Deconstructing Dylan Read online

  His brow furrowed as if some small excavating machine had just carved a canyon across his forehead. “Why twenty years ago?”

  I didn’t really have an answer. I just had this fascination with everything from the turn of the century. The millennium, as they called it — the year 2000 and the ten years leading up to it. “I think everything was simpler then. Things made sense.”

  “Trust me. Things made about as much sense then as they do now. Some people thought the world would end at midnight on December 31, 1999.”

  “Maybe it did. Maybe this is all an illusion.” I had bought into Robyn’s theory at least in part. She was now my mentor.

  “You’re going to tell me that all matter is made up of 99.9 percent empty space, right?” My father sounded slightly sarcastic but not insulting.

  “I was thinking along those lines.”

  “That we’re all just bundles of energy, and there really is no such thing as matter?”

  “That too.”

  “Dylan, I think you should study quantum physics. You’d like it.”

  My father often said that he wanted me to go to university and study physics or biochemistry. I wanted to be an entomologist, however. It was an ongoing debate. “If I study quantum physics, could I figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light?”

  “You could give it a shot.”

  “Then I’ll consider it. What sort of equipment would I need for FTL travel?”

  “You’d need a lot of energy would be my guess. If you could get yourself into space and build a spacecraft that was strong enough, then detonate a contained one-hundred-megaton nuclear explosion that could push you out of the solar system, you might, and I say might, approach the speed of light, but I don’t think you could make it work.”

  “But if I could, it would alter time, right?”

  “Somewhat. But the blast would probably kill you.”

  “That’s the downside, eh?”

  “Real down.”

  “Can’t I just create some kind of force field with my mind and travel back in time?”

  “And what kind of force field would that be?” My father could be a bucket of cold water at times.

  “I’m not sure. But I’d like to go back to that night of December 31, 1999, or maybe sometime in 1995.”

  “Why do you want to go back to the year 1995? That was before you were born.”

  “I don’t know. I just think I’d be more at home there.”

  “Do you realize how slow computers were then? How primitive the WorldCom was?”

  “It was called the Internet back then, remember? The World Wide Web.”

  “It was like a tortoise. And everything was two dimensional — video screens, comp monitors, cinascreens. You’d be bored out of your gourd.”

  “I am bored out of my gourd — sometimes, anyway.”

  “You’re sixteen, Dylan. It’s a tough age. You’ll get through it. Your mother and I love you and we’ll see you through. You’ll go to university. You’ll have the best holoprofs in the country. You’ll meet chicks.”

  “Chicks?”

  “It was a joke. Chicks was a term they used when I was growing up, although girls hated it.”

  “Why would you call them chicks? Like chickens?”

  “I don’t know. Language isn’t always logical.”

  “Language puts everything into little boxes,” I said. “I don’t trust it. I’d prefer to be telepathic.”

  “Oh, that would be swell. Everyone walking around listening in on everyone else’s thoughts.” He was sounding sarcastic again.

  “At least then everyone would have to be honest.”

  “Is honesty important to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. It’s one of the old-fashioned virtues and I approve of it and so does your mother. There’s not enough honesty in our world — especially in my job. Even though I work with brilliant men and women, they are always playing games. I can’t tell when anyone is telling me the truth. Makes me want to buy one of those Veriscans.”

  “They say the Veriscan is only about 85 percent accurate in telling if anyone is lying.”

  “If you buy the upgrade I think it might be closer to 90 percent, but really all it does is register pupil dilation and changes in skin temp, heart rate, and sweat.”

  “Miles Vanderhague got caught wearing one in school. Some of the teachers were really pissed off.”

  “No one wants to be caught fibbing.”

  “Can I have one for my birthday?”

  “No. Absolutely not. Why would you want one?”

  I thought for a minute. I really did want one. I wanted to know when people were bullshitting me. My parents in particular. It’s sometimes tough on a kid being raised by a couple of eggheads. Even though I knew they loved me, I often had this feeling they had read too many psychology textbooks. And I sometimes thought they were holding too much back.

  “I want a Veriscan,” I said, “so I can use it to meet girls — chicks.”

  “That’s not ethical. You want to know if they are telling you the truth? It would almost be like reading their minds, invading their thoughts.”

  “Precisely. I could ask them directly what they thought about me and I’d know if they were telling the truth. It would cut through a lot of bullshit.”

  “Dylan, you are one weird kid. Sometimes I don’t know where you came from.” He was smiling now, at least, and that was a major breakthrough with my father. “But I’m still not buying you a Veriscan for your birthday.”

  “Not even a cheap one?”

  “No way.”

  In my dream, I was at the bottom of Loch Ness. Either I was with the Loch Ness monster or I was the Loch Ness monster. It was unclear to me but it was one of my underwater dreams and I was looking at the surface of the loch and the Scottish sky above. I think I could see the dark underside of boats on the water. There in the depths I was feeling very lonely in an underwater monster sort of way. I was thinking I was the only one of my kind on the planet. I knew that if I surfaced and the truth about me was known, many people would find me fascinating but I would not be able to communicate with them and I would be considered a freak of nature. I did not want that so I stayed at the bottom of the loch and waited for the end of time.

  Although I may or may not have actually been the LNM in my dream, I had access to the creature’s memory and that memory was very good. He/she/I remembered a time when there were others like us — great, gentle beasts roaming the seas, well before humans appeared on the scene. It was a time of peace and harmony, which sounds dull when I say it out loud but it was good back then, quite good. And I’m pretty sure we were telepathic. In the dream, it really was like being there.

  When I woke up, I was surprised to discover I was still in my bed. I was slightly shocked to see I had two arms and two legs and that I had been returned to 2014. I looked in the mirror and saw that my hair was continuing to grow back on my head but stubble was also starting to appear on my chin. Pretty soon I would actually need to shave. I saw a look in my eyes that said I was disappointed with what I was seeing. But then I remembered Robyn and I cheered up. I remembered that I had promised to go to Tibet with her someday and that cheered me up even more.

  It was a Saturday and that meant no school but I had no real plans. I wrote down my dream on my comp — about being the Loch Ness monster. (Now I was convinced I had somehow merged my identity while asleep with the great beast.) I half convinced myself that I had travelled back in time with/as the LNM. Maybe I would not need the hundred-megaton nuke to power my time travel after all.

  Sitting before my home comp, I fed in a profile of the LNM and asked the searcher how long ago it would have been that such creatures roamed freely. Sixty-five million years ago was the answer.

  “Why did they disappear?” I asked the searcher.

  The sweet, feminine voice (the one I had programmed) came back immediately to say, “Probably a meteorite, Dylan. An extremely mas
sive chunk of rock from space. First the collision, next the crater, and then a huge column of debris catapulted into the atmosphere and then drifted all over the earth, cutting off the sun. It meant the extinction of many earth creatures.” She sounded so sad and sweet when she said this, and I felt a pang of regret too when she sobbed. I knew it was only programmed emotion (the upgrade I had installed last month, the one my father found foolish), but my own sadness was real.

  “Dinosaurs and other creatures, like your friend the Loch Ness monster, had been around for 100 million years. It was their planet.”

  “They didn’t know what hit them,” I said. “And then they were gone. All of them gone. All but one.”

  “It has not been absolutely proven that the creature exists,” she countered.

  “I know,” I said. “But it hasn’t been proven that it doesn’t exist, right?” I asked.

  “Correct.”

  “But sixty-five million years is a long time. Nothing could live that long.”

  “No single organism. But life regenerates.”

  “Remind me how long humans have been around.”

  “Less than four million years.”

  “That’s not very long, is it?”

  “Depends on your point of reference.”

  “Compared to dinosaurs.”

  “Compared to them, you and all of your kind, Dylan, are just a brief experiment.”

  “There’s a comforting thought.”

  “Sorry, Dylan. But as you know, I think you are great.”

  “Thanks.” I knew she was only a program but an upgrade is an upgrade and a comp that says nice things to you is better than one that has a bad attitude.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  My father was away on business for a few days and my mother looked pretty sad at breakfast.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I think I’m suffering from depression.” My mother was a scientist and a medical researcher. She couldn’t just say she felt bad or that life sucked or anything. She diagnosed herself with a temporary mental illness.

  “What’s wrong? Anything I can do to help?” At the best of times, we were not great communicators, my mother and I. Sometimes it was like we were on two different mountaintops signalling to each other by smoke signals.

  “I’ll see if I can get a prescription. My guess is that this is endogenous depression, an imbalance of chemicals in the neurotransmitters. It’s a matter of body chemistry.”

  “Are you sure it’s not that there’s something bothering you? I mean, I feel like crap sometimes too and usually there’s a reason — something is screwing me up. I didn’t think it was just chemicals.”

  Suddenly she looked concerned. “Dylan, you never told me that you had problems. I should have taken you to the doctor.”

  “It’s not like that, Mom. I have my ups and downs like everybody else. A girl looks at me the wrong way and I feel like a weege. I flunk a test and I feel like a dodo. I forget to pull up my zipper, someone laughs at me, and I feel like a bozo. Sometimes all those things happen at once and I’m convinced I’m a total loser.”

  “You’re not a loser. Dylan, you are someone very special.”

  “I know. My point is that I expect to feel down sometimes. I don’t think I need a pill to make it go away.”

  “You are wise beyond your years. But your mother is different.” She had a bad habit of referring to herself in the third person sometimes. “I’ll go to Dr. Grant and he’ll prescribe something so I’ll be okay.”

  After school, I trailed after Robyn and she seemed to enjoy my company although we didn’t quite know what to say to each other. I told her about my mother and her endogenous depression.

  “It’s probably just menopause,” she said.

  For some reason, I didn’t feel like discussing my mother’s menopause. It was possible, though, that she was right. My parents were considerably older than those of most other kids my age. I had asked my father once why they had waited so late to have me and he blamed it on their work. Everything had to do with their work, it seemed, even when the biological clock was ticking.

  “Probably,” I said. “Probably is menopause.”

  The subject of my mother’s unhappiness and her menopause had somehow made us both very hungry. “Would you like to go get something to eat?” she asked.

  “Yeah. You want to go to Burger King?”

  “Get real,” she said. “I’m off meat for good. Do you know how many chemicals they pump into cattle?”

  “I don’t know the exact ones, no.”

  “I’ve got a list. I’ll email it to you.”

  “Okay.”

  We ate veggie wraps together in the mall by the holo-fountain with the quarters in the water. It was odd how often I ended up at the mall. I had a theory that there was some mild addictive chemical in the air conditioning there that made us keep coming back. It was like the addictive nicotine that some people believed was put in some fast food coffee back in the old days.

  We discussed one of Robyn’s favourite topics: alternate planes of existence. She was trying to convince me that there were infinite numbers of me alive and well in infinite alternate universes.

  “I’d like to meet one or two,” I said.

  “You can’t. Those lives and yours are like parallel lines stretching to infinity.” I imagined those parallel lines just as the holo-fountain turned itself into a visual cascade of spraying icicles and then transformed again into a 3-D commercial for Seven-Up. “When you die, however,” she continued, “it’s possible that your infinite numbers of selves merge into one entity.”

  “That would be confusing,” I ventured.

  “Not if you are prepared for it.” Robyn had that confident sound to her voice, making me think that she was already prepared for it, that she was already practising to meet all those infinite selves and merge into one with them so they could have a major after-death kind of class reunion or something.

  “I know I’m not ready for anything like that,” I admitted. “I’m a pretty confused person as it is.”

  “Why are you confused?”

  “I don’t exactly know. And that’s part of the confusion. It’s just something I feel. I feel like I’m missing something that everyone else knows about. Or that a part of me is missing. It’s not like a toe or an ear. There’s something I should know about me that I don’t know.”

  Robyn looked at the worry in my face, the confusion. She was making me nervous as she stared at me. I tried to look away but our eyes were locked onto each other. “You are really sexy when you are confused,” she said out of the blue and then kissed me like before.

  “Wow,” I said afterwards, feeling somewhat stunned. “Thanks,” I added, like a fool.

  “You don’t have to thank me,” she said. “It was something I wanted to do.”

  I smiled at her now, coming back down to planet Earth after a quick exploration of some other alternate universe right there in the mall. “Listen, I’m confused a lot. So you can do that any time you choose.”

  “Maybe I will,” she said.

  When she kissed me a second time, a security guard stopped by the far wall and stared at us. She was a heavy-set woman in a blue uniform with a taser baton dangling from her belt. It wasn’t like it was illegal to kiss in public or anything but we knew it was time to move on.

  I walked Robyn to her home and then, my head still in the clouds, sauntered on to my own house. My father was still away. His skid, an old dual-fuel Honda, was not in the driveway. Inside, my mom was sitting at the kitchen table, a glass of wine in front of her and the music up quite loud. She was playing some oldies from way back. I didn’t mind it but I told the audio to turn itself down.

  My mother looked up. “Hi,” she said. Her voice had a strange quality to it.

  “You all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I feel much better.” Her words were a little slurred.

  “You went to Dr. Grant?”

  �
��He wrote me a scrip.”

  I was thinking that pills and wine were not a good combination and wanted to say something but I figured that maybe what my mother needed was to loosen up a bit more often. She seemed a bit looped but was trying to cover it up.

  “Did you have anything to eat?” she asked.

  “Some vegetarian food with Robyn.”

  “Are you sure you got enough protein?” She was almost giggling. Boy, was it ever weird to see my mom in this mood.

  “I’m positive.”

  She took a sip from her glass and then did that little swish of her finger like a Z in the air that made the audio volume increase. “I remember this song when it first came out. You were just a baby. I was so happy then. I was the happiest mother in the world. You were so healthy and so cute.”

  The song was really old. She must have been confused. I knew all of her old music and this song by Madonna — I can’t remember the name — was from way before I was born. I decided not to say anything. The song ended and she swished her finger again, turning off the music altogether. When she looked up at me she was crying. I didn’t understand why.

  She touched my face and stared at me as if she were searching to recognize something. When she stood up, she wobbled a little bit. I mentioned something about mixing the pills with the alcohol. She nodded. “You’re right, Dylan. I’ve altered my body chemistry. I should know better. It’s just that sometimes I have to try to get in touch with feelings that I’ve kept buried for a long time. Your father doesn’t like to discuss it.”

  “Discuss what?”

  “Dylan, someday I’m going to tell you, I promise. But not now. When you are older.”

  “Mom, what are you talking about?”

  She started to cry a little again. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed. I hugged her and felt her tears on my shoulder. Then she pulled back and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m going to bed, Dylan. I’m just talking crazy. I’m sorry you saw me like this.”

  After she was gone, I put the wine bottle away and looked around until I found the pills and then pocketed them so she couldn’t find them. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wanted to be careful.