Cities of Refuge (6 page)

When the lesson was over and they were driving back, Kim said she wouldn’t be keeping the rifle.

“It’s not how I want to deal with this, Donald.” His familiar baffled, hurt expression. Squinting behind rimless glasses, now fogging in the car. “I liked learning about the gun. I like knowing how it feels to shoot one.”

“I just thought you might feel safer.”

“No. And I can’t shoot what happened.”

The gun would call up shadows. A sitting gun, imagining its own completion. It would be different if she didn’t know that made-things incline to their use, but she did know it. And she was vulnerable, to images and songs and who knew what else. Already she had to remind herself to take the fireplace poker from under her bed before the others arrived each weekend.

February was mild, sunless. She read novels and listened to Górecki and went skiing with uneven strides on the lake. The thought of the city in spring, the noise and press of it. She would have to prepare for her return.

One afternoon she closed a book in mid-sentence and admitted she was scared. Not just of the city but of this cottage, the lake. The vast forest invited the loss of body and mind. She was scared of the night sky. She lived at a pitch of fear just below awareness. Now and then it welled up, then sank again, but it was always close to the surface. It was a matter of time before she would begin seeing demons. She had removed herself to this
place so she’d have no one to be brave for, but she’d been brave for herself from the first moment. The truth was, she didn’t know how to get past this. The authority of fear. She was being forced to make a project of herself.

He had calluses, she’d told the detective. She thought she could recognize his touch. She worried about touches, about how she’d respond to a man. She told herself what no one else would, that in some ways she’d been lucky. She hadn’t been killed. Or raped. Yet she could not accept the thought that had things gone differently she would feel even more violated. And that was it:
violation
. The expected word. Amid the many others, words like
closure
or
recovery
, it was hard to remember that there were brute facts, and words attached to them, and they were the right ones. Upon this revelation it seemed possible she might collect enough words to describe her fear even if she couldn’t describe her attacker. In a photocopied article with the heel of Harold’s palm at the base of every page she read about the neurophysiology of trauma. The fear, in material terms, was cerebral. The assault would have released a neurotransmitter in the amygdala that would have set off a calcium reaction that resulted in proteins gluing themselves to those parts of her brain that were active before, during, and after the attack, when her adrenalin was high. A fragment of gospel music, the sight of a construction crane, the smell of coffee, and she was cast back into the event.

And Harold. It was just bad luck that he’d been on her mind in those minutes before it happened.

The man with the calluses had changed her brain and she needed to change it back.

Harold called her twice a week, sent her oddly rambling emails about his work and things he’d read, but he visited just once. He arrived late in the afternoon on a bright Saturday in March when the snow had crystallized and the sap was running, darkening the maples. She’d guided him on his cellphone until he lost the signal, and he made it the rest of the way consulting Marian’s written directions along the last kilometres of half-frozen, forking gravel roads. He pulled in at the cottage, somehow appearing out of place even before he emerged from his car.

She came out in her winter boots, in long johns and a sweater, and he looked at her, and there it was. Since the attack she’d detected a stutter in his perception whenever he met her slightly altered face.

She helped him unload the supplies she’d requested. In the spirit of a game they’d devised long ago, he made his complaints in Spanish.

“No me gustan las cabañas.”

“Ni siquiera has entrado todavía.”

“Imagino que las moscas negras no molestan tanto en esta época. Pero el lugar estará replete de musarañas.”

“What?”

“I said I hate cottages and I expect the place is infested with … shrews or something.”

They ate dinner with him scoffing at the knick-knacks on the walls, the lacquered wood clock in the shape of a fish, the inexpert oil painting of the lake, surmising the low-middle-brow set of Donald’s clan.

“These are likely treasured heirlooms I’m ridiculing.”

“Didn’t E.P. Thompson say something about saving the dead from the condescension of the living?”

He smiled. “So you know your Marxist historians. I’m happy to be forgetting them.”

Silences made him uncomfortable. He described a Belgian movie he’d read about, then Warhol films and Tarkovsky and what he called “the dignity of boredom,” and how “mind-numbingly dignified” he felt during long, static movie shots. He quoted a study on the growing illiteracy of new university students (“they call them ‘incoming,’ like shellfire”). He admitted to being “a revanchist” about his lost territories in the department and complained about younger colleagues protesting police patrols on campus.

At one point he looked down and seemed mystified by the food on his plate.

“You think he had a dark complexion.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“It’s in the police report.”

“I didn’t say dark. I said dark white. I didn’t see his face. I don’t know where I came up with that. Maybe his hands.”

“Mediterranean? North African?”

“Dark white is meaningless. Even if I’d seen it.”

They were never together in strange spaces like this. At the moment they were trapped in this one. Like the fear itself, her aversion to talking of the assault with her father, of all people, was physical.

“You think you were followed.”

“It’s just a feeling I had.”

“I know these are hard moments to relive, but have you considered the possibility that he might have followed you all the way from your apartment?”

It was as if he’d never spoken about it until now.

“No. I came from Mom’s house that night. Remember?”

“But you rode by your building. He might have been there, or anywhere along the route. It was the same route you always took. The lock on the gate was already broken. As if he knew you were coming and he planned for it.”

“It wasn’t broken, it was open. No one cut it. And if he’d followed me I would have noticed him.”

“Maybe he was a stranger. Or maybe he knew you.”

Here it was, then.

“Or maybe he was a stranger who knew me. Is that your theory?”

“I’m sure it’s occurred to you. That maybe he was one of the rejects.” He raised his hands in apology. “Sorry. I don’t know what to call them.”

He wasn’t sorry. It was what he’d needed to say. And there was more. As if to slow himself for emphasis, he started back into his dinner, and then resumed.

“What if it was someone you turned down? Some guy you turned down at
GROUND
because he was dangerous, which is why he was rejected by the Review Board. And he targeted you.”

“The police don’t think so. I don’t think so. Only you do. There’s no reason to think the man who attacked me isn’t fourth-generation Canadian. I wish you’d see that there are other mysteries to solve here.”

He finished his glass of wine and held it out to her. She filled it and put down the bottle within his reach. He shifted to the matter of her recovery. Any experience that marked itself, he said, lapsed immediately, distorted, degraded, into memory, language, story. The process was true of everything in history.

“I’m sure the attack is still close to you. It will stay vivid and immediate unless you consciously process it. It unfolds in real time in memory, in dreams. It confronts you in absolute detail. You have to cast out the details, as it were, by describing them. Find the words and describe them. If you wait too long it’ll be too late.”

You couldn’t always tell with Harold when he was speaking from his researches and when from his experience. For a moment she thought she’d ask him, but he would close down, and wherever they’d arrived now would be lost to them.

“But I can’t describe them,” she said. “I don’t have the words. And so trying just compounds my sense of helplessness. If I say he seemed sure of himself, like he’d done it before, then I sort of believe that’s a fact. But then, you know, his mask wasn’t on straight, and I got away from him, so how slick was he? And so I doubt myself as a witness. And I feel powerless all over again.”

“So keep trying. Maybe take it from angles. Find the smaller composite truths within the larger one. You need to make it something to share. It’s the hopeful idea of two or more people seeing the same thing. Disarm it with scrutiny, as if it happened long ago, to someone else.”

“Who’s my audience? I wouldn’t want anyone I know so-called sharing this with me.”

“Tell it to yourself. Your older self. She looks in an old journal some day far off and finds the examined details. And they seem very real and very distant all at once.”

Did he keep a journal? she wondered. This was not a précis of some article he’d read or the usual hectoring about resuming her studies. He was telling her something he’d discovered.

“Have you told your mother what happened?”

“Not all of it.”

“You can, you know. You can tell either of us, if you need to.”

“So now we’re sharing our worst moments?”

He pretended to look directly at her but his eyes took in only her forehead and then dropped back down to the food, his shoulders now set slightly forward.

“You’re very aware of my worst moments, whatever you imagine them to be. I think you’ve let them shape you.”

“Really. What do I imagine them to be?”

“Well. The marriage had its worst moments. You were there for those. Or in nearby rooms, and the aftermath. And you’re angry with me, for her sake and your own, and –”

“Yeah, I know. So I sabotage my could-be career to disappoint you. Isn’t psychology simple.”

There had been not a sabotage but an awakening. Her first two terms in New York had gone well enough. She had a title for her proposed thesis – “Homeless Truths: Pluralism in Postwar North America” – and a lengthy reading list, but in her second year she began wondering what wasn’t in the studies, theories, and source documents. To Harold’s distress, her inspiration had always been those historians whose work admitted speculation – Donald’s interest in the Battle of Quebec began when she’d given him Simon Schama’s essay-fiction about Wolfe and Montcalm. As her second winter there began, and she realized that New York had covered her in a mood of broken promise, she returned in her reading to fiction-inflected histories. She became dreamy, stopped attending classes, and wrote nothing but vignettes, scenes that came to her unbidden, written all in one sitting. She was adrift, on other people’s money. And so she dropped out and went home.

They’d entered the brief pause before finishing their meals. Kim noticed how they mirrored each other, each with the left hand on the table, holding the stem of a wineglass, and the right resting on the edge. Harold pressed his palm against the table, spreading his thumb and fingers as if measuring the span of a thought.

“There’s no use denying the force of large events,” he said. “If we’re awake at all, we spend our early adulthood discovering that the world is more complex than we thought, and the rest of it discovering the main human themes have been the same for thousands of years. You can name each one in a word or two.”

“You know, you’re right that I was in nearby rooms. And I remember what I heard you two say to one another.”

“That was just dumb emoting. Mostly meaningless.”

“Well then maybe that explains my directionless life, because I thought I caught some spit wisdoms.”

“I can’t imagine which ones.”

“That some people live their lives inside a single ambiguity. You said that. All the yelling stopped and there it was. I don’t remember the context, I likely wouldn’t have understood it. But I’ve come to think of the statement as hard-won truth, maybe a confession. And I’ve always wondered what it was, your single ambiguity.”

“I don’t recall saying that. And I can’t imagine what I meant.”

“So then it’s left to me to imagine. And you’re right, after all. I guess what I imagine has shaped me.”

They had never talked at such length about anything that mattered, not that he’d opened up newly for her. He was still the sly interlocutor, defending not just his positions (his colleagues found him suspiciously apolitical, at best; she knew some of them
were handy with polite recriminations) but something in himself, something she had never been able even to glimpse whole. And there it was again, the particular mystery of him. She could almost touch it.

The next morning he was gone. The day was clear, the light through the pines lined the cottage. Now that she was alone again the place felt not empty but pristine.

What she’d been waiting for was a line of address, and in the wake of Harold’s leaving it finally appeared. She needed to discover what she already knew.

She began with a blank computer screen, facing the windows and lake. The first pages covered the day of the attack. She found a space above the story from which to tell it, neutrally, in the first person but a little outside herself. She tried not to invent or speculate, and ignored moments that only seemed true and ironies she couldn’t have known at the time. She wrote of her ride to work that night. As she drew it out, as if to delay the occurrence, the moments began to build more acutely with each line, and she found that if she stayed in them long enough, there were returns. The rust on the panel above the rear wheel of a parked car she’d locked her bike beside, the way the door to the café stuck a little, the smell of the spilled mint tea she’d stepped in near the entranceway, and the wet tread prints from her shoes on the sidewalk as she looked back to see if she’d dropped a napkin from the tray. A man walking ahead of her in jeans and a fitted blue shirt. He entered a house and was gone.