Cities of Refuge (25 page)

“It’s easy to make too much of it, Kim. It was frightening to be there under that kind of rule. The day after the coup I hid with others, people I didn’t know, in my teacher’s apartment, and later I got out of the country while they couldn’t. I wasn’t brutalized. It’s the dead and ruined who deserve our thoughts, not those of us who escaped. So I’ve never done them the disservice of dining out on my time there.”

Her face had an openness, each feature set off by another, and you could see her world in it, her eyes, her brow, little tremors
in her forehead, all the disturbed surface tensions, the wind on clear water.

“What about the people you knew there?”

“I only ever knew a few. I shared an apartment with other foreign students. A German and two Americans. I think they all got out okay.”

“You don’t know for sure? Weren’t they your friends?”

“I thought so. One of them, a guy named Carl Oakes, I don’t think he was who he seemed to be. He was hard to read. Politically. Anyway, yes, we survived.”

It was built into the cosmic trackings that the old would forget who they had been and replace themselves in memory with regrets and wistfulness, an innocence that never existed, even in the face of what does exist in youth, a fleeting, unheeding wisdom. Kim saw into him, she always had. But he saw things, too. Invisible things – not just the sly intents that people carried in their smiles, but darting fiends in shadows. There were safe ways to speak of them, these fiends, but Kim was the kind to call them up directly, as if to do battle. He wanted to warn her but didn’t know how.

“There’s a report on the dead and missing,” she said. “The Rettig Report. I just read it.”

And like that, it was all going wrong. It was in her now, Santiago. She knew her history, and had too strong an imagination.

“Did you. I guess it’s not exactly a romp.”

“When I worked at
GROUND
I read truth commission findings from all over. The stories are hard. I always ended up sort of drained and hopeful at the same time.”

“I see. I don’t think my feelings would be so complicated.”

Someone was coming along the hallway, then stopped and receded. The moment, as they waited it out, was obscurely freighted.

“You don’t think truth commissions serve a purpose.”

“What I think is, it’s good to get the record straight. And it might help victims, survivors, temporarily, to seem to be expelling their trauma. But there are no talking cures. And often the justice is too little or too late. The killers take asylum in their own cities and stay safe as long as they don’t leave and get arrested by an international court. Santiago. Guatemala City. These places are full of monsters, many of them now in suits.”

She let his words fall, then glanced around the office as if unable to look at him. Postcards she had given him were propped here and there. Picasso’s
Brick Factory at Tortosa
. Klee’s
Angelus Novus
, with the angel of history blown forward through time, looking back at the piling wreckage at his feet. Until now he had stopped seeing them. They were just cards she’d picked up in galleries and museums. There was nothing written on them.

“It’s not been easy,” she said, “going back to that night. Writing about it. I actually found a bit of courage in the thought that it was your idea, something you’d insisted on for my sake.”

“I was right to insist.”

“I guess it gave me the illusion I was expelling trauma. Is that how you put it?” She watched him. Her neck was flushed, her face lunar. “You know why I quit grad school? Because I didn’t want to be a professor. All I’ve ever wanted to be is a truth commission.” When she smiled, so did he, and she trapped him there by changing her face and letting the smile go.

“A lot of junk in that garage,” he said. “It might be time to take all those boxes to the dump.”

Her forearm pronounced little cords of muscle as she gripped the black foam seat. She waited a moment longer, then lifted the bike and turned it to face the doorway and started off and down the hallway and would have left without another word but he called to her. She walked backwards for a few steps, like a figure on a film in reverse, and stood with her bike in profile. Following any other conversation it would seem stylish, comic, a little Buster Keaton, but now it was just strange, and made her a stranger for a moment, long enough that he saw her face newly, the woman who existed for the rest of the world beyond the narrow idiom of father-daughter.

“We haven’t talked about you,” he said.

“Yes we have.”

She was working something through, one emotion to the next, each routed through her intelligence. Her heart, her brain. His chances weren’t great with either of them. But then what did he really know of her heart? Maybe they’d come out of this just fine.

“I can tell when you’re lying,” she said. “Don’t you know that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Lying, evading. You’ve been at it since I walked in.”

“I don’t lie to you, Kim.”

“There. You’ve just done it again.”

And then she was gone. A minute later she appeared beneath his window, balancing on a pedal, then mounting the bike on the fly. She rode between the buildings, and out towards the common, through the pedestrian traffic of students, all heedless of her, and then moved out of view.

I
n mid-story, mid-sentence, Kim stops writing. Instantly she knows she’s been preparing this desertion for days.

She’s going to walk out on R.

His life will continue unauthored from this day forward. Now and then she’ll think of him, and wonder if he’s come to mind because she has come to his. In farewell, she grants him an independent being, a kind of will. When he wants to, this made-up man, he can wonder whatever became of his absconded creator.

She doesn’t save the afternoon’s work. When she closes the file, she knows it will be for the last time. Then she deletes it. She shuts down the computer. The screen winks and goes dark. Along the base of the machine, four beads of light die rapidly one by one like the windows of a distant train disappearing into a tunnel and she feels stricken.

Then she does the thing she does sometimes, and loosens her jeans and reaches her left hand down and along her thigh, to feel the scar, to press her fingers against it. Pain and numbness. There and not. No one but the doctors have seen it. When she needs to bring herself back to earth, she does this thing.

The room is quiet. Through the open window, no reports from the city. A dog has ceased barking.

Here in this room she had once been a girl. All that was left of the girl was this staring at the back of the door, not wanting to open it, wanting it to open.

She wants to tell
R
that the desertion holds promise, for it falls to a neat equation, in that the man she’s abandoned him for once abandoned her. She wonders now if he ever came back, was ever really there in the first place.

When he’d visited her at the cottage, he had argued for disarming the past with scrutiny. He had called it hopeful, the act
of writing about the attack, the idea that two people might see the same complexity in the same way. Her hope now is to know her father as no one knows him. He is entirely undiscovered, even to himself. Her new chosen mode will be history, her subject revealed through his own method. She still believes in history. She’ll be the true historian’s historian, the very daughter he has always thought he wanted.

R
has brought her back to the plural, present world.

When she was young she’d known there was bitterness beyond the door, but there was love too. Without much self-pity she can admit now that the love was not as she’d imagined, that it was smaller, and from now on, maybe it’s not to be given to her, if given at all, without compromise. When Marian dies, the uncompromised love will end. It would be better not to know as much, but there is no getting free of the knowledge. She has had her life’s one lucky escape.

O
ne night he heard the walls speak his name until he stabbed the plasterboard with his fishing knife. In the morning he saw the pattern of holes and joined them with a marker to discover the secret constellation that described his pain. That had wanted describing, that was what had called to him all along, wanting its shape to be made. The shape had a centre but was uncertain of itself in the far reaches like it could have been a slow galaxy or spiny poisonous fish. He tacked a sheet on the wall to cover it but the spiny voice came again another night and he took his keys and went out to lose it in the warp.

He took a bright downtown bus and coming the other way they passed the 96 he used to ride two hours a day just to get told in a class that he wasn’t trying. He had unspooled and was sent for assessment. He lived by the lake back then and when he quit the class he took the transit everywhere, spending the afternoons in church kitchens and libraries so that he put the city together and held it in mind as a picture of foreign clusters. The Dufferin-St. Clair branch was Italian. College-Shaw, Italian and Portuguese. Jones past the little Chinatown across the Don. He wrote them on his folding map. He wanted the big design, to see
what it meant. Forest Hill was Jewish. Gladstone, Hungarian. Danforth-Coxwell was Greek and Indian and some branches were crawling with yowlers. There were pockets of Eritrean, Salvadoran, German, West Indian, Guyanese, he wrote out the names of the languages and looked up the strange ones. He used to be good at geography but he didn’t like the peoples if they didn’t hold still, didn’t stay in their places, or else why have the countries at all. He had said this many times and no one listened. He had said it to separate himself from the impression he made with his skin. His line had been tainted somewhere and he’d caught the dark more than anyone.

He stole books and poster ads. The city was full of things just there for the taking.

One poster was for a picnic, where he’d first seen her, making name tags for the yowlers. They crowded around her, laughing, she couldn’t spell the names or the ones who didn’t know it, whose sponsors always spelled it for them. In their small corner of the park with the wind up in the treetops like rushing water. He was there alone. He knew no one, and he sat on a picnic table with his feet on the seat and watched the white girl. They crowded around her and the African blacks were the worst, whose names began Nb or Nj or some such senseless thing, taunting their bodily hosts. The tags were on paper you stuck to your shirt and hoped it didn’t rain. When the table cleared he would say hello and watch her spell out what he said. The music began, the same dumb guitars and pan flutes he heard everywhere west of Yonge with the same players playing what seemed the same song standing in a half-bent row on the verges of the crowd.

He walked over and said hello. Her face was bright, she didn’t know him. He thought of a name and told her Mason, the name
of a dog he’d killed once, and when she looked down to write it he saw that she’d put both of hers on her tag. He could find her whenever he wanted.

Long ago a doctor had predicted her in his life and here she was. He wondered if he’d have met her if the doctor hadn’t said so and then knew she’d been there from the start, his whole life on this vector, and the doctor had just called the line.

She was not someone he’d pictured. He knew he would know her when the time came.

“There you go, Mason.”

He smiled. He wanted her to say his real name, to know it. He felt the sky unlocking and only later would know why.

She told him to have a free burger.

At first, following, it was like he just wanted to find a way of telling her something. Because of her work she kept to a pattern and he reduced his study to the last few blocks. In a black between-space he waited three nights in one week, two the next before he saw what would happen. The site was unsecured. The guard cheated and went home by eleven and left the lock open for the morning shift workers.

He bore no control of his physical self. Things he felt on his skin brought him mercy. What he wanted to say was that in some hours he understood that he was wrongly fitted to this world. There was another world where it would come up right, where the all of him worked as it should, but he was lost to it. It was light years away and he had no means of flying there.

Downtown was a different place. Every few blocks there were internet rooms with curtains around every station.

How to say, it used to be the windows would memorize me but now I can pass without judgment. The virtual world had
made him invisible. The place you cross over has no opening, no beginning. You have always been crossing until you do.

Mason, he would say again. He killed a dog once with a grappling hook. In his heart he was wrongly fitted.

“I just heard the music,” he said. Then the next ones in line started laughing. She waved him goodbye with a smile and he only wanted to show her himself open the same way. He wanted them both open at the same time. He walked off towards the grill and kept walking, saying her name, letting it carry him clear. In the night she would do the numbers, thinking back, not knowing what had happened, that he was more numbers than the rest. She might think “Mason” and he could almost think it with her.

The thing that happened came out wrong. He still wanted to explain, all day every day for months now. In his fantasy she wins the struggle, and beats him, and before she throws him into the pit, she holds him for the one moment he had been sent here for, the one he could stay inside forever.

O
ne evening, at the table with her mother after dinner, Donald in his study, Kim recalled for Marian a conversation they’d had years ago about intuition. Marian had said that when women spoke of intuition, they were just in some suggestible, wishing state in which they pretended to see signs. Kim had said her intuitions were sometimes colder than that. It wasn’t just that she knew things before they happened – what someone would say, however strange, just before they said it – but she felt she knew what they were thinking. She knew their silences.
Especially Harold’s. And she knew something very dark was going on in those silences. Marian had said only that she didn’t doubt it – it wasn’t clear whether she meant the intuition or the darkness – and that had been the end of the conversation.