The Wave Theory of Angels Read online

‘So you’re still unreasonable.’

  ‘I’m afraid a lot lately.’

  ‘You’ll get better.’

  ‘It’s not like me.’

  ‘Good to know then how the other half lives.’

  ‘And I bump into things.’

  ‘Which is where lights help, I find.’

  Her cheek is in the cradle of his neck. ‘You smell of outside.’

  7

  ‘Give it more time, sweetheart,’ he’s saying into his cellphone. ‘It’s only a week since you – ’

  ‘I want to come home.’

  ‘What does Dr Sperber say?’

  ‘Let me talk to Maggie.’

  ‘She’s not here, Tina. I’m at work. What’s that Ms Keegan like?’

  ‘I don’t belong here.’

  ‘There’s still the MRI tests. And the sleep lab. That’s tonight, isn’t it?’

  Dead air between them. He can see her rubbing the place behind her ears, like she does when she can’t find the words. Then, ‘Dad, please. Please don’t leave me here.’

  ‘It’s not for long.’ Don’t say it. Don’t say it, sweetheart.

  ‘He was here again.’

  He winces. ‘Christina, I can hardly hear you . . .’

  ‘I’ll be at the information desk, Dad. I’ll wait – ’

  ‘You can’t just walk out, sweetheart. There are rules.’

  ‘I don’t care any more.’

  ‘You know what the signal’s like out here, ladybug. If my phone cuts out, I’ll – ’ He hits the CALL END button. Turns on his swivel chair. Sits, head between his knees, defeated.

  Last night: to hell with Sperber, he decided. At last she was phoning. Thank God she was phoning. Four messages yesterday. Two on the answering machine. Two on his cell-phone. It was Sunday. He was going crazy sitting in the house by himself.

  He argued his way in after visiting hours.

  Her door was open but he knocked anyway. She was watching TV. Some reality thing.

  But the look in her eyes: like he was a rapist or something.

  She leaves behind the pastels of the Skilled Care Unit and talks her way past security. At the information desk, she lies. She says she has an appointment with Dr Bishop.

  The receptionist checks the extension. ‘I’ll phone to let him know you’re on your way.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ Christina moves away from the desk. ‘He knows.’ She hadn’t expected the woman to pick up the phone. She hoped she’d simply point her in the right direction. She has no idea where his office is.

  She takes a quick right down a nearby corridor, then a left. She finds herself suddenly in a pale green waiting room where people pace in thin, hospital-issue bathrobes, clasping the fluttering edges against the threat of two fans. Clearly no one is permitted shoes, though many still wear socks or pantyhose in spite of the day’s heat – something which, Christina notices, makes them look more uncovered, more vulnerable, not less. Each holds in his or her hands a small paper cup. A few grimace as they sip. Those nearest the door look up at her, startled, grey-faced.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she whispers.

  She is not sick. She should not be here. She does not need St Thomas’s.

  ‘Would patient Christina Carver please come immediately to the information desk?’ It’s a hospital-wide announcement. They know she’s missing from the unit.

  She moves through the outpatients clinic and down another hallway, past consultation rooms where the curtains on the windows of the doors haven’t been closed all the way. She sees half a man’s naked chest. One bright pink nipple and an outstretched arm. Overhead a CCTV camera follows her movements. How long before someone finds her?

  She feels like a rat in a laboratory trial. She turns back and, expecting to arrive at outpatients again, stumbles instead into a long, skylit corridor. There’s a carpeted hush. Royal blue and a good weave. A man with a golfer’s tan and Grecian Formula hair nods and smiles to her as he passes. On each door, a nameplate gleams.

  In his lab in the west tower of Wilson Hall, Carver stares at sprays of particle showers and data from hundreds of collision events. He squints for hidden symmetries; for the faint tracks of vanished particles; for the trace of something, anything, that will make him care today.

  He gulps coffee nervously. It’s not even noon. He moves into his office, turns to the latest Fermilab newsletter and finds himself reading it in its entirety. He stands, walks to the window and stares out over the grounds, watching traffic zip along the main ring road. A bus pulls up in the parking lot – another batch of college students filing in for a tour before the annual shutdown.

  From up here, the ring of the Tevatron’s tunnel is just visible through the prairie grass. Four miles in circumference. A magic circle, he used to tell his girls.

  She has learned, with difficulty, the art of compromise.

  ‘With your permission, I’m going out today, Dr Bishop. I need to get out. I will not attempt to go home. I will be careful. I will not overdo things. If I have a problem, I will ring the day nurse. I have her number here, see? I will be back in my room by five in plenty of time. I’m not due at the sleep lab till nine. My taxi is booked for eight-thirty. I won’t forget.

  ‘But I cannot stay day in, day out in the Skilled Care Unit, Dr Bishop. I do not want to learn origami. I do not want a make-over.’

  David Bishop leans back in his chair and smiles, reluctantly.

  By noon Christina is on the train. By 1:30 she’s running up the steps of Wilson Hall, dodging a sprawl of visiting college students. She stumbles twice, as if her body is still not her own, as if her feet have not yet remembered the experience of stairs. She stops outside the main doors, dizzy, faintly nauseous, but it has never felt so good to be in the open air.

  At reception, she’s getting her breath back. Sunlight floods the atrium ahead. ‘Would you let Dr Carver know his daughter is here, please? Christina Carver.’ He’ll just have to see her to realize that everything is okay, that she’s okay. Whatever the doctors have been telling him. They’ll start afresh.

  The receptionist looks up from the switchboard. ‘I’m sorry, Christina. I have a note here. Dr Carver is unavailable all afternoon. Was he expecting you?’

  ‘No.’ She feels stunned. ‘No, he wasn’t.’ Abandoned all over again. ‘Could you call through to him for me?’

  ‘Sorry. It’s priority calls only to the tunnel.’

  ‘The tunnel?’

  ‘Yes. He’s down there this afternoon with the Beams Division.’

  The leader of the college group is anxious behind her. His students are drifting away, in the direction of the cafeteria in the atrium. ‘Could I catch up with him in the tunnel?’

  ‘Not without authorization, honey. And I can’t give you that. Would you like to leave a message?’

  ‘No.’ She moves away from the desk. ‘Thank you.’ She bumps into someone by a display cabinet. She moves towards the cafeteria because she doesn’t know where else to go. In an hour and a half, maybe two hours, she’ll have to turn back. Dr Bishop will phone her room. Her gamble will have failed.

  ‘Excuse me.’ A guy with very large blue eyes is waving a hand in front of her face. Concerned. He looks concerned.

  Suddenly everything – the whole world – is on the other side of a pane of glass. She looks up.

  ‘Are you here for the tour?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The tour?’ He’s mistaken her for one of his fellow freshmen.

  ‘Yes,’ she hears herself say. ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘I nearly missed you. Everyone’s everywhere. Okay. Dr Holtz says we’re to meet on the steps in five minutes. And like he said on the bus, you’ll need to wear one of these.’ He passes her a radiation badge to pin to her top. ‘They won’t let you into the tunnel without it.’

  Giles Carver has gone to ground. Thirty feet under the prairie he talks cold-leak repairs with a Tevatron operator. He gets the latest on the luminosity figures. He chats with Mike
, one of the operators. He asks after his wife, who’s been diagnosed with lymphoma, a lower grade than Jen had. He says, yes, sure, he’ll juggle again for charity. Why not? He appears cheerful. He almost feels cheerful.

  ‘Say hello to your girls, won’t you?’ says Mike.

  First stop on the tour: the main control room of the Accelerator Complex. ‘The brain of the place,’ says the Fermilab guide, ‘if only after many dozen kicks of caffeine.’ He nods to some of the operators, shy of celebrity at the coffee machine. A guy called Gary from the Beams Division looks at Christina as if he can’t quite place her.

  In the central detector’s assembly hall they stare up, way up, at the 500-ton colossus of the detector, ‘a remarkable example of twenty-first-century wizardry’ that nevertheless, thinks Christina, looks like the dream-come-true of some nerdy child. Soaring over thirty feet into the assembly hall, its bright red, blue and yellow components are as cheerful as Lego.

  Their guide relays the detector’s vital statistics before the heart of its central chamber – located behind a big telephone dial of a portal – is opened for all to see. The chatter stops. Christina looks up. Even the operators seem to go quiet. ‘This,’ says their guide with a smile, ‘is what we acolytes call the tabernacle of quantum mystery.’ The chamber is crammed full of gold-plated wire – ‘sense-wire’, he calls it. ‘It’s here that we register the glimmerings of the subatomic world.’

  And he’s right, she decides. It’s actually beautiful. Sudden radiance. Like the golden glory of the heavenly host in a medieval painting. That’s what she’ll tell her father later. She’ll say it to annoy him because he’s an atheist, suspicious of anything that smacks of the Church. When she used to ask why, he’d say, ‘Ask Galileo.’

  The group arrives at gate A24. Christina stays near the front. She needs to be able to see. ‘Please stay with the group,’ the guide reminds them. Together, in the vaulted half-light, thirty feet underground, they will walk the four-mile ring.

  They step, one by one, into the tunnel. The guide draws their attention to the accelerator, ‘Where time turns back on itself. Where the earliest moments of Creation crack open again in the collisions of streaming particles.’

  Technicians and operators squeeze past. Maintenance workers, too, are busy, checking ventilation ducts and shafts.

  She squints into the flickering fluorescence, searching for a glimpse of his profile, for the back of his head, for the determined stride of his walk.

  *

  He keeps moving. He’s fine if he keeps moving. He checks his phone, then remembers – no signal. He’s out of range.

  And relief washes over him like some sweet depressant.

  Only half a mile to go and still no sign. She’s tired. Dizzy again. She should have eaten something on the train.

  ‘Remember, we’re thirty feet underground,’ the guide explains. ‘If you recall that just one cubic foot of soil weighs about a hundred pounds, you’ll appreciate that the construction of the Tevatron tunnel was no mean feat in its day.’

  And hot. She’s sweating now. The noise doesn’t help. A high-pitched, tuning-fork type of noise. Is it only her or is everyone hearing it?

  She looks around. She’s the only one with her hands pressed to her ears. She concentrates on her breath, on slowing it down. But the harder she concentrates, the faster it gets. And her palms are sweating against her head.

  ‘Sorry about the sound effects,’ their guide calls, grinning. ‘They’re checking the tunnel blowers and cleaning the supply registers today,’ he says. ‘Basically, they’re trying to lower the system’s pressure. The general aim is to pull more air.’

  A U of C student, someone says. ‘Our last panic attack of the season.’

  Giles Carver looks up from the huddle of Beams Division operators and watches with the others as she disappears around the final concrete bend. ‘You okay?’ one of them calls out, but she doesn’t turn. ‘She’ll be at the gate in no time,’ says another.

  ‘Guess I shouldn’t have mentioned airflow,’ confesses the guide as he reaches them. And from the back of her, Carver thinks, from the back of her, the girl could almost be Christina.

  Or it’s his conscience – fucking with him again.

  8

  He leaves early. He can’t work. Why kid himself?

  He picks up the West Line before rush hour. As usual he gets out at Oak Park but this evening he doesn’t turn up Oak Park Avenue. He sticks to North Boulevard instead, takes Harlem and turns on to Lake. Just past the intersection, he looks over his shoulder and takes you in.

  He’s wise to you. At last.

  You pass William, Monroe, Jackson, Lathrop. He turns up Lathrop unexpectedly. Then it’s Quick Street. The tennis club. The library, where Maggie’s name has been erased from the duty roster. It’s muggy. The weather these days won’t break. But he doesn’t slow down. Instead, he strides off in the direction of the common, determined to prove something to himself once and for all.

  You’ve engendered something. A break with routine. Enough, it seems, for happenstance to kick in. In the far distance, you see him. Angel, his jacket slung over his shoulder.

  His face is upturned. He’s following a plane out of O’Hare, its jet stream trailing like a thought. What he wouldn’t give. He and his dad almost flew to Ontario once, but it turned out that the cousins with the lake all their own weren’t cousins after all. That’s what his father told him in the end.

  Carver’s head is down, unaware. He’s trying to summon the moment; to stop, to turn around, to ask who the hell you are?

  You see them approach one another, each on the path that cuts a sharp diagonal across the common’s green: Carver, stubbornly out of place; Angel, craving open space after the dust of the railyard.

  Yes. You have the wide view now.

  You watch them pass, less than an arm’s reach from one another. It’s one of those myriad moments of significance that never unfold; that charge the day-to-day with a hum at a frequency we’ll never hear.

  Carver looks back, searching. Where did you go? He’s oblivious of course to Angel, now just a few feet ahead, in his immediate foreground.

  It’s only at 11:00 that night that the tongue and groove of cause and effect snaps back into place. A call from ‘Mr Ciacci, Head of Security at St Thomas’s,’ says Mr Ciacci.

  Giles Carver’s chest tenses.

  They picked up someone on the grounds late last night. In the area of the Skilled Care Unit. Not that there was any trouble. Not that she was even aware. A coincidence perhaps.

  Yes, sir, says Mr Ciacci. That’s right. By her window.

  Here in the sleep lab, there are few windows and none that can open.

  Christina can’t sleep. She has woken twice. On the monitor at the sleep technologist’s station, she opens her eyes wide to the infrared night. The on-screen timer reads 23:42:36. Below it the date flickers: 09-10-01. Above her bed a microphone awaits the undulant rhythm of her breath.

  She turns her head to the right, to the left, then to the right again. She rubs her arms as if to comfort herself and is surprised by metal – the saturation probe on her finger. She pulls the blankets higher.

  Upon arrival she was asked to complete a questionnaire. ‘Please summarize your feelings of the last twenty-four hours.’ Homesick, she wrote. ‘I’ve been feeling homesick.’ She did not mention her escape today from the Skilled Care Unit. She did not note her panic attack in the tunnel, or her failure to find her father. When required to tick a box – anxious, restless, sad, depressed, calm, alert, well or happy – that best described her current state of mind, she opted for restless. She imagines Angel at her window at St Thomas’s tonight – shut out.

  There are four electrodes on her scalp, two at the corners of her eyes, three on her chin, two on her ears, and an airflowthermister on her upper lip. There are two cords on her chest, near the clavicles, for the EKG. Another on each leg, for the measurement of muscle tone. She’s already told one of the n
urses at St Thomas’s. Her legs have started to ache. She needs to get outside. She needs to run. The nurse said they could probably get a treadmill for her room. Or a stationary bike. Which would she prefer?

  Time passes. Her sleep technologist skips from channel to channel. On 4, there, Christina. Asleep at last. He slips out of the office and buys himself a weak cup of coffee from the machine in the corridor.

  He will confirm Christina’s entry into delta sleep before forcing arousal. He would expect to see slow waves, with a frequency of only one half to two cycles per second. And yes, he would expect to see the pens of the polysomnograph sketching the shape of stalagmites on the page, close narrow peaks in the cave of sleep.

  He sips his coffee slowly. Christina, remember, has caught his imagination.

  Is that why he is unable to read the data properly? Suddenly, bells are ringing. He moves from computer screen to amplifier; from video monitor to oxygen saturation monitor. Coffee spills over a keyboard. We’ve been here before.

  He rips a recording from the rolling paper output of the polysomnograph. The last three minutes of her sleep. Why can’t he interpret?

  The automatic writing of the twelve pens is wild. The EEG says delta. No, delta moving into theta. Non-REM into REM. Deep sleep into dream. She is only dreaming. The oculogram confirms it. Yet airflow indicates arousals. Chest and abdomen effort is maximum. Nothing will correlate.

  He makes a dash for her room and throws open the door. Her blanket is on the floor. So are the cords that were connected to her legs and chest. He doesn’t understand. He goes to her bed. Beneath her lids, her eyes pulse in dream. Where is she?

  (Flat on her back as debris rains in on her from above. She’s turning her face, trying to breathe, spitting grit and earth from her mouth, when someone wanders past. A thin man in an open bathrobe. ‘Tastes awful, doesn’t it?’ he says, grimacing.)

  The technologist covers her once more. He listens at the door for a moment as she cries in her sleep.

  He checks his other patients. Normal. He fills out an incident report, minimizing discrepancies. He thinks of the girlfriend he once had who threw out every wristwatch she wore; who seemed to turn off street lights as she passed. He writes ‘ghost in the machine’ and overcompensates with a spree of exclamation marks.