Madeleine Thien - Dogs at the Perimeter

When Navin and Kiri arrive, the laboratory has emptied. I am the last one, still trying to catch up.

“Momma, we’re here,” my son says. “We’re here.”

I take him in my arms. Navin is holding Kiri’s discarded hat and mittens. They bubble, ripe with colour, from his pockets.

“You’re warm,” Kiri says. “See how warm you are.

“We walked all the way from Côte-des-Neiges,” he says proudly. “Down the big hill and then we saw a hawk but it didn’t come too close.” Unzipping his coat, he goes directly to the Zeiss. He looks into the microscope, studies the slide for a moment, and lapses into a contemplative silence. The first time my son came here, he was four years old. He had gazed at a neuron, lithe as a starburst, stained Nile blue. My son knows about pipettes and single-unit recording, he knows that there are neurons and also glia, that Aplysia is a kind of marine snail, and that the brain, full of currents and chemistry, is never at rest.

Navin goes from microscope to microscope, peering down, in case one of my colleagues has left a slide behind, a bit of hippocampus.

I go to him and touch his elbow. One of his arms folds over me like a wing. I tell him, “I’m glad you came.”

From his pocket he takes out a small, porcelain owl. “We saw this on the way and thought of you.” In my hand it feels like a polished stone, hollowed out, alive and perfect.

“Ma,” Kiri calls. “Come look. Aplysia.”

I go to him and put my eyes to the lens. Kiri rests his fingertips against my hip.

Bit by bit, one micromillimetre at a time, I lower the tip of a glass electrode toward the neuron. My head feels heavy, but somehow the pipette glides with stoic precision. Anaesthetized, pinned flat, cut open with surgical scissors, this innocent creature and her brethren have given me more cells than I dare count. I feel as if I can operate on Aplysia blindfolded: first, removing a tangle of nerves, then, carefully, delicately, extracting a particular neuron and its spindly axon, the axon sagging out like fishing line. Aplysia was the first creature I studied long ago, in Vancouver. In the sea, she looks like a petal swirling through the water, her gills clapping softly together.

When the electrode is touching the cellular fluid, I increase the voltage, waiting, hand on the dial of the amplifier, until the neuron fires. Here it comes: my signal amp is connected to a speaker, so we can hear the cell itself. Boom. Boom . It sounds like artillery fire, like a parade.

This is Kiri’s favourite part. “What’s he saying?” my son asks.

I close my eyes, listening. “He’s saying, ‘Open the door, let me in! I have a message!’”

“Come in, come in,” Kiri whispers. “Tell me.”

My son’s lashes, long and frail, are like tiny wingtips. I kneel down, touching his shoulders. They seem frighteningly small, weightless.

“Where does a thought come from, Momma?”

“From what we see. From the world inside us.”

He considers this. “Can you make a thought?” he asks. “Can you grow one in a dish?”

“Soon we’ll grow everything in dishes,” Navin says.

I smile. “Not yet.”

My son looks at me searchingly. “I’m waiting for you,” he says. He is trying to tell me something more, to make things right. The incomprehension in his eyes cracks my heart. I hold him and whisper in his ear. He says, “It was a mistake. Just a mistake.”

Navin comes to us.

Together, we put on our hats and scarves. I lock the door of the lab and then we go into the clear night. They continue, hand in hand, toward the stores and lights on St. Catherine Street. They have the same loping gait, their bodies sway, like paper boats, from side to side. For a long time, I stand there, trying to keep sight of them. They fade into the crowd. I turn in the other direction and begin walking back.

We kept the secret, Kiri and I. When Navin came home and saw the discoloured skin on his son’s face, Kiri said he had fallen at school. I let the lie stand. It had happened once. In a moment that seemed so large and inescapable, anger had suffocated me and then, just as quickly, dissolved. A few weeks later, Navin went away to London. I tried not to be alone with my son but Kiri, so small and confused, followed me from room to room. “You’re not here,” he kept saying. “Why aren’t you here?” I went out of the house and stood in the cold, desperate to find the way through. I told myself that I could fix things, I must stop what was happening.

In the apartment I turned the heat up high, but still my hands shook. The water came to me, everywhere, loud. Something had spilled on the kitchen floor and Kiri was walking through it, running, stamping his feet. I asked him to stop. My thoughts didn’t fit together. I heard noises all around us, I saw shapes coming nearer and Kiri shouting, oblivious. Stop , I said again. I tried to leave but he gripped my hands. I pulled away, but he was holding my clothes. I tried to free myself. In a moment of wildness, he grabbed a handful of forks and threw them down into the mess. The noise seemed like the ceiling crashing down, falling on top of us, blocking all the light. I raised my hand and hit him, once, twice. I cannot remember it all. And then, in an instant, the noise disappeared.

He was sitting on the floor, gasping, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I knelt beside him, in shock. When I looked into his face, the bruise terrified me, I saw my child curled up, I smelled a burning in the room. He saw me watching him. “Don’t be scared,” Kiri said. “I’m going to fix everything. You don’t have to be scared of me.”

When we lay down that night, he asked me to stop crying, he said I had been crying for days. “What’s happening to you?”

“I don’t know, Kiri.”

He gazed at me, his eyes older now, beginning to understand. “You have to know,” he said softly. “You have to.”

Night after night, in the days that followed, he came into my room. “You’re dreaming,” he said, waking me. “Stop dreaming. Please stop dreaming.” He would crawl into the bed, saying that he was cold, that he did not want to sleep alone. I was afraid to hold my son. One day, Kiri called his father without my knowing. Bravely, he told Navin to return home, that I was ill. He didn’t know how else to describe what we were going through.

Frantic, Navin took the first flight back. I told him everything. At first, he didn’t believe, couldn’t believe.

“Ask him,” I told him. “Please.”

It was January, and the ice covered everything and I didn’t know anymore, I couldn’t explain, how this could have happened, why I could not control my hands, my own body. We went through the motions, going to school, going to work, but something inside me, inside Navin, was dying. The broken world finally fell apart. Our son didn’t understand and I saw that he blamed himself, that he tried so hard not to be the cause of my rage, my unpredictable anger. He aspired to a sort of perfection, as if it were up to him to keep us safe. We sat down with Kiri. I told my son that the only person to blame was myself. I told him that I had to go away for a little while.

“No,” he said to his father. “Please don’t do this. I take everything back.”

Navin came to Hiroji’s apartment carrying a box of my books, Lena’s picture, and a photograph he had taken of Kiri and me at the fairgrounds, La Ronde, the bright halo of the Ferris wheel behind us, neon colours stretching across our skin. He set the box down, weeping without seeming to realize there were tears. He asked me why I had never confided in him, how we had let it come to this. He had been my lover for more than a decade and yet, he said, I remained a stranger to him. Navin wandered around Hiroji’s apartment, taking in the dusty shelves, the pillow and blanket on the couch.