Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  On her way to bed she heard Donald’s radio in the study. She went in and caught a few seconds of the CBC overnight service, another Radio Netherlands documentary about the international sex trade. When she turned it off, the new quiet held her, and she thought of Harold. She hadn’t heard from him since sending the Santiago letter. It struck her that she might have made a mistake.

  In her room she found an envelope on her pillow. Inside was a yellowed page in Harold’s hand – fifteen names, most Spanish, some partial – and a note in Marian’s: “The list I mentioned. I stole it years ago to free him of it, but I couldn’t throw it away, with all its mystery and weight. I produce it now inspired by the Bard, like a prop in a play. You can give it back to him, your choice – I’m letting go of these things. But you’ve inherited this territory, wherever it is.”

  Before she dropped away minutes later she tried to think about what it meant, the list, Harold’s silence, but instead it was the radio documentary that carried her to sleep. She felt her heart freely given into capture and then she was flying, falling into some impoverished hill country where parents sell their children into labour or prostitution and she sees it all, sees the kids sold away, sees maps of their journeys with arcing lines like cinnamon routes or advancing campaigns and the rest of the world lays indurate, watching, as their hearts and hers travel by.

  Rosemary’s door opened before he reached it. She must have seen him coming across the park. She stood behind the screen door.

  “Why are you here?” She turned on the foyer light. She looked a little rough, as if she’d not slept. “I can’t invite you in.”

  He tested the door. It opened. She stepped back as he stepped in. Then she went to an armchair and sat. He closed the inside door and looked around. The small front room was dominated by a tall, old standing stereo cabinet with wicker speaker covers. Set along the top were a white china fish and a propped image, a golden detail from some iconographic painting. The only other art was a small colour photo of a horse grazing in a field at sunset. The poor taste of the thing jarred him. The horse didn’t belong with the woman as he thought he knew her, but it fit the room.

  “I’ve come to apologize to you.”

  “Then you should have called.”

  “I’m doing what I can face to face. All of it.”

  “All of what?”

  From outside, the electronic chime from an open car door warning of keys in the ignition. He recalled the bell of the knife grinder going down the street he used to live on with his young family, his two girls.

  “I want to meet him. This man you shelter.”

  She looked off towards a table lamp as if reading something on the stained shade. Her face looked malarial. There were things this fearless woman didn’t really want to confront.

  “He’s none of your concern, Harold.”

  “Maybe you think of us the same way.” His voice was rising. “Do you see me like one of your charges? Am I in need of saving, is that it? He and I and all your undocumented semi-literate bloodstained young monsters.”

  She looked at him in a kind of horror, her mouth open and wordless. There were times when he would fall into himself, down a long darkness, tumbling beyond language or control. He would come to rest for only a moment in a state of unendurable clarity, and then the words would find him and like that he was back on the surface, in the falseness of things. Kim’s letter had stranded him far from the surface. But the deep order was all around him if only he’d be granted light to see it. There were, at least, one or two answers he could bring to his possession by force.

  As if he’d conjured him by will, he heard the young man begin up the basement stairs on the far side of the kitchen. He appeared, paused momentarily to look at him, and then came straight across. Rosemary stood as if to come between them.

  “It’s all right, Rodrigo.”

  He stopped and stood under the archway to the front room. From the park this Rodrigo had appeared handsome in a boyish way. Smooth and young. No doubt Rosemary would see the divine in his beauty. Showing the so-called path, being the way, she would think the way was shown back. But up close he was something else, his features harder, older. And today he had a fresh shiner and a cut on his brow.

  “Go back downstairs. Everything’s fine here.”

  — Where did you get those wounds?

  “What are you asking him? Speak English.”

  — A man hit me. A friend. A man I work with.

  — Which answer should I accept?

  Rodrigo looked briefly to Rosemary, the warning in her expression.

  — We’re good people.

  “What’s he asking you?” she demanded.

  — Have you ever gone to an organization called GROUND?

  “Don’t answer, Rodrigo.”

  “No need to,” said Harold. “I’m calling the police.”

  “To tell them what?” The tone was measured, her eyes level on him. She was used to drama. Voices raised, hands flying up. “That I rejected your advances and now you want my tenant arrested?”

  She was saying he didn’t know what he was doing. She wasn’t seeing the long view. Whatever he did or might do made sense from a distance. Kim had tried to find the distance, to look back at him. Whomever she’d seen, not him exactly, but someone he seemed to know, she’d seen with a clarity that changed everything.

  “There are criminals among us. Here. I’ve found one.”

  “This is how you apologize?”

  He was sorry for having kissed her but not for wanting to. The attraction was unknowable to him. Through a window he saw a small group of racing cyclists glide by in their glossy forms. He thought of a night river sheen. An image of himself standing with his father in the wilderness dark on a shore somewhere. It may have been a memory.

  “Conviction,” he said to Rosemary. “Loaded word, isn’t it?”

  “What does he ask?”

  — I’m asking for your story, whatever it is. Convince me.

  “Don’t listen to him. Go back downstairs.”

  — I’m no harm to you. I’m no danger. I don’t make trouble for this country.

  — You can barely speak English. I doubt you can even read your own language.

  Rodrigo leaned slightly against the archway without somehow relenting his readiness to advance. Something in the line of him suggested an ease with his space. This was his home, after all.

  — I can read. I can work honest work.

  — You sound Colombian. So you were with one of the paramilitaries, no doubt. What have you been trained to do in a circumstance like this?

  — How do you know me? You don’t know me.

  — I know your kind.

  Fuck them both, Harold thought. Exactly that. He wanted to fuck them over, fuck up the kid’s pretty face, fuck Rosemary’s brains out. Fuck them bloody.

  “I won’t have this.”

  “You don’t get to call every shot, Rosemary. I’m here. I want his bogus story. I want you to watch me hear it and judge it. If I like it, maybe I won’t turn him in.”

  His breathing was short. He’d never been aware of it before. This was all a charade, their little drama with its presumed stakes, the imagined echoes of distant conflicts, his very breaths. He was caught up in a mockery of the real world, with its events of scale, its oceans of misery. He’d made actors of the three of them. All he could do was bring them to the end, or if the end wouldn’t come, to somehow make them real. He’d walked out into the day still trailing Kim’s letter, in a spell brought on by the persuasions of fiction, its magic dust. But the spell broke upon anything of substance. The only dust that mattered was the pulverized earth of history. He recognized it by kind wherever he went. He collected it now and then in his travels, kept it in his pockets, the names of the killers, the numbers of the dead, the manners of deaths, and spilled it from his fingers to season the air on pleasant, forgetful days.

  “Your issue with me has nothing to do with him,” said Rosemary
. “Or with your daughter. You’ve been rejected and you’re behaving like a child.”

  “And what about you? What are the sources of your passion right now? Are you playing mother to him? Or is it something else? Or both? What good work you do, making murderers into motherfuckers.”

  They both came towards him and at first it wasn’t clear who was intercepting whom. Then it was Rosemary stepping between them. Rodrigo put his hand on her arm to move her aside and Harold took his wrist in hand and wrenched it away to free her.

  — Do you like hurting women? Is that it?

  And then before he could make further calculations he was hit and down on the floor and the kid was kicking him in the ribs. The pain was astonishing, he knew instantly he’d never before felt its kind. He covered up with his arms and his elbows were driven into him and so he rolled a little to and fro and the blows were general. They hit him as proofs in his favour. He looked up once to see Rosemary tugging on Rodrigo and screaming to no effect. There was no wind in him to stir the least of events and it seemed there never again would be. The intensity was focused and unfiltered and it made nothing of the crying and chaos so that the sounds seemed not entirely human as if the thing upon him had never known him, had nothing to do with him. The three of them connected only through his breaking body. He felt what he felt and he thought he detected some good in it and then all-that-was cracked into his skull and the darkness came up and he was gone and he said so to himself and kept saying it until he knew he was not gone at all but instead present in a new way.

  It was Rodrigo who was gone. Rosemary had put something under Harold’s head. She was kneeling over him, with a hand on his face.

  “He thought you were threatening me. He misunderstood. I’m calling an ambulance. You can say you were in the park. You were in the park and you were beaten. Do you understand, Harold?”

  Did he understand Harold? He had never much understood him, no. Except he was a talker and you could never trust a talker. It was an early affliction that had never left him. His father in a hospital bed, waking and finding him there sitting by, and his first words were, “Don’t you say a thing,” to bend him from his nature. And sure enough when the old man died Harold talked his way through school and on into higher learning, higher culture. And he had never stopped talking. He could never be the still point in a room of people. Only when he forgot himself was he quiet. He had never just shut up.

  He told Rosemary to call him a cab. He said if he felt any worse he’d get to a hospital himself. She took no convincing. The pain was almost unmanageable through the cab ride, the arrival at the condo. He went straight to the bathroom and stripped with the short, deliberate movements of the old man he would soon become. He stood before the full-length mirror. There were cuts on his forehead, on the bridge of his nose, and at the top of one ear, and the makings of a shiner of his own, but his bad body looked mostly like itself. To the eye, the damage was less than he’d supposed. The bruises would look worse tomorrow but he was hardly a specimen of abuse.

  How had this day begun? Yesterday had never ended. Deep in the night the phone had sounded once. Sleep had finally come as the window reported first light. Then the clock radio had woken him with the morning’s humidex reading and a prediction of heavy smog. He missed the old mornings of the knife grinder. They’d rented the bottom floor of a house. Kim had just been born and nobody slept and he’d walk the west-end streets in the pre-dawn with Kim in his arms and old men leaning on wrought-iron porch railings and Italians with scarred workboots and dented grey lunchpails squatting at corners awaiting their rides, smoking and looking meditatively before themselves in attitudes of faint recall. In the early hours the place was a village, people nodded to one another, and him with his baby girl, strangers stopping to talk to him, acknowledging a value in the easy transaction. He imagined some corrective measure in the mind’s design that the best part of the day should follow so close upon the worst part of the night.

  He’d spent much of the morning composing a letter to Kim. It was time they talked, but not until he’d said in print precisely what he wanted to. There was no room for misunderstandings. He needed to be exact and direct. There was a responsibility to the record, and to the real people on it or affected by it. They both knew the record took you only so far, but only one of them respected its limits. He pictured them walking across an open plain, coming to the outer edge of the last mapped, marked territory, standing side by side at the end of solid ground. Beyond them, air or water or the dark unknown, some element that generated only illusions. She stepped forward. He turned back.

  He ran a bath with Epsom salts, walked naked into the kitchen and poured a tumbler of Scotch, returned to the tub with his drink and set about soaking the dull chords and sharp notes of injury. The phone rang and he let it go, but when a minute later it rang again he got out and walked dripping onto the floor and missed it anyway. Standing there, naked and sopping, he checked his messages. An automated voice named Lisa tried to pitch him a financial service until he deleted her. Then a hang-up from Marian’s house.

  He returned to the water. The pain was now in his ribs and on his phone. In future he would be able to retrieve the pain in his body just by thinking of Kim’s refusal to leave a message. A word or two from her seemed to go a long way.

  From so little, she had imagined his days in Santiago so well. She’d conjured them from his posture, the set of his face, things he was unaware of. Her letter was a cruelty. She must have been in great pain to have written it. Of the pain he was certain.

  Today he had felt certainty. Upon a certainty, he had lost his bearings, and would still be without them if Rodrigo hadn’t beaten them back into him. It was in the balance of things that the beating would have consequences. He was a simple kid, Rosemary’s Rodrigo. He might never understand what was about to happen to him.

  The online profile revealed that Eduardo Jofre worked in a northern suburb for a self-proclaimed “socially progressive” investment company called Rahv Ashbaugh. He’d come to Canada from Santiago. He held a degree in Social and Political Thought. He spoke three languages. He researched and wrote reports, translated documents, advised the people who designed the portfolios. He knew a lot about factory farms and leather dyes and the economic ravages of global warming. He was available for presentations. There was an email address and a phone extension.

  There was also a photo. It was the man she’d known years ago in university. He didn’t look much older. He was smiling. His eyes were a shade too dark, maybe, and his features a little softened, but he was the same halfway handsome she’d always preferred.

  Another site, in Spanish, said that he worked from abroad in the Chilean reparations movement.

  The traffic would be murder so she didn’t take the car. His office was ninety minutes distant by transit. A last subway stop, two buses, a long walk across a hot parking lot, medium office towers in every direction portioning out the lower sky. Suburban business park nowhere. You looked and saw nothing, stunned wordless. She walked past a copy shop, dry cleaners. A massage parlour with a Thai girl reading a magazine at the desk. Kim knew no one who lived or worked up here, not even among the clients at GROUND. These lives were unimaginable. That seemed to be the point of the place.

  On the eleventh floor the view from the reception area was a little deadening, expressway traffic clouding off to the west. The receptionist took Kim’s name and gestured to the empty seating area. The decor’s only concession to the outer world was a framed photo she knew from somewhere of workers in an open-pit mine in Brazil. They climbed ladders. They were covered in mud. Guards stood over them like centurions. It was like a photo of hell from the fourteenth century.

  She looked up and there he was. He didn’t seem to recognize her. Standard greeting, practised handshake, and then her face, though altered, came to him, and he smiled a killer smile.

  They took lunch in a so-called bistro at the foot of a neighbouring office complex. By the time they a
rrived she’d told him all she could remember about their three or four meetings. He remembered her visits to the music store. They didn’t account for her being here. When they were seated, the sun on an opposite tower was in her eyes so he adjusted the blinds and sat across from her in louvred light. He seemed to understand that she didn’t know how to explain her presence, so he spoke for a while about the company, as if she were a potential investor.

  “When Rahv Ashbaugh started up, it was a struggle. There was more money to be made off of people with no conscience. That’s not the case now, necessarily, but we wouldn’t have entered into this business unless we meant it. We try not to deal with those companies who borrow against the future. Or those who ignore the past.”

  “Do good-guy companies exist?”

  “They do. Often in unlikely settings, countries trying to get clear of some dark period. And we find some business with good labour practices, that monitors health and safety and wages and vendor compliance, and that can’t be blamed for the tanks in the streets.”

  She wanted to believe that capital could have heart, or at least a clear conscience. And beyond that, she wanted to believe him. He seemed a slightly shy man of substance. No matter which of them was speaking, he looked Kim in the eye, but seemed to be receiving her in some way. He thanked the waitress for everything she brought to the table, and he looked at her too, and she was pretty, but didn’t glance at her when she walked away. He was present.

  “How well do your clients know the histories? They must rely on you to know it for them.”

  “It’s my view,” he said, “that Canada has won itself a great naivety. This is the most naive country in the world. Which is why it’s the most compassionate.”

  “Well, that puts us in our place.”

  “It’s my place too. Coups and revolutions don’t happen to nations, they happen to people, one by one.”