Cities of Refuge (11 page)

He walked Father André into the subway station and when they shook hands he sensed the man’s restraint. Surely he wanted to accuse Harold of a fall from reason. It was comforting to imagine someone with reserves of strength and wisdom.

They would be in touch, they agreed.

“I’d like to meet Kim sometime. Marian, too. And I think we should talk more about all of this.”

“Put in a word for me with the Ancient of Days.”

“I will.” He laughed. “I will if one occurs to me.”

The word would be xenophobe, Harold thought, or maybe even racist. Unhinged. Lost. As he made his way back out into the light, he felt exposed, naked as the questions of want and fear. From somewhere long ago, the image of an apartment building entryway – he could smell rot in the damp air – until the here and now, the traffic of people and cars overran the memory. Like the familiar faces and routines of his work, the streets had a way of turning back the tide. A city was like primary text to him, alive in itself and in the ways it returned him to his past readings of it. You could hide inside the play of chance, every block another intersection of raw noise, language and fashion, music
and work, cicadas and birds and the wind in the trees, small pockets of local remembered time. Now and then upon some stray reverie he’d discover he wasn’t here at all, that one city had reminded him of another.

The best memories were of Marian and Kim in one of their travel summers, as they accompanied him in his researches. Walking with his girls, all over the Americas. The days tended to be too hot, spent indoors, but the evenings were at times like scenes from Toronto in July, if with older buildings and palms and a different spoken music in the air.

He drifted along Bloor and passed by a fruit stand, the prices handwritten on cardboard. The vendor was a small woman. He saw that her hands were scabbed at the knuckles, and he thought of Kim when he’d first seen her in the hospital, bandaged and unspeaking, but holding his hand, and like that his state was upon him again. There was no shelter anywhere. He could no longer be the historian who cleaved to the present tense.

K
im evolved a fantasy and somehow it came true. As with any fantasy she left the edges fuzzy and just lived it one moment to the next, or more like she skipped along just the high moments and kept going without even thinking she was acting unlike herself, because who was she anyway, so that turning on the cell and making the call seemed to happen even as she packed her laptop and a small suitcase and left her bared apartment, catching a train and a streetcar with her bag like a runaway and getting off and waiting across the street in the window of the café, exactly where she told him she’d be, so that all she had to
do was wait for him to collect the message and he’d have to come for her, come along in his car, or come down from the apartment, just as he did, and out the glassy brass doors and across to her, and come in and not even say anything, just lean to give her a hug and then collect her bag and take her by the arm and so on, saying nothing until they were inside, when he sat her down and told her he was going to make tea.

It was all through her still, she told him, whatever you call it, the mix of emotions.

What she needed was his presence. The physical fact of him, standing, walking, handing her things, resolving sameness and difference into one named being.

She stayed with him for four days.

Greg came and went. She leafed through his books. Biographies of French film directors. A North American road novel. Popular guides to classical philosophy and quantum mechanics. Every one was jammed up with marginal notes in a shorthand border between the page and the world.

His couch was longer than her bed. There was no awkwardness about who’d sleep where. She’d consider it a mark of her recovery when the awkwardness hit her.

At night she heard things in the walls but in the morning he convinced her she hadn’t in variations of the same conversation.

“Concrete walls and floors. Triple the code standard.”

She tried to imagine the sound. She described it to him as more creaturely than not. She tried to imagine imagining it.

“This high, you don’t have rats,” she said.

“No rats or mice or roaches.”

“Then it’s something otherworldly.”

“Too high for rats, too new for ghosts.”

Sometimes they spent an hour or more in the same room without talking, then he was gone somewhere. The third afternoon he brought her lunch and stayed for a while making notes at the kitchen table with his briefcase at his feet. The picture of him there inspired her to want to hand-write her journal entry for the day and she hunted around for paper and a pen. In a desk drawer she found dozens of rolls of exposed film.

“So this is none of my business,” she said.

She held two in her palm for him to see.

“They’re mostly from travels. Over the years.”

“Why haven’t you developed them?”

She saw him take the thought and put it away.

“I do digital now,” he said, as if answering.

She wondered where men like him kept their lives. Some vast white space in the mind.

Every night she badly pretended to help make dinners. He was talented and knew where the pans were. It was the dance that mattered, the brushings past, the leanings across. At one point he moved behind her to get by and put his hands on her hips lightly and paused for a moment and she felt him against her and then they continued their business of cooking and eating, neither embarrassed nor especially distracted, as if his pausing had just been a way of putting things.

At home he liked to wear twill pants or jeans.

They spoke every day about
GROUND
, their past lives, of his clients. He said they were just regular people with jobs and families. “A little more resourceful than us. And who are we, for that matter? Look at us, the so-called support community. We’re mostly white. Educated, middle-class origins. We have names like Greg and Kim. You think we know each other?”

She asked him about the notes in the margins of his books. He said he recorded most interviews on paper and had evolved his own shorthand.

He said, “The only way to get through it all is with short, controlled bursts.” It was a while before she realized he was prescribing a way of thinking.

Sometimes he saw codes where they didn’t yet exist.
GROUND
was built as an acronym to fit into some abstruse interchange of short forms. Government agencies, insurgent armies, political regions, student movements, aid organizations, all were known by tags. Even distant sentences that had been reduced by a word or two could be brought back whole with an ease that surprised him, for he wasn’t in the habit of recall. He privately thought of “proper identity documents” as
PRIDS
. The “port-of-entry” was
PEN
. The “corroboration of identity” was
CORROID
. “Without the
PRIDS
the claimant needs
CORROID
that supports the
PEN
notes,” he said by way of example.

His home theatre had been upgraded since the night of the French movie. It now involved a large plasma screen and a floor with four risers and real moviehouse chairs called red rockers that were bolted in place and leaned back and shot forward so you could scull through the film scene to scene. They sat with a seat between them, watching a Palestinian feature about suicide bombers. Near-documentary-realism. No music. The men spend their last nights with their families, not telling them anything. In the morning they get strapped with explosives that can’t be removed. They are driven to a woods –

Greg turned it off.

“Sorry. I can’t tonight. Bad choice. You go ahead.”

He got up to leave and she reached out and took his hand and they stopped in that position like figures on a silkscreen. He seemed to search for something to say but she tugged and he tugged back, and she let him pull her up out of the red rocker and then they were face to face.

She reached up, leaned in and kissed him. Nothing felt movieish anymore. Then he stepped back.

“Kim, even if you had any idea what you were getting into with me, you aren’t in good shape to go through it.”

She almost laughed. It had been days. But she knew there’d be lines like this. She thought she’d prepared for them but, standing there, so close, just in the hesitation, she realized he was right.

That night on the couch she imagined what might have been, how she might have traced the length of him through his pants and then turned and taken three steps away and stood waiting with her back to him. And of course he would come to her, and she’d lift her arms up high and let him run his hands over her, along the ribs and hips, and then around. He’d reach under her clothes and hold her breasts, kiss her neck, and one hand would move over her belly and on down. She’d sweep her arms low and behind her now and take hold of the backs of his thighs and pull herself against him as he reached down between her legs, the familiar astonishment, and then he’d be unbuttoning her jeans and on his knees helping her out of them and she’d stand facing him now in blue socks and grey T-shirt.

He’d look up at her, his head slightly tilted to the side like that of a confused hound, waiting for a command.

Hey, you, she’d say …

The next day, her last at Greg’s place, she sits at his desk, writing. Now and then she looks up at a framed photo of African women hanging clothes on branches in a wind, the white sheets main-sailed on their echoing figures, and something echoes in her, though she doesn’t at first know what.

Greg is at work and she is at his desk, and she is on the computer page, standing outside a bright church. Something is about to happen.

Then she has it. It’s the sails and the desk, having come together. Above her desk in New York was a print Donald had given her when she left Toronto for her doctoral studies. It looked psychedelic but was mathematical, a so-called burning-ship fractal, with the nested repetitions of nearly the same forms in a kind of endless regression of hulls, masts, and sails. He’d called it “God’s thumbprint” and said that it was all the god any rationalist should need.

She’s closed the loop in her thoughts. She moves forward.

This time she steps inside the church. Everyone is standing and singing and a man at the front wearing a suit is raising his hands in the air. Kim is the only white person in the room. A young woman about her age near the door sees her and smiles, still singing, and gestures to an empty seat and Kim comes in and stands beside her and the woman takes Kim’s hand in hers and raises it up and there’s nothing but love in here, she knows, her attacker isn’t present, and then suddenly neither is she, and she looks away and then back at the page.

She writes, “He wasn’t in the church.”

This is pure intuition, not fact, but she’s sure of it nevertheless.

She isn’t in the church anymore, but past it, and she feels the gaze, and though she’s not ready yet to imagine the attack, he
is already there. She stops writing but he’s in her thoughts and growing, and so to get distance from him she begins a new page. She sees herself walking on a summer evening on a calm residential street, somewhere west of downtown, and as she begins to write the scene, she feels it, the motion of walking, and then suddenly she is someone else – these moments of release into her blood are growing into a dependency – walking without intention for more than an hour and happening by a community centre where a girl he’d known in language school used to work as a cleaner. Her name was Maribel.
R
hadn’t seen her in months but they’d been in the same small group of friends who sometimes studied together and went out, though she had a boyfriend back where she came from, some country in Asia he couldn’t remember, and had no interest in the clubs. She wasn’t pretty when you met her but seemed more so every day. As far as they could communicate she seemed a little smart, a little funny. She had her resident status.

The community centre was an old school. When he went in, the place seemed empty, but he found a class of some sort going on in one room. The man leading it asked if he could help and
R
said no and passed by. Finally down a hallway he found a janitor, a fat man who was maybe Italian, and asked him about Maribel, but the man said he didn’t know any Maribel and he knew everyone who worked there. The man was lying to him but there was nothing he could do.

He went out back of the centre and watched men his age and older playing soccer in a park. One side spoke Spanish. The others were mostly Brazilian, he thought. They lived some kind of organized lives, these men, that in the evenings they could be in uniforms playing games. The sides were not especially talented.
Most of the players were no better or worse than he was. They called to one another but otherwise it was quiet. He was the only one watching.

He returned every night to the park and watched. The teams were always different. Once or twice he retrieved a ball but otherwise he remained on the margins. Then one night after the game was over and he had stood to leave, one of the players came nearby and spoke to him in Spanish. He said the league was full but new players could join to replace the injured and he gave him a number to call. He said the new players paid only half price.
R
nodded and took the number and started away, and the man added, “If you can’t pay, you just tell the man that Carlos gave you the number.”
R
thanked him and left. He knew he’d never return there now and already he missed it.

Kim looks up and sees the women hanging their laundry in the picture, the sheets as sails, and thinks of Africans on ships. If she were to turn her head and look around the apartment or out the window at the city below, she’d see all the things of the world stealing glances at one another. Everything connected. Her attacker has given her this way of seeing, and she hates him for the giving, for the beauty of the gift. It’s been forced on her and she will never be free of it. She can’t separate the gift from the giver.

He is inside her.