Shoulder the Sky Page 11

  When you chew those black olives with the pits, you always have to be careful not to break a tooth by chomping right into it so you swirl it around in your mouth and after you’ve swallowed the meat of the olive, you study the seed with your tongue. All this is very meditative and probably gave Herodotus time to work up a plan for becoming the father of history.

  He became curious, for example, about the historical reasons and origins of the so-called Greco-Persian War (499–479 BC). Remember, this is BC, so the numbers go seemingly backwards, which makes it sound like the war went backwards. Did the end come first and then did it proceed to the beginning? If you were unlucky enough to be born in 499 and then got killed in the last battle of the war, maybe you lived to be minus twenty. But I digress.

  Backwards or forwards, I guess the war had been going on for a long while and at this point no one really knew why they were fighting — not the Greeks and not the Persians. It had become a sort of warring fact of life. Herodotus wanted to know what the hell all the death and destruction was all about.

  Herodotus wasn’t sure he could get at the truth unless he studied what he thought was all of mankind’s history. So he spit out his olive seed (from which a tree would one day spring to life) and he got on with it.

  Herodotus travelled and questioned and he learned what he could to make sense out of his world and his war. He took a fancy to the ancient Egyptians, who were even more ancient than his people — although, at the time, Herodotus, like us today, thought of himself as contemporary, not old in any form or fashion. The Egyptians were old — at least their pyramids and their culture were — and even though Egypt wasn’t real close to Greece or Persia, Herodotus had a hunch he’d learn some pretty cool shit if he rooted around there. Death, he concluded, was the most important thing in the life of an ancient Egyptian. That’s what he surmised from what he found there.

  When the ancient Egyptians had parties — and boy, oh boy, those were some parties — coffins would be set on the tables to remind everyone how close at hand death really was. And, of course, they built those really sturdy pyramids to house the spirits of dead pharaohs. In those days, it seemed, you really looked forward to death as something better than life. Even if you were rich, famous, and powerful at the time.

  The workers — mostly slaves who didn’t wear shirts — were all eating radishes, onions, and garlic for protein to build the pyramids. There were one hundred thousand or so of them doing this in the day, while at night the aristocrats sat around at parties boozing it up and staring at coffins.

  Herodotus discovered a lot about ancient Egypt but nothing about the roots of the war. He concluded there was no easy answer to why the Greeks and the Persians were at war so often and so long. But if it weren’t the Greeks and the Persians, it would have been the Mesopotamians and the Hittites. If not them, the Catholics and Protestants, and so forth down through the ages. The history of humanity is the history of mankind at war with itself.

  Emerso

  Lilly and my father had, of course, wanted a report from me about what Dave had to say, but I was feeling a little confused. As we drove on out of town, I sat in the back and used my father’s business laptop to write about Herodotus and the ancient Egyptians, who had been a lot on my mind lately. I knew it was a form of escape but I also knew that there were sorry souls out there who eagerly awaited my next installment of whatever was rattling around in my brain.

  “Look at all the trees,” Lilly said. “I thought all the trees had been cut down by now.”

  “Your mother loved trees,” I heard my dad say. “There’s a mall.”

  “There’s a cloud the shape of a hippopotamus,” my father said.

  “Where?”

  “Up there.”

  Lilly turned on the radio to some pretty nasty rap music but my father didn’t say a thing. He was glancing up at the sky every now and then looking for clouds the shape of other African animals. “Giraffe,” he said, pointing.

  “How can a cloud be shaped like a giraffe?” Lilly asked.

  “Anything is possible,” my father said over a lyrical complaint on the part of Eminem.

  “I can’t believe Bob Dylan is sixty-two,” he said. “Martin, did you know Bob Dylan turned sixty-two?”

  “He’s old,” I said, still thinking of the ancient Egyptians with the coffin at the party.

  “Can I use your cellphone to check my e-mail?”

  “Sure.”

  I uploaded my Herodotus piece onto my website, did a quick check for e-mail — the e-mail I never answered. I was there long enough to realize that many of those wackos who had logged onto Emerso yesterday had gone out into the world today expecting extraordinary things and found just that. I made a mental note that I would say not one more word about that exercise on Emerso.com. No explanations, no insight whatsoever. I planted a seed and walked away from it. Whatever was growing was on its own. I hoped that good would come of it.

  “Martin, you hungry?” my dad asked.

  “Famished,” I said. I felt like I’d been dragging enormous chunks of rock uphill all day. I did a quick check of my personal e-mail and clicked on a message from Darrell.

  “Dude, I’ve completely busted through the Gates. I have access to everything. You wouldn’t believe what it’s like inside. Where are you?”

  I fired back, “Egg — Once the shell is cracked, it could shatter altogether. Then the yolk will be on you. Avoid open windows and other signs of danger. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  We bought takeout Chinese and drove down a long gravel road towards a park that had campsites. My father parked near a river under a canopy of tall trees. “Hemlock,” my father called them, which made me think of Socrates.

  Sitting at the picnic table, eating cold Chinese takeout, we listened to the sound of the river.

  “It sounds like traffic,” Lilly said.

  “My friend Carl, at work, he has this little machine that he turns on — just a chip in it, I guess — that sounds like a river. Just like this. He clicks it and it sounds like waves or sometimes what he calls white noise. He says it relaxes him.”

  “But this is real,” I said. “This seems like the most real thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  “What does that mean?” Lilly asked, touching her tongue with her finger. “Dammit.” Then she popped the pin out of her tongue, stared angrily at it and threw it into the river. “Well, that was a waste of fifty dollars.”

  My father said nothing.

  “Are we really going to Alaska?” I asked. “See those birch trees on the other side of the river?” my father asked. “Look past them. See.”

  There was an adult deer and two young ones grazing in a meadow.

  “Just like the Discovery Channel,” Lilly said.

  “Only more real,” I added.

  I walked to the river and put my hand into the cold, clear water. I thought about the water coming down from the mountains far away. I thought about me with my hand in the moving water, allowing the cold to numb my fingers, and then I splashed some onto my face and it made me feel like I was suddenly awake, maybe truly awake for the first time in a long while.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Claire and I fell in love in university,” my father said. “American history class. Why we had both signed up for American history, I don’t know. It wasn’t a required course. The professor was lazy. He made us all give presentations to the class.”

  “Like oral reports,” Lilly said. “Sucks big time.”

  “Darrell almost threw up the time he had to do one.”

  “Your mother did the Battle of Gettysburg. I did Seward’s Folly. The U.S. bought Alaska from the Russians for cash — 7.2 million dollars. In 1867. Then they discovered gold in 1869.”

  “I bet the Russians were pissed,” Lilly said, putting a finger to her tongue.

  “I fell in love with Claire while she was talking about the Battle of Gettysburg. It was one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil W
ar. I almost flunked the course. I didn’t pay attention to anything in the class after that.”

  “Did you ask her out? After the Gettysburg thing?”

  “No. I wrote her a poem.”

  “No way,” Lilly said. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time. It wasn’t a good poem but it was honest.”

  “What did it say?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Birds in the trees. Not a sound of civilization.

  “It’s like we’re not on the same planet anymore. I don’t know how to deal with all this... this nature thing. I mean I like it, I just don’t know what to do with it. I’m going to call Wanda.” Lilly retreated to the cellphone in the van.

  My dad was staring at the river. “I wanted to trade places with her. I made myself believe I could do it. I wanted to be the one who was sick.”

  Alone with my father talking about Mom, I felt like I was trapped. I wanted to run away.

  “I should have been there at the end,” he said.

  “No one knew when she was going to leave.”

  “I was discussing frozen yogurt. I was with Carl Blinn. We were coming up with adjectives to describe the texture. Then the phone rang.”

  I was vaguely aware of the sound of my sister’s voice on the phone in the van. She wasn’t talking to Wanda. She was talking to Jake and she was crying. My father was breathing in a slow, halting way, rubbing his hand across the day-old stubble on his chin.

  The sun was beginning to set across the river. The deer had fled from the open spaces to the safety of the deeper forest. A lone tree in the middle of the field was in the line of sight between the setting sun and me. It suddenly seemed to be on fire with the light. The light shone through the branches and created a massive corona above the canopy of the tree.

  Abruptly, I had this irrational notion that my mother was not dead. I believed she was alive. She wasn’t here with us in the forest but she was home. We would drive there and she would be in her studio painting a landscape where everything possessed an inner light. I felt the truth of this idea and wanted to speak it but as soon as I tried to open my mouth I felt overcome with an anger and rage that I had never, ever felt before in my life.

  The sound that came out of my mouth just then was not a word. It was something primitive, something raw and horrible and very, very real to me.

  Even as my father turned to look at me, I stood up and began to run — away from the river. Into the forest. My father was shouting my name and he ran after me, but I was running as fast as I possibly could, as if my life depended on it.

  I ran headlong through the branches, the undergrowth. I didn’t trip. My legs were not attached to the rest of me. They worked of their own doing. I felt the thin branches lash my face and I tore through thorny vines that drew blood from my cheek. And the blood tasted salty and good.

  My vision blurred and my lungs began to burn but I plunged ahead. The only sound was the pounding in my ears and the deep gasping for air as I pushed my lungs to their limits.

  I don’t know how long I ran. My father could not keep up. When I stopped and fell to my knees, gasping for oxygen, I was alone. He was nowhere near. The evening light sifted through the forest, turned massive tree trunks to copper and gold. Before me was a forest floor with knee-high ferns — green, half unfurled, delicate.

  I would rest and then I would run on. I was running to Alaska. I didn’t care how far away it was or if I was going in the right direction. I could do it. I could run away and that would save me from remembering.

  All I needed was enough air to fill my lungs and enough courage to get up off my knees and make my leg muscles work. I was vaguely aware of what was going on in my head. The firewalls were coming down. The places I had denied myself access to were opening up. I would muster my strength and rebuild.

  I looked at the world in front of me. The trees. The light. The ferns. And realized I was in one of my mother’s paintings.

  Maybe I didn’t need to keep running. Here was a place I could hide out. I could live here. I did not need shelter or food. I could survive on what I had in this perfect visual feast where I was not alone, because she was here. This was a place she had created. For me.

  I remembered that day, when my father answered the phone. I was aware of his voice on the other end of the line. Someone was talking to him and it shocked me to the root of my being that it was my voice. I was speaking on the phone to my father from the hospital room and telling him that my mother had just died.

  That day had begun like dozens before. I woke up and felt a heavy weight over top of me. Lilly stormed out of the bathroom, angry about something from her long list of things to be angry about. I could hear her throwing things in her room.

  Downstairs, my father was hunched over his bowl of corn flakes in the kitchen. “I’ve got this damn meeting with Carl. Deadline is today. I can’t go to see her until later this afternoon. Martin, I’ll call the school and tell them you need to visit your mother in the hospital. It won’t hurt if you miss half a day. I’d rather send you. Lilly is acting kinda... well, you know.”

  “Dad, I can’t go. I got that test in geometry. I’ve studied. I don’t want to do a make-up.”

  He sighed. “Sure. It’ll be okay. I’ll call your mom. I’ll tell her I’ll be in later. Maybe you can drop by there after school.”

  “I will.”

  The sound of Lilly throwing a book at a wall. Traffic on the street. I had no test in math.

  Lilly went out the door without eating or speaking. My father made a quick stab at the watch on his wrist with a finger and then a small storm of activity involving a briefcase, a suit jacket, the corn flake box knocked onto the floor, irrational scattering of junk off the counter looking for keys, and a final download of coffee from a cup.

  “Be good, Martin,” was his anthem as he walked out the door and down the sidewalk to the van.

  There may have been a previous time in my life that I was not good, but it was not in the communal family memory. Although the world considered me odd, I was not prone to getting into any sort of trouble. I was not cruel; I was not belligerent. A little weird — but it came with the gender and age.

  I had refused an easy out from school to visit my mother in the hospital. She’d been there for two months now. She would not get better. I found each visit more painful than the one before.

  Outside, I felt the weight of the morning more intense than before. The sky was heavy with dark grey clouds and, as I walked down the driveway, I felt as if I was holding up the sky. It was sitting on my shoulders. I was hoping Mr. Miller would play his guitar in math today. I was praying that Kathy would talk to me. I didn’t care if she talked about her crush on Kyle or if she told me how cute Rob Dobson was. I just hoped she would talk to me.

  I found myself looking at the flowers in people’s yards as I walked along, naming them in my head: marigold, pansy, shasta daisy, calendula. Cosmos. But the walking was not easy. I was the 75,000-kilo kid. I tried to do complicated three-digit multiplication in my head to keep focused: 267 times 976 equals what?

  It was the fire drill during third period that sent us out into the light drizzle. My hair collected the droplets of water. Everyone complained they were getting wet. When the bell rang for us to go back in I told Darrell I had to leave.

  “Where you gonna go?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No. Thanks.”

  “Here’s a couple of bucks for the bus.”

  “How’d you know I wanted to take a bus?”

  Darrell shrugged. “Take it.”

  I didn’t have a cent on me. I took the money and turned to go. Mr. Miller was watching me as I walked away but he didn’t say anything.

  The nurse left the room after checking the tubes in my mom’s arm. I was thinking that I hated hospitals, that if you had to be sick, you should be in a place that looked completely different from this.

  S
he was not looking good. She had a lifeless colour to her skin, a little less light in the eyes. The sky sat on the roof of the hospital and the only thing keeping the building from collapsing was me.

  “Don’t look so glum,” she said.

  “Some days I’m a little moody,” I answered.

  “You’ve always been such a serious boy.” The hint of a smile seemed to cost her.

  “Dad’ll be here this afternoon.”

  “He works too hard.”

  “His job sucks.”

  “He should have been a poet.”

  “Right.”

  “I miss being outside. How are my flowers?”

  “Going crazy. It’s like a jungle.” Realizing I had forgotten to water them and they would be dying. Hoping it would rain big-time today and coax them back to life. “I’ll weed them this weekend.”

  “Leave the dandelions.”

  “And I’ll try not to disturb the snails.”

  “I lie here and my brain gets caught up in a circle of foolish things that go round and round and I can’t seem to stop it. It’s not even anything important. I think about a painting that I want to finish. I worry about your father not living up to his creative potential. I worry about Lilly. Did she ditch Jake yet?”

  “Not yet. But any day now.”

  “And you, Martin.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  “It’s you I worry about the most,” she said.

  When she held out her hand to me, I could see the pain in her face. She was tugging at me, pulling me towards her, and some part of me was resisting. But I gave in. I leaned forward, and I allowed her to pull my head to her chest. She ran her fingers through my hair, which was still damp from the drizzle outside.

  She seemed impossibly fragile. I closed my eyes, wished I could find a voice for the love I felt for her, but it was drowned out by fear.

  I did not move for what seemed like a long, long while. I concentrated on the light pressure of my mother’s fingers on my neck and the back of my head. Then I felt her grip diminish, and when her hands fell away her eyes were closed and she had fallen asleep.