Smoke and Mirrors Read online

  I checked my email to get my mind off the past. It was the usual waste of time: sex spam, hype for garbage I didn’t want, junk mail from losers and creeps. One quick cryptic note from Lydia, however.

  Simon,

  Time is no longer your ally. You are two steps forward and one back. This is not about you. If you are the knight, you must move two steps forward and then over one space. That fourth woman in your life, and you know who she is, Montague says she is losing much of her energy. She will not be with you much longer. If I knew what you should do, I would say so. But I do not. Montague says this, although I don’t know what it means: “Continue your research.” Lydia

  The only research I had been up to lately was my own navel gazing and my efforts to find Ozzie, but maybe that was the wrong direction. What was the right direction?

  I received a bleep that I had one new item of mail. It was from an address I did not recognize. And then a single word appeared on my computer screen: “West.”

  I looked out my window at the sun setting in that direction. Above, however, was that dark, brooding, almost leaden sky we had seen over us on the beach. But there on the horizon to the west was a thin line of clear sky and the sun had burst through, painting the entire outdoors in a magnificent coppery light. It was just such a sight as this that had lured me in younger years to climb out my dormer window and sit on the roof and stay there until the stars came out, or until my parents discovered me and my frantic father went running for the ladder stored in the garage.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  My parents played their little game well, right up until Wednesday. On Monday and Tuesday they had both been home by five-thirty and we’d sat down to a quiet evening meal. We were all so nice to each other that I should have sniffed out the fact that it was too good to be true.

  On Wednesday afternoon, my mom came home early. She was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee. “Simon,” she said, out of the blue. “Your father has moved out after all.”

  “What?” I was floored.

  My mother looked at the refrigerator, not at me. “We came to the conclusion that the timing was good. You are doing okay. We’re all doing okay. Better to have the separation when we’re not in the middle of problems and conflicts. He and I need some distance from each other.”

  “Have either of you thought about joining the space program?” I snapped.

  “He says that he enjoyed spending the day with you Saturday and that he’ll come pick you up next weekend and you two can drive back to the beach if you like.”

  “Great,” I said sarcastically.

  “Simon. Your father and I have known we were not meant to be together. We’ve known this for a long while, but we were waiting for a time when you were ready for it. When you were strong. And now’s that time. You are doing really well.”

  There wasn’t anything that I could say that would not be cruel so I went to my room. A room, especially your own bedroom, has a habit of changing the way it looks according to your mood. Sometimes my room looked liked a warm, private sanctuary away from the troubles of the world. Sometimes it looked like a happy, goofy, friendly place full of all the junk I’d accumulated as a kid. Today it looked like a dungeon.

  Even with all the lights on, it was dark. The pile of newspapers and magazines still sat by the door, slightly taller now as the evidence of daily catastrophe, war, pain, and suffering grew.

  At first, my mind fixed on the great irony of it all. While things had been bad, when conflict raged at home, my parents stayed together. Once we hit some seemingly smooth sailing, he moved out. Since we had become somewhat of a happy family, both parents agreed that now was the time to give up. I believed that, now that this step had finally been taken, now that I was “strong” enough to handle it, they would eventually divorce. There would be lawyers, and I knew that lawyers would bring out the worst in both of them. Once they became competitive as to who would get what, they would get greedy and it would get ugly. At that moment I was so angry with them that I wanted desperately to do something that would truly hurt them. But I let that thought pass.

  The anger subsided and was quickly replaced by gloom. I lay down on my bed, and it felt like the strength had gone out of my body. I closed my eyes and drifted, let it overwhelm me. I’d been here before. I knew this feeling of sliding down an inclined tunnel into the earth. I was allowing myself to descend, and I knew that the further I slid, the harder it would be to come back up. But I didn’t care.

  The great safe refuge of the truly depressed is sleep. It found me easily that afternoon, and there were no dreams.

  When I woke, it was early evening. I heard the television on downstairs. My mother was watching the news. I looked outside. One car in the driveway, not two. In the oak tree outside my bedroom window, three ravens were perched. They were looking right at me with those dark, inquiring eyes as if they were there waiting for me to wake up, waiting to tell me something. I opened the window and they flew away.

  I thought about climbing out onto the roof as I had done as a child and just sitting there. I would wait for the stars to come out and maybe, if I stared long enough, I’d see something interesting. But I knew my father would not find me this time. He would not go running to the garage for a ladder to bring me down.

  I took a deep breath, trying to ward off that all-too-familiar darkness again creeping up already in the back of my brain. If I were to give in to it again and again, I knew I was going to be in trouble. So I forced myself to do something, anything, to occupy myself. I started to turn on my computer to log onto a chess site and find an opponent but changed my mind and clicked it off while it was booting up.

  Then I sat down at my desk and lifted the pile of newspapers from the floor. Not one UFO story. No new underwater archaeological discoveries of Atlantis. No news about cults in communication with aliens. Nothing but politics and the daily dirge of violence and crime.

  But then there was this.

  Ridgefield Girl Still in Coma

  A teenage girl continues on life-support in the Ridgefield Hospital several months after accidentally taking an overdose of prescription drugs. Although in a coma, doctors are at a loss to understand the periodic bursts of brain activity. Gail Connolly, the girl’s mother, says they are praying for their daughter every day and they believe she will recover. The Connollys’ daughter, Trina, was, at the time of her accident, a popular, outgoing girl at Ridgefield High School and a member of the school’s chess team.

  Her parents have been unable to explain the girl’s overdose and insist it was an accident. Hospital doctors suggest that, after such a lengthy period of unconsciousness, the longer someone is in a coma, the more difficult it becomes for the patient to recover. They do, however, find the situation has a glimmer of hope in that Trina’s unusual brain activity is a sign that recovery may yet be possible.

  There was a photograph of the two parents but none of the girl. I began to wonder about what her story was. Ridgefield was a suburban town much like my own. I knew some kids who went to Ridgefield High. In fact, we had driven by the school and the hospital on the way home from the beach. I wondered exactly how someone could “accidentally” overdose so massively on whatever it was that she took. Something told me there was a story behind her coma. Another unhappy family, another unhappy kid.

  I knew that someone in a coma was totally out of it. It was a deep form of unconsciousness often leading to death. It was in some ways a kind of protective state that prevented a person with a life-threatening injury from experiencing pain.

  After my own accident, I myself had been in a coma for nearly twenty-four hours. I had “gone” someplace else, and it had not been unpleasant. The hard part was coming back to consciousness and the pain that went with it. And then the confusion, the lack of connections.

  I wanted to know what this Trina looked like and I went thumbing back through earlier newspapers but could find only two other small stories about the girl, Trina Connolly, a
bout her accidental overdose. I was wondering about “where” she had gone to and if she would return. I was deeply curious about her and felt so terribly sad that a girl my own age was in such a desperate state. I reread the three short articles, and it began to sink in. The parents were praying and expressing optimism, but the doctors, without coming out and saying it directly, were indicating that it was unlikely she would recover. Too much time had elapsed. In that most recent story, from yesterday’s paper, the one I had read first, the doctors sounded much less optimistic. Probably there was very little hope at all of her recovering.

  I began to shake first and then I cried again. I cried for this poor girl, Trina, but I was also crying for me and I was crying for the whole sorry state of the world.

  When I fell asleep, I started to dream. In my dream I was at the bottom of a very deep well. Fortunately (although the word seems ironic) for me there was no water in the bottom of the well. I had a very small flashlight in my hand, a key chain flashlight actually, the kind my mother keeps in her purse. I flicked it on and immediately realized the light’s tiny battery was failing. It would soon be dead. It was attached to a set of keys, but they were not car keys. Instead, they were old-style skeleton keys like something from a very old house or maybe even a castle.

  In my first flicker of dim light, I saw the walls of the well — smooth, wet stones, mossy. In the darkness, I realized that I could see the stars up in the night sky, the constellation Cassiopeia directly above me. Had I paid better attention in that History of Civilization class, I might have known something about the being the constellation was named for. But my mind had wandered often.

  Was I frightened down there in this well of despair? Oddly enough, it was not as bad as how I had felt while I was awake and learning of my parent’s separation. If I had been the cause of family conflict, I had also been the glue — the Crazy Glue to be precise. But the epoxy of me had failed. I wasn’t cohesive enough. My family, as I had loved it and sometimes loathed it, was no more as far as I was concerned.

  Which explains why my ever-fertile and entertaining subconscious mind put me in this well. A skilled lucid dreamer can make things happen in a dream. My astral projection skills had been coming along nicely, but I was a poor lucid dreamer. I willed all manner of interesting things to appear in dreams and they just didn’t materialize. But I kept trying. I yelled out to my parents for help.

  My voice echoed up through this deep chamber and spilled out into the empty night. Nothing. Maybe I would have been wiser to yell for Tanya or Andrea or even Ozzie. The Ozerater would never leave me stranded in a well. He’d at least toss me down a sandwich.

  The quality of the silence reminded me of what it sounds like to be wearing some truly expensive stereo earphones with the stereo turned off. You feel removed from the world.

  And so I had fallen into the earth, into this well or this chasm in the earth’s crust. I was not on my way to hell but trapped part of the way there.

  Then I heard breathing. Easy explanation: my own. It was echoing off the walls. I was always a heavy breather. A snoremeister in my sleep. In the daytime, I kept my mouth open, because my nose could never retrieve enough air to satisfy my demanding lungs.

  Focus, I commanded my sleeping self. Breathe in, breathe out. Stay calm. It is only a dream. We repeat, this is only a dream.

  The voice, I assumed, was the usual voice in my head, but I was sure the breathing now was coming from somewhere else directly behind me. I had been saving what was left of the depleted battery in the key-chain light for an emergency, and this seemed as good a time as any. I flicked it on and turned myself around.

  And there I was. Smiling.

  Old Roger Sperry, the Caltech researcher who studied epilepsy patients whose connective right/left hemisphere tissue had been severed, drew some odd conclusions from his research. In essence, he had concluded that the “you” who you identified with most existed in the left hemisphere. There was somebody else holding down the fort in the right side of your brain. As a result some patients heard “voices in their heads.” Well, doesn’t everybody? Duh.

  These patients were not like people with dual identity or multi-personalities or any of that sort of thing. They just had an amplified sense of what most people experienced. In the old days, that voice in your head may have been called a “conscience.” Or some could have thought it was God.

  Julian Jaynes, that other expert on brain activity, had concluded that our primitive ancestors were incapable of having this internal debate of trying to sort out what is real and what is imagined. As we evolved, we learned to sort things into two distinct categories of internal (imagined) and external (real world). We also began to have “conversations in our heads.” We had discussions, arguments, parliamentary debates, polemical altercations, and ultimately intellectual and moral mud-wrestling going on up there. Or at least I did.

  But I had never met my other self face to face.

  He was rather calm and composed in the failing flashlight. For a right-brain creation, he seemed to have a handle on a very physical problem that involved problem solving.

  The light went dead, and he spoke my name in a voice like the voice you hear when you first tape-record yourself. That doesn’t sound like me, you say. But that is probably what you really sound like outside your own head.

  Did I still think I was dreaming? I believe so. It was all a little surreal. Scary and interesting at the same time. (Like the first time I watched The Matrix.) The me who was not smiling, however, was considering when this dream was going to end. We were still in the damn well, and usually in a dream you flit about from one place to another. That same me was becoming fearful that I might not ever leave this strange place. I didn’t want to stay at the bottom of a freaking well for the rest of my life, and I didn’t know if my parents knew the right doctors who could throw down a rope.

  My other self said it this way. “Simon, we have a problem here and basically only one solution. Where would you like to go?”

  My left-brain me, ever so logical, suggested, “Up.”

  “Good. So we need a creative solution.”

  “I was hoping that’s where you’d come in.”

  “You trust me then?”

  “I’ve always trusted you,” I said.

  “Okay,” my twin said. “The rocks are too slippery to climb, but if we lean into each other, back to back, and brace our feet against opposite walls, we can do it.”

  It seemed like a crackpot idea. “Can’t I just will myself to wake?”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” he said.

  And so, back to back, Siamese twinned, with the hamstrings of our legs tight and straining against the wall, we ascended towards the waiting arms of Queen Cassiopeia.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I woke up with a sore back and a charley horse cramp in my leg, not knowing if I had reached the surface. I wasn’t even totally sure if the vivid well of my dreams had been on planet earth.

  My dream had prompted only one immediate decision. I would not go to school today. My mom was already off to the front lines of the real estate wars when the phone started to ring. I could see from the call minder it was my father calling from his office. I did not want to have that conversation. So I let it ring. He could leave a message. I had detected over the years, as the tensions mounted between us all, that we communicated better with each other by leaving messages on various machines and services. I think we could have held the family together if there was always a buffer of technology between us. It usually just involved stating the basics: who, what, where, and when. And we would leave out how and why.

  Lydia had told me once that I was destined to do great things in the line of “communications.” She interpreted this to mean that I could be an anchor man on a TV news show, a diplomat who could stop wars between warring nations, possibly even the first human to communicate with aliens already living undetected amongst us. Or maybe I’d just be a guy who hooked up cable to your house
so you could get all the sports channels.

  Back here on earth I was never a great conversationalist. As Lydia would say, it wasn’t my “time” yet.

  Alone in the kitchen drinking a cup of instant coffee (three sugars, lots of milk) I thought I might just spend the day reading the backs of cereal boxes. I was that motivated. But the newspaper was sitting on the table. In it was absolutely nothing of a metaphysical or occult nature, indicating to me that the whole day would be a great disappointment. I could see the forests of gloom already growing in the hallways, the vines of foul thoughts lacing up through the floorboards.

  The newspaper reminded me of the unconscious Trina, a girl I did not know and had never met. I thought we had something in common. Boy in a well, girl in a coma. At the very least I wanted to find out what she looked like.

  Riding a public bus involves being stared at. The eyes pinned me with various labels. Dope addict. Runaway. Purse snatcher. Car thief. Pervert. Generic deviant. You didn’t have to be telepathic on a bus to know who thought what about you.

  Fortunately for me, I was only going to Ridgefield, a mere twenty-minute ride west on Highway 17. I got off near the Wal-Mart and walked to the public library. The woman behind the desk there saw me coming and immediately sized me up as a hormone-crazed youth who wanted to use the public Internet access for pornography. She was surprised when I asked her if there was a collection of Ridgefield High yearbooks in the library.

  “Over near the fire extinguisher,” she said and pointed. I sat down beneath a portrait of Queen Elizabeth side by side with one of the presidents of the United States, an odd combo placed there as if the two were married. If so, I would have guessed it was an unsatisfactory union from the look on the queen’s face. The president, meanwhile, had that familiar glazed-over look suggesting he was there but not there, as if his real thoughts were on a favoured golf game from a decade earlier, or maybe it was a look that said, “My mind has been taken over by the grey, almond-eyed ones from Tau Ceti.”