Deconstructing Dylan (6 page)

I never accepted the story that Nessie had climbed up out of the water in 1933 and was seen snatching a lamb from the hillside where he feasted on it before
trundling back into the water. My Loch Ness monster was no meat-eating carnivore.

My Loch Ness monster was as real to me as the blue jay sitting in the tree outside my window in the morning. He was a gentle lost being, a survivor against all odds and a reminder to all those who put too much faith in science and reason that extraordinary things happen and are not easy to explain. That egotistical scientist on TV would not take that away.

My father was still out of town and I came home to find my mother slightly inebriated. “I'm going through a difficult phase,” she said. “It's probably my age. Something hormonal, nothing more. That's my guess.”

“Is it something between you and Dad?”

“Your father is wrapped up in his work right now. He doesn't have time for me. We've always been quite independent but right now — I just don't know about these feelings I have — like I want to cry all the time. Come here. Give me a hug.”

I hugged her and she hugged me tightly. She sobbed but did not cry. This was entirely unlike my scientist mother. Always reasonable and cool. I would make a point of looking up menopause on the net and see if I could help out. “Everything will be all right,” I
said, not knowing what I was talking about. I just knew it was what she would say if I was feeling really down.

“You were the world's most beautiful baby,” she said.

“Just what a boy of sixteen wants to hear.”

“But you were. Look.”

She got up and went for her purse, came back and flipped her wallet open to a photograph: me, not long after I had come into this flawed world. “See.”

“I see,” I said, staring at the picture. I turned the wallet sideways and looked at another photo of me as a baby. Face perfectly the same. But the photographic style was different and it was faded. As if this other one had been left out in the sun. And then there was this feeling in the pit of my stomach.

My mother reached over and closed the wallet, put it back in her purse, dabbed at her tears, and then stood up. “I'm sorry about the theatrics.”

“I'll do anything I can to help if you need me.”

“I'll be fine. Your father will be back in a few days. Maybe we can go to Lawrencetown, to the beach. Something about being by the sea makes me feel better.”

In my bedroom, I pondered this reversal of roles. Me, worrying about my mother, taking care of her. While my classmates were out smoking dope, drinking to excess, or having carefree unprotected sex, I was home in my
bedroom worrying about my mother's psychological health. From the net I learned that menopause occurs in women between the ages of forty-six and fifty-four. The woman ceases ovulation. There is a decline in the production of estrogen. The psychological effects vary dramatically. Some women have little or no mental change. Others go through what the site referred to as “significant turmoil.” I reckoned my mom fell into the latter category. I would definitely have to keep an eye on her.

The site pointed out that most all species retained their reproductive capacity through their entire lives. Humans were the exception. “Might there be an evolutionary explanation for menopause?” it queried.

No answer was provided, leaving me to ponder why evolution had singled out humans for this. But then we were an oddity. My research into menopause took me on a side trip, typical of my net searches, into the area of what was referred to as “reproductive rights.” The author on this net site, sexhistory.com, pointed out how bizarre it was that Western men and women for centuries had been searching for the perfect means of birth control, and almost at the exact point in history when such birth control was widely available, researchers and drug companies were shifting their focus to fertility. There were millions to be made in helping couples figure out how to have kids instead of selling them contraceptives that prevented children.

It was kind of bizarre if you thought about it. Of course, there was a lot about the adult world that did not make sense to me. Much about human nature that seemed incredibly odd. In some ways, I preferred the study of bugs. I flicked off the net and turned back to my favourite text, Frank Lutz's
Field Book of Insects
. “Young insects may be said to grow by leaps and bounds, not gradually. A soft shell-like skin that will not stretch largely covers them. All the flesh is inside of this shell, and when the quantity of this flesh gets too large, the shell splits, the insect emerges, swells out, and its new skin in turn hardens. The process is repeated several times before adult life is reached.” Now that makes perfectly good sense to me. It's a shame that we humans were cheated out of this ability.

This got me thinking that it would be kind of cool if kids did go through such a process. It would make school much more interesting if, say, in the middle of third period calculus Miles Vanderhague began to moult as his inner “quantity of flesh” became too great. You'd be sitting there and hear this crack and, whoops, here comes the new Miles, possibly an improved version now looking entirely different with a better personality and more compassion for people who were a bit off the norm. Evolution had truly cheated us of such opportunity.

I shared Professor Lutz's understated admiration of everything about insects. “In man,” he states, “the
blood is sent to the lungs for a load of oxygen, which it then carries to the tissues. Insects do things more directly: air is conducted to all parts of the body by means of a system of tubes called trachea.” In other words, insects don't breathe through their mouths or noses. They can breathe all over their bodies. Brilliant. Lutz also reminded me that “There is no brain, strictly speaking.” Although he did not state it outright, I again perceived a kind of aloof admiration for the design of bugs, the implication being that they “think” with their entire being. If our brain is severely damaged, our nonfunctioning brain might destroy the rest of the body and we would die. An insect could be damaged in any number of ways and still the body control/thinking process could continue.

It's not that I truly wanted to wake up one morning like Gregor in Franz Kafka's famous “Metamorphosis” story. I was stuck with being human and would make the most of it.

I had heard my mother heading to her bedroom and then the door opening. After about twenty minutes of further reading, I went to check up on her to make sure she was okay. She was in bed, asleep, snoring loudly. (My parents had argued about this. My dad claimed she snored. She said he was lying. He wondered why anyone would lie about snoring. She said he could not possibly be telling the truth. “Women don't snore,” she
had said, a perfectly illogical thing for a woman of science to say, but then there were many things about both my scientific parents that made no sense to me.)

A drawer in the night table by her bed was open, and inside was a small hinged photo display. Feeling a bit guilty, I opened it to discover it contained two pictures of me. I appeared to be about eight years old in both. In the one I recognized my old favourite T-shirt, the one with the enlarged image of the head of a praying mantis. I had a kind of smirk on my face that told the camera I did not really want my picture taken. But I was undeniably cute nonetheless. The other picture of me was less familiar. It appeared to have been manipulated in some way, photoshopped as they used to say, so that my hair was longer, dangling down in front of my eyes, and I was wearing a
South Park
cartoon T-shirt — big oval face with wide eyes. I'd seen the old
South Park
cartoons on the comedy channel but was never a fan of that style of raw humour. In the background of the photo was another odd thing — the castle that I had once visited, the one that sat high above Loch Ness.

I couldn't imagine why my mother would have had a photo of me altered to look like this, and why it was placed here in the drawer of her night table paired with the other photo. It was as if one was me; one was not me. There was a bottle of pills on the dresser. I pocketed them and would put them on the kitchen table in the
morning. I still worried about my mom. Something wasn't quite right.

She snored loudly as I pulled the covers up around her neck. She started to say something in her sleep. I couldn't make out the words but it sounded like she was talking to a child. She was dreaming. The words were slurred from both wine and pills but the tone was obvious. At first she was saying something comforting. I recognized that tone from when I was little. She had a way of making me feel that I was safe, that everything was going to be okay, even when I thought everyone in the world was against me. But then her expression changed and she started to sound afraid. In her dream, something had gone wrong. Something terrible was happening. She was no longer talking to the eight-year-old me in the dream. “No,” she said, suddenly very distinctly. “You're wrong. You're lying. It can't be.”

Despite my worries about my mother, I went to bed and fell into a deep dream. In my dream, I was swimming in Loch Ness again. The water was inky dark and cold but cold in a good way. It was night and the moon was out. I could see the hills and the silhouette of the castle above the loch. At first I thought it was me swimming and I could sense that below me somewhere was the Loch Ness monster. Not really a monster, though, just a lonely, amazingly sad, ancient creature left over from a time long ago. Then the shift occurred again and I realized, as before, that
I
was the Loch Ness monster. It was one of those instant dream transformations that make reasonable sense at the time. My body was immense but I felt graceful gliding through the dark water. Even more amazing was the fact that I suddenly realized I
was not alone. Alongside of me was another creature, my mate or my twin.

And then all at once the loneliness, the isolation of centuries, dissipated. A feeling of completion and warmth flooded my being. It was as if for the first time in my life, I knew that I was not a tragic isolated quirk of nature, a true freak. I had a companion who was like me.

To the east, I saw the sky beginning to lighten. The sun scattered light over the Scottish hills, while in the west the moon still shone brightly, casting silver daggers and swords of light on the water's surface. I watched as my companion dipped headlong into the water and dove deep. I followed and felt the powerful compression of water all around me, familiar and vital, as I went deeper and deeper into the loch.

In the morning I was surprised to discover Robyn banging on my door. “I asked around and found out where you live. I decided to give you a lift to school. My mother gave me the skid for the day. So you want a ride or what?”

I guess I was still coming up from the depths of the loch. I must have looked at her kind of oddly as I shielded my eyes against the sunlight.

“It's not like I'm stalking you or anything.”

“Oh,” I said, groggily. “It would be okay if you were. I've never been stalked by a girl before.”

She smiled. When Robyn smiled, her whole face, her entire being, changed. The world changed along with her. The sun became even brighter and the birds started singing. I saw a blue jay and I swear he winked at me. When a dark, beautiful, cynical girl smiles, she has no idea how powerful the effect can be.

“So are you ready to go or what?”

I was still in my pyjamas — the ones with images of flying insects all over them: mosquitoes, flies, lady-bugs, and dragonflies. “I need a few minutes. You want some breakfast?”

“Toast,” she said. “I'd eat a piece of toast as long as it's not white bread.”

“Whole wheat, stone ground. Is that okay?” “My favourite kind of grinding. And coffee. I need coffee in the morning. You have coffee?”

“We do coffee too.”

My mom walked up behind me. She brushed her hair out of her eyes. I noticed the darkness under the skin. She yawned once, pulled her housecoat a little tighter around her, and then smiled at Robyn.

“This is Robyn,” I said. “That's my mom.” Robyn nodded. My mother studied her. She was evaluating her, judging her, but she remained polite.

“Robyn's gonna give me a lift to school. I'm gonna make her some toast and coffee first.”

“I'll do that,” my mom said. “You go get dressed.”

When I came back down, they were discussing — well, arguing about — genetically modified foods. This public debate had been going on ever since I'd been born or before. My mom was solidly in favour of GM foods. I'd heard all of her arguments and they made sense. I could have guessed that Robyn would be on the other side of the fence.

“So we'll agree to disagree,” I heard my mom say when I walked into the room. The debate had probably started with the toast. Was the wheat GM or not GM, Robyn would have asked, and it went from there. My mother changed the subject. “So you drive?”

“Got my licence when I turned seventeen.”

I didn't know she was seventeen. Not that it much mattered.

It was my turn to change the subject. I didn't want this to become an interrogation. I sipped my coffee. “Mom, I went to tuck you in last night&hellips;”

“Sorry about that, Dylan. Your mother has had a bit of a rough spell here.” She looked embarrassed.

“No, it's not that. But I found these two pictures of me by your bed. One I recognized but the other one &hellips; someone had digitally altered it or something. What was that all about?”

She didn't seem to know what to say. There was an awkward pause and then she said, “Oh, that. Your father's idea of a joke. He and I had differing opinions
about whether you should keep your hair short or let it grow. So that was what you would have looked like if you had had long hair. He put you in Scotland as a reminder of the old days when he and I were working there — before you came along.”