"City of Refuge," by Linda Heller

Numbers 35:6 “Six of the towns you give the Levites will be cities of refuge, to which a person who has killed someone accidently and unintentionally may flee and find protection from the avenger of blood. In addition give them forty-two other towns.”

Dorothea was kindhearted and wanted to help the afflicted. I worshiped the god of avarice and didn’t care who I hurt as long as my holdings increased. Despite our differences, we loved each other and functioned as an enviable pair. Or so we thought.

Our city had failed us. A dark wind had blown through it carrying microscopic seeds that mouth breathers swallowed. Within moments their lungs disintegrated and they coughed up a deadly invisible grit. This invisibility was harrowing. The grit remained lethal for days and could be anywhere and on anything. Dorothea and I became so overwhelmed by fear we forgot that we were dodging a specific danger and became afraid of everything we encountered including newborn babies and Chihuahuas in running suits.

The sick and the dying comprised a ghastly overlay atop a resilient landscape. We’d go to the park and be unnerved by the profusion of magnolias and cherry blossoms when bombed out ruins seemed more appropriate for the catastrophe. But our city wasn’t Beirut in the 80’s and its buildings remained unscathed. 

The malevolent wind travelled in ever narrowing circles over our neighborhood. Ambulances roared past us. There was a shortage of hearses. How had this happened? To us, we meant. How had this happened to us? Certainly there’d been news reports of the wind when it had wreaked havoc halfway around the world. I’d skimmed articles about overseas deaths, stories of young doctors who, while fighting to save the sick, had succumbed themselves and left orphaned toddlers. But those wretched souls lacked our luck, our savvy, our country of origin. Bad things were always befalling them. They expected to be battered, to struggle to recover only to be pummeled again. Dorothea and I lived above that fray. Our lives had value. We were safe and protected until, and it was mind-blowing, a D- plot from a bad movie, in one insane instant our luck fled, taking our future with it, the future we’d mapped so meticulously that I’d been able to score low interest loans based on my sales projection for the next twenty years.

I’d always told myself that I’d be the first person to live forever. At age nine or ten this story had calmed me enough to let me fall asleep. Later, it was more of a wish. The odds were against it, yet who could say that it might not come true? Now death walked among us exposing thousands of arms that reached out to grab us.

I was the protector in our marriage, the rational presence who’d evaluated Dorothea’s whims (as I’d called them) and decided which, if any, I’d let her pursue. Her role was to bolster me while I sped toward greater and greater solvency. This ended when, without warning, the city slammed shut its doors and I barreled into them face first.

As a man I’d learned to put fear in its place. But after weeks of trying to evade the grit, my old self had been replaced by a child who squatted on the pavement and screamed for his father to pick him up.

Since the start of the crises we’d been barraged with emails from car rental agencies that swore their vehicles had been sanitized so thoroughly they could be used as operating theaters. We decided to risk it and we packed what we could in two rolling suitcases. The car awaited us across town and we wondered if we should soap our clothes, our gloves and our masks to produce enough lather to have the grit slide off us. No one had recommended this method of defense yet we gave it a try. Dignity had died alongside the cities’ human victims. Survival was king and we were its slaves. The foam flattened before we reached the lobby. I hurried back for our store of garbage bags. 

We’d nearly run out of disinfectant, a product we’d never thought about in our old lives but which we now depended on more than we depended on oxygen. Use it to clean the handles of a taxi, its seat and the plastic divider and we’d have nothing left. To be prudent, we’d walk the three miles, a short enough distance on a normal day but not now when it felt like everyone in our path had a poison blow dart in his mouth and was aiming it at us.

Damp, coated with soap, wrapped in black plastic, additional bags on our heads, we traveled east, we who’d once been so dazzling that a roving reporter had asked if he could photograph us for the style section of the Times.

How to take off our protective gear without contaminating ourselves? Minus a scientist to advise us, we ripped off the bags and flung them as far away from us as we could, possibly spreading the grit to nearby innocents. Dorothea trembled at our crime and would have sank to her knees with remorse but she was afraid to have further contact with the sidewalk.

We fell into a rental car whose dashboard had been designed to mimic a cockpit. We longed for a real cockpit. Neither of us were pilots but it was vital that we evacuate our beloved city as fast as we could.

We’d heard on questionable authority that the Levite cities were spread throughout the desert. The most lavish had been constructed by Las Vegas developers while, in keeping with their purpose as hideouts, the cities of refuge were subterranean and absent from maps. Only a frenzied sense of desperation, of being pursued by a vengeful killer, could lead you to one. 

We slept in our car and ate crackers from vending machines after we’d thoroughly doused them with the last of our disinfectant. We might have joked that if the grit didn’t get us the hypochlorites would, but we were too drained to joke, too focused on the unknown and what we’d do once we reached it.

The roads were empty and after only three days we reached a rust-colored desert where rocky shards had yet to be broken down into sand. Our GPS was useless without an address. “We’ll go straight,” I said, summoning my old confidence. “It’s the smart thing to do.” Assuming, which I couldn’t, that the second point lay directly ahead. 

The highway ended abruptly. We soldiered on, our tires spinning, gaining traction, losing traction again. I saw something in the distance. We drove toward it, flew toward it psychically.

With hardly any gas left, we reached Pueblo de Júbilo, a domed Levite city that looked like it had been built to humor Louis XIV, if the sun king had magically seen and appreciated Mexican architecture. We preferred minimalism and we’d decorated our apartment in various shades of white but as refugees we’d accept whatever was given.

A woman in a hazmat suit directed us to an outbuilding where we were blasted with UV light, told to sign over our assets and memorize the rulebook before our interview. A quick reading of the laws and we realized that Dorothea’s hair, a striking mass of long auburn curls, would have to be cut into a bob. “Attention seeking is forbidden at P. de J.,” the rule book said. As were roadsters, children under the age of eighteen, owning a pet, and displays of negative emotions. Loath though I was to conform, I dreaded dying more.

“We’re getting a good deal,” I told Dorothea. “The others must have forfeited B.M.W.s and dozens of brokerage accounts to pay for this place.” Most of our holdings had been secreted away and would stay concealed. Until our return, I thought, if that ever became possible.

Dorothea sat trembling. “But how will I manage? I can’t and you know it.” Years earlier she’d been hospitalized for depression after a summer long crying jag. The therapy had worked to a degree but she’d suffered recurrences.

“We have no choice. Smile clown, smile,” the bastard in me told her.

“But the cities of refuge?”

“We can’t chance it. We’re practically out of gas.”

UV light, however destructive to microorganisms, was not the equal of a hot shower and a change of clothes. Deprived of the opportunity to freshen up, we were led into the conference room in the same filthy, foul-breathed, greasy-haired state we’d arrived in, while the board of governors, as they called themselves, wore white linen suits and bolero ties with silver sliders. A few questions and we learned from their frowns that we were from the wrong coast and had the wrong political leanings. My business although successful was not successful enough. “I have other ventures,” I yammered, prepared in my fright to give them every penny I owned and to steal more if necessary. They didn’t ask about these other projects. As for Dorothea’s little storefront where she sold hand knit baby clothes? A member of the board snapped his fingers and we were expelled from their midst.

Our tank was low. It was empty. We wrapped our clothes around our faces, abandoned our suitcases and proceeded on foot, bent and weeping. Had I been too callous toward those who suffered? Were my ethics too fluid? Should I have learned what real strength was, rather than settling for being a bully? And Dorothea who was goodness personified, had her crime been to subject herself to a jackass like me?

We heard a faint communal moan in the distance. We struggled on, moaning in kind and beating our chests. The sounds came from inside a rocky embankment. Dorothea spotted an opening near the ground. Beast-like, propelled by instinct, we clawed our way through it.

We’d entered a room so dark it took time to realize we were surrounded by people.

“We’re contaminated,” I cried. “Stay away from us. In the space of a week we’ve become unwilling assassins.”

“As were we.” In the dim light, the man who spoke seemed to be the essence of ordinariness. His height was average. He had run-of-the-mill features and wore plain pants and a shirt. “We hadn’t meant to kill yet we had. We’d been too lazy to fetch our reading glasses and gave our parent the wrong medicine. We’d swung our bat at the ball field and shattered a bystander’s skull. We’d galloped down the subway stairs and sent a woman plummeting. Accidental or not the result was the same. There was an outcry. We were condemned. Our lives were in jeopardy. We fled here weighted by guilt. Our accusers closed in on us. Their breath scalded our backs yet we managed to evade them.” 

“And now?” Dorothea reached for my arm to steady herself.

“We’re safe from everything except our thoughts. But we practice forgiveness and mercy. It’s a slow process. We train ourselves to return to our earliest innocent state, to the time when evil was contained.” He led us down a long corridor. Messages were scrawled in blood along the walls—“Forgive me, Mama.” “Carol, I’m different now. Can you accept that?” “Sweetheart, I didn’t mean to do it.” A palpable sorrow pressed against me. I wept in response.

“Come,” the man said.

He threw open a door and we stepped into a garden rife with olive and fig trees, almonds and pomegranates, grapes that hung low on their vines. The air was heady and smelled of every kind of flower. Frogs hopped onto our feet. A small bird flew toward me. Its eyes were extraordinarily human. Its wing brushed my cheek. Other birds called to us. Dorothea and I listened and heard the words, “Repent. Rejoice. Restore your inner goodness. Begin anew.”