The Most Precious Substance on Earth

by Shashi Bhat

  I start a new post and write: If I had a time machine, I’d go back in time and make it so the troll who comments on this blog was never born. I hit Publish.

  What’s this? says the troll, minutes later. Am I the troll? Who’s trolling who now?

  Yup, that’s you. You’re the troll, I type in the comments box. Do you really know me? Where do you know me from? How do I know you’re not lying?

  How do you know what I know? How do I know you don’t know what you say you don’t know?

  I think you’re lying, I type. You’re just some guy who stumbled across my blog.

  His reply contains a link. I hesitate for a second, wondering if it will lead to tedious spyware, but of course I click on it anyway. It’s an image file: an old photo of my high school class. Students clumped together wearing cargo pants and really big shirts, and the teachers smiling at the back. I’d forgotten this photo was ever taken. In it, I’m circled in digital red pen.

  I imagine the troll at his computer, sitting in an unlit basement, a black silhouette like an anonymous documentary subject. In my mind, the silhouette takes on a particular shape. There are only so many people this could be. What the hell, I figure. In that case, I type, I’d like to interview you for my blog. I need to know who this is. I expect him to decline, but I guess his ego wins out.

  Fame! he replies…. Fortune?

  I mean, it’s not like I’m going to pay you. When are you free to meet?

  Meet? Ha. Ha. Ha. Just post the questions here.

  Nope, I respond.

  A minute passes, then ten. I wander away from the computer, assuming he won’t respond. When I return with a cup of coffee, he’s written a new comment: Obladee. 8pm tomorrow.

  * * *

  Because I’ve been on dates at Obladee, I keep trying to shake the uncomfortable sense that I’m here for a date now. The place is lit with hanging amber bulbs. There’s a wall of white scalloped tile, and dark wooden shelves holding a collection of wine bottles; a chalkboard with a handwritten list of cheeses. I arrive early and secure a two-person table near the washroom so we don’t have to sit at the communal table with all the young professionals.

  The man who walks in the wood-and-glass door is hunched over, angular and underfed, and has an outsized beard; he looks like Kafka, but with the facial hair of Dostoevsky. Does this make him Kafkaesque? He stands out in his T-shirt, too casual for the location. When he makes eye contact and heads towards me, I suppress an overwhelming urge to tell him, “No, just go away.” But I also feel relief, even as my body sags with a strange disappointment. He isn’t who I both hoped and worried he might be.

  As the man sits down in front of me, the interaction seems pointless, the moment deflated.

  “You’re buying, correct?” he asks, in a voice low and crackling. It’s impossible to tell how old he is.

  “One drink.” I’m here now, so I might as well talk to him.

  He glances up and to the side, at the chalkboard on the wall, combing his beard with his fingers. “And a cheese plate.”

  “All right.” I half laugh in disbelief. “And a cheese plate.”

  The waiter comes by and is excessively friendly. I try to match his friendliness as I order two glasses of Sauvignon Blanc and some cheese for the troll, who watches me with his lips pressed together smugly. “Scratch that, make mine a flight of wine.” He waits to see if I’ll challenge him, then selects a flight off the menu. I shrug.

  After the waiter leaves, the troll leans back in his chair, crosses his arms and his grasshopper legs. “Eager to please, eh?”

  I ignore him and reach into my bag for my phone. “Can I get a photo of you?”

  “Absolutely not.” He blocks his face with his hands as though I’m a paparazzo.

  “How about an artistically fuzzy image with, say, only your hands in focus?”

  “Okay, but no face. No identifying features.”

  I take a photo of his hands, one laid over the other. I keep wanting to laugh at how seriously he’s taking himself. The photo looks like a free stock image, except that he has the slouch of a ten-year-old boy. I’m pretending to know what I’m doing, but I’ve never interviewed anybody before. Out on the table comes my notepad of questions, just as the waiter sets our wine in front of us. Suddenly this all seems very funny.

  “So, when did you start trolling?”

  “That’s your opening question? Why does that matter? Sooo fascinating. Here, take this Pulitzer.” He makes as if to hand me a glass of wine, then downs it. I assume this is meant as a power move.

  Next, the waiter brings three different cheeses arranged artfully on a slate board, with slices of baguette, seed crackers, and olives. “Enjoy!” says the waiter.

  “Thank you,” says the troll, politely.

  Don’t laugh, I tell myself. If I laugh, he will certainly leave. Or spend more of my money on wine. I muster up my teacher persona. “Okay. Let’s get to a tougher question, then: Why do you do it? What do you get out of posting annoying comments on people’s websites?”

  He wrings his hands in a mock plea. “Why do you do it?!”

  I ask a few more questions. He gives circular non-answers, piling crumbly chèvre onto hunks of baguette and taking moist, audible bites, as though he has just discovered cheese for the first time and finds it scrumptious. I think about plucking a bit of Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar off his plate, just to see how he would react.

  “To be honest,” I tell him, “I only started thinking of you as a troll because that’s what my friend called you after she saw your comments. You seem more like a leprechaun than a troll.”

  He pauses with a wine glass in one hand and a spreading knife in the other. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” There are crumbs on his thin lips as he clenches his jaw under his raggedy beard.

  “At worst a goblin,” I add, smiling at him, and setting down my notepad and pen to sip my own wine.

  He leans forward, his face illuminated by the tea light flickering in a glass between us. “You don’t know about goblins, do you? They live on human teeth.”

  The waiter interrupts. “How are we doing here?”

  “Everything is delicious,” the troll tells him. When the waiter leaves, he turns back to me. “Gobble, gobble. Isn’t that what goblins say?”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what turkeys say.” I laugh, finally. I can’t help it.

  He narrows his eyes, then deliberately swipes his hand sideways, catlike, knocking his empty glass over the edge of the table. Without thinking, I reach out and catch it before it hits the ground. I feel like I’ve just caught a pop fly. “Whoa,” I say, as he blinks. “No need to break the stemware.” I place the glass carefully back on the table. “You’re trying really hard to be interesting, aren’t you? What’s your name, anyway?” I ask, but he shakes his head and doesn’t answer.

  I check my list of questions. Jules and I had brainstormed them together, and then I arranged them into an order of increasing intensity. There’s one near the bottom of the list that draws my attention: Is there anything you regret posting? I don’t ask this question. I know he’ll just say no. The last question on the list is What’s the worst thing you’ve ever said or done? It’s juicy. It’s the question you ask at a slumber party to show how edgy you are. But I hold off and decide I’ve been over-directing. I’m going to treat him the way I would a classroom full of lively students and just let the conversation flow in its own direction. “Why don’t you just tell me about some of the ways you’ve trolled people? Your proudest moments.”

  It seems to work. He’s thoughtful for a second, still drinking and munching but alert now, with the luminous eyes of a real fairy-tale monster. “Well, let’s see, I’ve hacked into the odd dating profile, changed a woman’s search settings, that sort of thing,” he says, smirking. His pupils don’t quite line up. I check behind m
e to see what he might be looking at, but there’s nothing there. “I like to be creative, but sometimes I just call everybody a cunt. Oh, one time I wrote a lot of dead baby jokes in the comments section of an article about a mother convicted of drowning her own baby. Any time someone commented, I’d post a new joke as a reply. By the way, how do you make a dead baby float?” he asks.

  “I don’t need to hear the punchline,” I say.

  “Take your foot off its head. Ha! Hmm, but let me think…Oh, you’ll appreciate this one: I posted on a city planning forum that Halifax should have two sidewalks, one for whites and one for everyone else.”

  “Are you actually a racist, or do you just say that stuff to get a rise out of people?” It strikes me that I’m indifferent to hearing his answer.

  “Does it matter? I trolled a rape victim once.”

  “I’d rather not hear about that.”

  “This girl from my university who everybody knew—”

  “I told you I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “You asked, though. Didn’t you?”

  What am I doing here? I’m quite literally feeding the troll. I’d been anticipating wit, but he’s just a gross man with off-putting manners who harasses people. And whatever the worst thing he’s said or done is, I don’t want to know. Why would any reasonable person want to know the answer to these questions? “Okay, this isn’t really working,” I say, pushing back my chair and trying to catch the waiter’s eye. “Thanks for your time, but I see now an interview with you wouldn’t fit in with what my blog’s about anyway.”

  “You want to know how I know you?” He pulls out his phone. Swipes and presses the cracked screen. When he glances back up at me there’s a peculiar look on his face—the uncanny knowledge of somebody who has been to the future and back. There’s something familiar about him now, but I still can’t place him. He holds the phone up close to my face, but the screen is too bright in the dim bar. As I pull my head back and my eyes adjust, I recognize Amy’s Facebook memorial page. The main photo has been changed. It’s the same class photo he posted on my blog, but I’m uncircled. Instead, there’s Amy in the front row, sitting cross-legged in the grass, wearing a grey sweatshirt with Sir William Alexander High School written in forest green. She’s smiling, the Amy I used to know. Each of her eyes is crossed out with a crimson X. At the bottom of the photo, someone has added text in the same dark red shade: Drugged-up sluts deserve to die.

  The troll sits back, watching for my reaction. When I say nothing, he says, “You knew Amy. Cormier. She was a real bitch in high school.”

  “Her family probably saw that,” I tell him quietly, though I know he doesn’t care.

  “Maybe.” He shrugs. “Who do you think made the page, though?” He swipes and presses the screen again and shows it to me. Points at the name of one of the page administrators. “That’s this guy.” He aims the thumb of his free hand at himself. “Funny, how people send private messages to the dead. Do you plan to monitor your Facebook messages when you’re a corpse?”

  I taste tannins and acid. The back of my throat goes dry, and I can’t get any words out.

  Around us there are regular people having regular conversations. At a nearby table, the waiter chuckles and says, “You didn’t enjoy that at all, did you?” as he takes away an empty plate. Out the window the evening has turned indigo. A woman walks by, pulling her collar up against the fall air.

  “I sent that message to her private page,” I tell the troll.

  “And how hard do you think that was to hack into? Just look up how to hack into a Facebook account. A zillion nosy parents have travelled that road before me.”

  The waiter approaches, and says, “And are you folks still doing okay over here?” I ask him to please leave us alone. The troll finishes another glass of wine.

  “How did you get that photo?” I ask, trying to change the subject.

  “Are you kidding me?” he asks, eyes full of scorn. He points to a kid in the back row, skinny and wearing an ecstatic grin. Sam. My memory of him is a blip. A tiny crease in the timeline: A boy who talked to himself. A boy onstage at an assembly, karate-chopping the air. Amy’s fluke of a boyfriend for what, a few months? And then we never spoke of him again.

  * * *

  After I first saw Amy’s memorial page, fluorescent white and Facebook blue, with bland comments written all over it—now I wonder if they were even written by real people—I sent her a private message, the most honest thing I’ve ever written. I was in my childhood bedroom, at my parents’ house, where I’m staying temporarily to save money until work picks up. It’s the same old room. Nobody has gotten around to repainting it, so the walls are still a startling black. In the moment, time felt fluid, changing shape to fit the container. The world had rushed forward, but I was still here. In my message, I told her everything I couldn’t tell her when we were kids.

  My biggest regret is a thing I push way down and don’t let myself remember. And yet details surface in my thoughts at unexpected times, like Ogopogo stretching his neck up from Okanagan Lake before sinking back, a blurred shape in the water. When I was fourteen, I had sex with a grown man. Or rather, he had sex with me. It happened only once, and I can’t even picture what he looks like anymore, though I can still feel his face, rough and urgent under my hands.

  Mr. Mackenzie. My Grade 9 English teacher, who stands at the back of that high school class photo in a blue button-down, sleeves rolled to his elbows, projecting such ease.

  I’ve searched for him over the years—in the phone book, on Netscape, eventually on Google. After he left my high school, he taught in Dartmouth for a while, but then he disappeared. Where has he been since then? I wonder if he’s done internet searches for me, if he’s read my blog or found me on Facebook, if he’s examined my photo to see how much I’ve changed.

  I’d half thought the troll might be him. Though why would he be commenting so glibly and obscenely on my blog? I had brushed this question aside. It wasn’t like I’d expected an apology, or even that I wanted to confront him. I had just wanted to know if he was still in this world somewhere or if he had walked off its edge; if he was still married, if he was still a teacher, if he’d aged; if he’d become a grizzled, twisted old troll. If he had taken on his true form. But most likely he is the same as he was, only older, living mundanely, reading a book in a cozy living room chair, somewhere not too far from here.

  On my laptop I’ve bookmarked an interview with Samantha Geimer, the woman Roman Polanski raped when she was thirteen. Thirteen. When I was thirteen, I still had my collection of Polly Pockets displayed on a shelf in my bedroom. In the same interview, Geimer quotes her mother as saying, “You were never the same person after that.”

  The only person I ever told about Mr. Mackenzie was a therapist I saw in my late twenties, who said, “But it was consensual, right?” He recommended mindfulness exercises and said I should try to live in the present.

  I remember leaving the therapist’s office and wandering around Halifax, tweeting photos and tagging them with #100HappyThings. It was trending at the time. I posted photos of COWS ice cream in a waffle cone, a cornflower blue house at the west end of Quinpool Road, the large bum of a Newfie dog lumbering down the waterfront. Recently I saw a popular Twitter thread where people posted photos of themselves from the worst times in their lives. In the photos, they’re grinning at sporting events, beaming on beaches. The captions say things like This was right before I tried to commit suicide.

  * * *

  The troll drinks his wine and eats his cheese. Behind him, the young professionals in pressed black clothing clink their glasses to celebrate an ordinary day. The troll taps on my notepad with one finger. He is saying something, but I can’t quite put together what.

  I should storm out of the bar, assert myself. Storm is the kind of word I used to love examining with my students. It can be a noun or a verb.
You can see a storm or be a storm or be caught in one or carry one inside you like an extra lung. I don’t storm out, because I have to get the check. This reasoning will seem silly later, but right now it is an anchor. If I don’t pay, the troll probably won’t either, and the busy, affable waiter will have served us for nothing.

  “Blog…interview…Hey, are you listening to me?” says the troll. He snaps his fingers in front of my face, and it’s as though I can watch the sound of the snap glide away, past the clinking glasses, and out the door to where the evening has grown fully dark. I haven’t brought a warm-enough jacket. The troll finishes eating and drinking, shoves back his chair, and leaves.

  I wonder if he got what he came for.

  When the waiter brings the cheque and finds just me, his face is gently surprised and sympathetic. He hands me the machine and I tap my card.

  “Cheer up! Plenty of fish out there,” he says, with a wink.

  * * *

  I’m back in my old room and I can hear my parents downstairs, eating a late dinner. Sitting on my bed, under the light of a single lamp, I search the internet for that Twilight Zone episode, “The Midnight Sun.” The episode opens: Outside a woman’s window, the sun is a white diamond. A close-up shot of the woman’s face, a sheen of sweat across her troubled forehead. A thermometer where the mercury can’t go any higher.

  How accurate is my memory of high school? Here is the gritty floor under one palm as I sit in the hallway alcove during lunch. The hallways narrowing at one end like a bottleneck, pushing everyone uncomfortably close. The almond scent of Amy’s hair—or did it smell like chemicals? The brassy, triumphant sound of the school band, exquisite and enveloping, not a single note or person out of place. The high school as alive and complicated as a world. If I travelled back to those years, how familiar would they look? I read once that memories are altered through remembering. Every memory you have is only a memory of the last time you remembered it. Our pasts are just broken telephone messages we transmit to ourselves. Could I spot the differences between a drawing of the actual past and the past that’s been mutating in my memory for all this time? On which side of the building had our mothers dropped us off? Did the school assemblies really have that level of fanfare? For how many weeks had we worn those goth clothes? How would Amy have described that place, or me, or our friendship, or any of it, if I had asked?