained that she’d just found out that a woman she was helping had been detained and deported last week, and the woman would be persecuted in her home country. She said when this happened she suddenly wanted to believe that the people she helped were all lying, that they would be safe when they returned. But she knew, she had proof, that some had been killed, and she grieved for them and there was no place to put the grief, no funerals or graves, except her prayers, but the grief never ended that way.

  And so when she asked him to tell his story again, he thought she was asking him to lie to her in case he was ever returned. But he couldn’t lie. He wasn’t good at it. And anyway his new life owed to the true story, and he couldn’t give it up.

  And when he began to tell it, he saw that he’d been wrong, that it was the true story she wanted. She nodded at what was familiar to her from the version he’d presented to the tribunal, and she seemed to hang on the details he just remembered then in the course of this new telling.

  When he was done he said he understood that he couldn’t stay with her for much longer but that she was for him the person who brought together his life past with the life yet to be. He couldn’t guess where he’d be if she hadn’t helped him. They had never before spoken so well with one another, and never since.

  His cellphone rang. Luis said they had a job and he’d come by in twenty minutes. It was past ten. Rodrigo collected his clean work clothes from the laundry room and got into them and went upstairs and packed a little lunch. He didn’t put on his workboots yet and wouldn’t unless they got the job. They had been someone else’s boots once.

  Hours later he and Luis were standing in a dining room, looking at a chandelier somehow left undamaged by the fire and water. It had hung just below the smoke in a room that had been saved. But it was a hazard to them and they’d have to take it down anyway and when they put it on the floor, a little cut-glass ball separated and rolled to his feet. When Luis turned away, Rodrigo picked it up and put it into his pocket.

  Luis dropped him off at Rosemary’s house at five in the morning, and they were to be back on-site by one. He went in quietly. He took his boots off and shed his dirty work clothes in the entranceway and carried them downstairs. On the table beside his bed he found one of the envelopes of money Rosemary sometimes left for him. Before he moved into the house, the envelopes had come to him through Luis. He understood that she didn’t hand these to him directly out of respect for his dignity and because she wanted him to feel that it was from the church and not from her alone.

  A hundred and twenty dollars. Seeing the cash always made him feel a little worse. After one more paycheque he would tell her to give the money to another.

  He set his alarm for noon. As he began to nod off he pictured the clothes he’d dumped in the laundry room and remembered that he had no clean ones ready for the afternoon. He got up and put the clothes in the wash and looked out his window at the early sun drawing along the neighbour’s brick and the grey plastic garbage bins and he felt a weakness in his hands from work. He then sat watching the muted TV until the clothes were done. The second time he went to bed, it was to the sound of the dryer, and the fresh images from the local morning show of traffic and weather and yesterday’s news from some Arab land in ruin. No one understood the world, he thought. Not even the quietest, smallest part of it.

  Harold turned off the lights in the condo and stood at the south-facing window, looking out at the city from twenty-one storeys. The place was in one of its prosperous phases that tended to come in decades of bland Western architecture. As in Buenos Aires, San Diego, Kingston. Marian used to find the mornings in Vancouver deflating. It was a line of theirs, “Blame it on the architects,” whenever things got tough and they’d grown tired of blaming each other. Some resentment or small cruelty conducted along a maze of pathways, of past arguments, betrayals, hoping for some surprising new light on things. They’d been lost for so long, they couldn’t even find the door they’d come in through.

  Commanding views made him feel ridiculous. He removed his reading glasses. He was thinking about culling his books. He’d done it badly for the move, tied up in sentimental attachments to histories and festschrifts that marked out his life. But if he counted the ones he’d actually look at again, there were fewer than fifty. The other three hundred or so along the walls were merely sound baffles. He’d read and forgotten most of them. The others, he either didn’t believe or didn’t care about. They seemed not so much unreal to him as beside the point. He couldn’t articulate the point, but it existed in some dimension where everything he thought of could be beside it.

  Depressed by architecture. They’d had no idea.

  He studied himself briefly, his image, light upon the window. The glasses in his hand made him look satisfied or contemplative, or something. He looked all wrong, in any case. But then everything looked wrong these days. Down the block a floodlight from a crane died on the beginnings of the new high-rise condos. The site. Ground zero. Had he been here that night and looked down, what could he have seen? He would never stop asking the question. The site was still badly lit, and from this height he could see nothing in the recesses. Not the side street, not the dark spot next to the wall where the attack occurred, not much of the ground across which she’d run, and not the pit into which she’d fallen, which had since been filled. He could see the trailer, though. Even lit up, it looked empty. If Kim had taken his advice she’d have sued the company for not securing their space.

  He took a long last gaze at the dark spot. He would have to move again.

  Upstate New York on the flat black horizon of the lake. Water, command, guiding points. His mind was shifting to a navigational fancy. Conquest. He thought of Connie, though she was out of the picture. He shouldn’t email her, he knew. It wasn’t just that she’d turn him down. He’d detect that familiar note of sadness for him, her willing failure to suppress it. When they’d first spent time together, eleven years ago, she was the diligent grad student, his grad student. She was gone and married before they’d had their affair, two Januaries back. A happy-hour drink in a downtown hotel lounge. At some point the lights dimmed in a blunt promotion of intimacy. They ended up in his car, kissing like teenagers. It had come out of nowhere, it seemed, for what else would you call a shared interest in colonial Mexican history. Only later did he see the other mutual factors, marriages failed or failing, their moribund careers. She’d found nothing on the academic job market and now worked as an editor of children’s books. At least he’d gained a position before his career had stalled. Now they often stalled right off the line. It was through some sort of conditioning, something in the student-mentor dynamic, that even years later she’d come to him for advice and consolation. In time she understood that his need surpassed hers. Or maybe, though he didn’t like to think of it, she just couldn’t be naked anymore with a man twenty-some years her senior.

  He’d had this place for ten months when he’d finally persuaded her to come over. He’d wanted her to see it, to see he was free and clear, if not happy. Since then, without even acknowledging the invitations, she’d turned them down. Every few weeks she’d write, the letters weren’t even newsy. Mostly she asked about his classes. “Some days when you got going you could change the whole room. All that dead history got up and walked around in front of us. You were the great necromancer. You need to find those days again, Harold.” She had always been his champion among students and other faculty, his defender. He had precious few of them, and so forgave her for pretty much anything, even for calling him a necromancer.

  She used to check her mail almost hourly. He turned on the desk lamp and tapped out a note – “Come here for a drink. The city’s beautiful from my couch. You remember it, don’t you?” – and sent
it.

  If he’d been honest he’d have told her there were ghosts here tonight. All over the papers and the TV was a forensic artist’s reconstruction of the face of last week’s murder victim, the “dumpster girl,” as one paper had settled on calling her. She was the consummate image of the woman who’d inspired his first infidelity. Celina Shey. That had lasted no more than a month, though Marian wouldn’t learn of it for years, but it foretold all that was to come.

  The silence of his hours here, distracting himself with reading, television, the internet, the phone, cooking – all that was missing was an exercise wheel. He’d bought this place as much for the soundproofing as the view, but it had been a mistake – he longed for footsteps, music, traffic, any stray notes of ongoingness. Without them he simply lined up tasks and performed them. You could build another day upon the half-awareness of your moving hand.

  He opened a bottle of Amarone and started into it in the spirit of wasting a good thing in self-pity. It was now well into what used to be the reading hours. Against his will he turned on the television and flipped back and forth through the channels, finding nothing but the usual bilking operations and fictions to feed a mass idiocy. It was true that the American network news was a sly way of selling cars and bad government, not that he ascribed to conspiracy theories. It infuriated Kim that he so readily accepted her calling him a snob. He liked “snob.” The word didn’t break down as easily as “elitist.”

  He kept flipping. Two men fencing with baguettes, a pop star with a navel ring talking about her so-called art. Gene Hackman was on two channels, in different stages of his career. The whole point of the device was to feel a part of the audience, but there was nothing he could stomach.

  He checked for email. No messages.

  Then the local cable news, and there she was again, the double. How does this work, he wondered, that for two or three days we all walk around with the same picture in our minds, the same bleak facts? The police insist that the unclaimed girl must have had a circle of friends and appeal for someone to come forward.

  Did Celina ever think of him? He barely remembered himself from back then, a budding Latin Americanist with some ideas about the Wars of Independence. They’d met in Montreal. He was living with Marian and going to McGill. At a street festival he’d stopped to watch a blind boy playing Italian folk songs on guitar and then there she was, across the crowd. It was a powerful moment of recognition, though he couldn’t say who she reminded him of, if anyone. Her features, dark and slightly dramatic against her olive skin, fit perfectly into some still image from his experience. He followed her down the block and managed to come up beside her as she bought gelato. As they ate their treats together there in the street she told him she wrote magazine articles on home furnishings, and he said he was a graduate student, new to the city. She gave him her number unprompted. He told her about Marian and she said it was an old story to her. Years later he tried to explain to Marian this first encounter. In following Celina, chatting, taking the number he’d betrayed her, yes, but he was doing it all against his instincts, even against his desire. What he really wanted to do upon seeing the woman was to turn and go the other way. The recognition, whatever it was, disturbed him, and only a conscious act of will allowed him to confront the disturbance. None of this made sense to Marian - how could it? – who thought he was just revising the past and parsing it in his defence. The short-lived affair was not without pleasure, but the pleasure was always fraught. As he got to know Celina, as she became to him more herself and less the mystery he thought he’d recognized, their passion died.

  And yet now, another recognition. Had Celina had a daughter? He imagined the girl growing up, moving to Toronto, dying here on his television.

  He’d had two brief affairs during his marriage. Since the divorce, several dates but only two lovers, and only for a few months each. Though Marian and Kim thought of him as a womanizer, he was not, by the modern standard. He was always meeting women who thrilled him, but his attempts to move beyond the talking stage were full of misreadings, misplays, embarrassments. After a while, the attempts came to seem self-punishing.

  By the time Connie called he had finished off the Amarone. Early into the conversation she’d begun to cry and he was worried he’d missed something in his drunkenness. It turned out that she and her husband had had to put their dog down the previous afternoon.

  “Fourteen years,” she said. “Bob’s been part of my life longer than you have.” It was a second before he surmised that Bob was the dog.

  “I’m very sorry, Connie.”

  “Dog grief is a weird thing.”

  “Yes. It must be.”

  Why, in her grief, had she called him? He wondered if this didn’t affirm a deep connection between them.

  “You can’t write me messages like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You asked if I remembered your loveseat. Meaning what we did on it.”

  “I don’t remember asking that.” He tried to recall what he’d written. He thought he’d alluded to other nights looking at the city from rooftop bars. She’d misinterpreted things before. Maybe she wouldn’t have been a good academic after all.

  “Oh, come on, Harold. You don’t have to remind me what happened.”

  How could he tell her that she would have to remind him? They’d made love there on the couch, and in bed, and in the car once. But he couldn’t recall the details of these hours. They’d both been happy, he remembered. He would only remember her body if he saw it again.

  “I take it you’re not coming for a visit, then.”

  “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t when I asked you over, though.”

  “You might not realize that it hurts me to get these messages, but it does. I’m telling you now. So unless you don’t mind hurting me, stop them. I don’t want to hear from you again. I wish you well, Harold.”

  She didn’t leave him time to respond before she hung up. He was aware that if he’d been sober he’d be in more pain, that the pain he felt was bogus and he couldn’t trust it. He’d somehow robbed himself of what would have been a moment of sharp loss, real but manageable. It was more bad luck that he’d missed it.

  Unsteadily now he walked to the small couch and pushed it up to the window. He climbed over the arm to take his next position, his head resting on a cushion as he looked out at the city. An airliner hung over the skyline in low gliding profile.

  If I was king of the world, he thought. A game he used to play with Kim. If I was king of the world I’d make it go to sleep. I’d utter it into dormancy. I’d shut the place down by fiat. Or maybe I’d say nothing and just pull the plug, casting us into darkness and thought, turning to face our terrors and getting to know them by name, undistracted by noise and duty. All souls but one. One to walk among us as we looked at the sky each night, one to mark who could sleep and who couldn’t.

  You walk at night, drift through streets. He was down there right now, tucked into the shadow by the steps. Waiting. A few faces and names are with him too, many of them women, lost or deranged or betrayed, one his daughter. For cold seconds it seems she’s been mixed up with the lost and it’s too late to save her, to separate her from them, and then suddenly it’s he himself among them. The fear is absolute. All of the dead must die knowing it.

  This time, returning, without the snow, with the wet earth on the air and the city up ahead, she thought: He’s still here. I know it. This time she felt the difference between the man she’d imagined and the real thing. The real thing, a mystery she would scream at, and run from or strike if she could. She needed to think about this, this raw force still inside her, but instead she just felt it, in non-thought, and let herself be funnelled into the northern downtown, and she kept driving, hearing herself breathing deeply now, in the quick mud and vapour of memory.

  The sublet tenants had left the place intact. Marian had asked her to move home – they missed each other and admitted that
even the old mother-daughter tensions would feel reassuring - and so she gave her notice and set about collecting boxes from the stores along Bloor Street, as she’d done before. Counting every chair, she was in possession of eleven pieces of furniture, and three could be returned to the curb, where she’d found them a year ago. The rest would end up in her mother’s storage garage until it became too much to live at home again, or until she decided what to do with her life.

  Eight days before her phone was to be disconnected she made enquiries about yoga classes, which it turned out she couldn’t afford. She dug out notes she’d once compiled for a documentary she wanted to make about a local group home for Liberians who’d had their hands hacked off, and then she put them away again. The Liberians had long ago dispersed.

  On her daily transits she made a point of stopping to touch leaves and flowers. She looked a little mad, she supposed, stooping to rub and smell in every second wild garden.

  She watched TV and changed channels, forgot what she was watching and then discovered it again, a heist movie, a documentary on mountain apes, and allowed herself to be reabsorbed for two minutes and forget what she’d seen up the dial along some other invisible band in the air. Her sleep patterns began to grow random again. She nodded off mostly in a fetal slouch in an armchair with the quipping bad guys and the apes. She saw the same smoking rubble on three channels, the same victims in the same hospital beds. In a few hours would be the same funeral processions.

  At one point it occurred to her that vast uncertainty was a form of knowing. It was a thought she could not get past.

  She could go back to the forest and lake, the long thoughts and sure rhythms, or she could hang on and see what became of her.

  Having already packed her clocks, she lay in unmeasured quiet every night amid her boxes and the scent of dead candles. In the mornings she sat on her mattress, writing the old way, by hand.