Cities of Refuge (40 page)

The light in the room changed. The last clouds had cleared off. The day was full of openings. The sky would hold for a while, with its imaginary gods for those who believed, and for those who didn’t, with the names of the colours of blue. And still, under the gods or whatever, an alien intelligence, it was possible to say one or two things that were true, and to marry them to one or two things that were half-true, and so to approximate a universe, partly understood, playing itself out.

“We’ll let things be, then,” he said. “We better just let them be.”

He stood. He thought about coming forward but didn’t. He imagined holding her. She was all bones.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Tell Kim I was by.”

As he walked past the foot of the bed he squeezed her toes lightly through the blanket. She looked at him and breathed a small sigh.

He left the room and stood in the hallway for a time. He wondered if he heard her crying. He stood not knowing for certain what he’d ever said or done to her, what she’d done to him. Not knowing what to do. They’d almost made it to the end, he and Marian, without an opening up. But things caught up, the way they did out there. If only they’d caught him and not their daughter. He still didn’t know what to call it, what happened to Kim. An inevitable return, or just bad luck. Maybe it was the century that had happened. The century, the city. You couldn’t
escape them. And yet now that they’d been caught, they would survive, he saw. When she calmed down, he thought, Marian would see it too.

B
y her sudden arrangement she met Greg for dinner in a murmuring lounge that served tapas. He wore a light blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled. Somehow the muscles in his forearms were taken up in his jawline and the mastoids of his neck and it all was present for her. He started into another account of his work in the asylum trade and she stopped him this time. She saw he understood what it was about, what she hoped for. The food inspired them each to tell stories of travelling in Spain, conjuring for one another the small towns of Estramadura, the Alhambra, quail dishes, the bridges of Rhonda, and minarets, fields of sunflowers. Whenever the conversation veered off she brought it back to the sensual. Buñuel. Greg said he’d once studied flamenco guitar for a month in Seville. He’d fallen for a girl there who led him along but wouldn’t sleep with him, and he needed a project to keep him sane. He was full of passion but no technical ability.

“Your whole life seems unlikely,” she said.

“Everyone’s unlikely.”

And so between them now was something from his distant past. He’d never let her this close before. She wanted to smell his skin. She would tell him this if she had to, if he started to doubt what she wanted, or doubt he should agree to it, though yes, he would agree, and she wanted to tell him anyway. And so when he said, “It’s early, but would you like to go to my place for more
drinks?” she didn’t answer or even nod to uphold the pretense. She just got up and waited for him, and she left her bike locked up outside, and they walked to his building. They said almost nothing, and what they’d just talked of, the wonders of Spain, his boyhood in the true west, drifted off in the slanted air. They brushed arms twice, once on the street, once in the hallway to his door, and she wanted the weight of him. The mystery was that she knew he understood this. He understood. So when they were finally inside his door and he kissed her, and she found herself crying, she knew he understood that it didn’t matter, that the crying was part of the desire, and then the tears let off and she could feel him and he touched her and undid her jeans and they were gone and he was on his knees. She slid down to the floor. She seemed to be lying in shoes. His thumb was on her, and then his fingers were in her and he moved down further to kiss her until she shuddered. Then he picked her up and carried her to his bed. It was hot and he threw the covers and sheets to the floor. Then they were both naked. She turned onto her belly and he covered her.

In time, afterwards, he started talking again. He couldn’t seem to help himself. There were human smugglers on the Detroit River. There were politicians buying votes with temporary permits, Indian surgeons accidentally deported, Tamils extorting their kind. There were claimants stuck in a Buffalo refugee shelter and a new government snitch line. A
DNA
test that reunited a family, children detained in front of their elementary school classmates. For a while she wasn’t really listening, and then something passed and she caught it.

“What did you say? The Colombian?”

“Turned in by an Anglican priest.”

She drew her knees up and hugged them.

“What’s his name?”

“… Cantero. Rodrigo Cantero.”

It wasn’t admission, after all. There was only the world going on.

“What is it?” he asked.

Rodrigo Cantero. She hadn’t known his name. She’d failed to give him one.

“I don’t know. A coincidence maybe.”

She asked him to tell her about Rodrigo Cantero. He was suspected of having been in a Colombian paramilitary group that had kidnapped and killed local farmers in a documented incident. He’d been here for a couple of years. He’d gotten into some legal trouble or other and a warrant had been issued for his arrest and removal.

“What does he look like?”

“He’s thin. Boyish. He’s quiet. Maybe a bit acquiescent. So you know him?”

The bed, the walls, the building, all the made things that held her. The imagination had force, she wanted to tell her father. It was real, its movement changed governments and traffic and air currents in the room. In the right mind, it could do good work. Her own imagination was supposedly healing her. And at some point the fully imagined world could touch on the world that was. She ran her finger over the idea that through
R
she had written Rodrigo into existence.
R
or someone very like him was out there in the city right now.

“Can I meet him?” Already she felt what would pass between them, the recognition.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They flew him out this morning.”

T
hey spoke through glass. Teresa had brought her lawyer, named Greg. The man wasn’t old. He gave the impression of having once looked stronger. He told Rodrigo there was nothing to be done and no money to do it. Then he wished him luck and left. He looked like he spent his days walking out of the same room.

Teresa then sat before him and looked at him hard. She wiped away tears without blinking. She was trying to memorize his face. He would try not to remember her crying. She said she had written him a letter and given it to Rosemary. She wanted him to read it before he left, to know he was not alone, that he was in her thoughts and would be all the way out and thereafter. She said she had already left Luis and was living with a girlfriend from the café, but the space was too small so they were looking for another.

It was a minute or two before she understood he had nothing to say.

There was nothing to say.

He dropped his head and waited for her goodbye but she stayed and stayed, saying his name, and then finally left without another word. If she had said goodbye he would have said it too.

He had lunch in the cafeteria. The uniformed guards looked about his age. None of them white. It was hard to see what they were guarding against. Seven prisoners eating in seven places. They seemed not to want to look at one another and Rodrigo stared a little longer only at an African woman who looked too thin to
have deceived anyone, and an old, maybe Arab man who was crying at his table. He had no food or drink and so Rodrigo brought a tea and set it before him. The man looked up, surprised, as if he’d thought he was alone in this place. He nodded to him and Rodrigo nodded back. They sat together sipping for a few minutes, not even trying to communicate. If they had had a common language he would have asked the man respectfully if he could tell him something, and he’d have advised him to keep his thoughts gathered tightly together, watching for strays, like a cowboy in a movie, moving them along to wherever they needed to be. Many times in his life a man so old must have needed to master his thoughts. It was disturbing that he couldn’t keep them in order.

After some time Rodrigo moved a distance away and ate. He thought about what lay ahead. It would be stupid to go to his family or old friends, he would only endanger himself and them. His uncle had paid someone to get him out of the country. The man gave him a ticket and a false passport and American dollars, and told him to tear up the passport in the washroom of the plane and to say the English word “refugee” when he landed. The uncle and Uriel were now in Cartagena. Maybe he could find them. Unless he was unlucky, he would live long enough to get away again, if he could find the money.

The last meeting was with Rosemary. She didn’t look like herself. She wore a white shirt with long sleeves and a collar. He’d seen it once before. It looked wrong on her. She always looked wrong when she dressed up, even for church. He didn’t like it that she thought she needed to dress up to see him in this place, as if she were showing it respect.

She said that he had done nothing wrong, that she was the one who had made mistakes and brought the trouble to their door.
She didn’t say what he knew to be true, that she had kept him too long, that with his first paycheques he should have found an apartment and disappeared into the city, that his chances would have been better if he’d made his own attachments, people connected through him, to whom he himself was a way further into the city and so of value equal to that of any new friend. She gave him strategies for returning and asked about namesakes and documents, and the cost of false passports. He was to write her with an address once he had one.

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.