Smoke and Mirrors Page 9

  I was right about Tanya. She was mad at me. I found her in the hallway at school. “That Lydia lady made my skin crawl. Why did you take me there?”

  “I thought you would find it interesting.”

  “You don’t believe any of her crap, do you?”

  “I like to keep an open mind,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you call me back last night?”

  And then I said something that I would quickly regret. “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think it was important.”

  Early on in life you figure out that some very ordinary words can mean many different things to different people. What I had meant was I didn’t think it was important to call her back right then, when my head was filled with other things, when I was confused. What she heard me say (reading between the lines and drawing her own conclusions) was that I was saying she wasn’t important, that I didn’t care, that I was totally uncaring and insensitive.

  She gave me a look that shocked me. I saw hurt first but it quickly morphed into anger. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You won’t have to talk to me again.” And she walked away.

  “Tanya, wait,” were the words that came out of my mouth, but they didn’t do any good at all.

  And it was while I was watching her walk away down the school hallway that I suddenly realized what I was losing. I knew I would not get her back. I had been dreaming about Tanya for a long time. She had allowed me into her life, and I had walked in. She liked me. She was maybe falling in love with me. I think she really was. It had been the most amazing thing.

  And now she was walking out of my life, and I had let it happen. I knew instinctively there was no way to repair the damage. And then I was leaning against someone’s locker, my head down, and I was sobbing. Something powerful and terrible was sweeping over me. I had not felt anything like this before. I didn’t understand it and I couldn’t control it. I knew I had to get out of there, so I ran down the hall and outside. I ran long and hard down the school driveway and down the road until I came to the old railway tracks that led into the woods. My chest was heaving and my eyes burned. I thought I heard a voice calling to me, but when I turned there was no one there.

  I sat down by the river and watched the water, studied the patterns of light and dark, the ripple effect on the surface. I remembered being here with Andrea. I remembered walking here with Tanya. How different they were. Now they had both come into my life and both disappeared. And I wished that I had never known either one. There was a cold hollow place inside me, and it was growing larger. I took a deep breath and tried to focus on being calm, but I began to feel a throbbing pain in my head.

  I wished for a kind and healing witch to walk out of those woods and comfort me. But I had no such luck. And I was feeling terribly, horribly alone. Isolated. I did not want to go home. I couldn’t bring myself to go back to school. I thought I heard someone call my name again, a nickname I hadn’t heard for a long while. “Slime-on.”

  No one there. Trees. Vines. Wind moving things around a little. I looked back at the water, at the reflection of me shifting and rippling on the dark surface. And then in the reflection, someone standing behind me. A kid. Ozzie.

  The image came into sudden clarity and it was perfectly clear. He was standing there, smiling. And he still had a skateboard in his hand. And he still looked to be twelve years old.

  “Ozzie,” I said out loud, but when I turned around no one was there.

  One of my science teachers had told us once about the principle of Occam’s razor, which stated that, usually, the best explanation for any unusual phenomena is the simplest one. If ever there was a time to put Occam’s razor to the task of cutting through the complexity of things to look for the simplest explanation, it was now. Ozzie was the same age as me and living a two-hour drive away in a home near the ocean. While we had not kept in touch, it was not possible that he still looked like the wiry little rat that he had been back during our reckless skateboard days.

  Stress can cause both visual and auditory hallucinations, the experts say. And I had sure experienced plenty of stress, worrying about my parents and now getting dumped by Tanya. I had also flushed the pills that were intended in part to “keep me in balance.” I believed then that the combination of the two factors must have sent me off the deep end. I suddenly realized that I could remember everything about Ozzie from before my accident and nothing about him after it.

  I walked home, both frazzled and uncertain as to what I might see next or do next. I went to my room, and inside I tripped over the pile of newspapers I had failed to get rid of. I did not look in the mirror. In fact, I put a shirt over it. I drank a large glass of water and searched my desk drawer for some leftover pills, but I had been thorough. I was chemical free and stuck with that fact. I could not tell my parents about the missing pills. They would know I had chucked them. I’d done that before. To them, it would be a sign that I was still in trouble. (And I was, but I didn’t want them to know.)

  I could feel all of my energy draining out of my body, seeping out of the soles of my feet and into the floor. I lay down on my bed and I faded into a deep sleep.

  In my dream, Tanya came back to me and I apologized. But Tanya had changed. She was both Andrea and Tanya — fused. Well, dreams are not meant to be logical. But she seemed one and the same and I seemed to accept that just fine. We were standing on a grassy island in the middle of a four-lane highway. It was noisy from the traffic and I could smell exhaust. And I kept saying that we should get to the other side. On one side was a city and on the other side of the highway was the sea. There was a boardwalk there and beyond it the blue, perfect ocean. I assumed we were trying to get to the beach even though we didn’t look like we were dressed for it.

  There was no break in traffic at all, and Andrea/ Tanya kept saying that all we had to do was start walking and the cars would stop. But I kept pulling her back. And each time she looked at me her face had somehow changed. Tanya smiling. Andrea putting her finger to her lips. Tanya angry with me. Andrea with that terrified look. Finally, as she turned away, she pulled me out into the onslaught of traffic. I heard screeching tires and then I woke up.

  It was five-thirty in the afternoon and my father had just pulled his car into the driveway. I drank some more water and changed my clothes. I tested one quick look in the mirror and saw that I looked like hell. A quick shower made me appear semi-human, but both my parents said that they thought I looked a bit ill at dinner.

  “Simon, you spend too much time inside. How about if you and I go to the beach this Saturday?” my father said. He was not inviting my mother, just me.

  I stirred my food with my fork. “I’d like that,” I said. “And maybe we can visit Ozzie. I haven’t seen the guy in a really long time.”

  My parents looked at each other and then back at me. My mother changed the subject. “I got a bid on that new listing but it was way under the asking price. And the buyer asked me to trim my commission fee. I told him to stuff it where the sun doesn’t shine.”

  “That was tactful of you,” my father said.

  Friday I stayed home from school. I explained to my parents that it was a matter of too much stress. “I just need to chill for a day.”

  I moved that pile of newspapers back towards my desk and clipped a few oddities about Elvis appearances, sign language communication with apes, and a magician named Gabor who many claimed could make household appliances float in mid-air — blenders, toasters, microwave ovens. He did not make people or animals float, he said, because it was against his principles. He also said this: “Magic is when there is an effect with no apparent cause. All of my effects, my magic, occur because I make it happen. The observer simply does not have the ability to see the forces I use.” As if that explained it. I wondered if he was the real thing or just another showman who made things appear to happen through gimmicks and visual tricks.

  I turned on my computer and found an opponent online to test my skills at chess. He won three games
before I realized my demise each time was the result of my attempts to protect my queen with little regard for the loss of other strategic pieces. I logged off and noted my stress levels rising again as I began to blame myself for losing Tanya. But even more than that, I was worried about Andrea, that amazing person who had come into my life, stayed so briefly, and then vanished.

  If each of us could peer into the future, we would alter a considerable amount of the things we do in the present. We would be different people for sure. Gabor’s simple statement got me thinking about cause and effect. His explanation of magic could apply to many things. If every morning you hear a sound like two claps of thunder at exactly nine-thirty you think that is odd. It is unlikely that it can be thunder since such things don’t happen on a daily schedule. You run through many possibilities but come to the conclusion that it is inexplicable — some odd phenomena that appears to have no logical cause. Since the sound has no negative effects and no particular positive ones, after a while most folks would just stop thinking about it or, at most, find it mildly amusing each time it occurs.

  Let’s say, later, much later, you discover that an overseas supersonic flight to Paris is passing over where you live at nine-thirty each morning. And it clicks. The plane is breaking the sound barrier overhead and that is what you are hearing. You now have a theory, and ultimately an explanation of the cause of the effect. But if you had not been alerted to the information, by chance or intention, then you would continue to assume that the sound was a strange phenomenon — a kind of magic.

  Lydia had guided me through several possibilities of what she called “divining” my future. She was a hardcore horoscope believer and argued that even Carl Jung, the famous psychologist, was a believer in the possibility of using astrology to tap into some kind of code as to how our lives are played out according to a pattern that includes stars and planets and galaxies.

  She was lukewarm on palmistry but thought it had some merit. I told her I didn’t like the look of my lifeline and she studied it herself and frowned. “I’ve known ninety-year-old men whose lifelines peter out to nothing in the middle of their palm. Yours doesn’t end. It’s broken off and begins again. There.” She traced the crease that began just below my forefinger and carved a deep canal across my hand and down around the pad of my thumb towards my wrist.

  Lydia was always more interested in what she called “the forces at work within you and the energy around you.” She’d say, “When the planets are in your favour, move forward. When they are against you, retreat.”

  I was clearly in retreat, but I wanted to know if I was the cause of my own effect or if it was something external. Not necessarily planets, but something else at work. I felt like my life was this great, crazy, sometimes amusing, sometimes impossible jigsaw puzzle. I was unable to fit enough of the pieces of the puzzle together to grasp what the picture was supposed to be when completed. And I was pretty sure that I was missing a number of key pieces.

  This is why I rather wished I could look ahead into the future and return to the present with a clear vision as to what I should do next. What was it I was supposed to do?

  Aside from the usual methods of palmistry, astrology, Tarot cards, and throwing the I Ching, Lydia told me that down through the ages there had been a lot of pretty wacky ways of attempting to foretell the future. Alomancy was a method using salt. Antropomancy was reading the future by studying the entrails of human sacrifices (a rather extreme method, one would assume). Necromancy was the old standby of listening to what the dead have to tell you about the future. Alectryomancy involved simply throwing down some corn on tiles of letters from the alphabet. Then you let your favourite rooster peck away and see what words he spells that will prophesy what tomorrow may bring. One method called xenomancy involved divination by interpreting the appearance of foreign visitors. I had a feeling that none of the above was going to be suitable for my dilemma.

  There would be no easy way to prepare myself for what tomorrow may bring. And looking back, I am sure now that nothing could have prepared me for what was to come next.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I was really hoping that my father would drive me to the coast on Saturday as he’d promised. I believed that simply looking at the sea would help fix my head. I didn’t think he’d go along with my great lifelong desire to learn how to surf. But I figured he would at least help me try to locate the Oz.

  I dug out some old letters from my long-lost buddy, but not one of them had an address. He had moved to the shore town of Whitby but that was all I knew. I tried phoning information for a listing of his father, Winston Coleman. There was a W. Coleman but that was all. I tried phoning W. Coleman, but it turned out to be an elderly woman named Winnie who must not have had many people to talk to because she wanted to tell me about her cat and the skin allergies it had.

  I did an Internet search for Ozzie Coleman, Winston Coleman, and Ozzie’s mother, whose first name was very vague, but I was fairly sure it was Lizzie. So I tried Lizzie Coleman, Elizabeth Coleman, Liz Coleman, and E. Coleman. Nothing.

  I phoned Whitby High School and explained about my quest for an old friend. At first the secretary said no way, but I pleaded, so she put me through to a school counsellor.

  “It doesn’t ring any bells,” he said, trying to be helpful. “Hang on.”

  He did a quick search and then told me that there were two Colemans in the school, both girls. No Ozzie. “His family probably just moved on, maybe back while he was still in junior high. I don’t have access to any records there. A lot of families move in and out of this town. How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”

  “Four years,” I said. “Sorry I can’t be more helpful. Keep looking. You’ll probably find him. Good luck.”

  My own prediction that my father would find an excuse to bow out of the trip to the beach at Whitby proved faulty. We were actually on the road Saturday morning, my father with a big mug of coffee and me looking out the window.

  My dad turned down the radio. “About this thing you want to do ... track down your friend ...”

  “Ozzie,” I said. “You remember him. I know you always thought he was trouble but he was my friend.” I had this feeling that the Ozman was part of that puzzle that was my life. He was one of the missing pieces. And that somehow, I didn’t know how, he would be able to help me figure out how to get in touch with Andrea. Ozzie always, even way back when we were kids, had the ability to make the leap of faith that made it seem that anything was possible.

  My father put on his sunglasses and cleared his throat to speak again, but I interrupted.

  “We can try the library, maybe a couple of skateboard shops. I’m sure that if we are real polite and go to a police station, if it’s a slow day with no major crime, someone will try to help. It’s really important to me.”

  “Okay,” he said, giving a great sigh. “If it’s that important. You won’t mind if I just hang back and wait in the car?”

  I smiled. Just like him to not want to get involved, but at least he was driving me to Whitby. I was certain I was going to find Ozzie. Reunion time.

  But by three o’clock, I gave up the search. Every place I went to I had been the most polite seventeen-year-old on the planet. Even the cops tried to be helpful, but I had no luck at all. I knew Ozzie’s father had been some kind of computer salesman so I even tried calling the computer stores from the yellow pages.

  “Let’s go to the beach,” my father finally said.

  I had given it my best shot and was feeling pretty low. If Ozzie had moved, why hadn’t he at least let me know where he had gone? I began to wonder if something awful might have happened to him or his family.

  My father parked, we got out, and we walked onto the beach. What had started out as a sunny day had turned overcast. Dark thunderclouds hung over us and the sea looked dense and brooding. There was not a breath of wind. The beach had emptied, and we walked the sand down to the edge of the water. A few surfers were still out ther
e, far from shore, catching waves and riding across long glassy walls of water. It looked different from what I had imagined.

  My father took off his sunglasses. “I guess I don’t need these.” He stood there beside me looking out to sea.

  I didn’t say anything, although I felt bad that I had wasted most of the day in my failed search instead of spending some “quality time” with my father. Then he dropped the bombshell.

  “Simon,” he said. “There was no Ozzie. He never existed. He was someone you made up in your head.”

  I felt nauseous just then. I couldn’t understand why he would say a thing like this.

  “You remember your accident?”

  “Yes. And I know you blamed Ozzie for it, right? It’s true that he was there, but it was my stupid decision.”

  My father rubbed his face and took a deep breath. “Ozzie was your imaginary friend from the time you were a little kid. At first we thought it was cute and that he would just eventually go away.” He waved his hands in the air. “In fact, I guess we wanted to believe that you knew he was just that, an imaginary friend.”

  “Why are you saying this? I know Ozzie was real.”

  “He wasn’t. When you started doing crazy things, your mother and I were truly getting worried. We had taken you to get professional help. This was before the accident. Do you remember that?”

  “No.”

  “Dr. Waller?”

  “You’re the one imagining things.”