Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) (3 page)

“It’s good you have a sport,” said my dad grudgingly. I guess he was having a good day if he was conceding that fencing was a sport. “But fencing is so, so…” he struggled for some politically correct word and failed to find one.

I knew what he wanted to say was “fencing is so gay,” but those words would never come out of his lips. He was always better at picking away at the edges of problems rather than facing them directly. The truth was he had feared I was gay ever since my collapse four years ago. He might have swallowed fencing; I think it was the harp playing that really horrified him, but the poetry writing didn’t help. I knew that in some deeply hidden part of his mind, he was just waiting for me to announce I was taking up ballet. Honestly, the man would have been secretly delighted if he’d caught me in bed with a girl. Even my getting a girl pregnant would probably have been better for him than the gray dread he must have felt every time he contemplated what for him was unspeakable.

Okay, I know you are dying to ask, so for the record, I’m not gay—not that it should matter. The ancient Celts really had the right idea; if a man were brave in battle and a dutiful subject of his king, people didn’t worry too much about whom he was in bed with, as long as it wasn’t another man’s wife.

“Dad, you know some of the football fathers would feel the same way about soccer that you feel about fencing.”

“I don’t feel anything about fencing,” said my father defensively, burying himself in his newspaper.

I might have had the accumulated knowledge of millenniums of incarnations, but in more ways than you would think, I was a teenager. Yeah, I wanted to rebel against my parents—but I had done that in so many subtle ways already that it was getting old. Really, I wanted my dad to be proud of me, and even though I had some prestigious colleges already interested in me, I knew he just couldn’t feel proud of who I was now. He wanted the little boy again. He wanted me to play soccer and be carefree, like I was before the hospital. But of course, that little boy didn’t have the weight of thousands of years bearing down on him. I would never be that little boy; I didn’t even remember what it was like to be him. I wanted to tell my dad that the boy was dead, but that I was alive, and I needed him—I needed him to love me, not some memory that hung between us like a pale, dull fog. However, those words would never escape my lips.

I guess in that way my dad and I were not that different.

I looked at my mother and father then, and sighed. My mother had once been beautiful, my father had once been handsome, and they were still sometimes described as “a handsome couple,” but they were both graying and sagging a bit, and their faces where lined with more worry than the last four years should probably have given them. But of course, I reflected, it wasn’t really the last four years that had done that, but me.

Well, I decided that was enough guilt-tripping for one day. I finished my breakfast as fast as I could and managed to get out of the house with minimal fussing on my mom’s part, though I did end up with a jacket I didn’t really think I needed.

However, once outside I had to admit, though grudgingly, that she might have had a point. We were only a few blocks from the beach, so marine layer was not uncommon, especially in the morning. Still, mid-August tended to be warmer than this, if not exactly on a par with “Indian summer” in areas further inland. Despite myself, I shivered a little bit as I finished zipping my jacket. And talk about fog! It wasn’t perhaps quite “John Carpenter” thick, but I really couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of me.

The situation was made more uncomfortable by the fact that I had a backpack on my back, my guitar case hanging from my left shoulder, and my fencing bag hanging from my right. Carrying all that was a hassle, but I didn’t want to be caught unprepared. I needed the contents of the backpack for school, and, given the ominous signs last night, I didn’t want to be too far from a musical instrument. The harp would have been my first choice, but it was too large for me to drag along with me. As for the fencing equipment, let’s just say one of the foils only appeared to be a foil; it was actually a little something special I might need at some point. I might be doomed, but if death came for me, I intended to die fighting.

Unless of course something attacked me right now, in which case I was so awkwardly weighted I could be knocked over pretty easily.

I stumbled a few steps and glanced back at my house, partly to make sure Mom wasn’t watching. If she was, she wasn’t going to be seeing much. That Spanish colonial revival architecture-on-steroids monolith that we called home was already little more than a large grayish white blur, the fog washing out the roof tiles to vague brown smudges, the landscaping to greenish black swirls.

I staggered on down the street, passing more Spanish colonials. Even though the neighborhood, and indeed most of the town, had been the product of a single development, the architects had gone to considerable lengths to vary the basic pattern, so that no two houses were exactly alike, but in this fog, they were just a row of more or less identical grayish white blurs. I had to really concentrate to keep track of which one was Stan’s. It would be mildly embarrassing to knock on the wrong door in a neighborhood where I had lived basically my whole life.

Luckily, I got the right door, and Stan answered it. His parents were always superficially nice to me, but his mother in particular seemed suspicious of me, as if I had some evil plan to recruit Stan as a roadie for my band, introduce him to drugs, and just generally mess with his destiny: graduate high school with honors, graduate Stanford with honors, become a famous scientist, win a Nobel prize, the works. For the record, I wasn’t even sure what use a roadie would be for such a small band, and I didn’t do drugs, but one thing my parents had certainly taught me was that parental fears aren’t always rational.

I said hello to him and asked if he was ready. He was—and probably had been for an hour, if only to keep his mother from fretting over him—so we got as quick a start as we could, given my load. I wasn’t eager to talk to him, though, after what had happened last night, so I whistled instead, and he didn’t interrupt. In fact, I was using the whistling to instill in him the feeling that the silence shouldn’t be broken. Probably the damage was already done anyway, and I could just as well have shouted my secret in the center of the high school quad, but I decided to adopt a “wait and see” attitude.

And so we walked along slowly, the silence broken only by our footsteps and my soft whistling, and I thought about Santa Brígida, a town that was both home and a never ending puzzle to me.

If you have ever passed through Santa Barbara, you might know about where my “city” (really a town) is. It’s just a little east of Santa Barbara on the coast, between Coast Village and Summerland. But the best way to describe Santa Brígida is in reference to Montecito, which is just north of Coast Village, and so northwest of us. For lack of a better way of putting it, Santa Brígida is “wannabe Montecito.” In fact, but for some legal snarls, the town name would have been something with Montecito in it. While Montecito traces its origins to the late 1700s, Santa Brígida, despite the historic sounding name, only goes back to 1996—coincidentally, the same year I was born. Montecito is an enclave of prestige and wealth; Santa Brígida is an enclave of people who aren’t quite as wealthy as those in Montecito but who would very much like to look like they are. Both communities are demographically very heavy with executives, entrepreneurs, and various professionals, though the average income in Montecito is considerably higher. Undaunted by that difference, the developers did their best to imply that home buyers would get the “Montecito experience” (whatever the hell that is) at a lower cost.

So why did the town leave me puzzled? It hadn’t until my hospital stay. Afterward, the place always seemed just a little off, somehow, like everyone was trying too hard. The very houses themselves seemed to groan with the weight of the expectations placed upon them, if not the weight of the extra stories—I learned in architecture class last year that the Spanish colonial revival style typically only had one story, but in Santa Brígida, most of them had two or more. The square footage also tended to be big for residential properties in the area—except, of course, some of the homes in Montecito. To complete the intended effect, the developers paid extra to get fully grown trees, including the enormous palm trees on the street Stan and I were walking down, trees that, when enshrouded by fog like today’s, looked even more out of place than usual.

How all this worked out financially was another puzzle. How could the developers have poured such money into extras, put the houses on such large lots, and still been able to sell the houses at reasonable rates? Rumor had it they got the land “dirt cheap,” if you will pardon the cliché. The way my luck was running, the whole place would probably turn out to be built on a toxic waste dump or Native American burial ground, with ecological and/or karmic consequences one could readily imagine.

As we were nearing the school, Stan mumbled something to me. I was deep enough in my own thoughts that I answered without thinking.

“I knew it!” Stan practically yelled. He surprised me so much I almost lost my balance.

“Stan, what the hell?”

“Tal,” he said, slowly and deliberately, “I just asked you a question—in Hebrew—and you answered it. In Hebrew.”

Well, that was a problem.

I guess I should mention that Welsh wasn’t the only language I wasn’t supposed to know in this life but did. There was a poem in “The Tale of Taliesin” that was sometimes attributed to me, though I couldn’t remember writing it. A lot of it was pretentious nonsense suggesting that the bard Taliesin (whom I thought of as Taliesin 1) was with God at the creation and would be in the world until the Day of Judgment. Hogwash, probably, but there were specific verses talking about being with King David when Absalom was slain and witnessing other events in ancient Israel that stirred dim memories in me, as did the references in the same work to Alexander the Great. In any case, my ability with both Hebrew and Greek was second only to my ability with Welsh—though right then, I was wishing that was not the case.

“I must have picked up enough Hebrew from you…”

“Tal, the only time you ever heard Hebrew was at my Bar Mitzvah, and you weren’t exactly quoting my Torah portion just now.”

The fog was still thick, but I could hear voices up ahead. We were definitely getting close to school. If I wasn’t careful, Stan would out me in front of everyone. The
tynged
aside, I wasn’t sure how I felt about some public revelation of my previous lives, which at best would make Stan look stupid, at worst make me look like some kind of freak.

“Anyway, when we started to really talk last night, you put me to sleep. I know you did.”

The danger level just spiraled off into the stratosphere. There was no way, absolutely none, that Stan should’ve remembered our conversation as anything but a dream—and there was really no way he should’ve remembered my putting him to sleep. Over the last four years, I had had to manipulate my parents from time to time. I’m not proud of that, but I did it very sparingly, and only when necessary. (I know that sounds at best self-serving coming out of an adolescent mouth. Feel free to picture me as a wise old man with a white beard—I’ve been one quite often in the past—if that helps my credibility any.) Anyway, I had done the same with others as well. No one in all that time had ever resisted me or realized that I had done something to them. No one. And yet now Stan was talking as if he were somehow immune to me. Well, he hadn’t been last night, so what had changed?

I really had no time to ponder that question. Shadowy figures in the fog ahead of us had to be other students. We were very, very near the front of the school.

I did my best work with both voice and instrument, but I couldn’t exactly whip out my guitar at this point, or start singing, for that matter. In a pinch, I had sometimes made my speaking voice alone work, if I put enough “oomph” into it. Welsh would have been best for that, but I couldn’t risk that either, so I settled for English.

“Stan,” I commanded in a harsh whisper, “you will be unable to speak of this until we are alone.” I could feel the power flowing through my words. This maneuver should be enough to buy me some time, and perhaps a little privacy.

Stan stopped dead in his tracks.

“What are you trying to do, Tal, cast a spell on me?” That was Stan’s serious tone, not his joking one. Odd as it was to hear the campus’ biggest science nerd talking about spells, there was no question. He was aware of what I was doing, and he was completely unaffected by it.

I was still trying to frame a response when the car hit me.

CHAPTER 3: THE THEFT

Okay, so I was being a little over-dramatic. The car hit at about half a mile an hour, not enough to kill or maim in this case, but certainly enough to make an ominous sounding thud, knock me over (since I was a little off balance anyway), and send my shoulder bags flying in different directions. I had been so distracted by Stan that I hadn’t realized we were standing right in the middle of the street. The incident ended up being more embarrassing than anything else. The driver turned out to be one of the mothers dropping off her daughter. She seemed torn between fussing over me and getting hysterical; getting hysterical won pretty quickly, with the result that we drew an uncomfortably large crowd, including several girls who I wished had not seen me sprawled out in the middle of the street, and Ms. Simmons, the high school’s principal, who eased back on her usual sternness to fuss over me herself. Needless to say, that too was embarrassing.

There were, however, two good things that came out of the fiasco: Stan couldn’t keep questioning me, and Ms. Simmons sent me to the nurse’s office to be checked out—which meant I got to check out the nurse!

I’m not complaining, but really someone should have more common sense than to hire a smoking hot twenty-something nurse with long blond hair and the figure of a
Playboy
model for a high school. Usually students just try to get sent to the nurse’s office so that they can miss class, but at good old Santa Brígida High School, the guys had an additional reason for faking illness. You practically had to be dying, though, before most teachers would let you out of class. Clearly, they knew what was going on.