Free Certainty by Madeleine Thien Page A

to be let in. He opens the door for them despite foreseeing the grumbles of the reception staff, not quite ready for the morning intake. The patients quietly descend the stairs. This morning, there’s a family with three young daughters, two yawning med students, and a middle-aged woman. The woman is pale and trembling, and Ansel stays beside her and she uses his arm as a bannister. “It’s the arthritis,” she says, not looking at him.
    “Just a few more steps now.”
    He takes them to the waiting room, shows the girls where the crayons and drawing paper are, then goes on to his office. He flicks the light switches as he walks, and the fluorescent lights buzz on around him, throwing down a blue shadow before settling into a wavering glow. At the end of the corridor, Ansel unlocks his office door, hangs his jacket and helmet on the coat stand, and sits down at his desk. He has a few minutes before the first patient, not quite enough time to deal with the stack of referrals, emails and lab results left over from the day before.
    In Ansel’s basement office, there are three high windows, just inches above the ground outside. They frame blades of grass, dandelions in the summer, a few small stones. The light falls in three rectangular shafts along his desk. The offices have always reminded him of a warren, the hallways that merge together, leading towards a tunnel that connects to Vancouver General Hospital. He has worked here, at the provincial tuberculosis clinic, for almost five years as a clinician and researcher, and each day has a familiar routine. The first half-dozen appointments of the morning, along with files and chest X-rays, are waiting in his in-tray. There’s a photocopied abstract on the relationship between AIDS and syphilis, and, underneath, two faxes. One is from his father, about an upcoming medical conference in Chicago. The other is from the hospital in Prince George, where Gail, ill, had gone the day before she died. The hospital writes that they have concluded their review of the case and now consider the file closed. A pain branches out from behind his eyes, a dull pulsing, and he stares at the page for a moment, until the lines begin to run together. Ansel pushes the correspondence aside and opens his Thermos of coffee.
    His work is a comfort to him. Even as a child, he never considered a career outside of medicine. Both of his parents were doctors, his father a heart surgeon, and his mother a GP . Night after night, his father came home at dawn, an overcoat on top of his rumpled greens. If the surgery had gone well, his father would put a record on, Ella Fitzgerald or Muddy Waters, the music rising like smoke through the house. From bed, Ansel could hear the murmur of his parents’ conversation, his father’s low voice taking pleasure in relaying the details of the surgery. Even before Ansel learned to read, his mother had taught him how to use a stethoscope, how to listen for opacities, crackles and echoes in the lungs, how to track the beating of a heart. By the time he turned four, he had practised on both his parents, as well as his older sister. He remembers warming the diaphragm between his hands then setting it against their skin, astonished each time by the familiar sound, the reliable
lub dub
of their hearts.
    It was Ansel and not his sister, Lydia, who got to go on rounds with their father. While Lydia played guitar in her bedroom, Ansel would concentrate on his father’s rumbling voice relating Mrs. B.’s myocardial infarction followed by congestive failure and arrhythmia, elaborating on her EKG and digitalis treatment. “Are you following this, Ansel?” To which all the residents and interns would laugh. When he was twelve, he read his father’s copy of
The Microbe Hunters
, then he saved his allowance for a year and bought a microscope. That year, he made a list of his top one hundred scientists. The obvious ones, Galileo, Einstein, Newton. And then, depending on the month, or