He carries his tea into the den. All around, the sound of light. He thinks of Galileo, born to the sound of his father’s lute. Swept into this world on the music of the universe.
Tonight, the moon is tossed and low. The clouds skim by in fragments, whisk between the stars. The dog is agitated, snuffling. Once, the man longed for certainty, permanence. Those constructs do not exist. The only permanent discoveries are those of the imagination. He walks to the darkening window.
He thinks of the woman. Outside, the lonely signals of a late autumn storm. Lightning knifes the sky. The two of them moving past each other like the song of trains, heading in opposite directions, glimpsing through reflected glass, the glimmer, each other’s light.
He breathes to sew his splintered chest together. He picks up his pen. He will tell his class about interference. How when two waves combine they interfere with each other. Then one of two things happens. They can add to each other to make a bigger wave. This cooperative action is called constructive interference.
But, if, by their combination, they cancel each other out, what’s left is destructive interference.
Her words. His silence.
Then you can’t get anywhere. You just go up and down, until you break the wave. The den in darkness. He moves to illumine a light.
If what we believe of quantum mechanics is true, every time we observe the universe, we disturb it.
Yet nothing meaningful happens until you entangle yourself.
A dead cat and a live one.
He looks at the silver-peppered sky and sees six thousand stars.
There is no official version.
A box. She holds in her arms a brief melody of child. Da capo. Repeat from the beginning. She turns from the Files Access Office and carries the evidence down the long corridor, steps into November wind. Weight in her arms. This terrible stack of charts, this record of a life. She envisions the papers scattering like ashes, crumbling, dust. She unlocks the car door, belts the cardboard box into the front seat. Leaves fling against the headlights. She drives. Wind fills her throat. She drives, imagining a future.
In the mudroom she kicks off her shoes, walks stocking-footed, silent through her sunlit kitchen. Wind gusts against the house.
He stands in his physics classroom, seeing a great distance.
Listen.
He is with her on the lip of Nose Hill, overlooking Calgary’s glass skyline, rushed wind, air skimming, scattered wild roses. He brushes a finger to the child’s translucent skin.
The child’s face in light. Tell me the story.
She lifts the lid
A trace of song
Scattering scars
The sough of a child
Once upon a time
A special thank you to:
The Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Programme for affording me a prodigious year as Canadian writer-in-residence to pursue this manuscript while rubbing shoulders with Albertan, Canadian, and international writers.
The Banff Centre’s five-week Writing Studio during which I put down the first words of Kalila.
The Leighton Artists’ Colony, also at the Banff Centre, for repeated sojourns in the Hemingway and Evamy studios and for beauty and solitude in which to dream this story.
The International Retreat for Writers at Hawthornden Castle, Lasswade, Scotland, for insisting upon silence and allowing me five weeks to live inside the manuscript.
The University of Windsor, its English professors, students, and community, for so warmly welcoming me as writer-in-residence while I did final edits on Kalila.
The Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Woodcock Fund for their financial support.
***
This book has been influenced in different stages by talented, generous friends, each of whom offered his/her own unique contribution to Kalila. My deepest gratitude to my two equally fabulous long-time editors:
Nicole Markotić, who was on board long before this book’s inception. Thank you for your legendary edits, for keeping me afloat through its numerous transformations, for slashing and chopping, for all those energizing Starbucks conversations, and the airport and errand runs so we could keep talking about what mattered. And to Margaret. Markotić for accepting me as another daughter whenever Nicole is in town.
Suzette Mayr for your brilliant suggestions that shook this book into its present form, for your infectious enthusiasm, for your belief. For being my writing buddy, for practically sending the manuscript out for me when I got discouraged. And to you and Tonya, always, for your warm hospitality.
My deepest thanks also go to:
Bethany Gibson, Goose Lane’s editor extraordinare, for seeing Kalila. For your exceptional first-class edits that came from head and heart combined. For your remarkable otherworldly wisdom. It was a transcendent experience for which I will never stop being grateful.
Aritha van Herk for graciously taking a draft with you to the North Pole one Christmas and writing that tough, terrific, six-page single-spaced critique instead of tobogganing.
Stan Dragland for kindly putting your busy life on hold to read and edit a draft and nudge me in the right direction.
Linda and Esta Spalding for reading and commenting on excerpts on the road to Banff in the old van.
Tom Dilworth for large-heartedly reading the manuscript in the midst of term’s end and scribbling sharp, perfecting edits that made a marked difference to the final draft.
Julie Scriver for an exquisite cover and layout.
Angela Williams for your thoroughness in searching out permissions.
Gordon Drake, physicist, for your elegant equations.
Bob Nixon for your numerous physics talks and edits.
Karen Lean for your care, for standing up for her.
Karen Martin for sharing conversations and your Masters thesis, When a Baby Dies of SIDS, Qualitative Research Press, with me.
Various Deckert-Roth-Nixon family members for your medical and physics and hunting conversations, and Carol and David Roth for again offering your lovely snowy Fernie log house as a writing retreat.
My beautiful children, Jordan and Madeleine, whose love and presence sustain me, and your lovely partners, Kelsey Hough and Ryan Stewart, for being family through it all.
And last but not least, Julie, Akou, Susanne, Corey, Heather, and again, Bethany, for making everything about working with Goose Lane a remarkable experience.
Excerpts of Kalila have appeared in Tesseract, Rampike, The New Quarterly, Intersections (Banff Centre Press), and Threshold (University of Alberta Press).
The following authors and lyricists, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, were cited by the characters in this novel.
p. 37 The lyrics are from “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” by Elisha A. Hoffman and Anthony J. Showalter.
p. 38 “Close up the casement, shut out that stealing moon” comes from “Shut Out That Moon” by Thomas Hardy, which appeared in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973).
p. 38 “You promised to buy me a bonny blue ribbon …” is excerpted from a traditional nursery rhyme, “Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be?”, which appeared in http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/2010/07/more_nursery_rhymes_about_peop.html
pp. 48 and 49 The lyrics are from “Under His Wings” by William D. Cushing and Ira D. Sankey.
pp. 58-59 The lyrics are from “Walk Right Back.” Words and Music by Sonny Curtis. © 1960 (Renewed) Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All Rights Reserved.
p. 74 The lyrics are from “If I Didn’t Care.” Written by Jack Lawrence. Used by permission of Range Road Music, Inc. and © 1939 Chappell & Co., Inc. (ASCAP) All Rights Reserved.
p. 79 Excerpt from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, copyright 1943 and renewed 1971 by Harcourt, Inc. reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company.
p. 87 The lyrics are from “Mockin’ Bird Hill” by Va
ughn Horton. Used by permission of Peer Music.
p. 87 The lyrics are from “Way Up High in a Cherry Tree.” Traditional song.
p. 102 The lyrics are from “Onward Christian Soldiers” by Sabine Baring-Gould and Arthur S. Sullivan.
p. 103 This excerpt is from “The Eolian Harp,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. I & II, edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford, 1912).
p. 115 The lyrics are from “Baby’s Bed’s a Silver Moon” from Lullabies: An Illustrated Songbook, edited by Richard Kapp (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997).
p. 118 The lyrics are from “Sing Your Way Home.” Traditional song.
pp. 130-131 Excerpt from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, copyright 1943 and renewed 1971 by Harcourt, Inc. reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company.
p. 134 Excerpt from Albert Einstein in a letter to the family of his friend Michele Besso (March 1955) from Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
p. 171 The lyrics are from “Baby’s Bed’s a Silver Moon” from Lullabies: An Illustrated Songbook, edited by Richard Kapp (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997).
p. 175 Quotation from P.L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins, which appeared in “Personal View: Books,” Sunday Times, December 11, 1988.
p. 181 The lyrics are from “Hush Little Baby.” Traditional song.
pp. 186, 209-210, 233-234, 239, 240 Excerpts from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, copyright 1943 and renewed 1971 by Harcourt, Inc. reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company.
Rosemary Nixon penned Kalila on two continents over fifteen years. She is the author of two previous short story collections, Mostly Country and The Cock’s Egg, winner of the Howard O’Hagan Short Fiction Award. Nixon has taught creative writing at the University of Calgary, Chinook College, and Sage Hill Writing Experience. She was Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Programme and at the University of Windsor.
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