She hands you celery. You begin to chop. You are an outsider; you’ve always been. Your parents use words to inflict damage, like the side of an axe to drive a point home. Words frighten you. A phrase falls like Newton’s apple, drops and explodes before you get it out; words shift into shapes, intents you never meant. In the classroom this doesn’t happen, only here, where words are too important. Galileo left words altogether. In the late 1500s he disappeared into the Camaldolese monastery; attracted by the quiet, studious life, he joined the order.
You start in on the Chinese cabbage. People in ancient times believed the earth stood still, and the sky moved around it. That’s how they explained the changing position of the stars, movement from night to day. Strange, the earth’s steadfast rotation. Exactly three hundred and sixty-five days, six hours, nine minutes, and ten seconds. One revolution around the sun. You’ll put that on the grade ten science exam. You pick up a zucchini. A trivia bonus question.
Maggie climbs a chair to reach a serving bowl. You want to say, I’ll tell you anything, but Maggie doesn’t ask. Beside you, your Cross pen, three red marking pens, your calculator, a stone you picked up by the river, your labs, a book called simply Physics, as if that says it all. Maggie moves to the light switch and, without asking, gathers up your pens and papers, sets a place for two.
She’s using few words these days. You miss her chatter, her foolish endless lists of who she lunched with, a joke one of the old men in the Home told her — why is six afraid of seven? Because seven eight nine — how some of the old ladies are forever chasing Fred Regier. Those times seem relics of an ancient world that you strain to remember.
Throughout dinner neither of you says a thing.
Your silence, and the rhythm of the lifting of your spoons.
Foothills Neonatal ICU becomes a separate country. With its own time zones, population, weather. Well-behaved mothers are allowed inside its borders only after passport inspection, the ritual washing, the donning of the gown.
The hospital gown: that barrier, that disguise. A yellow gown that forces mothers to look like invalids, not real mothers at all. What does a mother bring to neonatal? Nothing. I flip open the Mother File in the filing cabinet of my head, watch my own, bent weeding in the garden, moving under loads of wash, sprinkling clothes, making soap, cutting noodles, gutting chickens, canning fruit, alive with the energy of chores. My mother fed her children from the soil. I pushed my child, soiled, into the world. She slid out in her own feces, meconium-stained. A sign of distress, the doctors said. Kalila made some pick of a mom. I look around the huge warehouse of a room, designed for optimal efficiency. Isolettes jut from the walls. Panels of wall plugs. Blinking, beeping monitors. Hell of a nursery I’ve created for my daughter. The nurses told me yesterday they’ll take no more breast milk. Kalila cannot swallow. Just give up the breast pump. There’s no work I’m allowed to do. Not even fold clothes. Kalila has none. My work experience in a seniors’ residence doesn’t translate to this place. The neonatal nursery doesn’t want a program coordinator to set up crafts, exercise classes, book displays for two-pound babies the size of a hunk of cheese. It doesn’t want parents who stick their noses in the doctors’ business. I pass through the quarantine room, sidestep a large basket of soiled gowns. The mothers’ job here in Foothills Neonatal is to stand around in yellow gowns like a hospital choir. If nothing else we are clean. What would the nurses do if we broke into song?
I’m so lonesome for you, baby
I’m so lonesome all the time …
The smell of camphor salve, digoxin, formaldehyde, wet diapers, fear.
You’re my dream come true
I cry through empty nights withou-ou-out you…
I fight my way this morning among the babies and equipment to find Kalila, awake and waiting, left hand ballooned and purple.
What happened?
Her intravenous went interstitial.
Interstitial: occupying the place between.
Nothing serious, nurses cry over their shoulders, bagging, resuscitating, administering physiotherapy and drugs.
I look through glass at my child. #524010 with the swollen hand.
You’ll have to leave now, Mrs. Solantz.
A bird, long-beaked and blue, soars by the high window and wheels away. I have a sudden image of my flock of sisters: Marigold, Iris, Rose, June, crowding, chattering, interrupting, talking while they chew, their language tumbling, intimate, inclusive. Someone has opened the door to the hall, but still, the bleach-tinged air. The closed-up smell of things unsaid. The doctors here navigate the crowded aisles in a choreographed line dance to avoid questions. They bend over procedures, backs turned, faces guarded. Where dancers open their bodies, the doctors shut theirs off, their movements exclusive, circling inward. It is always high noon here, always glaring light. When forced, the doctors speak in codes of graphs and charts, prescriptions, lab results.
Your daughter has multiple problems, Mrs. Solantz, many undiagnosed at present.
There is a swallowing disturbance (a disturbance? like a fucking cold front?) and abnormal electroencephalogram.
How do you spell that?
A startled doctor spells.
At this time, your daughter appears to have pulmonary dysplasia and so is in danger of potential sepsis.
I scribble.
She has intermittent cyanosis. We hear rhonchi and rales in her chest.
Her presence reminds them they are failing.
I want to see her.
I’m sorry, Mrs. Solantz, you’ll have to leave this morning.
I long for emotion from them; what they want from me is none. This is a research hospital. My baby is useful.
Ma’am, the doctors have their rounds to do. All case information is confidential.
I imagine myself one day fading toward the exit, melting out the sliding doors, vanishing to nothing. I feel it coming, my body, dissolving into light.
Pretend you’re not here, I tell myself. They do.
Before I can grab my purse, say my goodbyes, the march of the white coats begins. Bona fide doctors in long coats lead trailing residents in short. They swing from isolette to isolette, their cryptic voices. They stare at the babies, comment, prod, confer. Move to Baby Hargreaves, the size of two blocks of butter, sparrow legs dry, the tendons showing, to Baby Mueller, a fourteen-pound elephant, brain damaged as he ploughed his way through his diabetic mother’s birth canal, to Baby Leung, born without an anus.
I take a last look at their white backs and file out with the other parents, passive as babies. Two go home, one walks the halls, I look up words in my dictionary in an empty waiting room.
Electroencephalogram, EEG: records the minute electrical impulses produced by the activity of the brain. Indicates the alertness of the subject.
Pulmonary dysplasia: any abnormality of growth. She has abnormal lungs, then. No one’s said.
I wait. That’s all. I wait. Day after week. Emigrant turned immigrant, yoked to this hospital.
Whither thou goest I will go
Wherever thou lodgest I will lodge
Thy people will be my people, my love.
Yoked to this dreaded family of sick babies, prim receptionists, smoking relatives, green-suited floor polishers, anxious nurses, taciturn doctors.
A mother enters the waiting room, a runny-nosed three-year-old whining at her leg. Hands smoothing her daughter’s fruit-embroidered dress, she tells me the hospital is threatening foster care if she doesn’t visit her baby more often.
They’re telling me my constant presence is getting in the way.
Sepsis: infection of a wound or body tissues with bacteria.
Cyanosis: a bluish colouration of the skin and mucus membrane. A sign of heart disorder, lung damage, fluid in the lungs.
I want to strike at the thick smoke of their secrets.
If I didn’t care
More than words can say …
The mother stands, watching me write. The c
hild wants to colour in my dictionary.
My dictionary won’t transform itself into pretty pictures.
What’s wrong with your baby then? the child says.
What a question! Let’s fill in the blanks. Give us an E, Vanna. Are there any Es?
Does she look funny? Does your baby smell? Ours does. Today …
The mother takes the child’s arm, turns her away, covers the child’s eyes.
Peek a boo, singsongs the mother,
I see you,
No, I don’t!
Yes, I do!!
What kind of psycho made up a disappearing baby game?
Rhonchi: a rattling.
Rales: an abnormal sound heard on auscultation of the chest.
Auscultation: listening to the heart, lungs, organs with a stethoscope.
Once, I was safe. Once, I owned myself. Now, not even my grief is mine. The hospital owns it. I can rent, make withdrawals, like books on a library card. Time’s up. Hand it over. Bear it. Buck up. Grow up. Quit snivelling. A headache at the centre of the storm. I want to strike at them. Instead I put my arms into my coat and carry my four-pound dictionary out into the ordinary world, into the harsh cold swell of winter. Ache in the gut. Pretend you chose this. Pretend you deserve this. It makes the explosions in the lungs easier to bear.
You walk the railroad tracks while Skipper bounds into the bushes, scares out birds, and splashes into the river, barking. You throw a stick. Sunlight travels the water. Skipper, tail spinning propellerlike, retrieves, and, coughing, gagging, throat-clearing, aims his bedraggled self toward shore, but the current carries him downstream and, thrashing sideways, he disappears. After some time you hear him crashing through the bush and here he is, stick clamped between his teeth. He drops it at your feet, shakes himself all over your shoes. When you make to throw the stick again, Skipper snatches it up, and there ensues a tug-of-war, Skipper growling, tail wagging, till you wrest it free and fling the stick again.
The path here in Edworthy Park is lined by caragana bushes, dying with autumn. The intensity of a light wave follows the inverse square law. It radiates out from the source, the intensity decreasing as it travels through space. Science is how you separate truth from ideology, from foolish, unproven beliefs. Physics governs the world you used to know. That world has shifted, tilted off its orbit. You have stumbled into a universe of uncertainty. What porthole will see you through? The wind sings in the trees. You read somewhere that Australian aboriginals believe the world was sung into existence, that their belief system holds song lines, pathways that connect the landscape to a story each life tells. You picture yourself standing in these caragana bushes, lifting your voice to the stars. You smile ruefully. You can’t carry a tune. The article said each geographic contour emits its own unique song. You stand still, listen to the grasses. Once, you knew what questions needed asking. Science brought you that. Wind shushes in the trees. The splash of water. Skipper dives for the stick a woman has thrown for her dog. That poster in your study: Things You Can Learn From A Dog: Allow the experience of fresh air and wind on your face to be pure ecstasy. Take naps and stretch before rising. If you want what’s buried, dig until you find it. A fish jumps. A bald eagle swoops from nowhere, skims the water, snatches, and glides up a tree branch to feast. The sun climbs the sky. Because we circle the sun, it shows us all its faces. Skipper crashes out of tangled bush and grasses. Unlike the moon, which, circling, shows us the same side. Maggie says you hide parts of yourself from her. You don’t, no more than you hide them from yourself. Depression twists down your esophagus like a funnel cloud. You turn abruptly, head back, the wind a whistle in your ears. You bend into its force, crunching and slushing the wet and brittle leaves that scatter in your path while the dog tears through them, skidding in wet decay.
At the van, Skipper whines in anticipation while you hunt for your keys, impatient for life’s next experience, no matter what it brings. You give his coat an affectionate ruffle and he leaps inside, heads for his mat, paws and paws it, turns four times in a circle, and, satisfied, slumps down. You check your pant legs. Not that dirty. You drive to the hospital, leave Skipper snoring, ride the elevator, scrub your hands, slip into the yellow gown, seat yourself by the baby.
Once upon a time a small glass castle sat high on a windy hill. The castle lodged a little princess, and its walls and ceiling winked and caught the light. The castle and the countryside around stayed lit up night and day, and whenever the little princess wished, she could gaze out her glass walls to what lay on all sides. Dotting the countryside were other tiny glass castles, each with a little prince or princess lodged inside. But like all glass slippers and glass hills in fairy tales, each glass castle was under a spell: each little prince and princess held captive inside the tiny castles unless the Great Sorcerer decided to set them free.
Few escaped to live outside their castle walls. Day after day the little princess languished alone in her glass castle, high on the windy hill. If visitors came, it was to prod or stare or wave or shout Hello outside the castle fortress. Each castle had two small round portholes that opened to the outside, and from time to time a curious visitor would push a hand through, but this happened so rarely that when it did, the little princess recoiled from the touch.
Imagine the princess’s loneliness for no human, only food and drink appeared inside her castle walls. She awoke each day to stare wistfully across the landscape …
Kalila’s eyes stay closed. The Little Prince is sprawled where someone left it, on the shelf under a neighbouring isolette. You pick up the book, press your face against one armhole, flip through its pages:
At sunrise, the sand is the colour of honey … What brought me, then, this sense of grief?
… But I, alas, do not know how to see sheep through the walls of boxes.
Spinal tap; lumbar puncture: a procedure in which a hollow needle is inserted in the lower part of the spinal canal to withdraw cerebrospinal fluid. To diagnose and investigate disorders of the brain and the spinal cord.
Infusion: slow introduction of a substance into a vein.
I lug my dictionary and think of Brodie’s hands, which are always travelling, caressing a science book’s cover, meandering through his hair, tracing an onion’s paper skin. 6:05 p.m.. Brodie stays at school to plan his lessons, mark his labs, comes home in darkness, gulps down his supper. Fingers clenching, unclenching on his knee.
Were the kids good, Brodie?
Fine.
Even his jaw works; the core of his emotion resting in a cheekbone. So small a movement. As if a blizzard blew between us and snatched away our words. He starts the car, drives to the hospital, hearts running on empty we sit beside our child, drive back in silence; Brodie goes to bed.
Desire tingles into nerve endings that reach out my hands to walk the inner seam of his pants just above the knee.
Touch me.
I feel so guilty.
His mouth. The brush of finger against that lower lip. I want to slip my hand into his pocket, remove his wallet, play my fingers in that hidden place between materials, search out the cotton twill of his pants.
I awaken on the couch, back stiff, move to the window, a pool of street light, a lone dog trotting down a sidewalk. Skipper emerges, groggy, from his spot under the table, stretch-yawns, regards me gloomily. We stare out at the darkness of Nose Hill.
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence
cometh my help.
There’s no help coming.
Maggie, you’re on your own.
The ancient Greeks saw stars and moons and constellations as their gods and heroes. They prayed to them and sought answers to their prayers. They gazed into the night sky and pondered their own place in the cosmos. They tried to understand what we call science.
You can’t just study to be a scientist. In order to hypothesize, a scientist must believe. Believe there is an unknown — not what it is, but that it is. How else can he predict? Science equals curiosity
. A scientist can’t wait for answers. He has to leave the world he knows and go in search of them. A scientist revels in the contradictions.
You stand before your restless grade elevens, pointer on a timeline you have trailed across the blackboard. Frankie’s bed head is rising toward the lights in a kind of frenzied glee.
It was in 1900 that Max Planck, the German physicist, formulated an equation that dealt with the emission of light from a hot surface. He couldn’t explain why his equation worked.
So what was the use? Sukjeevan, twirling a paper clip. Andy gets up to retrieve a sailing pencil, sits down on a tack deposited neatly by Raj. You ignore his small shriek.
I’m starved, Erika mutters.
Well, Planck felt sure that the tiny emitters of light could only have certain values of energy. So, you tip the pointer against the blackboard, he took a leap. He proposed that radiation was made up of small packets, much as matter is made up of atoms. He called each unit of radiation, ‘the quantum, or quanta,’ which in Latin means?
How much, Ashton says.
Hungry or not, you can rarely stump these kids. Quantum mechanics is what? A theory that governs the very small, those minuscule pieces from which the universe is made. And for those tiny pieces, the rules of our world do not hold. The uncertainty principle reigns in quantum mechanics.
But what about Planck?
What about him? The man proposed something he couldn’t see. He took a chance. Chance based on probability. He proposed that radiation is made up of these small packets. Were the physicists of his day impressed? No, they were not. Because he couldn’t prove it, they believed Planck a kook. But in 1918 that kook won the Nobel Prize. Thanks to Planck’s imaginative thinking, quantum physics entered modern thought.
Kalila Page 4
