“Of course not. They’ll go away eventually,” Jake replied, suddenly looking a little concerned.
After about six hours, as dusk began to settle around the bungalow and it became clear that the door would not open again, the crowd slowly started to disperse. A small group of unusually persistent stragglers sat on the doorstep for three more hours. Having exhausted their 1960s repertoire they had moved on to singing “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” over and over until it was well and truly dark, each protestor hoping that he or she would be the last one allowed inside.
The next morning, Annie and her dad got up early and, after checking that there was no one left on the lawn, they cleaned the tent carefully. They vacuumed the interior with a hand-held DustBuster, aired out the sleeping bag, and even sprayed air freshener inside. They still had a dozen cans of frozen lemonade in their freezer and about four hundred Styrofoam cups. They were lemonaded out, but they figured they could encourage Mrs. Mooney’s seven-year-old son to start a business. “I guess it was overkill on the cups,” Jake said.
Back in the living room, they stood in front of the tent and thought again about taking it down, now that it had had its fifteen minutes. Annie leaned into her dad and he wrapped his arm around her.
“So, are there instructions for disassembly?” Jake asked.
“I don’t think we even need them, do we?” Annie replied. “But I’m sure there’s a sheet in the stuff-sac. Should we check?”
“Yeah,” said Jake, without making a move towards the tent. “Okay.”
“Are you ready?”
“How about we try it out one more time?”
“Sure, Dad,” said Annie. “One last time just to make sure it’s good inside.”
Annie and her father closed the living-room curtains. They stood in front of the tent and gave each other a small nod before climbing in. Then they lay down side by side and settled into the blue.
EVERY TIME THE NORTHERN LIGHTS WHISPER across the sky, Edward goes outside to listen. Since he moved north, it has been his retirement project to read all of the research on magnetic fields and auroral electrons, and now he knows all there is to know about them. Whether or not the lights make a real sound that is audible to the human ear is an open question, scientifically speaking, but Edward is sure he can hear a fizzling noise accompanied by a buzzing sensation that seems to course through his whole body. This is the empirical evidence on which he bases his conclusions, but the sound is something more, too. It’s sparklers lighting up in his blood, flashing from his fingers up to his earlobes, and radio waves inside his eyelids. Nothing else has ever made Edward feel the way he does when he’s standing under the big green sky – like he’s at the very centre of the hum, as if the curve of his inner ear contains the whole known universe, spiral galaxies bouncing off his eardrums. But surely even his ecstasy can be explained. When he finds a way of measuring vibrations to prove that we can really hear the lights, that there may even be a stimulation that causes synesthesia, he will publish it to great acclaim in Science. It will be his last article: his swan song.
It remains a great disappointment for Edward that his daughter, Jess, has never been sufficiently impressed by natural phenomena. “I know, Dad, they’re nice,” she says, checking her grocery list on her iPhone as he tells her about his discoveries. “I can’t hear anything, personally, but if you want to measure the waves, you should.”
Nice. How could she possibly describe the lights that way? Even though she means to be reassuring, they are simply not “nice” any more than fetal pig dissection is “nice.” Edward is sure that his eleven-year-old grandson, Sam, will feel differently than his mother does. Unfortunately, the sky only opens up at night, when Sam is in bed. Because of Jess’s lack of interest and the strict sleeping regimen she keeps for her son, she never wakes Sam up to take him outside to see the spectacle. Even when Edward calls her in the evening to suggest it, he knows she never takes her son out into the night air to eavesdrop. Before he can even begin to explain that Sam, with all the intensity of his youth, will surely feel the experience to the fullest, an exasperated breath usually emerges from the receiver in response. Sometimes, he thinks her reedy breathing is her best effort to be kind, that she’d rather make a noise like static on the line than say anything to upset him. During these conversations, Edward often holds the telephone away from his ear and stares at it, as if it is the phone and not his daughter sighing at him before wishing him a good sleep.
Some evenings, now that it’s getting dark earlier, Edward drives two-and-a-half hours out of town to a place where he can be alone with the sky. He unfolds a camping chair on the gravel by the side of the road, the wide yawn of canola fields beside him, and just listens with his whole self.
Sam takes his own hobbies seriously. His latest obsession is with ancient Japanese combat. This is why Edward owns a ninja outfit of the finest quality that Sam helped him to purchase online – a clean and unworn set of black clothes, including slim jacket, ballooning trousers, balaclava, as well as a set of ninja stars, nunchuks, and, of course, a long sword in a black leather sheath that slips into the suit’s belt. The sword is astonishingly heavy and Edward needs both hands to carry it. His only regular form of exercise, now that his cycling days are over, is repeatedly grasping a spring-loaded device designed to develop his grip, so although he has forearms of steel, his general upper body strength leaves something to be desired. Never mind. Edward has no practical experience with ninjas aside from what his grandson has taught him, but if he wanted to, he could really look the part. The getup has to be hidden away so that Sam’s mother doesn’t find the sword and scold Edward for condoning violence and for spoiling her son by indulging his fantasies. According to the floor plans that Sam has drawn up, the kitchen is the heart-centre of Edward’s house, readily reachable at any moment. Edward has stored the ninja collection carefully, so that the outer curve of the weapon just touches the upper cabinet door without scratching.
Edward and Sam have lunch together every day, since Sam’s school is across the street. Despite having lived alone since his wife, Wendy, died thirteen years ago, Edward is still not quite accustomed to cooking for only one person. He often instinctively makes two sandwiches, or measures milk into two cups, even if he ends up pouring tea over only one of them. He suspects this means he is getting old. Jess has threatened to abandon him to the care of the elderly ladies who swim at the community rec centre should he ever become senile, so he never confesses his culinary misjudgments to her. He assumes she’s joking about the old dears, but the idea still fills Edward with a feeling of authentic dread. He simply cannot abide the notion of himself standing poolside in a speedo, swimcap, and goggles, soggy and wrinkled as a Shar-Pei puppy. This is not everyone’s idea of torture, and Edward knows that Jess means well with her mockery, but he finds it simply impossible to think of anything more humiliating than Seniors’ Aquafit at the public swimming pool. At any rate, Sam puts him right at lunchtime. They eat grilled cheese sandwiches and share a can of SpaghettiOs or Campbell’s Tomato Soup, slurping from teaspoons as they watch crime dramas and worry inwardly.
In a way, it’s a shame Sam has to go to school at all. Edward had taught his grandson how to read by the time he was four years old, and, a year later, to write, although early literacy was their secret. Even when he was in diapers, Sam would ignore the other children at preschool and sit on the carpet, silent and regal as a king, books piled high around him like a fortress. Edward knew that although Sam seemed a toddler of few words, he was, in fact, a miniature master of acrostics, turning the letters over and around in his mind until they fit just so. Despite Edward’s assurances, Sam’s parents and teachers grew concerned when he remained silent in the classroom throughout grade one, preferring to sit on the floor and pull book after book off the shelf just to look – or so the teacher thought – at the pictures. It wasn’t until just after he turned seven, after many visits to the school counsellor, several aptitude tests
, and countless fits of parental anxiety, that Sam announced his reading to his grade two teacher by finishing a full-length spy novel in French, about which he wrote, in perfect cursive, a book review.
Today the two of them are sitting at the folding card table that Edward keeps in the living room for when Sam comes over, so that they can eat and watch TV at the same time. He used to fold the table away and then put it out again every day, but he has recently taken to just leaving it beside the couch across from the TV, slightly crowding the space, but saving his back for more important challenges. When Law and Order comes on, Sam and Edward chime in, “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.” Sam punctuates this last line by pounding his fists gleefully on the table. Edward considers telling him to be more careful, as Sam’s soup wobbles near the edge of his bowl, but instead he stands, and asks if he’d like anything else.
“No, Granddad. There’s a robbery taking place.”
In the kitchen, Edward puts on the kettle and opens the cupboard to admire the ninja gear. Funny to have acquired so much apparel when what most appeals to him is the ninja’s ability to become entirely invisible. This is his aspiration: to be everywhere and be seen nowhere; to get in no one’s way, and yet still be able to stand up for oneself, if this were called for. Perhaps being old is its own kind of stealth, but Edward would like to be more glamorously invisible. Of course, it is not the ninja’s cunning or transparency that most attracts Sam. For him the glory is all in the image. The ripple of black harem pants in the wind as the creature flies from a rooftop and lands silently on padded feet. The mask. The sword. Sam’s right; it is an appealing uniform. Edward pours himself a mug of tea and carries out a small china cupful with extra sugar to Sam. They settle into a gritty alleyway, where an unhelpful shopkeeper is leading investigators astray.
Edward lived in Vancouver for nearly seventy years before moving to northern British Columbia to be near Jess and her family when he retired two years ago. Real estate here costs nothing compared to the city, so when he moved, the contents of his small, tidy apartment seemed to spill out across the three-bedroom, two-storey house like a riot of prizes from a piñata. Sam has his own bedroom upstairs, and Edward uses the other spare room as his library. Set against one wall is a bookshelf with all of his own publications and notes, the bound doctoral theses of his former students, and several now-outdated reference books that once thought they could explain global warming. His degrees are somewhere in a box. On the opposite wall is a roll-top desk equipped with a brown leather desk set. His mother’s copy of The Complete Works of Robert Burns takes pride of place on the desk’s built-in shelf, and Edward keeps two letter openers and one blue ballpoint in the pen cup. On the desk are several of Sam’s drawings, all of which depict empty rooms. The first time Sam presented Edward with a pencil-drawn picture of a classroom full of vacant desks, Edward had been confused.
“Don’t you get it?” Sam had asked, impatient.
Edward looked harder, then shook his head.
“A room full of ninjas!” Sam exclaimed, crouching down on the floor and raising an imaginary sword.
Edward let out his loud, gulping laugh, so Sam, encouraged, had gone on to sketch every room he knew and fill them with invisible martial artists. This made Sam quite skilled at representing furniture. For a while, Edward kept the ninja clothing locked inside the closed desk along with the drawings, but he knew that Jess had a key, and that in the event of his unexpected demise, it was the first place she would look for his Last Will and Testament. He isn’t entirely sure, actually, what Jess would think of the ninja obsession, but he suspects that it would go against the strict anti-violence policy that his daughter and her husband uphold. He could picture her now, pedantically explaining the “Little Bang” parenting theory, which suggests that the use of toy guns by small boys leads to a higher incidence of violent crime in the teenage years. It pains him that Jess would be so gullible despite the fact that she had been such an exceptional student when she was younger. The theory, at least as Jess describes it, relies on a basic logical fallacy that confuses correlation with causation. To make matters worse, the newspaper article she showed him clearly indicated that the study on which the theory was based had relied on twenty volunteers: hardly a large or diverse enough group of participants to produce generalizable results. If she had gone to university and followed through on her early intellectual promise, she could have been a much better researcher than these parenting-theory frauds. And anyway, Edward has enough confidence in his grandson to be quite sure Sam won’t whip out the nunchuks on the playground. Still, he is convinced that it would be better for everyone if Sam could commandeer the ninja gear before his mother finds it.
Sam sips his sweet tea without unfixing his eyes from the scene on the TV of a man dressed in a woman’s wig and sporting voluptuous red lips being interviewed by a po-faced attorney. Edward has been paying less attention. He checks his watch and comes to the conclusion that this episode will be continued tomorrow. Sam tips the sugar from the bottom of his teacup into his mouth before turning to face Edward as the closing credits begin to roll.
Edward clears the bowls, and when he returns from the kitchen, Sam is sitting on the couch, tilting his head to read Edward’s notes in the margins of the heavily annotated Aurora Watcher’s Handbook that he must have left on the coffee table. It is unlike Edward to leave his books scattered around the house, and even less like him to have drafts or scribbles out in the open like this; but instead of feeling protective of his unfinished work, he can’t help but feel that Sam ought to be reading the notes. Somehow, perhaps even without realizing it, he had written in the margins not for himself but for his grandson.
Sam’s hair has blonded in the sun, and his jean shorts are becoming a bit too little for his lengthening legs. As his grandson shifts slightly on the couch, Edward sees a scrape on one of Sam’s small knees and feels a fondness open up in his chest like a golf umbrella. He wants nothing more than to have Sam reclining on a lawn chair beside him under the night sky, listening to the hum and feeling as though he’s holding thunder between his teeth. Edward is tired of arguing with Jess about taking Sam out with him. Whatever Jess might say, Sam simply needs to hear the lights at their best. He’s tried to get Sam to sneak out of bed without his mother’s permission, has offered to lend him a hand-held sound level meter to hide under his pillow, but Sam is a heavy sleeper and an obedient son. Time, Edward decides, to take matters into his own hands.
“Sam, I was thinking.”
“What?”
“I’m going to take you back to school, and when you’ve finished, I’ll have a surprise ready. Will I meet you at the crossing guard at three, or is today soccer day?”
“Soccer,” says Sam, without taking his eyes off the book.
“Right. Well. Four-thirty then. In the parking lot.”
After he’s walked Sam back to school and picked up some milk and bananas at the corner store, Edward paces excitedly around his house. He hopes the sky will be ready for them. To distract himself, Edward begins to clean. He scrubs down the card table, and vacuums the living room rug. He dusts the bookshelves and the TV, polishes the glass on the coffee table, and only when the last of his wife’s milk-glass candy dishes on the side table has been dusted and refilled does he sit down on the couch. He turns on the radio and listens to someone playing an amateurish rendition of “There Will Never Be Another You” on the saxophone. The saxophonist is, as Edward guessed, a high-school music student auditioning for the Youth Jazz Orchestra. Edward is momentarily proud of her. These kinds of accomplishments are worth appreciating. He had been so pleased when his own children took piano lessons, and so disheartened when, one by one, all three stopped once they reached the age of fourteen. When Jess first started her piano lessons, Edward decided to take a few classes hims
elf. It didn’t last long. He couldn’t bring himself to endure his plodding fingering as he fumbled through Bach’s easier Preludes. Although he would never have said so, he was also ashamed to be outdone by his then five-year-old daughter. Jess had always been the most promising of his children.
Edward goes over the familiar route to his favourite roadside spot in his head, and checks the provisions in the car to make sure everything is in order: he has a map (just in case), his own field notes and a fresh notebook for Sam, a sound level meter, a video camera, two flashlights, and three freshly sharpened pencils. He has had an extra lawn chair in the trunk of his car since he started his expeditions. Edward has always been the sort of person to carry multiples of his supplies, but he would be lying if he said that this was just a spare. He makes a peanut butter and banana sandwich for Sam, and zips it into a zip-lock bag, sucking the air out with a straw to keep the bread from going stale. He phones his daughter and leaves her a message, making up some excuse for her about an early-morning soccer practice and explaining that he’s happy to have Sam stay the night if she and Kevin want some time to themselves. He packs his ninja gear into the trunk of his car and then settles himself into the driver’s seat, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel as he waits for the minutes to pass. Finally, it is time to get Sam.
Edward knows it is ridiculous to drive the short distance to the school, but he doesn’t want them to go home first, where they would be likely to settle into the couch and choose coziness over adventure. He is always early when he picks up Sam, but today he has a full twenty minutes to kill. He checks his tires and then leans back against the car and watches the soccer team practise throw-ins, the balls flying in neat parabolas over the field. Eventually, Sam comes barrelling along the gravel path and into the parking lot and wraps his arms around Edward’s belly. Once they’re inside the car, Sam makes his usual request as he does up his seatbelt.
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