He falls asleep to the sound of more trucks on the road, and he returns to the bridge his mother carried him over, the basket that rocked him back and forth, the sound of rushing water taking hold of him. This memory floods his vision. He opens his mouth and finds he can breathe it in, finds that the water miraculously pours out of his body, out of his skin.
Sometime in the middle of the night, he wakes hearing the door opening. His mother is there beside him, her hand smoothing his hair, smoothing the sarong that covers his body. She says that she has been down to the harbour. She has seen the Australian soldiers arrive in Sandakan. He looks up at her face, so beautiful to him, and he does not know if she is crying out of joy or sadness. She tells him that she has searched all night for his father. “I wasn’t here,” she says, her voice catching, tearing. She repeats the words, trying again. He tries to speak but no sounds come. She cups her hand against his head, as if to hold his thoughts, as if to stop them from sliding loose, and eventually sleep takes over once more.
He wakes expecting to see his father. Matthew opens his eyes, already picturing a day like every other: the radio in the room, the wire reaching up, his father concentrating on the sound. Instead, the room is still. He realizes that he has slept far longer than usual; the sun has risen, and he can see the light filtering in through the slats of the hut.
On the far side of the room, his mother is brushing her hair. It falls past her shoulders, down her back, and she gathers it up in her hands, slowly twisting it into a complicated knot. Her arms are too thin, too fragile. She is not yet aware of him. She faces the wall, as if imagining a mirror there, and brushes the stray hairs back from her face.
His mother turns and crosses the room. He tries to tell her that the one they love is not dead, that he is only hidden away, safe. Her eyes are dark and swollen. When she puts her fingertips to his cheek, her hands are trembling. She tells him that all the Japanese have gone away, they have given up Sandakan. Under cover of night, they abandoned the town and then disappeared. “Rest now,” she says, putting her lips to his hair, holding on to him. Without realizing it, she repeats his father’s words. “Everything will turn out for the best.”
Because he cannot bear to see her sadness, he closes his eyes, tries to find sleep again.
He lies still, the sarong covering his body. His heart is beating fast, and his mouth tastes of a bitter, metallic dust. When the war is truly over, he imagines that the cities will be empty places, that all the trees and shops and houses will be tidied away, swept clean like the bowl of a crater. Sleep comes, and in his dream, which is bright with colour and very clear, people move through the open space, a film of dust clinging to their bodies. The cities are like Sandakan. He walks the abandoned streets, remembering where each building stood, the tin maker, the eyeglass shop, everybody remembers, but no buildings will grow there again.
When he steps outside in the afternoon, the sky is white. His mother remains inside, and he closes the door behind him. When he kneels on the ground, brushing his hand over the loose dirt, he finds no cigarette ends, no boot marks, no stray bullets.
He begins to walk downhill, towards the harbour. There are people gathered beside their huts, listening to a radio that cuts in and out with static. Some have almost no clothes, they sit in the shade of the trees, or pace the grass. Two small boys hurry past him, almost running.
His father says, You must pay attention. Always pay attention.
Up in the sky, an airplane is coming nearer. Matthew watches small pebbles shiver across the ground. The plane descends through the clouds. The two boys are calling to each other. The younger one starts to scream. The plane is too close, flying so low, the trees in its path are bending away. Out of the belly of the plane, something falls. Matthew does not flinch or try to escape. He says, I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention. I can’t remember what day this is. A parachute opens, he watches the cloth open and snap. It passes by him, carrying a box, sailing down to earth. The box hits a tree, the parachute buckles, the lines fall down, and the silk blooms down around the tree, as if to protect it. A woman runs towards the box, dragging a child behind her.
He can feel his thoughts dissolving to liquid. Is it the heat? Which day was yesterday? Part of him tries to focus that picture in his mind, a hand opening to reveal a pistol. He sits down in the dust. At the tree, the woman with the small girl is lifting out cans of food. She is putting something into her pocket. Matthew watches her, and in his mind he hears gunshots. One shot, a pause, and then another. But the woman does not fall down. She laughs and smiles and pulls a blanket out of the box. Nobody reacts to the gunfire. But Matthew has thrown his body onto the road. He lies there, his hands gripping the dirt.
Some time later, a man lifts him up off the ground, and Matthew feels as if the weight of his own body has been left behind on the road. The soldier wears a brimmed, floppy hat and he has light-coloured eyes and he asks Matthew if he has eaten. The soldier tells him, in broken Malay, that the war is finished now, that he has nothing to be afraid of any more.
3. A New Geometry
Each morning, Ansel commutes to work on his bicycle. Today, the rain is steady, clinging to the buildings, tipping down the leaves of the trees. In Vancouver, there are many varieties of rain, but the most common, he believes, is the kind that tries to convince you it isn’t there, the kind that is so thin it makes the windshield wipers squeak. He has walked for hours in this kind of rain, without an umbrella, and still emerged reasonably dry.
After years of leaving umbrellas in assorted places – buses, of course, but also elevators, take-out coffee windows, public washrooms – Gail had given up carrying them. She wore jackets with hoods, and kept her distance from small gadgets: mobile phones, Palm Pilots, USB keys. “Give me things that announce their presence,” she said. “Did you know we used to have the world’s largest hockey stick in Vancouver? It came with its own puck.” In the evenings they used to walk along False Creek, and sometimes the rain would condense over the water, fog lifting into the dark.
By 8:00 a.m., when Ansel arrives at the clinic, there are already people leaning against the entrance, waiting to be let in. He opens the door for them despite foreseeing the grumbles of the reception staff, not quite ready for the morning intake. The patients quietly descend the stairs. This morning, there’s a family with three young daughters, two yawning med students, and a middle-aged woman. The woman is pale and trembling, and Ansel stays beside her and she uses his arm as a bannister. “It’s the arthritis,” she says, not looking at him.
“Just a few more steps now.”
He takes them to the waiting room, shows the girls where the crayons and drawing paper are, then goes on to his office. He flicks the light switches as he walks, and the fluorescent lights buzz on around him, throwing down a blue shadow before settling into a wavering glow. At the end of the corridor, Ansel unlocks his office door, hangs his jacket and helmet on the coat stand, and sits down at his desk. He has a few minutes before the first patient, not quite enough time to deal with the stack of referrals, emails and lab results left over from the day before.
In Ansel’s basement office, there are three high windows, just inches above the ground outside. They frame blades of grass, dandelions in the summer, a few small stones. The light falls in three rectangular shafts along his desk. The offices have always reminded him of a warren, the hallways that merge together, leading towards a tunnel that connects to Vancouver General Hospital. He has worked here, at the provincial tuberculosis clinic, for almost five years as a clinician and researcher, and each day has a familiar routine. The first half-dozen appointments of the morning, along with files and chest X-rays, are waiting in his in-tray. There’s a photocopied abstract on the relationship between AIDS and syphilis, and, underneath, two faxes. One is from his father, about an upcoming medical conference in Chicago. The other is from the hospital in Prince George, where Gail, ill, had gone the day before she died. The hospital writes that they have concluded their review of the case and now consider the file closed. A pain branches out from behind his eyes, a dull pulsing, and he stares at the page for a moment, until the lines begin to run together. Ansel pushes the correspondence aside and opens his Thermos of coffee.