The Shoe on the Roof Read online

  Thomas was busy analyzing physical clues as well, studying Amy with a steely Sherlockian resolve. Fingernails, closely cut. (A sign of biting? Anxiety?) Traces of different colours embedded around the nails. (Remnants of various nail polishes, apparently. Insecurity? Or indecision? Either was a good sign, as this added a touch of vulnerability; self-possessed women were hard to seduce.) Hair, falling over half her face. (An unconscious desire to hide or withdraw? Possible feelings of alienation? Isolation?)

  She had a faint dusting of freckles across her nose, so faint they looked like they might come off with a warm washcloth. Beautiful imperfections.

  Thomas’s analysis was precise and methodical, and absolutely wrong. Thomas had struck out on every item: Amy’s nails were kept short so that when she kneaded clay or mixed glazes nothing would get caught underneath; what Thomas had thought were multiple attempts at choosing nail polish were in fact various colours of paint she hadn’t quite scrubbed off her hands; her hair had been pulled back because she’d hurried over to the lab right after her last studio class and her hair had come loose while she was running through the corridors and down the stairs hoping to catch Thomas and Bernie before they left. It was two minutes to five when she arrived. (He was right about the freckles, though. They were indeed beautiful imperfections.)

  “Is that the . . . the mechanism?” she asked, referring to the God helmet that Bernie was now setting up.

  “It is,” Thomas said. “So let’s dim the lights, start recording, see what happens.”

  After the tests, they removed the helmet, and Amy was in tears. “Nothing,” she said, trying not to break down in front of them. “I felt nothing. Nothing.” Not God. Not even nausea. Amy was an outlier, immune to suggestibility. She pulled on her coat, hands shaking as she buttoned up, and fled.

  Thomas would have followed her into the catacombs, would have tried to comfort her, but there was no need.

  “Hi! Amy? It’s me, Thomas Alexander. You came in for the experiment with the God helmet last week. Listen. I felt bad about how it ended. Can I take you out to dinner to make up for it? There’s a Thai restaurant near my place, just down the street from a club that features a terrific jazz trio. No? Are you sure? Well, if not dinner, would you like to come back for a follow-up study? This would be for a brain scan. We use an IV, inject a tracer, follow its path. It allows us to map out your mind, pinpoint where your sense of spirituality resides.”

  She said no to dinner, but came back for the follow-up test.

  Forging Cerletti’s signature to gain access to the lab’s PET scan after hours was simple enough (and it’s not like Thomas and Bernie had attempted to access one of the school’s prohibitively expensive MRIs; no, they’d shown a certain amount of restraint).

  “But why do we have to do this at night?” she asked.

  “Easier access. And hey, afterwards, there’s a jazz band playing on campus, if you’d like to go. The food court has Thai as well.”

  They asked Amy to recite a centering prayer (her choice; a form of Catholic meditation said to bring one’s soul into spiritual alignment) while they took a snapshot of her brain, and although the entire procedure was mainly a ruse—that’s right, Thomas was willing to inject low-level radioactive material into her bloodstream to get a second chance at a date—he’d watched her brain light up, but not in ways he expected.

  “She’s engaging her frontal lobes almost exclusively,” Bernie pointed out after she’d left (having again turned down Thomas’s offer of jazz, even though she had clearly stated that was her preferred choice in music).

  The two of them had her scan up on the screen, were—in effect—peering into Amy.

  “That’s weird.”

  Faith, they’d been told, originated in the emotional regions of the brain. But not so with Amy.

  “It’s like she’s choosing to believe,” Bernie said. It was as improbable as choosing to fall in love. We’re just molecules, after all, and yet, here she was, glowing in the radioactive half-life, deciding to believe. And if we could choose something as irrational as faith, thought Thomas, could we also choose madness? Sanity? It was an idea that would linger like a tune caught in his head, and it would set other, larger dominoes in motion.

  Amy would eventually say yes to Thomas for dinner (a testament to persistence; he kept asking till she relented). He took her to a jazz bar, where he pretended to enjoy it, and then out for late-night pad thai. (He was banking on all that noodle slurping to trigger subconscious oral fixations.) They ended up back at her messy apartment, where she showed him her canvases and made him a cup of tea. This was followed by conversation with kisses, and then kisses with conversation, until finally it was only kisses; they had replaced conversation entirely: a predictable progression, yet one with endless variation. Not unlike jazz, Thomas thought.

  The hardest part was hiding who you were. Amy was the first girl he ever told willingly, confessing his Rumpelstiltskin identity to her under the ecclesiastical candlelight of her studio. She’d hardly reacted, had hardly seemed interested, in fact, something he tried to convince himself was refreshing. She doesn’t care! Isn’t that wonderful! (The sad truth is that Amy didn’t want to know, didn’t want the added burden of Thomas’s family history; she had burdens enough of her own, and was worried that in making his confession Thomas had opened the curtain for further disclosures on both sides.)

  Sometimes when she was sleeping, Thomas would lie beside her, would softly inhale her breath as she exhaled. Toothpaste and tea.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT POURED THE DAY after Thomas saw his father at the television studio: great bucket-throws of water dousing the streets, cars hydroplaning past, fanning water onto pedestrians. So much for the sun in sunglasses. This was duck with an umbrella weather.

  Thomas went through his mail before he left, hoping in that sadly deluded way of rejected lovers that Amy might have reached out, but there were only the usual letters from people asking him for advice (because of his father’s book) or wanting to share the story of their own childhoods. They came in bundles, two or three times a year, redirected from his father’s publisher and they were, by turn, needy, greedy, demanding, exhausting, trivial, heartrending. He never answered any of them. The only unusual entry in this batch was a loose postcard of a generic landscape, instantly forgettable save for the message written on the back: a single sentence in cramped, boxy letters, as though the person who’d sent it was trying to hide their handwriting: REMEMBER ME?

  No name or return address, so no. No, I don’t remember you.

  Thomas sensed a certain anger lurking behind the question, a vague threat. But the feeling quickly passed, and Thomas tossed the postcard in the recycling box with the rest of the letters. It was only as he was pulling on his overcoat that he stopped, went back, retrieved it. The postcard hadn’t been forwarded to him by his father’s publisher; it had been mailed directly to his apartment. Whoever sent it knew where he lived. A former lover? One of his soccer moms? Not worth worrying about. He discarded the postcard again and stepped out, into the rain.

  A long walk brought him past Our Lady of Constant Sorrow. The tattered vagrant was still there, maintaining his vigil, the handwritten sign proclaiming himself Saviour held in front of his chest like a number in a police arrest photograph. A mug-shot Messiah. Jesus on the sidewalk. The tent-like tarp he had set up was sagging under a pool of rain, and the man himself stood out front, hoodie soaked, beard streaming, facing Our Lady of Constant Sorrow. You’d think the Son of God would have enough sense to come in from the rain. Thomas hurried past him, leaning into the wind behind an umbrella that threatened to turn inside out at any moment.

  The homeless shelter was down an alley from Our Lady, a cinder block building that had once been a juvenile detention centre. The ragged men and bag ladies inside were crowded around long, low tables as volunteers moved through, clearing plates, topping up cups of coffee, teasing patrons.

  “Beautiful weather!”


  “Did you order this rain?”

  Rheumy eyes and waterlogged hearts. The musty smell of wet hair. Thomas shook out his umbrella and approached one of the volunteers, a thin-faced gentleman barely distinguishable from the people he was serving.

  “Is Frances in?” Thomas asked.

  “Frances?” The man’s face clouded over. “Don’t know anybody by that name.”

  “Sister Frances,” he said. “Frances Mary Bedford. She’s a nurse.”

  “Nurse?”

  “And a nun.”

  “Oh, right. Didn’t know her name. She’s in the back, in the men’s dorm.”

  Down a sallow hallway into the leaden light of the dormitory. Rows of cots. Damp coughs. Every bed was full: women in the front room, men in the back. It reminded Thomas of a Civil War battlefield triage.

  Frances Bedford (Sister Frances Bedford) stood in a haze of light with a medical kit open on the cot beside her. Her laminated Community Health ID read “SR. FRANCES,” which had earned her the nickname “Sir Frances.” She was examining a gaunt old man, more sinew than muscle, who sat with his shirt off, staring into the middle distance. Frances didn’t look much like a nun: no Sally Field winged hat, no soft-focus eyes fixed ever-heavenward, no crucifix clutched between praying hands. She wore a plain olive-green dress that looked more like hospital scrubs than a nun’s habit. Grey hair, pulled back. Face as creased as linen.

  “Hold still, Charlie.”

  The old man’s back was wet with sores, and as Frances applied cotton and gauze, Thomas sauntered up with a big fake smile plastered on his face.

  “We could use a drop of golden sun,” Thomas said.

  She glanced his way. “Look what the cat dragged in. Make yourself useful. Grab me that tape.”

  He handed her a roll, along with some disinfectant.

  “Are you a doctor yet?” she asked.

  “Soon.”

  “Ants,” the old man said.

  “You have to wash more often, Charlie,” she said, speaking slowly. “I’ll check in on you, but you have to help.” She held up a tube of ointment. “Twice a day, okay? When you wake up and before you go to sleep. Shelley will assist you, but you have to remind her, okay?”

  “Ants,” he rasped. “They’re under my skin.”

  Thomas looked to Frances. “He needs quetiapine.”

  “Quetiapine?”

  “Maybe lithium.”

  She gave Thomas a sour look.

  “What?” said Thomas. “This patient is clearly hallucinating. He needs to be medicated. Any atypical antipsychotic drug should do the trick.”

  “What he needs is to get these sores to heal. The ants are in his imagination. The bedsores are real.”

  “Frances, those bedsores are only a symptom.”

  “So are the ants, Tommy. So are the ants.” She gathered up her supplies. “You sound like your father. How is he anyway? Still famous?”

  “Dad? He’s still Dad, only more so.”

  “You’re all done, Charlie. You can put on your shirt now.”

  Frances pushed her cart down the next row of cots. “Grab a bedpan, Tommy.” Then, warning him: “Next one’s a colostomy. The trick is to pinch the valve before you turn it.”

  The smell, even with the disinfectant, reached down his throat and punched him in the stomach. He gagged. Tried to speak, gagged again.

  “Breathe through your mouth,” Frances said as they rolled on to the next cot. “It’s a trick I learned years ago. Of course, then you end up tasting it.”

  “Can’t you just add a dab of tiger balm inside your nostrils?”

  “Not a good idea. It can mask symptoms. If someone is hemorrhaging from their anus, you need to know.”

  “Busy place,” Thomas noted.

  “Migrants from Tent City. It’s getting bad down there. They found two more bodies this morning. People are running scared.”

  “ODs?”

  “The residents tell a different story. They say the devil is running loose.”

  Frances mentioned Maggie, a sex trade worker from the overpass, who told her what was happening. “She came in with six cracked ribs,” Frances said as she pushed the cart to the next cot. “Bad date.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Not much we could do. Can’t tape ribs, the shallow breathing might induce pneumonia. All we could give her was ibuprofen and comfort. While she was recovering, she whispered to me that there’s someone haunting Tent City late at night.”

  “The sex trade is a hell of a business.”

  “But whoever’s killing people isn’t targeting women. They’re targeting older men. Not that it matters. Everyone is running, male and female, young and old. The Sally Ann, Crosswalk, Mustard Seed: they’re overwhelmed. People are crowding in here now as well. This is supposed to be a recovery centre, not a flophouse. Although”—she looked at the rows of cots—“I imagine everyone here is recovering from something. And anyway, it might not be the devil at all. It might simply be a spike in overdoses. It happens.”

  More cuts, more bandages, more suppurating wounds sticky under gauze. Frances looked over at Thomas. “You should come for a drive-along in the health van sometime. The alleys, the parks, and the projects. You’d learn a lot. Situations not covered in your textbooks.” She stretched her neck stiffly one way, then the other. “I’ve seen it come, I’ve seen it go. Amphetamines, meth, crack, ecstasy, OxyContin, and now fentanyl. Some have even taken to mainlining cleaning fluids. But I haven’t seen anything like what’s happening in Tent City right now. Not the ODs, but the fear. It’s like they’re being picked off, one by one.”

  “Heroin?”

  “Probably. The dealers have started cutting it with horse tranquilizer and Clorox, even industrial-strength rat poison. Gives it that extra kick. Not enough to kill you, just enough to make your lips go numb. That’s the idea, anyway. Doesn’t always end well.” She stared at Thomas with unblinking eyes. “Why are you here?”

  “I had a question. You knew my mom. She was with you at the—What do you call it? The convent?”

  “College. She never joined the order. She met your dad, remember?”

  “Still, she was almost a nun. And who becomes a nun in this day and age anyway?”

  “Fools like me,” said Frances. “Hand me the antiseptic. No, not that. The swabs.”

  “How did my parents reconcile their opposing beliefs? Something had to give, right? Or was it a stalemate? That’s sort of the definition of a marriage, right?”

  “You came all the way down here to ask me that?”

  “Well, there’s this girl.”

  “Ah, yes. Here it comes.”

  “She’s very . . . ‘churchy.’ ”

  “Churchy? You make it sound like an affliction.”

  “Oh, it is,” he assured her. “But don’t worry, we’re working on a cure.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Her name’s Amy, comes from good working-class stock, as they say. Her dad is the floor manager or something at a mattress factory, you know the one, down on 3rd. Her mom died when she was young, so we have that in common. Not much else. Like I said, churchy.”

  They came to an old man with bruises on his face lying on his back, talking to the ceiling. Frances began an assessment.

  “Thing is,” Thomas said, continuing their conversation as Frances worked. “This girl I mentioned? She lied to me and we had a falling out, and now she’s gone and I don’t know how to get her back.”

  “Well, if you want this young woman back—and if she lied to you, think about whether you—”

  “I do.”

  “In that case, you need to ask yourself what really matters. To her.”

  “Art. She’s a painter. That’s what matters to her. Art and her family, though I’ve never met them.”

  “Maybe that’s where you should begin. Pass me a bedpan.”

  “Can’t.” He held up his hands. “These are the tools of a future neurosurgeon.”
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  “Or an overpaid pill dispenser.”

  “Either way, can’t take that chance.”

  “Grab a bedpan, okay?”

  He slid a clean one from the cart, exchanged it for the full one Frances handed him. “You’re a mean old woman,” he said to her. “I ever tell you that?”

  “All the time.”

  The next morning, he phoned Bernie. “Do you still have those tapes? Of Amy on the first day?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “OKAY, SO THERE ARE only seven basic emotions,” said Bernie, clearing a space for his laptop on the cafeteria table. “Three of them we’re born with: fear, love, rage. A newborn baby will demonstrate all three. The primordium of fear, the primordium of love, the primordium of rage. A Holy Trifecta. They’re like the primary colours of emotion. The other four—happiness, sadness, surprise, and disgust—those come later. And you can blend any of those seven emotions to create further variations, the social emotions, as they’re known.”

  “Social emotions?” Thomas asked.

  “Envy, shame, guilt, pride. Those are taught. Those are inculcated in us. They don’t come naturally. Guilt, for example, is disgust turned inward. Pride is love without a secondary subject. Religious awe, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—that’s Latin, by the way, you uncouth lout—the formula for religious awe is just fear plus fascination. And so on. We blend old emotions to make new ones.”

  It reminded Thomas of Amy’s painterly palettes and the endless possibilities she was able to call forth from three primary colours. The search for perfect blue.

  “It’s, like, how there’s only five basic tastes, right?” said Bernie, counting them off on his fingers. “Salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and—I forget the other one. But from those five, blended and mixed, we derive an endless, almost infinite variety of flavours, everything from sharp citrus to thick butterscotch, from creamed curries to onion soup, lemon tarts and licorice, fishy seaweeds, cilantro, chocolate ice cream, nutmeg and Nutella. Even—God forbid—olives and feta.”