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 steamy 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.