Smoke and Mirrors (2 page)

I wouldn't have called myself a happy camper by anyone's standards. But I was coping. Every once in a while I did something pretty weird, like walking around on the roof of our three-storey house with my eyes closed, or sitting outside on a full moon night waiting to be abducted by aliens I had tried to contact through mental telepathy. Otherwise, I traipsed through life one day at a time like all the other androids at my school.

Until everything changed that day when she appeared in my history class.

I was certain that she was real, but I had known for a long time that there is, for me at least, a pretty thin line between what is real and what is imagined. I am a believer in fuzzy lines of distinction of all sorts. What is alive and what is dead, for example. What is sentient and what is not. What is important and what isn't.

I realized that others my age didn't give a rat's ass about these trifles but were more intent on hockey, drugs, booze, or the interest of the opposite sex. Of this array of concerns, I admit that I had a strong lusting instinct when it came to certain female classmates, but I was inept in those necessary social skills. This may help explain why Andrea appeared to me.

We left the classroom together, and I decided to hold off on making any quick judgments. This was a skill learned in the scientific heyday of Ozzie and me — young researchers using pure scientific hypotheses in our attempts to create ever more noxious smells from household chemicals and cooking supplies.

Andrea carried herself gracefully, far more gracefully than most girls at Stockton High. I was afraid to touch her, and she kept teasing me about that.

“You think I'll disappear.”

“You might.”

“You think I'm not real?”

“I'm holding off on making that call.”

We were in the hallway, and there were other students around. “Who are you talking to?” Kylie Evans asked when she saw me having what appeared to be a conversation with a fire extinguisher. What she would have heard me say then was, “You might,” followed by “I'm holding off on making that call,” two bits of conversation
that may or may not make sense coming from a boy talking to safety equipment.

I wanted to say more to Andrea but decided to wait for privacy. I moved on down the hall oblivious to the usual rattle and chant of students changing classes. I was further oblivious as to where I was headed. Which classroom? What subject? What to do about Andrea? Suddenly there was a tug on my arm.

“You're going the wrong way,” she said. “English is upstairs.”

The hallway was thinning. I held my hand over my mouth when I spoke in hopes that no one would notice. “I could feel that. When you touched me.”

“I seem to be corporeal in some respects.”

“Seem to be what?”

“You felt my hand on your arm.”

“I did.”

The hallway was now empty. A very bright light was coming in through the glass doors at the end of the hall. It suddenly seemed like we were in a tunnel. I didn't like those implications at all.

“Oh crap.”

“You keep saying that.”

“This time I really mean it. I'm not ...?”

Andrea tugged at my arm again. Her smile was different this time — softer, sadder. “No, you're not. You are here in high school. You really are.

“I've always had a hard time distinguishing between death and school. In fact, it's one of my fears — that I'll die and wake up wherever you go to and I'll still be in school. Still listening to Mr. Holman drone on about the Sumerians.”

“When the Sumerians died, they expected to need all their belongings in the next world.” Andrea seemed inexplicably knowledgeable about ancient cultures. “They knew it was going to be a gloomy place under the earth with roots and dirt and worms, I guess. So they took along what they could. This included oxen and servants.”

“How did they do that?”

“Those left behind killed them and piled up the bodies by the burial chamber.”

“It must have been messy. How do you know this stuff, anyway?”

“I have no idea. But I do know they were wrong. The Sumerians didn't know squat about the afterlife.”

“You're still freaking me out, you know.”

“You need to get to English.”

“And you?”

“I'll be there, but if there are no empty seats, I might just hover.”

“You're kidding, right?”

“Try to keep an open mind. No labels. No judgments. First impressions are not always right.”

“I know that,” I said to the door and then turned the handle, apologized to Mrs. Dalway about being late, and went to take a seat in the back of the room.

Mrs. Dalway was launching an animated discussion about the witches in
Macbeth
. All the desks were filled with student bodies. Andrea walked to the side of the room and sat at one of the computers. She was typing on the keyboard, and I was sure others would notice. The computer's sound was off, but I saw images on the screen. I leaned hard backwards to see what she was doing, and it seemed that she was checking her email.

Mrs. Dalway picked up her voluminous volume of Shakespeare and, with great authority, read the lines of a character she called “Witch Number Two”:

Fillet of fenny snake,

In the cauldron boil and bake;

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

Adder's fork and blind-worm's string,

Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,

For charm of pow'rful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

When I was twelve I had a skateboarding accident. My father had this assessment of my skateboarding style: “Simon, you are reckless and lacking any semblance of good judgment.” He probably said this because I was reckless and lacking any semblance of good judgment. But I had not yet learned to practise astral projection, so I was using a skateboard to expand my boundaries of possibilities.

My parents were already busy professional people at this point in my life — heck, they had been like that since I was in diapers. In fact, I think, my birth was an accident, I was an accident, and perhaps that accident-mode was following me as I grew up. Most of us do not like to admit that there are parents in the world who probably should not have been parents, but I think you could apply this to mine. They were born for real estate
and corporate bonds. They had no great commitment to perpetuate the species or to raise me. They lavished money on babysitters, and as a result I had some of the best and some of the worst.

It was a babysitting wonderland until about eleven, and by then I was good and pissed off at my parents for trying so hard to ignore my existence. I don't know what form of wisdom had kicked in, but they were wise enough not to have a second child. I expect they believed, by this point, that their first one was a bit of a failure or at least a freak (with his fart bombs, his comic books, his interest in the paranormal, and his pitiful grades at school).

The skateboard was a fantasy tool for me. Ozzie (short for Osmond) was still part of my life in those days and as good as it got when it came to having a loyal but weird friend for a weird kid. My parents never said much to Oz because they didn't like him. They said he had a funny smell — it was the foreign cheeses he ate with much gusto. They said he was a bad influence — he had introduced me to cracking my knuckles and skateboarding. They said I should get other friends.

Pretty much all of my friends up to that point had been imaginary. Or as I explained it, they existed on an alternate plane of existence. Which didn't mean they weren't real; they just weren't
here
.

Oz showed me videos of young, fearless kids not much older than us doing death-defying feats, and I
knew I could do those things. I wanted to fly on my skateboard. It was inconceivable that I could be injured.

We started out on steep streets racing straight down the white line towards ill-placed stop signs. No slalom, no turns at all, just straight cowabunga-screaming gravity-fed speed. I liked the way the wind felt in my hair and the sound it made in my ears. I used my mental powers (the ones I refused to activate in school) to will traffic to let me slide across the intersection and up the driveway of the house situated there. Sometimes there were car horns heralding my triumph, sometimes skidding tires and shouts of appreciation or rage.

I always found a lawn or at least a flowerbed to end my spree. I was that good. I was gold.

By the age of twelve, I had the baggy clothing and an array of scars. I had experienced road rash on nearly every inch of my body. I had a nasty attitude towards anyone who looked at me funny when I was in skater mode. Oz had somehow sobered himself up into being more cautious, but I was an adrenalin junkie who didn't mind kissing asphalt if that was what it took.

I was a railing artist. I skidded down metal railings wherever I could find them. I didn't care what was at the bottom. Usually just concrete. I understood that concrete was hard and flat and unforgiving but I'd made my peace with that. Oz said I understood the physical nature of concrete — up close and personal —
more than any other person on this planet or any other planet in the solar system. Oz had taken a backseat in the thrill-and-spill-a-minute world of skateboarding. He had introduced me into the lifestyle and then sat back, nursing his small wounds and watching me go for the glory. He was my number one (and only) fan.

My mother insisted I get professional help for my “problem” (and this was not the first time for that). But it turned out that the professional help was on my side. “He's just trying to get your attention,” Dr. Rickbenbacker told my parents. “You need to spend a little more time with your son.” Grumbling and griping the whole way about a golf game missed and potential bond business down the tubes, my father took me fishing. I wasn't really interested in fishing. “Let's go to the beach,” I begged. “I want to learn to surf.”

“We're going fishing,” he said, gritting his teeth, gripping the steering wheel tightly as he beheld visions of corporate bonds, whole truckloads of them, being sold to unwary investors by his rabid competitor, Hal Gorey.

Turned out there was a cell phone in the glove compartment, and it rang. It rang often. The fish were not biting at the fish farm he took me to. We bought a salmon, already cleaned and filleted, as evidence of father-son bonding.
Just for the record, let me say that I was not trying to kill myself. It's safe to say, though, that skateboarding had consumed me. If there had been an ocean handy, I would have been surfing and falling off into salt water. But I had no ocean, only streets and sidewalks and elaborate steps to public buildings and railings and ornaments of various shapes and sizes. What I had to fall onto was concrete or asphalt. It was not my destination of choice, but it was what was available when I was ready to fall.

I would be lying if I told you that I did not enjoy coming home with a bloody nose, a forehead abrasion, or a nicely mangled knee. These were all showy awards for attempting the impossible. A kid trying to liberate himself from various laws of physics and reality wants to show off his effort, if not his success.

Ozzie had a bad habit of locating new venues for me to try — places he himself would not attempt. Twice he suggested the long, three-tiered set of granite steps in front of the downtown courthouse. Better yet, there was the metal railing going down the middle.

It was an in-service day for teachers, the sort of day when kids have no classes and go for broke with parents away at work. Teachers were cloistered away in meeting rooms gossiping about their students and inventing new ways to bore them to tears. Meanwhile, Oz and I would rule downtown. We were twelve and had the
right clothes, the right skateboards, and enough attitude to start a world war.

The steps were impressive, and the railing gleamed in the sun. We ran up the steps and, without even a split second to determine where I might end up, I placed my board with me atop it on the railing and began my descent. It was another cowabunga moment with adults aghast, pulling their hands off the railing as I slid south at the speed of infinity. I stayed focused, kept my wits about me, and was near the bottom when something went wrong. My board caught on metal, and I was launched into the air.

All of the arguments about safety helmets had fallen on my two deaf ears, of course, and some protective Styrofoam would have come in handy at the moment my skull made impact with the curb. A bus tire skidded to a stop a full twenty centimetres before crushing my skull, but my head had come down hard on that darned curb. I was delivered into unconsciousness and went someplace else while pedestrians tried to figure out what to do with my unconscious body. Ozzie began to cry. He thought he had killed me. He kept shouting, “It isn't fair” for some reason, but I guess he thought I was a goner and that my life had been too short.

Someone would later explain that my brain had been bruised (along with my ego) and that it was a pretty serious concussion as far as concussions go. I did not die and
then resurrect like a Jesus Christ of skateboarders or anything. But I did travel to someplace far from Stockton.

It was a beach, I can tell you that. And everything was shimmering (a word Mrs. Dalway says is overused). And there were two beautiful girls. (I'm sorry, but there were.) They were wonderful and sweet and they were surrounded by light. Everything was fuzzy in an extremely bright sort of way. I thought I recognized them both as my two all-time favourite babysitters, but I could not make out their faces very well. I just knew that I was someplace safe and happy. A young man with a surfboard walked up to me and held out something in his hand. I put out my own hand, palm upward, and he dropped into it twenty or so of those little shiny ball bearings used in skateboard wheels. He motioned up at the sky, and I seemed to understand that I was supposed to throw the ball bearings up, so I did.