Cities of Refuge by Michael Helm Page B

be in a state of turbulence. Next up, I’m afraid, is torment. And as creatures, our signature means of dealing with tormentaren’t so good. Many are lost to it. Some become habituated, and are lost to that. What your daughter needs is what we all do. She needs peace. And we can only find that in the goodness and strength of others, the people we’re closest to.”
    “A simple enough equation.”
    “Peace is real. It has force. It spreads.”
    “Like democracy.”
    “Don’t fail it like that.” His tone was calm but dead stern. “Don’t try to debase it, or disarm it with irony or politics.” “It’s all politics at some level, Father.”
    “There are things that stand outside of politics. We’re made of solitude and endure it through the social. We can draw on others for peace. Not abstractly. Our essential networks are very small. A few people. Mutually supportive. People who value others for their goodness, not their sophistication or wit. People who don’t pretend there aren’t differences between us, and yet know what it is we share.”
    “All right. And so you’ve diagnosed her troubles by seeing mine. I don’t strike you as at peace.”
    “Almost no one does.”
    Harold tried on a rueful smile. “There’s no quick fix for us, is there?”
    “You don’t feel God is watching over you?”
    “Not watching over, no. Just watching.”
    “At least you feel Him.”
    “I don’t know who I feel.”
    He was not used to talking like this. It was astonishing, what came out of his mouth.
    “Years ago, Harold, when I left the seminary, I confessed to an older priest that I wasn’t sure what my job was, going out into theworld. He said it was to get people to look beyond whatever it was they most wanted in life, and what they most feared in it. But I think maybe that’s all it is. People get into trouble because they can’t answer those questions of what they want and what they fear.”
    “And those, also, are more complicated matters than they might seem.”
    “They might be. Or they might not. Can you answer them?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know, or you aren’t prepared to?”
    “Maybe that’s what I mean by complicated.”
    He walked Father André into the subway station and when they shook hands he sensed the man’s restraint. Surely he wanted to accuse Harold of a fall from reason. It was comforting to imagine someone with reserves of strength and wisdom.
    They would be in touch, they agreed.
    “I’d like to meet Kim sometime. Marian, too. And I think we should talk more about all of this.”
    “Put in a word for me with the Ancient of Days.”
    “I will.” He laughed. “I will if one occurs to me.”
    The word would be xenophobe, Harold thought, or maybe even racist. Unhinged. Lost. As he made his way back out into the light, he felt exposed, naked as the questions of want and fear. From somewhere long ago, the image of an apartment building entryway – he could smell rot in the damp air – until the here and now, the traffic of people and cars overran the memory. Like the familiar faces and routines of his work, the streets had a way of turning back the tide. A city was like primary text to him, alive in itself and in the ways it returned him to his past readings of it. You could hide inside the play of chance, every block another intersection of raw noise, language and fashion, musicand work, cicadas and birds and the wind in the trees, small pockets of local remembered time. Now and then upon some stray reverie he’d discover he wasn’t here at all, that one city had reminded him of another.
    The best memories were of Marian and Kim in one of their travel summers, as they accompanied him in his researches. Walking with his girls, all over the Americas. The days tended to be too hot, spent indoors, but the evenings were at times like scenes from Toronto in July, if with older buildings and palms and a different spoken music in the air.
    He drifted along Bloor and