Shoulder the Sky (20 page)

But that's another website.

Emerso

The question driving the blinding confusion that was in my brain had no easy answer. I spent hours at my keyboard writing rants about anything I could get into my head. The destruction of the codfish in the North Atlantic, the decline of the right whales, the barefaced bozo-ness of restarting the arms race with new missiles in space, genetically modified foods, drug companies more interested in profits than cures for disease.

I had stopped showing off what I knew about existentialism and German philosophers. I could tell from the postings on the bulletin board and the e-mails I would not answer that my old clientele was drifting away. I was down to cynics, hard heads, hard-asses, hard cases. My kind of people.

Thanks to Darrell's ultra-clever web mastering, my site drew spiders and forged automatic links. Punch in
“revolution” or “anarchy” at Google and you'd end up with Emerso.com as maybe number three on your list. Some of my tribe were fascists; some were disenfranchised down-and-out homeless people tapping into my head-space from the computer in the downtown public library.

I forged diatribes about the meaninglessness of the universe and the corruption of the human spirit; I denounced right-wingers, and when I grew weary of that, I denounced left-wingers. I despised the status quo in such eloquent terms that I drew kudos from weirdos who claimed to be making bombs in their basements.

My hatred of humanity, I argued, was based on my love of humanity. I raged because I wanted to change the world as it so pitifully existed. My website was my lever and the web itself was the fulcrum. I don't know what strange alien turf I was standing on, but I was still trying to lift a gargantuan weight. And I was trying to do it with words.

My father, on the other hand, had become enamoured with food and cooking. Our kitchen was crowded with cans and boxes of unusual and exotic forms of sustenance. The refrigerator was stuffed with organic vegetables. I was not opposed to eating what he cooked. Lilly made faces and stuck out her pierced and baubled tongue but she ate what he prepared nonetheless.

I liked the way our house smelled when he made his own spaghetti sauce. That was not the case at first. But
the wafting aroma of tomato, garlic, oregano, cumin, and all the rest was something I grew to appreciate. It was number three on my list of the things I liked about the world. It was still a small but growing list and I'd averaged one likeable new thing per week. But it was not enough to sustain me. The anger was not going away.

I sucked it in during school. I concentrated on invisibility, positioned myself behind Kathy. Looked at her hair. But began to realize this was getting pretty looped.

Corporate scalpers heard about Darrell from a mole inside Microsoft and he had a few other job offers. No one knew yet he was only fifteen and a kid who had received a modest C+ in health class. Darrell claimed that his mind wandered and he just wasn't interested in the human reproductive system.

Every once in a while I broke my own rules and actually read the e-mail people sent to my site. I was beginning to think that Emerso.com was headed into its final days. I was attracting too many weird fans. Mostly embittered people like me trying desperately to find someone to blame. Not long ago, people would write asking me for advice (even though I never, ever answered their mail) and they would imagine I was responding to them personally when they read my postings — say, my short thesis on Darwinism and deism —
and then assume it was a pretty good answer to a personal query about what to do about a husband who ignores his wife in favour of fixing his '57 Chevy.

But now that I was attracting the let's-make-bombs-in-our-basement crowd, I was being asked if I wanted to join a neo-Nazi party or an organization called ICHTHOS that wanted to free the fish from all the world's aquariums. I was asked to be a spokesperson for better living conditions for chickens about to be slaughtered for KFC. A fringe political bunch called the Blue Party wanted to know if I would run in a federal election. One woman in an unnamed correctional institution asked me if I would marry her and father her child. And so forth.

I would have to talk to Darrell about pulling the plug on Emerso and we'd have to do a pretty clean wipe. I don't think I'd want it wandering around cyberspace as some websites have been known to do — like a commercial fishermen's plastic filament driftnet cut loose and travelling with the currents causing endless death and destruction to thousands of fish for God knows how long.

The thought of cutting myself off from my Emerso persona, however, gave me another pang. I had set myself up as some kind of surrogate parent to a family — a bizarre assortment of humanity for sure, people I'd be afraid to be in the same room with. But a family
nonetheless. My own crippled real family was one thing but I needed more. And if I cut off Emerso, it might be like lopping off my right foot to save me from the gangrene that would seep into the rest of my body and kill me. It was going to hurt like hell.

I scrolled through the pithy, the posturing, and the paranoia-filled e-mails until I came to this one:

“What is Emerso angry about?” was the entire contents of the unsigned message that came from the address [email protected].

Screw you, I responded in my head, but my fingers would not tap the keys.

I scrolled on to other messages. Some idiot had downloaded the entire contents of
Mein Kampf
and sent it to me as an attachment. One I would not open.

Another marriage proposal. This one was from a seventy-year-old woman in a nursing home who claimed to be political prisoner.

And then this one came yet again, but in a more personal form.

“What is Martin angry about?” It came from the same source as the earlier anger question.

Only two real options, I figured: Dave or Darrell. Either one, messing with my head. I phoned Dave first. He said he was between clients.

“Not me. Someone else has found you out. What were they asking?”

“Nothing important.”

“How are you doing? You skipped your last appointment.”

“Things are working out. I'm cured, maybe.”

“Doesn't work like that. ‘Here, kid. Take a pill. Fix your head.'”

“How come I didn't get the machine?” I asked. “I always get your machine.” Dave's message was always the same. Dave's voice: “Hi, you've reached the machine. Leave a message after the bleep.” He called it a bleep.

“I'm going to take some time off. A kind of sabbatical. I've got some travelling I want to do. I'm referring my clients on to other professionals. One by one.”

“Then?”

“I'll do a disappearing act.”

“You bastard. You're running away.”

“I think of it as running
to.
”

I felt rage. “I should never have trusted you in the first place.”

“Martin, I'm not leaving until you say it's okay to leave.”

“Like I said, I'm cured.”

“Convince me. Come over some time. We'll talk.”

“Nah. That's okay. Just refer me on to someone else.”

“I don't want to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you and I are a lot alike.”
Darrell swore that he had not sent me the e-mail questions either. It was somebody else. I read the origin of the mail to him over the phone.

“I can trace it. A little program I borrowed while snooping around. Stay on the line.”

I scrolled backward through old messages on my screen from a while back. I had almost forgotten about my promo package predicting extraordinary things in the lives of my good followers. Guys had made up with girlfriends, a couple of UFO stories, religious experiences, someone remembered a past life while eating frozen yogurt, nobody reported anything negative — all good stuff, some of it pretty boring, but my old fans were impressed. Emerso had set off scads of small miracles.

And then Emerso had changed. Hard-core, hard-ass. A more comfortable identity in some ways. I liked to rant, to vent, to extrapolate new cynical meanings from history. The new-age flakes had no doubt moved on to loftier sites than mine. Now it was just me, the fascists, and the committee to prevent penguins from being exposed to television.

“Got an answer for you, Martini,” Darrell said. “You're good.”

“No, Martin, I'm bad. Bad is good in this biz.”

“So who is it?”

“Kensington Miller.”

“Heavy Metal Math.”

“Whodathunkit?” One of Darrell's favourite expressions from when we were little kids.

It was really strange seeing Mr. Miller again. He had bags under his eyes and he was still unshaven — a beard now, partly grey, covered his chin. He tugged at it as he looked at me.

“Martin.”

“Mr. Miller, it's been a while.”

He shrugged. “I'm into this new lifestyle thing.” He opened the door wider and I walked in. His new lifestyle was pretty much like the one Lilly and Darrell and I had encountered before. It involved closed blinds and a cornucopia of multi-coloured beer cans strewn about the living room, some crushed, some not. Mr. Miller flicked off the TV. Oprah faded off the tube.

“It's recycling day. I was just trying to get things organized,” he said, knocking a couple of empty Moosehead beer cans off a chair for me to sit down.

“You thinking about going back to teaching?”

“Nah. I don't think they'll let me back.”

“Why not try?”

“I've been kind of busy.” He swept his arm round the room as if to suggest he'd been at work at something.

“How'd you know Emerso was me?”

“I didn't at first. Dave must have told me to check out the site. I was into killing time. The Internet can be a great place to go if you don't have anything you want to do.”

“He promised not to tell anyone.”

“He didn't tell me it was you. Hey, I didn't get it until you started to change.”

“Emerso changed.”

“Yeah, he got on this kick of ranting about how screwed up everything was. Then I read through everything — old stuff and new — and I put the pieces together. That is some education we gave you at school.”

“You introduced me to the German philosophers.”

“Stay away from Nietzsche, okay?”

“Now we just do math in math class.”

“Sucks, doesn't it?”

“I always covered my tracks. Never said anything personal on the site. It was always Emerso.”

“It was always you, kid. And I know the answer to my question. I know who you're angry at.”

“Then why ask it?”

“I know the answer but you don't.”

“This is stupid.” I realized I had made a mistake coming here.

“Tell me then. Who are you angry at?”

I sucked in a breath. “I'm angry at me.”

“Maybe a little,” he shot back. “But that's not where the deep-down anger is coming from.”

I said nothing.

Mr. Kensington Miller picked up a couple of empty beer cans and dribbled the leftover contents onto a dead fern plant. “Martin, I know. I've been there. My father died when I was fourteen. He worked construction — he built bridges for a living. My mother had been trying to get him to quit for a long while. He always said it wasn't dangerous. And the money was good. When she complained, he said that she didn't appreciate him. He said that none of us did. After his accident at work, I was angry for a long time.”

“Who were you angry at?”

“I was angry at him.”

My father was in the back yard when I took the keys from the kitchen table and started the van. It was the first time I'd ever driven around town in the daylight. I kept trying to tell myself that what I was feeling was wrong. Not logical. But what if Mr. Miller had been
right? I felt a horrible kind of guilt for feeling the way I did. I focused on the driving. Slow and cautious. Keep the animal in the cage.

I hated the antiseptic smell of the hospital more than anything as I entered it. I took the elevator to the third floor and went to room 317, walked in. One bed was empty. In another was an old man with an oxygen tube up his nose. He was asleep.

I stood by the empty bed where my mother had died and looked up at the TV screen as I had before. I studied my muddy reflection in the dark screen, reconnecting that day with this one, reconnecting myself to that hollow image in the screen. I closed my eyes and slipped back to that time. I saw how easy it had been to make my great escape. But I knew where I had to go next.

I was shocked at how difficult it was for me to find the exact location of the grave. Everything was green. The place had just been mowed maybe a couple of days ago. As if on purpose, I was making detours in one direction and then another until I wove my way from the older headstones to the newer ones.