Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  And she rode through the rain that came suddenly and hard like pebbles, rode half-blindly past the cars with their wipers crazed and useless, and kept riding until the rain passed and the sun returned and the gutterflooded streets began to dry on the crests, and she was soaked through, and she looped around and near the bookstore came into the route she’d taken that night, so many nights, so many times in her writing of it, and swung her leg over, gliding on one pedal, then stepping into stride.

  Something about the window had changed, not just the books, of course, now graphic novels, political lampoons, idiot’s guides to Islam and jazz, but the display itself, the size and frame of it, lit in her memory like a diorama, now seeming too small, without enough depth to have made an impression. Down the next block the hair salon that had served as a church was now a costume rental store. There were deals to be had on monsters and elves, it was not a season for getups, and everything about the shop seemed out of time. A single moment of overlaid worlds, the daily interchange of the downtown streets, extended through months. The shop that had been a church in a salon was only itself. What she’d returned for. Majorettes and alien faces, dummy cowboys with orange faux-hawk wigs. They made sense just for being.

  From the costume shop window, wheeling her bike she walked at the pace she’d walked that night, as she’d walked in her stories replaying it. But it was afternoon now. She felt the sun hot on her and smelled the pavement’s fading carbon sheen. The night wasn’t coming back like she’d thought it would. A part of her wanted it back if only to attach it to this hour and this light because there was the night in her imagining, even in her blood, but now was another kind of revisiting, the literal kind, and she wanted it to mean all it could. The thing she couldn’t get inside, that had nothing to do with this street, was the feeling of being followed and the moment when she’d decided to do one thing and had done another. Here and there were not the same. She could come back but she couldn’t return.

  The dying animal knows something we don’t, homeless Fran had said. And the wolves eat it up, the bones and the knowing and all.

  The site was of course now a building, thirty-some storeys high. The Bonifice. New Urban Living. Available for Occupancy Soon. The former open darkness had been named and numbered. She could press a palm to it if she wanted.

  She locked up her bike and went through the doors and a smiling redheaded woman sitting at what would soon be a security desk greeted her and asked if she’d like to see the show suite on the twenty-first floor, where the view was quite something.

  “No.”

  Kim turned. It was right here, she realized. It had all gone down around here. On this carpet and floor, through the lobby, under the chandelier, through the marble back wall, down along the banks of elevators.

  “Is everything all right?”

  She lived in a place ever fuller of matter and her father was lost to her and these were the facts.

  “Someone once tried to murder me here.”

  She walked deeper into the lobby and did as she’d imagined, putting her hand on the marble wall, trying to let it work on her, this reassertion of substance and solid design. The only place left from that night was within her. She’d worked long and hard at it, remaking the space as she could. And she thought she’d nearly done it, engineering a new physical being – the bones, the knowing and all – though even now a heat was rising in her shoulders as if her body had only just discovered where she’d arrived, and it was time to leave these two places she was.

  When the rain let off, Harold got out of the car. Through the little window of the garage he saw that Kim’s bike was gone. He found the spare house key in the place he’d devised long ago, on top of the lamp by the door.

  He took the white chair. Marian lay on the bedspread under a green and red blanket he’d never seen before with her body barely there among the folds. Her mouth was slightly open. Floral slippers by the side of the bed. Afternoon windowlight through lace curtains. He didn’t remember it, this light. The room was a new place, as if it had never been his.

  He knew the moment she was awake before she did, before her eyes had even opened.

  “Hello, Marian.”

  She opened them. His presence made no more sense to her than wherever she’d emerged from.

  “It’s just me.”

  “God, what’s happened?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  With much effort she sat up against the headboard. Her face was still far away.

  He shook his head.

  “Then what is it? Tell me.”

  “I’m not here with news.”

  “What time is it? Where’s Donald? What are you here with, then? This is pretty creepy, Harold.”

  He was calm. He said it had been raining hard.

  “It didn’t wake you.”

  “No. You woke me.”

  “Do the drugs make you sleep?”

  “You’ve come to enquire after my well-being?”

  She brought her arms above the blanket and let her hands rest on her stomach, the sleeves of her thin, blue gown hanging as if empty. Even when they were young she kept her arms covered in summer. He remembered the shock when she bared them at night before bed. Arms known only in lamplight for months at a time. One by one, such memories lifted up and then fell away forever. He wouldn’t again think of her arms.

  “We used to fly a kite. Kim and I. Whatever happened to that kite?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You and Kim never flew kites. You never even took her swimming.”

  “Once, we did. Where were you? I saw some kids flying kites in a schoolyard and so I had the idea. I went out and bought it that afternoon. She must have been about eight or nine. And we went up to that big park below St. Clair. I got it in the air for her. I had to run down a little slope to get any serviceable breeze, but then it took off and she screamed, she was so excited. I gave her the line and she flew it. All of about twenty minutes. A big kite up there with a cartoon face on it, a bear or something, peering down at us.”

  “You’ve made all this up.”

  “No, I haven’t. I don’t know where you were.”

  “It’s another of your stories. This one with a bear on a kite. Am I supposed to think you had your moments as a father?”

  The kite story had sounded made up but it wasn’t. He was almost certain.

  “Do you remember Celina Shey?” She did not, and then, he saw, she did. The first affair. “I spoke to her, said hello, because she looked like my accuser.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I had an accuser. She looked like Celina Shey. Who looked like the dead girl, the dumpster girl from the news, named Anna Huard, it turns out. Or the sketch of her.”

  “Stop. What’s wrong with you?”

  He’d thought there was more to say about the resemblances. How they’d linked Kim to certain times past. Marian’s and his together, and his alone. But now he realized the connections meant less than he’d assumed. They might not have meant anything at all.

  “I’m feeling fine just now, actually. I’m feeling good. It’s good to talk to you. I’m sorry I missed Kim.”

  There followed some subtending moments when he thought she would right him. She drew up her knees. The blanket made voluted shapes of her feet.

  “So this is about Kim. You’re worried about what she’s digging up on you. You should be told, I guess, that I gave her your list. I’ve had it for years, your mysterious list. I’ve begun divesting myself of things. And I don’t want you to put new things in their place. You come in here like a terrier with a rat. Dropping some old girlfriend at my feet.”

  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 possi
ble 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.

  By 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.”

  They 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 ma
n 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.