Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  In the group, spread out on the grass inside a rectangle of wildflowers, Kim knew only Sadaf, Namjeh, and Marlene from GROUND. The others were of varying ages and connections. Maybe four were Canadian-born. Kim sat by the portable grill, watching three of them play Frisbee. Two men and a woman in their thirties, all could have been Iranian, terrible players who delighted in their terribleness even as they tried to get it right. Soon they were joined by a young law student who played easily, at half speed without seeming so. He received the disc and threw it all in one motion, with no visible effort. He was thin and strong, the body of a rock climber. Watching him was so far the best part of her day.

  The others were managing simultaneous conversations. Namjeh was talking to a pale woman in a floral skirt who said she’d grown up in Manitoba. Namjeh then spoke of her own home province on the Caspian Sea, born into Persian and Turkish, the dialects of Azari and Gilaki. Kim tried to picture a map with the Caspian Sea but it was blank.

  To all appearances Marlene was smiling at the lake. Kim could not bring herself to be angry at her for having told Sadaf whatever she had. As always, she had hugged Kim in greeting and said “Dear,” nothing more. A motherly hug, not appreciably different than usual. Kim caught her staring once but otherwise Marlene had just given her space, which is how she would have put it. She advised her staff about giving clients space, especially when the news was bad. Kim couldn’t escape the sense that Marlene felt she had now crossed to the other side and so made them all vulnerable. There was a degree of magical thinking involved in helping those in trouble, as if it staved off troubles of your own. The fact of her must have shaken the woman.

  The downtown sat still, boats tacking by.

  “They figure about fifty million unknown species in the oceans,” someone said. “Think about it.”

  At dark now people began to trail away in ones and twos, people she would likely never see again. Marlene squeezed her arm in farewell and said GROUND would always have a place for her. As the others began to leave, Sadaf and Namjeh asked Kim to join them for a walk to the south side of the island. They passed cottages and small homes with their prized reverse angles on the downtown, old factories across the water to the east, the lights along the Spit, and took a path through thick, untended growth that came out on a small beach. They stood in the sand looking west at the lights at the far end of the lake. When Sadaf began speaking in Persian, Kim assumed it was to Namjeh, but on delay Namjeh started up in English, translating, and the two languages together, one coming forth in the lull of the other, though directed at Kim, seemed sprung from some third language more ancient even than the lake lapping at the shore.

  “I can’t tell you how to live. But no one can live without hope. If you don’t know this hope, Kim, you must still believe in it. For me, when I was in prison, every day I would choose a point far ahead. In the distance I imagined. I still do this. The point might be a light, like those across the water, and I can find it anywhere in my thoughts, by day or night, with an instrument of my own making, like an instrument for sailors – she means a sextant – a sextant in the mind. It guides me. It corrects my fears and the deceptions of nonsense and beautiful appearances. What is the instrument in us? You know it already. It is the body, yes. You say you want your body back, it is this point far ahead that you need to find. I must always imagine my way into the next day, the new day. I must never just find myself there. So choose the point and begin towards it. And know that you too are a point on the horizon for your past selves. You are not escaping them but leading them. Soon you are all in a new world.”

  The women stopped talking, one and then the other. It was Kim’s turn to step into the silence but she said nothing. Her faith at the moment was in Sadaf sounding so unlike herself in her own language – on the other side of sufferings and fears, she went on forever, this woman – and the thought that, however foreign-sounding was the sense she’d expressed, there was no simpler, no other way of saying it.

  Namjeh had walked off down the shore in the dark.

  “What was your point of hope, Sadaf?”

  Sadaf hugged herself and turned to Kim.

  “It was a person, of course. The most precious one.”

  The morning light filtered grainy and diffused through the early haze and the Japanese rice-paper screens that Harold used on the west-side windows in lieu of blinds. He went across the room and adjusted them to admit a view of the opposing high-rise. Across from him was the woman he’d named the Lady of Instruments. She sat as always working at a drafting table with a TV on behind her. He had watched her a few times and once had even identified the channel and had gone across the room and turned on the television to the same program so they could each have their backs to the same surface of reassurances resting deep in the defiles of the morning time slots. She liked educational programming, this Lady. And cooking shows, cosmetics. One morning a talk-show guest said, “Women want personal relevance,” and she got up from her table and turned it off. That was when she’d noticed him. Walking back from the TV, she’d stopped short, as if having found an intruder, which of course she had. She didn’t look long before dropping the blinds. He supposed he wasn’t visible to her now, standing farther inside. Every so often the dark hair fell to her left shoulder and she absently replaced it behind her ear to keep the shadows from her paper.

  He was not himself so adept at technologies, and had arranged to spend two hours that afternoon with a kid named Drew, learning the digital arts as part of his course prep. He pictured himself sitting there, being tutored by a pimply undergrad, feeling like a Dalmatian staring at a gramophone. He’d collected images from his books and research, postcards bought in Mexico City markets, racist cartoons from old newspapers, stylized maps with mountain peaks and schools of fish drawn into the rivers, church propaganda, anonymous lampoons. The best sequence wasn’t necessarily chronological, he decided. Better to counter the headlong linearity of the history with a frame story, and then a few short thematic digressions balanced at intervals in the lecture. Could the new breeds understand temporal frames? Unless a screen lit up somewhere in the lecture hall, they barely knew where to look. The world they were inheriting wasn’t his, it was theirs. But they were making it up as they went along. He hoped they’d get lucky, but chances were that in time they’d be trembling at the thunder, and the great fires would take them, like the rest.

  The thirty-five-minute walk to his office lately was full of self-rebuke. By his count, along the route were six posters of the dumpster girl, colour photocopies of the approximated face that stabbed him at each passing. The skin was orange, which meant light brown. The features were wide, which meant unpronounced. Police-sketch faces of the missing so often looked the same, like someone dug up from a peat bog, half-familiar, not exactly seen but glimpsed. Yet all the bad art only made this one more itself somehow. Just the picture and the end of her story. No one had yet stepped up to say the name.

  The nose was without distinction, meant not to throw anyone off. They would have to be guessing, of course – the girl’s face had been torn – but the sketched nose turned out to be exactly that of Celina Shey. How well he remembered her face, one he hadn’t seen in thirty-some years. It had found him at a vulnerable moment, full of reflection and regret. The onset of the late period.

  At lunch he sat on the patio of the Faculty Club and picked up his cell messages. Marian called with the opinion that Kim was doing well. “Last night we even jousted a little. Whenever you came up in conversation, we took turns defending you. The defender always lost, of course.” Then Kim called to cancel their plans to see a Spanish film that night at the Cinematheque. She gave no reason, but no doubt the reason was her reluctance to be out in the city at night. Or maybe it was the film. Or she wasn’t up to fending off more of his questions and theories. They were overtaking him. He knew it but couldn’t stop his thoughts. Father André had described a soul in a state of turbulence and then despair, and seeing it – having the knowl
edge, the privileged perspective – should have saved him. But it wouldn’t. He could feel that it wouldn’t.

  He’d once tried to compliment Kim with the word “undaughterly,” but she’d taken it as a criticism. Now she was scared of the dark, and very much his little girl.

  On his third glass of a very good Alsatian Pinot Gris he called 411 and got Rosemary’s number.

  “It’s Harold Lystrander. I wonder if you might like to meet again.”

  The briefest pause.

  “I don’t know, Harold. I don’t have anything more to tell you.”

  Her voice echoed coldly, as if he’d caught her in the church.

  “I just don’t want to leave things as we left them. I’d be civil. We could think of it as a social get-together.”

  “Social.”

  “It was interesting, our conversation at lunch.”

  “You mean you don’t understand me and it bothers you.”

  “Let’s say I don’t understand and I’d like to.”

  “Well. Honestly.”

  “Think about it, if you like. Call me back.”

  She had faith, which meant she had imagination. Both would work in his favour.

  “I’ll tell you now. I don’t think it’s a good idea. So I’m sorry but I’ll have to say no.”

  The ambiguity in the invitation should have precluded an outright rejection.

  “I guess I shouldn’t have called it social.”

  “Good luck, Harold.”

  Before him a thin young man in a grey summer suit sprang from his table and to the delight of his colleagues began to dance. He failed again and again to step on a whirling newspaper page in a mulefoot jig with the vortex, a moment of inspired theatre, until the page blew away and Harold saw it drift by and glimpsed the day’s tabloid Sunshine Girl in her yellow bikini and like that found himself up against an early memory of bikini girls, from a time of wakeful silences in rooms with his father, of dirty magazines curled into hollow bedposts. He’d been, what, eight years old, making his dad not forty, a widower with his boy in rented rooms across the West. The summer when Harold was old enough to run fast they boosted themselves into boxcars or onto flatbeds to ride hidden in the wide open, each time a great thrill that died fast. His father’s one talent was concealment. He could find a dozen places to hide cash in a phone booth, saw every room as a scheme of little hideaways. He always showed Harold where to find the clip of bills. In case of emergency. In case of drunken accident or absence. His boyhood subsistence was now a mystery. It seemed they’d lived on jerky sticks and the obscurity of their intentions.

  Riding in a boxcar like true itinerants or thieves with the door cracked open for light to read a book about a kid with a dog. They hopped off when the train paused for switching on the outskirts of a rail yard and walked into downtown wherever, Leduc, Prince George, from the tracks side of town.

  Concealment and deception were skills, even talents. His father hid his poverty from others, Harold hid his shame from his father. Later he hid his origins from girlfriends and professors. But deception was in him, there was no sweating it out through any amount of climbing through classes or ranks.

  He had it in him, and he had an eye for it in others. She hadn’t simply rejected him. Rosemary was hiding something.

  Drew turned out to be a young woman, chirpy and eager to help, and converting and training Luddites was her “lately fulltime job.” He woke up his computer and got out the images he wanted to use. The idea was to spring this on the students after he’d discussed church and state powers, the politique tradition, and the definitions of orthodoxies and heresies. What they always looked forward to – he’d offered this course in alternating years for a decade – was the lecture on physical coercion. They wanted to know about torture, most of them, the Canadian-born ones, and he used their interest to digress into a talk on popular understandings of the Inquisition, then and now. The idea was to make them feel a part of a centuries-old fascination that drove not only the conflicts between natives and Europeans, Catholic and Protestant regimes, and the major faiths of the old world, but popular art from the thirteenth century to Monty Python.

  Connie had TA’d this course for him once. After graduating she came to a few lectures, and afterwards they’d meet for a tour of the galleries, arguing over every painting, photo, light box, and film. Those afternoons had been all about desire. It sounded trite, but lovers were like artists, he thought. Desire itself was fundamentally mimetic. It called for an answer. As an act of seeing done by hand, a painting required a virtuosity that he wouldn’t claim for himself as a lover, but he did know something of the ways in which the sexual act used to sharpen his perceptions and allow him to forget about the male body in its decades-long deceleration. So it was to be expected, then, that a sexual loneliness, such as he’d fallen into, was attended by a blurring in his apprehension of things, and without the corrective of intimate companionship and the meditative afterstate, he experienced a growing hunger, not only for sex but for something new. He missed his time with Connie at the galleries, standing before some empty scene or still life, some mundane subject. But now, more and more by the hour, he wanted something dramatic, lurid, sensational, whatever it was that the massive fact of the ordinary was held against.

  Drew scanned for him three maps of the Americas, made with the early arts of projection, capturing something of the European view of the Americas and their natives. She worked with him on cropping the images to fit them together. She provided a stapled yellow information sheet for him to follow as she stroked and cursored through the commands with her precise fingers. In another time she’d have been a musician, he thought. Maybe she was in this time. High on her left wrist, peeking out from the sleeves of her red brocade tunic, was the lower border of what looked to be a riotous green and black tattoo that extended around her arm. Whenever he saw these things he worried again that Kim might show up one day with Che Guevara gazing up from her neck or bicep. Who knew what she had on her rear end? But there was an incoherence in the surfaces of these young people that he’d given up trying to understand. They were full of confidence and ink. Given the tattoos and her skill at manipulating his images, he wondered if Drew was only a kind of stage name.

  She wasn’t much of an instructor, it turned out. She moved too quickly, used terms he had no hope of knowing, made no concessions for his stated inability to follow her from window to window, and anticipated the wrong questions. Before long he realized he would just have to let her set it all up, and then make sure he understood how to start the engine and put it in gear. But when they moved from maps to documents to the first drawings of torture wheels and dismemberments, she evinced a sudden distress, and began to fumble with the keys, even though she was looking down at them now more than at the screen, making mistakes and correcting them without comment. He told her that at this point in the lecture he wanted to establish the thematic elements of images of suffering in Western art, from the crucifixion, to Goya, to the World War I sketching of Otto Dix. Central to his lecture was Titian’s The Flaying of Maryssa in that it allowed him to talk about the attempt to resolve Thinking, Feeling, and Will in a contemplation of suffering.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t need to get it.”

  “But it’s upset you. It’s easier to accept if we understand it conceptually.”

  “Then it’s probably better not to know much about it. Whoever painted this –”

  “Titian.”

  “Whatever. He probably didn’t do it just to get us all talking.”

  She scanned the image and saved it for him.

  It came up onscreen, and he looked at it as she had, as if for the first time. He could think of nothing to say, and then he began to weep.

  In his office, with the door closed, he wondered at himself.

  There was something powerfully distilled in static images, even when they lied, as if in meeting them we remember something, though the photo is of strangers in a stra
nge place, or the painting is from centuries ago. But then memory is made of stop time. Likeness isn’t time-bound.

  Everything that mattered, mattered personally. If we were troubled by the pain, everywhere and through time, we’d all be on the floor, fetal, dying of empathy. The perfect world we might aspire to, he decided, would be locked in perfect memory and agony. Only the worst would survive it.

  He would not. But then no one was in danger of finding themselves in a perfect world. No doubt he would be done in, as so many were, by the unpursued questions in his life. The particular agony at his end might turn out to be of regret, or self-loathing. If he got lucky, maybe he’d just die suddenly, an old man full of some small satisfaction at the events of his morning, struck down by his heart or a bakery van. He pictured himself lying in a street. It’s winter, but a sunny day, not too cold. The police come and perform their duties around the space. He lies in a little heap, then is turned over, confirmed dead. For a second, before he’s covered, before the ambulance comes, he is face up, eyes half-open to the sky, and then rising up out of him, not his soul but the questions he’s carried the longest, scattered into the world to find other matter, leaving him hollow, light, and alone.

  He emailed Drew. He made no mention of his breakdown, but thanked her for her help. “And I think you’re right that Titian didn’t want to get us all talking about what he’d made, though he did want each of us, alone, to think about it. I’m very sorry that the images disturbed you. It’s a good sign for you, at least, that you’re capable of being shocked. Hang on to that. Good luck, Drew.” Then he sent a note to her superiors at Technical Services, putting in a good word for her, even for her instructional abilities. He lied on her behalf. She had inspired the lie, the good words, and he had no trouble finding them.