Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  Not all young men, maybe, but most of the ones in the news.

  As her body began to feel tested she lapsed into a thought of something blue and stolen and she lengthened her stride and upon the new rhythm escaped it.

  Nothing sweated out, of course.

  Harold was avoiding her. That her inability to reach him might open an old wound in her hadn’t occurred to him. He was re-enacting his absence.

  Terrorists. Political kidnappings, murder. Last week she passed by the TV Donald was watching. The old man superimposed on his younger self was James Cross, the one from the FLQ crisis who didn’t get killed. He said, “I think of it as a storm. You might say my life since then has been a calm after the storm. The storm didn’t take my life. But it has made it less my own.” There was Trudeau, Laporte. Months ago, inside one of their debates, Harold had told her Canadians once knew who they were and who they weren’t, and that was the beauty of them. “But there isn’t a ‘we’ anymore, Kim. There’s only who we used to be.”

  The running felt bad until it felt good. Even the old wrestling with her quitting mechanism made her feel like a kid again, absorbing self-discipline in furtherance of some abstract quality of character. Years ago her gymnastics coach had told her that training would make her a fighter. The short, unsmiling woman made mantras of goal-result thought and broke things down into lists of three. Balance, line, explosion. Practice, technique, focus. “Training makes the fighter.” “Fight means focus.” Anything that mattered, meant for memory, fell to clipped phrases, in the limited English of a transplanted Romanian instead of the Scots-Irish old blood she was. But maybe she’d been right, Coach McKinnon. Kim had fought gymnastically. She’d been trained into focus as if being prepared all along for that moment years away of thrust and escape.

  She walked for a minute before the turn home, another minute after, then began again. A little flush, like the kind she felt before vomiting, but she pushed through it and tried to hold her pace. She was strong for her size but her lungs had never been very good. As always she blamed her former smoking father – the flush had always led to blame – and then she pushed through that too. Her scar was itching. She was sweating real sweat now. It had been too long.

  She pictured Pinochet and Thatcher in an old news photo. He’d ordered men to be mutilated, dropped from helicopters, throatslit. He’d ordered women burned alive.

  It wasn’t just poetry, the news that stayed news.

  With the house in sight she let off and trotted to a walk. Short of a brain disease she would never again be newsless, wordless, but soon she’d be naked in a glass stall, staring at a bar of green soap with its carved name washed away and keeping her thoughts there with her, in the steamy present, where the flesh lived.

  It happened one afternoon that he came later than usual, near the time she was going home, and so he waited and accompanied her onto the streetcar and down to the subway platforms and the silver train and then onto a southbound bus. When he’d first met Luis and Teresa he’d hoped that their common pasts and language would inspire in him things to say, but he was not a talker, not to anyone, and now on this route home with her when he felt most in need of words between them he felt only his deficiency. When he looked around at the city he saw cars and people, buildings and trees, not anything more particular, and many of the things, he didn’t know the names of because they existed only in English. There were blocks of store windows to the south full of metal things he wanted, knives, watches, lighters, studded belts and boots, and he used to imagine that if he had one or two of these things they would remove the mocking absence of the names of other things, but because he had no money he stopped walking by those windows and thought less and less often about them until now he didn’t feel their pull at all, and didn’t believe now that the metals had any power to help him anyway.

  He walked her past towers, to her tower building. He looked at her in wonder, the black hair, her head level as she walked. She at least was all in the particular – the skin, the flat bones of her face, her hands turned in slightly – of a kind anyone who really looked at her could know.

  In the lobby she stopped at her mailbox and collected a package from her sister, and she guessed it would contain crayon drawings from their nieces and one or two books. In the elevator she told him about her brother’s daughters and then he asked about the books. She laughed a little, and opened the package and showed him. There were two romantic novels, each with a picture of a man and a woman on the cover. One of the nieces had drawn a picture of the very tower they were now inside, with a stick-figure Teresa waving from a window.

  — Maria is more a mother to them than our brother’s wife, she said.

  She mentioned her sister more and more, it seemed, and he hoped it was to remind him that she only played Luis’s wife, but he wondered why she would. There was no shame in her secret, he wanted to tell her, but the truth was that there was shame in it, and they both knew it. Luis knew it but didn’t care because it wasn’t his shame.

  Inside the door she called out for Luis and then pretended to discover that he wasn’t home. She said the job he had now often kept him out past midnight.

  Rodrigo sat at the table off the kitchen. He looked out at the view of the other towers, with the city between them running north as far as he could see.

  What he most wanted was to see what Teresa saw when she looked at him, to think about himself however she did. What he wanted to talk about, and there was shame in this too, was himself. He had been falling away from his own thoughts for days. The only time he felt he belonged to his life, all of it, was when he was with her, and he didn’t even know her very well. But when he was with her he thought he knew a few things, that she should stop living with Luis, that he should leave Rosemary’s basement and get free of her charity and find work somewhere lucky, with the right man to teach him a trade and a way of being in this country so that he had money and friends and could build a life, even if it had to be in the shadows. He didn’t mind the shadows, and thinking about them filled him with the only anticipation he felt, other than when he was with a woman.

  She took two cans of beer from the fridge and sat opposite him.

  — When will you get your own apartment, Rodrigo?

  — I need a good job. Rosemary’s looking.

  — I think maybe she wants you to stay with her. Teresa smiled. I think maybe she’s in love with you, her hot young Latin man.

  He looked to his beer. He didn’t think it was love but there was something. More and more Rosemary came to talk to him, and more often now about her life than his. What bothered him was that she knew he couldn’t always follow her, the words she used, how fast she talked, and yet she spoke on without bothering to ask claro, as she once used to do. He was serving some function in her life, the listener who only half understood and wouldn’t question her or enter his own thoughts into matters. She was full of stories, usually the events of her days, but sometimes she seemed to pause before one and then not tell it. Maybe she’d fallen in love with someone. The closer she got to this story, the more silences in her speech. He had no sense of what it might be but it was only when the silences began that he felt close to her.

  When he finished his beer Teresa went to the fridge and got him another, and this time she came around to his side of the table to put it before him. She was there, close at his side, and when he didn’t turn to her, she put a hand beneath his chin and pulled him to her belly and the smell of her skin in her shirt. He opened his mouth against her. She stood him up and kissed him and it all happened like they had been blind until now. The need for talk was gone. She had brought him forth by touch.

  He wanted to have her where they were, high up over the city, looking down on it, but she took his hand and led him to her bedroom. Then she placed him at arm’s length and just looked him in the eye and so they stood for several seconds, saying nothing. She was wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt with clouds or flowers, Rodrigo couldn’t tell, stit
ched in white into the front, swirling around each breast. A thin braided silver chain lay against her neck.

  She held her hands out again and he took them and she pulled him onto the bed on top of her. He knew he was too hungry for her but couldn’t slow himself. She let him continue kissing, biting her mouth, as she rolled him to the side and unbuttoned her shirt. When he tried to help he got in the way so he went to work on his own clothes. His shirt was off now and he reached behind her and unhooked her bra and at first she didn’t let it fall. He got to his feet and removed his shoes and pants and stood in his underwear, hard before her. Then she let the bra fall and he saw that her breasts weren’t full, as if she’d had a child somewhere in her past, he didn’t know, and she seemed shy about them, and he found himself kissing her nipples as they both got her out of her jeans and panties. He wanted inside her and she said it was safe and then he was there and she was someone different again and she told him to come inside her but he pulled out and came on her belly. With her hand she wiped the come on her breasts and in her pubic hair. He got up and cleaned himself and put on his pants and she asked him to come back to bed. Then he sat with her and they talked about food.

  That evening they walked in the city for hours. Later, alone in his bed, the day returned to him half-crazy. He replayed the sex and the streets, what they’d said, what they’d seen, and the moments fell out of sequence. A young boy asleep on a hammock in a yard. Hard-rolling kids in a skateboard park. Her face beneath him. Store clerks and the way she stood next to him at the table and pulled him in. The blue in the necks of the black birds that resettled on the lawn after they’d passed by. How she held him with the printed flats of her fingertips and brushed him with her nails. All of it summoned out of the basement ceiling and looming all night in the unlit room.

  In one of the seminars I took at Columbia (yes, I did attend some classes) the prof began the year by asking us what we thought it meant to practise history. “I mean, why do it?” she asked. Instantly, nine bodies tensed, ready to answer. Only I sat calmly, with nothing on my tongue, and so of course she asked me. The room waited me out. Finally I said something along the lines that it’s the historian’s responsibility to help those whom history has abused to bear it forward. She responded by asking the guy next to me what he thought, and around the table it went, all of them positing and expanding, quoting Hegel or Le Goff or Hayden White or Spivak, who’d taught some of them. They were parrots in a pet store, the acolytes, but the prof seemed to like them. Mine was not the answer she was looking for. At least she never called on me again.

  Why write history? Haven’t all the points of view, all the expert opinions, drained authority from one another? Is there one answer that stands above the rest?

  You’re not replying to my emails or calls. You’re not in when I come by, or at least you’re not answering when I buzz you. The department secretary says you haven’t been by your office for days as far as she knows. Should I file a missing persons report? Or have you yet again gone dark, as they say in the spy movies?

  When you depart from your life as I know it, I can’t imagine where you are. Your failure to appear in body or word feels directed at me but it becomes a condition of all things.

  Do you understand?

  Unless you reply, this will be my last note to you. I’ll see you whenever, with mother at the house, and nothing that matters will pass between us.

  The differences: her body and face had changed; she lived by need, isolated, but against her need, lonely. Every day she took shelter in her room to write or read or simply to lie on her bed, exhausted at having had to maintain an outward self, and yet more alone, more separate than a year ago she could have come anywhere near with all her volunteer witnessing and empathy.

  She slightly despised mystery. Particular absences, gaps in the sequences, holes in the known were intolerable to her. She thought less. She simply felt and needed.

  One afternoon she announced to Marian an intention to go gallery hopping, alone, and off she went, taking in a few small spaces on Ossington and then Queen. Nothing much caught her interest. She headed north on Spadina, then along Dundas to the Art Gallery of Ontario. In the museum’s pre-Gehry era she and Harold would take in riotous Rauschenberg and Picasso and all the artists whose names she could never remember. The place was different now, the interiors, the vistas, the collection itself with its new orders and none of the old disappointments and tantalisms. She ended up in a small room, staring at a painting, Helga Matura, a murdered prostitute, according to the explanatory text. There was something about the fuzzy realism, like a slightly unfocused photograph that made it falsely romantic and yet more present, like a memory. Another male artist sly with violence. When she was a girl Kim had imagined the beautiful woman she hoped to become, with fine, dark brows set high over brown eyes, a full mouth like her mother’s, and shoulder-length black hair. It turned out she’d been imagining a dead woman.

  Through the windows the city kept coming up newly. She stood for several minutes in one of the back winding stairwells, ascending through a blue incandescent cube, with its mediumlevel view of mid-downtown, the lake winking between columns to the south, construction cranes everywhere, ponderously knitting themselves skyward. The city in its remaking. She considered taking in a few Old Masters, but instead she simply left. Outside were Japanese and American tour groups, couples, single men and women on cellphones, giving directions, arranging rendezvous. She became one of them, calling Marian to tell her she’d bring home Indian takeout.

  “Was there anything good?” her mother asked.

  “Mostly the same things. But the best of them get better.”

  At the back of the gallery, in the park, the half-closed sky produced notes against the wall of blue cladding. She walked south and picked up the dinner, and was out on the street again when a rain caught her and she took to a bar patio and sat under an awning.

  Near the end of her half-pint the long light of the afternoon began to return. After the rain a passing car made silverblack salmonskin tracks in the wet pavement and the sun caught the side-view mirror and burned on her retina and she looked into the recesses of the bar now dancing in red and took in the unlikely collection at the tables, locals and tourists, a homeless old man standing neither here nor there, slightly apart from the bar, a mother and preteen son, all of them like her gathered out of the weather. When the waiter came she asked if she could buy a round for the old man, anonymously. He said, “One,” and she ordered for herself another glass of beer to stay inside this feeling, this need of her father’s to be lit with drink.

  What was it he yielded to?

  Whatever it was, she wanted the full account. He knew as she did that certain events are not time-bound, that they’re never really past. She imagined the shape of the account, of what might be revealed. She’d glimpsed it somewhere. As she turns a corner, it’s ahead of her, then disappears in mid-air. The shape is not of an animal but something harder, time-encrusted, a dusty, run-nelled curving surface, the length of a life held miles distant, hanging before you until the wind comes and it turns and thins to seeming nothing.

  This was what she was after, this dusty surface. Whatever its substance, the surface would be hard, rough. Otherwise Harold would already have offered the full account. He must have thought that she would judge him, which meant he couldn’t accept that she believed him to be, at heart, though starkly flawed, a good man. Unless he allowed her closer, she had no way of proving to him that despite all, despite whatever, she loved him.

  The takeout was cold. She thought about having another drink. The alcohol wasn’t courage, it was faith. The faith felt good, warm, but then all in a few seconds some cold, clawed certainty began moving under the warmth and she hurried to put cash under her glass. When she left the bar she looked back to see the old man sitting at a table now, talking with the waiter. They both looked up and the old man smiled for her and slightly lifted his hand from the drink in farewell.

&nb
sp; He had to be careful how often he watched and where he called it up, the cops tracked these hits and saw patterns, but today in his booth he couldn’t help but click on the re-enactment, re-amazed how they got it all wrong. For one it had been too dark to see, not lit for cameras. From the back his actor looked Chinese or something, you couldn’t tell. He always felt like asking the stranger at the next station if they thought he looked Chinese. And she didn’t look like herself either, not like anyone he’d have chosen. Her hair was too flat and her face overfed. She didn’t even walk the same, too slow and showy. And the actor attacker sort of hustled her through the cage gate instead of how it was, how he’d slammed into her shoulder, how he heard her breath shoot out so it hung a second in mid-air with the coffee and sweets, and how he landed on her so she was stunned all over again when they fell into the deeper darkness and she knew his weight and belief.