Deconstructing Dylan (3 page)

I felt the put-down sting. She might as well have slapped me on the face. And it showed.

Then this really crazy thing happened. She let down her guard. Her face softened. She opened the door to the girls' room. “Wait here,” she said.

I waited. When she came back out, she looked me in the eye this time. The fire was still there but it wasn't anger. “What's your favourite book?” she asked.

I swallowed and took a chance on telling her the truth. “
The Field Book of Insects
by Frank E. Lutz,” I said and waited for her to laugh.

“Interesting choice. I haven't read it but I bet it's a real page-turner. You really into bugs?”

“Yes. Ever since I was a kid. I can identify a tiger beetle in its larval stage and tell you if it is going to be a male or a female.”

There was a hint of a smile. “You are so weird, you know.”

“I know.”

“But weird is good. Smart and weird is a good combination.”

I couldn't help myself. I smiled. “Thanks,” I said. “What's your favourite book?”

“
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
,” she said. “Ever read it?”

“No, but I've read lots of books about death and dying. It's one of my favourite subjects. Is it in the library?”

“Here? I doubt it.”

“Well, in the public library?”

“Probably. But I'll loan you my copy.”

“Cool.”

“If I loan it to you, you have to read it.”

“I will.”

“Are you afraid of dying?”

“A little.”

“I'm not,” she said with great certainty. “Life scares the shit out of me but not dying.”

Now she was scaring me. “You're not like&hellips;?”

“Suicidal? Hell no. I'm not ready to die. You have to prepare yourself for that, like it says in
The Tibetan Book of
the Dead
. It takes a whole lifetime for most of us to be ready for the liberation from our bodies. It's a lot of hard work. I've gotta suffer for a long time so I can prepare myself.”

I felt I had just met a kindred spirit or even my soul-mate. “School is a good place to suffer,” I said. “Can I suffer with you?”

“You already are, I think. But yeah. Sure. You're cute. Weird, smart, and cute. And I want you to teach me some stuff about bugs.”

“I will.”

She stopped by a classroom and announced, “Chemistry. I took chemistry. Nothing sucks in school worse than chemistry. I took it, though, so I could learn to suffer well. I better get in there and go to it.”

“Robyn,” I said. “There's something you should know about me.”

“And that is?”

“I'm different.”

“So?”

“There's something about me that's not quite right. I don't mean like a bad heart or liver or anything. And I don't mean like I'm crazy. It's something else I can't quite nail down but I need to figure out what it is.”

“Okay. That's okay with me. I'll help you if you like. It'll be like a science project.”

My parents were way too protective of me when I was growing up. They thought I would choke on popcorn. They thought I would be run over by a bus. They thought I would catch a deadly disease. They thought I would fall out of a tree.

I did fall out of a tree when I was thirteen. I fell from very high and I fell very fast. It was an oak tree, I remember. On the hard ground I was alone and I was unconscious. No one found me. I just woke up with a headache and a very sore shoulder. I was fascinated by the fact that I had gone away and come back. I don't know where I went. I just know that it was blue and it was very beautiful. There was no real me there, just sky. I had become the sky somehow, and that was what I was looking at when I woke up — staring at the sky through the tree limbs.

My mother was home when I arrived and saw that I had been injured. She raced me to the hospital and they scanned every inch of me. Damaged but not dead was the result.

I often wished my parents were not as smart as they were. They subscribed to
Scientific American
and we had twelve science channels in the house. They were health nuts as well. I had to hide junk food in my room to get by. Both my mom and my dad were believers in the new genetic brands of food. Enriched this and enhanced that. If we were going to eat potatoes, those potatoes had to have a kind of pedigree. My mother did background checks over the WorldCom on the brand names of potatoes. A potato or even a turnip nearly needed a university degree before it was eaten in my house.

By the time I was sixteen I was trying to wrest some control over my life: what I ate, what tree I would fall out of, when I would cross the street, and what friends I would have. I was still a bit of a Loch Ness monster looking up at the surface of the water from very deep murky depths. I was not a disturbed person like Miles Vanderhague or anything. Miles was addicted to violent video games and said insulting things to people as often as he could get away with it. He accused people he did not like of smelling bad and of wearing the wrong brand names of clothing.

I was the opposite of Miles Vanderhague. I smiled a lot, a perfected goofy smile that made people think I was on some of those newer designer drugs. But, despite my father's venue of employment, I was not a drug lover. I had my own little mysterious quest of trying to live life like I really meant it. I was trying really hard to get to the surface and all I could do was keep swimming for the sunlight.

Robyn was a fresh breeze in my life. She was oxygen in my lungs.

We'd walk to the mall and she would stare at the other students from school who were shopping there. Robyn said she never shopped for anything new. She'd only buy used clothing or things recycled. She was also studying astrophysics to see if there was any commonality with the ideas in
The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

“Would you go to Tibet with me when we graduate?” she asked as we strode through the mall. Robyn glared at the other students who were buying what she referred to as “unimaginable crap.”

“My parents want me to go to university in Glasgow.”

“Why there?”

“They have this thing about Scotland. They think it is where I should go for school.”

“Then Tibet is not a possibility?”

“I didn't say that. Let me think about it. I'm just getting to know you.” I was feeling a little uncertain about many things, so making a decision to go to Tibet while in the mall was something I was not prepared for.

“Sometimes you just have to leap. I'm a leaper,” Robyn said.

I was thinking about falling out of trees.

“A woman named Alexandra David-Neel went to Tibet around the beginning of the twentieth century. She's my role model.”

“I never heard of her.”

“She wanted to learn how to create a tulpa, a phantom being conjured up by the mind through rituals and meditation. She shut herself up all alone for several months and finally her tulpa arrived. She took her tulpa on a road trip and other people could see him and they talked to him as if he were a real person. He started out playful and fun to be around but later got nasty. It took her six months to make the tulpa go away.”

“You don't really want to try that, do you?”

“I might,” Robyn said. “But it sounds kind of dangerous.”

“I'll go to Tibet with you if you promise not to conjure up imaginary beings.”

“Who said tulpas were imaginary? They just come from another plane of existence.”

“Sometimes it's hard to tell what is real and what isn't,” I admitted. I was looking at the ceiling of the mall with its high-res video display. It appeared that there was no roof at all and that we were looking up into a beautiful azure sky, the same sky I had once become when I fell out of a tree.

“None of this is real,” Robyn said with great confidence, sweeping her arm in a wide arc. “It's very, very thin. These people are leading trivial lives. They have little substance.”

I tried to keep up my end of the conversation, which now seemed to be about density. I had remembered reading something while in my bathroom at home. My dad would leave science articles on the video screen in the bathroom and I'd get caught up reading about the latest wonder drugs or long-distance laser surgery or even stuff about space. “Do you know anything about neutron soup?”

“Does it have tofu in it?” she asked.

“No. It's in space. It's made up of collapsed matter. It becomes compacted together and incredibly dense, so dense that some of it the size of a cube of sugar would weigh a thousand million tons.”

“So that's what happens to collapsed matter,” she said perfectly matter-of-factly, and I couldn't tell whether she was genuinely interested or just joking.

“On the other hand, a neutrino has virtually no mass at all and every day we are bombarded with neutrinos
hurling around in space. They pass right through us, right through the earth as if it isn't even here.”

“That's because this is all an illusion.”

The video screen in the front of the Gap store caught my attention. Three-D human images kept taking clothes off and putting on new duds. One minute, a girl would be totally naked and the next she'd be putting on the latest designer top and pants. Some little kids were staring at it and laughing. The display was very sexual and I was thinking it was making me horny so I turned away.

Robyn noticed that I was uncomfortable. “You are different, aren't you? You're shy, too, right?”

“Sort of.”

“Do you like me?”

“Yes.”

“Enough to go to Tibet with me?”

“Maybe. But I need to get to know you first.”

“Did you know that in the seventeenth century, many people believed that every time you had sex, it took a day off your life? You'd die a day sooner?”

“That would make you think twice about doing it.”

“You're funny, you know that?”

And then she kissed me. I closed my eyes and I was someplace else. I don't know exactly where I was, but wherever it was, it sure wasn't the mall.

I liked Robyn's suggestion that it was all an illusion and I liked Robyn a lot. It was really fortunate that I connected with her as soon as she arrived at school. My hair was growing back already, creating a kind of fuzzy stubble. I'd given up on wearing black and wondered what would be next for me. I was like an insect going from the larval phase into something else, I figured. No, not a butterfly, that was for sure. But a metamorphosis nonetheless.

One of my childhood dreams was that someday I would figure out how to travel through time. I understood that all you had to do was travel faster than the speed of light and you could alter time, but no one was offering me a clue about FTL travel. Except my father, that is, who took my question to heart in his clinical, scientific way.

“You want to travel back in time? Not satisfied with the here and now?”

“The here and now, as you call it, sometimes sucks. I don't want to go back to ancient Egypt. I just want to see what it would be like to be alive, um, say, twenty years ago.”

His brow furrowed as if some small excavating machine had just carved a canyon across his forehead. “Why twenty years ago?”

I didn't really have an answer. I just had this fascination with everything from the turn of the century. The millennium, as they called it — the year 2000 and the ten years leading up to it. “I think everything was simpler then. Things made sense.”

“Trust me. Things made about as much sense then as they do now. Some people thought the world would end at midnight on December 31, 1999.”

“Maybe it did. Maybe this is all an illusion.” I had bought into Robyn's theory at least in part. She was now my mentor.

“You're going to tell me that all matter is made up of 99.9 percent empty space, right?” My father sounded slightly sarcastic but not insulting.

“I was thinking along those lines.”

“That we're all just bundles of energy, and there really is no such thing as matter?”

“That too.”

“Dylan, I think you should study quantum physics. You'd like it.”

My father often said that he wanted me to go to university and study physics or biochemistry. I wanted to be an entomologist, however. It was an ongoing debate. “If I study quantum physics, could I figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light?”

“You could give it a shot.”

“Then I'll consider it. What sort of equipment would I need for FTL travel?”

“You'd need a lot of energy would be my guess. If you could get yourself into space and build a spacecraft that was strong enough, then detonate a contained one-hundred-megaton nuclear explosion that could push you out of the solar system, you might, and I say might, approach the speed of light, but I don't think you could make it work.”

“But if I could, it would alter time, right?”

“Somewhat. But the blast would probably kill you.”

“That's the downside, eh?”

“Real down.”

“Can't I just create some kind of force field with my mind and travel back in time?”

“And what kind of force field would that be?” My father could be a bucket of cold water at times.

“I'm not sure. But I'd like to go back to that night of December 31, 1999, or maybe sometime in 1995.”

“Why do you want to go back to the year 1995? That was before you were born.”

“I don't know. I just think I'd be more at home there.”

“Do you realize how slow computers were then? How primitive the WorldCom was?”

“It was called the Internet back then, remember? The World Wide Web.”

“It was like a tortoise. And everything was two dimensional — video screens, comp monitors, cinascreens. You'd be bored out of your gourd.”