Smoke and Mirrors (7 page)

I waited for Tanya to look up, wondering if she was going to think I was getting too creepy. Instead, she just said, “That's really fascinating. I never knew that about mistletoe.”

“It's a little-known fact.”

I dredged up some other details about stone circles and more on the Druids' ideas of immortality and Tanya seemed to be genuinely impressed.

A car was blowing its horn outside on the street: two long, one short. “That's for me,” Tanya said. “It's my mom. She never gets out of the car when she picks me up anywhere. Just two long and one short. You've been great.” Then she touched my hand and as she stood up and she smiled at me again. “Let's get together again,” she said. “I want to pick your brain some more about ancient rituals.”

As she was about to leave the library, she turned and blew me a kiss.

At that point I had forgotten all about Andrea. I had never had a girl like Tanya give me so much attention and I was in a kind of swoon — foggy in the head, getting up and floating down the aisles through the bookshelves. I turned a corner and nearly ran right into Andrea standing there leafing through a book about vampires.

“And how did that go?”

“Fine,” I answered. “I really like her. She has an inquiring mind.”

“And a nice set of boobs,” Andrea said sarcastically.

I think I blushed. “She was nice to me because of you, right?”

“Correct,” Andrea said, a cool breeze in her voice.

“And I don't really stand a chance?”

Andrea didn't say anything. She smirked. At least that's what I think that look was on her face.

Andrea looked down at her book and turned the page, pretending to read it. After I stood silently for a few minutes, she looked up. “What are you waiting for?” she asked.

I wasn't sure what to say. I felt flustered. Puzzled. “I don't know. I guess I figured that if you were here, you were here to talk to me about something.”

She seemed downright angry now, closed her book, and said, “You think it's always about you, don't you?” She slid the book back onto the shelf and
then went down the next aisle into the fiction section. I followed, but as expected, when I looked down the next aisle she was gone.

Once when I was fifteen, I was walking to the mall on a winter day near sunset when I looked out into a field and saw a tree that seemed to be on fire. But there was no smoke, just the fire of the sun shining through the leafless branches. I felt paralyzed, but in a good way. It was the kind of feeling I expected if ever aliens transported me up into a spacecraft.

Immobility and a kind of diffuse feeling of well-being. I felt myself being drawn toward the light even though I was not moving. I felt like I was one with the tree and one with the sun. And no, I had not been toking up (marijuana makes me cough) and I was not taking anything illegal or over-the-counter.

I think this feeling, this sense of overwhelming connection and awe, lasted for nearly a minute. Then the sun was dropping beneath the horizon and it was gone.

I felt cold and alone and infinitely sad, for what I had experienced was so brief.

I kept expecting the same thing to happen again. But it didn't. I tried to
make
it happen but it wasn't there. It was like a fleeting window had opened up to another world, another way of being, another me — and then that window was gone, maybe forever.

Lydia was the only one I could talk to about this. I did not mention it to my parents or there would have been more money wasted on prescriptions I would not take. Lydia made me feel like I wasn't crazy.

“The Japanese Zen Buddhists call it a
satori
. Wham. It just hits you, usually triggered by something. Something beautiful but not always. You could be walking down the street on a dull, dreary afternoon and it could happen.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means everything is connected to everything else, if you'll pardon my New Age vernacular. If we are lucky, every once in a while we just feel this to be true. You had your
satori
. You were a lucky boy. I felt the same thing once sitting in an airplane of all places. Coming home from a psychic fair in Ottawa. There was a rainbow at the end of the runway, and when we took off through the arch of the rainbow it followed us up into the clouds and changed into a perfect circle around the plane. We flew through the centre of it and then it
vanished. Nobody else on the plane seemed to notice or care. Except for me.”

“So it doesn't mean I'm crazy?”

Lydia laughed and then straightened a pile of palmistry books sitting on the table. “Oh, you're freaking crazy all right. You'd rather be normal?”

“I don't know what normal is.”

“Don't go there. You wouldn't like it.”

I waited impatiently for the next
satori
. Music almost took me there once. It was close but not the real thing. I went back to the tree at sunset again. It was pretty, but no cigar. I went there at sunrise once but it wouldn't give.

As usual, I turned to books for some more insight into this and discovered that the ancient Chinese were a bit more interested in the
satori
experience than us busy modern folk in designer shirts and pants. It was common for someone in ancient China to have the
satori
experience and want to achieve it again. While reading about ancient waterfalls and the sound of tiny ancient birds, I recalled my own vision of the beach and the surfer pouring skateboard ball bearings into my hands. I saw there was a connection between the way I had felt then in that “other” world and the tree. Just like my experience with the tree
satori
, I had tried to get back there to that beach — in my mind, at least.

I could imagine the place, but I could never feel that feeling of being there.

One ancient Chinese dude named Wu-men explained that
satori
comes only after you have exhausted your thinking, only when “the mind can no longer grasp itself.”

At school my English teacher, Mr. Pace, got mad at me for reading about Zen while he was lecturing us on pronouns. I had been bored out of my gourd as he droned on about subjective, possessive, and objective pronouns. So I picked up my Zen book and began to read. Many of my classmates had perfected the semiconscious hibernetic mode of pronoun lecture survival where they looked like they were paying attention but they were a million miles away. Maybe this mode of mental and physical separation was something practised by ancient Chinese masters as well, I don't know.

As far as Mr. Pace was concerned, he was drilling those pronoun rules into our thick skulls, turning us into better speakers, immaculate writers who knew where and when to use the right words. To Mr. Pace, grammar was probably a kind of religion. Maybe he found his own
satori
among the right combination of nouns and verbs, adverbs and adjectives.

But he was fully and perfectly insulted when he looked my way and saw that I was not pretending to pay attention. I was reading a book on Zen, which was
at that moment suggesting to me that “to travel is better than to arrive” and that “man is a process not an entity.” These ideas were real corkers and demanded all my attention.

“Simon,” Mr. Pace said in a rather nasal and negative voice. “Simon, what do you think you are doing?”

Well, this drew everyone in the class back to a third period plane of existence. Heads turned. I was sitting there with my book open, a bit blatant I suppose. I felt my cheeks getting red. Had I been looking at a
Playboy
magazine, things would not have been so bad. Had it been a pornographic comic or a magazine about growing weed or even a motorcycle magazine, it would not have been such a problem.

“I guess I got distracted,” I said, closing my book, blinking at the words on the board:
Objective, subjective, possessive
.

Mr. Pace liked the fact that he now had the attention of the class and that he had a victim. Well, maybe he wasn't sadistic; he just had an opportunity to flaunt his authority and get away with a little humiliation, which is a kind of fringe benefit for some teachers. “Exactly what are you reading about that's so much more important than grammar?”

“Enlightenment, sir,” I said. I threw in “sir” because I thought it would get me off the hook, and it was the term that all the ancient Chinese students of Tao used
when referring to their own masters who would ask them questions like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

The class roared in laughter. I was the perfect fool, in their minds. Only Simon would sit in English class and do something as goofy as read about religion, wasting good daydreaming time, existing in his own weird little planet, his own dimension. And Mr. Pace laughed along with them.

I had said nothing more. I took my humiliation, swallowed hard, saw the look on Davis Conroy's face, the look on all their faces. I saw a small spider working on a web up in the front corner of the room near the flag. I watched it and allowed my mind to distance itself from my body.

To say that Tanya Webb and I had a relationship is probably stretching it. She received a B+ for her Druid report and considered herself, under my tutelage, to be something of a world expert on the subject. My reward was an actual hug and a peck on the cheek. I helped with her homework in the library a couple more times. I was always more interested in her homework than mine. I maintained my usual plan of trying to get through high school on autopilot, expending only minimal brain activity on the curriculum and preferring all the extracurricular possibilities of learning. I was one of
those students proud to achieve a C and felt lucky to nail down a C+ sometimes as a pity grade from a teacher who knew I was smart but “had problems.”

With Tanya showing some interest in me — she always remained friendly with me even when the homework was over — other girls would at least talk to me now. They asked my opinion about the latest reality-based TV shows. I almost never watched TV except for old
Star Trek
reruns or rented DVDs like
The Matrix
or
Blade Runner
.

My opinion on the latest TV crap thrust on the mindless proletariat? “It's hard to pick a favourite,” I would say. And then I would smile a kind of warm, vacant smile and I would give good eye contact. That was Andrea's idea. “Give them eye contact. Hold it until they turn away first.”

Phew. Simple little manoeuvre. But it worked. I didn't stare. I didn't ogle the way the other members of my male half of the population like to do. I didn't try to overpower them with my penetrating gaze. I just gave good eye contact. It took some practice in front of the mirror to get it right.

“And say their names,” Andrea further advised.
See you later, Jennifer. Hi, Candace. Yo, Venetia
.

“Say nice things about their clothes or hair,” she continued.

“I can't do that,” I said. “It doesn't feel like me.”

Well, I did try it on Tanya when I thought Andrea wasn't around, although I never really knew for sure when she was around. Tanya liked the compliments. Oddly enough, she seemed to be happiest when I told her that I liked her shoes. “Great shoes,” I said.

“You like them?” she said enthusiastically.

“I love them.”

The shoes looked like average girl footwear. I was slipping over to the dark side.

After homework one day in the library, I walked Tanya home — one small step for mankind. Before I said goodbye, I gave her the full range of compliments. After I left Tanya and began walking home, there was Andrea.

“It's really important to her, you know?”

“What is?”

“Footwear.” She wasn't smiling.

It was two weeks into the new improved me. “You taught me everything I know. It's really quite amazing. I've graduated from class dweeb to social respectability. I guess this is how you were supposed to help me.”

“Maybe it is.”

I suddenly remembered my discussion with Lydia. “What's your sign anyway?”

“My what?”

“Your astrological sign.”

“Capricorn. Why?”

“Just curious, I guess.” Lydia had been right.

Then, as I looked at her, I realized something was wrong. While I had been changing, Andrea had been changing, too. At first she had been fun to be around. Now she was serious. And elusive. She appeared less often. Did I detect that she seemed to have less ... colour? A kind of pallor.

“I really like your hair,” I said.

“Idiot.” But she liked the compliment.

I was giving eye contact. Andrea had often deflected my questions about her, and I had assumed that I should quit asking. But we'd known each other a long time — two weeks seemed like a long time — and she knew everything about me, even the embarrassing stuff, and I knew nothing about her. “Do you have, um, parents?” I asked.

Something changed drastically in her eyes. I felt that weird sensation of her moving away from me even though her feet were not going anywhere. “Okay, forget it. I won't ask. But someday I hope you'll tell me about you. Who you are. Where you're from.”

She took a step closer. “I'm worried that I might be losing you,” she blurted out.

“Losing me. How?” I asked.

But I heard a car stop just then behind me. I turned and saw it was a police car. Andrea was gone.

A boy standing on the sidewalk having an intent conversation with a hedge sometimes prompts a lawman to make an inquiry.

“I'm in a school play. I was just practising,” I explained.

He was a young officer with one of these lawn-mower haircuts. He had a kind of pudginess to the sides of his head, a soft layer of fat that was all too obvious thanks to the close-cropped hair. I was thinking I'd seen cops like him before, that maybe he was a clone. But I didn't ask.