“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.”
That night, Ansel wakes up in the dark, the covers off him, a street lamp pouring light into the room. He says her name, but the word that remains in the air is a sound, a word that is beginning to lose its meaning, because it receives no answer.
Downstairs, he puts the kettle on. Sleeping, he thinks, is over for Ansel Ressing. This is a new era. Last week, he had gone walking each night, crossing the invisible boundary between Strathcona and the Downtown Eastside, walking to Main and Hastings, where crowds of people were still awake, milling about. The crowds made him think of Gail’s description of the Arctic in the winter, people living their waking lives in the dark.
Tonight, he takes his glass of tea and goes into Gail’s office. He turns the lights on and then dims them, because she says, authoritatively, “You can’t hear as well when the lights are bright.”
All her equipment is here, everything dusty. There is a shelf crammed with reels of tape, grease pencils, razor blades and splicing tape. What is he ever going to do with all of this? The CBC has already collected and archived some of her work, but the rest – features and documentaries, unfinished fragments, all the scattered interviews and soundscapes that she always thought she’d organize – remains here.
He turns on her computer and waits while the icons flash up one by one. When the screen settles, he opens the sound-editing program, moves the cursor through the files and chooses one at random. A slightly accented voice comes up from the console: Harry Jaarsma’s. “Cryptography is a kind of protection. Think of the Sullivan diary as a message from the past, but one that has been buried beneath many layers.
“Every language leaves its own unique footprint. Cryptography, you know, is a complicated profession. You are given something in code, someone says, ‘Break this,’ and then it becomes a game, a chase. Of course, you assume that there is something to be pursued, some meaning to be unravelled. It is exactly the kind of thing that can destroy a person. It is like a scent it is so strong, but there is no physical proof of it. What if you cannot, despite all efforts, find the way in? We have a saying in Dutch. I hear the bell toll, but I know not where the hands of the clock lie.”
The fragment of interview ends, the sound waves on the screen become a straight line, and the room falls quiet.
Outside the house, Ansel can hear people walking by, a man and a woman speaking in jocular, teasing voices. It is late, a quarter after three. He clicks on the icon for Gail’s inbox, and the email program opens up onto the screen.
Even now, all these months later, new correspondence occasionally arrives for her – queries from overseas, notes from people she has worked with or interviewed. He opens an email from Harry Jaarsma, one that he has read before. I know of course that you’re gone, but your account is still open. These emails don’t bounce back. I miss you in very many small ways. This email is accompanied by a series of JPEGs, magnified images of the Mandelbrot Set. Before she saw these images, Gail said, she had never been able to picture the idea of infinity.
The pictures open up slowly, each one magnifying a small part of the preceding image. The shapes remain elusively familiar, scorpion tails and chains of spirals, evolving across generations.
One of the new messages catches Ansel’s eye. He opens it without thinking.
Lieve Gail, I haven’t heard from you in many months. I hope all is well. I have been thinking about you. Do write soon. Yours, Sipke.
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.