Kalila (2 page)

Möbius syndrome? he scribbles.

They'll have to feed her through gastrostomy.

The angled doors of Foothills Hospital slide apart, and you enter the smells — floor polish, coffee, corned beef, flowers, medication, pus. You think, We exist because of an explosion of stars. O
₂
, CO
₂
, H
₂
. You got the mail before you drove here. Maggie's mother sent a baby quilt, bits from her Saskatchewan sewing sunroom, a starburst pattern, tiny triangles of brown, blue, green, yellow, patterned, cotton, linen, gabardine, hand-stitched leftovers from Maggie's childhood.

The elevator pings. A group of anxious visitors herds on and mills while everybody stabs a button. This morning you explained Schrödinger's cat experiment to your grade eleven class. A box, an unfortunate cat shoved in a box, radioactive material, and a potentially lethal device. This device could kill the cat, depending on whether the radioactive pellet emits a particle and triggers the device. There is a 50-50 chance. You step out of the elevator and head down the hall. The observer's paradox. The scientists outside the closed box have no idea of the fate of the cat, which remains in a state of superposition, of limbo: the cat alive
and
dead, or neither alive
nor
dead — until an observer opens the box and looks inside. You scrub your hands, don the yellow gown, open the heavy door, and step into the cold, sharp neonatal climate. Breathe its absence: a stroller ride, a winter toque, tugs on a mother's nipple, a rubber ball. A series of bleating beeps. A nurse calls, Brady. Baby Heisler. Got it.

You look at the sweeping reach of babies, bereft of the smell of oranges, autumn quilts, iced tea. A room full of babies who cannot see the stars. You wind to your baby's isolette and peer down at the child breathing in great gulps, as if the air were uncertain, retreating from her. Einstein never accepted Schrödinger's quantum mechanics. Einstein said God doesn't play dice with the world. You reach into the child's isolette, rub your thumb, like rubbing Aladdin's lamp, against the baby's forehead and an agonizing flush of hope bursts across your skin. You straighten the cords, arrange the files flung atop her isolette, collect two pens, some lint, a piece of napkin from the floor.

Order in the world.

Foothills Neonatal ICU breathes story. Stories weave the isolettes, the suction machines, heart monitors, the oxygen tubes, the heaving ventilators. They cling to the hems of nursing uniforms and ride the lapels of doctors' lab coats. They smell, these stories, these angry prayers.

I hold Kalila on my lap, an intravenous needle stuck in her head. Yellow bruises criss-cross her shaved scalp where intravenous needles went interstitial. Even needles fail my baby. When I was a child, farmboys caught frogs, cut off their legs, and let them go. The frenetic gyrate of legs, the bulging eyes. Stop it! I hate you! Sobbing. The boys laughing.

Just being boys.

Kalila fights like that when the nurses suction her. Her fists punch out, head wheels from side to side. I conserve strength for those suction episodes — twelve, fifteen times a day. A tube inserted up the baby's nose, tiny mouth open in a gag, push farther, farther, frog legs jerking, a nurse hauling tubing like a hose snaked down a drain hole. White-green gunk sucking up the hose, spastic limbs, the baby's face a caricature of anguish. The nurses step around me, doing their job.

Dr. Staszick enters. One of the boys. The head nurse is also one of the boys. This is an old boys' club and we have crashed it. Nobody likes us here. Nobody likes my baby. I ask permission to bathe Kalila. To lift her into a warm water basin. The surprise of skin on skin. Baby, you exist. We're really touching. I know to arrange the gastrostomy tube inserted in the baby's stomach, to keep hold of it twelve centimetres down the tube so gravity won't pressure and pull it free, to arrange the oxygen tube, the heart monitor attachment tubes, her intravenous lines. My fingers support her at the small of her neck. Kalila finds herself in water, her expression is surprise. I lap water against her belly, the soles of her feet. Cheek against my baby's head until her features lose their tenseness, her head moves to touch her cheek to mine and she kicks. For one strange moment the institution smell lifts, and I am a live whole mom holding a live whole baby.

No bath! Nurse says no time this morning. Beepers are going off. Babies are trying to die. The nurse has filled a basin with water, then abandons it when the baby next to Kalila goes into cardiac arrest. The nurse moves fast, her elbow catches the baby's foot, which hits the basin, knocks it to the floor, and now the cleaning staff has been called in — more bodies, more equipment.

I hum. It's an act of rebellion. I hum to Kalila, who ignores her bathwater sweeping the neonatal floor.

My baby's life here at Foothills Hospital is one big awful song.
Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-nine bottles of beer
. Fragments. Bleak and rhythmic. The sickening repetitive pattern.
Pass one down. Hand it around
. Same tune, same words. Fewer bottles.

The lab benches are cluttered with archaic meters and ring stands and retort stands. The pipes bang, someone has turned the water on upstairs. Dan Lemer is making origami from his physics handout sheet.

Okay, class. A quick review. Who did the first experiments on light? you ask your grade elevens.

Isaac Newton, Mr. Solantz.

Good, Malik. When?

Sometime in the 1600s.

It appears to be a miniature piano.

Tell us how Newton did it. You knock your knuckles on a desk. Pearl straightens sharply. Dan abandons the piano and starts in on a swan. You take great breaths. Breathe air breathed by kids who care about basketball and scoring. Kids whose expectations for you are not to fix them, just to pass on information.

What instigated the experiment?

A sunbeam shining through a crack in a blind, sir.

You betcha. Gavin, do your chemistry homework in chemistry class. This is physics. He let it fall at an angle on a triangular glass prism and set up a white screen the beam would strike against. The beam was already bent upon entering, and of course it was bent much farther when it came out the prism on the other side. To his surprise, he found — what did he find?

A bunch of colours.

Right, Lazar. Instead of forming a white light, the sunbeam spread itself into a band of colours. To which, by the way, Newton added indigo, though no one knew exactly what colour indigo was. Some say he named it after his niece, others a lover. Newton wasn't always bright — he did get sunblindness from his experiments.

I heard Newton was gay! pipes Gaganpreet from the back.

Indigo is not gender-specific, Gaganpreet. For some reason Newton wanted seven. Seven was magical, the influence of alchemy. The notion exists — you scratch out a layered pictogram on the worn blackboard in this archaic room, in Calgary's oldest school — that butterfly wings are layers of transparent scales. Like so? Each species layers in a unique arrangement. This means, of course, butterflies refract light in different wavelengths, hence they appear — ?

— as different colours.

Dan's hand has been waving through your entire talk.

Hey, Mr. Solantz, you spelled
spectrum
wrong.

Jesus, fix it in your book, says Huong.

Good solution, Huong. More influence from you and we'll have Daniel here thinking on his own. You slap the chalk dust off your hands. Feel almost happy. It hovers in the morning light. We rarely think about light, or the eyes we see it with. Did you know, grade elevens, that you see some things better by looking sideways? In good light you see clearly and in colour, right? But take something that gives off only a faint light, such as a small night star, you'll actually see it only if you look
beside
it —

Cool. Dan has turned in his desk, grinning flirtatiously at Huong.

— causing the light to fall on our retina where our rods, those bits of our eye that detect light, are closely bunched.

That's not where Dan's rod is, Huong mutters.

Dan calls, Hey, sir, I know what spectrum means in Latin. Ghost!

Who says dead languages aren't useful? you say. Yoohoo, anybody home, Oleg? Feet on the floor. It was Newton, as well, who first decided that light consisted of tiny particles travelling at tremendous speed. You drop your piece of chalk from hand to hand, weave among your students. But in 1678, pens ready? the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens found proof for an opposing theory. He believed that light consisted not of particles but of very tiny waves. This made sense to him because it explained the differing refraction of the different kinds of light. The shorter the wavelength, he thought, the greater the refraction. Which colour, by the way, has the shortest wavelength?

Red.

Nope. Gurpyar?

Violet.

Right. Which has the longest?

Red. I guess.

Good guess. Didn't your grade six teacher make you memorize Roy G. Biv? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet?

The kids are staring at you with incredulity.

But Huygens's theory didn't answer everything. Discoveries, class, only serve to open up more mysteries. Why, for instance, light waves can't go around obstacles, though sound waves can.

The students' eyes are on the clock. Countdown to lunchtime. You lay aside your chalk. To this day, nobody knows for sure what light is. You perch on your desk, hope the day will never end. The students' shuffling quiets.

Try this. If you think you know what light is, set up an experiment — and you know what results you'll get? You'll get the results you want. If you think light is made up of photons or particles, you can arrange an experiment that will prove light behaves like tiny pellets shot from a gun. But hang on. Your lab mate sets up another experiment and proves that light acts like a pebble dropped into a creek — it circles out in waves. So what is light? Frankly, we don't know. Why don't we know? Because, grade elevens, each time we make an observation, we change the thing observed.

Uh-uh. You don't pack up until the bell rings. Alan, get your binder back out. Scientists have made countless discoveries with their experiments, but the smart ones use their imaginations. Dream possibility. What did Albert Einstein say? Imagination is more important than knowledge.

The classroom empties. Chalk dust down your pants.