Certainty

6. The Garden of Numbers

VANCOUVER, CANADA

On the morning of her thirty-ninth birthday, Gail wakes up to the warmth of the light through the attic windows. Ansel is lying on his side, one hand on the curve of her waist. In Gail’s vision, without her glasses or contact lenses, he is blurred and indistinct, like someone in the farthest reaches of a swimming pool. From their bed under the steep roof, she can see the change from night to day, evening stars, rainfall tapping insistently on the glass. Some mornings, Gail wakes up to the sound of their elderly neighbour across the street, Mrs. Cho, who trims her yard with a pair of children’s scissors.

When Ansel wakes, they climb out from under the covers and dress in comfortable clothes. She takes a comb and does her best to calm Ansel’s hair, which is tossed like grass on a wind farm. He makes the bed and picks her pyjamas off the floor. By the time they have stepped outside, they have spoken only a few sentences, yet she feels a tentative peace. They move as if in memory of a different day, of countless similar mornings.

They used to have a running joke, she and Ansel. When people asked how long they had been together, they’d say the first number that came into their heads. “Twenty-five years?” Ansel would respond, turning to Gail, eyebrows raised. “Or is it more?” Forty years, perhaps. What, in their minds, seems a lifetime, a history together. She remembers this joke with pleasure, because it returns her to a time when their relationship was carefree, when it harboured neither suspicion nor fear. For almost a month now, she has known about Ansel’s affair with a woman named Mariana. It remains as a space between them, around which they carefully move.

They walk to the New Town Bakery, where they choose their breakfast from the display case and the high stacks of bamboo steamers. Then they continue, under the Georgia Viaduct, towards False Creek. It is early Sunday morning, and the city still drowses. Ansel counts two or three sails unfurled on the windless bay.

Tonight, her parents and a few close friends will come over for dinner. Her parents had wanted to host the party, but she had put them off. Knowing them, such a party would involve a ten-course dinner, towering cake and enough sparklers to light the neighbourhood. Even at the best of times, she has never felt comfortable as the centre of attention. Perhaps, she had thought, handling it herself would keep things low-key, and take the pressure off the occasion.

They are sitting on a wooden bench, facing the creek. Ansel tells her to be alert for seagulls. Just the other day, he says, he saw one swoop towards the bus shelter and seize a sandwich straight from the hand of a young woman. A freak occurrence, Gail says, but she clutches her breakfast tighter and scans the skies warily for belligerent birds.

In the last few weeks, he has been solicitous, grieving; he watches Gail as if she might disappear. At first, she had imagined packing a suitcase, walking away. A thought that, for just an instant, sent a rush of weightlessness through her heart. She has never been one for dramatic entries or exits. People fall in and out of love, relationships change, she accepts this fact as truth. But the intensity, the depth of her feelings for Ansel has always frightened her. Once, long ago, he asked her to marry him, but she had pushed them both away from that possibility. She did not want to get married, she wanted a different kind of relationship. Each day choosing to be with one another. Each day deciding.

She remembers the first time she met Ansel. His white coat was too big for him, it drooped over his shoulders. She had been working for CBC-Radio, covering the crash of a six-seater Cessna, the pilot killed instantly, his son in critical condition. They had sat on the bench outside the hospital, looking up at the night sky, the hint of starlight. For a long time, they talked about nothing in particular, and then, finally, about the pilot who had been killed and his son who was slowly, but certainly, dying. “Hour by hour,” Ansel had said. “And all we can do is try to make sure that he feels no pain.” They had both been drawn out of their own private thoughts, out of their loneliness. This is what love was to Gail then, a line, a thread that she could follow, eyes closed, leading her out from the solitude of her mind. No secrets or revelation, just one person on Earth who could anchor her.

“Are you happy, Ans?” she asks him now, surprising even herself by the fearlessness of her question.

He looks at her searchingly.

“I just wonder if we ended up where we thought we’d be. I’m almost forty, and I don’t know where the time went.”

“Yes,” he says, without hesitation. “I’m happy.” He looks as if he wants to say something more. Then, stopping himself, he asks, “Are you?”

Gail nods, but it takes her aback that it is she who cannot give a straightforward answer. She closes her eyes, feels an ache in her chest, a physical pain that pulses slowly. Day by day, she thinks, the distance between them is growing, carrying them out of reach of each other.

Instead of speaking, she takes his hand, holding it carefully between her own.

That night, while she is setting the table for dinner, the phone rings, and a moment later Ansel appears beside her holding the cordless. “For you,” he says. “Harry Jaarsma, calling from Amsterdam.”

She glances at the clock. It is four in the morning in the Netherlands. She can see him in his apartment, the heavy brocade curtains, high stacks of paper obscuring the carpet. “Jaarsma,” she says, taking the phone from Ansel, watching his back as he disappears from the room. “How are you?”

He says, without greeting or introduction, “I have good news.”

“Don’t tell me –”

“It’s true,” Jaarsma says, unable to contain his joy. “Never underestimate the power of patience.”

She says the only words that come to her mind. “You broke it.”

“Indeed.”

Gail sits down. Behind her, there is a low hum in the living room, the sound of the party, Ansel laughing with her mother, Ed Carney and Glyn playing a duet on the piano. Gail’s father is standing by the window, looking into the room as if he is outside it. She puts a hand against her eyes, trying to concentrate on Jaarsma’s voice as he tells her how he had woken in the night and an idea had come to him. He had leapt out of bed, turned on his computer and typed what he guessed to be the key phrase. “I sat back and waited. Then, right in front of my eyes, the numbers began to fade away. Letters, words, entire sentences. I felt as if William Sullivan’s ghost had arrived in my office and was rudely typing upon my keyboard.” He laughs. “I must enter the remaining the numbers, but I wanted to share the good news.”

In her mind, Gail can see the first line of the diary: 5 9 24 8 26 9. Numbers fill thirty single-spaced pages, without any visible order or pattern. She has repeated the line to herself for months, 5 9 24 8 26 9, as she falls to sleep at night. She has awoken with it on the tip of her tongue.

She remembers how Jaarsma had been as excited as she was at the prospect of unlocking the secrets of Sullivan’s journal. They had met in the Netherlands some fifteen years ago, through mutual friends now only vaguely remembered. Gail had been studying in Leiden, and during their first meeting they had found themselves arguing on the same side in a heated discussion about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, about science, ethics and history. Part way through the night, he had turned to her, eyes glassy from the beer, and said, “We think so much alike. Let’s not ruin it by falling in love.” They had raised their glasses to a long and enduring friendship.

Almost immediately, Jaarsma, whose specialty was chaos theory, had worked out the structure of the code, a version of the Vigenère Square. But rather than using the letters of the alphabet, Sullivan had used the numbers 1 through 26. The Vigenère Square, Jaarsma had explained to her, combines twenty-six different cipher, or code, alphabets. So far, so good: since the mid-nineteenth century, a means had existed to unlock it. But the final level of encryption, the key word that would allow the codebreaker to determine which of the twenty-six cipher alphabets was in use at any given time, had so far eluded him. A key word of blue, for instance, would alert the codebreaker to use the cipher alphabets b, l, u and e. The key used by Sullivan was not a simple word, and the longer the key, the more difficult it was to break the code. Perhaps the key was a list, a song, an entire book. It could be virtually anything.

Two months ago, Jaarsma had called her, exhausted, saying that the effort was futile. “My computer runs for hours at a time,” he had said, “but it is lacking in that most human of traits: intuition.” He told her that he had ceased to function properly, was unable to eat or sleep. He carried the diary everywhere, studying it on the train, in his laboratory, at the dinner table. His colleagues were unforgiving. The journal was occupying him to distraction. Jaarsma and Gail had mutually decided to put the project on hold. The phone call this evening is the first time Gail has heard from him since then.

“What was the key phrase?” she asks him now, straining to hear through the noise of the room.

“It was their names. His son, his wife and himself. Just their full names spelled out. Nothing more.” After a pause, he says, “I haven’t read all the way through to the end, but I think the contents will surprise you. Her father was not the man I expected to find.” He adds, “Is that enough to persuade you to visit me in Amsterdam?”

“I hardly need to be persuaded.”

He laughs. “I’ll have the champagne ready. Congratulations on your birthday, by the way.”

The dinner progresses around her, laughter and conversation, and much clinking of glasses. Her thoughts drift in and out of the present. Over dessert, Ansel looks across the table at her, as if to say, What is it? What’s wrong? She feels, for a brief moment, a wave of claustrophobia, and she stands up and begins clearing away the dishes.

Glyn rises to help her, and the two go into the kitchen, plates and coffee cups balanced precariously. When the dishes are safely stowed in the sink, Glyn leans against the counter, her expression concerned. “Thinking about work?” she asks.

Gail does not answer right away. She reaches up to the cupboard, brings down the bottle of port, and then enough glasses for everyone. As she opens the bottle and begins pouring, she tells Glyn about Jaarsma’s phone call. Glyn is editing the documentary, a co-production for CBC-Radio and Radio Netherlands, but so far she has stayed in the background, allowing Gail time to research and gather tape. “When this project is finished,” Gail says, “I think I’ll take some time off. Sit back for a while. I’m a bit run down, is all.”

They touch glasses, Glyn’s infectious smile warming the room. “For years we’ve been planning to celebrate New Year’s on the Gulf Islands,” she says. “Why not this year? Rent a little house on the Pacific, do the Polar Bear Swim. Ansel must have vacation time coming up?”

“Yes,” Gail says, sipping her port. “I think he does.”

“You’re exhausted. The curse of the freelancer.” She reaches her fingers out, brushes a strand of hair from Gail’s forehead. “Remember Prague? We sat under the stars together, knowing we were at the start of something, some grand adventure. Were we right or wrong, back then? You and I, what a pair of romantics.”

That night, after everyone has gone, Gail leaves Ansel in the living room and goes into her office, shutting the door behind her. The curtains are open, and outside the street lamps glow, laying circles of light on the empty road.

She is surrounded by equipment worthy of a museum. Reel-to-reels, cassette recorders, record players. Lately, she has been working with Mini Discs and digital editing programs, but she cannot bring herself to dispose of the old tape, the old equipment. “They still work,” she says to amused colleagues. “They still do what we asked of them.”

She collects tape the way others collect records or rare books, safeguarding them with a feeling of reverence. She has fragments spliced together, dozens of conversations gathered on a single reel. Soundscapes, features, interviews. On days when her mind wanders, she randomly loads a reel onto the player, puts the earphones on, listens. For Gail, the devotion lies in more than the words spoken. It is the words spoken at a specific moment in time, in a particular place. A child singing in the background, a pause in the telling, an old woman wetting her lips, smoothing her dress. A man who forgets the presence of the microphone, who begins a conversation with himself. “And after that, nothing was ever the same. I wanted to go back, I needed to see him, but I couldn’t.”

Before going to bed, Ansel knocks on the door of her office, pushes it open. “It’s your birthday,” he says, casually. “Surely you can take the night off.”

She saves the document she is working on, then turns to face him. “Jaarsma broke the code,” she says. “That’s what he called to say.”

His eyes light up, happy for her.

“I’ve decided to go to Amsterdam. I set aside part of the funding for this, the plane ticket and travel, hoping everything would turn out.”

She can see him wanting to say something, to argue against her going. Her response begins to take shape in her mind, I have to do this. I need to be away. But he does not fight her. Instead, from where he stands, he wishes her good night, then closes the door softly behind him.

Alone again, she opens files, then closes them once more. She thinks of another love affair two decades before, the feel of another man’s hands on her body, the pull of desire. All this, a lifetime ago. At twenty-one, Gail had begun graduate work in the Netherlands. There, not even halfway through her M.A. in history, she took a leave from the University of Leiden, gave up her apartment, and travelled east. She was restless, tired of reading about realpolitik, about her thesis topic, Japanese militarism in the 1930s, anxious to make something concrete of her life. And she was in love. A floundering, impossible affair. The man, a professor of languages, was handsome, brilliant and married. So she cut her ties and applied for a visa to the Eastern Bloc.

By spring, she was living in Prague, in a tiny two-room flat, working afternoons in a haberdashery. Her roommate, Glyn Madden, was a radio producer. At thirty-six, divorced and at loose ends, Glyn had sold her house in Wales and gone off in search of adventure, which, they both agreed, had proven to be more elusive than it first seemed. They traded books between them, drove across the border to Germany in search of English-language novels, came home with strange, tattered copies of Karl May westerns. They walked at dusk, joyous, alive, up to the Prague Castle. The apartment they shared was in Na Kampa, and at night they sat at the window, staring down at the miniature heads gathered around the café tables. They took turns changing the records on Glyn’s turntable: Abbey Road, Joni Mitchell, REM.

Each month, her mother sent her a small package of famous B.C. smoked salmon and a long, descriptive letter, filled with stories. Gail’s father, she wrote at one point, had started a community garden in Strathcona. Every Sunday, children clustered around him, each one wearing tiny rubber boots, holding tight to a miniature spade. Business in the restaurant was steady, she said, and her father had decided to come on as a part owner. He is well, though he misses you. We both do. Gail went home only once each year, at Christmas time. It was the most she could afford, and she did not want to rely on her parents for money. “Too stubborn,” her mother would say, holding her at the airport when she left. “Too independent.” But the words, Gail thought, were filled with pride, too, that they had raised her to be so free, so fearless in the world.

In Prague one morning, Glyn had woken her at 4:00 a.m., holding a cassette recorder and a microphone. “Join me,” she had said, her voice low and robotic, leaning over Gail’s bed, eyes shining in the darkness.

“What is this? Star Wars? Spaceballs?”

“Let’s go. We’re late.”

They loaded their bicycles into Glyn’s van, then drove two hours east. Through the countryside, a Thermos of coffee between them, they watched the sun rise over the fading hills. In Brno, thousands of runners were gathered for a marathon. Glyn wired her to a cassette recorder, placed a microphone in her hand and headphones over her ears. The starting gun went off, and Gail, flustered, immediately dropped the recorder on the ground. On the tape, afterwards, she could hear Glyn laughing. But when she replaced the headphones, Gail heard details that she had never heard in life. Whispered conversations, the rhythm of hundreds of shoes striking cobblestone.

She hurriedly unlocked her bicycle and began pedalling after the runners. On the tape, later on, she heard the bicycle bell ringing ever so slightly as the wheels rattled over the stones. She heard runners drinking as they went, dropping the plastic cups on the road, and the light jaggedness, like cut glass, of their breathing.

That was the moment of revelation. Her degree fell by the wayside, and Glyn found her a job at Radio Netherlands, which had a small outpost there in Prague. They worked side by side each afternoon, pulling tape. Switching from grease pencil to razor blade, the reel of tape sliding back and forth, her right foot maneuvering the pedals. A swift diagonal cut, then a thumbprint of splicing tape to bind the pieces together. She laid the outtakes over her right shoulder, and then her left, in a carefully ordered fringe. Afterwards, they would eat dinner in the studio, potato dumplings soaked in gravy, washed down by bitter black coffee. Among her reels of tape, she has a recording Glyn made in 1989, in Wenceslas Square, when hundreds of thousands of people, laughing and crying, jingled their keys in unison to symbolize the fall of the Soviet regime and the opening of the door to democracy.

Somewhere in that decade, she had fallen in love with a print journalist, a goat herder and an art collector. The print journalist had been the last, while Gail was in the Arctic. That was much later, after Glyn had moved to London and Gail was on assignment for Deutsche Welle’s English radio service, recording a feature about the beluga whales trapped in the ice-jammed waters of the Chukchi Peninsula, near the Bering Strait. The three thousand whales were slowly suffocating. Chukchi fishermen set out each morning, axes on their backs, attempting to open patches of ice. Up above, Russian helicopters circled like clumsy birds. They poured fish down from the sky.

For three weeks, Gail did not see her own body naked in its entirety; she was a walking bundle of fur and fleece. Swaddled, she carried her portable DAT recorder in an insulated bag. When she held her microphone out over the water, she could hear the whales themselves; they formed an endless line as they took turns breathing, one by one, at the air holes. A whistle of sound, a breath like water being swallowed. Sometimes, the whales allowed a seal to push into line, rising up, finding oxygen. She could not distinguish the sky from the ice, the snow from horizon.

The Chukchi gathered at her microphone to tell their stories. Before the waters were divided up, they said, before lines were drawn in the sea by Washington and Moscow, they used to cross the Bering Strait in skin boats. Once upon a time, their people lived nomadic lives; back then, the herds of reindeer had been thirty thousand strong. When she looked up from her recorder, Gail saw a group of young boys pirouetting their bicycles on the snow, their shadows, thin and graceful, reaching into the distance.

Eventually, a Soviet icebreaker arrived to clear a path for the whales. The icebreaker played Beethoven, and it thundered from the speakers. The whales, entranced, followed the Ninth Symphony back to open water.

Afterwards, Gail caught a flight to Fairbanks, and then on to Vancouver. Home to the house on Keefer Street, the wild, luxuriant garden that her father kept, the trellises bursting with roses, perfuming the air. She had been living in Europe for almost a decade. When they sat down to dinner, she felt as if she and her parents were travelling across a vast field, coming to meet one another. Her father, who had worked all his life in a restaurant, set down dish after dish, and each one was her favourite. They were so tentative with one another, as if circling in a room where the lights have gone out, trying to find their way by intuition, by memory alone.

After dinner, washing up in the kitchen, she had seen a letter lying on the countertop. The envelope was addressed to her father, and the stamps, she was surprised to see, were from the Netherlands. “What’s this?” she had asked, picking the letter up.

He had taken the envelope from her, turning towards her mother. His expression is vivid in her mind, even now, and the way her mother had looked at him, the lightest touch against his arm. “Someone I knew once, in Sandakan,” her father had said, seeming to search for the words. “She died recently. Her husband wrote to tell us.”

“During the war,” her mother said, “they were children together.” Her father clutched the envelope in his hand, lost, unsure where to set it down.

Gail had busied herself with the dishes. When she turned back, the envelope had disappeared, and her father was hanging the dish cloth to dry, smoothing the creases away with his hands.

Standing up from her desk, she turns the lights off and climbs the stairs to their bedroom. Ansel has left the reading light on for her, and he is fast asleep. She slips into bed beside him. For a long time, she gazes up through the skylight at the stars. She connects the invisible lines between them, Lyra, Cassiopeia, Perseus, as she used to do when she was a child.

Beside her, Ansel sighs in his sleep, he rests his body against hers. Her feelings have not changed, though she no longer knows how to make them palpable, certain. Gail thinks of something he told her long ago, how the pattern of the wave is one of the most common in nature. Sound, light, X-rays. The revelatory pictures of an MRI scan, a machine that throws light on the shadows of the mind. And what does it see? The work of thousands of synapses. The chemical traces of memory and love. If it could peer into Gail’s mind in a moment when she thinks of Ansel, how many patterns would it see awakened? The incoming tide, wave after wave of memory. The accelerated heartbeat, the charge Gail feels in his presence, none of this has changed. But for him? If she could see into the darkness, would she find in him what she hopes for? An echo of her own desire, as strong and sure as it was in the beginning, before something between them faltered and lost hope.

The next morning, after Ansel has left for the clinic, Gail finds the Bering Strait recording on a reel labelled Whales, Ode to Joy, 1990. She unwinds a foot of tape, blows the dust off, and has a memory of walking out across the shelves of ice. She remembers being taken, by snowmobile, to the Strait, seeing open water, still and crystalline, a mirror at the edge of the frozen tundra.

Two years ago, she had given up the security of her job as a producer. After another round of funding cuts at the CBC, she had been anxious. She wanted to make radio herself, to create features and documentaries on subjects that aroused her curiosity, that moved her. To make ends meet as a freelancer, she pitched her ideas to public radio stations around the world, calling up old contacts at Deutsche Welle or the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She had a way of making every vacation into a work project. While other people carried cameras or mobile phones, she was never without a microphone and recorder.

As she sits down to work, a group of school children come laughing down the sidewalk, two by two, holding hands. Their teacher points out a blue jay, and the children erupt in yelling and finger pointing: “I see! I see!” or, heartache in their voices, “I don’t see! I don’t see!” An older woman shuffles past, pushing her groceries in a supermarket shopping cart. Viewed from her desk, her fingers poised over the keyboard, the scene seems to hang, suspended, before Gail’s eyes.

5 9 24 8 26 9. She clicks an icon and an audio file flickers open across the screen. The interview that she plays was recorded in Prince George several months ago, on the verandah of Kathleen Sullivan’s home. They had driven from the airport, through a landscape of open fields, along a single highway unrolling like a river. Kathleen had leaned forward as she spoke, strands of auburn hair slipping loose from a low ponytail, each sentence clear and insistent.

“Even now,” she says, her voice coming through the speakers in Gail’s office, “I remember the way the diary smelled and the sound it made when my father opened it. The book literally creaked. He had found it laid away in a drawer, and he wanted to decode it for us. He set a notepad on the table in front of him, then he picked up a pencil and started to copy down the numbers.” Kathleen tells how, when she had first become fascinated by the diary, she had been ten years old. She had believed in the possibility of a perfect answer to the mystery of her father. Rain was the result of condensation in the atmosphere; the sun was an exploding star. There was a solution to her father, too, a cause and an effect.

She describes watching her father write out a row of numbers. Underneath this row, he wrote a line of letters. More letters, chaotic on the surface. It went on this way for some time while the television murmured in the living room, where her older brother was watching a soccer game. Kathleen had turned to watch it, the Vancouver Whitecaps, the rain of white jerseys, a soccer ball drummed across the pitch. Her father put his pencil down, stared at the numbers as if willing them to form a meaning. He erased what he had written and began again. He ran his hand across his face, shook his head. Kathleen remembered looking at his terribly scarred hand, a strange hollow in the index finger where he told her a bullet had passed too close. Her father became confused as he worked backwards through the code. Still, he went on staring at the numbers as if, given enough time, the method of decryption would magically present itself.

Kathleen sat at his feet. Eventually, she felt them shift, opened her eyes to see them walking away, the diary abandoned on the table.

On the tape, Gail’s voice: “And if the code is broken. Can you put into words the thing that you hope to find?”

There is a long pause, the muted sound of a truck passing on the back roads. Then, silence. “He drank,” she says finally. “He drank himself into oblivion. In his worst moments, he couldn’t even recognize us. There was so much violence in our lives. In the end, it was his drinking that drove my brother away, that broke my family apart. I need to know what happened to my father in those camps, what he lived through. And if it isn’t in the diary, then where did he keep those thoughts? What did he do with all those memories?”

The sound waves roll across her computer screen. Gail edits in a fragment of Jaarsma’s interview.

“Cryptography,” he says, “holds a particular danger of its own. People expect to find patterns. You are handed a code, someone says, ‘Break this,’ and then it becomes like a game, a chase. It can drive you mad. Once you begin to doubt your skill, once you begin to lose faith, to wonder if the code is indeed a code, if it contains any meaning at all, it throws your life into disorder. What if, in the end, this book is no more and no less than a book of numbers? What if the surface is all there is?” He pauses and then says, “I think codebreaking is part of a very human desire, the desire for revelation, for meaning. To have every secret, every private thought, laid bare, regardless of what that might cost us.”

In front of her, the recording has come to an end, and the sound waves disappear from the screen.

The phone rings, and Gail blinks, coming back to her surroundings. When she picks up, she hears her father’s voice, already speaking, halfway through a sentence.

She takes the phone and walks out of her office, into the living room, where the windows are open. A sudden breeze shivers the newspapers across the coffee table. Her father is talking about arranging a vacation, two weeks along the coast of British Columbia, north to Haida Gwaii, the Queen Charlotte Islands. “And with our anniversary coming up,” he is saying, “it could be a nice present. But will she like it? Perhaps it’s too extravagant?”

Gail smiles, leaning out the window now, and she pictures her parents walking hand-in-hand in the hush of the rainforest. Outside, fall leaves scatter on the wind. “I think it’s a lovely idea.”

“It’s our fortieth wedding anniversary,” he says, in wonder at the thought.

His voice sounds grainy, worn at the edges, and she asks him if he slept well last night. Her father makes a noise that means, Not to worry. But when she presses him, he says that he slept for an hour or two, then watched The King and I on television.

Night after night during her childhood, her father, the insomniac, would pace the house, haunting it like a restless spirit. Before leaving for school each morning, Gail would see the remnants of his night. An empty teapot on the counter, the sleeve of a record on the floor. In university, her father had studied history. Occasionally, a book, Gibbon or Toynbee, the pages dog-eared, would lie open on his chest.

Sometimes, the insomnia slid into depression. Then, for a week, he would not step out of his room. She remembers her mother standing at the doorway, leaning her ear against the door, as if listening for the sound of his breathing.

What do you dream about? Gail had asked him once. My childhood, he said, after a pause. What was your childhood like? Her father had smiled fondly at her before turning away. “Like every childhood. Mine was no different.” Ever the curious daughter, she would take his hand. “Tell me one thing about it. Anything.”

He told her how to tap a rubber tree, how to hold a cigarette tin against the trunk and catch the precious liquid. How to carve an orange into a lantern, or a radish into the petals of a rose.

She once kept a list of his eccentricities. Her father was afraid of the dark. He could not eat certain foods: sweet potato, cassava and tapioca, which he called ubi kayu. Every weekday morning, before leaving for his job at the restaurant, he would stretch his arms and back, a kind of calisthenics that he said they had learned in school, when he was a boy. He had a fascination with Japan, a quick temper, and a disconcerting knowledge of British Columbian history. The First Nations, he once told her, have an archaeological history here that can be traced back ten thousand years. “Imagine that,” he would say, shaking his head, peering down at Gail as if he could read the span of years in his daughter’s face. He said that he tried to picture what first contact was like, when the Haida stumbled across the ship of Juan Perez, when they saw the white sails open and fluttering in the wind.

On the phone now, he is still talking about The King and I, describing how he first saw the film in Melbourne, in 1958. “All the boys I knew, they wanted to grow up to be Yul Brynner,” he says, laughing. Once, he had woken to the sight of his roommate practising his ballroom dancing, twirling an imaginary partner.

“And who did you imagine you might dance with?” Gail asks teasingly.

“I always danced with same person. In Sandakan, when I was young. But she died a long time ago. I thought I might see her again, but it was impossible.” She hears him shifting the phone to his other ear. “Don’t forget,” he says. “I want to surprise your mother. It’s been so long since we took a trip together.” When she puts down the phone, something in her mind seems to stop and catch, a word, a name, hovers on the edge of her memory.

The phone rings again, but she doesn’t pick it up. On the answering machine, Ansel’s voice. “It’s me.” A pause, and then he says, “Are you there? I didn’t want to wake you this morning before I left. Are you there, Gail? Anyway, that’s all right. It was nothing important. You looked so peaceful this morning. That’s all.” Something in his voice causes her to sit down, exhausted, unsure. “I love you.”

The message light on the machine begins to glow. She thinks of her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, polishing the glass beads of the chandelier, a task she did when Gail’s father was ill, when he slipped into a depression and she could not pull him back. Long ago, when she was a child, Gail would fall asleep in her mother’s lap, face pressed against the fabric of her dress. The familiar smell of soap and sweetness. Across the room, her father sat for hours in his armchair, his cup of tea gone cold, and it seemed to Gail that he had disappeared, cut himself loose from his body. Her mother would lift Gail from her lap, rise from her chair. She would place her hands on his shoulders, rubbing his neck and back. Touch calling another person back to this world, warmth flowing from one body into another.

A few months ago, she had helped her mother clean and organize her workroom. While her mother went to the kitchen to prepare lunch, Gail had got started, wiping the bookshelf. It was crammed with sewing manuals, but there were also cookbooks, magazines and novels: Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, coated in a thin layer of dust. Gail had sat cross-legged on the floor, turning the worn pages. She was replacing the books on the shelf when she saw a handful of envelopes that must have fallen on the carpet. She recognized one of them immediately. It was addressed to her father, and the Dutch stamps, now yellowed and dry, curled up at the edges. She had slid the letter out, a single page, fragile and creased.

I am heartbroken to write that Ani passed away on November 29, 1992, at home, of cancer. Wideh has returned from Jakarta, and he is here now. He was with his mother at the end.

Before her death, Ani requested that I write to you, and she provided me with your last known address. I hope that this letter reaches you.

I am very sorry to have to write to you with this news.

The name at the bottom of the page was Sipke Vermeulen.

She goes back to her office. At her desk, she scans the list of sound files, trying to focus on her work. She chooses one and hits Play. The recording that emerges from the computer is her own voice, the interview with Jaarsma about cryptography and the Vigenère Square. “The ciphers leave a shadow,” Jaarsma says, in response to her question. “However faint, you cannot erase that. This is the narrow, almost invisible opening for the codebreaker. At Bletchley Park, during the Second World War, cryptographers often recognized a pattern they had seen weeks, even months ago. They would walk across the room, fish out the correct fragment from a stack of paper. As if it were all a dream. It was the subconscious memory of a pattern.”

In radio, in the countless scripts that she has written, Gail works with the belief that histories touch. Follow the undercurrent and you will arrive at the meeting place. So she weaves together interviews, narration, music and sound in the hope that stories will not be lost in the chaos of never touching one another, never overlapping in any true way. Each element a strand, and the story itself a work of design. Out of the disparate pieces, let something pure, something true, emerge. Let it remain there, visible.

And in this documentary, where is the truth in the story of William Sullivan?

Gail runs her pen along the script, making notes in the margin.

Years ago, in Prague, she had interviewed a woman whose teenaged son had drowned in the Vltava River, a tragic accident. In the midst of recalling that day, the woman had looked up at Gail, suddenly angry, asking why she dared to ask these questions, what right she had. Gail had opened the recorder, removed the cassette tape. She had placed it carefully in the older woman’s hand. “If only you could understand,” the woman had said, clutching the tape. “The words that I put in the world can never be taken back.”

She remembered the woman’s frantic gestures, the ribbon pulled out of the cassette, spooling onto the ground.

She opens a browser on her computer and begins to book her flight to Amsterdam. Dates, flights, times: the numbers swim before her eyes. When she has an itinerary ready, she prints it up, and emails a copy to Jaarsma.

Outside, a woman calls out, then a screen door opens and slowly closes, the hinges creaking. She types Sipke Vermeulen’s name into the computer and watches the results scroll down the screen. The Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam. World Press Photo. She follows a link, and a series of black-and-white photographs open up before her. The caption underneath reads, Algiers, 1959. The Algerian War.

For a long time she studies the photos. In one, a child plays on an abandoned tank, he hangs upside down, suspended from the barrel of the gun.

She opens one image after another, seeing images from the Netherlands, Germany, Indonesia, and it becomes clear that Sipke Vermeulen is a Dutch photojournalist, a war photographer.

Gail closes the browser, picks up the printed itinerary from her desk, and walks out of her office. She climbs the stairs to their attic bedroom. Standing at the window, she can see a dozen tai chi practitioners gathered in the nearby schoolyard, moving, out-of-phase, in a lengthening ballet. Elderly men and women flick their heels, stretch their arms away from their bodies, turn with a strange and gorgeous precision. Movement after movement unfolding, an outgoing tide, spreading towards the edges.

Many times in her childhood, she had woken to the sound of her father’s nightmares. A screaming in the dark, lights coming on in the house. She would creep to their bedroom door, holding on to the sound of her mother’s voice comforting him. Once, unable to go back to sleep, she had found her way, in the dark, to the living room. There, she lay on the carpet, her arms open, as if to gather up the air, to hold the weight of the room. From where she lay, she reached out and turned on the antique radio. The panel glowed and, after a few seconds, music, something jazzy, began to drift through the speakers. Eyes closed, she pressed her hand to the wooden cabinet, drew the vibrations through her fingertips, all the way to her heart.

When dawn came, she went to her parents’ bedroom, inched the door open, stood at the border of their room as they slept. She gazed at them with a boldness that she would not otherwise dare. Asleep, it was as if they had gone away together, leaving the worries of their life behind. She imagined casting a spell over them. When they woke, they would find themselves in a place where no secrets existed, where all the sorrows of the past had been laid to rest. What sorrows? She did not know. She knew so little about their lives. Privacy, her parents believed, was sacred.

For as long as she can remember, she had wanted to save them. She imagined her parents turning to her, seeing her finally, and the past would fall away. That is what she had hoped for when she was a child. To say the right thing, to pull off a feat of such perfection, they could be distracted, if only for a time.

From the window, she can see the myriad cracks in the sidewalk, the antique waste bins. A few blocks over, the sound of Chinatown like a swirling body of water. Here, in the oldest neighbourhood in the city, the trees are surprisingly young. They are planted each in a square of soil, a gesture towards the future. In the playground at Strathcona Elementary, children run in looping paths. They dribble balls on the basketball court, run three steps for a lay-up. For a fleeting moment, as she watches, their bodies hover motionless in the air.

The clouds open in a rainstorm, a kind of sheeting monsoon that rarely appears in Vancouver. In the bedroom, Gail listens to it clattering on the house, onto the glass skylight. Downstairs, Ansel is making dinner, a casserole of leeks, tofu and potatoes, spiced with curry. She gets up and goes downstairs, where she uncorks a bottle of red wine, drinks one glass and then another too quickly. The alcohol warms her, and she remains by Ansel as he assembles dinner, leaning her head into the hollow between his shoulder blades. A familiar gesture. He slides the casserole in the oven, and together they go into the living room. It is dimly lit, and on the couch he gathers Gail into his arms.

There is a recklessness to the way they undress one another. Perhaps such release is a gift; perhaps it is only the wine passing through her bloodstream. He kisses her mouth, along her neck, and it is a kind of betrayal, the way her body responds to him. But she does not want to stop it, stop the momentum that accumulates between them, she cannot imagine how such a thing, something so treasured, could come to an end.

Later, when they are lying together on the couch, she tells him that she has booked her flight to Amsterdam, and that she will remain there for six days. She will finally be able to move ahead on this project.

The silence lingers between them.

“I need this time away,” she says.

“From us.”

Long ago, any sign of pain in him would cause her deep anxiety, because it hinted of a future of possible loss, more loss than she could imagine. But now, seeing his expression, she feels confused.

“Gail?” he says, her name a question. “Just come home.”

My love, she thinks, and the words are true.

He kisses her, and she knows, somehow, that he is asking for help, for an end to the sadness they are causing one another. Asking because, after all these years together, it is the only thing that might save them. Together they stand up, they find their clothes and pull them on. Then they go into the kitchen, leaning on one another.

Harry Jaarsma’s home in Amsterdam is a three-storey brick rowhouse, tall and narrow. Inside, the staircase to his office is so steep that, climbing up, Gail feels a sensation of vertigo, the walls pitching towards her. She grips the bannister, takes a deep breath, and climbs the last few steps. She and Jaarsma emerge into an open space, glass walled and high-ceilinged. The room is a container of light.

“My thinking space,” Jaarsma says. He is a few feet ahead of her, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt bearing a diagram of a caffeine molecule.

She had arrived last night. “Lovely,” he had said, on seeing her at the airport. “But careworn.” They had taken the train from the airport into central Amsterdam, then walked through the cold, winding streets to Jaarsma’s home. Past the train station, where thousands of bicycles leaned together in the night, continuing across the canals that ring the city, rippling away from the centre. Her breath trailed behind her, a white fog in the darkness. They passed brick facades, topped with delicate gables. Almost twenty years have passed since she studied in the Netherlands, but the sound of the Dutch language now fell reassuringly on her ears. He set her luggage in the spare room, and, over the course of a few hours, they had moved from coffee to beer to Beerenburg, a sweet liquor distilled from juniper berries, which had dulled her senses and caused her to fall asleep on the couch, but not before she and Jaarsma had managed to talk enough politics, art and science to make up for years apart. “Having children,” he had proclaimed, at the end of the night, before nodding off on the carpet, “is an essentially hopeful act. But I, Harry Jaarsma, have always been an essentially hopeless man. And I will never, never, be persuaded otherwise. Bring on the worst. I am ready.”

Now, standing in the sunlit office, they are both fatigued and pale, nursing cups of steaming black coffee.

He goes to his desk, lifts up a stack of pages, and brings them to her. She recognizes the photocopied pages of the diary at once, and her heart begins to thrill in her chest. She sets her coffee down and starts to turn the pages, finding where the numbers end and the text begins: 20 December 1941. Hong Kong. “You said that he surprised you,” she says.

He smiles, an expression both gentle and melancholy. “Read it and discover for yourself.”

She had wanted to believe that once the code was broken so much in William Sullivan’s life, in his children’s lives, would come clear, that a line could be drawn from beginning to end and a true narrative emerge. She sets the pages down, unable to begin, not wanting to finish. It isn’t disappointment she fears, but trespass. To awaken a memory that has no consolation. She remembers a conversation with her mother, from years ago. Gail had asked her mother to tell her about her first love, and her mother had smiled at the question. Your father, she had answered. Your father was my first love, and my first heartbreak.

When they have finished drinking their coffee, she opens her equipment bag and removes the Mini Disc recorder, microphone and cords. They set up a space by the windows, William Sullivan’s diary laid on a table between them. She tells him that she will read the pages this afternoon. Perhaps, for now, they can fill in a few missing pieces about codebreaking, and tomorrow they will talk specifically about the diary.

He nods, one hand brushing the tip of the microphone that she has affixed to him with her usual trick, the bent coat hanger around the neck. “How do I look?” he asks, smiling.

“Sharp. Very sharp.”

They settle into place and Gail listens, assessing the sound of the room. There are no refrigerators, no computer fans whirring. She readies her equipment, then does a sound check, adjusting the needle as Jaarsma rambles on about his hangover. In her earphones, his voice has a low, rich timbre, a melodious accent.

Guided by her questions, he begins to talk about the Vigenère Square, and then cryptography in general. She asks him to assess the personality of someone suited to the work of codebreaking.

He begins to describe the repetitive nature of the work, how codebreakers were recruited from mathematics departments, orchestral groups and crossword puzzle competitions. He beams. “Do you know football?”

Gail shakes her head.

“I’m reminded of a famous quote by Johann Cruyff. He said, ‘If I wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better.’ He was talking about football, but I think what he meant is to trust pure intuition. Follow something less explicit. It is perhaps very unscientific to say, but I think that to break a code you must inhabit the mind of the codemaker. To unravel the clues, you must, to some extent, place yourself within his consciousness.”

Outside, she can hear the whistle of a train passing, and they wait a few moments for the noise to subside. On the far side of the room, a blur of colour catches her attention.

“The print on your wall, Jaarsma. I feel like I should recognize it.”

He smiles, pushing his chair back, stands and walks to the other side of the room. Gail follows closely behind him, wondering whether to pause the tape. She lets the recording continue, taking care to ensure that the wires of the microphone stay clear. Framed beneath the glass, the pictures, six in total, are strange and wild. They hint of seahorse tails, the spiral of a winding nautilus, electric sparks.

“The Mandelbrot Set,” Jaarsma says, running his fingertips over one of the prints. “A collection of points derived from the quadratic equation z = z2 + c. The equation itself is very simple, but the Mandelbrot Set is one of the most complex objects in mathematics. See this boundary here,” he says, indicating a shape enclosed by a band of colour. “Any part of this edge, this cartoid, no matter where, no matter how small, will, if magnified, reveal new points. And these, if further magnified, will also reveal new points, ad infinitum.”

Gail moves closer to the wall, gazing at the pictures. Each successive print is a magnification of a detail of the last. The last frame is labelled as being a ratio of 1:1 million.

“The boundary encloses a finite area, but the boundary itself is infinite. No matter how much we increase the magnification, the same shapes appear and reappear in the border, though never quite the same. The image reveals a kind of symmetry, not of left and right, but of large scales and small ones.

“Imagine that we are standing here,” he says. Unexpectedly, he takes her hand, ever so gently, and places it on a corner of the print. “I can imagine what the rest of the picture is like because this is a fractal image, and it is self-similar. It repeats. But to imagine the entire picture is akin to standing on a street corner and trying to imagine what England looks like from an airplane, or from Mars. I can extrapolate, but what I see at this level may not conform to my expectations of what it will look like as we move in space and time.

“Do you know how birds fly in formation? As far as we know, they hold no picture in their minds of the V formation, let alone the vast pattern of migration. They are aware only of the other birds in their immediate proximity. And the same is true for me; I respond to what is immediately around me. But the pattern that I cannot see, that I have no knowledge of, exists. My mind, my brain, is not made to imagine distances of great magnitude. Or infinite time, eternity. We glimpse a part of the puzzle and intimate, however vaguely, an answer. But if I read a book about geography, or the history of the Earth, or the universe, for that matter, how does that change the way I place myself within this formation?”

She gazes at the boundary, the intricate details. “It changes nothing and everything.”

Jaarsma smiles, delighted. “Precisely.”

She turns off the recorder and removes her headphones. “If I wanted to find someone in the Netherlands,” she says, “how would I go about it?”

He is taken aback by the question. “The telephone book?” he says, finally, not sure if she is serious.

“There is someone I want to find.”

Jaarsma walks across the room to his computer. He opens a browser and enters a Dutch Internet address. When the page has opened, he looks up at her, fingers resting on the keyboard.

Gail retrieves her notebook from her bag and opens it to the last page, where she had written, this morning, the name that she cannot shake loose: Sipke Vermeulen. Jaarsma studies the page, then types in the words. Almost instantaneously, an address and phone number appear on the screen.

That night, Gail stays awake. Her suitcase is open, the contents still neatly packed. Jaarsma’s translation of the diary is open before her, twelve pages of single-spaced type. William Sullivan, she thinks, all his thoughts transcribed into numbers, multiplied and added to themselves, a testament to what a person might do to make all their words disappear.

She imagines him working with pencil in hand, copying the numbers onto a sheet of looseleaf. Over and over, he erases his numbers and begins again. How is it possible to forget pain, to be unable to recall something that was once so inescapable?

In the diary, there is no detailing of violence witnessed and endured, of friends executed, of resistance. That, in the end, is what Gail finds so startling. She knows, through her research, that in the Hong Kong camp, a third of the men died before the war ended. In the prisoner-of-war camp in Sandakan, only six of three thousand men lived to see liberation. William Sullivan kept the diary as proof of a different kind of existence, where part of him still saw the world as if he were free. He wrote about their rituals, what time they got up in the morning, the kind of trees that grew outside the camp, the food they ate, the girl smugglers who passed by outside. “Some are as young as ten years old. Their clothes hang together with invisible thread.” And another entry: “My most prized possession is a set of three tin dishes. They came to me through various hands, and they are useful for all sorts of things. Food, chiefly. But also to gather leaves for tea, to hold on to a bit of water. They are valuable also because, in a time of necessity, they can be traded for pills or medicine.” Through these sentences, these pages, he would make the world cohere.

For three years, the men in the camp were starved and brutalized, treated as less than animals, but he had continued the journal, as if through it he could maintain some part of his dignity. In entry after entry, he imagines the days to come. “When I see you next,” he writes, addressing Kathleen’s mother. “After the war is finished.”

When the camp was liberated in August 1945, he had been twenty-five years old. Gail had learned that the physicians and psychologists of the time had all agreed: the war was finished, these men who had survived should go on with their lives in the best way possible. They should not burden their families with the misery of what they had endured. So he had gone on, honourably discharged from the army, and he had kept his silence.

Earlier, she had telephoned the number for Sipke Vermeulen. The voice of an elderly man had answered, his words clear and lightly accented. When she said her name, a silence followed, and she feared the conversation had come to an end, that Sipke Vermeulen would put down the phone, without her understanding the reason why. But then time had begun again. He had repeated her name, in surprise, in recognition.

Arrangements were made. Sipke Vermeulen had told her he would come down to Amsterdam in two days’ time, and then they would travel up north together to his home in rural Friesland.

Jaarsma had been standing in the window, watching the moonrise, the gleam of light clouding the city. He had poured two glasses of wine and ordered dinner from the neighbourhood Indonesian restaurant, sticks of satay, babi pangang, a container of rice. When he looked at her, his face held a question. She told him about the letter that she had found years ago. She wondered if it was possible to know a person truly. And if we did, would we know what we had, would we recognize it?

At one point in the evening, Jaarsma had put his fingers to the window, indicating the light. He told her that people believe that the moon changes in size as it moves across the sky, becoming larger and fuller as it nears the horizon. But the size of the moon, he said, remains constant no matter where it is, and the idea of a larger moon is an optical illusion. We could measure it, he said, with a paper clip, shaped into a caliper. He still remembered the day his father, an astronomer, told him this fact.

“And what did you feel,” Gail had asked him, “when you learned it was only an illusion?”

At first, disbelief. He had been standing beside his father, the moon, low and immense, before them. “It was so large,” he said, “I felt we could get in the car, drive across the city, reach out and hold it in our hands. Every night after that, I twisted a paperclip just as my father had taught me, proving over and over again that even the largest moon is no different in size from all the rest.” Was it our perception of the sky that was in error, he had wondered, or our perception of the moon relative to the buildings on the horizon? Did we compare the current moon to an inaccurate memory of a previous one? What was it, within our own minds, within the wires and creases of our visual cortex, our internal map of the world, that allowed this distortion to happen?

She had sat in silence, the wineglass in her hands, waiting for Jaarsma to continue.

“There is no definitive theory,” he said at last. “The question itself is thousands of years old, spanning from the time of the ancient Greeks. Maybe if we are lucky, within our own lifetime, we will find not only the right answer, but also the one that satisfies us.”

That night, she falls asleep, the lamp still burning, the transcribed pages of the diary laid out beside her.