Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  “I know perfectly well,” Harold said, “that if you were to suspect someone, you’d want proof. You could hardly risk your whole operation without it. And so if there’s anyone, you can tell me, and I’ll arrange things with the police so that you and your people will be protected.”

  “I’m not running a resistance movement. There isn’t a ‘whole operation.’ I know it’s very hard to accept the randomness of violence. We’d rather that the world made sense somehow, and that’s what you’re trying to come up with. Sense. Meaning. Sometimes, Harold, there is no meaning.”

  “I disagree. I think we just have to look harder and smarter, and that’s what I’m trying to do. And I think you can help me.”

  “You aren’t taking me at my word.”

  “And you won’t tell me why you harbour murderers and rapists.”

  Her eyes widened on him. He’d set something in motion now. She recognized a certainty as blind as her own. Until this moment Harold wasn’t sure he believed his theory, that the attacker might have come from Rosemary’s particular circle of the underground, where she perhaps had met him, or knew others who had. Even if he was wrong, there was no reason she shouldn’t ask around.

  “You don’t know my work. And you have a lurid imagination.”

  When had he ever posed a real threat to anyone? The power, his demonstration of it in blunt speech, her response to it, made him a little high, and then a little nauseated.

  Lunch was difficult but they stayed with it. She told him about her job in the public library system; he described a couple of courses he liked to teach. They said goodbye without much warmth.

  On the long walk home, he stopped to sit on a park bench and watch dogs run and wrestle around their dutiful owners, who seemed transfixed by them. Animals move us to wonder, Harold thought, because their seeming and their being are the same, while we live in falseness, from our fashionable shoetops to our mimicking tongues. The best we can hope for is that some brilliant artifice busts us back to the real, and not a bullet or bad luck. He considered taking in the new Matisse exhibit at the AGO. He normally made an outing of his gallery visits but today thought he might just follow his impulse. As if anyone paid attention to the routines of a man like him.

  He sat there. A cloud shaped like Ecuador was stalled over the sun. Kim had been harmed. He was getting old and labile.

  Not Matisse. Pissarro. The one with a little less mystery, the one with the conquistador’s name.

  A small mutt in chase of a tennis ball came to a skidding stop in front of him as the ball rolled under the bench. The dog thought Harold was part of the game, apparently. It looked at him with its dumb, cocked head, and when the moment was held, it spoke an aggrieved yelp. Do you long to be understood? Harold thought.

  He picked up the ball and tossed it feebly back in the direction of the group. The dog took off running and caught it on the first bounce.

  One of the owners waved to him.

  The surgeon examined his work and told her she was healing well. She thanked him, as if for a compliment. He was quick, senior. He would die on his feet. The news that she’d not been sleeping well lately seemed to disappoint him but he said nothing. She said she would ask her GP for another round of sleeping pills.

  “Are you taking painkillers?”

  “Not anymore. But it hurts sometimes. It’s one of the things that keeps me awake.”

  “Think of the pain as a sign of healing.”

  “But it’s not in this case, is it? It’s just my leg telling me it’s torn to shit.”

  “I see torn to shit a lot and this isn’t it.”

  He had her walk across the room in her underwear and medigown. It didn’t occur to him apparently that the problems this presented might not be physical. She walked the way she walked, not limping but with slightly foreshortened steps. She did a slow-motion runway turn and walked back.

  He said her step was slightly foreshortened, and told her she’d be better off without the sleeping pills for a while, as if the one gave him a read on the other.

  That evening she allowed herself to be summoned to a hotel rooftop bar to see her lapsed friend Shenny. They’d met as under-grads and moved to New York at the same time, sharing a dark apartment at 90th and Broadway for two years while Shenny went to film school and Kim mostly failed to attend graduate classes. After the attack Kim refused visits, but because Shenny had found the sublets for her apartment, whether or not they were friends anymore, Kim owed her the get-together.

  Kim arrived first and sat looking down at the museum where she used to work, thinking about her move home. It had seemed a good idea at first but now that it was upon her she had doubts, afraid to be so full of need while living with her mother, so needy herself. They’d each put on their best selves, and little by little, it would wear them out. A flecked thought, invisible when still.

  Shenny emerged from the door into the slanted light, tall, Nordic, though she wasn’t, talking on her phone, out of cadence with whatever it was supposed to mean, this reunion. Kim stood, they hugged. Soon they had fifteen-dollar glasses of wine before them and Shenny was telling Kim to order something, dinner was on her, and she didn’t stop talking, about boyfriends, about work, their undergrad days together, as if staving off any mention of the obvious, any expression of concern, until the food arrived and she looked down at her salmon salad and pronounced it ugly.

  “Ugliness is the mother of deception. Ask me how so?”

  “How are you, Shenny?”

  “I produced a nature show all last year and I’ve retained nothing but the bluegill sunfish. During mating, the less attractive of the male sunfish hang around the breeding site pretending to be females. They’re very good at this, the ugly ones. They fool both sexes, and then, when a real female dumps her eggs in a nest, the ugly sunfish moves in fast to shoot off all the ugly little gametes he can.”

  “Imposture is a pattern in nature,” said Kim. “It’s probably worth paying attention to.”

  “I’ll pay attention to fish when they’re smart enough to be using me as an analogy. We made the scale of sentience. What have they ever made that I rate so low on?”

  Over the next twenty minutes Shenny’s phone would not stop ringing. She answered it every time. Kim gathered that the callers wanted something from her, work in fact, and the air was full of false notes. Above the city, a few small ink-bordered clouds diffused the late-evening light. Something in the line of the distant rooftops spoke to a peregrine heart. It was getting late. Kim couldn’t go home in the dark.

  Finally Shenny made a show of turning off her phone.

  “These people calling. They all want this job I’m hereby offering you. I’m working on a history show. We need someone to write commentary for the footage.”

  It had never been clear to either of them how they became friends. Shenny had always embraced conventional ideas of success. She’d had several boyfriends of the kind that would have been lured by her money or early ascendance, and Shenny herself admitted as much. She’d once described her composition of features as “slightly unpretty.” Kim used to remember the comment a little too readily at times.

  “The writing comes after the footage?”

  “It’s the footage people want. Someone edits the images, keeps it balanced – for every tracer bullet there’s a naked thigh belonging to a Rockette or a fruit festival queen. We balance bullets and thighs. It’s practically mathematical. You’re given a cut of the images and a text explaining them. You write the voice-over. The tones are grave to chirpy.”

  “Why doesn’t the person who writes the notes just write the voice-over?”

  “Because she’s a post-literate, put-upon producer. Who can’t help alliterating. Who’s only good for captions. You work at home. We deliver the material, you courier it back. It won’t take long, maybe two days a week. And you negotiate the salary with me. It’s not much but it’s more than you used to get in your little guard’s uniform, I bet.”

 
“Thanks, but I don’t know.”

  She extracted a DVD from her purse and gave it to Kim.

  “This is perfect for you. This pays you to be who you are, a writer who knows history. Take a look and see what you think. Then tell me how much you want. We can agree to boost your credit and salary in a few weeks. You’re off at least three days out of five. So you can go back to helping the illiterate foreigners or whatever you have in mind.”

  Kim searched her friend’s face, as if they might once have known one another. If one of them didn’t leave soon, their faces would fall apart.

  “I don’t know how to talk to you about what happened, Kim. I don’t have a clue what to say.”

  On the way to her apartment she caught a streetcar and sat by the open window. She’d stayed out too late. The lights were coming up all around. People on café patios, an old man talking to a vendor of, what, something, wearing an apron. There was music from a window, going by. It sounded Cuban but the lyrics were French. Likely West African, she thought, and simply placing the sound seemed to open her to the next, the pock of old men playing bocce in a park. The streetcar passed the length of a wrought-iron fence that separated the grass from an upsloping alley that ran between rows of small garages. There were kids with hockey sticks and a tennis ball that seemed to dance along the halberds.

  Somewhere she experienced that moment of delayed awareness that felt familiar but unspecific. Because it was there all at once, the city, she couldn’t say exactly when it came to her that she was being followed. She told herself her mind wasn’t strong enough to trust, but it was as if the time with Shenny, to whom silence was a threat, had awoken a peril. The feeling didn’t attach to any one person, or rather it did, at times, on the walk, on the streetcar, but not to the same person. It was like in a movie when the tail is handed from one follower to the next. The woman in dark glasses to the man with the tight black beard. Now there was a beautiful young man in the back of the streetcar who looked Indian or Pakistani. She’d like to have known whom they thought they were following. She’d like to ask them what they knew, what they saw.

  When she turned and pretended to look out the back window, the young man looked right at her and she was stricken. She looked down at her hands, she was shaking. The car stopped for a group of teenagers trying to get on two by two. She could get off now, if only she could stand, but if she moved she’d scream out and so she held on. She looked out at the street and tried to focus on a scene. From inside the building she was staring at, a man appeared with a corn broom, which he dipped in a bucket of soapy water. He began scrubbing the door and then stopped suddenly and went back inside, so that the performance seemed less sanitizing than superstitious, a propitiating ritual. Every doorway has a life with observable rhythms, and now they were moving again, into rank winds, past small, contended spaces and sad, darkening corners and there were no more little thoughts to hold her.

  She tried to muster awareness and measure threat.

  One stop before hers, the young man got off. He wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans. He lit a cigarette as he walked and didn’t look back at her and the streetcar started up again and passed him and she should have felt free but her body and mind were lagging. She looked back at him, into the gloom. The distance between them was growing, but elastic, as if he might suddenly be here with her again, meaning harm, and she wanted the elastic to break, and finally when he turned down a street and was no longer visible, it broke, she could almost hear it, somewhere inside her.

  She’d been eating off the same plate for a week.

  The message light flashed on the phone in her kitchen. The caller had hung up. Number unavailable.

  She closed the blinds and got ready for bed. She inserted the DVD, opened it. The last century appeared before her in five segments. There were notes from Shenny that explained the usual method for writing scripts. The images would be tagged, there would be facts. Kim’s job was simply to make sentences that ran in time with the pictures. She would write the sentences and then speak a mock voice-over to see that they fit the clips. This was the method.

  She was feeling punchy, a little stupid with fatigue. Surely she should sleep before facing the inconsequence and banality of the words she was expected to find, but she hoped a few minutes in the given sequencing of world events would suppress her imagination somewhat and make for softer dreams.

  File number one, “The Modern Age, 1896-1932.”

  Some clips are silent, some retain their original voice-overs and music. She’s seen these images before somewhere. Early flight. Jolson. Mary Pickford – America’s first sweetheart was a Canadian from Toronto. Chaplin, the tramp caught in the works. She begins to speak. She’s making this up as she goes, being fed the lines from her own long-ago wasted hours, as if by some unseen host of the popular century. Against the footage her voice is continuous. She wants to say something new but nothing comes.

  And then she falls quiet before another familiar image. A man hesitates before going up over the ridge of the trench. He knows he will die, surely, but something sends him over. The camera sends him over. He launches up and without gaining level ground slouches back down into the trench, dead. The shot that killed him is invisible. The bullet must be inferred.

  A meeting of leaders –

  She reverses the clip to the dead soldier. There is more to say.

  “What you’re not shown here is a clashing of centuries. The armies had cavalries, they wore breastplates, they communicated on the field by hand signals and flags. And they killed each other with artillery shells, automatic weapons, gas.”

  She will never fit her words over these images so she runs them over Lloyd George and the factories.

  “There were 475 miles of trenches. The scale of death is unimaginable. In one place, at the endless Battle of the Somme, 1,200,000 men died. In 1918 there were 630,000 war widows in France alone.”

  She’s doing this by heart. Donald liked to recite the numbers over dinner and by now they’d nested in her.

  “For many, even those who lived on, this was the end of the world,” she says. She wants to say that after the war more and more of the world was claimed by illusion, sustained with ever more words and pictures, that no one was up to naked silence, but it’s just a feeling she has and she doesn’t know how to say it.

  The reductiveness is compelling, she is a part of it now, or a greater part of it. This insidious softening of the public record.

  “The truth is,” she says, “these images, this voice, they don’t actually record a thing other than our need to keep our distance. We pretend to know where we are by pretending to know what we’ve separated ourselves from.”

  This is not making sense. Here’s another line of work she is clearly not cut out for.

  She tries again, “There are primary processes in play that we’d all rather not think about.”

  She skips ahead to the second-last segment and tries to put the “boiled housewife” of the air-conditioning ad into context. The images and slogans stream from the point where mass production meets mass media as lives change moment to moment. She blames climate control on the decline of porches.

  She says the name Bikini Atoll and stills on an image of two unidentical grass huts on the beach with the hydrogen pillar offshore ruining the scale. She remembers seeing this film when she was little and asking her mother if the cloud was a trick. It’s like a picture left out of her grandmother’s illustrated Bible. The New Testament was all sheep and miracles, but in the Old Testament, the skies were different. Even then she’d had the feeling there were things she wasn’t old enough to know. And what since then? During her years in New York she’d met a Missouri boy in an East Village club who said his great-uncle had flown on the Enola Gay. This came up in their only conversation. He’d been trying to buy her a drink.

  She hates the lack of nuance, the dumb blunt killing impression that the whole century has been staged. Rocket Richard is suspended so that we may have hockey ri
ots in Montreal. Martin Luther King goes to Washington so that he may be shot in Memphis. There’s good footage in the U.S. civil rights years, crowds of screaming crackers, police dogs let loose. A young man thrown up against a black-and-white as Kim anticipates his hand positions on the roof and finds them true. She says nothing. How do we form an expectation about the fall of a hand? It seems every frame predicts the one to follow in the illusion of history’s logical sequence. This is only a feeling she gets from the imperfectly preserved footage, but it’s also the apparent point.

  One thing she notices, despite all the people there are practically no eyes. She finds herself looking for a clear glance into the camera, a moment of contact across the fourth dimension.

  De Gaulle gets carried away.

  The ’68 has an American bias. She says so. “We should ask, where is Prague and the tanks? Where is Paris or Lyon? There should be students and workers in the street.” In ’69 she says, “The moon shot, you might as well close your eyes.”

  She closes her eyes until she thinks she hears the phone and goes into the kitchen near the end of the FLQ crisis but the phone is silent and the War Measures Act is invoked. She makes tea and tries not to worry that she won’t be able to sleep. She feels herself lapsing into fear and fights it. History is running on in her living room, she’s afraid to go back in. It’s like she’s seen a rat along the baseboard.

  She waits for a human shadow to appear in her window but it doesn’t show.

  She eats a tea biscuit. Wets a rag and cleans the counter. Catches a view of herself in the toaster and goes to the bathroom and washes her face. On her right deltoid, the running dog tattoo that she’d gotten last year, the day after an outing with a guy named Liam from the Falls Road part of Belfast. He’d left her mid-date for another woman he was meeting at midnight. The tattoo was a tribute to her mother and the Guatemalan dogs who’d saved her years ago.

  When she finally re-enters there are men capping wells after the first Gulf War. They’re covered in oil, their Jolsoned faces making a kind of loop of the recorded century and the past half-hour of her life. The camera, overhead now, dropping into a lush rainforest. She turns off the DVD player and the green turns to snow.