Smoke and Mirrors Read online

  Andrea stood by the window through the rest of math but vanished again when I wasn’t looking at her. I didn’t see her again until lunch. Tanya waved at me from a table where she was sitting with her friends. I waved back but decided I would blunder if I tried to sit with her and those other girls. Instead, I sat alone with my tray of meat loaf and macaroni, my can of Dr. Pepper, and my thoughts. And then someone touched my elbow. I turned and there she was.

  I told her about Lydia, and she didn’t seem too pleased. “You asked her about me?”

  “I have a hard enough time figuring out basic stuff. You are something quite unusual. Unique. I needed some thoughts from someone I trust.”

  Andrea seemed a little hurt. “You don’t trust me?”

  “What’s there not to trust? You make a girl like me. You save my ass at the board in math. I’ve known Lydia for a long time. She’s my friend.”

  “Maybe she’s the one that you shouldn’t trust. I don’t believe in psychics or people who claim to talk to spirits,” Andrea said.

  That was a twist. I decided not to ask her why an appearing and vanishing girl did not believe in psychics or mediums. “Okay. But she’s a good friend. As you’ve noticed, I don’t have many.”

  “You want to be voted most popular for the yearbook?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Okay. Just be careful what you say about me and to whom. I’m in a kind of vulnerable position and I’m still new at this.”

  That’s when I realized that some of the kids noticed I was talking out loud to no one. I had only been whispering and I had been covering my mouth so I didn’t look so obvious, but I guess it was still pretty apparent.

  I looked into Andrea’s eyes and repeated her gesture — finger across the mouth. Keep it zipped.

  Then I looked around the room. A few people were staring. I smiled at them like everything was normal. I would have to keep my wits about me. I would have to be more careful.

  In the split second when I had looked away from her, Andrea was gone. She had either gotten up and run off or she had vanished into thin air, and I was left alone with my cold meat loaf and a new sense of confusion, enough to send me back to my locker to check my schedule to figure out where I had to go next. I realized I might have to make it through the rest of the day on my own.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  For the rest of the school day I was on my own. And I did wonder often where Andrea went. Was it a matter of geography, of time, of different planes of existence? Or was she still there? Could she simply control who could see her and when?

  I should have been nervous about my after-school meeting with Tanya but I wasn’t. I was in fortune cookie mode. I had good planets in the right houses. I had Andrea influencing Tanya’s interest in me. I figured I was pretty much just along for the ride. And it was about time.

  My interest in girls had always been there, but it seemed like a lost cause. I was a kid with many labels — some polite, some not. Oddly enough I was rarely a victim. Guys didn’t pick on me because of the way I am. If someone made fun of me for saying something stupid in class, I laughed along with everyone else. I learned a long time ago that the best self-defence is sometimes no defence at all. Laugh at yourself when they are laughing at you and you defuse their power.

  Andrea, on my behalf, had changed Tanya’s view of me from peculiar to interesting. If you think about it, the two aren’t that far apart. I wanted to thank Andrea, but she wasn’t anywhere to be seen at school at the end of the day, so I walked down the street to the library and there was Tanya sitting at a table alone. I saw her through the window and my heart leaped in my chest. “Just try to avoid acting like an idiot,” I counselled myself. At least I assume it was me giving advice to myself in my head. “Be cool,” the voice said. “Like ice,” I replied.

  Tanya was doodling in her notebook.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said.

  I sat down. “So you’re interested in Druids?”

  She nodded. “Well, I’m curious. They seem so mysterious. But I don’t know where to begin ... my research, I mean.”

  “We could get a few books.”

  Tanya seemed to think that using the computer to look up the call numbers of books and then actually finding the books was brilliant on my part. It wasn’t like rocket science, but maybe she was just trying to be nice to me.

  “I really appreciate you helping me.”

  “Sure. No problem. In fact, first let me tell you what I already know about Druids.”

  My head was stuffed with an encyclopaedia of information regarding the occult, mysticism, the paranormal. What I had read stayed with me — almost all of it. But I couldn’t retrieve it easily. I suppose it had something to do with the brain damage. In order to remember things, I would have to use memory tricks. For example, if I closed my eyes and pretended I was in the desert, and then started looking for something by digging in the sand, I would find what I was looking for. Or I could imagine I was on a lake and go fishing for an answer with a fishing pole. And find it.

  Tanya studied my face as I closed my eyes. I went to a rocky coastline this time. It looked like Cornwall in England, and I was looking for a stone that had the dope on Druids. It was just beneath a high cliff with a cascading waterfall.

  “The Druids were like religious leaders, healers some of them. I think they cured sick people with herbs and plants. They worshipped the sun and they believed in the immortality of the soul.”

  I could open my eyes now and remember more once I had started to tap into the information in my memory. Tanya was taking notes. She had the most beautiful handwriting I’d ever seen — like flowers in a garden. “What do you think about the immortality of the soul?” I asked her, thinking this was a clever segue into getting to know her better.

  She stopped writing. “I don’t know what you mean.” I realized I was not very good at small talk with girls. “I was just wondering if you thought we lived on after we died or what.”

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s a big question. I guess something must happen. What do you think?”

  I swallowed. I should probably not go there. I had seven different theories, all quite plausible, about what happens when you die, but if I were to tell Tanya, I figured it would be the end of our “friendship.” So I just said, “I think the soul lives on.”

  “Cool,” she said, pleased with the brevity of my answer.

  “So the Druids lived in France and southern England. They built monuments to the sun — like Stonehenge, for example, where they set up a circle of very large stones.”

  “But I thought they were quite short.”

  “Not necessarily, although I think everybody was shorter in those days. And they didn’t live as long as we do.”

  “That’s too bad. But do you think they had any fun?”

  Hmm. I didn’t know if the Druids had any fun. They seemed kind of serious from what I read, but I hoped they had fun so I made something up. “They had lots of parties and drank a concoction made from fermented honey. And they had great music.”

  How could the Druids not have had great music? Tanya was back to taking notes, but I’d been distracted from my memory search. I closed my eyes again and saw some Druids dancing on a cliff above the waterfalls. Oh boy.

  “The Druids were the religious leaders of people called the Celts — that’s with a C — and they held worship ceremonies in sacred groves. They had fires and burned things as sacrifices. They worshipped the sun, but they believed the earth too had sacred powers and some Druids could feel the energy along certain paths. Some Druids could use willow branches to find water deep under the earth.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “I read a lot of books.”

  “I read mostly magazines. But this is really great stuff.” She looked at me so sweetly I thought I would melt, but she seemed almost sleepy and I think she was stifling a yawn.

  I didn’t know what else
to do but ramble on some more about Stonehenge and the sun worship, and when all I had left was stuff about fertility rituals I told her, “Fertility of the earth and people were intermingled in the Druids’ religion. Some plants were considered to have powers to make women more fertile — you know, so they could have sex and have more babies.”

  Tanya was dutifully taking notes. “Mistletoe, for example — the berries were said to represent human male sperm. It was considered a sacred plant to the Druids. In fact, the custom of kissing beneath mistletoe at Christmas is like a leftover from some Druid ritual involving mistletoe.” But that was as far as I was willing to explain anything about fertility rites.

  I waited for Tanya to look up, wondering if she was going to think I was getting too creepy. Instead, she just said, “That’s really fascinating. I never knew that about mistletoe.”

  “It’s a little-known fact.”

  I dredged up some other details about stone circles and more on the Druids’ ideas of immortality and Tanya seemed to be genuinely impressed.

  A car was blowing its horn outside on the street: two long, one short. “That’s for me,” Tanya said. “It’s my mom. She never gets out of the car when she picks me up anywhere. Just two long and one short. You’ve been great.” Then she touched my hand and as she stood up and she smiled at me again. “Let’s get together again,” she said. “I want to pick your brain some more about ancient rituals.”

  As she was about to leave the library, she turned and blew me a kiss.

  At that point I had forgotten all about Andrea. I had never had a girl like Tanya give me so much attention and I was in a kind of swoon — foggy in the head, getting up and floating down the aisles through the bookshelves. I turned a corner and nearly ran right into Andrea standing there leafing through a book about vampires.

  “And how did that go?”

  “Fine,” I answered. “I really like her. She has an inquiring mind.”

  “And a nice set of boobs,” Andrea said sarcastically.

  I think I blushed. “She was nice to me because of you, right?”

  “Correct,” Andrea said, a cool breeze in her voice.

  “And I don’t really stand a chance?”

  Andrea didn’t say anything. She smirked. At least that’s what I think that look was on her face.

  Andrea looked down at her book and turned the page, pretending to read it. After I stood silently for a few minutes, she looked up. “What are you waiting for?” she asked.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I felt flustered. Puzzled. “I don’t know. I guess I figured that if you were here, you were here to talk to me about something.”

  She seemed downright angry now, closed her book, and said, “You think it’s always about you, don’t you?” She slid the book back onto the shelf and then went down the next aisle into the fiction section. I followed, but as expected, when I looked down the next aisle she was gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Once when I was fifteen, I was walking to the mall on a winter day near sunset when I looked out into a field and saw a tree that seemed to be on fire. But there was no smoke, just the fire of the sun shining through the leafless branches. I felt paralyzed, but in a good way. It was the kind of feeling I expected if ever aliens transported me up into a spacecraft.

  Immobility and a kind of diffuse feeling of well-being. I felt myself being drawn toward the light even though I was not moving. I felt like I was one with the tree and one with the sun. And no, I had not been toking up (marijuana makes me cough) and I was not taking anything illegal or over-the-counter.

  I think this feeling, this sense of overwhelming connection and awe, lasted for nearly a minute. Then the sun was dropping beneath the horizon and it was gone.

  I felt cold and alone and infinitely sad, for what I had experienced was so brief.

  I kept expecting the same thing to happen again. But it didn’t. I tried to make it happen but it wasn’t there. It was like a fleeting window had opened up to another world, another way of being, another me — and then that window was gone, maybe forever.

  Lydia was the only one I could talk to about this. I did not mention it to my parents or there would have been more money wasted on prescriptions I would not take. Lydia made me feel like I wasn’t crazy.

  “The Japanese Zen Buddhists call it a satori. Wham. It just hits you, usually triggered by something. Something beautiful but not always. You could be walking down the street on a dull, dreary afternoon and it could happen.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means everything is connected to everything else, if you’ll pardon my New Age vernacular. If we are lucky, every once in a while we just feel this to be true. You had your satori. You were a lucky boy. I felt the same thing once sitting in an airplane of all places. Coming home from a psychic fair in Ottawa. There was a rainbow at the end of the runway, and when we took off through the arch of the rainbow it followed us up into the clouds and changed into a perfect circle around the plane. We flew through the centre of it and then it vanished. Nobody else on the plane seemed to notice or care. Except for me.”

  “So it doesn’t mean I’m crazy?”

  Lydia laughed and then straightened a pile of palmistry books sitting on the table. “Oh, you’re freaking crazy all right. You’d rather be normal?”

  “I don’t know what normal is.”

  “Don’t go there. You wouldn’t like it.”

  I waited impatiently for the next satori. Music almost took me there once. It was close but not the real thing. I went back to the tree at sunset again. It was pretty, but no cigar. I went there at sunrise once but it wouldn’t give.

  As usual, I turned to books for some more insight into this and discovered that the ancient Chinese were a bit more interested in the satori experience than us busy modern folk in designer shirts and pants. It was common for someone in ancient China to have the satori experience and want to achieve it again. While reading about ancient waterfalls and the sound of tiny ancient birds, I recalled my own vision of the beach and the surfer pouring skateboard ball bearings into my hands. I saw there was a connection between the way I had felt then in that “other” world and the tree. Just like my experience with the tree satori, I had tried to get back there to that beach — in my mind, at least.

  I could imagine the place, but I could never feel that feeling of being there.

  One ancient Chinese dude named Wu-men explained that satori comes only after you have exhausted your thinking, only when “the mind can no longer grasp itself.”

  At school my English teacher, Mr. Pace, got mad at me for reading about Zen while he was lecturing us on pronouns. I had been bored out of my gourd as he droned on about subjective, possessive, and objective pronouns. So I picked up my Zen book and began to read. Many of my classmates had perfected the semiconscious hibernetic mode of pronoun lecture survival where they looked like they were paying attention but they were a million miles away. Maybe this mode of mental and physical separation was something practised by ancient Chinese masters as well, I don’t know.

  As far as Mr. Pace was concerned, he was drilling those pronoun rules into our thick skulls, turning us into better speakers, immaculate writers who knew where and when to use the right words. To Mr. Pace, grammar was probably a kind of religion. Maybe he found his own satori among the right combination of nouns and verbs, adverbs and adjectives.

  But he was fully and perfectly insulted when he looked my way and saw that I was not pretending to pay attention. I was reading a book on Zen, which was at that moment suggesting to me that “to travel is better than to arrive” and that “man is a process not an entity.” These ideas were real corkers and demanded all my attention.

  “Simon,” Mr. Pace said in a rather nasal and negative voice. “Simon, what do you think you are doing?”

  Well, this drew everyone in the class back to a third period plane of existence. Heads turned. I was sitting there with my book open, a bit blatant I suppose. I fe
lt my cheeks getting red. Had I been looking at a Playboy magazine, things would not have been so bad. Had it been a pornographic comic or a magazine about growing weed or even a motorcycle magazine, it would not have been such a problem.

  “I guess I got distracted,” I said, closing my book, blinking at the words on the board: Objective, subjective, possessive.

  Mr. Pace liked the fact that he now had the attention of the class and that he had a victim. Well, maybe he wasn’t sadistic; he just had an opportunity to flaunt his authority and get away with a little humiliation, which is a kind of fringe benefit for some teachers. “Exactly what are you reading about that’s so much more important than grammar?”

  “Enlightenment, sir,” I said. I threw in “sir” because I thought it would get me off the hook, and it was the term that all the ancient Chinese students of Tao used when referring to their own masters who would ask them questions like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

  The class roared in laughter. I was the perfect fool, in their minds. Only Simon would sit in English class and do something as goofy as read about religion, wasting good daydreaming time, existing in his own weird little planet, his own dimension. And Mr. Pace laughed along with them.

  I had said nothing more. I took my humiliation, swallowed hard, saw the look on Davis Conroy’s face, the look on all their faces. I saw a small spider working on a web up in the front corner of the room near the flag. I watched it and allowed my mind to distance itself from my body.

  To say that Tanya Webb and I had a relationship is probably stretching it. She received a B+ for her Druid report and considered herself, under my tutelage, to be something of a world expert on the subject. My reward was an actual hug and a peck on the cheek. I helped with her homework in the library a couple more times. I was always more interested in her homework than mine. I maintained my usual plan of trying to get through high school on autopilot, expending only minimal brain activity on the curriculum and preferring all the extracurricular possibilities of learning. I was one of those students proud to achieve a C and felt lucky to nail down a C+ sometimes as a pity grade from a teacher who knew I was smart but “had problems.”