IN THE CORONARY CARE Unit of Seattle’s Harborview Hospital, a woman identified as M. goes into full cardiac arrest. She dies on the operating table. With no vital signs—no pulse, no respiration—an emergency EEG reveals that her brain activity has flatlined. But the doctors and nurses at Harborview do not give up. They work frantically to resuscitate her and, even more remarkably, they succeed. They bring the patient back from a state of clinical death.
When she regains consciousness, M. tells the doctors that she could hear what they were saying the entire time, every word. She’d felt herself floating above the operating table, calm and at peace, had watched the doctors as they tried to revive her. She’d drifted upward into a tunnel of light—but was then pulled back down, into her body, felt the pain and panic return.
When she told them this, the doctors nodded. It was a common hallucination. The light, they explained, was a symptom of cerebral hypoxia: with oxygen cut off to the brain, peripheral vision goes first, closing inward toward the centre of the optic nerve, creating a distinct tunnel effect. The sense of calm would have come from a sudden release of endorphins. The feelings of separation from her body would have occurred as her brain’s parietal lobes shut down.
But it seemed so real, she said. I could feel myself lifting up, through the ceiling, above the hospital, I could see the roof, could see the ledge, the shoe in one corner.
The shoe?
Yes, a tennis shoe.
The patient described the shoe in detail: the frayed toe, the matted laces caught under one heel. I saw it, she said. It’s there, on the roof. The doctors exchanged looks, then sent a janitor up. They found it, tucked out of sight, exactly where she said it would be: a single shoe, on the roof.
PART ONE
* * *
THE WINE, THE BLOOD, AND THE SEA
CHAPTER ONE
THE ONE ALMIGHTY FACT about love affairs is that they end. How they end and why, although of crucial interest—indeed, agony—to the participants, is less important than that they end. Marriages might linger like a chest cold, and there are friendships that plod along simply because we forget to cancel the subscription. But when love affairs collapse, they do so suddenly: they drop like swollen mangoes, they shatter like saucers, they drown in the undertow, they fall apart like a wasp’s nest in winter. They end.
Thomas knew this, and yet . . .
There is a story, often told, possibly apocryphal, certainly apropos, of a seasoned skydiver who, in what can only be described as a monumental lapse of judgment, forgot to strap on his parachute before flinging himself from a plane. As one might imagine, he went through all five stages of Kübler-Ross in quick order, shock, denial, anger, dismay, until, in accepting his fate, he chose to embrace it. The skydiver spread his arms, turned pirouettes and somersaults while he tumbled, performing acrobatic death-defying feats all the way down.
But none of that makes the landing any softer.
Thomas was in his late twenties when he hit the ground. He’d begun his swan dive without realizing it, in an artist’s loft in Boston’s West End on a sleepy cirrus Sunday. A muted morning. The curtains were moving; he remembers that, the ripples of cream-coloured cloth: long inhalations, slow exhalations. Sunlight on the floor. A messy room (not his), lined with equally messy canvases. Oil paintings mostly: thickly textured renderings of angular faces spattered with stars. An overstuffed laundry hamper in one corner was spilling clothes like the world’s worst piñata. Bricks-and-board bookshelves, overdue art volumes splayed every which way. A telescope by the window, leaning on drunken legs, squinting upward into nothingness. Wine bottles on the windowsills, multicoloured candle wax dripping down the sides—still de rigueur among the university set. Wind and curtain and canvas. And now, this: the sound of church bells.
Amy, scrambling out of her dishevelled bed. Amy, dashing about, baffled by the very concept of time. She was always late, which was not remarkable in itself, but she was always surprised she was late, and Thomas found this both annoying and oddly endearing. She seemed to think that time was liquid, a substance that filled the available forms it was poured into, when in fact it sliced the air with a metronymic predictability.
Moments before, Thomas and Amy had been playing doctor, a favourite game of theirs, with Amy astride his lap, dressed in a man’s shirt—not his. (Where did it come from, this oversized shirt? Why did she have it? Was it a souvenir of other phosphorous love affairs? Best not to think about it.) She wore it loosely, like a pajama top, mis-buttoned, un-ironed.
He remembers the loose cotton. The warmth of her.
Amy, laughing. “Stop it.”
It would be the last happy conversation they would ever have.
“Stop what?”
“Stop that.”
Thomas is in a white lab coat with boxers pooled around his ankles. He slides a stethoscope down the inside of her shirt, and then slowwwwly across her chest. Pretends to listen.
Amy, voice hushed. “What is it, doc? Somethin’ bad? You can tell me, I can take it.”
Thomas frowns. A practiced frown. A medical frown. Listens more attentively. “Can’t seem . . . to find . . . a heartbeat.”
He was scarcely a year older than Amy, but looked ten years younger, as though his face had never grown up, as though it were still trapped in the first flush of postpubescence. It’s something she’d often commented on, how young he looked. Later, she would notice how old he had become.
So there they are, the two of them: Amy, with a raven’s wing of hair fanning across her shoulder; Thomas in his Sunday-morning stubble. Straw-blond hair that refused to hold a part, eyes so pale they were barely there. “Grey? Or blue?” Amy had asked this early on, studying him carefully before deciding. “Blue. Definitely blue.”
Our intrepid young medical student has now slipped the stethoscope further down, cupping Amy’s breasts, first one, then the other. She shivers at the touch of it. “Can’t you warm those up first?”
Now it was Amy’s turn.
She pulled the end of the stethoscope free, flipped it over, held it up to Thomas’s chest. A thin chest, almost hairless.
“So?” she asked.
He tilted his head, listened for his own heartbeat.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He looked at her. “That can’t be good. Can it?”
She laughed, a snort, really. “Are you sure you’re a real doctor?”
“A real doctor?”
She leaned closer, held him with her thighs. “I’ve heard rumours.”
“Rumours?”
“Med students, passing themselves off as physicians, taking advantage of impressionable young women.”
“I resent that! A slanderous accusation! Slanderous and scurrilous! Now then, take off all your clothes and say ‘Ahh.’ ”
Amy leaned in closer, whispered in his ear. “Ahhhhh . . .”
And then—and then, the goddamn sound of the goddamn church bells. Dull peals, distant but ever-present.
“We’re late! C’mon!” She leapt from his lap, hurried about, searching for underwear. She pulled on a pair, more or less at random, grabbed her jeans and hopped into them on the way to the bathroom.
Thomas fell back onto the bed, frustrated, annoyed, erect. He could see Amy brushing her teeth—or rather, chewing on the toothbrush as she unbuttoned the man’s shirt she was wearing. She tossed it to one side like a flag on the play, tried to disentangle a bra from a knot of laundry on the counter.
“Amy,” he said (sighed).
She packed her breasts into her bra like eggs into a carton, gave her teeth two decisive back-and-forths, spit into the sink, pulled back her hair with an elastic.
Thomas leaned up on his elbows, boxers still
around his ankles. “Listen. About this whole church thing . . .”
She stopped. Stepped out of the bathroom with her toothbrush clenched in her mouth, glared at him. They’d had this conversation before.
CHAPTER TWO
NEW ENGLAND IN AUTUMN. Blue skies. Air as crisp as a celery stalk snapped in two. A dry wind, stirring the trees. Leaves spiralling down: deep reds and unrhymeable orange, twirling on eddies, layering the streets.
And above this calico quilt of trees: the sharpened spire of Our Lady of Constant Sorrow, marking the spot as cleanly as a pin on a map. Today’s field trip will be to an anachronistic remnant of pre-industrial Bronze Age mythology Hurry along, class. Amy was churning a trail through the leaves, with Thomas, as always, following in her wake. They passed a playground on the way with strollers parallel-parked out front, babies held on hips like plump packages by thumb-texting mothers. A grinning toddler wobbled across the grounds, giddily enamoured with the power of his own locomotion, pursued by a woman, presumably his mother.
Amy was worried they’d be late, but when they got to the church, a bottleneck of elderly parishioners with canes and walkers had formed on the steps. They filed in slowly, heads bobbing, bowing, as they went.
“We’re always the youngest people here,” Thomas complained as they waited to make their way through the heavy, medieval doors.
His gaze drifted back across the street.
A man stood on the other side. Ratty hair and a tangled beard, dressed in rags, he was holding up a sign written on a piece of cardboard. It read: I AM THE LORD GOD, SON OF MAN.
Thomas caught Amy’s elbow as she was about to step over the threshold. “Hey. I think I found your guy.”
“What?”
“You’ve been looking for him. Well, there he is.” He gestured with his chin toward the homeless man.
Amy scowled at Thomas, said nothing—loudly.
He gave her what he hoped was a disarmingly boyish grin, but she’d already pushed past him, had disappeared into the darkness, into that realm of incense and candles, of stained glass vignettes and matronly choirs. Thomas looked back one last time at the tatterdemalion saviour on the other side of the street.
I know you.
Thomas had seen that man before. Where?
It gnawed on him throughout the service. At one point, he leaned in closer to Amy and said, “That guy, the one outside, holding the sign. I’ve seen him somewhere.”
“Shhh.”
It was one extended session of Simon Says, these Catholic masses. Stand up. Sit down. Repeat after me. Incantations and swaying chains trailing smoke. The apostles and the martyrs, the miracles and the make-believe. Benedictions and exaltations. Homilies and parables. “We believe in the Seven Sacraments, in Christ everlasting.” Thomas stifled a yawn, shifted his buttocks on the pew. Numb enough you could perform rectal surgery on my ass without the need for anaesthetics.
The interior of the church was vast but largely empty, and the dwindling numbers and sea of silver hair added a funereal feel to the proceedings. Eventually churches will become little more than curiosities. It was a satisfying thought. “Can you believe what we used to believe?” This is what people would say, looking back at the hymnals and sermons of yesteryear. “Can you believe it?”
Amy had a rosary on her wrist. This was for meditation on the Fifteen Mysteries: Annunciation, Coronation, Crucifixion, the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and so on. Of the Fifteen Mysteries, five are joyous, five are glorious, five are sorrowful. Thomas had tried to educate himself about the arcane intricacies of her faith, but he still couldn’t tell the difference of effect between an Our Father and a Hail Mary. One was liturgical, one devotional. And damned if he knew what that meant.
The sermon had ended and the silver-haired set were now shuffling out again, stopping to dip their hands a final time, making the Sign of the Cross over their body before departing. Spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch. Several of the elderly parishioners clasped hands along the way. “Peace be with you.” “And with you.” The first time Amy had dragged Thomas to a service, he’d misheard the salutation as “Pleased to meet you!” and had gone about shaking hands accordingly.
Virgin and child. Sundry saints. The lacquer-like patina of history. A God that needed constant reassurances: flattery and praise, bribery and placation. Thomas was sitting alone on a pew. Above the altar, with arms outstretched somewhere between embrace and surrender, was Christ in crucifix. On the ceiling, rising into the sky, was Christ ascendant. And in a side alcove, illuminated in a liquid shimmer of candles, stood another Jesus, draped in royal hues: Christ returned, eyes downward cast, robe opened to reveal a heart enshrined in thorns. The Sacred Heart, radiating splinters of light. It reminded Thomas of the plastic overlay pages in his anatomy textbooks, where one could peel back the layers of the human body, one at a time: muscular, circulatory, skeletal. The world’s most thorough striptease. It brought to mind autopsy hearts and med school organs floating in formaldehyde, those pale grey lava lamps lit from below for the morbidly curious. It brought to mind cadavers as well. The wet weight of the human brain, the dark gravity well of the chest, the aortas and arteries that his instructors had pulled back in layers.
He could see Amy through a gap in the confessional curtains, on her knees, lips moving. You didn’t have to kneel, but she always did. Somewhere, he could hear music, even though the choir had departed.
She was a long time confessing, and when she finally came out, she hurried past him, buttoning up her navy overcoat and pulling her scarf in closer.
Thomas stopped her on the steps outside. “You didn’t tell him everything, right? The priest, I mean. It’s only been a week since your last confession. How much sin could one person possibly have gotten up to? Wait. Don’t answer that.”
Amy gave him an artfully enigmatic look. “Maybe I’m not confessing what I’ve done. Maybe I’m confessing what I’m going to do.”
“Ooooh. Sounds good. Are handcuffs involved? Because I warn you, I bruise easily.”
Amy rolled her eyes, almost audibly. Down the stairs, clatter and step, onto the sidewalk, quick-walking, kicking aside leaves as she went. I gave you a chance. I tried to warn you.
Thomas caught up with her again outside a corner-store pharmacy where the Coca-Cola sign had faded to pink.
“He’s still there,” Thomas said.
“Who?”
“The guy with the sign.”
She looked past Thomas, down the street to where the man stood, maintaining his vigil, silently proclaiming his divinity.
“Do you think he believes it?” Thomas asked.
“Believes what?”
“That he’s really Jesus. Or do you figure at some level he knows it’s a lie? I mean, medically speaking, religious delusions are basically a manifestation of—”
“Why does it matter so fucking much? Huh?”
Now, that was a showstopper. Amy so rarely resorted to profanity that Thomas had no idea how to respond.
“Why do you care, Thomas? Really. I want to know. Why does it matter to you what he believes?”
“Um. No reason, I guess. Just scientific curiosity.”
She gestured toward the man with the sign without actually looking at him.
“That’s a real person. That’s somebody’s son, somebody’s brother. Why does it— They aren’t lab rats, you know. You can’t talk about people like that.”
Her reaction seemed so disproportionate to whatever it was Thomas had been saying (he could barely remember what he had been saying) that he knew instinctively: This is about something else.
“Hey hey hey,” he said, voice laden with concern. “You’re talking to the original lab rat, remember? Listen. I’m sorry for whatever it is you think I may or may not have—”
“Don’t. Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“One of those jujitsu apologies of yours, where you try to turn it back on me. This isn’t about me. This
isn’t even about him, okay?”
“Truth be told, I don’t know what any of this is about. All I said was—”
“Wait. Here.”
She entered the store on the angry jangle of a bell above the door, leaving Thomas outside, still baffled by her outburst. He looked back at the street-corner prophet. And . . .
Thomas laughed. I know who you are.
By the time Amy returned, on a less angry but still strident jangle of bell, Thomas had forgotten they were fighting.
“Hynes Station,” he said. “By the overpass, playing three-card monte. That’s where I’ve seen him! You know the game, where you try to pick the queen of hearts. ‘Find the lady!’ He takes sucker bets at the station. This must be his Sunday gig. Brilliant, don’t you think?”
Amy wasn’t listening.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Can we go? Please?”
There was a chill in the air. He pulled her closer as they walked. She resisted at first, then relented, and he threw one last look to the shyster on the street corner, his three-card Messiah, his trickster god. Find the lady.
Somewhere in the distance he could hear a siren, an ambulance from the sound of it.
CHAPTER THREE
OIL PAINT IS POORLY named. It doesn’t smell like oil—neither cooking, nor automotive—but carries instead the scent of licorice and furniture polish, with a hint of Vicks VapoRub thrown in. It’s a smell that is almost tactile.
It reminded Thomas of the balm they prescribed to burn victims. It was only when Amy splashed turpentine into jars and swished the brushes clean that the smell became overpowering. She’d keep the windows open, even in the rain, as she let the turpentine settle in her eclectic array of glass containers, pickle and jam, mainly. She would later pour off the clearer upper levels of turpentine for reuse later, would separate them from the silted pigments at the bottom.
“There’s a real science to this, isn’t there?” Thomas had said, assuming this was the highest compliment one could give.