The Wave Theory of Angels

by Alison Macleod

  He reads that his daughter may still enjoy emotional, sensual and intellectual pleasures at a level others may not understand; that she may, equally, feel pain, loneliness, fear and despair.

  He won’t allow it. ‘You’re not on your own. Do you understand, Christina? You’re not on your own.’ He scans the second book. The young nurse who comes in to check the ICP monitor watches his face darken.

  The authors of this guide propose the use of a light source of at least 150 watts to achieve a pupillary reflex. Once the patient’s eyes are fixed and open, they recommend the use of strobe or flashing lights. To be followed by the determined use of flash cards.

  ‘Did you bring in a pair of shoes, Mr Carver, like the doctor asked?’

  ‘I will tomorrow.’

  The authors note that the banging of saucepans or the use of a loud whistle near the patient might trigger the startle response. Noises must be random. Remember, the brain is able to turn off continuous disturbances.

  The nurse cleans her patient’s mouth with a moistened sponge on a stick, pushing it past her gums and over her tongue. She takes a brush out of the bedside cupboard and smoothes the thick weight of Christina’s hair, teasing out the knots as she goes. ‘She’s better off in shoes, really, as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’m told Christina’s not going anywhere.’ Slapping, pinching, the use of stiff brushes or deep-pressure massage might help to stimulate the latent defence mechanism.

  ‘Shoes that lace up are the best. In terms of support.’

  ‘I understand.’ He can’t believe what he’s reading. Vinegar, lemon juice or chilli on the tongue, and ammonia, garlic or rubbing alcohol under the nostrils can, in some patients, produce facial grimacing – a reliable indicator of rudimentary taste and smell responses.

  ‘Otherwise, Mr Carver, in time, we could be looking at footdrop. You wouldn’t want that, now, would you, and you’d be surprised how fast the muscles – ’

  He flings the book into the can in the far corner of the room. ‘Medieval nonsense, ladybug. We don’t need it.’ Next they’ll be advising burial alive – an effective aid to the stimulation of the choking reflex.

  ‘That can’s for clinical waste only, Mr Carver.’

  He looks at her.

  ‘If you walked over to the can, instead of throwing material into it from across the room, you would see it’s clearly marked ‘‘Clinical Waste Only’’.’

  ‘My daughter and I heard you the first time.’

  ‘There’s me thinking your daughter was playing possum.’

  He gets to his feet. ‘What?’

  ‘Playing possum. You know. A bigger animal comes along. The possum takes fright and bang, it falls down dead. Only it’s not. It’s in a coma. Maybe for a few minutes. Maybe for a few hours. I found one once with my mother under our front porch. We were digging dandelions.’

  He stares.

  ‘It’s just what people say where I’m from.’

  ‘And go to hell is just what people say where I’m from.’

  He turns. Maggie is standing at the door, and he can see it on her face. She wishes she was someone else. She wishes she wasn’t his daughter. But she only says, quietly, ‘Last night, Dad. Christina was back.’

  9

  In the 1880s the house that stands at the corner of Thatcher Avenue and Chicago Avenue, on the edge of Thatcher Woods, was an institution devoted to the care and moral instruction of young men from broken homes. More than a century later, it is the home of orphaned and injured native animals before they are released back into the wild. Here you might see a blue-winged teal, its blue wing broken. Perhaps you will help to feed it on duckweed and snails from the river. In a cage opposite is a chipmunk, concussed in a fall from a tree, and a muskrat who got caught in the spokes of a boy’s bike wheel on a woodland path.

  In the clearing behind the nature centre, Angel sits on the wide spread of a solitary tree stump. He spent the night in the abandoned signalman’s lodge, near the bridge. He does that sometimes, sleeps rough. His mouth grips a cigarette. His boot, still thick with the dust of yesterday’s ballast, toes a clump of lovegrass. The day is bright. His eyes are trained on the leafy darkness of the trail ahead.

  ‘Open the blinds, Maggie.’

  ‘What?’ Maggie is dropping her bags on a chair. She’s letting the cold water run at the sink in Christina’s room. She needs a long cool drink.

  ‘Now. Open the blinds,’ her father says. ‘All the way.’

  ‘Why?’

  She turns. He is looming over her sister.

  ‘She blinked. I saw her blink.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ She’s twisting the pole to open the venetian blinds. She can’t make it work quickly enough.

  ‘Hurry.’

  Then she’s on the opposite side of the bed, in the sudden light, staring with him at her sister’s face. ‘Tina? Tina, it’s me, Maggie. Can you hear me? Can you move your eyes?’

  ‘That’s right, sweetheart. Try. Try to open your eyes again.’

  They wait one minute. Five minutes. Ten.

  ‘Tina?’

  They hover over her bed for half an hour.

  Angel wonders what it must feel like to be on a family hike. Or a weekend picnic. He takes the double-time. On a long weekend he’ll take any shift they throw at him.

  He doesn’t want to wonder. He doesn’t want to be waiting here. A wide-open clearing. Behind a public place. On Labor Day weekend with families, young couples – everyone it seems – emerging from the woods. But not her.

  It’s all he can do not to bolt and run.

  A lot of the time he takes red-zone work – work on a stretch of track they can’t afford to shut down. Sometimes it’s emergency repairs to the tie-rods, bolts or plates. Or ballast tamping on track beds they find sinking in the summer’s heat. A few weeks ago it meant re-laying a section of conductor rail in a hurry before the morning rush hour. In the record-breaking rain last fall he was one of a team of four turning a landslide back into an embankment.

  The other guys are always on the blower to the union, but him, he’s saying, sure, okay, no problem. Who’s my lookout?

  That day, no lookout. He didn’t see her coming.

  It was a stone skipping on the river behind him. He turned. Got down on his haunches. Peered down through the screen of leaves and across the water’s glassy surface.

  ‘Four!’ someone called to him from the opposite bank.

  A girl with hair the colour of honey.

  The next trackman, a guy called Malone, was at least five hundred yards up the line. Past the bridge. Angel threw down his jacket, spat out a piece of gum, then took the embankment in easy slipping strides.

  When he landed at the water’s edge, it seemed to be waiting for him: a gleaming oval of a stone. He bent down, got the feel of it in his hand, bounced it a few times against his palm, then let fly.

  ‘Eight!’ she called. ‘Why do men always have to win?’

  ‘I don’t have to do anything.’

  Why did he say that? She was joking. And now she was shrugging, turning to go. ‘What are you drawing?’ he called. She looked back over her shoulder. He pointed to the pad of paper under her arm.

  ‘Things.’

  He almost missed it. There was the distance, and her voice so reluctant. ‘What kind of things?’ He could hardly believe he was doing it, finding the words, drawing her back to the edge of the bank.

  She stopped and turned. ‘Thing things.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Already he was forgetting the glare of metal And the dead weight of concrete. He was remembering the smell of fresh water. Of sweetgrass too – is that what he was getting on the breeze? Its vanilla scent. He must have trampled some underfoot. Somewhere too the trace of a fox – like a whiff of rancid red wine. ‘If it’s private, just say,’ he called, and he buried his face in his T-shirt, wiping the smear of sweat and gravel dust from his face. The shirt still stank of mildew, from his night on the rotting floorboards of the l
odge. Once, he’d boasted to his dad that he could live like a fox if he had to. Well, here, he’d said. You can skin and bone this rabbit before it goes stiff.

  By her feet, lacy fronds of maidenhair.

  ‘Wildlife,’ she called suddenly. ‘Mostly I draw wildlife.’

  ‘That’s good.’ He reached for his smokes. ‘Interesting, I mean.’ He knew. If it hadn’t been for the river between them – narrow enough here but steeply shelving – she would have retreated by now. He understood. ‘I mean, that’s a good thing to draw. Especially round here.’

  ‘Do you know these woods?’

  He felt a smile break across his face, the feeling strange. ‘I half grew up around here.’ He nodded to the woods, to the river, and, self-conscious suddenly, kicked a stone with the steel cap of his boot. It ricocheted off a nearby hickory tree and panicked a nest of tree swallows. She didn’t know whether to stay or go. He could tell. She was jumping for a cluster of oak leaves, just beyond her reach.

  He needed to say something else, to ask her another question. But instead he made a shield of his hand, straining skyward as he tracked the swallows’ path. Anything to stop looking at her.

  10

  ‘Incubation’, in its earliest and least remembered form, referred to the practice of sleeping in a consecrated place – for the purpose of dreaming oracular dreams or in the hope of attaining within oneself a new fullness of being. One appealed, not to a lofty deity or a transcendent power, but to the genius loci, the spirit of the place, who was kindled by the action of the human heart.

  For spirit of the place, read also incubus.

  Demonic molester and guardian attendant, the incubus had the capacity both to destroy and to heal. To beseech him was to die and to live again more fully. Medieval authorities, however, were less interested in the experience of supernatural love or seduction than in a positive identification. ‘Between the moon and the earth,’ writes Geoffrey of Monmouth, ‘live spirits which we call incubi demons. These creatures, part men and part angels, assume mortal shapes and have intercourse with women.’

  Notably, in the works of early Christian writers through to the thirteenth-century encyclopedists, the incubus is often equated – or confused – with the ‘wild men’ of the wood. This unhappy race was born of a time when the forest was suddenly the great ‘Loneliness’; when townspeople were turning increasingly to cultivation for their survival and lived in fear of the encroaching wood. As time went on, wild men or wild people would haunt the public consciousness with an all-too-corporeal image of rabid desire and divine punishment.

  The story of the wild man begins as a cautionary tale. He abducts women and children who wander. He rapes the former and eats the latter. He has a thick pelt of hair, usually black. Only the face, palms and feet (and breasts of the woman) are bare. His elbows and knees are exposed, too, for hair will not grow on these areas of flex and wear. On his head the hair is long and tufted – sometimes filthy and matted with dirt and moss.

  Because he has an innate understanding of wild beasts, he is a skilled hunter. He will eat all game completely raw. When meat (and succulent children) are scarce, he will scratch up roots from the ground, pluck berries where he may, and gnaw at verdure. He knows every season. He feels every shadow, every shaft of light, on the woodland floor. He can even assume the guises of animals.

  The wild man is strong enough to uproot trees. When he gives vent to his rage and frustration, he sets up a mighty woodland din. He is by nature hyperactive, combative, noisy and ‘fiery-complexioned’, but he is also prone to bouts of silence, immobility and deep suspicion.

  Though he is entirely wanton in his desires, he suffers no shame.

  Though he has the body of a man, he is without a soul.

  Though his strength is unrivalled, he shrinks from contact with humans.

  He doesn’t have the words.

  Its juice is red, abundant, especially at the root. When injured, the stalk ‘bleeds’ like a person. A single broad notched leaf sheathes the new bud as it rises from the earth. The solitary bloom emerges white, immaculate. In spring sunshine, it might last a week; in rough winds as little as a day.

  That first day he wanted to tell her this, but his own voice embarrassed him. ‘Over there,’ he called.

  ‘What?’

  ‘To your right . . . No, back a bit. Bloodroot. Those white ones. On the bank.’

  ‘Oh – ’

  ‘Something for your book.’

  She looked blank.

  ‘For you to draw,’ he shouted, louder than necessary.

  She nodded, pushing her hair away from her smile.

  He felt something catch light within him. ‘The Indians used it. For dye and paint.’

  ‘Really?’

  She couldn’t be more than twenty.

  Young. Too young. And Malone would be wondering where he was.

  Overhead, a train was clattering along the track, the 11.20, when – ‘What?’ He cocked his hand to his ear.

  ‘Stay there,’ she shouted again.

  Something in his gut pulled sharp.

  ‘I’m going upriver to the bridge.’

  He had no words to call back. He wanted to run, to scramble back up the embankment. But the world was narrowing to the bright span of the river, to the shelter of the oaks, to shouting distance. And as she disappeared into the woods he felt something in himself clamber into being; life stumbling late from a hole into the warm earth of spring.

  Love me, he felt everything in him say. Love me.

  Then he was leaning against the hickory, peering now and again into the river, looking for shiners, for rainbow darters, to show her. It hardly seemed real. Sunlight flickered with the breeze. She sat cross-legged on the bank, careless of mud on her denim skirt, watching the sky, the trees, for birds. That’s what she was supposed to be doing. Recording bird life today. She had a pair of fold-up zoom binoculars. Which is how she first spotted him, she was saying, up there on the tracks. She didn’t tell him about her last sketch – the fleeting shape of him moving down the embankment. She’d got the motion of him, his energy, but not his face, not the essence of him.

  Did he know? At least a hundred million birds are killed each year across North America in collisions with skyscrapers. Think of it: one hundred million. At least. She’s seen photographs showing large masses of birds circling certain buildings and battering the windows. Chicago is a death trap for birds – 50 per cent that hit are killed. They don’t put that in the guidebooks, do they? They don’t mention that on architecture tours. And glass is the worst. Had he heard that? She hadn’t, until one of the other volunteers told her. Birds see the reflection of the trees or sky, so they think the forest or flight path continues. Or worse, they see their own image and mistake it for a rival bird they have to drive away. It’s the major problem for the reintroduction of certain species like the peregrine falcon. Had he ever seen a peregrine falcon?

  And starlight. What about starlight? Nobody cared. Not really. Even though it takes four whole years for the light from even the nearest star, not including the sun, to reach us. The Milky Way had never looked milky to her. Had it to him? Not even in the middle of the night outside a small cottage her father once rented for them on the wild shore of Lake Erie. The fact that she might never really see the Milky Way made her so angry. She was part of the Campaign for Dark Skies. For smart lights and sky-caps on street lights. For downshine. There are more than fifty million stars, she said. The sky should teem, like an ocean should teem.

  And every single element here on Earth, every element heavier than hydrogen that is, originated inside a star. Did he know that? Sorry – her dad was a scientist. Everything that was anything began with a dying star: the calcium in our bones, the oxygen in our lungs, the iron in our blood.

  ‘Bloodroot,’ she said in his ear, as if only half remembering a detail from a long-ago time. A time, only earlier that day, when they were still strange to one another. And she could feel it too: his he
art slamming at his chest.

  Then, ‘Don’t hurt me,’ she said, and he wanted to say the same but didn’t know what it would mean even if he could say it. Breath. Blood beat. He was moving beyond knowing. ‘Don’t hurt me,’ but her fingers were on the buttons of his fly. They were lifting him out, kindling him. Her head was bending low – her neck so white as her hair spilled away – and ‘Oh.’ She smiled, moved by him, moved as he yearned in her hands towards her.

  Lips. Tongue. Mouth. The gift of being received.

  He lifted her face, pressed her back to the trunk of the hickory. Her nose was in the musk of his chest, his armpit. His lips glanced over her neck, her shoulder, over the velvet of her nipple. Later, the marks of his fingers on her thighs, on her hip. And ‘Lift me up with you’ – that’s what she was saying, her voice almost lost in her throat. ‘Lift me up.’

  11

  The lid of the peephole slides back.

  ‘Giles. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  The chain clatters and drops. The door opens. She smoothes her hair and pulls a shoulder strap back into place. ‘How did you find – ’

  ‘You’ve left the South Loop. Boy, that was one great apartment.’

  ‘Small. Extortionate. I’m on my way out.’

  ‘Got a minute?’

  ‘I’m picking Aarif up at school. Then I have to get groceries.’

  ‘It’s Sunday, Nat.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘No school.’

  ‘Arabic lessons. After Sunday School at the mosque.’

  He raises one eyebrow. ‘Arabic?’

  ‘His grandfather’s language.’

  ‘I just meant – ’

  ‘Another time maybe, eh?’ She starts to close the door. But she stops, toeing the welcome mat, uncertain. ‘Unless you’re any good at carrying groceries.’

  ‘Any good? Any good? You know me, Nat. I’m the god-damned best.’

  She rolls her eyes, smiling. ‘Still Giles.’