Kalila

by Rosemary Nixon

I hold the book I’ve picked at random off my bookshelf. Close my eyes. Picture my mother, reading with her finger, like a child after all these years. She can read at most an hour, then the page blurs. The doctors tell her macular degeneration is a mysterious disease. No one knows why an eye’s blood vessels break and leak. Lately she has trouble recognizing faces. She tells people mostly by their shapes these days, their walk, their smell, their voices. Their outline is a blur. I can’t make eye contact, she tells me over the phone. There are times I know I appear rude. I feel such shame.

  On her last visit, Dr. Nichols jovially told her that in mythology, blindness is linked to inner sight. Birds see better than humans. My mother reading up on sight as she loses her own. Pigeons, for instance, see polarized light that is absent to the human eye. These same birds can be trained to pick out letters of the alphabet, a skill my mom is losing. A spindrift of sunlight at the window. My book slips from my knee. How I long for my mother’s faith. Mine fell away somewhere. I listen to the prayer my mother will be praying. Our Kind Loving Heavenly Father, Ye who said your kingdom is likened unto a child, Ye who said to the nobleman, Go thy way, thy child liveth, Ye who said, Suffer the little children to come unto me. Ye who sees the sparrow fall, Attend to the suffering of little Kalila. I squint at a breath of sunlight shifting against the windowpane.

  A sunny Tuesday morning. I find myself standing in the fresh produce aisle. Shoppers negotiate carts about me.

  Maggie Watson! I turn in the act of picking up a mango. Remember too late the touch of its skin blisters my own. Standing at the far end of the aisle is a woman I worked with at the seniors’ complex. Bernice stands large in her overcoat, open, revealing a fuchsia paisley dress. Her feet, stuck in serviceable white nursing shoes, squeak my way.

  So, Bernice says.

  Umm, Bernice says.

  I pick up three pomegranates, pack them in my cart. How’s life at Confederation Lodge?

  Things could be worse. Bernice pinches the kiwi. I moved to days. Remember Vivian? She worked in foods? She’s developed a tremor in her left hand. Mm-hmm.

  I set in my cart arugula, a bag of kale. Bernice goes for the romaine lettuce, leans close. Pear perfume. Who’d want to smell like fruit?

  Bernice says, May be cerebral palsy. Vivian, she adds to my blank look. Oh, Bernice says, and Madge Middleton finally died. She snaps her fingers. Went just like that at Tuesday Bingo. It was so distressing for the others. And Ruth Barker, the activity coordinator —was she there before? — well, she took Velma’s job — anyway, she didn’t notice Madge had passed on, and kept shouting, Under the B-52! Under the O-12! Madge passed on in her folding chair beside old Julian Bates, who got so agitated when he noticed her gone, he hollered, Bingo! And Nattie Schue slid all the buttons off her cards. Was there a to-do when Nattie found she was out of the game for nothing! When all the excitement died, and the paramedics left, they had to start the game over on account of Nattie Schue.

  I walk into morning light, pushing a cart of groceries I don’t need: mangoes, shrimp, Chinese cabbage, lemongrass, leeks, a clump of beets. As I pull onto Sarcee Trail, window rolled down, the Rocky Mountains, the whole Bow Valley corridor, bursts into view in all its granite snow-topped sunlit splendour.

  A chinook wind sings.

  The world is turning on its axis.

  Anything can happen.

  Hand in your quiz. I trust it’s jolted you awake. Surprises are stimulating. Keep you on your toes. Harvey, you already wrote the thing. What’s the point of complaining now? Take out your notebooks. Fifteen minutes left. No. There’s no such thing in my class as free time. Chaos theory. With whom did it begin?

  Mutterings. Scramblings. A frantic search for pencils.

  Edward Lorenz, sir.

  Early morning light streams through the classroom windows. Dust hangs, pale and shifting, students’ faces hard to see.

  Lorenz was fascinated by the unpredictable, the seemingly random behaviour occurring in a system that should be governed by deterministic laws. The kinds of systems Lorenz was dealing with were disordered, but Lorenz searched to find underlying order in his random data. To find such an equation, however, involves many variables. A very small initial difference may make an enormous change to the future state of a system.

  Does this have something to do with butterflies? Frankie is combing his hair, holding a tiny hand mirror.

  It does. And you look lovely, Frankie. The theory was first introduced to describe unpredictability in — Evan. Your toast popped.

  And sure enough, the smell of toast wafts through the classroom. The students crane their disbelieving necks to find quiet Evan Stewart unplugging a pop-up toaster balanced on the radiator, and now he is pulling from his backpack a tiny tub of peanut butter, another of jam, and a plastic knife. Evan slathers his toast.

  Sorry, Mr. Solantz, Evan says earnestly, mouth thick with peanut butter, but I practise on the swim team till eight-thirty Monday mornings and I don’t have time for breakfast, which is, he waves his knife, according to Mrs. Mahovalich, my grade two teacher, the most important meal of the day. He cuts his toast in four, pops a quarter in his mouth. The kids are giggling — now they’re wide awake.

  Evan, be kind enough to give us a definition of the chaos theory.

  Evan cheerfully stuffs in another quarter, waves a hand, pulls a baggie from his backpack, and drops the empty tubs inside, along with his plastic knife. He withdraws a napkin with a scruffy hen on it and wipes the grease from his desk. Swallows.

  How weather around the world is affected when a butterfly in South America flutters its wings, sir, he says respectfully and cleans his teeth with his tongue.

  You shake your head. Next time, Evan, it would be nice to share. Yes, Lorenz started with weather. And he found that the equations governing weather were so sensitive that he came to the conclusion that if a little butterfly palpitates its wings in one part of the world, it may affect the arrival of a hurricane or tropical storm — or divert it — somewhere around the globe.

  Evan pops the toaster in his backpack, hollers, Ow! and dumps it back out to cool.

  Right, you say. The chaos theory, which Evan is so aptly demonstrating here for us this morning, is a field of science that studies the complex and irregular behaviour of nature’s systems, Evan being only one. What are some examples of the chaos theory in practice?

  Hands bob the air.

  The currents in oceans, sir.

  The dripping of a tap.

  The collision of billiard balls.

  Russian roulette.

  All correct, you say. Or let’s take something closer to home. The evolution of the human species. Our body’s inner workings. Even the human heart and its blood flow have a chaotic pattern. Or music. Not that many years ago a graduate student in electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology used chaos theory to recreate musically variating themes in Beethoven’s symphonies.

  You sit down behind your desk. The twentieth century, grade elevens, is known for three monumental discoveries: relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory. And who knows what new discoveries await?

  I still don’t get what a theory that can’t be consistent gives us. Gurinder, polishing his glasses.

  Hope, you say, standing abruptly. Such a system gives us hope.

  The bell jangles. Chaos ensues, students slipping back into runners, stuffing textbooks into bags, and heading for the door.

  Evan, you call to their departing backs, next week we review the big bang theory. We’ll look forward to your demonstration.

  You walk through a windblown Sunday morning, weather and light, smoky with early December, molecules hanging, the wind’s song snatched away. Then you open a door and replace it with hospital clutter. A nurse is weighing Kalila’s diaper. You stand aside to watch the nurse’s back, the way her hair graces her slender shoulders, the tiny white scar on her forearm you want to run a finger over, the muscles of her upper arms flexing as she does her chor
es. When she finishes, she smiles at you and you turn to your baby, watching the way her small hand, lost in a baby dream, reaches out to nothing, fist clenching, opening, clenching, as if latching on to daylight.

  The nurse says, Okay. Her creatinine level is high today. One-ninety.

  What should it be?

  Forty.

  Machinery chugs.

  This means her kidney isn’t functioning, not filtering the blood. The nurse taps the intravenous bag, looks back at you, a look that’s almost coy. The baby’s most comfortable this morning on her tummy. She turns to other duties. One side of Kalila’s head is freshly shaved, what little hair grew back now gone, to clear a vein for another intravenous. The nurse returns to say they are administering a drug called Eprex — it makes red blood cells.

  My father-in-law died Wednesday, the nurse confides, so I’m just back. Her hands sort out the cords. He had a heart attack, then kidney failure. Had he lived, he’d have been institutionalized. She has moved to stand next to you, gives you a sideways glance, then back turned to check the drip, she says in a careful, casual voice, My mother-in-law had to make the decision to pull the plug. She taps the tube above Kalila’s isolette. It nearly killed her. She adds softly, She made the right one though.

  You look at her sharply, but she has moved to arrange an isolette drawer. To fill the silence, to cover its startling implication, you pick up The Little Prince, take over the space beside the isolette.

  … seeds are invisible. They sleep deep in the heart of the earth’s darkness, until some one among them is seized with the desire to awaken … It is such a secret place, the land of tears … The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen.

  The baby’s eyes are closed. You lean over her isolette, your cheek against its chill.

  Little princess. Once upon a time Phoenician sailors had a shipwreck, and along with pieces of their wreckage, they washed ashore. Wet and bedraggled, they stumbled onto the sand and gathered together to see what they could salvage. One sailor retrieved a small cooking pot, another several blocks of natron, a chemical used most often for embalming the dead. They searched the shore for roots and seaweed, berries, gathered together sticks on which they piled the natron, and, after several tries, managed to light a fire. It soon grew into a bright blaze. The sailors shivered around its searing heat until their eyes grew heavy, and, one by one by one, the men slid into sleep.

  Imagine their surprise when they awoke in dawn’s first light. A hard and shiny decoration stuck to their cooking pot. They snatched up the pot. The decoration rode along. They all peered through. The sand beneath their fire had melted, run in a liquid stream, until it cooled and hardened into glass against the pot’s rough surface.

  Little princess, glass can awaken, melt, dissolve, glass can open a closed door —

  You will your child this story.

  You will her imagination.

  You will her the energy to slip like an electron to another level.

  Your heart whaps once, wham-whams erratically. You stare at the isolette, its small door flung ajar. Baby Leung’s name tag untaped and dangling. What are the probabilities? A baby’s fled his box.

  An aide is housecleaning the tiny room, polishing the little chamber with a cotton cloth. The nurses, pinch-faced, don’t look at one other, won’t look at you. Hammering silence. Kalila opens her eyes, makes to cry. You offer your finger, and her little face moves back to serene. Brief cool caress of darkness in your hand. A baby. A life.

  Here. Gone.

  You sink down against your stool. Some people prepare against death their whole lives, edge through each day, heads cocked, the possibilities terrifying: hit by a car, gassed in your sleep, sliced by a mugger’s knife. It’s cold in here tonight. Backs turned in duty.

  You watch small dramas stop and start. Plunged into this hospital world, the catch of the neonatal door, the cadence of a nurse’s heels, you don’t know which is more unnerving, footsteps clicking toward you or the ones tapping away. You sit in the glare of the fluorescent lights. Kalila’s eyes slip closed.

  The doctors say they need time. What was Einstein’s belief? People … who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Time, as we understand it, does not exist.

  A flash of Joyce and Larry’s living room wall: their three framed dead butterflies, stapled behind glass. You look at the spot where Baby Leung was held captive his short life. Hey, you want to say, let’s start the experiment over. Nothing dies. You watch Kalila’s puffing breaths. The particle collapses; it goes on existing as a wave. You watch your child’s body stuffed with tubes and needles; memorize her blue and amber scars. You have sat back and waited for the moment of transfiguration. Water to ice. Mass to energy. Liquid to gas. Lead to gold.

  A doctor enters ICU and speaks in a low tone to the resident in charge.

  It’s moving into winter. Dusk falls now before you eat your suppers, before you leave the house, move through darkening streets to the lights of Foothills Hospital, standing gargantuan against the sky.

  The terrible desire to be wrong.

  You think of Isaac Newton, detached from the world. A secretive man, obsessive, driven by the mystic. He sought knowledge in all he came across.

  He had a nervous breakdown.

  A second doctor steps through the neonatal door. A scientist steps out, risks everything, walks an unchartered path.

  Kalila jolts in sleep, flings out her arms. This daughter, the faintest pencil stroke of an equation. She’s barely here. What holds her? Not medicine. Not science. You reach out to caress your small girl’s blue-tinged forearm.

  The moon has no light of its own, you tell your sleeping child. We can only see the moon because of its reflection off the sun. Your shadow baby stirs and sighs. You breathe with her, quick breaths flitting there, here, there, here.

  Sometimes the little princess risked calling through her portholes. Hello? Hello? I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. And heads did turn. But mostly the wind snatched up her voice to echo off the hill. Played it against the other castles, boomeranged ’til it dissolved. A rustle of spirits. The princess glimpsed through an accordion of air, brome grass, sage, a tiger lily, salt-stung, sunlit. The white ones lifted their heads. Singing? No, only a chinook wind communing round the building. They turned back to their work. The little princess held her face against the glass, against bursts of erasure while the small ones’ spirits gathered, sang her back. The little princess shone with anger and the place remembered her.

  The light is thin in neonatal. You look up at the high windows framing squares of evening dusk. Imagine life outside these walls, imagine Kalila through these walls, the two of you escapees into an undulating landscape. Landscape. It makes you who you are. So it’s your job to give her one. The soles of Kalila’s pockmarked feet smelling of new-cut grass, Kalila and Skipper charging through wind and tearing rain, chaotic weather. Machines click on off on. What are the odds? You think of James Clerk Maxwell, whose research in the nineteenth century first drew attention to those specific systems in which the slightest uncertainty in their present state prevented researchers from accurately predicting their future state. You realize suddenly that by using Galileo’s scientific process, science has created a world with few options. You can’t make just one observation. You can’t limit yourself to one reality.

  You sit in the hum of chugging motors.

  Imagine Schrödinger’s box, lid flung aside.

  The day begins in raw fluorescent light and stays that way. You stand under the harsh bulb in the gown room, facing Dr. Vanioc, who, in a rare move, has seen you by the isolette and called you out. The doctor clears his throat. I — yes, wanted to chat. The baby’s blue spells mean she hasn’t been getting enough oxygen. Because of the hole in her heart.

  Fix it.

  We’re at a bit of a stalemate. She’s too sick to risk an operation. As a result of the oxygen depriv
ation, it is a possibility that she may be mentally retarded.

  You try to get the words wrong.

  But, then, of course, that’s normal, considering all she’s been through.

  Who says the word retarded? Retarded is not normal.

  The doctor looks past you through his spectacles. You could be in different galaxies.

  The normal force is your favourite force, you’ve always told your students. Your weight is the force of gravity, so when you sit on a chair, for example, the force of gravity pulls down on you. And the chair pushes back up on you with a force called the normal force. Think of it as a reaction. Your chair actually knows if someone heavy or light is sitting in it, so it can gauge how much it should push back.

  Push back.

  You feel your own chaotic blood flow whamming against your eyes. Your child, neither dead nor alive, is being kept in a box. And no one is bothering —

  The doctor shifts in his shoes and claps his hands, So, there it is. We’re doing what we can.

  They’ve not removed the lid.

  We’re trying to keep her comfortable.

  They’ve made the choice not to imagine.

  We’re working to keep you informed …

  They have made one kind of observation.

  The doctor’s voice is hearty… trying to deal with her problems straight on.

  They have limited themselves to one reality. Look sideways. Newton went blind from staring at the sun.

  The doctor’s language thins to a cough. As if absolved, he leaves the room.

  You watch him move through the doorway, leaving a sprinkle of aftershave. These doctors are the kind of men whose world turns on measure, on method, on statistics. And what are they measuring for? What they think they already know: the probability that a child will not get well.

  After a while you put on a hospital gown and slip your wrists under the stream of water.