Certainty by Madeleine Thien Page B

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.”
    Ed puts his hands in his pockets. “I guess it’s to keep us alive somehow.”
    Ansel looks at him expectantly.
    “Grief is the time when you ask all the questions. If you don’t find some way to answer them, you won’t go on living. You won’t think about having children. Maybe it’s an evolutionary imperative to find a way to accept death, your own and others. We forget that it’s a possibility. People die and we’re surprised. It always seems so unlikely. That’s a trick of the mind.” He pauses, and then looks back towards his house. “It’s like what you were saying about perspective. From far away, I can accept everything. I can see the things that repeat themselves, the patterns and so on. I accept that the universe is thirteen billion years old. But up close, right here, is where you feel pain, grief. Right here, there are some things that I can never be at peace with.” He shakes his head. “What helps me is when I fall asleep and dream of her, dream of my Patricia, and she says, There’s nothing to worry about. Relax. Let it go.” He shakes his head. “But that doesn’t happen nearly enough, not enough at all.”
    That night, Ansel wakes up in the dark, the covers off him, a street lamp pouring light into the room. He says her name, but the word that remains in the air is a sound, a word that is beginning to lose its meaning, because it receives no answer.
    Downstairs, he puts the kettle on. Sleeping, he thinks, is over for Ansel Ressing. This is a new era. Last week, he had gone walking each night, crossing the invisible boundary between Strathcona and the Downtown Eastside, walking to Main and Hastings, where crowds of people were still awake, milling about. The crowds made him think of Gail’s description of the Arctic in the winter, people living their waking lives in the dark.
    Tonight, he takes his glass of tea and goes into Gail’s office. He turns the lights on and then dims them, because she says, authoritatively, “You can’t hear as well when the lights are bright.”
    All her equipment is here,