The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  Lambert took to relative wealth with a certain degree of grace. He spoke of hiring a fancy Toronto ghost writer to write down the story of his varied and intriguing career at sea. Maybe there would be a film starring Sean Connery. Eager stopped complaining for nearly a month until he discovered that, “Money ain’t necessarily the equivalent of happiness. Money has a back yard full of problems just waiting like bear traps to trip you up.”

  So the two men clammed and crammed the money in the bank or spent it like clam piss on anyone who came along. If they weren’t up at the cracklight of dawn dragging the sea for Spickerton blue-eye gold, they were on the phone to their Japanese broker, Yasuhira, who every once in a while would send them some exotic present by mail or by truck — a set of silk kimonos or a giant straw mat or a beautiful ten-yard long banner from a Japanese New Year’s parade. “Success,” Lambert would say, “was always right there just beyond my finger tips waiting for me to go after it. All it took was for your father to help me get a grip on it.”

  However, when I went to work with the two old geezers m the summer, they’d pay me minimum wage and expect me to bleed from the knuckles to prove I was working up to their expectations. “You’re young,” Lambert would say while he was pissing over the side of the boat. “The important thing is for you to build character and have that character in place for when you are old and successful.”

  But I certainly didn’t feel like I was building character. I still didn’t know who I was. Everything was so damned con-fused. If I could only have been able to continue the heart-to-heart talks I had once had with Ben or my grandmother or even Hants. But I’d developed what some might call an inferiority complex. The role model of my father was too grand. Even my previous New York courage had diminished, drained off somewhere into a blind gulley.

  Burnet Jr., through a quirky twist of fate, had become a handsome young man sought after by the girls. He had also turned out to be not nearly as stupid as all of us had expected. At least he had developed an ability to get by with the brains that his father had passed down to him, and he had learned to hide his inherent cruelty far better as he grew. I was privy, however, to his secrets. He was, alas, my friend. I knew that he broke into the hardware store and stole sixty bucks of cash and a chain saw. I knew that he had a .22 rifle and that he would sit on his back step and shoot squirrels and blue jays. And I knew that he had gone down to Sheet Harbour and had sex with a woman there for money. Maybe these are all forgivable in the light of him being a teenager. What was wrong was the false exterior he had created for himself? He had gone from being a snot-dripping bully with an untucked shirt and a fat gut to a clean-cut, high school jock with a manly physique and a politeness about him that charmed the women, young and old.

  Meanwhile, I was still a skinny stripling of a kid, a wind-ravaged, TV-addicted, scrawny, scared boy, incomplete in every way. I guess I should give the guy some credit because, despite all my shortcomings, Burnet remained my friend. Our friendship had begun in a genuine enough fashion, fuelled by the shared sandwiches after saving his old man from the fallen car, but it had degenerated into something else. I was the foil. I made Burnet look good. Over that fateful half-decade, while the world wandered toward the brink of nuclear war, while men vaulted into space, while American cities burned, while Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot dead, while the Soviets drove tanks in Czechoslovakia, while bigger and better bombs were bursting in the ribs of the planet beneath me, a terrible trade took place.

  In the early years of our friendship, Burnet had studied me, I am sure. He’d seen how I succeeded in school, watched how I had “fit in” in a way that was not his own. He learned how to be a civilized human being, something his father could never have taught him. The more he began to fit in and to succeed, the more I began to find myself falling towards the edges. I had to fight to keep my grades up, working long hours into the night to keep my head above water where once it had all been so easy. I had to cause trouble of some sort if I wanted the attention of my teachers where before I was able to command their respect with the limited but quirky sum of knowledge I had accumulated from my father and Hants Buckler and Mrs. Bernie Todd.

  While other girls had dazzled me briefly with a flash of eye or a funny little sensual look, I had remained in love with Gwen. The plight of the silent lover is the deepest and darkest of graves, the most tortuous of traps. My guess is that she did not know how deeply I felt for her. I had attempted to write these feelings down and tell her the shocking truth of my passions, but like so many young men before me, I was scared, scared to my roots, that she would think I was making a joke.

  And worst of all, Gwen and I had become “friends.” We shared so much, had so much common ground and common experience that there were no surprises left. Gwen had grown into a beauty — long light brown hair styled like the sexiest of the American TV girls. In fact, Gwen had in some mysterious inner way left the island behind her. She still lived there, but the place no longer had the magic for her, the magic that we had shared when she first arrived and we were young. She, too, had been transformed by TV and what TV had done for her was to turn her back into an American. And although Burnet had clearly been born here, TV had also helped trans-form him. Concurrently I watched my two “friends,” Gwen and Burnet, become less like kids from the Shore and more like the polished, slick, sophisticated worldly kids I saw on TV.

  And maybe that was why it was inevitable that Gwen and Burnet became girlfriend and boyfriend. I had seen it coming for months. It was almost as if they were two beautiful jungle animals who had stalked each other, circling warily but enticing each other day after day. I was caught in the middle and hated every moment of it. And, in the end, it was me who had brought them together. A cycle of circumstances made this inevitable and there was not a damn thing I could do about it. If I thought that it was good for Gwen, I believe I could have accepted it. I could have been selfless and wished them happiness. But I knew better than that. I knew the dark depths of Burnet, and I knew he had not changed as much as the world believed.

  25

  My mother withdrew into herself during those years although she always pretended that everything was the same with us. She could see my pain but could not do a thing about it, for I was never to admit how confused and hurt I was feeling. Casey, on the other hand, was growing into a pretty little girl who had discovered she could sing like the superstars on the radio. We had been so thoroughly washed over by television and radio waves from the outside world that our conversation was peppered with worries about what would be on TV or who was at the top of the charts on Top 40.

  Casey had gone Motown. She could sing along with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas or the Supremes or any of the best Black soul groups from Philadelphia to Detroit. The girl who once refused to talk was now the girl who could not help but sing in her bedroom, at the breakfast table, all through every class at school in a low or high pitched angelic contralto. She had not known that most of her singing idols were Black. When she first saw Diana Ross on the TV, she was startled and excited at once. “I want to look just like her,” she said, pointing to a thin wisp of a fragile-looking, young Black woman with heavy eye make-up and a pile of hair that looked both puffed up and slicked down all at once.

  Casey was determined to be a professional Motown singer after that. She began to sit for long hours in the sun to darken her skin, and she took to wearing heavy make-up and hair goo. She made a shiny tight dress for herself and, I must say, the end product, prancing around our living room singing to the record player jacked up to speaker-shattering volume, was nearly convincing.

  “That’s right, Casey,” my mother would say. “You can be anything you want to be.”

  My mother’s weekly intimate meals with Ben continued, only now they had shifted from our house to his. Sometimes Casey and I would go; sometimes, if we had a lot of home-work, we would just stay home. These events were no secret to my absent father who now reported in to us almost every o
ther day by means of the telephone with news of his latest political triumph or idea for provincial economic development.

  I still liked Ben immensely but was so troubled by the intimate relationship developing between my mother and him that I decided I had to have a man-to-man talk with the good doctor. After several years of design, planning, revision and study, Ben had only completed the foundation of his ultimate home and was now just laying the floor joists. Forty two-by-twelves were laid out on edge, perfectly in place from side to side of the foundation. Not one had yet been nailed into place, however. One lone plank had been set flat across these floating, unattached joists and Ben stood in the very centre of the house, precarious, pondering. One false move could topple him and all his un-nailed joists like a stack of playing cards. I remained on the perimeter and broached the subject of my mother with caution.

  “I could never do anything to hurt your mother or your family,” Ben said, looking a little unsteady all of a sudden on his plank held up mostly by air and planning. “I think it’s not unreasonable of you to fear that Dorothy and I are becoming, well, lovers.” A shudder went through the entire configuration of joists. My own vision blurred as the word struck me. “Don’t get me wrong,” Ben said. “We are not lovers. That is, we don’t do things that lovers do. Nothing physical. We have a different relationship. What was it Shakespeare said in the sonnet… ‘two minds can love whose hands have never touched’?”

  “I don’t know what Shakespeare said, Ben. I don’t know those kind of things. I only know my mother — and my father — and Casey and me.”

  Ben took a deep breath and began to walk the poem back to the edge of the firm rock and cement foundation. One step shy of arriving, the board beneath his feet gave a jerk and all of the on-edge joists shifted. Ben hopped to safety as they all fell flat with a loud whack. A couple fell into the basement. Ben walked over to me, sat down on a bulb of granite covered with yellow-gold lichen. He began to pick off the growth and flick it to the earth. “We’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. We help each other. Let me try to explain.” He sounded too much like an adult now. Ben had usually treated me as an equal, but I had lost ground, lost confidence since our foray to New York. “I’m working with your mother on memory loss. She wants very much to know about the first fifteen years of her life. Aside from your family, this missing memory is probably the single most important thing in the world to her.”

  “You’re not a psychiatrist,” I countered with real anger coming up in my throat. “You’re not even a goddamn doctor.”

  Ben shook his head. He could see that I had lost the little bit of faith and trust that had once welded us together as fast friends. “I know. She knows. Now.”

  “How did she find out? Did she guess or did you finally tell her the truth?” There was bitterness in my voice.

  “Neither,” Ackerman said. “She read my mind.”

  I knew he wasn’t playing games with me because I knew my mother. She had powers of some sort beyond what other mothers had. They were hard to pin down, hard to prove, hard at times to believe, but she had psychic skills. It was as if a trade had taken place; the loss of the memory of the first part of her life for these other abilities almost too fantastic and too frightening for a son to believe in if he hadn’t seen the evidence with his own eyes. “What have you found out about her childhood?” I asked.

  “Very little,” Ben admitted, studying a delicate little petal of the golden lichen. “I have read many books, worked with psychiatrists before. Don’t ever underestimate me, Ian. I may have been a fraud, but I always helped people.”

  “I think I know that,” I said. “Photographic memory. Chameleon personality. You told me everything.”

  He smiled. “I did. I told you everything. I could always trust you — something about you. I know where you got it from. You got it from her.”

  “And I inherited a few traits from my father as well.” I just wanted to bring him back into this picture. But what exactly had I inherited from my old man? A desire to change the world? Foolish dreams and notions? Unfortunately for me, I could not put any of this to real use. There would be no girl waiting for me in an open boat at sea at sunrise. There would be no John G.D. Maclntyre on my doorstep offering glory. I would have to work it all out for myself, and all too often I felt like I just didn’t have the courage to do that.

  “Your father is a wonderful man,” Ben asserted.

  “You don’t even know him.”

  “Do you? Any more, I mean?”

  It was cruel thing to say and I scratched my fingertips across the granite bolder Ackerman sat upon, wishing right then to do him harm, to hit him. The fucking world was falling apart. I scratched across the lichen and stone until I had cut the tips of my fingers and they bled. Ben grabbed my hand.

  “You’re much tougher than you think, Ian. You are not as weak as you think. You still have the courage and the wisdom that you had when I first knew you. It’s just layered over right now with a shell of confusion. The shell will break. I know what I’m talking about. It will. All you need is time.”

  I looked at him. There was something about what he had just said, but it wasn’t just the words. They were simple enough. It was something else, something like a shaft of sunlight reaching into the gloomy pit of my soul. He was right about the shell and, for what seemed like the first time in years, something had just cracked through the shell. It wasn’t that he was just understanding the look on my face and it wasn’t just a bunch of words in our conversation. Ben Ackerman had just leaped — he had gone beyond what we had said or what we showed on our faces. He had even gone beneath the surface of what was uppermost in my thoughts right then — my desire to hit him in the face. And it wasn’t just a kind thing to say or a good guess.

  He had gone right to the core of my problem: I thought I was a weakling — not physically but emotionally. I had lost my ability to assert who I was in a world where everyone else seemed to have it all figured out and were oh-so-confident in who they were. “How did you do that?” I blurted out.

  Ben understood immediately what I was talking about. He could tell from the look of astonishment on my face. “I learned it, or at least I’m learning it from your mother. This is our trade. This is our relationship. Call it love if you want because I do think we love each other, but there is nothing physical in it. Ever. I am helping her to recover her past. I think we’ll get there eventually, but first I have to help her explore every element of her personality and what; memory she has. In return she teaches me to look into other minds.”

  “And the two of you can actually have like a conversation… “

  “Without talking,” he completed. “It’s too perfect. In fact, it’s not even a conversation at all. It’s more like what I just did with you. I went past what you would have said to what you really were feeling, what you really meant.”

  “Good God,” I said. I was really shaken.

  “Your mother has learned to use her psychic skills, if I can use a clinical term, rather well. She’s learned to simply blend them into her life in a wonderful way, giving her strength and helping both of her children. And I saw the night with the dogs, remember? We can talk about that sometime if you want. I don’t think she’d mind. I think that I’ve been able to help her to be less afraid of her powers, although I don’t think you should see them as being weird or supernatural. She just has certain skills the rest of us have a hard time tapping. She hasn’t been able to help you much lately, I think, because you’ve been pushing everybody away. Even the ones you love. Your mother, Casey, your father. Even Gwendolyn.”

  Now I felt like I’d been invaded, violated. “What do you know about Gwen?” I insisted.

  “I know you love her and you feel that you’ve lost her forever. That’s how much you’ve told me without ever even speaking a word. Your mother probably knows a lot more about it. You might want to ask her to help out.”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t want my mother involved. And righ
t then I didn’t know whether to trust Ben Ackerman, his intentions and his knowledge, not to mention his new-found skill. I felt confused, but in the mass of swirling confusion there was an oasis of clarity. Ben was so perfectly right about my fears and inabilities. Now that he had brought them out in the open, so much about my life began to make sense. I would have to think about all this long and hard. Despite my doubts, however, I felt that I had just seen a way out of a long, winding, dark, horror-infested tunnel. I saw light. I saw possibility. The world, my world, had not disintegrated entirely. I suddenly felt as if I had a chance to pull myself up out of the grave. I was ready to admit it to Ben, to thank him even for this new insight.

  But I hadn’t opened my mouth. “There’s one danger in all this, I think,” he said.

  I was still thinking of myself. Danger? Hah! I was about to get ready to challenge anything.

  But it wasn’t a danger for me. “It’s Dorothy. I don’t know what will happen if she does regain her memory. Something devastating occurred back then. Maybe something extraordinary, maybe something terrifying. I’ve warned her and she too is wary of unlocking all the doors. It may be very difficult and she may never be quite the same again.”

  26

  It was on one of those nights that my mother went to visit Ben for a dinner and an evening of psychic inter-mingling that I made my first daring gesture in a long time. I was at home with my little sister who was glued to the TV. From deep within I called on my energy reserves, I dipped into my meagre, dwindled supply of courage, I picked up the phone and dialed. The Duke answered and I asked to speak to Gwen. When she picked up the phone and said a quiet, curious hello, I wobbled on my feet and nearly dropped the phone to the floor.

  “Hi,” I said. “It’s Ian. I’m home alone with Casey and wondered if you would like to come over and do some home-work with me.”