This evening, he has launched into a story about the first open heart transplant. Hamilton Naki was a gardener, Ed tells Ansel. As a young man, he had apprenticed to a doctor at the University of Cape Town who needed help with his laboratory animals. It was 1950s South Africa, so Naki, who was black, kept his designation as gardener, even while he was learning to transplant organs in animals. “He worked on giraffes,” Ed says. “Imagine that. What kind of operating table would you use? And in what room?”

“You have to operate when they’re standing upright,” Ansel says. “Giraffes have high blood pressure, so it’s best if they don’t lie down. So, no operating table. Just a scaffold.”

Ed nods, pleased. “When Barnaard performed his famous surgery,” he continues, “Naki was the man who led the first team, the one that removed the heart from a twenty-five-year-old donor, a woman who had been hit by a car. She had stopped to buy a cake. It’s sadder than a Raymond Carver story.” It was 1967, and Naki’s contribution was carefully hidden. Naki was at the press conference announcing the success of the surgery, but identified himself as a gardener who worked at the research institute. “Until this year,” Ed says, “no one knew. Not even his neighbours. He retired with a gardener’s pension.”

They both shake their heads in wonder. Ansel remembers the first time he saw an exposed heart pumping. The way it leapt out of the cavity had shocked him, made him put his gloved hand to his own chest.

“Which part of this man’s life was fiction?” Ed is saying.

“For him, none of it. Which means, I suppose, it depends on where you’re standing.”

Ed sets his plate down on the floor. “If you’re in an airplane,” he says, “a cloud ten feet away looks just the same as one ten thousand feet away. Clouds, they’re every bit as fractal as broccoli or cauliflower. A very small part of a cloud, the way it looks up close, is the same shape as one in its entirety.”

Ansel smiles. “Does that console you, Ed?”

“You know, the strange thing is, sometimes it really does.”

“Because of the pattern?”

Ed shakes his head.

“Because it’s mysterious?”

He takes a sip of wine, then slowly twirls the glass by its stem. “That’s part of it. We’re here for just a speck of time, and my greatest regret is that I don’t know more. I’m like those sci-fi kids that want to peer into the future. Just let me read ahead a bit. Let me stay up another hour, flashlight under the covers. That’s my comfort.”

When the rain starts again, they’re on to the second bottle of wine. “Ed,” Ansel says, “what kind of rain would you say this is?”

Ed peers into the night. “It’s like water out of a salad spinner.”

“Who invented the salad spinner?”

He shakes his head, laughing. “Can’t say, can’t say.”

Ansel can hear a siren coming down Hastings Street, and a short while later, several more. The sound is carried away, into the night. Ed says, “People told me I should start again after Patricia died. They said the house was too big for an old man, too many things to remind me.”

Ansel listens in silence, watching the glimmering light of a plane up above, disappearing as the clouds sweep slowly across it. Behind them, music from the CD player drifts out of the house. Their home is still very much how she left it. Her clothes, her belongings. All the rolls of reel-to-reel, the DAT and Mini Discs. Touch a button, and her voice fills the room.

“I’ve got a picture of you two sitting right here,” Ed says. He takes a sip of wine, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

Ansel’s favourite song is playing on the CD now. Dom Turner’s “Down by the Riverbed.” He can hear the accordion and harmonica, the bluesy guitar.

Gail is singing, “I’ve got a case of Anselitis.” She has a glass of wine in her right hand, and she’s swaying down the front steps.

“I’ve thought about leaving, too, Ed. But everything I have is in this house.”

“She was young. Thirty-nine is young.” Ed’s eyes are red and watery. “What am I saying? Seventy is young.”

In the months after Patricia died, before Scott Carney moved back into the house to be with his father, Gail used to pack a dinner for Ed and walk it over to him. Ansel could see her from this very chair, standing in the doorway. Ed Carney talking her ear off about fertility clinics, or a new super skin being developed by the U.S. Army, about Marconi and the telegraph: “The man that signalled the death of the carrier pigeon.” He filled his mind with so much in order to keep it aloft, like a balloon setting sail from the grief in his body.

“I don’t need to think up ideas for radio projects,” Gail had said, part-laughing, part-crying, when she came home again. “I have an Ed.”

Now, Ed pushes himself up to standing. He looks across the street to his own house, where the front light burns in the dark. “She was like a daughter to me. And my boy, Scott, he thought of her as family, too. The way they laughed together, the way they argued. He was always trying to pitch ideas to her. He finally got to her with that coded diary; it was just the type of thing that would spark her imagination.”

“Ed,” Ansel says. When he looks up at his friend, the stars seem to blur behind the clouds. “Do you think there’s a biological purpose to grieving? An evolutionary purpose.”

Ed puts his hands in his pockets. “I guess it’s to keep us alive somehow.”

Ansel looks at him expectantly.

“Grief is the time when you ask all the questions. If you don’t find some way to answer them, you won’t go on living. You won’t think about having children. Maybe it’s an evolutionary imperative to find a way to accept death, your own and others. We forget that it’s a possibility. People die and we’re surprised. It always seems so unlikely. That’s a trick of the mind.” He pauses, and then looks back towards his house. “It’s like what you were saying about perspective. From far away, I can accept everything. I can see the things that repeat themselves, the patterns and so on. I accept that the universe is thirteen billion years old. But up close, right here, is where you feel pain, grief. Right here, there are some things that I can never be at peace with.” He shakes his head. “What helps me is when I fall asleep and dream of her, dream of my Patricia, and she says, There’s nothing to worry about. Relax. Let it go.” He shakes his head. “But that doesn’t happen nearly enough, not enough at all.”

That night, Ansel wakes up in the dark, the covers off him, a street lamp pouring light into the room. He says her name, but the word that remains in the air is a sound, a word that is beginning to lose its meaning, because it receives no answer.

Downstairs, he puts the kettle on. Sleeping, he thinks, is over for Ansel Ressing. This is a new era. Last week, he had gone walking each night, crossing the invisible boundary between Strathcona and the Downtown Eastside, walking to Main and Hastings, where crowds of people were still awake, milling about. The crowds made him think of Gail’s description of the Arctic in the winter, people living their waking lives in the dark.

Tonight, he takes his glass of tea and goes into Gail’s office. He turns the lights on and then dims them, because she says, authoritatively, “You can’t hear as well when the lights are bright.”

All her equipment is here, everything dusty. There is a shelf crammed with reels of tape, grease pencils, razor blades and splicing tape. What is he ever going to do with all of this? The CBC has already collected and archived some of her work, but the rest – features and documentaries, unfinished fragments, all the scattered interviews and soundscapes that she always thought she’d organize – remains here.

He turns on her computer and waits while the icons flash up one by one. When the screen settles, he opens the sound-editing program, moves the cursor through the files and chooses one at random. A slightly accented voice comes up from the console: Harry Jaarsma’s. “Cryptography is a kind of protection. Think of the Sullivan diary as a message from the past, but one that has been buried beneath many layers.