Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  She’d lost her line of thought.

  In another minute the voices in her head fell silent. Then she saw herself two places at once, as the girl under the Western sky, believing, and the city woman in her bed saying prayers to herself, and then both of her, the younger and the older, looking up through the same closed eyes, drifting north to the pole.

  2

  In late October she moved north to a cottage belonging to Donald’s sister. At night, the porch. The moon caught on the screen in the semi-deep woods.

  Her leg was well enough to manage the uneven ground along the path to the dock and back. Once in the morning and once before bed, she’d climb down bundled in a flannel coat and sit for a time with the still lake reflecting at its edges deep greens by day and black at night. She had rejected psychologists and group therapies, hadn’t looked at the readings Harold had collected for her on trauma and recovery. But she needed time alone and thought it would do her good to be as close as possible to a change of season. Shenny had found three sets of people to sublet her place, Vancouverites and Americans in town to work on movies. Marian and Donald came up on weekends, and once Marian stayed a full week, but mostly it was the quiet.

  When the snow finally came in November, a restorative blankness, she seemed to settle with it. She was an urban girl and didn’t know the names of things here in summer, the shrubs and trees, the constellations, and the things she did know she now seemed to know less certainly, all of them blunted. But the snow levelled the ground and sky to white and grey, and for a minute or so every morning she resolved into a simpler creature of movement and need.

  For weeks after the assault she had drawn against an invisible weight, and she slept and woke feeling no better. But as winter set in she emerged from a dormancy, as if lagging the world, and her body began to come back to her. Her leg had required only one surgery so far. The side of her quadriceps had been impaled on a half-inch steel rebar rod, which had then torn through the outer sheathing as she continued her fall. There was little vascular trauma but undetermined nerve damage. The wound and its repair had left a cartoonish scar and a burning in the leg that might or might not go away over time. Her other injuries had healed, though on the dock or in the porch she often felt an ache in her ribs. Her nose had been slightly displaced. She’d been advised to consider cosmetic rhinoplasty but wouldn’t pretend that things could be put back in place. She looked a little different now, as she should.

  Citing “personal reasons,” she’d quit everything in one-line emails – her job at the museum, her work at GROUND – and now had nothing to do. At first the tasklessness was difficult, and then it wasn’t, and then it was time to put her brain to work. She had Marian and Donald bring up CDs and books and when they left again she practised her languages. Listening to herself speaking Russian one day, she thought she detected a slur in her speech in some region of pronunciation she didn’t normally occupy. It was possible, but unlikely, that the head blow she’d received or the fall had caused a neurological deficit that would grow over time, but the scans revealed nothing as yet.

  “Eto nastoiashaia istoriia.”

  The story is genuine.

  She began to put her time in order. She slept from ten to four a.m. Each morning began in the dark. With fire and tea she prepared herself for the day’s rhythm of physical labour and study. Two hours studying languages, then, at first light, building the woodpile she’d need if she stayed into winter. The wood had been hauled before she arrived, unsawed, unchopped boles and thick branches, and so she learned from manuals to use a chainsaw and an axe, and she was terrible at both, these motions she didn’t know, and then got stronger and better. In the shed beside the cabin she learned to dress the axe with a foot-pedal grindstone and to cool it in the snow. After two hours she would stop and go inside for bread and cheese, and then again take up her books and audio lessons. After lunch she would nap, and in the afternoon she set out with a shovel to keep the road clear on the steepest grades all the way out to the main highway. If there’d been no new snow she’d hike along one of the routes she’d devised. The only neighbour within walking distance was half a mile away, and the one day she came near the house she peered in the windows – it was shut up tight, lawn furniture stacked in the kitchen. Several times while hiking she saw deer and evidence of other animals, tracks and scat she didn’t recognize. There were what had to be wolf prints. Part of her expected an encounter but didn’t expect it would kill her. All her fear was occupied. While cooking and eating she listened to the radio. After dinner she resumed her studies. Once a week she started up the car Marian had now more or less given her and drove to a town thirty minutes away for supplies.

  Every three or four weeks she went to the city for medical appointments, hers or Marian’s. Her mother’s test numbers were good, though no one was talking remission. She stayed for two or three days at a time, in her old room at the house, spending the mornings with Marian. The city was in its chill phase. It was comforting to sit in a café window and watch it go by, remembering student apartments past, a harpsichord on FM as she read for her classes or fell in love with a poem. She found she wasn’t more afraid in the city, but it was winter, and she hadn’t yet been out at night alone. And anyway, the fear didn’t reside in the place.

  Its power owed partly to her reluctance and then inability to find words for it. She hadn’t returned voluntarily to the attack – she didn’t have to, it was still immediate, in her physical pain and a disjuncture between her past and present selves – but in the first weeks at the cottage it was as if her imagination had been dulled so she might have time to distance herself from the event. One night not long after she’d moved up she’d heard something outside, a heavy presence, and then came the crash onto branches and a few hard breaths. Whatever it was scrambled up and away. She told herself it was likely a deer, a moose or bear. But for an hour or two she sat cold, waiting, armed with a poker from the fireplace. There was no one to help her. She’d stayed awake through the night.

  She’d been told to expect the nightmares, and to think of them as a kind of purging, though they were not. Because her dreams were never literal she assumed they wouldn’t be of the attack itself, and the first ones that came had a familiar symbolic slant. She would be dreaming untroubled and then suddenly, thin black veins in the sky or along the walls that no one else could see, and when she looked again, they were gone. A drop of inky poison, absorbed. But then she met the real thing. Consecutive nights of vivid fragments of the event itself, with no illogic or distortion. It was here that she realized his nylon mask had small eyeholes that sat slightly askew. That at some point the eyes came up in the holes and he was looking down and his eyelashes were long, almost girlish. That lying in the dig she’d seen a concrete block near her face and thought how once the dumb square thing was set down the rest of the building would follow prefigured, without further invention.

  In her dreams she kept passing by books in a window and the open door of a brightly lit improvised church.

  And so she came to learn that she had only been managing the lesser symptoms of the fear. By day, the real fear was a kind of waking in the blood. Or a visitation to her conscious mind from her unconscious. It came upon ordinary moments. A December Thursday, late afternoon. She was making lentil soup, listening to news on CBC Radio, where the stories always began with a sound. This one, a documentary about AIDS education conducted by Canadian missionaries in Kenya, began with a choir. The hymn (the word like “him”), the mind’s picture of a singing congregation, and the next thing she knew, she was rigid and shaking. After a minute or so she reached over and killed the radio and in the silence the dread was stark. It remained for hours. She understood then that the fear was going to have her long after her attacker had.

  Her attacker. Whom she did not contemplate. There were no suspects, only her vague description for the police. They could barely make a sketch from it. He had said nothing, his smell was particular but she couldn’t de
scribe it except to say that he smelled like a closed room after long sex and she couldn’t, wouldn’t say that. The nylon mask made a false complexion, and she felt for no reason that he was dark white or light brown, not black or South Asian, but she couldn’t explain why she felt this. The smell might have been in the mask. He was not tall, of medium build.

  The police investigator, a short, square woman with sharp arching eyebrows named Cosintino, whom Kim liked, had said it was unlikely she’d been followed from the coffee shop or the church when she first sensed a presence – he was more likely waiting for her on the dark block, with the gate open, knowing exactly how the attack would go down. He waited for a woman, not even necessarily a particular kind of woman, and along came Kim. It might have been significant that he found his victim on a downtown street rather than a park, or some jogging path in the valley. Maybe he liked the idea of raping her – Cosintino thought that was the idea – beneath all the high-rise windows, all the people who could be looking down. Knowing such a compulsion had not yet helped the investigation.

  But if it were true that he’d waited for her, then how to account for her sense of being followed? Was the feeling not intuition but premonition? The other question was why she had turned down the dark street when she’d thought to trust her instinct and go north.

  Some of the fears she had to manage belonged to friends and family. At first her three parents had all objected to the idea of her staying at the cottage. The most complicated moment had Marian asking, “Why would you want to be nowhere?” and then breaking down. She’d been the solid one until then. The assault had given her someone to be strong for. Even after Kim left, the reports from Donald were that Marian was already into her sober season, and it was holding. She didn’t drink at all on the weekends at the cottage. When Kim went home for four days at Christmas, the parents were on their best behaviour. Untaken baits, uncharacteristic silences. Harold and Marian didn’t know what to do with her, or with themselves around her. Then she went back to the woods.

  One weekend in late January, Donald told Marian that he and Kim were going to drive to a hiking trail. They curved around the edge of the lake with Donald telling her he knew what she was made of. She said that at the moment she was made of confusion, that even the things she thought she knew, not just about the attack but about herself, were now in doubt. When they got out, he took from the trunk a rifle and some shells and began to talk about indeterminacy.

  “In math we know that certain things are consistent only if they contain inconsistencies. Some things are built to be undecidable, Kim. You remember the liar’s paradox – ‘This sentence is false’ – which can’t be true even though it can’t be false.”

  “The world is an Escher sketch.”

  “Some parts of it are.”

  “Those are the parts I’m in right now. And in the world I used to know, you wouldn’t be carrying a gun.”

  They walked over the frozen lake to an island. She let him teach her how to load the rifle and fire it. He told her everything – the name of the gun, a Remington Model Seven SS, its primary use, the names of the parts, their material compositions, then the way to store it, to hold and carry it. To load, aim, and fire it. He said, “Imagine that dead birch down there as your target” – was she supposed to picture her attacker? could she see his face, his eyes in the knots, the light and dark reversed on the peeling parchment bark? – and she shot at it nine times and hit it twice. She had thought rifles kicked upon firing and sort of wished this one had. He said the tree was “at” sixty yards. She allowed him to remind her twice that this lesson was their secret. Because Kim wasn’t outwardly in ruin, Marian worried about her mental health. She told Kim it was important not to be strong for the sake of others. She had to confront the event head-on, when she was ready. Her mother apparently wanted her in tears.

  When the lesson was over and they were driving back, Kim said she wouldn’t be keeping the rifle.

  “It’s not how I want to deal with this, Donald.” His familiar baffled, hurt expression. Squinting behind rimless glasses, now fogging in the car. “I liked learning about the gun. I like knowing how it feels to shoot one.”

  “I just thought you might feel safer.”

  “No. And I can’t shoot what happened.”

  The gun would call up shadows. A sitting gun, imagining its own completion. It would be different if she didn’t know that made-things incline to their use, but she did know it. And she was vulnerable, to images and songs and who knew what else. Already she had to remind herself to take the fireplace poker from under her bed before the others arrived each weekend.

  February was mild, sunless. She read novels and listened to Górecki and went skiing with uneven strides on the lake. The thought of the city in spring, the noise and press of it. She would have to prepare for her return.

  One afternoon she closed a book in mid-sentence and admitted she was scared. Not just of the city but of this cottage, the lake. The vast forest invited the loss of body and mind. She was scared of the night sky. She lived at a pitch of fear just below awareness. Now and then it welled up, then sank again, but it was always close to the surface. It was a matter of time before she would begin seeing demons. She had removed herself to this place so she’d have no one to be brave for, but she’d been brave for herself from the first moment. The truth was, she didn’t know how to get past this. The authority of fear. She was being forced to make a project of herself.

  He had calluses, she’d told the detective. She thought she could recognize his touch. She worried about touches, about how she’d respond to a man. She told herself what no one else would, that in some ways she’d been lucky. She hadn’t been killed. Or raped. Yet she could not accept the thought that had things gone differently she would feel even more violated. And that was it: violation. The expected word. Amid the many others, words like closure or recovery, it was hard to remember that there were brute facts, and words attached to them, and they were the right ones. Upon this revelation it seemed possible she might collect enough words to describe her fear even if she couldn’t describe her attacker. In a photocopied article with the heel of Harold’s palm at the base of every page she read about the neurophysiology of trauma. The fear, in material terms, was cerebral. The assault would have released a neurotransmitter in the amygdala that would have set off a calcium reaction that resulted in proteins gluing themselves to those parts of her brain that were active before, during, and after the attack, when her adrenalin was high. A fragment of gospel music, the sight of a construction crane, the smell of coffee, and she was cast back into the event.

  And Harold. It was just bad luck that he’d been on her mind in those minutes before it happened.

  The man with the calluses had changed her brain and she needed to change it back.

  Harold called her twice a week, sent her oddly rambling emails about his work and things he’d read, but he visited just once. He arrived late in the afternoon on a bright Saturday in March when the snow had crystallized and the sap was running, darkening the maples. She’d guided him on his cellphone until he lost the signal, and he made it the rest of the way consulting Marian’s written directions along the last kilometres of half-frozen, forking gravel roads. He pulled in at the cottage, somehow appearing out of place even before he emerged from his car.

  She came out in her winter boots, in long johns and a sweater, and he looked at her, and there it was. Since the attack she’d detected a stutter in his perception whenever he met her slightly altered face.

  She helped him unload the supplies she’d requested. In the spirit of a game they’d devised long ago, he made his complaints in Spanish.

  “No me gustan las cabañas.”

  “Ni siquiera has entrado todavía.”

  “Imagino que las moscas negras no molestan tanto en esta época. Pero el lugar estará replete de musarañas.”

  “What?”

  “I said I hate cottages and I expect the place is infested with …
shrews or something.”

  They ate dinner with him scoffing at the knick-knacks on the walls, the lacquered wood clock in the shape of a fish, the inexpert oil painting of the lake, surmising the low-middle-brow set of Donald’s clan.