The Time Traveler's Almanac (171 page)

Babette says, “There’s this protein drink for kids. Makes her pee bright yellow.”

The other thing about becoming a parent? It becomes perfectly normal to discuss your child’s excreta with anyone who’ll sit still for five minutes. When we were in art school together, Babette used to talk about gigabytes, Cronenberg and post-humanism.

I can hear someone else ringing through on the line. It’s probably Cecilia. I mutter a quick reassurance at Babette and get her off the phone.

*   *   *

Kamla never does get over her obsession with the beach, and with shells. By the time she is nine, she’s accumulated a library’s worth of reference books with names like
Molluscs of the Eastern Seaboard,
and
Seashells: Nature’s Wonder.
She continues to grow slowly. At ten years old, people mistake her for six. Sunil and Babette send her for test after test.

“She’s got a full set of adult teeth,” Babette tells me as we sit in a coffee shop on Churchill Square. “And all the bones in her skull are fused.”

“That sounds dangerous,” I say.

“No, it happens to all of us once we’ve stopped growing. Her head’s fully grown, even if the rest of her isn’t. I guess that’s something. You gonna eat those fries?”

Babette’s come home to visit relatives. She’s quit smoking, and she’s six months pregnant. If she’d waited two more months, the airline wouldn’t have let her travel until the baby was born. “Those symptoms of Kamla’s,” says Babette, “they’re all part of the DGS.”

The papers have dubbed it “Delayed Growth Syndrome”. Its official name is Diaz Syndrome, after the doctor who first identified it. There are thousands of kids with Kamla’s condition. It’s a brand new disorder. Researchers have no clue what’s causing it, or if the bodies of the kids with it will ever achieve full adulthood. Their brains, however, are way ahead of their bodies. All the kids who’ve tested positive for DGS are scarily smart.

“Kamla seems to be healthy,” Babette tells me. “Physically, anyway. It’s her emotional state I’m worried about.”

I say, “I’m gonna have some dessert. You want anything?”

“Yeah, something crunchy with meringue and caramel. I want it to be so sweet that the roof of my mouth tries to crawl away from it.”

Cecilia’s doing tech support for somebody’s office today. Weekend rates. My mum’s keeping an eye on our son Russ, who’s two and a half. Yesterday we caught him scooping up ants into his mouth from an anthill he’d found in the backyard. He was giggling at the way they tickled his tongue, chomping down on them as they scurried about. His mouth was full of anthill mud. He didn’t even notice that he was being bitten until Cecilia and I asked him. That’s when he started crying in pain, and he was inconsolable for half an hour. I call him our creepy little alien child. We kinda had him by accident, me and Cece. She didn’t want kids any more than I did, but when we found out she was pregnant, we both got … curious, I guess. Curious to see what this particular life adventure would be; how our small brown child might change a world that desperately needs some change. We sort of dared each other to go through with it, and now here we are. Baby’s not about changing anyone’s world but ours just yet, though. We’ve both learned the real meaning of sleep deprivation. That morning when he was so constipated that trying to shit made him scream in pain, I called Babette in panic. Turns out poo and pee are really damned important, especially when you’re responsible for the life of a small, helpless being that can barely do anything else. Russ gurgles with helpless laughter when I blow raspberries on his tummy. And there’s a spot on his neck, just under his ear, that smells sweet, even when the rest of him is stinky. He’s a perfect specimen; all his bits are in proportion. I ask Babette what new thing is bothering her about her kid, if not the delayed growth.

“She gets along fine with me and Sunil, you know? I feel like I can talk to her about anything. But she gets very frustrated with kids her age. She wants to play all these elaborate games, and some of them don’t understand. Then she gets angry. She came stomping home from a friend’s place the other day and went straight to her room. When I looked in on her, she was sitting looking in her mirror. There were tears running down her cheeks. ‘I bloody hate being a kid,’ she said to me. ‘The other kids are stupid, and my hand-eye coordination sucks’.”

“She said that her hand-eye coordination sucked? That sounds almost too…”

“Yeah, I know. Too grown up for a ten-year-old. She probably had to grow up quickly, being an adoptee.”

“You ever find out where she came from before you took her?”

Babette shakes her head. She’s eaten all of her pavlova and half of my carrot cake.

It just so happens that I have a show opening at Eastern Edge while Babette and Sunil are in town. “The Excavations”, I call it. It was Russ’s anthill escapade that gave me the idea. I’ve trucked in about half a ton of dirt left over from a local archaeological dig. I wish I could have gotten it directly from Mexico, but I couldn’t afford the permit for doing that. I seeded the soil with the kinds of present-day historical artifacts that the researchers tossed aside in their zeal to get to the iconic past of the native peoples of the region: a rubber boot that had once belonged to a Mayan Zapatista from Chiapas; a large plastic jug that used to hold bleach, and that had been refitted as a bucket for a small child to tote water in; a scrap of hand-woven blanket with brown stains on it. People who enter the exhibition get basic excavation tools. When they pull something free of the soil, it triggers a story about the artifact on the monitors above. Sunil is coming to the opening. Babette has decided to stay at her relatives’ place and nap. Six months along in her pregnancy, she’s sleepy a lot.

I’m holding court in the gallery, Cecilia striding around the catwalk above me, doing a last check of all the connections, when Sunil walks in. He’s brought Kamla. She doesn’t alarm me any more. She’s just a kid. As I watch her grow up, I get some idea of what Russ’s growing years will be like. In a way, she’s his advance guard.

Kamla scurries in ahead of her dad, right up to me, her head wobbling as though her neck is a column of gelatin. She sticks out her hand. “Hey, Greg,” she says. “Long time.” Behind her, Sunil gives me a bashful smile.

I reach down to shake the hand of what appears to be a six-year-old.

“Uh, hey,” I say. Okay, I lied a little bit. I still don’t really know how to talk to kids.

“This looks cool,” she tells me, gazing around. “What do we do?” She squats down and starts sifting soil through her fingers.

“Kamla, you mustn’t touch the art,” says Sunil.

I say, “Actually, it’s okay. That’s exactly what I want people to do.”

Kamla flashes me a grateful glance. I give her a small spade and take her through the exhibition. She digs up artifact after artifact, watches the stories about them on the video displays, asks me questions. I get so caught up talking to her about my project that I forget how young she is. She seems really interested. Most of the other people are here because they’re friends of mine, or because it’s cool to be able to say that you went to an art opening last weekend. The gallery owner has to drag me away to be interviewed by the guy from
Art(ext)/e.
I grin at Kamla and leave her digging happily in the dirt.

While I’m talking to the interviewer, Kamla comes running up to me, Sunil behind her, yelling, “Kamla! Don’t interrupt!”

She ignores him, throws her mushroom-shaped body full tilt into my arms, and gives me a whole body hug. “It was you!” she says. “It was you!” She’s clutching something in one dirt-encrusted fist. The guy from
Art(ext)/e
kinda freezes up at the sight of Kamla. But he catches himself, pastes the smile back on, motions his camerawoman to take a picture.

“I’m so sorry,” Sunil says. “When she gets an idea in her head…”

“Yeah, I know. What’d you find, chick?” I ask Kamla. She opens her palm to show me. It’s a shell. I shake my head. “Honestly? I barely remember putting that in there. Some of the artifacts are ‘blanks’ that trigger no stories. The dig where I got it from used to be underwater a few centuries ago.”

“It’s perfect!” says Kamla, squeezing me hard.

Perfect like she isn’t. Damn.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for this!” she tells me.

“What, is it rare or something?” I ask her.

She rears back in my arms so that she can look at me properly. “You have no idea,” she says. “I’m going to keep this so safe. It’ll never get out of my sight again.”

“Kamla!” scolds Sunil. “That is part of Greg’s exhibition. It’s staying right here with him.”

The dismay on Kamla’s face would make a stone weep. It’s obvious that it hadn’t even occurred to her that I mightn’t let her have the shell. Her eyes start to well up.

“Don’t cry,” I tell her. “It’s just an old shell. Of course you can take it.”

“You shouldn’t indulge her,” Sunil says. “You’ll spoil her.”

I hitch Kamla up on my hip, on that bone adults have that seems tailor-made for cotching a child’s butt on. “Let’s call it her reward for asking some really smart questions about the exhibition.”

Sunil sighs. Kamla’s practically glowing, she’s so happy. My heart warms to her smile.

*   *   *

When the phone rings at my home many hours later, it takes me awhile to orient myself. It’s 3:05 a.m. by the clock by our bedside. “Hello?” I mumble into the phone. I should have known better than to have that fifth whiskey at the opening. My mouth feels and tastes like the plains of the Serengeti, complete with lion spoor.

“Greg?” The person is whispering. “Is this Greg?”

It’s a second or so before I recognise the voice. “Kamla? What’s wrong? Is your mum okay?”

“They’re fine. Everyone’s asleep.”

“Like you should be. Why the fuck are you calling me at this hour?” I ask, forgetting that I’m talking to a child. Something about Kamla’s delivery makes it easy to forget.

“I’ve been on the Net. Listen, can you come get me? The story’s about to break. It’s all over Twitter and YouTube already. It’ll be on the morning news here in a few hours. Goddamned Miles. We told them he was always running his mouth off.”

“What? Told who? Kamla, what’s going on?”

Cecilia is awake beside me. She’s turned on the bedside lamp.
Who?
She mouths. I make my lips mime a soundless
Kamla.

“It’s a long story,” Kamla says. “Please, can you just come get me? You need to know about this. And I need another adult to talk to, someone who isn’t my caretaker.”

Whatever’s going on, she really sounds upset. “Okay, I’ll be there soon.”

Kamla gives me the address, and I hang up. I tell Cecilia what’s going on.

“You should just let Babs and Sunil know that she’s disturbed about something,” she says. “Maybe it’s another symptom of that DGS.”

“I’ll talk to them after Kamla tells me what’s going on,” I say. “I promised her to hear her out first.”

“You sure that’s wise? She’s a child, Greg. Probably she just had a nightmare.”

Feeding our child has made Cecilia’s breasts sit lower on her ribcage. Her hips stretch out the nylon of her nightgown. Through the translucent fabric I can see the shadow of pubic hair and the valley that the curves of her thighs make. Her eyes are full of sleep, and her hair is a tousled mess, and she’s so beautiful I could tumble her right now. But there’s this frightened kid waiting to talk to me. I kiss Cecilia goodbye and promise to call her as soon as I’ve learned more.

Kamla’s waiting for me outside the house when I pull up in my car. The night air is a little chilly, and she’s a lonely, shivering silhouette against the front door. She makes to come in the passenger side of the car, but I motion her around to my side. “We’re going to leave a note for your parents first,” I tell her. I have one already prepared. “And we’re just going sit right here in the car and talk.”

“We can leave a note,” she replies, “but we have to be away from here long enough so you can hear the whole story. I can’t have Sunil and Babette charging to the rescue right now.”

I’ve never heard her call her parents by their first names; Babs and Sunil aren’t into that kind of thing. Her face in her weirdly adult head looks calm, decisive. I find myself acquiescing. So I slip the note under the front door. It tells Babette and Sunil that Kamla’s with me, that everything’s all right. I leave them my cell phone number, though I’m pretty sure that Babette already has it.

Kamla gets into the car. She quietly closes the door. We drive. I keep glancing over at her, but for a few minutes, she doesn’t say anything. I’m just about to ask her what was so urgent that she needed to pull a stunt like this when she says, “Your installation had a certain antique brio to it, Greg. Really charming. My orig – I mean, I have a colleague whose particular interest is in the nascent identity politics as expressed by artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how that expression was the progenitor of current speciesism.”

“Have you been reading your mum’s theory books?”

“No,” she replies. There was so much bitterness in that one word. “I’m just a freak. Your kid’s almost three, right?”

“Yeah.”

“In a blink of an eye, barely a decade from now, his body will be entering puberty. He’ll start getting erections, having sexual thoughts.”

“I don’t want to think about all that right now,” I say. “I’m still too freaked that he’s begun making poo-poo jokes. Kamla, is this the thing you wanted to tell me? Cause I’m not getting it.”

“A decade from now, I’ll have the body of a seven-year-old.”

“You can’t know that. There aren’t any DGS kids who’ve reached their twenties yet.”

“I know. I’m the oldest of them, by a few weeks.”

Another thing she can’t know.

“But we’re all well past the age where normal children have achieved adolescence.”

Goggling at her, I almost drive through a red light. I slam on the brakes. The car jolts to a halt. “What? What kind of shit is that? You’re ten years old. A precocious ten, yes, but only ten.”

“Go in there.” She points into the parking lot of a nearby grocery store. “It won’t be open for another three hours.”