Madeleine Thien - Certainty

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 answers. “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.”