The Wave Theory of Angels Read online

  Keep walking.

  The walls on either side of you are vast, opaque. They ripple and curve, on and on, as if deep space has suddenly solidified into Plexiglas. You’re in the terminal at Madison and Canal. You walk past the ringing phone and into the public washroom.

  You are not an abstraction. You need to go.

  As you enter, two of the sinks turn on by themselves and, momentarily, you’re spooked.

  By the time Maggie replaces the receiver, you’re heading across the concourse. You’ve got your ticket. The West Line. That’s the one. Follow your instincts.

  The train’s at the platform already. In the distance you hear the lonely call of another, beautiful above the din of brakes and steel doors. Yours is a double-decker. Climb on. There’s a single row of seats only. The feeling is vaguely claustrophobic despite the long, cigar-shaped windows; despite the fact that you’re the first to board. You take the stairs to the upper level. The strip lighting flickers. The seat creaks as you slide across the blue-grey vinyl.

  Maggie arrives for her Saturday shift. She works at the River Forest Public Library Saturday afternoons, and sometimes on Sundays. She and Christina are saving for their trip to France, though Christina keeps giving her money away to new causes: Save Chicago’s Birds or, last time, the Campaign for Dark Skies. ‘Starlight,’ she insisted to Maggie. ‘Of course it’s important.’

  Maggie does not tell Mrs McFarland, the senior librarian, that they rushed Christina to the hospital in the middle of the night. She does not tell anyone that her sister will not wake up.

  Mrs McFarland would cluck in her Scottish way. She’d cluck as if the sky were falling but (sigh), ‘Of course, it cannae be helped.’ She’d send Maggie home so that, later, she could whisper to Miss Slack and Helen, the other weekend assistant, ‘Och aye, I sent the poor wee girl home.’

  But home is not home with her sister gone from it.

  In the stark days of early spring, Christina cleared the last pocked patches of snow by the big bay window, dug up dead grass with a spade, and scattered streams of sunflower seeds over the new bed. Later, in the backyard, she strung bright teacups from bare branches to cheer up the view.

  Sometimes at night when Maggie is sleeping Christina creeps into her room and slides folded sketches under her sister’s pillow: their street after the first snow, the footsteps of the paperboy ghostly on the lawns; a still life of pears rotting in the kitchen fruit bowl; the crab-apple tree in the backyard in a froth of blossom.

  She sings out of tune as she cooks, and burns herself often. She feeds the neighbourhood strays on the back porch. She leaves holes in the toothpaste tube, crumbs in the honey jar, honey on the morning headlines, runs in Maggie’s tights and scraps of paper under fridge magnets saying ‘I borrowed $4.84 from change in assorted coat pockets’ or ‘Let’s make a really BIG dinner tonight, okay?’

  In the gardens each spring she’ll pick the wild hyacinths you’re not allowed to pick and curse herself as soon as they’re in her hand. She knows the stars by name. She smears her face in body glitter when she’s feeling low.

  She is eternally hopeful about the Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes. She walks under ladders because she refuses to be afraid. When their father is brooding and silent, she sits with him.

  The circulation desk is unusually quiet. It’s a blazing summer’s day. Outside the asphalt is melting, and, up and down the streets of River Forest, homeowners are watering their lawns with a collective will that could be mistaken for moral urgency. Old people, walking their dogs, pit their wills against sprinkler systems, as wide fans of water hit the sidewalk and retreat, hit and retreat. Goth teenagers loiter in the sprawling shade of oaks and maples, at the edge of civilization where Thatcher Woods begins. Kids are on bikes, skateboards, scooters, roller skates, rollerblades and hopscotch squares. They’re behind home-made lemonade stands and in treehouses. They’re high in mid-air above skipping ropes. They’re turning into mermaids under the stagnating tides of plastic pools.

  The good weather’s holding.

  Which means Maggie has a few minutes, maybe more, to return to Jane Eyre. Less than fifty pages to go, and still no note from her mother. She reads the scene again.

  All the house was still; for I believe all, except St John and myself, were now retired to rest. The one candle was dying out: the room was full of moonlight. My heart beat thick and fast: I heard its throb. Suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible feeling that thrilled it through, and passed at once to my head and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on my senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor, from which they were now summoned and forced to wake. They rose expectant: eye and ear waited while the flesh quivered on my bones.

  ‘What have you heard? What do you see?’ asked St John. I saw nothing, but I heard a voice somewhere cry –

  ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ – nothing more.

  ‘O God! What is it?’ I gasped.

  I might have said, ‘Where is it?’ for it did not seem in the room, nor in the house, nor in the garden; it did not come out of the air, nor from under the earth, nor from overhead. I had heard it – where, or whence, for ever impossible to know! And it was the voice of a human being – a known, loved, well-remembered voice –

  Maggie stops. She just about trusted Jane and her account of events till now. How can she hear Rochester? In the movie, doesn’t she just fall asleep over her Hindustani books and dream his forlorn call?

  Maggie likes realism. Until last night, it served her well.

  As she stamps the purple return date in a boy’s The Philosopher’s Stone, she wonders if she’s betraying Christina by not insisting, like their dad, that her sister will wake up; if she’s being disloyal by refusing to pretend that Christina can hear them, across the forested terrain of deep sleep.

  (Tina! Tina! Tina!)

  Later, after she’s signed the time-sheet, she’ll make for the payphone in the library’s foyer. Once again she’ll dial the number she copied on to her bookmark. She’ll ease herself out of Mrs McFarland’s line of sight. She’ll hang up only when the ringing cuts out; when the one-armed trumpeter crosses to the payphone, lifts the receiver and drops it down again.

  No reply.

  The West Line rolls on. From Chicago to Kedzie. From Oak Park to River Forest, Giles Carver’s station each morning. You know the route. Some days you slip into the same compartment, like an ordinary commuter. Other days you fall into step behind him at the end of the working day.

  Now through the green blur of late summer, the train takes you over the river, past Maywood and into Melrose Park Station. You rub the back of your neck. You can’t quite relax.

  Onward. Bellwood. Berkeley. Elmhurst.

  At Villa Park, children are in tears at the bottom of the stairs because their mother won’t allow them to sit on the train’s upper deck. You still have the space to yourself. No distractions. You’ll know it when you see it. Or him. Or her.

  Imagine.

  Through the window, wasteland. A disused quarry. Smokestacks. The behemoths of water towers. Chicago is thinning out. The architectural might of Oak Park and River Forest has given way to faded frame houses and dirt yards that back on to the West Line. An old black man, sitting on a buckling lawn-chair, looks up and meets your eye.

  You keep your things on your lap: jacket (too hot for the day) and a light knapsack. Contents: a bottle of water, your cellphone, a Metra timetable, your guide to Chicago, and a disposable camera in case. In case of what, it’s hard to say.

  YOU ARE BEING WATCHED

  A police surveillance sign at one of the stations. You smile.

  You appreciate irony when you see it. After all, it’s you who’s doing the watching.

  Wheaton. College Avenue. Winfield. At West Chicago, the rail yard. Finally, Geneva station.

  You’ve reached the end of the line. All passengers to disembark.

  Y
ou scan the platform. Nothing. No one recognizable. No one who strikes you. You feel vaguely foolish. Like you’ve lost the plot.

  You cross to the opposite platform. The next train back is already in the station. You hit the DOOR OPEN button. You hear voices on the upper deck. You stick to the lower, near the back. Your appetite for the view is gone.

  The train pulls out of the station, almost empty. You let your head rest against the window, and in no time it seems the brakes are sounding for West Chicago station. Did you doze off?

  Four rail workers get on. They’re still in their jeans and yellow safety jackets, in spite of the heat. Each grabs a seat to himself and spreads out. Two bang all the windows in the compartment open.

  Three rows in front of you, you see him. It’s the blue ballpoint on the broad back of his jacket that catches your eye. Just above the seam of the yoke. Below one of the silver reflective strips. ‘Angel’.

  The A is drawn with the heavy lines and flourish of a Gothic letter. A nickname. Something a girlfriend might have written with a smile, literally when his back was turned. ‘What are you up to?’ he would have asked with a laugh.

  Station after station dissolves behind you into the day’s heat. At River Forest you alight. Thatcher Station. Angel’s already on the platform, stripping off his jacket. As you make for the exit to the street, you see him hurdle a security barrier. Then he heads off up the track, following the line north into the woods.

  7

  It was a provocative study. In 1982, neurophysiologist Dr Jacobo Grinberg asked couples to participate in an experiment that would explore the neurology of love.

  Picture it. Each couple is seated in the lab, face to face – a conventional means of heightening empathy. They are not permitted to speak or touch. Observe how the pupils of each dilate at the sight of the loved one. Consider the force of the shared gaze. Remember the sweetness of lashes.

  Twenty minutes later and the time’s up. The subjects are moved into separate Faraday cages – screen rooms which shield against conventional forms of communication such as radio waves. Here, each is wired up with EEG sensors that will map the electrical activity in the brain.

  Now the test. A stimulus is applied to one of the subjects – a bright light or a mildly painful shock. So quick, it is over as soon as it is felt. Yet the pattern given off by that person’s brain in response to the light or the shock is mirrored instantly by the other person’s brain pattern. Even though his or her mate has not been subjected to the stimulus. Even though he or she has no knowledge of the stimulus applied in the other screen room.

  In one out of four cases, the minority certainly – yet a figure that demands attention, outstripping, as it does, the random probability stats.

  Perhaps, too, it suggests that Jane does suddenly know Rochester’s anguish; that it is not merely a febrile imagination at work; that she does, in some sense of the word, hear him. Interestingly, Grinberg notes that this meeting of minds does not diminish even when, like Jane and Rochester, loved ones are some distance apart. Like ancient notions of ‘contagious’ or ‘sympathetic’ magic, Grinberg’s ‘transferred potential’ suggests that substances, once joined together, continue to influence one another, even when those substances are physically separated.

  Relatedness, it seems, does not end.

  Talk to me, Maggie.

  I would if you could hear me.

  The nurse parted my hair in the middle.

  I’ll fix it.

  My brush is in the –

  Bedside cupboard. I know. I put it there.

  You sound low.

  There. That’s better.

  Talk to me.

  I don’t know what to say.

  Dad says I’m going to get better.

  Yes.

  You don’t believe it.

  Nobody knows, Tina.

  What day is it?

  Saturday. Saturday night.

  Were you at the library today?

  This afternoon.

  And?

  The usual. Helen complained and complained about the heat and how we can’t have a fan even at the circulation desk, and Mrs McFarland said what she always says: how her Uncle Jimmy had had his head blown off in the war –

  And nobody heard him complain.

  Exactly. Then she and Miss Slack started swapping tragedies again. Today it was the girl who went with her boyfriend last week to the Dairy Queen in Spring Grove. Or maybe it was Silver Lake. Anyway, she had a Brownie Earthquake. He had a Peanut Buster Parfait. He kissed her goodnight. Ten minutes later, she’s dead.

  Peanut allergy.

  The trace on his lips was enough.

  See? There’s always someone worse off.

  Then Miss Slack started on about the woman in her home-town in Indiana who sent her son out to the root cellar to get potatoes for supper. He was taking his time so she asked her daughter to go. When her daughter didn’t come back she sent her husband.

  Oh no.

  All three dead. Gas released by rotting vegetables. Blocked ventilation.

  God. It’s like the one she told you last week.

  Which one?

  About the couple with the baby who moved into their new house and asphyxiated themselves by redecorating with exterior house paint by mistake.

  . . .

  What’s wrong, Maggie?

  Nothing.

  You’re crying.

  No.

  Yes you are. Don’t stop talking to me, Maggie. Do you hear?

  Visiting hours are nearly over. Dad will be here soon to pick me up.

  Talk to me, Maggie.

  What was that number on your hand?

  What number?

  You wrote a number on your hand. I found it on you yesterday. I tried calling – twice – but no one answered.

  I don’t remember.

  Is it the same person who phoned last night? Did you hear a voice on the other end before you collapsed?

  No.

  No, it isn’t the same person? Or no, you didn’t hear a voice?

  Just no.

  Why is it a secret?

  Maggie?

  Tell me.

  Maggie?

  I’m here, Tina.

  Talk to me, Maggie.

  I’m talking to you. I am. Just stay with me, Tina. Just stay.

  8

  ‘Transport’ is not a notion with which we are especially comfortable. In its raw form, stripped of the sentiment of paper valentines and celluloid love, it is hardly recognizable. It does not seem to us a natural development of, say, happiness or gladness of heart. Nor do the expert witnesses reassure:

  ‘a sudden or gradual though always involuntary process’

  ‘characterized by a loss of normal muscle tone, a fall in body temperature and depressed respiration’

  ‘which may seize the subject abruptly when in a normal state of consciousness’

  ‘leading to psychic disturbance or invasions from the subliminal region’.

  As for the condition sometimes termed ‘rapture’, the less said the better:

  ‘a violent uprush’

  ‘an uncontrollable expression of genius for the Absolute’

  ‘which temporarily disorganizes and may lead to permanent damage of the nervous system’

  ‘so, an accident, no matter how fertile the yield’.

  On Sunday morning Giles Carver is informed by a medical team of three that his daughter has lost her senses. Her eye and verbal responses are almost nil. Her motor response is weak, though she is able to withdraw from pain, which, one of the team adds, is encouraging. Her Glasgow Coma Score, however, is only 7, an early indication which does, they are afraid to say, point to significant damage.

  Carver is not afraid to say, How dare they presume? How dare they give up on his daughter? She is a girl of twenty. She has always been fit and well. She was not dragged from a car crash. She was not pulled out of the Chicago river. She ran for the phone in the middle of the night.

&nb
sp; A member of the team will agree that, of course, every coma patient is unique. She will gently remind him that they are not giving up on her. She will pass him details of a counselling service for carers of persons with Acquired Brain Injury. Feelings of denial, she will add, are part of grieving, and his reaction is entirely understandable.

  He knows it is futile to deny the charge of denial. He tells her to leave the room. He tells them all to leave. He has allowed them to doom-say at her bedside long enough. He refuses to not believe: that where there is life, there is presence.

  Giles Carver cannot know that there are others like him, in hospitals everywhere; ordinary heretics (a civil servant, a piano tuner, a high-school German teacher) who would tell him that the comatose person is, contrary to appearances, exquisitely sensitive. That the mere touch of fingertips against fingertips has moved the sleeping loved one – beyond words. That the fluttering of his or her eyelids has signalled, not a chemical wash in the brain but a boundless flight of the spirit. So a young boy, left comatose after being hit by a car, communicates to his family that he is in the middle of a great heroic battle. A twenty-five-year-old man, a patient in an urban hospital, wakes from his coma and cries when he realizes that the nurses are unaware of the music he still hears.

  These ordinary heretics believe that the comatose person can recognize, from the hands laid upon them, which nurses know they are alive and which believe them dead and gone. They would tell you that comatose people have communicated these things in the secret grammar of breath. In the stammered syllables of their hands. In time-lapsed messages of brow, cheeks and mouth. The loved one, the heretics would tell you, will make of his or her body a dowser by which you can find them.

  Carver forgets the Glasgow Coma Score. He takes out the two books he has brought with him. All he could find yesterday at the local bookstores. He tells Christina about Coma Arousal Therapy. He strokes the palm of her hand. He tells her he’s going to listen to her in new ways. That they’re going to find a way through this.

  He tells her that the first book says that her vital signs, such as her heart rate, can strengthen with touch and stimulation, especially from loved ones, even when there is no outward evidence of a reaction. He understands this. Not to fear. He won’t fail her. He squeezes her hand.