Shoulder the Sky Read online

  Dave saw the puzzled look on my face. “Well, enough of that anyway. You had a few interesting creative responses. Non-traditional, in some cases. I like that. Why don’t you tell me a bit about how things are going.”

  “Things are going well. The universe is unfolding as it should.”

  “What did you do yesterday?”

  “School?”

  “What happened at school?”

  “Nothing.”

  “There’s a fresh response.”

  “Well, you know.”

  “What about last night? What did you do?”

  “Same old thing.”

  “Which is?”

  That’s when I realized that I couldn’t exactly recall what I did last night. It was a nothing night. “I guess I did some homework, listened to the radio. I must have gone to bed early.”

  Dave was looking at me in that Dave sort of way. Then he tugged at his ponytail and looked out the window. “Know anything about Salvador Dali?”

  “Yeah, he was way out there. Melting watches over the branches of trees. Some kind of painter. Spanish, right? Big moustache.”

  “I wanted to look up something about Dali, so I check out a couple of search engines. One keeps taking me to this really interesting site where I find all these paintings. Dali, Picasso, some other stuff that’s unlabelled. I click on something called ‘Stuff to Consider,’ and I get this little lesson about something called ‘neutron soup.’ Are you familiar with neutron soup?”

  “Sure. Collapsed stars, electrons rammed into protons. So dense that a piece the size of a sugar cube would weigh a thousand million tons.”

  “Right.” Pony-tug. “Then I check the web address and discover it’s something called Emerso.com.”

  “Probably an acronym.”

  Dave looked out the window. “So I’m there staring at my computer monitor — you know I’m not that savvy about all this Internet stuff. A rank amateur compared to you kids. But I’m thinking this weird site is strangely familiar. It’s like a public version of a public version of the images and the ideas of a single very singular person.”

  “Darrell was too good.”

  “The Egg Man?”

  “He built the site with so many tags placed so perfectly that most of the search engines will send you to me in the first five listings. You typed in ‘Dali’ and wham, you were at Emerso and began to root around. You could have typed in ‘soup’ hoping for a recipe for turkey noodle and end up reading about black holes and collapsed stars.”

  “You scanned the paintings?” Dave asked.

  “Sure. Dali, Picasso. Lots of Hieronymus Bosch.”

  “Figures,” Dave said. “I made a little tour of your gallery. Very impressive. How come some were unidentified?”

  “Just sloppy web mastering, I guess.”

  “But it’s a great site. How many people know you created it?”

  “It’s a secret between Darrell and me. He set it up but I put in the content.”

  “Very eclectic. But why the secrecy?”

  “I don’t know. I like the idea of communicating with people over the net. I get to put my ideas and some borrowed stuff out there but nobody knows who I am.”

  “They get a sense of who you are by what you’re interested in.”

  “Then maybe that’s who I really am. I’m Emerso. Martin is the kid who sits in the third seat in the second row in English class. I can be both, can’t I?”

  “Yes. You are both. You are one hell of a kid. I enjoy talking with you. You challenge me. You challenge people on your website, too. Time’s about up. Anything bothering you this week? Anything make you mad?”

  “Not really.”

  “Damn.”

  At home, I logged onto Yahoo. I typed in “Hieronymus Bosch” and it listed nearly 750 sites. Mine was number six. I clicked on it and saw the familiar Garden of Earthly Delights, where people are part human, part animal, part vegetable. This bizarre and far-fetched image seemed to be a kind of explanation for many of the kids and teachers at school.

  I clicked on “Art” and it gave me screen after screen of dozens of miniature paintings. I remember all the hours I’d put in scanning them from books. I don’t know why it seemed so important that my site had these paintings. They all could be found elsewhere on the Internet. But what gave me a funny feeling on the fifth page of the catalogue was the painting made by my mother, the one she had called Alaskan Sunrise, but there was no title or name listed here. I clicked on the next page and found more of her paintings. No artist name again, no title.

  No one else but me could have scanned the paintings from the photos and posted them here. But I couldn’t remember doing it.

  I went back to Alaskan Sunrise and maximized the image. There was a mountain and a forest and something half-realized in the foreground that could have been a van with a family standing around a campfire. Or it could have been something else.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Nobody ever said good things about school, but I found school to be a safe, goofy place. I had perhaps inherited the ability to be invisible from my father, and after my brief career of notoriety — smoking, egg tossing, and eco-warrior random kindness activist — I returned to being comfortable as a kind of nobody. I just wasn’t cut out to be a troublemaker and I was too smart to be cleverly stupid like some kids who became famous for doing really dumb things at school.

  I had a basic sense of doing the right thing that made me appear dull to others. I handed in homework; I did well on tests. I had a genuine interest in things like the periodic table and cell mitosis. I liked reading long books by dead English writers. Darrell had similar faults — he was extremely good at math and was a natural at learning foreign languages. He always got an A in French but he studied Russian and Greek on the side. No one knew why, not even Darrell. He disliked Latin because he found it too easy. “No wonder their civilization crumbled,” he said once, referring to the fact their language was overly structured and ultimately uninteresting.

  Most kids, if they thought about me at all, still had some sympathy for me over the death of my mother. I think everyone wondered what it would be like to lose his or her own mother. But if anyone asked me about it, I used a stock response: “It was really bad for a while, but I’m over the worst of it.” Those were words that just came out. I couldn’t explain what it was that I was feeling over her death. I had created firewalls around that part of my life. Necessary barriers that allowed me to get on with things. Dave knew all about my defences, he said, and he thought that I needed to take a big sledgehammer to those walls. But I wasn’t ready. Maybe I never would be.

  Mr. Cohen, the vice principal, had a special interest in me. He was a nice guy, which was a poor qualification for a VP who had to deal with trouble. He would stop me in the hall and ask me how I was doing. “Martin, how is it going?”

  “Not bad.”

  “What is it you are reading these days?” Mr. Cohen loved books and he knew I read voraciously.

  “Jules Verne. Journey to the Centre of the Earth.”

  “Have your read The Island of Dr. Moreau yet?”

  “It’s next on my list.”

  “I want you to let me know what you think about the ethical issues involved — about vivisection, as they used to call it, and ramifications to cloning and genetic mapping.”

  “I will do that. See you later, Mr. Cohen.”

  “Take care.”

  See what I mean? School was a goofy, warm place. Where else would I have such a conversation?

  I had an interest in a girl. It was a long-term thing, a kind of unrequited affair of the heart with Kathy Bringhurst. Kathy was not beautiful in the twentieth-century high school girl sort of way. I think they would have thought she was pretty in the nineteenth century, though. She had a nineteenth-century nose and cheekbones and a very pale complexion. An eggshell complexion, as Darrell pointed out. She was smart but pretended not to be and she was always interested in some really good-looki
ng guy who wouldn’t give her the time of day. A guy like Scott Rutledge.

  Back before Mom died, I had a true crush on Kathy and had tried (and failed miserably) several times to explain to her how I felt. I even resorted to writing a poem for her — words spilled straight from the heart in rhyming couplets like they might have done in the nineteenth century. I sealed it in an envelope with a wax seal from a candle and gave it to her during Heavy Metal Math class.

  “Don’t open it until you get home.”

  She had looked at me in a warm, fuzzy way and stuffed the envelope in her math book. The next day she said she had lost the envelope walking home. “It must have fallen out of my book bag.” She blinked and asked me what had been in it.

  “Nothing important,” I said.

  Nowadays she was interested in Scott Rutledge. All the girls were interested in Scott. Scott broke hearts left, right, and centre. It was who he was. Kathy was not up to Scott’s standards and she knew it, but instead of turning her gaze elsewhere, she pined for Scott in an old-fashioned sort of way. I was her biggest confidant. She told me if Scott had talked to her or shown any small courtesy. I would pretend interest. She was almost in tears once because she thought Scott was about to ask her out before he lost interest and moved on to Katie Osmond.

  My passion, if that’s the right word, for Kathy had diminished to a small hopeful flame. Hopeful maybe is not the right word. After the loss of the wax-sealed envelope, I saw things as hopeless except for the fact that Kathy considered me a “friend,” and so I would suffer Scott stories for eternity or until I graduated, whichever came first. Dave had once asked me if Kathy reminded me in any way of my mother. And I had said, “Definitely not.”

  “Do they share any physical resemblance?”

  I had never thought about it. I could picture Kathy with her fragile, pale face and sad eyes. But I couldn’t even remember what my mother looked like and that scared the hell out of me. “Not at all,” I told Dave. “What’s with this Sigmund Freud thing?”

  “Sorry, dude,” he said. “Guess I got carried away.”

  Like I said, I sat beside Kathy Bringhurst during Heavy Metal Math class. Mr. Miller, the former lead guitar of the now defunct band Gangrene, had his guitar in class today. Everyone was very attentive. Mr. Miller had enlarged his notion of math teaching to include “logic” in the curriculum. Some parents, for some unknown reason, had complained about this, and Mr. Miller had to defend himself at a parent-teacher meeting. Mr. Miller, as mentioned, was also a former wrestling champion in that world of show-off half-fake, half-real Saturday afternoon wrestling. (Someone had found magazine pictures of him mud wrestling and some kids had forged his nickname: Heavy Metal Mud Wrestling Math Teacher). After the parents had met Mr. Miller, the fathers had convinced the mothers that it was probably okay for him to enlarge the math curriculum to include logic, or even astrology, voodoo, or atheism if he was so inclined.

  So Mr. Miller had his old Fender guitar plugged into his “practice” amp. He hit a ragged, soft humming distorted minor chord and played a riff on the high E string that I knew came from one of Gangrene’s early hits and then he said, “I first learned about something called the ‘gambler’s fallacy’ when we were touring with Aerosmith. We were the opening act. Aerosmith was very unprofessional in my opinion back then. Drunk and rude and never on time and sometimes their instruments weren’t even in tune. They had no true respect for the audience.

  “Well, to get to the point, before a big gig in, um, Minneapolis one night, you-know-who asked me if I had a quarter. I dug in my pocket and found him one. He began to flip the coin. You’d think a superstar like that would have better things to do with his time than flip a coin for ten to twenty minutes at a time, but he didn’t.

  “‘Bucky boy, I want you to watch this,’ he said. He called me Bucky boy back then. I don’t know why. He refused to use my real name.

  “‘I’ve flipped this coin seven times,’ he said, ‘and it’s always come up heads. You were paying attention right?’ Well, not really. ‘Let’s see what happens. Stay with me.’”

  HMMWMT hit a couple of power chords, ran his fingers up and down the neck of the guitar to move from several high staccato squeals to a low-pitched thunder — all of which must have been driving the other teachers in the hall mad.

  “So he continues to flip the coin, promising me it’s a real coin — a ‘fair’ coin as he called it. He flipped it five more times and it came up heads each time. Then he said he wanted to make me a bet. Seven hundred dollars. He bet seven hundred dollars that the coin would turn up heads again.

  “‘It’s some kind of trick you do, right?’ I asked.

  “‘You flip the bleedin’ quarter then,’ he said. ‘Are you in on the bet?’

  “He had flipped what appeared to be a regular quarter twelve times and it had come up heads each time. I figured the odds were well in my favour that the next flip would be tails. So I went for the bet. I flipped the quarter and let it land on the floor.”

  Mr. Miller tromped on his effects pedal and closed his eyes as he played a short but effective guitar blitzkrieg.

  “I lost seven hundred dollars that day but learned a very important lesson of logic. The gambler’s fallacy. I fell for it. I thought the odds were, um, maybe ninety percent that the next flip would be tails but, in reality, the odds were still fifty percent. He could have won or I could have won. And if he had lost seven hundred clams, what would it be to him? But I lost. I haven’t gambled since.”

  The bell rang then before he could hit a final chord. The HMMWMT turned off the power to his amp. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the liar’s paradox, and if we have time, we’ll nail down some of the ideas put forward by Immanuel Kant.”

  So this is why school was not such a horrible place to spend the day.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Meaning of Life

  You probably haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about Immanuel Kant. This is because he was a German philosopher who lived in the eighteenth century. Philosophers spend a lot of time thinking instead of watching television, but this is obvious in Immanuel’s case because they had no TV back then. He wrote a lot about ethics, which is the science of telling right from wrong.

  We make ethical (or unethical) decisions every day, even every minute of our lives, and each of us has our own set of ethics that we follow.

  Immanuel Kant was really into this ethical thing and trying to figure out the meaning of life. I don’t want this to turn into a big rant on Kant except to say that he saw every individual as an end, not a means. In contemporary terms, this suggests that we are all here for a purpose. We are here for a reason.

  That makes a person feel pretty good about him- or herself, but the problem is that we probably never figure out what that reason is. Some people pretend to be confident about who they are and what they are all about, but I think that’s mostly a front.

  I think most of us are confused. We are baffled. We are searching. And it doesn’t matter if we find answers or not. The searching and questioning is the important thing.

  Dave had been after me to get my father to open up. My father was working way too much and when he came home he appeared exhausted. He planted himself in front of the tube and watched basketball or football, or hockey or tennis or golf.

  He was a good father, I know, but since Mom died he had shut his life down. Lilly and I didn’t know what to do about it. She shopped and stocked the refrigerator and pantry with lots of food and we fended for ourselves. If my father ate at all, he didn’t do it on the premises. Coffee and maybe three bites out of a bagel in the morning. At night, he came home claiming to have consumed something — although he never said what — at the office.

  Then he did the TV plant. When the power went out one night, he just sat on the sofa watching the empty screen.

  One time I was taking out the trash and I accidentally dumped the big green plastic can in the driveway. Out spilled a whole bunch of photographs, so
me of them torn — of him, of her, of us. I took the trash can back into the garage and went through the whole mess. I saved old movie stubs of the original Star Wars, which he must have gone to with Mom. There was a lock of her hair. There were old letters they had sent to each other before they were married. And a lot more.

  I salvaged what I could and took it back to my room. I taped up the photos. It was like putting our lives back together. I cleaned everything up and put it into a box. Some day he would want this back.

  I lay on my bed staring at a picture of me as a toddler. I could only find half of the picture. There was me on my feet with two outstretched adult arms holding me up, keeping me from falling. I looked very unstable. The look on my face suggested I wasn’t used to having my head so far above my feet. But, aside from the arms, the rest of my mother was missing from the picture. She’d been ripped away.

  I was thinking about shutting down my website because I thought I was getting a little too weird, writing about a German philosopher, getting all cerebral, but it was getting a lot of hits these days. Darrell had added some great 3-D graphics. Maybe that was all that kept people coming back to it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Does that name ring a bell for any of you?” Mr. Miller asked.

  “Did he play drums for Rush?” Scott Rutledge asked.

  “That was Mr. Neil Peart. You’re way off.”

  “Bass player for AC/DC?”

  “Not even getting warm.”

  But the class was warmer. HMMWMT always had a way of loosening up an otherwise uptight and irascible group of young people. I wasn’t about to raise my hand. I knew who Leibniz was but I knew better than to open my yap and draw attention. I had inherited some of my father’s skills of being invisible and I used them when I wanted to.

  “Our friend Gottfried Leibniz came up with something we call differential calculus. Actually differential and integral calculus. He and good old Isaac, Mr. Idiscovered-gravity Newton. But Leibniz was really into math.”