The Wave Theory of Angels

by Alison Macleod

  He goes behind Sperber’s back and calls Bishop, seemingly out of the blue. He never dreams Bishop will think to take it further, to cross-check. He never dreams his two sources will compare notes. Hasn’t he made the phone call seem almost incidental? A friendly by-the-by chat. A few shared chuckles, perhaps, about the repartee at the last board meeting at St Thomas’s. Only then does Joseph change the subject to that of Christina . . .

  And who, let’s face it, would be suspicious of a charitable organization? Who would speculate about the motives of nuns?

  Carver stops at a set of lights. Okay, he thinks, playing devil’s advocate with himself, then why doesn’t Sperber just lie to David Bishop about the anomalies in Monday night’s data? It wouldn’t be difficult. Why doesn’t he simply neglect to mention the twenty seconds of footage? Bishop might never see the tape himself.

  The lights change. He shifts into first.

  Why doesn’t he?

  Because he has to play it carefully. Christina has to be booked into the sleep lab again – because, everything else aside, the data that night was anomalous. Unreliable. The sleep lab people were talking power surges. As Christina’s now legal guardian, Bishop might ask to see the tape for himself.

  Besides, Sperber can’t really know how much Mr Joseph gave away in his phone call to Dr Bishop. Joseph was stupid enough to ask about the sleep lab, wasn’t he? Stupid enough to probe the date; to relate the timing of Christina’s visit to the shock of Tuesday morning’s events. David Bishop is a sharp individual. What other miscalculations did Mr Joseph make in that call? What else, Sperber has to ask himself, might David Bishop not be telling him? What else might he suspect?

  So Sperber realizes it’s too risky to lie. Better, in any case, to play to each audience. To talk radial distortions to the very reasonable David Bishop and revelation to the die-hard Christians. And who doesn’t want revelation when they’re looking the ‘infidel’ in the face? Who wouldn’t clamour for a Christian miracle in America’s heartland when share prices are falling?

  Carver makes a mental note to check the holdings of Aquinan Services, Inc. No doubt, he’ll find a surprisingly broad portfolio. Where else would a Christian outreach organization get the cash to launch themselves as the major sponsor of a state-of-the-art primary care and research facility?

  In fact, he begins to realize, it’s possible that Sperber, Joseph and maybe even Sister Paula Wright concocted the whole video story. It’s possible they ‘cooked’ the tape themselves to get the results they wanted. ‘Augmented reality’. Isn’t that what Sperber himself was saying? Maybe the whole show of concern in Bishop’s office was nothing more than Sperber’s alibi. It’s highly unlikely, Carver decides, that any head of media and imaging is giving that tape so much as a cursory glance, let alone a ‘distortions’ analysis.

  On the other side of Carver’s windshield, the turn-off for Bridgeview suddenly looms into view. He brakes hard. In the back, Christina rolls forward, frowning hard in her sleep.

  14

  The doorstep is dark. The peephole slides back.

  ‘Nat, sorry it’s late. It’s me. Giles.’

  A woman’s voice. ‘Nathalie isn’t here.’

  He talks into the door. ‘I’m Giles Carver, a friend of hers. Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘A neighbour. I’m babysitting Aarif.’

  He glances back to the car in the driveway. Christina, asleep still.

  ‘She might not be home for some time.’

  ‘I understand. Could you open the door perhaps? I’m a friend. I used to work with Nathalie at the university.’

  The porch floods with light. And only then does he see. He backs down the stairs to read it in full.

  ‘SAND NIGGERS OUT.’ A filthy scrawl across the aluminum siding.

  ‘My God.’

  The door opens. A small, plump woman in her fifties appears, her eyes nervous.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs . . . ?’

  ‘Mazin. Nathalie isn’t here.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘You don’t watch the news?’

  ‘I’m sorry. My daughter’s been ill . . . I – ’

  ‘Last night three hundred teenagers drove into Bridgeview and ran riot. They honked horns and waved flags. They chanted slogans and hurled bricks. And worse.’ She nods to the front of the house. ‘Nathalie and Aarif were in here, terrorized.’

  He feels all the adrenalin of the night drain from him.

  ‘The police came in riot gear and stopped them from marching on the mosque, but only just. They were still permitted to ‘‘demonstrate’’. They were still permitted to shout, ‘‘Kill the Arabs!’’ ’

  ‘Where’s Nat?’

  ‘Two officers turned up this morning to investigate the vandalism – not that there was much to be done after the fact. It so happens they also noticed her library books on the table – books on Islamic philosophy and so on. They seemed curious. They asked her what she did for a living and she told them. A physicist. An associate professor. They asked her how long she’d been living in the US. They wondered what she was doing in a foreign country all by herself. They seemed bemused, Mr Carver. Then tonight two different officers in an unmarked car turned up at the door and told her they needed to speak to her at the station.’

  ‘What reason did they give?’

  ‘Some kind of visa violation. It’s happening all over Bridge-view. Things, Mr Carver, are happening all over Bridgeview. The FBI has even been down to our public library. They’re trying to access records: who checked out which book and for how long. It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.’

  Aarif wanders out in his pyjamas, dragging a Canadiens hockey shirt behind him like a blanket.

  ‘Hi, Aarif,’ he calls. ‘The bedbugs biting?’

  He approaches the door. ‘I told my mother I didn’t want to play soccer with you any more. I told her.’

  ‘Aarif,’ chides Mrs Mazin.

  ‘You’re right. Now hockey, that’s the game. Can you skate yet, Aarif?’

  The boy pushes at Mrs Mazin’s arm. ‘Where’s my mother? Why isn’t my mother home yet?’

  ‘Sssh now. She’ll be home soon.’

  ‘She told you not to open the door.’ He raises his arm and pummels her side.

  Giles stops his hand. ‘Can I do anything, now, for you or Aarif?’

  ‘What can be done, Mr Carver?’ She sighs, adjusting her headscarf. ‘People have enough religion to hate, it seems, but not enough to love.’

  There is nothing he can say.

  A white man in a baseball cap passes the house on foot. She retreats slightly behind the door. ‘To bed now, Aarif. I’ll come tuck you in in a minute.’

  Giles looks at his feet. Tears prick his eyes. ‘Tell Nat I’ll call her in the morning. And, again, Mrs Mazin, I’m very sorry about the hour.’

  She nods, closes the door. Only when he turns does he see: Christina, wide awake and glaring at him through the car window.

  He stops where he stands, an animal in the headlights, until Mrs Mazin remembers the porch light.

  She won’t discuss it.

  ‘I’ll get you a flight. You can go to Boston. Grandma and Granddad Carver would love to see you. Remember how you wanted to see Walden? And art – they’ve got that great museum of fine art. Or we could think about a hotel. I’ll find you a special one.’

  She stares out the window. She speaks only to say that if he doesn’t drive her back to the Skilled Care Unit immediately, she’ll get out at the next set of lights and call them herself.

  In less than half an hour he’s pulling up in front of St Thomas’s bright foyer. The back door slams before he can turn around in his seat.

  He sits, watching the slim line of his daughter recede. He sees her approach the information desk. She seems to say something to the receptionist about the bag in her hand. Then she turns the corner and disappears.

  This, he thinks, is what you get for holding your children to you instead of allowing
them to outgrow you. This is what you get for being more charmer than father; more suitor than guardian.

  Tomorrow, he decides, he’ll try to see David Bishop. He’ll ask about medication: the anti-psychotics. He’ll admit he doesn’t know what else to do.

  15

  At the town gate he dismounts, awkwardly.

  ‘I prefer not to meet His Grace with the dirt of the world on me.’ He nods to the water trough inside the gate where two cows lap. ‘Tell him I will be with him shortly.’

  His keeper – young, burly – looks uncertain.

  L’Ymagier smiles. ‘Do you think I would wander off here, in Beauvais of all places?’

  He is alone for the first time in days. He stands and stares at the hole in the horizon where the towers once soared. He washes quickly, not easy with his hand in the sling. Then he slips into the warren of cramped houses that teeter against the town walls.

  A word. A hello. His only chance.

  How could he not take it? A wooden likeness. The spirit of her caught in a tree. He found it days ago under the tumble-down roof where his father once hauled sacks of char. As if it had been left for him.

  He knew immediately the planes of her face. The rise of her breast. The fineness of her hands. He touched her hair, pale at his fingertips. Cruel magic.

  Sometimes he let himself lie next to her. On a bed of earth. In the balm of shadow. As if she might stretch her wooden limbs and turn to him.

  The evening the towers fell, he felt the ground shudder. Swallows skidded skyward from their nests. A cloud of bees retreated into the carcass of a dead tree. A pigherd drove his beasts towards the town.

  And for the first time he felt it. He alone was alone.

  The sign above Athalie’s door wobbles from a nail. The rebel eye in the flaming heart. The secret sign of ecstatic contemplation.

  A secret no more. L’Ymagier can see where the bolt has been forced.

  He shoulders the door, crunching glass underfoot. Smashed phials. He almost trips over a heavy stick.

  He bends, taking it in his good hand, and pokes at the vast heap of cooling embers. Her father’s volumes; borne on his own back all the way from Egypt to France. Disguised as a brutish hump, she’d told him once. ‘No one questioned it, for naturally we’re a coarse breed.’ She’d laughed. ‘Yet together they must have weighed five stone.’

  In the draught from the open door, ash stirs.

  That evening, as chalk dust fell like pollen from the sky, he went to the pigherds’ camp and felt his voice burble in his throat. Where is the girl?

  La Merveilleuse, they said with a laugh. The one who rises up to knock a cathedral down.

  In the morning, he followed the pigherds’ trails through the wood and across the grape-growers’ terraces. And he saw it was so, what they told him: the sky vast again.

  Nearing the town walls, he stopped short at the sudden clamour of pickaxes and the urgent shouts of labourers. It was not yet light. He would know the house, the lame pigherd had said, by the soaring spray of water.

  Yes.

  A locked gate but he hurdled it easily.

  Many windows. He touched his palms to the transparency of glass. He beheld the faces of women, trampled by sleep. He observed the form of a man weighed down by fur, even in the warmth of the season. At last her, alone on the far side of a room – laced and still in her sleep. Half obscured by heavy curtains. Yet he had only to see her to understand.

  She needed release.

  He found the stone easily, a good weight in his hand. Then he stepped back, raised his arm high and broke the cool spell of glass.

  A serving nun shows l’Ymagier through to the pleasure garden. The bishop sits in the shadow of the fountain. Bright marble fish dart at the pool’s bottom. On the fountainhead, a fisher-man lets down his nets. His own work.

  The bishop stands and runs a finger across the rim. ‘As you can see, Monsieur l’Ymagier, the dust is still settling.’ A smile flickers at his mouth. ‘And to think I had Blanche clean it but yesterday in anticipation of your visit.’ He extends his ring.

  Giles of Beauvais bends low and kisses it. Then he reaches into his rucksack and, with some difficulty, passes the bishop the surviving piece of keystone wrapped in chamois leather. As instructed.

  ‘Well,’ says the bishop, ‘what think you of my keepsake?’

  (A cul-de-sac, not far from the stonecutter’s workshop, where he’d found work at last. His feet kicked out from under him. His left arm hauled free and pinned to the ground. A message: the bishop asks that you accept this token of his faith. The stone brought down at speed, shattering every bone. The fragment of his angel’s head left rolling with him on the ground.)

  ‘Do you reflect?’ queries the bishop when he does not reply.

  Giles of Beauvais stares at the ground. ‘Sadly, I see now that the quality is poor.’

  The bishop surveys him. ‘I would be inclined to agree.’

  It is hard not to step through to the other side.

  Christina sits by the windowless window, turning the mossy stone over in her hands.

  It is hard to believe that her father will indeed come.

  First she is told he has left her and that Marguerite is sent away. Now the bishop talks of a Paris commission and her father’s imminent return. She cannot believe it. And yet, if she goes and he does come? If she flees now and they never meet again? And how, on her own, will she find Marguerite?

  ‘That hand looks bad. Your carving hand, am I right?’

  ‘Yes,’ says l’Ymagier, adjusting the sling, avoiding his gaze. ‘An accident, I suppose.’ The bishop dips his hand in the fountain’s pool.

  ‘Yes.’ He wills the words from his mouth. ‘I was careless.’

  ‘Broken?’ says the bishop. ‘Entirely,’ says l’Ymagier.

  The bishop calls into the house. ‘Mathilde, you may serve now. We will dine in the garden. And please tell Blanche that Monsieur l’Ymagier will require help cutting his food.’

  Sometimes, in the dizzying quiet of her cell, Marguerite still hears her. Marguerite, are you awake? Marguerite?

  Yes, Christina. Yes. I am. I hear you. I’m awake.

  The bishop looks up, taking a piece of venison in his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. ‘I am sorry you will not carve again.’ He waves at the fountain and smiles. ‘Like magic. Isn’t that what people always said?’

  ‘It is a craft.’

  ‘Indeed. But which sort? Now I myself am a practical man. My concern is not enchantment but insurgency: ideas with the power – if I may coin a phrase – to topple a church.’ He lifts his serviette, wipes his mouth.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘And I understand that you, of course, are no longer a free mason. You cannot travel at will as you were wont. It is doubtful, Monsieur l’Ymagier, given your injury, that you are even yet a mason. The situation is, frankly, difficult. Were I to grant you freedom to leave this house, you and your daughter would be pelted with cathedral rubble before you could make it even as far as the town wall.

  ‘Why, just the other morning, the day after the collapse, a stone was hurled through her window as she slept. There was glass everywhere. I regret to say it has not been easy to keep her safe. Especially when she will not unburden her heart to her anointed confessor.’ He sips his wine. ‘If, on the other hand, she were to confess – ’

  ‘With respect, Your Grace, confess to what?’

  ‘If she were to ask for Christ’s forgiveness in the holy sacrament of confession; if she were to appeal, publicly, to the Holy Mother Church; if she were to pray for the Church’s intercession on her behalf . . .’

  L’Ymagier stares at his plate.

  ‘. . . then I am confident you and both your daughters would find peace at last. In fact, you have my word on it. My only interest is the stability of my diocese, and at the moment, Monsieur l’Ymagier, as you may have noticed, I have a cathedral on the ground.’

  He pours himself water, waves his hand
. ‘You have not eaten.’ He frowns. ‘I forget myself.’ He pushes back his chair, walks to the top of the pebbled path. ‘Blanche! Did I not say you were needed?’

  He returns to his seat and reaches for a dish of leek and courgette. ‘Speak to your daughter.’ He looks his guest in the eye. ‘Counsel your daughter, Monsieur l’Ymagier – as only a father may.’ He smiles broadly. ‘I know you will. In fact, I rely upon it.’

  He looks up. ‘I believe that was a drop of rain.’ He pours more wine. ‘The farmers will be glad.’

  16

  A drop of rain at last. Outside Something’s Brewing.

  Yes. You have a funny sense of déjà vu.

  Giles Carver is talking at you, edgy, self-conscious. Or he is until he finds himself suddenly at a loss. Out of his depth. He turns, starts to walk away – that Milky Way wrapper flapping from the sole of his shoe – when the words move through you, catalysing the moment. ‘You can’t leave her there.’

  Giles Carver stops short. ‘What did you say?’

  Say it. ‘Your daughter.’

  ‘What do you know about my daughter?’

  ‘You can’t leave her there.’

  He stares, bewildered.

  The rain comes at last. A downpour in an Indian summer.

  Commuters, on the home stretch, dive for doors and bus shelters. They huddle for cover under awnings and newspapers. Across the street someone darts out of a shop to save a table of second-hand paperbacks. In a moment, he’ll walk on again, lost to his thoughts, to whatever it is he won’t say out loud.

  Remember. Don’t lose him.

  ‘And raised a Catholic, you say?’

  ‘Well, baptized one, at any rate,’ says Dr Sperber. ‘Her father, I believe, is lapsed.’

  ‘That’s not an issue,’ says Mr Joseph.

  The elevator door opens. The three of them step on to the ground floor. ‘I think she enjoyed your visit last time more than she let on. After she let her guard down, that is. It’s been a tiring time for her.’