Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  A car driven by a young black woman passed by and from inside came two notes of a ring tone and the street sat down differently. The light was soft but brimming, as if the invisible world vibrated to a sound she couldn’t hear.

  The house was quiet. Donald and Marian had gone to receive the new blood test results. She went back to her room and lay on her bed.

  The ring tone notes were still with her, the familiar first notes of an ice cream truck’s overplayed, fuzzy, demagnetizing jingle. She was still high from the writing, overoxygenated, she could see all the way to Peru.

  That she’d found this place in herself, there was hope in that. She wished she could grant her father the same reprieve and take him up into this amazing air, this sunblasted air, and in those few moments when she believed she really could take him there, that this reprieve was available to him in the very words she had found, she returned to her desk and sent him the letter.

  Harold stood on a slight rise in the lawn, with a prospect of the Humanities faculty and graduate students. He sipped his wine and scented rain.

  The Dean’s Reception marked the start of the fall term. For years he’d met the event with calm forbearance, and then the year arrived when he no longer had to feign that he’d been put out by company, that it was a strain simply to say hello to acquaintances in other departments. This year, today, he was somewhere else again. It seemed likely that at some point in the next thirty minutes he would be addressed and be unable to respond. With their little exchanges, their show of good enterprise, they were all only re-enacting a ritual diversion from things as they really were. They affected to disarm these things, terrible things, by talking at angles to them. In years past, he himself partook of the show. One minute he’d be comparing the patriarchal leadership of Pentecostal churches and caudillismo on the haciendas, and the next he was complaining about the new hours at the library, or listening to someone hold forth on a dead Frenchman’s theory about forced relocations in the early soviet. But he saw through it all now. The only true thing that remained was that the wine was never very good, and there was never enough of it.

  Now it was his own name on the wind. In approach were the graduate chair of History, Richard Trevorian, and a woman in a floral summer dress. Brown hair, with bold blond streaks. Her face was sharp and intent, but amiable. Harold allowed himself to notice that her arms and calves were those of an athlete. Not long ago, he would have desired her.

  “This is the Harold of lore. Harold, this is Carrie Hughes. Our new Americanist. She’s from New York by way of the original Cambridge. You two have overlapping interests, I think. And she knows your work.”

  “Hello, Carrie Hughes.”

  “It’s all true, what Richard says. He’s thought through my connection to everyone quite brilliantly.” She briefly put a hand on Trevorian’s arm. He was clearly delighted. Harold suppressed an urge to shake him by the shoulders as if to make him see. “I could have used you before the interview.”

  “You nailed the interview. That committee made for a complicated landscape but you moved over it like …”

  “Like a lithe beast of the plain? Can I have been that?”

  “Clearly you still are,” said Trevorian.

  “You know,” she addressed Harold now, “we just missed meeting each other in Tarrytown, at the Rockefeller archives last summer. I was there the week after you left.”

  “You were going through the log books.”

  “The archivist, James, told me. He knew we had common pursuits.” A lithe beast in pursuit, thought Harold. The fool he once was would deceive himself to think he’d just been sighted. “And this was before I got the job here.”

  “Yes, old James.” He could see she didn’t know what to make of his response. He wanted to help her out, but couldn’t. Trevorian was looking at him oddly, on the verge of concern, but then dismissed himself and went off to find Carrie a glass of wine. She stood with her arms at her sides, and felt no need to do anything with her hands, a posture that most people couldn’t carry off. The woman must have been near thirty-five but she stood unselfconsciously, like a girl. Why had he been in New York? He would recall if he could muster the words. “I was researching suspect sources of missionary funding in the eighties. But then I abandoned it. I’ve abandoned every idea over the last few years. It turns out I’ve been right to do so.”

  She looked him in the eye, searched his face briefly. She could see he wasn’t kidding.

  “Well. I have to choose a faculty mentor. Forgive me if you’re not on the list.”

  “Get tenure and then save yourself. That’s what I’ve learned.”

  “I have to say, this is a strange party. I just met someone who claimed to be from Cultural Studies. She’s one of those among us who’s built a career on hostility. She’s found a way to com-modify her rage.”

  “We all have to do something with it.”

  “I confessed to her that I didn’t know what Cultural Studies was if it wasn’t what all of us were doing. But it must be something else because she didn’t seem to know about history, literature, or languages. Apparently she writes on popular subjects for one of the newspapers. A scholar of American celebrities.”

  They began to walk along the edge of the party. The expected thing would be to ask about her work, but he didn’t want any expected thing between them. On the lawn beyond the group a couple of young men were playing catch with a baseball, and for several seconds it seemed to him that the parabola of the ball’s flight was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  “Not that I don’t enjoy a slant on things.” She was talking about the scholar of celebrities. “I have a feminist friend who reviews movies for journals read by six people.”

  She seemed to be hoping for returned wit, or at least a smile from him. He was a disappointment. At least the impression he was making was true. Trevorian spotted them and brought the wine. Now that they all had a glass, they toasted Carrie’s arrival. Then they all agreed it was important for her to meet as many of the faculty as she could. As Trevorian led her away, she turned back to Harold and fluttered her fingers and arched her brow comically.

  And then something struck him, a kind of knowledge. Within it, a seed of the familiar, and so the promise that it could be forgotten, for it had come to him as a revelation. He must have known it once and lost it. In the past he would have escaped the knowledge by involving himself in a strong distraction. Back when the distractions still charmed him there was hope, though his preferred distractions tended to damage, and the damage replicated. He told himself to leave the party, but that would trap him alone.

  He stood at the edge of things, hoping not to be approached. When next he saw Carrie Hughes she was standing, unchaperoned, in a group who weren’t from the department. No one could see, as he could, that she was by herself in the world. He drifted near.

  A young man was saying that the college had just been cleared because of a bomb threat. Everyone stole quick, dumb glances at the stone building before them. A campus security guard was in the doorway but none of the bomb police or dogs had arrived yet.

  “Another student lunatic trying to reschedule an exam.” The speaker had a shaved head and wire glasses. He was trying to look like Foucault.

  “No exams this time of year,” said the young man. He worked in the building, apparently, but Harold didn’t recognize him. “I hear the caller had … altogether, an Arab accent.”

  “Bomb threats are a tradition of the institution,” said someone.

  “In winter term we’re always evacuating into the snow,” said the Foucault. “I never invigilate without my parka. It’s all part of the dialectic of external influence and local adaptation.”

  “Did you say that you shit in the snow?” Carrie asked.

  Harold smiled, at last. She was reckless where she could be. The bald man gave her a curt glance. She took a few steps towards Harold.

  “I thought you Canadians had a famous sense of humour.”


  A cool breeze came out of nowhere. The sky was massing over them. He wished he hadn’t left his jacket in his office so he could offer it to her. He wanted to tell her that he knew of her loneliness, but that for her, this was a good place. A good university in a global near capital, a place to be. Maybe, in human terms, and if you were lucky, the best. In the history of the species, to be here, now, was to have won the lottery of all creation, to have been swept by the waters of time and chance up onto the shores of a greenness, full of spectacle and quiet, wonder and certainty, possibility. A place that would provide. As long as she hadn’t brought with her some corruption.

  The wind stiffened and took up in the white tablecloths of the catering station, and the staff scrambled to save the wineglasses from disaster. Everyone made for the unthreatened buildings. Harold was slow to follow. He began for the nearest entryway, from which Carrie Hughes now watched him, tucked into the old stone. It was a movie rain when it came. The sky falling. When the lightning and thunder arrived he maintained his pace. She stepped aside for him and they stood together a moment and then went into the building and watched the storm become everything. The darkening stone. Then it really came down.

  “Do you suppose this is what that phone warning was about?” Carrie asked.

  He turned and saw that she was soaked. A little shyly, he thought, she looked at his chest, and her face seemed to change in the dim light through the rain running down the old lead windows. Even now, he felt no physical desire. Was it that he’d finally come to inhabit his own heart, or had he been relieved of it?

  They watched for another minute or two and finally it began to let up. Carrie said she was going to make a run for her car. She asked if he needed a lift somewhere.

  “No, thank you. I’ve got to get back to my office. Now that the bomb’s gone off.”

  “All right. I’ll think about your advice.”

  “The department,” he said. “There are bores and lechers, and a couple of crazies I should have told you about.”

  “I’ll avoid them.”

  “Don’t do that.” She wouldn’t understand. “They’ll attach to you, I know. But be kind to them. We lose so much to choose differently.”

  She paused for a moment. She nodded and he knew her. She gave his hand a little tug and then she left. He watched her fade.

  By the time the building was clear and he got back to his office he was almost dry. He locked the door and took off his pants, shirt, and socks and hung them on the coat rack where they’d catch the breeze from the window. From his filing cabinet he took his bottle of single malt and a glass and set them up on the desk. He sat in his underwear and jacket, only a little chilled, his feet wrapped in a throw rug, and tried not to picture himself as he called up his email, and opened a message from Kim that began

  Kim,

  Once when you were about fourteen

  Teresa was asleep on his chest as he replayed the sex and the stories she had told after it, the way she opened up and led him into her disappointments and pride at having overcome many of them, that no matter how tired she was, she arrived at the café each day upon a kind of illusion that as she moved from table to table, overhearing, entering conversations and leaving them, she somehow held together all these bastards of luck – what her father used to call them, the exiles – and he told her she was right, that it meant something to them to see her move between them, the way they were aware of her without always watching, or watching without knowing why. Her boss had told her she inspired the better men to keep the worse ones in line and so it was a good bar, by day. Her happiness about her work surprised Rodrigo and led them into a round silence, and the silence back into their desire and they began again, in the spirit of surprise happiness, maybe, this time making love for what seemed like hours until the light through the window had tilted away from them and the walls had died a little, and she was still asleep in his arm when he heard the apartment door open.

  He didn’t move. The sound of the television woke Teresa and he looked down at her and found a stranger there, though one he’d seen before in other women stricken with fear. He himself was not afraid. There was nothing Luis could say against them.

  She crawled across him naked and hurried to close the bedroom door. Only when she locked it did he see that it had been fixed with a small brass bolt, mounted crookedly.

  — Don’t worry, he said, and she held a finger to her lips to quiet him.

  Her face had hardened by the time she’d dressed. She gathered Rodrigo’s clothes in her arms and presented them to him and he got out of bed and tried to kiss her, just to calm her, but she pushed him away.

  — I’ll talk to him, he said.

  The channels were changing every few seconds, then stopped on an ad for an exercise machine people bought for their homes. The voice in English said “see the difference in just four weeks.” A minute or so passed before he and Teresa both jumped at the sound of something thrown hard against the other side of the door, and then falling and rolling, empty beer can, and crushed underfoot.

  — Who’s in there? Luis was at the door.

  Teresa stood back, near the window. Rodrigo still didn’t have his shirt on. He unlocked and opened the door.

  When Luis saw Rodrigo he seemed not able to make sense of him. Rodrigo nodded slightly in greeting but Luis did not acknowledge it. He wore black jeans and a frayed blue shirt Rodrigo had seen dozens of times. His feet were bare, and this made Rodrigo aware of his half-nakedness, so he pulled his T-shirt on, and in the second it took to duck his head and look up again, he saw that Luis had settled on a meaner expression.

  — I let you into my life, he said. I help you out. And this is what happens.

  — This has nothing to do with you.

  — You drink my beer and you fuck my wife.

  — Don’t talk like that.

  It was too late, Rodrigo knew, but in that moment he understood that the three of them were different because of the ways they were mistaken. Every day Teresa in her fantasies was beautifully mistaken. He himself was mistaken to believe he was too young and ignorant and out of place to fully trust his knowledge. And Luis was mistaken to believe his life could be different if he took it in hand and bent it to the shapes he saw in his dark thoughts.

  — Teresa only pretends she’s your wife.

  — Yes. And she pretends to do the cooking and cleaning. And she pretends to fuck me when I want her to. She pretends very well.

  Then it was Teresa flying up at him and Rodrigo holding her back with one arm, finally turning to push her onto the bed, with Luis laughing at them. He turned back then and hit Luis even before forming a proper fist, a clumsy punch in the face, without much force, but enough to satisfy Luis that he’d led them where he intended. They crashed to the floor and up again and wrestled without clear advantage until again they fell and Luis was on top and throwing elbows into his face. The blood and pain didn’t scare him. What scared him was that close by were new arrangements, like a sudden light that broke through to dreams and woke you into some strange, closed place. He had seen men die, boys too, no one he had known, but like him just the same.

  Luis lowered his form and head-butted him on the brow. When Rodrigo found his senses, Luis was standing over him, telling him to get up, and Teresa was somewhere crying.

  He got to his knees and then his feet and stood before Luis, seeing him with one clear eye.

  — What do you do? Hit me? Luis laughed at him. I’ll call the police and they’ll send you back to your jungle. Get out of here.

  Rodrigo turned to search for Teresa. She was framed in the bedroom doorway. She seemed to have blood on her too, on her hand and across her shirt, and he knew it was his blood. He started towards her but she shook her head. She disappeared into the bedroom and then came and gave him a wet towel and he mopped his face. Then she took it from him and went to the kitchen. She found scissors and cut a strip from it and tied it around his forehead. Luis had gone to the window and turned h
is back on them.

  He reached out for Teresa but she backed away.

  — Come with me.

  — No. You have to leave.

  She walked to the door and he followed, and she opened it and took hold of his belted waistband and tugged him past her. He stood in the hall. She kissed her bloody hand and touched it to his cheek, and closed the door.

  It would be an early bedtime. Marian got into her nightgown and sat with Kim on the sofa. They were both slightly drunk. They’d gone with Donald to a Shakespeare in the Park production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and then on the way home, with the car windows open and in clear violation of the law, passed around a bottle of Pinot Grigio and took in the noise and nighttime improvisational spirit of Bloor Street West.

  “Who knew dying could be so much fun?”

  “Jesus, Mom.”

  Marian hadn’t expected to make it to the end of the play but surprised herself.

  “I think I’m through the hardest part. And I can’t stand moroseness. Is that a word? Morosity.”

  “Morosery.”

  “Gloomism. Blueyness.”

  Kim smiled. Marian brought her feet up onto the couch and rested them in Kim’s lap.

  “Maybe I’m mostly faking it at this point, but the faking feels real. It’s a way of waiting. I want to make the best of each day. And not say too many banal things.”

  Donald entered and announced that the news on the internet described Russians rattling their sabres again up at the Arctic border.

  “You see,” said Marian, “it’s not a bad time to be leaving,” at which point Donald seemed to flinch. He turned and left the room.

  “I guess that’s a border I can’t cross with him.”

  Kim was the last one up. She sat alone, wondering how the play’s comic energy had so easily influenced her mother’s mood. It was possible that, as her days ran out, Marian was more often cheery than she had been before her illness. Absurdity counted for more at the end.