Smoke and Mirrors Read online

  “I was afraid it was like some kind of computer virus had sucked you into cyber world or something.”

  “I’m not computer generated, if that is on your list of theories.”

  “That’s comforting. But I still have a long list.”

  “Willing to share the top five?”

  “Well, the top one is currently that you don’t exist at all. That you are a product of my own mental imbalance.”

  “I hadn’t noticed you were imbalanced.”

  “I cried when I thought you were gone. I mean, I really let go. Would a balanced person have done that?”

  “I’m touched.”

  “Maybe you should tell me why you’re here.”

  “I have some theories too, but I really don’t know the whole truth. I just know I’m supposed to be with you.”

  Sung and Fishman had apparently made up and they were walking by me now, best of friends. They must have thought I was talking to them because they turned and stopped. I just waved. “Gonna watch the game tonight on TV?” I asked.

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Sung said.

  They did not see Andrea. “Am I the only one who can see you?” I asked her after Sung and Fishman had moved on.

  “So far, just you. Which is what makes me think I am here to do something for you. Help you in some way. But that’s just a hypothesis.”

  “Do you have any special powers?”

  Andrea looked straight at Lisa DeLong, another one of the students who had seen me cry in English, walking towards us carrying an armful of textbooks. Suddenly Lisa dropped a pencil, stopped, and picked it up, almost spilling her books.

  As Lisa walked by, she paused and smiled. “See you tomorrow, Simon.”

  “Bye, Lisa.” And she walked on.

  “What about that?” Andrea asked.

  “That what?”

  “The way she smiled at you.”

  “You’re saying you made her do that?”

  “When was the last time she even gave you the time of day?”

  “I’m not totally without my charms.”

  “You wanted to know about my ‘special powers.’ Well, I’m just beginning to figure out what I can and cannot do. I don’t know how special they have to be to impress you, but I made her look at you. And I made her feel something, some small thing, something warm and fuzzy towards you just then.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Like mind control?”

  “No, Simon. All I can do is tweak a person’s emotions. I can’t change what they will do. I can’t totally change the way they feel. But if someone is feeling angry I can make them angrier. If they are feeling kind, I can make them a little kinder.”

  “So you tweaked Lisa DeLong’s feelings towards me?”

  “Just then. Just a little.”

  I was beginning to see some possibilities here.

  “How am I feeling right now?” I asked.

  “You seem to be feeling pretty good.”

  “So do something with that.”

  And damn. I suddenly felt a little better. A bit lighter. The weight of this crazy world had been lifted from my shoulders.

  Andrea smiled at me. My own elevated spirits seemed to have lifted hers as well.

  “So there has to be a bit of mind reading involved here, yes?”

  “I suppose so. You might call it that. It’s just that I know certain things. I don’t know where the information comes from. In fact, there’s an awful lot I don’t know, so you’ll have to bear with me as I figure things out.”

  I was still smiling, still on my emotionally tweaked little buzz of being happy. I took hold of my padlock and was going to turn the numbers when I stopped.

  “What’s the combination?” I asked her.

  “That’s easy. Right to twelve, left to thirty-seven, right to twenty-one.” She was totally certain she was right. She worked the combination herself, but the lock would not open.

  She was one hundred percent wrong. “Sorry,” I said, and cranked back and forth on the dial until the lock snapped open.

  Andrea suddenly looked distraught. She was staring at the lock, and I felt like there was a great distance between us. I tried to say something reassuring but couldn’t find the right words.

  Then she seemed to remember something. “Of course,” she said. “That couldn’t be your combination. It belongs to someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind,” she said. “It’s not important.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Andrea told me to forget about the bus. She wanted to walk.

  “You’re going to come home with me?”

  “You thought I wanted to stay here at school?”

  “My parents are going to love this.”

  “Just pretend I’m not there.”

  Andrea wanted to walk the old abandoned railway hiking path that follows the river. I’m not sure how she knew about it. Out of the blue she started naming trees and birds. “Oak, chokecherry, tamarack, alder, hemlock, maple. Goldfinch, purple martin, grackle, blue jay, mourning dove.”

  It was beautiful walking through the forest like this. I almost never went hiking. I would take the bus home, and my brain would whirr, but I usually talked to no one. I would arrive to an empty house, my dutiful parents still hustling their bonds or houses somewhere else. I had no dog, although I had always wanted a dog. I had a computer program of a dog that my father bought me. When I turned on my computer, it barked and wagged its cybernetic tail on the screen, and I would open a door by clicking the mouse and let it “out” where it barked some more and peed on an imaginary lawn. Sometimes there would be the voice of an angry neighbour yelling at my dog. The dog was not real, so I never gave it a name. Just called it “the dog.”

  “How did you learn all the names?” I asked Andrea.

  “I don’t know. I seem to have a selective memory. This place, this trail, this forest. It is familiar. I’ve been here before.”

  “Like in another life?”

  “Do you believe in reincarnation?” she asked.

  I stopped and leaned against what I thought was an oak tree. “I’m the guy who believes in everything. When I was younger, my friend Ozzie told me I could fly, so I believed him and I jumped off the garage roof. I flew for a second or two and then hit the ground, but it never occurred to me then that I couldn’t fly. It would just take a little more practice. The Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation, and I’ve never met a Buddhist or Hindu I couldn’t trust. If it is metaphysical, I believe in it. But I don’t think you were reincarnated suddenly as a seventeen-year-old girl. I don’t think it works that way.”

  “You think I am seventeen?”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “I’m sixteen,” Andrea said, but as she said it she seemed to remember something.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  She shook her head, pointed to a tree with red berries. “Mountain ash. Also known as a rowan tree. Said to have magical powers.”

  “Trees are great, aren’t they? Big, heavy-duty photo-synthesis machines. When I grow up I want to be a tree.”

  Andrea laughed. She laughed very loudly for a girl of sixteen. “I haven’t laughed like that for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “That I don’t know. Let’s stop.”

  We sat down by the river, and I stared into the water. First I saw the water moving, then the stuff on the surface — dust and twigs and a few leaves. Then I saw us. Both of us quite clearly. I looked different. Older maybe. A tad less insane looking around the eyes. No one ever came out and said I looked crazy, but I knew that some people thought so. Not Charles Manson crazy, just harmless crazy. In the river I didn’t look crazy. It was like I was watching a movie of a different me — a guy and a girl sitting by a moving river in a world of trees and birds.

  And then all of the birds suddenly stopped singing. The image in the river grew fuzzy like a TV with bad reception. It was from a breeze that had come up, stirring the sur
face of the water. There were clouds now as well — not clouds that said, We’re going to unleash buckets of rain on you and make thunder and hit you with a thirty-thousand-volt thunderbolt. Just clouds.

  I was wondering if she somehow did that — made the birds stop singing and the wind start up to erase my movie. And the clouds.

  “It wasn’t me,” she said.

  “You’re reading my mind.”

  “No. Not really. You gave me a look, and I answered the look.”

  Because of the change of lighting Andrea looked different. Very pale. Some famous director once said that in movies, lighting is everything. Sometimes this can be applied to real life too. My mind jumped to the conclusion that Andrea was fading, maybe vaporizing in front of me. I didn’t want her to leave, so I reached out to touch her arm.

  I touched the cloth of her sleeve. It was cotton, and I slid my hand down until I was touching her wrist. The smoothness of the skin over her wrist left a powerful impression that will last the rest of my days. Then I put my thumb in the centre of her palm, my fingers on her knuckles, and I squeezed a little.

  “You’re testing me again to see if I’m real, aren’t you?”

  I felt a little silly. “Let’s walk. I’m really glad you brought me here.”

  “For me there’s a sort of déjà vu feel to it.”

  “I’m the world’s biggest fan of the déjà vu,” I said. “I’ve kept a list of them, at least the ones since I was in the hospital when I was twelve. They don’t seem to make any sense at all, but I’m hoping that someday they will. Usually it’s trivial stuff. I’m doing my homework and the lead breaks on my pencil. Wham. Déjà vu. I’m sitting down to toast at breakfast, open up a jar of raspberry jelly, and there it is again. You don’t think it’s one big, long, repetitive loop we live over and over and these are just snippets of things that sneak through into our current memory?”

  “Where did you get that idea from?”

  “Star Trek. I’ve logged a lot of hours on the Starship Enterprise.”

  “My brother used to ...” she stopped and had that distant, puzzled look again.

  “Your brother used to what?”

  “Watch Star Trek.”

  “You have a brother?”

  “I think so,” she said. “I remember him, or at least something about him, but it isn’t clear at all. I’m not sure I can tell you more.”

  “And so the mystery deepens.”

  Now she seemed a little defensive. “Remember, this isn’t about me. It’s about you. I’m here to help you.”

  I smiled. “And believe me, I can use all the help I can get, so if I ask you anything you don’t want to answer or say anything stupid, just ignore it and go on about your business of helping me.”

  But the inquiring mind is a devilish tool, and I did continue to ask her questions about trivial things in hopes of getting an inkling of who exactly it was that was trying to help me. I asked her several easy questions about Star Trek shows, but she didn’t seem to remember anything. But then it was her “brother” who had been the fan, not her. And I began to wonder if she meant brother literally or if it referred to someone like her — another apparition or spirit or even this, the word that I did not want to test on her: ghost.

  When we arrived at my house I was feeling a little dizzy — not surprising, I wasn’t in great physical shape. I hadn’t exercised much, and I loathed most sports that didn’t require surfboard wax or ball bearings. Since mentioning her brother, Andrea had taken a couple of mood swings, and I tried to cheer her up with recitations of all the trivia in my head.

  “The man who invented chop suey was Li Hung-chang. The father of frozen foods was Clarence Birdseye. Milton Loeb invented the Brillo pad, and Francis Davis invented power steering.” Then I explained to her about my severed hemispheres. “The doctors don’t have a clue if they have reconnected in any way, but my ‘problem’ seems to allow me to memorize vast quantities of seemingly useless information.”

  “Do you still think that I may be something conjured up by your imagination?”

  “My definition of what is real is anything I believe in. And right now, I believe in you more than I believe in the existence of God or McDonald’s or that Jeep Cherokee coming down the street.”

  “Good. Although I think you might do well not to speak about me to anyone.”

  “Like my parents?”

  “Especially them.”

  We were at my front door. I took the key out from under the mat and opened the door, then punched the code on the security system so it wouldn’t go off. “Be it ever so humble,” I said and invited Andrea in, but she seemed frozen on the front steps.

  “I can’t go in. Sorry.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. But I just have a feeling that I shouldn’t be in your house. It’s almost like I’m not allowed.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be around. I’m not really going anywhere.”

  “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, touched my hand once, and began to walk away.

  I assumed that Andrea’s not wanting to come into the house had something to do with my parents. If buildings absorb negativity then my house had absorbed its share. Andrea was sensitive in this area. She had told me school had an odd balance of positive and negative that didn’t “overload” her emotions.

  A sixteen-year-old should probably never try to describe his own parents, but this one will do that anyway.

  My mother must have been a knockout when she was young — in fact, I can tell that men still find her attractive. She uses her good looks and flattery of the male species to sell houses. I find this appalling, but then this is my mother. The woman has smarts but hides them sometimes, which I think makes her conniving.

  My father was class president in high school and valedictorian at the university he went to. He was an achiever and always wanted to be the best. He married my mom because she was this great-looking woman. While others of his generation set about trying to save the world, my father set out to make a lot of money. What he actually does each day is a bit of a mystery to me, but it involves persuading big-time investors to invest in corporate bonds. He’s explained to me what a corporate bond is but it doesn’t really make any sense. A company that already has a huge amount of money borrows from another company, or a wealthy investor, more money to do something that will make them all more money.

  Dad was a high flyer in this circus until some of those corporations went bankrupt and his bond buyers lost big bucks. So poor old Dad had to step down several rungs on his corporate ladder.

  Both Mom and Dad had decided not to have any children but to dedicate their lives to the worthy cause of capitalism, but I came along, prompting my father to give up faith in various birth control methods and have a vasectomy, which he often speaks of in public.

  As previously noted, I was a peculiar child, although no one could pin me down with a label. Attention deficit disorder, maybe. Hyper attention deficit disorder. Other terms were applied. My loving parents fed me Ritalin for a couple of years, and the teachers noted how my behaviour had improved.

  I kept trying to fly — jumping from trees and roofs and second-storey windows. Skateboarding took me to the next level, and Ozzie was my coach. After the accident, I was a little stranger to the world, but I felt just fine after the headaches went away.

  I didn’t have friends like most kids, and a lot of the kids I knew, if given the chance, found ways to make fun of me. I was more interested in the paranormal than the normal anyway. So once Ozzie had moved, I was pretty much on my own, trying to bend spoons with my mind, travel by astral projection, or devise ways to make contact with those aliens that I was sure were watching over us.

  Periodically, a teacher or a school principal would report my odd behaviour to my parents, who had long since given up on their dream of having a normal, possibly even a high-achieving, son. I know I was a
disappointment to them. Once there was discussion with medical experts about reconnecting the right and left hemispheres of my brain more effectively, but the doctors concluded that it couldn’t be done.

  In truth, I was glad I was not normal. Normal seemed dull. Predictable. In my curious universe, all manner of entertaining surprises happened. Which is why I stopped taking my pills, my meds, as my mother called them, quite a while ago. My parents thought I was taking them. Certainly the drugstore was paid handsomely for the prescription. Clearly the doctor had made notes about how effectively the medication was working on his patient.

  Often, as often as possible perhaps, my parents chose to leave me alone. They had little interest in the things I was interested in. They thought extra-sensory perception was a lot of hogwash. Even if my father believed ESP existed then he probably would have used it to persuade clients to buy his bonds.

  One of my favourite ESP games was to look at someone who was not looking at me. Anyone. A guy in a mall. A girl in class. Seven times out of ten, if you looked long enough, the other person sensed someone looking at them and turned to look at you.

  My mother wished I would stop going out on the lawn at night with my telescope to look for UFOs. The neighbours thought I was spying on them, but I had little interest in my neighbours. I saw things in the sky that might have been UFOs, and I would try to send the aliens in the spacecraft telepathic messages like, “If you receive this, please bring me ice cream so that I know you can hear me.”

  But not once did an alien with ice cream show up at my house.

  My parents, I’m sad to say, were in a kind of competition with each other over who was the most successful at their work. I think my mother was slightly ahead of my father, and this was not good at all for the male ego. I don’t know why they were so caught up in their jobs, and they couldn’t understand why I didn’t have more interest (or respect) for what they did. I didn’t want to grow up to be like either one of them.

  I was fed well. I had a nice room, a computer, and a bunch of expensive video games that I quickly grew bored with. My parents would buy me only the so-called best of brand name clothing. For such a weird kid I was always well-dressed. But I knew there was more to be had from life. Someday I hoped to work on a SETI project as a scientist or possibly train chimpanzees to speak with sign language. My preference for employment would be working with either aliens or chimps, but not people. My communication skills with my own species were remarkably weak.