Certainty (7 page)

Because he cannot bear to see her sadness, he closes his eyes, tries to find sleep again.

He lies still, the sarong covering his body. His heart is beating fast, and his mouth tastes of a bitter, metallic dust. When the war is truly over, he imagines that the cities will be empty places, that all the trees and shops and houses will be tidied away, swept clean like the bowl of a crater. Sleep comes, and in his dream, which is bright with colour and very clear, people move through the open space, a film of dust clinging to their bodies. The cities are like Sandakan. He walks the abandoned streets, remembering where each building stood, the tin maker, the eyeglass shop, everybody remembers, but no buildings will grow there again.

When he steps outside in the afternoon, the sky is white. His mother remains inside, and he closes the door behind him. When he kneels on the ground, brushing his hand over the loose dirt, he finds no cigarette ends, no boot marks, no stray bullets.

He begins to walk downhill, towards the harbour. There are people gathered beside their huts, listening to a radio that cuts in and out with static. Some have almost no clothes, they sit in the shade of the trees, or pace the grass. Two small boys hurry past him, almost running.

His father says,
You must pay attention. Always pay attention.

Up in the sky, an airplane is coming nearer. Matthew watches small pebbles shiver across the ground. The plane descends through the clouds. The two boys are calling to each other. The younger one starts to scream. The plane is too close, flying so low, the trees in its path are bending away. Out of the belly of the plane, something falls. Matthew does not flinch or try to escape. He says,
I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention. I can’t remember what day this is.
A parachute opens, he watches the cloth open and snap. It passes by him, carrying a box, sailing down to earth. The box hits a tree, the parachute buckles, the lines fall down, and the silk blooms down around the tree, as if to protect it. A woman runs towards the box, dragging a child behind her.

He can feel his thoughts dissolving to liquid. Is it the heat? Which day was yesterday? Part of him tries to focus that picture in his mind, a hand opening to reveal a pistol. He sits down in the dust. At the tree, the woman with the small girl is lifting out cans of food. She is putting something into her pocket. Matthew watches her, and in his mind he hears gunshots. One shot, a pause, and then another. But the woman does not fall down. She laughs and smiles and pulls a blanket out of the box. Nobody reacts to the gunfire. But Matthew has thrown his body onto the road. He lies there, his hands gripping the dirt.

Some time later, a man lifts him up off the ground, and Matthew feels as if the weight of his own body has been left behind on the road. The soldier wears a brimmed, floppy hat and he has light-coloured eyes and he asks Matthew if he has eaten. The soldier tells him, in broken Malay, that the war is finished now, that he has nothing to be afraid of any more.

3

A New Geometry

E
ach morning, Ansel commutes to work on his bicycle. Today, the rain is steady, clinging to the buildings, tipping down the leaves of the trees. In Vancouver, there are many varieties of rain, but the most common, he believes, is the kind that tries to convince you it isn’t there, the kind that is so thin it makes the windshield wipers squeak. He has walked for hours in this kind of rain, without an umbrella, and still emerged reasonably dry.

After years of leaving umbrellas in assorted places – buses, of course, but also elevators, take-out coffee windows, public washrooms – Gail had given up carrying them. She wore jackets with hoods, and kept her distance from small gadgets: mobile phones, Palm Pilots,
USB
keys. “Give me things that announce their presence,” she said. “Did you know we used to have the world’s largest hockey stick in Vancouver? It came with its own puck.” In the evenings they used to walk along False Creek, and sometimes the rain would condense over the water, fog lifting into the dark.

By 8:00 a.m., when Ansel arrives at the clinic, there are already people leaning against the entrance, waiting to be let in. He opens the door for them despite foreseeing the grumbles of the reception staff, not quite ready for the morning intake. The patients quietly descend the stairs. This morning, there’s a family with three young daughters, two yawning med students, and a middle-aged woman. The woman is pale and trembling, and Ansel stays beside her and she uses his arm as a bannister. “It’s the arthritis,” she says, not looking at him.

“Just a few more steps now.”

He takes them to the waiting room, shows the girls where the crayons and drawing paper are, then goes on to his office. He flicks the light switches as he walks, and the fluorescent lights buzz on around him, throwing down a blue shadow before settling into a wavering glow. At the end of the corridor, Ansel unlocks his office door, hangs his jacket and helmet on the coat stand, and sits down at his desk. He has a few minutes before the first patient, not quite enough time to deal with the stack of referrals, emails and lab results left over from the day before.

In Ansel’s basement office, there are three high windows, just inches above the ground outside. They frame blades of grass, dandelions in the summer, a few small stones. The light falls in three rectangular shafts along his desk. The offices have always reminded him of a warren, the hallways that merge together, leading towards a tunnel that connects to Vancouver General Hospital. He has worked here, at the provincial tuberculosis clinic, for almost five years as a clinician and researcher, and each day has a familiar routine. The first half-dozen appointments of the morning, along with files and chest X-rays, are waiting in his in-tray. There’s a photocopied abstract on the relationship between
AIDS
and syphilis, and, underneath, two faxes. One is from his father, about an upcoming medical conference in Chicago. The other is from the hospital in Prince George, where Gail, ill, had gone the day before she died. The hospital writes that they have concluded their review of the case and now consider the file closed. A pain branches out from behind his eyes, a dull pulsing, and he stares at the page for a moment, until the lines begin to run together. Ansel pushes the correspondence aside and opens his Thermos of coffee.

His work is a comfort to him. Even as a child, he never considered a career outside of medicine. Both of his parents were doctors, his father a heart surgeon, and his mother a
GP
. Night after night, his father came home at dawn, an overcoat on top of his rumpled greens. If the surgery had gone well, his father would put a record on, Ella Fitzgerald or Muddy Waters, the music rising like smoke through the house. From bed, Ansel could hear the murmur of his parents’ conversation, his father’s low voice taking pleasure in relaying the details of the surgery. Even before Ansel learned to read, his mother had taught him how to use a stethoscope, how to listen for opacities, crackles and echoes in the lungs, how to track the beating of a heart. By the time he turned four, he had practised on both his parents, as well as his older sister. He remembers warming the diaphragm between his hands then setting it against their skin, astonished each time by the familiar sound, the reliable
lub dub
of their hearts.

It was Ansel and not his sister, Lydia, who got to go on rounds with their father. While Lydia played guitar in her bedroom, Ansel would concentrate on his father’s rumbling voice relating Mrs. B.’s myocardial infarction followed by congestive failure and arrhythmia, elaborating on her
EKG
and digitalis treatment. “Are you following this, Ansel?” To which all the residents and interns would laugh. When he was twelve, he read his father’s copy of
The Microbe Hunters
, then he saved his allowance for a year and bought a microscope. That year, he made a list of his top one hundred scientists. The obvious ones, Galileo, Einstein, Newton. And then, depending on the month, or what he was reading, Tesla, Koch, Curie, Salk, Leeuwenhoek, Darwin and Wallace. And always Louis Pasteur.

“Ah,” his father had said once, examining the names. “The beer makers are fond of him.”

Lydia shook her head. “What is it with men and lists?”

For a time, Ansel had strayed towards cardiology, interning for half a year at St. Paul’s Hospital. In surgery, he waited while people slid away from him into the wash of anesthesia, their presence literally fading from the room. Dr. Biring, his mentor, would sing while he worked, rock ballads, folk songs, anything. The words, Biring said, were like a ladder he could climb down, and thus descend into his memory. Sometimes, in the operating room, humming along with Biring, Ansel was surprised to look up and see the patient’s face, framed by a green plastic cap. Their minds had been disconnected from the organs that he worked on. Retractors held the chest wall back, exposing the heart; every few seconds, the heart pumped out of the skin. There were tiny cameras that he could swim through a person’s body, a tool to magnify his own sight, a device to reach where his hands couldn’t.

From surgery, he went to a one-month placement in the Burn Unit. This was where he had met Gail, almost ten years ago. She was working as a reporter then, covering a crash that had happened at the airport, a Cessna that had stalled in mid-air.

He had to come out of the hospital every hour just to breathe, to escape the pain, the bodies, rotated, covered in Silvadene. It was the middle of the night, and Gail was rooted outside, along with the other journalists, waiting for a break in the story. By 4:00 a.m., she was the only one left, still sipping her coffee. “You don’t have to stay here all night, do you?”

“No.” She had smiled, embarrassed. “You must think I’m eager or something.”

“If you leave me a number, I can call you if there’s more to report.”

“Actually, I don’t have an apartment yet. I just got back to Vancouver a few days ago.”

He asked where she had been, and Gail said, “In the Arctic Circle, but only for a month. I was living in Prague before that.” When he asked what she did there, she told him, “This and that. I make radio features, soundscapes. I’m not the sharpest interviewer, but I like to listen.”

After morning sign-in, they ate breakfast in the cafeteria. Her eyes kept wandering over to a group of doctors in wrinkled greens, surgical masks dangling from their necks and covers on their shoes. She was twenty-nine, dressed in jeans and a cotton T-shirt. She leaned towards him, long dark hair falling forward, a triangle of buttered toast dangling from her fingertips, and asked him what kind of medicine he hoped to practise. He told her that, initially, he had wanted to be a surgeon.

She paused, studying him. “You don’t seem the type,” she said at last. “I picture the surgeon as someone who parachutes in, gets the job done, then waves airily as he goes home to bed. You strike me as a more long-haul kind of person.”

He laughed and cut a piece of jam from its packet. “I haven’t decided what I want to be yet. I guess I’m leaning towards internal medicine.”

He had his bicycle there, but she loaded it into the back of her van and drove him home. At his front door, she said, “You can see the hospital from your house.”

Ansel looked behind him. The Centennial Pavilion, built in the shape of a star, little windows in neat rows like a line of type, hovered over them. When he turned back, he saw that her eyes were ringed and dark. “Where are you staying?” he said.

“In my van until I find a place.”

He fumbled for the right words. “You’re welcome, if you want, to stay here.”

She laughed, suddenly hugging him. “Thanks. Maybe when we get to know each other a bit better.”

In the examining room, the family is seated, waiting for him. Two of the girls are working on crayon drawings, and the third, the youngest one, has drawn a picture of an imposing man in a white coat, stethoscope around his neck. The man has dark hair, like Ansel, and his expression is moody, sober. The figure reminds Ansel of the way he had once pictured his own father, larger than life, replete with answers.

As he enters, the family gathers around him. He seats the girls, one, two, three, on the examining table, and motions the parents to take the chairs. “Dr. Ressing,” the father says immediately, “we were on an airplane. Somebody from the health region called us. They said we had to get tested right away, the entire family.”

He tells them how a young woman on their flight had contracted tuberculosis on her travels. “You’re being screened as a preventative measure. Most people’s defences are strong enough to prevent the
TB
from causing disease. We’ll do a skin test on each of you, and then in three days we need you to come back for the second part of the procedure.” He tests them one at a time, starting with the father.

The youngest girl is crying and whispering, “No needles, please, no needles,” over and over, and by the time Ansel has sat down beside her, she has buried her head against her mother’s stomach. He takes her right arm and rubs a bit of alcohol on it. The mother is clucking at her, saying something in Pakistani, then smiling indulgently. She holds the girl’s arm steady, and Ansel inserts the point. The girl screams pitifully, pressing her body into her mother’s side. The fluid pools below the surface of her skin.

“That’s it.”

The girl blinks, cautiously eyeing her wound, then gazes up at him, tear trails on her cheeks. Startling everyone, she lifts her arm and grabs hold of his stethoscope. He is yanked forward.

Her parents exclaim in surprise, shaking their heads, apologizing, but Ansel doesn’t move. He is nose to nose with the little girl. “Will you let me have your drawing?” he asks, pointing at the sheet of paper in her hand. She agrees to the trade.

He fits the earpieces on her ears, pushes his lab coat aside and sets the stethoscope against his chest.

After that first meeting in the hospital, he had sought her out, calling the telephone number she had given him, the number at her parents’ house. On his days off, he accompanied Gail as she travelled the city, interviewing people for her work at
CBC
-Radio. She had begun working on a piece about memorials. She had been introduced to a thirty-year-old man whose fiancée had died eight years ago. In the first year after her death, he had poured his grief and loss into his garden. As the years passed, the garden had become a memorial to her, and a permanent part of his life. “This is the blue season,” he told them. He wore a microphone affixed to a coat hanger that Gail had widened, then placed around his neck. The contraption rested firmly on his chest. A trick she had learned, she told him, from a producer in Prague, in the hope that the microphone would be forgotten by the speaker. It would became a part of his or her own body.

Ansel, who knew nothing about plants, looked around. Blue flowers, blue blossoms in all shapes and sizes. Delphiniums, bellflowers. There was a ghostly sadness to it. Latin names spilled off the tongue of the young man.

Gail was wearing a blue skirt and top, and she merged seamlessly into the palette of the garden. Her hair hung loose, reaching the small of her back, and a woven hat shaded her face from the sun. She held the young man’s gaze as he spoke, adjusting the recording levels with her right hand. A thin line of wire ran between them, from the microphone to the recorder, and then to the headphones that Gail wore. Watching her, it had seemed to Ansel as if he stood at the edge of a doorway. The world that she inhabited was full of stories, of questions. That expression, her face relaxed, yet held in concentration as she listened, is the one that remains with him now.

“This one is my favourite, and the one I’ve grown the most,” the young man told Gail. The flower was sky blue with a creamy yellow eye. He extended his hand as if presenting something. “A large slope of them, beginning somehow at waist level, trembling in the wind, would be quite a statement.”

The next day, she visited a woman who balanced stones, one on top of the other, in her garden, an imitation of the inukshuk scattered on the shores of English Bay. The Inuit word
inukshuk
, Gail told Ansel over dinner, means “likeness of a person.” The direction of a leg or an arm may be used for navigation, or might signal the presence of fish in a nearby lake. The middle-aged woman, an immigrant from Scotland, had lost her twin sister to cancer. She said that she balanced the stones on hot summer days when she and her four children sat in the backyard. They had seen these structures while walking around Stanley Park, and the image had stayed in their minds.

While Ansel sat in the living room copying out his rotation notes, Gail played him parts of the interview. She told him that Inuit tradition forbids the destruction of an inukshuk. The woman said, “I suppose the wind and rain will take them down one day. But there’s a tradition that says dismantling them would be a desecration. And I understand that.” She paused and then said, barely audibly, “Yes, a desecration. I saw it that way. Even though I knew, my sister knew, it would happen one day.”