Cities of Refuge (8 page)

He took a long last gaze at the dark spot. He would have to move again.

Upstate New York on the flat black horizon of the lake. Water, command, guiding points. His mind was shifting to a navigational fancy. Conquest. He thought of Connie, though she was out of the picture. He shouldn’t email her, he knew. It wasn’t just that she’d turn him down. He’d detect that familiar note of sadness for him, her willing failure to suppress it. When they’d first spent time together, eleven years ago, she was the diligent grad student, his grad student. She was gone and married before they’d had their affair, two Januaries back. A happy-hour drink in a downtown hotel lounge. At some point the lights dimmed in a blunt promotion of intimacy. They ended up in his car, kissing like teenagers. It had come out of nowhere, it seemed, for what else would you call a shared interest in colonial Mexican history. Only later did he see the other mutual factors, marriages failed or failing, their moribund careers. She’d found nothing on the academic job market and now worked as an editor of children’s books. At least he’d gained a position before his career had stalled. Now they often stalled right off the line. It was through some sort of conditioning, something in the student-mentor dynamic, that even years later she’d come to him for advice and consolation. In time she understood that his need surpassed hers.
Or maybe, though he didn’t like to think of it, she just couldn’t be naked anymore with a man twenty-some years her senior.

He’d had this place for ten months when he’d finally persuaded her to come over. He’d wanted her to see it, to see he was free and clear, if not happy. Since then, without even acknowledging the invitations, she’d turned them down. Every few weeks she’d write, the letters weren’t even newsy. Mostly she asked about his classes. “Some days when you got going you could change the whole room. All that dead history got up and walked around in front of us. You were the great necromancer. You need to find those days again, Harold.” She had always been his champion among students and other faculty, his defender. He had precious few of them, and so forgave her for pretty much anything, even for calling him a necromancer.

She used to check her mail almost hourly. He turned on the desk lamp and tapped out a note – “Come here for a drink. The city’s beautiful from my couch. You remember it, don’t you?” – and sent it.

If he’d been honest he’d have told her there were ghosts here tonight. All over the papers and the TV was a forensic artist’s reconstruction of the face of last week’s murder victim, the “dumpster girl,” as one paper had settled on calling her. She was the consummate image of the woman who’d inspired his first infidelity. Celina Shey. That had lasted no more than a month, though Marian wouldn’t learn of it for years, but it foretold all that was to come.

The silence of his hours here, distracting himself with reading, television, the internet, the phone, cooking – all that was missing was an exercise wheel. He’d bought this place as much for the soundproofing as the view, but it had been a mistake –
he longed for footsteps, music, traffic, any stray notes of ongoingness. Without them he simply lined up tasks and performed them. You could build another day upon the half-awareness of your moving hand.

He opened a bottle of Amarone and started into it in the spirit of wasting a good thing in self-pity. It was now well into what used to be the reading hours. Against his will he turned on the television and flipped back and forth through the channels, finding nothing but the usual bilking operations and fictions to feed a mass idiocy. It was true that the American network news was a sly way of selling cars and bad government, not that he ascribed to conspiracy theories. It infuriated Kim that he so readily accepted her calling him a snob. He liked “snob.” The word didn’t break down as easily as “elitist.”

He kept flipping. Two men fencing with baguettes, a pop star with a navel ring talking about her so-called art. Gene Hackman was on two channels, in different stages of his career. The whole point of the device was to feel a part of the audience, but there was nothing he could stomach.

He checked for email. No messages.

Then the local cable news, and there she was again, the double. How does this work, he wondered, that for two or three days we all walk around with the same picture in our minds, the same bleak facts? The police insist that the unclaimed girl must have had a circle of friends and appeal for someone to come forward.

Did Celina ever think of him? He barely remembered himself from back then, a budding Latin Americanist with some ideas about the Wars of Independence. They’d met in Montreal. He was living with Marian and going to McGill. At a street festival he’d stopped to watch a blind boy playing Italian folk
songs on guitar and then there she was, across the crowd. It was a powerful moment of recognition, though he couldn’t say who she reminded him of, if anyone. Her features, dark and slightly dramatic against her olive skin, fit perfectly into some still image from his experience. He followed her down the block and managed to come up beside her as she bought gelato. As they ate their treats together there in the street she told him she wrote magazine articles on home furnishings, and he said he was a graduate student, new to the city. She gave him her number unprompted. He told her about Marian and she said it was an old story to her. Years later he tried to explain to Marian this first encounter. In following Celina, chatting, taking the number he’d betrayed her, yes, but he was doing it all against his instincts, even against his desire. What he really wanted to do upon seeing the woman was to turn and go the other way. The recognition, whatever it was, disturbed him, and only a conscious act of will allowed him to confront the disturbance. None of this made sense to Marian - how could it? – who thought he was just revising the past and parsing it in his defence. The short-lived affair was not without pleasure, but the pleasure was always fraught. As he got to know Celina, as she became to him more herself and less the mystery he thought he’d recognized, their passion died.

And yet now, another recognition. Had Celina had a daughter? He imagined the girl growing up, moving to Toronto, dying here on his television.

He’d had two brief affairs during his marriage. Since the divorce, several dates but only two lovers, and only for a few months each. Though Marian and Kim thought of him as a womanizer, he was not, by the modern standard. He was always meeting women who thrilled him, but his attempts to move beyond
the talking stage were full of misreadings, misplays, embarrassments. After a while, the attempts came to seem self-punishing.

By the time Connie called he had finished off the Amarone. Early into the conversation she’d begun to cry and he was worried he’d missed something in his drunkenness. It turned out that she and her husband had had to put their dog down the previous afternoon.

“Fourteen years,” she said. “Bob’s been part of my life longer than you have.” It was a second before he surmised that Bob was the dog.

“I’m very sorry, Connie.”

“Dog grief is a weird thing.”

“Yes. It must be.”

Why, in her grief, had she called him? He wondered if this didn’t affirm a deep connection between them.

“You can’t write me messages like that.”

“Like what?”

“You asked if I remembered your loveseat. Meaning what we did on it.”

“I don’t remember asking that.” He tried to recall what he’d written. He thought he’d alluded to other nights looking at the city from rooftop bars. She’d misinterpreted things before. Maybe she wouldn’t have been a good academic after all.

“Oh, come on, Harold. You don’t have to remind me what happened.”

How could he tell her that she would have to remind him? They’d made love there on the couch, and in bed, and in the car once. But he couldn’t recall the details of these hours. They’d both been happy, he remembered. He would only remember her body if he saw it again.

“I take it you’re not coming for a visit, then.”

“You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I wasn’t when I asked you over, though.”

“You might not realize that it hurts me to get these messages, but it does. I’m telling you now. So unless you don’t mind hurting me, stop them. I don’t want to hear from you again. I wish you well, Harold.”

She didn’t leave him time to respond before she hung up. He was aware that if he’d been sober he’d be in more pain, that the pain he felt was bogus and he couldn’t trust it. He’d somehow robbed himself of what would have been a moment of sharp loss, real but manageable. It was more bad luck that he’d missed it.

Unsteadily now he walked to the small couch and pushed it up to the window. He climbed over the arm to take his next position, his head resting on a cushion as he looked out at the city. An airliner hung over the skyline in low gliding profile.

If I was king of the world, he thought. A game he used to play with Kim. If I was king of the world I’d make it go to sleep. I’d utter it into dormancy. I’d shut the place down by fiat. Or maybe I’d say nothing and just pull the plug, casting us into darkness and thought, turning to face our terrors and getting to know them by name, undistracted by noise and duty. All souls but one. One to walk among us as we looked at the sky each night, one to mark who could sleep and who couldn’t.

You walk at night, drift through streets. He was down there right now, tucked into the shadow by the steps. Waiting. A few faces and names are with him too, many of them women, lost or deranged or betrayed, one his daughter. For cold seconds it seems she’s been mixed up with the lost and it’s too late to save her, to
separate her from them, and then suddenly it’s he himself among them. The fear is absolute. All of the dead must die knowing it.

T
his time, returning, without the snow, with the wet earth on the air and the city up ahead, she thought: He’s still here. I know it. This time she felt the difference between the man she’d imagined and the real thing. The real thing, a mystery she would scream at, and run from or strike if she could. She needed to think about this, this raw force still inside her, but instead she just felt it, in non-thought, and let herself be funnelled into the northern downtown, and she kept driving, hearing herself breathing deeply now, in the quick mud and vapour of memory.

The sublet tenants had left the place intact. Marian had asked her to move home – they missed each other and admitted that even the old mother-daughter tensions would feel reassuring - and so she gave her notice and set about collecting boxes from the stores along Bloor Street, as she’d done before. Counting every chair, she was in possession of eleven pieces of furniture, and three could be returned to the curb, where she’d found them a year ago. The rest would end up in her mother’s storage garage until it became too much to live at home again, or until she decided what to do with her life.

Eight days before her phone was to be disconnected she made enquiries about yoga classes, which it turned out she couldn’t afford. She dug out notes she’d once compiled for a documentary she wanted to make about a local group home for Liberians who’d had their hands hacked off, and then she put them away again. The Liberians had long ago dispersed.

On her daily transits she made a point of stopping to touch leaves and flowers. She looked a little mad, she supposed, stooping to rub and smell in every second wild garden.

She watched TV and changed channels, forgot what she was watching and then discovered it again, a heist movie, a documentary on mountain apes, and allowed herself to be reabsorbed for two minutes and forget what she’d seen up the dial along some other invisible band in the air. Her sleep patterns began to grow random again. She nodded off mostly in a fetal slouch in an armchair with the quipping bad guys and the apes. She saw the same smoking rubble on three channels, the same victims in the same hospital beds. In a few hours would be the same funeral processions.

At one point it occurred to her that vast uncertainty was a form of knowing. It was a thought she could not get past.

She could go back to the forest and lake, the long thoughts and sure rhythms, or she could hang on and see what became of her.

Having already packed her clocks, she lay in unmeasured quiet every night amid her boxes and the scent of dead candles. In the mornings she sat on her mattress, writing the old way, by hand.

One day she landed in the pissy little food court of the Starr Inn, a hotel that doubled as a way station for deportees, a two-storey cube on Airport Road, facing an Air Canada hangar. It was the last building that jets passed over before touching down on one of the north runways. There she was, watching very young security officers in grey, distinctively ugly sweaters with epaulettes eat doughnuts and pizza slices. At another table a woman and
three children – they looked maybe Thai – were bent over the chore of wrapping a package. They would be here to give something to a detainee, for the detainee’s use, or maybe for family back home. The woman had given each child a specific task, holding folds, pulling tape, applying it, and Kim wondered if she was worried what to do with them when the package was finally sealed. When the woman saw her looking, Kim smiled at her, and the woman studied her briefly as if she should know her, and then went back to the package.

She’d driven up with Greg. She’d sent a note that she was back and an hour later he’d written from his wireless, “how about a run up? i’ll be by in 10 to see if youre there.” She used to accompany him for no reason, it was just an excuse to be together in the days when it seemed there were possibilities for them. They’d be shooting along the expressway and someone’s life might be at stake and yet for minutes at a time her thoughts ran only between herself and Greg, plying back and forth between exhaustion and desire. Today there was neither, only his kindness at having asked and her sitting there in a small pocket of difference. He had emailed once after the attack to say he was thinking of her, but now didn’t even ask how she was. They just sort of skipped the dumb-question phase.

Greg was inside with Robert Plaia. Robert inspired complicated feelings. He volunteered in a program helping victims of torture, but Greg suspected him of abusing the woman he lived with. A few hours ago he’d been detained for reasons unknown. Robert’s sponsor had called Greg. “If his sponsor had been at the mall I might never have known. It’s happened that people get deported before their lawyer knows they’ve been detained.” It had happened that the lawyer knew and didn’t show, that he
fell asleep during the hearing, that he confused one client with another and defended himself by complaining about the names. Kim had heard all the stories. She wondered how many of the lawyers had once been like Greg and then been broken by frustration until they simply pulled their emotional investments.