by Michael Helm
Through his window, the world was no fuller or subtler, just a few dead colours and hesitant shades, a little pool of sky on the pavement, the usual distant textured planes.
Before leaving his office he called Kim’s detective and left her a message. He heard himself telling her about Rosemary and her dangerous illegals. He heard himself giving up the name, and then the phone number, and he felt a little dirty, a little sick, true to himself.
Then he invented another lie. He said he’d been hearing a rumour. “Some women have gone missing unaccountably, leaving everything they have. No names yet, but I keep hearing about an Eritrean, a Kurd, and a Russian. Then there’s the dead girl found in the dumpster, who might be mestizo, it seems from the composite sketch. I’m not saying Kim is necessarily connected, but you can see a pattern. If it can be established that these missing women and the dead girl came through GROUND, then Kim is enfigured into this pattern.” It was a strange way to put it – he wished another had come to him. This wasn’t a composition problem. “So there might be reason to put more resources into this case.”
He sounded strange, even to himself, and he hung up without saying goodbye.
Of course there was a pattern. Men who did what her attacker had done did it again and again. It was all of the violent rhythm of history. There had always been those who would dance to it. Some of them made money from movies and books, exploiting pain they pretended to imagine. Harold thanked god that Kim’s name wasn’t out there for others to use. If anyone ever hurt her again, he didn’t have it in himself not to hurt them back. Of course he didn’t. It was no failing. Only pacifist fools thought there were no uses for direct measures. When people identified with groups and formed hatreds for other groups, then yes, violence only led to more thoughtless violence. But on the scale of one and one, a violent act could be expressed and contained. The sins of her father had been visited upon her, and it fell on him to set things right. He imagined coming upon Kim’s attacker in a quiet, empty side street, and shooting him once in the belly, standing over him and explaining who he was and what he was redressing, and when he was satisfied that the man understood, administering the coup de grace. The great thinkers and artists would have you believe there’d be consequences to your soul for such an act. But who among them had had their daughter nearly raped and murdered? Who could even truly imagine it? His soul would not be imperilled. His soul would be just fine.
He’d forgotten to tell the detective that there were likely more victims among the illegals, that the killer was preying on women who, if they survived, couldn’t go to the police. As would be the case if Kim’s attacker was linked to the rejects. It seemed ever more obvious that she might have been targeted through the office itself.
Where to put his thoughts? He looked out at the common, students crossing in all directions. Transit from the Latin transitus. To go across or pass over. His scores were lowering lately in these little word-recall tests. The day he failed one, he’d have to quit his job, he supposed, or at least stop drinking. Or see a specialist. Maybe the memory deficits had nothing to do with age. He wasn’t hypochondriacal in the least but there was the possibility that a sinister cause might be masked by a benign false one. For a few lethal months, the doctors had thought Marian was suffering from an incipient hernia. Then she wasn’t.
Epiphanies were just momentary failures in the seeming of things.
In the evenings, after Donald cleared the dinner dishes and went to his study, she and Marian would stay at the table and talk. They drank and Marian told of her lawyering days as an associate and the succession of unlikely characters she’d helped to defend. In her mother’s laughter Kim heard something of the formidable woman she’d been. These were years she’d never talked about with Donald, the early Harold years, full of travels and parties, telepathic witnesses and one-eyed defendants with one-eyed dogs. In the courtroom or out of it, Marian had always been able to argue down charges with style. She could still perform, her dramatic instincts intact, and she came alive now as if in defiance of the cancer and the feeling she would soon disappear. One night she told Kim, “You’re the only audience I care about,” and Kim didn’t know what to say. Seven hours later she found Marian sitting in the dark living room in her emerald nightgown. She switched on the table lamp and her mother turned and looked through her without recognition. Kim said nothing, helped her to her feet and back to bed.
Some days were blind and she didn’t want to write. Then the best she could do was read novels and feel herself manipulated for her own pleasure. Nothing predictable. She needed to get lost and feel the author’s presence, some gravity bending the light in her, letting him lead her through. Sometimes she cried at the endings like a sap, not always for the characters but because her trust had been rewarded.
And then, strengthened, she sat down again at the small desk in her bedroom and returned to work. She alternated between the two stories, writing her own, then R’s, knowing their vectors would meet somewhere up ahead. The writing couldn’t yet move her past fear, but added to it a hopefulness or faith that came in the act of braving her interiors page to page. She was putting herself back together. Time alone would not be enough to heal her.
One afternoon storms moved in and lightning was all around. She stopped writing and for just a moment had the urge to go outside and climb into the tall elm and let happen whatever would happen. The thought was not idle, not a girl’s fanciful urge, but when she opened the door, and only then, she remembered Marian. She found her looking out the front-room window. In the rain and thunder Kim entered unheard and Marian stood, still thinking she was alone, with her arms crossed, her palms on her elbows, and the heels of her floral slippers slightly off the ground, as if she, too, had the need to lift up into the whirl.
Kim said, “The sky’s gone green” just as another bolt sounded over them.
Marian hadn’t heard her and hadn’t flinched at the booming, but stood as before, so like a ghost that Kim suddenly didn’t want to be seen and she turned and everything in the house was wrong, out of time. She went back to her room and closed the door. Even when the storm finally passed, the wrongness held in the appearance of things, every surface slightly mis-coloured, as if the portending green had fallen with the sky and suffused all that was with all that would be.
Rosemary was at her old manual typewriter, composing her third letter of the evening, this one to her sister in despair. Her sister was always in despair. Sammy had come to depend on it as the tenor of their mutual lives, both sprung from the same chaos. Last year Rosemary had told her that there was one path to freedom (“and it’s not to ‘get religion,’ as you put it, but to know God”), and that although Sammy had shown strength in accepting professional help, she must surely see by now that doctors and drugs weren’t really restorative. “Psychiatrists seem to hold out the illusion that they can unknot us like string,” she wrote. “But we’re not knotted like string. We’re knotted like trees.” Sammy had rejected all such characterizations of her distress, because part of her distress involved a fear of diagnosis, figurative or medical. She simply didn’t want to know her afflictions, or anyone’s. She talked about her life as a “mess” and her “head” as “scrambled,” and she lived in a world of dire omens. She was always leaving movies and putting down novels the moment a character developed a cough or suffered a dizzy spell. Her last letter contained the hopeful aside that she was enjoying Howards End and had pushed on through the rough patches (“Mrs. Wilcox does get sick and die, but in Forster’s tasteful old-fashioned way, he doesn’t specify the illness and doesn’t really address it at all and she’s dead within pages”).
The letter was not coming together. They were never easy, or newsy. Rosemary was not a writer of newsy letters. She wanted things to matter, to have meaning and force. And Sammy, who had no meaning in her life, who had not been granted peace or physical beauty, who had none of the certitude that Rosemary had found in God’s dictate, expected as much from her. And
so she wrote slowly, composing a structure of words, a consoling architecture built line by line, each one struck once, hard and clean. Sammy always played the tough case, dismissive of her sister’s God, and Rosemary had learned not to mention Him anymore. And so it was important that she write prayerfully.
But tonight she was self-conscious. Sometimes her own need for Sammy, her doubt that her sister would ever be free of her dread, made her write with too much intention. She insisted on the reality of saving wonders. She wrote of using pain for wisdom, and the selfless goodness of others for hope; of gaining purchase on her days, and gathering strength to climb out of what Father André called “the morass of pointless anxiety” – but her own language was flat. There was nothing real in it, and certainly nothing of God. You couldn’t sit around and wait for inspiration any more than the world could. You had to summon it. Some nights, though, it turned out you hadn’t prepared yourself, and the words weren’t granted. Those were the nights for the Guinness and Bach.
There wasn’t anything in the letter about fire and risk or any of the battle metaphors she herself lived by. Rosemary was a soldier. She knew the enemy. She wanted to tell Sammy about sly King David, a killer and poet. The great faiths were founded upon blood sacrifice, but she certainly couldn’t tell her sister that.
She tried to say something about prayer and doubt. In one of his sermons last winter – there had been ten or eleven people that night, most who’d come in from the cold, some of them drunk, but a better than average turnout – Father André had pointed out that the word “precarious” comes from the same root as “prayer.” She’d made a note at the time to save this connection for Sammy. Now she wrote, “Anyone who’s really awake (many aren’t) lives in doubt. But if they’re asked the right way of the right power, prayers are often answered. I know this is true. Please imagine what it means to me to know this.”
The conditions were not best for prayer lately. Her A key was sticking. She got her repairs and supplies from an old man who barely had space left for himself in an apartment crammed with wheels and hammers, platens and screws, lettered keys. The place smelled of fresh inky ribbons and grease. His name was Mr. Stubbs. She couldn’t see him in there without carrying around the picture of the place for the whole day, this man trying to make repairs in the world he’d made of his mind. When she’d invited him to come to the church, he’d said nothing. He only ever talked about typewriters.
And lately the television made its assaults from the basement all evening. Rodrigo watched with his finger on the mute button, trying to anticipate every shout and siren, but it was hopeless. It seemed that whenever Rosemary passed by the screen with a basket of laundry there was brain matter on a wall or a bullet hole in a dead woman’s naked chest. She assumed these were the American shows that were messing up the jury pools down there. Rodrigo just called them “murder shows.” He’d seen his first one at sixteen. It might not have seemed to him like make-believe.
Tonight he was in the living room, standing at the front window, looking for Luis like a boy for an older brother. He could simply stare for twenty or thirty minutes at a time, with no book or phone in hand. “The patience of peasants,” as an idiot former colleague had called it. A patience often mistaken for blankness. But it was hardly empty. Not in Rodrigo’s case. She’d seen this sort of near-violent calm before. Rosemary had been there the day of his Review Board hearing, on one of the tips she got from lawyers sympathetic with her goals. Rodrigo had looked on neutrally as the evidence was presented until, through a translator, his lawyer explained that the details of the drug soldiers’ activities, which Rodrigo had acknowledged were accurate, had been put forward not in defence of his claim, but rather against it. The horrors that had sent him running north in the first place now revisited him in the accusation that he was an actor in these atrocities, and he began to fall apart. His face didn’t change, it abandoned him. He had had to be wrestled from the hearing room.
“I’m having a drink,” she announced. “Would you like one?”
“No, thank you.” He turned and looked at her briefly with his thin, hollowed gaze, then turned back and said suddenly, “There is someone watching us.”
He moved away from the window. She walked into the room and stood still.
“A man, in the park. I thought there was a man in the shadow and then when I looked again I saw him moving to the tree.”
She went forward to the window.
“To the right of the bench. Behind the tree, to the right.”
She saw nothing. Either the man had concealed himself or he was gone. Or he’d been imagined. There was a point at which sensible paranoia crossed into illness – she looked for it constantly in herself and her boarders – and this may have been an early warning, she supposed. Whomever Rodrigo had been before he came to Canada, it was Canada that had forced him to imagine himself as a killer. He didn’t have to imagine that he was a hunted one.
He retreated to the basement.
There was a movement beyond the tree. A man walking away? The tree obscured him almost perfectly. He was meaningless, this stranger, or else something was wrong and there was nothing she could do about it. And then, suddenly, there he was, just a man lost in thought, waiting patiently for his terrier to piss.
She sipped her stout and contemplated her slight dread of Luis’s arrival. He always made a show of arriving. A sustained “hellooo” and a broad smile, a prepared comment on the beauty of her home or the food she’d dropped off. His forced manner saddened her each time. She could hear any number of horror stories and witness killing judgments and actual family-splitting removals, she could feel whole lost lives, but it was the way a new Canadian came through a door that got to her. Just once she’d like him to arrive as a solemn presence, or as whomever he was in the lonely dark.
He knocked his four knocks – tat-tat, tat-tat – and she opened the door. He was wearing a dark red windbreaker over jeans, and cheap canvas runners, as if he’d just been sailing. His looks were often out of place. He’d once appeared in cheap cowboy boots and a western shirt. And tonight he had a prop. He handed her a batch of mondongo, corn soup with tripe. He held out a plastic bowl and she took it.
“Thank Teresa for me.”
“You should hide it from Rodrigo.” There was the smile.
He stood in the entranceway. If she invited him to come in or sit down, he’d make his excuse – he and Rodrigo were expected somewhere, they were already late – and so she didn’t invite him, but turned and walked into the kitchen and put the bowl in the fridge. Then she called down to Rodrigo.
He came up and she told him the man had been no one, walking his dog.
“He thought he saw a man in the park,” Rosemary explained to Luis. “He did see one. But it was okay.”
Luis hadn’t moved. As if his shoes were muddy.
“Maybe the man out there, he’s in love with you, Rosemary. He comes with his dog to sing at your window.”
He put his hand on his heart and looked up at the ceiling with a face in sweet pain and sang “Oh, my love, Rosemaryyy” and then laughed at himself. Or at her. She wasn’t sure.
Rodrigo appeared and went straight to the door. He and Luis never greeted one another. It lent to the impression they were up to something on these nights. Hiding things from her. On the nights they dressed like this, presumably they weren’t heading for work but trying to find Rodrigo a woman. There was a dance club the Colombians favoured. She didn’t want to know the details.
“Should we leave in the back?” Rodrigo asked. It was only a courtesy to her, to show he was cautious.
“No. It’s fine”
“The man hides in the park until we leave,” said Luis. “Then he comes to your door with a dog and flowers. He steals them from the park maybe.”
“Okay, enough,” she said. “You two keep out of trouble. If you get arrested, Rodrigo, no one can help you.”
He was busy tying his shoes.
“Did you hear Ro
semary?” Luis asked.
“Yes.” He stood. “Yes. No troubles.”
She had explained the rules when he moved in. He must always have his false ID. He could never be in trouble. He could never be standing nearby it. He could not defend a friend. He could never drive a car. He must always have cash for a subway or taxi. If he was sick or injured, he was to go to this hospital and not that one. He must always know his false name and his story and her address and number. No friends or lovers could ever know his real story, not even Luis, though he likely already did. If he was in trouble, he was to go to the church, not to anyone’s home.
Luis left first. Rodrigo paused as he was about to leave, and then turned and approached her. To her astonishment, he embraced her. She hugged him uncertainly, on delay, her head laid against his chest. They had never touched, not once, and now he held her like a grown son. He said nothing and didn’t meet her eyes, then left. She went to the window and watched the men walk away.
When her Guinness was gone, Rosemary returned to her letter and found herself writing with new fluency. She told Sammy that despair only proved a depth of heart and a willingness to be open to loss, and that sorrow and loss were not to be feared but accepted, “and then we should put them up on our bedroom shelves like those hippos you used to collect – remember Mr. Boy? – and look at them now and then. But Sammy, you need to celebrate all your feelings, and when you do, you’ll find so much to be happy about, there’ll be victories, new ones and old ones rediscovered. You can’t celebrate triumphs without also accepting loss, or put away your losses without the courage to shout out at your triumphs. And when you least expect it, between the wins and losses, in the calm, you’ll see that everything, all of it, is truly amazing.”
She didn’t want to end there but suddenly she remembered herself, the one who’d received the embrace. She so seldom had reason to think of her physical self. There was little joy to be taken in it, not anymore. Her response hadn’t been warm and pure, but complicated and willed. And yet a young man had put his arms around her and either she dismissed the moment and tried to forget it or she took her own advice.