“Every language leaves its own unique footprint. Cryptography, you know, is a complicated profession. You are given something in code, someone says, ‘Break this,’ and then it becomes a game, a chase. Of course, you assume that there is something to be pursued, some meaning to be unravelled. It is exactly the kind of thing that can destroy a person. It is like a scent it is so strong, but there is no physical proof of it. What if you cannot, despite all efforts, find the way in? We have a saying in Dutch. I hear the bell toll, but I know not where the hands of the clock lie.”
The fragment of interview ends, the sound waves on the screen become a straight line, and the room falls quiet.
Outside the house, Ansel can hear people walking by, a man and a woman speaking in jocular, teasing voices. It is late, a quarter after three. He clicks on the icon for Gail’s inbox, and the email program opens up onto the screen.
Even now, all these months later, new correspondence occasionally arrives for her – queries from overseas, notes from people she has worked with or interviewed. He opens an email from Harry Jaarsma, one that he has read before. I know of course that you’re gone, but your account is still open. These emails don’t bounce back. I miss you in very many small ways. This email is accompanied by a series of JPEGs, magnified images of the Mandelbrot Set. Before she saw these images, Gail said, she had never been able to picture the idea of infinity.
The pictures open up slowly, each one magnifying a small part of the preceding image. The shapes remain elusively familiar, scorpion tails and chains of spirals, evolving across generations.
One of the new messages catches Ansel’s eye. He opens it without thinking.
Lieve Gail, I haven’t heard from you in many months. I hope all is well. I have been thinking about you. Do write soon. Yours, Sipke.
The name is familiar, but in his fatigue, he cannot place it. Ansel writes back, telling him that he is sorry. He gives him, as briefly as possible, the details of what has happened.
He hits Send and leans back, closing his eyes.
Gail says, “In radio, sounds might be translated into microwave signals and then shot at a satellite floating in space. People say it’s like shooting the eye out of a squirrel from a ten-mile range.” She laughs, wrinkling her eyes as if she is picturing that very image. “These signals are then broadcast back to us, but some parts always escape. Some parts turn their back on the Earth, and maybe they keep travelling forever.”
His affair with Mariana happened last summer, when Gail’s work had taken her to Toronto. One night after working the evening shift at the clinic, he and Mariana had gone out for a drink. They were surrounded by a group of people, other doctors and friends, and then, a short time later, he looked up to find that everyone else had gone home. Yet he and Mariana had lingered on.
She was a respirologist, and was at the clinic covering for another doctor who was on leave. He found himself drawn to the way she sat at a table, legs crossed, chin resting on her hands. She was warm and serious and she was married, so, at first, he believed that there was no risk, no potential for the affair that later occurred. His own feelings he had dismissed as harmless, unremarkable.
The bar grew noisy, and they moved to a corner table. She said that her father had been a doctor, too, and she had never doubted that she, herself, would study medicine. Yet the more time passed, the more she had second thoughts. It was a career that set one apart, she said, made one solitary in ways she would not have chosen. Each encounter was so intimate, and yet professional. Always, doctors had to close a part of themselves off, from their patients, from their loved ones.
At some point, he had taken her hand and leaned across to kiss her. For a single, brief second, she pulled back, and then she did not. He remembered, still, the taste of her lips, of citrus, of the bitterness of the wine. She said that her husband and son were away on a camping trip. They left the bar and wandered out into the warm summer night. There were streams of traffic moving down Cambie Street, people flowing out of the local cinema, into coffee shops and bars. He and Mariana were holding hands, and they turned into a quiet residential street towards her home. He remembers all this now as if he is recalling the details of someone else’s life, once told to him.
Sometimes, the things that should be difficult occur so easily, to undress someone else, to put your lips to theirs, to breathe in the scent of their skin and forget what came before. He can pinpoint this moment, isolate, study every detail. The second before he leaned across the table to kiss her, the second before his hand reached out, taking hers.
Mariana unlocked the door to her house. She switched all the lights on as they went, and his eyes half-closed against the brightness. The layout was familiar to him from some childhood remembrance, the hallway leading from the living room, past the kitchen, the thick carpet beneath his feet. There had been a birthday recently, and cards were displayed on the coffee table. Framed photographs hung neatly on the walls. They passed the open door of the child’s room, a lone airplane suspended from the ceiling.
In the afternoons that followed, he and Mariana had walked the three blocks from the clinic to her house. They would let themselves in and walk through the quiet rooms. Lying beside her, he told himself he had crossed into a different country, another place, separate from his relationship with Gail. As if the affair was an event happening to him, as if every moment were not a choice, deliberated over, settled on.
Once, in his office at work, Mariana had set a scan against the light box showing him the clouding of a patient’s lungs. She had described the patient’s history and present condition. While she spoke, Ansel wondered what would happen now a device had been invented that, with the use of light, allowed one to see through the human body. He knew the shape and weight of a heart, the density of a human rib, the mysterious and beautiful branching of the ventricles. He knew that at a time of grief, the body was flooded with chemicals, and these chemicals were the groundwork for the emotions that people felt, responses mapped in the body like ink flooding the bloodstream. Mariana had told him once that there was a time when they might have found happiness together but that perhaps the moment had already passed. By the time they met, they had moved on to other possibilities, they had begun to live out other lives. We always choose in blindness, she said. We always choose looking backwards.
As the weeks passed, his life seemed to split in two, the affair that he had begun, and his relationship with Gail, whom he loved. Two parts that could not touch, because they told something very different about the man he was and the person that he wished to be. In September, he had ended the affair and told Gail everything. She had listened in silence, then she tried to escape him, agitated, going from room to room. He followed after her, terrified that if he closed his eyes, she would disappear. Her pain is still vivid to him, the lines on her face. What did he want from her? she had asked. What did he want her to say?
He wanted her to be angry with him, to accuse him. To tell him why she found it so easy to leave for months at a time, to commit herself so wholeheartedly to her work. To admit the truth to herself if she had now, finally, fallen out of love with him.
She was incensed. How dare he turn the blame around? Her anger seemed to shimmer around them, and then it simply dissolved, evaporating into the air. Her acceptance was, to him, worse than any other response. She said she felt as if they had been struggling for so long, and now they had finally reached the end.