Westlake Soul (2 page)

Niki, my sister (it’s short for Phereniki—my parents truly are fucked in the head), came outside then, yapping on her cell phone, trying to sound American even though she’s from small-town Ontario.

“So I’m, like,
really?
” she yapped, rolling her eyes. “And he’s, like,
really?
” She glanced at me, then pulled one of those comical double takes.

“Ohmygod,” she said. One word. The thought balloon in her mind read, OMG. Then it read, LMFAO as she started to laugh her fucking ass off. “Westlake has, like,
totally
got a bird on his head.”

And I’m, like,
really?

“I’m not kidding,” she said. “I’ll take a picture and
totally
e-mail it to you.”

So she took a picture and totally e-mailed it to her friend. Then she took another and totally uploaded it to her Facebook page.

“Mom-Dad,” she shouted. “Come quick. Westlake has got a bird on his head.”

So Mom and Dad came outside and they started laughing, too.

Satisfied?
I asked the finch.

Stop being so square,
the finch replied.
Stop being so bitter. It’s been a long time since you gave them a titter.

“Does that have video?” Dad asked, pointing at Niki’s cell phone.

“Hell yeah,” she replied, and started recording.

“Priceless,” Dad said.

Mom slapped Dad’s shoulder playfully, wiped tears from her eyes, then did the decent thing and shooed the bird away.

Go on, Tweety Pie,
I said.
Fuck out of here.

It took wing in a brief tick of yellow, cussing me in rhyme, like an R-rated, avian version of Dr. Seuss.

No wonder I release. I’m trapped in body, but not in mind—in soul. It feels like a horse behind a starting gate, pushing and frothing, and all I have to do is throw the gate open. The horse bolts. There’s no stopping it. To the ocean. To the mountains. Wherever. It’s wild, powerful and fast.

I don’t always release to exotic locales. Sometimes I’ll hang with my old buddies while they cruise Hallow Falls or go clubbing, although that makes me sad because I’m not physically with them. And despite my family being a lovable pain in the ass, I’ll often float into the next room . . . sit with Dad while he illegally downloads music or plays
World of Warcraft.
Or I’ll watch Mom reading or watering the plants. She sings to them, softly, and I like that.

But what I like more is the fact that they’re being natural. There is no false hope. They’re in a place where they’re not thinking about me—where they don’t
have
to think about me, and that’s exactly how I like to see them. It warms my heart. It’s so beautiful.

The ocean, though. The world’s emotion. Sometimes calm. Sometimes raging. Always deep. Where it began—life on earth. Where it will end. And I go there, when the box just isn’t bright enough. I throw myself into its moiling depths and remember what it was like to ride. To feel the life beneath my board. Aquamarine in my lungs. Salt in my hair. The top of a wave curling over me, gathering me, like God’s wing.

Perfection is clear in my mind. The birdlike weight of her hand in mine. Her breath so sweet, almost toffee. The way her lips danced across my skin, and the wishes in her eyes—my wishes, yet to be granted.

Nadia Charles. Name like a Bond girl. She looked like a Bond girl, too, with a swirl of black hair and a body so precise you’d think she’d been designed. Suspicious beauty. I have all my memories of her, and they’re vivid enough to relive at any time (a benefit of reclining in what Jung called the personal unconscious, and what I call secondhand reality). My favourite memory is the one that hurts the most. Our last morning together. The last time we made love. The last time we kissed.

I relive it often; pain helps me feel normal.

“Baby,” she had said. “Open the blinds a little. I love pink sunshine.”

We were on vacation in Tofino, British Columbia. Three weeks of beach life. Me, my best friend Darryl, and our girls. Surfing all day. Kick-ass parties by night. The roar of the Pacific. Beer bottles popping open. The kind of music that makes everyone dance. It was supposed to be the best summer ever. The one we’d remember until we could remember no more.

Early morning, touching dawn. Nadia had just woken up. Her dark eyes had that crinkled, sleepy look. Adorable. I cracked the blinds and diagonals of pink light jumped into our room. They touched her body like lines on a stave. I kissed her. Random notes, like a cat walking across piano keys.

“Here,” she said, and opened herself for me.

A thousand clichés. She made me feel alive. She was the ocean. Time stood still. All I ever wanted. The truth is, all were relevant. But there was more—the little things that prosaisms could never relate. The way our teeth would sometimes clash when we kissed. Our similar laugh. That we were always first on the dance floor. How she insisted on unzipping my wetsuit because she liked to see the tight material separate, my toned traps revealed. Ad infinitum . . . the things that defined us.

“I want to be your Soul,” she said after we had made love for the final time.

“Nadia Soul?” I asked.

“I like how that sounds,” she said.

I smiled and ran my finger down the middle of her body, from the hollow of her throat to the place where her pubic hair was beginning to grow back in. I left a trail in our sweat that caught the pink light like a strip of chrome.

“I like how that sounds, too,” I said.

She was nineteen. I was twenty-one. We’d met the previous summer at the Skate-Krazy tourney in Toronto. I wouldn’t say it was love at first sight, but Nadia was definitely
cool
at first sight. The kind of girl that makes your ego purr. She was deejaying the men’s vert prelims, Allen & Heath headphones parked on one ear, responding to crowd noise with insane effects and backspins. She was wearing a white bikini top and a jean skirt. Donna Karan shades. The Rip Curl logo for a tramp stamp. My kind of girl.

I approached her at the after-party. She was with some thug called Farley. Think of the guy at your local gym who spends thirty seconds on power reps, then ten minutes strutting, flexing, checking himself out in every mirror. Yeah, that’s Farley. I didn’t need to introduce myself; Nadia knew who I was. We were Facebook friends, apparently. Farley shook my hand and squeezed too hard. I gave him a smile to let him know that everything was chill, even though I had every intention of SuperPoking his girlfriend.

I threw a sheep at her. She threw a chicken at me. I chest-bumped her. She high-fived me. I tickled her. She blew a kiss at me.

Farley saw this interaction, of course. He responded with a SuperPoke of his own. He roundhouse kicked me. I snapped his bra. He dropkicked me. I threw a ShamWow at him.

A private message from Farley. Nothing in the subject line. Just a badly spelled warning:
Beter watch yur step you fuckin ass clown.

I unfriended and blocked him, but not before throwing a ninja star his way. Then I sent a private message to Nadia:
I upset your boyfriend. Guess he doesn’t like me poking you.
She sent one back:
He’s not my boyfriend, exactly. Just a dude who wants to be. And I like when you poke me. Don’t stop.

The rest happened quickly, effortlessly. Thirteen months of loving that began with a thrown sheep, and ended in pink sunshine. Of course, I had no idea it was the end. I thought we were still at the beginning.

In our final moments of togetherness, I drew stars around Nadia’s nipples and thought how incredible her skin smelled, and how the sun had coloured it perfectly. She was imagining (I didn’t know this then, but do now) our wedding. Somewhere hot. On the beach. She was dressed in a white sarong, an orchid in her hair. I was dressed in a Rastafarian tam, Bermuda shorts, and espadrilles. Our page boy had coffee skin and dreadlocks. The service was conducted by the Reverend Al Green.

“Are you going out?” she asked me.

I heard the ocean, calling to me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s still early,” she said.

“The best time,” I said. “No kooks in my way. I should catch some good rollers.”

She touched my chest. “You can stay here. Roll with me.”

This was the moment. When I recall everything that happened, this moment sits heaviest on my soul. It is Y-shaped, bound in chains that rattle,
if only . . . if only,
with a near-human voice
.
How different would my life be if I had stayed with Nadia and let the waves roll alone? This isn’t the time to discuss quantum mechanics, but consider, for one second, the relative state formulation—a universal wave function that doesn’t collapse at each branch point, and implies the existence of parallel worlds. According to this theory, there are infinite Westlake Souls out there, living in infinite dimensions, each one splitting into the next
.
In one of these worlds I stayed with Nadia in the pink sunshine. We made love again, and again. I didn’t go surfing, and subsequently didn’t drown in the ocean. There’s a Westlake Soul out there who
did
marry Nadia on a beach in the Caribbean . . . but in the reality I know the wave function collapses.

I kissed Nadia for the last time and went surfing.

If only.

I have, incidentally, sought these parallel worlds, to the point where my brilliant mind aches with the effort. If I could access that critical branch point, I could live an alternate life with no knowledge of this one. I’d have my body back. My girl. Failure to come close throws into question Hugh Everett III’s relative state formulation. Either the theory is nonsense or the universal wave function cannot be accessed on a psychic level, which makes it impossible to prove.

In other words . . . I’m stuck with this life.

With that last kiss still on my lips I strolled down to the beach, my board under one arm, my bag slung over one shoulder. The waves were primo, climbing high and breaking hard. There was a guy throwing a Frisbee for his dog to catch, but otherwise the beach was mine. I set down my board and applied a layer of wax, my eyes never leaving the ocean. A rippling blue/white flag that I couldn’t wait to fly. I got a read on the waves and decided to switch to a 10mm leash. More drag, but less likely to break in the heavies. Another critical branch point. If I had stuck with the 5mm, maybe the leash would have broken, taking the board away from me, rather than having it boomerang and crack me in the skull. So many ifs, and all insignificant.

I stepped out, now living the last thirty-two minutes of life as I knew it. I remember feeling the sand push between my toes, and the surf fizzing around my ankles. Sensations I have always loved. The dog barked happily as I moved into deeper water, then paddled out to the action. The first wave I caught surprised me. It was fast and rough, but I tamed it with my balance, attacking the lip and reentering to let it know who was boss. I rode it backhand until it was spent. The second wave was a cruncher and I wiped out as soon as I got to my feet. The ocean laughed and pulled at me but I grabbed the rails of my board and popped back up. I schooled it with the next set, hitting cutbacks and aerials, then shooting the curl and howling with exhilaration. Nothing comes close to this feeling. Not for me, at least. Maybe snowboarding an avalanche, or skateboarding an earthquake. I cry inside. Jubilant, exultant tears. I’m quite literally riding the world, and that’s exactly how it feels. If making love to a beautiful person is heaven, then surfing is God.

I laughed—it was the last time I ever laughed—and paddled out to the heavies again. And then I saw it. A wall of water surging toward me, filling the horizon. A no-nonsense, freakish motherfucker of a wave, its sole purpose to prove how small and inconsequential I was. My instinct screamed to back down but I was charged inside and nothing could stop me. The rest of the world disappeared. I felt both tiny and limitless.

This was my every wish. My every nightmare.

This was the wave that would kill me.

I caught it perfectly, rising up the face, springing to my feet and feeling the push behind the board. I was ready for the speed, but not the power—thought I was, but it sucked the air from my lungs and drove me into the trough so hard that I almost lost it. Fists pummelled on the bottom of my board and the spray was like teeth. I refused to bail, though, even when I could hear the white water behind me, a thunderhead of sound, bigger than the moon. I turned into the open face and locked in. No chance of pulling any tricks. It was all I could do to keep from getting nailed. Then came the moment I lived for (ironically, the moment I died for): the lip of the wave curling over me, surging ahead of me, and all at once I was riding through a perfect cylinder of water. The barrel. The glasshouse. The green room. A surreal and powerful experience. As close to dreaming as you can get while still awake. I clenched my fists and roared.

There was a tiny circle of daylight at the end of the barrel, filled with spray and tangerine sky. I aimed for it, but the wave was closing around me fast. No way I would make it in time. I considered pulling out, fractionally shifting my back foot, and this was all the hesitation the wave needed. It lifted the tail of my board and threw me. I was airborne for less than a second, then chewed up and swallowed. The power was otherworldly. I had challenged thousands of waves and many of them had gotten the better of me, but I had never known anything like this. An atom bomb in the ocean. An aquatic black hole. My body was thrown down, dragged up, tossed around. Just another piece of seaweed about to be cast limply on the shore. I tried to protect myself—to curl into a ball and cover my head with both hands—but I had no control over my body. I was pushed deep, dragged along the sandy floor, skin sheared from my face and hands. My heart thrashed and my lungs ached for air. Pale thoughts opened in my mind, and as I was sucked up for another go-round, my board whipped on its leash, cut through the water like a ray, and slammed me in the middle of my forehead.

I saw Nadia in that moment, lying on our bed with the ruffled sheet clutched between her legs, between her breasts. A leaf of hair pressed against her left cheek, curled at the tip. The light, through the blinds, was wilder. She blinked her huge eyes, like a woodland animal in a Disney cartoon, and I screamed for her. I didn’t want this wave anymore. This ocean. I wanted my beautiful girlfriend, to fall into her body as I had less than an hour before, draw star-shapes around her nipples and ride deep inside her. I called her name but there was no sound. Not even a shimmer in the air. My hand, reaching for her, was imagined. The depression my head had made in the pillow was still there. It was like my ghost—as close to her as I could get.