Smoke and Mirrors. Lesley Choyce
Gibson story and the reading — and would give me a good grade no matter how badly I screwed up. And when it came to school, I screwed up badly and often. So there was this positive aspect.
But aside from that glimmer of academic brightness, I was devastated. Over the years my parents had invested heavily in the proper professional treatment to see if something could be done about my emotional outbursts. Although they disagreed about a lot of things during what little time they spent at home, they were unanimous in wishing they had produced a normal child instead of me.
The skateboard near-death head injury had supposedly severed some of the connective tissue between the left hemisphere and right hemisphere of my brain. One doctor had even shown me a model of the brain in its two lovely halves. I held one half in my hand; Dr. Yumato held the other half in his. “See,” he said, “two seemingly independent parts of the brain. Now give me back the left hemisphere.”
He wanted to prove some point about how the two were normally connected but, because I was annoyed by his condescending attitude, I would not hand back to him the left hemisphere of the brain. “This is not a game,” he said.
But it was a game. It was all a game. I didn’t like what he was telling me about my connective tissue and I didn’t like the way he was treating me like a child. I was nearly thirteen at that point. Dr. Yumato became angry with me. “You are a very stubborn boy,” he said. This was not news to me.“You cannot be helped if you keep acting like this.”
Maybe that’s why I kept acting like that. I don’t know, but I never did give him back his other half of the brain. It’s still in my room at home and it is one of my prized possessions.
The doctors all agreed I could not have my two hemispheres stitched back together. There was no quick fix, no easy repair. Most thought I would just have to adapt. So I would remain a kid and ultimately a teenager with some problems. Emotional. Mental. But adapting as best as I could with my two free-floating hemispheres in my head.
My parents were continually disappointed that they couldn’t buy their way back to having a normal son. Sometimes they argued with each other about whether I had been normal even before the clunk on the concrete. Sometimes I cried myself to sleep at night listening to them through the wall. At such times, I wished myself back on that beach I had been on with the two girls and the surfer pouring the ball bearing planets into my hands. Other times I wished I were dead.
After my teary English class, a fight broke out between Charles Fishman and Barry Sung. It was one of those odd high school disagreements between two ethnically proud individuals. Fishman was Jewish and Sung was Chinese and they were arguing over who made better hockey players, Jews or Chinese. It’s possible that this argument had never happened before anywhere on earth, but that’s the way our high school was. I wasn’t going to be the one to break it up. I had my own problems with my right brain probably not even knowing what my left brain was doing. I wondered if I would eventually grow up to have a split personality and end up having my own arguments with myself as to who were better hockey players, left-brained people or right-brained people.
Tanya Webb looked right at me as I walked to my locker. I had known Tanya since the second grade, and while I had evolved into this strange creature that I now was, she had somehow matured into a beautiful and sometimes intelligent young woman. She had a legion of male admirers and I was at the far perimeter of that crowd, but she was not an insensitive goddess. And today, in post-English-class-meltdown, she took pity on me, I suppose, and walked alongside of me down the hall.
“You really like Shakespeare, don’t you?”
“It’s the beauty of the language,” I lied.
“I know what you mean. It’s fluid and musical.”
“And all those deep meanings,” I added.
“What do you think she’ll ask on the exam?”
Well, that was a bit of a letdown. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to study for the exam. I never did. “I don’t know,” I said. “But maybe we can study together or something?”
In high school, we always added vague phrases like “or something” into our conversations just to open up opportunities. My seemingly innocent proposal was pretty far out on a limb for me, but my crying jag had left me feeling reckless and, having lost my imaginary friend Andrea, I was going for broke.
Tanya looked down and seemed to be studying the trash on the hallway floor. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can,” she said, letting me down as gently, I guess, as she could.
“Maybe the exam will be easy anyway,” I said.
Tanya smiled what I’d call a one-quarter smile and fled down the hall, swallowed by the crowd of noisy end-of-the-school-day students.
Amazingly, Andrea was there at my locker when I arrived. She had been watching me talk to Tanya. I felt a wave of euphoria sweep over me. She was back.
“I was afraid you were gone. One minute you were at the computer and then gone the next.”
“You’ll have to get used to me coming and going.”
“I was afraid it was like some kind of computer virus had sucked you into cyber world or something.”
“I’m not computer generated, if that is on your list of theories.”
“That’s comforting. But I still have a long list.”
“Willing to share the top five?”
“Well, the top one is currently that you don’t exist at all. That you are a product of my own mental imbalance.”
“I hadn’t noticed you were imbalanced.”
“I cried when I thought you were gone. I mean, I really let go. Would a balanced person have done that?”
“I’m touched.”
“Maybe you should tell me why you’re here.”
“I have some theories too, but I really don’t know the whole truth. I just know I’m supposed to be with you.”
Sung and Fishman had apparently made up and they were walking by me now, best of friends. They must have thought I was talking to them because they turned and stopped. I just waved. “Gonna watch the game tonight on TV?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Sung said.
They did not see Andrea. “Am I the only one who can see you?” I asked her after Sung and Fishman had moved on.
“So far, just you. Which is what makes me think I am here to do something for you. Help you in some way. But that’s just a hypothesis.”
“Do you have any special powers?”
Andrea looked straight at Lisa DeLong, another one of the students who had seen me cry in English, walking towards us carrying an armful of textbooks. Suddenly Lisa dropped a pencil, stopped, and picked it up, almost spilling her books.
As Lisa walked by, she paused and smiled. “See you tomorrow, Simon.”
“Bye, Lisa.” And she walked on.
“What about that?” Andrea asked.
“That what?”
“The way she smiled at you.”
“You’re saying you made her do that?”
“When was the last time she even gave you the time of day?”
“I’m not totally without my charms.”
“You wanted to know about my ‘special powers.’ Well, I’m just beginning to figure out what I can and cannot do. I don’t know how special they have to be to impress you, but I made her look at you. And I made her feel something, some small thing, something warm and fuzzy towards you just then.”
“Oh,” I said. “Like mind control?”
“No,