Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  André put a hand on her shoulder. She couldn’t recall him ever touching her before.

  “You’re in a tricky legal position here. You don’t want to aggravate them. These men were good enough to let me call you.”

  She paused in the idea that any of them were good enough.

  “All right. The kitchen it is, then. Damon, will you join us?” Damon looked to Father André as if to say he’d had enough. “Humour me. Please.”

  “You don’t seem like the humouring type,” he said, but he went along. When they’d assembled, Father André laid it out for her. Either Rodrigo would be charged with assault and very likely do jail time, and then get deported, or he could be sent back directly, now. Father André stressed that Harold would prefer not to press charges.

  “How big of him.”

  Rosemary turned to Damon. “If you send him back, he’ll be killed.”

  “I’m not the judge.”

  “But you are the judge. You have all the power now. If he dies, it’s on your hands.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s my fault what happens to them if they go, and my fault if they stay here and shoot someone.”

  “I know this boy” – boy, what was she saying? – “and he’s no harm to anyone.”

  “Tell that to Harold,” said Father André. It must have pained him to speak so sharply, but he’d done it anyway.

  “That wasn’t Rodrigo. He wasn’t himself. He thought he was defending me.”

  “But who is he, Rosemary? That was some beating, by the sounds of it.”

  Whoever Rodrigo was when he’d arrived in the country had been distorted by the judgment and compassion of others, expressed in the wrong language. She was not absolved.

  “I do empathize,” said Father André. “To be in the country but not of the nation. It’s a tough spot. But it’s not a defence.”

  “Bingo,” said Damon.

  They each knew the other’s position, as if it came down to positions.

  “I’ve always known you to be a fair man,” she said to Father André. “You’ve helped a lot of people. You’ve helped me. You’re full of knowledge. But you can go to hell.”

  She strode back into the living room trailed by the others and started into the fat man.

  “This young man is innocent and you’re going to endanger him.”

  “He had his shot here, lady. We’re just executing a warrant.”

  “We’re gone. Let’s load him up, Ken.”

  She went to Rodrigo and he stood. When she moved in to embrace him he held her away.

  “I tell you something,” he said. “You think I’m some good man. But I’m not a good man. I’m not a bad man and I’m not a good man.”

  “I know who you are.”

  Then he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek and whispered into her ear a thing said for her sake, though it wasn’t true, and she wanted to let him know that she understood why he’d said it, that it was for her, his way of saying he forgave her for her love. And even as he said it, “My story is a lie,” and she’d responded, “It’s not true,” she saw how her words could be misinterpreted to mean that she accepted his statement when she meant to say she did not, and so when he nodded to her it wasn’t clear what he was affirming. She let the uncertainty stand.

  As they took him she wanted to say that she’d get him a lawyer but she couldn’t speak without breaking down now, and she was determined not to break down. She watched as they led him out. Father André stood next to her. Rodrigo’s hands were cuffed. She thought he might run. The men were on each side. Everyone must have known he would run except Rodrigo. The car door closed. He looked straight ahead. The fat man got in on the passenger’s side.

  When they were gone Father André said he’d stay with her for a while.

  She said, “Leave my house.”

  Then she was alone. She did an odd thing. Though the day was warm, as if to preserve the air she closed the windows and blinds and carried her floor fan down to the foot of the stairs to bring up the cool from the basement. She began to go through his things. She would have to pack all of it into his one suitcase. He would be gone in days, maybe hours. She gathered his clean clothes, folded in neat piles on the floor – an unopened box of condoms hidden there – and took his dirty clothes from the hamper, and put them all except his work gloves into the wash. His underwear was semen stained. There was blood on a shirt.

  This part of the basement had been off-limits to her. She’d entered it only when leaving the cash envelopes. The suitcase was under his bed, an old brown hardshell with a frayed rope handle. A name had once been markered on the side but was now scribbled out in a neat black rectangle. Inside was a collection of random things, mostly junk. A picture book for tourists to Nova Scotia. A cut-glass ball that could only belong to a chandelier. A small brass rocking horse, still soot-stained. A fridge magnet of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. There were things, she didn’t know what they were, clamps, and a forking, hooked device that could have come from a musical instrument or game or machine. Loose cassette tapes of singers she hadn’t heard of. A pen with a flattened picture of the waterfront skyline. A broken mobile with animal shapes that once must have turned for a child. Were they stolen from the living or the dead? They had no value unless as mementoes. What could he have been hoping to remember in thieving such little things?

  She walked to the clothes pile and chose the gloves and a long-sleeved T-shirt he sometimes wore on cool evenings and set them aside for herself. She gathered his few bathroom items into his toiletries kit. His personal papers were in a plastic portfolio case she’d given him. She looked through them in hopes of finding a picture of him and came up only with a bad photocopy of a headshot on one of his court documents. It might as well have been a thumbprint. She put it back.

  Upstairs again she sat in the dark living room and it came to her that she’d forgotten Sammy’s birthday last week. Where had her mind been? She would call later and Sammy would tease her about a failing brain and growing old. Rosemary knew that her sister would outlive her – she’d told her so and it was true and Sammy hadn’t even pretended to joke about the ways we sometimes know things. She’d said, “It better not happen until we’re ancient or I won’t recover from that,” and now she thought not about her death but about Sammy’s recovery, and then Rodrigo’s junk stolen from burnt ruins, and how she was in the salvage business herself. The whole city was. Her first weeks of work, on call for the sick anywhere in the library system. Her marriage had broken up and she helped students from around the world researching their papers and measured them for grades of need and relative privilege. High school and university papers on sports heroes, Victorian table talk, the devices of espionage, minor Canadian historical figures, and trilobites. They were good kids and they broke her heart. She had felt the city reshaping her. This place that spoke two hundred languages. There was a collection of books for every migration.

  She would visit Canterbury someday. Jerusalem Celestial, as André Rowe referred to it. A place of pilgrimage for troubled souls and tourists. She wondered which kind of pilgrim she would be.

  It was hot now in the house. She was suddenly very tired. It had been a mistake to stop moving.

  Dear Father, what do you ask of me?

  The breeze from the basement was dying on the stairs.

  9

  He closed his office door and looked out the window at the campus. It was the end of the first day of classes, hundreds of students in every direction, walking alone or in groups, gambolling on the grass, with shouting here, little moving pockets of silence and promise there. He sensed their beauty in the autumn light.

  He sat down and revised his reply to Kim, then sent it. He found a message from her in his inbox:

  How does one person’s worst hour, long ago and far away, close around another’s here and now? What I sent you, that imagined thing, brought you close to me. Let’s know that redress is ongoing. I’m putting my time in, and so are others, everywhere.r />
  Below she’d attached a link. It was too early for a drink but he poured one anyway and sat looking at the tumbler. Then he clicked on the link and up came a video. Funa al principe asesino de Victor Jara. 16:00 hours. The James Bond movie theme playing over random street shots. We see signposts, we’re in Santiago, it’s three years ago. People in ones and twos, carrying wax cups of coffee, going about their days. A few glance at the lens and look away too late. Then a cameraman, a second one, preparing. 16:30. A line of drummers in the street, beating and chanting for justice, the idea is surprise public spectacle. People gather, most look under thirty. A banner rises – “El Sueño Se Hace a Mano y Sin Permiso FUNA” – and the march begins. We cut to a small group, ahead, four or five people, with cameras, walking fast in the sound of a daytime street, then back to the chanting, marching crowd, cameras and phones and phone cameras, now with photos of the dead man held high. A young face from thirty-some years ago, the shot seems captured yesterday.

  The guerrillas, the advance group, moving faster now. We pan up an ugly tower. Veering into the building, part of a sign says Prevision Social, and now they’re in the lobby of a government office, getting on an elevator, and the doors close. The number notches higher, up to floor 14. Down on the street the marchers take up position and unfurl a new banner. “Edwin Dimter Bianchi Asesino del Estadio Chile.”

  The guerrillas move calmly through the corridors, looking for an office. Workers at their desks look up and no one knows the intruders and all must know what this is about. They breach the door to the killer’s office. He’s wearing a dress shirt and tie. There’s a moment when he thinks he can turn them back, then he tries to hide from the cameras. Now he’s on his desk in some kind of contorted distress, kicking at them. Shouting and cameras. The guerrillas are reading from flyers, reading the judgment against him, and now the killer is back on his feet. He grabs from one of them a placard with the victim’s face on it and masks his own. He’s doing everything wrong. Then finally he drops the placard, exposed again, and tries on a reasonable bearing. He smiles and gestures, now drops the smile. When the group finally begins to recede the killer reaches for one of them from behind and brushes his hand along the side of his face, lovingly, and the man who’s been touched recoils and moves out the door and the clip ends.

  Half an hour later he was still at his desk. He poured his untouched whisky back into the bottle and went out to the hallway and rinsed the glass in the drinking fountain, then came back and put away the glass and bottle. At the bottom of the drawer was an old file folder of stories he’d cut from newspapers and magazines, a habit he’d fallen out of. He followed a compulsion to leaf through them and chose a few pages and put them into his briefcase. Before he left he thought to fold closed his office laptop, then stood over it, still not quite satisfied. To turn it off would be a way of pretending. From his supply drawer he took out a roll of masking tape and covered over the little pulsing bead of light. It would bother him to imagine it out there in the city, boring all night into the empty dark. When the job was done he looked over his shelves briefly, not really seeing the books and journals, simply to acknowledge yet again the many worlds at once present and closed, this glancing habit always there in the final checks he made before going home.

  One night he walked along her street in defiance of how people thought of him. According to true-crime reality shows most perpetrators did not physically return to their victims in this way, and the ones who did, the returner perps, intended particular harm. On these two scores he did not belong to the common profile. The first time he had come along the street he had stopped there in the open, in front of her house, and he felt himself seeing angles, running numbers in his blood, thinking of what had been given him here and what might be. The door wagging open. The light falling into the mouth of the garage. On his second pass the door was closed. When he took the sweater he brushed his hand along the bike seat and then saw where things had taken him and he ran.

  For days he had talked himself out of going back but then did. In the driveway beside the house across the street from hers was an aluminum garden shed so it was this house he checked first, walking clear around to the next street and coming down between two places, over a fence into one backyard, then another, and on up beside the shed. He waited no more than a minute before he stepped out and checked the doors, and they slid open, so he had it. Now he was back before sun-up and took the same route to the shed across from her house, and slipped inside, brought the doors to within an inch of closed, and squatted. When the light was up a little blade of sun came through and he could see a plastic crate that he used for a stool. Everything about where he was said widowed or retired. There was no evidence of dog. If someone came out here he could likely hide, but even if he couldn’t he’d be gone before they squawked or he’d break them in the face.

  He gave himself this, this one day of watching without food, water, or pissing. The boredom and discomfort were part of the deal of being who he was. The street woke up in human sounds that he mostly couldn’t see. In the opening the light seemed to stab right through her house and all of what had happened between them had come down to this long finger of seeing. If he shifted left or right he could make a bigger picture that was still not the whole of where she lived but at no time would he open the doors any wider. At some point she would come out. He wondered if she’d know what was different, the doors on the little tin shed, the one watching her inside it. He knew from the event between them that she sensed things, and she must wonder at her feelings now and wonder should she doubt them. Did she know the life of watching he had known? His life bled out of hospital windows, seeing the garbage tossed from the doorway to the steel bin, the alley light shot suddenly into ratscramble amazement, the sparks from the incinerator fire catching in the field, and water jets from hoses making cotton of the flames. Bled out of bus windows, correct change only. Bled into television shows for people that he wasn’t, thinking they said something about people like he was. Did she know the brain fooled you in the same way that it solved, how one thing hid inside another of the same general shape. Sometimes he heard echoes that weren’t really there.

  First to appear was the man of the house, leaving for the day. He wore dull brown clothes as if he didn’t mean them. Then an older lady came out onto the porch, collecting the paper in a wild-red robe. They seemed like a lazy place. It was hot in the shed in a way he had not accounted for. Then at 10:47 the door opened and she came out for him. Her caramel pants stopped at the knee. Her T-shirt was loose, sagging a little senseless. She carried a cup of maybe coffee and the paper and sat on the step right opposite him, taking in the sun, and read in the posture of someone in a waiting room. For a long time he could not get beyond her wrists. He could feel them in the memory in his hands. He held his hands up now and pretended to be squeezing. He’d tried to crush her wrists and yet there they were, still themselves. There were kinds of defeat he accepted with love.

  He could feel her inside him now, the familiar things she did to him. What he wanted was for her to know that he could be this close and her inside him and still she would be safe. That she would never know this, that was what he struggled with. It would be enough if she would look up at him but he waited for minutes in vain. He told himself to make no noise. When he stood he felt her tight in him. Then she looked up, not his way exactly, and not seeing whatever she looked at, a little lost, and she stood too and turned and went inside. In some life or other, he had come to her.

  By early afternoon he was soaked through and wondered if the heat and lack of water would make him pass out. As he understood his body he decided to remain. The day became kids on bikes and women jogging with strollers, cars and a few lone passersby. And birds shooting through his vision. Two cardinals, crows in mostly threes, and little ones he couldn’t see the names of. He tried to guess their motives, not in pattern but in cause, but what went on in their heads was not available to his view, so that after a time their motions
seemed a taunt from the forces of chaos that knew him by name. Still he wouldn’t fall. She was in no danger. He honoured her with safety. But he felt a bend coming on and told himself it was not about her but the door, and so he opened the crack two more inches, breaking his vow, and shifted himself to the left. His view now admitted more sky and trees, more air. The air helped him accept that he waited for a signal that would tell him what to do. He could not stay until the night dragged in its carcass but he would wait for her one more appearance.

  When it came it came like a gift and he almost teared up and cried. She had a computer and a book this time, and she sat in a chair on the porch. She had changed into blue jeans. Her feet were bare. She sat typing, copying from the book, and he started seeing copies now, foot to foot, bird to bird, the times of his watching her, then and now, the second things drawn from the firsts. There were beats in his head that he couldn’t escape. She closed the book and stopped typing, then touched what she touched and sat reading her screen what seemed a long time. When she looked up, it was almost right at him. Her face was different somehow, he had to remind himself to breathe. He had been here all day but her few minutes of sitting quiet made her seem like some kind of animal in the woods. As the time ran on he didn’t notice at first the mail-lady come into view. She came along the walk on the edge of the frame and above her the sky was bruising to black, though the front of the house outside the porch was still in sunshine, and went up the steps and stopped for a second to say something that she didn’t really respond to, and handed her the mail. She watched her leave, then went into the house and came out with a phone.

  She dialled and then gave him another gift. He could barely hear her voice, could only hear the notes like bird notes like whimpers and so in this way too she returned to him. The world so full of pain, it sings a little. She put the phone down and sat for a minute, then touched the machine and began reading.