Free Cities of Refuge by Michael Helm Page A

consummate image of the woman who’d inspired his first infidelity. Celina Shey. That had lasted no more than a month, though Marian wouldn’t learn of it for years, but it foretold all that was to come.
    The silence of his hours here, distracting himself with reading, television, the internet, the phone, cooking – all that was missing was an exercise wheel. He’d bought this place as much for the soundproofing as the view, but it had been a mistake –he longed for footsteps, music, traffic, any stray notes of ongoingness. Without them he simply lined up tasks and performed them. You could build another day upon the half-awareness of your moving hand.
    He opened a bottle of Amarone and started into it in the spirit of wasting a good thing in self-pity. It was now well into what used to be the reading hours. Against his will he turned on the television and flipped back and forth through the channels, finding nothing but the usual bilking operations and fictions to feed a mass idiocy. It was true that the American network news was a sly way of selling cars and bad government, not that he ascribed to conspiracy theories. It infuriated Kim that he so readily accepted her calling him a snob. He liked “snob.” The word didn’t break down as easily as “elitist.”
    He kept flipping. Two men fencing with baguettes, a pop star with a navel ring talking about her so-called art. Gene Hackman was on two channels, in different stages of his career. The whole point of the device was to feel a part of the audience, but there was nothing he could stomach.
    He checked for email. No messages.
    Then the local cable news, and there she was again, the double. How does this work, he wondered, that for two or three days we all walk around with the same picture in our minds, the same bleak facts? The police insist that the unclaimed girl must have had a circle of friends and appeal for someone to come forward.
    Did Celina ever think of him? He barely remembered himself from back then, a budding Latin Americanist with some ideas about the Wars of Independence. They’d met in Montreal. He was living with Marian and going to McGill. At a street festival he’d stopped to watch a blind boy playing Italian folksongs on guitar and then there she was, across the crowd. It was a powerful moment of recognition, though he couldn’t say who she reminded him of, if anyone. Her features, dark and slightly dramatic against her olive skin, fit perfectly into some still image from his experience. He followed her down the block and managed to come up beside her as she bought gelato. As they ate their treats together there in the street she told him she wrote magazine articles on home furnishings, and he said he was a graduate student, new to the city. She gave him her number unprompted. He told her about Marian and she said it was an old story to her. Years later he tried to explain to Marian this first encounter. In following Celina, chatting, taking the number he’d betrayed her, yes, but he was doing it all against his instincts, even against his desire. What he really wanted to do upon seeing the woman was to turn and go the other way. The recognition, whatever it was, disturbed him, and only a conscious act of will allowed him to confront the disturbance. None of this made sense to Marian - how could it? – who thought he was just revising the past and parsing it in his defence. The short-lived affair was not without pleasure, but the pleasure was always fraught. As he got to know Celina, as she became to him more herself and less the mystery he thought he’d recognized, their passion died.
    And yet now, another recognition. Had Celina had a daughter? He imagined the girl growing up, moving to Toronto, dying here on his television.
    He’d had two brief affairs during his marriage. Since the divorce, several dates but only two lovers, and only for a few months each. Though Marian and Kim thought of him as a womanizer, he was not, by the modern