Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

None at all, I replied. Nothing in the world matters to me more than to give the kid the best start in life that I can.

She said nothing but somehow looked uneasy. There was a silence. I waited for a response.

Have I misunderstood? Do you have objections to private schooling? I asked her.

No, I don’t, she said, and she smiled, a smile to herself it was.

I don’t know where that conversation was going. Her mother was at the front door, so it ended. And because something about it had made me uncomfortable, I didn’t raise the matter again.

At fifteen weeks, it is fifteen centimeters long. Its sex is predictable with almost 100 percent accuracy. The it has become a he or she in progress. He or she can make his or her own independent movements. He or she is, in short, so easy to imagine that only with conscious effort can you not do so, and even then you will only be telling yourself not to think about something. Information paints a vivid picture, and that is why those who would limit a woman’s choice work first to have a woman informed , denying the right of a human being to choose how to be informed or to choose not to be informed. But what of the couple that decides to have a child? Who would deny them their daydreaming, his daydreaming and hers, the visions of a future human being?

There were signs, but I didn’t notice them. She had, as I mentioned, sold her apartment while I was in hospital and was looking for another, staying with me at her mother’s place. I was barely involved in the process, visiting only one property with her, an apartment much the same, I thought, as the one she’d left, differentiated only perhaps by its better address, something I would never have understood but for my fast education on entering her world. In those seven weeks we never talked about where we — we three — might live.

* * *

I did not perceive the signs because I was in love in an altogether new way. How does one talk about such love? I loved the baby before it was born, before God made the heavens and the earth, you know, before the idea of nations, before any plant had found the memory of its flower. I would pester Emily in bed to let me listen, and I would announce at the slightest tremor, certainly imagined, that the child was a kicker. This one’s a kicker. I thought of how I would play with the baby and the toddler and the boy. I imagined making wooden toys, a doll’s house, a tree house, a rocking horse. I drew sketches. I considered kinds of wood. No plywood; the edges might splinter. I fantasized about answering the child’s questions. I liked doing that the most, Jasper asking questions, why after why, and I would give an answer and wait for the next why or say that I didn’t know but that we could find out, and we go to the library and look things up or sit at the computer, Jasper on my lap, and call up pictures of butterflies and dragons, and I tell him never to mistake the names of things for the things themselves, still less for an understanding of what they are, and I say this knowing it will pain me to watch him learn, for I know the cruel fact awaiting him, that understanding is not what this life has given us. And I lie in bed with him between us, Emily sleeping, her body that had so often coiled into a question mark now echoing the fetal position; she is asleep but not I, too afraid we might roll onto him, onto Jasper, and I whisper into the curl of his ear, Your father loves you all the way to infinity , adding under my breath, whose force terrifies me, and don’t you ever underestimate infinity. And I learn that when you hold seven or eight pounds of new human being in your arms, those seven or eight pounds teach you for the first time, against all the laws of science, how a thing can weigh so little and weigh so much. At another age I teach him chess and we start with a simple version of the game, each side with only a king, a queen, and a pawn, a new and familiar game, and I promise to play with one hand only, and he giggles and he moves the pieces helter-skelter and I move all three of my pieces onto one square and he giggles again because — it pleases me to believe — something in him understands something in me.

There were other signs. There was a moment when I thought it would all come out. Emily, Penelope, and I were standing in the kitchen, Penelope making tea. She took a carton of milk from the fridge, and as the door moved on its hinges she paused, as if time had come to a halt, as if perhaps she had noticed the luster of her daughter’s skin or the softness of its edges.

You look really rather well, darling, she said to her daughter.

But I do not think Penelope considered any clearer notion than that. If the thought had traversed her mind, it had appeared so low on the horizon as to be barely visible. She might have shaken her head; I cannot say. Her daughter remained silent, and if I now remember Emily glancing my way, it seems equally likely that she studiously avoided my eyes.

One day, seven weeks after I came out of hospital and only a few days after that incident in Penelope’s kitchen, Emily called me from work. I was sitting at an oak bureau in the office.

I’m sorry, my love, she said. I’m sorry but I’m not ready. I want to have the child, but we’re not ready. Right now, you have to come first. We’ve got to get you better.

I said nothing. If you know me at all, then you won’t ask why I acceded but why I said nothing. When I began to think about why, my answer first came in stages of error, approximating something hard to find, something obscured by layers of emotion. It seems the answer is, finally, rather prosaic. I believed that she needed me, that this bright and beautiful woman, who might possibly have no reason to love me, needed me now.

I can’t do this on my own, sweetheart, she said. I don’t have the strength. Come with me. Will you hold my hand?

When I try to remember the day itself, all I can assemble before my eyes are mere fragments, as if the sun that day fell in patches. We know or we believe that as well as taking the form of a wave, light has a quantum form of discrete packets. And, defying intuition, these two forms exist together, at the same time, if they exist at all. It is the simultaneity of opposites in one that pleases me, the coterminous existence of contradicting states. I never studied quantum mechanics or relativity; I was too much a pure mathematician in my youth. But now I’m glad I have only sketchy notions of such things, those notions that make their way into the popular consciousness, for the fuzziness around the fringes allows me to piece them together in such form as to make something consoling. I am reminded of what Einstein said on the death of his friend: He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.

* * *

Late in the afternoon, even as dusk was coming in, we went south of the river, to a place where these things happen discreetly, privately, and conveniently, during hours that require no absence from work and no excuses. In the waiting room, I sat with her, holding her hand. I avoided eye contact with others, some couples and a few women who were there alone. I pitied the women on their own, and I sensed the couples clenching each other’s hands. Perhaps, I thought, this is a kind of death, numbness brought on by the vulgar reality of shame. I did not like that room.

In the weeks and months to come, this particular day would return to me, not some uncertain date of an unfinished birth but this particular day with its uncompromising certainty. In the hour I waited, I grasped the nature of my own need. I needed to believe that what she had carried had mattered to her, maybe not as much as it had to me, but that it had mattered to her in some way. It would not be enough to hear it; I had to feel it in the muscle of my heart.