Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  She tried to feel what had been exchanged, but she was not allowed, and so was left with the wish, unsentimental, that she could have felt more. She wished Sammy could feel differently, and she could feel more.

  She pictured her sister’s troubles lined up on the shelf. Beside them, on the wall, the long-ago school photo of their dead little brother. The sisters lived a thousand miles apart but slept in the same room each night.

  When the letter was finished she sealed it and affixed the stamp, and gathered it with the others and left the house. The mailbox was four blocks away. Along the residential streets, people were out walking, or talking and laughing porch to porch. The streetlights spilling on the cars, and teens heading downtown inside the kind of summer night that inspires music and myths and life-altering mistakes.

  She opened the box and dropped them away and the door closed with a hollow, metal-muffle sound and, for a moment, she didn’t know where she was.

  When she got home there was a phone message from a policewoman. She had a few questions and could they meet. Jesus, said Rosemary. She said it again, the name of the Lord, and again, the curse and prayer of it together that received and held her.

  Donald and Marian were in bed. Kim wrote them a note and left the house. She took her mother’s car, not really sure what she was doing, where she was going, and she drove the tree-lined avenues of her girlhood. She tried to remember who she’d been at fourteen. A girl with three talking parents, living in a pocket of white. She’d loved being in her body, she remembered, a dancer with sore ankles who floated when she walked, a gymnast with bloody chalked palms who could still bend herself expressively and visualize a tumbling run and feel the rhythm of moves and transitions. She missed that. To imagine a thing and then enact it and make it actual and true. It was hard now to know what was true, what to imagine, or how to enact anything. Now she tumbled against her will, out of control. Even a ride through quiet streets shocked her to the bones.

  It was her first night out alone since the attack. Undisturbed darkness in her lap. She turned on the radio news and turned it off before three words had formed and she was heading downtown.

  Harold had come by in the afternoon and they’d driven to the Beach neighbourhood and strolled on the boardwalk. The scene was busy and dull with occupation. Volleyball, Frisbees, children and dogs at the water line. There were sailboats pressed into the dead blue sky. Harold said the police used to bring people to Cherry Beach at night to beat them up. He said he wished he had more confidence in cops. “Your cop, do you still think she’s any good?” Kim said she liked Cosintino but had no illusions about the investigation. He said, “It’s nothing but illusions, Kim,” and then, as if regretting the comment, bought her an ice cream cone. Throughout the afternoon, for seconds at a time, he fell silent and a pandemonium played in his eyes. On the way home he was distracted and almost hit a cyclist and then pedestrians getting off a streetcar. He didn’t argue when Kim insisted she drive and she took him to his condo and walked home.

  Alone now she passed the former dessert place where a girl had been shot dead in a robbery years ago, when this city could be defined by such returns, a time not long past when you could almost remember every unlikely death, murders and subway accidents, the places where famous lawyers and lost kids were last seen, or the buildings and floors and maybe balconies from which toddlers or party guests had fallen, because the place wasn’t then yet so violent that the bad news didn’t register, that thinking of local sudden deaths was like staring at the rain.

  She parked five or six blocks from the attack site, on a safely lit neighbourhood street. The motionlessness was a problem. For long seconds she kept one hand on the ignition before she turned it off, and left the hand there seconds more. She relocked the doors. There was no way she was getting out of the car, but she had done something to come down here and she would sit with it a little longer. She checked her rear- and side-view mirrors and then again, and then realized she wasn’t really looking so she looked. Nothing certain, maybe a little movement down the block. She could have parked in the noise and traffic of Bloor but there’d be nothing achieved. So what was she achieving now? The movement became someone on the sidewalk, obscured by parked cars, coming her way. She almost started the car but then waited and it became a couple, a young couple, and they passed by, and before they could get away she got out of the car and followed them.

  Weeks ago her old co-workers had emailed a note inviting her to come by one night and “stroll the old joint” with them, and so here she was, now entering the eye of the security camera looking along the south walkway of the Royal Ontario Museum, where Lansford would be able to see her so she waved, and by the time she’d made the door he was already buzzing her in.

  He came out of the control room, completely abandoning his post, and didn’t think twice about putting his arm around her, and then he was calling Nick on the radio and invited her into the room, a clear violation of protocol, and they talked about this midnight world they always talked about, and about her replacements, who had both gone back to daytime so they were short-staffed again this week, while behind him on the bank of monitors she glimpsed skinny Nick, a songwriter, loping from screen to screen to come say hello, and then there he was and he hug-lifted her right off the ground, and she laughed, and he said he had something to show her.

  Lansford fitted her with her old radio and flashlight and then Nick led her in and she felt that moment of release into the building’s vast interiors. It was something most people would never know, the great measures in repose, free of life, of school kids and couples, those driven in by heat or cold or loneliness, moving along, knowing what would be there around every corner, the reassurances of same old same old, each foreign treasure in its out-of-place place. Motion detectors caught the passing of anything sentient and reduced to near nothing the possibility of chance encounter. Her being here tonight constituted “a perfect retreat,” to use for her own purposes an expression that Donald sometimes deployed.

  Nick was describing the ten-foot skeleton of a prehistoric giant sloth. That it was the most impressive item in the museum, that it had been in storage for years and was now in the old rotunda, that he’d seen it long ago, as a student, and in his memory it stood in the exact posture of a 1960s wrestler in one of those publicity shots you could still see through the windows of old barbershops near the Gardens or on the walls of retro diners downtown, slightly crouched, bent arms held forward to suggest full-nelson strike capability.

  The real thing, when they came to it, was something else.

  “Okay, you don’t see Our Lord, you thought He’d be taller, but most of the stuff in here is humanformed. This thing, this gives pause. You feel something like reverence.”

  Kim was unprepared, how could anyone be prepared? The bones carried ancient time, the dream of an extinct god. Something of a lost creation was foretold in the bare cage and panicle.

  “You agree this is truly ball-hiking. Even if you lack that response.”

  She couldn’t look away.

  Lansford radioed with a reminder that Nick had under four minutes to get to his next station.

  “Fucking Devouring Time,” said Nick.

  When he was gone she went forward and touched the long femur, if that’s what they called it, and ran her hand along, feeling the grade of phosphorus and epoxy. She had the urge to step inside the creature, stand up inside its ribs, become the guts, the life of it. To give herself over and away to a long-lost being like one of the devout.

  “You break that thing, you bought it, Kim.” Lansford had her on camera. She stepped away and then turned and felt the emptiness in the vaults of her own frame, and started off along her old route. She walked strangely bereft, thinking of her life. She wanted to live freely, not fearlessly but unflinchingly, and yet it seemed likely now that she simply couldn’t. Whenever something had to give, it gave in her. She had learned that much, if little else. At some point you had to admit you were alon
e in the wilds.

  Before long she was standing at a Romano-Egyptian display case, trying to focus on the grotesques. Testing herself not to flinch. Seven small human heads, twisted, prognathic, male and female. Two rooms over they showed up as symbols for averting evil, and in the Greeks and Etruscans gallery they appeared as depictions of comic actors and the masks of characters playing the slaves who carried the plot. Then she thought of Harold. His eyes today had looked as if he were seeing grotesques. These were the faces that came to him before sleep.

  In the Members’ Lounge she reclined on her favourite sofa. To mark their rounds the overnight guards walked to a series of appointed stations and used a key at each one to punch the clocks they carried on their belts. As long as the keys were inserted in the right sequence and in the right time window they were doing their jobs, so the practice was to trot from station to station and manually move the clock hands forward before using the key. In this manner, a two-hour round could be killed in under thirty minutes, and they could nod off now and then with time itself reposited on their hips.

  The couch faced a window. In the reflection of headlights streaming both ways along the glass she could sometimes find a state approaching sleep, but more often entered semi-conscious fugues. Her first few nights here she’d used a combination of caffeine pills and oranges to stay awake, but they induced esophagitis and just generally messed her up worse. Nick had told her that years ago, before the planetarium closed, he’d start up a night sky sequence, dial up the southern heavens and take a seat. He liked to imagine himself an ancient mariner. He’d fall asleep tilted back under the nacreous screen. When she was trying to get to sleep, here or at home, she sometimes imagined watching the heavens show. But for planes and satellites, in human terms the sky was now as it had always been. That and the ocean, and a few sublime vistas. Everything else had been humanized, every perceivable thing.

  Her dreams now were of textured surfaces, the grey of birch-bark or wasp nests, and the moment she understood them to be parchments they bloomed language, characters she didn’t know that somehow formed words she did. The parchment began to move until it was water and the words were gone and she was standing in a northern lake, hearing the cry of a loon.

  Nick buzzed in.

  “Are you ready for this? I’ve negotiated Paris and I’m standing at Nildate’s desk, over.”

  In the months after his wife had died, an entomologist named Robert Nildate had cleared his office floor and begun the plaster and balsa constructions of miniature replicas of the cores of the great cities of the world. He relied on vacation shots he’d taken with his wife and satellite photographs downloaded from the Net to measure with great accuracy the forkings in Manhattan and the slight meniscus in the fall line of classical pillars in Athens.

  “‘The two methods for killing’ – I’m quoting notes here – ‘are cyanide under plaster of paris or ethyl acetate over sawdust, over.’”

  “Don’t, Nick. Stop.”

  “He says, ‘I prefer cyanide. It’s a question of knowing where you stand. With cyanide, if a jar breaks and cuts you, you die. But ethyl acetate kills you through residue on the skin. It can take years.’ Unquote. I’m thinking this guy is dangerous, over.”

  It was the language of torture scenarios. She’d read it almost daily in the literature at GROUND. The lines were declarative shading to clinical. It was the surest sign that Nildate had lost his purchase on reality. She’d once seen Nildate’s floor and had never returned. London had the harbour that once belonged to Rio. The Chrysler Building overlooked the Parthenon, and why not? she thought. Cities aren’t buildings, they’re traffic. They’re selected eye contact and the compassing alarms at night and what they set off, the scurrying, the looping guesses at haunchweights. The city is held together by hundreds of thousands of tacit agreements, many forgotten but still in place. The sheer size of things is not to be acknowledged, for instance. The cold terror in the sea depths of personal histories, the millions upon millions of seas. People in their fleeting moments of clarity had full contact with the place, it was that simple, and no one would stand still for what they’d seen if only they could remember it.

  The sloth, the grotesques, they’d done a number on her.

  Nick radioed Lansford that he was going out for a smoke. They had their own protocol about breaking the rules. Kim got off the couch and pilfered an apple danish from the fridge.

  A minute later she was standing over a drinking fountain, eating the danish. She swallowed and listened to her blood sugar. It had a kind of junkie talk of hits and spikes. When the thing was consumed she cleaned up every crumb and washed them down the fountain. She let the spout run thirty seconds longer as if that was enough to bleed out the water that had been sitting in the ancient pipes with their toxic crud, and then she drank and stood again, staring out into the dark guarded spaces.

  She still had to get home.

  People allowed their creations to bend them out of shape. It turned out that she still believed, in some part of her, that sooner or later you had to trip all the systems you could.

  At first he just watched her window, like a lonely creep in the night. The park bench was directly across the street from her door, as if it had been placed there for him. He made no effort to conceal himself. He wouldn’t have known how, didn’t even own a hat. It was early dark, the lights had just come up along the street and inside now, one by one in the small shuttered windows beside the porch and in the basement. The picture-window curtains were open but the room was dark. At some point he saw someone moving, a dim disturbance, but for the rest of his watching, there was no other motion.

  The next evening, though he had promised himself he wouldn’t return, he was there again. In the clear evening light the colours of the houses lining this side of the park looked richer, oxygenated, and little by little they darkened. A vague smell of dog piss around the bench added to the sense that he was outside his territory. It felt good to be outside it. Outside his memory, if not his experience. Watching, the risk of being exposed as a watcher, was something he knew.

  Now and then you were reminded of your nature. That enduring word. It wasn’t human nature that troubled him – there was something consoling in common folly – so much as Harold nature. There were people, we all knew them, unwitting fools who resisted their foolishness and so made things worse for themselves. And there were others who were just unlucky. He was both foolish and unlucky. His signature instinct upon each revelation of his nature was to make things worse, and to make them worse without much flare as if in the hope he and whoever else was caught up in his mistakes might come to overlook his part in the ruin. There had once been better days, delusional, he now thought, when he had actually believed in something like the incorruptible upper heavens of his soul. He hadn’t been able to reach those heavens but now and then on a clear night all the little human worlds, the maddening knowledge of contexts, had left him and he’d found a rare part of himself in art or music, the sprung wonder of laughter. But with age, the little human worlds had multiplied until there was no escaping them and the upper heavens became thin to the eye, no more than a mockery. He was in his post-primitive phase. All he’d brought with him were fears and lusts.

  There it was again, the movement, and now coming up in the picture window was a man, looking out, looking at him. He was young and narrow, with dark features, a general impression of concern in his face. There was nothing more to read out of the semi-dark. Harold calculated that some of the lighting elsewhere in the house must have been reflecting in the window, and given that he himself was unlit, the man would have seen him even less distinctly. Then he drew the curtains, the lights came on, and over the next few minutes the man’s shadow came and went.

  In time, drama was born. A woman’s form passed by. Rosemary in her keep. So who was the man? An illegal, in hiding? A young lover? Both? He could have been a son, Harold supposed, but the story there didn’t interest him. What interested him was the vie
w of himself as an actor, the idea that he could just leave the audience to be part of the events. He was about to stand, cross a threshold, no longer the shuffler of footnotes, as Kim had called him.

  But not tonight.

  Two kids passed on bikes, a girl and a boy with the same open face.

  He stood, a bit dizzy, and took the path deeper into the park.

  She’s past the church but leaves herself standing in the moment just after she thought to turn north but then didn’t. She’s tired of going over the same ground, something she’s done not obsessively, but dutifully. There was nothing more to be secured from the night of the assault. The exercise of recall had emptied.

  Instead she opens the computer file called “R. doc.” It’s now twenty-four single-spaced pages, mostly fragments. There are short scenes and half-scenes, descriptions of the city from R’s point of view. He lives in a basement somewhere east of the valley. His jobs come and go. He spends much of his time walking but not prowling. Every time she returns to these fragments, R seems fuller, realer. She can almost believe he exists.

  She’s been waiting for a history to reveal itself. His past has been trailing in her blind spot, where he comes from and how he’s ended up here, things until now he’s suppressed in his thoughts. Even to himself he is half-closed, living hour to hour. But now it comes to her.

  He is Colombian.

  She’s not sure how she knows this, but trusts she’ll learn how.

  She leaves the house to gather research and returns before dinner with reports from human rights groups, copied pages from three histories of the country, a journalist’s memoir, a novel in Spanish, a book of photos. Then she tries to half forget them well enough to reinhabit her character’s story, and when she thinks she’s ready, she returns to her keyboard and sets about finding him again in her imaginings. It turns out he emerges not as a boy in Colombia but as the man she knows, R, who lives in a fictional version of here, a couple of miles away. He is in his basement apartment, watching television. On one channel is a show about wolves in Northern Ontario, on another, a beauty pageant in Italy, and nothing he sees there has anything to do with him, and when he turns the TV off, his mind is full of the whole history of his witnessing, what he’s seen first-hand, what he’s seen on TV. She feels a great weight for him that his life doesn’t register in the world, but he himself seems undisturbed, as if he’s had no expectation of being represented to anyone. And of course, she realizes, he wishes never to be noticed, never questioned, except by the woman he hopes is in his future.