Shoulder the Sky (14 page)

But I do care about you. And you've trusted me before. If you believe that something extraordinary will happen, send me an e-mail to the site and I'll keep tabs on what's going on. But I won't offer more advice. You'll have to figure the rest out for yourselves. You're on your own, as you should be, cowboys and cowgirls.

Like Roy Rogers often said to Dale Evans,“Happy Trails to you.”

Emerso

Well, we didn't pack up and go to Alaska right then, like Dad said. He went back to writing ad copy about foot odour. And I put off telling Lilly about rat-face Jake.

At school I started to get scared about what I had posted on Emerso. I knew I had a big audience. I knew my “followers” sometimes took me way too seriously. What if people expected too much? What if they did something stupid and got hurt looking for “something extraordinary.” I knew it was a game, a suggestion game, but, like I told them, I wasn't just messing with their minds. I was trying to open eyes. When I wrote for Emerso, I always felt sure of what I was saying — or at least I felt honest. At the heart of the honesty was this
core of something mythical. The myth of Emerso the Wise. Some people out there, according to my fan mail, really needed Emerso. And so did I. Maybe when I was older, Emerso and I would be one and the same.

The ghost of Scott Rutledge was still haunting the school. I could see the effect everywhere in the faces of the sad girls at school. Teachers droned on about who knows what. I kept seeing my own reflection in the shiny doors of lockers. Darrell found me by the water fountain. I was now in the habit of drinking at least three litres of water a day.

“You still believe water makes you smarter?” he asked.

“Yes. It irrigates the brain cells.”

“Good theory. But the water moves in and it moves out quickly.”

“Maybe man's purpose is to act as a water transportation system. You drink it at point A and piss it out at point B.”

“Yeah, but all you're doing is taking it from the pipe here in the hallway and then moving it to the urinal in the boy's room across from Ms. Vogler's classroom. Not much of an accomplishment.”

“Distance is relative,” I said.

“Isn't everything?”

“But suppose I quaffed a gallon or so here,” I theorized, “got on a plane and held it in until I got to, say, Kuala Lumpur. That would be major liquid displacement. If a million or so people did that each day for a month, it could lead to climate change. That would be something to brag about.”

“What about Scott? He ate a bunch of cheeseburgers and french fries, added some other chemicals, and had this big package of molecules that he delivered back to the earth. Was that what he was here for?”

“Maybe that was all there was to it, Darrell. Maybe that was okay.”

The Egg Man's eyes rolled. “Metaphysics is not my domain, remember. I just want to be a cyborg someday and avoid the continuation of the whole organic journey.”

“You may have to settle for being a brain in a vat.”

“Better than being six feet under.”

I drank some more water. “Too much chlorine.”

“I slipped into Microsoft HQ,” Darrell said matter-of-factly. “The guys running their system are old. Nearly thirty, I'd guess. They're losing their edge. Oh, and I saw what you posted on your site. I'm a bit of an agnostic on your prognostics. So far, I got an A on a quiz, my pen ran out of ink, I discussed bio-water transport with my best friend — but the heavens have not opened to reveal the face of God.”

“Has it been twenty-four hours yet?”

“No.”

“Then hang in and wait.”

We were late for class. But everybody was breaking rules today. The smokers were cutting out from school, headed towards what was left of the woods. I saw Mr. Cohen turn and pretend he didn't see. Bill nodded and fingered the cigarette pack in his pocket as he walked by me.

“Nicotine transport systems,” Darrell said.

As I watched the smokers exit from the dark hallway out into the bright light of the afternoon, their silhouettes looked like characters in a science fiction movie passing into another dimension.

“What if this is as good as it gets?”

“Who are you? Jack Nicholson?”

“I got over three hundred e-mails from people who believe something amazing is going to happen today.”

“They believed in you, man.”

“I wish I was like them. I wish I could read some words on the Internet and believe.”

“But you the man. You are the great Emerso with all the answers. Or at least theories. You sure you don't want me to add movie music to your site? For effect.”

“No. Let's keep it pure.”

“Untainted. But don't lose the art. The images are great.”

I had almost forgotten about the paintings we had put up on the site. My mother's art, even the unfinished ones. Other worlds. Soft dreamy places. Better places.

I saw Jake headed towards the same door that the smokers had used for an exit. I waved Darrell away and ran to catch up with him. He looked really ticked off.

“I thought I told you to talk to her, you little jerk.”

“I was meaning to.”

“But what, you had something more important to do?”

“She knows?”

“Now she knows, but it was all messed up because I thought she already knew. No one should ever trust you to deliver a message.” He left and slammed the door in my face.

Lilly would be devastated. I needed to find her.

I checked the math class she was supposed to be in, peering in through he window, but she wasn't there.

Only one place for Lilly to go when sorrow struck: the mall.

Halfway there I had to pee real bad, which prompted me to use the washroom at the Burger King. Burger King and McDonald's had always been on my mother's boycott list because hamburgers and vegetarians didn't mix well. I finished my morning's water transport obligations
and was headed back outside. Something about going from the air-conditioned Burger King out into the warm springtime midday sun made me feel dizzy. I sat down on a thin strip of grass and dandelions and had this weird feeling that I was looking down at myself from above. It only lasted a twelfth of a second; I closed my eyes and saw purple splotches and then something else kicked in. I was in the landscape of one of my mother's paintings. And I was driving down a forest road. I knew how to drive — as if I'd been doing it for a long time.

When I opened my eyes I was still in front of Burger King. I was a long way from wherever I'd been but I wanted to go back inside my mother's painting. I wanted to be there, in that landscape, driving our old van. I wanted it so badly that it hurt like a pain inside my chest. I must have looked pretty strange, like a kid on drugs or something, because a couple of women were staring at me.

“Sorry, just a little flatulence,” I said. “Red meat'll do that to you. I wouldn't eat here if I were you.”

I heard some kind of soft hum in my ears as I got up and walked towards the mall. I also thought I was seeing auras around things. The mailbox had a blue one and a Pekingese dog on a leash had a yellow one. The owner, an elderly man with coke bottle glasses, had a great halo of green around him. Cars had silver auras
and even the sidewalk had a kind of light emanating from it. The mall up ahead had no aura at all.

I found Lilly in the process of getting her tongue pierced at the hair/beauty place. The guy was pushing a large needle straight through her tongue and she looked like she was in pain.

I sat down in a chair and she saw me. She glared in my direction but couldn't talk because the needle was still through her tongue. The receptionist asked me if she could help me, and, while I was staring at my sister, I asked, “Do you do brain piercing? I'd really like to put a ring through my brain.”

In the hallway just outside the piercing parlour I sat down on the floor and waited for Lilly while people walked by. Some of them stared at me as if I had a nuclear bomb right there and I was preparing to do something mean. This is why people should not be allowed to carry knives, handguns, stink bombs, or thermonuclear devices. I'm convinced of it. Anger should be turned into something creative, not destructive, if at all possible, and if that doesn't work, do what my father does and take a nap.

I poked my head back into the salon and saw that Lilly was finished so I went back in. “Let's call Dad,” she said to me right away. “We should go to Alaska today.” Behind her, two young women were getting their hair dyed, one Jell-O green, one pink.

Lilly looked mad at somebody and it wasn't hard to understand why. I'm sure she was in pain. She glared at
me. As if I was the source of the pain. I looked up. For some reason, the fluorescent lights buzzing above my head made me angry too. I decided to look up the guy who invented fluorescent lights and say nasty things about him on my website. Lilly paid for the piercing. She now had a small silver stud in the middle of her tongue. I could think of a million reasons why a person would not want to have such a thing but I would not use my own tongue to utter negative thoughts.

“Jake is not much more than salamander shit,” I said as we walked through the mall.

“Jake thinks I'm not good enough for him,” Lilly said. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“It was just bad timing. You should have called it quits after you dumped him before.”

“I was in love with the rat. I think I still am.”

“The man has clam mucous for a brain. His heart is a small little weasel turd. You are better off without him.”

Lilly stopped and turned, looked at me, then up at the ceiling of the mall where banners hung down in blue and red. “Jake was a kind of anchor for me, Martin. But it was more than that. You probably wouldn't understand.”

“I understand that you feel hurt.”

Lilly looked at me hard, angry with me again. “Martin, you don't know anything about pain. You didn't cry when Mom died. You never show any emotion. You don't know.”

I said nothing. I didn't know what to say about what I did or didn't know.

“You're lucky, you know,” she added. “I want to be like you. Teach me, Martin. This is your gift to the world. Teach us all to feel no pain.” Lilly opened her mouth and touched the silver ball in the centre of her tongue. It hurt, I could tell.

“I'll buy you a coffee.”

“I'm not supposed to drink or eat anything for a while.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I'm quitting school.”

“You've said that before.”

“I'm serious this time.”

“I'll quit with you,” I said. “Maybe we can do home schooling together.”

Lilly tried to laugh but that hurt too. Life seemed to be full of pain for her. Her point about life being painful for everyone but me was making me feel pretty uncomfortable inside. Mr. Numb. Emotions all sealed up inside, vacuum packed.

We were walking across the mall parking lot. I looked up at the sun and then saw the purple splotches again, followed by the auras. Lilly's aura was red. Anger and pain. I looked at my hand — no aura. Just like the mall. Maybe I was just a ghost. A product of Lilly's imagination.

Lilly tore open her purse, yanked out her little cellphone and punched in a phone number. “Dad? I want to go to Alaska. I want to go to Alaska now.”

I remember my mother getting angry with me once when I was quite small. I had a hammer and I was cracking open the shells of several large snails in her garden. Why I remember this when other territory is blank, I don't know. But I do.

I enjoyed the sound made by my hammer smashing on the shells of the poor snails, and somehow my brain had not made connection to the fact that I was killing the living thing inside. I think it was because I honestly didn't know that things could die. Or if I was intrinsically aware of this fact, I kept it buried in some secret place that had no relation to my day-to-day life.

I had massacred at least a dozen snails when my mother came on the scene. She tore the hammer out of my hand and threw it across the yard. Then she glowered at me, much as Lilly glared at me when I showed up during the tongue-piercing. Lilly had inherited my mother's tiny arsenal of anger and done ambitious things with it during her formative and teenage years.

I think my mother almost spanked me for killing the snails but she didn't follow through. Instead, she yelled at me in words that I did not understand back then. It
was the tone of voice that mattered. I'm sure the lesson had to do with preserving life and never harming living things — words that would be heard again as I grew older, words of wisdom, sometimes coupled with tirades against corporations and greed and government and bastards who cut down trees with chainsaws.

There I sat guiltily amidst the carcasses of snails — a serial snail killer in my mother's own garden. An ugly scene for sure. My mother kneeled down and gathered up the demolished snails, picked up her weeding fork and made a small mass grave for them. I began to cry as she buried them. Then she cried.