Smoke and Mirrors Read online

  “Be brave, Tanya. It’s no big deal. I don’t know if I believe in any of it. But this is important to me.”

  “All right,” she said, but I could tell she would rather be going to the mall.

  I knocked first and then we walked up the stairs and in through the open door to Lydia’s apartment. Lydia was sitting at the kitchen table smoking a joint. A thin ribbon of smoke, like a pale wispy wraith, drifted towards the ceiling. In front of her, spread out on the table as if it had just been spilled, was maybe a quarter ounce of marijuana leaves and buds. Behind her was a large mirror on the wall that made the room seem like it was much larger than it was. It also had the unnerving quality of making you spend too much time looking at yourself while you were talking to Lydia.

  Lydia smiled when she saw me and waved us in. I closed the door behind us. Tanya took my hand and looked a little scared. Lydia was holding in a hit of smoke she had just inhaled. Her glasses were a little fogged up. The room smelled of the powerful combination of weed and garlic and lavender.

  Lydia exhaled a small nimbus cloud and motioned for us to sit down. She stubbed out her joint in an ashtray, talking to it. “I’ll finish you later,” she said. “Don’t go away.” She took a deep breath as if she’d been deprived of oxygen and then looked up at us. “His name is Montague,” she said.

  “Your new guide?”

  “Yes. He’s a bit of a snob. Seventeenth-century upper-crust English. Quite the aristocrat. Opinionated, blustery at times, but well-informed, and once you get past the surface, he has a good heart.”

  “How did you find him?” I asked.

  “He found me,” Lydia said. “He knew I was drifting. No anchor, no sail, no rudder. Just drifting. Who’s your friend?”

  “Tanya, Lydia. Lydia, Tanya.”

  “Your parents give her to you for your birthday?” Lydia asked. I was surprised that she knew it was my birthday.

  Tanya looked insulted.

  “It was a joke,” Lydia explained and looked directly into her eyes. She nodded at me. “Did he tell you he saved my ass in the Napoleonic Wars? And did he tell you he is a healer? He’s not using it now, but he is. Look at his hands sometime. Look closely. There is a tremendous amount of healing energy in this one. But he doesn’t know what to do with it yet. He will eventually. You watch for it.”

  Tanya was feeling quite uncomfortable, I could tell. She was way outside her comfort zone. I was wondering if I had made a big mistake coming here with her.

  “I’m glad you kids are here. And forgive me for the smoke. It’s herbal, I assure you. Pure organic. Nothing to be afraid of here. Everything that happens here is just smoke and mirrors. Hocus pocus. Something some of us do to keep ourselves entertained.” She waved away the smoke in the air and turned to make a funny face into the mirror. She was trying, in her own odd way, to make Tanya feel more comfortable.

  Lydia pointed to the leaves and buds on the table-top. “This is a variation of reading tea leaves in the bottom of a cup. I study the random patterns here and receive a few messages about the future. Stay quiet for a minute and let’s see.”

  Tanya squirmed beside me. Silently mouthed, “Let’s go,” but I squeezed her hand gently.

  “Something terrible is going to happen in Europe,” she said. “Something political. In a city. A big city.” She was pointing with her forefinger to a cluster of leaves. “And I think things will get worse in Africa, especially in the sub-Sahara, before it gets any better.”

  She pointed to another part of the table. “All the interest in Mars will turn out to be a waste of time. Money should have gone to health care, not space. The queen will make an important announcement before the year is over. Small wars, too. Many of them but nothing big.” Suddenly she looked up and smiled at Tanya. “Listen up, honey,” she said. “This will be on the test.” And then she laughed.

  I’m not sure why she said that, but Tanya recognized it as a kind of direct insult. That had been the question Tanya was famous for at school. At least one teacher had made fun of her for saying it, and she had cut it out, but I don’t think I had ever mentioned anything about it to Lydia.

  “Excuse me, kids. I have to pee. Be right back.” Lydia cleaned up the pot on the table and brushed it with a hairbrush into a jewellery box. Then she left the room.

  “I’m gonna leave,” Tanya said. “I don’t like any of this.”

  “She’s harmless,” I said. “Please stay.”

  But she shook her head. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “I’ll call you,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said, then got up and walked out of the apartment.

  Tanya was one of the better things that had happened in my life and I expected that one day she would move on from me for some better looking guy. She was the first girl I had ever kissed. She was the first for a lot of things, and maybe I should have apologized to Lydia and followed her. But I didn’t.

  Lydia returned and noticed Tanya had left but didn’t mention it. “All our lives liquids just flow through us,” she said. “I drink my tea and it sustains me and then what’s left, which is most of it, I just piss it out and away it goes. Have you ever thought about these cycles of things, Simon?”

  “Sure. Water. Food. Money. My parents try too hard to get money but they don’t even keep it. It flows through them.”

  “Water. Food. Money. Smoke. Ideas. But it works on other levels too. Time flows through you. Today you are seventeen but tomorrow you’ll be, what? Seventy. Time will continue to flow. You through it, it through you. But you didn’t come here for this. It’s your birthday and I’m sorry I insulted your friend. I meant to, but I didn’t mean to. If you know what I mean.”

  “It’s okay, I think.”

  “You’re not thinking about her, though. Which is odd. You are thinking about another girl,” Lydia ventured.

  “I am. That’s why I came.”

  I explained about going back on the medication.

  Lydia knew my past. She knew about the weird stuff I did as a little kid and then about the accident.

  “I’m going to contact Montague. You’re not telling me everything, I know, but you must have a reason for that. Give me your wallet.” She set out a great chunk of amethyst crystal in front of her and waved her hand over it.

  I handed her my wallet, and she held it between her hands and closed her eyes. She had lost a lot of potential customers this way. Give me your wallet, she would say, or your ring, or your watch. She claimed she needed something that a person wore or carried or kept close to their body. She said it carried a “signature of their vibrations.” For Lydia, vibrations had a lot to do with everything. The amethyst was good for focusing the vibrations, she said.

  “Take a deep breath, Simon, and relax. You’re just along for the ride. But Montague is playing hard to get.” I watched her eyes moving beneath her closed lids as if she were searching the darkness for her guide. Suddenly she yawned.

  “Okay. Found him. I’m going to try to tell you what Montague has to say and you can ask a question or make a comment and we’ll see where it goes. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  What I was doing there, if I was to be honest with myself, was trying to verify if Andrea was at all real or purely something I had made up in my head. I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust Andrea. I had no clear reference points. No one else saw her. If Lydia could somehow contact her or at least provide some evidence ... well, this was not hard science. This was the best I could do. I needed some guidance. Who better to take it from than a seventeenth-century aristocratic snob?

  “Montague says that if you want him to help you, you have to show him a bit more respect.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “He accepts your apology. Now he wants to know about the four women in your life. He sees four.”

  “There’s Tanya.”

  “We know about Tanya,” Lydia said. “She’s not why you are here.”

  “There’s, well, my mother.”
r />   “Maybe she’s the one.”

  “What do you mean, the one?”

  “The one with the problem. Who else?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say next. “There’s you, Lydia. You’ve known me longer than just about anyone.”

  “I don’t think this is about me but it could be. Hmm. No, Montague says, it’s not about me. Now he’s reminding me I should take more vitamins, eat more vegetables. He says you aren’t getting enough roughage, either. He says he’s sorry to divert like this but can’t help himself. He’s a health food nut in his own seventeenth-century way. Root vegetables, he’s big on. And Brussels sprouts. He wants to know if you eat them.”

  “No.”

  “That’s a mistake, he says. You should. Tell him you’ll increase your roughage, drink more water, and eat root vegetables and then we can move on.”

  “I promise,” I said. “I’ll start today.”

  “Great. Now we can move on.” Her eyes were still closed. She waved her hand over the crystal and put it back on top of the wallet.

  “The fourth woman?” I asked.

  “He says he doesn’t know yet. He sees four directions. North, south, east, and west. A woman is an anchor at each point in your life. I am the east. I’ve always been the east, so that takes care of me. I am the sunrise, the birds in the morning sky. The east wind.”

  I wasn’t sure I was following her and wondered if she or Montague were just teasing me, wasting my time. Not that I had anything more important to do.

  “Your mother is north. She is a good person but has coldness about her. No, that’s a bit cruel. She has a reserve that often holds her back from telling you how much she loves you. She is troubled but better now than before. I think it was you who somehow helped her.”

  “And Tanya?”

  “Tanya is south. Sensual. Sweet in some ways. Weak in other ways. She has some growing up to do. Her world is small. She’s like a small tropical greenhouse. Contained. Limited for now. But she is not the one with the problem.”

  “What about west?” I asked.

  Lydia turned my wallet over in her hand.

  “Montague wants to know why you are holding back.”

  “Because I need to know something. And if I reveal too much, I may not get the answer I need.”

  “Chess.”

  “What?”

  “You play chess, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Montague says you should never sacrifice your queen.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Pawns, rooks, knights, bishops even. But to win by sacrificing the queen is not the thing for a gentleman to do.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said, although I did not fully understand the reference.

  “Who rescued you when you were feeling lost?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She did,” Lydia answered. “Montague said it was her. West.”

  “I don’t understand what west is.”

  “West is the setting sun. West is where the day goes. Time moves in that direction. West is night. Completion. West is death.”

  I felt a chill run down my spine. I looked into the mirror now behind Lydia and stared at my own face. I am not a mirror person and hardly ever took a look at myself in a mirror. There he was. Me. Seventeen years old today.

  “I want you to tell me if she is real,” I said. “I need it to come from someone who does not know what I know. Someone who hasn’t seen what I’ve seen.”

  “Why do you need this so badly?”

  “Because this is important to me.”

  “Montague is feeling annoyed. He wants to know why you are testing him, testing us both.”

  “It’s not you. I’m testing me. I’m testing what I believed to be real. Tell me one thing you know about her. About West.”

  Lydia frowned. “Montague says you are just a boy. You aren’t ready for this. You aren’t prepared. He thinks you should just back away from it all. Stay on the path you are on.”

  “Okay. Is that it?”

  “There is no it, Montague says. No easy answer. He says, if you are so poorly prepared, maybe you should just sacrifice your queen and win your little game and you won’t have to worry yourself anymore.”

  I was feeling frustrated and angry now. At Lydia or Montague or this whole crazy afternoon. I felt a little dizzy. Maybe it was all the marijuana smoke in the room. I was feeling confused and light-headed. I looked at my reflection. Smoke and mirrors. A crazy woman playing tricks with my mind. A dope-smoking, unemployed nutcase entertaining herself. When I took my wallet back, would I find its contents, a single twenty-dollar bill, missing?

  Lydia opened her eyes suddenly. “We’re through,” she said, sliding my wallet back to me. “Montague’s gone. I’m feeling tired.” She had changed entirely. “I don’t think you were fair about this,” she said accusingly.

  “Maybe I expected too much.”

  “You wanted answers. You wanted someone to tell you what to do. This is what people want when they come here. They want easy answers, and it usually doesn’t work out that way. You have a problem on your hands. You need to decide what to do. You can walk away from it. That’s what Montague was telling you, but that’s only because you pissed him off. I don’t think you can walk away from it.”

  I sat silently for a minute. Lydia opened a window and began to put dirty cups and saucers into the dishwater in the sink. She squirted in some dish detergent.

  Looking out the window now she said this: “It isn’t really her trying to save you. It’s the other way around. You have to save her.”

  “But I don’t even know where she is.”

  “Then you better find her. Does she have a name?”

  “Andrea,” I said.

  “Well. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  My parents were never good at birthday parties, and this one was no exception. Ice cream. Cake. I blew out the candles. They gave me a bunch of presents I didn’t particularly need or want.

  My present to myself was flushing my pills down the toilet. I don’t know what results I was expecting, but I was becoming more confused over who I liked best. The old me, the new me, or just me.

  Tanya called while I was out for a walk but I didn’t call her back. I wasn’t quite prepared for it if she had bad news for me — the spell had worn off, maybe. I had turned back into a pumpkin. She had been totally freaked out by Lydia. Did I really want such a straitlaced girl?

  Or maybe she just wanted to apologize. It seemed that I had to choose allegiance, loyalty to one of two girls. Tanya was the prettier of the two, but was I that shallow? Maybe. But then Tanya was real and Andrea was ... exactly what?

  So Andrea was west. She was death. She was my queen. All metaphorically speaking. I knew that whatever Lydia was up to with her weirdness and her so-called spirit guides, it was up to me to interpret what she told me. But if it was all a chess game, then who was my opponent? And how was I doing? Winning or losing?

  I looked at the pile of newspapers sitting by my desk. Maybe it was time to put all that behind me. If I wanted to research anything, I could use the Internet. Did I really want to spend more evenings alone in my room with a pair of scissors? I moved the pile of newspapers over towards the door. I’d haul them down later and put them with the recycling.

  In doing so, I knocked over my research box and a folder spilled its contents on the floor. Witchcraft. I hadn’t thought about witchcraft for quite a while, although it had once been up there in my top ten most important subjects of interest. Ozzie was convinced witches were real and had always wanted to meet one. We had theories about who they were. Certainly our fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Dexter. She could paralyze you with her stare or make you feel ten feet tall with her smile.

  Ozzie and I assumed that witchcraft was an honourable undertaking for the most part but there were probably a few nasty witches around too. The only test we had heard of was one we could obviously
never use. It was the ancient one of throwing a suspected witch into a pond. If she floated, she was a witch. If she sank, then not. Probably many non-witches had drowned over the years in such ponds and the floaters mostly were stoned or hanged or burned to death. Our ancestors were not particularly tolerant of women with unusual abilities.

  If a woman could cure your wart, for example, you might be thankful and give her a loaf of homemade pumpernickel bread, but then if a neighbour heard about this, he might accuse her of being a witch. And then the dirty work began.

  My witchcraft file contained mostly stuff I’d photocopied from books since there was not a lot of news about witches in any of the local papers. I reread an article I had about an accused witch during the reign of King James I in England. Poor Gilly Duncan, a servant girl from North Berwick, had a gift for healing and, as a reward for her kind deeds, the local authorities accused her of being a witch and having sex with the devil. She was tortured and “confessed,” leading to her being burned to death. Such stories were repeated for centuries.

  The death penalty for witches remained until 1736 in England, but it remained illegal to call yourself a witch in that country until 1951. In another time, Lydia certainly would have been considered a witch. She was an avowed pagan and believed in her herbs and spirits.

  I put the folder away in my “research box” right between werewolves and wormholes. And I walked out into the night. I needed some exercise. I wanted to clear my head and figure out what I was going to do about Andrea — if I was going to do anything at all. I walked west into the night.

  It was a clear night, and the sky was full of stars. I saw one shooting star and could locate at least two satellites. Venus was low on the horizon, and I think I could see Mars. I would stop near streetlights and peer into the shadows behind trees and parked cars. I think I expected Andrea to appear, to walk out of the darkness and come back into my life. But she did nothing of the sort.

  When I arrived back home, I heard my parents arguing again. So much for the truce. I listened long enough to determine that they were arguing about money this time, not about me. I wondered if I could find a modern-day witch to cast a spell and make them stop arguing, make them like each other a little more. I wondered if Andrea could use those influences she had used on Tanya to help my parents. And so I continued to ponder this problem of Andrea. Did she exist, and was she in trouble? What kind of trouble could it be? And how could I possibly help?