Kalila (8 page)

The ancient Greeks saw stars and moons and constellations as their gods and heroes. They prayed to them and sought answers to their prayers. They gazed into the night sky and pondered their own place in the cosmos. They tried to understand what we call science.

You can't just study to be a scientist. In order to hypothesize, a scientist must believe. Believe there is an unknown — not what it is, but that it is. How else can he predict? Science equals curiosity. A scientist can't wait for answers. He has to leave the world he knows and go in search of them. A scientist revels in the contradictions.

You stand before your restless grade elevens, pointer on a timeline you have trailed across the blackboard. Frankie's bed head is rising toward the lights in a kind of frenzied glee.

It was in 1900 that Max Planck, the German physicist, formulated an equation that dealt with the emission of light from a hot surface. He couldn't explain
why
his equation worked.

So what was the use? Sukjeevan, twirling a paper clip. Andy gets up to retrieve a sailing pencil, sits down on a tack deposited neatly by Raj. You ignore his small shriek.

I'm starved, Erika mutters.

Well, Planck felt sure that the tiny emitters of light could only have certain values of energy. So, you tip the pointer against the blackboard, he took a leap. He proposed that radiation was made up of small packets, much as matter is made up of atoms. He called each unit of radiation, ‘the quantum, or quanta,' which in Latin means?

How much, Ashton says.

Hungry or not, you can rarely stump these kids. Quantum mechanics is what? A theory that governs the very small, those minuscule pieces from which the universe is made. And for those tiny pieces, the rules of our world do not hold. The uncertainty principle reigns in quantum mechanics.

But what about Planck?

What about him? The man proposed something he couldn't see. He took a chance. Chance based on probability. He
proposed
that radiation is made up of these small packets. Were the physicists of his day impressed? No, they were not. Because he couldn't prove it, they believed Planck a kook. But in 1918 that kook won the Nobel Prize. Thanks to Planck's imaginative thinking, quantum physics entered modern thought.

A wad of paper whaps into the garbage can.

A whispered, Right on!

Freddie, just for you, we know you love your sport, fifteen minutes after school today. A coaching session — no, I'm uninterested in excuses, fifteen minutes in which to perfect your hoop shot. I understand your obsession. I'll be here for you. Three-forty. Sharp.

You move your pointer along the timeline trail. It squeaks and sings.

Caleb, are you listening? Five years later, 1905, a young German physicist, Albert Einstein, verified Planck's findings. But Einstein, too, veered off the safe path and in the process made a discovery that changed our view of the world.

Einstein's Theory of Relativity suggested a brand new view of the universe, based on Planck's quantum theory. He proposed that light moved through space in quantum form. He proposed that light had
at the same time
the properties of a particle and a wave. Sometimes it showed one set of properties; sometimes the other.

Yet this was not the most astounding feature of Einstein's discovery. The most astonishing was his rejection of absolute space and absolute time. All we need to do, Einstein said, is pick a frame of reference against which to set the happenings of the universe. Einstein believed time meanders like a river around the stars and galaxies, slowing and speeding.

Now move forward a decade. Trenton, are you with me? Well, try to look it. Remember mid-term's in five days. Do I review for the hell of it? Niels Bohr, a Dane, carried forward the idea of quantum physics. In 1913, he was first to suggest that the energy of
atoms
are quantized as well. It was Bohrs who discovered that electrons simply shift from one orbit to another, without being seen to travel, existing simultaneously in two different orbits. It's called quantum theory because they make a quantum leap.
Quantum Leap
? You guys watch old TV reruns?

You perch on your desk. The superposition of states of quantum mechanics is truly mysterious, grade elevens. Remember the experiment of two holes in the screen? The light can zip through both holes at the same time, instead of having to choose one over the other. Yes, the impossible can occur: a photon, a quantum of light in other words, can be in two or more states, here and there, at the same time.

That doesn't make sense, a voice pipes from the back.

Sure it does. Anita leans forward. It's like my boyfriend — nice guy, son of a bitch —

Anita, you get my gist. Reflect, grade elevens, on how far quantum mechanics has brought us. Humankind has moved from gazing in awe at the unattainable and distant sky, to a particular and detailed study of what light might be, melding the poetry and mystery of the heavens, to the rational logic of scientific inquiry.

Mid afternoon light washes the window. Everything ghosts white. I expect the scent of calla lily, trillium, jasmine, snow, picture my mother, standing motionless in a gauze curtain of thought, then turning to finish the dishes at her small sink, feeling their way through grey light into the cupboard. Last night she phoned to say she dreamed she was tattooed in large words and people read her. The dream awash in colour. My dad gone ten years and still Mom's house in town feels strange and new though she's been in it six. Each day her world fades deeper into grey-white twilight. Frost stars the ground. She spends less time with her large-print books, more afternoons listening to old tapes. This morning, she said over the crackling telephone wire, she came across one of us girls singing. She pressed Play, leaned into the window, and my dad appeared. I saw Wilf, bent forward on the chesterfield across from the piano, grinning at you girls. His voice lurks in the shadows by the coat hooks, his step on the cellar stairs, she smells his Sen-Sen though she keeps none in the house. Remember, Maggie? She hummed, then sang across the wire:

My mother, imagining colour. The brown of a lonesome cowboy song, the soft mauve of a hymn, the wagon-red of “Way Up High in the Cherry Tree.” She used to sing that song to us when we couldn't sleep.

Song calmed me, after shouting out my childhood nightmares.

Mom had an eye specialist appointment in the city yesterday, she said. The Sawatskys drove her up. The doctor said, Congratulations, Mrs. Watson. You have excellent sight. You're registering 20-25 in both eyes. Quite a feat for someone your age.

Och, why can't I see then? my mother said.

You have macular degeneration, Mom, I reminded her gently. Your retina is full of tiny holes.

Do you know what the doctor told me? my mother said, exasperation in her voice. If you stare sideways long enough, things may grow clear.

I want to report a missing child.

I sit on the front step, seven-forty in the morning, and watch the sharp lights of Jupiter and Venus, brilliant and singular against the darkness. Joyce and Larry arrived last night on the way through to Kelowna. Second time in six weeks. Brodie disappears inside himself when his parents come. Joyce is in the kitchen, scraping up the last of her eggs and ketchup. The air so chilly, minus twelve degrees. I open the porch door and Skipper wriggles through, tears once around the yard, poops, and rips back in.

Where's the mustard? Joyce's head is in the fridge. Don't you guys keep mustard? Rice crackers, lettuce, mayonnaise, pickle jars strew the table.

It's too damn cold to go, Larry says, splashing skim milk on his porridge.

Well, Larry, Joyce says. In case you didn't notice, what this house needs is a little cheer.

Cripes, she says to the dog. Stand on your
own
feet, will you?

It's too damn cold, Larry says. Who wants to tramp around the mountains in the cold?

Joyce has been mad all morning. The doctor said her neighbour Grace Proproski died of lung cancer. She didn't die of lung cancer! She died of pneumonia. Caught it in the hospital too! Cripes! Joyce could've told them that! And now she's livid at the refrigerator delivery man who chipped a nick out of the wall when he wheeled their new fridge in six years ago. Don't they give these guys some kind of training? That's what I'd like to know! Can somebody give these lunkheads driving lessons?

I stand in my kitchen, reciting to myself the unread books that have found their way onto my shelves:
Motherhood and Mourning; The First Year of Life; The True Story of the Three Little Pigs; A Farewell to Childhood; Transformation through Birth; A Complete Guide to Achieving a Rewarding Birth; How Shall We Tell the Children?

So I told him. I said, You want I should call up the manager? Is that what you want, fella? I tell you, that lit a fire under him.

I'm going to the hospital, I say. I swing on my coat and reach for the doorknob.

Now? Joyce whirls. Good God Almighty, it's seven-thirty in the bloody morning! Breakfast hasn't even settled. What's a few hours? She's not going to run away.

At the hospital, a mother exits the gown room, crying. She isn't coming back! She's had it.
Blessed are they who mourn
. I won't become attached! she sobs. A child herself, no more than eighteen, her yellow hair spills down her back, her lipstick fierce.

You
look after him, she hiccups to the startled nurses who stand in the open doorway. I'm not allowed to touch him anyway. I won't have my heart broken. I won't! This unit's like living inside a ventilator! the girl-child cries. You breathe for us. You do it all!

A crowd has congregated at the far end of the room. A redhead is standing, hand on a careless hip, surrounded by nurses, chatting excitedly.

She's keeping her food down?

She's gaining weight?

Her hair's grown back?

I lift my head, strain to hear above the machines.

You
have
to bring her in!

We'll see you at the Christmas party!

The woman stands regal among them, accepting their words as if praise is her due.

When at last she turns to go, nurses trail her to the door. The woman steps through the doorway with a final wave.

I follow. Excuse me.

The woman looks down at me.

I was just wondering — it sounded as if —

I took my kid home? The woman pops a Dentyne stick into her mouth, Well. I did. She eyes her teeth, her eyebrows in a tiny mirror extracted from a messy purse.

I've never met one. A mom who got her papers, passport, and checked out of this place. I can't imagine. Our eyes collide.

Can we have lunch? I say.