by Michael Helm
“You could ask him.” So Marian would say more. Kim had to remind herself that her mother, too, had reason to act out of character. “He’s never been able to correct himself. He just crashes and then walks from the wreckage and goes off to another pursuit.”
It was the sort of thing Marian would say of Harold, but her tone had none of the usual bitterness. However slowly they were moving, the way seemed to be parting for them as it never had. The air was full of admission.
“Do you still love him?”
“You don’t need to ask that, Kim. The man has so much more worth than he knows. Little tragedies knock him over. He won’t survive the big ones on his own.”
“Have you told him that?”
“I can’t help him. He wouldn’t recognize the help, or if he did he wouldn’t allow it.” They stopped walking. They stood side by side, glancing at one another. “And focusing on him would be good for you too. You’ve always been a helper. Here you are helping me.”
“I’ve been my own project these last months.”
“Of course you have. But you might do a lot for yourself by lending him a little spine. You’re the only one who could get that close to him.”
“You make it sound like an assassination.”
Marian laughed. “Well, every love has its own best expression.”
That evening after the office was closed, Kim parked her mother’s car across from GROUND and stared up at the second-floor window until she was sure that Marlene had gone home. She let herself in with the key she’d never returned and made her way upstairs and through a second door.
It had come to her that this was it, the point of origin. Harold was convinced she’d met her attacker through GROUND. She couldn’t bring herself to concede as much, but this office was a locus. How had she come to be attacked in one of the safest big cities in the world? She’d brought it upon herself by working here, as an open host, constantly aware of her privilege, and she had felt guilty. She would not have thought that the guilt determined her actions, certainly not her life choices. But just maybe, one night, the work she did in this place had made her take a risk. Maybe it had taken her down a dark, quiet street when she’d thought to head towards a busy one. There was no other explanation. Either the guilt of privilege had sent her into trouble or nothing had. She chose to think it was guilt.
The phone rang through to the answering machine and there was a voice from one of the many territories of broken English. Someone named Irina was calling on behalf of her brother, whom she didn’t name. She invited Marlene to a citizenship party where she promised to serve vodka.
The key to the three standing files was kept in a locked desk drawer. The key to the drawer was under the green plastic pot on the corner of the desk holding the cactus one of the clients had given Marlene as a gift. The cactus was dead but the spines endured as part of Marlene’s idea of a security system, as if anything more elaborate would be in bad faith. Besides, the dead-bolted office and building doors kept out junkies and thieves, and whoever else might have wanted to peek in the files tended to respect locks and follow rules where they were discernible. Marlene was supposed to be the only person with access. Though it had made things awkward at times, the standing files had been off-limits to Kim and the other volunteers, a fact for which Marlene had apologized. “If anyone has to get in trouble over what’s in there, it’ll be me.” Kim had assumed Marlene was worried about violating confidentiality, or maintaining for the volunteers some plausible degree of deniability, or maybe the trouble in the records ran deeper. If Kim’s attacker was in the files, she’d find him on her own, and keep GROUND out of it if she could.
The file drawers were unlabelled. The key to the first stack opened all four drawers. The top one contained old copies of the long-ago-aborted newsletter and a few letters addressed to Marlene and tucked back into their envelopes. The client files, arranged by case number, began in the second drawer. The numbers corresponded to computer files that contained the clients’ names, but Kim didn’t know the password – Marlene changed it monthly – and she didn’t need the name anyway, didn’t want it really. What she wanted was a suspect whose story she’d recognize.
She went through files from the months before the attack, looking for anything that seemed familiar, that triggered a face, maybe a tense moment with someone they’d turned down. Every file contained a fact sheet with the claimant’s name, blacked out once the electronic file was created, age, country of origin, family information, port of entry, entry date. There was a box to check for “evidence of torture.” There were copies of the documents submitted in the claim, copies of the board’s decision. Most files listed local addresses and phone or contact numbers. Some had Polaroid headshots that lawyers had clipped to the referral letters.
For a moment she saw herself in mid break-and-enter. Far from enacting this scene, the old Kim wouldn’t even have imagined it.
After forty minutes, her attention and hope fading, she came across a translated narrative she barely remembered, from late winter, five months before the attack. Even as she read the header she recalled Marlene telling her the story of a young Colombian man. She said if you spent five minutes with him you could tell he had a sweet nature, and that he couldn’t be blamed for whatever violent world he’d been carried into as a boy. And yet he’d been rejected by the Immigration Review Board.
Name removed. Age 22. Colombia. No family in Canada. Pearson, Oct. 18, 2008. No photo. No home address. The contact was to be through his lawyer.
Kim had once met the referring lawyer, Belinda Paul, another smart engagé. She had wild black hair and tended to narrow her eyes as she spoke. Marlene thought that Belinda didn’t approve of their work but now and then she’d send clients to GROUND who’d suffered especially unjust decisions. “If Belinda sent them, they’ll break your heart,” she once said.
Kim photocopied the file of the heartbreaker, then returned it, put the office back together, and walked out to the car.
If the file led somewhere, if it furthered investigations, then bringing it into the house, her bedroom, had implications that she decided to accept. She sat in her desk chair with one arm folded across her chest, her hand clamped under the opposite elbow, and started to read.
My name is [removed]. I was born in Yopal, Colombia, in 1986 and am presently a citizen of Colombia and no other country.
In 2003 my family sent me to live with my cousin’s family in Bogota. My cousin is two years older than me. A few weeks before I arrived he had been recruited by three men to sell kitchen utensils from a cart on the street. He went to the men and got me the same job, working one street away.
After only a week or so my cousin Uriel complained to the men about our salaries and we were told we’d be paid more if we took a plantation job to the south.
The next day my cousin and I left for work without telling his family about our new jobs. We rode on the back of a truck for several hours. We had not brought anything from home except for the clothes we were wearing.
We were dropped off at a training camp for soldiers. When we asked about the plantation work, we were given 10,000 pesos each and told we would collect 500,000 by the end of the month. Our leader, named Volmer, gave us food and a bed and blankets. The next day we were given guns and told how to use them. We practised with them for one day. No one at the camp wore uniforms or arm bands, and we didn’t know who we were working for.
We were told our work was to protect workers at an agricultural production plant. We were moved to this facility and the same man, Volmer, led us around the area we were supposed to guard. There were about twenty men in all guarding buildings that were behind a wire fence.
For several days we did our work with no incident. We slept in one of the buildings inside the compound and met the workers. Some said they were there against their will. Some said they had been kidnapped. Others said they were there by choice. All of them had been paid. There was no agreement about which group we were workin
g for.
One morning in the second week Uriel and I and ten or twelve others were loaded again onto a truck and taken to Villanueva, Casanare. We were posted at the side of a road -
She stopped. Whatever was about to happen on the road, whatever would send the heartbreaker running, he’d run clear to Canada, into her life. She skipped to the end. The signature was blacked out. The translator’s name was absent. Then she read the rest of the narrative.
She knew why the board had rejected the story. It was of a type with others she’d read, that they all had read, from the war zones. An innocent is caught up in some atrocity and tries to stop it but fails, but somehow survives, escaping reprisals by leaving the country. In this version, the heartbreaker’s family had fled too. Or that was the claim. No one had been able to contact the family in Cartagena. Either they hadn’t received the petition or had chosen not to give themselves away. Or they didn’t exist.
In the evidence was a statement from a man convicted in the killings who named the heartbreaker as one among many drug thugs who shot and then buried a group of seven farmers who had happened upon the armed men and gotten into an argument over the use of a road. It was possible both versions, those of the convicted witness and the heartbreaker, were lies.
The young man would likely have ended up an exclusion case, to be deported, but the file hadn’t been updated. Maybe he hadn’t come back to GROUND.
Yes, the office held origins. She’d built her fictional man, R, out of this real one’s history. She was an accidental thief, only slightly disturbed to learn of her crime. She went to her bedroom window and looked out. The farthest line of rooftops down the block, bitten off against a blue field of sky. The neighbour’s rectangular backyard fence dissected by a clothesline into triangles of air. She had been drawn all along by something she knew.
The theft had served her well, seeding a life of its own. The fictional story was more alive for her than the featureless, documented one – the one with life-and-death consequences – because her imagination held her fear, and the fear was as real as the scar on her leg. Whoever her attacker was, he’d been displaced. He was not alive in her understanding. In her peopled imagination, it was R alone who was fully there.
She felt a sudden thrill in her blood that she remembered as joy. She was returned through some physical memory to her younger self, to the small delights she had felt in the past, at open moments in the house, in the wake of her mother’s voice, and outside in the daylight city, listening to buskers, smiling at the shared laughter of workers stacking bitter melons in the jammed Chinese markets where no one spoke English. Yet there was no reason to feel these last bloomings of a young girl’s wonderment. Her mother was dying, her father was a mess and getting worse, she herself still couldn’t walk even short distances alone in the city at night. And so where did the joy spring from? There was nothing to account for it. Not time, not forgetting.
And then it was gone and the pain returned, sharper. She left the window and sat on the bed, and she understood. The pain itself produced joy only to open her heart and flood it again with its thick liquid truths. And so her suffering had fooled her. But by whatever power they were wielded, the joys were truths too. She thought she just might survive if she kept her eye steady. The pain was just one kind of finite creature, not a condition. She resolved to cede to it only its share of her.
5
At ten in the morning the college’s librarian had found Harold drunk and weeping in the Divinity stacks. The librarian called the History chair, who’d called her old Academic Council pal Donald, who was of the opinion that Harold would become unwieldy at the sight of him. And so Donald called Kim.
“Where is he now?”
“In the library office, slouched on the floor. Hannah’s with him.” Hannah, the chair, was trying to keep Harold out of sight until someone could spirit him home.
Kim took Marian’s car to campus. By the time she met Donald on the stone steps of the college, someone from Medical Services had been called in. The librarian was named Danny, a Chinese-Canadian with a look of grave disapproval. He received them wordlessly and led the way behind the information desk to the administrative precincts, an echoing space lit by old windows. They passed a thin, greying woman in a window bay, on a cellphone, who beckoned to Donald. He veered off, and Kim continued to follow Danny to the door of a small office. Through the glass slit Kim peeked at Harold sitting across the table from a young woman with a blunt haircut. She was leaning towards him, a pamphlet on STDS in the back pocket of her green pants. Harold looked glassy, drunk, yes, and fearful, as if he’d been arrested.
Danny left her as Donald arrived, taking an angle that concealed him from the door window.
“Hannah will protect him. He won’t face discipline. Though he could use some.”
“What did you say to them?”
For a moment they stood in deeper silence.
“I said sometimes he drinks too much – we’ve all had our weekends – but he hasn’t until now been a morning drunk. I don’t even know if that’s true.”
The subject of Harold had been generally off-limits at home, at least when Donald was around, as it had been periodically since he first moved in, when Kim was eighteen. She left for university and he more or less passed her in the doorway. At home on the weekends she tried to make sense of the new arrangement, and the idea that her parents weren’t ever going to mend things. The following spring Marian and Donald married in the garden surrounded by a few old family friends and Donald’s Math Department colleagues, whom Kim didn’t know and hadn’t seen since. Now that she’d moved back, Kim felt old patterns that belonged to her mother and her returning to the house, cleaning rituals, the stacking of shelves and fetching of newspapers, some extending back as far as the Harold years. Whether or not he understood it, Donald must have felt that his claim hadn’t taken. The house had never been his.
“You must be Kim. I’m Hannah Posetta.”
Her bearing was one of extreme competence. She shook hands warmly, though without smiling, as Donald was, idiotically.
“I’ll take him now,” said Kim. “Thanks for helping.”
“Marilynne’s almost done with him. It’s just routine.”
“I don’t see the point of talking to him if he’s drunk,” said Donald.
Hannah looked at him. He didn’t take her meaning.
“Would you excuse us, Donald?”
He nodded, though looking baffled, and walked back towards the outer offices.
“Is this some kind of psych assessment?”
“They’re just talking. He knows her, Kim.” For a second she considered the absurd possibility that Harold and the counsellor were lovers. “Just take him home when they’re done in there. The department will take care of the fine.”
“What fine?”
“I thought Donald would have explained. He defaced one of the books.”
What did it mean that Kim could believe her father was drunk and melting in a library, but not that he’d defaced a book? She would have thought that the progress of his troubles could be stayed by books. The printed word was his refuge.
Hannah reached over and squeezed her shoulder, then nodded in farewell and left. Kim spotted Danny on the far side of the room and cornered him. She asked to see the damage. He led her to his desk, picked up an oversized, almond-coloured book, and opened it to lambent reproductions, with text, of the St. Francis cycle by Giotto. Harold had torn out the page, now set loosely back inside, containing the fresco Confession of a Woman Raised from the Dead. The page had been folded.
“He had it in his pocket,” said Danny, a sympathy forming around his eyes. “We can repair it better than you might suppose. I think he’s done.”
It was a moment before she realized he was telling her that Harold had appeared. She turned and found him staring at her from across the office, as if he couldn’t make sense of her presence. The smart thing was to play it cool. She didn’t want him falling ap
art again, if that was in the cards.
“I’ll give you a lift home,” she said.
He smiled – there was no evident embarrassment or shame, but then he was still drunk – and from their separate places in the room, they started away.
He had returned to her on a warm November day. She was alone. Marian had gone out – where? by now she’d forgotten – and Kim had come home from school to an empty house that had changed on her. The first snow had fallen the week before, but now the city had entered a little false summer, so through open windows the light slanted at winter angles, casting shadows that should never have belonged to the scented air. She took this in all at once, even as she passed through the living room on the way to her bedroom, shedding a bookbag onto an armchair and turning into the kitchen to find him standing there with a cup of coffee in his hand. At the sight of him – in her mind, he was Harold; in her blood, an intruder – she almost screamed, and instead, in the moment it took her to recognize him, a moment not long enough for her sudden fear to abate, she reached to the counter and grabbed the cordless phone and threw it at him. It had felt good to hurl something, to see it hit him in the shoulder, to see him flinch and spill the coffee. He put down the mug and approached warily, hands held palm up before him, as if to shrug, in confusion, or as if in supplication, or to calm her, or embrace her – he was unreadable – but she didn’t let him get near. She went to her room. He gave her a few minutes and then came to her door. He spoke her name. Then again. After a long interval, he said it once more. When she didn’t respond, he said, “I’ll be in touch. Soon. I miss you, darling.” His presence outside the door as she stared at her wall poster of Nelson Mandela was very much like his palpable absence had been for almost four months. And now he’d just shown up. At some point, she looked to the door and knew he was gone, though she hadn’t heard him leave the house. It had been thoughtless, not to have warned her. He hadn’t even parked in the driveway. Later, she’d learn that Marian hadn’t known he was coming, that he must have waited until she was gone. He must have been staking out the house.