Free Cities of Refuge by Michael Helm Page B

standard. He was always meeting women who thrilled him, but his attempts to move beyondthe talking stage were full of misreadings, misplays, embarrassments. After a while, the attempts came to seem self-punishing.
    By the time Connie called he had finished off the Amarone. Early into the conversation she’d begun to cry and he was worried he’d missed something in his drunkenness. It turned out that she and her husband had had to put their dog down the previous afternoon.
    “Fourteen years,” she said. “Bob’s been part of my life longer than you have.” It was a second before he surmised that Bob was the dog.
    “I’m very sorry, Connie.”
    “Dog grief is a weird thing.”
    “Yes. It must be.”
    Why, in her grief, had she called him? He wondered if this didn’t affirm a deep connection between them.
    “You can’t write me messages like that.”
    “Like what?”
    “You asked if I remembered your loveseat. Meaning what we did on it.”
    “I don’t remember asking that.” He tried to recall what he’d written. He thought he’d alluded to other nights looking at the city from rooftop bars. She’d misinterpreted things before. Maybe she wouldn’t have been a good academic after all.
    “Oh, come on, Harold. You don’t have to remind me what happened.”
    How could he tell her that she would have to remind him? They’d made love there on the couch, and in bed, and in the car once. But he couldn’t recall the details of these hours. They’d both been happy, he remembered. He would only remember her body if he saw it again.
    “I take it you’re not coming for a visit, then.”
    “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”
    “Yes. I wasn’t when I asked you over, though.”
    “You might not realize that it hurts me to get these messages, but it does. I’m telling you now. So unless you don’t mind hurting me, stop them. I don’t want to hear from you again. I wish you well, Harold.”
    She didn’t leave him time to respond before she hung up. He was aware that if he’d been sober he’d be in more pain, that the pain he felt was bogus and he couldn’t trust it. He’d somehow robbed himself of what would have been a moment of sharp loss, real but manageable. It was more bad luck that he’d missed it.
    Unsteadily now he walked to the small couch and pushed it up to the window. He climbed over the arm to take his next position, his head resting on a cushion as he looked out at the city. An airliner hung over the skyline in low gliding profile.
    If I was king of the world, he thought. A game he used to play with Kim. If I was king of the world I’d make it go to sleep. I’d utter it into dormancy. I’d shut the place down by fiat. Or maybe I’d say nothing and just pull the plug, casting us into darkness and thought, turning to face our terrors and getting to know them by name, undistracted by noise and duty. All souls but one. One to walk among us as we looked at the sky each night, one to mark who could sleep and who couldn’t.
    You walk at night, drift through streets. He was down there right now, tucked into the shadow by the steps. Waiting. A few faces and names are with him too, many of them women, lost or deranged or betrayed, one his daughter. For cold seconds it seems she’s been mixed up with the lost and it’s too late to save her, toseparate her from them, and then suddenly it’s he himself among them. The fear is absolute. All of the dead must die knowing it.
    T his time, returning, without the snow, with the wet earth on the air and the city up ahead, she thought: He’s still here. I know it. This time she felt the difference between the man she’d imagined and the real thing. The real thing, a mystery she would scream at, and run from or strike if she could. She needed to think about this, this raw force still inside her, but instead she just felt it, in non-thought, and let herself be funnelled into the northern downtown, and she kept driving, hearing herself breathing deeply now,