His work is a comfort to him. Even as a child, he never considered a career outside of medicine. Both of his parents were doctors, his father a heart surgeon, and his mother a GP. Night after night, his father came home at dawn, an overcoat on top of his rumpled greens. If the surgery had gone well, his father would put a record on, Ella Fitzgerald or Muddy Waters, the music rising like smoke through the house. From bed, Ansel could hear the murmur of his parents’ conversation, his father’s low voice taking pleasure in relaying the details of the surgery. Even before Ansel learned to read, his mother had taught him how to use a stethoscope, how to listen for opacities, crackles and echoes in the lungs, how to track the beating of a heart. By the time he turned four, he had practised on both his parents, as well as his older sister. He remembers warming the diaphragm between his hands then setting it against their skin, astonished each time by the familiar sound, the reliable lub dub of their hearts.
It was Ansel and not his sister, Lydia, who got to go on rounds with their father. While Lydia played guitar in her bedroom, Ansel would concentrate on his father’s rumbling voice relating Mrs. B.’s myocardial infarction followed by congestive failure and arrhythmia, elaborating on her EKG and digitalis treatment. “Are you following this, Ansel?” To which all the residents and interns would laugh. When he was twelve, he read his father’s copy of The Microbe Hunters, then he saved his allowance for a year and bought a microscope. That year, he made a list of his top one hundred scientists. The obvious ones, Galileo, Einstein, Newton. And then, depending on the month, or what he was reading, Tesla, Koch, Curie, Salk, Leeuwenhoek, Darwin and Wallace. And always Louis Pasteur.
“Ah,” his father had said once, examining the names. “The beer makers are fond of him.”
Lydia shook her head. “What is it with men and lists?”
For a time, Ansel had strayed towards cardiology, interning for half a year at St. Paul’s Hospital. In surgery, he waited while people slid away from him into the wash of anesthesia, their presence literally fading from the room. Dr. Biring, his mentor, would sing while he worked, rock ballads, folk songs, anything. The words, Biring said, were like a ladder he could climb down, and thus descend into his memory. Sometimes, in the operating room, humming along with Biring, Ansel was surprised to look up and see the patient’s face, framed by a green plastic cap. Their minds had been disconnected from the organs that he worked on. Retractors held the chest wall back, exposing the heart; every few seconds, the heart pumped out of the skin. There were tiny cameras that he could swim through a person’s body, a tool to magnify his own sight, a device to reach where his hands couldn’t.
From surgery, he went to a one-month placement in the Burn Unit. This was where he had met Gail, almost ten years ago. She was working as a reporter then, covering a crash that had happened at the airport, a Cessna that had stalled in mid-air.
He had to come out of the hospital every hour just to breathe, to escape the pain, the bodies, rotated, covered in Silvadene. It was the middle of the night, and Gail was rooted outside, along with the other journalists, waiting for a break in the story. By 4:00 a.m., she was the only one left, still sipping her coffee. “You don’t have to stay here all night, do you?”
“No.” She had smiled, embarrassed. “You must think I’m eager or something.”
“If you leave me a number, I can call you if there’s more to report.”
“Actually, I don’t have an apartment yet. I just got back to Vancouver a few days ago.”
He asked where she had been, and Gail said, “In the Arctic Circle, but only for a month. I was living in Prague before that.” When he asked what she did there, she told him, “This and that. I make radio features, soundscapes. I’m not the sharpest interviewer, but I like to listen.”
After morning sign-in, they ate breakfast in the cafeteria. Her eyes kept wandering over to a group of doctors in wrinkled greens, surgical masks dangling from their necks and covers on their shoes. She was twenty-nine, dressed in jeans and a cotton T-shirt. She leaned towards him, long dark hair falling forward, a triangle of buttered toast dangling from her fingertips, and asked him what kind of medicine he hoped to practise. He told her that, initially, he had wanted to be a surgeon.
She paused, studying him. “You don’t seem the type,” she said at last. “I picture the surgeon as someone who parachutes in, gets the job done, then waves airily as he goes home to bed. You strike me as a more long-haul kind of person.”
He laughed and cut a piece of jam from its packet. “I haven’t decided what I want to be yet. I guess I’m leaning towards internal medicine.”
He had his bicycle there, but she loaded it into the back of her van and drove him home. At his front door, she said, “You can see the hospital from your house.”
Ansel looked behind him. The Centennial Pavilion, built in the shape of a star, little windows in neat rows like a line of type, hovered over them. When he turned back, he saw that her eyes were ringed and dark. “Where are you staying?” he said.
“In my van until I find a place.”
He fumbled for the right words. “You’re welcome, if you want, to stay here.”
She laughed, suddenly hugging him. “Thanks. Maybe when we get to know each other a bit better.”
In the examining room, the family is seated, waiting for him. Two of the girls are working on crayon drawings, and the third, the youngest one, has drawn a picture of an imposing man in a white coat, stethoscope around his neck. The man has dark hair, like Ansel, and his expression is moody, sober. The figure reminds Ansel of the way he had once pictured his own father, larger than life, replete with answers.
As he enters, the family gathers around him. He seats the girls, one, two, three, on the examining table, and motions the parents to take the chairs. “Dr. Ressing,” the father says immediately, “we were on an airplane. Somebody from the health region called us. They said we had to get tested right away, the entire family.”
He tells them how a young woman on their flight had contracted tuberculosis on her travels. “You’re being screened as a preventative measure. Most people’s defences are strong enough to prevent the TB from causing disease. We’ll do a skin test on each of you, and then in three days we need you to come back for the second part of the procedure.” He tests them one at a time, starting with the father.
The youngest girl is crying and whispering, “No needles, please, no needles,” over and over, and by the time Ansel has sat down beside her, she has buried her head against her mother’s stomach. He takes her right arm and rubs a bit of alcohol on it. The mother is clucking at her, saying something in Pakistani, then smiling indulgently. She holds the girl’s arm steady, and Ansel inserts the point. The girl screams pitifully, pressing her body into her mother’s side. The fluid pools below the surface of her skin.
“That’s it.”
The girl blinks, cautiously eyeing her wound, then gazes up at him, tear trails on her cheeks. Startling everyone, she lifts her arm and grabs hold of his stethoscope. He is yanked forward.
Her parents exclaim in surprise, shaking their heads, apologizing, but Ansel doesn’t move. He is nose to nose with the little girl. “Will you let me have your drawing?” he asks, pointing at the sheet of paper in her hand. She agrees to the trade.
He fits the earpieces on her ears, pushes his lab coat aside and sets the stethoscope against his chest.
After that first meeting in the hospital, he had sought her out, calling the telephone number she had given him, the number at her parents’ house. On his days off, he accompanied Gail as she travelled the city, interviewing people for her work at CBC-Radio. She had begun working on a piece about memorials. She had been introduced to a thirty-year-old man whose fiancée had died eight years ago. In the first year after her death, he had poured his grief and loss into his garden. As the years passed, the garden had become a memorial to her, and a permanent part of his life. “This is the blue season,” he told them. He wore a microphone affixed to a coat hanger that Gail had widened, then placed around his neck. The contraption rested firmly on his chest. A trick she had learned, she told him, from a producer in Prague, in the hope that the microphone would be forgotten by the speaker. It would became a part of his or her own body.