by Michael Helm
He nodded now and then. It was as if they were again in her basement. He didn’t tell her about the interview with the officer named Luke. He’d told Luke that he’d met good people here at a church but they were too open, too ready to accept foreigners, and that he agreed with Luke that it wasn’t right to accept the bad with the good. Luke told him he could use the phone as often as he liked, but there was no one to call.
He still hadn’t spoken. She was going to ask him if his story was true. She was going to make him lie to her again, for her own sake, not thinking of him. He couldn’t tell her that he’d already begun to return home even now, before leaving, or that he in fact did have some hope that he’d be safe upon his return, that maybe those who would wish him harm had forgotten him, that they had more recent scores to settle, or had turned on one another, or were long gone, in prison, or dead.
She said she’d brought his bag and his things. She’d put a letter inside from Teresa that he was to read on the plane.
“Where will you go first?”
“There’s a town where my aunt lives, where I went as a child.”
“Tell me something about it. I want to be able to picture you there.”
Very little came to him.
“It’s a stone town. No grass or trees. No sidewalks. At night the power goes out and it’s quiet, it’s full of peace. Just the dogs barking.”
“You’ll be safe there.”
“Yes.”
“Will you have friends?”
“Maybe my aunt knows a man with work for me.”
“Write to me. I can send money.”
He focused on the markings scratched onto the glass. They were all on her side.
“I’m sorry, Rodrigo. I just want to help.”
“Yes.”
She was out of things to say. Soon she would say anything to keep talking. She had no idea who he was.
“Remember the Lord loves you.”
“Yes.”
“Remember you are loved.”
“Yes.”
“You are loved here.”
He got up and nodded his last goodbye.
In his room he opened the suitcase. The clothes were not folded carefully, as she would have folded them – someone had gone through it. On the bottom was a large envelope with his name in huge letters, as if he wouldn’t see it otherwise. He took out the letter, only two small pages, handwritten. They began with his name and before reading further he tore them in half and then again, and then balled up each piece and put them all in the toilet and flushed them away.
There was knocking in the pipes. From a nearby room came the sound of someone beating on a wall in a slow rhythm. He lay in the dark on the narrow bed and waited for the rhythm to end and remembered the sound of Rosemary’s typewriter above him at night when he’d lay thinking of her fingers, the quarter inch of keystrokes no more than moved a trigger. He shut his eyes and above him came the faces he hadn’t seen in months, the ones close behind him again. The way one man’s face pinched when he fired his gun, and another’s folded when he was shot. Someone down the hall knocked on a door and opened it and the rhythm stopped, and minutes later Rodrigo lay thinking of the town where his aunt lived, and the dogs in the dark and after the rain the water dripping on the stones. In the morning he would wake to singing and electric music on loudspeakers cast over the town from the evangelical church where the same people were saved every morning and lost again by night. His aunt believed it was the night itself that tried to take them. The light and the dark fought for them every day until one or the other took them fully and they walked in the world in service of a master that wasn’t of this place or any, a master they couldn’t name, though they would choose a name, and that couldn’t hear them when they sang or asked questions or cursed, couldn’t know their thoughts, wondering at the flaws in the fabric of things or the meaning of their dreams, of ancient footprints baked into a plain, or the faint stars pretending to be of the day. There is no hope but in people, she would say, and only some people. You know them by their faces when they think no one can see them.
If she was right about souls, then his was still unclaimed. He would never be saved once and for all, but maybe luck and forgetting were such that he could be won piece by piece, hour to hour. It helped, he supposed, that there were those who would keep him in their thoughts.
In the night, a knock came on his door.
He opened his eyes in the dark, still dreaming.
In mid-afternoon Harold left his condo, steeled for the twenty-minute walk to his first class of the year. It was all beginning again, another season of slotted times, as if anyone knew what would happen next. He rode to the ground floor. The doors opened – there was the bank of elevators opposite, the hallway with mailboxes, angling off – but for some reason he didn’t move. When the doors closed he pressed GI and then there he was in the garage, where he’d paid as much to buy a parking space as his father had for his first house. He threw his portfolio case onto the back seat of the old Saab and took it out into the bright, calamitous streets. Minutes later he was heading west out of the city on the Queen Elizabeth Way, a little ahead of the rush-hour traffic.
He cruised through forty miles of sprawl particularized only by the exit signs. The highway forked near Aldershot, named after the English town where his father had marched on parade grounds during the war. He’d always wanted to go back there, his dad, but hadn’t managed it. Harold had never been able to picture the old man in a uniform, in lockstep with anyone. A part of him had always suspected the war stories were a lie, but in his father’s papers after he died was an old newsy letter from a woman in Bristol. It gave nothing away but of course there was a story there, now lost.
The story to be revived was his own. Early in his boyhood, earlier than he should have had to, he had followed time out of grace, or whatever the phrase was. But if you only hung on, and if you were lucky, and then maybe lucky again, you could even on the earthly plane follow time back into grace. That no one seemed to acknowledge this return suggested how rare it was. The luck had simply been conferred upon him, just as years ago, through no volition of his own, he had been given freedom long enough to build a life. Now he had been forced into memory, but it had delivered him somewhere unexpected, somewhere he sensed would provide for him. And there was the luck, finding him largely by chance, as of course was its nature. He had never felt so full of understanding.
At St. Catharines he turned off and jotted up to Niagara-on-the-Lake, teeming with white and Japanese tourists buying marmalade and carriage rides, books about George Bernard Shaw, and then he joined the procession at 6o km/h along the semi-famed wine route. By the fourth stop, he was pretty sloshed on the samples of bad Chardonnays, bottom note of bile, but had finally found one to his liking. He took two bottles to the counter. The young woman at the till had acne and rings on her fingers and thumbs that clinked on the bottles as she scanned them. “I’m celebrating,” said Harold, “and have no one to drink with me. Will you raise a plastic sample glass with me?” The woman looked at him for the first time. “They don’t let us drink on shift,” she said. “We might lose confidence in the product.” She winked at him and snuck into his bag a shiny new titanium cantilevered corkscrew. He paid up, winked back, and walked to his car, marvelling at the gift she’d given him. Apart from its function the corkscrew was beautiful, and unlike those overproduced contraptions, when put to use the design conveyed power efficiently. The titanium cantilevered corkscrew belonged on the short list of perfect objects. Rowboats, bows and arrows, books. Too bad it had so many syllables.
The stripping out of syllables was the only worthwhile thing he could remember ever having imparted to Kim, and it had been returned to him in the trophies of an elegant prose. Details from her little fiction had returned in hypnagogic flashes, charging his dreams, and the dreams had bled into his day. He wasn’t usually knocked over by words, but then he’d never before been granted characterhood, an alternative story
with all the charms of false immediacy. There were ironies they could now observe together, he and Kim. And they could admit that events had changed them both, but their inspired turns had been prepared for by ordinary life and death.
Yes, that. Marian’s illness was working on all of them. At any point in the day he could look back over his thoughts and find he’d circled the same blunt fact without directly approaching it. A musing on insomnia would lead to another on how men fear death, but somehow he’d not then think of Marian. And so he circled while the illness progressed, simply not facing the facts. She might well have gone into remission and outlived him, but it wasn’t going that way for her, it seemed. They were looking at the end. It had struck him fully upon seeing her in their old bedroom. Kim and Donald must have known it for a while. When he’d phoned the house last week Donald answered, called up from sleep or a bit drunk – normally he would have checked the call display and let it ring through to the message – and for a minute or two they pretended to talk about Marian like serious men. Finally they ran out of words, a silence of a few seconds, and Donald said, “She doesn’t look like herself, you know. She’s wasting.” He got the poor sap to agree that she was still herself, however she looked, but then came Donald’s last line before hanging up. “Gödel was sixty-five pounds when he died.”
One of the cars up ahead drifted to the narrow shoulder and stopped, and then cars all around, in both directions, were pulling over, so that the road was barely a lane. He was too drunk to guide himself past them so he stopped too. In the cars ahead people were looking back his way. Everywhere windows were lowering, so he lowered his. He looked across at an SUV. A large young man was smiling at him. “Don’t get out of the car,” he said. Harold nodded though he didn’t understand. Finally he looked into the field beside him and there, not ten feet from his car, stood a large dog, staring at him without interest, like a zoo animal. He heard the guy in the truck calling to people up and down the lines not to get out of their cars and he heard him say “coyote.” The animal walked up to the road and in front of Harold’s bumper and crossed into a fallow field. The guy in the truck backed up a little so Harold could see. The coyote paid none of them any attention. And then a beautiful thing happened. It stood in profile and began to lower its head, elongating its body into the ancient lines of a rock painting, a glyph of single-mindedness. It stepped a perfect step. And then it was over, the mole in its jaws. It flipped it into the grass and watched it, then flipped it again, playing with its prey until the prey stopped moving. A minute or two later, the other cars had left. Harold stayed watching awhile, perfectly disregarded. By chance he’d found what he wanted. The disregard comforted him.
Yesterday he’d found in his department mailbox a typed letter from Rosemary. She said she’d try for the rest of her life to forgive him for having called Father André, and she expected to fail. The last page was taken up with several short paragraphs about her Rodrigo. She listed the jobs he’d worked here. She called them “shit jobs.” The letter explained that when he was twenty he’d tried to stop the shooting of farmers by the narcotics thugs who employed him, and had pointed his automatic rifle at them. These men knew his name, where he was from, and they thought of him now not just as someone who’d threatened them but as a potential witness against them. They’d shot the farmers anyway and he took off running. The killers had contacts all over the country. It had been “a miracle” that the kid had escaped. His family had had to move to Venezuela. And now he’d been sent back, without money or friends, because, she believed, Harold had been jealous of his youth and resentful of her care for him. She said that Harold’s pain over the attack on Kim excused nothing, not his suspicions, and certainly not his actions.
He had reason not to believe Rodrigo’s story but even so he had tried to square it with the young man’s face as he recalled it and found he could not. He didn’t believe it, he couldn’t say why. Maybe because the story so easily invited pity. A heart like Rosemary’s, nothing warped it like pity, and she was full of it for everyone but him, it seemed. Sentimental pity was one of her evident failings. She would call it a virtue, but it was delusion. He had always had a sharp eye for the difference.
On past Queenston, where Laura Secord had saved Upper Canada from the Americans two hundred years ago, and into Niagara Falls. The actual place was never as dreadful as he imagined. The tourist cafés and museums were avoidable, the walk from the parking lot along the ever-awakening river was already sublime, and nicely managed by the stone and iron fencing, and the Falls themselves never got old. Thunder rimmed with lime. He’d been here first with Marian and Kim, when she was just four or five - a winter scene, he could still picture her blue mittens gripping the iron railing – and had been back a few times since with women, on outings, most recently with Connie. They’d eaten in the restaurant at the Falls and that’s where he was headed now. He needed food and a table to read at. Better not to read drunk in a car.
When he got to the real commotion the crowd was four deep. Their faces suggested that they were not disappointed at what they were seeing, or rather they seemed surprised not to be disappointed. He expected to have to wait for his table but instead got one right off, overlooking the something-or-otherth wonder of the world. He had another glass of wine, French this time, and a chicken club sandwich held together with toothpicks. From nowhere he was overcome by a wave of dizziness, elations, he supposed, and it almost took him but he steadied himself by getting out the page and starting into it. On the backside of a news story among the clippings he’d taken from his office – the old news stories, all his lost ideas and intentions – he’d found a photo of a bridge. The story was from 2004. He’d read it with horror, unable to stop himself. It concerned the death of a woman trying to smuggle herself over the border. She’d jumped off a freight train and fallen under its wheels on the upper level of the Whirlpool Bridge, hereabouts. Her leg had been severed and she’d bled to death. The mystery was that none of the border patrol cameras on either side that night could determine which train she’d been on, or even which direction she’d been travelling. Two trains had used the bridge within minutes, heading opposite ways. Her body had been found near the midpoint, her leg “about eighty feet into the Canadian side,” but whether the body or the leg or both had been dragged, and by which train, or both, wasn’t clear. The woman had no ID. It was unusual for such a person to be travelling alone. And no one had identified the body. “Because most of her remains had come to rest in Canada,” she’d been “buried at Canadian expense in a potters field adjacent to the Riverview Cemetery.” She mustn’t have known, this woman, that she could have crossed by foot into Canada. It was just her practice, no doubt, to cross borders in boxcars, as she’d have done all up the continent.
He studied the approximate map in the story, then looked out at the people looking out at the Falls. They stepped into openings to get closer. They gave their cameras to strangers and struck poses. They pointed at rainbows and threw bread to the gulls. It had all been going on every day for decades, the same movements, the same public rituals for the disarming of awe. No one wanted to be still with it, certainly not alone with it.
He paid up and left.
Despite its name, the cemetery did not, in fact, command a river view. It was eight or ten blocks from the river, the usual mix of maples, elms, evergreens, and chestnuts. The stones nearest the main road all had fresh flowers, keeping up with one another and the politics of tending the dead. The sections were lettered, though there seemed to be no X, Q, or Z, and then double-lettered. When he’d driven a couple of interlocking loops, he stopped in at the little administration building. In the small foyer a young man in a white dress shirt was talking to a woman in coveralls. The man offered Harold a practised, sympathetic smile and came forward to shake his hand. He introduced himself as Kyle. The woman watched Kyle perform for a few seconds and then drifted down a hallway and disappeared.
“What can we do for you, Harold?”
/> “Back in 2004. A woman died on the bridge. She’s here somewhere. I’d like to see her.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know who –”
“There’s no name. She lost her leg. A train took her leg.”
Kyle dropped his eyes to Harold’s left hand, the one he hadn’t extended in greeting, in which for some reason he was holding the cork he’d extracted from the second Chardonnay before putting the car into gear. Something in Kyle’s earnest face changed. It’s called twigging, Harold thought, and wondered why. Kyle looked briefly beyond Harold as if for a handler. His focus never entirely came back. He seemed to be dialing up training scenarios.
“Harold, have you been drinking?”
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”
He reached to extract the news story from his pocket but it wasn’t there. He must have left it on the table at the restaurant.
“Is that your car out there? Is there someone who’ll come and get you?”
Harold laughed. “You’re a responsible kid. That’s great. Now can you give me a map to her grave. I’ll walk there.”
Kyle excused himself and retreated into an office with an ascending bird designed into the blasted-glass window. Harold hoped he wasn’t calling the police. He heard himself mumble something but didn’t catch it, and only then realized just how tanked he was. Now he recalled the open bottle between his legs on the way over. The truth, the innocent truth, was that he’d had to drink it down a ways to keep it from sloshing onto his pants. If they came for him, he’d explain that his public drunkenness, the danger he posed, was all because the cupholder in his car could not accommodate a wine bottle. Neither he nor his defence could stand up well to questioning.
Kyle re-emerged with a folded piece of paper.
“I think I’ve found out who you mean, the woman. And here’s the map. I’ll trade you for your car keys.”
This was a good kid. There were a lot of them out there. Then, for the first time, he thought of the class he’d failed to meet. Filled with this affection, this spirit, he could have done wonders for them. He found the keys and handed them over. Kyle gave him the map.