Certainty

3. A New Geometry

Each morning, Ansel commutes to work on his bicycle. Today, the rain is steady, clinging to the buildings, tipping down the leaves of the trees. In Vancouver, there are many varieties of rain, but the most common, he believes, is the kind that tries to convince you it isn’t there, the kind that is so thin it makes the windshield wipers squeak. He has walked for hours in this kind of rain, without an umbrella, and still emerged reasonably dry.

After years of leaving umbrellas in assorted places – buses, of course, but also elevators, take-out coffee windows, public washrooms – Gail had given up carrying them. She wore jackets with hoods, and kept her distance from small gadgets: mobile phones, Palm Pilots, USB keys. “Give me things that announce their presence,” she said. “Did you know we used to have the world’s largest hockey stick in Vancouver? It came with its own puck.” In the evenings they used to walk along False Creek, and sometimes the rain would condense over the water, fog lifting into the dark.

By 8:00 a.m., when Ansel arrives at the clinic, there are already people leaning against the entrance, waiting to be let in. He opens the door for them despite foreseeing the grumbles of the reception staff, not quite ready for the morning intake. The patients quietly descend the stairs. This morning, there’s a family with three young daughters, two yawning med students, and a middle-aged woman. The woman is pale and trembling, and Ansel stays beside her and she uses his arm as a bannister. “It’s the arthritis,” she says, not looking at him.

“Just a few more steps now.”

He takes them to the waiting room, shows the girls where the crayons and drawing paper are, then goes on to his office. He flicks the light switches as he walks, and the fluorescent lights buzz on around him, throwing down a blue shadow before settling into a wavering glow. At the end of the corridor, Ansel unlocks his office door, hangs his jacket and helmet on the coat stand, and sits down at his desk. He has a few minutes before the first patient, not quite enough time to deal with the stack of referrals, emails and lab results left over from the day before.

In Ansel’s basement office, there are three high windows, just inches above the ground outside. They frame blades of grass, dandelions in the summer, a few small stones. The light falls in three rectangular shafts along his desk. The offices have always reminded him of a warren, the hallways that merge together, leading towards a tunnel that connects to Vancouver General Hospital. He has worked here, at the provincial tuberculosis clinic, for almost five years as a clinician and researcher, and each day has a familiar routine. The first half-dozen appointments of the morning, along with files and chest X-rays, are waiting in his in-tray. There’s a photocopied abstract on the relationship between AIDS and syphilis, and, underneath, two faxes. One is from his father, about an upcoming medical conference in Chicago. The other is from the hospital in Prince George, where Gail, ill, had gone the day before she died. The hospital writes that they have concluded their review of the case and now consider the file closed. A pain branches out from behind his eyes, a dull pulsing, and he stares at the page for a moment, until the lines begin to run together. Ansel pushes the correspondence aside and opens his Thermos of coffee.

His work is a comfort to him. Even as a child, he never considered a career outside of medicine. Both of his parents were doctors, his father a heart surgeon, and his mother a GP. Night after night, his father came home at dawn, an overcoat on top of his rumpled greens. If the surgery had gone well, his father would put a record on, Ella Fitzgerald or Muddy Waters, the music rising like smoke through the house. From bed, Ansel could hear the murmur of his parents’ conversation, his father’s low voice taking pleasure in relaying the details of the surgery. Even before Ansel learned to read, his mother had taught him how to use a stethoscope, how to listen for opacities, crackles and echoes in the lungs, how to track the beating of a heart. By the time he turned four, he had practised on both his parents, as well as his older sister. He remembers warming the diaphragm between his hands then setting it against their skin, astonished each time by the familiar sound, the reliable lub dub of their hearts.

It was Ansel and not his sister, Lydia, who got to go on rounds with their father. While Lydia played guitar in her bedroom, Ansel would concentrate on his father’s rumbling voice relating Mrs. B.’s myocardial infarction followed by congestive failure and arrhythmia, elaborating on her EKG and digitalis treatment. “Are you following this, Ansel?” To which all the residents and interns would laugh. When he was twelve, he read his father’s copy of The Microbe Hunters, then he saved his allowance for a year and bought a microscope. That year, he made a list of his top one hundred scientists. The obvious ones, Galileo, Einstein, Newton. And then, depending on the month, or what he was reading, Tesla, Koch, Curie, Salk, Leeuwenhoek, Darwin and Wallace. And always Louis Pasteur.

“Ah,” his father had said once, examining the names. “The beer makers are fond of him.”

Lydia shook her head. “What is it with men and lists?”

For a time, Ansel had strayed towards cardiology, interning for half a year at St. Paul’s Hospital. In surgery, he waited while people slid away from him into the wash of anesthesia, their presence literally fading from the room. Dr. Biring, his mentor, would sing while he worked, rock ballads, folk songs, anything. The words, Biring said, were like a ladder he could climb down, and thus descend into his memory. Sometimes, in the operating room, humming along with Biring, Ansel was surprised to look up and see the patient’s face, framed by a green plastic cap. Their minds had been disconnected from the organs that he worked on. Retractors held the chest wall back, exposing the heart; every few seconds, the heart pumped out of the skin. There were tiny cameras that he could swim through a person’s body, a tool to magnify his own sight, a device to reach where his hands couldn’t.

From surgery, he went to a one-month placement in the Burn Unit. This was where he had met Gail, almost ten years ago. She was working as a reporter then, covering a crash that had happened at the airport, a Cessna that had stalled in mid-air.

He had to come out of the hospital every hour just to breathe, to escape the pain, the bodies, rotated, covered in Silvadene. It was the middle of the night, and Gail was rooted outside, along with the other journalists, waiting for a break in the story. By 4:00 a.m., she was the only one left, still sipping her coffee. “You don’t have to stay here all night, do you?”

“No.” She had smiled, embarrassed. “You must think I’m eager or something.”

“If you leave me a number, I can call you if there’s more to report.”

“Actually, I don’t have an apartment yet. I just got back to Vancouver a few days ago.”

He asked where she had been, and Gail said, “In the Arctic Circle, but only for a month. I was living in Prague before that.” When he asked what she did there, she told him, “This and that. I make radio features, soundscapes. I’m not the sharpest interviewer, but I like to listen.”

After morning sign-in, they ate breakfast in the cafeteria. Her eyes kept wandering over to a group of doctors in wrinkled greens, surgical masks dangling from their necks and covers on their shoes. She was twenty-nine, dressed in jeans and a cotton T-shirt. She leaned towards him, long dark hair falling forward, a triangle of buttered toast dangling from her fingertips, and asked him what kind of medicine he hoped to practise. He told her that, initially, he had wanted to be a surgeon.

She paused, studying him. “You don’t seem the type,” she said at last. “I picture the surgeon as someone who parachutes in, gets the job done, then waves airily as he goes home to bed. You strike me as a more long-haul kind of person.”

He laughed and cut a piece of jam from its packet. “I haven’t decided what I want to be yet. I guess I’m leaning towards internal medicine.”

He had his bicycle there, but she loaded it into the back of her van and drove him home. At his front door, she said, “You can see the hospital from your house.”

Ansel looked behind him. The Centennial Pavilion, built in the shape of a star, little windows in neat rows like a line of type, hovered over them. When he turned back, he saw that her eyes were ringed and dark. “Where are you staying?” he said.

“In my van until I find a place.”

He fumbled for the right words. “You’re welcome, if you want, to stay here.”

She laughed, suddenly hugging him. “Thanks. Maybe when we get to know each other a bit better.”

In the examining room, the family is seated, waiting for him. Two of the girls are working on crayon drawings, and the third, the youngest one, has drawn a picture of an imposing man in a white coat, stethoscope around his neck. The man has dark hair, like Ansel, and his expression is moody, sober. The figure reminds Ansel of the way he had once pictured his own father, larger than life, replete with answers.

As he enters, the family gathers around him. He seats the girls, one, two, three, on the examining table, and motions the parents to take the chairs. “Dr. Ressing,” the father says immediately, “we were on an airplane. Somebody from the health region called us. They said we had to get tested right away, the entire family.”

He tells them how a young woman on their flight had contracted tuberculosis on her travels. “You’re being screened as a preventative measure. Most people’s defences are strong enough to prevent the TB from causing disease. We’ll do a skin test on each of you, and then in three days we need you to come back for the second part of the procedure.” He tests them one at a time, starting with the father.

The youngest girl is crying and whispering, “No needles, please, no needles,” over and over, and by the time Ansel has sat down beside her, she has buried her head against her mother’s stomach. He takes her right arm and rubs a bit of alcohol on it. The mother is clucking at her, saying something in Pakistani, then smiling indulgently. She holds the girl’s arm steady, and Ansel inserts the point. The girl screams pitifully, pressing her body into her mother’s side. The fluid pools below the surface of her skin.

“That’s it.”

The girl blinks, cautiously eyeing her wound, then gazes up at him, tear trails on her cheeks. Startling everyone, she lifts her arm and grabs hold of his stethoscope. He is yanked forward.

Her parents exclaim in surprise, shaking their heads, apologizing, but Ansel doesn’t move. He is nose to nose with the little girl. “Will you let me have your drawing?” he asks, pointing at the sheet of paper in her hand. She agrees to the trade.

He fits the earpieces on her ears, pushes his lab coat aside and sets the stethoscope against his chest.

After that first meeting in the hospital, he had sought her out, calling the telephone number she had given him, the number at her parents’ house. On his days off, he accompanied Gail as she travelled the city, interviewing people for her work at CBC-Radio. She had begun working on a piece about memorials. She had been introduced to a thirty-year-old man whose fiancée had died eight years ago. In the first year after her death, he had poured his grief and loss into his garden. As the years passed, the garden had become a memorial to her, and a permanent part of his life. “This is the blue season,” he told them. He wore a microphone affixed to a coat hanger that Gail had widened, then placed around his neck. The contraption rested firmly on his chest. A trick she had learned, she told him, from a producer in Prague, in the hope that the microphone would be forgotten by the speaker. It would became a part of his or her own body.

Ansel, who knew nothing about plants, looked around. Blue flowers, blue blossoms in all shapes and sizes. Delphiniums, bellflowers. There was a ghostly sadness to it. Latin names spilled off the tongue of the young man.

Gail was wearing a blue skirt and top, and she merged seamlessly into the palette of the garden. Her hair hung loose, reaching the small of her back, and a woven hat shaded her face from the sun. She held the young man’s gaze as he spoke, adjusting the recording levels with her right hand. A thin line of wire ran between them, from the microphone to the recorder, and then to the headphones that Gail wore. Watching her, it had seemed to Ansel as if he stood at the edge of a doorway. The world that she inhabited was full of stories, of questions. That expression, her face relaxed, yet held in concentration as she listened, is the one that remains with him now.

“This one is my favourite, and the one I’ve grown the most,” the young man told Gail. The flower was sky blue with a creamy yellow eye. He extended his hand as if presenting something. “A large slope of them, beginning somehow at waist level, trembling in the wind, would be quite a statement.”

The next day, she visited a woman who balanced stones, one on top of the other, in her garden, an imitation of the inukshuk scattered on the shores of English Bay. The Inuit word inukshuk, Gail told Ansel over dinner, means “likeness of a person.” The direction of a leg or an arm may be used for navigation, or might signal the presence of fish in a nearby lake. The middle-aged woman, an immigrant from Scotland, had lost her twin sister to cancer. She said that she balanced the stones on hot summer days when she and her four children sat in the backyard. They had seen these structures while walking around Stanley Park, and the image had stayed in their minds.

While Ansel sat in the living room copying out his rotation notes, Gail played him parts of the interview. She told him that Inuit tradition forbids the destruction of an inukshuk. The woman said, “I suppose the wind and rain will take them down one day. But there’s a tradition that says dismantling them would be a desecration. And I understand that.” She paused and then said, barely audibly, “Yes, a desecration. I saw it that way. Even though I knew, my sister knew, it would happen one day.”

Gail was sitting cross-legged on the floor. “I have all these outtakes,” she told him. “These reels and reels. Just tapes of people talking, but I can’t throw them away. Sometimes, people remember things they haven’t thought about in years, a private memory, a story. You know that feeling when you’re moving house, going through boxes, and you find something unexpected? That’s what I feel is happening to them. Inside their minds, they open the box, and there it is right in front of them, almost as if they’re seeing it for the first time.”

He told her that memory is a tricky thing. “Sometimes, we forget, because the right cues, a word, a face, never arise. Until someone reminds us, we forget that the box is there. Sometimes there’s disassociation. The memories splinter into different worlds.”

“It’s Nietzsche. The ability to forget is what brings us peace.”

“He was on to something in a biochemical way, too. If there’s a trauma, or a difficult memory, sometimes that severs the links. The memories themselves don’t disappear, but you can’t find your way back to them, because the glue that connects the different streams is somehow dissolved. That’s the idea, anyway.”

“And can you tell me, dear doctor, where I go after I die, or when the world ends, and if there’s a magnanimous god in the heavens? Or, more pressingly, why giraffes don’t faint when they lower their heads to the ground?”

“Ah, let me see. I’m sure that’s in my notes somewhere.”

When she came down with the flu, he moved her out of her van and into the house. Set her up like a hospital patient. Brought meals to her three times a day. She demanded a bedpan. He ignored her and took her vital signs, writing them down on a notepad that he kept at her bedside, on top of a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. At night, lying in bed, he read aloud to her, beginning with his favourite section on the oblivious Rain God, the miserable truck driver adored by clouds everywhere.

“You nutter,” she said, drowsily, her words slurring into his pillow. “Why don’t you find some healthy people to hang out with?”

He began to yearn for winter. At the first frost, she had said, she would move out of her van and into his apartment.

If he could have seen into the future, he would not have believed the affair possible. And yet it had happened, one year ago now, the relationship brief, intense. On the night he told Gail, she had stood with her back to him, as if to separate the image of him from the words she was hearing. In the days that followed, she did not go up to the bedroom. Instead, she slept in her office downstairs, some nights leaving the house entirely, taking the car, disappearing. He listened to the sound of the door closing, tires on the gravel. Those nights are still vivid, a rift, a heartbreak, dismantling everything that had come before. But settling them, finally, on a different ground.

Even before she caught her flight to Prince George, she had been fatigued, coughing. He no longer tries to push these thoughts away. She had picked up a cold, a virus, that persisted. He had wanted her to cancel the trip, to stay with him, but she said that this interview with Nathan Sullivan, Kathleen’s older brother, was necessary. His words were the last remaining piece. Nathan would be in the country for only a few days, and she might not have the chance again.

On the phone from Prince George, she told him that she had woken two days ago with a tightness in her chest. When, that morning, even breathing had become painful, she had gone to the hospital. The emergency room physician had diagnosed pneumonia and prescribed antibiotics.

He had wanted to drop everything and go to her. Her voice remains in his memory, surprised. Moved by his concern. “It’s just a glorified cold,” she had said, laughing. “Stop fussing.” She said that she would sleep the illness off, and tomorrow evening she would catch her flight home, as scheduled. But he had persuaded her otherwise, telling her that she should stay there until she was fully recovered.

The pace at which Gail disappears from his life has slowed, a loss that is spread out over time, bits and pieces that break down and gradually disintegrate. He recalls mornings when, waking first, he would see the room take shape around him and turn to find her curled away, her hair sweeping up across the pillows, away from her neck. He would place his lips there, her skin smelling of the sheets, of warmth.

Every Sunday, he drives to the cemetery. Often, he sees Clara. On his most recent visit, he had lain his own small offering down, then he had taken a cloth and cleaned the dirt and grass from the marker. He told her passing things, the grocery list, jokes, ramblings. Quotidian details that they have always shared. He heard her voice, Did you sleep well?, Did you dream?, What shall we do today?, And then, my love, what then?

At 10:30, Ansel has an appointment with a new patient, Alistair Cameron. A nurse at the AIDS outreach clinic has referred him here. According to the file, he has already been hit three times with pneumonia, once with Kaposi’s and once with CMV retinitis. “Symptoms suggestive of TB infection. No previous BCG vaccination.” Ansel reads the history closely, seeing an immune-compromised patient with probable tuberculosis, a diagnosis that he has no wish to give.

Thirty minutes go by and Alistair Cameron does not arrive.

Sitting in his office, he turns to the cassette player he keeps beside his desk. After a moment, he picks up the headphones and slides them on. He rests one finger on the controls, hesitating, but he cannot help himself. All he wants is to hear her voice. He hits Play, and a young man begins to speak, reading from the letters of Franz Kafka. “I shall never get well again. Just because what we are dealing with here is not tuberculosis that can be nursed back to health in a sanatorium deckchair but a weapon that remains indispensable as long as I live. It and I cannot go on living together – or apart from each other.”

A slight pause, then a voice reading from a “Dispensary Instruction Sheet,” an artifact from the 1930s. “No fondling or kissing of other members of the family, particularly not of children. Married Partners to sleep in separate beds preferably separated by a partition. Most important: Family members must immediately notify the dispensary of the death of the patient.”

“The history of tuberculosis, the white death, is deeply embedded in the history of the modern world.” Gail’s radio voice is much the same as her usual voice. Only here the pauses are more deliberate, her tone intimate. “Influenza, the Black Plague, syphilis and AIDS – these diseases, like tuberculosis, have their own personalities in much the same way that nations have historic periods. Tuberculosis rose with the Industrial Revolution, in a time of poverty and cramped living conditions, among the child labourers of the nineteenth century and in the inhabitants of bohemia on the Left Bank. It came to prominence again between the two world wars, and reappears now in developing nations and in the urban ghettoes of North America. Tuberculosis, as the saying goes, is the perfect expression of an imperfect civilization.”

A year after they met, Gail had begun working on this documentary. Since its completion, he has kept a copy in his office, lending it to students, colleagues or interested patients. Now, occasionally, he plays it to hear her voice, preserved and distinct, as if she is in the room there with him. He closes his eyes, bows his head under the weight of the headphones, and the sound runs over him.

Canned music starts up, and then a man’s voice reminiscent of the late 1950s. “The beginning of the end came in 1943, when Selman Abraham Waksman observed that certain bacteria and micro-organisms in the soil could inhibit others. These inhibitors made use of certain chemical substances, known to us now as antibiotics.” The commentator goes on to describe the case of Patricia S., a twenty-one-year-old woman in the terminal stages of pulmonary and disseminated tb. “She responded to Waksman’s inhibitor at once. Like a fairy tale, she got up and left the hospital, completely cured.”

The music slides to silence, and Gail’s voice returns to the forefront. “The tuberculosis bacillus, discovered by Robert Koch in 1882, became famous to doctors and even the general public. A slender, elegantly curved rod, so small that a dozen or more could fit inside a medium-sized tissue cell.”

“My name is John de Vreede. I’m the director of New York City Tuberculosis Control. On August 30, 1991, the United States Centre for Disease Control reported four small outbreaks of tuberculosis. Three of the outbreaks occurred here, in New York City. Almost all the patients were HIV-positive, drug users or alcoholics. We knew, at that time, that there were as many as seven million cases in the developing world. But here in America, tuberculosis, consumption – in the public perception this disease was gone. Eradicated. It was a character in a folk memory.”

When they first met, Gail had been using a portable DAT machine. Interviewing Ansel for this piece, she had listened to his voice using a set of headphones, saying that his voice was being funnelled directly into her ears, through the canals of her brain, woven into her thoughts forever.

“Dr. Ressing.”

“To counter the possibility of drug resistance, we now treat each patient with four different drugs: isoniazad, rifampicin, pyrazinamide and ethambutol. If they don’t respond, if they are multi-drug resistant, then we have nothing. No medical treatment for the disease. We’re back to the eighteen hundreds.”

Ansel has his eyes open, but he can see Gail listening. He can see her glancing down at her notes, at the needle on the recorder. There was something in her manner that Ansel recognized early on, something that others were always drawn to in her. You believed you could trust her – whatever you said, whatever you confided – that she would hold that trust as something sacred.

The intercom buzzes, startling him. When he touches the button, Pauline’s voice comes through in a crackle of static. “Your 10:30 just checked in. Room Three.”

He thanks her, then stands, shrugging on his lab coat. He starts down the corridor, the file flipped open, reading as he goes.

Inside the room, a young man sits on the examining table. He is wearing a frayed windbreaker over a thin T-shirt and jeans. There is a ball cap in his right hand. His face has the inquisitiveness of a young boy, though he is pale and clearly ill. “Hi, Alistair, I’m Dr. Ressing.”

“Al is okay.”

“Call me Ansel.”

“You look young, Doctor, if you don’t mind me saying it.”

“Thirty-eight.” Ansel opens the file and looks at it again. “We were born in the same year.”

Alistair Cameron nods. “The similarities end there, I think.”

“You’re from Alaska?”

“Juneau. And you?”

“Vancouver.”

“Lucky you.”

Ansel wheels a chair out and sits across from Al Cameron. He orders his thoughts, unclips the pen from his lab coat, and begins to take a case history. Born in 1961, parents came up from Nebraska. High school education. Came to Vancouver when he was thirty-six. HIV positive for three years. Full blown AIDS since last September. His only family is a younger sister who lives in Victoria. Al spills it out like something memorized a long time ago. “There it is,” he says, shrugging. He lifts his right hand and turns it over as if looking for dust. “This time? Tuberculosis, hopefully not drug-resistant. Picked up in one of the shelters probably. It travels through the air, could be dangerous for someone like me.” He pauses and touches the side of his neck. “Lymph nodes swollen and sore. Definitely a bad sign.”

Ansel places his hand against the man’s neck. He does a thorough physical. Febrile to 103, and his pulse is high. Through his stethoscope, Ansel can hear the faintest of crackles in the upper part of the left lung. He does the tuberculin test, and Alistair looks away as the liquid is injected just below the surface of the skin. A reaction develops almost immediately.

“It takes two or three days to be sure of the results. There might be some swelling or itching, but try to leave it alone.” He looks down at the chart, to the notes he has made. He has seen so many young men and women like Alistair, who have come to him at the end of their lives. For a moment, Gail is standing beside him, she is resting her head against his arm. “I’m going to admit you,” he says.

Al lifts his shoulders, then lets them fall. “I figured you might.”

Ansel walks him to his office, then takes the paperwork over to Pauline. He orders a chest X-ray and a blood test, and Pauline phones over for a bed.

He returns to the office with two mugs of coffee. Al is sitting at his desk, facing the computer screen. He is peering at Ansel’s photograph of Gail.

“Your girlfriend?”

Ansel nods.

Al sets the photo back down on the desk. “This morning, instead of coming here, I walked over to Trout Lake. You know where that is?”

Ansel nods at the picture. “Gail is a runner.” He catches himself, but then he continues anyway. “Sometimes she goes there. It’s only a few kilometres from our house.”

“A lake in the middle of the city. Families and kids playing in the water. Lots of people running on the trails. Maybe I’ve even seen your girlfriend. And then me, just sitting on the sand like I own the place. Someone was playing the cello.” He laughs and shakes his head. “There was no way I was going to get up, leave that behind, and come here.”

“I’m glad you came.”

“Well. It started to rain.”

The bed comes through in half an hour. Ansel drops what he’s doing and goes to find Al Cameron, who is making his way through a stack of magazines in the waiting room. Together they walk through the underground corridors towards the hospital reception.

Al trails his hand along the wall as he walks. “What next, then?”

“If it is tb, we’ll get you started on a course of drugs. It’s difficult, because we don’t want to interfere with the meds you’re currently on. If it’s not tb, then it’s something else. You’ve got some time with the radiologist this afternoon. We’ll see.”

Al pats his pocket. “Thank God for health coverage,” he says. “There are thousands of dollars of good drugs pouring through this body.”

At noon, Ansel goes outside and stands on the front steps of the clinic. Beside him, there’s a young man and woman, cigarettes moving from hand to mouth in a circling, fluid gesture. The man breathes out rings of smoke, small and perfect, expanding as they float away from him. The woman smiles. “What luck,” she says, leaning her head against him. He puts his arm tenderly around her waist.

The nerves around Ansel’s eyes begin to tense, and he finds that he has to look away. Lately, all displays of affection have caused this response in him, whether between lovers, between parents and children, or children and grandparents.

Neither he nor Gail had wanted to hang up the phone, and so they continued talking, though her voice seemed to fade in and out, a thread he kept losing.

In a dream that recurs, Ansel catches a plane that night, he arrives in time.

He knows it is impossible, irrational, but he is lifted away from the present, set down in a different timeline. The details of their lives, all the habitual acts, the cherished conversations, continue to accumulate, day after day, into the future.

By the time he arrived in Prince George with Gail’s parents, it was too late to change what had occurred. When he closes his eyes, the city, her body, is blocked out, he turns his memory away from the room in the hospital basement where they’d brought him and Gail’s parents. Instead, he is in the airplane, flying over the Cascade Mountains, looking down on the snow and fog. When the mountains fall away, highways emerge, thin lines moving across the land, unravelling from the towns.

Everything after, the funeral, the interment, blurs into a single moment. He has gone on, returning to work, doing all that is required of him. One part of him moves ahead, the other is lost, and each passing day widens this breach, a knife edge in his body.

He has copies of the coroner’s findings, the radiology report, EKG charts, the hospital records. She had contracted a bacterial infection, a sudden devastating pneumonia. This, the coroner believed, had depleted the oxygen in her bloodstream, triggering a stroke. The paramedics had said that she was peaceful, there was no sign of pain. Night after night, he studies the test results, trying to find the gaps, the detail that might have saved her. He suspects an underlying medical condition, one that would have made her more susceptible, cardiomyopathy or channelopathy, undiagnosed. The charts and details hold a power over him, as if they will shed light not only on her illness but on Gail herself, who she was, everything she once hoped for, what she believed at the end. He has written to the hospital, met with the attending physician, tried to draw a line from the hour she died, back through the night, to the previous day. Lives change in an instant, he knows this. He knows one can never be prepared. But his desire to make sense of her death will not subside. If she had not been released from the hospital, if he had gone to her, if the diary had never fallen into her hands, if someone had found her sooner, if it had not been winter. At night, the avalanche of possibilities comes to him, a weight collapsing against his body, he cannot breathe, cannot weep for all the exits he seeks to find.

After he closes his files that afternoon, he bicycles home. Clouds have moved in, and the rain, hesitant at first, quickly loses its inhibitions and becomes a downpour. He stops briefly at the side of the bike path and switches his generator on. When he begins pedalling, the sound of the machine washes out behind him and his headlight beams into the rain. He and Gail had come across this generator at the secondhand cycle shop on Dunbar Street, attached to an inexpensive bike. She had waxed poetic on the bicycles of Prague and Amsterdam, on the cleverness of using kinetic energy to power headlights, and the wastefulness of batteries. Ansel had buckled under the eloquence of her argument, or so he told her, and shelled out ten bucks for the old wreck that the generator was attached to. They had ridden it home, Gail perched on the back of the bicycle. She had been belting out a song while he pedalled. What song? U2, “Beautiful Day.” Tone deaf, as usual. Afterwards, on the front lawn, they had surgically removed the generator and attached the wires to his own bicycle. Voilà, a bit of Amsterdam in Vancouver.

The bicycle ride home is what saves him. A decade of the same route, down Heather Street, his body swaying past the roundabouts, down the sloping hill to the sea. Even the cars seem to scatter around him.

On Keefer Street, the lights from Chinatown shine a red and yellow river across the wet pavement. Rivulets soak into his shoes, and he feels as if his ankles are underwater. He continues on, past the line of seniors’ homes, towards the high roofs of Strathcona.

When he arrives home, he carries his bicycle up the front stairs. The house is quiet, and it smells of old coffee. Inside the house, Ansel peels off his wet clothes and steps into the shower. The steam hits his lungs and his body fills with warmth.

Gail has her hand on the small of his back. She says, “Pull yourself together, Ans.” He lifts his face towards the streaming water, and she circles her arms around his waist.

“With the kind of day I’ve had?”

She laughs. “You’ll have to prescribe your own drug regimen.”

The air is all fog and heat. She says, “I spent the day in my pyjamas. Reading. Mainlining coffee. Listening to music.”

“There was a man my age. He’s coming to the end.”

After he turns the shower off, he remains standing there, watching the steam whirling up into the overhead fan.

In the living room he puts on a CD, a bluegrass compilation she brought home one day and then played incessantly. Gail, the sous-chef: “My one talent,” she says. “I can chop onions without shedding a tear.” Ansel views cooking as a kind of construction game, a sort of Lego with food. A casserole built floor by floor, a skylight of potatoes. Six months later, he has not got himself out of the habit of cooking for two. To compensate, he now cooks every other day; slow, elaborate meals. The sun goes down as he whips up the potatoes, dices the onions and leeks.

By the time everything is ready, the rain has stopped, so he carries his dinner out onto the front porch. The sky above is a soothing light, warm colours crowding the horizon. Ansel can see Ed Carney sitting on his porch, and he lifts his hand in greeting. Watching Ed stand up, take the steps one at time and hobble down the sidewalk towards him, is like watching bread rise. So Ansel goes into the house, gets a second helping of casserole for his friend, and another glass of wine, and by the time he returns with a tray, Ed has reached his front yard.

Ed makes himself comfortable, and the two sit eating quietly while the occasional car grumbles by along Keefer.

Ed describes the coyote he saw earlier, sprinting down the middle of the street. Across the road, Mrs. Cho is visible in her window, reading the newspaper. She looks up and sees them sitting there, beams a smile to them, then closes the blinds.

To Ansel, Ed still has the build of a mailman, lean and reedy, with eyes that have a tendency to mist up as he loses himself in one train of thought or another. He retired just a year ago, after forty years at Canada Post. Because Gail used to work at home, she would stop by his house during the day for coffee and conversation. She told Ansel once that Ed spent the day making pinhole cameras, reading Nature, and writing letters to his grandchildren about the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace. He told his grandchildren that evolution was still the defining idea of modern times, just as it had been when he was a child. “Stem cells, Dolly, robotics, theories of everything, he and Darwin are the bedrock,” he said. “And to think people still refuse to teach him. It’s downright madness.” In the evenings, the three of them used to while away the hours while Ed peppered them with snippets of esoterica. Mathematical equations for the distribution of seeds on a sunflower head, and so on.

This evening, he has launched into a story about the first open heart transplant. Hamilton Naki was a gardener, Ed tells Ansel. As a young man, he had apprenticed to a doctor at the University of Cape Town who needed help with his laboratory animals. It was 1950s South Africa, so Naki, who was black, kept his designation as gardener, even while he was learning to transplant organs in animals. “He worked on giraffes,” Ed says. “Imagine that. What kind of operating table would you use? And in what room?”

“You have to operate when they’re standing upright,” Ansel says. “Giraffes have high blood pressure, so it’s best if they don’t lie down. So, no operating table. Just a scaffold.”

Ed nods, pleased. “When Barnaard performed his famous surgery,” he continues, “Naki was the man who led the first team, the one that removed the heart from a twenty-five-year-old donor, a woman who had been hit by a car. She had stopped to buy a cake. It’s sadder than a Raymond Carver story.” It was 1967, and Naki’s contribution was carefully hidden. Naki was at the press conference announcing the success of the surgery, but identified himself as a gardener who worked at the research institute. “Until this year,” Ed says, “no one knew. Not even his neighbours. He retired with a gardener’s pension.”

They both shake their heads in wonder. Ansel remembers the first time he saw an exposed heart pumping. The way it leapt out of the cavity had shocked him, made him put his gloved hand to his own chest.

“Which part of this man’s life was fiction?” Ed is saying.

“For him, none of it. Which means, I suppose, it depends on where you’re standing.”

Ed sets his plate down on the floor. “If you’re in an airplane,” he says, “a cloud ten feet away looks just the same as one ten thousand feet away. Clouds, they’re every bit as fractal as broccoli or cauliflower. A very small part of a cloud, the way it looks up close, is the same shape as one in its entirety.”

Ansel smiles. “Does that console you, Ed?”

“You know, the strange thing is, sometimes it really does.”

“Because of the pattern?”

Ed shakes his head.

“Because it’s mysterious?”

He takes a sip of wine, then slowly twirls the glass by its stem. “That’s part of it. We’re here for just a speck of time, and my greatest regret is that I don’t know more. I’m like those sci-fi kids that want to peer into the future. Just let me read ahead a bit. Let me stay up another hour, flashlight under the covers. That’s my comfort.”

When the rain starts again, they’re on to the second bottle of wine. “Ed,” Ansel says, “what kind of rain would you say this is?”

Ed peers into the night. “It’s like water out of a salad spinner.”

“Who invented the salad spinner?”

He shakes his head, laughing. “Can’t say, can’t say.”

Ansel can hear a siren coming down Hastings Street, and a short while later, several more. The sound is carried away, into the night. Ed says, “People told me I should start again after Patricia died. They said the house was too big for an old man, too many things to remind me.”

Ansel listens in silence, watching the glimmering light of a plane up above, disappearing as the clouds sweep slowly across it. Behind them, music from the CD player drifts out of the house. Their home is still very much how she left it. Her clothes, her belongings. All the rolls of reel-to-reel, the DAT and Mini Discs. Touch a button, and her voice fills the room.

“I’ve got a picture of you two sitting right here,” Ed says. He takes a sip of wine, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

Ansel’s favourite song is playing on the CD now. Dom Turner’s “Down by the Riverbed.” He can hear the accordion and harmonica, the bluesy guitar.

Gail is singing, “I’ve got a case of Anselitis.” She has a glass of wine in her right hand, and she’s swaying down the front steps.

“I’ve thought about leaving, too, Ed. But everything I have is in this house.”

“She was young. Thirty-nine is young.” Ed’s eyes are red and watery. “What am I saying? Seventy is young.”

In the months after Patricia died, before Scott Carney moved back into the house to be with his father, Gail used to pack a dinner for Ed and walk it over to him. Ansel could see her from this very chair, standing in the doorway. Ed Carney talking her ear off about fertility clinics, or a new super skin being developed by the U.S. Army, about Marconi and the telegraph: “The man that signalled the death of the carrier pigeon.” He filled his mind with so much in order to keep it aloft, like a balloon setting sail from the grief in his body.

“I don’t need to think up ideas for radio projects,” Gail had said, part-laughing, part-crying, when she came home again. “I have an Ed.”

Now, Ed pushes himself up to standing. He looks across the street to his own house, where the front light burns in the dark. “She was like a daughter to me. And my boy, Scott, he thought of her as family, too. The way they laughed together, the way they argued. He was always trying to pitch ideas to her. He finally got to her with that coded diary; it was just the type of thing that would spark her imagination.”

“Ed,” Ansel says. When he looks up at his friend, the stars seem to blur behind the clouds. “Do you think there’s a biological purpose to grieving? An evolutionary purpose.”

Ed puts his hands in his pockets. “I guess it’s to keep us alive somehow.”

Ansel looks at him expectantly.

“Grief is the time when you ask all the questions. If you don’t find some way to answer them, you won’t go on living. You won’t think about having children. Maybe it’s an evolutionary imperative to find a way to accept death, your own and others. We forget that it’s a possibility. People die and we’re surprised. It always seems so unlikely. That’s a trick of the mind.” He pauses, and then looks back towards his house. “It’s like what you were saying about perspective. From far away, I can accept everything. I can see the things that repeat themselves, the patterns and so on. I accept that the universe is thirteen billion years old. But up close, right here, is where you feel pain, grief. Right here, there are some things that I can never be at peace with.” He shakes his head. “What helps me is when I fall asleep and dream of her, dream of my Patricia, and she says, There’s nothing to worry about. Relax. Let it go.” He shakes his head. “But that doesn’t happen nearly enough, not enough at all.”

That night, Ansel wakes up in the dark, the covers off him, a street lamp pouring light into the room. He says her name, but the word that remains in the air is a sound, a word that is beginning to lose its meaning, because it receives no answer.

Downstairs, he puts the kettle on. Sleeping, he thinks, is over for Ansel Ressing. This is a new era. Last week, he had gone walking each night, crossing the invisible boundary between Strathcona and the Downtown Eastside, walking to Main and Hastings, where crowds of people were still awake, milling about. The crowds made him think of Gail’s description of the Arctic in the winter, people living their waking lives in the dark.

Tonight, he takes his glass of tea and goes into Gail’s office. He turns the lights on and then dims them, because she says, authoritatively, “You can’t hear as well when the lights are bright.”

All her equipment is here, everything dusty. There is a shelf crammed with reels of tape, grease pencils, razor blades and splicing tape. What is he ever going to do with all of this? The CBC has already collected and archived some of her work, but the rest – features and documentaries, unfinished fragments, all the scattered interviews and soundscapes that she always thought she’d organize – remains here.

He turns on her computer and waits while the icons flash up one by one. When the screen settles, he opens the sound-editing program, moves the cursor through the files and chooses one at random. A slightly accented voice comes up from the console: Harry Jaarsma’s. “Cryptography is a kind of protection. Think of the Sullivan diary as a message from the past, but one that has been buried beneath many layers.

“Every language leaves its own unique footprint. Cryptography, you know, is a complicated profession. You are given something in code, someone says, ‘Break this,’ and then it becomes a game, a chase. Of course, you assume that there is something to be pursued, some meaning to be unravelled. It is exactly the kind of thing that can destroy a person. It is like a scent it is so strong, but there is no physical proof of it. What if you cannot, despite all efforts, find the way in? We have a saying in Dutch. I hear the bell toll, but I know not where the hands of the clock lie.”

The fragment of interview ends, the sound waves on the screen become a straight line, and the room falls quiet.

Outside the house, Ansel can hear people walking by, a man and a woman speaking in jocular, teasing voices. It is late, a quarter after three. He clicks on the icon for Gail’s inbox, and the email program opens up onto the screen.

Even now, all these months later, new correspondence occasionally arrives for her – queries from overseas, notes from people she has worked with or interviewed. He opens an email from Harry Jaarsma, one that he has read before. I know of course that you’re gone, but your account is still open. These emails don’t bounce back. I miss you in very many small ways. This email is accompanied by a series of JPEGs, magnified images of the Mandelbrot Set. Before she saw these images, Gail said, she had never been able to picture the idea of infinity.

The pictures open up slowly, each one magnifying a small part of the preceding image. The shapes remain elusively familiar, scorpion tails and chains of spirals, evolving across generations.

One of the new messages catches Ansel’s eye. He opens it without thinking.

Lieve Gail, I haven’t heard from you in many months. I hope all is well. I have been thinking about you. Do write soon. Yours, Sipke.

The name is familiar, but in his fatigue, he cannot place it. Ansel writes back, telling him that he is sorry. He gives him, as briefly as possible, the details of what has happened.

He hits Send and leans back, closing his eyes.

Gail says, “In radio, sounds might be translated into microwave signals and then shot at a satellite floating in space. People say it’s like shooting the eye out of a squirrel from a ten-mile range.” She laughs, wrinkling her eyes as if she is picturing that very image. “These signals are then broadcast back to us, but some parts always escape. Some parts turn their back on the Earth, and maybe they keep travelling forever.”

His affair with Mariana happened last summer, when Gail’s work had taken her to Toronto. One night after working the evening shift at the clinic, he and Mariana had gone out for a drink. They were surrounded by a group of people, other doctors and friends, and then, a short time later, he looked up to find that everyone else had gone home. Yet he and Mariana had lingered on.

She was a respirologist, and was at the clinic covering for another doctor who was on leave. He found himself drawn to the way she sat at a table, legs crossed, chin resting on her hands. She was warm and serious and she was married, so, at first, he believed that there was no risk, no potential for the affair that later occurred. His own feelings he had dismissed as harmless, unremarkable.

The bar grew noisy, and they moved to a corner table. She said that her father had been a doctor, too, and she had never doubted that she, herself, would study medicine. Yet the more time passed, the more she had second thoughts. It was a career that set one apart, she said, made one solitary in ways she would not have chosen. Each encounter was so intimate, and yet professional. Always, doctors had to close a part of themselves off, from their patients, from their loved ones.

At some point, he had taken her hand and leaned across to kiss her. For a single, brief second, she pulled back, and then she did not. He remembered, still, the taste of her lips, of citrus, of the bitterness of the wine. She said that her husband and son were away on a camping trip. They left the bar and wandered out into the warm summer night. There were streams of traffic moving down Cambie Street, people flowing out of the local cinema, into coffee shops and bars. He and Mariana were holding hands, and they turned into a quiet residential street towards her home. He remembers all this now as if he is recalling the details of someone else’s life, once told to him.

Sometimes, the things that should be difficult occur so easily, to undress someone else, to put your lips to theirs, to breathe in the scent of their skin and forget what came before. He can pinpoint this moment, isolate, study every detail. The second before he leaned across the table to kiss her, the second before his hand reached out, taking hers.

Mariana unlocked the door to her house. She switched all the lights on as they went, and his eyes half-closed against the brightness. The layout was familiar to him from some childhood remembrance, the hallway leading from the living room, past the kitchen, the thick carpet beneath his feet. There had been a birthday recently, and cards were displayed on the coffee table. Framed photographs hung neatly on the walls. They passed the open door of the child’s room, a lone airplane suspended from the ceiling.

In the afternoons that followed, he and Mariana had walked the three blocks from the clinic to her house. They would let themselves in and walk through the quiet rooms. Lying beside her, he told himself he had crossed into a different country, another place, separate from his relationship with Gail. As if the affair was an event happening to him, as if every moment were not a choice, deliberated over, settled on.

Once, in his office at work, Mariana had set a scan against the light box showing him the clouding of a patient’s lungs. She had described the patient’s history and present condition. While she spoke, Ansel wondered what would happen now a device had been invented that, with the use of light, allowed one to see through the human body. He knew the shape and weight of a heart, the density of a human rib, the mysterious and beautiful branching of the ventricles. He knew that at a time of grief, the body was flooded with chemicals, and these chemicals were the groundwork for the emotions that people felt, responses mapped in the body like ink flooding the bloodstream. Mariana had told him once that there was a time when they might have found happiness together but that perhaps the moment had already passed. By the time they met, they had moved on to other possibilities, they had begun to live out other lives. We always choose in blindness, she said. We always choose looking backwards.

As the weeks passed, his life seemed to split in two, the affair that he had begun, and his relationship with Gail, whom he loved. Two parts that could not touch, because they told something very different about the man he was and the person that he wished to be. In September, he had ended the affair and told Gail everything. She had listened in silence, then she tried to escape him, agitated, going from room to room. He followed after her, terrified that if he closed his eyes, she would disappear. Her pain is still vivid to him, the lines on her face. What did he want from her? she had asked. What did he want her to say?

He wanted her to be angry with him, to accuse him. To tell him why she found it so easy to leave for months at a time, to commit herself so wholeheartedly to her work. To admit the truth to herself if she had now, finally, fallen out of love with him.

She was incensed. How dare he turn the blame around? Her anger seemed to shimmer around them, and then it simply dissolved, evaporating into the air. Her acceptance was, to him, worse than any other response. She said she felt as if they had been struggling for so long, and now they had finally reached the end.

In that moment, so much between them was clear, all the barriers and edges, the failure to grasp something unnamed that they both wanted. They saw that they could step back, lower their hands, let this something fall.

He told her that he wanted to continue on, to try to find a way from this place. But their days and nights entered a kind of limbo. They existed in the house, side by side, the ritual of their years together shielding them from a growing distance. Several weeks later, on Gail’s thirty-ninth birthday, they had walked together along the creek. On the water, white sails opened like handkerchiefs.

“Are you happy, Ans?”

Gail had asked him this out of the blue, her gaze turned away from him so that he could not see her eyes.

Yes, he told her. This was where he wanted to be. But her hurt was visible, almost a pallor on her skin. He felt he could not reach her, as if some part of her, below the surface, had turned irrevocably away from him.

Late in the fall, Gail went to Amsterdam to see Harry Jaarsma. When she returned, she was full of life, impassioned. She seemed to want change, within herself, between them, and she believed all things were possible. She said that the past is not static, our memories fold and bend, we change with every step taken into the future. As the weeks passed, they had found a way to begin again. In February, she had gone to Prince George.

There is so much that he yearns to remember – everything that she ever said to him, the way she walked, her face when she woke, her singing voice.

He is still sitting at the computer, dawn beginning to move in through the windows, when the response comes back.

How? Sipke Vermeulen has written. How could something like this happen?

He had forgotten the name, but he remembers now that Gail had met Sipke Vermeulen when she went to the Netherlands that last fall. He had known her parents, after the war. She told him about a place where they had gone, an island that was now a part of the continent, a place she would one day return to, with Ansel. For a long time he sits in front of the screen, hands resting on the keyboard. But he does not know how to answer. Eventually, he closes the window and shuts the computer down.

Outside, he hears voices again. People who cannot go home, who haunt the streets of the Downtown Eastside.

She says, “Come to bed, Ans. My feet are cold.”

“Yes,” he answers. “Gail.”

And when he closes his eyes and finds her, she rests her feet against his calves. He holds on to her, and the heat of both their bodies realigns, and comes to an equilibrium.

The next day, Ansel wakes up, his throat dry and his mind clear. He’s overslept. He knows this by the amount of sunshine coming into the room. Downstairs, someone is singing. The CD that he put on last night is still going, looping endlessly on itself.

He stumbles into the bathroom, throws cold water on his face and pats his hair down. He looks longingly at the coffee pot, but there isn’t enough time. In five minutes, he’s out the door and circling False Creek. Little birds fleck the water and boats are moored in the August sunshine. He doesn’t recognize any of the commuters. This is the 9:00 a.m. set, somewhat more laid back. They wear wraparound sunglasses. He pedals fast, speeds around the blind corners, hearing the lap of water on the moorings.

At the clinic, Pauline hands him a sheaf of papers. “Your first appointment never showed. But Alistair Cameron has results.” She shrugs. “It feels like chaos, but it isn’t. It’s a state of being, really.”

Alone, in his office, Ansel reads the radiology report on Al Cameron. The X-rays confirm active pulmonary tuberculosis.

His eyes are drawn to the photograph that Al had noticed the day before, and he reaches across the desk, picks up the frame. She had been home from Amsterdam for only a week by then, and they had decided to travel to the southwest coast of Vancouver Island to see friends. On the morning he’d taken this photograph, they had walked along the shore of the Pacific Ocean, stopping to explore the tide pools, to admire red starfish and tightly wound snails. Gail is wearing jeans and a windbreaker, and her hair, now shoulder length, blows lightly around her face. He remembers standing on the rocks, framing her in the camera’s lens, the gentleness of her expression when she looked up to see him.

He has often wondered what dreams she had, if any, what last image accompanied her at the end, away from life, away from consciousness. When he tries to imagine that passage, the ground gives way, he falls with her.

Before he goes home that afternoon, Ansel stops at the ward to pay Al Cameron a visit.

He is lying in bed, IV tubes feeding his veins. His green-stockinged feet poke out from the hospital blankets and his eyes appear listless.

Ansel stands at his bedside reading the chart for several minutes before either man speaks.

“Streptomycin is out.”

“Yes, in your case, streptomycin is out.”

“What have you got for me then?”

“I don’t know, Al. Let’s wait for the tests to come back.”

“tb is consumption, right?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s an old disease. Strange to think of yourself as a modern person saddled with an old disease.”

Ansel tries to remember the exact lines from Gail’s documentary. Kafka, diagnosed with consumption, had imagined a dialogue between his brain and his lungs. He tells the story to Al, the words returning to him as he speaks. “‘The brain found itself in a position where it could no longer sustain its burden of pain and affliction. It said, “I give up, but if there is still anyone here who cares at all for the preservation of the whole, let him then lessen my burden, and I’ll be able to carry on for a while yet.” At that point, the lung came forward; it didn’t have much to lose.’”

Al smiles, a lovely ghost of a smile, of something remembered. He shifts his arms, then pushes himself to sitting.

“Do you have kids, Ansel?”

“No.”

“Do you want some?”

“Yes.”

“Am I prying too much?”

Ansel puts the chart down beside the bed. A feeling comes, like a pressure against his skin, then slowly, inexplicably, gives way. “No, you’re not prying.”

Al pulls the sheets up against his body. He says, “I think that I’ve accepted it, that I’ve come to terms with everything. But when I wake up the next day, that peace vanishes like it was never there, or as if it were all an illusion. That’s what I find so difficult. I just want to accept it and be at rest. No more questions, no more doubt.”

Ansel nods, unable to speak. He feels that he could put his hand out, reach her, hold on for one moment. Don’t go, he thinks. She doesn’t say anything, because they both know how it ends, they always knew they could not change it. Gail. He stands half turned away from Al, afraid of his emotion.

“Am I allowed a phone call? This isn’t like jail, is it?”

Ansel hands him his phone. “You know the number?”

Al nods.

“Okay. This one’s on the clinic.” He returns Al’s chart to the foot of the bed.

When Ansel leaves the room, Al Cameron is lying on his side, the covers up over his body.

“I’m here,” he is saying. “I’m here.” He and the phone inside a small cave of stillness.