Cities of Refuge (7 page)

Then, the moment when she’d passed by the door of the brightly lit improvised church and a chill fell upon her. She was
seeing herself on the page from a ground-level distance. She was seeing herself from the cold.

Every day she wrote to this point and no further.

One crisp morning when the fire wouldn’t catch, as she lined up the same moments the same way, a breakthrough. She’d made a mistake. There were tread prints, yes, but not hers. It was the night before the attack that she’d stepped in the tea. And this small error admitted the possibility of others. It showed up the deficiency of her method. On the night of the attack she would have looked back and seen the prints and known they were someone else’s and been reminded of her own on the previous night. She might even have felt an echo of the disjointed time she’d experienced minutes earlier when she’d pictured herself riding in the morning, going home in the opposite direction. And wouldn’t she then have felt an eeriness? If not consciously, then in some part of her? And mightn’t this feeling, and the footprints behind her, have prepared her for the sense that she was being followed?

She began over now, allowing for her interiors. The writing ran deeper, and though the account was sliding to speculation, she felt herself returning in the prose. If a misremembrance could lead her to a fact she’d overlooked, then maybe so could other variations from the narrow-seeming truth. And so she half remembered, half invented the night.

One morning she wrote,

I left dinner with my parents and rode south through the dark towards work.

She stopped. The words that made distances were wrong. She realized that the “I” itself was wrong, for whoever she was now was not who she had been, and one letter could not be them both.

Then she wrote,

Before the shift that night she left dinner with her parents and biked south in darkness past her apartment building, along into her usual path. The afternoon storms had broken the heat and departed without trace. The air was drying, late-summer cool. On the side streets near campus were weakly haloed car headlights and shadowed figures waiting to be briefly illuminated.

She wrote for almost three hours without stopping, finally deep into something true, without any sense of present time and place. Then she turned off her computer. Some minutes later she found herself outside, at the woodpile. She split six pieces of elm and lay them in the handled canvas. She smelled the wood and a sugary scent that she followed around the back of the cottage. On one of the maples a bucket had been knocked off a tap that had begun to drip sap. There were bear tracks all around. She stepped away, seeing everything.

Back inside, she sat by the fire, stared out at the lake. The animals were waking from their dens. Seeing the prints had brought forth the smallest things. The faintest yellow in the grey of the dormant beech buds. The weather seemed no different but it was already spring in the ancient systems.

All moved forward from here. It was time to go home.

Her thoughts returned to the half-written story. She was still standing outside the church and she couldn’t go further without confronting what she couldn’t. Fear had stopped her, but also an incapability. How to think of him? He was faceless, without even a name to hold the substance of him in place. She wanted him known, not named, not by her. Any name might skew her sense
of him one way or another. And so instead she designated him with only a letter, and for reasons she didn’t speculate upon, the letter that seemed right was R. A letter rolled on some tongues, though she didn’t roll it now. A letter that sounds like
are
. Her attacker, a plural state of being.

A verb in English, she thought, at which point her intuition that he didn’t speak English was useful to her. The man had language, but not hers. The detail opened up more of the globe than it closed in her conception of him. And it isolated him within the city, which made sense, she decided. And thinking of him without English, in fact, meant she could attribute to him any life she wanted.

She expected he would come to her like this, that one day she’d call up her narrative, and begin writing, and there he’d be, fully present and named.

I
t had been six steady weeks on the new job and it paid the best of any work he’d ever had. Rodrigo worked for a man about his age named Kevin, who bid on contracts from insurance adjusters and then phoned Luis, who called him, and they had to be on-site within an hour because of sitting water that would ruin everything left to ruin if it wasn’t pumped out and the carpets and walls stripped away. The work was hard and dirty, and sometimes Rodrigo came across burned-up things he wished he hadn’t seen. Last night it had been a child’s doll lying in a hard black pool of its melted head and back. One time it had been a dog that the firemen hadn’t found. The heat had curled its legs in front of it stiffly, as if it had died in an instant, running, though it had not died that way.

He didn’t say much at work. Kevin got them going and then spent a long time on the phone. He brought all the tools and wanted them put back as soon as they were used. Rodrigo and Luis were not to talk to anyone but Kevin or Matt, the other crew member, who took more turns than Luis with the worst of the work.

Most fires were at night. The hours they worked were backwards to the lives of other people. He showered before bed and
slept until mid-afternoon. His one daily event was the walk to the internet lounge where he’d check for news from his cousin Uriel in Cartagena but there was never news. Uriel had written only once, after Rodrigo’s first message to him, to say that there had been no reprisals yet against the family. Then silence for over a year. Nearly every day Rodrigo sent a small note into the silence.

He felt a great need to lie a little about his days, to make the stories better than they were. He wanted to write that he had a job selling TVs or coaching football, they called it soccer, that he was in school learning business, that a woman he loved was in love with him, or even that their love was impossible, that she was married to a rich man who treated her cruelly. In one version of his life he played a Mexican on a TV show. He imagined these stories at work and at night before bed. But so far he had never written them to Uriel. To write them would be to feel the full difference between his life as he imagined it and his life as it was.

He tried to describe his two thick work shirts. A shirt here could be described in terms of shirts from home, but not the need for them against an October morning in Toronto. In winter he wrote about the snow, but he knew Uriel could never imagine it, and he couldn’t write it into imagining. Instead he just wrote, “The days are very cold and there’s snow and ice. I have good boots,” knowing Uriel wouldn’t picture the right kind of boots.

He put down his thoughts as they came to him. He could never allow himself to be questioned by police. He’d met his girlfriends at a language school before he stopped going. It was important not to get hurt on the job and once when a stairway collapsed he’d fallen on his hand and hurt it badly but he didn’t tell anyone and now there was a ridge between his knuckles and wrist and it still hurt him and was useless by the end of the
day. The first girl was named Halia, she was from somewhere in Africa and he couldn’t even kiss her because of what had happened to her in her country. The other girl was a woman, a teacher at the school, named Julie. She wouldn’t go out with him while he was in her class and so he had quit and they went dancing. When she had broken up with him, it was only because they could never be married. He was illegal and could be sent back at any time. He didn’t tell Uriel that this was the first time he realized that his future here was small.

Now it was Rosemary who helped him with his English. Whenever they ate together she had him read out loud to her from the newspaper and then asked him questions about what he’d read. The stories she chose for him were about deportations and cruel governments and black boys shot dead in the clubs. The news was full of warnings and he felt it made his English more serious than his Spanish. She asked him once which language he thought in and when he couldn’t answer her, she asked if he was mostly full of feelings and pictures. His only problem was expression, she said. Maybe she felt she’d insulted him, that she’d made him feel stupid. She said only that he should use English in his thoughts, and it should sound like his voice when he lowered his head at dinner to recite English grace.

Only once had she asked him to tell her his story from beginning to end. He’d been downstairs when she’d come home and he called up hello but she hadn’t answered, and then he heard her crying in the kitchen. He let her be. Soon she came down and explained that she’d just found out that a woman she was helping had been detained and deported last week, and the woman would be persecuted in her home country. She said when this happened she suddenly wanted to believe that the
people she helped were all lying, that they would be safe when they returned. But she knew, she had proof, that some had been killed, and she grieved for them and there was no place to put the grief, no funerals or graves, except her prayers, but the grief never ended that way.

And so when she asked him to tell his story again, he thought she was asking him to lie to her in case he was ever returned. But he couldn’t lie. He wasn’t good at it. And anyway his new life owed to the true story, and he couldn’t give it up.

And when he began to tell it, he saw that he’d been wrong, that it was the true story she wanted. She nodded at what was familiar to her from the version he’d presented to the tribunal, and she seemed to hang on the details he just remembered then in the course of this new telling.

When he was done he said he understood that he couldn’t stay with her for much longer but that she was for him the person who brought together his life past with the life yet to be. He couldn’t guess where he’d be if she hadn’t helped him. They had never before spoken so well with one another, and never since.

His cellphone rang. Luis said they had a job and he’d come by in twenty minutes. It was past ten. Rodrigo collected his clean work clothes from the laundry room and got into them and went upstairs and packed a little lunch. He didn’t put on his workboots yet and wouldn’t unless they got the job. They had been someone else’s boots once.

Hours later he and Luis were standing in a dining room, looking at a chandelier somehow left undamaged by the fire and water. It had hung just below the smoke in a room that had been saved. But it was a hazard to them and they’d have to take it down anyway and when they put it on the floor, a little cut-glass
ball separated and rolled to his feet. When Luis turned away, Rodrigo picked it up and put it into his pocket.

Luis dropped him off at Rosemary’s house at five in the morning, and they were to be back on-site by one. He went in quietly. He took his boots off and shed his dirty work clothes in the entranceway and carried them downstairs. On the table beside his bed he found one of the envelopes of money Rosemary sometimes left for him. Before he moved into the house, the envelopes had come to him through Luis. He understood that she didn’t hand these to him directly out of respect for his dignity and because she wanted him to feel that it was from the church and not from her alone.

A hundred and twenty dollars. Seeing the cash always made him feel a little worse. After one more paycheque he would tell her to give the money to another.

He set his alarm for noon. As he began to nod off he pictured the clothes he’d dumped in the laundry room and remembered that he had no clean ones ready for the afternoon. He got up and put the clothes in the wash and looked out his window at the early sun drawing along the neighbour’s brick and the grey plastic garbage bins and he felt a weakness in his hands from work. He then sat watching the muted TV until the clothes were done. The second time he went to bed, it was to the sound of the dryer, and the fresh images from the local morning show of traffic and weather and yesterday’s news from some Arab land in ruin. No one understood the world, he thought. Not even the quietest, smallest part of it.

H
arold turned off the lights in the condo and stood at the south-facing window, looking out at the city from twenty-one storeys. The place was in one of its prosperous phases that tended to come in decades of bland Western architecture. As in Buenos Aires, San Diego, Kingston. Marian used to find the mornings in Vancouver deflating. It was a line of theirs, “Blame it on the architects,” whenever things got tough and they’d grown tired of blaming each other. Some resentment or small cruelty conducted along a maze of pathways, of past arguments, betrayals, hoping for some surprising new light on things. They’d been lost for so long, they couldn’t even find the door they’d come in through.

Commanding views made him feel ridiculous. He removed his reading glasses. He was thinking about culling his books. He’d done it badly for the move, tied up in sentimental attachments to histories and festschrifts that marked out his life. But if he counted the ones he’d actually look at again, there were fewer than fifty. The other three hundred or so along the walls were merely sound baffles. He’d read and forgotten most of them. The others, he either didn’t believe or didn’t care about. They seemed not so much unreal to him as beside the point. He couldn’t articulate the point, but it existed in some dimension where everything he thought of could be beside it.

Depressed by architecture. They’d had no idea.

He studied himself briefly, his image, light upon the window. The glasses in his hand made him look satisfied or contemplative, or something. He looked all wrong, in any case. But then everything looked wrong these days. Down the block a floodlight from a crane died on the beginnings of the new high-rise condos. The site. Ground zero. Had he been here that night and looked down, what could he have seen? He would never stop
asking the question. The site was still badly lit, and from this height he could see nothing in the recesses. Not the side street, not the dark spot next to the wall where the attack occurred, not much of the ground across which she’d run, and not the pit into which she’d fallen, which had since been filled. He could see the trailer, though. Even lit up, it looked empty. If Kim had taken his advice she’d have sued the company for not securing their space.