Kalila (23 page)

 

I didn't know you would come back.

The child's hair flows along her head like fire.

Above them, the flight path of a plane. It moves across the sky, the hill, into prairie wind, and disappears.

The child's breaths cold on her face.

They both are smiling.

 

The man looks about this room he has painted the colour of evening sand. Things do not go together the way they come apart. Time props itself up like magazines in a cigar store; he is the browser. In the corner of his den he keeps an ancient globe, a map of the world the way it used to be, made up of simple elements: water, wind, earth, fire. Ancient history. He rubs his neck muscles which are always aching. History is no story with beginning, middle, end. It is a string of simultaneous events, past leaking into future; the future into past.

The man's head commingles of late his many years of lessons. Radio waves have always existed; people just didn't have the ability to detect them. A rainbow doesn't exist as a material object. It appears in a different place to each observer.

The man looks out his darkening window. Nothing in the way of evidence — no letter, phone call, touch. Only a dog's dream to say that she was real. He feels his life repeated in a thousand empty lives. Energy slips in its entirety to another level, no longer made of particles; it exists, but it's a wave. The dark brings such sharp loneliness; the heart asking too much.

A flutter. The man turns in his dusky flaxen room. His dog rises, growling, on the far side of the wall. She pads down the hall paralleling the man's den. Growling softly, she seats herself outside the closed door. A flutter at his cheek. Butterfly-wing light. His hand rises to the touch. A moth? No. Quick and silver, he feels the fluted air, the strange world breathing.

The man looks out across the city, across the future, present, past, where stories come apart; where you catch sight in pieces.

Listen.

Melody floats the room

the settling ashes

pure, desiring

he cups her in his hands.

 

The child stands. Air fogs between them.

The prairie grasses sound a note.

Wind spills its gusts inside the woman.

Down below a light illuminates an upstairs room.

Night draws. It has begun to sprinkle. A storm gathering on the horizon.

The woman's veins rivers of molten glass. Air in the trees, the telephone wires sound A minor.

Allegro, cantabile, grazioso. Dolce.

The woman stops halfway down, looks back.

The child, darkening, merges with the landscape.

The note sounds clear now.

One beautiful still tone.

 

Umbilically corded.

Ne m'oublie pas.

 

The man sits in his den. He feels an energy. Late autumn sunlight floods his desk. The sun has long passed its summer solstice; the year is heading toward its shortest day. He holds a pen, looks through molecules of evening light. Einstein's Theory of Relativity has woven time and space together, curving through the stars, bending light away from a straight line. Several particles in a single quantum system share a single inseparable psi field: entangled. Erwin Schrödinger called entanglement the most profound characteristic of quantum mechanics. Einstein called it spooky. Anything that happens to one particle affects the other. They could be in separate galaxies, yet remain in a single quantum state. The man's hands reach for his books. The world turns beneath your feet; you learn to right yourself. You learn to keep on walking. You learn too late that questions need not be answered; rather, answers must be questioned. You learn to live with choices. You learn to live with loss. No point in longing for the light; too much light blinds. His son's last visit the man took him up Nose Hill. The boy ran and ran, tireless, until he reached a large stone where he sat, waiting.

Nothing ceases to exist, the man said, joining his son on the rock. Matter turns back to energy. The boy kicked his football, ran to retrieve it, wiggled back up beside the man. Did you know, the man said, that we are made of atoms formed from hydrogen in stars? That stars are most radiant when they die? We're made from stars that died long before our world was formed. We're made from stardust.

The man gets up, makes himself some tea. The recent many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics suggests that the world splits, creating multiple universes. Each one real. Time loses all meaning when you jump from world to world. For reasons physicists can't yet understand, people only see their own.

The man pulls down a mug from the top shelf. All you can do is seek to fulfill the mind's yearning. That's what physics is, a fairy tale, small glimpses of our world projecting us into a timeless universe where anything can happen. The bigger a scientist's imagination, the more possible events he can see. It is thinking that keeps the man from going crazy.

He carries his tea into the den. All around, the sound of light. He thinks of Galileo, born to the sound of his father's lute. Swept into this world on the music of the universe.

Tonight, the moon is tossed and low. The clouds skim by in fragments, whisk between the stars. The dog is agitated, snuffling. Once, the man longed for certainty, permanence. Those constructs do not exist. The only permanent discoveries are those of the imagination. He walks to the darkening window.

He thinks of the woman. Outside, the lonely signals of a late autumn storm. Lightning knifes the sky. The two of them moving past each other like the song of trains, heading in opposite directions, glimpsing through reflected glass, the glimmer, each other's light.

He breathes to sew his splintered chest together. He picks up his pen. He will tell his class about interference. How when two waves combine they interfere with each other. Then one of two things happens. They can add to each other to make a bigger wave. This cooperative action is called constructive interference.

But, if, by their combination, they cancel each other out, what's left is destructive interference.

Her words. His silence.

Then you can't get anywhere. You just go up and down, until you break the wave. The den in darkness. He moves to illumine a light.

If what we believe of quantum mechanics is true, every time we observe the universe, we disturb it.

Yet nothing meaningful happens until you entangle yourself.

A dead cat and a live one.

He looks at the silver-peppered sky and sees six thousand stars.

 

There is no official version.

A box. She holds in her arms a brief melody of child.
Da capo
. Repeat from the beginning. She turns from the Files Access Office and carries the evidence down the long corridor, steps into November wind. Weight in her arms. This terrible stack of charts, this record of a life. She envisions the papers scattering like ashes, crumbling, dust. She unlocks the car door, belts the cardboard box into the front seat. Leaves fling against the headlights. She drives. Wind fills her throat. She drives, imagining a future.

In the mudroom she kicks off her shoes, walks stocking-footed, silent through her sunlit kitchen. Wind gusts against the house.