Kalila (12 page)

Mutterings. Scramblings. A frantic search for pencils.

Edward Lorenz, sir.

Early morning light streams through the classroom windows. Dust hangs, pale and shifting, students' faces hard to see.

Lorenz was fascinated by the unpredictable, the seemingly random behaviour occurring in a system that should be governed by deterministic laws. The kinds of systems Lorenz was dealing with were disordered, but Lorenz searched to find underlying order in his random data. To find such an equation, however, involves many variables. A very small initial difference may make an enormous change to the future state of a system.

Does this have something to do with butterflies? Frankie is combing his hair, holding a tiny hand mirror.

It does. And you look lovely, Frankie. The theory was first introduced to describe unpredictability in — Evan. Your toast popped.

And sure enough, the smell of toast wafts through the classroom. The students crane their disbelieving necks to find quiet Evan Stewart unplugging a pop-up toaster balanced on the radiator, and now he is pulling from his backpack a tiny tub of peanut butter, another of jam, and a plastic knife. Evan slathers his toast.

Sorry, Mr. Solantz, Evan says earnestly, mouth thick with peanut butter, but I practise on the swim team till eight-thirty Monday mornings and I don't have time for breakfast, which is, he waves his knife, according to Mrs. Mahovalich, my grade two teacher, the most important meal of the day. He cuts his toast in four, pops a quarter in his mouth. The kids are giggling —
now
they're wide awake.

Evan, be kind enough to give us a definition of the chaos theory.

Evan cheerfully stuffs in another quarter, waves a hand, pulls a baggie from his backpack, and drops the empty tubs inside, along with his plastic knife. He withdraws a napkin with a scruffy hen on it and wipes the grease from his desk. Swallows.

How weather around the world is affected when a butterfly in South America flutters its wings, sir, he says respectfully and cleans his teeth with his tongue.

You shake your head. Next time, Evan, it would be nice to share. Yes, Lorenz started with weather. And he found that the equations governing weather were so sensitive that he came to the conclusion that if a little butterfly palpitates its wings in one part of the world, it may affect the arrival of a hurricane or tropical storm — or divert it — somewhere around the globe.

Evan pops the toaster in his backpack, hollers, Ow! and dumps it back out to cool.

Right, you say. The chaos theory, which Evan is so aptly demonstrating here for us this morning, is a field of science that studies the complex and irregular behaviour of nature's systems, Evan being only one. What are some examples of the chaos theory in practice?

Hands bob the air.

The currents in oceans, sir.

The dripping of a tap.

The collision of billiard balls.

Russian roulette.

All correct, you say. Or let's take something closer to home. The evolution of the human species. Our body's inner workings. Even the human heart and its blood flow have a chaotic pattern. Or music. Not that many years ago a graduate student in electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology used chaos theory to recreate musically variating themes in Beethoven's symphonies.

You sit down behind your desk. The twentieth century, grade elevens, is known for three monumental discoveries: relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory. And who knows what new discoveries await?

I still don't get what a theory that can't be consistent gives us. Gurinder, polishing his glasses.

Hope, you say, standing abruptly. Such a system gives us hope.

The bell jangles. Chaos ensues, students slipping back into runners, stuffing textbooks into bags, and heading for the door.

Evan, you call to their departing backs, next week we review the big bang theory. We'll look forward to your demonstration.

You walk through a windblown Sunday morning, weather and light, smoky with early December, molecules hanging, the wind's song snatched away. Then you open a door and replace it with hospital clutter. A nurse is weighing Kalila's diaper. You stand aside to watch the nurse's back, the way her hair graces her slender shoulders, the tiny white scar on her forearm you want to run a finger over, the muscles of her upper arms flexing as she does her chores. When she finishes, she smiles at you and you turn to your baby, watching the way her small hand, lost in a baby dream, reaches out to nothing, fist clenching, opening, clenching, as if latching on to daylight.

The nurse says, Okay. Her creatinine level is high today. One-ninety.

What should it be?

Forty.

Machinery chugs.

This means her kidney isn't functioning, not filtering the blood. The nurse taps the intravenous bag, looks back at you, a look that's almost coy. The baby's most comfortable this morning on her tummy. She turns to other duties. One side of Kalila's head is freshly shaved, what little hair grew back now gone, to clear a vein for another intravenous. The nurse returns to say they are administering a drug called Eprex — it makes red blood cells.

My father-in-law died Wednesday, the nurse confides, so I'm just back. Her hands sort out the cords. He had a heart attack, then kidney failure. Had he lived, he'd have been institutionalized. She has moved to stand next to you, gives you a sideways glance, then back turned to check the drip, she says in a careful, casual voice, My mother-in-law had to make the decision to pull the plug. She taps the tube above Kalila's isolette. It nearly killed her. She adds softly, She made the right one though.

You look at her sharply, but she has moved to arrange an isolette drawer. To fill the silence, to cover its startling implication, you pick up
The Little Prince
, take over the space beside the isolette.

The baby's eyes are closed. You lean over her isolette, your cheek against its chill.

Little princess. Once upon a time Phoenician sailors had a shipwreck, and along with pieces of their wreckage, they washed ashore. Wet and bedraggled, they stumbled onto the sand and gathered together to see what they could salvage. One sailor retrieved a small cooking pot, another several blocks of natron, a chemical used most often for embalming the dead. They searched the shore for roots and seaweed, berries, gathered together sticks on which they piled the natron, and, after several tries, managed to light a fire. It soon grew into a bright blaze. The sailors shivered around its searing heat until their eyes grew heavy, and, one by one by one, the men slid into sleep.

Imagine their surprise when they awoke in dawn's first light. A hard and shiny decoration stuck to their cooking pot. They snatched up the pot. The decoration rode along. They all peered through. The sand beneath their fire had melted, run in a liquid stream, until it cooled and hardened into glass against the pot's rough surface.

Little princess, glass can awaken, melt, dissolve, glass can open a closed door —

Your heart whaps once, wham-whams erratically. You stare at the isolette, its small door flung ajar. Baby Leung's name tag untaped and dangling. What are the probabilities? A baby's fled his box.

An aide is housecleaning the tiny room, polishing the little chamber with a cotton cloth. The nurses, pinch-faced, don't look at one other, won't look at you. Hammering silence. Kalila opens her eyes, makes to cry. You offer your finger, and her little face moves back to serene. Brief cool caress of darkness in your hand. A baby. A life.

Here. Gone.

You sink 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.