Kalila by Rosemary Nixon Page B

down against your stool. Some people prepare against death their whole lives, edge through each day, heads cocked, the possibilities terrifying: hit by a car, gassed in your sleep, sliced by a mugger’s knife. It’s cold in here tonight. Backs turned in duty.
    You watch small dramas stop and start. Plunged into this hospital world, the catch of the neonatal door, the cadence of a nurse’s heels, you don’t know which is more unnerving, footsteps clicking toward you or the ones tapping away. You sit in the glare of the fluorescent lights. Kalila’s eyes slip closed.
    The doctors say they need time. What was Einstein’s belief? People … who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Time, as we understand it, does not exist .
    A flash of Joyce and Larry’s living room wall: their three framed dead butterflies, stapled behind glass. You look at the spot where Baby Leung was held captive his short life. Hey, you want to say, let’s start the experiment over. Nothing dies. You watch Kalila’s puffing breaths. The particle collapses; it goes on existing as a wave. You watch your child’s body stuffed with tubes and needles; memorize her blue and amber scars. You have sat back and waited for the moment of transfiguration. Water to ice. Mass to energy. Liquid to gas. Lead to gold.
    A doctor enters ICU and speaks in a low tone to the resident in charge.
    It’s moving into winter. Dusk falls now before you eat your suppers, before you leave the house, move through darkening streets to the lights of Foothills Hospital, standing gargantuan against the sky.
    The terrible desire to be wrong.
    You think of Isaac Newton, detached from the world. A secretive man, obsessive, driven by the mystic. He sought knowledge in all he came across.
    He had a nervous breakdown.
    A second doctor steps through the neonatal door. A scientist steps out, risks everything, walks an unchartered path.
    Kalila jolts in sleep, flings out her arms. This daughter, the faintest pencil stroke of an equation. She’s barely here. What holds her? Not medicine. Not science. You reach out to caress your small girl’s blue-tinged forearm.
    The moon has no light of its own, you tell your sleeping child. We can only see the moon because of its reflection off the sun. Your shadow baby stirs and sighs. You breathe with her, quick breaths flitting there, here, there, here.

    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