Shoulder the Sky Read online

  I sat back down in the chair by the bed and watched her face, which now seemed free of pain. She was breathing a shallow, steady rhythm, and I looked up at the blank TV screen on the far wall. I could see a reflection of the two of us in it. A son and his mother in a hospital room. The reflection in the dark glass seemed like a portal into another place — a stark, two-dimensional world without colour or energy.

  The nurse came into the room shortly after that to check on my mother. She left abruptly, but I did not seem to understand the reason. She returned with a doctor and another nurse and I was ushered out of the room. It was as if it was happening to someone else — the boy reflected in the dark TV screen above — because that’s the image I focused on until I was led out of the room.

  I sat in a chair in a waiting room and no one talked to me. Then I was allowed to go back into the room with my mother. It was then that I made the phone call to my father. The doctor asked me for the number and said he would call, but I said no. And I called him. Then I called the school and told Mr. Cohen to get Lilly out of class.

  I didn’t look at my mom even though she was right there in the room with me. The doctor and nurse were talking to me, but I didn’t understand the meaning of words spilling out of their mouths.

  And then I felt the great weight that had been upon my shoulders disappear. I felt much lighter. I straightened my back and sat upright in the chair, looking out at the rain. Aside from that, I didn’t feel much of anything. And that was the way I stayed for a long time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I was kneeling in the forest. My hands were clenched — two fists full of dirt and pine needles from the forest floor. I heard a mosquito buzz near my ear, and then it landed on my cheek. I felt the small sharp pain of it piercing and drawing blood from me.

  Then I heard someone running towards me. Lilly. “Martin.” She nearly collapsed beside me. She touched my face, then looked at the blood on her finger. “Jesus, Martin.”

  “What am I going to do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I threw the dirt in my fists. Not at Lilly. At nothing. I felt the anger well up inside me. “Why did she have to die?”

  “We better find Dad. I followed him after you ran off. Then we split up. You scared him pretty bad.”

  “I don’t care. I was there with her when she died.”

  “We know that. You called Dad, remember?”

  “Now I do.”

  It was almost dark by the time we found our way to the gravel road and met up with my father. I’d never seen him look so scared. He pulled me to him and held on tightly. He didn’t ask me to explain. I could remember what she looked like now. I could see her face very clearly in my mind. I could remember what she looked like when she was healthy — fussing with her flowers in the back yard. And I could remember her in the hospital — I could see the pain; I could see what it was like to die. And the rage that accompanied those images was so great, I was afraid to speak.

  When we arrived at the van, the side door was open and it was full of mosquitoes.

  “We’re not going to Alaska, are we?” Lilly asked. “I don’t think so,” my father said. “Let’s go get a pizza somewhere and then find a motel.”

  I sat down in the back seat of the van. My father started the engine and we drove back the way we had come in. I realized in my silence how angry I was at him for changing his mind. The forest around us was dark and silent.

  “I’m getting back together with Jake,” Lilly said. “He said he made a mistake. Jake is like the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  I bit my thumb until it bled.

  Opinions/Advice/Stuff/Junk/Meaning of Life: You Choose

  Language limits what we know and what we think. Language is limited and our minds are limited by it. What one generation “understands” to be true, the next generation discovers to be false — because people change, times change, ideas change. Language changes. Truth is probably unknowable, and so we fumble with half-truths.

  History is shaped more by misunderstanding than understanding, more by mystery than fact. Some philosophers I think try to deal with this. The German Jewish philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of those men. He was a teacher who told his students something like this: “I want to be able to move you away from something that is disguised nonsense to something that is obvious nonsense.” Better to know something is false (even if you continue to live by it) than to believe something is true when it is actually untrue.

  Wittgenstein admitted to having a “low misery threshold,” which made him a pretty unhappy character at Cambridge, where he hung out with the likes of Bertrand Russell. Ludwig projected some of his unhappiness in a philosophical way by getting into arguments about the nature of reality and how we perceive it. In one classic case, during a tête á tête among masters, he adamantly refused to believe that there was not a rhinoceroses under his desk. He did not assert there was a rhinoceros there, just that no one could absolutely prove otherwise.

  Wittgenstein became a soldier during the First World War and helped save a fellow soldier who was wounded on the battlefield. He learned to believe in the ultimate reality of pain and suffering, but everything else was up for debate.

  Born in 1889, Wittgenstein died in 1951, the year of the first colour television broadcast in the United States. Wittgenstein viewed himself as a kind of therapist for misunderstanding. He hoped philosophy could cure you of all the screwed up ideas stuck in your head that rule your life. This did not always go over well at parties and more often than not, almost no one (other than Bertrand Russell, maybe) knew what the hell he was talking about.

  Wittgenstein did succeed in distancing himself from his own misery by writing cumbersome, hard-to-read books with titles like Tractates Logico-Philosophicus, which would make a great name for a rap group if anyone wants to borrow it.

  Like other intellectuals and writers before him, Ludwig W. used his ideas to escape from the hard work of living with himself. But like Mick Jagger once said, “It’s all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.”

  Emerso

  “Who exactly are you angry at?” Dave asked.

  “Everyone. Everything.”

  “Could you begin to narrow that down?”

  “I’m really pissed off at you, for starters.”

  “Why me?”

  “I was okay the way I was. I didn’t necessarily like who I was but I could live with it. I’m not sure I can live with this.”

  “You never told me about being in the room when she died.”

  “Everyone knew I was there. I called my father while I was standing beside her bed. It wasn’t exactly a secret.”

  “But you had shut it out of your mind.”

  “I kept it in a box.”

  “And now the box is open?”

  “And I’m not sure I can stand it.”

  “A lot of people have to learn to live with pain, with truth. Join the club.”

  “This is all you have to offer now that I’m acting the way everyone wanted me to act? I hate all of you for doing this to me.”

  “You can hate me if you want. Just don’t cut me out. Gotta keep coming here. Gotta keep talking.”

  “I don’t feel like being nice to anyone anymore. No more good deeds. What are they all going to make of me at school?”

  “You’re probably going to piss a lot of people off.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping for.”

  “How’d you learn to drive, anyway?”

  “I just figured it out, I guess.”

  “Better stay off the road. The world doesn’t need another angry driver.”

  “I could be good at road rage.”

  “You going to go back to the cemetery, though?”

  “I can’t.”

  “You should. Sometime when you’re ready.”

  “When will that be?”

  “I don’t know,” Dave said.

  “That’s all you
can say? Maybe you are right for having those self-doubts. Maybe you’re not very good at your job. Look at me. I was better off before I started coming here. What if I sued your ass for malpractice?”

  “I don’t know. If you feel you have to do it, then go for it.”

  After a while it felt like we were talking in circles. I wanted to hit something or break something and I had this feeling that if I did, it would give Dave great satisfaction. He’d see it as some kind of success, so I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Gloom was the persistent mood as we pulled back up into the driveway. “Welcome to Mt. McKinley,” I said out loud. “Mt. McKinley is the highest mountain in Alaska, in North America for that matter. It’s 20,320 feet, to be precise.”

  And I was going to have to climb that damn mountain day after day from now on. With the overwhelming weight of the sky settling down on my shoulders again, I would have to attempt to climb those forbidding icy slopes.

  “We’re home,” my dad said.

  “I’m gonna go call Jake,” Lilly said and walked into the house.

  “Why would she want to hang onto Jake?” I asked him.

  “Lilly needs something to hang onto. We all do.”

  “Understatement of the century.”

  “Martin, we’re going to make it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m quitting my job. I hate it. I hate it even more because Claire would hate the fact I stayed with it.”

  “What are you going to do, write poetry? Now there would be a brilliant career move.” It felt natural now to be giving my father a hard time.

  “Yeah, I am. First I’m gong to get out all of your mother’s paintings. I’m going to photograph them outside in natural light. This is something I told her I would do but never did.”

  I wanted to tell him about the paintings — the scanned images of the paintings I’d posted on Emerso — but I didn’t. He didn’t know about the website. I still didn’t want him to know. I wanted that to remain my own secret kingdom — this fantasy world inhabited by me and those other freaks out there who found “my world” something they could relate to. As Emerso, I could set off shotgun epiphanies. Miracles could blossom in strangers’ lives just because I said it should be so.

  But no one was going to be able to create a miracle for me.

  “I’ll freelance,” my dad said. “I’ll do some advertising work but just enough to scrape by. We’ll live on the cheap but I’ll work from home. What do you think?”

  “You know what we called you, Lilly and me?”

  “The Invisible Man,” he said.

  I suddenly felt guilty. “I may have been invisible but I wasn’t deaf. And by the way, I hate golf. If I ever turn on the Golf Channel again, destroy the television at once.”

  “I will,” I promised, but I wasn’t thinking about him, I was thinking about me and the misery that still haunted me.

  “Let’s do some father-son thing. What do you want to do?”

  “I want to clean up the back yard,” I said.

  And that’s what we did. We weeded the flower beds, cleaned up some trash, snipped some grass with hand cutters. I transplanted some small cosmos dwarfed by the older growth. I dug into the soil with my fingers and transplanted the flowers to a place they’d have more room. Then I watered them with my mom’s old watering can.

  “Some of them are perennials,” he said. “They keep coming back every year from the root.”

  “Some just drop a zillion seeds and keep coming back that way. Calendula. Asters.”

  All night I climbed Mt. McKinley’s jagged slope. It was dark, cold. The winds were horrendous. I couldn’t get a good handhold and my feet kept slipping. I wanted to let go and fall.

  When I woke up in the morning, my father was out in the yard with her paintings. He leaned them against trees in the morning sun and was taking pictures of them with his Pentax mounted on a tripod.

  Lilly was burning pop tarts. “Jake’s picking me up in a few minutes. Want a ride to school?”

  “Sure,” I said. My venom supply was still topped up. Why not get a good kick-start with Jake?

  A car horn, three hammer blows. My father, pausing from his work, waving to Jake; Jake not responding. His eyes were straight ahead, music on loud, bobbing his head slightly, reptilian.

  I got into the back seat without asking. “Dweeb transport?” was all he said to Lilly. She shrugged.

  Between tracks on the CD playing I asked Jake how long he’d had that zit on the back of his neck. “You know,” I said, “the one that looks like Vesuvius ready to erupt?”

  Lilly turned and gave me a look of shock. Jake was raising his hand to give me the finger, eyes in the rear-view mirror. I beat him to the draw.

  I was surprised that I didn’t feel any satisfaction in this. I wanted so bad to be nasty but this was just kid’s stuff. Jake was an easy target. He was Pearl Harbor and I had all the planes. But I couldn’t seem to drop the load.

  “No more mister nice guy,” was all Jake said to me when I climbed out at school. I didn’t thank him for the ride. Lilly grabbed me before I walked away. I thought she was going to yell at me. Instead, she shoved her school schedule in my hand. “You need me, you’ll know how to find me,” she said. I walked towards school. It didn’t look anything like the same place I’d left yesterday.

  After a major fire burns through an old growth forest, after the fire has seemingly run its course and the fire fighters are all home washing the soot out of their clothes and staring at their singed eyelashes in the mirror, sometimes there are roots deep underground still smouldering. All they need is a little oxygen.

  I think the other kids could smell something burning in the classroom during my first two periods of the day. Teachers droned and students sat droopy-eyed and uninterested. I stared at the back of Kathy Bringhurst. I liked her hair and that surprised me. I had to admit to myself that I liked the way her hair looked. It was long and brown and kind of straight. It was nothing Hollywood gorgeous, just real girl hair and I liked looking at it.

  And I was totally shocked. Shocked because I was one hundred percent sure I hated everything in this world. There was not one thing right about what was going on in the universe and it was as if everything that happened was some kind of punishment for me.

  Except for this. I liked her hair.

  The bell rang. I couldn’t even tell you what the teacher had been talking about for the last fifty minutes, but the blackboard was full of ambitious words and diagrams. Apparently it had been an English class and Ms. Wallace was talking about a poem by Walt Whitman.

  I caught up to her outside class. “Kathy.”

  “Martin, I didn’t even see you in class.”

  “Invisibility runs in my family.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “How are you?” I asked.

  She had that sadness still about her. Scott Rutledge was still dead. He had not come back to life as she had hoped. Her dreams were shattered. Her heart broken and scattered to the highways headed off in all directions. “I’m doing better,” she said.

  “I really like your hair.”

  “Thanks. I was thinking of getting it cut.”

  “No,” I said. “Please don’t.”

  She didn’t understand, I know. And I’m sure I appeared more the freak than usual. I had discovered one blessed thing in the world I liked — only one thing. And she was considering cutting it off. She studied the weirdness in my face. “Okay. I won’t cut it.”

  My soul dredged up from the sewers of Hades.

  “Maybe I’ll trim the split ends.”

  “Sure,” I said as if giving permission. “You can do that. Walk you to math?”

  Math had been on a major downhill skid ever since the HMMWMT had exhibited dementia during class. Whatever was going on in class was as exciting as last year’s lint. The new guy, Mr. Templeton, didn’t seem to care. He droned and dron
ed and then gave an overly ambitious homework assignment that no one would be able to finish. I stationed myself in the back of the room so I could stare at the back of Kathy some more but I decided not to talk to her again because whatever was going to come out of my mouth would probably sound fully flaked.

  Darrell made first contact with me at lunch. I hadn’t seen him all morning and at lunch he wanted to know where I had disappeared to yesterday. The Egg Man had thought to bring an extra sandwich for me in celebration of his own success. I warned him I was feeling a little testy, that if I said anything rude, he should chalk it up to simple psychosis.

  “Emerso, I had my way with Microsoft.”

  “The challenge of a lifetime, right?”

  “You bet. I hacked past all the firewalls and all kinds of stuff only Bill Gates himself could have dreamed up. I was there. I was inside the corp. Adrenalin rush or what? Access to everything. Financials, R&;D, Bill Gates’ personal hobby files — some weird shit there. Company memos. Short range, long-term planning, info on corporate spying. You name it.”

  “Once again, hearty congratulations. And then you got arrested?”

  “No. I was tricked.” But Darrell was still smiling. “I was suckered in and it was beautiful.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Hackers’ heaven. I thought I’d busted down the doors just like I’d always dreamed, but it was a virtual space — a virtual version of Microsoft. I was lured right in like a skunk headed for some smelly mackerel in a Havaheart trap. It was all fake, perfectly and convincingly so.”

  “How did you figure that out?”

  “I didn’t. I back out of the whole shebang, I cover my tracks, I bask in the glory of it all, and then I get this e-mail marked urgent. They offered me a job.”