Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  Finally, Marian proposed that Kim attend a gymnastics camp in Ottawa the week before school resumed. She said the camp would get Kim’s “focus” back, and allow them both a vacation. Marian herself was thinking about a few days in New York. After some argument, Kim agreed to go – she would quit the sport that year – billeting with the family of a local gymnast, a four-and-a-half-foot-tall tumbler whose single topic of conversation was her beam routine. And Marian decided against New York, travelling instead to Guatemala to look for her husband. She didn’t find him. He hadn’t attended the conference, despite appearing on the program. When she and Kim were both back home, Marian spoke of Guatemala, of fabrics and music, and Kim felt an odd connection to the country for her mother’s experiences there, and for its being another place where Harold had failed to appear.

  Marian told her of a hike up a volcano on which she’d almost been trapped by hot lava and had been led to safety by mongrel dogs.

  “Those dogs got me out of some big trouble,” she said, and Kim, to the surprise of them both, announced that she hated her father. Even as she said it, calmly, she knew that “hate” was the wrong word for the resentment she felt at being awash with a spoiled love for him, but all she could manage was the one inexact syllable. Marian put her hand on the back of Kim’s neck and said maybe she should have brought the mongrels back with her.

  Harold had met Father André Rowe three winters ago during a badly attended lecture series called Religion and the New Theocratic Age at which they’d both delivered papers. Of the priest’s address – the first in the series - he recalled only its violent imagery of a “disarticulated church,” and the holy word itself ripped limb from limb by the forces of cynical liberalism and reactionary conservatism. Listening to him, Harold had thought the man had no real command of anything, and was barely in control of his passions. But over the weeks, as the group members got to know one another during the informal discussion sessions, all of them lining up at the coffee urn and then angling their chairs into a sort of parliament, he came to think of Father André as the most valuable participant, the one among them who coaxed them from their turfs, translated the terms now and then, and kept things peaceable even as he challenged arguments and core beliefs. By the end of the semester, Harold had had to admit to himself his own academic hubris.

  One night they’d walked together out of the college and across the campus with the city lights holding above them in low winter clouds. They’d been trading views of the evening’s lecture, a sociologist’s work-in-progress on the local adaptations of conservative Islam in European cities. Harold wanted them to get past the subject so that the conversation might move at random. The impulse was familiar to him from his relations with certain especially smart women, a need to be close to the power and authority of a truly other mind. On most days he believed that over his life of observation and thought he’d come to know how to see things. Yet every now and then, it seemed he’d collected nothing but prejudices and a few disguises for them. As they moved single file in the snow onto the packed path that cut across the field, the priest had kept finding new implications in the sociologist’s work, kept asking Harold for an historian’s assessment and then using it to open other levels of inquiry. Finally Harold stepped into a pause and asked him how a man who spent his day with the unfortunate had the energy or even the inclination to spend his evenings with people whose devotions must seem so removed from the front lines. “I like most academics,” said Father André. “They commit to their enthusiasms, as we all should, with mind, body, and spirit.” Harold said he wasn’t sure that described many of his colleagues, or himself. “It describes you. I know it when I see it.” The comment surprised Harold into speechlessness. He had come to value it out of proportion.

  They’d had little contact in the past two years. Before he’d called him yesterday to arrange a meeting, Harold had hunted up the online course calendar and found Father André there on Tuesday nights teaching Time and Ritual in Christian Doctrine. The posted reading list would look pretty daunting to an undergraduate, Harold knew, but he’d have better students because of it. They arranged to meet at noon in a café near campus. The view from their table was of southbound streetcars emerging from the underground, and northbound ones disappearing into the station.

  “I read your book on Central American Protestantism.” The man’s faded white short-sleeved shirt was tucked in too far in the back. It gave the impression he was straining at the collar.

  “So there’s two of us.”

  “I’m not in a position to evaluate the scholarship, but it has an authority. It seems rigorous and well argued.”

  “Thank you. But I’m guessing you don’t think it addresses the whole picture.”

  Father André smiled. His boyish yellow hair clashed with the thick parchment on his arms and face. He looked worn and hardened.

  “Your book reads like a smart market analysis. Event X leads to event Y. I don’t see why the force of living faith has to be put aside in such studies, or discussed exclusively in terms of material needs and politics and American business models used to sell Pentecostalism to the poor.”

  “Well. There’s the whole chapter on the migration of the spirit, conversion as the movements of people from the country to the city.”

  “Yes, but that’s only a metaphor. There should be room for testaments. It isn’t that I don’t acknowledge the power of need and politics to shape history. It’s that I do, I know it very well, and so I know how people endure their hungers and sufferings and despair.”

  “You’re talking about a kind of social history, or simply documentary history, that I don’t do. It’s not my particular thing.”

  “I think it should be part of the practice.”

  “Well, take it up with the ancients, I guess.”

  “Oh, I do.” He laughed. “I debate daily with the Ancient of Days.”

  They talked about their courses and students, and the vague sense of the world at large bearing down on them. Father André asked about Marian – she’d been first diagnosed the winter of the lecture series – and Harold gave him the short answer.

  “If you’d like to talk about that, I’m certainly your man, Harold.”

  “Thank you. Thanks. No, actually, I wanted to get together with you because of my daughter, Kim.”

  Harold hadn’t realized he could say anything at all to another about Kim. He wasn’t sure, starting into it, that he could tell it fully, but he just kept talking and let the story run where it would. Kim emerged in the telling as a serious woman full of unrestrained heart, or love, he supposed, and anger, maybe a few notes of spite. She was not always aware of her own motives. You couldn’t really know her without watching her carefully, but even then there was something elusive. She had ascetic tendencies that seemed to distance her from her generation. New technologies didn’t interest her. She had few amusements. Few friends. She was purposeful but directionless, or at least without professional ambitions. It was not just his fatherly imagination, he stressed, that she was possessed of an enormous power that had no apparent means of expression or becoming, and he was worried this power, an intelligence, a talent, if contained much longer would grow sinister and begin to ruin her.

  Then he told the priest about the attack. He had never told anyone about it – either people had heard or they hadn’t – and he was surprised at how hard it was. He wanted to leave out the details but found himself describing them. At some point he became aware of himself trying to get the story right, and he thought of how much harder the telling must be for Kim, and his voice began to constrict and he had to leave off.

  Father André was sitting back. He’d received it all with an expression of pained but warm understanding. Harold knew the look would stay in his mind and do good there.

  “To think of what’s loose out here.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Harold. How can I help?”

  Harold had an image of himself, a rodent poking his nose out into the li
ght of the calamitous world. The priest was at home in it. Harold hadn’t been for most of his adult life. It was obvious to both of them. But the man respected him. Around Father André Rowe, Harold almost respected himself.

  “She used to work with rejected refugee claimants. As you do, or your church does. She volunteered for an organization called GROUND.”

  “I know it. They do important work.”

  “But the work made her vulnerable. I’m not saying she was naive, but she told her mother once about never knowing enough at GROUND, never being able to see all the things in play at a given time. The faces, the body language. And in that kind of world, even an ounce of ignorance and you pay the consequences.”

  “You said the attacker wasn’t caught.”

  “She might have been followed. Which means she was chosen in some way.”

  “Chosen at random?”

  “It might be she was followed from her apartment building. That the attacker waited for her there. That he knew where she lived, and knew her. And the attacker didn’t speak English. Neither did most of her clients. And he was dark-skinned, but not black. She works with a lot of Central and South Americans because of her Spanish.”

  “Is this the police theory?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Is it her theory?”

  “She doesn’t want to examine these questions.”

  The priest met his eye. Harold supposed he was wondering about him as a figure in his daughter’s life. Would he ask for the salient facts, for direct admissions? He was sure the man inferred it all at some level anyway.

  “Not knowing her myself, Harold, I can say only that her soul must be in a state of turbulence. Next up, I’m afraid, is torment. And as creatures, our signature means of dealing with torment aren’t so good. Many are lost to it. Some become habituated, and are lost to that. What your daughter needs is what we all do. She needs peace. And we can only find that in the goodness and strength of others, the people we’re closest to.”

  “A simple enough equation.”

  “Peace is real. It has force. It spreads.”

  “Like democracy.”

  “Don’t fail it like that.” His tone was calm but dead stern. “Don’t try to debase it, or disarm it with irony or politics.” “It’s all politics at some level, Father.”

  “There are things that stand outside of politics. We’re made of solitude and endure it through the social. We can draw on others for peace. Not abstractly. Our essential networks are very small. A few people. Mutually supportive. People who value others for their goodness, not their sophistication or wit. People who don’t pretend there aren’t differences between us, and yet know what it is we share.”

  “All right. And so you’ve diagnosed her troubles by seeing mine. I don’t strike you as at peace.”

  “Almost no one does.”

  Harold tried on a rueful smile. “There’s no quick fix for us, is there?”

  “You don’t feel God is watching over you?”

  “Not watching over, no. Just watching.”

  “At least you feel Him.”

  “I don’t know who I feel.”

  He was not used to talking like this. It was astonishing, what came out of his mouth.

  “Years ago, Harold, when I left the seminary, I confessed to an older priest that I wasn’t sure what my job was, going out into the world. He said it was to get people to look beyond whatever it was they most wanted in life, and what they most feared in it. But I think maybe that’s all it is. People get into trouble because they can’t answer those questions of what they want and what they fear.”

  “And those, also, are more complicated matters than they might seem.”

  “They might be. Or they might not. Can you answer them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know, or you aren’t prepared to?”

  “Maybe that’s what I mean by complicated.”

  He walked Father André into the subway station and when they shook hands he sensed the man’s restraint. Surely he wanted to accuse Harold of a fall from reason. It was comforting to imagine someone with reserves of strength and wisdom.

  They would be in touch, they agreed.

  “I’d like to meet Kim sometime. Marian, too. And I think we should talk more about all of this.”

  “Put in a word for me with the Ancient of Days.”

  “I will.” He laughed. “I will if one occurs to me.”

  The word would be xenophobe, Harold thought, or maybe even racist. Unhinged. Lost. As he made his way back out into the light, he felt exposed, naked as the questions of want and fear. From somewhere long ago, the image of an apartment building entryway – he could smell rot in the damp air – until the here and now, the traffic of people and cars overran the memory. Like the familiar faces and routines of his work, the streets had a way of turning back the tide. A city was like primary text to him, alive in itself and in the ways it returned him to his past readings of it. You could hide inside the play of chance, every block another intersection of raw noise, language and fashion, music and work, cicadas and birds and the wind in the trees, small pockets of local remembered time. Now and then upon some stray reverie he’d discover he wasn’t here at all, that one city had reminded him of another.

  The best memories were of Marian and Kim in one of their travel summers, as they accompanied him in his researches. Walking with his girls, all over the Americas. The days tended to be too hot, spent indoors, but the evenings were at times like scenes from Toronto in July, if with older buildings and palms and a different spoken music in the air.

  He drifted along Bloor and passed by a fruit stand, the prices handwritten on cardboard. The vendor was a small woman. He saw that her hands were scabbed at the knuckles, and he thought of Kim when he’d first seen her in the hospital, bandaged and unspeaking, but holding his hand, and like that his state was upon him again. There was no shelter anywhere. He could no longer be the historian who cleaved to the present tense.

  Kim evolved a fantasy and somehow it came true. As with any fantasy she left the edges fuzzy and just lived it one moment to the next, or more like she skipped along just the high moments and kept going without even thinking she was acting unlike herself, because who was she anyway, so that turning on the cell and making the call seemed to happen even as she packed her laptop and a small suitcase and left her bared apartment, catching a train and a streetcar with her bag like a runaway and getting off and waiting across the street in the window of the café, exactly where she told him she’d be, so that all she had to do was wait for him to collect the message and he’d have to come for her, come along in his car, or come down from the apartment, just as he did, and out the glassy brass doors and across to her, and come in and not even say anything, just lean to give her a hug and then collect her bag and take her by the arm and so on, saying nothing until they were inside, when he sat her down and told her he was going to make tea.

  It was all through her still, she told him, whatever you call it, the mix of emotions.

  What she needed was his presence. The physical fact of him, standing, walking, handing her things, resolving sameness and difference into one named being.

  She stayed with him for four days.

  Greg came and went. She leafed through his books. Biographies of French film directors. A North American road novel. Popular guides to classical philosophy and quantum mechanics. Every one was jammed up with marginal notes in a shorthand border between the page and the world.

  His couch was longer than her bed. There was no awkwardness about who’d sleep where. She’d consider it a mark of her recovery when the awkwardness hit her.

  At night she heard things in the walls but in the morning he convinced her she hadn’t in variations of the same conversation.

  “Concrete walls and floors. Triple the code standard.”

  She tried to imagine the sound. She described it to him as more creaturely than not. She tried to imagine imagin
ing it.

  “This high, you don’t have rats,” she said.

  “No rats or mice or roaches.”

  “Then it’s something otherworldly.”

  “Too high for rats, too new for ghosts.”

  Sometimes they spent an hour or more in the same room without talking, then he was gone somewhere. The third afternoon he brought her lunch and stayed for a while making notes at the kitchen table with his briefcase at his feet. The picture of him there inspired her to want to hand-write her journal entry for the day and she hunted around for paper and a pen. In a desk drawer she found dozens of rolls of exposed film.

  “So this is none of my business,” she said.

  She held two in her palm for him to see.

  “They’re mostly from travels. Over the years.”

  “Why haven’t you developed them?”

  She saw him take the thought and put it away.

  “I do digital now,” he said, as if answering.

  She wondered where men like him kept their lives. Some vast white space in the mind.

  Every night she badly pretended to help make dinners. He was talented and knew where the pans were. It was the dance that mattered, the brushings past, the leanings across. At one point he moved behind her to get by and put his hands on her hips lightly and paused for a moment and she felt him against her and then they continued their business of cooking and eating, neither embarrassed nor especially distracted, as if his pausing had just been a way of putting things.