Smoke and Mirrors Read online

  SMOKE AND MIRRORS

  SMOKE AND MIRRORS

  Lesley Choyce

  Copyright © Lesley Choyce, 2004

  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: Andrea Pruss

  Design: Jennifer Scott

  Printer: AGMV Marquis

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Choyce, Lesley, 1951–

  Smoke and mirrors / Lesley Choyce.

  ISBN 1-55002-534-1

  I. Title.

  PS8555.H668S56 2004 jC813'.54 C2004-904889-9

  1 2 3 4 5 08 07 06 05 04

  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’s Ontario Book Initiative.

  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 credit in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Printed on recycled paper.

  www.dundurn.com

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  This book is dedicated to the memory of

  Robyn MacKinnon

  CHAPTER ONE

  She first appeared in my History of Civilization class at 9:35 on a Thursday morning. Mr. Holman had long since given up on trying to entertain us. He had failed at being interesting and had retreated to the ageold teaching strategy of exerting as little energy as possible during class. Torpor, a kind of liquid dullness, had settled over the entire classroom like toxic haze as the teacher proceeded to simply read from the textbook.

  We were lost in Babylon, on the Plain of Shinar to be specific. “The Plain of Shinar contained probably less than eight thousand miles of cultivable soil.” Mr. H. had stumbled over the word cultivable, wondered if it was a legitimate word or not, and then asked for a show of hands from those who had heard anyone use the word before. Heavy eyelids and no raised hands throughout the room. “Hmm,” Mr. H. pondered out loud, then proceeded.

  “The Plain of Shinar was roughly equal in size to New Jersey or Wales.” Hundreds of years passed as Mr. Holman continued to read. He himself yawned as he read of the early Sumerians on the Plain of Shinar. “Their settlements of low huts, at first of plaited reeds (wattle) and then of mud bricks, crept gradually northward, especially along the Euphrates, for the banks of the Tigris were too high for irrigation.”

  Davis Conroy was absent that day. He was three days into a false flu he had been cultivating to keep him home from school so he could play an ultra-violent video game called Slayfest. Through the window I could see the sun was out. This meant my father was playing golf. He took days off from work to play golf when the weather was good. He invited his favoured clients with him, so he considered golf part of his job. If the sun came out on the weekend, he played golf with other clients and called that work too. Even if he had promised his son that they would drive to the coast to watch the surfers. If the sun came out, it was golf and to hell with the surfers. To hell with promises to his son.

  So in the midst of pondering the sunshine and cultivating my own viral anger, I blinked, and then suddenly she was there. She was sitting in Davis Conroy’s seat. She was looking directly at me.

  I must have appeared puzzled, because she waved her hand in front of my face then leaned towards me.

  “Agriculture and cattle breeding produced most of the wealth which formed the basis of Sumerian life,” she whispered.

  “Agriculture and cattle breeding produced most of the wealth which formed the basis of Sumerian life,” Mr. Holman echoed.

  She smiled and put a finger to her lips. Then she held up one hand and touched her fingers and silently did a countdown. Five, four, three, two, one. The bell rang, and the rest of the class roused itself into mobility as the students began to collect books, scrape chairs, and spill out of the room. With a well-practised air of defeat, Mr. Holman closed up his volume of ancient history and, without looking up, gathered together what was left of his sad educational career and left the room.

  When everyone was gone she cleared her throat and said, “You’re Simon Brace, right?”

  “I am. But you’re not Davis Conroy.”

  “Davis Conroy is home with the flu. At least that’s what he told his mother.”

  “You must be new.”

  “I am.”

  “I could have sworn that you weren’t even there at the beginning of class.”

  “I knew it was going to be a very tedious class. So I missed the beginning of it.”

  She was attractive, yes, but not my dream girl. Not a Tanya Webb. Whoever she was, she was really messing with my head. I was absolutely certain she had materialized out of the blue.

  “Out of thin air,” she said, as if reading my thoughts.

  “Oh crap,” I said. “You can’t read my thoughts, can you?” Given the weird crap that went through my head in the course of a day, I had a secret fear I would someday meet someone who could look at my face and know what I was thinking.

  “Not really. But I’m pretty good at estimating what a person is feeling, or if they are puzzled, I can quickly figure out what’s puzzling them.”

  “You got a name?”

  “Andrea.”

  “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “Not exactly. I’m not enrolled here, if that’s what you mean.”

  I studied her face, and she didn’t seem to mind. She was prettier than I’d first thought. But I also saw something sad about her. In her eyes.

  “What do you see?”

  “I see you.”

  “Do you think I’m attractive?”

  “I didn’t at first but then, well, yeah, I noticed.”

  “That’s because I made you notice.”

  “You’re doing some weird thing to me, aren’t you?”

  “No. Not that weird. I just made you notice.”

  “I’m thinking that I’m having some kind of mental episode. I’ve been reading a lot of books about metaphysical stuff. And I’ve been feeling stressed about a lot. My folks. This freaking school. My freaking life.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” she said. “Maybe I can help.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I am the product of two very ambitious parents. My father sells corporate bonds and my mother sells real estate. It seems there is no end to these two commodities. The hustling of houses and bonds goes on into the evenings and weekends by this man and his wife who more or less abandoned me, their son, many years ago. Abandoned is perhaps a harsh word, since I have a roof over my head, a refrigerator full of food, and most of the comforts desired by a young man of sixteen going on seventeen.

  Despite the fa
ct we all live in the same house, I think I’ve grieved over the loss of my parents for six or seven years now. I am an only child, and it’s a good thing that my folks did not decide to bring another child into the world to be ignored by them.

  I tried getting adolescent revenge on my parents in several ways — poor grades, petty crimes, and household vandalism — but no matter how desperately I tried to bomb test after test, I’d end up with a C or C+. I could steal things from stores — CDs, gum, shoelaces, and running shoes even — and not get caught. I broke things around the house on purpose and they would be replaced without question.

  Now my parents are hardly ever around to get mad at me. And they feel some guilt over not being around, so they buy me things. “If you have a problem, throw money at it until it goes away.” My father said this about car trouble and problems with the furnace and the flying ant infestation. And I’m sure he applied the same solution to me. More money could always be made selling bonds to greedy investors on manicured putting greens.

  My mother’s favourite word in the English language is closing. “I’m closing on the Ferguson house today,” she’d say in early morning glee at the breakfast table. “I bet I’ll be closing on that condo by the end of the week.” And so forth.

  Ozzie Coleman had been my good friend since the third grade. In those days we were making evil-smelling concoctions we called fart bombs. I forget exactly what the famous combination was, but it was deep science to us, very serious business: filling plastic bags with our mix, leaving them in unlikely places where they would eventually be stepped on or ripped when a drawer opened, or sometimes just throwing them into crowds of unaware victims. No harm was done except for the stench, but the results were most gratifying.

  Of course we went on to bigger and better adventures, and Ozzie was such a good friend that I never really cultivated any other friends.

  Right after my accident Ozzie moved. His father moved him and his family because of some kind of corporate restructuring, I think. And I was left high and dry. We wrote letters to each other and talked on the phone, but it wasn’t the same.

  I became a loner after that. I had few social skills, and my parents tried to find a way to throw money at that problem, too. They couldn’t buy me those skills, although they tried (and failed miserably) by enrolling me in kung fu classes, gymnastic programs, and even golf lessons. I told them I really wanted to learn to surf, but they laughed and said the ocean was two hours away. They weren’t going to spend their Saturdays driving me to the beach. Besides, I might drown. It looked dangerous.

  I trained myself at self-hypnosis by reading a book on the subject, and that helped some. I read about astral projection, and I found that pretty entertaining. And I began accumulating a great library of books (some stolen, some bought) on anything metaphysical.

  I cut out clippings from newspapers and magazines about anything relating to the paranormal or anything that seemed inexplicable to the experts — survivors of freak accidents, weird weather phenomena, and UFO sightings, of course.

  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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  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).