Deconstructing Dylan

by Lesley Choyce

  There are, in the insect world, long-legged bugs called pond skaters or water striders that walk across the surface of ponds and lakes. They literally walk on water because their thin, hairy legs support a nearly weightless body. They make a tiny, dimpled depression on the surface of the water but they usually do not break through it and sink. The skin of the water’s surface is strong enough to support them.

  As a child, I would catch the striders and try to take them home in a jar of water but they nearly always drowned. Once the surface of the water was disturbed, the water strider could not support itself. I felt bad about drowning them and stopped doing it.

  Most of my life I have felt somewhat like a water strider — able to walk or run on the surface of things, knowing that if something were to disturb that surface, I would sink into whatever was beneath me and drown. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic. Part of me, though, often wanted to pierce that surface and drop beneath. I wanted to see what was down there. I wanted to be immersed although I did not want to drown.

  I felt heavy and sad after Caroline dumped me. I had not known how much I cared for her until she had moved on. My ego was bruised, my confidence shaken. Anyone could have seen that she and I would not have lasted the school year. In truth, I think it was not only my talk about insects but also my compulsion to read books about death and dying that put Caroline off. My new-found interest was a book on near-death experiences, which I read when I was bored in my classes. I would hide it behind the math textbook I was supposed to be looking at. I was preparing myself to die. I understood that much of life was a preparation for death and whatever came after, that living and dying were part of a natural process. I wondered if all my life I would be the water strider on the surface of things, and one day the surface would be disturbed and I would sink into whatever was beneath. I wondered, Would that be when I would understand who I really was and what it meant to be alive?

  Caroline thought I was morbid. Bugs and death drove her away. Who could fault her for that?

  I didn’t always mind skating along the surface of things like the water strider. There was a lightness to it — sometimes I was unaffected by everything around me. The good stuff and the bad. Other times, when I felt heavy, it was more like being the Loch Ness monster. I was in the deep murky water, alone. Some believed in my existence, some did not. I was the only one of my kind on the planet, or so I believed. I was a kind of monster, I suppose, although I didn’t think of myself as scary. I was waiting for a bold explorer to discover me. I wanted to find out if I was real.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “It’s Robyn, with a y,” the new girl insisted. Mrs. Gillis hated it when students were surly and Robyn was being surly with a capital S.

  “Okay, Robyn with a y, do you want to tell us anything about yourself?” Mrs. Gillis was holding her glasses in her hand and giving Robyn a look, the special look she used to intimidate. She was treating this new girl pretty rough, trying to embarrass her. She was being a bully in her own way. There are teachers who are kind human beings and there are teachers who are just plain cruel. Mrs. Gillis fell into the latter category.

  “Why would I want to tell you anything about me?” Robyn snapped back. “I have a right to my own privacy and if you don’t like that &hellips; well, screw you.”

  I was falling in love. The Loch Ness monster was surfacing into the bright sunlight of a beautiful Scotland morning. There was bagpipe and fiddle music in the hallways of all the empty castles.

  Mrs. Gillis glared at Robyn. A hush fell over the class. Mrs. G knew that she could send Robyn to the office and get the girl in trouble on the first day of class, or she could hold off and get back at Robyn in some more sinister way. Mrs. G wanted to hold off and wait until she had the field of advantage. She had played this game for many years. She knew how to get back at a student who didn’t show the proper respect.

  Robyn said nothing more but popped a piece of chewing gum into her mouth.

  I looked over at Caroline and could tell she was jealous. Robyn had commanded the attention and respect of everyone in the class. Whereas Caroline would use her flamboyance and exaggerated gestures to demand an audience, Robyn had demonstrated a fiery, understated quality that was far more powerful.

  “The substandard use of English always indicates low moral character,” Mrs. Gillis said to the rest of the class. “Sometimes it reflects a person’s limited intelligence and maturity, one’s inability to function in society as a civilized human being.” Her voice was cool and clinical as if she were delivering an address to the United Nations.

  Robyn had decided it was a good time to study the nail of her thumb. I think she was holding back.

  “Open your anthologies to page 324,” Mrs. Gillis said and dropped a copy of the book on Robyn’s desk so it made a loud wallop. Robyn just stared at the book like it was a dead rat that had been deposited in front of her.

  I think it was a poem by Robert Frost that Mrs. Gillis was teaching that day but it could have been Shakespeare. I can’t remember. I was studying the poetry of Robyn instead. She had shoulder-length black hair. She had large dark eyes and there was a fire in those eyes. Defiance was the name of her game. She had a beautiful full mouth that would be dangerous to kiss. Her skin was brown — something ethnic about her — black or South American or maybe Arabic, but none of the labels seemed quite right. She stared at Mrs. Gillis as if prepared to do battle with her most hated enemy. Mrs. Gillis pretended she did not see this as she reminded the class that the poem was going to be on the test and that the test was going to be “significant.”

  “Those who do poorly in Grade 11 academic English rarely get into university,” she reminded us. It was a threat, no more, no less.

  Caroline was looking at herself in her pocket mirror, putting lipstick on and fumbling with makeup. She too saw Robyn as a threat. I was suddenly glad that Caroline was out of my life. I now felt free and happy and ready to give myself over to this new dark, surly girl named Robyn.

  After class, I caught up with her and asked her where she was from.

  “I’m not from anywhere,” she said. “I live in the present and avoid thinking about the past. The past, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t exist.”

  “Okay, good point.” I had only been trying to make small talk, but, like Mrs. G, I was being tested. Human or otherwise, which would it be?

  “Where are you headed to?”

  “The washroom,” she said. “I have to pee.”

  “Oh yeah. Me too.”

  She stopped and gave me a look that announced her decision concerning which category I fell into. “This has been a truly intimate moment,” she said, stopping by the door to the girls’ lavatory.

  I felt the put-down sting. She might as well have slapped me on the face. And it showed.

  Then this really crazy thing happened. She let down her guard. Her face softened. She opened the door to the girls’ room. “Wait here,” she said.

  I waited. When she came back out, she looked me in the eye this time. The fire was still there but it wasn’t anger. “What’s your favourite book?” she asked.

  I swallowed and took a chance on telling her the truth. “ The Field Book of Insects by Frank E. Lutz,” I said and waited for her to laugh.

  “Interesting choice. I haven’t read it but I bet it’s a real page-turner. You really into bugs?”

  “Yes. Ever since I was a kid. I can identify a tiger beetle in its larval stage and tell you if it is going to be a male or a female.”

  There was a hint of a smile. “You are so weird, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “But weird is good. Smart and weird is a good combination.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I smiled. “Thanks,” I said. “What’s your favourite book?”

  “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” she said. “Ever read it?”

  “No, but I’ve read lots of books about death and dying. It’s one of my favourite subjects. Is it in the library?”
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  “Here? I doubt it.”

  “Well, in the public library?”

  “Probably. But I’ll loan you my copy.”

  “Cool.”

  “If I loan it to you, you have to read it.”

  “I will.”

  “Are you afraid of dying?”

  “A little.”

  “I’m not,” she said with great certainty. “Life scares the shit out of me but not dying.”

  Now she was scaring me. “You’re not like&hellips;?”

  “Suicidal? Hell no. I’m not ready to die. You have to prepare yourself for that, like it says in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It takes a whole lifetime for most of us to be ready for the liberation from our bodies. It’s a lot of hard work. I’ve gotta suffer for a long time so I can prepare myself.”

  I felt I had just met a kindred spirit or even my soul-mate. “School is a good place to suffer,” I said. “Can I suffer with you?”

  “You already are, I think. But yeah. Sure. You’re cute. Weird, smart, and cute. And I want you to teach me some stuff about bugs.”

  “I will.”

  She stopped by a classroom and announced, “Chemistry. I took chemistry. Nothing sucks in school worse than chemistry. I took it, though, so I could learn to suffer well. I better get in there and go to it.”

  “Robyn,” I said. “There’s something you should know about me.”

  “And that is?”

  “I’m different.”

  “So?”

  “There’s something about me that’s not quite right. I don’t mean like a bad heart or liver or anything. And I don’t mean like I’m crazy. It’s something else I can’t quite nail down but I need to figure out what it is.”

  “Okay. That’s okay with me. I’ll help you if you like. It’ll be like a science project.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My parents were way too protective of me when I was growing up. They thought I would choke on popcorn. They thought I would be run over by a bus. They thought I would catch a deadly disease. They thought I would fall out of a tree.

  I did fall out of a tree when I was thirteen. I fell from very high and I fell very fast. It was an oak tree, I remember. On the hard ground I was alone and I was unconscious. No one found me. I just woke up with a headache and a very sore shoulder. I was fascinated by the fact that I had gone away and come back. I don’t know where I went. I just know that it was blue and it was very beautiful. There was no real me there, just sky. I had become the sky somehow, and that was what I was looking at when I woke up — staring at the sky through the tree limbs.

  My mother was home when I arrived and saw that I had been injured. She raced me to the hospital and they scanned every inch of me. Damaged but not dead was the result.

  I often wished my parents were not as smart as they were. They subscribed to Scientific American and we had twelve science channels in the house. They were health nuts as well. I had to hide junk food in my room to get by. Both my mom and my dad were believers in the new genetic brands of food. Enriched this and enhanced that. If we were going to eat potatoes, those potatoes had to have a kind of pedigree. My mother did background checks over the WorldCom on the brand names of potatoes. A potato or even a turnip nearly needed a university degree before it was eaten in my house.

  By the time I was sixteen I was trying to wrest some control over my life: what I ate, what tree I would fall out of, when I would cross the street, and what friends I would have. I was still a bit of a Loch Ness monster looking up at the surface of the water from very deep murky depths. I was not a disturbed person like Miles Vanderhague or anything. Miles was addicted to violent video games and said insulting things to people as often as he could get away with it. He accused people he did not like of smelling bad and of wearing the wrong brand names of clothing.

  I was the opposite of Miles Vanderhague. I smiled a lot, a perfected goofy smile that made people think I was on some of those newer designer drugs. But, despite my father’s venue of employment, I was not a drug lover. I had my own little mysterious quest of trying to live life like I really meant it. I was trying really hard to get to the surface and all I could do was keep swimming for the sunlight.

  Robyn was a fresh breeze in my life. She was oxygen in my lungs.

  We’d walk to the mall and she would stare at the other students from school who were shopping there. Robyn said she never shopped for anything new. She’d only buy used clothing or things recycled. She was also studying astrophysics to see if there was any commonality with the ideas in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  “Would you go to Tibet with me when we graduate?” she asked as we strode through the mall. Robyn glared at the other students who were buying what she referred to as “unimaginable crap.”

  “My parents want me to go to university in Glasgow.”

  “Why there?”

  “They have this thing about Scotland. They think it is where I should go for school.”

  “Then Tibet is not a possibility?”

  “I didn’t say that. Let me think about it. I’m just getting to know you.” I was feeling a little uncertain about many things, so making a decision to go to Tibet while in the mall was something I was not prepared for.

  “Sometimes you just have to leap. I’m a leaper,” Robyn said.

  I was thinking about falling out of trees.

  “A woman named Alexandra David-Neel went to Tibet around the beginning of the twentieth century. She’s my role model.”

  “I never heard of her.”

  “She wanted to learn how to create a tulpa, a phantom being conjured up by the mind through rituals and meditation. She shut herself up all alone for several months and finally her tulpa arrived. She took her tulpa on a road trip and other people could see him and they talked to him as if he were a real person. He started out playful and fun to be around but later got nasty. It took her six months to make the tulpa go away.”

  “You don’t really want to try that, do you?”

  “I might,” Robyn said. “But it sounds kind of dangerous.”

  “I’ll go to Tibet with you if you promise not to conjure up imaginary beings.”

  “Who said tulpas were imaginary? They just come from another plane of existence.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to tell what is real and what isn’t,” I admitted. I was looking at the ceiling of the mall with its high-res video display. It appeared that there was no roof at all and that we were looking up into a beautiful azure sky, the same sky I had once become when I fell out of a tree.

  “None of this is real,” Robyn said with great confidence, sweeping her arm in a wide arc. “It’s very, very thin. These people are leading trivial lives. They have little substance.”

  I tried to keep up my end of the conversation, which now seemed to be about density. I had remembered reading something while in my bathroom at home. My dad would leave science articles on the video screen in the bathroom and I’d get caught up reading about the latest wonder drugs or long-distance laser surgery or even stuff about space. “Do you know anything about neutron soup?”

  “Does it have tofu in it?” she asked.

  “No. It’s in space. It’s made up of collapsed matter. It becomes compacted together and incredibly dense, so dense that some of it the size of a cube of sugar would weigh a thousand million tons.”

  “So that’s what happens to collapsed matter,” she said perfectly matter-of-factly, and I couldn’t tell whether she was genuinely interested or just joking.

  “On the other hand, a neutrino has virtually no mass at all and every day we are bombarded with neutrinos hurling around in space. They pass right through us, right through the earth as if it isn’t even here.”

  “That’s because this is all an illusion.”

  The video screen in the front of the Gap store caught my attention. Three-D human images kept taking clothes off and putting on new duds. One minute, a girl would be totally naked and the next she’d be putting on the late
st designer top and pants. Some little kids were staring at it and laughing. The display was very sexual and I was thinking it was making me horny so I turned away.

  Robyn noticed that I was uncomfortable. “You are different, aren’t you? You’re shy, too, right?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Do you like me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Enough to go to Tibet with me?”

  “Maybe. But I need to get to know you first.”

  “Did you know that in the seventeenth century, many people believed that every time you had sex, it took a day off your life? You’d die a day sooner?”

  “That would make you think twice about doing it.”

  “You’re funny, you know that?”

  And then she kissed me. I closed my eyes and I was someplace else. I don’t know exactly where I was, but wherever it was, it sure wasn’t the mall.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I liked Robyn’s suggestion that it was all an illusion and I liked Robyn a lot. It was really fortunate that I connected with her as soon as she arrived at school. My hair was growing back already, creating a kind of fuzzy stubble. I’d given up on wearing black and wondered what would be next for me. I was like an insect going from the larval phase into something else, I figured. No, not a butterfly, that was for sure. But a metamorphosis nonetheless.

  One of my childhood dreams was that someday I would figure out how to travel through time. I understood that all you had to do was travel faster than the speed of light and you could alter time, but no one was offering me a clue about FTL travel. Except my father, that is, who took my question to heart in his clinical, scientific way.

  “You want to travel back in time? Not satisfied with the here and now?”

  “The here and now, as you call it, sometimes sucks. I don’t want to go back to ancient Egypt. I just want to see what it would be like to be alive, um, say, twenty years ago.”