Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

She doesn’t save the afternoon’s work. When she closes the file, she knows it will be for the last time. Then she deletes it. She shuts down the computer. The screen winks and goes dark. Along the base of the machine, four beads of light die rapidly one by one like the windows of a distant train disappearing into a tunnel and she feels stricken.

  Then she does the thing she does sometimes, and loosens her jeans and reaches her left hand down and along her thigh, to feel the scar, to press her fingers against it. Pain and numbness. There and not. No one but the doctors have seen it. When she needs to bring herself back to earth, she does this thing.

  The room is quiet. Through the open window, no reports from the city. A dog has ceased barking.

  Here in this room she had once been a girl. All that was left of the girl was this staring at the back of the door, not wanting to open it, wanting it to open.

  She wants to tell R that the desertion holds promise, for it falls to a neat equation, in that the man she’s abandoned him for once abandoned her. She wonders now if he ever came back, was ever really there in the first place.

  When he’d visited her at the cottage, he had argued for disarming the past with scrutiny. He had called it hopeful, the act of writing about the attack, the idea that two people might see the same complexity in the same way. Her hope now is to know her father as no one knows him. He is entirely undiscovered, even to himself. Her new chosen mode will be history, her subject revealed through his own method. She still believes in history. She’ll be the true historian’s historian, the very daughter he has always thought he wanted.

  R has brought her back to the plural, present world.

  When she was young she’d known there was bitterness beyond the door, but there was love too. Without much self-pity she can admit now that the love was not as she’d imagined, that it was smaller, and from now on, maybe it’s not to be given to her, if given at all, without compromise. When Marian dies, the uncompromised love will end. It would be better not to know as much, but there is no getting free of the knowledge. She has had her life’s one lucky escape.

  PART TWO

  6

  One night he heard the walls speak his name until he stabbed the plasterboard with his fishing knife. In the morning he saw the pattern of holes and joined them with a marker to discover the secret constellation that described his pain. That had wanted describing, that was what had called to him all along, wanting its shape to be made. The shape had a centre but was uncertain of itself in the far reaches like it could have been a slow galaxy or spiny poisonous fish. He tacked a sheet on the wall to cover it but the spiny voice came again another night and he took his keys and went out to lose it in the warp.

  He took a bright downtown bus and coming the other way they passed the 96 he used to ride two hours a day just to get told in a class that he wasn’t trying. He had unspooled and was sent for assessment. He lived by the lake back then and when he quit the class he took the transit everywhere, spending the afternoons in church kitchens and libraries so that he put the city together and held it in mind as a picture of foreign clusters. The Dufferin-St. Clair branch was Italian. College-Shaw, Italian and Portuguese. Jones past the little Chinatown across the Don. He wrote them on his folding map. He wanted the big design, to see what it meant. Forest Hill was Jewish. Gladstone, Hungarian. Danforth-Coxwell was Greek and Indian and some branches were crawling with yowlers. There were pockets of Eritrean, Salvadoran, German, West Indian, Guyanese, he wrote out the names of the languages and looked up the strange ones. He used to be good at geography but he didn’t like the peoples if they didn’t hold still, didn’t stay in their places, or else why have the countries at all. He had said this many times and no one listened. He had said it to separate himself from the impression he made with his skin. His line had been tainted somewhere and he’d caught the dark more than anyone.

  He stole books and poster ads. The city was full of things just there for the taking.

  One poster was for a picnic, where he’d first seen her, making name tags for the yowlers. They crowded around her, laughing, she couldn’t spell the names or the ones who didn’t know it, whose sponsors always spelled it for them. In their small corner of the park with the wind up in the treetops like rushing water. He was there alone. He knew no one, and he sat on a picnic table with his feet on the seat and watched the white girl. They crowded around her and the African blacks were the worst, whose names began Nb or Nj or some such senseless thing, taunting their bodily hosts. The tags were on paper you stuck to your shirt and hoped it didn’t rain. When the table cleared he would say hello and watch her spell out what he said. The music began, the same dumb guitars and pan flutes he heard everywhere west of Yonge with the same players playing what seemed the same song standing in a half-bent row on the verges of the crowd.

  He walked over and said hello. Her face was bright, she didn’t know him. He thought of a name and told her Mason, the name of a dog he’d killed once, and when she looked down to write it he saw that she’d put both of hers on her tag. He could find her whenever he wanted.

  Long ago a doctor had predicted her in his life and here she was. He wondered if he’d have met her if the doctor hadn’t said so and then knew she’d been there from the start, his whole life on this vector, and the doctor had just called the line.

  She was not someone he’d pictured. He knew he would know her when the time came.

  “There you go, Mason.”

  He smiled. He wanted her to say his real name, to know it. He felt the sky unlocking and only later would know why.

  She told him to have a free burger.

  At first, following, it was like he just wanted to find a way of telling her something. Because of her work she kept to a pattern and he reduced his study to the last few blocks. In a black between-space he waited three nights in one week, two the next before he saw what would happen. The site was unsecured. The guard cheated and went home by eleven and left the lock open for the morning shift workers.

  He bore no control of his physical self. Things he felt on his skin brought him mercy. What he wanted to say was that in some hours he understood that he was wrongly fitted to this world. There was another world where it would come up right, where the all of him worked as it should, but he was lost to it. It was light years away and he had no means of flying there.

  Downtown was a different place. Every few blocks there were internet rooms with curtains around every station.

  How to say, it used to be the windows would memorize me but now I can pass without judgment. The virtual world had made him invisible. The place you cross over has no opening, no beginning. You have always been crossing until you do.

  Mason, he would say again. He killed a dog once with a grappling hook. In his heart he was wrongly fitted.

  “I just heard the music,” he said. Then the next ones in line started laughing. She waved him goodbye with a smile and he only wanted to show her himself open the same way. He wanted them both open at the same time. He walked off towards the grill and kept walking, saying her name, letting it carry him clear. In the night she would do the numbers, thinking back, not knowing what had happened, that he was more numbers than the rest. She might think “Mason” and he could almost think it with her.

  The thing that happened came out wrong. He still wanted to explain, all day every day for months now. In his fantasy she wins the struggle, and beats him, and before she throws him into the pit, she holds him for the one moment he had been sent here for, the one he could stay inside forever.

  One evening, at the table with her mother after dinner, Donald in his study, Kim recalled for Marian a conversation they’d had years ago about intuition. Marian had said that when women spoke of intuition, they were just in some suggestible, wishing state in which they pretended to see signs. Kim had said her intuitions were sometimes colder than that. It wasn’t just that she knew things before they happened – what someone would say, however strange, just before they said it – but she felt
she knew what they were thinking. She knew their silences. Especially Harold’s. And she knew something very dark was going on in those silences. Marian had said only that she didn’t doubt it – it wasn’t clear whether she meant the intuition or the darkness – and that had been the end of the conversation.

  “You remember all of that?” Marian asked.

  “For some reason you were full of silences yourself that night.”

  “I don’t remember. But don’t get carried away about intuition, Kim. Women can make no more sense of men than they can of dogs or mooses. They’re hurt, they love us, a doubt is buzzing around, bothering them, they don’t know their own hearts. It’s all us, projecting. Which is why they think we’re trouble.” Marian had energy tonight. It had combined with the wine to make her voluble. “They think we’re full of enigmatic forces. The sins of Eve.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “And we scheme. Here we are scheming. It must be a man who set this off.”

  “Now there’s your intuition at work. He’s someone who came to mind today from long ago. Second-year undergrad. A Chilean guy. He told me his father was killed before he was born. During the coup in ‘73.”

  Kim measured the pause. She’d wondered if mention of Chile would expose Marian to something she’d rather not talk about. In trying to be considerate of her mother’s feelings, Kim was becoming sly – they had never before had slyness between them – but it turned out she couldn’t read Marian’s reaction. Her face had been slowly departing over the weeks. It had lost its set. Often there was a translucence, something resinous on the surface.

  “Who was this man from Chile? And why think of him now?”

  She said his name was Eduardo something and explained that she’d met him at an International Students Union party, an older guy she was half interested in.

  “He worked at a music store. I used to go by with my friends.” Kim kept to herself the memory of Eduardo joining them in a soundproof booth. They went in with gorgeous instruments and wailed away terribly, with the exuberance of ignorant youth. As if sax and guitar and a little squeezebox could ever come together no matter how much they wanted it. She and her friends only ever wanted anything for ten minutes tops. Then she met someone else and forgot him.

  They could just hear Donald’s voice from the study. He was on the phone.

  “What does this Chilean man have to do with intuition?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Marian reached over to Donald’s half-full wineglass and placed it in front of her daughter, who now had two. The family always finished each other’s wine, and never poured glass to glass for fear of spilling, and so depending when each had had enough, or how the conversation was running, the glasses moved around like gaming pieces.

  The tablecloth tonight was yellow with a blue-lined border. Marian had bought it in Cuba years ago. She had fabrics and pottery from every trip she’d taken with Harold, small quetzal bird paintings and decorative lizards and jointed snakes. Most were in storage but she kept them in rotation, as if to insist the experiences they commemorated were hers, uncompromised by what was to come between them. She’d travelled with Donald, too, to Montreal, Chicago, London, Kim couldn’t recall where else, but she’d not collected so much by that time in her life. Or maybe she had but the objects were not for display. It had been years since Kim had seen this bright cloth. Last week there had appeared ceramic coasters with painted Cuban scenes, little wedges against the narrowing of Marian’s days. She had always claimed to love Havana above all cities.

  “What do you think Harold was looking for in the garage that day?” Kim asked.

  “This intuition of yours. Maybe you got it from your father. Except in him it’s more like superstition. He would never admit it – it runs counter to his self-image as a rationalist – but he’s prone to some pretty loopy thoughts.”

  “Especially when drunk, I guess.”

  “All his bad luck,” said Marian. “Harold thinks he brings it on himself. And because it’s usually true that he does, he sees it all linking back through the years to a kind of original sin. And we’ve all paid for it.”

  “Has he said that?”

  From the study, the sound of Donald braying delightedly into the phone, as if hearing news of some enemy undone.

  “What if he’s right, Kim? What if the years of trouble begin in some distant mistake and how he came to regard it? A mistake with real consequences, one to the next. Of course you wouldn’t be free of them. Neither of us would.”

  “You can’t let what happened to me get you thinking like this.”

  “It’s my life that gets me thinking. My life and yours. I can’t blame him for all our troubles, but I can for a lot of them.”

  She’d had too much to drink. Tomorrow she’d repudiate it all. Kim had learned to pay attention to anything that might come to be disavowed.

  “I found a few of his old CVs.”

  Marian looked down at her napkin and straightened it. “So you were digging around in there too.” In her next breath she seemed to draw them both to a single point of focus. “You know, the things that are precious to us, that we keep to ourselves, they’re not all consoling.” She was using her bitter-wisdom tone. “But still they’re ours and no one else’s.”

  “Why does it sound like you’re protecting him?”

  “Because you shouldn’t snoop.”

  “Historians snoop. He does it.”

  “You don’t snoop, Kim. You snoop and worlds fall.”

  She only covered for Harold when he wasn’t around, but even then she seemed to allude to the broken marriage.

  “He was in Chile during the coup. I think it’s odd he’s never mentioned that to me.”

  The words took hold and Marian looked out at her from some endless space.

  “Chile. I didn’t know that,” she said. “I guess I knew he’d been somewhere.”

  “He was at a language school and –”

  “I don’t want the details.”

  The statement seemed addressed to herself. How many times had she uttered it?

  “There was a list of names,” Marian said. “Spanish names. He had it when I first met him. I found it tucked into a book I’d just taken down from a shelf, and I asked him about it. He came up and plucked it from my hand and walked off. After that it would turn up now and then, hidden away somewhere around one apartment or another.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “It stopped turning up. After a while, it just disappeared.”

  Kim finished the night alone, on the porch.

  She had snooped, yes. She’d done it at GROUND and in the garage. And she had found things. Marian must have decided long ago never to dig around in Harold’s pockets. And yet mysterious lists and women’s names had come to her anyway, by chance. It would have been better to have known, and known early. Learning another’s heart too late ends up knocking your own out of true.

  But her intuition was still at work. She could feel it, the slight lifting in her thoughts. She looked out into the night. In the yard across the street a family of raccoons walked along a shed roof and dropped one by one over the back, and it came to her. It was her attacker who’d taken the sweater from the garage. At the time she’d talked herself out of the possibility. But it was him. His communication had now reached her, three days later.

  She went back inside the house. Before bed she called Cosintino and left a message. She found herself arguing against what she knew, sounding calm. She made the case for the thief being a kid. And regardless there would be no evidence, no fingerprints - she’d been in and out of the garage for her bike several times since then, and anyway he wouldn’t have been so careless.

  “I’m telling you just so you know,” she said. “Just for the sake of the record. But please, if my father calls you again, don’t mention it.”

  The sources were ever harder to trace. Increasingly Father André found himself cribbing his new
sermons from his old ones. This morning, rather than reread Athanasius, he’d employed the lines he knew by heart. Man bears the Likeness of Him Who Is, and if he preserves that Likeness through constant contemplation, then his nature is deprived of its power and he remains incorrupt. But this man doubted that even constant contemplation would be enough. It was ever harder these days to find contemplative space, and when he did find it – walking, in his study with scripture, in the lull after service – he often felt no longer equal to it. Most of the things that were once true to him were still true, but he’d worn through his ways of thinking about them. When repeated endlessly in the same forms, revelations emptied, little by little. This was aging.

  Athanasius. Doubts about him had crept into the histories. Could a church father have used violence and murder for political ends, a man who wrote of the need for the “active, arduous peace of poise and balance in a disordered world”? The words were thinning but true.

  Outside the door to the parish hall, the homeless were gathering for the Thursday meal. There were maybe twenty today. He knew most by their first names. As he approached them, Leonard the Dubious waved to him with a dirty palm. Leonard, who was more or less his own age, had once expressed his life philosophy, which he clung to though it had not served him well: “Take what you want and then chow the fuck down.” The man was a compendium of useless aphorisms, many of them vaguely sexual, if one followed the mangled metaphors. The idea seemed to be that Leonard was fuller than André of experience in the world. It was no small ministerial project to lead him to the realization that, mostly, he was just full of shit. Someday Leonard would understand, because he would need to, that the project had been mounted for him.

  “Hey, Father. Looks like we all come running to the same dinner bell.”

  “We do, Leonard.”

  “A man needs what he needs.” He tossed up a canted grin. The others were watching their exchange. A young man named Jules looked at André sympathetically.