Smoke and Mirrors (10 page)

I remember falling asleep after writing that and dreamed of wide, green, rolling fields with a castle in the distance. A lone white horse came out to greet me and stood shyly by my side nibbling at the grass. I woke when my mother knocked on my door, telling me it was time for dinner.

For many days I studied what he or I had written. I had succeeded in contacting or conjuring a spirit with excellent penmanship but I wasn't sure he made any sense. I read meaning into every part of it though and memorized it, reciting it to Ozzie as we rode our skateboards along the paved bike path down by the river. Ozzie was most impressed and urged me to recite it at the school talent night saying it was a poem I had “written.” Well, I had written it, but it wasn't exactly mine.

I did, in fact, recite my “poem” before a rather stunned audience of parents, students, and teachers. I was in grade six at the time. Adults, many of them, told me they were amazed at my gift. They thought it was a fabulous poem and they acted as if they understood what it meant. All except for one old geezer — a retired
English professor who introduced himself as Dr. Lester Willis. He took me aside after the show and accused me of plagiarism. “You lifted it from James Joyce, didn't you, lad?” There was a musty smell about him and an odd look in his eyes.

“No. I don't even know who James Joyce is.”

He became quite rude and nasty. “Theft of any sort, especially great literature, is a crime against humanity. My guess is you copied this from
Ulysses
, or possibly
Finnegan's Wake
. Am I correct?”

I had heard of neither book, although I looked them up later in the library and found them dense and unreadable but not entirely unlike my “poem.”

“Sir,” I said, “I did have some help in writing it.”

“Very well,” he said, changing demeanour, now satisfied. “Then you have confessed. The truth will always prevail.”

He turned away, and it suddenly struck me how oddly he was dressed. I never saw him again and thought it strange that a man like that would have been in attendance at all. It was as if he himself had come from another time and another place. A restless literary constable on the prowl for boys claiming to have written verse that was not their own.

My parents typically had not been able to attend the evening and thus missed my moment of glory. My father picked me up afterwards, however, and at home
my mother asked to read the poem. I could tell from her furrowed brow that she feared this to be another example of how odd a child I truly was. I did not 'fess up to the origin of the work.

“The handwriting is extraordinary,” she said.

There were many more days of scrawling, rolling, tumbling, florid handwriting on white pages but there were no real words to speak of. Vowels and consonants strung together but mostly just hills and valleys of ink, Vs and Ss and endless Ms. In my trance, I would request contact with someone who could write in English, someone with good penmanship, and someone who had something intelligent to say.

These seemed to be fairly stiff demands. The “poet” never returned to me. There was a feminine entity that drew pictures of flowers with bees buzzing about them. And a pale boy with spiky hair who drew kites. And then it all stopped and each time I tried to hypnotize myself I just fell asleep.

I explained to Tanya where I wanted to go.

“She's a what?”

“A psychic,” I said. “And an old friend. Her name is Lydia, and she's unusual. I want you to like her.”

“I thought we were going to do something special. It's your birthday, remember?”

“This is special. Lydia says she has a new, um, guide.”

“Like a guide dog? Is she blind?”

“No. Lydia is a medium. She contacts spirits, dead people. Sometimes they can speak through her.”

“This is giving me the creeps. Can we maybe do something else?”

“Be brave, Tanya. It's no big deal. I don't know if I believe in any of it. But this is important to me.”

“All right,” she said, but I could tell she would rather be going to the mall.

I knocked first and then we walked up the stairs and in through the open door to Lydia's apartment. Lydia was sitting at the kitchen table smoking a joint. A thin ribbon of smoke, like a pale wispy wraith, drifted towards the ceiling. In front of her, spread out on the table as if it had just been spilled, was maybe a quarter ounce of marijuana leaves and buds. Behind her was a large mirror on the wall that made the room seem like it was much larger than it was. It also had the unnerving quality of making you spend too much time looking at yourself while you were talking to Lydia.

Lydia smiled when she saw me and waved us in. I closed the door behind us. Tanya took my hand and
looked a little scared. Lydia was holding in a hit of smoke she had just inhaled. Her glasses were a little fogged up. The room smelled of the powerful combination of weed and garlic and lavender.

Lydia exhaled a small nimbus cloud and motioned for us to sit down. She stubbed out her joint in an ashtray, talking to it. “I'll finish you later,” she said. “Don't go away.” She took a deep breath as if she'd been deprived of oxygen and then looked up at us. “His name is Montague,” she said.

“Your new guide?”

“Yes. He's a bit of a snob. Seventeenth-century upper-crust English. Quite the aristocrat. Opinionated, blustery at times, but well-informed, and once you get past the surface, he has a good heart.”

“How did you find him?” I asked.

“He found me,” Lydia said. “He knew I was drifting. No anchor, no sail, no rudder. Just drifting. Who's your friend?”

“Tanya, Lydia. Lydia, Tanya.”

“Your parents give her to you for your birthday?” Lydia asked. I was surprised that she knew it was my birthday.

Tanya looked insulted.

“It was a joke,” Lydia explained and looked directly into her eyes. She nodded at me. “Did he tell you he saved my ass in the Napoleonic Wars? And did he tell
you he is a healer? He's not using it now, but he is. Look at his hands sometime. Look closely. There is a tremendous amount of healing energy in this one. But he doesn't know what to do with it yet. He will eventually. You watch for it.”

Tanya was feeling quite uncomfortable, I could tell. She was way outside her comfort zone. I was wondering if I had made a big mistake coming here with her.

“I'm glad you kids are here. And forgive me for the smoke. It's herbal, I assure you. Pure organic. Nothing to be afraid of here. Everything that happens here is just smoke and mirrors. Hocus pocus. Something some of us do to keep ourselves entertained.” She waved away the smoke in the air and turned to make a funny face into the mirror. She was trying, in her own odd way, to make Tanya feel more comfortable.

Lydia pointed to the leaves and buds on the table-top. “This is a variation of reading tea leaves in the bottom of a cup. I study the random patterns here and receive a few messages about the future. Stay quiet for a minute and let's see.”

Tanya squirmed beside me. Silently mouthed, “Let's go,” but I squeezed her hand gently.

“Something terrible is going to happen in Europe,” she said. “Something political. In a city. A big city.” She was pointing with her forefinger to a cluster of leaves. “And I think things will get worse
in Africa, especially in the sub-Sahara, before it gets any better.”

She pointed to another part of the table. “All the interest in Mars will turn out to be a waste of time. Money should have gone to health care, not space. The queen will make an important announcement before the year is over. Small wars, too. Many of them but nothing big.” Suddenly she looked up and smiled at Tanya. “Listen up, honey,” she said. “This will be on the test.” And then she laughed.

I'm not sure why she said that, but Tanya recognized it as a kind of direct insult. That had been the question Tanya was famous for at school. At least one teacher had made fun of her for saying it, and she had cut it out, but I don't think I had ever mentioned anything about it to Lydia.

“Excuse me, kids. I have to pee. Be right back.” Lydia cleaned up the pot on the table and brushed it with a hairbrush into a jewellery box. Then she left the room.

“I'm gonna leave,” Tanya said. “I don't like any of this.”

“She's harmless,” I said. “Please stay.”

But she shook her head. “I'll talk to you later.”

“I'll call you,” I said.

“Sure,” she said, then got up and walked out of the apartment.

Tanya was one of the better things that had happened in my life and I expected that one day she would move on from me for some better looking guy. She was the first girl I had ever kissed. She was the first for a lot of things, and maybe I should have apologized to Lydia and followed her. But I didn't.

Lydia returned and noticed Tanya had left but didn't mention it. “All our lives liquids just flow through us,” she said. “I drink my tea and it sustains me and then what's left, which is most of it, I just piss it out and away it goes. Have you ever thought about these cycles of things, Simon?”

“Sure. Water. Food. Money. My parents try too hard to get money but they don't even keep it. It flows through them.”

“Water. Food. Money. Smoke. Ideas. But it works on other levels too. Time flows through you. Today you are seventeen but tomorrow you'll be, what? Seventy. Time will continue to flow. You through it, it through you. But you didn't come here for this. It's your birthday and I'm sorry I insulted your friend. I meant to, but I didn't mean to. If you know what I mean.”

“It's okay, I think.”

“You're not thinking about her, though. Which is odd. You are thinking about another girl,” Lydia ventured.

“I am. That's why I came.”

I explained about going back on the medication.

Lydia knew my past. She knew about the weird stuff I did as a little kid and then about the accident.

“I'm going to contact Montague. You're not telling me everything, I know, but you must have a reason for that. Give me your wallet.” She set out a great chunk of amethyst crystal in front of her and waved her hand over it.

I handed her my wallet, and she held it between her hands and closed her eyes. She had lost a lot of potential customers this way.
Give me your wallet
, she would say, or
your ring
, or
your watch
. She claimed she needed something that a person wore or carried or kept close to their body. She said it carried a “signature of their vibrations.” For Lydia, vibrations had a lot to do with everything. The amethyst was good for focusing the vibrations, she said.

“Take a deep breath, Simon, and relax. You're just along for the ride. But Montague is playing hard to get.” I watched her eyes moving beneath her closed lids as if she were searching the darkness for her guide. Suddenly she yawned.

“Okay. Found him. I'm going to try to tell you what Montague has to say and you can ask a question or make a comment and we'll see where it goes. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

What I was doing there, if I was to be honest with myself, was trying to verify if Andrea was at all real or
purely something I had made up in my head. I didn't trust myself. I didn't trust Andrea. I had no clear reference points. No one else saw her. If Lydia could somehow contact her or at least provide some evidence ... well, this was not hard science. This was the best I could do. I needed some guidance. Who better to take it from than a seventeenth-century aristocratic snob?

“Montague says that if you want him to help you, you have to show him a bit more respect.”

“Sorry,” I said. “He accepts your apology. Now he wants to know about the four women in your life. He sees four.”

“There's Tanya.”

“We know about Tanya,” Lydia said. “She's not why you are here.”

“There's, well, my mother.”

“Maybe she's the one.”

“What do you mean, the one?”

“The one with the problem. Who else?”

I wasn't sure what to say next. “There's you, Lydia. You've known me longer than just about anyone.”

“I don't think this is about me but it could be. Hmm. No, Montague says, it's not about me. Now he's reminding me I should take more vitamins, eat more vegetables. He says you aren't getting enough roughage, either. He says he's sorry to divert like this but can't help himself. He's a health food nut in his own seventeenth-century
way. Root vegetables, he's big on. And Brussels sprouts. He wants to know if you eat them.”

“No.”

“That's a mistake, he says. You should. Tell him you'll increase your roughage, drink more water, and eat root vegetables and then we can move on.”

“I promise,” I said. “I'll start today.”

“Great. Now we can move on.” Her eyes were still closed. She waved her hand over the crystal and put it back on top of the wallet.

“The fourth woman?” I asked.

“He says he doesn't know yet. He sees four directions. North, south, east, and west. A woman is an anchor at each point in your life. I am the east. I've always been the east, so that takes care of me. I am the sunrise, the birds in the morning sky. The east wind.”

I wasn't sure I was following her and wondered if she or Montague were just teasing me, wasting my time. Not that I had anything more important to do.

“Your mother is north. She is a good person but has coldness about her. No, that's a bit cruel. She has a reserve that often holds her back from telling you how much she loves you. She is troubled but better now than before. I think it was you who somehow helped her.”

“And Tanya?”

“Tanya is south. Sensual. Sweet in some ways. Weak in
other ways. She has some growing up to do. Her world is small. She's like a small tropical greenhouse. Contained. Limited for now. But she is not the one with the problem.”