Ansel, who knew nothing about plants, looked around. Blue flowers, blue blossoms in all shapes and sizes. Delphiniums, bellflowers. There was a ghostly sadness to it. Latin names spilled off the tongue of the young man.
Gail was wearing a blue skirt and top, and she merged seamlessly into the palette of the garden. Her hair hung loose, reaching the small of her back, and a woven hat shaded her face from the sun. She held the young man’s gaze as he spoke, adjusting the recording levels with her right hand. A thin line of wire ran between them, from the microphone to the recorder, and then to the headphones that Gail wore. Watching her, it had seemed to Ansel as if he stood at the edge of a doorway. The world that she inhabited was full of stories, of questions. That expression, her face relaxed, yet held in concentration as she listened, is the one that remains with him now.
“This one is my favourite, and the one I’ve grown the most,” the young man told Gail. The flower was sky blue with a creamy yellow eye. He extended his hand as if presenting something. “A large slope of them, beginning somehow at waist level, trembling in the wind, would be quite a statement.”
The next day, she visited a woman who balanced stones, one on top of the other, in her garden, an imitation of the inukshuk scattered on the shores of English Bay. The Inuit word inukshuk, Gail told Ansel over dinner, means “likeness of a person.” The direction of a leg or an arm may be used for navigation, or might signal the presence of fish in a nearby lake. The middle-aged woman, an immigrant from Scotland, had lost her twin sister to cancer. She said that she balanced the stones on hot summer days when she and her four children sat in the backyard. They had seen these structures while walking around Stanley Park, and the image had stayed in their minds.
While Ansel sat in the living room copying out his rotation notes, Gail played him parts of the interview. She told him that Inuit tradition forbids the destruction of an inukshuk. The woman said, “I suppose the wind and rain will take them down one day. But there’s a tradition that says dismantling them would be a desecration. And I understand that.” She paused and then said, barely audibly, “Yes, a desecration. I saw it that way. Even though I knew, my sister knew, it would happen one day.”
Gail was sitting cross-legged on the floor. “I have all these outtakes,” she told him. “These reels and reels. Just tapes of people talking, but I can’t throw them away. Sometimes, people remember things they haven’t thought about in years, a private memory, a story. You know that feeling when you’re moving house, going through boxes, and you find something unexpected? That’s what I feel is happening to them. Inside their minds, they open the box, and there it is right in front of them, almost as if they’re seeing it for the first time.”
He told her that memory is a tricky thing. “Sometimes, we forget, because the right cues, a word, a face, never arise. Until someone reminds us, we forget that the box is there. Sometimes there’s disassociation. The memories splinter into different worlds.”
“It’s Nietzsche. The ability to forget is what brings us peace.”
“He was on to something in a biochemical way, too. If there’s a trauma, or a difficult memory, sometimes that severs the links. The memories themselves don’t disappear, but you can’t find your way back to them, because the glue that connects the different streams is somehow dissolved. That’s the idea, anyway.”
“And can you tell me, dear doctor, where I go after I die, or when the world ends, and if there’s a magnanimous god in the heavens? Or, more pressingly, why giraffes don’t faint when they lower their heads to the ground?”
“Ah, let me see. I’m sure that’s in my notes somewhere.”
When she came down with the flu, he moved her out of her van and into the house. Set her up like a hospital patient. Brought meals to her three times a day. She demanded a bedpan. He ignored her and took her vital signs, writing them down on a notepad that he kept at her bedside, on top of a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. At night, lying in bed, he read aloud to her, beginning with his favourite section on the oblivious Rain God, the miserable truck driver adored by clouds everywhere.
“You nutter,” she said, drowsily, her words slurring into his pillow. “Why don’t you find some healthy people to hang out with?”
He began to yearn for winter. At the first frost, she had said, she would move out of her van and into his apartment.
If he could have seen into the future, he would not have believed the affair possible. And yet it had happened, one year ago now, the relationship brief, intense. On the night he told Gail, she had stood with her back to him, as if to separate the image of him from the words she was hearing. In the days that followed, she did not go up to the bedroom. Instead, she slept in her office downstairs, some nights leaving the house entirely, taking the car, disappearing. He listened to the sound of the door closing, tires on the gravel. Those nights are still vivid, a rift, a heartbreak, dismantling everything that had come before. But settling them, finally, on a different ground.
Even before she caught her flight to Prince George, she had been fatigued, coughing. He no longer tries to push these thoughts away. She had picked up a cold, a virus, that persisted. He had wanted her to cancel the trip, to stay with him, but she said that this interview with Nathan Sullivan, Kathleen’s older brother, was necessary. His words were the last remaining piece. Nathan would be in the country for only a few days, and she might not have the chance again.
On the phone from Prince George, she told him that she had woken two days ago with a tightness in her chest. When, that morning, even breathing had become painful, she had gone to the hospital. The emergency room physician had diagnosed pneumonia and prescribed antibiotics.
He had wanted to drop everything and go to her. Her voice remains in his memory, surprised. Moved by his concern. “It’s just a glorified cold,” she had said, laughing. “Stop fussing.” She said that she would sleep the illness off, and tomorrow evening she would catch her flight home, as scheduled. But he had persuaded her otherwise, telling her that she should stay there until she was fully recovered.
The pace at which Gail disappears from his life has slowed, a loss that is spread out over time, bits and pieces that break down and gradually disintegrate. He recalls mornings when, waking first, he would see the room take shape around him and turn to find her curled away, her hair sweeping up across the pillows, away from her neck. He would place his lips there, her skin smelling of the sheets, of warmth.
Every Sunday, he drives to the cemetery. Often, he sees Clara. On his most recent visit, he had lain his own small offering down, then he had taken a cloth and cleaned the dirt and grass from the marker. He told her passing things, the grocery list, jokes, ramblings. Quotidian details that they have always shared. He heard her voice, Did you sleep well?, Did you dream?, What shall we do today?, And then, my love, what then?
At 10:30, Ansel has an appointment with a new patient, Alistair Cameron. A nurse at the AIDS outreach clinic has referred him here. According to the file, he has already been hit three times with pneumonia, once with Kaposi’s and once with CMV retinitis. “Symptoms suggestive of TB infection. No previous BCG vaccination.” Ansel reads the history closely, seeing an immune-compromised patient with probable tuberculosis, a diagnosis that he has no wish to give.
Thirty minutes go by and Alistair Cameron does not arrive.
Sitting in his office, he turns to the cassette player he keeps beside his desk. After a moment, he picks up the headphones and slides them on. He rests one finger on the controls, hesitating, but he cannot help himself. All he wants is to hear her voice. He hits Play, and a young man begins to speak, reading from the letters of Franz Kafka. “I shall never get well again. Just because what we are dealing with here is not tuberculosis that can be nursed back to health in a sanatorium deckchair but a weapon that remains indispensable as long as I live. It and I cannot go on living together – or apart from each other.”