Free Cities of Refuge by Michael Helm

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 stopasking 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.
    He took a long last gaze at the dark spot. He would have to move again.
    Upstate New York on the flat black horizon of the lake. Water, command, guiding points. His mind was shifting to a navigational fancy. Conquest. He thought of Connie, though she was out of the picture. He shouldn’t email her, he knew. It wasn’t just that she’d turn him down. He’d detect that familiar note of sadness for him, her willing failure to suppress it. When they’d first spent time together, eleven years ago, she was the diligent grad student, his grad student. She was gone and married before they’d had their affair, two Januaries back. A happy-hour drink in a downtown hotel lounge. At some point the lights dimmed in a blunt promotion of intimacy. They ended up in his car, kissing like teenagers. It had come out of nowhere, it seemed, for what else would you call a shared interest in colonial Mexican history. Only later did he see the other mutual factors, marriages failed or failing, their moribund careers. She’d found nothing on the academic job market and now worked as an editor of children’s books. At least he’d gained a position before his career had stalled. Now they often stalled right off the line. It was through some sort of conditioning, something in the student-mentor dynamic, that even years later she’d come to him for advice and consolation. In time she understood that his need surpassed hers.Or maybe, though he didn’t like to think of it, she just couldn’t be naked anymore with a man twenty-some years her senior.
    He’d had this place for ten months when he’d finally persuaded her to come over. He’d wanted her to see it, to see he was free and clear, if not happy. Since then, without even acknowledging the invitations, she’d turned them down. Every few weeks she’d write, the letters weren’t even newsy. Mostly she asked about his classes. “Some days when you got going you could change the whole room. All that dead history got up and walked around in front of us. You were the great necromancer. You need to find those days again, Harold.” She had always been his champion among students and other faculty, his defender. He had precious few of them, and so forgave her for pretty much anything, even for calling him a necromancer.
    She used to check her mail almost hourly. He turned on the desk lamp and tapped out a note – “Come here for a drink. The city’s beautiful from my couch. You remember it, don’t you?” – and sent it.
    If he’d been honest he’d have told her there were ghosts here tonight. All over the papers and the TV was a forensic artist’s reconstruction of the face of last week’s murder victim, the “dumpster girl,” as one paper had settled on calling her. She was the