Shoulder the Sky (16 page)

I parked in front of Dave's home office. I handed the keys to my father but couldn't begin to explain anything about how I had learned to drive.

“I think I want to go in by myself,” I said.

“We'll wait out here,” my father said. “Lilly and I have some catching up to do.”

Dave pretended to be casual. “Your father says you are all driving to Alaska. They have grizzly bears up there, you know.”

“It's not the grizzly bears I'm afraid of.”

“Something else?”

“Well, me, for starters.”

“Courage imperils life; fear protects it. I got that from somewhere.”

“I don't know what I'm protecting.”

“You are probably trying to protect you. That's the way it usually works. Look, if this is serious, maybe I need to get you connected with someone with, um, more experience in these things than me.”

“I'm not letting you off that easy. Besides, I trust you.”

“Trust is a big word.”

“Well, right now I don't trust myself and I need someone to trust. My family is a little confused and I'm seeing halos around people so I'm gonna trust you to tell me I'm not crazy.”

“You're not crazy. What kind of halos?”

“I can see colour around people. It kind of vibrates or shimmers. Yours is yellow.”

“Does that mean I'm a coward?”

“I don't know what it means. But it's only the tip of the iceberg.”

“But we're not on the
Titanic.
You are seeing energy fields. Some people can do that. Auras. Might be your eyes playing tricks or might be you really do see them. When did this start?”

“When I walked out of Burger King.”

“Something they put on your Whopper?”

“I didn't eat anything. But it's not the auras that bother me. There's more.”

“That's what I'm here for.”

“I drove here. Me. I drove the van. I drove like I've been driving for a long time. I didn't make any mistakes. Dave, I don't drive. I've never driven before. But Lilly somehow knew I could drive.”

Dave could see that I was scared. And I was scared. There was more to it, but I didn't know what else there was. I wished I were sitting back in school, bored out of my skull in that usually warm, fuzzy
place, listening to a teacher drone on about something I wasn't interested in.

“Want me to invite Lilly and your dad in?”

“No. I think I scared my Dad. Lilly knows something but she isn't talking.”

“Martin. Look at it this way for starters. Everyone has been worrying about you because you've been acting so normal since...”

“Since she died?”

“Yes. Now you have this sort of odd streak going for you and you don't feel normal, right?”

“Dave, I know this is the sort of shrink logic you are famous for, but now that I'm not normal, I think I liked it the other way. Because it was safe.”

“Maybe safe is for losers, Martin. So what's the worst-case scenario you can think of for the auras and the driving?”

“I don't know. I was abducted by aliens and they gave me some kind of extra visual sense and they taught me how to drive for some reason.”

“Maybe they needed a chauffeur.”

I heaved a sigh. “I wish it was that simple.”

“You're suggesting it is not.”

“Right.”

“Let's ask Lilly what she knows.”

“Not yet. I feel like I have to get it from me first. I'm missing some pieces of the puzzle. Lots of them.

Can you hypnotize me?”

“Sure, but aren't you afraid I'll make you act like a chicken?”

“No. I trust you.”

It was a dark night, frost on the grass, a half moon. I was sitting in my room looking at one of my mother's landscape paintings. Everything had a glow to it: the clouds, the trees, and the mountains in the background. I couldn't bring myself to go to bed because I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember what my mother looked like, but it seemed impossible.

Then my brain seemed to suddenly shut down and when it fired up again, I was driving our van down the street. I was nervous and oversensitive to everything, ready to slam on the brakes if anything surprised me, but I knew where I was going and what I was doing.

I drove straight there, parked, and walked across the grass. I had forgotten to put on a jacket and I was cold. I could see my breath. There was no wind. No sound except for a few dogs barking somewhere. I wasn't scared.

The marble was smooth and cold to the touch and I held my hand on it for a long time, then moved my cheek to it and felt how the cold was transferred. I kneeled down on the grass and cleared the frost from
over the grave. I knew where I was and even why I was there. I started talking to her and at first the sound of my own voice scared me.

No one else was around, although I didn't seem to care if anyone found me there. I knew it was where I had to be. I didn't tell her how much I loved her or how much I missed her. I talked about me. I told her about school, about Kathy Bringhurst. I told her about my website, about Darrell still trying to hack into Microsoft. I told her about what a jerk Jake was.

And then I started talking about surprise quizzes. Suppose your teacher tells you there's going to be a surprise quiz on one of the next five days. If you get to day four and it hasn't happened, then it can't happen on day five because it's predictable and, therefore, no surprise. But if three days go by and you know it can't be day five, then it has to be day four and that's not a surprise either.

I think I kept trying to talk to her about something meaningful but I kept yammering about stuff like this. I could focus on the headstone and the ground but couldn't bring myself to believe my mother was buried here.

I didn't cry. After a while, I just started to feel cold. I drove home and went to bed. In the morning I went to school.

“They're waiting for me. I should go.”

“Do you think you should go to Alaska?”

“Yes. If Lilly and Dad want that, I do too.”

“Running away?”

“Sure, why not.”

“Let your father drive, okay?”

“I will.”

“Careful of grizzlies.”

“That too.”

“What colour did you say my aura was?”

“What aura?”

Junk

Herodotus is sometimes referred to as the father of history, which is a pretty grandiose label for anyone, even a Greek. He was probably a believer that if we could understand the past, we could understand the present. Not all of us buy into this theory. I might argue that we only understand the present by understanding the present, but that sounds a heck of a lot like circular reasoning or maybe no reasoning at all. Being Greek means that he must have eaten a lot of olives. Olives, like water, can make you smart, or at least inquisitive.

When you chew those black olives with the pits, you always have to be careful not to break a tooth by chomping
right into it so you swirl it around in your mouth and after you've swallowed the meat of the olive, you study the seed with your tongue. All this is very meditative and probably gave Herodotus time to work up a plan for becoming the father of history.

He became curious, for example, about the historical reasons and origins of the so-called Greco-Persian War (499–479 BC). Remember, this is BC, so the numbers go seemingly backwards, which makes it sound like the war went backwards. Did the end come first and then did it proceed to the beginning? If you were unlucky enough to be born in 499 and then got killed in the last battle of the war, maybe you lived to be minus twenty. But I digress.

Backwards or forwards, I guess the war had been going on for a long while and at this point no one really knew why they were fighting — not the Greeks and not the Persians. It had become a sort of warring fact of life. Herodotus wanted to know what the hell all the death and destruction was all about.

Herodotus wasn't sure he could get at the truth unless he studied what he thought was all of mankind's history. So he spit out his olive seed (from which a tree would one day spring to life) and he got on with it.

Herodotus travelled and questioned and he learned what he could to make sense out of his world and his war. He took a fancy to the ancient Egyptians, who were
even more ancient than his people — although, at the time, Herodotus, like us today, thought of himself as contemporary, not old in any form or fashion. The Egyptians were old — at least their pyramids and their culture were — and even though Egypt wasn't real close to Greece or Persia, Herodotus had a hunch he'd learn some pretty cool shit if he rooted around there. Death, he concluded, was the most important thing in the life of an ancient Egyptian. That's what he surmised from what he found there.

When the ancient Egyptians had parties — and boy, oh boy, those were some parties — coffins would be set on the tables to remind everyone how close at hand death really was. And, of course, they built those really sturdy pyramids to house the spirits of dead pharaohs. In those days, it seemed, you really looked forward to death as something better than life. Even if you were rich, famous, and powerful at the time.

The workers — mostly slaves who didn't wear shirts — were all eating radishes, onions, and garlic for protein to build the pyramids. There were one hundred thousand or so of them doing this in the day, while at night the aristocrats sat around at parties boozing it up and staring at coffins.

Herodotus discovered a lot about ancient Egypt but nothing about the roots of the war. He concluded there was no easy answer to why the Greeks and the Persians
were at war so often and so long. But if it weren't the Greeks and the Persians, it would have been the Mesopotamians and the Hittites. If not them, the Catholics and Protestants, and so forth down through the ages. The history of humanity is the history of mankind at war with itself.

Emerso

Lilly and my father had, of course, wanted a report from me about what Dave had to say, but I was feeling a little confused. As we drove on out of town, I sat in the back and used my father's business laptop to write about Herodotus and the ancient Egyptians, who had been a lot on my mind lately. I knew it was a form of escape but I also knew that there were sorry souls out there who eagerly awaited my next installment of whatever was rattling around in my brain.

“Look at all the trees,” Lilly said. “I thought all the trees had been cut down by now.”

“Your mother loved trees,” I heard my dad say. “There's a mall.”

“There's a cloud the shape of a hippopotamus,” my father said.

“Where?”

“Up there.”

Lilly turned on the radio to some pretty nasty rap music but my father didn't say a thing. He was glancing up at the sky every now and then looking for clouds the shape of other African animals. “Giraffe,” he said, pointing.

“How can a cloud be shaped like a giraffe?” Lilly asked.

“Anything is possible,” my father said over a lyrical complaint on the part of Eminem.

“I can't believe Bob Dylan is sixty-two,” he said. “Martin, did you know Bob Dylan turned sixty-two?”

“He's old,” I said, still thinking of the ancient Egyptians with the coffin at the party.

“Can I use your cellphone to check my e-mail?”

“Sure.”

I uploaded my Herodotus piece onto my website, did a quick check for e-mail — the e-mail I never answered. I was there long enough to realize that many of those wackos who had logged onto Emerso yesterday had gone out into the world today expecting extraordinary things and found just that. I made a mental note that I would say not one more word about that exercise on Emerso.com. No explanations, no insight whatsoever. I planted a seed and walked away from it. Whatever was growing was on its own. I hoped that good would come of it.