Deconstructing Dylan

  DECONSTRUCTING DYLAN

  DECONSTRUCTING DYLAN

  Lesley Choyce

  Copyright © Lesley Choyce, 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Editor: Barry Jowett

  Copy-Editor: Jennifer Gallant

  Design: Andrew Roberts

  Printer: Webcom

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Choyce, Lesley, 1951-

  Deconstructing Dylan / Lesley Choyce.

  ISBN-10: 1-55002-603-8

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55002-603-0

  I. Title.

  PS8555.H668D42 2006 jC813’.54 C2006-900167-7

  1 2 3 4 5 10 09 08 07 06

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Printed on recycled paper.

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  In Memory of Nigel Allison

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was April 16, 2014, the momentous day that Caroline Marks decided to break up with me. She opted for the full-volume, middle-of-the-cafeteria-at-noon hysteria version. She would one day be a movie actor, she had told me, and it was important for a good actor to be able to perform in an emotionally intense manner. That was what had attracted me to her at first. She was the most intense girl I had ever met. The first time I kissed her, she sucked the air right out of my lungs. I couldn’t breathe but wanted to die happily in her embrace.

  But that’s all over now. I had just bought her lunch — a chicken burger, french fries, and a yogurt. I myself was taking a chance on the so-called Chinese food. I had a lot of rice in my mouth when she decided to rip my head off with her insults. I was talking again about insects and she had heard one too many of my insightful rants about how female dragonflies decapitate and eat the head of the male dragonfly right after they mate.

  “Dylan, you are sixteen years old,” she suddenly yelped. “You are talking to me about bugs again. I can’t stand it. I really can’t. You are too freaking weird.”

  I liked her when she was angry. Her eyes grew wide and her mouth seemed so sexy. Her face got a little red but I liked that too. “I’ll shut up,” I said. “God, you are beautiful when you are like this.”

  “Don’t tell me I’m beautiful!” she screamed. I wanted to kiss her but people were watching now. Everyone was watching. They knew Caroline was a real performer, whatever the script. She was writing her own script this time. It was the scene where she dumps me and I end up feeling like a squashed dung beetle.

  She looked flabbergasted.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I spent a good deal of time in our relationship apologizing for things. It usually worked. I played my part convincingly even if I didn’t mean it. In the end, she almost always kissed me so hard that I would get dizzy. But not this time.

  “If it’s not bugs, it’s you telling me about things that you say happened to you that couldn’t possibly have happened. I listen to your stories and then tell you it’s all in your head, but pretty soon there’s a new story. You’re like a little boy who can’t tell what’s real and what’s just your imagination.”

  “I’ll stop telling you those stories,” I said.

  “It’s too late. I’m counting to five and then we’re through. I want you out of my life.”

  “You don’t mean it.”

  “One.”

  “Look, I know I’m a little odd sometimes.”

  “Sometimes? Two.”

  “I’ll change.”

  “You’ve said that so many times before. But you don’t change. If I don’t break up with you I’ll never forgive myself. Three.”

  Right then I wanted to stop time. Freeze the sucker and try to figure something out. Caroline was a big part of my life even if she was high maintenance. She was trouble from day one, but I liked that about her too. I think there was some hormonal thing going on that affected her emotions. “Remember Lincoln Park?” I asked.

  “Lincoln Park is not going to work this time. Four.”

  I had only one digit left before my life would be in tatters.

  “Remember the sunset at Lawrencetown Beach?” I pleaded in desperation. That sunset had saved me before. It was my last, best hope.

  Her eyes softened suddenly and I was about to say something more. Teachers were walking our way. Caroline was making quite a scene.

  “Five.”

  I gulped. “I’ll try to act more normal,” I offered.

  Her face hardened and she looked angry again. The sun at Lawrencetown Beach had already set at that point, I guess. She looked at my plate of chicken chow mein and then flipped it ever so perfectly with her long fingers. The food fell into my lap. Then she stood up and headed for the door. She was aware that everyone was looking at her but she didn’t care. In fact, I think she liked it.

  Mr. Lownder was standing over me now, looking down. He was laughing. “Chinese was probably a bad decision today, Dylan,” he said. “I’d stick with the chicken burger and fries.” Then he walked away.

  I tried calling Caroline but she could tell from her call minder it was me, so she didn’t answer. I tried four more times and then I gave up. Before I fell asleep that night, I had a vision of being six years old in the back seat of an old car with two people sitting up front. The man was driving and the woman was reading an old-style magazine. I thought it was my parents but they were way too young. We were driving through some mountains. New England, maybe. The window was down and the air smelled sweet. The woman was singing a song out loud. “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” — the same song my own mother sings. I wondered who this younger version of her could be. I wondered why I had this memory.

  Suddenly a deer jumped out in front of the car. The man swerved off the road. I became terrified but the car skidded to a halt in the gravel alongside of the road. No one was hurt. But when the two of them turned around and looked at me, I was crying.

  And then it was over. I was alone in my bed but the pillow was soaked. I suddenly felt very alone. More alone than I had ever felt in my life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Caroline moved on to Parker Alwight but did not find true happiness. Parker was not as interesting as me, Caroline would soon discover. Before long, he too received the notorious lunchroom theatrical performance, as did others.

  I had come to the conclusion that girls were more trouble than they were worth, but that too would not last long. At first I returned to my personal agenda, which was a seemingly lifelong quest to
figure out what was different about me. Was it just the fact that I was raised by parents older than most? Or the fact that they were both scientists? Or was it something else?

  My father, Roger Gibson, had given up his research and was now an executive with a large pharmaceutical company that kept changing its name every few years as ever larger multinational conglomerates bought it out. When asked what my father did, I often facetiously answered, “He sells drugs,” although I don’t think he actually ever handed over any pills in exchange for cash. He wore a suit and a tie and drank coffee in his office, made a few phone calls and took planes to other cities to meet with other suits and ties. I liked the man, strangely enough, but I didn’t ever quite understand him.

  My mother was a beautiful woman with long flowing hair (tinged by grey that she refused to alter with hair colouring) and a great smile. Mary Gibson had been a brilliant medical researcher for many years and had come up with a drug that reduced the suffering of cancer victims who were going to die. Her intent was to ensure that the drug was available cheaply or for free to anyone anywhere, but the company she was working for couldn’t let that happen since there was great profit to be made. So she was handed an early retirement package and set loose. Now she had a net site where she gave free advice to researchers all over the world. Her heart was in the right place.

  I’m avoiding, I suppose, the story about how I was different. And I realize I’m not the first confused teenage kid to wonder about the mystery of who I am and where I fit into the world. By means of self-identification, I could list a few things about me — the me of sixteen years — that were odd. I played the didgeridoo, for one thing. This Australian Aboriginal wind instrument took some serious breathing and blowing practice to make it work, but it sounded way cool. I was fanatically interested in the Loch Ness monster. I liked old movies, especially the Japanese Godzilla-era monster movies. I sang opera in the shower. Yes, opera, although I faked the Italian. My second language was Esperanto, although I knew no other person, except for a few contacts in a chat room, who used the so-called international language. I was a failed vegetarian but my intentions were always good to stay off meat and chew tofu for the rest of my days.

  What else? I had a passion for anything about insects. Termites or grubs. Sow bugs or centipedes. I found the insect world fascinating despite what Caroline Marks said about me. And I paid close attention to my dreams. I had weird and amazing dreams as most people do. I didn’t think they foretold the future as some believe. I didn’t think they were symbolic. I doubted that they connected me to any cosmic consciousness. I just realized they revealed something about the inner me. What I liked to think of as “the real me.”

  I could tell you more, but let me get more to the heart of the problem. Sometimes when I looked at the world, it was like there was someone else inside me looking out at that world with me. I was still there but so was this other person. It was not my evil twin. It was someone I liked very much but had never met. Someone with whom I shared a powerful but inexplicable bond. This other me never spoke directly to me but I felt his presence — almost always there, observing, wondering.

  Despite the scientific background of my parents, they discounted my requests to be sent to a shrink for a total cerebral checkup. “They prescribe way too many pills,” my father said, this man whose career was built on selling drugs for everything from sniffly noses to heart attacks. My mother too was adamant. “Just grow up normal” was the brilliant advice from this complex, intelligent woman who counselled PhDs all over the world.

  Normal sounded easier than it was.

  In my post-Caroline phase, I was thinking that all my attempts to act and be normal were failing me so I decided instead to go back to cultivating my eccentricities. I shaved my head and began wearing black clothing. I wore a black leather jacket that I had bought at the Salvation Army and realized that it was ironic that a guy like me who aspired to be a vegetarian and made rude remarks at meat eaters would want to wear leather.

  My mother and father were appalled. My teachers would noticeably gasp when I walked into the classroom. At night I studied the shape of my skull in the mirror as I listened to Verdi. There was something vaguely familiar about looking at myself in the mirror and seeing that bald scalp. It was a kind of pale, shiny desert landscape, and each time I rubbed my hand across it, it was like landing on the moon.

  Sometimes, too, when I looked into that mirror, it was as if someone else was looking back. The other me. And he was reminding me that I was supposed to remember something. Something that was just beyond my grasp. Like a memory that was more of a taste than a thought, more a sound than an idea. And then sometimes I would feel the pain.

  I felt it in the back of my brain at first, then all over my body. It shot through me and then it was gone. And as soon as it disappeared, despite how much it hurt, how much it shocked and scared me, I felt whole again. I felt like me and no one else. I experienced a flood of endorphins rippling through my veins. I felt alive and free and happy. And ravenous to simply live my life to the max.

  But, no, I did not feel normal.

  In school, I was what is euphemistically called an average student. C-plus to tell the truth. I think I was smarter than that but I was bone-lazy when it came to school. Aside from my abiding love of the insect world and the Loch Ness monster, I was also quite interested in the human body and how the mind works. I didn’t have the whole picture by a long shot, but I had some interesting bits and pieces. I knew how we smell things, for example.

  When you inhale air, you breathe in all kinds of molecules, a great cornucopia of various molecules. They smash into your olfactory epithelium and the receptor cells that greet them. The information about the smell (be it sweet or stinky) is ushered on to olfactory bulbs that hurry the information on to the olfactory cortex.

  So the smell never makes it to the brain, just the information about the smell. One theory suggests that we smell something when the shape of the molecule entering your nose finds an olfactory receptor that is the same shape. If the molecule fits, we get the smell. If there is no fit, we don’t smell anything. Sometimes when you smell something, it triggers a distant memory. Sometimes there are powerful emotional connections. Once, while walking in the woods, I smelled the sap of a pine tree and found myself falling down on the floor of the forest crying. No one saw me do this and I was glad for that. I don’t know what it was but, ever since then, I’ve felt this emotional tie to pine trees. I told Caroline that pine trees made me cry and she said that I was sweet. “I like it when men are emotional,” she said. So I purposefully took her to the park so I could smell some pine trees and I did start crying. She was impressed.

  But that was before I started talking about insects and opera and lost her to the world.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When I was twelve, my parents took me to Scotland so that I could look for the Loch Ness monster. I had been begging them for two years to take me there and to go out on a boat in the loch. We visited ancient castles in ruins and I listened to the wonderful way the Scottish people spoke. Everyone around the loch was certain that the giant sea creature was real but none said they had seen it first-hand. The loch was deep, they said, and anything was possible in those depths.

  Against my parents’ wishes, I swam in Loch Ness. I didn’t have any bathing trunks so I swam in my underwear. I was not afraid of the monster and was certain he would not want to kill a skinny little North American boy in boxer shorts with reindeer on them. I was right about that. The Loch Ness monster had better things to do. Swimming in the loch gave me a feeling of déjà vu, but then I was the king of déjà vu. Some things about Scotland seemed so familiar. Some things did not.

  When I ate haggis, for example, I was certain that I had never before eaten such a thing. When I listened to bagpipe music, though, it made my hairs stand on end. I wanted to learn how to play the bagpipes but by that time I had already attempted the French horn, the oboe, the cell
o, and the trumpet. I had not been much good at any of them and my parents had spent quite a bit of money on musical instruments that I failed to master. Bagpipes were expensive and they told me it wasn’t going to happen.

  So they bought me a penny whistle and I did well enough on that. And later when I went through my Australian phase they bought me a didgeridoo, my next great musical passion. I played the didgeridoo with great panache. I was the only kid in my school who played that instrument but was never asked to perform with the high school band or march around with it at football games. If I had been given the bagpipes, all of that would have been different.

  While in Scotland, I got a cold and it was decided I should go to a doctor for a complete physical checkup. “Scottish doctors are the finest in the world,” my mother said. “Consider this good luck.”

  I was poked and prodded and sampled and I didn’t like any of it. In the end, the bespectacled Dr. Ernest MacKenzie, “one of the finest doctors in the world,” said I had a common cold and it would go away. Which it did. He said I probably caught it swimming in the cold water of Loch Ness. It was a Loch Ness cold. And that made it rather special to me. MacKenzie was a thin, intense man with piercing eyes. He drew blood from me with a needle and it hurt. He looked almost guilty for the pain it had caused but he didn’t apologize. I wanted to dislike him, but as soon as he was finished he had a piece of pizza waiting for me followed by vanilla ice cream. That’s all it took to get my forgiveness.

  I remember that there were fields of sheep on the Scottish hills and I remember how the people were both rude and friendly at the same time, a skill that I greatly admired at twelve and tried to emulate. There was something exciting about being in such a foreign place but also something familiar. There were researchers who knew my mother — or at least knew who she was. And they took us out to dinner — haggis and beyond. I remember that I did not want to come home. I wanted to move into an old stone house near Loch Ness or on the Isle of Skye.