Smoke and Mirrors (18 page)

And I heard a human voice. A whimper, a cry, a kind of choking gasp. I saw her arm moving, almost waving as if she had no control of it. She was hitting at her face, at the mask on her face.

I steadied myself and looked at her eyes that so perfectly reflected the very fear I had just felt. As gently as I could, I pulled the mask from her. She coughed and spit something out as she gasped and cried out.

“It's okay. It's okay. It's okay,” was all I could bring myself to say to her. And I put my hand on her forehead again, trying to calm her. But she let out a childlike, broken scream. I could tell from the look in her eyes that she did not know where she was. And she did not know who I was.

The resistance was still there. She was still pushing me away. But now it was different. Now I would leave her alone.

With my eyes still on hers, still hoping that she would show some sign that she remembered who I was, I edged away from the bed. To her I remained a total stranger who did not belong there.

I unlocked the door and it swung open. A doctor and a nurse burst in. The doctor looked straight at me, accusation in his eyes, but when Andrea cried out again, they both turned to her. “My God,” the nurse said. “My God.”

Shaken, and still filled with my own confusion as to what had just occurred, I gathered my strength and moved out of the room. Andrea's parents were walking down the hall towards me and were not aware of anything that had happened yet. As I approached them they could see that I was acting very strange. And they saw the blood on my forehead. I did not speak to them. I lurched forward, my head still pounding with pain. And I ran.

Seventeen is an age that is both too young and too old. I think that if I were still, say, fourteen, I would have viewed the events differently. I would have said to myself,
You're still just a young, stupid kid. There are a million things you don't understand. This is just another one of them
.

My mother bought herself that new car. “I'm trying to reinvent myself,” was the way she explained it. New car, new hairstyle, new clothes. She even had a new way of treating me. Well, sort of. She'd leave me notes on the table about what I should eat for breakfast and what we would have for dinner. But food for me was something I ate to keep myself going. I was a joyless eater at best.

The Mustang was mine, but I didn't have a driver's licence and I hadn't taken the driving course yet. I sat in it in the driveway, though. Quite a bit. I sat there alone, with the windows down, and I would think.

So seventeen was old enough to be sitting in your own car in your driveway sifting through the wreckage of your life. But it wasn't old enough to have a clue as to what it was all adding up to. I didn't know what anything meant. I kept hoping the events of recent weeks would make sense but it was all a big jumble.

Twice, well, maybe more than that, I had assembled all I knew about Ozzie and decided that my conclusion had been wrong. If I could keep searching, I would find the now seventeen-year-old Ozman somewhere, in some other town, egging on a friend, giving bad advice, and probably getting someone else into a lot of trouble.

But I didn't see any future in rooting around in the past, whether it was studying ancient civilizations like Sumeria and Babylonia or whether it was my own strange childhood days. I was purposefully trying to fail Mr. Holman's class, and I think he was going to pass me anyway, out of pity. Most people tend to frown on teachers who pass kids because they feel sorry for them, but I think it is an admirable trait. I think sometimes you just have to move on, and if you have a big whacking gap in your education — if you know next to nothing about Carthage or polynomials or Archduke Ferdinand — well, you'll probably just be able to get on with your life anyway.

I don't know why the cops would have bothered to bust Lydia again, but they did. Someone in her building must have thought she was an annoyance and probably told the police Lydia was growing marijuana and selling it. Sure, they found some of her weed. She never hid it, and you could always smell that sweet “herbal” smell in the hallway. She was fined and released.

“I should have seen it coming,” Lydia said to me. “I'm in a vulnerable phase right now. Anything could happen. I'm going to lay low for a while and wait for my planets.”

I wasn't exactly sure which planets she was waiting for, but I got the picture. “And what about your queen?” she asked, after I'd heard all about the rudeness of the police, the pettiness of the law, and the small-mindedness of a government that still had laws against an ancient, natural remedy for loss of appetite.

I told her about Andrea and about what happened in the hospital. She was wide-eyed. “Have you tried to talk to her since?”

“She doesn't know who I am. I went back to Ridgefield. I went to her house and waited until she was outside, just walking around looking at flowers in her yard. I walked up towards her on the sidewalk. And stopped. She looked up at me, said, ‘Hi.' But I could tell that she didn't have a clue. She did not remember me at all. So I kept on walking.”

“The Andrea who appeared to you may not be in full communication with the one who is now awake. It could stay like that for a long time. In fact, if she is still recovering, you shouldn't force it. It's possible she'll never remember.”

“I know. That's what I was thinking. There was a story in the paper. The doctors said that sometimes, after a long coma, a chemical is triggered in the brain, the body's last-ditch effort to survive. It's rare. It releases a kind of shock treatment to the nervous system. They think that's what happened. They say she has memory problems, gaps, and some difficulty with language that should go away. Everyone is happy, though, and they don't particularly care how she was brought back.”

“Didn't someone see you there at the time?”

“Her parents knew I was there. They knew that some strange teenager named Simon, a kid unfamiliar to them but claiming to be a friend, had been there. And then he disappeared. I didn't even get a mention in the paper. Maybe they assumed I had just accidentally been there when it happened. Maybe that's all there was to it.”

“Simon, she's better. Why are you so sad?”

“Because I lost her. Because now all I have is me.”

“What am I?” Lydia said, pretending to look a little hurt. “Am I nothing?”

“Sorry. I didn't mean that. It's just that the past looks better to me than what is ahead. I wake up in the
morning and it takes all the energy I can muster just to get out of bed and stay awake for twelve hours.”

“You have your whole life ahead of you,” she said.

“Boy, that's original.”

“Well, it's true.”

“So this is what it's going to be like? No meteors crashing in the backyard, no aliens communicating to me from space, no wizards, no witches, no flying carpets, no telepathic ravens?”

Lydia had been infected by my sadness, and I now saw that she shared what I was feeling. Despite what I'd been through, or maybe because of it, I had triggered an inner realization that what had happened probably would never happen again. I felt like I was changed somehow. I was older, more reasonable even. Maybe I was becoming normal. It was a kind of death. The death of possibility.

And I didn't know if this sense of loss, this feeling of great sadness, would go away or if I would carry it around for the rest of my life.

A week went by, and I tried again to make contact with Andrea. I skipped out of my own classes early and waited for her outside her school, feeling a little like a stalker. I even got on her school bus and sat down beside her. “Andrea,” I said, “I'm Simon. We've met before.”

I guess it's the way I said it, the way I was acting. She was totally creeped out. She looked away from me at some other kids she knew on the bus. Her look was loud and clear. She didn't know who I was and she thought I was coming on to her in the most obvious and obnoxious way.

“Why are you calling me Andrea?” she asked, clearly annoyed.

“Um. It's your middle name, right? Didn't you once want everyone to call you that instead of Trina?”

“Oh, the yearbook thing. Is that it?”

“Yeah, that's it,” I said. I guess I was hoping that something would click in her memory, that a light would go on and she would remember everything about me. I didn't know what to say next. Other kids on the bus were looking at me. The whole scene was feeling weirder by the minute. I could see the bus was coming to its first stop, and a couple of kids were getting up to leave.

“Well,” I said, knowing this was probably the last time I would talk to her, “be good to yourself.”

She gave me a quizzical look as I stood up. I reached out and almost touched her hand, but pulled back and went quickly to the front of the bus, tripping once on somebody's backpack that was in the aisle. Someone laughed. At the front, the door had closed, and I stood there for a second as the driver reopened it. Everyone on the bus was looking at me now. No one on the bus knew who I was.

I read in a book somewhere that the mind is a kind of immense dark castle with many, many rooms where most of them remain locked. If they were opened all at once, we would go insane. Sometimes, we open up an old, familiar, comfortable room and sometimes we open up a room where we've never been before. What is inside can be wonderful or terrifying. I was coming to the conclusion that I had lost my set of keys —
skeleton keys, no doubt — to many of those rooms in my dark castle.

I took my first hands-on driver's training class and nearly sideswiped a Pepsi truck and came close to flattening a pair of pedestrians who apparently could not read the “Student Driver” sign on the front of the car. It would take a while before I could become a competent driver, but I was on my way to all the freedom that driving meant to a young man. I now had a set of keys to a Mustang, and I cared less about those lost skeleton keys that might as well stay lost.

I also lost interest in my clipping files, even the orange one, so I moved the box into my closet. While avoiding doing homework one night, I reread a book Lydia had given to me for my birthday: Aldous Huxley's
Doors of Perception
. In it, he writes, “Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that ever happened to him and perceive all that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge ...”

If that was true, then the job of the mind was more to filter information out than to let it through into consciousness. And the end result is that the better you can do this, the more you become “normal” or mature or sensible or all of the above. And eventually someone, if
you are lucky, hands you the keys to a Mustang, and you take a few driving lessons and drive off into the sunset.

My father skipped his first two weekend father-son outings because of two extremely urgent and important golf games with clients that he'd been trying to line up for a long while. He took me out for pizza, though, a couple of times and we went to see the latest
Matrix
sequel at the movies.

The next weekend, however, he did show up as promised and said we were driving to the beach. We'd stay overnight at a motel there. I expected that when we got there, we wouldn't do much of anything but maybe lie on the beach and run out of things to say to each other, then watch TV at the motel.

Instead, he was full of surprises. He was in a great mood, and he wanted to listen to my CDs on his new CD player the whole way there. After we'd checked in to the Flamingo Motel right on the beach, we walked down the boardwalk to a surf shop called Happy Dudes.

“I'm gonna rent you a board and buy you a surf lesson,” my dad said as we stood before the shop.

I felt like I had been hit by a piece of lumber — but in a good way. An old, grizzly-faced, balding guy inside made me sign a paper that said we wouldn't sue if I was “maimed, injured or killed” while renting the gear. My
father paid with his Visa card. The old guy tossed me a wetsuit. “Water's still cold enough to freeze your nuts, so you need this,” he said.

We waited on the beach, me in my wetsuit, my dad just sitting there smiling up at the sun through his Rayban sunglasses. When the instructor arrived it was a blonde-haired guy in his early twenties. He looked a lot like the guy who had been in my dream in the hospital, my vision. I shook his hand, and he yanked me up onto my feet. “The first thing you have to remember about surfing is that the wave is a whole hell of a lot more powerful than you are. Respect that. Use that energy, tap into it, but don't fight it. You'll do okay.”

I'd like to tell you I was an amazing surfer and that I picked right up on it the first day out, that it was righteous and I was a natural.

But it wasn't anything like that.

The waves were overhead. The water was cool — well, frigid is a better word. I got worked over seriously, dragged back to shore by waves several times before I could even make it past where the waves were breaking. My coach, who went only by the nickname Thumper, congratulated me when I finally paddled through the waves and made it “outside” to a place beyond the smashing waves where I could sit and get my breath back.

Thumper saw a set of waves approaching and told me to let the first four waves pass by. I watched as
other surfers took off and slid gracefully down the face of the head-high waves. Wave number five was mine. As advised, I paddled like a madman, and I soon felt the wall of water swell up beneath me. I felt myself rising and then dropping, sliding down the cool blue wall of ocean. It was the most amazing thing I had ever known — the speed, the power, and the water. Everything moving.