Cities of Refuge (30 page)

In one of the seminars I took at Columbia (yes, I did attend some classes) the prof began the year by asking us what we thought it meant to practise history. “I mean, why do it?” she asked. Instantly, nine bodies tensed, ready to answer. Only I sat calmly, with nothing on my tongue, and so of course she asked me. The room waited me out. Finally I said something along the lines that it’s the historian’s responsibility to help those whom
history has abused to bear it forward. She responded by asking the guy next to me what he thought, and around the table it went, all of them positing and expanding, quoting Hegel or Le Goff or Hayden White or Spivak, who’d taught some of them. They were parrots in a pet store, the acolytes, but the prof seemed to like them. Mine was not the answer she was looking for. At least she never called on me again.

Why write history? Haven’t all the points of view, all the expert opinions, drained authority from one another? Is there one answer that stands above the rest?

You’re not replying to my emails or calls. You’re not in when I come by, or at least you’re not answering when I buzz you. The department secretary says you haven’t been by your office for days as far as she knows. Should I file a missing persons report? Or have you yet again gone dark, as they say in the spy movies?

When you depart from your life as I know it, I can’t imagine where you are. Your failure to appear in body or word feels directed at me but it becomes a condition of all things.

Do you understand?

Unless you reply, this will be my last note to you. I’ll see you whenever, with mother at the house, and nothing that matters will pass between us.

The differences: her body and face had changed; she lived by need, isolated, but against her need, lonely. Every day she took shelter in her room to write or read or simply to lie on her bed, exhausted at having had to maintain an outward self, and yet more alone, more separate than a year ago she could have come anywhere near with all her volunteer witnessing and empathy.

She slightly despised mystery. Particular absences, gaps in the sequences, holes in the known were intolerable to her. She thought less. She simply felt and needed.

One afternoon she announced to Marian an intention to go gallery hopping, alone, and off she went, taking in a few small spaces on Ossington and then Queen. Nothing much caught her interest. She headed north on Spadina, then along Dundas to the Art Gallery of Ontario. In the museum’s pre-Gehry era she and Harold would take in riotous Rauschenberg and Picasso and all the artists whose names she could never remember. The place was different now, the interiors, the vistas, the collection itself with its new orders and none of the old disappointments and tantalisms. She ended up in a small room, staring at a painting,
Helga Matura
, a murdered prostitute, according to the explanatory text. There was something about the fuzzy realism, like a slightly unfocused photograph that made it falsely romantic and yet more present, like a memory. Another male artist sly with violence. When she was a girl Kim had imagined the beautiful woman she hoped to become, with fine, dark brows set high over brown eyes, a full mouth like her mother’s, and shoulder-length black hair. It turned out she’d been imagining a dead woman.

Through the windows the city kept coming up newly. She stood for several minutes in one of the back winding stairwells, ascending through a blue incandescent cube, with its mediumlevel view of mid-downtown, the lake winking between columns to the south, construction cranes everywhere, ponderously knitting themselves skyward. The city in its remaking. She considered taking in a few Old Masters, but instead she simply left. Outside were Japanese and American tour groups, couples, single men and women on cellphones, giving directions, arranging
rendezvous. She became one of them, calling Marian to tell her she’d bring home Indian takeout.

“Was there anything good?” her mother asked.

“Mostly the same things. But the best of them get better.”

At the back of the gallery, in the park, the half-closed sky produced notes against the wall of blue cladding. She walked south and picked up the dinner, and was out on the street again when a rain caught her and she took to a bar patio and sat under an awning.

Near the end of her half-pint the long light of the afternoon began to return. After the rain a passing car made silverblack salmonskin tracks in the wet pavement and the sun caught the side-view mirror and burned on her retina and she looked into the recesses of the bar now dancing in red and took in the unlikely collection at the tables, locals and tourists, a homeless old man standing neither here nor there, slightly apart from the bar, a mother and preteen son, all of them like her gathered out of the weather. When the waiter came she asked if she could buy a round for the old man, anonymously. He said, “One,” and she ordered for herself another glass of beer to stay inside this feeling, this need of her father’s to be lit with drink.

What was it he yielded to?

Whatever it was, she wanted the full account. He knew as she did that certain events are not time-bound, that they’re never really past. She imagined the shape of the account, of what might be revealed. She’d glimpsed it somewhere. As she turns a corner, it’s ahead of her, then disappears in mid-air. The shape is not of an animal but something harder, time-encrusted, a dusty, run-nelled curving surface, the length of a life held miles distant, hanging before you until the wind comes and it turns and thins to seeming nothing.

This was what she was after, this dusty surface. Whatever its substance, the surface would be hard, rough. Otherwise Harold would already have offered the full account. He must have thought that she would judge him, which meant he couldn’t accept that she believed him to be, at heart, though starkly flawed, a good man. Unless he allowed her closer, she had no way of proving to him that
despite all, despite whatever
, she loved him.

The takeout was cold. She thought about having another drink. The alcohol wasn’t courage, it was faith. The faith felt good, warm, but then all in a few seconds some cold, clawed certainty began moving under the warmth and she hurried to put cash under her glass. When she left the bar she looked back to see the old man sitting at a table now, talking with the waiter. They both looked up and the old man smiled for her and slightly lifted his hand from the drink in farewell.

H
e had to be careful how often he watched and where he called it up, the cops tracked these hits and saw patterns, but today in his booth he couldn’t help but click on the re-enactment, re-amazed how they got it all wrong. For one it had been too dark to see, not lit for cameras. From the back his actor looked Chinese or something, you couldn’t tell. He always felt like asking the stranger at the next station if they thought he looked Chinese. And she didn’t look like herself either, not like anyone he’d have chosen. Her hair was too flat and her face overfed. She didn’t even walk the same, too slow and showy. And the actor attacker sort of hustled her through the cage gate instead of how it was, how he’d slammed into her shoulder, how he heard her
breath shoot out so it hung a second in mid-air with the coffee and sweets, and how he landed on her so she was stunned all over again when they fell into the deeper darkness and she knew his weight and belief.

Whoever made these films for the cops, they had no real standards or talent. He wished they’d done more to get it right. He didn’t like being misrepresented to the world.

He surfed around the local news and cop sites. Break-ins, assaults, a car-jacking. The newest missing girl, caught by cameras in the subway, in a store. He couldn’t understand a killer’s way of thinking. They were busted, stupid people, not the twisted geniuses in movies. Or they probably had sexual problems. There were cross-Canada warrants for this guy and that. He shared no element with sexual assailants, only a definition. He could prove against statistics he was humanly complicated beyond others in his category. When it started he broke into homes like a lot of rapists, it was true, but only when he knew they were empty. He’d choose the women, get to know them from a distance by name and appearance, and plan how and when to break in. It happened seventeen times before he was caught coming out a window with panties stuffed down his jeans. He always took the underwear but he loved just to be in their spaces, the places they thought of as theirs. And he wasn’t as violent as people saw him. He’d killed the dog in self-defence in a shipping bay in cold Saskatoon when he’d lived three weeks at the Y without incident, a block from the bus station. Animals did not seem to take to him. And he’d tackled his one victim Kim in a classic so-called blitz approach only because he couldn’t deceive her, couldn’t even really speak to her in the circumstance. It was not easy for him to be physical. He’d hurt his knee as a child that had never healed to all-better.

He knew numbers but didn’t trust them. The numbers said about half of serial attackers feel remorse for their crimes, but how could you believe them? The numbers said between eight and thirteen per cent communicate afterwards with their victim, but how do they communicate, what could they really say, and is it understood?

He entered her name and hunted around. It linked to some old campus job with someplace that helped foreign students. She’d listed two phone numbers. One of them hit in a reverse directory and he had an address. Her last name turned up a father and mother, and the mother lived at the same place. He fed it into a map site and then zoomed a satellite picture. He tried to feel her presence there but couldn’t say for sure.

The numbers said he was in a low percentage that he’d not attacked anyone since and he wanted to believe it. It was something he wished she could know about him, though he knew she never would. In his fantasies she passes by in a crowded city street and sees him, smiles, not knowing, because he seems harmless, just another downtown character. And then he says her name, and she turns. What happens next is grey.

Things of no worth in themselves can mean something when they’re gathered.

He put Yonge Street on the satellite and scrolled to the place where he was. He zoomed inside a hundred feet. There was a perfect viewing distance for every place that was. The picture seemed just about right. It was summer then and now. He had a long time left on his two dollars so he angelled over the city, flying over and back, up and down, like he was already past his sad ending and could visit the past and replay it. He tried to find a billboard with the date and time but the readouts would
not come up clear. Whatever this day he was hovering over, the whole of it was his. He could drop down to the physical buildings and then swoop in his mind through the windows, into any one of the millions of lives.

He did not mind not belonging. He had never known his own street addresses, the climbing falling numbers did not apply to him. People pretended to know themselves by finding their lives on the grids. There were things he knew that they didn’t, outside of numbers and names. Nothing repeats the same way twice. Nothing stays. Pictures hold still for us but we don’t for them.

In the future was someone to show his thoughts to. It was hours later, in his room, when the angelling finally failed him and he felt himself floating in the deeps. They gave ships women’s names. The ship out there was one he’d known. When she was close enough to see him, it would be too late for her.

M
arian’s getaway was an organic farm about an hour west of the city owned by her oldest friend, a tall strawberry blonde now going grey poet named Lana Keyes-Little, and her husband, Daniel. She had spent days there in every season for years, sometimes helping with the farm work, often preparing large dinners for the seasonal workers, who tended to be environmentally savvy students, and Lana and Daniel’s writer friends, who drove great distances for the dinner conversation, and for those who stayed over, the wonder of being there in the morning for breakfast and a walk through the barn or the fields. Daniel was an African-Canadian from Manitoba who wrote possibly brilliant plays about obscure historical figures, mostly scientists, that tended
to close before completing their planned run. There’d once been a rumour that Robert Lepage was going to revive Daniel’s drama about Kepler, but nothing had come of it. Kim had always liked him – he’d always taken an interest in her, and she was old enough now to understand that he was living the life he wanted to, without expectation or disappointment. But Lana was unpredictable, prone to making a bloodsport of conversation, and Kim had more than once had occasion around her to feel embarrassed for her mother, whose early life with Lana, in their student days, had been wilder than her own. The stories were told not for her but for Donald, whom Lana liked to shock, maybe because, as Kim read it, her husband was more interested in Donald’s views on math and science than in hers on art.

They arrived just after two in the afternoon. Kim hadn’t been there since the year she left for New York but it was as she remembered, the vegetable fields all around, the open barn, the brown, weathered side buildings, the gated pasture falling off to the north, and the huge old oak shading the nineteenth-century red-brick Italianate house. Inside, the thick planked softwood floors and, everywhere, kittens.

Marian had slept in the car and had a forty-minute window of energy as they all took seats in the front room, with a view of the long gravel driveway, the road, a neighbour’s corn rows. Lana and Daniel did well not to react to Marian’s appearance – Kim was watching for it, she’d told Lana on the phone to expect to be a little shocked – but earlier than usual she broke out the dope and the writers and Marian passed a joint between them as Donald and Kim sipped their tea. Kim watched the cigarette pass from Daniel’s thick fingers to his wife’s long ones to her mother’s small hand and then followed it up to her
mouth and watched her purse and inhale so that her face took on a new appearance, because she was not a smoker, as if whatever they all shared there in the room could be drawn in only through a self-estranging act, and it was all a little strange, out of time and place, and it felt good.