Cities of Refuge (27 page)

“Things take time. It’s partly because the Book of Psalms was six centuries in the making that one day everyone will be reading it again.”

“And one day the sun will explode. Right now I’m worried about us.”

Here was his opening. He stepped through it without much hope, and offered up a small, silent prayer.

“I am too. I’ve been thinking we could use you in some of the other social outreach programs. Lately –”

“I don’t have time, Father.”

“It’s a matter of balancing your efforts.”

A man’s laughter rose up from the hall. It sounded like Willy, the young
AWOL
American soldier. He’d never really come back from Iraq. Every second face in the city spooked him and he laughed at scenes in his head. He seemed to be laughing through the walls at André’s proposition, another Distant Audience.

“You want me to give up my work. You don’t trust it, or me for that matter.” Her voice always softened as her accusations sharpened. “You’ve come to see me as a zealot, blinded by – what’s that word you like? Hubris?”

“You know I value your work, Rosemary. And I value you. But we all must attend to our humility.”

“I’m too big for my britches.”

“Not all our social justice work is done in battle gear. Maybe you need to allow yourself a break. Maybe to feel some reward, and a bit more hope.”

“Why are you saying all this?”

“Because week by week you’re becoming harder, more indignant. I don’t blame you, I’m just trying not to lose you. And you’re in danger of losing yourself.”

She pushed herself away from the desk.

“And what about those I help? What’s to become of them if I take your recommended R and R?”

“They’re resourceful. That’s how they ended up here.”

And then it was Rosemary laughing. It was low and brief, but derisive. She’d never sounded this note before with him. She got up from the chair.

“I’ve never asked you to sanction my work. You or the church. I raise most of the money on my own anyway. Actually most of it’s mine. So what do I need you for?”

“You know the answer.”

“Yes. I do. But you seem to have forgotten it.” She wouldn’t soften again. She walked past him, saying, “I’m off to feed mouths,” and left him alone. In her simplest statements he sometimes heard the compressed rhythms of biblical Hebrew. On meeting her, against his good sense, he’d felt a force of need in her that he supposed had a personal aspect. In fact, the need was for the knowledge he could impart, first of theology, and then of faith and its practices. He’d wondered if there wasn’t something for them both to learn of the lessons of the heart. Now she was able to leave his presence without apparent loss, not the smallest pang of parting. He’d brought her out of one world into a larger, more fraught one, and it had worn her down. He’d animated
her sense of the holy without knowing how to guide it, and so she’d wandered into the fray with a half-formed spiritual intelligence. It could be that her heart was stronger than his. In any case, it was about to exile itself. He would lose her, if he hadn’t already.

The Old Testament God sometimes played his adversary. There was a lesson in the arrangement that he had never understood.

Stranger,

In the weeks before you left us, we used to make jokes, the three of us, about the famous last words of historical figures. Do you remember? Henry
VIII
, Napoleon. Minnesota Fats, calling a kiss off the tombstone. Mother had all the best lines. And then one night there was a tension in the air that I didn’t understand and I wanted us all to play, and you said you were tired of the game. You said, “Nobody really dies quipping.”

It wasn’t one of your usual evasive remarks. This one sounded earned. I thought so even then.

More and more of your lines have come back to me lately. They seem to want to be put together.

When I worked with the clients at
GROUND
, I often felt the force of plot design, some hand at work, rounding the periods in their lives into legible wholes. Their testimonies were full of high drama, veered off in unlikely directions. And now in my own life I’ve experienced such a turn and it’s had the effect of clarifying for me which things matter and which don’t. It’s important to me that my life doesn’t become a banal story, a lesson in pity or self-deception, an example of courage or staring down misfortune or whatever. I want instead to be accepting of ambiguity,
even contradiction, and hard truths. And to be without illusion, and yet still hopeful.

I don’t expect to make sense of senseless events, but hope to find a way of accepting a world that contains them. Things can change, all in a day, a given hour. That hour can run in us forever. Some people hold it too close even to speak of it. Others go over it compulsively, telling the same story for years (maybe they get the story wrong, it doesn’t matter unless a tribunal is judging). The one wrong thing is to turn from it.

We recognize one another, those who’ve lived through that hour.

There’s much you haven’t told me. But your ways of not telling aren’t strategic, I now realize. They’re part of you. Which means, I think, that there’s much you haven’t told yourself.

You don’t believe in talking cures. I do believe in telling ones. The hard part is to begin. But begin at the beginning.

Who were you?

k

H
e nodded.

“Hello, Rosemary.”

She was just outside his door. He made room and she stepped past him and walked to the window, as he’d imagined she would. He closed the door and looked at her fully from behind. She’d made a slight effort to dress attractively, a long skirt and low-cut top mottled in yellows and browns. She carried a woven red bag.

“Does everyone comment on the view?”

“Invariably.”

She turned and surveyed the place. It looked orderly enough, he thought, in the late-afternoon light.

“My friends in St. James Town love their views,” she said. “People mistake altitude for perspective. There’s a little Roma boy who has the sense to be scared of living in the sky, but I told him the angels were up there with him. He asked if that meant he’d see his dead brother.”

She wouldn’t make this easy for them.

“That’s quite an opener. Can I get you something?”

Maybe she doubted her decision to come. He’d asked her over the phone. He said he was in trouble and wanted her help. He’d never said anything like it before.

They took their drinks at either end of the couch, looking down at the city. He pointed out the better new buildings among the older ones, with their squared-away expressions of nearly the same thought. Often the lowering light caught some wonder in the downtown architecture that was never there on the local cable channel with the traffic cameras marking the main arteries and crawl lines parsing troubles from the streets.

“I used to think all the urban confusions could be resolved in a good prospect.”

“I’m not impressed by views.” She seemed as composed as usual, but there was a new stillness, as if to contain herself. She held the glass with both hands and balanced it in her lap. “No one learns anything without their feet on the ground. I wish we’d stay in our element.”

“Our nature is bigger than our element, it seems.”

Having said so, he could now confess to her, carefully, that he’d been watching her house. He would apologize and explain that he didn’t understand the compulsion, that he’d never done
this before, that most hours of the day he was fine, and in those hours he thought of his spying on her (though it wasn’t as if he’d ever followed her or crept up and peered in her windows), or surveilling of a sort, as something other than erotic, even though here and now he’d admit to being attracted to her in otherwise acceptable and healthier ways. That in fact his watching involved a kind of overwhelming need to observe and to understand her and her life, even as this observation also seemed to him a kind of surrender to certain truths about his own life, certain failures, that he seemed incapable of addressing directly.

She said the idea of being outside our element reminded her of a photo Father André had once called up for her on his computer, a spaceship picture of a monster storm on the south pole of Saturn. She began to describe it, and Harold couldn’t get back from Saturn to the first words of his admission.

“I think I know it,” he said. Kim had sent him a link a few years ago. She was always sending him links in those days. Never the funny kind. Now she sent notes boring into him.

“It’s five thousand miles across, forty-five miles high,” she was describing the alien storm. “You look into the eye of that thing and it sees you. But it’s not meant to, not in God’s scheme.”

“It looks like the eye of a dread sea creature,” he said. Did Rosemary understand that that wasn’t God out there, in the places where no one was looking? “It’s best not to contemplate.”

The couch wasn’t working. Somehow the city was different with her here, not at all what he’d try to describe. Their little perch wasn’t intimate so much as remote. Far off, dazed sun on the water, the wind on the lake spinning up white flags. Out along the expressway, a strange signal reached him.

“What is that?” he asked “Two fingers left of the wind turbine.” He held his arm straight and invited her to sight along it. Instead she looked from her side of the couch.

“It’s the news.” Of course. How hadn’t he noticed it before? It was one of the electronic billboards playing its package of ads and headlines. Now that he knew what it was, some impression in the lines and colours reassembled in the eye the entire image. All he saw were dark green lines, dead straight, but somehow it meant that another Canadian soldier had been returned home in a coffin. You glimpse from a distance or drive past and picture the rest by yourself. The dead kid’s haircut and uniform, the very frame of the headshot there over the news anchor’s shoulder (the anchor’s haircut and suit). The military spokesman (his haircut, his uniform …). And back to the flag-draped coffin and the young family standing strong. He tried to explain the phenomenon to Rosemary and then found himself describing how the brain makes things up, reassuring us with a false sense of stability.

“Neurocircuitry corrects for curvatures in receding lines. Realist painters know all about it and take countermeasures. Art correcting for nature.”

“So we’re back to nature again,” she said. “Will we be going in circles some more?”

“Maybe we’ll stick to art. I forgot to thank you for the poem.”

“I’m glad you got it. Though that doesn’t mean it reached you necessarily.” “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” by John Updike. She’d typed it out and mailed it to him care of the department. The old, slow technologies were likely intended as a message of sorts in themselves.
“Let us not mock God with metaphor.”

“That’s certainly a handy line to have in your pocket.”

“But you won’t be keeping it in yours, I guess.”

“I have no real memory for poetry.”

He recalled a line or so from the last stanza.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous
… something, something …
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance
. Did she presume he’d never known remonstrance? Things had been proven to him. Certain lessons of history had been directed at him personally.

She said a trailing-away thing he couldn’t make out.

“Sorry?”

She’d looked at him once since they sat down. Now she held to the view that didn’t impress her.

“You said you were in trouble. But sitting here with your drink you seem pretty well adjusted to it.”

She moved a hand to her leg as if to smooth her skirt but then returned it to the glass, no doubt afraid to invite his eye to a certain movement.

“All right. I wanted to talk about you.”

“How am I part of your trouble?”

He smiled. “If you’re in my life, you’re part of my trouble. But honestly, it’s that you confound me. And I won’t be able to understand you unless I can spend time with you, which you know I like doing. Though I won’t complicate things if you’ll allow me to –”

“Observe? I sound like an interesting bug.”

“I know it sounds ridiculous. It’s not hard to make me sound ridiculous. Not for you.”

“What’s your question, Harold?”

“I don’t know exactly. It has something to do with recognizing the enormousness of things. Have you always sensed it, even before your … religious turn?”

“I don’t think you understand what you’re asking. But if it helps you, I’d say yes. I’ve always known. And the turn, as you put it, wasn’t something I was aware I was looking for.”

“So it wasn’t that you were an agent of your own change but that change just happened to you. One self supervening another.”

“I guess so. It didn’t have anything to do with feeling blue, or being mixed up. It still doesn’t.”

They entered a silence. He was instantly at swim. He could think of nothing to say, and watching her seemed to hold him still somehow. Her eyes were fixed on something far off. A half minute passed. As if to find what she was focused on he looked out again at the city. She was out there somewhere – he believed that she’d forgotten him, or maybe she was trying to lead him into her prayerful quiet.

His actions of finishing his drink, rising, and preparing another didn’t penetrate her attention. Maybe she needed to know if she could be alone with him, outside the chatter. Could he be quiet with her? Who was he without talk and ideas?

When he returned to the couch, she took a sip, then put her drink on the floor and went off to the bathroom without even asking directions. He marvelled at her underplayed theatrics. The manipulation of him, body and mind. The timing, the way the talking prepared for his question – she’d been waiting for it – the question for the silence, the floating in strange empty space. He felt he’d been led into a trap, bent inward. The silence now was liquid. The past had been returning in waves. All these dead little worlds exerted a drag. You don’t see your life as a
shape, don’t really believe it has wholeness, until a certain age, a certain break of luck, good or bad, that allows you to see a kind of ending. The ending can come at any stage, and after it, you just float for years towards your death like so much space junk destined for burning re-entry.