The Wave Theory of Angels

by Alison Macleod

  ‘Of course,’ says Sister Paula. ‘She’s weathered a lot. Which is exactly why we want to help, if we can.’

  ‘And that brings us to our other question,’ says Mr Joseph.

  Dr Sperber smiles. ‘About a boyfriend, you mean.’ He opens a door and ushers them through.

  Sister Paula smiles graciously. ‘The Aquinan Center for Living, Dr Sperber, is really a place for guided retreats and educational advancement. We’ve found that the greater the girl’s independence from family and friends in general, the healthier her transition.’

  ‘I understand. And, I must say, from the literature it looks like a beautiful place.’ He motions them down another corridor.

  ‘It is,’ says Sister Paula. ‘Truly. And that’s what we’d like to make clear to Christina. The Center occupies close to a hundred acres of protected woodland. There’s a spa, a set of stables, a Neo-Gothic chapel, not to mention a good and growing collection of contemporary art. But, most importantly, we have an accredited learning programme. We offer classes with top people in everything from bee-keeping to horseback riding; from landscape painting to conceptual art. The Center was established forty years ago and our members have gone on to play key roles in all areas of American civic and family life.’

  ‘Well, if she does have a boyfriend,’ says Dr Sperber, ‘we haven’t seen him here.’ He lowers his voice as he approaches her door. ‘But she’s . . . how shall I put it?’ He knocks politely. ‘Reticent on the subject.’

  ‘Perhaps I could try,’ says Sister Paula.

  *

  Inside Something’s Brewing, you stand at the counter, dripping.

  At last the kid behind the counter is pouring the coffees, punching the register and taking your money. He’s explaining something about stamps and loyalty cards when a cellphone goes off.

  ‘Of course it’s me – who else were you expecting on your old dad’s phone? No, sweetheart, I’m not sure where she’s got to . . .’ Carver’s voice is light, easy, but when you turn to look, he’s staring at the ceiling, his face strained. He remembers his surroundings, turns to the wall. ‘Of course I haven’t left you there. No, listen, Christina. I keep saying. No one’s left you anywhere . . . Well, what does Bishop say?’

  You cross to the table and lower the tray.

  ‘I’m just asking, Christina. I’m just asking if he had anything new to say. Maybe something about medication? No, of course he’s not God. I’m merely . . . Well, don’t worry about them . . . Again? As in again today? Well, who authorized that?’ He pushes his hand through the wet thickness of his hair. ‘What sort of questions?’

  He meets your eyes briefly.

  ‘Okay. Christina. Christina? Listen to me. Listen. I’m coming now. Are you listening? Yes, right now.’ He reaches for his coat, sliding one arm awkwardly in. ‘No . . . Like I said, ladybug, I don’t know where Maggie is but . . . Christina, listen. I’m leaving now.’ He glances at his watch. ‘It’s six-fifteen. I should be with you by seven. Quarter past at the latest. Do you have a clock in your room? Good. So I’ll be there soon.’ He shuts his eyes, like he’s making a wish. ‘The video’s yours for the choosing on the way home. Anything but Dr Zhivago again.’ He forces a laugh. ‘A benign dictator? Me? Are you sure we’re talking about the same guy here?’ He winces – he’s just said the wrong thing. ‘That’s what I said, didn’t I? Okay . . . Yup. Bye . . . Bye, ladybug.’

  He flips his phone shut. ‘Have to be somewhere.’ He slides out of the booth. Studies you for a moment. ‘See you around.’

  By 9:00 his keys are on the kitchen table, the blinds are pulled, and he’s peeling off the damp skin of his coat.

  ‘No change,’ said the duty nurse, as if it wasn’t obvious: his own daughter, his first-born, picking up the phone and calling Security.

  When he hits the button on the answering machine, the message. At 6:10. Just before she tried his cellphone. Maggie? Dad? It’s me. Will you pick up? Are you there?

  Christina: speaking to him from whatever place it is that passes for the Beyond these days.

  17

  Gone.

  When l’Ymagier opens the door of Christina’s room – the bishop only moments behind him – she’s gone.

  Running: up the hills, through the vineyards, lungs straining, rain streaming, her heart climbing in her chest, as if it could lift the whole of her with it.

  ‘Gone,’ Dr Bishop breathes into the phone. ‘She was on camera about an hour ago, moving in the direction of Maple Avenue, but I’m afraid it wasn’t picked up on time. The truth is, Giles, we have no idea where she is.’ And Carver, phone in one hand, steering wheel in the other, feels life kick-start within him.

  Her father’s line is busy. Maggie hangs up. She’ll try again later. She goes back to her booth at the Happy Griddle, asks for a refill and opens Jane Eyre. The last chapter, and still no word from her mother.

  No exclamatory comment. No passing thought. No fragment of her voice.

  So she’s going home. Back to her house and her sister’s teacups dangling gladly from the trees in the backyard. Back to her father who was loved by her mother, whom she loves, who must love her, who does love, if haphazardly. Back to her room, where she’ll close the door and stand before the old lacquered bookcase – the last surviving piece of furniture from her parents’ first apartment. Back to the creased and faded spines, two rows deep, and the layer of dust, silent as a first snow. Wuthering Heights. Villette. The Rainbow. Women in Love. Dubliners. Bleak House. Hard Times. The Awakening. The Scarlet Letter. The Age of Innocence. Gone to Earth. And there, there: her mother’s delicate, erratic handwriting alive in a margin, waiting to be found.

  The window to her right is smeared with the syrupy finger-prints of children. Rain’s coming down now, bouncing off the asphalt in the parking lot. And she suddenly realizes: she’s not even sure what town she’s in.

  In the purple blaze of a lavender field, Marguerite stops at last, caught in a sudden downpour.

  How good it is to be in the weather.

  How easy it was to slip past the curtain. How easy it always would have been. It was only fear that stopped her, the fear of being any more lost than she has been.

  Yet she has never felt easier than she is now, here, in the middle of nowhere.

  Standing in the rain. Before two surprised lavender pickers.

  Her face upturned and wet.

  Making a spectacle of herself.

  At the airport he shakes out the umbrella they’ve crowded under and scans the overhead monitors. Flight AC 784 to Montreal is departing, unexpectedly on time, at 12:35. He loads Nathalie’s luggage on to the cart. As they push into a sea of delayed passengers and security checks, he takes hold of Aarif ’s hand.

  ‘What will you do?’

  She smiles. ‘I don’t know. Work in the bakery for a while.

  Read palms. Sell magic carpets. Dabble in extremist groups. You know me. I like to stay busy.’

  He smiles. ‘When will I see you?’

  ‘When you can. When you can do it, Giles. That’s when you’ll see me.’

  ‘Soon then.’ His hand finds hers. ‘I’ll see you very soon.’

  Christina stops for shelter in the ashmen’s ancient lodge. Her legs are mud-splattered. Her tunic and shift are soaked through.

  He will sense her in the wood as easily as he does the movement of deer. At times, he will watch her. Watch out for her too. She knows this. He will leave food. She will not go hungry.

  She stops at last, out of breath, and bends, anchoring her hands on her shins. Rain trickles down her front. Her T-shirt sticks to her. Her hair is hot at her neck. She checks the plastic bag with her sketchbook, pencils and charcoal, and pulls the handles tighter against the weather.

  And as she breathes, it comes to her. All of it. The dream from the night of the tenth, as she lay wired up in the lab.

  It was the Tevatron tunnel. That’s where she was. She was lying in the tunnel, only it was open to the sky, and earth
was raining in on her. ‘One hundred pounds per cubic foot,’ she could hear the Fermilab guide saying somewhere behind her. ‘That’s how much it weighs.’

  She was spitting grit from her mouth, trying not to choke, when the thin man in the open bathrobe wandered past. ‘Tastes awful, doesn’t it?’ he said.

  She’s remembering now. ‘My legs,’ she pleads. ‘I can’t move my legs.’ But he doesn’t turn around. When she reaches out to feel her thigh, she touches solid wood.

  Someone’s shouting from high above. Angel. It’s Angel. She turns her ear, trying to hear over all the noise of the world falling in. He’s telling her that it’s not what it seems, in spite of her useless legs, in spite of the grave. It’s hard to catch every word. ‘Listen to me, Tina!’ he calls. ‘Listen.’ And suddenly she knows where he’s calling from.

  He’s there at the very top of Angel’s Flight, high above all the winking lights of the Near West Side. Where she would love to be. ‘What are you doing down there?’ he says. ‘What did I tell you? You are fucking made for the world.’ And she longs. She longs to be there, up high, looking down on the expressway, a slipping current of unending light. ‘You can do it, Tina. I’m telling you. You can do it.’ And slowly, slowly, as if magnetized by his words or his voice or his will, she feels herself rise . . .

  She finds the key for the lodge’s padlock under the usual stone. The door is swollen with the damp. She forces it with her hip. It is a moment before her eyes adjust to the dim light; before she spots it, in a heap in the corner, under a dribbling leak, next to the rusty signalling lanterns. His jacket.

  She picks it up, shakes it out. In ballpoint, immediately above her own writing, words: ‘I love you. Know that.’

  In the sudden shadow of the ashmen’s lodge, the words come back – ‘And the devil wept, saying: I leave thee, my fairest consort, whom long since I found and rested in thee; I forsake thee, my sure sister, my beloved in whom I was well pleased. What I shall do, I know not’ – the story Marguerite copied long ago by stealth in the days when a story was only a story.

  Christina shakes rain off the bag and lifts out the pad. A train rushes past on the West Line, and she watches from the rain-dashed window, her heart still drumming for him.

  She won’t see him again. That’s what he’s telling her. She knows it is.

  She opens the pad to the loose sketch and reaches for a stick of charcoal. She sits down cross-legged on the broken floorboards, under the best crack of light.

  Within minutes she’ll focus it: the kinetic life of him as he comes down the embankment; the private stillness of his face. She’ll get his eyes too: melancholic, luminous. She’ll finish the sketch.

  It will be the first time she will have got a figure – a person, that is, and not a still life – right. It will be the first time she gets the contradictions of the human form down on the page. It will be the first time a drawing will feel truly like her own.

  Later, she’ll head back through the wood, slipping into his jacket, a new, strange skin in the torrent of rain. The smell of his cigarettes will rise up, fleetingly, around her. She’ll realize she’s hungry; that her blood sugar is low. As she walks, she’ll already be tasting it: the bread hot from the toaster, the trickle of butter, the richness of honey.

  18

  Entanglement is the thing.

  Einstein, for one, didn’t like it. For him, the ability of one particle to instantaneously affect the physical properties of a once-related particle on what could be the opposite side of the universe was nothing less than ‘spooky action at a distance’. Physicists today are more relaxed with the idea, if only because, unlike Einstein, they worry less about its metaphysical side-effects.

  Entanglement between particles, we now understand, exists everywhere and all the time. Once any two (or more) particles have interacted, it no longer makes sense to consider one in isolation, no matter how great their separation. The physical realities of these particles, such as their momentum and spin, are now decidedly shared properties.

  But the story of the entangled world does not stop at the subatomic. The latest research is a bolt from the blue: researchers have located entanglement here, in our big, wide, macroscopic world. While the discovery of entanglement between holmium atoms in a magnetic salt may not be everyone’s idea of a heart-stopper, the implications are far-reaching. The results suggest that, if we only knew where to look, we would find the effects of entanglement elsewhere in the everyday world.

  Some go further. Some believe we will, in time, discover entanglement everywhere. Some argue we will find that entanglement is a consequence of anything with claims to a physical reality. Consider your own body, for example, and the countless interactions between the electrons in all of its atoms. Wouldn’t it be surprising if it were anything less than a mass of entanglements?

  What about two related bodies? Or two bodies in relationship? Wouldn’t two masses of entanglements tangle? And what about two kindred consciousnesses? After all, entangled atoms make molecules. Molecules make biology. Biology makes life and all its attendant mystery.

  But even here, it seems, entanglement doesn’t end. For recent research has uncovered an uncanny connection between past and future time.

  Think photons for a moment. Think polarization. Picture it: you’re measuring a given photon’s polarization.

  Done. Great. Phew.

  Polarization measured. You’ve got your result.

  Now measure the polarization again. Same photon.

  The news?

  The second measurement you take or, more precisely, the influence of the act of this second measurement on the photon, could well affect how that photon was polarized earlier.

  Yes. Earlier. For time too, it seems, can become entangled.

  As for worlds—

  You bump into Carver by the revolving doors. He laughs as if to say, Of course, who else? He’s on his way out, having seen Nathalie and Aarif off.

  You’re on your way in. Your stay is over. You’re flying back. No baggage to check. You travel light.

  He’s unexpectedly chatty. Relaxed even. He turns back and walks with you towards departures. ‘I’ll follow you for a change, if you don’t mind.’

  It shouldn’t surprise you. Did you think you could remain detached from events? Did you think you could resist entanglement?

  He makes a joke about the riddle of the video footage, about his career in supergravity ‘of all things’, about ‘the tired jests of the gods’. ‘There’s no one,’ he says, ‘like your own children to puncture your vanities.’

  He’s hedging. Play along. There’s time yet. You have fifteen minutes before you board. And you can see a difference in him, a change that began the day you confronted him outside Something’s Brewing. Man of science though he is, he seems at last to be coming round to the idea that he can’t conjure the world; that mystery persists.

  Of course he’ll never know what he can never know: that early one morning in 1284, as the church bell rang for matins, Christina of Beauvais’s body shut down in the panic of too much feeling. That, even as that bell rang, his own daughter collapsed on the kitchen floor of their home, her heart faltering as she picked up the phone.

  He’ll never know that, just as he himself was made outcast for his physics, so a thirteenth-century man called Giles of Beauvais risked all for a radical metaphysics; that the imaginator’s vision, like his own, was of a cosmos that is endlessly unfolding.

  Giles Carver will never know that four girls moved as one into the world.

  Nor does he know anything of you. He knows only that you’ve dogged his steps; that you’ve watched with a keen eye; that you’ve read him strangely well. And though he’ll never say it, he also senses, in some vague way, that you, the Observer, have been the making of him – even if he does regard it merely as a turn of phrase.

  He’s laughing again. He’s telling you he’s even relinquished, at last, the puzzle of the late-night phone calls. He jokes. He’ll cr
ack the mystery of the singularity itself – the secret of the universe’s first spark – long before he figures out who was on the phone the night Christina collapsed.

  You’ve made it through the crowds as far as the departure gate. You take a final gulp of the drink you’ve acquired en route. You have to go. Yet there’s still something you need to know.

  He’s trying to explain something called a graviton, a ‘spin-two particle’, the theoretical carrier of the force of gravity. Elusive. Exotic. Half dream. You’re beginning to wonder if you’ve come all this way for a science lecture. Yet he’s working something out. Something in his own head.

  Because he knows. At the end of this day, the force of your expectation isn’t something he can avoid.

  ‘What most people don’t get is this: gravity is actually a hell of a lot weaker than most of us ever would or could imagine. Take the electromagnetic force – just for the sake of comparison. It’s a thousand billion billion billion billion times stronger than gravity.’ He smiles. ‘Forget that. Think of this. It takes nothing more than some aerodynamic thrust to get an entire jet off the ground. Nothing more than magnets to suspend high-speed trains above metallic tracks. Right? No. Forget engineering. Think of the human body. You need only a very ordinary set of muscles to overcome a planetary force, routinely, on a daily basis. We do it all the time, every time we heave ourselves out of bed.’

  You drop your cup in a waste bin. As he talks, you adjust your watch. Soon you will be in another time zone.

  ‘But the weakness of gravity has stumped everyone for ages, right? Why should one of the four forces of the world be so paltry compared to the other three? Nobody gets it until a couple of voices come along and say, ‘‘What if?’’ What if gravity isn’t just ‘‘thin on the ground’’? What if there’s a leak? A flow of gravitons, in other words, from our familiar world to worlds within our world – to dimensions within our dimensions.’

  You hear the boarding call again. Time’s running out.

  ‘Okay. Take it a step further. What if it’s not a leak? What if it’s a transmission instead, like some M-theorists suggest? Some kind of signal between all these planes of being. It isn’t impossible. That’s all we can say right now. But to say that is to say more than I, for one, ever dreamed of.’