The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  SPRING’S ARRIVED. THE SNOW’S VANISHED FROM the lawn, leaving behind a ghostly mould like a collapsed parachute. Buds swell on the ornamental plums and raindrops meander down the windowpanes. From the speakers in the Glasgow-Phimister living room, Joni is singing about the crocuses she’ll bring to school tomorrow. And on the coffee table, in a nest of eyelet cotton and white wicker, spring’s crowning specimen lies. Aiden can hardly look at her petal face for the clamour that starts up in him.

  Krzysztof Nowak’s mother has been driven over for a formal viewing. No baby-kissing for her – she takes one skeptical look and hobbles straight to a chair. Noah touches a hand to Sylvie’s shoulder and walks towards the fireplace, studying the baby from a distance. But Natalie, his half-sister, runs across the carpet and leans over the bassinette, putting her face right next to the baby’s.

  “She smiled!” she cries.

  “It’s your smile she can’t resist,” Maggie says. “From the minute babies are born, they mirror our expressions.”

  Sylvie’s in the Mission chair with an afghan over her lap. She’s a mermaid washed up onshore, the flotsam and jetsam of the occasion all around her: a wooden rattle painted pink and cream, a mobile with seven belugas lying jumbled as though caught in a net. Three sleepers, four dresses with matching panties, three squeeze toys. Natalie shyly brings over her gift. A board book, Goodnight Moon. Thank you.

  Rain thrums against the window and the room goes dim. Can Maggie pick up the baby? Yeah. And can Natalie hold her? Uh-huh. Natalie sits very still, her little arms full to capacity and her feet sticking straight out in fuchsia tights. Her face is like Noah’s when they put a pale yellow gown on him at the hospital and he sat in an armchair and held the baby. Grave. Inquiring. Unscathed.

  MAGGIE: That’s a beautiful little quilt, Liz. Did you make it?

  LIZ: Thanks, I did. While Sylvie was on bed rest, those last few weeks. A tiny quilt like that doesn’t take long to run up.

  The irises Maggie brought have found their way into a vase – Chilean irises, lifting their sharp purple beaks into the northern air. The baba sits with both hands on the head of her cane. She’s dressed as if she just got off a steamship from Gdansk. A doorbell rings on the sound track in Sylvie’s brain, but someone else hears and answers it. More flowers – pink roses and baby’s breath – from Auntie Maureen in Toronto. It rings again and Wendy from next door dashes in with an octopus she made for the baby out of purple yarn. She dangles her hand into the bassinette and the baby clasps one finger. The adults smile at each other across the kilim rug. It’s a reflex, they say, all babies do it.

  Then George Oliphant is in the archway. “Congratulations, little mama.” A new George, with short hair and a soul patch and glasses with big black frames. Patti in a yellow slicker. With great ceremony they present a silver baby cup. “We would’ve had it engraved,” Patti says, “but we didn’t know her name.”

  “That’s all right,” Sylvie says. “Nobody does.” She pushes at the pile of gifts to make room, and Goodnight Moon falls. She starts to bend for it, but black threads of pain pull at her stomach. She sits back.

  “So where did this little critter come from?” George asks.

  “We don’t know,” Aiden says. “We childproofed the house but she got in anyway.”

  PATTI (to Noah): Were you with Sylvie, dear? When the baby was born?

  NOAH: No, I didn’t get home in time.

  AIDEN: Liz was with Sylvie, holding her hand through the whole thing. I ended up in the triage area, but that was great too. They brought the baby there almost right away.

  PATTI: How much does she weigh?

  LIZ (tossing proprietary happiness like fairy dust across the room): Six pounds, three ounces. She would have been huge if she had gone full-term. And her APGAR was seven, which is amazing under the circumstances.

  WENDY: What does APGAR stand for again?

  LIZ: Let me see. (She holds up her fingers, rhymes off some words.)

  AIDEN: Grimace? G for grimace?

  LIZ: They like an irritated baby. It’s considered a very good sign. And who wouldn’t be irritated after going through all that?

  MAGGIE (lifting the baby from Natalie’s arms and cradling her like an expert): It’s kind of telling, isn’t it. Hospitals just assume babies have to be traumatized. By a natural process. I had both kids at home. Natalie is a little fish – she was born in the bathtub, and it was lovely! For all of us. So peaceful. Noah was there, weren’t you, honey.

  WENDY: How many times was she up last night?

  SYLVIE: Twice.

  LIZ: She wakes up and nurses and goes straight back to sleep. Of course, it’s early days.

  PATTI: And how are you, sweetie?

  SYLVIE: I’m fine.

  LIZ: She is doing just great. We are so proud of her, the way she is handling everything.

  PATTI: I’ll tell you the secret, Sylvie. Eat, sleep, poo. Forget everything else. Be a mother grub.

  MAGGIE: It’s so important, breastfeeding. If you can keep from supplementing, even just a little. They’re seeing a lot of necrotizing colitis in preemies, and it’s all from using cow’s-milk-based formula.

  LIZ: This baby is not that premature.

  AIDEN: When Sylvie was born, I was reading Rousseau. I had the idea our kid would eat the instant she was hungry, sleep when she was tired, follow the lead of her own desires, and be a happy child of nature.

  PATTI: And how did that work out?

  AIDEN: Aw, who remembers those early days?

  PATTI (cackling): I bet Liz does!

  GEORGE: So, kid, when you off to Africa?

  NOAH: I’m not going. I’m working at Presley Point again.

  GEORGE: Didn’t get into the program?

  NOAH: I got in but I turned it down.

  GEORGE: Hey, dude, that’s sweet! You can work my booth at the Folk Fest.

  PATTI: You’re pale, though, darling. Did you lose a lot of blood?

  LIZ: It always makes the recovery harder, doesn’t it, when the mom has to have a Caesarean. Not every woman can have the luxury of a home birth.

  PATTI: At least she didn’t have to go through labour first. I was in hell for sixteen hours when Troy was born. Back pain – did any of you girls have back pain? Oh god, I practically chewed his daddy’s hand off! Turns out I was fully dilated but it wasn’t enough – well, look at the size of me – and then all of a sudden they’re wheeling me into surgery. And here the suction thing breaks down, and by the time they get that little bugger out of me, the doctors are wading through blood. Those cloth booties they wear? They were absolutely soaked.

  AIDEN: All right, everybody – time for bubbly!

  It’s real Champagne for once. He’s twisting the muzzle off the first bottle, the flutes are at the ready on a tray, and George Oliphant is up like a shot, snatching the bottle from Aiden, heading for the kitchen. Then he’s back in the archway with a butcher knife in hand, he’s sabre-slashing the glass neck, and Champagne bursts from the glass throat and splashes wildly over the flutes. They dodge flying glass, they cheer, and George decapitates the second bottle. They lift their flutes to the baby, awake and remote, still half in another world.

  Aiden cranks up the music. He’s got a mix on: this is Shivaree’s big hit, Goodnight Moon. Some of them know it and they start to laugh. Aiden turns to the little girl on the couch and puts out a hand. “I believe this is your song, Auntie Natalie,” he says. She jumps up to dance and he looks over her head at Sylvie and winks.

  Liz and Wendy took belly-dancing classes together long ago, and they raise their arms and undulate. George and Patti start to move with the stoned look of old hippies, and Max scrambles to his feet and barks. Sylvie angles her legs out of the way (Your stitches are tearing, Sylvie). Sparky’s up – his mother’s dragged him up – and Sylvie feels wonder at the sight of him in his clean jeans and worn plaid shirt, still encased in his old life. He looks her way with eyes that beg for rescue, and the sexy voice from Kill B
ill drips down the windows (What will I do, I’m just a little baby), and in the bassinette on the coffee table their own baby lies, her profile perfect and white and her fists waving. Behind her floats the face of the granny, scowling. She’s daring Sylvie to pick up the baby. Sylvie stares back. She’s beyond me, she says with her eyes. Look at her, she’s far beyond my feeble love. Then the doorbell in Sylvie’s head rings again, and she hoists herself out of the chair and goes out to the hall.

  A man is standing on the veranda, a bulky man with dark greying hair and a shadowed face. Sylvie opens the door. “Krzysztof,” he says, in careless impersonation of a total stranger. “Sylvie?” he pretends to guess. He tosses his wet jacket on the banister and runs a hand through his hair. Maggie’s in the archway and he drops a kiss on her lips, then steps into the living room, where Liz is at the bassinette fussing with the blue and red quilt. She darts a glance in his direction and then she straightens up and works her way through the crowd to be introduced, a half-smile on her face and Sylvie’s sleeping baby as tender camouflage on her shoulder, and all the quiet treachery of the day finds its focus at last.

  A party at 385 Augusta … how long has it been? For a few years they had a great thing going with Peter Kohut, a guy Aiden knew from high school. What a brilliant guitarist that guy turned out to be. He’d show up with some musician buddies and people would stream in from all over the neighbourhood, and they’d get a bounce going on the hardwood floor. One morning Liz and Aiden came downstairs and found three characters they’d never clapped eyes on before, sleeping in the living room. But then Wendy came to a party and started handing out singalong sheets for “Big Yellow Taxi,” and that was the day the music died.

  Oh, well, Aiden’s got a pretty good ear for a playlist. David Lindley now, doing his California thing with reggae. Aiden’s squeezed into a corner of the living room, drinking Corona with Patti. Patti turns to him with liquid eyes and says, “He was the third one to go,” and next thing he knows she’s vanished and he’s been teleported into the hall, where he stands with a welcome-to-summer G and T in hand. The front door is propped open, watery light pours in, and Tracy Chapman is begging them for one more reason to stay. These lovely little folds in time – he only ever has them at parties.

  He sips his G and T and watches Noah move along the veranda railing, passing around a box of Cubans in his courteous fashion. The other grandpa brought the cigars: George is all over the chance to show off his prowess with a smoke ring. Lucky Patti’s made it outside – there she stands in a clean and sparkling world – and Liz is up at the end, doing her sexy shtick with a cigar. “When Sylvie was born, I was in labour so long they had to shave me twice,” she deadpans in Patti’s direction. It’s an old line she stole from Ab Fab, but everybody falls against the rail laughing.

  Whereas Aiden’s marooned in the entranceway with the brooding Slavic artist, who’s standing with his eyes on the Afghan prayer rug, sucking back a tumbler of Glendronach from what Aiden has always considered his secret stash.

  “Machine guns,” Aiden says. “Helicopters. AK-47S.”

  Krzysztof does the three-second pause that lets you know your place in the Doric temple of his thought. “Beg your pardon?”

  “The designs in the prayer rug. It was apparently made while the Soviets were having a go at Afghanistan.”

  “Hmm.” Krzysztof frowns, looks closer. “How’d you end up with it?”

  “Bought it at an auction in the ballroom of the Marlborough Hotel. I can’t say I’ve quite got my mind around it. You are standing on a symbol of my moral confusion.”

  Krzysztof barks dryly.

  “So, you working on something at the moment?” Aiden asks.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What’s the premise of this one?”

  “Um, it’s, uh, kind of a post-urban fantasy set in the bush. About a post-tech society.”

  He’s got a slight accent and a modest, almost ingratiating way of speaking, but Aiden’s been around, he knows this tone as a further refinement of ego. “What happens?” he asks. Artists hate this question, in his experience.

  “Uh, a father takes his kid on a hunting expedition, they’re desperate for food, and the kid becomes his prey.”

  Aiden turns back to gaze out at the veranda, where water drips in a silver chain from the lowest point of the plugged and sagging eaves. “It’s a psychological thriller?”

  “I’m not really into psychology.”

  He hasn’t shown a flicker of interest in Aiden or what he does. “You think it’s plausible,” Aiden asks, “on the face of it, for a father to go after his kid with a rifle? However hungry?”

  “I’m interested in the anarchy of the post-apocalyptic scene. The aesthetics of anarchy, I guess you could say.”

  “The Road: The Next Generation?”

  Krzysztof looks at him with open distaste. Aiden turns to peer towards the kitchen, thinking, Eat something. He can tell that Liz ransacked the place for snacks, though he hasn’t laid his hands on as much as a cracker. When she invited people, she said, “Stop by and take a peek,” specifying after dinner so they’d arrive fed. But then Maggie showed up with her crew about four-thirty (didn’t she purport to know the best hour in a baby’s biorhythms?) and they’re all starving, and now it’s seven-thirty and the second wave has hit – happy partiers who ate at home and are settling in for the night.

  Somebody’s turned the music right up. The baby’s crying. Aiden checks the living room. Still filled with yakking women, women from SERC bonding with women from the neighbourhood. The granny hasn’t moved from her chair. The last time he caught sight of Sylvie, she was enduring Wendy’s account of making the yarn octopus, and she was white as a ghost. But he can’t see her now. Maybe she’s changing the baby.

  He turns back to Krzysztof. “So what caused the big collapse?”

  “Collapse?”

  “The apocalypse. In your film.”

  “Oh. Oh, I don’t go there.”

  Aiden drains his drink, grabs the shard of lime with his teeth, bites into it for its food value. “With all due respect,” he says, “I don’t grasp a story about human behaviour that’s indifferent to the human mind and human feelings. I’m trying to remember a film of yours I saw at Cinematheque a long time ago. A bunch of kids out in the bush being killed off one by one. By animals?”

  “No, they offed each other.”

  Aiden hears the baby’s crying torque up. He and Krzysztof have drifted up the hall and he can’t see if Liz is still out on the veranda. “So again,” he says, “it could have been a psychological thriller.”

  “Not really. If you recall, they were taken over by totems.”

  “Some sort of malignant force of nature?”

  “I don’t like to talk about my work in thematic terms. But yeah, I am interested in notions of wilderness.”

  “The aesthetics of wilderness?”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “You’re interested in the aesthetics of anarchy. So I presume you’re also into the aesthetics of wilderness.”

  Krzysztof doesn’t deign to answer. He lifts his shoulders wordlessly to withdraw from the conversation. He’ll be used to being God in his own little world.

  Aiden takes an involuntary step closer. “You know, fear is big. I get why you want to scare the shit out of people. But ever consider making a film about real stuff?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You have to ask me what real stuff is?”

  “I’m asking you what you’re talking about.”

  The women from the living room have drifted to the archway. They’re hearing a baby in distress; they look around anxiously. Their eyes snag on Krzysztof and Aiden.

  “Okay,” Aiden says. “For example, what it’s going to mean when the arctic ice is gone and the poles start absorbing heat instead of deflecting it.”

  “You want a film about ice,” Krzysztof says, “maybe you should make it yourself.”

&n
bsp; “Hey, excuse me. I’m asking you a question about your work, seeing you dismissed mine out of hand.”

  “I’m an artist. I’m not a scientist. I’m not an ideologue.” His boyhood in Sevastopol or wherever is seeping into his speech.

  “An artist has a vision of the world.”

  Krzysztof turns to face Aiden, as if he’s squaring off. “You want me to tell you what I see?”

  “Sure, by all means.”

  “I see a man who’s getting old, who sees his own death staring him in the face, and decides the planet is going down with him. You think the world’s coming to an end. Every generation thinks that – a certain type of mind in every generation. It’s just not my subject.”

  “But it is your subject.” Asshole. “Your film’s about the end of the world.”

  Then Maggie’s there and the baby’s on her shoulder, her whole tiny body clutched into a spasm of squalling. “This. Infant. Is. Starving. And she needs changing. I can’t find a diaper. Sylvie’s in the washroom in your kitchen. She’s extremely upset.”

  He goes to the kitchen. Noah’s little sister is sitting on the floor outside the pantry, swinging the purple octopus like a pendulum between two of its braided tentacles. “Your baby’s crying and you’re crying,” she says sweetly into the confessional.

  Aiden can see Sylvie’s bare feet under the half-doors. He waggles the doors: there’s a half-inch of play in the sliding bolt. “What’s up, sweetheart?”

  Sylvie opens the door and falls against him, sobbing.

  “Come on, let’s get you up to your room,” he says, putting an arm around her shoulder. They start up the stairs. Natalie follows, and Max, and Maggie with the screaming baby. Faces in the hall lift to watch their reproachful parade.

  At the door of Sylvie’s room, Aiden tries to takes the baby from Maggie. “No, I’ll settle them,” she says. “Why don’t you get Sylvie something to eat.”

  Liz is still out on the veranda. “Our daughter needs attention,” he says. She turns a startled face in his direction, follows him inside, and makes a move towards the stairs. “It’s okay, Maggie’s with her. But she needs to eat. What have we got?”