Cities of Refuge by Michael Helm

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