The Wave Theory of Angels Read online

  All are creatures escaped from the illuminated margins of our dreams, where the human is also part beast. In his Speculum Naturale Vincent of Beauvais was penning warnings, even as Marguerite read over his shoulder, of coitus between species.

  We expect such fears of medievals. We are better acquainted with the world.

  So let us move Christina, for our purposes, from the bed she shares with her sister in the year 1284 to a bed in a sleep lab in a large urban centre in, say, the year 2001. We want, after all, the reassuring hum of state-of-the-art living. We want New World rather than Old, for youth is famously impatient of ambiguity.

  Chicago.

  We’re in Chicago.

  Forget for now the church bell’s sway over the day and its hours. Forget the clear reckoning of the hourglass. Leave behind the timekeeping candle and its steady-flamed resolve. Blow it out. We need not watch the hours disappear in thin bands of coloured wax. Let us move instead into ‘imaginary time’, that speculative dimension of late-twentieth-century physics which is represented mathematically by the square root of −1.

  It is a time when events are able to move in any direction. It is a time which has some of the qualities of space.

  This is a flying visit.

  A sleep technologist replaces the priest at Christina’s bedside. A qualified respirologist, he also stands in for the young physic and the strand of wool before her nose. Perhaps he once travelled to France. A high-school exchange. The Chicago skyline for French Gothic. Glassy façades and sinews of steel for monumental stone and flying buttresses. Sky-scraping prodigies for vaulted heavens.

  In his souvenir album on the final page: the cathedral of St Pierre at Beauvais on an overcast day. Yellowing extravagance in an everyday town. On the back of the snap a long-ago note to himself, a detail from the tour, forgotten now: ‘Even the Pontiac Building, reassembled in this cathedral, would not touch its vaults.’

  Here, in the sleep lab, the ceilings are seven feet. There are few windows, none that can open, and little natural light. The effect, for anyone entering the lab for the first time, is not so much timeless as atemporal.

  He finds Christina, of course, already asleep. Nor does she wake as he tapes four electrodes to her scalp for the EEG, two to the corners of her eyes, three to her chin, two to her ears, and small wires to her upper lip for the airflowthermister. The wires tangle in her hair. He throws back a corner of the sheet and attaches two more cords to her legs, for the measurement of muscle tone, and two to her chest, near the clavicles, for the EKG. Her breasts are small, high. His fingers are cold but she doesn’t wake; even reflex twitches are absent in dream, if dream it is. He slips a bright metal probe over her finger, like some strange token of betrothal.

  Her history: parasomnia. A confusion of states of consciousness in deep stage three or four of sleep, occurring usually in the first third of the night. Events are commonly referred to as ‘attacks’. The result? Sleepwalking or talking. Bed-wetting. Or, in Christina’s case, night terrors – the sensation of a body upon her. Which may trigger, in rare cases, an arrhythmia, a disturbance to the heart’s electrical system.

  Arrhythmia, typically, is brought on by exercise, emotional excitement or distress, even in sleep. Blood flow to the major organs, particularly to the brain, diminishes or stops. The pulse is lost. The victim is catapulted into unconsciousness – into anything from a faint to a coma. Otherwise death itself is the first sign. A young person, sound of heart, dies of cardiac arrest. Coroners find nothing.

  (Possess thy heart. That’s what l’Ymagier whispered to his daughter the morning she did not awake.)

  The long, forested sleeps of fairy tales are of no account in the sleep lab, nor the dark raptures of the mystic saints and their sudden transports. Long forgotten too is the medieval taxonomy of paradromes, demonic agents of dream who interrupted the sleep of mortals; who brought on the evil of ‘nocturnal pollutions’ (wet dreams, swollen genitals); spirits who dissolved the boundaries between love and fear, between this world and another.

  Even the occasional real-life scare story of modern days – the retired English woman who woke to find a string knotted around her finger; who couldn’t remember what it was a reminder of; who sat up in bed to turn on the light and knocked her head against the steel roof of a mortuary drawer – even these news sensations are far, far away from the concerns of the sleep technologist, lulled through the night by the scratch of the polysomnograph’s twelve pens; by the intimate, amplified sounds of others in sleep; by the surety that he, alone, is awake.

  But Christina.

  The microphone above her bed awaits the sound of her breath. The infrared eye of a video camera is intent on her face. The electrodes on her scalp will pick up electrical activity in the temporal lobes, the most electrically unstable portions of the human brain. Deep within, the hippocampus and the amygdala mediate the neuronal whirl of emotion and perception. Food, sex and smell excite these areas of the brain, which are essentially primitive, though not rudimentary. The hippocampus, for example, seems to be involved in instances where the mind ‘splits off ’ from the brain; where the mind emerges with an apparent autonomy – spirit or even soul, in the parlance of 1284.

  Such instances would seem to suggest we possess an innate capacity for transcendence. Or at least for the delusion of transcendence. Artificial excitation of temporo-parietal lobe circuitry can, for example, generate a profound sense of mystical experience. You may seem to slip gravity’s tether, floating near the ceiling and gazing down upon your body below. You may breathe deeply of a rose or hear, from nowhere, the voice of a loved one.

  Notably, we do not doubt the reality of roses or the fact of a beloved voice simply because one or the other has been artificially produced, a phantom of desire on the stage of the brain. So could this, this means of somehow rising above ourselves, be the brain’s oldest memory?

  And where is Christina now? Will she wake suddenly, coming up for air – wires clinging like river weed to her hair – to find she overslept? Might l’Ymagier wish her awake after all?

  Wait. The sleep technologist has yet to locate her on his video monitor. He hits a button and moves, channel to channel, room to room.

  There she is.

  The fixed and limited angle of the camera presents her as if she is a young woman in a box, under glass, and in a sense she is. The on-screen timer reads 23:42:36, and already in Beauvais l‘Ymagier has taken the measure of her body for the bier upon which she’ll rest; for the litter that will bear her to the grave. Already, behind the closed door of his atelier, her effigy – no mere memento mori – has taken form.

  It is faithful to the circumference of her head, to the distance between her eyes, to the position of her ears. It knows too the breadth of her shoulders, the reach of her arms, the ratio of her torso to her legs.

  Rewind a little.

  L’Ymagier planes the rough-out and sees her again in his mind’s eye, running like a boy to her bees; kicking off her clogs at the stile. Long legs. Yet the legs and feet can only be crudely hewn. There is no time, he argues to himself. It is the head, face, breast and hands that must serve. Her wooden hands will clasp a wooden lily to her wooden breast. No one, he reminds himself, will see the feet.

  He raises the vigil-cloth once more, observing it as it falls lightly into place, unruffled as the standard-issue white bedspread and sheet that cover her now in the lab.

  One day, thinks our technologist, observing her on the screen, brain imaging – MRI, PET scans – will look crude. One day, implants will track, record and translate the activity of individual neurons as a patient sleeps. One day we will have footage of her dreams.

  6

  Can you hear her?

  It had started to rain. A shower, but sudden and heavy. I marked the tree with the hive and stood waiting beneath its dripping branches. I saw something, a muddy shoulder, a flash of white arm behind a dead trunk, then nothing.

  You knew how to hide. You were so easy
in the undergrowth. You could disappear with a handspring in long grass.

  Now you climb even into my dreams.

  What was the knowledge of Sister Paul’s three fingers?

  On a windy afternoon in May, Marguerite had followed Christina past the town walls and the crumbling chalk quarry, up the vine-covered hills and into the wood beyond. She called out, but her sister moved too quickly. When she came suddenly upon a camp of tree-bark pullers, she stopped short and ran for home.

  That night in their bed, Christina didn’t smell like herself. She smelled of damp earth, Friday fish and woodsmoke. There were pieces of twig caught in her hair. And honey. Honey in her hair, on her neck.

  From that night on – or did Marguerite imagine it? – her sister’s sleep was broken. She’d open her eyes and speak incoherently to the dark. Sometimes she’d wake rigid, unable to get her breath.

  For the first time in her life, Marguerite was no longer certain who her sister was, and this uncertainty spread like a drizzle over the brightness of spring. Nothing was clear any more. Christina was secretive, impatient. When she combed out Marguerite’s hair at night, she’d sigh, exasperated by the knots. When one of her clogs went missing, she flung the other at the tanner’s dog. When l’Ymagier said he wanted her home more often, that he wanted her to help him in the atelier as she once had, there were tears of frustration in her eyes.

  Your mother was a travelling acrobat who left you in the hollow of a tree when the troupe moved on to Clermont. It’s all your father told you.

  An ashman, you said, with a wasted leg. The wood, his home before it was yours.

  You can skin a fox or a rabbit as easily as I remove a glove. Sometimes I watch you hoard acorns and truffles, for you know what it is to live half-dead for weeks at a time, like an animal in a hole.

  There is a winter in you.

  You are more solitary than a bark puller. You’ve never even been as far as the town. The new cathedral is an impossibility at which you squint from the edges of the grape-growers’ terraces. When you told me you didn’t believe in it, I laughed.

  Your eyes are black, luminous. Hard to turn from.

  Only in 1972 did Pope Paul VI abolish the formal order of the exorcist. A belated concession to modernity. Five hundred years before, exorcists were unapologetic. Giles of Beauvais – still a student at Paris in 1258 and not yet the imaginator he was to be – was ordained to lower orders as a matter of course, and fortified with a book of exorcisms.

  Today, one in five of us will experience what is still known, clinically, as the incubus, though, statistically, few will ever speak of it. From the mote-filled distance of the thirteenth century, William of Auvergne, in De Universo, recounts numerous stories, recognizable today, of this dark stranger: in from the Latin for ‘upon’, cubare meaning ‘to press’. So, a burden or a weight. He is more commonly known, however, as the crusher. The choker. The shaggy defiler of women. The restless woodland demon. The wild man. The damaged angel, outlawed from heavenly climes.

  ‘There is nothing wonderful,’ writes William, ‘that demons should make love to women.’ Officialdom was unwilling to raise an eyebrow. Folk wisdom, too, is matter of fact: it describes a sexual organ that is freezing cold, made of iron, or even double-pronged.

  Victims recall the sound of footsteps, of breathing. They remember the sense of suffocation, of being wide awake, of helpless paralysis, imminent entombment or near heart attack. Even today, more than 80 per cent of those who have experienced the incubus remain convinced of a highly personal encounter with something other.

  Only rarely does the incubus come gently, a love partner, a spirit whose habit it is to invade hearts torn by grief; a spirit, we are told, women once beseeched, seeking him out, sleeping alone in his forested temples and metamorphosing under the weight of him. Is it for these reasons that the incubus was notoriously difficult to exorcize?

  In the language of this century: a chronic sleep disorder. Cause unknown.

  We know it is not a case of sluggish humours stopping the passage of the animal spirits so that the body cannot move. It is not a case, as Paracelsus argued, of menstrual flux engendering phantoms in the air. It is not due to incongruous matter from the blood mixing with the nervous fluid in the cerebellum, nor poisonous gases, miasmata, congesting the brain. It is not a matter of undigested food pressing on the diaphragm – for the early Greeks, incidentally, the seat of the soul. Nor does the incubus loom at certain phases of the moon.

  He is not, it would seem, abolished by shaving one’s head, scarifying the throat, bleeding the ankle or ingesting any of the following: wild carrot, the black seeds of the male peony or ten milligrams of diazepam.

  In this century, the incubus comes to us in what is known as ‘delta’ sleep – a dreamless sleep, the sleep of the cathedral crypt. While most of us shoot out of deep sleep to the surface when disturbed, like a lift speeding upward, some of us unaccountably get stuck between floors. We experience a double consciousness, and the incubus, it seems, gains entry through this portal.

  Of course, the experience of a presence in the room may be nothing more than the result of pressure on a limb as one sleeps; of chronic electrical discharges within the temporal lobe structures; of repressed mental conflict regarding sexual desire, usually incestuous. For Freud, the demon and its crushing weight represent the authoritative father and the guilty aspects of an incest symbolism.

  Or, take a variation on that theme. Remember the pressure on the victim’s breast, the terrible inevitability of self-surrender, the genital emissions. The incubus represents a repression of the natural masochistic component of the female sexual instinct. (Picture, we are instructed, the fear of being entered, of being impaled. Consider the conflict associated with yielding.) Or is this diagnosis merely the mid-century Freudian’s denial of his own repressed feelings of dominance, resurrected by the fantasy of a narcoleptic femininity, by the eros of a young woman at rest?

  In any case, angst, we are reminded, has a voluptuous quality.

  In predisposed subjects, attacks of parasomnia, including the incubus, may be elicited by forced arousals.

  Our sleep technologist will experiment with arousals as Christina moves into delta-phase sleep. At his desk, the eight intercoms breathe sonorously. On channel 1 of the monitor, we find Mrs H, aged forty-eight. She has been gaining weight unintentionally. In the morning she discovers plates, cups and saucers around her bed, and crumbs in her sheets. She is concerned about her lack of control. Recently she defecated in her bed one night and, understandably, this has disturbed her.

  On channel 2, Mr R, a newlywed. Mrs R has woken repeatedly at night to discover her husband masturbating in his sleep. When she awakens him, he is always unaware of his behaviour and very embarrassed. The couple claim to have good sexual relations. Now, however, in the night of the sleep lab, nothing. No sign. Mr R scratches his groin haphazardly under the blanket. That is all.

  On channel 3, a suspected case of sleep apnoea. The same on 6. Beds 5, 7 and 8 are empty tonight. No last-minute referrals. No midnight visionaries from the night shelters.

  On channel 4, there, Christina. Dead to the world.

  The technologist slips out of the office and buys himself a weak cup of coffee from the machine in the corridor. The animated metal hand selects and holds the cup, ready for the greater workings within. Coffee. Milk. One sugar. The only other sign of life in the lab at one in the morning.

  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. 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.

  Is the image not reminiscent of something he once longed for as a child? He dimly remembers pouring packets of coloured crystals into a fishbowl and awaiting a bright, underwater world of stalagmites to spring up, cathedral towers for his goldfish. Did it ever turn in
to the picture on the box? He cannot recall.

  He sips his coffee slowly. He is not usually susceptible to idle moments of fantasy. Christina, it seems, 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. 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 leads 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 upon her from high 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 out in her sleep.

  He checks his other patients. Normal. He fills out an incident report, minimizing the evident 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. It will amuse his colleague who replaces him in four hours.