Laplace and All His Demons.
The evening deepened. The games were played, the food was eaten, and the events moved along their planned course, drawn by invisible threads, traveling along hewn tracks.
Noah rubbed his eyes sleepily on the sofa, stubbornly worn, reserved for children who were not at all tired. He had refused to go to bed a number of times, as is customary for a grandson whose parents are not at home, his grandmother serving as a visiting-supervisor in his own house. He was inevitably progressing toward a point where he would have to surrender and go, showered and fed, toward his bed. His defiance was failing him; contrary to his earlier judgment, sleep was becoming increasingly inviting.
His grandmother sat at the high counter in the center of the kitchen, her elbows resting on the natural woodwork surface. Her sitting there felt both familiar and alien to Noah. She didn't confine herself to the living room, where guests were expected to sit, but the place she chose was uncommon among the house's occupants. The counter served mainly as a food preparation area, and the footrest beneath it spent its life mostly as a hanger or storage space. Sitting there was not something the house's residents did, like using a dessert spoon from a forgotten set to stir coffee – an act that had an intimate freedom and a blatant disregard for the household's customs.
A yellowish LED illuminated the woman from a carelessly assembled light fixture above the counter. Due to a slight tilt in the fixture, the rays of light struck the woman in several spots, painting complex shadows around her, and when she moved, the shadows all danced simple dances, repeated endlessly, adding a certain grace and restraint to her measured movements. But there was no restraint in the silent attrition between grandmother and grandson. Noah should have been asleep already. Long ago. His grandmother had sat at the counter and shifted slightly, restrained, for long minutes without uttering a word. Noah was well aware of the defiance in this restraint and stretched the ambiguity that prevailed to its limit, until he thought his grandmother might change strategy and launch an attack on his continued refusal to follow the predetermined rules. And anyway, he really was tired. The battle lost meaning because he himself needed a branch to break so he could climb down from the tree.
His grandmother, recognizing that the point of stubbornness had moved from her to an internal stubbornness within Noah, easily exchanged her anger for compassion and suggested to Noah, with honeyed words, that he try lying down in his bed for a little while, and if he couldn't fall asleep, he could return to the living room. Noah rolled his eyes, groaned, and went, his legs dragging and his hands limp, to his bed.
Now his grandmother could devote herself to the simple pleasures offered by babysitting. Since she was forbidden to clean or cook or tidy, she was left only to rest guiltlessly, reading a book with the support of a cup of coffee. She approached the giant coffee monstrosity that her daughter loved so much and looked at it thoughtfully. The chrome color and wooden handles were inviting to the touch, and the entire machine, which claimed most of the space on the handsome countertop, was an invitation to touch. Handles wanted to be pulled, and knobs were destined to turn, and water, whose boiling yearned to become steam, moved restlessly in the machine's innards. Her daughter had explained to her, in that impatient way that daughters explain things to their mothers, exactly how to make coffee from this mechanical monster. She explained exactly how to grind the coffee and where to weigh it and about pressures and temperatures and attached great importance to the correct stages of the ritual, in all their precise details, leaving her mother, a person gifted with great technical skill, confused, tired, and yearning for simplicity.
She took a cup from the cabinet and poured into it an unknown amount of ground coffee, extracted with great difficulty from the grinder, and added hot water from the kettle. The coffee, for its part, frothed at the amateur use and released bubbles and a torrent of grains that floated and reached the rim of the cup before losing some of their power and plunging deep into the hot liquid pit.
And she was, indeed, the grandmother, a technical person. Years of accompanying processes, quality control, improvement, and efficiency had left her free of the romance associated with processes that were not sufficiently efficient. She was happy about being a grandmother, and especially happy about the role of the observer, who was not obligated. She watched the conduct of this family, whose members were more beloved to her than she could have imagined, as one watches a play in the theater. Completely committed to the plot, admiring the scenery, angry at those who made noise, and happy with the applause. But mostly, she rejoiced that at the end of the evening, she could leave. Sink into her car with the experiences that had befallen her and wrap herself in the silence that her lack of influence on the events, on the plot, brought her.
And as she heard, from the crack of the open bedroom door, Noah's heavy breaths, reporting deep sleep, she began, in her mind's eye, to imagine the silence that would envelop her in a few hours, maybe two, maybe more, when Noah's parents returned, the child who, after a battle, had fallen asleep, and her role would end. Noah's parents had gone to a party, not a common thing, and not a regular reason for babysitting. But her daughter's husband had insisted, said it would do them good. At his work, where there were many people of the creative type, those who argued, argued forcefully, that it was simply a necessity, an obligation, people their age should go to parties, grandmothers should babysit – that was the order of things, and they owed it to themselves to try, it was important and right and natural. She, of course, agreed, even though, between herself, she said that if it were right or natural or important, there would be no need to mention all three.
She sat in the living room. Where Noah had been sitting just a few minutes before. She felt the warmth of his body fading from the cushions and felt her eyelids begin to grow heavy as well.
The vibration of her phone woke her, her awakening made it clear that something was wrong. Her body was cold and stiff. The hour was late. Too late, perhaps so late that it could be considered early. A maternal, amuletic voice rose within her. A voice that she thought, in her role as a grandmother, had been completely silenced, a voice with one simple and familiar message: "They should have been here already." She felt another vibration from the phone. The vibration was certainly her daughter, she was writing to her, certainly that they would be late, that they were coming soon, that the car broke down but had already been fixed, that everything was fine.
She knew. She knew that the solution was within reach of a simple action: she would look at the phone screen, and a little information that shone through it would fix everything, would arrange and straighten the wrinkles. So why wasn't she looking? Why was she building a huge lump over her chest? Between her ribs? She went to check on Noah, tucked in his blanket, and breathed. The phone vibrated again, there, in the distance. She stroked Noah's hair, groaned, and went, her legs dragging and her hands limp, to the device.
She picked up the device, all glass, metal, cold, and vibration. She looked at its black screen, knowing that soon it would light up and reveal its secrets. And then another vibration, as expected, and a message. A lot of details, a lot of reasons. Fog.
There was an event, a shooting, they need her to answer, they have questions. Tiredness. All of it, her entire being, tiredness.
She put down the device, let it slide from her hand to the counter, and went back to sit on the sofa. She stared at the wall and felt the millions of threads that were woven around her. Thin fibers, thick ropes, knitting yarns, and sewing threads. They all began to connect, to intertwine. Not yet pulling, but the power inherent in them was clearly felt, the woven, clear tracks were now revealed to her. She would go in them, pull, and be pulled.
But Noah. Noah was sleeping. The threads that had begun swirling around him were still transparent to him, what had to happen had not yet happened. Because Noah was still sleeping.
She got up immediately. Noah was sleeping. It hadn't happened to him yet. He was still sleeping. And in this suspended existence, life remained as she had left it. His family was whole, his role, like everyone else's, clear. Noah was sleeping. And as long as Noah was sleeping, nothing had happened; the world was exactly what it had been.
She lowered the air conditioner, lowered it past the numbers and degrees, lowered it until the only word that appeared on the screen was, "Low." She went to the bedroom, held her breath, went in, and took the thick down comforter that her daughter insisted on sleeping with, even in the summer, even when she woke up covered in sweat. She wrapped Noah and prayed that she was strengthening his sleep. He breathed deeply, and her own breath caught, but he went back to sleep. It hadn't happened yet. She noticed in his room, there, where time had stopped, and breaths were exchanged, that the light had begun to rise. From a small crack between the curtains, she began to see grains of dust floating in the rays of the first light. She moved the curtain immediately but knew that it would not be enough. The light would find a way. She ran to the kitchen, searched, and found a roll of aluminum foil.
First, she wrapped Noah's window. Stopped the light, fought the sunrise. Then she continued to the whole house; the windows, frozen from the air conditioner, thickened their breath into tiny droplets of water. She continued. When the aluminum foil ran out, she used blankets and towels, and when those ran out – why were there so many windows in this house? – she began tearing pages from her daughter's old physics books that lay at the foot of the bookcase and stuck them with tape to the remaining windows. Equations, waves, and particles, blankets and towels, all fighting the light, strengthening the darkness. Noah could continue sleeping; she could prolong it. It hadn't happened yet.
She sat back on the sofa. The vibrating sounds of the phone had already become so frequent that they faded into the natural noise of the house. Noah would continue sleeping. It hadn't happened yet. The threads could wait, the tracks too. It hadn't happened yet, and as long as Noah was sleeping, it wouldn't happen either. That's all he needed to do. To keep sleeping.
