Do You Think This Is Strange?

by Aaron Cully Drake

  He was looking at you!

  “Okay,” I said.

  Mr. Chips.

  “Look at your homework, okay?”

  I started writing quickly. Avogadro’s constant. Moles. Equilibrium.

  “Okay?” he asked again.

  “Mr. Chips,” I said softly.

  I told you not to call him that.

  Mr. Pringle stood up. “What did you say?”

  “You looked at me,” I said.

  This time, he stared at me with a little more than indifference. But he said nothing. He shook his head and returned to his work.

  One of these days, the threads said, you will fail to dodge the bullet.

  AN ACCOUNTING OF MY

  DAY IN THREE PARTS

  The evening of the day Saskia returned, Bill and I walked the trails behind the house, and he requested an accounting of my time.

  “Tell me three things you did today,” he said as we walked single file up a path made rough by granite knobs, made stubborn by hemlock roots, some as thick as an arm, lacing up the path underneath.

  As we walked, I took my water bottle from my belt. Bill led, at a steady pace, not looking back, waiting for my reply. He didn’t wait long. He never did.

  “Three things, Freddy,” he said, and his voice was irritated.

  “I ate my lunch,” I said and shook my bottle, listening to the water splash about.

  “You can do better than that,” he told me and turned back to look at me directly, still walking, paying no attention to the broken ground beneath him. I broke from his gaze, and he turned back to watch his footing. The forest was silent, except for the dropping of our feet, and the sloshing of the water.

  “What else did you do?” he asked again. “Lunch is no longer an allowed answer.”

  “I sat at the cafeteria table with someone.”

  He stopped walking. His eyebrows went up. “With someone?” he said, as if he were contemplating a new postulate of science. “What kind of someone?”

  At that moment, I felt my stomach tighten. I didn’t want to tell him about Saskia Stiles but I didn’t know why. Not knowing my own motivation is unusual and causes me alarm. But I was even more alarmed that there were no threads appearing in my head, asking why I didn’t want to tell him.

  Zero threads.

  None.

  Apparently, the threads in my head were quite okay with it.

  “Who did you have lunch with, Freddy?” my father asked again.

  “With a janitor,” I said, and I wondered if I said it too quickly and was now acting suspicious.

  My father didn’t answer. I held my breath for a moment but realized it was not a good long-term strategy. I exhaled in a burst and took a quick swig from my water bottle.

  “A janitor?” he said, frowning. “You had lunch with a janitor?”

  I didn’t answer. I sloshed my water.

  “Well,” he said, then closed his mouth and pursed his lips. He opened his mouth again and began to speak, but stopped. He frowned.

  “What in the world did you talk about?” he asked me, at last.

  “Fecal aerosols,” I replied, and flecks of water flew from my lips to land between us.

  Somewhere the mountain trolls were watching, chuckling.

  You pulled that one out of the fire, they probably said.

  THE THREE THINGS

  Listen: Eleven years ago, my parents started asking me to tell them three things I did during the day. Notwithstanding the few times someone was sick or the few times we were out, or the times Bill sat in the living room and watched my mother dance, one of them asked me for an accounting every single day. They thought it was good for my memory.

  It’s not.

  I remember conversations I had weeks ago, to the word. I remember the date and time when I saw a dog with only three legs. Three legs. I remember the commercials that appeared in the first quarter of last year’s Super Bowl, and I remember their order.

  So I certainly remember what I did today. I did many things, and therein lies the problem. I do many things every day. I get out of bed. I put my feet in the slippers at the foot of my night table. I walk to the bathroom and pee. I run cold water over my hands. I wash my face. I brush my teeth. After I brush my teeth, I fart. Every time.

  I put on grey underwear on even days of the week. I put on black underwear on odd days of the week. I won’t wear white underpants because they get dirty too fast. My father used to yell at me when I wore white underwear.

  “Jesus Harold Christ, Freddy!” he shouted, sorting the laundry. “Did you wipe your ass at all this week?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “With what? Your underwear?”

  By the time I am asked What did you do today? I have done literally hundreds of things. I don’t have difficulty remembering what I did. I have difficulty deciding what’s noteworthy enough to talk about.

  When they first introduced this exercise, my parents had trouble getting more than a single unique thing dredged up from my memory. “Tell me one thing about your day,” my mother said, long ago, and I didn’t like the new game. I stuffed my mouth full of whatever food was available. It was my most successful avoidance tactic to dodge questions, just ahead of closing my eyes and screaming at the top of my voice.

  My mother touched my hand, her most successful compliance tactic. “Try and remember,” she said.

  “I don’t know.” I looked to her face for approval.

  “You must remember something,” she said.

  “I ate breakfast,” I offered.

  “Everyone has breakfast, Freddy. Tell me something interesting.”

  “Breakfast is interesting,” I replied.

  My mother took my chin in her hand. “It’s not interesting enough,” she told me. “Do you understand interesting?”

  “What,” I said, not as a question, but a half-hearted attempt to dodge the original question. Often, such a response stopped them asking questions and started them explaining things, at which point I could stop listening. I hoped it would work this time.

  It didn’t.

  “The word interesting,” Mom said. “Do you understand what it means?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled. “What happened to you today that you really found interesting? But not breakfast.”

  “I ate lunch,” I said.

  As I grew older, I grew better at knowing which things were interesting and which things weren’t. I was seven when I finally grasped that there were certain things during the day that merited remembering for the pop quiz later that evening. Infrequent occurrences were always good candidates.

  “I had a spelling test,” I said.

  “Did you!” My mother’s eyebrows went up. She finished cutting my meat. “How did you do on it?”

  “Yes!” I said, excited.

  “And how did you do on the test?”

  “I had a spelling test,” I agreed.

  “Did you get them all right?”

  “Yes!”

  “You didn’t get any wrong?”

  At this point, I began to panic. The questions were becoming increasingly specific, and I was beginning to get confused.

  My mom tried again. “I’m so happy to hear you got all the answers right! What words were on it?”

  “Well, that’s just GREAT!” I shouted, threw my fork into my mashed potatoes, and crossed my arms in frustration.

  The worst thing about the Three Things You Did Today game is the prize. If I successfully guess three things that were interesting, then I will have to guess several more answers to the follow-up questions. It’s mentally exhausting. It’s frustrating to know that my reward for answering questions is more questions.

  —

  When I was eight, we began the tradition of walking the trails in the early evening. In the winter months, we raced the shortening day to see if we could escape the forest before night fell. Half the year, we shortened the trip to only the midway point, turning around at the firs
t fork, fifteen minutes into the bush.

  Sometimes the dwindling light made me afraid, and our walk slowed as I stared up the side of the mountain, watching for mountain trolls. To take my mind off of this, Bill would ask me about the three things. I answered as reluctantly as I did at the kitchen table, but it kept us occupied, and perhaps the trolls were interested enough to hear my answers: they never bothered us on those walks.

  The three questions became a regular outdoor sport when Bill became too preoccupied with his other nightly activities. He began to ask them on every walk behind the house, and stopped asking at the kitchen table altogether. I was fine with that. At least, the game was shorter on our walks. All the more reason to like the walks.

  Favourite thing number 3.

  THE DAY I LEARNED WHO

  LIVED UP BY THE CLIFFS

  I opened my eyes and I was six years old. The wind blew through the trees, and I held my father’s hand as he walked with me on the trails behind our house. They wind along the bottom of the mountain, over steep gullies and through fir forests plump with mossy bedding. The trails were dug into the hillside, shored up with logs and gravel. They zigzag up the side of the mountain, spread out like a web, splitting and joining, and some go to the summit, thousands of metres up the ribs of the Coast Mountains. Always, we watched for trolls.

  I learned there were mountain trolls in the hills behind our house earlier that year. We went for a walk through the forest, from a path that begins just up the road on the west side of our house and shoots straight into the trees.

  “It’s time you knew the truth,” Bill told me as we walked between two giant firs, the sentinels at the path entrance.

  Our home is at the edge of town, high up on Westwood Plateau, where the rainforest tumbles down the steep mountain walls and spills into a steep gully. It’s a beautiful neighbourhood, with a wide view of the valley. On clear nights, the city lights spread out away into the deep distance. On other nights, the lights are lost in the low-hanging mist. When the rain falls, the gully echoes loudly, angrily, with runoff. When I was younger, my father took me to the edge of the creek where we threw rocks into the tumbling water.

  The trail follows the creek, through salmonberry and devil’s club. It climbs out of patches of alder and dogwood, with blackberry bushes so thick a mouse would get trapped on their thorns. After it crosses a bridge, it winds up the side of the mountain and joins an old logging road reclaimed by alder and cherry wood.

  We like to take walks along this path, and I’m happy to do so. We rarely speak, and, when I was younger he let me run ahead, or lag behind. He called to me to hurry up and called to me to slow down, depending on his mood and my energy level. But he gave me my freedom on those walks.

  They are good memories. Favourite memories.

  One day, I ventured off the path and climbed straight up the mountainside to the rocks above me, the tumbling cliffs where the sunlight burst through the canopy of hemlock and fir, where the moss-covered cliff glowed like gold.

  That day, my father called me back in a tone of voice I had never heard before. When I came back to him, he got down on one knee, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “There’s something you need to know about these woods. I’m going to share it with you, but you have to promise to keep it a secret. Do you promise?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you know what a secret is?”

  “What?” I said.

  He adjusted the hood of my rain jacket. “A secret is something that you only tell to one person. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And who is the one person you can tell it to?”

  “You.”

  He nodded. “So, you can’t tell anyone else. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “You can’t tell anyone at Excalibur House, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You can’t tell the bus driver, or the cashier at the grocery store, or the person who stops traffic at the school at the end of our street. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you can’t tell your mom. Right?”

  I hesitated. He sighed. “Okay, fine, you can tell your mother, but only if I’m with you. Right?”

  I nodded.

  He looked around to see if anyone was listening. He pulled me closer to him, put his arm around me, and pointed to the cliffs above the path. “This forest is alive, Freddy,” he said. “With things you don’t want to come across.”

  Listen: There are mountain trolls just beyond my backyard. They come out at night. If I went into the backyard by myself, they might come down from the cliffs, with thundering steps, with arms as thick as garbage cans, feet shellacked with calluses, toes growing out at every angle. Noses long and drooping, eyebrows hung like eaves.

  If I went into the backyard alone, if they heard me, if they came down, they would eat me. If they didn’t eat me, they might make a raucous noise and wake the neighbourhood. Then I would be responsible for disturbing everyone’s sleep. I would probably have to answer a lot of questions.

  So I stayed out of the backyard.

  If I went into the forest alone, the trolls would see me and come stomping, guttural, growling, a stench of decayed flesh under their claws and between their teeth. If I went into the forest alone, they would sit on me, crush my bones into jelly, take me back to their caves in the cliffs, and hang me over a fire, slow cooking me for days. They would eat me like turkey dinner.

  So I didn’t go into the forest alone.

  “You can’t ever go by yourself, Freddy,” my father told me. “Trolls are not creatures to be made friends with. They are stupid and angry, and always want to look you straight in the eye.”

  “Will they eat you?” It was a fair question. He’d walked in the forest alone plenty of times.

  He fished a rock from his pocket. It was green, no bigger than my thumb, and polished. I ran my finger over its top, back and forth, back and forth. When I tried to take it, he closed his fingers and pulled back his hand, smiling.

  “This is my talisman,” he told me. “So long as I have it, no trolls ever bother me. It’s a sign that we have come to an understanding.”

  “The trolls understand you?”

  Nodding, he pointed to the forest. “I let them keep the forest as theirs. They let me keep this house as mine. They let me walk in the forest, and take whomever I want with me. And they leave us alone.”

  He pointed to the sky. “You know how the clouds come over the mountain and it rains? That’s the trolls, sending it our way. When there’s thunder, that’s the trolls. Sometimes, they’re dancing. Other times, they’re arguing. Thunder and rain are a part of their life, and it’s a part of ours, and they have to keep sending it our way. So I let them.”

  The cliffs loomed higher up the slopes, deep with cracks and fissures.

  “Up there,” he said. “That’s where the trolls live. That’s their land, and up there, they have a legal right to sit on you and squish you into jelly.” He knelt down and looked me straight in the eye. “Do you want to be made into jelly?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good,” he said. “All you have to do is stay away from the cliffs.”

  “Those cliffs up there.” I pointed.

  My father nodded.

  “The thunder is trolls dancing.”

  “Right.”

  “Like Mom dances.”

  He shrugged. “Kind of, I guess.”

  “Is Mom a troll?” I asked.

  “Sometimes, Freddy.” My father sighed and patted me gently on the shoulder. “Sometimes we all are.”

  THE DAYS WHEN MY MOTHER DANCED

  When I was younger, thunder at night terrified me. When the winter storms arrived, my father came to my bedroom, sat at the windowsill, and talked with me.

  “It’s the trolls,” he said. “Just the trolls arguing.”

  “They’re loud,” I complained. “Why are they loud?”

  He shrugged and stood up. His hands in his poc
kets, he was calm, while the wind howled and rain fell like the first wave of an invasion.

  “Sometimes trolls argue for no good reason,” he said at last. “Sometimes they’re just bored.”

  There were some good thunder days, though. They were joyous occasions, because when the trolls grumbled in the hills, my mother danced. Sometimes she went out and bought orchids, white ones, for the living room. After she shook off her umbrella and hung up her raincoat, she hurried into the living room and found a spot for them on the coffee table or the end table against the sofa chair by the window.

  The TV was off, the laundry folded, the dishwasher finished. Everything became quiet, except sometimes when the thunder rumbled. I ran into the living room and hid behind the curtains, my hands popping my ears or slapping at my thighs, just to make noise.

  Still, I knew it was going to be okay, because soon the music would start. My mother stood at the stereo, smiling at me.

  “I know just the song,” she told me and slowly turned up the music until it was pounding off the walls and I couldn’t hear the thunder anymore. She gave me a book, and I sat and stopped moving, fidgeting, stopped clapping my hands. My mother closed her eyes and danced. This was one of my Favourite Things. I’m sure it was one of hers, too.

  She danced with the blinds open, and sometimes people slowed as they walked by, standing under their umbrellas. The heat of their stares never bothered her. They were strangers she would never see again, or they were people who saw her dance often enough to not be surprised by it. My mother liked to dance a lot.

  When Dad came home from work, he opened a Bud Light and sat back on the couch, to watch her. Relaxed, I sat in the living room with them and stared at the wall.

  —

  My first memory of my mother is of the thing she said to me, the same thing she said when she danced.

  “Look at me, Freddy,” she said, and I remember her.

  She doesn’t say it anymore. If she asked I would look.

  If she asked.

  When I was seven years old, my mother drove me to the train station. “Look at me, Freddy,” she said. Then she kissed me on my cheek and was gone. I sat on a bench, lay on my back, and it rained.