Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

“Philip.”

Tim Magrath was standing in the doorway.

The doctor looked like his own grandfather. Since his wife had died he had suffered what was once called nerves, and was in fact the collapse of his soul. The subsequent vacuum in his chest had reduced his shirt size by four inches, and his head of hair seemed dusted with the white talcum makeup of a theatrical ghost. His eyes floated in sunken bags of skin and were caught in fine nets of blood vessels that looked on the point of bursting. Tim Magrath held his hands while he stood. There was no discernible line to his lips, as if he had sucked them in and mutely gnawed on his grief until only the thin gap remained. When he spoke, his voice was a whispery remnant of a voice.

“Philip, how are you? Please come in.”

Although the man had changed, the room had not. Philip sat in the same seat as before, looked across at the bare trees of the square, and then made an announcement.

“I’m not a man who believes in medicine,” he said.

Tim Magrath sat down. He held his hands still and made the slightest quivering in the muscles of his mouth.

“I’m not here for miracles, Doctor,” Philip Griffin added.

“Tim.” It was less than a whisper.

“I’m not here for miracles, Tim. I’ve cancer. I’ve had it for years. It’s moving into the final stages now and I want to know how much longer I have.” He paused and looked across at the doctor, who had slid like a shadow into a seat by the wall. “It’s not fear,” he said, “it’s not that I want to cancel it out, it’s just a question of how long, do you get me? I need a delay in it. That’s all.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. How long have you been …”

The whisper died, the lipless mouth dried the words into an ashen silence, and Tim Magrath raised the fingers of his right hand to see if he could find them.

“I was never checked. I know it myself. It’s here.” He patted his stomach and below. “And here. Spreading. A pain in the morning like I’ve swallowed knives. There’s an aching round the back, and this, see.” He stuck out the wedge of his tongue. “That’s not right, is it?” He had closed his mouth again before the doctor had even risen to look.

Tim Magrath did not know what to say; he himself looked more like death than the majority of his patients. He could outnumber the ailments of any of them and had already moved into that company of men whose gatherings in the clubhouse were dominated by discourse of disease and the dropped dead. He had weekly funerals to go to, and eyed the mourners with the small comfort of knowing that at least some of them would be at his. Now he lowered the grey head of his hair and looked at the fine carpet on the floor. He felt the disconsolate, irredeemable sense of dread in his soul, the feeling he had experienced daily since the death of his wife that he was in fact an impostor, that he had dressed himself in a fine suit and sat with patients for thirty-six years in a room where he wrote prescriptions for drugs that merely masked and postponed the true pain of life. That medicine cannot stop illness or death but merely divert it was a truth he had denied daily. To fifty patients a week there was little Tim Magrath could say, and even as his doubts in the efficacy of medicines grew, he was unable to sit by the bedside and say there is no cure for this condition we live in, and instead felt the gratitude and hope of the sick swim over him when he said, Take three of these every morning noon and night.

But Philip Griffin was different: he didn’t want curing, he wanted time, and in the moments while Tim Magrath stared at the carpet he gathered in himself the resolve to speak the truth and not offer the bald man the bottle of tablets. When he looked up the patient was looking directly at him.

“It’s for my son,” Philip said. “He’s in love.”

And so, like medieval knights bound on a ceaseless quest for an obscure and chivalrous honour, for the defence of an unattainable ideal with which they themselves had only the briefest acquaintance but whose threatened extinction provoked in each of them the deepest resolve, for the victory of Love over Death, Tim Magrath and Philip Griffin plotted into the afternoon how they would slow down the cancer. The first thing to find out was the size and age and speed of the enemy. Philip needed tests. The earliest available appointment with Carthy, the specialist, was two and a half months later, February 1.

“By then you could be dead,” Tim told him.

“I could,” Philip agreed.

They sat on the moment and felt the November light dying behind them. Cars were moving outside with the illusion of progress, but the clock was almost standing still. February seemed several years away, and the fear of the winter ahead crept in their skin like age. The weathers of wind and rain, of chill, frost, and hail, blew in imagination at the backs of the old men’s necks as they sat wondering how they would outwit Time. The stilled air was grey between them, and they held their hands between their knees and their heads bowed while the icy weight of the word “winter” lodged on their spirits like a sentence.

Then Tim Magrath spoke.

“Fall down,” he said. “Go on, fall down, cry out.”

There was a half-second, a moment it took for the complicity to register, and then, as if his seat had suddenly been thickly oiled, Philip Griffin slid down onto the carpet at the doctor’s feet. His first cry was smaller than a bird’s.

“Louder,” the doctor whispered over him. “Scream it out, and keep doing it until you are in a hospital bed.”

Philip opened his mouth wide and screamed. He astonished himself with his own sound, and looked into the space in front of him as if he could see the twisted shape of agony. He looked at the doctor standing over him and saw the urgency in the other man’s eyes, the need he had to make this medicine work and see the patient carried out of his surgery to hospital; he saw it and he screamed on, raising and lowering the cries as Tim Magrath rushed out to his receptionist and ordered an ambulance, turning on his side and crying out the long cry that drained him like a sewer of the gathered and broken debris of his life, crying for himself, for the miseries and disappointments of his own childhood, the terrible fearfulness of the world that grew inside him, the timidity he had carried until the moment he met Anne Nolan and she blew it from him like a cobweb, the loss, the inestimable loss that was born out of knowing that he had missed so many opportunities to express love while his wife and daughter were alive, the death of loveliness, and the wounded bafflement of his son, for all of it Philip Griffin screamed on the floor, until he was howling out of an emptiness and grief that constituted a pain more real than the pain of cancer.

He cried out and wept until the sorrow exhausted him and he was lying in a hospital bed with a white sheet tucked tightly like a bandage across his chest. He had been given something for pain, he was told, and lay there in the soft pillowy mountains and valleys of his half-consciousness, waiting to be investigated. When he saw the doctor coming, it was as if from a very long distance, and his white coat shone like the illumined raiment of an angel.

Stephen drove west with Vivaldi playing in his head and the face of Gabriella Castoldi lingering between him and the windscreen. He saw her more clearly than he saw the road, and only a small miracle brought him round the bend in Kinnegad. He did not know yet the dimensions of his own heart or that love developed like a geometric progression and could increase rapidly in the shortest of time, without seeing or hearing or touching the other person at all. Neither did he consider yet that his life was changed entirely now and that while the turbulence of emotions churned within him he could not return to the ordinary life of teaching. He imagined it was something which would subside. But still he saw her face. All across the country as he drove she was there before him. He saw the angle of her head as she turned to the violin, the sharpness of her elbow where it bent below the fingerboard, the taut contracted muscles of her shoulder when she bowed the sharp fierce notes of “Winter.” Crossing Westmeath he touched that shoulder with his mind and was surprised only that it did not stop the music in his head.