Cities of Refuge (16 page)

He had it in him, and he had an eye for it in others. She hadn’t simply rejected him. Rosemary was hiding something.

Drew turned out to be a young woman, chirpy and eager to help, and converting and training Luddites was her “lately fulltime job.” He woke up his computer and got out the images he wanted to use. The idea was to spring this on the students after he’d discussed church and state powers, the
politique
tradition, and the definitions of orthodoxies and heresies. What they always looked forward to – he’d offered this course in alternating years for a decade – was the lecture on physical coercion. They wanted to know about torture, most of them, the Canadian-born ones, and he used their interest to digress into a talk on popular understandings of the Inquisition, then and now. The idea was to make them feel a part of a centuries-old fascination that drove not only the conflicts between natives and Europeans, Catholic and Protestant regimes, and the major faiths of the old world, but popular art from the thirteenth century to Monty Python.

Connie had
TA
’d this course for him once. After graduating she came to a few lectures, and afterwards they’d meet for a tour of the galleries, arguing over every painting, photo, light box, and film. Those afternoons had been all about desire. It sounded trite, but lovers were like artists, he thought. Desire
itself was fundamentally mimetic. It called for an answer. As an act of seeing done by hand, a painting required a virtuosity that he wouldn’t claim for himself as a lover, but he did know something of the ways in which the sexual act used to sharpen his perceptions and allow him to forget about the male body in its decades-long deceleration. So it was to be expected, then, that a sexual loneliness, such as he’d fallen into, was attended by a blurring in his apprehension of things, and without the corrective of intimate companionship and the meditative afterstate, he experienced a growing hunger, not only for sex but for something new. He missed his time with Connie at the galleries, standing before some empty scene or still life, some mundane subject. But now, more and more by the hour, he wanted something dramatic, lurid, sensational, whatever it was that the massive fact of the ordinary was held against.

Drew scanned for him three maps of the Americas, made with the early arts of projection, capturing something of the European view of the Americas and their natives. She worked with him on cropping the images to fit them together. She provided a stapled yellow information sheet for him to follow as she stroked and cursored through the commands with her precise fingers. In another time she’d have been a musician, he thought. Maybe she was in this time. High on her left wrist, peeking out from the sleeves of her red brocade tunic, was the lower border of what looked to be a riotous green and black tattoo that extended around her arm. Whenever he saw these things he worried again that Kim might show up one day with Che Guevara gazing up from her neck or bicep. Who knew what she had on her rear end? But there was an incoherence in the surfaces of these young people that he’d given up trying to
understand. They were full of confidence and ink. Given the tattoos and her skill at manipulating his images, he wondered if Drew was only a kind of stage name.

She wasn’t much of an instructor, it turned out. She moved too quickly, used terms he had no hope of knowing, made no concessions for his stated inability to follow her from window to window, and anticipated the wrong questions. Before long he realized he would just have to let her set it all up, and then make sure he understood how to start the engine and put it in gear. But when they moved from maps to documents to the first drawings of torture wheels and dismemberments, she evinced a sudden distress, and began to fumble with the keys, even though she was looking down at them now more than at the screen, making mistakes and correcting them without comment. He told her that at this point in the lecture he wanted to establish the thematic elements of images of suffering in Western art, from the crucifixion, to Goya, to the World War
I
sketching of Otto Dix. Central to his lecture was Titian’s
The Flaying of Maryssa
in that it allowed him to talk about the attempt to resolve Thinking, Feeling, and Will in a contemplation of suffering.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t need to get it.”

“But it’s upset you. It’s easier to accept if we understand it conceptually.”

“Then it’s probably better not to know much about it. Whoever painted this –”

“Titian.”

“Whatever. He probably didn’t do it just to get us all talking.”

She scanned the image and saved it for him.

It came up onscreen, and he looked at it as she had, as if for
the first time. He could think of nothing to say, and then he began to weep.

In his office, with the door closed, he wondered at himself.

There was something powerfully distilled in static images, even when they lied, as if in meeting them we remember something, though the photo is of strangers in a strange place, or the painting is from centuries ago. But then memory is made of stop time. Likeness isn’t time-bound.

Everything that mattered, mattered personally. If we were troubled by the pain, everywhere and through time, we’d all be on the floor, fetal, dying of empathy. The perfect world we might aspire to, he decided, would be locked in perfect memory and agony. Only the worst would survive it.

He would not. But then no one was in danger of finding themselves in a perfect world. No doubt he would be done in, as so many were, by the unpursued questions in his life. The particular agony at his end might turn out to be of regret, or self-loathing. If he got lucky, maybe he’d just die suddenly, an old man full of some small satisfaction at the events of his morning, struck down by his heart or a bakery van. He pictured himself lying in a street. It’s winter, but a sunny day, not too cold. The police come and perform their duties around the space. He lies in a little heap, then is turned over, confirmed dead. For a second, before he’s covered, before the ambulance comes, he is face up, eyes half-open to the sky, and then rising up out of him, not his soul but the questions he’s carried the longest, scattered into the world to find other matter, leaving him hollow, light, and alone.

He emailed Drew. He made no mention of his breakdown, but thanked her for her help. “And I think you’re right that Titian didn’t want to get us all talking about what he’d made, though he did want each of us, alone, to think about it. I’m very sorry that the images disturbed you. It’s a good sign for you, at least, that you’re capable of being shocked. Hang on to that. Good luck, Drew.” Then he sent a note to her superiors at Technical Services, putting in a good word for her, even for her instructional abilities. He lied on her behalf. She had inspired the lie, the good words, and he had no trouble finding them.

Through his window, the world was no fuller or subtler, just a few dead colours and hesitant shades, a little pool of sky on the pavement, the usual distant textured planes.

Before leaving his office he called Kim’s detective and left her a message. He heard himself telling her about Rosemary and her dangerous illegals. He heard himself giving up the name, and then the phone number, and he felt a little dirty, a little sick, true to himself.

Then he invented another lie. He said he’d been hearing a rumour. “Some women have gone missing unaccountably, leaving everything they have. No names yet, but I keep hearing about an Eritrean, a Kurd, and a Russian. Then there’s the dead girl found in the dumpster, who might be mestizo, it seems from the composite sketch. I’m not saying Kim is necessarily connected, but you can see a pattern. If it can be established that these missing women and the dead girl came through
GROUND
, then Kim is enfigured into this pattern.” It was a strange way to put it – he wished another had come to him. This wasn’t a composition problem. “So there might be reason to put more resources into this case.”

He sounded strange, even to himself, and he hung up without saying goodbye.

Of course there was a pattern. Men who did what her attacker had done did it again and again. It was all of the violent rhythm of history. There had always been those who would dance to it. Some of them made money from movies and books, exploiting pain they pretended to imagine. Harold thanked god that Kim’s name wasn’t out there for others to use. If anyone ever hurt her again, he didn’t have it in himself not to hurt them back. Of course he didn’t. It was no failing. Only pacifist fools thought there were no uses for direct measures. When people identified with groups and formed hatreds for other groups, then yes, violence only led to more thoughtless violence. But on the scale of one and one, a violent act could be expressed and contained. The sins of her father had been visited upon her, and it fell on him to set things right. He imagined coming upon Kim’s attacker in a quiet, empty side street, and shooting him once in the belly, standing over him and explaining who he was and what he was redressing, and when he was satisfied that the man understood, administering the coup de grace. The great thinkers and artists would have you believe there’d be consequences to your soul for such an act. But who among them had had their daughter nearly raped and murdered? Who could even truly imagine it? His soul would not be imperilled. His soul would be just fine.

He’d forgotten to tell the detective that there were likely more victims among the illegals, that the killer was preying on women who, if they survived, couldn’t go to the police. As would be the case if Kim’s attacker was linked to the rejects. It seemed ever more obvious that she might have been targeted through the office itself.

Where to put his thoughts? He looked out at the common, students crossing in all directions. Transit from the Latin
transitus
. To go across or pass over. His scores were lowering lately in these little word-recall tests. The day he failed one, he’d have to quit his job, he supposed, or at least stop drinking. Or see a specialist. Maybe the memory deficits had nothing to do with age. He wasn’t hypochondriacal in the least but there was the possibility that a sinister cause might be masked by a benign false one. For a few lethal months, the doctors had thought Marian was suffering from an incipient hernia. Then she wasn’t.

Epiphanies were just momentary failures in the seeming of things.

I
n the evenings, after Donald cleared the dinner dishes and went to his study, she and Marian would stay at the table and talk. They drank and Marian told of her lawyering days as an associate and the succession of unlikely characters she’d helped to defend. In her mother’s laughter Kim heard something of the formidable woman she’d been. These were years she’d never talked about with Donald, the early Harold years, full of travels and parties, telepathic witnesses and one-eyed defendants with one-eyed dogs. In the courtroom or out of it, Marian had always been able to argue down charges with style. She could still perform, her dramatic instincts intact, and she came alive now as if in defiance of the cancer and the feeling she would soon disappear. One night she told Kim, “You’re the only audience I care about,” and Kim didn’t know what to say. Seven hours later she found Marian sitting in the dark living room in her emerald
nightgown. She switched on the table lamp and her mother turned and looked through her without recognition. Kim said nothing, helped her to her feet and back to bed.

Some days were blind and she didn’t want to write. Then the best she could do was read novels and feel herself manipulated for her own pleasure. Nothing predictable. She needed to get lost and feel the author’s presence, some gravity bending the light in her, letting him lead her through. Sometimes she cried at the endings like a sap, not always for the characters but because her trust had been rewarded.

And then, strengthened, she sat down again at the small desk in her bedroom and returned to work. She alternated between the two stories, writing her own, then
R’s
, knowing their vectors would meet somewhere up ahead. The writing couldn’t yet move her past fear, but added to it a hopefulness or faith that came in the act of braving her interiors page to page. She was putting herself back together. Time alone would not be enough to heal her.

One afternoon storms moved in and lightning was all around. She stopped writing and for just a moment had the urge to go outside and climb into the tall elm and let happen whatever would happen. The thought was not idle, not a girl’s fanciful urge, but when she opened the door, and only then, she remembered Marian. She found her looking out the front-room window. In the rain and thunder Kim entered unheard and Marian stood, still thinking she was alone, with her arms crossed, her palms on her elbows, and the heels of her floral slippers slightly off the ground, as if she, too, had the need to lift up into the whirl.

Kim said, “The sky’s gone green” just as another bolt sounded over them.

Marian hadn’t heard her and hadn’t flinched at the booming, but stood as before, so like a ghost that Kim suddenly didn’t want to be seen and she turned and everything in the house was wrong, out of time. She went back to her room and closed the door. Even when the storm finally passed, the wrongness held in the appearance of things, every surface slightly mis-coloured, as if the portending green had fallen with the sky and suffused all that was with all that would be.

R
osemary was at her old manual typewriter, composing her third letter of the evening, this one to her sister in despair. Her sister was always in despair. Sammy had come to depend on it as the tenor of their mutual lives, both sprung from the same chaos. Last year Rosemary had told her that there was one path to freedom (“and it’s not to ‘get religion,’ as you put it, but to know God”), and that although Sammy had shown strength in accepting professional help, she must surely see by now that doctors and drugs weren’t really restorative. “Psychiatrists seem to hold out the illusion that they can unknot us like string,” she wrote. “But we’re not knotted like string. We’re knotted like trees.” Sammy had rejected all such characterizations of her distress, because part of her distress involved a fear of diagnosis, figurative or medical. She simply didn’t want to know her afflictions, or anyone’s. She talked about her life as a “mess” and her “head” as “scrambled,” and she lived in a world of dire omens. She was always leaving movies and putting down novels the moment a character developed a cough or suffered a dizzy spell. Her last letter contained the hopeful aside that she was enjoying
Howards
End
and had pushed on through the rough patches (“Mrs. Wilcox does get sick and die, but in Forster’s tasteful old-fashioned way, he doesn’t specify the illness and doesn’t really address it at all and she’s dead within pages”).