Certainty (9 page)

Al pats his pocket. “Thank God for health coverage,” he says. “There are thousands of dollars of good drugs pouring through this body.”

At noon, Ansel goes outside and stands on the front steps of the clinic. Beside him, there’s a young man and woman, cigarettes moving from hand to mouth in a circling, fluid gesture. The man breathes out rings of smoke, small and perfect, expanding as they float away from him. The woman smiles. “What luck,” she says, leaning her head against him. He puts his arm tenderly around her waist.

The nerves around Ansel’s eyes begin to tense, and he finds that he has to look away. Lately, all displays of affection have caused this response in him, whether between lovers, between parents and children, or children and grandparents.

Neither he nor Gail had wanted to hang up the phone, and so they continued talking, though her voice seemed to fade in and out, a thread he kept losing.

In a dream that recurs, Ansel catches a plane that night, he arrives in time.

He knows it is impossible, irrational, but he is lifted away from the present, set down in a different timeline. The details of their lives, all the habitual acts, the cherished conversations, continue to accumulate, day after day, into the future.

By the time he arrived in Prince George with Gail’s parents, it was too late to change what had occurred. When he closes his eyes, the city, her body, is blocked out, he turns his memory away from the room in the hospital basement where they’d brought him and Gail’s parents. Instead, he is in the airplane, flying over the Cascade Mountains, looking down on the snow and fog. When the mountains fall away, highways emerge, thin lines moving across the land, unravelling from the towns.

Everything after, the funeral, the interment, blurs into a single moment. He has gone on, returning to work, doing all that is required of him. One part of him moves ahead, the other is lost, and each passing day widens this breach, a knife edge in his body.

He has copies of the coroner’s findings, the radiology report,
EKG
charts, the hospital records. She had contracted a bacterial infection, a sudden devastating pneumonia. This, the coroner believed, had depleted the oxygen in her bloodstream, triggering a stroke. The paramedics had said that she was peaceful, there was no sign of pain. Night after night, he studies the test results, trying to find the gaps, the detail that might have saved her. He suspects an underlying medical condition, one that would have made her more susceptible, cardiomyopathy or channelopathy, undiagnosed. The charts and details hold a power over him, as if they will shed light not only on her illness but on Gail herself, who she was, everything she once hoped for, what she believed at the end. He has written to the hospital, met with the attending physician, tried to draw a line from the hour she died, back through the night, to the previous day. Lives change in an instant, he knows this. He knows one can never be prepared. But his desire to make sense of her death will not subside. If she had not been released from the hospital, if he had gone to her, if the diary had never fallen into her hands, if someone had found her sooner, if it had not been winter. At night, the avalanche of possibilities comes to him, a weight collapsing against his body, he cannot breathe, cannot weep for all the exits he seeks to find.

After he closes his files that afternoon, he bicycles home. Clouds have moved in, and the rain, hesitant at first, quickly loses its inhibitions and becomes a downpour. He stops briefly at the side of the bike path and switches his generator on. When he begins pedalling, the sound of the machine washes out behind him and his headlight beams into the rain. He and Gail had come across this generator at the secondhand cycle shop on Dunbar Street, attached to an inexpensive bike. She had waxed poetic on the bicycles of Prague and Amsterdam, on the cleverness of using kinetic energy to power headlights, and the wastefulness of batteries. Ansel had buckled under the eloquence of her argument, or so he told her, and shelled out ten bucks for the old wreck that the generator was attached to. They had ridden it home, Gail perched on the back of the bicycle. She had been belting out a song while he pedalled. What song? U2, “Beautiful Day.” Tone deaf, as usual. Afterwards, on the front lawn, they had surgically removed the generator and attached the wires to his own bicycle.
Voilà
, a bit of Amsterdam in Vancouver.

The bicycle ride home is what saves him. A decade of the same route, down Heather Street, his body swaying past the roundabouts, down the sloping hill to the sea. Even the cars seem to scatter around him.

On Keefer Street, the lights from Chinatown shine a red and yellow river across the wet pavement. Rivulets soak into his shoes, and he feels as if his ankles are underwater. He continues on, past the line of seniors’ homes, towards the high roofs of Strathcona.

When he arrives home, he carries his bicycle up the front stairs. The house is quiet, and it smells of old coffee. Inside the house, Ansel peels off his wet clothes and steps into the shower. The steam hits his lungs and his body fills with warmth.

Gail has her hand on the small of his back. She says, “Pull yourself together, Ans.” He lifts his face towards the streaming water, and she circles her arms around his waist.

“With the kind of day I’ve had?”

She laughs. “You’ll have to prescribe your own drug regimen.”

The air is all fog and heat. She says, “I spent the day in my pyjamas. Reading. Mainlining coffee. Listening to music.”

“There was a man my age. He’s coming to the end.”

After he turns the shower off, he remains standing there, watching the steam whirling up into the overhead fan.

In the living room he puts on a
CD
, a bluegrass compilation she brought home one day and then played incessantly. Gail, the sous-chef: “My one talent,” she says. “I can chop onions without shedding a tear.” Ansel views cooking as a kind of construction game, a sort of Lego with food. A casserole built floor by floor, a skylight of potatoes. Six months later, he has not got himself out of the habit of cooking for two. To compensate, he now cooks every other day; slow, elaborate meals. The sun goes down as he whips up the potatoes, dices the onions and leeks.

By the time everything is ready, the rain has stopped, so he carries his dinner out onto the front porch. The sky above is a soothing light, warm colours crowding the horizon. Ansel can see Ed Carney sitting on his porch, and he lifts his hand in greeting. Watching Ed stand up, take the steps one at time and hobble down the sidewalk towards him, is like watching bread rise. So Ansel goes into the house, gets a second helping of casserole for his friend, and another glass of wine, and by the time he returns with a tray, Ed has reached his front yard.

Ed makes himself comfortable, and the two sit eating quietly while the occasional car grumbles by along Keefer.

Ed describes the coyote he saw earlier, sprinting down the middle of the street. Across the road, Mrs. Cho is visible in her window, reading the newspaper. She looks up and sees them sitting there, beams a smile to them, then closes the blinds.

To Ansel, Ed still has the build of a mailman, lean and reedy, with eyes that have a tendency to mist up as he loses himself in one train of thought or another. He retired just a year ago, after forty years at Canada Post. Because Gail used to work at home, she would stop by his house during the day for coffee and conversation. She told Ansel once that Ed spent the day making pinhole cameras, reading
Nature
, and writing letters to his grandchildren about the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace. He told his grandchildren that evolution was still the defining idea of modern times, just as it had been when he was a child. “Stem cells, Dolly, robotics, theories of everything, he and Darwin are the bedrock,” he said. “And to think people still refuse to teach him. It’s downright madness.” In the evenings, the three of them used to while away the hours while Ed peppered them with snippets of esoterica. Mathematical equations for the distribution of seeds on a sunflower head, and so on.

This evening, he has launched into a story about the first open heart transplant. Hamilton Naki was a gardener, Ed tells Ansel. As a young man, he had apprenticed to a doctor at the University of Cape Town who needed help with his laboratory animals. It was 1950s South Africa, so Naki, who was black, kept his designation as gardener, even while he was learning to transplant organs in animals. “He worked on giraffes,” Ed says. “Imagine that. What kind of operating table would you use? And in what room?”

“You have to operate when they’re standing upright,” Ansel says. “Giraffes have high blood pressure, so it’s best if they don’t lie down. So, no operating table. Just a scaffold.”

Ed nods, pleased. “When Barnaard performed his famous surgery,” he continues, “Naki was the man who led the first team, the one that removed the heart from a twenty-five-year-old donor, a woman who had been hit by a car. She had stopped to buy a cake. It’s sadder than a Raymond Carver story.” It was 1967, and Naki’s contribution was carefully hidden. Naki was at the press conference announcing the success of the surgery, but identified himself as a gardener who worked at the research institute. “Until this year,” Ed says, “no one knew. Not even his neighbours. He retired with a gardener’s pension.”

They both shake their heads in wonder. Ansel remembers the first time he saw an exposed heart pumping. The way it leapt out of the cavity had shocked him, made him put his gloved hand to his own chest.

“Which part of this man’s life was fiction?” Ed is saying.

“For him, none of it. Which means, I suppose, it depends on where you’re standing.”

Ed sets his plate down on the floor. “If you’re in an airplane,” he says, “a cloud ten feet away looks just the same as one ten thousand feet away. Clouds, they’re every bit as fractal as broccoli or cauliflower. A very small part of a cloud, the way it looks up close, is the same shape as one in its entirety.”

Ansel smiles. “Does that console you, Ed?”

“You know, the strange thing is, sometimes it really does.”

“Because of the pattern?”

Ed shakes his head.

“Because it’s mysterious?”

He takes a sip of wine, then slowly twirls the glass by its stem. “That’s part of it. We’re here for just a speck of time, and my greatest regret is that I don’t know more. I’m like those sci-fi kids that want to peer into the future. Just let me read ahead a bit. Let me stay up another hour, flashlight under the covers. That’s my comfort.”

When the rain starts again, they’re on to the second bottle of wine. “Ed,” Ansel says, “what kind of rain would you say this is?”

Ed peers into the night. “It’s like water out of a salad spinner.”

“Who invented the salad spinner?”

He shakes his head, laughing. “Can’t say, can’t say.”

Ansel can hear a siren coming down Hastings Street, and a short while later, several more. The sound is carried away, into the night. Ed says, “People told me I should start again after Patricia died. They said the house was too big for an old man, too many things to remind me.”

Ansel listens in silence, watching the glimmering light of a plane up above, disappearing as the clouds sweep slowly across it. Behind them, music from the
CD
player drifts out of the house. Their home is still very much how she left it. Her clothes, her belongings. All the rolls of reel-to-reel, the
DAT
and Mini Discs. Touch a button, and her voice fills the room.

“I’ve got a picture of you two sitting right here,” Ed says. He takes a sip of wine, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

Ansel’s favourite song is playing on the
CD
now. Dom Turner’s “Down by the Riverbed.” He can hear the accordion and harmonica, the bluesy guitar.

Gail is singing, “I’ve got a case of Anselitis.” She has a glass of wine in her right hand, and she’s swaying down the front steps.

“I’ve thought about leaving, too, Ed. But everything I have is in this house.”

“She was young. Thirty-nine is young.” Ed’s eyes are red and watery. “What am I saying? Seventy is young.”

In the months after Patricia died, before Scott Carney moved back into the house to be with his father, Gail used to pack a dinner for Ed and walk it over to him. Ansel could see her from this very chair, standing in the doorway. Ed Carney talking her ear off about fertility clinics, or a new super skin being developed by the U.S. Army, about Marconi and the telegraph: “The man that signalled the death of the carrier pigeon.” He filled his mind with so much in order to keep it aloft, like a balloon setting sail from the grief in his body.

“I don’t need to think up ideas for radio projects,” Gail had said, part-laughing, part-crying, when she came home again. “I have an Ed.”

Now, Ed pushes himself up to standing. He looks across the street to his own house, where the front light burns in the dark. “She was like a daughter to me. And my boy, Scott, he thought of her as family, too. The way they laughed together, the way they argued. He was always trying to pitch ideas to her. He finally got to her with that coded diary; it was just the type of thing that would spark her imagination.”

“Ed,” Ansel says. When he looks up at his friend, the stars seem to blur behind the clouds. “Do you think there’s a biological purpose to grieving? An evolutionary purpose.”

Ed puts his hands in his pockets. “I guess it’s to keep us alive somehow.”

Ansel looks at him expectantly.

“Grief is the time when you ask all the questions. If you don’t find some way to answer them, you won’t go on living. You won’t think about having children. Maybe it’s an evolutionary imperative to find a way to accept death, your own and others. We forget that it’s a possibility. People die and we’re surprised. It always seems so unlikely. That’s a trick of the mind.” He pauses, and then looks back towards his house. “It’s like what you were saying about perspective. From far away, I can accept everything. I can see the things that repeat themselves, the patterns and so on. I accept that the universe is thirteen billion years old. But up close, right here, is where you feel pain, grief. Right here, there are some things that I can never be at peace with.” He shakes his head. “What helps me is when I fall asleep and dream of her, dream of my Patricia, and she says, There’s nothing to worry about. Relax. Let it go.” He shakes his head. “But that doesn’t happen nearly enough, not enough at all.”