The truth is, she doesn’t want Christina to come down from her magic carpet. She is afraid that her sister’s body – the body that shared baths and beds and a mother with her – will be different, that her sister will be a husk.
A stack of library books sits on her coffee table. He grabs a seat, scans the titles. Science? Philosophy? Eastern magic? The names on the covers mean nothing to him: Avicenna, al-Ghazzali, Yahya Suhrawardi, Ibn al-Arabi.
‘One coffee, then I’m out of here,’ he calls. ‘Maggie’ll be wondering where I am.’
She walks through from the kitchen, mugs steaming in her hands. He looks up, shaking his head. ‘Your beach reading’s getting worse, Nat.’
She laughs. ‘My father’s influence. Blame him.’
‘That hardly seems fair.’
‘He was a Sunni Muslim by birth but an old Sufi by inclination.’
‘I see.’ He doesn’t.
‘I’ll tell you a story.’ She joins him on the sofa, crossing her legs beneath her. ‘My mother grew up in a Montreal neighbourhood known as the Plateau. Catholic. Deeply working class. Yet, at its heart, a proud boast of a church. Beautiful. Every morning she left for school early so she could take communion at Église St Jean Baptiste. She’d walk up rue Marie-Anne, chapel veil and bobby pins stuffed in her coat pocket, and, by quarter to eight, she’d cross boulevard St Laurent.
‘Her first glimpse of my father was across the boulevard as he shut the bakery door behind him. He was just finishing the early shift. She was seventeen. He was almost thirty. She told me she noticed him because she felt you could read a man by his back, and in my father’s back she immediately saw, not only his strength, but also his kindness in the world.
‘At first they nodded to one another from their respective sides of St Laurent. If she were a little late, he’d wait for her across the street by the bakery door, tap his wrist and laugh – partly because it would make her blush and partly because the watch he pointed to was long gone, hawked at a pawnshop the day he got off the boat in Montreal.
‘After a while, my father got bold. He’d finish a few minutes early so he could cross to her side of the street and pass her there instead. Now at least he could see the blue of her eyes and the small mole above her lips, and those things alone, he always said, were worth crossing the street for.
‘When his French improved, he managed to tempt her to stop, to chat. About the weather. About the bread that morning. About the customers, who came from all over the Main. Eli Mandel, who came every morning to collect the tins of unbaked rolls for the Steakhouse ovens; who was growing thinner and thinner by the day because his wife was looking prettier and prettier. Monsieur Lafayette, the poet who swept floors in one of the garment factories on St Laurent and recited Rilke to the women at their machines. Miss Doyle, whose glass eye misted up in the rain or the snow, so she wept in equal measure for the poverty of the poet Monsieur Lafayette and for the glazed beauty of the almond croissants. The six Leblanc children, who would burst into the bakery on their way back from school and for whom my father made cinnamon pinwheels from the endcuts of pastry.
‘My mother was still shy in those days. But she stood and she listened and she smiled. Especially at my father’s terrible French. And she accepted his daily gift for the rest of that winter: a hot bun for each pocket, to keep her hands warm on her way to mass.
‘After a few months, she agreed to a café au lait after mass, in the minutes before the school bell rang. He brought the bowls and the coffee himself, in an old army Thermos, and they sat on the bottom step of a different spiralling fire escape every day in a space he would clear of snow with his bare hands because he was saving for a pair of good leather gloves. Imagine. No gloves in a Montreal winter.
‘But my mother, though always girlish, even now, is steelier than she looks. She only allowed herself to fall in love with my father when he told her one thing. Not that he was a graduate of Islamic sciences at al-Azhar, one of the world’s oldest universities. Not that his ancestors had been ulama, travelling scholars and wise men. But that there were Sufis, himself included, he said, who were devoted, also, to Jesus.’
Giles Carver suppresses a smile. ‘I’ll have to remember that line.’
She slaps his leg. ‘It was the loophole he needed. That same day, he ran like hell down St Laurent, almost got hit by a fish truck on St Dominique, shouted at kids on rue Coloniale, and landed finally on rue de Bullion. There, squeezed between brothels, he found a narrow apartment building and, in the darkness of a basement apartment, an old man who was known, alternatively, as a street philosopher, a vagrant and a Sufi pir.
‘My father told him he needed to become a Sufi toute de suite. That it was his only hope of salvation. He told the master that he had always been a good student and that he learned fast, and the Sufi master said to him, ‘‘Well, in that case, you are not a good student. A good student learns only very slowly.’’
‘My father felt something in him sink like a stone.
‘ ‘‘But unpromising as you are,’’ pronounced the old man, ‘‘I will not turn you away.’’
‘My father was so happy when he left the master that he lay down in the trampled snow of St Louis Square and made a snow angel, like he’d seen kids do that first long winter in Montreal. And, only years later, did he understand the meaning of what he had told my mother in that moment of sudden inspiration: that Jesus was an ideal Sufi because he had preached a gospel of love.’
‘Have you found Jesus, Nat? Is this what you’re trying to tell me?’
‘I’m trying to tell you that I had long assumed that my parents were endearingly naïve in the way they looked at the world. Isn’t that what people like you and I think of our parents? I’d assumed that their respective beliefs were little more than the products of a powerful cultural machinery. Roman Catholic in her case. Islamic in his. That both faiths were only thinly disguised forms of social control. And don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying they’re not. But I used to listen to my father talking about his days as a student at al-Azhar, and for me it might as well have been something out of the Arabian Nights. I felt very superior when I told him that the phrase ‘‘Islamic sciences’’ had to be one of the best oxymorons of all time.’
‘Kids are brutal.’
‘I was going to show him how it should be done. Physics at McGill. I thrived. The department got me funding for postgrad work, research, the usual. My dad was very proud. Both my parents were.
‘I moved here in 1990, after the offer came through. I’d always been really happy in Montreal, but the idea of an association with Fermilab was too tempting. That, and all the strings stuff that had come out of the department. Then Aarif was born two years later.’
‘Yes.’
‘With an enlarged heart.’ She looks up. ‘I never told you that.’
He looks at the coffee table. ‘I wouldn’t have told me anything.’
‘It was a ventricular septal defect – a ‘‘hole in the heart’’ – not uncommon, but this hole was big. So he was very blue when he was born, and his heart was already enlarged under the massive pressure of trying to get the low-oxygen blood to his lungs. In many cases small holes repair themselves naturally, but this hole wasn’t small. They told me that emergency surgery, on my tiny child, was the only option.
‘It was unbearable. Just the idea of it. The risks were huge, and even if he survived that, there was all this evidence coming out at the time about anaesthetics used on newborns leading to brain damage. It seemed like the beginning of something that could go on for years; something I didn’t have the stamina for. I couldn’t stop crying.
‘Aarif ’s father was heading for tenure-track at the university, not to mention a tenth-wedding anniversary. I never told you that either. It had all been a painful mistake, except for Aarif. So I wasn’t surprised when he told me, on my answering machine, that he’d respect any decision I needed to make; that we had to remain civilized. I knew what that meant. We lost c
ontact. My parents were with me for the birth, but my father couldn’t stay indefinitely because the operation could be weeks away, and he just couldn’t afford to keep the bakery shut.
‘But back in Montreal, every couple of nights, he got his friends together: Muslim friends, French friends, Jewish friends, Portuguese, Greek, Irish. Men and women I’d grown up with. Monsieur Nasser. Monsieur Mahmoud. Monsieur et Madame Bellefleur. Mademoiselle Juneau, the niece of Madame Bellefleur. Monsieur Heschel. Monsieur Demetrious. Monsieur Gonsalves. Monsieur Rubenstein. Le vieil et le jeune Messieurs Broussard. Monsieur and Madame O’Grady. That’s our neighbourhood, yes? They were where I’d grown up, something that had more to do with my parents’ united charm than with any set of progressive politics.
‘Anyway, sometimes in those nights after Aarif was born there’d be twenty or more squeezed into our small living room, the air thick with the smoke of all nations: with du Mauriers and Rothmans, with Gitanes and Camels, with roll-ups, cheroots, the occasional pipe, and I guess a bong here or a hookah there. Better than the Stanley Cup play-offs, he’d tell me on the phone. And, together, after exorcizing the pressures of the day with a good smoke, they’d pray for Aarif.
‘The hole closed, Giles. Not in a year. Not in six months. It closed in twelve days. A hole they said was too big to close closed. I’m in the cardiologist’s office, waiting to sign a consent form. A junior doctor comes in with Aarif ’s file, including that day’s test results. The cardiologist tells her she’s brought him the wrong child’s file. Only she hasn’t. He insists. But she hasn’t.
‘Later, my father told me that, when he prayed, he used to imagine the hole as the eye of Aarif ’s heart. It’s the old mystic image of contemplation, of wisdom. If you can see the hole as more than a hole, Rami, it might surprise you. That’s what he told himself. And, over and over again, he’d watch the eye of Aarif ’s heart close.
‘I was grateful. Beyond words. To my mother, my father. To everyone in that smoke-filled upstairs room above the bakery. And yes, it made me wonder. But then your life takes over again. Some kind of normality returns.’
‘Thank God.’
‘Exactly. Thank God. I no longer had to think about it. Aarif and I had been released into the world. He was fine. And, after a year, maybe a year and a half, I finally stopped listening to him breathe at nights. Then, three years ago, I stumbled across something: the results of a 1988 study conducted by a cardiologist. Randolph Byrd. He was investigating the possible effects of intercessory prayer in a sample of coronary care unit patients. Over ten months. In the cases of almost four hundred patients. Some were prayed for by outside prayer groups; some were not. Nobody knew who was in which group. Not the doctors. Not the patients.’
‘And?’
‘Some of the results were certainly significant. The prayed-for patients were five times less likely to require antibiotics and three times less likely to develop pulmonary oedema – a complication involving fluid and swelling in the lungs. The prayed-for patients were less frequently intubated and ventilated. They had fewer cases of pneumonia and cardiac arrest.’
‘Very X-Files.’
She smiles. Sips her coffee. ‘In the end, though, the results were challenged, partly because no one could say that the control group, the group that hadn’t been officially prayed for, were not being prayed for anyway. In fact, it’s likely that many of them were being prayed for by miscellaneous loved ones. So the study, finally, yielded more questions than it answered.’
‘With respect, Nat, this isn’t exactly an offshoot of strings.’
‘No.’ She turned. Stared out the open window. ‘But what if we do find, at Fermilab or at CERN, the experimental support we need – maybe a trace of your ghostly graviton? What if we do prove that one energy is the basis of all matter?’
‘Stop. I’m going all tingly.’
‘Giles, shut up for once. We know – or at least we think we know – that everything is a stream of particles emanating from a string or strings. But there’s still ‘‘blur’’ or ‘‘smear’’ or ‘‘fuzziness’’, less fundamental mess than we once suspected but – ’
‘ – but still a mess of waves. So we’ve still got the old question.’
‘Of what collapses a probability wave into real life. And we’re still ignoring it because the equations don’t care whether we know why or not.’
‘But you do.’
‘Don’t you – I mean, at the bottom of it all? What is it about the act of observation or measurement – ’
‘Or thought or will . . .’ He smiles.
‘ – that yields an outcome? And, yes. Okay. I wasn’t going to say it, but yes. Or thought or will – maybe. In any case, if the stuff of the world is only raw potential until some sort of act of consciousness kicks in and determines things, then isn’t it also possible that deep prayer, essentially an act of the concentrated mind – ’
‘ – collapses possibility into actuality?’ He laughs. ‘Nat, nobody will thank you for this.’
‘I didn’t say they would.’
‘The faithful will think you’re turning God into a gigavolt. The research community will think you’re turning gigavolts into God.’
‘But what if it is all the same thing? God, gigavolts. Spirit, energy. The Word, the Singularity. ‘‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’’; the many dimensions, eleven at last count, of M-theory. What if both versions are equally true?’
‘But this idea of willing an outcome in the physical world . . .’
‘ ‘‘Will’’ is the wrong word. A good contemplative, of any faith, would tell you it’s not about will; it’s about attention. A sort of relaxed awareness that comes from looking inward.’
‘And does what?’
‘I’m going on too much.’
‘And does what exactly?’
She stares into her mug. ‘Makes manifest what was previously latent. Or virtual. Or implicit.’
‘That’s what we tell ourselves when we make a wish, Nat. We’re back to the Arabian Nights.’
She turns her ear to the window; hears Aarif laughing in the yard with the boy from next door. ‘There are always implicits in the explicit world, and you know it.’
‘That’s the point, Nat. I know it. I know it from hands-on experience in the lab.’
‘You’ve got a slice of eleven dimensions in your lab? Giles, really. You should have said.’
‘I know it mathematically.’
‘A symbolic language.’
‘That has made accurate predictions time and again.’
‘As have many philosophies and works of art.’
‘You know what I’m saying.’
‘Do I? Maybe everything the physicist, the priest, the mathematician or the imam knows is always only a description – no, not even a description – a metaphor, and by that I mean a truly wonderful and revealing metaphor, for something we’ll never hold in our hands.’
He drains his mug. Checks his watch. ‘I have to go.’ Through the open window, the wail of the late-afternoon adhan, the call to prayer, arises from the mosque’s loudspeakers two streets away.
‘I’m sorry. I’m keeping you.’ She picks up his mug.
‘You’re doing this, Nat? This contemplation stuff?’
‘No. I’m trying. That’s all. Which is what tonight is about, partly. There are people from the mosque, from a local orthodox Sufi group, from a synagogue in Chicago, from the local Polish-Catholic church. We’ve also got one Quaker and two Buddhists coming tonight. I liaise with the spiritual director at the University of Chicago Hospitals. I usually have everyone here. We’re given names.’
He stares at the carpet. He can’t not risk it. ‘Christina. Christina Grace Carver.’
It’s on his way out of Bridgeview that he sees you.
He pulls up the handbrake and squints as you move on to the crosswalk. When it clicks. You’re from the train. The West Line. In the same compartment, often, in the mornings; there on the platf
orm at Oak Park at the end of the day. Behind him on Erie Street on his way home. Another commuter. Same neighbourhood. Why else –
Except, now you’re here, in a random suburb, sixteen miles out of town, on a late Sunday afternoon at the same intersection.
As the light goes green, he watches the back of you disappear down a side street.
The car behind him honks.
He’s not even sure he could describe you.
13
It was the eve of her birthday, her twentieth, just before midnight. He reached out and put his hands over her eyes. ‘It feels faster if you don’t look.’ And in the window’s smeared reflection, she smiled wide as the late-night train made its bone-juddering run at the ascent known to railmen as Angel’s Flight. Thirty-five feet over the expressway, he pulled his hands away.
Far below, the Near West Side winked at her with the light of 50,000 lives. Bedside lamps. Porch lights. The bright bulbs of fridges opened for the late-hour snack. He wanted her to have that, the world unfolded. Greektown. Little Italy. The Congo, as they called it in his day. And there, fleetingly, where his finger smudged the window, Ashland, the street where he’d lived until his dad died, in a house at the back of the heaving, ramshackle Blue Line. Long before politicians started shouting, ‘Renew the Blue.’ In the days when you could go down to the Maxwell Street Market, the original one, that is, and get a set of hubcaps, a live blues tune and a prostitute all on the same Sunday afternoon. Beyond it: the lights of downtown, which could have been Mecca when he was growing up, that’s how unreal all those towers seemed. ‘If I’d heard of Mecca, I mean.’
She laughed.
‘Good view?’ he said.
She looked at him, eyes so bright he had to look away. The old shyness. But his heart kicked to life in his chest. He knew he could do this: make the world new for her. He felt things: the life in the current of a river, the vibrato of a bird call, the metabolic dimming of winter, the green charge of summer. He lived in the moment. He could net it when he wanted to.
The girl who sat beside him, nose to glass, wanted to see. She wanted to smell. She wanted to taste the world. And he wanted to hold it for her, live as a fish in his hands.
The Wave Theory of Angels Page 15