Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  “And he needs to know what he needs to know,” said André. “Beginning with who he is, and who he serves.”

  “Well, if you just open these doors, I’ll serve myself, thanks.”

  “Let me see if it’s ready.”

  He nodded to the others and passed inside. As usual Maggie and Molly, the Keegan sisters, were present, and David Asodi, an old Trinidadian who wore sweater vests year-round. None of them had been at the morning service.

  Maggie tossed him an apple, which he almost caught.

  “You had that look on your face,” she said. “Lost in space again.”

  “We can’t have that.” He picked up the bruised apple and set it in one of the fruit bowls. “How are you all?”

  However they were warranted no complaint. Molly said they’d been discussing summer movies.

  “Not your kind of thing, Father.”

  “Not mine either,” said David. He had a wife who’d never come to the church.

  “We used to show old black-and-whites in the basement,” André said. “They didn’t draw flies.” The table was ready. It was time to open the doors. “What holds more meaning, do you suppose? A year’s worth of movies, or this bowl of fruit?”

  David laughed gently and nodded. André regarded the bowl and thought of the works, vividly representational, of the neighbourhood’s graffiti artists, the best of whom seemed limited only by their available colours. If he himself could paint, he’d depict this bowl of fruit, bruises and all. Most of the things he valued had a memorial aspect.

  Molly opened the doors. In they came. André excused himself and went to his office. As was her habit, Rosemary was on his computer. She seemed to resent her time with it, and so didn’t have one in her home, but there were things she couldn’t call up during her work in the library. She said hello without looking away from the screen.

  “Lunch is served,” he said.

  “Soup and conversation.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You remember Mariela Cendes.”

  “Of course.”

  She looked at him now with that familiar fixed gaze of slight accusation, as if he’d misled her somewhere long ago. It had been seven years since she first showed up in his night class, six since she began coming to the church, and almost that long since she’d made herself central to its mission. Only in those first months was she capable of expressing joy at having been granted a certainty of direction so anomalous in her life. Eventually, working in the community, the joy left her. He used to be able to talk her back into her own capacities for calm devotion. But his words no longer reached her.

  “I told your friend Harold about Mariela,” she said. “Then it came to me later that his obsession with what happened to his daughter, generating theories, getting tangled up in lives, lives like mine, it’s completely the right response. Anything else is a lie. I think I felt something like his freefall back when Mariela disappeared. And I wonder what happened to me that now I seem able to eat soup and make conversation.”

  “I see. What are you looking at there?”

  She glanced at the screen.

  “Obscenities. We live in an age when obscenity is the given.”

  The best he could do now was to alter her course slightly, enough to bring her, in time, to a service that wasn’t haunted at the edges with the worst human actions, the heaviest mourning, suffering as a kind of lodestone she couldn’t help but turn to upon every waking.

  “We do. But we don’t have to look.”

  “Everyone looks, Father. If only to see what the others are looking at. The internet brings us beheadings, war deaths, celebrity autopsy reports. Traffic accidents, and sexual acts so bizarre they seem the result of traffic accidents. This isn’t a new democracy. This isn’t freedom. We’ve poisoned ourselves. How can we survive this?”

  “Humour helps.” He forgave himself the comment, and only wished something funny had come to mind. She was once capable of easy laughter; now it was work all around. “And so do our disciplines. I have my daily orders. The internet is just another of our enemy’s weapons. It must be stunting to witness so much meaningless spectacle.” Was it truth or self-pity or pride that allowed him to see himself as belonging to a dying breed, the Retainers of Long Knowledge? “We need to bring people news from the un-uploadable worlds. The historical, the private, the spiritual.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, they aren’t buying.” She was right. They’d lost the battle for the common man. Microelectronics could do anything with a standard-issue forty-watt brain. But then the brain was full of wonderful atavisms. As was the present. The Anglican Communion was fracturing and its leader was writing books on Dostoyevsky.

  “Things take time. It’s partly because the Book of Psalms was six centuries in the making that one day everyone will be reading it again.”

  “And one day the sun will explode. Right now I’m worried about us.”

  Here was his opening. He stepped through it without much hope, and offered up a small, silent prayer.

  “I am too. I’ve been thinking we could use you in some of the other social outreach programs. Lately –”

  “I don’t have time, Father.”

  “It’s a matter of balancing your efforts.”

  A man’s laughter rose up from the hall. It sounded like Willy, the young AWOL American soldier. He’d never really come back from Iraq. Every second face in the city spooked him and he laughed at scenes in his head. He seemed to be laughing through the walls at André’s proposition, another Distant Audience.

  “You want me to give up my work. You don’t trust it, or me for that matter.” Her voice always softened as her accusations sharpened. “You’ve come to see me as a zealot, blinded by – what’s that word you like? Hubris?”

  “You know I value your work, Rosemary. And I value you. But we all must attend to our humility.”

  “I’m too big for my britches.”

  “Not all our social justice work is done in battle gear. Maybe you need to allow yourself a break. Maybe to feel some reward, and a bit more hope.”

  “Why are you saying all this?”

  “Because week by week you’re becoming harder, more indignant. I don’t blame you, I’m just trying not to lose you. And you’re in danger of losing yourself.”

  She pushed herself away from the desk.

  “And what about those I help? What’s to become of them if I take your recommended R and R?”

  “They’re resourceful. That’s how they ended up here.”

  And then it was Rosemary laughing. It was low and brief, but derisive. She’d never sounded this note before with him. She got up from the chair.

  “I’ve never asked you to sanction my work. You or the church. I raise most of the money on my own anyway. Actually most of it’s mine. So what do I need you for?”

  “You know the answer.”

  “Yes. I do. But you seem to have forgotten it.” She wouldn’t soften again. She walked past him, saying, “I’m off to feed mouths,” and left him alone. In her simplest statements he sometimes heard the compressed rhythms of biblical Hebrew. On meeting her, against his good sense, he’d felt a force of need in her that he supposed had a personal aspect. In fact, the need was for the knowledge he could impart, first of theology, and then of faith and its practices. He’d wondered if there wasn’t something for them both to learn of the lessons of the heart. Now she was able to leave his presence without apparent loss, not the smallest pang of parting. He’d brought her out of one world into a larger, more fraught one, and it had worn her down. He’d animated her sense of the holy without knowing how to guide it, and so she’d wandered into the fray with a half-formed spiritual intelligence. It could be that her heart was stronger than his. In any case, it was about to exile itself. He would lose her, if he hadn’t already.

  The Old Testament God sometimes played his adversary. There was a lesson in the arrangement that he had never understood.

  Stranger,

&
nbsp; In the weeks before you left us, we used to make jokes, the three of us, about the famous last words of historical figures. Do you remember? Henry VIII, Napoleon. Minnesota Fats, calling a kiss off the tombstone. Mother had all the best lines. And then one night there was a tension in the air that I didn’t understand and I wanted us all to play, and you said you were tired of the game. You said, “Nobody really dies quipping.”

  It wasn’t one of your usual evasive remarks. This one sounded earned. I thought so even then.

  More and more of your lines have come back to me lately. They seem to want to be put together.

  When I worked with the clients at GROUND, I often felt the force of plot design, some hand at work, rounding the periods in their lives into legible wholes. Their testimonies were full of high drama, veered off in unlikely directions. And now in my own life I’ve experienced such a turn and it’s had the effect of clarifying for me which things matter and which don’t. It’s important to me that my life doesn’t become a banal story, a lesson in pity or self-deception, an example of courage or staring down misfortune or whatever. I want instead to be accepting of ambiguity, even contradiction, and hard truths. And to be without illusion, and yet still hopeful.

  I don’t expect to make sense of senseless events, but hope to find a way of accepting a world that contains them. Things can change, all in a day, a given hour. That hour can run in us forever. Some people hold it too close even to speak of it. Others go over it compulsively, telling the same story for years (maybe they get the story wrong, it doesn’t matter unless a tribunal is judging). The one wrong thing is to turn from it.

  We recognize one another, those who’ve lived through that hour.

  There’s much you haven’t told me. But your ways of not telling aren’t strategic, I now realize. They’re part of you. Which means, I think, that there’s much you haven’t told yourself.

  You don’t believe in talking cures. I do believe in telling ones. The hard part is to begin. But begin at the beginning.

  Who were you?

  k

  He nodded.

  “Hello, Rosemary.”

  She was just outside his door. He made room and she stepped past him and walked to the window, as he’d imagined she would. He closed the door and looked at her fully from behind. She’d made a slight effort to dress attractively, a long skirt and low-cut top mottled in yellows and browns. She carried a woven red bag.

  “Does everyone comment on the view?”

  “Invariably.”

  She turned and surveyed the place. It looked orderly enough, he thought, in the late-afternoon light.

  “My friends in St. James Town love their views,” she said. “People mistake altitude for perspective. There’s a little Roma boy who has the sense to be scared of living in the sky, but I told him the angels were up there with him. He asked if that meant he’d see his dead brother.”

  She wouldn’t make this easy for them.

  “That’s quite an opener. Can I get you something?”

  Maybe she doubted her decision to come. He’d asked her over the phone. He said he was in trouble and wanted her help. He’d never said anything like it before.

  They took their drinks at either end of the couch, looking down at the city. He pointed out the better new buildings among the older ones, with their squared-away expressions of nearly the same thought. Often the lowering light caught some wonder in the downtown architecture that was never there on the local cable channel with the traffic cameras marking the main arteries and crawl lines parsing troubles from the streets.

  “I used to think all the urban confusions could be resolved in a good prospect.”

  “I’m not impressed by views.” She seemed as composed as usual, but there was a new stillness, as if to contain herself. She held the glass with both hands and balanced it in her lap. “No one learns anything without their feet on the ground. I wish we’d stay in our element.”

  “Our nature is bigger than our element, it seems.”

  Having said so, he could now confess to her, carefully, that he’d been watching her house. He would apologize and explain that he didn’t understand the compulsion, that he’d never done this before, that most hours of the day he was fine, and in those hours he thought of his spying on her (though it wasn’t as if he’d ever followed her or crept up and peered in her windows), or surveilling of a sort, as something other than erotic, even though here and now he’d admit to being attracted to her in otherwise acceptable and healthier ways. That in fact his watching involved a kind of overwhelming need to observe and to understand her and her life, even as this observation also seemed to him a kind of surrender to certain truths about his own life, certain failures, that he seemed incapable of addressing directly.

  She said the idea of being outside our element reminded her of a photo Father André had once called up for her on his computer, a spaceship picture of a monster storm on the south pole of Saturn. She began to describe it, and Harold couldn’t get back from Saturn to the first words of his admission.

  “I think I know it,” he said. Kim had sent him a link a few years ago. She was always sending him links in those days. Never the funny kind. Now she sent notes boring into him.

  “It’s five thousand miles across, forty-five miles high,” she was describing the alien storm. “You look into the eye of that thing and it sees you. But it’s not meant to, not in God’s scheme.”

  “It looks like the eye of a dread sea creature,” he said. Did Rosemary understand that that wasn’t God out there, in the places where no one was looking? “It’s best not to contemplate.”

  The couch wasn’t working. Somehow the city was different with her here, not at all what he’d try to describe. Their little perch wasn’t intimate so much as remote. Far off, dazed sun on the water, the wind on the lake spinning up white flags. Out along the expressway, a strange signal reached him.

  “What is that?” he asked “Two fingers left of the wind turbine.” He held his arm straight and invited her to sight along it. Instead she looked from her side of the couch.

  “It’s the news.” Of course. How hadn’t he noticed it before? It was one of the electronic billboards playing its package of ads and headlines. Now that he knew what it was, some impression in the lines and colours reassembled in the eye the entire image. All he saw were dark green lines, dead straight, but somehow it meant that another Canadian soldier had been returned home in a coffin. You glimpse from a distance or drive past and picture the rest by yourself. The dead kid’s haircut and uniform, the very frame of the headshot there over the news anchor’s shoulder (the anchor’s haircut and suit). The military spokesman (his haircut, his uniform …). And back to the flag-draped coffin and the young family standing strong. He tried to explain the phenomenon to Rosemary and then found himself describing how the brain makes things up, reassuring us with a false sense of stability.

  “Neurocircuitry corrects for curvatures in receding lines. Realist painters know all about it and take countermeasures. Art correcting for nature.”

  “So we’re back to nature again,” she said. “Will we be going in circles some more?”

  “Maybe we’ll stick to art. I forgot to thank you for the poem.”

  “I’m glad you got it. Though that doesn’t mean it reached you necessarily.” “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” by John Updike. She’d typed it out and mailed it to him care of the department. The old, slow technologies were likely intended as a message of sorts in themselves. “Let us not mock God with metaphor.”

  “That’s certainly a handy line to have in your pocket.”

  “But you won’t be keeping it in yours, I guess.”

  “I have no real memory for poetry.”

  He recalled a line or so from the last stanza. Let us not seek to make it less monstrous … something, something … lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance. Did she presume he’d never known remonstrance? Things had bee
n proven to him. Certain lessons of history had been directed at him personally.

  She said a trailing-away thing he couldn’t make out.

  “Sorry?”

  She’d looked at him once since they sat down. Now she held to the view that didn’t impress her.

  “You said you were in trouble. But sitting here with your drink you seem pretty well adjusted to it.”

  She moved a hand to her leg as if to smooth her skirt but then returned it to the glass, no doubt afraid to invite his eye to a certain movement.

  “All right. I wanted to talk about you.”

  “How am I part of your trouble?”

  He smiled. “If you’re in my life, you’re part of my trouble. But honestly, it’s that you confound me. And I won’t be able to understand you unless I can spend time with you, which you know I like doing. Though I won’t complicate things if you’ll allow me to –”

  “Observe? I sound like an interesting bug.”

  “I know it sounds ridiculous. It’s not hard to make me sound ridiculous. Not for you.”

  “What’s your question, Harold?”

  “I don’t know exactly. It has something to do with recognizing the enormousness of things. Have you always sensed it, even before your … religious turn?”

  “I don’t think you understand what you’re asking. But if it helps you, I’d say yes. I’ve always known. And the turn, as you put it, wasn’t something I was aware I was looking for.”

  “So it wasn’t that you were an agent of your own change but that change just happened to you. One self supervening another.”

  “I guess so. It didn’t have anything to do with feeling blue, or being mixed up. It still doesn’t.”

  They entered a silence. He was instantly at swim. He could think of nothing to say, and watching her seemed to hold him still somehow. Her eyes were fixed on something far off. A half minute passed. As if to find what she was focused on he looked out again at the city. She was out there somewhere – he believed that she’d forgotten him, or maybe she was trying to lead him into her prayerful quiet.

  His actions of finishing his drink, rising, and preparing another didn’t penetrate her attention. Maybe she needed to know if she could be alone with him, outside the chatter. Could he be quiet with her? Who was he without talk and ideas?