Madeleine Thien - Certainty

When Ani looks up, she sees Sipke, and the tenderness in his expression returns her to a morning almost thirty years ago. She and Wideh are in the airport in Amsterdam, their one trunk on the ground. She sees the mass of people, the high wavering lights, and then Sipke coming towards them.

Together they leave the airport. Outside, they find that a light snow is falling. Sipke has borrowed his brother’s car, and they drive under a series of concrete bridges, into the open. The colours transfix her, muted shades of green and brown, ice beneath a pearl-white sky. Everywhere, the land is unfamiliar, unimagined, canals slipping across the fields. For a moment, the future comes to her, as vivid and clear as a memory unfolding. The highway rises onto a plateau, the land falls away. The North Sea opens before her, wind rippling the water.

January

I t had been one of those rare winter days, almost a year ago now, Ansel recalls, when the chill of the season seemed, for a few hours, a thing of the past. He had just arrived home from work, and Gail was sitting on the front porch. She had earphones on and she was listening to music. This is the way he remembers it. Gail in jeans and a cardigan, watching the life of the street go by.

What are you listening to? he asked. She told him to guess, and then, smiling, she took both of his hands, doing a jive. Somebody across the street whistled long and low. Car doors slammed, talk radio spilled out a nearby window. She was all energy, all heat. They were dancing on their handkerchief of lawn, and he felt as if something he had lost was, for a moment, within reach again. Later, her feet on his lap as she read the newspaper. This is good, she had said. Her voice was hopeful. This is right.

Overhead, the fluorescent lights in the hospital corridor waver. Ansel takes the stairs up, emerging on the fifth floor, into the quiet of the ICU. He stops at the nurses’ station to take his bearings. The phone rings, the head nurse turns his face away, speaking in a low voice, and Ansel continues along the corridor.

At the far end of the ward, he can see Alistair in the last bed. A nurse is checking his IV lines. Alistair’s eyes are closed, and he gives the impression not of sleeping but of being deeply absorbed, preoccupied by his own thoughts. Ansel scans the monitor, then picks up the chart from the foot of the bed. He runs a finger over the lines as he reads, and the movement reminds him of his own father, of how once, when he was a child, he had stood at his father’s side in this same ICU. They had walked from bed to bed and his father had told him to be very still, that he should not be there, but he wanted Ansel to see how things were. The hush and gravity of the ward made Ansel want to run outside, swing a bat, stomp up and down on the pavement. His anxiety must have shown. His father bent down, hands on Ansel’s shoulders, holding his gaze. “Sooner or later,” he said, gently, “we all end up in the care of another.”

Ansel hears the sound of a chair scraping. He had not seen her, a woman near his own age, so close to the curtains that her outline seems to disappear into the folds.

She nods slightly when he introduces himself. “I’m family,” she says. “Al is my brother. I only arrived last night.”

“There’s a private room in this ward. A place to rest and be alone, if you need it. He’s stable now.”

“It’s okay. I just want to be near.”

He returns the chart to its holding place. Through the windows behind her, he can see down to the bay where the water gleams. The fierce light of the sun comes in, shining off the glass walls of the ward. They listen to the heart-rate monitor, the slow measured blips of electronic sound. Alistair, his face partly obscured by an oxygen mask, is still.

“Are you the doctor that got him into Kafka?”

“Pardon?”

“Kafka. Al phoned up one night and said, when I came, I should bring along some books. He says Kafka had tuberculosis.” She reaches towards the windowsill, holds up a tattered paperback. “So I went to the library and found this.”

“Oh, yes,” Ansel says, and then nods. “I think it was me.”

“He was always a big reader, even when we were kids. I used to tease him about it. He was my older brother, and I thought he was showing off.” Her voice sounds exhausted, but she continues speaking, filling the silence between them. “Always with his nose in a book and it didn’t matter what, novels, comic books, even the magazines our mother kept around the apartment when she was still there. Al was full of surprises. Not everyone would want to be sent off with Kafka.”

“I don’t think that I would.”

She smiles briefly before glancing away. “What would you have instead? A piece of music, maybe.”

“No.” He gathers his thoughts. “Someone beside me. No radio, no television. Just the sound of the world going by.”

She puts the book down. Dr. Singh, the attending physician, appears in the doorway. His eyes skim the folder in his hand and then he steps into the room. Al’s sister stands up. He can see the resemblance between siblings, the way Al might have looked before terminal illness set in. Her eyes are red from weeping.

Ansel listens while Singh speaks. He is kind when he details the prognosis, but he holds nothing back. When Singh leaves, Al’s sister comes to stand beside Ansel. The light falls against her hair, casting her face in shadow. They watch Singh through the plate-glass walls, the multiple reflections of his white coat.

“If there’s other family to contact, we should do it soon.”

“No, I’m the last.”

The room floats in silence, and then she says, “I’d been trying to get Al to come to Victoria, to stay with me and my kids. A few years ago, I almost had him convinced, but then he got the diagnosis, the HIV. He changed his mind.” She pauses after each sentence, as if to gather strength for the next. “We’ve always been close. Things never came easy for him, he was sixteen when he left home. He was reckless with himself. I knew I couldn’t save him if he didn’t want to be saved. And even then,” she crosses her arms in front of herself, “sometimes one thing doesn’t go right, and then another, and then it all snowballs. But he put all the blame on his own shoulders, he tried to be the one to carry the weight, and it hurt him in the end.

“Some things I only realize in hindsight. How someone caught me at a time I didn’t even realize I was slipping. And then, those times when I failed to reach out. Failed to see that someone I cared for was losing their footing.”

“But you’re here now,” Ansel says. “When he wakes up, you’ll be here.”

Outside, in the hallway, time continues. They can hear the voices of nurses, of visitors in a nearby room. An elderly man is wheeled out on a gurney, his wife holding his hand as he glides past.

Ansel says, “Would you tell him I’ll come back this evening?”

“I will.”

“Do you need anything?”

He cannot read her expression. She seems lost in her own thoughts, trying to turn over a line, a word, that she cannot quite comprehend. What was it Alistair had said, so many months ago? No more questions, no more doubts.

“I’m fine,” she says. “I am.”

Behind the words, he sees loss as if it were a tremor of light around her. Ansel walks towards the doorway, is about to leave the room when she returns to the window. Her back is to him, dark hair against her shoulders, and she gazes out over the shining city.

At home, after nightfall, the house is unbearably quiet. In the kitchen, he switches the radio on, listens as a physicist describes the latest images transmitted back by the Hubble Telescope. Ansel has seen them on the Internet: a nebula six light-years wide, impossibly strange and glorious. The shape, with its swirling tentacles of dust clouds, is somehow familiar. To him, it resembles a deep-sea creature let loose in space. Or one could imagine it minuscule, a dot in a Petri dish, now magnified large.