Cities of Refuge (2 page)

When she flailed at him, he caught a wrist in each hand, and it was then she felt hopeless, for he was impossibly strong and it seemed as if he would snap her bones. He squeezed until her hands were dead and she was choking on her stopped cries and so gave them up.

He said nothing. He held her still as if to let the fear become conscious of itself. He looked down at her through the mask, through his own featurelessness. She dreaded hearing his voice and, when she didn’t, dreaded its absence.

The only movement left to her was to turn her head. The site was huge. There were trailers far across, one of them lit, and parked trucks and tracked machines, cranes with lights along the top, sleeping high overhead with their arms over the dig. Near them were cages of gas tanks, jacks, low stacks of sheeting. Lamps at intervals made little cups of light along the verges with near dark and full dark between them. She thought about the pockets of dark until they seemed to belong to this force on her, until she sensed a kind of breathing like his inside them – the things they
knew best, the two of them, they could never tell – and wondered if the lights were gapped on purpose to make a space for lives like his, and if so, then who it was who slivered the light.

She thought, he can’t put his mouth on me with the mask on, as if that was what she feared most, and then he leaned closer to her and she thought he would do just that, and still holding her wrists, from a short distance he butted his forehead into her face and for a minute or more she slackened utterly. When she came around there was something in her eyes she knew was blood, and her wrists were taped together. She wasn’t kicking but her knees were drawn up and she wondered why he hadn’t taped her feet together, and then she tried to stop wondering.

She focused on the lit trailer across the pit, the possibility there was someone inside with a night-shift job like hers. Only when the foreground moved did she realize she was being dragged by her wrists into one of the pockets of dark. She’d brought it on herself by thinking of the dark and then of the lit trailer. This thing on her was reading her mind.

But it didn’t know her. It never would. Reduced to her physical being, she sank into her physical history and then it was in her, or she was inside it, her younger self, the high school gymnast trained in taking poundings, in leverage and balance and explosive bursts. She thought, I’m stronger than he thinks. Then she thought, I’m stronger than he is. And she believed it in the moment when she drew up her knees and then shot out her legs and brought them down hard while thrusting her hips and pulling down her hands. When she broke free she knew there was no time to get to her feet so she rolled to the side and as he came down on his knees for her she was moving out of reach, so he half stood and then lunged just as she was turning belly up.
She could do nothing but bring her elbows together, and when she kicked his feet out, the full weight of him came down hard onto her before he could brace himself, and her elbow caught him square in the throat.

He rolled off onto all fours, hacking a short note, then again, with his head swaying oddly, like that of a field animal, and now there was time to get up, though the blood was making it hard to see, and she couldn’t guess where the gate to the street was so she ran for the lit trailer. It seemed like a reasoned decision and now she didn’t have to think anymore, just to run on the ground she couldn’t see well enough to read, towards the light and shadows beneath the cranes and across to the trailer. And the image of the open gate came to her and then the thought that maybe the trailer was empty, that the man who worked there was her attacker, but she kept running, almost forgetting the edge of the dig, and then turning to run along it. She’d nearly made it to the far end when he tackled her. They fell hard, and she rolled free, and then she was falling. Something tore through her thigh as her ribs struck an edge and she spun into a final tumble and landed in a slack somersault at the bottom of the dig.

The pain kept her conscious and then it didn’t. She came to once sometime in the night and she couldn’t move. She isolated the many sources of pain, her head, her ribs, especially her leg, and realized she wasn’t paralyzed, but her thigh was wet and raw and she understood she would bleed to death. When she next gained consciousness it was because she couldn’t breathe and she snorted the snot or blood from her air passage. Faint nausea. If she vomited she would choke. The pain was not going away, but if she’d opened a main artery she would be dead by now, so she allowed herself to think she might make it until morning.
Though she didn’t remember moving, she was now fetal. She looked up and saw above her a reaching thing, and lights along it, an arm against the heavens held over her. She searched for the name of the thing but could only think “arm.” She imagined saying it, imagined her mouth and tongue free and breathing the word, and in her imagined voice the longed-for breath turned the word into “harm,” and she tried it again and again it came out wrong, so that what might have been a comfort in its unsayability conferred a curse. The lights along the arm carried her eye to the vague stars. Now and then a jet plane moved through her field of vision and the sound of each one in approach seemed to pronounce time itself.

When the dark finally began to burn off she heard human sounds. A clacking. Voices. Then she heard the name of Jesus and saw a man in a yellow hard hat standing far above, looking down at her. She stayed awake as they came down. One of them kneeled close by and someone said not to touch her and the kneeler said he would cut away the tape and he put a hand on her head lightly and the moment the air hit her mouth she was sobbing. The man cut free her hands and then stood and stepped back. More men had gathered there but even when the ambulance attendants arrived and strapped her on a board, none came closer.

There’s a sound the earth makes in its transit, a streaming without music or echo, not coloured or pleasing or solemn or one thing so much like another. If god speaks to us in murmurs, she heard them.

There came hours when she thought the violence had involved her only by chance, and others when it seemed that she’d consciously placed herself in its path. As if it had been not a singular event but a kind of sounding within a slow pattern much older than she was. At first she could see no pattern, could not even put the past together in her mind, but she was full of a need to return, and what she returned to were the days before violence found her. The days made no sense at first, then built to sense and beyond it, to a near-unendurable clarity.

What she remembers.

The night of the attack, her visit home. It had been hot and close that afternoon until thunderstorms moved through and tore the smog down into the gutters and knocked out the power for minutes here or there. She’d biked up to the house around noon and she and her mother had cleaned the place together, laughing now and then at things like end tables and hassocks, objects they knew Harold would move to his preferred positions from long ago, and Donald would have to haul back again when he returned the next morning. Harold arrived around four with his usual greeting and gave Kim a hug that as usual was not fully returned. They’d not seen each other since April. He and Marian didn’t actually greet one another – they never did anymore. Marian simply asked if he’d remembered the fish and he said of course. He was dressed with his signature note of slight incoherence in dark blue cotton pants, a winter-weight mauve shirt with the sleeves rolled unevenly, and brown sandals. He’d made the effort to put his grey-brown
hair into some order but there was a film of grime on his glasses. Everything he came with including the fish was wrapped separately inside a canvas bag he’d picked up at an academic conference long ago with the ghosts of words on the side and the outline of some equatorial country Kim didn’t recognize.

Now Marian was lying down in her room, Kim and Harold in the kitchen, their own old family kitchen, slicing peppers and preparing the sea bass for grilling.

There’d been a joke about her night-shift work at the museum. “My pretty, green-eyed daughter,” he said, “the security muscle.” He glanced at the digital clock on the stove and dropped everything, washed and dried his hands, and began fiddling with the radio. He left behind a jazz station Donald liked and dialed down the
FM
band, passing blues, hip hop, the news in French, and then on to the end of the lead story on the
CBC
. That the worst news of the day was a development in a government financial scandal was somehow quaint, even reassuring, given the times.

He resumed his position across the island from her and went back to work on the salsa as she consulted the printed-off recipe and patted dry the fish. The scents were coming up now in the travertine flesh. It was hard not to tell him that buying Chilean sea bass was a way of killing the planet.

“Have you read anything good lately?” His usual point, inserted bluntly. If she wasn’t finishing her doctorate, then she was letting her brain go to waste. “Don’t tell me. You’re too busy with, whats-itcalled – Group?”

“
GROUND
. The Group for the Undocumented. And okay, I won’t tell you.”

He cocked an eye at his mango, as if to signal to her that this was just sport for him. They both knew it was more than that.

“You can think and you can write. You have talent. Use it.”

“Remember my old rubber bath toy? You’d squeeze it and it sounded the same note every time.”

“Beloved duck. What was its name?”

“You named it Lawrence,” she said.

“He ended up a dog toy. He lost his toot.”

“I loved him more when he lost it.”

Harold nodded, or gave the sense of nodding.

“And I guess he didn’t seem such an idiot. Sorry, stranger.”

They sometimes called each other “stranger.” He used the term jokingly, Kim to draw a pinprick of blood, in reference to the day he returned to her life when she was sixteen. Or returned again – he’d disappeared for four months when she was thirteen, and then left Marian for good a year later – but on this second return her parents were promising the establishment of a new order. She had walked home from school with a friend, Alyssa, now long disappeared from her life, who’d confided that she’d just that weekend given a boy what she called “mouth sex,” and Kim was still unsettled by the secret as she entered and saw them there in the living room – Marian, Donald, and Harold, who she’d been told was on sabbatical in Mexico for the semester. They stood apart from one another, turning to her as she entered, each wholly occupied with her presence, as if the others weren’t there. Donald gave her a thin smile. Marian watched her reaction to seeing Harold with a delicate attention Kim could feel. And Harold stood rigidly, his eyes slightly wide, as if surprised by some change in her appearance, and then there came across his face something familiar to her, his regret at having missed yet another increment of her growing up. The three of them tried to fool her into thinking that Marian had forgiven Harold and
they would all be better off if they just tried starting over again, with Donald as the live-in father and Harold as the ongoing presence who wanted to spend as much time with his daughter as she would allow. Kim stood just inside the door. She’d been trained to be physically confident, but now felt a little small, a little thin, and with the others looming there it was as if her size was being used against her. Marian had asked her to sit down but she’d not moved or spoken. Marian had said that they all understood Kim’s feelings, and Donald said in a rehearsed but concerned way that they respected her feelings. Kim unslung her knapsack and set it down on the floor. Then Harold said it was important that everyone not settle into “a ruinous estrangement.” And then, because he had never had a grasp of his daughter’s vocabulary, he defined “estrangement” for her – and Kim walked across the room and hit him in the face with the side of her fist.

It had been a stabbing motion. She hung in the sense memory, the flesh and knuckle of her hand meeting his nose and forehead, thirteen years ago. It must be by chance that she’d tangled up Harold in these small, violent connections before the attack.

Out on the back deck at the grill he was saying that history separates us. They sat drinking wine, looking out at the flower garden and the ivy on the brick of the neighbouring houses. The shaded leaves were still wet from the rain. It had been a very long time since they’d sat there together. Harold’s legs were stretched out and resting on another chair, his trimmed toes protruding from his sandals. He told her he’d just been invited to give a paper at a conference in London on recent popular upheavals in Latin America, and the explosion of evangelical Christianity in the region in the void left by anti-Catholic
movements in the nineties. He summed up the phenomenon for her with the image of New World peasants somehow swimming the Tiber.

“It’s an amazing part of the world, those lands below Mexico. I’d like to do more work on them.”

She said he hadn’t described it that way when she’d wanted to travel there a few years ago.