Cities of Refuge (43 page)

When the door rolled back (had he opened it?) it was the night hurtling by and he was presented an escape that he understood to be false. He moved to the doorway and felt the stiff air. Here he found at last a time of gathering, and all was resolved. The voice behind him said something that was lost on the wind.

The merciless streaming unseen world. It had always been his.

He steadied himself, and awaited his moment to step forward.

T
he deepest questions we pursue are themselves in pursuit of us. It was the first line from his lecture on evil, a kind of warning to the students, as if fair warning absolved him for taking them where he would. They were into the second week of it now, halfway through evil, on their way to sin, and eventually redemption, a thorny matter, as he liked to say, and André was, for the first time after years of teaching this class or something like it, beginning to understand what it meant to be pursued by the deep questions. The measure of pointless suffering and death had grown recently, and grown closer. And Rosemary had absented herself from the church and from him. He hadn’t returned to her house, and wouldn’t, but there was no trace of her on the usual routes, nothing except the bookmarks she’d left on his computer. Pages on William Temple, weather forecasts, discount stores, Thomas Merton, a badly mic’d woman at a lectern talking about coal-fired plants, a bank. He chose a newslink she’d marked and up came footage of a missing woman from the late summer. He watched it all the way through. He imagined that as Rosemary watched it, she would have been thinking about Mariela Cendes. Here was a new woman,
a different name, but year by year, city by city, Mariela just kept disappearing.

Today he was to book his trip to Canterbury. It was his last chance to follow through on his decision to invite Rosemary. When his call rang to her machine he left the message that he hoped she’d accompany him. He said the church could help pay for her ticket. He said this would be the case wherever she wanted to go, and that if she wanted to fly south instead of east, he would be happy to accompany her there, too. If she wanted to go alone, the offer stood nevertheless. He said that though he made no apologies for his actions, he understood and respected her need to practise her beliefs by occupying them. Upon some passage of lateral thought he then told her in some words or other that he’d not later recall, except a few phrases that he knew from lectures and sermons, that he was reading
The Brothers Karamazov
and wondered if she had, he would love to talk with her about it, and how he loved vast, cold, northern literatures, that he had grown with age into his appreciation of the Russian greats and couldn’t help but feel they offered just the counter to this world of noise and ever-replicating surfaces and – the message cut out and he called back – he spoke of pages here and there, a bowl of soup or a river, the day before us, we look up from these things and where do we find ourselves? As if we might uncover and reassemble the bones of the first ones, the creatures closest to God – we run ourselves down to the last ounce of hope and begin to shed our own faiths, thinking in our weakness that there is no order beyond nature and loss upon loss, no truths that don’t melt into pools of illusion, and so we become vulnerable to a dark mindlessness always making raids at our borders, enlisting despair, infirmity, corrupted instincts, even
chance in our undoing, and all evidence of God is withheld, every new day appears drawn to light by no command, only our turning in space.

And then we find a shard. By night, above us, the lights of heaven, or by day, some mercy extended, some selflessness full of meaning, and upon witnessing such a soul, we feel the very substance of – the message ended, he called back – We have our proof in those rare others. We have our shard, Rosemary. We take possession of it, carry it in our pocket, rub it with a thumb. In time, yes, it wears away, people fail us, people we most trust, and whatever it was we once held disappears, becomes a memory, and so we examine our memory, we wonder at its nature, and see that it deceives us, at times, and so we’re lost again, wondering if we truly ever held this knowledge, this shard of the original ongoing moment, of the godhead. We promise ourselves that, should we find another, we’ll mark ourselves with it, we’ll cut its shape into our skin. And so by longing we’re blinded to our true condition, that we are already marked, marks we not only fail to read but fail to see. Unless, perhaps, something should remind us, should truly remind us, that there is meaning outside of our making, that the details of the real world deserve our full attention, that we’re witness to daily miracles – however cheapened the language of saying so (how ingeniously the corruption spreads in language, rotting the very form by which we lone, trapped souls reach out to one another, and sapping the beauty from unsayability itself). And that, though the weight we bear is the weight of all, and though we cannot truly know the pain we witness, any pain greater than our own, we can nevertheless know love, a greater love, this is its advantage, and we can aspire to it. If compassion is what Bergson calls “aspiration downwards,”
if it requires our imagination, then love for those outside our given circle of loving requires it too.

Here I am with my orders and my Holy Bible, reading again to the end, growing old. Every day is a reclaiming against the world outside my window, in chaos even in those places it desperately strives not to be. Maybe these events could not be Authored. But remember, dear Rosemary, that even the end of this unsigned world has the Maker’s mark on every page.

T
he state had no name.

She had a memory she couldn’t place from her girlhood of the moment when she understood herself to be separate from her parents, them in the front seat, her in the back, and the sure thing they’d been, the three of them, lost on a frozen prairie road she could still see curving into river hills. Long ago she’d lost history and god. She kept losing god without once getting god back.

It began with a scene on the lawn, their own front lawn. Donald had come outside and everything about him said that her mother was dead and so she was already there in the knowledge of one parent’s death when he had to bring her out far enough to tell her it was Harold, not Marian. His name sent her wandering out of the yard at an angle to nowhere, and Donald trailed her into the street, thinking he was explaining, when she fell. She fell all the way to the country, to Lana’s, where the doctors still made house calls. For some days Donald was the only one not medicated. The doctor was very tall and thin, an old man with huge hands. Kim asked for more drugs and said she
didn’t want to know their names, and he wrote out the dosages and handed the instructions to Donald, and then sent her half out of being.

A nameless state, cottoned, neither waking nor sleeping. When she felt the rising to time-place, she tricked herself to drop away again by following little things to their ends. Something like an ice cube, call it an ice cube, runnelling from a crested summer street to a gutter and sliding to a grate, dropping through, from dim to dark passageways running on, losing its very self, then suddenly shooting out into light again for some brief dying moment, into the thing it was, water falling inside water with no border between them.

Following voices, near or trailing, administering, but not letting them form into sense upon sense. Beneath the voices, a streaming she’d known once before, without music or echo, not coloured or pleasing or solemn or one thing so much like another.

Her hand in air became a bird of prey tracing sky, and in time she was her hand, waiting for seeing to become hunger, for wanting to become desire, and then a movement in the grasses below wrenched her into another form that cast her down full of all-things-in-the-balance and the ground rushed up.

She came down enough to see that someone had bought pyjamas for her. The sleeve across her pillow, striped light blue and a sort of meringue, a sky-and-clouds colour that sent her following the light tracking across a country yard, coming and going, and rain, water again, and then returning in evening to fire in the trees, setting them alight with markings until they all read as one equation that held true forward and backward: she had ended him, he had ended her. She had only to remove the variable she was to render this truth beyond mattering.

There was yet no stability, they said, just lapsing in and out, and upon one of these lapses she had the last vision, cold and clear. A bluntness is watching a dark street in summer. The city is weakly playing at sense. The selected one approaches along the draw. For moments at a time in the watching the bluntness is bent away from itself to some undernature and it feels its deep wilderness mind, moving, intent, fully itself, crossing through bush, over saplings, crossing road into encampment, wilderness mind, two thousand miles to the west. And then at once it’s back, in the alien space of this same dark street, somewhere nearby, in the folds of the sheet, waiting for her. And she is going to it.

She will come to think that she remembers what happens next but she won’t for a very long time. Until one day, when she’s old, she’ll forget what happens next in the vision, though what happens next is everything and always. What happens next is what is.

All of this, by some counts, passed in eleven days.

Donald arranged the service. Kim sat with her mother, absent, among strangers in a small chapel. She had to be told when to walk out.

In the days following, back home, there came hours with the television. Vertical desserts, clever cartoons, strong men pulling truck rigs, soldiers real and fake, sterilization in Puerto Rico, space-saving tips for the closet. Her body, she’d worked at it for so long, had closed back down. Words failed to be recalled. It was all happening again and she had to stand, get up off the couch and literally stand, or fall. For a week she ate almost nothing and had never been so heavy.

It would have to begin, the next recovery, as a kind of show.
For Marian, for Donald. For herself, given that they’d all know it wasn’t real, the dark humour, the sure movements around the house, the half-lively voice she used on the phone. It would begin as a show and at some point become real, or seem so, which would be enough.

She would examine her actions and find them loving or cruel, she didn’t know which. Confronting him, conducting her researches. Sending him the letter she’d written to herself, beguiled by a moment of hope. And then, as if knowing her Santiago story had presumed too much, had stolen from him, she’d sent the video link, casting after her presumption an act of redress that, in the end, redressed nothing. Whatever she would find, looking back, she’d impose a reading that would keep her free of ruin. She had a secret she would never tell. She was culpable or she wasn’t. It was true, he had lived inside an ambiguity, whatever it was, and had died inside another, and bequeathed it to her. Only now, facing facts, were the contradictions of her heart apparent to her. At one moment it seemed she’d acted only for his sake, and at the next to prove that he had lied to her so that he might admit all of his past, including that which had shaped her. She’d loved him and she wanted to hurt him. She saw it all, and saw how she deceived herself to think that her actions were passionate and principled, driven by moral instinct, rather than calculated upon her old pains. And then it seemed she was granting the old pains too much of herself, and that there might have been a way through for both of them.

At some point she just said fuck it. She turned off the TV and began reading. Then she went through nineteen days of uncollected email. Five people had sent sympathetic e-cards, two of the cards were the same.

Eduardo said Eyzaguirre had offered to look at a photo. She knew where to find one from ’74, but declined their further help.

In time, by turns, Greg and Shenny came through as they could. The idea was to resocialize her. Greg visited once, then took her out with a friend named Winston and the three of them went to an oyster bar that in the twenties had been a garment district sweatshop, the original machine layout marked with dozens of vestigial floorbolts that sent ever more customers stumbling as the night wore on. Winston was a short, round man, with narrow designer glasses that seemed to frame more than his eyes, his whole literate, avid bearing. He seemed like someone Kim should have known a long time but she suspected she’d never see him again. That Greg had people like Winston in his life opened her idea of him. Shenny took her to a spa with a woman named Parmja, a film reviewer with a gender politics slant who made a kind of sport out of over-informed commentary. On both occasions Kim ended up describing an article she imperfectly recalled on evolutionary biology and religious belief. The feeling of an ordering mystery beyond us could be explained by the human mechanisms for agent detection, causal reasoning, social cognition, and god formed there in the spandrels. She said, “God’s just a place in the physical brain.” The heretical sense of it should have played well, but her friends and acquaintances, godless all, said almost nothing, as if she was presenting them her crisis of faith.