Smoke and Mirrors

by Lesley Choyce

  “I’m not. After the accident you suffered some memory loss, so it’s understandable that you don’t remember some things. And you changed. You were different. And there were complications.”

  “I know all that,” I said, feeling anxious now, unsettled. More stress creeping me out.

  “You kept asking about Ozzie. It was the accident itself or the medication you were on, but either way, Ozzie simply wasn’t there anymore for you. So we told you he had moved away.”

  “But I have letters.”

  My father put his hands up in the air. “You always had a powerful imagination.”

  I was shaking now, and my father put his arm around me. My friend Ozzie had been as real to me as anything had ever been in my life.

  It began to rain, and I watched one final lone surfer catch a wave, stand, cruise across a long dark wall of water as lightning flashed behind him, striking the sea far in the distance. He rode the wave in and then came ashore. He walked right past us, but we must have been such a sorry looking pair standing there on the beach that he stopped. My father asked, “How is it out there?”

  “Awesome,” he replied. “I’m beat, though. Been in the water three hours. My arms are noodled and my skin is pruned. But it was worth it.” He looked at me and I felt like I recognized him. I expected he was going to hold out his hand and pour skateboard ball bearings into mine, but he just said, “Ever try it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Takes a while to learn, but once you got it, it’s yours for life. Take it easy.”

  My dad smiled. We turned and followed the surfer off the beach, got in our car, and began to drive home. It began to rain. Halfway there, I was feeling pretty depressed. My father was trying to make small talk, telling me about his job, but I wasn’t listening. I was nodding off when something made me turn around.

  And there she was. A girl lying down in the backseat, asleep. Andrea.

  She did not wake up and, filled with my own self-doubts, I couldn’t bring myself to test the reality of her presence in any way. I was angry with my father for his insane insistence that Ozzie had never existed. He had been part of my young life for years. We had shared so much together. If he was not real, then nothing could be trusted.

  My parents had never had a good word to say about Oz, never invited him to stay for dinner, never gone out of their way to be friendly to him. They had always insisted he was somehow “bad” for me. And they were very happy when he was gone. Both my dad and my mom, in my estimation, had told me some ridiculous things to me over the years, given me bad advice, shown me how little they truly understood important things like skateboarding and astral projection and science fiction. They wasted the days of their lives chasing money.

  I always hoped to show them that there was another way to live. I wanted to show them they were wrong about so many things. I always knew that I was not normal, that I had problems, but I also knew that I was capable of seeing a kind of wonder in the world. When it came to the occult and the mystical — and the world of the possible — I was endlessly curious. And my mind was always open despite the gargantuan effort of the adult world to get me back on track, to turn me into a clone of my father.

  Damn him for saying this to me today. To remove Ozzie from my life, to cut him out with a scalpel, was to amputate a big part of who I was.

  All of this was going through my mind there in the car. Pretending to look behind at something we had passed, I turned twice to see if she was still there. She was. Andrea still lay sleeping, and it seemed certain that if my father had turned, he would have been shocked to see an unknown girl back there.

  We had not locked the car while we were on the beach. There was nothing inside to steal, and my father’s theory was that an unlocked car with a window partially down would attract no thief. A locked car tempted a hoodlum to smash the window with a rock and steal whatever guarded treasure lay inside. Car alarm or no car alarm. These days, no one paid any attention to car alarms. They went off all the time by accident and were a general annoyance. If someone wants to steal your briefcase or your car, they do it one way or the other.

  My father stopped to buy us hamburgers, and I insisted we go through the drive-through and eat in the car. I didn’t want to leave the car for fear she would be gone when we returned. Given the difficulties of the day, he was not about to say no. We ate silently in the parking lot, and when my dad went inside to use the bathroom, I waited until he was out of sight.

  “Andrea, wake up,” I said. I touched her hand, and then tapped on it lightly. Nothing.

  “Please, Andrea.” I reached back and touched her face. I smoothed the hair out of her eyes. I leaned back and listened to the sound of her breathing, felt the warm air on my cheek. I almost kissed her, but I stopped myself. If she was not prepared to wake, she must be exhausted, and I would let her sleep.

  Although I had known her only for such a short time, I had sorely missed her when she was gone. I wanted her to stay in my life this time. From now on, I decided, I would try to be attentive to what she needed, rather than what I needed. Andrea was the chessboard queen that I would not sacrifice for my own well-being.

  Even though Andrea had always been invisible to everyone but me, I had this sudden fear that when my father returned, he would see her there and I would have to explain. But I was wrong. He was in a hurry to get back on the road and just started up the car and we drove on. He seemed in a great hurry to get home now, as if his effort to tell me that Ozzie was a fairy tale had totally taxed his nerves.

  And then she awoke.

  “Don’t turn around,” she whispered. I could feel her breath this time in my ear.

  I didn’t flinch.

  “Your father loves you, Simon. So does your mother. They have their share of problems, but hang onto them. Don’t push them away.” She sounded very, very tired as if the words took a great effort.

  Stay with me. Don’t leave again, I wanted to say to her, but I knew if I said anything out loud, my father would freak. I sat staring silently at the road ahead.

  “I would stay if I could,” she said, answering my silent request. “I’m not sure I can. I’m sorry it didn’t work out with Tanya. But there will be others.”

  I wanted to tell her how much I needed her. I felt a deep connection to this girl. I felt alone in the world without her.

  “No one is ever truly alone,” she said. “Now stop worrying about me and stay focused on the people around you. I’m going to help your father say what he really feels. It would be nice if you could be kind to him.” Then she sat back, and I waited.

  “Simon,” my father began, “I’m sorry that today didn’t turn out better — for both of us. I feel like I haven’t always been there for you. I think there’s time for us yet, though. You know, sometimes at work, I feel like I don’t have a single friend in the world. I’m in competition with everyone in the office. I can survive at my job as long as I can compete. As long as I make the good pitch, sell what I have to sell. Cripes. It’s a game, all of it. But it’s also plenty serious.” The words were spilling out of him, and it wasn’t like he was talking to me, his son. More like he was talking to a friend.

  “But you’re good at what you do, right?” I assured him.

  “I’m good enough to hang on. For now. But if I lose my edge — and I don’t even know what my edge is — or if something changes in the economy and I can’t shift with it ...” He took a deep breath. “If I don’t perform, I would be out of there in no time. There’s no room in my work, not a smidge, for someone who is not performing.”

  “That sucks,” I astutely observed.

  “Big time.”

  “What about your friends? The ones from work?”

  “There are two types of friends, Simon. The ones who are there when you are high-flying and the ones who are there when you are down in the gutter and need all the help you can get.”

  My father, the human being.

  What can I offer up in return that w
ould make him feel better? I wondered. And then it seemed obvious. I wondered if Andrea had put the lie in my head, made the suggestion. “Dad, about Ozzie. I wanted to believe he was real. But he wasn’t, was he? I know that now.”

  My father smiled in a sad sort of way, and then he let out a big sigh as if a thousand-pound weight had just been lifted from his shoulders. The rain had let up, and it was not much more than a light drizzle.

  I did a quick half glance towards the backseat and saw that Andrea was fast asleep again. I almost thought I could detect her snoring.

  I was hoping we could make it home without stopping, but we needed gas. And I needed to pee badly. I slipped quietly out of the car and came back as quickly as I could. But much as I had feared, Andrea was no longer in the car.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I lied to my mother and told her we had a great time at the beach. My father corroborated my fib and held out his arm. “Do we look like we got a tan?”

  “Maybe a little,” my mom said.

  No one said a word about Ozzie. Despite what I had said out loud, I had not given up on my old friend. Somewhere in my room, I was sure I had some hard piece of evidence to prove that Ozzie was as real as anyone. But I would not argue this with my parents. Maybe they thought they were trying to protect me from something, as they had so often before. Maybe something horrible had happened to Ozzie after he moved away and they didn’t want me to know. Maybe my father had somehow fixed it today so my search had been in vain. I desperately wanted to know the truth. But maybe I wasn’t ready for it.

  “I’m thinking that I need a new car,” my mother piped in, directing her announcement towards me for some reason. “I need it for my work. Can’t be taking my clients around in an old beat-up rattletrap like what I’m driving.”

  Her “old beat-up rattletrap” was a two-year-old Mustang that had every accessory imaginable: super CD stereo system, power everything, mag wheels, sun roof.

  My father didn’t seem surprised. But he wasn’t giving her one of his usual looks that said, Oh boy, here she goes again. Nothing is ever good enough. Instead, he was smiling and looking at me for some reaction.

  My mom was still looking at me. “And Simon, you’re seventeen now. Soon you’ll have your licence and need your own car. So I was thinking that you can have the Mustang and I’ll move up to something a tad more appropriate for my work.”

  I had always thought my mom was so attached to her Mustang that she’d want to be buried in it when she died. It had been one of her proudest possessions, what she called a “gift to herself” after three big commissions on some of the best real estate in town. Why she thought giving it to her lunatic son was a good idea I can’t imagine, but I wasn’t about to complain. The rules to the universe seemed to keep changing. Had I often wished for the Mustang as my own? Of course.

  But I had wished for many things, and few had come true.

  “But you have to keep taking your meds,” she said.

  Even in the new universe, there were deals to be made. ”Of course, Mom,” I said.

  In a week or ten days, my latest supply (which had been flushed) would be supposedly consumed and I would receive a fresh supply of those shiny pills my folks paid so handsomely for. And, I supposed, I might have to begin taking them again. In the cock-eyed world of these two screwy adults, they sure as heck didn’t want their son behind the wheel of a car unless he was taking drugs.

  In my room, I thought much about Andrea and about Ozzie. I looked for a scrapbook that I remembered I had stashed away — maybe that had some photos of Oz and me. But in my scrapbook I could find none. There were some empty spaces where I must have removed some shots. And there were pictures of me with my new bike or a skateboard, but Ozzie wasn’t there in a single scene. I even found one where I was wearing a safety helmet and knee pads (to please my parents, of course). The photo was ripped on one side as if someone had removed half of it — the side where Ozzie had been standing.

  But I had the letters. I read them over again, studied the handwriting. I grew skeptical and took out some old samples of my schoolwork from those days. Essays I’d written on poltergeists and doppelgangers. Ozzie had this crisp, clear, printed handwriting as if each letter had been crafted with scientific precision. My own penmanship, at best, was a scrawl.

  I reread my own work reflecting my lifelong interest in the unlikely occurrences of the past.

  Between 1829 and 1845, a beautiful young teacher in France named Emily Sage was fired from sixteen different jobs because she had the habit of appearing two places at once. This scared her students a bit too often for her employers to accept. On one occasion she would be picking flowers with her students by the schoolyard and at the same moment appear to other girls to be sitting at her desk back in the classroom. The girls inside said they could touch the second Emily and that she seemed very real. Emily had no explanation for this ability except that she did say she was worried about the girls left inside “getting into mischief,” so that must have prompted her double.

  Lewis Spense defines these doubles as “the etheric counterpart of the physical body, which ... may temporarily move about in space.”

  I really liked using words with as many syllables as possible, a habit my teacher had been trying to break me of. I only received a B- on the essay because she thought I had not really done the research but instead had made much of it up. When I tried to show her the books I had used, she dismissed them as “rubbish.”

  My other essay, one of my old favourites, was about the Amherst, Nova Scotia, poltergeist. In part, it read thus:

  Esther Cox lived in a big old house and odd things started happening after her boyfriend tried (and failed) to have sex with her. Soon afterward, odd noises started happening in her room. When others in her family went to see what was going on, Esther inflated like a balloon and rose up into the air.

  An invisible hand scratched a death threat against Esther into the plaster of the wall, saying, “Esther Cox, you are mine to kill.” In the days that followed, there were classic poltergeist activities. Knives flew through the air and stabbed poor Esther in the back. Fires broke out and Esther was charged with arson. When she was put in jail, the inexplicable activities stopped.

  I had received a solid B on that one, perhaps because I had included my own youthful cockamamie explanation for the poltergeist activities. My conclusion read, “Thus one sees the complexity of the feminine psyche and how traumatic events might trigger unseen forces heretofore dormant in the environment.” Heretofore was a word I had learned from reading old books on angels and miracles, so it found its way into my writings whenever I could plug it in.

  It’s curious that my parents were still such believers in prescription drugs as a path back to normalcy for me. They had not always received good advice from doctors concerning medication. While my mom was pregnant with me, she made the mistake of taking two different medications prescribed by two different doctors. The gynecologist gave her one thing for the nausea and her family doctor gave her another prescription for the backache. Even though I was not a particularly hefty baby, I apparently wreaked havoc with my mother’s spine.

  She continued on both drugs through many months of her pregnancy so she could continue to show houses to home seekers wanting to move up in the world. I was in my blissful cocoon kicking and elbowing my mother’s gut every now and then at the most inconvenient moments and receiving, along with my daily sustenance, a never-ending cocktail of whatever was in the pink pill and the blue pill.

  Once out of the womb, I burbled and blubbered, pooped in my pants, and vomited with great abandon, and, if the photos do not lie, I was a happy, slobbering infant with a slightly goofy look in my eyes and not a care in the world. But, by the time I was one and a half, the family doctor acknowledged my parents’ fears that I was somehow different. No name was ever nailed down as to what my condition was, but the family doctor learned that while pregnant my mother had taken not only drug A but also drug B. A
nd he said that was ill-advised. If he had known, he would never have let her continue.

  “What should we do now?” I imagine my parents asking him.

  “Raise him as if he is perfectly normal.”

  All things considered, they didn’t do a bad job. My accident jumbled up the transmission lines between the before and after of my life at age twelve. So my memory is sometimes a big fragmentary jumble — that jigsaw puzzle with pieces still scattered around the room.

  I think that my parents had almost split up at least a dozen times, although it could have been more than that. I have a feeling that my father, when he learned about my mother’s error in mixing drugs, blamed her for my “problems” because I saw remnants of that blame lingering on into the arguments down through the years. When stuff goes wrong, adults have a bad habit of looking for someone to blame, as if that makes the problem better. It rarely does.

  I didn’t necessarily see my oddness as a “problem.” For the most part, I liked myself and I liked the fact I was different. Lydia would, of course, confirm that many of my unusual traits were, in fact, positive ones. They were related to my future role of being a so-called healer. In a previous time or place, I might have been viewed as an exceptional person instead of a bit of a freak. Anyway, I figured I really didn’t have any say in the hand of cards I was dealt, to use an old television cliché. And I was okay with that, too. I never remember feeling lonely as a child. I had the great skill of always occupying myself, or at least my mind, with something.

  Such an inquiring mind is led to the usual dangers of matches, stoves, dogs that bite, attractive bottles of poisons, household cleaners, and the like. It also led me to knock a hole in a hallway wall with a large hammer to see where the voices were coming from. And I am sure that someone or something was luring me to walk out into traffic now and then or climb a very high tree or wander as far as I could from my parents, who were trying to buy new shoes in the mall store.