The Shoe on the Roof

Will Ferguson

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781501173561
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Meet Thomas Rosanoff: med student and researcher.
Meet his subjects: three homeless men who believe they are God. Ever since his girlfriend ended things, Thomas's life has been on a downward spiral. A gifted medical student, he has spent his entire adulthood struggling to escape the legacy of his father, an esteemed psychiatrist who used him as a test subject when he was a boy. Thomas lived his entire childhood watched over by researchers lurking behind one-way glass.But now the tables have turned. Thomas is the researcher, and he's convinced an experiment he has concocted will cure three homeless men of their delusional claims. When the experiment careens out of control, however, Thomas is forced to confront the voices echoing in his own head and the ghosts of his own past.An explosively imaginative tour de force, The Shoe on the Roof questions our definitions of sanity and madness while exploring the magical reality that lies just beyond the world of scientific fact.

PART ONE

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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, tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Prologue
• Part One: The Wine, the Blood, and the Sea
• Part Two: God of the Gaps
• Part Three: The Cessation of Miracles
• Part Four: If by Chance you See
• A Note from the Author: On the Blending of Montreal and Boston
• Acknowledgments
• Reading Group Guide
• About the Author
• Copyright