The Wave Theory of Angels

by Alison Macleod

  ‘Turn around,’ she said, her eyes glinting. He was still in his safety jacket – they’d met at the terminal straight after his shift. He was on lates, all that week. He heard her unzip her bag; felt the point of a pen on his back. The impress of letters. ‘Not until you get home,’ she said.

  He’d forgotten until the next morning when he was throwing his jacket into the locker at work. Angel. She’d written ‘Angel’. With a fancy capital A. He didn’t even try to get it off.

  And he’s angry now that it should have given him such pleasure. Angry that he’s loitering by a payphone in the terminal at Madison and Canal, thinking here, she might try to reach him here. Wasn’t it always their back-up plan if things went wrong?

  An hour passes. Two. Angel crouches by the wall, sucking a cigarette, wondering where she is – who she’s with.

  Maggie is in a toilet cubicle. Her father will be on his way to the hospital by now. He said he would pick her up at 5:00, then return to spend the evening with Christina. She wishes she could lift her feet from the vinyl floor, pull them out of view, and become invisible to the world.

  Because how can she explain? She saw the light of her sister go out. She watched light spill from her sister’s body.

  There is no paper in the dispenser. And her nose is still running. She reaches for her bag. Her hand pushes past the neglected Jane Eyre. It finds a remnant of tissue – and her bookmark, with the phone number on it, adrift at the bottom.

  He’s walking away across the concourse when he hears it – faint as the trill of a bird in winter.

  He sprints back as Maggie crumples the bookmark in her hand and drops it, with the number, into a waste can by the hospital payphone. He picks up the receiver just as she is about to hang up for the third and final time.

  ‘Hello?’

  A voice. She shakes herself back into the world. ‘Hello.’

  Not Christina. After everything, not her.

  Maggie doesn’t know what to say. ‘Who is this, please?’

  ‘No one.’ He’s about to hang up. ‘I was just passing.’

  ‘It’s about my sister . . .’ She gambles.

  He covers his other ear with his hand. ‘Who am I talking to?’

  ‘Maggie Carver.’

  Something’s wrong. ‘What is it, Maggie?’

  ‘Do you know who I am?’

  He tries to sound casual. ‘Sure. Is Tina there?’

  ‘Did you phone our house last night? Was that you on the phone?’

  ‘Maggie, is something wrong? Is that why you’re calling?’ A horn blows as a train enters the station. His father’s arm flies up again. He can’t hear himself think.

  ‘If it was you, please don’t phone us again.’

  ‘Listen, Maggie. I was supposed to meet her – today, this morning – and she never came.’

  ‘Never came where? I don’t know who you are. She hasn’t said anything about you.’

  ‘I was here, waiting for her to call . . .’

  ‘Where’s ‘‘here’’? What’s that noise?’

  He stops kicking the wall beside the phone. ‘I need to know where she is, Maggie.’

  She can’t tell him where her sister is. The light of her sister went out.

  ‘Maggie.’

  The tears are coming back. ‘I have to go now. I need a Kleenex.’

  ‘Maggie, how did you get this number?’

  She can’t any more – she can’t keep blowing on the world to keep it turning. ‘I have to go now.’

  ‘No – ’ He winces. He mustn’t startle her. ‘You still there?’

  ‘I’m going now.’

  ‘Where is she, Maggie?’

  ‘We don’t know you.’

  ‘I need to see her.’

  She thinks, Why talk like this? What are they talking about anyway? ‘Because you love her?’ She can hear her own voice. Flat. Dead.

  And he tries to get them to stop: the pictures in his head. That volunteer she likes, his fingers. The dark centre of her, rich as a split fig. They’re like flash cards in his head.

  ‘Yes.’ His voice is hoarse. ‘Yes, because I love her.’ He sounds suspicious even to himself.

  But Maggie hardly hears. She’s already saying, ‘I shouldn’t have called. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Maggie?’ He gets his wits back. ‘Christina must have given you this number, right? She must have asked you to call me.’ More words than he speaks in whole days sometimes.

  ‘No. She didn’t.’ She looks up. Sees her father coming through the hospital’s main doors. ‘You don’t understand – ’

  ‘Where is she, Maggie?’

  Her father will ask her who she was phoning. If she says his cellphone, he’ll check. He’ll know she was lying.

  ‘Just tell me where she is, okay?’

  Her thoughts are slowing down in her ears, like they used to when she was little. Who will she say she is talking to? ‘The library.’

  ‘She’s at the library?’

  ‘I mean, St Thomas’s.’

  ‘Christ.’

  She didn’t mean to tell him. ‘I have to go.’ Her father winks at her on his way to the information desk.

  ‘Can I see her?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ The woman at the desk smiles and fills out a visitor’s pass for her father. ‘She isn’t awake.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t talk – ’

  ‘Is she sedated?’

  ‘No.’ She wants out of this conversation. ‘She won’t wake up.’ She can’t bring herself to say the word ‘coma’. Her father turns, clipping the pass to his lapel. As he walks back towards her, he stops.

  ‘What’s wrong, Maggie? I need to know what’s wrong.’

  His keys. She watches him feel his pockets; sees him look back to the desk. ‘I mean, she can’t. She can’t wake up.’

  ‘Why not? What are you saying?’

  He’s got them. Shirt pocket. She turns to the wall. ‘Please don’t phone us any more.’

  ‘The room number. Maggie, I need a room number.’

  Click. Dial tone.

  14

  You were in Bridgeview. Out of place. Out of time. No mere bystander.

  Of course not.

  At the information desk, Giles Carver asks to speak to the person responsible for security.

  ‘It’s a Sunday evening, sir.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s also Labor Day weekend.’

  ‘Isn’t that what pagers are for?’

  Nathalie stacks the dinner dishes. ‘I hadn’t thought about it, sweetie pie. He might come again.’

  ‘Tell him he can’t.’

  ‘We must be kind, Aarif. His daughter is very sick.’

  ‘I don’t like him. He likes you too much.’

  ‘I thought you had fun playing soccer in the schoolyard.’

  ‘He wouldn’t give me the ball.’

  ‘That’s the point of soccer, Aarif. You have to get the ball. It was all of you and only one of him.’

  ‘But if he comes over, it will be him and you, and only one of me.’

  ‘It’s always, always you and me. Now one game outside with Abdul and then bed.’

  At 7:30 Angel arrives at the hospital. He finds an empty chair in the foyer. Visiting hours are till eight. He checked.

  He sits, watching family and friends leave for the night. He studies middle-aged men for Christina’s eyes, for the line of her mouth, for the colour of her hair in twenty-five years. Could that man be Giles Carver? Could the girl with the puffy eyes be Maggie?

  ‘May I help you?’ The woman at the information desk has noticed his boots, still thick with dust from Saturday’s shift.

  ‘I’m fine.’ He nods. ‘Thanks.’

  He works out the cameras. One on the waiting area, one on the security desk where every visitor has to stop, and one trained on the main doors. The information desk, he estimates, should be just out of view.

  By 8:05 he’s the only person left
in the waiting area.

  Aarif is in bed, at last. Nathalie curls up on the sofa and reaches for a book before her guests arrive, skimming the blurb. An exploration of the philosophy of Avicenna, especially his Philosophia Orientalis – the lost text, known to us only through the commentaries. Stolen by Christian Crusaders from the library of Muhammad I of Granada – though they failed to take the kingdom. Stolen again by Spanish itinerants. Smuggled into France in the early thirteenth century in fragments – priceless contraband that was to ignite an underground battle between the Church and the University of Paris as each struggled to acquire the fragments before the other.

  And the dangerous import of the Avicennan contraband? That man might, through acts of the imagination, co-create the world.

  She looks up. Within minutes, her living room will be transformed by prayer mats, meditation cushions, prayer shawls, rosaries and small icons. She’s expecting thirteen or fourteen people tonight. Some will sit in chairs with their eyes closed or their faces buried in their arms. Some will kneel. A few will move their lips as they pray. Some will face Mecca. One or two will gaze up, as if they’re seeing through her stucco ceiling into the vault of the world.

  Giles Carver is shown into a small office full of monitors. ‘The nerve centre, I guess,’ he says, extending his hand to the head of security, who smells of the flame-grilled burgers he’s just left behind.

  Carver studies the twelve monitors. ‘I work at Fermilab, Mr . . . Mr?’

  ‘Ciacci.’

  ‘I’ll try to keep this short, Mr Ciacci. I work at Fermilab. I’m a physicist, and in my line of work, you can attract crackpots. There are people, for example, who will never understand that not every physicist is personally responsible for the atom bomb. Others will decide that you’re part of some New World Order, that you know things.’

  A wry smiles flickers across Mr Ciacci’s face.

  ‘It’s ridiculous. I know it is. And I feel ridiculous telling you this now. But it seems I’m being followed – I’ll spare you the details – and there have been phone calls, too, at odd times. None of it might be of any significance. But, as I was telling you a few minutes ago, my daughter’s here at St Thomas’s.’

  Mr Ciacci turns to the console. ‘You’re looking for reassurance, Mr Carver. Okay. Let me reassure you. St Thomas’s is monitored twenty-four, seven. Not only is everyone required to obtain a pass before passing through security, but we’ve got cameras trained on every public space and corridor. Take the foyer, for instance. There’s the wide view of the waiting area for you. And if you like . . .’ he presses a button on the console ‘. . . you can zoom in too. So look at that guy in the chair. The one in the reflective jacket. See him?’

  ‘The back of him.’

  ‘Well, here’s the close-up. Right?’

  Carver nods.

  ‘Now look. There’s something written on his jacket. See that? I can even highlight that area, like so . . . Right? And bingo! We can read the writing.’

  Carver peers at the screen and smiles. ‘Angel.’

  Mr Ciacci returns to the wide view. ‘We don’t want to go troubling no angel, so perhaps we should draw a veil, as they say. If I can answer any other questions, Mr Carver, you know where to find me – Monday to Friday.’

  Giles Carver returns to his daughter’s room. He spends a few silent minutes with her and kisses her goodnight. On his way out, just after eight, with keys in hand, he glances at the guy in the jacket. Still there. Picking someone up as visiting hours finish, he supposes. Maybe his girlfriend. Maybe his wife. The idea of either strikes Giles Carver as some kind of novelty gift, an easy pleasure from the everyday world to which he no longer belongs. He sighs; walks over to the information desk; drops off his pass. He is just past the main doors when the woman from the desk comes running after him. ‘Mr Carver!’

  He stops, turns.

  ‘Your keys!’

  He slaps his head. ‘I’m always doing that.’

  ‘Nice to be consistent.’

  ‘If only I was.’

  ‘I’m sure you have your moments.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  She laughs. ‘Safe home.’

  ‘Thanks again.’

  It’s only as he gets into his car that he realizes what’s been at the back of his mind since Mr Ciacci hit the zoom. The writing – on the jacket.

  Hers.

  Every day he sees it. Old notes on the fridge he can never bring himself to take down. (Let’s make a really BIG dinner tonight, okay?)

  He slams the car door. Runs back to the foyer.

  ‘Mr Carver!’

  Gone.

  15

  Emergency.

  He grabs a number, takes a seat. The place is packed: with kids who have fallen out of treehouses and bunk beds; with Little Leaguers who’ve taken a ball to the head; with old people who’ve landed a piece of chicken bone in the throat at the family picnic.

  Twenty minutes have passed and, so far, no one’s come running.

  To his left, a man who’s more stomach than man sits down, heaving his dead leg on to the chair across from him. ‘So what you in for?’

  Suddenly the cigarettes in his pocket are all Angel can think of. ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘Try me.’

  He nods at his left hand, the one that’s stuffed in his jacket pocket. ‘Rabies.’

  ‘Sheesh.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Bad luck.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Squirrel or something?’

  ‘Or something.’

  The guy sits for a moment, drumming his fingers on the armrest. Then, ‘Hey, abracadabra! I think they just called my number.’ He manoeuvres his leg on to the floor and drags himself into the distance.

  Angel goes over the scene in his mind: the sudden jiggling of car keys, the woman’s heels tapping across the floor, and ‘Mr Carver!’ She was gone just long enough.

  He pulls it from his pocket. Opens his hand. DATE: SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2001. VISITOR: GILES CARVER. ACCESS TO: RM 212.

  Hold on, baby. Hold on.

  In a room above, two nurses undress her, unbuttoning her nightgown and easing it past her hips. They leave her on her side and wash her, front and back, with warm water, liquid soap and two facecloths. They dry her with a stiff white towel, the name of the hospital printed in large blue letters at its edge. They swab her mouth with water and mouthwash and moisten her lips with balm. One of them takes the brush from the bedside cupboard and smoothes the knots from the ends of her hair while the other squirts moisturizer into her hand, rubs it between her palms to warm it, and applies it to Christina’s arms and legs, still brown with summer. ‘They need to check her fluid levels,’ she says. ‘Her skin’s getting dry.’

  Her colleague checks the drip and the catheter bag. She grabs a pencil from her pocket and makes a note on the chart. Then, together, they turn Christina from her side on to her back and manoeuvre her pillows accordingly. They pull the nightdress back up over her hips – a sleeveless cotton one Maggie supplied –and they work the longline of miniature pearl buttons, one starting at the bottom and the other at the top.

  ‘Pretty girl.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Brown eyes?’

  ‘That’s what Jane said. After the eye test.’

  ‘Christina?’

  She nods. ‘Twenty years old.’

  They pull the white sheet and blanket over her, smoothing, tucking. They close the window blinds and dim the lights over her bed. ‘Sweet dreams, Christina.’ They hover a moment by the door. ‘We’re not far.’

  By the time the emergency receptionist calls number 48, it’s 9:45. ‘Name?’

  The one on the locker next to his at the railyard.

  ‘Nature of problem?’

  ‘Work injury,’ he says through the perspex pane. ‘My hand. I can’t move it.’

  She points to a room down the adjoining corridor where a nurse will take his details and assess the seriousness o
f the injury. He nods and heads up the corridor as patient 49 moves up to the window. He looks back once, then punches the button of what he has already determined, from the distance of his chair, is a small service elevator.

  Come on, come on.

  The door rattles back and he slides in.

  If security is waiting for him on the next floor, he misheard the directions. He’s got a dud ear. From too many years on the tracks.

  He hits the button for the second floor. Waits for the door to close. Punches the DOOR CLOSE button, twice. The elevator grinds upward. Lights flash overhead. He’s standing next to a mop, an empty bucket and a cleaner’s cart. There are sprays, solvents, cloths and garbage bags, neatly tied. How long can the thing take between floors? There are only two, not including the basement. And 216 beds. He saw it on a poster.

  The elevator lurches to a halt. His stomach does likewise. He presses his thumb to the DOOR OPEN button and holds it there, waiting.

  Giles Carver sits at the kitchen table, his heated-up meat loaf – Maggie’s speciality – cold on his plate. He’s thinking. About Maggie upstairs. About how she hasn’t come down; about how she can stay in her room for hours at a time; how he should go up to her. And can’t.

  He’s thinking about the way, when Christina was a toddler, Jen would try to get him to use that child harness every time he took her to the gardens. Because she was always disappearing. Into bushes. Under the jungle gym. Once she managed to climb into the back of the ice-cream truck.

  At the time – it’s hard to imagine now – they had to think twice about whether they wanted another baby. About whether they could manage another. About whether they could feel so close to another.

  ‘I’ll watch her, Jen. Really.’ He can still hear himself telling her.

  Angel breathes again. It’s been three, maybe four, minutes – and security’s nowhere. He strips off his jacket, grabs a new garbage bag and stuffs his jacket out of sight. He clips the visitor’s pass to his shirt – he’s noticed staff wear one of a similar size. Green not blue, but he guesses – hopes – the security screens are black and white. He pulls on a pair of cellophane gloves, grabs the cart and humps it, whining, into the corridor, and straight into the camera’s path. 200. 202.