The Wave Theory of Angels Read online

  Fanjeaux?

  Far from Beauvais, it is true. Yet Fanjeaux, the abbot tells her, will afford her ample opportunity for reflection. It will help her to begin again. She will have a new family, new sisters.

  Maggie casts the scene in her mind’s eye. At 3:45, Mrs McFarland will phone their house. She will leave a message, wondering where Maggie was today. Hadn’t Maggie wanted the holiday shift? Didn’t Mrs McFarland give it to her rather than Helen? Perhaps Mrs McFarland will knock on their door on her way home from the library. ‘Just passing,’ she’ll say. ‘But ach aye, if only I knoooo you couldnae worrk today, we might have coped, hen. I can only hope you’re nae tooo pooorrrly.’

  Maggie doesn’t feel poorly. It is easier this way, she tells Mrs McFarland, standing on the threshold of her own daydream. It is easier to slip from life. Less painful, she says.

  ‘Oh you’re young, Maggie. So young. You dooon’t know what pain is.’

  Pain is her sister’s cold stare and her one frozen pupil.

  Pain is the secret phone number on Tina’s hand, and the nameless man on the phone.

  Pain is a father who doesn’t know how to talk to her if he can’t charm her; who likes her best when she pretends; who doesn’t want her as she is.

  ‘The world comes right in the end, Maggie,’ Mrs McFarland is saying. ‘You mark my words.’

  But Mrs McFarland doesn’t know the world any more. She’s out of her element; she’s out of her century.

  ‘You’re a good gerrrl really, Maggie Carver. I was saying as much tooooday to Miss Slack.’ Mrs McFarland cocks her permed head. She hears something at the margins of this, Maggie’s daydream. A man’s voice? ‘Tell me, hen.’ Her eyes dart. ‘Is there someone else here in this wee rrreverie of yours?’

  It’s her father’s voice, louder now. ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘My daughter. Margaret Constance Carver.’

  Maggie smiles, pleased that Mrs M has finally noticed. ‘Yes, Mrs McFarland. My father’s in the next room on the phone.’

  ‘Goodness, I wish you’d said!’ Her hand moves quickly to her hair. ‘I didnae realize your father was here, having a prrrivate conversation no less. And there’s me, mithering away like . . .’ She peeks round the corner, into the next room. She draws breath at the sight of Dr Giles Carver, a man in his prime, taking action in a family emergency.

  The cord of the phone is taut in Giles Carver’s hand. His back is hunched over the phone on his desk – a red phone, Maggie decides. ‘What do you mean ‘‘Give it time’’?’ he shouts. ‘She’s a missing person now!’

  Her father cares. See how he cares.

  Mrs McFarland looks to her, then to her father, and back to her again. She fans her face. She covers her mouth with a liver-spotted hand. ‘Oh dear, Maggie. Oh dear, dear, dear, dear, dear.’

  Maggie looks at the ground and smiles. Hasn’t she been disappearing, little by little, for days? But now, now it is accomplished. She is a missing person. Her father has just said so to the police. This is how it will be.

  ‘Ooooooh, Maggie. What have you done?’

  She shakes her head and smiles again. How can she explain?

  On her own, she will be fine. On her own, she can steer a steady course in an unsteady world.

  5

  It turns out you’re that kind of commuter. Giles Carver occupies an aisle seat. He’s unaware of you behind him, reading over his shoulder. Today’s paper. Thursday, September 6. He has things on his mind.

  Maggie made one withdrawal on Monday minutes before her bank closed for the day. $386.56. Her savings for France. She left one dollar in the account. That’s a good sign, he was told. It suggests prudence, said the beefy cop. An optimistic outlook, adds his partner. They told him it was important to maintain routine; that she is eighteen years old and, from what her teachers say, a level-headed girl.

  Usually he gets his paper in Oak Park, on the walk home. But today he picks it up at the station in Geneva instead. He needs the distraction for the journey home. He doesn’t want train time on his hands. He turns a page and shakes the thing into submission. He glances at headlines.

  There. An article in the far left-hand column: ‘Scanning Mystery: Columbia Computer Scientists Investigate the Rise and Fall of the Gothic Cathedral’. The fall of one in particular: St Pierre in Beauvais, France. He’s got the picture of Jen in his wallet, standing in front of it, holding two dripping cones.

  Once the tallest building in Europe, taller than even the Pantheon in Rome, its towering choir, you read, collapsed in 1284. In spite of its eventual reconstruction, the structure remains a mystery. Or, in other words, a cause for concern. Nobody can say exactly how it stands.

  There are theories about the fall of 1284: a failure to account for gale-force winds off the English Channel; a lack of roof support; an inherently unstable foundation; insufficient buttressing; an unexpected rate of settling; greater attention to opulence than structural soundness.

  In June, the Columbia team arrived in Beauvais with a laptop and a laser scanner. For ten days they bounced beams off the 700-year-old stonework. Then they returned to New York to produce 3D-range scans and imagery of the cathedral. There’s a copy of one in colour with the article. Golden, unearthly, St Pierre seems to float free of its foundations in a digitized night.

  The scans, you read, will permit a degree of structural analysis that has not been possible before now. The team will return next summer to complete the modelling. The mystery of St Pierre’s collapse, of its ever insistent flux, might yield up its secrets at last.

  Good luck. Carver closes the paper. The irony isn’t lost on him. The renovations at Wilson Hall have been going on for, what, three years now? These days scaffolders seem to outnumber scientists at Fermilab, for, like St Pierre, its lofty inspiration, Wilson Hall also defies symmetry floor by floor, axis by axis. That piece of concrete in 1993 was an interesting case in point: a piece of a fifteenth-floor support joint plummeting past his office window.

  He checks his cellphone for messages.

  Nothing. Not from Maggie. Not from Christina.

  He has ignored Sperber’s advice. How could he switch off his phone with Maggie gone?

  Will he find her? she wonders. Will he try? Or is it as they tell her? Has she truly died to the world?

  Marguerite has seen no one since the day she arrived. Only the pale freckled hand that pushes her daily meal past the curtain. The curtain is permitted until vespers, when the oak door of the room is closed upon her. On the air sometimes: the smell of lavender, off the fields of Fanjeaux. But no window.

  And it is true. What she has always known. She can survive within herself.

  He wonders where Maggie slept. Friends. Surely she has friends. School friends anyway. When he realizes.

  He doesn’t know.

  Since Jen, the three of them have been all for one and one for all. (‘Are you with me – or are you with me?’ ‘Dad.’ ‘Well?’ ‘I’m with you.’ The old call and response.) They have conjured their own world. They have looked upon others as if they were short-lived illusions, less real somehow than they three.

  For the first time he can see the effects of his own faulty magic: Maggie’s strange interiority; Christina’s secretiveness, hidden too well behind her good cheer; his own clanging loneliness. (Jen gone. Nat forced out. His charm all but used up.)

  He can see collateral damage too: his eight-year isolation in supergravity, playing the wounded maverick – playing it safe, ironically–when all along he’s known that only creative, chancy dialogue can yield anything worth a damn. As Ed Witten proved. And there was Nat too. Wasn’t she still struggling to recover her life, her livelihood, after her gamble for him?

  But it’s too late to know, to see. He can’t turn things around fast enough.

  Christina will know by now that he gave his consent for her involuntary admission. Betrayal. How can it seem anything but? And Maggie’s punishing him by running away. She must be. Because nothing is as he promis
ed.

  The room is plain but clean, apart from the dead and dying bugs in the light fixture. There’s one double bed. A pair of yellow-and-brown pleated curtains. A framed picture of grazing cattle. A TV too big for the bureau it sits on. A Better Business Bureau calendar tacked to the wall. A small bathroom with a cracked toilet seat and a stammering fan.

  Through the wall, she can hear the family in the next room. Someone is bouncing a ball off their common wall. Someone else is taking a shower. The TV is on, a rerun of I Dream of Jeannie.

  The smack of the ball. The groan of the hot-water pipe. The shouts of Larry Hagman at Jeannie in her bottle. Each sound elongates in Maggie’s head, stretching the container of its moment like a soapy bubble blown slowly through a plastic ring. One moment after another. She remembers this from childhood: time lengthening to its secret proportions.

  She is about to change the month on the wall calendar but doesn’t. It’s still July. She still likes her job at the library. She’s still saving money for France. She doesn’t know yet that Christina has a secret.

  From her window, the vast laughing face of the Happy Griddle is a leering moon in the gathering dark. It won’t let her forget: her sister’s cold stare, her father insisting that everything is fine, her motherlessness.

  6

  Christina’s confessor does not raise his voice.

  ‘Something or someone,’ he repeats, ‘has made away with your spirit.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ He leans back in the chair.

  ‘I believe not.’

  ‘Yet you are spiritless.’

  ‘These are heavy days.’ She turns her face to the window. ‘It is difficult even to breathe in this heat.’

  He folds his hands in his lap. ‘There is a name.’

  ‘There is no name.’

  ‘You gainsay me.’ His eyebrows mimic surprise.

  ‘I know no name.’

  ‘You are without family, without connections.’

  She meets his eyes. ‘This is what I am told.’

  ‘Yet you reject the efforts of His Grace, your spiritual father.

  And you reach not for Christ’s forgiveness.’

  ‘Is my need so great?’

  ‘It is your heart which must tell you that.’ He smiles, sardonic. ‘It seems we await your heart.’

  As the bell rang for matins on the morning that everything would change, Christina panicked and her heart faltered.

  We hardly remember that the word ‘panic’ is the legacy of the shaggy-legged god Pan.

  Pan was born into turbulence. His mother was an Arcadian nymph who abandoned her infant son at birth after first laying eyes on his wild and bearded face. His father, Hermes, was more robust. He picked up the child, wrapped him in a hare’s pelt and carried him back to Olympus.

  God of procreation and the natural world, Pan’s image was often a suitably phallic post draped in a mantle, a mask and leafy boughs. A shape-shifter, he also took animal form, usually that of a goat – hence the trademark horns and cloven feet. In the minds of the ancient Peloponnese, Pan was many things: magical, libidinous, terror-awakening, though not necessarily malignant.

  Clothe Pan liberally in our cultural suspicions, and he emerges as the duplicitous demon lover of Western folklore: ‘They had not sailed a league, a league,/A league but barely three,/Until she espied his cloven foot,/And she wept right bitterlie.’

  But think back again to the ancient world. For before demons were ‘demons’, they were daimones – Greek for ‘spirit-energy’. Even our word ‘devil’ derives from the primeval root DV, which in Sanskrit is found in two forms, DIV and DYU, the original meaning of which was not ‘to corrupt’ or even ‘to tempt’, but rather ‘to kindle’.

  In his ‘Treatise on the Descent of the Soul’, the classical writer Apuleius describes for us these ‘kindling’ beings: ‘As they are media between us and the Gods, in the place of their habitation, so likewise is the nature of their mind; having immortality in common with the Gods, and passion in common with the beings subordinate to themselves.’

  Is it this passion then that we fear? Are we scared stiff of its transformations? Is this why, through centuries of consensus, we have demonized the daimone? A figure who, in Latin, Apuleius reminds us, corresponds to Genius.

  Daimone. Demon. Pan. Wild man. Incubus. Outcast angel. Each speaks to us of the terrible force of change.

  *

  ‘The impression of a body?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘A parasomnia. You’re familiar with the term?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Since . . .’ He glances at her file.

  ‘I was thirteen.’

  ‘But you’ve had problems, during sleep, since you were . . .’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘About the time of your mother’s death.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me what you remember about the night you collapsed.’

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘A bell.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The phone was ringing.’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘You’d been asleep for . . .’

  ‘Hours.’

  ‘And the phone woke you.’

  ‘I don’t remember waking.’

  ‘And you don’t remember running?’

  ‘I just remember a bell.’

  ‘Ringing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘I couldn’t move . . .’

  ‘When you heard the bell.’

  ‘I’ve already said.’

  ‘Why do you think you couldn’t?’

  ‘I was asleep, I suppose.’

  ‘Was someone with you as this bell rang or were you alone?’

  ‘I have my own room.’

  ‘I mean, was there the sensation of someone?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘I’d be making it up.’

  ‘Fine. Make it up. Someone familiar or not?’

  ‘Familiar.’

  ‘Did you want to run?’

  ‘I panicked.’

  ‘So you wanted to run.’

  ‘Yes . . . And no.’

  ‘No because . . . You wanted to stay?’

  ‘I could say anything and you’d write it down.’

  ‘Let me worry about that. You wanted to stay with that person?’

  ‘Yes. I think I did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I also wanted to run.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Just talk. Why did you want to run?’

  ‘I’ve always been a good runner.’

  ‘And for you, running is about . . . ? Pick a word.’

  ‘I don’t know . . . Energy. Speed.’ She looks up. ‘Flight.’

  He nods, pleased, she thinks. ‘And since your coming to on Tuesday, no sleep disturbances? No ‘‘visitations’’?’

  ‘No.’ She crosses her legs. ‘None.’

  ‘Good.’ Dr Sperber studies her. ‘Though I still want to get you checked into the sleep lab as soon as a bed is available. Just a few routine tests.’ He replaces his pen’s cap. He nods to the sketch she has stuck to her window. ‘You’re drawing again?’ He doesn’t ask her why she has taped it so that the picture faces the glass and not the room.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not so good at silk-flower arrangements.’

  ‘Have you seen the fountain in the courtyard?’

  ‘Yes. Have you?’

  He slides his pen into his breast pocket. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Christina.’

  ‘I’ve already told you I can’t explain it.’

  ‘Explain what?’

  ‘How they can make themselves look like my family.’

  ‘I know you can’t. I understand.’

  ‘And I understand it’s your job to say you understand.’

  He smiles, amused
. ‘I’ll let Dr Bishop know that the aphasia has clearly resolved itself.’

  When the call comes, she lifts the phone from its charger and walks to the door where the laundry staff huddle on their cigarette breaks.

  ‘Find me,’ she says. ‘Find me.’

  Her room is on the ground floor. He’ll know hers, she says, when he sees the sketch stuck to the window: the river, sparking with light. The oak trees grave as witnesses. And a figure – ‘You,’ she laughs into the phone, ‘you’ – taking the embankment in slipping strides. Still unfinished. He’ll see it. He can’t miss it.

  She leaves her window open to the night. She closes the curtains and the venetian blinds. She turns off every light. She puts a towel at the bottom of her door to soak up the crack of light.

  Then, sleep’s undertow. Until the bed’s creaking and Angel’s pulling her to him so they lie, breathing like one.

  His neck is salty against her lips. ‘Are you here?’

  ‘Of course I’m here. I said I’d be and I am.’

  She pushes her face into his chest. ‘There’s something wrong with me.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’

  His warmth. His solidness. His voice in the night. She runs her toes through the soft hairs on his calves. ‘They say there is. Not in so many words, but they might as well.’

  He reaches past her, groping in the dark for a bedside lamp.

  She grabs his wrist. ‘I told you on the phone. You can’t.’

  ‘I’ll be me.’

  ‘What if you’re not?’

  ‘I will be.’

  She turns and clambers on to him, sinking into his chest. ‘Promise me you won’t fall asleep,’ she says.

  ‘I won’t. Now let me turn on the light.’

  ‘Because I won’t go to sleep if I think you might.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You have to be gone before I wake up. Way before.’

  ‘I get the picture.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear not to know you.’

  ‘You’re thinking too much.’

  ‘Dr Sperber says my reason is unaffected.’