Free Certainty by Madeleine Thien Page B

what he was reading, Tesla, Koch, Curie, Salk, Leeuwenhoek, Darwin and Wallace. And always Louis Pasteur.
    “Ah,” his father had said once, examining the names. “The beer makers are fond of him.”
    Lydia shook her head. “What is it with men and lists?”
    For a time, Ansel had strayed towards cardiology, interning for half a year at St. Paul’s Hospital. In surgery, he waited while people slid away from him into the wash of anesthesia, their presence literally fading from the room. Dr. Biring, his mentor, would sing while he worked, rock ballads, folk songs, anything. The words, Biring said, were like a ladder he could climb down, and thus descend into his memory. Sometimes, in the operating room, humming along with Biring, Ansel was surprised to look up and see the patient’s face, framed by a green plastic cap. Their minds had been disconnected from the organs that he worked on. Retractors held the chest wall back, exposing the heart; every few seconds, the heart pumped out of the skin. There were tiny cameras that he could swim through a person’s body, a tool to magnify his own sight, a device to reach where his hands couldn’t.
    From surgery, he went to a one-month placement in the Burn Unit. This was where he had met Gail, almost ten years ago. She was working as a reporter then, covering a crash that had happened at the airport, a Cessna that had stalled in mid-air.
    He had to come out of the hospital every hour just to breathe, to escape the pain, the bodies, rotated, covered in Silvadene. It was the middle of the night, and Gail was rooted outside, along with the other journalists, waiting for a break in the story. By 4:00 a.m., she was the only one left, still sipping her coffee. “You don’t have to stay here all night, do you?”
    “No.” She had smiled, embarrassed. “You must think I’m eager or something.”
    “If you leave me a number, I can call you if there’s more to report.”
    “Actually, I don’t have an apartment yet. I just got back to Vancouver a few days ago.”
    He asked where she had been, and Gail said, “In the Arctic Circle, but only for a month. I was living in Prague before that.” When he asked what she did there, she told him, “This and that. I make radio features, soundscapes. I’m not the sharpest interviewer, but I like to listen.”
    After morning sign-in, they ate breakfast in the cafeteria. Her eyes kept wandering over to a group of doctors in wrinkled greens, surgical masks dangling from their necks and covers on their shoes. She was twenty-nine, dressed in jeans and a cotton T-shirt. She leaned towards him, long dark hair falling forward, a triangle of buttered toast dangling from her fingertips, and asked him what kind of medicine he hoped to practise. He told her that, initially, he had wanted to be a surgeon.
    She paused, studying him. “You don’t seem the type,” she said at last. “I picture the surgeon as someone who parachutes in, gets the job done, then waves airily as he goes home to bed. You strike me as a more long-haul kind of person.”
    He laughed and cut a piece of jam from its packet. “I haven’t decided what I want to be yet. I guess I’m leaning towards internal medicine.”
    He had his bicycle there, but she loaded it into the back of her van and drove him home. At his front door, she said, “You can see the hospital from your house.”
    Ansel looked behind him. The Centennial Pavilion, built in the shape of a star, little windows in neat rows like a line of type, hovered over them. When he turned back, he saw that her eyes were ringed and dark. “Where are you staying?” he said.
    “In my van until I find a place.”
    He fumbled for the right words. “You’re welcome, if you want, to stay here.”
    She laughed, suddenly hugging him. “Thanks. Maybe when we get to know each other a bit better.”
    In the examining room, the family is seated, waiting for him. Two of the girls are working on crayon drawings, and the third,