Smoke and Mirrors. Lesley Choyce
brother used to ...” she stopped and had that distant, puzzled look again.
“Your brother used to what?”
“Watch Star Trek.”
“You have a brother?”
“I think so,” she said. “I remember him, or at least something about him, but it isn’t clear at all. I’m not sure I can tell you more.”
“And so the mystery deepens.”
Now she seemed a little defensive. “Remember, this isn’t about me. It’s about you. I’m here to help you.”
I smiled. “And believe me, I can use all the help I can get, so if I ask you anything you don’t want to answer or say anything stupid, just ignore it and go on about your business of helping me.”
But the inquiring mind is a devilish tool, and I did continue to ask her questions about trivial things in hopes of getting an inkling of who exactly it was that was trying to help me. I asked her several easy questions about Star Trek shows, but she didn’t seem to remember anything. But then it was her “brother” who had been the fan, not her. And I began to wonder if she meant brother literally or if it referred to someone like her — another apparition or spirit or even this, the word that I did not want to test on her: ghost.
When we arrived at my house I was feeling a little dizzy — not surprising, I wasn’t in great physical shape. I hadn’t exercised much, and I loathed most sports that didn’t require surfboard wax or ball bearings. Since mentioning her brother, Andrea had taken a couple of mood swings, and I tried to cheer her up with recitations of all the trivia in my head.
“The man who invented chop suey was Li Hung-chang. The father of frozen foods was Clarence Birdseye. Milton Loeb invented the Brillo pad, and Francis Davis invented power steering.” Then I explained to her about my severed hemispheres. “The doctors don’t have a clue if they have reconnected in any way, but my ‘problem’ seems to allow me to memorize vast quantities of seemingly useless information.”
“Do you still think that I may be something conjured up by your imagination?”
“My definition of what is real is anything I believe in. And right now, I believe in you more than I believe in the existence of God or McDonald’s or that Jeep Cherokee coming down the street.”
“Good. Although I think you might do well not to speak about me to anyone.”
“Like my parents?”
“Especially them.”
We were at my front door. I took the key out from under the mat and opened the door, then punched the code on the security system so it wouldn’t go off. “Be it ever so humble,” I said and invited Andrea in, but she seemed frozen on the front steps.
“I can’t go in. Sorry.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. But I just have a feeling that I shouldn’t be in your house. It’s almost like I’m not allowed.”
“Where will you go?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be around. I’m not really going anywhere.”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“It’s okay,” she said, touched my hand once, and began to walk away.
I assumed that Andrea’s not wanting to come into the house had something to do with my parents. If buildings absorb negativity then my house had absorbed its share. Andrea was sensitive in this area. She had told me school had an odd balance of positive and negative that didn’t “overload” her emotions.
A sixteen-year-old should probably never try to describe his own parents, but this one will do that anyway.
My mother must have been a knockout when she was young — in fact, I can tell that men still find her attractive. She uses her good looks and flattery of the male species to sell houses. I find this appalling, but then this is my mother. The woman has smarts but hides them sometimes, which I think makes her conniving.
My father was class president in high school and valedictorian at the university he went to. He was an achiever and always wanted to be the best. He married my mom because she was this great-looking woman. While others of his generation set about trying to save the world, my father set out to make a lot of money. What he actually does each day is a bit of a mystery to me, but it involves persuading big-time investors to invest in corporate bonds. He’s explained to me what a corporate bond is but it doesn’t really make any sense. A company that already has a huge amount of money borrows from another company, or a wealthy investor, more money to do something that will make them all more money.
Dad was a high flyer in this circus until some of those corporations went bankrupt and his bond buyers lost big bucks. So poor old Dad had to step down several rungs on his corporate ladder.
Both Mom and Dad had decided not to have any children but to dedicate their lives to the worthy cause of capitalism, but I came along, prompting my father to give up faith in various birth control methods and have a vasectomy, which he often speaks of in public.
As previously noted, I was a peculiar child, although no one could pin me down with a label. Attention deficit disorder, maybe. Hyper attention deficit disorder. Other terms were applied. My loving parents fed me Ritalin for a couple of years, and the teachers noted how my behaviour had improved.
I kept trying to fly — jumping from trees and roofs and second-storey windows. Skateboarding took me to the next level, and Ozzie was my coach. After the accident, I was a little stranger to the world, but I felt just fine after the headaches went away.
I didn’t have friends like most kids, and a lot of the kids I knew, if given the chance, found ways to make fun of me. I was more interested in the paranormal than the normal anyway. So once Ozzie had moved, I was pretty much on my own, trying to bend spoons with my mind, travel by astral projection, or devise ways to make contact with those aliens that I was sure were watching over us.
Periodically, a teacher or a school principal would report my odd behaviour to my parents, who had long since given up on their dream of having a normal, possibly even a high-achieving, son. I know I was a disappointment to them. Once there was discussion with medical experts about reconnecting the right and left hemispheres of my brain more effectively, but the doctors concluded that it couldn’t be done.
In truth, I was glad I was not normal. Normal seemed dull. Predictable. In my curious universe, all manner of entertaining surprises happened. Which is why I stopped taking my pills, my meds, as my mother called them, quite a while ago. My parents thought I was taking them. Certainly the drugstore was paid handsomely for the prescription. Clearly the doctor had made notes about how effectively the medication was working on his patient.
Often, as often as possible perhaps, my parents chose to leave me alone. They had little interest in the things I was interested in. They thought extra-sensory perception was a lot of hogwash. Even if my father believed ESP existed then he probably would have used it to persuade clients to buy his bonds.
One of my favourite ESP games was to look at someone who was not looking at me. Anyone. A guy in a mall. A girl in class. Seven times out of ten, if you looked long enough, the other person sensed someone looking at them and turned to look at you.
My mother wished I would stop going out on the lawn at night with my telescope to look for UFOs. The neighbours thought I was spying on them, but I had little interest in my neighbours. I saw things in the sky that might have been UFOs, and I would try to send the aliens in the spacecraft telepathic messages like, “If you receive this, please bring me ice cream so that I know you can hear me.”
But not once did an alien with ice cream show up at my house.
My parents, I’m sad to say, were in a kind of competition with each other over who was the most successful at their work. I think my mother was slightly ahead of my