by Michael Helm
At home he liked to wear twill pants or jeans.
They spoke every day about GROUND, their past lives, of his clients. He said they were just regular people with jobs and families. “A little more resourceful than us. And who are we, for that matter? Look at us, the so-called support community. We’re mostly white. Educated, middle-class origins. We have names like Greg and Kim. You think we know each other?”
She asked him about the notes in the margins of his books. He said he recorded most interviews on paper and had evolved his own shorthand.
He said, “The only way to get through it all is with short, controlled bursts.” It was a while before she realized he was prescribing a way of thinking.
Sometimes he saw codes where they didn’t yet exist. GROUND was built as an acronym to fit into some abstruse interchange of short forms. Government agencies, insurgent armies, political regions, student movements, aid organizations, all were known by tags. Even distant sentences that had been reduced by a word or two could be brought back whole with an ease that surprised him, for he wasn’t in the habit of recall. He privately thought of “proper identity documents” as PRIDS. The “port-of-entry” was PEN. The “corroboration of identity” was CORROID. “Without the PRIDS the claimant needs CORROID that supports the PEN notes,” he said by way of example.
His home theatre had been upgraded since the night of the French movie. It now involved a large plasma screen and a floor with four risers and real moviehouse chairs called red rockers that were bolted in place and leaned back and shot forward so you could scull through the film scene to scene. They sat with a seat between them, watching a Palestinian feature about suicide bombers. Near-documentary-realism. No music. The men spend their last nights with their families, not telling them anything. In the morning they get strapped with explosives that can’t be removed. They are driven to a woods –
Greg turned it off.
“Sorry. I can’t tonight. Bad choice. You go ahead.”
He got up to leave and she reached out and took his hand and they stopped in that position like figures on a silkscreen. He seemed to search for something to say but she tugged and he tugged back, and she let him pull her up out of the red rocker and then they were face to face.
She reached up, leaned in and kissed him. Nothing felt movieish anymore. Then he stepped back.
“Kim, even if you had any idea what you were getting into with me, you aren’t in good shape to go through it.”
She almost laughed. It had been days. But she knew there’d be lines like this. She thought she’d prepared for them but, standing there, so close, just in the hesitation, she realized he was right.
That night on the couch she imagined what might have been, how she might have traced the length of him through his pants and then turned and taken three steps away and stood waiting with her back to him. And of course he would come to her, and she’d lift her arms up high and let him run his hands over her, along the ribs and hips, and then around. He’d reach under her clothes and hold her breasts, kiss her neck, and one hand would move over her belly and on down. She’d sweep her arms low and behind her now and take hold of the backs of his thighs and pull herself against him as he reached down between her legs, the familiar astonishment, and then he’d be unbuttoning her jeans and on his knees helping her out of them and she’d stand facing him now in blue socks and grey T-shirt.
He’d look up at her, his head slightly tilted to the side like that of a confused hound, waiting for a command.
Hey, you, she’d say …
The next day, her last at Greg’s place, she sits at his desk, writing. Now and then she looks up at a framed photo of African women hanging clothes on branches in a wind, the white sheets main-sailed on their echoing figures, and something echoes in her, though she doesn’t at first know what.
Greg is at work and she is at his desk, and she is on the computer page, standing outside a bright church. Something is about to happen.
Then she has it. It’s the sails and the desk, having come together. Above her desk in New York was a print Donald had given her when she left Toronto for her doctoral studies. It looked psychedelic but was mathematical, a so-called burning-ship fractal, with the nested repetitions of nearly the same forms in a kind of endless regression of hulls, masts, and sails. He’d called it “God’s thumbprint” and said that it was all the god any rationalist should need.
She’s closed the loop in her thoughts. She moves forward.
This time she steps inside the church. Everyone is standing and singing and a man at the front wearing a suit is raising his hands in the air. Kim is the only white person in the room. A young woman about her age near the door sees her and smiles, still singing, and gestures to an empty seat and Kim comes in and stands beside her and the woman takes Kim’s hand in hers and raises it up and there’s nothing but love in here, she knows, her attacker isn’t present, and then suddenly neither is she, and she looks away and then back at the page.
She writes, “He wasn’t in the church.”
This is pure intuition, not fact, but she’s sure of it nevertheless.
She isn’t in the church anymore, but past it, and she feels the gaze, and though she’s not ready yet to imagine the attack, he is already there. She stops writing but he’s in her thoughts and growing, and so to get distance from him she begins a new page. She sees herself walking on a summer evening on a calm residential street, somewhere west of downtown, and as she begins to write the scene, she feels it, the motion of walking, and then suddenly she is someone else – these moments of release into her blood are growing into a dependency – walking without intention for more than an hour and happening by a community centre where a girl he’d known in language school used to work as a cleaner. Her name was Maribel. R hadn’t seen her in months but they’d been in the same small group of friends who sometimes studied together and went out, though she had a boyfriend back where she came from, some country in Asia he couldn’t remember, and had no interest in the clubs. She wasn’t pretty when you met her but seemed more so every day. As far as they could communicate she seemed a little smart, a little funny. She had her resident status.
The community centre was an old school. When he went in, the place seemed empty, but he found a class of some sort going on in one room. The man leading it asked if he could help and R said no and passed by. Finally down a hallway he found a janitor, a fat man who was maybe Italian, and asked him about Maribel, but the man said he didn’t know any Maribel and he knew everyone who worked there. The man was lying to him but there was nothing he could do.
He went out back of the centre and watched men his age and older playing soccer in a park. One side spoke Spanish. The others were mostly Brazilian, he thought. They lived some kind of organized lives, these men, that in the evenings they could be in uniforms playing games. The sides were not especially talented. Most of the players were no better or worse than he was. They called to one another but otherwise it was quiet. He was the only one watching.
He returned every night to the park and watched. The teams were always different. Once or twice he retrieved a ball but otherwise he remained on the margins. Then one night after the game was over and he had stood to leave, one of the players came nearby and spoke to him in Spanish. He said the league was full but new players could join to replace the injured and he gave him a number to call. He said the new players paid only half price. R nodded and took the number and started away, and the man added, “If you can’t pay, you just tell the man that Carlos gave you the number.” R thanked him and left. He knew he’d never return there now and already he missed it.
Kim looks up and sees the women hanging their laundry in the picture, the sheets as sails, and thinks of Africans on ships. If she were to turn her head and look around the apartment or out the window at the city below, she’d see all the things of the world stealing glances at one another. Everything connected. Her attacker has given her this way of seeing, and she hates him for the gi
ving, for the beauty of the gift. It’s been forced on her and she will never be free of it. She can’t separate the gift from the giver.
He is inside her.
The restaurant was Peruvian. Because it was good, and near the university, Harold had come here a few times for lunches with his graduate students, who’d always felt compelled to order in Spanish. All except one, Davey Voith, a kid from some small town in New Brunswick. Out of high school he’d travelled to Mexico with what sounded like a Christian cult, though a socially useful one that built houses for the poor. When he came home, he quit the cult for the study of Mexican history. He was sharp, if a bit too trusting, a professional naïf, and without an ounce of pretension. He’d married young, a nursing student. Now he taught in Miami. Harold saw him every March at the annual conference. Davey always had new photos of his kids stored on his laptop, and called them up in bars or lobbies. Little William and Leena, another year older. Their father was still happy, producing good work, and somehow still himself. Except when he was in Davey’s company, Harold tended to imagine the young man’s life was a brilliantly performed lie.
He’d taken the last empty table in the lattice shade of the patio, and had just ordered wine from a blond waitress whom he recognized when another, a mestizo whom he didn’t, came and asked if he was waiting for a woman named Rosemary. A moment later she was leading him back inside the restaurant and up the stairs to the second floor. It was empty. He was led to a window table. There was no sign of Rosemary Yates. She must have called ahead to reserve the spot. It was she who’d suggested the restaurant. Now that he’d been moved to her table, the place seemed more hers than his.
Father André had called last night with the arrangements and a kind of warning. “We work together, of course, but I don’t always know what she’s up to. I’ve learned not to ask, actually.” He’d described her as “plugged in” to the underground world of illegals. He must have thought this woman could give him some perspective, or counsel him to face his emotions more directly instead of producing a misleading analysis of the events. The subtext was all wrong.
Harold had wondered why Rosemary hadn’t called him herself. Now it seemed likely that she’d wanted to prepare an entrance, to appear in voice and body all at once. What a lot of calculation had gone into meeting a stranger. She was probably troubled, untrustworthy, of no use to him. Because she was Anglican, he supposed she was dour.
He ate a piece of bread and allowed himself half the glass of Shiraz. By now she was late, and he was hungry, but if he ate more, he’d drink more, and that was out of the question. He’d forgotten to bring something to read. The new Times Literary Supplement was on his desk at home. He’d been keeping up with it ever since they’d given him a generally favourable review for the last book. The reviewer had been a rising cross-disciplinary star from Boston, about Kim’s age, whom Harold had never met. The kid had called him on a few points, speculations that the documents didn’t quite support. It was a small caveat, but Harold had been unable to dismiss it, and he still periodically sent forth a wish for the reviewer’s comeuppance upon some blunder in his own work.
Low Spanish voices up the stairs. He briefly suppressed the urge to turn, but when she was in approach, with the mestizo waitress behind her, he looked up, nodded, and stood to shake her hand.
“Harold Lystrander.”
“Hello, Harold.”
She didn’t bother to say her name as she took his hand with great surety. She looked a bit Irish. Dark hair and dark blue eyes. A full, solid body. A medium-tall woman in her forties, in loose-fitting, flared blue pants and a white blouse.
When he turned to sit back down, he noticed the napkin that had been on his lap was now on the floor. He got to it before the waitress did. She took it from him without speaking and went off to get a fresh one. Rosemary was seated now, waiting for him, somehow taller in her chair than she’d seemed standing, as if propped on all her small advantages.
“I hope this place is fine.”
“Yes, I come here myself.”
“I thought you might. Father André told me your field is Latin America.”
“That’s right. Mexico specifically. Or that’s where I began my career. As a subject, I mean.” He sounded like a fool but couldn’t stop himself. “But by now I’ve written around the lower continent.”
“Sounds like sailing,” she said. The waitress returned with his new napkin and a sparkling water for Rosemary. “I’ve already ordered. Go ahead if you’re ready. Thanks, Carolina.”
The young woman smiled at her. There was some confederacy here that extended beyond waitress and customer.
— What do you recommend today? he asked, in his best South American Spanish.
— The specials are all very good. They’re on the board. Someone just thanked me for suggesting the mariscos al quesillo.
There were Castilian notes in her speech.
— You’re not from Peru, I think. Is it Colombia? The Paisa region?
The question, which he thought had been innocent, seemed to trouble her.
“What would you like?” she finally asked.
He ordered the sea scallops, in English, and she left in double time.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was trying to place her accent.”
“Better not to ask where they come from.”
“I guess you know her.”
She looked at his wineglass. Another calculation, maybe.
“I hear you wrote a book about Protestants.”
“Well, Protestantism.”
“Right. Of course.” Academics and their isms, she’d be thinking. She was no doubt gauging his response to the shift in topics.
“It examined so-called evangelical Protestantism in late-twentieth-century Spanish America.”
“I must have missed it.”
“There wasn’t a tour.”
Somehow she received the humour without actually smiling. There was no end to her ability to hang him up in speculation. She was very quick, this woman, and self-assured. Yet she’d done no more than enter a room, sit down, and offer some opening pleasantries. Harold decided she must be going through life on guard, owing to some past emotional disaster. She presented, to him at least, as a woman once betrayed.
“Father André told me about your daughter. I’m very sorry.”
“Do you know her?”
“We haven’t met, no.”
“That surprises me. I would think it’s a pretty small army.”
“I don’t have much contact with GROUND.”
She looked off across the room for a moment. Carolina was behind the small bar discussing something with a man in a cook’s apron. He too looked Latin American. He glanced at Harold and disappeared down the alcove.
“Is it true you take on the hardest cases, the people whom even GROUND turns away?”
“I’m not a judge. I take who I can. It comes down to resources.”
“But how do you know they’re not dangerous? If GROUND doesn’t take them, then by definition they’re likely somewhere in the range between dishonest and dangerous.”
“GROUND has its mandate. I have mine.”
“And what’s yours?”
“It’s a living mandate. It can’t be explained out of context.”
A shrill note from out on the street below. They both turned to watch a cyclist flying by blowing warnings with a whistle. People watched. A young Chinese man on the sidewalk looked up at him.
“I work mostly with what are called exclusion cases. People who meet the refugee criteria but aren’t admitted for other reasons.” “They must be pretty serious reasons.”
“At least one person thinks so. That’s all it takes. And we’re not so far removed from the days when the prime minister’s wife’s hairdresser was appointed to be one of these people.”
“But I’ve even gotten Kim to admit that the board gets most of their decisions right.”
“But who are they to decide?”
“And w
ho are you to decide?” The sharpness was drawn from old professional debates. He hadn’t accessed it in years. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound accusing.”
A tilt of the head made her face more intent.
“I’m accused of something every day. Harbouring criminals, undermining the country, the justice system, the social safety net, the underground helper networks, the church. Almost no one approves of what I do. Even Father André has begun to doubt. So don’t bother trying to be delicate with me.”
“Okay.”
His usual company of academics was full of enthusiasm or cynicism, sometimes both. He wasn’t used to those with conviction. It was one reason Kim made so little sense to him.
He said, “I guess I have a theory that I can’t dismiss. The attacker wasn’t white –”
“There are four or five million people within a short car ride of where your daughter was attacked. The majority of them are not Caucasian.”
“But investigations move along profiles. They exclude all the millions but a handful. Maybe a foreigner. Maybe doesn’t speak much English, that’s what Kim thinks, so a newcomer, and Kim worked with a lot of Latin Americans. And dangerous. Suddenly the pool is very small.”
“It doesn’t sound to me like you’re willing to dismiss your theory.”
“I just find no reason to.”
Carolina and the man in the apron brought the salads. It wasn’t a two-person job. The man took a good look at him this time before they both receded again.
Rosemary said that the people she helped weren’t any trouble to anyone. She told him about two who had made something of themselves here, and now helped with her work. He barely nodded.
“Your daughter has suffered, and you too. I’d help you if I could, but I can’t.”
Harold thought of how Father André had represented her in the warning. Even her friends were wary of her. André had called her “a force of righteousness.” Harold felt he’d somehow already given himself away. She had learned something about him, likely even more than he could guess.