After he turns the shower off, he remains standing there, watching the steam whirling up into the overhead fan.
In the living room he puts on a CD, a bluegrass compilation she brought home one day and then played incessantly. Gail, the sous-chef: “My one talent,” she says. “I can chop onions without shedding a tear.” Ansel views cooking as a kind of construction game, a sort of Lego with food. A casserole built floor by floor, a skylight of potatoes. Six months later, he has not got himself out of the habit of cooking for two. To compensate, he now cooks every other day; slow, elaborate meals. The sun goes down as he whips up the potatoes, dices the onions and leeks.
By the time everything is ready, the rain has stopped, so he carries his dinner out onto the front porch. The sky above is a soothing light, warm colours crowding the horizon. Ansel can see Ed Carney sitting on his porch, and he lifts his hand in greeting. Watching Ed stand up, take the steps one at time and hobble down the sidewalk towards him, is like watching bread rise. So Ansel goes into the house, gets a second helping of casserole for his friend, and another glass of wine, and by the time he returns with a tray, Ed has reached his front yard.
Ed makes himself comfortable, and the two sit eating quietly while the occasional car grumbles by along Keefer.
Ed describes the coyote he saw earlier, sprinting down the middle of the street. Across the road, Mrs. Cho is visible in her window, reading the newspaper. She looks up and sees them sitting there, beams a smile to them, then closes the blinds.
To Ansel, Ed still has the build of a mailman, lean and reedy, with eyes that have a tendency to mist up as he loses himself in one train of thought or another. He retired just a year ago, after forty years at Canada Post. Because Gail used to work at home, she would stop by his house during the day for coffee and conversation. She told Ansel once that Ed spent the day making pinhole cameras, reading Nature, and writing letters to his grandchildren about the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace. He told his grandchildren that evolution was still the defining idea of modern times, just as it had been when he was a child. “Stem cells, Dolly, robotics, theories of everything, he and Darwin are the bedrock,” he said. “And to think people still refuse to teach him. It’s downright madness.” In the evenings, the three of them used to while away the hours while Ed peppered them with snippets of esoterica. Mathematical equations for the distribution of seeds on a sunflower head, and so on.
This evening, he has launched into a story about the first open heart transplant. Hamilton Naki was a gardener, Ed tells Ansel. As a young man, he had apprenticed to a doctor at the University of Cape Town who needed help with his laboratory animals. It was 1950s South Africa, so Naki, who was black, kept his designation as gardener, even while he was learning to transplant organs in animals. “He worked on giraffes,” Ed says. “Imagine that. What kind of operating table would you use? And in what room?”
“You have to operate when they’re standing upright,” Ansel says. “Giraffes have high blood pressure, so it’s best if they don’t lie down. So, no operating table. Just a scaffold.”
Ed nods, pleased. “When Barnaard performed his famous surgery,” he continues, “Naki was the man who led the first team, the one that removed the heart from a twenty-five-year-old donor, a woman who had been hit by a car. She had stopped to buy a cake. It’s sadder than a Raymond Carver story.” It was 1967, and Naki’s contribution was carefully hidden. Naki was at the press conference announcing the success of the surgery, but identified himself as a gardener who worked at the research institute. “Until this year,” Ed says, “no one knew. Not even his neighbours. He retired with a gardener’s pension.”
They both shake their heads in wonder. Ansel remembers the first time he saw an exposed heart pumping. The way it leapt out of the cavity had shocked him, made him put his gloved hand to his own chest.
“Which part of this man’s life was fiction?” Ed is saying.
“For him, none of it. Which means, I suppose, it depends on where you’re standing.”
Ed sets his plate down on the floor. “If you’re in an airplane,” he says, “a cloud ten feet away looks just the same as one ten thousand feet away. Clouds, they’re every bit as fractal as broccoli or cauliflower. A very small part of a cloud, the way it looks up close, is the same shape as one in its entirety.”
Ansel smiles. “Does that console you, Ed?”
“You know, the strange thing is, sometimes it really does.”
“Because of the pattern?”
Ed shakes his head.
“Because it’s mysterious?”
He takes a sip of wine, then slowly twirls the glass by its stem. “That’s part of it. We’re here for just a speck of time, and my greatest regret is that I don’t know more. I’m like those sci-fi kids that want to peer into the future. Just let me read ahead a bit. Let me stay up another hour, flashlight under the covers. That’s my comfort.”
When the rain starts again, they’re on to the second bottle of wine. “Ed,” Ansel says, “what kind of rain would you say this is?”
Ed peers into the night. “It’s like water out of a salad spinner.”
“Who invented the salad spinner?”
He shakes his head, laughing. “Can’t say, can’t say.”
Ansel can hear a siren coming down Hastings Street, and a short while later, several more. The sound is carried away, into the night. Ed says, “People told me I should start again after Patricia died. They said the house was too big for an old man, too many things to remind me.”
Ansel listens in silence, watching the glimmering light of a plane up above, disappearing as the clouds sweep slowly across it. Behind them, music from the CD player drifts out of the house. Their home is still very much how she left it. Her clothes, her belongings. All the rolls of reel-to-reel, the DAT and Mini Discs. Touch a button, and her voice fills the room.
“I’ve got a picture of you two sitting right here,” Ed says. He takes a sip of wine, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
Ansel’s favourite song is playing on the CD now. Dom Turner’s “Down by the Riverbed.” He can hear the accordion and harmonica, the bluesy guitar.
Gail is singing, “I’ve got a case of Anselitis.” She has a glass of wine in her right hand, and she’s swaying down the front steps.
“I’ve thought about leaving, too, Ed. But everything I have is in this house.”
“She was young. Thirty-nine is young.” Ed’s eyes are red and watery. “What am I saying? Seventy is young.”
In the months after Patricia died, before Scott Carney moved back into the house to be with his father, Gail used to pack a dinner for Ed and walk it over to him. Ansel could see her from this very chair, standing in the doorway. Ed Carney talking her ear off about fertility clinics, or a new super skin being developed by the U.S. Army, about Marconi and the telegraph: “The man that signalled the death of the carrier pigeon.” He filled his mind with so much in order to keep it aloft, like a balloon setting sail from the grief in his body.
“I don’t need to think up ideas for radio projects,” Gail had said, part-laughing, part-crying, when she came home again. “I have an Ed.”
Now, Ed pushes himself up to standing. He looks across the street to his own house, where the front light burns in the dark. “She was like a daughter to me. And my boy, Scott, he thought of her as family, too. The way they laughed together, the way they argued. He was always trying to pitch ideas to her. He finally got to her with that coded diary; it was just the type of thing that would spark her imagination.”
“Ed,” Ansel says. When he looks up at his friend, the stars seem to blur behind the clouds. “Do you think there’s a biological purpose to grieving? An evolutionary purpose.”