And he can see it again in his mind’s eye.
You too can see it in his mind’s eye. At last. The mystery of those twenty seconds. In real time.
Look.
The images are grainy. The light is greenish on the infrared footage. The video’s on-screen timer reads 01:37:14. Below it, the day pulses: 09-11-01. Under the fixed view of the camera Christina looks like a girl in a box. Her face is unusually pale. Her covers are in disarray. She’s been restless in the night.
What surprises both you and Giles Carver as his daughter rises – three inches, six, a foot and a half – is how unremarkable it seems. How quiet. How untumultuous.
Her face calms. Her mouth falls open slightly. Her breath is as shallow as a child’s. The sheet and blanket slide from her on to the floor, but she hardly stirs. Only her right foot twitches briefly in the air.
(‘You can do it, Tina. I’m telling you.’ Angel’s voice.)
Below her, EEG wires dangle with her hair, blonde now after the long summer. Her right hand rests on her chest. Her left hand drifts below her, as if she is trailing her fingers over a river’s cool surface. Her back remains effortlessly straight.
She is as light, as weightless, as a bird on a warm uprush of air.
Ten seconds. Twelve. Fifteen. Then her slow, ineluctable return to earth.
Only twenty seconds. Yet you feel as if you’ve just surfaced from a slow-plunging dive.
Your final boarding call is flashing.
Giles Carver blinks, turning back to you. ‘It’s a mystery,’ he says. ‘We don’t know where gravity comes from or where it goes.’ He looks at the floor, trying to hide whatever it is he’s feeling. ‘But, whatever the case, it’s always about pull.’ He looks up. ‘Do you see? It’s always an attractive force.’
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Copyright © Alison MacLeod, 2005
The publisher is grateful for the permission to reproduce lines from ‘Second Elegy of the Duino Elegies’
by Rainer Maria Rilke, published in The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke,
edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell, Picador, 1987
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
MacLeod, Alison, 1964–
The wave theory of angels / Alison MacLeod.
ISBN 0-14-305133-4
I. Title.
PR6063.A2485W39 2005 823’.914 C2005-900224-7
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data available
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The Wave Theory of Angels Page 25