Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  Whoever made these films for the cops, they had no real standards or talent. He wished they’d done more to get it right. He didn’t like being misrepresented to the world.

  He surfed around the local news and cop sites. Break-ins, assaults, a car-jacking. The newest missing girl, caught by cameras in the subway, in a store. He couldn’t understand a killer’s way of thinking. They were busted, stupid people, not the twisted geniuses in movies. Or they probably had sexual problems. There were cross-Canada warrants for this guy and that. He shared no element with sexual assailants, only a definition. He could prove against statistics he was humanly complicated beyond others in his category. When it started he broke into homes like a lot of rapists, it was true, but only when he knew they were empty. He’d choose the women, get to know them from a distance by name and appearance, and plan how and when to break in. It happened seventeen times before he was caught coming out a window with panties stuffed down his jeans. He always took the underwear but he loved just to be in their spaces, the places they thought of as theirs. And he wasn’t as violent as people saw him. He’d killed the dog in self-defence in a shipping bay in cold Saskatoon when he’d lived three weeks at the Y without incident, a block from the bus station. Animals did not seem to take to him. And he’d tackled his one victim Kim in a classic so-called blitz approach only because he couldn’t deceive her, couldn’t even really speak to her in the circumstance. It was not easy for him to be physical. He’d hurt his knee as a child that had never healed to all-better.

  He knew numbers but didn’t trust them. The numbers said about half of serial attackers feel remorse for their crimes, but how could you believe them? The numbers said between eight and thirteen per cent communicate afterwards with their victim, but how do they communicate, what could they really say, and is it understood?

  He entered her name and hunted around. It linked to some old campus job with someplace that helped foreign students. She’d listed two phone numbers. One of them hit in a reverse directory and he had an address. Her last name turned up a father and mother, and the mother lived at the same place. He fed it into a map site and then zoomed a satellite picture. He tried to feel her presence there but couldn’t say for sure.

  The numbers said he was in a low percentage that he’d not attacked anyone since and he wanted to believe it. It was something he wished she could know about him, though he knew she never would. In his fantasies she passes by in a crowded city street and sees him, smiles, not knowing, because he seems harmless, just another downtown character. And then he says her name, and she turns. What happens next is grey.

  Things of no worth in themselves can mean something when they’re gathered.

  He put Yonge Street on the satellite and scrolled to the place where he was. He zoomed inside a hundred feet. There was a perfect viewing distance for every place that was. The picture seemed just about right. It was summer then and now. He had a long time left on his two dollars so he angelled over the city, flying over and back, up and down, like he was already past his sad ending and could visit the past and replay it. He tried to find a billboard with the date and time but the readouts would not come up clear. Whatever this day he was hovering over, the whole of it was his. He could drop down to the physical buildings and then swoop in his mind through the windows, into any one of the millions of lives.

  He did not mind not belonging. He had never known his own street addresses, the climbing falling numbers did not apply to him. People pretended to know themselves by finding their lives on the grids. There were things he knew that they didn’t, outside of numbers and names. Nothing repeats the same way twice. Nothing stays. Pictures hold still for us but we don’t for them.

  In the future was someone to show his thoughts to. It was hours later, in his room, when the angelling finally failed him and he felt himself floating in the deeps. They gave ships women’s names. The ship out there was one he’d known. When she was close enough to see him, it would be too late for her.

  Marian’s getaway was an organic farm about an hour west of the city owned by her oldest friend, a tall strawberry blonde now going grey poet named Lana Keyes-Little, and her husband, Daniel. She had spent days there in every season for years, sometimes helping with the farm work, often preparing large dinners for the seasonal workers, who tended to be environmentally savvy students, and Lana and Daniel’s writer friends, who drove great distances for the dinner conversation, and for those who stayed over, the wonder of being there in the morning for breakfast and a walk through the barn or the fields. Daniel was an African-Canadian from Manitoba who wrote possibly brilliant plays about obscure historical figures, mostly scientists, that tended to close before completing their planned run. There’d once been a rumour that Robert Lepage was going to revive Daniel’s drama about Kepler, but nothing had come of it. Kim had always liked him – he’d always taken an interest in her, and she was old enough now to understand that he was living the life he wanted to, without expectation or disappointment. But Lana was unpredictable, prone to making a bloodsport of conversation, and Kim had more than once had occasion around her to feel embarrassed for her mother, whose early life with Lana, in their student days, had been wilder than her own. The stories were told not for her but for Donald, whom Lana liked to shock, maybe because, as Kim read it, her husband was more interested in Donald’s views on math and science than in hers on art.

  They arrived just after two in the afternoon. Kim hadn’t been there since the year she left for New York but it was as she remembered, the vegetable fields all around, the open barn, the brown, weathered side buildings, the gated pasture falling off to the north, and the huge old oak shading the nineteenth-century red-brick Italianate house. Inside, the thick planked softwood floors and, everywhere, kittens.

  Marian had slept in the car and had a forty-minute window of energy as they all took seats in the front room, with a view of the long gravel driveway, the road, a neighbour’s corn rows. Lana and Daniel did well not to react to Marian’s appearance – Kim was watching for it, she’d told Lana on the phone to expect to be a little shocked – but earlier than usual she broke out the dope and the writers and Marian passed a joint between them as Donald and Kim sipped their tea. Kim watched the cigarette pass from Daniel’s thick fingers to his wife’s long ones to her mother’s small hand and then followed it up to her mouth and watched her purse and inhale so that her face took on a new appearance, because she was not a smoker, as if whatever they all shared there in the room could be drawn in only through a self-estranging act, and it was all a little strange, out of time and place, and it felt good.

  Marian asked Daniel about his writing and, with some prompting from Lana, he fell into a story about negotiations with an Unnamed Great Director who had been workshopping his new play on Marshall McLuhan.

  “His genius is counterintuitive, but so are his faults. He wants complete control of the text. At best I’d be a collaborator in the defiling of my own creation.” He laughed at his absurd predicament. Lana called The Director “a no-talent blustery asshole” and laughed a little more meanly. Donald then steered everyone into a discussion of something he’d read about methylation and the genetic inheritance of emotional trauma, but at some point seemed to find himself having forgotten his company, and simply trailed off in the middle of a point about stress responses in rats.

  When Marian got tired, Lana set her up in the guest room and then invited Kim for a hike around the farm as Donald and Daniel took up on the back porch. Lana introduced her to two sturdy young women working in the barn with the horses in their rented stalls. They did the work in exchange for wages and food and riding, they said, and because they liked their employers. “That’s more or less how I taught them to say it,” said Lana.

  Everywhere in the yard were small chickens. Lana led Kim out into the pasture, where a few horses were grazing and looked up at them for a moment, and on into stands of old trees, telling stories of deer and raccoons, wild turkeys, grinning poss
ums in the woodpile, and coyotes scared off with shotguns. Eventually they came back, approaching the house from the side, and sat down on wooden lawn chairs by a little blue concrete swimming pool with a waterline that sat several inches too low.

  “She’s worse than I pictured,” said Lana.

  “Yes.”

  “And how are you doing? Be honest.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Marian says you’re spending a lot of time managing Donald and Harold.”

  “Donald’s been on his own. I wouldn’t know how to manage him. And Harold’s kind of disappeared.”

  “If only he’d done that years ago.”

  “He did. But then he came back.”

  When they left that night, after the duck and the wine and the conversation about how all things are unlike one another and Daniel quoted Augustine on prayer being a journey to “the land or region of unlikeness” and Kim said she could stare at horses for hours and Lana spoke of her sense of the wild and Donald had trouble keeping up with the metaphors and wondered if they were all about burritos and Marian laughed quite a lot and said it was always one ongoing party out here, always was and always would be, Kim found herself craving the silence of her room. Once they got home and Marian was put to bed with a kiss on the forehead, Kim fell hard into her own bed and allowed herself to feel the fullness of the day, though within it, a coldness coming in on the night tide of sleep that she knew would still be there the next day. Old and unresolved, brought forward by what Lana had said just before they left their poolside chairs and went in to make dinner.

  She’d said to hell with Harold. He’ll stand before you at pointblank range, look you in the face, and lie. The lies will be well appointed. He will hand you over to his lies and let them lead you around like a pull toy. You underestimate him if you think he just fibs now and then, or that he lies only to protect others, or himself, out of cowardice. He lies wholeheartedly. He lies to others and to himself, yes, but also to rocks and trees and heaps of scrap metal and coffee stains on his shirt. I have never known a more thoroughgoing liar, and I have known a great many. Your mother came here once, this was the dead of summer, and she sat out by this pool in a sundress and big sunglasses. I watched her through the window, and she went over and picked free a bit of blue paint that was flaking off the side and she took it back to her chair and studied it as if it were ancient parchment. She turned it over and over again, then let it fall to her lap. And then, from behind those big glasses the tears began to stream. She barely moved, but here came the tears. And I went out to her and made her tell me what was wrong. She said the pool had made her think of a motel pool that the three of you had once played in on a road trip across the country – she couldn’t remember where it was – but there you all were, and she had stood at the end of a slide and caught you as you hit the water, and your father had sat on the deck, fully clothed but fixed on the scene with great surety and love, she said, but that isn’t what she was crying at. It was that the motel had made her think of a call she’d received from the police, this was a few years after the road trip, a few years before she was there by my pool, telling the story. Some girl had been killed in one of those lakeshore motels, a hooker, they said, and they’d gone through the desk registry and taken the licence plates of all the cars there that day, and one of them was Harold’s, and so they were calling to see if he was in. They said all this at once, as if not imagining what they might be setting off, though of course they didn’t care. The fact that they were calling and not at her door meant they knew who they were looking for, and only wanted the liar as a witness, if he’d seen the guy there, but none of this mattered, really. What mattered was that the night of the afternoon in question Harold had come home and told a long story of his day. There’d been a trip to St. Lawrence Market that had reminded him of the day you, at the age of five, had gone missing there when each of them thought the other was watching you, and he’d dropped to his hands and knees to see you across the way, staring up at some fish on ice. Of course Marian remembered that day. And then, he said, he’d gone to some talk by a visiting French historian who wore a black turtleneck under a safari jacket and a bunch of them went out afterwards to a Spanish restaurant with flamenco dancers and they all had too much to drink and one of his colleagues who nobody liked had bought the castanets off the fingers of one of the dancers. It’s all vivid, isn’t it? That’s why I remember it. It’s vivid almost to the degree that it’s fantasy. Because there’d been no market trip, no visitor in black. He’d spent the day in a motel room, with some woman. I know you know about his escapades – your mother always regretted that you knew – still maybe I shouldn’t have said all this to you. I’ve done it to set things straight, or straighter.

  And because I’m telling the truth here, I might as well add that I’ve always wanted to run him through with a burning sword.

  PART THREE

  8

  Kim,

  Once when you were about fourteen I showed you photos of yourself as a six-year-old. Do you remember? A former neighbour in Mexico City found them and mailed them to me at the university. We were in our courtyard (or was it theirs?). In one of them, you were in the act of battering me with a plastic baton of some kind. I’m sitting in a chair, rearing back, afraid that you’ll hurt me. My expression would be familiar to you, I suppose. I remember showing you the pictures when you came home from school. You claimed not to remember Mexico City at all.

  I can tell you that in some ways you haven’t changed much. You were born a batterer of authorities. I’ve always admired and feared that in you. And feared for you because of it.

  Because it’s not clear to me yet whether I’ll ever send you this letter, I just might see it through. I’ll take your place as the reader while I write. I remember you also accusing me once of not sounding like myself in the letters I sent you in New York. I was someone else when I wrote, you said. A little smarter, and less prone to complaint, and less passionate. It’s odd that you find me at all passionate in person, or once did. It seems a risky word, somewhat accusatory, as if it was my appetites only that had hurt us all. And anyway you and your mother have always been more truly passionate. Even your intellects had all of you down to your toes. The two of you running out in “the sudden rain of a deep conversation just to smell the air.” Did I get that right? Do you know whom I’m quoting? I remember things you’ve said all your life, and how you said them. I don’t have a brain for metaphors – I’m not even all that strong on analogy – but I have a memory for yours.

  Do you recall defending me in that bleak driveway scene when I’d dropped you off and there were Marian and Donald out front, waiting by their car to take you somewhere else? He made as if to compliment me on my new book and then added that he hoped to get a contract for a book of his own (we’re still waiting) on Gödel, with “crossover appeal,” that a non-academic publisher might be interested in. Beware dumbing down, I said (or just plain dumb, I didn’t). He said my own book would have been strengthened had it been written in “a less mandarin prose.” And I likely said that simplified language is a tool of tyrants and so on, and then Marian stopped us. We are such a couple of brats together, he and I.

  And they got into the car, and then you gave me a hug and told me (I wish they could have heard you) that you weren’t an expert but you liked my book and wanted to talk with me about it sometime. We never did have that talk, but you should know how much that moment means to me.

  People like me are always marvelling at people like you, those who connect directly, effortlessly, who passionately batter and compassionately embrace. I don’t want you ever to lose that passion. But there are signs, I think, that you’re following it blindly, letting it undermine you. It was a mistake for you to drop out of school. And, yes, I think you dropped out to hurt me. You’ve always assumed I’ve withheld myself from you – and I have, parts of my past, and my very presence for those months when I was more or less lost to myself, having left you both.
But it was never my intention to withhold love. In fact, it was love for you and your mother that kept me closed.

  And so, what to say? Where to begin?

  Think of yourself in New York. Then imagine me the same age. In 1973 I won a travel scholarship to fund sixteen weeks of language instruction in a country of my choice. From this distance, I’m inclined to see myself as more naive than I was, but everywhere then students were politically aware, campuses were engaged, and I’d just completed my master’s degree that spring, and so I knew about Chile – the world’s first freely elected Marxist leader, the American attempts at “destabilization,” the bribes, the funding of armed opposition, the kidnappings intended to spark revolts. It was the place to be, a place I could never afford to visit otherwise, and I knew even then that my doctoral work would be in Latin American history. Whatever was happening in Chile was going to change that history. I don’t even recall there being a decision about where I should go. It was self-evident.

  The Santiago of mid-June that year turned out to be full of young Allendistas from the Americas and Europe. Though it was quite clear from my first days there that you weren’t to make assumptions about the political allegiances of anyone who didn’t declare them, it seemed that everyone at the school was either actively in support of the government as Marxists themselves or, like myself I suppose, as fellow travellers of the cause.

  I lived with a German named Armin and two Americans, Will and Carl, three of us attending the same school, though different classes. We had rooms in a small house in a once prosperous neighbourhood by then fallen to a barrio. It was off Moneda Street, at the far end of which was the presidential palace. Many houses were now apartments, in disrepair, with bright balconies and clover gardens. The jacaranda in the austral spring. The looming Andes. The city’s sheer beauty, I thought, must surely hold a promise of peace. There’s nothing like sharing joy and hope with so many in such a place.