Deconstructing Dylan (2 page)

Despite the scientific background of my parents, they discounted my requests to be sent to a shrink for a total cerebral checkup. “They prescribe way too many pills,” my father said, this man whose career was built on selling drugs for everything from sniffly noses to heart attacks. My mother too was adamant. “Just grow up normal” was the brilliant advice from this complex, intelligent woman who counselled PhDs all over the world.

Normal sounded easier than it was.

In my post-Caroline phase, I was thinking that all my attempts to act and be normal were failing me so I decided instead to go back to cultivating my eccentricities. I shaved my head and began wearing black clothing. I wore a black leather jacket that I had bought at the Salvation Army and realized that it was ironic that a guy like me who aspired to be a vegetarian and made rude remarks at meat eaters would want to wear leather.

My mother and father were appalled. My teachers would noticeably gasp when I walked into the classroom. At night I studied the shape of my skull in the mirror as I listened to Verdi. There was something vaguely familiar about looking at myself in the mirror and seeing that bald scalp. It was a kind of pale, shiny
desert landscape, and each time I rubbed my hand across it, it was like landing on the moon.

Sometimes, too, when I looked into that mirror, it was as if someone else was looking back. The other me. And he was reminding me that I was supposed to remember something. Something that was just beyond my grasp. Like a memory that was more of a taste than a thought, more a sound than an idea. And then sometimes I would feel the pain.

I felt it in the back of my brain at first, then all over my body. It shot through me and then it was gone. And as soon as it disappeared, despite how much it hurt, how much it shocked and scared me, I felt whole again. I felt like me and no one else. I experienced a flood of endorphins rippling through my veins. I felt alive and free and happy. And ravenous to simply live my life to the max.

But, no, I did not feel normal.

In school, I was what is euphemistically called an average student. C-plus to tell the truth. I think I was smarter than that but I was bone-lazy when it came to school. Aside from my abiding love of the insect world and the Loch Ness monster, I was also quite interested in the human body and how the mind works. I didn't have the whole picture by a long shot, but I had some interesting bits and pieces. I knew how we smell things, for example.

When you inhale air, you breathe in all kinds of molecules, a great cornucopia of various molecules. They smash into your olfactory epithelium and the receptor cells that greet them. The information about the smell (be it sweet or stinky) is ushered on to olfactory bulbs that hurry the information on to the olfactory cortex.

So the smell never makes it to the brain, just the information about the smell. One theory suggests that we smell something when the shape of the molecule entering your nose finds an olfactory receptor that is the same shape. If the molecule fits, we get the smell. If there is no fit, we don't smell anything. Sometimes when you smell something, it triggers a distant memory. Sometimes there are powerful emotional connections. Once, while walking in the woods, I smelled the sap of a pine tree and found myself falling down on the floor of the forest crying. No one saw me do this and I was glad for that. I don't know what it was but, ever since then, I've felt this emotional tie to pine trees. I told Caroline that pine trees made me cry and she said that I was sweet. “I like it when men are emotional,” she said. So I purposefully took her to the park so I could smell some pine trees and I did start crying. She was impressed.

But that was before I started talking about insects and opera and lost her to the world.

When I was twelve, my parents took me to Scotland so that I could look for the Loch Ness monster. I had been begging them for two years to take me there and to go out on a boat in the loch. We visited ancient castles in ruins and I listened to the wonderful way the Scottish people spoke. Everyone around the loch was certain that the giant sea creature was real but none said they had seen it first-hand. The loch was deep, they said, and anything was possible in those depths.

Against my parents' wishes, I swam in Loch Ness. I didn't have any bathing trunks so I swam in my underwear. I was not afraid of the monster and was certain he would not want to kill a skinny little North American boy in boxer shorts with reindeer on them. I was right about that. The Loch Ness monster had better things to do. Swimming in the loch gave me a feeling of déjà vu,
but then I was the king of déjà vu. Some things about Scotland seemed so familiar. Some things did not.

When I ate haggis, for example, I was certain that I had never before eaten such a thing. When I listened to bagpipe music, though, it made my hairs stand on end. I wanted to learn how to play the bagpipes but by that time I had already attempted the French horn, the oboe, the cello, and the trumpet. I had not been much good at any of them and my parents had spent quite a bit of money on musical instruments that I failed to master. Bagpipes were expensive and they told me it wasn't going to happen.

So they bought me a penny whistle and I did well enough on that. And later when I went through my Australian phase they bought me a didgeridoo, my next great musical passion. I played the didgeridoo with great panache. I was the only kid in my school who played that instrument but was never asked to perform with the high school band or march around with it at football games. If I had been given the bagpipes, all of that would have been different.

While in Scotland, I got a cold and it was decided I should go to a doctor for a complete physical checkup. “Scottish doctors are the finest in the world,” my mother said. “Consider this good luck.”

I was poked and prodded and sampled and I didn't like any of it. In the end, the bespectacled Dr. Ernest
MacKenzie, “one of the finest doctors in the world,” said I had a common cold and it would go away. Which it did. He said I probably caught it swimming in the cold water of Loch Ness. It was a Loch Ness cold. And that made it rather special to me. MacKenzie was a thin, intense man with piercing eyes. He drew blood from me with a needle and it hurt. He looked almost guilty for the pain it had caused but he didn't apologize. I wanted to dislike him, but as soon as he was finished he had a piece of pizza waiting for me followed by vanilla ice cream. That's all it took to get my forgiveness.

I remember that there were fields of sheep on the Scottish hills and I remember how the people were both rude and friendly at the same time, a skill that I greatly admired at twelve and tried to emulate. There was something exciting about being in such a foreign place but also something familiar. There were researchers who knew my mother — or at least knew who she was. And they took us out to dinner — haggis and beyond. I remember that I did not want to come home. I wanted to move into an old stone house near Loch Ness or on the Isle of Skye.

There are, in the insect world, long-legged bugs called pond skaters or water striders that walk across the surface of ponds and lakes. They literally walk on water
because their thin, hairy legs support a nearly weightless body. They make a tiny, dimpled depression on the surface of the water but they usually do not break through it and sink. The skin of the water's surface is strong enough to support them.

As a child, I would catch the striders and try to take them home in a jar of water but they nearly always drowned. Once the surface of the water was disturbed, the water strider could not support itself. I felt bad about drowning them and stopped doing it.

Most of my life I have felt somewhat like a water strider — able to walk or run on the surface of things, knowing that if something were to disturb that surface, I would sink into whatever was beneath me and drown. I don't mean to sound melodramatic. Part of me, though, often wanted to pierce that surface and drop beneath. I wanted to see what was down there. I wanted to be immersed although I did not want to drown.

I felt heavy and sad after Caroline dumped me. I had not known how much I cared for her until she had moved on. My ego was bruised, my confidence shaken. Anyone could have seen that she and I would not have lasted the school year. In truth, I think it was not only my talk about insects but also my compulsion to read books about death and dying that put Caroline off. My
new-found interest was a book on near-death experiences, which I read when I was bored in my classes. I would hide it behind the math textbook I was supposed to be looking at. I was preparing myself to die. I understood that much of life was a preparation for death and whatever came after, that living and dying were part of a natural process. I wondered if all my life I would be the water strider on the surface of things, and one day the surface would be disturbed and I would sink into whatever was beneath. I wondered, Would that be when I would understand who I really was and what it meant to be alive?

Caroline thought I was morbid. Bugs and death drove her away. Who could fault her for that?

I didn't always mind skating along the surface of things like the water strider. There was a lightness to it — sometimes I was unaffected by everything around me. The good stuff and the bad. Other times, when I felt heavy, it was more like being the Loch Ness monster. I was in the deep murky water, alone. Some believed in my existence, some did not. I was the only one of my kind on the planet, or so I believed. I
was
a kind of monster, I suppose, although I didn't think of myself as scary. I was waiting for a bold explorer to discover me. I wanted to find out if I was real.

“It's Robyn, with a
y
,” the new girl insisted. Mrs. Gillis hated it when students were surly and Robyn was being surly with a capital
S
.

“Okay, Robyn with a
y
, do you want to tell us anything about yourself?” Mrs. Gillis was holding her glasses in her hand and giving Robyn a look, the special look she used to intimidate. She was treating this new girl pretty rough, trying to embarrass her. She was being a bully in her own way. There are teachers who are kind human beings and there are teachers who are just plain cruel. Mrs. Gillis fell into the latter category.

“Why would I want to tell you anything about me?” Robyn snapped back. “I have a right to my own privacy and if you don't like that &hellips; well, screw you.”

I was falling in love. The Loch Ness monster was surfacing into the bright sunlight of a beautiful
Scotland morning. There was bagpipe and fiddle music in the hallways of all the empty castles.

Mrs. Gillis glared at Robyn. A hush fell over the class. Mrs. G knew that she could send Robyn to the office and get the girl in trouble on the first day of class, or she could hold off and get back at Robyn in some more sinister way. Mrs. G wanted to hold off and wait until she had the field of advantage. She had played this game for many years. She knew how to get back at a student who didn't show the proper respect.

Robyn said nothing more but popped a piece of chewing gum into her mouth.

I looked over at Caroline and could tell she was jealous. Robyn had commanded the attention and respect of everyone in the class. Whereas Caroline would use her flamboyance and exaggerated gestures to demand an audience, Robyn had demonstrated a fiery, understated quality that was far more powerful.

“The substandard use of English always indicates low moral character,” Mrs. Gillis said to the rest of the class. “Sometimes it reflects a person's limited intelligence and maturity, one's inability to function in society as a civilized human being.” Her voice was cool and clinical as if she were delivering an address to the United Nations.

Robyn had decided it was a good time to study the nail of her thumb. I think she was holding back.

“Open your anthologies to page 324,” Mrs. Gillis said and dropped a copy of the book on Robyn's desk so it made a loud wallop. Robyn just stared at the book like it was a dead rat that had been deposited in front of her.

I think it was a poem by Robert Frost that Mrs. Gillis was teaching that day but it could have been Shakespeare. I can't remember. I was studying the poetry of Robyn instead. She had shoulder-length black hair. She had large dark eyes and there was a fire in those eyes. Defiance was the name of her game. She had a beautiful full mouth that would be dangerous to kiss. Her skin was brown — something ethnic about her — black or South American or maybe Arabic, but none of the labels seemed quite right. She stared at Mrs. Gillis as if prepared to do battle with her most hated enemy. Mrs. Gillis pretended she did not see this as she reminded the class that the poem was going to be on the test and that the test was going to be “significant.”

“Those who do poorly in Grade 11 academic English rarely get into university,” she reminded us. It was a threat, no more, no less.

Caroline was looking at herself in her pocket mirror, putting lipstick on and fumbling with makeup. She too saw Robyn as a threat. I was suddenly glad that Caroline was out of my life. I now felt free and happy and ready to give myself over to this new dark, surly girl named Robyn.

After class, I caught up with her and asked her where she was from.

“I'm not from anywhere,” she said. “I live in the present and avoid thinking about the past. The past, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't exist.”

“Okay, good point.” I had only been trying to make small talk, but, like Mrs. G, I was being tested. Human or otherwise, which would it be?

“Where are you headed to?”

“The washroom,” she said. “I have to pee.”

“Oh yeah. Me too.”

She stopped and gave me a look that announced her decision concerning which category I fell into. “This has been a truly intimate moment,” she said, stopping by the door to the girls' lavatory.