Certainty

by Madeleine Thien

  The name is familiar, but in his fatigue, he cannot place it. Ansel writes back, telling him that he is sorry. He gives him, as briefly as possible, the details of what has happened.

  He hits Send and leans back, closing his eyes.

  Gail says, “In radio, sounds might be translated into microwave signals and then shot at a satellite floating in space. People say it’s like shooting the eye out of a squirrel from a ten-mile range.” She laughs, wrinkling her eyes as if she is picturing that very image. “These signals are then broadcast back to us, but some parts always escape. Some parts turn their back on the Earth, and maybe they keep travelling forever.”

  His affair with Mariana happened last summer, when Gail’s work had taken her to Toronto. One night after working the evening shift at the clinic, he and Mariana had gone out for a drink. They were surrounded by a group of people, other doctors and friends, and then, a short time later, he looked up to find that everyone else had gone home. Yet he and Mariana had lingered on.

  She was a respirologist, and was at the clinic covering for another doctor who was on leave. He found himself drawn to the way she sat at a table, legs crossed, chin resting on her hands. She was warm and serious and she was married, so, at first, he believed that there was no risk, no potential for the affair that later occurred. His own feelings he had dismissed as harmless, unremarkable.

  The bar grew noisy, and they moved to a corner table. She said that her father had been a doctor, too, and she had never doubted that she, herself, would study medicine. Yet the more time passed, the more she had second thoughts. It was a career that set one apart, she said, made one solitary in ways she would not have chosen. Each encounter was so intimate, and yet professional. Always, doctors had to close a part of themselves off, from their patients, from their loved ones.

  At some point, he had taken her hand and leaned across to kiss her. For a single, brief second, she pulled back, and then she did not. He remembered, still, the taste of her lips, of citrus, of the bitterness of the wine. She said that her husband and son were away on a camping trip. They left the bar and wandered out into the warm summer night. There were streams of traffic moving down Cambie Street, people flowing out of the local cinema, into coffee shops and bars. He and Mariana were holding hands, and they turned into a quiet residential street towards her home. He remembers all this now as if he is recalling the details of someone else’s life, once told to him.

  Sometimes, the things that should be difficult occur so easily, to undress someone else, to put your lips to theirs, to breathe in the scent of their skin and forget what came before. He can pinpoint this moment, isolate, study every detail. The second before he leaned across the table to kiss her, the second before his hand reached out, taking hers.

  Mariana unlocked the door to her house. She switched all the lights on as they went, and his eyes half-closed against the brightness. The layout was familiar to him from some childhood remembrance, the hallway leading from the living room, past the kitchen, the thick carpet beneath his feet. There had been a birthday recently, and cards were displayed on the coffee table. Framed photographs hung neatly on the walls. They passed the open door of the child’s room, a lone airplane suspended from the ceiling.

  In the afternoons that followed, he and Mariana had walked the three blocks from the clinic to her house. They would let themselves in and walk through the quiet rooms. Lying beside her, he told himself he had crossed into a different country, another place, separate from his relationship with Gail. As if the affair was an event happening to him, as if every moment were not a choice, deliberated over, settled on.

  Once, in his office at work, Mariana had set a scan against the light box showing him the clouding of a patient’s lungs. She had described the patient’s history and present condition. While she spoke, Ansel wondered what would happen now a device had been invented that, with the use of light, allowed one to see through the human body. He knew the shape and weight of a heart, the density of a human rib, the mysterious and beautiful branching of the ventricles. He knew that at a time of grief, the body was flooded with chemicals, and these chemicals were the groundwork for the emotions that people felt, responses mapped in the body like ink flooding the bloodstream. Mariana had told him once that there was a time when they might have found happiness together but that perhaps the moment had already passed. By the time they met, they had moved on to other possibilities, they had begun to live out other lives. We always choose in blindness, she said. We always choose looking backwards.

  As the weeks passed, his life seemed to split in two, the affair that he had begun, and his relationship with Gail, whom he loved. Two parts that could not touch, because they told something very different about the man he was and the person that he wished to be. In September, he had ended the affair and told Gail everything. She had listened in silence, then she tried to escape him, agitated, going from room to room. He followed after her, terrified that if he closed his eyes, she would disappear. Her pain is still vivid to him, the lines on her face. What did he want from her? she had asked. What did he want her to say?

  He wanted her to be angry with him, to accuse him. To tell him why she found it so easy to leave for months at a time, to commit herself so wholeheartedly to her work. To admit the truth to herself if she had now, finally, fallen out of love with him.

  She was incensed. How dare he turn the blame around? Her anger seemed to shimmer around them, and then it simply dissolved, evaporating into the air. Her acceptance was, to him, worse than any other response. She said she felt as if they had been struggling for so long, and now they had finally reached the end.

  In that moment, so much between them was clear, all the barriers and edges, the failure to grasp something unnamed that they both wanted. They saw that they could step back, lower their hands, let this something fall.

  He told her that he wanted to continue on, to try to find a way from this place. But their days and nights entered a kind of limbo. They existed in the house, side by side, the ritual of their years together shielding them from a growing distance. Several weeks later, on Gail’s thirty-ninth birthday, they had walked together along the creek. On the water, white sails opened like handkerchiefs.

  “Are you happy, Ans?”

  Gail had asked him this out of the blue, her gaze turned away from him so that he could not see her eyes.

  Yes, he told her. This was where he wanted to be. But her hurt was visible, almost a pallor on her skin. He felt he could not reach her, as if some part of her, below the surface, had turned irrevocably away from him.

  Late in the fall, Gail went to Amsterdam to see Harry Jaarsma. When she returned, she was full of life, impassioned. She seemed to want change, within herself, between them, and she believed all things were possible. She said that the past is not static, our memories fold and bend, we change with every step taken into the future. As the weeks passed, they had found a way to begin again. In February, she had gone to Prince George.

  There is so much that he yearns to remember – everything that she ever said to him, the way she walked, her face when she woke, her singing voice.

  He is still sitting at the computer, dawn beginning to move in through the windows, when the response comes back.

  How? Sipke Vermeulen has written. How could something like this happen?

  He had forgotten the name, but he remembers now that Gail had met Sipke Vermeulen when she went to the Netherlands that last fall. He had known her parents, after the war. She told him about a place where they had gone, an island that was now a part of the continent, a place she would one day return to, with Ansel. For a long time he sits in front of the screen, hands resting on the keyboard. But he does not know how to answer. Eventually, he closes the window and shuts the computer down.

  Outside, he hears voices again. People who cannot go home, who haunt the streets of the Downtown Eastside.

  She says, “Come to bed, Ans. My feet are cold.”

  “Yes,” he an
swers. “Gail.”

  And when he closes his eyes and finds her, she rests her feet against his calves. He holds on to her, and the heat of both their bodies realigns, and comes to an equilibrium.

  The next day, Ansel wakes up, his throat dry and his mind clear. He’s overslept. He knows this by the amount of sunshine coming into the room. Downstairs, someone is singing. The CD that he put on last night is still going, looping endlessly on itself.

  He stumbles into the bathroom, throws cold water on his face and pats his hair down. He looks longingly at the coffee pot, but there isn’t enough time. In five minutes, he’s out the door and circling False Creek. Little birds fleck the water and boats are moored in the August sunshine. He doesn’t recognize any of the commuters. This is the 9:00 a.m. set, somewhat more laid back. They wear wraparound sunglasses. He pedals fast, speeds around the blind corners, hearing the lap of water on the moorings.

  At the clinic, Pauline hands him a sheaf of papers. “Your first appointment never showed. But Alistair Cameron has results.” She shrugs. “It feels like chaos, but it isn’t. It’s a state of being, really.”

  Alone, in his office, Ansel reads the radiology report on Al Cameron. The X-rays confirm active pulmonary tuberculosis.

  His eyes are drawn to the photograph that Al had noticed the day before, and he reaches across the desk, picks up the frame. She had been home from Amsterdam for only a week by then, and they had decided to travel to the southwest coast of Vancouver Island to see friends. On the morning he’d taken this photograph, they had walked along the shore of the Pacific Ocean, stopping to explore the tide pools, to admire red starfish and tightly wound snails. Gail is wearing jeans and a windbreaker, and her hair, now shoulder length, blows lightly around her face. He remembers standing on the rocks, framing her in the camera’s lens, the gentleness of her expression when she looked up to see him.

  He has often wondered what dreams she had, if any, what last image accompanied her at the end, away from life, away from consciousness. When he tries to imagine that passage, the ground gives way, he falls with her.

  Before he goes home that afternoon, Ansel stops at the ward to pay Al Cameron a visit.

  He is lying in bed, IV tubes feeding his veins. His green-stockinged feet poke out from the hospital blankets and his eyes appear listless.

  Ansel stands at his bedside reading the chart for several minutes before either man speaks.

  “Streptomycin is out.”

  “Yes, in your case, streptomycin is out.”

  “What have you got for me then?”

  “I don’t know, Al. Let’s wait for the tests to come back.”

  “tb is consumption, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s an old disease. Strange to think of yourself as a modern person saddled with an old disease.”

  Ansel tries to remember the exact lines from Gail’s documentary. Kafka, diagnosed with consumption, had imagined a dialogue between his brain and his lungs. He tells the story to Al, the words returning to him as he speaks. “‘The brain found itself in a position where it could no longer sustain its burden of pain and affliction. It said, “I give up, but if there is still anyone here who cares at all for the preservation of the whole, let him then lessen my burden, and I’ll be able to carry on for a while yet.” At that point, the lung came forward; it didn’t have much to lose.’”

  Al smiles, a lovely ghost of a smile, of something remembered. He shifts his arms, then pushes himself to sitting.

  “Do you have kids, Ansel?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want some?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I prying too much?”

  Ansel puts the chart down beside the bed. A feeling comes, like a pressure against his skin, then slowly, inexplicably, gives way. “No, you’re not prying.”

  Al pulls the sheets up against his body. He says, “I think that I’ve accepted it, that I’ve come to terms with everything. But when I wake up the next day, that peace vanishes like it was never there, or as if it were all an illusion. That’s what I find so difficult. I just want to accept it and be at rest. No more questions, no more doubt.”

  Ansel nods, unable to speak. He feels that he could put his hand out, reach her, hold on for one moment. Don’t go, he thinks. She doesn’t say anything, because they both know how it ends, they always knew they could not change it. Gail. He stands half turned away from Al, afraid of his emotion.

  “Am I allowed a phone call? This isn’t like jail, is it?”

  Ansel hands him his phone. “You know the number?”

  Al nods.

  “Okay. This one’s on the clinic.” He returns Al’s chart to the foot of the bed.

  When Ansel leaves the room, Al Cameron is lying on his side, the covers up over his body.

  “I’m here,” he is saying. “I’m here.” He and the phone inside a small cave of stillness.

  4

  Aloft

  Clara sits beneath the skylight of her sewing room, a square of light falling through the window, marking a border around her. It is early morning, still but for the occasional birdsong, and an animal, a squirrel, she thinks, scurrying across the roof. The day is open in front of her, a pocket of space to fill. She will finish her sewing this morning, and then, later on, she will gather flowers from the garden and take them to the cemetery for her daughter.

  She runs her hand across the newspaper, blinking the sleep from her eyes. The article she is reading tells how scientists in Austria have measured the shortest interval of time ever observed, one hundred attoseconds, or a quintillionth of a second. To imagine how long this is, the article says, if 100 attoseconds is stretched so long it lasts one second, one second would last 300 million years on the same scale. Time, Clara believes, is the great mystery. Since Einstein, physicists have argued that time is merely a convention, that only the speed of light is constant everywhere in the universe. If one travelled fast enough, time would bend, and one person’s past could theoretically become another person’s future.

  In her workroom, a dozen costumes hang from a clothes rail. The show, a children’s production of The Nutcracker, is scheduled for September, completely out of season, but the children from the dance school don’t seem to mind. Over the last few weeks, they have trooped in for their fittings, girls in frothy tutus skipping down the hallway, the Snow Queen waiting, aloof, hands on her hips, in a sequined dress. Clara is putting the finishing touches on a giant head for King Rat. On her table is a stack of pipe cleaners which she plans to shape into whiskers.

  From her window, she can see Matthew standing in the garden. He looks up at the August sky, the low sweep of clouds, then lowers his head, surveying the last of the summer flowers. Because of the arthritis in his knees, her husband walks slowly, with the aid of a cane. She is tempted to put down her coffee, to join him outside, but work cannot wait. The garden has always been Matthew’s domain. There, he loses track of himself and the hours. He can coax the most stubborn flowers into bloom.

  In another hour or so, he will come back inside the house. Each morning is the same. They will put the kettle on for tea, prepare a light breakfast. Every act, every routine, helps, the way sitting in a car travelling along the highway can seem a comfort, a motion to fall back on, to keep their thoughts contained as they move into another place.

  She had grown up in her father’s restaurant in Kowloon, and the Hong Kong that Clara remembers is cramped and vibrant, a city heated by the press of bodies. On Reclamation Street, where they lived, the buildings, crowded shoulder to shoulder, seemed to jostle for space. Laundry shook in the wind, people overflowed onto balconies, onto the sidewalks.

  After school, during the dinner hour, she would work the floor of the restaurant, greeting customers as they stepped through the shuttered doors: elderly men, newspapers tucked under their arms, young women in shifts and trousers towing a line of children. In the kitchen, behind glass, cooks appeared and disappeared in the s
teamy air. “Ching Yun,” her father would say proudly, calling her by her Chinese name. “Hurry and bring this gentleman a glass of tea.” Always, she had felt at ease in the ebb and flow of the restaurant, chopsticks clicking against porcelain bowls, the clatter of her father’s abacus. She balanced a half-dozen plates in her arms, listening sympathetically when a customer complained about the state of the world, his children or simply the weather. Leftover food she carried to the back door, where the very old and the very young would congregate, carrying tin plates.

  Behind the kitchen, faded linoleum stairs led up to their living space. She and her four younger sisters lived in one room, one on top of the other, sharing their clothes, their hairbrushes and slippers. Her sisters spent their days working in the restaurant, but Clara, as the eldest, had been enrolled at St. Mary’s School. In the evenings, while her sisters finished their chores, she sat at the dining table, writing essays or laboratory notes, or helping her mother with the sewing. She worked quickly, impatient to join her father in the sitting room, where each night he would open a novel and step away from the world. She gathered what lay discarded at his feet, reading, in English or Chinese, Father Goriot, A Tale of Two Cities, Journey to the West. Hours later, while the rest of the household slept, she remained awake, reading by candlelight. Her sisters sighed in their sleep, breathed in unison, while she, turning pages, shuddered or wept or shook with laughter.

  In Journey to the West, the young monk Xuanzang is called by the Bodhisattva on a pilgrimage to India. He is joined on his travels by three disciples who have each been given the task of accompanying him in order to atone for past mistakes. To make amends. The stories that make up Journey to the West are enshrined in countless Chinese operas. On Sundays, she and her father would take the bus to the theatre, a converted temple, where they bought their tickets from an old whiskered man who slept in the booth with one eye open. Like a dolphin, her father said once, awake just enough to stay afloat. In the open auditorium that day, Clara made her way to the front, past the grandmothers seated on stools, drinking tea, littering the ground with sunflower seeds. She stood so close to the stage that the sound of the gongs exploded in her ears, tingling up her spine; she could see the stitching of the Monkey King’s yellow robes as he somersaulted across the stage. All the while, her father, beside her, followed the undercurrent of the story. The quest for enlightenment, the spiritual journey that remained at the core.