Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  “All right, I’m off. And when I come back in a few minutes I’d like to buy a plot.”

  “But you’re drunk.”

  “I’m inspired to buy a plot. Next to the woman, or as close as you can get. I want that spot, and a piece of paper, a deed or whatever, that I can put with my papers to be discovered by my family when I drop dead. You can see I’ve thought it through. I couldn’t have thought it through drunk.”

  “You’ll have to come back when you’re sober.”

  “Jesus, Kyle.” Harold opened the map. On the top border Kyle had circled what looked to be a pretty large area. “Can you at least X the spot for me?”

  “Well.”

  “Well, what?”

  “The sort of remains you’re talking about, there’s no actual grave.” He was saying the record was wrong. “Cases like that, it’s cheaper to cremate. We just handle the ashes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They’re sort of in storage. We don’t use up space on the grounds. But there’s plans for a modern mausoleum. That’s what I circled there, where it’s going up. In four or five years.” He turned to the wall nearest them and pointed out an artist’s sketch of the building, a concrete gazebo relieved with ivy features that looked like legumes. “Then we’ll move the remains in storage to their final resting place. But you’re still welcome to come back and buy the plot.”

  There was nothing for him so he devised a new course of action. In the time it took to retrieve the second bottle from the car and walk to the river and along the avenue of pretty houses there he contemplated what it was in him that defeated his every inspiration. He was not good at inspiration. In fact he could say without self-pity that he was not good at very many things beyond the practice and teaching of history. The scene from Kim’s story that most often returned was of Carl Oakes, or her version of him, getting out of the car with the diplomatic plates, and someone inside saying “Good work.” He could see it all, though he hadn’t. He could hear the voice. If only he’d stepped forward then. If only she’d written him as someone who would step forward. But she knew him, and had found a way to tell him what she knew.

  What she couldn’t know was that he knew the man in the car, the man on the edge of the photo from El Salvador. He had known him for years. The dark angel of human event. The man, the angel, would turn up all the time in his researches, in dreams. In the documents he was the unnamed agent of evil never entered into the record. Dream to dream he spoke with different accents, in different languages. Smiling at him from the edge of a dull party, or in the car beside his, turning to look. The stranger in the crowd, viewed from a panellist’s chair on some stage, who looks up from his listening posture and finds him. Always this recognition. In a recurring dream Harold is walking with a small group at night, people he knows, and then a new voice enters the exchange with a word or two that won’t be recalled upon waking, and now it’s Harold who turns to find him, the most vivid of his company, there and then gone, and none of the others saw or heard him.

  In his second season on the job market, just as his thesis was published, he’d landed on four short lists – along with Toronto were San Marcos, the Colegio de México, and the American University in Washington. The San Marcos position fell through but he was offered the others all in the same week. He’d chosen Toronto not because it was in his homeland but because it was safe, he thought, barely registering the troubles of successive global moments. He’d chosen it in retreat. But there was no hiding. The angel was there at each cardinal point, and now, having grown ever nearer over the past year, he’d found Harold out. The man in the car with diplomatic plates was very close now, but Harold no longer feared him. That he should have shown up in Kim’s imagination did not mean that Harold had drawn him to her. That he might have appeared one night in the flesh to tear into her body and mind was just so much self-punishing, self-indulgent fantasy.

  Across from the Whirlpool Bridge was another, apparently closed off. The only trouble posed by the access was to keep from spilling the wine as he scrambled up a steep embankment through shrubs with the earth sliding away beneath each step. When he reached level ground he looked to the bottle and found it was still with him, about half-full. He felt sick and bent over as if to wretch but managed not to as he caught his breath. Nearby, a circle of stones, charred wood, broken beer bottles. He walked on.

  This had been a train bridge too. He walked next to the dead tracks, over the last road and out onto the span above the river. The way was blocked there with a low steel wall. A warning sign. He turned to look across at the Whirlpool Bridge and found it a consummate thing. The trains ran on top, he saw. He marked where the woman would have fallen only two or three feet to her death, and he looked down to the waters, two hundred feet below. She’d messed it up, he thought. Better to die in the waters than on the tracks. Even he could see the poetry of the long fall.

  In time, on some delay, he found himself motionless, listening. He drifted towards a sound, barely audible, and looked up now as he’d looked up then, and at first he couldn’t see it. Then there it was, high above. Watching him, no doubt. It was because he’d been looking up that he hadn’t noticed that a group of six soldiers was approaching. Unable to stop thinking of Carl Oakes, who was, in fact, something like Kim had written him, an insider, fluent, though older and thicker of body, he’d begun to feel unsafe in his room, and so he’d taken his passport and money and walked out in the direction of the embassy. At some point a fighter jet flew overhead and he looked up, for only seconds, and then looked down and there were the soldiers. They wore helmets and five carried machine guns. One, with a white arm band above his elbow and a pistol in his hand, walked straight up to him and asked who he was. A Canadian, he said, and the guard said – You’re a communist. Your leader Trudeau is a communist too. Harold said, No, and the guard laughed at him. Harold said, It’s complicated, and the guard mimicked his voice, what he’d said, in Spanish, and the way he’d said it, and then told him to explain himself. – Explain in perfect Spanish and I will let you go. The other soldiers stood in a line behind him. Their faces were distorted by the helmet straps but they were very young. Harold said Canada had supported the U.S. embargo, that it had done its part to destabilize the government. He knew as he spoke that he was being understood, but that he’d made errors. For one, he’d used the noun form desestabilización instead of the verb desestabilizar, and though he hadn’t believed the guard would have let him go for his Spanish, he couldn’t be sure, and knew only that he’d failed the test. The guard asked if he himself supported the embargo, and Harold said nothing. The man’s pants were tucked into his boots. — Give me the name of your school and your teacher. Even as he replied, Harold reasoned that the soldiers would already have the names, that they wanted him to say the names just to implicate him, and Orlando would already have been arrested or be in hiding. Harold said the name of the school, then of his teacher. He said it and spelled it. The guard holstered his pistol and made a show of writing it down.

  — Is this correct? He showed Harold what he’d just printed out. There were a couple of dozen typed and hand-printed names with addresses after many of them. Harold said it was the name. He tried to think of something more to say but his fear got in the way. The place was upside down. It was time to get out of the fucking country. The soldier asked him for the address of his teacher. Harold said he didn’t know it. The soldier nodded. — You go back to Canada now. I will kiss your teacher goodbye for you. And his wife – he has a wife? – I will kiss her twice.

  Harold turned and walked away then, and when the man said stop he might have kept walking and might have been let go but instead he stopped and turned again, for years he sees himself turning, and the soldier explained that he’d had an idea. Harold would accompany them to every building on the list. He said no more and Harold couldn’t bring himself to ask what would happen then. He imagined the soldiers leading people out and past him as they were taken away. He mi
ght have been asked to humiliate himself or the others. Whatever the soldier had in mind, the idea seemed to be that Harold would be released of this duty only when they found his teacher’s apartment, and they would find it anyway, and Orlando would surely be elsewhere by now. This is what he told himself. He gave the soldier the street and intersection. He allowed himself to be ushered into a military truck. He would show them the actual building.

  When they arrived, the two of them stood across the street as the others with guns went inside. — They talk about their dream, said the soldier. They sing songs about it. You must know the songs. Sing one for me now. Harold said he didn’t know the songs and the man smiled. — You knew them yesterday but already they’re forgotten. He lit a cigarette and gave it to Harold. He said he didn’t smoke but the soldier made him take it. Then he lit one for himself. A minute or so later those who’d been hiding in the apartment were led out of the building and into a bus parked a short way down the block. No one looked his way until, just as the last of them were loaded into the bus, one man turned and saw him standing there across the street. Harold recognized him, had met him somewhere on campus. His name was Eyzaguirre. Harold had no doubt that he’d been discovered. Over time he came to assume that Eyzaguirre, all of them, were dead.

  Then the last two were brought out of the building. Orlando, a thin poet and teacher, and Maria Alicia, who taught at the Technical University, where Harold had met them at rallies on nights that had ended with drinks and song. She was classically beautiful, with large dark eyes that caught him that day before her husband’s did. The soldier took Harold across the street to them. The couple was made to stand against the wall of the building squarely before him. The soldier asked Orlando — Do you have a last lesson to teach your Canadian? — I don’t know him, said Orlando. — But he knows you. He’s given me your names and brought us here. He says you’re a very good teacher. Orlando looked down. Maria Alicia then stepped forward and slapped Harold in the face, to the obvious pleasure of the soldier, who began to say something when she then turned and punched him in the throat. Only then did Harold think of the soldier as anything like him, a breathing, feeling man, for he was down on his knees taking loud, sucking breaths as Orlando, being restrained now, began to plead and two soldiers ran up to hold Maria Alicia. She offered no resistance then as the man she’d struck got to his feet, took a machine gun from one of the soldiers, raised the weapon, and brought the butt of it down hard into her face. She had turned her head and received the blow along the cheek and jaw. She fell to the ground and he hit her once more, squarely in the face, as Orlando cried out for his wife, and when the meaning of the cry reached the soldier, he swung around and shot Orlando in the chest. Harold saw his teacher slump and fall, quite dead. Then he and the soldiers looked back at Maria Alicia. At the sight of her, one of the soldiers emitted a sharp breath and the leader, the killer, as if only just seeing what he’d made, recoiled and stepped back. He then told two of them to drag the bodies back inside the building. They left the dead couple there, then left Harold – he didn’t see them go exactly – standing in the now orderly street.

  When her face returned to him, as it had for years and more often now in the resemblances, it was composed as the face that had looked into his. It was this face that shocked him in memory now and then, and not the final, brutalized one, the one for which there were no likenesses. This never returned. It had never left him. What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t be sure of, was whether or not, before dying, Orlando had seen what had happened to his wife upon the second blow. He had chosen over the years to think that Orlando had not seen her but he had had to keep choosing. Now he was inclined to think that all of them had seen it, and once he accepted this, it was hard to doubt it.

  He finished the wine, then made his way in full trespass to the railing. At the foot of the opposite bridge there was, in fact, a whirlpool. It had fallen on him again, the monster eye of that alien storm, and he knew all at once whose eye it was. As if to blind the thing he hurled the bottle as far as he could and leaned over to watch it fall until its entry into the river was lost in the disturbances.

  He was walking fast then, back the way he’d come, along the tracks and over the edge of the bank, sliding down to the street, landing hard on his hands and knees. He got to his feet and started into a half run, two short blocks to the approach to the second bridge, an open incline, and out to the working tracks. He was drunk and the drunkenness at least was familiar, something to hold on to. In one direction the tracks ran atop the bridge to the U.S., and he thought he saw men far across them. They would be wearing uniforms and they’d be warning the men here of him, and so he started back the other way, towards the station and the freight train sitting there. He must have imagined the uniformed men, he thought, but it didn’t matter. The helicopter was louder now, it had zeroed in on him, he was quite sure, and so he ran as he could, to the end of his breath, and approached the train on the blind side, away from the station.

  There was no escaping the gazing eye out here. He understood that it was what had killed the woman on the bridge, that she knew she’d been seen, and so jumped. When he could run no farther he stepped up to the door of the boxcar beside him and slid it open, a boy with his father again, and hauled himself in awkwardly, kicking the air, then shut the door.

  He lay in the new utter dark. Silence. The helicopter had been extinguished. In the reeling drunken space he turned and turned, losing his position on the floor, until he came to rest, and lay still a long time. He closed his eyes to find scenes from he didn’t know where. The poor part of a town on a lake, boarded-up buildings and wet winds, the bobbing hip-hop figures of two black kids in long parkas, hoods over caps tilted roadward, in otherwise peopleless snowblown streets. An old man in a white undershirt sitting on his bed in a hospital or retirement home, staring at the floor inside some memory, a secret love that kills you, with strains from other times reaching him from the common room. A blond woman alone in a restaurant, turning her face, removing her glasses, a Slavic flatness in her forehead and orbitals, her eyes flickering to a wineglass and a look of resignation surfacing in her expression. They were looking down, all of them, in passing thoughts yet to come. Soul-lost harbingers, he could do nothing for them. He stared into whirl, unmoving but in motion, eyes open but blind, buried alive but still spinning, as if the vortex was upon him and he was the prophet falling into the sky like the missing girl whose name was always with him translated to heaven, and the missing like the failed like the dead. The darkness swam with semblances. He called out, “Who’s there?” and it was with him. He was not alone. The winged presence had found him out. Through the blackness it watched.

  When the door rolled back (had he opened it?) it was the night hurtling by and he was presented an escape that he understood to be false. He moved to the doorway and felt the stiff air. Here he found at last a time of gathering, and all was resolved. The voice behind him said something that was lost on the wind.

  The merciless streaming unseen world. It had always been his.

  He steadied himself, and awaited his moment to step forward.

  PART FOUR

  10

  The deepest questions we pursue are themselves in pursuit of us. It was the first line from his lecture on evil, a kind of warning to the students, as if fair warning absolved him for taking them where he would. They were into the second week of it now, halfway through evil, on their way to sin, and eventually redemption, a thorny matter, as he liked to say, and André was, for the first time after years of teaching this class or something like it, beginning to understand what it meant to be pursued by the deep questions. The measure of pointless suffering and death had grown recently, and grown closer. And Rosemary had absented herself from the church and from him. He hadn’t returned to her house, and wouldn’t, but there was no trace of her on the usual routes, nothing except the bookmarks she’d left on his computer. Pages on William Temple, weather forecasts, discount stores, T
homas Merton, a badly mic’d woman at a lectern talking about coal-fired plants, a bank. He chose a newslink she’d marked and up came footage of a missing woman from the late summer. He watched it all the way through. He imagined that as Rosemary watched it, she would have been thinking about Mariela Cendes. Here was a new woman, a different name, but year by year, city by city, Mariela just kept disappearing.

  Today he was to book his trip to Canterbury. It was his last chance to follow through on his decision to invite Rosemary. When his call rang to her machine he left the message that he hoped she’d accompany him. He said the church could help pay for her ticket. He said this would be the case wherever she wanted to go, and that if she wanted to fly south instead of east, he would be happy to accompany her there, too. If she wanted to go alone, the offer stood nevertheless. He said that though he made no apologies for his actions, he understood and respected her need to practise her beliefs by occupying them. Upon some passage of lateral thought he then told her in some words or other that he’d not later recall, except a few phrases that he knew from lectures and sermons, that he was reading The Brothers Karamazov and wondered if she had, he would love to talk with her about it, and how he loved vast, cold, northern literatures, that he had grown with age into his appreciation of the Russian greats and couldn’t help but feel they offered just the counter to this world of noise and ever-replicating surfaces and – the message cut out and he called back – he spoke of pages here and there, a bowl of soup or a river, the day before us, we look up from these things and where do we find ourselves? As if we might uncover and reassemble the bones of the first ones, the creatures closest to God – we run ourselves down to the last ounce of hope and begin to shed our own faiths, thinking in our weakness that there is no order beyond nature and loss upon loss, no truths that don’t melt into pools of illusion, and so we become vulnerable to a dark mindlessness always making raids at our borders, enlisting despair, infirmity, corrupted instincts, even chance in our undoing, and all evidence of God is withheld, every new day appears drawn to light by no command, only our turning in space.