Kalila (13 page)

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 deprivation, 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.

Kalila lies in her isolette, bluish, eyes open.

A baby girl has all her eggs at birth, a nurse chats to another at a neighbouring isolette. She twists the top of a bag of clear liquid dripping into Baby Wong. Yes, and a baby leaves some of her X chromosomes behind in the mother's body when she's born. The nurses fiddle and adjust the numbers. A mother carries her child forever, the nurse says. Imagine that.

You imagine. You stare at the needle sinking into Baby Wong. On the neonatal floor, you spy a stone slipped from a purse or pocket, the bronze colour of spun gold, edges tinged brown; a tiger's eye. You retrieve it; fit it against your thumb. Isaac Newton and his search for the philosopher's stone. You look at the equipment that keeps your baby girl alive: oxygen tanks, apnea monitors, heart monitors, drip bags, respirators, oxygen dispensers, IVs, bilirubin bulbs, heaters. Blinking lights, flashing numbers, warnings of cardiac arrest. The stone warms against your fingertips. You look around at the exhausted babies, battling low birth weights, intrauterine growth retardation, respiratory distress, seizures, asphyxia, infections.

One day an armoured knight rode up the hill. He opened the door of a glass castle, reached out his hands to a small boy. The knight released him from his prison, seated him on his steed. They galloped toward the sky —

You stand abruptly. The stone clatters to the floor. You walk out of neonatal, pulling out your cell.

Maggie, I'm coming to pick you up. Maggie. Let's go for a drive.

Sunday evening. Dr. Vanioc drives down Highway #1 toward Calgary, two hours of solitude, a tree every twenty kilometres, radio off, not harangued by anything or anybody. Still light low on the horizon. It was dark when he left the city Friday — heart shifting into first gear after months of splintered hammering, worries slipping like flow charts out the window, the dog keeping up an excited whine — and will be darker when he hits the outskirts tonight.

He fought rush hour for the silence of those hours alone in the truck, and now two more, no wife, no phone, no child, in his cammo cap that Diane says makes him look mental. Two nights at Murray's farm outside of Brooks. Two days tramping the bush, guns over-and-under, carried broken, the guys fanning out, Brad heading upstream, Cal crossing the beaver dam, Murray striding ahead, kicking at grass and thistles. One of the dogs going on point. An explosion of colour and wings. A shot cracking the air. The bird plummeting. Whit and Connor — Brad's dog — rushing in.

The fraternity he feels hunting is hard to express to Diane. Everything a question of how to explain to Diane. You have to trust people, that they won't shoot you. Diane thunks the iron against his best shirt and says she doesn't have to drive two and a half hours into the country and tramp through bush to find out her friends won't shoot her. You don't bring outsiders along without asking the others, Dr. Vanioc says lamely. This confirms for Diane that they're nothing but a sixth-grade clique. You don't let slip to other hunters where you hunt, he says. And if discovered, you certainly don't tell them how to work the area. Never show your cards.

Diane slaps the ironing board down, carries it to the closet, and gestures out the window. Why don't you just build a treehouse in the big maple, swing a few ropes, and have sleepovers in
our
yard, pound your chests, and play at being guys. Hunting has its own kind of order. He doesn't convince her. He never will.

Whit didn't run into a porcupine this year. Last November he disappeared on point. When the thing didn't fly, Whit attacked. Dr. Vanioc shot the beast in frustration and turned to his shrieking dog. Three held him down. Cal took the hind end, Murray the body, the owner gets the teeth. Brad yanked the quills out with the pliers someone always carries. No point putting off the pain.

Whit missed two birds this weekend, but Connor found them. Whit didn't even know, and Dr. Vanioc is glad for that. The dog was so wiped, he had to lift him up into the truck box when it was time to roll. He's snoring back there and once in a while he yelps in his sleep. Dr. Vanioc rubs his shoulder. The best time of the day is five to six-thirty. That's when they sit around in the dusk and dark and visit in the field before they shower and go out for dinner. Tell stories of the day, how Connor made that perfect retrieve, then last minute swam across the creek away from Brad and plucked the bird with his teeth, ate the entire thing, eyes fixed on Brad, checking out his reaction. Never did it before. Never will again. Everyone guffawing. Brad working his mouth and scowling.

Men only talk when they're doing something. Say things in the dark they wouldn't say in light. Brad's worried about his kid — the second — Cory — who can't settle down in junior high. Dr. Vanioc wonders if the boy's drinking. He's been friends with Brad and Murray and Cal for more than twenty years.

Dark light slips past his cracked-open window. He feels sad and good and everything's a question of perspective. There's order in the world and part of that order is death. The medical system has created the illusion in the city that every kid will live forever. He wipes his hand across his stubble. He can feel embedded dirt. The ritual of the hunt. Whit was bred for this. There is a strange companionship between man and dog and bird. Each knows its place. And for him? The going out and doing it is an attempt to forget. Forget Diane's cold frustration, forget the drugged infants fighting for breath.