by Deni Béchard
We caught nothing and left early, stumbling in rubber waders back to the truck. As he drove, I talked. I’d decided that as much as I liked fish, mental powers were more interesting. I explained this and told him how when I’d meditated, I’d seen my soul, and also that if I was quiet and listened, I could hear the advice of my invisible friends. He was silent, the day ending, the sky gently streaked like one of his old faded shirts.
“Your mother told you all this stuff?” he asked.
“Yeah. I can even read people’s minds if I want. Did you know that’s possible?”
He didn’t answer, just clutched the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. My brother looked out the side window, not speaking, and I realized that I’d been repeating things that enraged my father. The truck gained speed, swerving along the narrow road until we came to the highway. It careered through the junction, wobbling. The tires screeched and then caught, and we surged forward.
“Goddamn it anyhow,” he said.
My brother and I sat, pretending nothing had happened. Was my father angry about not catching any salmon, or because I’d repeated my mother’s words? Should these things be secrets, too? Sitting at his elbow, I watched the stark motions of his hands guiding the wheel, the way he hunched, narrowing his eyes as if aiming at something far away, just as she had, speaking of purpose.
Beyond the windshield were the last smoky colors of sunset, the sky ragged above the trees as if torn from a picture book. I gazed at it, not thinking, not wanting to, and after a while, as if pushing against the density of night, the truck slowed and I fell asleep.
A week later, Ian told me that his sister had gone missing. She’d ridden to the highway on her ten speed and traveled so far that she hadn’t known how to get back. The police had found her watching the traffic, crying because the batteries in her black tape player had gone dead.
LEVITATION CLUB AND THE END OF THE WORLD
The way my mother described the end, it didn’t sound bad. Nature would prevail, and those who’d chosen to return to it would survive. Though I pictured war and the destruction of cities, I’m not sure she mentioned these things. The end, as I understood it, came to me through how she spoke of chemicals and machines and our denatured lives. She seemed at odds with a force I couldn’t identify, resentful of what she heard on the radio. But the two things she most hated were Christians and processed foods.
“See that?” she said in the supermarket. A fat man trundled down the aisle. “He eats foods made of chemicals.” She pointed at bloated bags of chips, leering cartoon faces on boxed cereal, or candy bars like turds in brown wrappers.
“Sugar corrodes your bones. Your teeth turn brown and fall out. Your muscles get weak, your brain stops working, and your skin begins to sag. The human race is becoming stupid because of all that unnatural junk.”
I considered an ancient man with his walker, bald head speckled and seamed like a nut, then another, hands crabbed up beneath his chin as he stepped awkwardly with the plodding motion of an injured insect.
Back at home she made us drink the beery milk from her goats. My brother and I cramped our fingers around the glasses and chugged the frothy white sauce. We spoke of the end of goat milk season the way we did about the beginning of summer vacation.
“I can’t wait for cow milk,” he said.
“Me, too,” I agreed, though I knew that goat milk might be my salvation.
Even if I missed holes when I buttoned my shirt and didn’t notice if my shoelaces came untied, I managed to draw a small following at school. We met beyond the playground, on the blustery slope where our teachers weren’t likely to catch us speaking English, and I told them about the powers of the mind, telepathy, and telekinesis.
Watching TV, I’d seen Marco Polo spy on a Buddhist monk practicing levitation, and my mother had confirmed that peaceful men in faraway places could float and even speak with their minds. So I began practicing. Lying in bed, I let myself become as light as air, attempting to rise from the thin foam mattress. When this didn’t work, I tried with something small. I lay a sheet of paper on my dresser and stared at it. I put it on the floor and squinted over it with rage. I propped it against the wall and tried to help it slide down, which eventually it did, though I wasn’t sure how much of this was my doing.
“You just have to focus,” I told the other children, feeling inspired by my own words, as if the experiments I’d failed at until then were obviously possible.
“You let your eyes close halfway,” I said. “You look at the paper, and it will start to float. You can even do it with yourself. In bed. You can levitate.”
A scrappy boy named Matthieu stared, his mouth agape. He had a scar like he’d been operated on for a harelip, though he insisted a kid had thrown a stone, and he’d beaten him up.
“You did that?” he asked. “You floated?”
I shrugged. “Only by accident. I was sleeping. I fell down when I woke up.”
Testing myself as a budding cult leader was risky. I was far from popular, bad at sports, and a pet for the girls who took turns tying my shoes. I often forgot to zip my fly, and after school, when I climbed into my mother’s van, the first thing she’d do was realign the buttons on my shirt and tuck the untucked side in or pull the tucked-in side out.
“You have to try,” I told them.
“Why?” asked Guillaume, big and awkward and freckled, with a blushing face the mean kids called la tomate.
“Because the world is going to change. We have to be ready.”
The children nodded. There was a hardy evangelical community near the school, and they’d heard this before. A few gave their own testimonials. One thought he’d floated ever so slightly in bed because he’d heard the plastic rustling beneath his sheet. Guillaume had caused a paper propped against the wall to slide to the floor. Everyone was impressed.
Back in class, Mme Hans jabbered, making us do grammar exercises. As I conjugated the verbs in a story about sugar cabins and ice skating in Quebec, I couldn’t imagine why my father had left a place where everyone ate sugar and skated around all day, even if they did fight a lot, a fairly important fact that the story didn’t mention. But Mme Hans cared only about verbs. She had short gray hair and a chest like a longshoreman, and she was probably a good fighter, too. Staring at her, I thought of a barrel wearing women’s clothing. I pictured it going over Niagara Falls. She repeated: j’étais, tu étais, il était, nous étions. Why did we have to learn how to speak when we already could? I closed my eyes and felt my body growing light. Soon, I’d no longer need grammar. I’d rise, passing through my desk unseen, and slip through the wall into the fresh air outside. Then I’d run like hell. But for now I was still dissolving, becoming mist.
“Reveilles-toi! Wake up!” Mme Hans said and slapped the back of my head.
This was her warning, for which I referred to her—to the other students—as “Mrs. Hand,” thereby breaking the most important rule, that of not speaking English.
During reading period, I asked to go to the library. But when the librarian saw me, he made himself look busy, ducking into his office and fussing about, pausing to rub at his mustache. I’d been hounding him to find me books on ESP and psychic powers.
I pulled out a chair and sat and slumped. The elbows of my red checkered shirt had holes that my mother would patch as soon as she noticed. The tabletop felt cold through them.
In a few days, school would let out for Christmas, and I needed enough to read. My parents rarely spoke, and the mystery of his simmering rage and her muted fear dug at me. Whenever my father left, my mother went through papers or made phone calls in the hushed voice of a TV villain. I’d definitely need a lot of books to get through the break. I couldn’t sit still without one. Even sleep was impossible without a story first.
I went to the shelves and stood the way I did before the open refrigerator. I’d planned on giving up reading about fish, so maybe I could take the novel about mutant telepathic children living af
ter a great war? I’d drawn on it for my recess sermons, telling grim stories about the future.
But there was also a volume I loved on prehistoric fish, so I walked to the section of fish books. It was empty, and I realized that I’d checked them all out, and they were at home.
Just before dark, my father’s truck crunched into the driveway, and my brother went out to say hi. I sat in the kitchen, reading about coelacanth, a prehistoric fish rediscovered off the coast of South Africa when it was caught by a fisherman. This made me wonder what ancient fish might accidentally be in my father’s stores. Outside, the pulse of my brother’s words sounded light and quick next to the slow, somewhat gravelly voice of my father.
My mother was helping my sister in her room, so I got up and looked out the door. The gray sky sagged into the valley, promising cold rain and not the snow I was hoping for.
“Sh,” my brother whispered. He was peeking from behind the shed, the bangs of his brown bowl cut in his eyes. “Hurry up!”
I hustled behind the wall. My father was there, grinning through his beard, and seeing him, I knew that we’d do something bad and very fun.
“Don’t tell your mother,” he said. “You promise?”
I nodded as he took a long, curvy bottle of Pepsi from his jacket. He popped the cap and it hissed. My brother lifted his shoulders and dropped them and sighed nervously.
“Just a little drink,” my father was saying. “It’s going to burn.”
My brother held the bottle in both hands and tipped it back. He shook his head and swallowed, looking as worried as I felt, though we both tried to smile. This wasn’t a joke at all. My mother had always warned us never to drink pop, and I never had.
“Good, huh?” My father passed the bottle to me. I hid my fear and took a swig. The cold liquid fizzed on my tongue, burning gas rising into my sinuses. Permeating sweetness followed, chemical in its intensity, and I gave the Pepsi back. Though I stood as if nothing were unusual, I could feel my bones corroding just beneath my skin.
“You’ll learn to like it,” he told us and raised the bottle, draining most of it in a few gulps. It was a miracle he was still alive. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and told us to promise again. Even as he smiled, his eyes became still and menacing. We promised. Then he sent us back inside.
My mother was standing at the stove and looked at us suspiciously.
“Have you done your homework?”
“I’m almost finished,” my brother told her, but I just took my backpack to the living room and dumped it, then crouched as if I’d come upon strange droppings. Sometimes only by misbehaving could I hide previous misbehavior. The composition manual with three ducks on the cover lay before me, and I kicked it about as if playing soccer. The cover fell off, and my heart seized. Wasn’t it clear that I wasn’t made for school?
“Deni’s acting weird!” my brother complained. My mother came in, and without looking at her, I opened the mangled manual. This was just another thing that would make me stand out in class. I closed my eyes to squeeze back my frustration. I was always the weird kid. The others had colorful backpacks and new clothes while my brother and I had big flannel shirts with brown patches on the elbows and patched pants that hid our shoes. Our backpacks were made by cutting a leg off my father’s jeans, chopping it in two, sewing one end shut and putting a drawstring on the other. All the kids had pointed and said, “What’s that?” and the next morning my father had walked into the kitchen with one naked leg, hollering, “What the fuck happened to my jeans?” My mother had turned red with strangled laughter and told him, “Oh, I thought you didn’t use that pair anymore.”
Now he’d undressed by the kitchen door and prowled into the living room. He glanced about like an animal in a box, and my mother retreated to the stove. He sighed and sat in his chair and turned on the TV.
“You should pay attention to the news,” he told us, interrupting our homework. “It’ll teach you everything you need to know.”
We joined him in learning how America could deploy nuclear missiles from thousands of underground shelters joined by tunnels beneath the desert. The commentators discussed the importance of surviving a first strike and what had changed since Brezhnev’s death. My father grumbled and said, “Things were getting better until he screwed it all up.”
A little later, he proclaimed the ayatollah “a mean son of a bitch” and said, “Maybe Reagan can clean up the mess Carter made. That guy didn’t know what he was doing.”
“If World War III starts,” my brother asked, “can we capture a tank and can I live in it in the backyard?”
My father turned sharply and looked to where we lay before the TV.
“Well,” he said, “okay, I guess that’s fine.” But he kept studying my brother.
I tried to picture the camouflage tank beneath the apple tree and wondered if I should ask for one, too, but I could tell from my father’s face that he thought my brother’s request was weird. I’d been compiling a list of all that I shouldn’t mention to him, levitation being at the top. That was the good thing about what was in my mind: no one else could see it, so I couldn’t get in trouble. Still, I often worried that my mother could tell what I was thinking just from looking at me. Or maybe it was because I knew that she believed in telepathy. My father didn’t, so it was easier to make him happy.
I carried my book into the kitchen and sat across from my sister, who was coloring horse pictures. She wore bell-bottoms and a plaid shirt, her blond hair in a barrette. My mother glanced at me with those blue eyes that saw right into my head. Instantly, I wanted to confess, but my fear was stronger. She’d be angry, and my father would be angrier. Pepsi, which she’d forbidden, seemed far worse than alcohol. How could she accept that he drank it?
“What’s a nuclear missile?” I asked to distract her.
“Oh, that’s hard to explain,” she told me. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing, and it could kill all of us. It will probably destroy the planet someday.”
But she didn’t explain the way she usually did. She paused, staring into the bubbling spaghetti sauce as if seeing this future.
“The world,” she said more quietly, “is a terrible place. It’s not so bad for boys, but girls have to be strong.”
My sister looked up. She was six, and I wanted to tell my mother to be quiet.
And yet I longed to see the fierceness of the world revealed, to witness it at last.
The entire class was laughing at me. It was the day before Christmas break, but they still made fun of the lunches my mother packed. Usually, to hide my sandwiches, I ate them from inside my brown lunch bag, like a wino swigging from a wrapped bottle.
“Show it,” they were saying. They had chips, PB&J, and cookies. I took out two dark, crumbly slabs of bread with six inches of lettuce and tomatoes piled between.
“Oh,” I said as the tomato slices slid free and the bread broke and the lettuce spilled onto my desk. The children howled. To make my accident appear intentional, I lowered my head and snuffled about like a cow, gobbling from my desk. Kids were falling out of their seats. I sat up, making bovine eyes and working my jaw with a ruminating motion.
Mrs. Hand swatted the back of my head.
“Cochon,” she scolded, and the students fell silent.
During recess, when I spoke about levitation, the kids looked doubtful, having seen me imitate a cow. Only Guillaume was enthusiastic. He was getting better at moving sheets of paper propped against the wall. He talked until his face turned red and spit gathered at the corners of his lips, and even I wanted to knock him down.
I explained that my mother had said I should build mental powers slowly, by meditating with a candle. She’d set one up for me, and when I’d concentrated, the flame had wavered considerably. Guillaume sputtered that he’d try it, though his parents didn’t let him play with fire.
No one else cared. They were looking at my unzipped fly, my lopsided shirt, my shoelaces trailing in the dirt. They trickled away as
I rambled—great wars, mutations, superpowers. I felt that if I talked enough, something amazing would happen.
“You have to focus,” I said. “It takes time.” I said all sorts of things.
“Maybe you aren’t the right type,” I told Matthieu as he turned away.
“The right type of what?”
I had no answer, and he snorted and wandered off.
Normally, I’d be excited for Christmas break, but home wasn’t fun these days. For the rest of recess, I followed the path around the playground, walking backward, closing my eyes when I could, just breathing, not letting myself be angry, not thinking anything at all. Each time the wind gusted, I leaned back into it, trying to see if it would hold me up.
On Christmas Day, my father returned, smelling of pine sap. He’d shut down his lots and stripped his rain gear at the door without speaking to my mother. He turned up the heat that she kept low since, as I’d heard her complain, he didn’t give her much money for gas and we’d once run out and had to warm ourselves around the stove. He sat in his chair wearing boxers, and stared at the TV as the anchorman mentioned the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Briefly, there was a clip showing men outside a church, all wearing sandwich boards printed with The End Is Near.
At least when the end came I wouldn’t have to go to school, and my life would be like The Chronicles of Narnia. Maybe I’d do things my father had, catch huge salmon that took hours to reel in or drive a truck without brakes, crashing into things that people no longer needed.