Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  When she stops writing it’s out of exhaustion. She goes through the house, tidying. She says good night to Marian and Donald. She stands in the kitchen, looks down to find she’s holding a glass of pomegranate juice that she can’t recall having poured.

  Then she goes back to R.

  It’s late. A dark side street. A low creature stiffens its back in the dark.

  And here he comes, running.

  The next job came through Luis. There were no names or numbers, just an address and a time, and he didn’t know the work until he got there. With a sledge and shovel he broke up insulation around furnaces in old downtown houses and then cleaned out the rooms. The boss was Portuguese. The other workers changed every few days. They were mostly white Canadians just out of prison. Rodrigo never got to know them. Everyone wore masks with charcoal filters, so there was no talking. Each worker had only two masks a day, so you sucked as hard as you could as long as possible until finally the filter was blocked. They were supposed to wear two layers of coverall suits but no one bothered and when they were breaking up the fibre walls the air was thick and by the time they went outside they looked like they’d been formed out of dust and ash like the long-dead rat he’d seen fall with the mess from the palm of his short-handled spade.

  One day Rosemary asked him to describe the work and then she made him quit. He hated the job but hated quitting it more, each lost job another weight against his chances, and though he felt a great debt to Rosemary, he didn’t like having to do what she said, or having to listen to her patient explanation about why the job would kill him. The poison English word she made him say. Her same old reassurance that he’d soon get something more.

  For three or four days he hardly came up from the basement. He felt weak but not sick, tired in ways he didn’t understand.

  He called Luis. They met in a booth in a pool hall where a friend once had bought them some games. Luis didn’t ask how he was but started into his own story of how he’d lost the job with Kevin and now worked cleaning building exteriors with a Costa Rican crew who took only ten dollars an hour off the books while he himself made double that, though they’d been on the job for more than a year. He told stories about the Costa Ricans, how they would do anything. They hung from frayed wires in torn harnesses. Many got badly hurt but kept working.

  — And then it happened to me, he said.

  He took his time describing the work of blasting oxidation off the facing of a warehouse. He set the scene and tried to shape with his hands in the air the instruments and assemblies of this new trade and explain their workings so Rodrigo could see where the dangers lay.

  “Thirty-five hundred psi’s,” Luis said in English, and then explained what it meant.

  Then he told the story of the mistake he’d made, triggering the jet of water that tore into his leg and took the skin off from his knee to his ankle. He leaned back and swung his foot onto the table and pulled up the leg of his jeans. It was wrapped in white gauze.

  Two of the Costa Ricans had gotten him to the hospital.

  — I missed only two days of work. Now I just change the bandages at lunch and when I get home. And now the Costa Ricans tell stories about me.

  He had lied to no purpose and not well. He couldn’t have hurt the leg so badly and gone back to work so soon.

  Luis smiled and looked around, then slid his leg off the table. He wanted a bigger audience, Rodrigo thought. The room was mostly quiet but for two young men playing pool with a girl who didn’t seem to have any feeling for them. She was maybe high, Rodrigo thought. She looked at the pool balls and then at Rodrigo and Luis as if they were all of the same problem of angles.

  — What happened to your girlfriend, Luis?

  He bent over and rolled his pant leg back down.

  — She’s gone. He emitted a familiar half cough. In Luis, it was a kind of laughter. Back home maybe. What do you care?

  — I think I might need to go somewhere else.

  — I don’t know about anyplace else. Some say things are better in other cities but I don’t know. So don’t be stupid. Here you have friends.

  The manager had been eyeing them from behind the bar, a short balding man with badly scratched lenses in his glasses. Now he came by and asked them to order something. Luis said they were waiting for a friend. The manager said either they ordered something or they’d have to go.

  Luis told him to say it again.

  “What’s that?”

  “Tell me again that I have to go.”

  Luis straightened up against the seatback.

  “If you boys want to make trouble, make it somewhere else.”

  The others were watching now. The girl’s companions put their cues down on the table. One of them, with a huge round shaven head, put his hands in his back pockets.

  He said to Luis, “You better clear out of here, Tito.”

  The other man, who had a thin beard along his jawline, looked around the room as if for witnesses.

  Luis got up from the booth and Rodrigo stood beside him.

  — Let’s be quiet and go, he said, but Luis was looking at the owner. Then he dropped his head a little and smiled and began to nod just as he threw his hand out and snatched the man’s glasses from his face and the room spilled open and Rodrigo saw the bearded man run for the door and Rodrigo knew he had to beat him to it and he ran and was out and down the stairwell when he heard the door above him close and the bolt thrown to.

  He ran across the street in traffic and turned down a darker street of houses, running still, unpursued but unable to stop or to get clear, he could not get clear, and finally he stopped and squatted down, and then sat on a lawn with the trees swirling above him and what came to him was a moment from his arrival so many months ago, the airport baggage claim and an enormous toy bear abandoned belly up on the carousel.

  Being here meant he had to behave like a coward. He didn’t care whether or not Luis would forgive him. Luis made his own trouble.

  A woman walking a large short-haired dog came along the street and crossed over, away from him, and then stopped and asked if he was all right. He found he was reluctant to speak but he nodded to her and said he would be fine. The dog stared at him and its tail rose slightly. The woman gave the animal a little tug and continued down the street.

  He walked a long time towards home. He was spoken to only once, by a shirtless young native man asking for change. He was sitting against the suicide hotline phone at the entrance to the bridge. Rodrigo just shook his head and kept walking. The native wished him good luck and then laughed and called out something he didn’t understand and then laughed and called out again and again until Rodrigo could no longer make it out in the sounds of traffic on the parkway below.

  Father André’s church was east of downtown, a few blocks from a housing project that was now being dismantled. Passing by the low buildings, Harold was reminded that he knew the city’s neighbourhoods mainly through inexpert media representations. He recalled a magazine story on the unsolved murder of a teen prostitute in a wading pool somewhere here. The white writer described the white residents directly and the blacks in terms of which American movie actors they put him in mind of. In such ways the article invalidated itself. It left the impression that the families had nothing in common except the writer in their midst, a false witness, another trader in stock pictures.

  Along the stone streetside wall of St. Eustace by the Lake were illegible words of spray-painted graffiti. Lower than the rest, as if a child had drawn them, a few of what he thought were called tags, vaguely familiar from the backs of subway seats and alley garage doors.

  According to the posted list, the next service was evensong, hours away. It occurred to him to wonder what exactly Rosemary’s function was in this place that she should be here in mid-afternoon.

  She had called the meeting. She said they had things to clear up. No doubt she’d accuse him of ratting her out to Cosintino. He intended to confess, and then ask her to do the sa
me, whatever her deception.

  The closing of the door shut out the street sounds and left him in emptiness. The interior was dimmer than he’d expected, a quality of light he associated with a grander scale, the oldest cathedrals of Europe in the rain. He moved along, past an empty wall rack with the sign “Pamphlets $1. Please Take One.” Up the side aisle he stopped before a small altar of the Virgin and a few votive candles. The light coloured rose and yellow in a lone window.

  Her voice echoed from across the nave.

  “A rare visitor.”

  Was she already implying something? Had she seen him watching her house? He could hardly believe it himself, at least not by day. He was becoming two people.

  She wore corduroy pants and a tattered Montreal Canadiens hockey sweater.

  “Numbers aren’t what they used to be, I take it.”

  She started down the centre aisle and he reversed his way towards the back.

  “We serve the community, whether they attend service or not. But we owe about twenty per cent of our income each year to the diocese, and we can’t pay it. And the church is selling off properties to pay lawsuits and debts.”

  “The story tends in one direction.”

  “Yes, it does,” she said.

  “So how much longer?”

  “We don’t know.”

  They were outside now. She seemed to have wanted him out of there, he thought. She probably had someone stuffed in the vestry. To the west, the downtown towers were softening in the haze. She was walking ahead of him.

  “Let’s talk while I run my errands.”

  She led him to an old dark green Volvo wagon. Harold opened the door and sat in the passenger seat without comment. Very likely it would be useful to him later to assert some advantage now, to claim some small agency in these first minutes, but his positions weren’t favourable yet again, and so he allowed Rosemary to think she could lead them.

  They headed west. She drove very well, full of surety, knowing the side-street routes. When she leaned forward to watch the progress of a woman in a wheelchair at an intersection, he saw the number 10 on her jersey. Some player from the seventies, he thought, but he couldn’t remember the name.

  She headed into the university campus and pulled up half on a sidewalk and parked.

  “Hold on.”

  She got out and headed into a college carrying a plastic bag. Her movements lacked fluency but suggested strength. A determined, slightly overstriding march. She was back within seconds.

  “I had to drop off some copying for Father André. He lectures here. Tonight it’s iconography. You might want to come.”

  “He’s a truly thoughtful man.”

  “He’s worthy of the subject.” She eased the car off the sidewalk and stopped to wait out a squirrel’s indecision in the road.

  “He walked me through icons once, I recall. The Incarnation, how God penetrates matter so humans can contemplate the invisibilia.”

  “Icons and scripture. God’s energies are everywhere, but we have to be open to them.”

  She started forward again. Apparently the church was more to her than a community service body.

  They toured back through the east downtown. Rosemary ran a commentary through the passing scenes. It was very much her neighbourhood and it extended for blocks in all directions. The failing history of a soup kitchen, a park forbidden by bylaw to the homeless, the window of a room where a Children’s Aid worker had been attacked by the parents of a beaten child. North into Cabbagetown she pointed out the gay club raided twice by rogue cops and told a story of a bashing they didn’t respond to that she ended with a blatantly cinematic image of men on their knees in the reddening snow. She was performing for Harold, as if her particular high ground commanded a view that could be known only through her descriptions.

  And then finally it came, bluntly, and he was prepared.

  “Why did you give the police my name?”

  “I wasn’t accusing you of anything. Except maybe of not seeing clearly who you’re involved with, these people.”

  “And yet I see them every day, and you’ve never met them, so how is it you see them so well?”

  There was no getting out in front of her, this woman who seemed to live a few seconds into the future. He wanted to tell her that the idea of presenting his theory to the investigator and dropping Rosemary’s name, it had all come to him at once, and that he was pleased to find himself acting in ways he couldn’t predict, a momentary stranger to himself.

  “Ever been to St. James Town?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then you’ll experience something today.”

  St. James Town, the most densely populated area in the country. Twenty square blocks of high-rise apartments built in the fifties for singles and couples without children. A court ruling had struck down the restrictions and opened the place up to anyone. The landlords had been accused by tenants organizations of letting the place run down. The grounds were now thought to be the territory of thugs.

  They swung in off Wellesley and turned into a system of lanes that connected the dozen or so towers. Ahead was an attempted piazza of shadowed concrete and blowing garbage. Rosemary found a parking spot with a view of a line of dumpsters – dumpsters were now a motif of Harold’s attentions. Between two of them several teenage boys were involved in some transaction. They turned and regarded Rosemary’s car and, as if on cue, dispersed without a word.

  It was a show, Harold thought. The stylized way they broke, it gave them away as kids, performing.

  “How many races did we scare off?” she asked.

  “Race is a social construct. My colleagues tell me so.”

  “How many, really? I see a couple of South Asians, a black kid, two whites.”

  “It’s the national experiment. We’ve been blowing New York and London out of the water for years. The world gathers at our dumpsters.”

  Rosemary removed some documents from under her seat, and then a plastic bag of something from the trunk. She walked, Harold followed. They passed an old man in an Afghani hat with a display of knock-off Persian carpets on the sidewalk that looked as if they’d been pulled from front stoops.

  “Do you know how many people live here?” she asked.

  “I’m guessing no one knows exactly.”

  “That’s right. Even if we could settle on a definition of what constitutes living, there’d still be no fixed number.”

  “Between birth and death, pretty much everything’s provisional.”

  “You might believe that, but I’m just saying there are a lot of people here unofficially.”

  “They’re here but they’re not here. They’re here in front of us but they’re not in the country.”

  “Yes. Many of them.”

  “And right now we’re going to visit some of these people who aren’t here.”

  “Off the record,” she said. “Okay?”

  In the world but not on the record. Globally, it was the largest category.

  In a dim lobby they waited along with a young Indian or Pakistani couple for one of the three elevators to arrive. A full two minutes passed.

  On the eighth floor Harold noticed that the corridors, though a little stale, looked well enough maintained. The smell of curry. The building was much like the city itself. The mix of races, histories, living side by side, affording incompatible myths. A crime-ridden, unpoliceable mistake of urban planning. Or a self-maintaining, multi-ethnic community, an asylum from any number of worlds gone wrong.

  Small pools of light in each doorway. He thought of library carrels.

  Rosemary knocked on two doors. At the first there was no answer. She slipped an envelope underneath. At the second she passed the plastic bag with unknown contents to the man who answered, introduced as Luis. In his thirties, likely, a little soft in the face. Luis affected a great delight at the bag and at meeting Harold. He told Rosemary she looked beautiful and asked Harold if he didn’t agree. He couldn’t tell whether Luis
was truly insincere or only seemed so in translation, but the man didn’t inspire Harold to say anything in Spanish.

  They walked down two floors and made a last call. When Rosemary knocked and announced herself, they heard low voices and what Harold imagined to be urgent movements inside. A young African man opened the door. Deep in the room, two women at a table were looking at Harold with grave expressions.

  “Jonathan, this is Harold. He’s helping me today.”

  Jonathan was taking Harold’s presence very seriously.

  “Hello, Harold.”

  “Hello.”

  Jonathan backed out of the doorway and Rosemary led them into the apartment.

  It wasn’t well furnished, there was no television even, but a long window provided a clear view of the downtown and the lake and the islands. The floor was parquet.

  Rosemary said hello to the women. They nodded at her. One woman was a little younger and she smiled at Harold. The older woman didn’t acknowledge him. They were sitting there with nothing between them, no newspaper or coffee. Harold couldn’t imagine what they’d been doing a minute ago.

  Among the papers for Jonathan was a small envelope. He opened this before examining the documents, and turned his back to the two of them for a moment to look inside. Then he faced them again and nodded slowly to Rosemary.

  “Thank you,” he said.