The sun was out and the sky was blue. I leaned towards the fly to look up at the top of the mountain on one side of valley. That’s when it happened.
I heard it before I saw it. A loud thunk and then the windshield of the old car shattered. I doubled over forward and felt the seatbelt dig deep into my gut. A deer had jumped in front of the car and landed on the hood, then crashed through the glass. It cracked into a thousand pieces but remained intact, a kind of shattered glass blanket falling in on the adults in the front seat. I was screaming now, crying, confused and frightened in a way I had never experienced.
The car skidded to a stop and I wailed louder. I was panicked by what I saw: my young mother and father before me buried by what was left of the windshield and a large animal, a deer that must have been killed by the impact. I knew that my stomach hurt and my head had hit the back of the seat in front of me. The engine was off now and it was suddenly quiet except for my father saying “Oh my God” over and over and my mother kind of whimpering. Then she shouted something out, a name. Not mine. “Kyle! Kyle, are you all right?” She was trying to push the glass and animal off of her but she was pinned down. There was blood pooling on the shattered glass.
And then my father heaved himself up and out of the car. He looked back at me and saw my fear. “You’ll be okay,” he said. “It will be all right, Kyle.”
I heard another car stop behind and people were running towards us, shouting. The door opened on my mother’s side and my father and another man were struggling to lift her out from beneath the broken glass and the deer carcass. I wailed louder.
A big woman opened the back door and touched both my arms. “Poor laddie,” she said. “We’ll have you out in a jiff.” And she did. She undid the seat belt and lifted me out of the car and carried me away. I remember her big thick arms and the way she held me to her as if I was a little baby.
A couple of men were lifting the dead deer out of the car now and wrestling the shattered sheet of glass off my mother. My father then unharnessed her and lifted her out and sat her down by the side of the road. Then she yelled out, “Where’s my little boy?”
I tried to speak but was unable to because I was still sobbing, so the thick-armed woman shouted, “He’s here, ma’am, and he’s just fine.” She carried me to my mother and put me in her arms. I felt her hot tears falling on my face as she said that name again. “Kyle.”
When I drifted back to math class, I had an odd sensation as if I was lowering myself back into my seat, pulling myself back from an actual physical space up there in the upper-right-hand corner of the room. Although I had believed this strange experience to be something very real to me while I was envisioning it, I also immediately understood that it was not anything that had ever happened to me. Those two adults seemed like my parents but they were far too young. The car was from another time and place. But I was sure I recognized the location. I had been there once — the valley of Glencoe, site of the famous massacre in 1692. The Campbells had murdered the MacDonalds: men, women, and children. I remembered the story, the history. But what was it that had just happened to me, and who was this little boy, Kyle?
A sense of disorientation stayed with me for the rest of the day. I decided not to seek out Robyn. I was still annoyed at her for saying those things about my mother. She had no right to do that. Maybe it was her crazy head trip on me that afternoon that had triggered the bizarre daydream.
At home, my mom grilled me some more about Robyn until I insisted she give it up. There was definitely some kind of bad vibe going on there between two women who had met only briefly. I wondered what that was all about.
I felt halfway relieved when I saw my father’s old Honda pull up in the driveway. “Dad’s home,” I announced.
He came in the door and gave my mom a hug. He came over and rubbed his hand over the top of my head as if I was a little kid. My hair was still trying to grow back. All I had was a kind of short spiky crop of hair. “It’s like sandpaper,” he said affectionately. “I could sand a two-by-four with that head.”
We had dinner and my father told us both how much his job sucked. “We spent two days creating the new project and two days destroying it. That’s how a committee works. In the end, we decided to do nothing. All the tests on the new stem cell stimulants were positive but the PR people think the climate isn’t right. We’re going to end up holding back on making the drug available, one that could improve the lives of thousands of people.”
“It’s the same old story. Mistrust of science, corporations responding to public opinion instead of hard facts.”
“Just like the old days,” he said, although I wasn’t exactly sure what “old days” referred to.
I offered to do the dishes and my dad picked up his suitcase and took it into their bedroom. My mother soon followed and the door was shut. I was a little surprised and somewhat shocked when I heard the bed bumping against the wall and realized what they were up to. Kids have a tough time thinking about their parents making love — especially going at it in the daytime. Why that seems disgusting, I don’t know. But if it’s happening and you’re in the next room, you don’t want to know about it. So I turned up the music kind of loud. The WorldCom site was playing oldies music, my mom’s favourite, and I left it there. Alanis Morissette was complaining about something in her song. She seemed really angry. And then there were a couple of nasty rap songs — sexist and raunchy. Hard to believe that my mom liked that kind of music.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
My father was tapping at my door and I looked at the clock to see if I had overslept. It was only seven o’clock. “Yo,” I said.
“Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
The door opened. My father walked in and stood there. He wasn’t wearing his suit. No tie, no shiny shoes. Just a T-shirt and jeans. He was smiling.
“You get fired?” I asked.
“I wish. No. I’m just taking a day off. Stress leave, as they used to call it. R and R.”
“Rock and Roll?”
“Rest and relaxation. I want you to join me.”
“Cut school?”
“Yeah. Cut school. I want to take you someplace. You have any good hiking shoes?”
“Sure.”
My mother had an appointment with her doctor and I was happy for that. I truly was worried about her. She needed some kind of help and I was glad she was turning to a professional.
“Your mother’s been under a lot of pressure,” my father said as he drove us out of town and east towards the nature reserve called Traverse Ravine, a place he’d taken me to several times when I was young. A deep gully, a rift really, that was said by geologists to be the fault line where two ancient super-continents had once collided: Gondwana and old North America. It was an extraordinary place where you could find exotic rocks like amethyst, magnetite, and even fossils of creatures long extinct — fish and underwater insects.
“I’m worried about her,” I said. “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”
My father tightened his grip on the wheel and seemed ready to tell me something that he had been holding back. “I haven’t been doing a very good job as a father — or a husband, for that matter.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“Too busy. There’s got to be more to life than work.”
“Somebody’s gotta pay the bills,” I said, mouthing the cliché.
“Well, when you get to my age, you realize that maybe all that effort you put into your career isn’t worth it, after all.”
“So what is this then that you’re going through? Midlife crisis, male menopause, or what do they call it now?”
“They call it taking your head out of your ass,” he said, rather surprising me with this choice of words.
I suddenly felt a whole lot more relaxed. Up until then, I had been thinking there was some hidden agenda here, like he was about to tell me some deep dark secret. I don’t know what — that he was having an affair with anothe
r woman or that he was laundering illegal drug money. I had a bad habit of letting my imagination take over — like that daydream the day before in math class.
“I’ve saved enough. I’ve invested. I could quit tomorrow if I wanted to. We could move, even. Where would you like to go?”
“Australia,” I said. “Or New Zealand.”
“Entomological heaven,” he said. “I hear the people are friendly, too.”
“Or maybe Tibet,” I said, thinking about the promise I made to Robyn.
“Tibet? Really?” “Just kidding,” I said. I didn’t want to have to explain.
“But I’m serious,” he said. “Maybe it’s time for a change. Do you remember much about when we lived in Scotland?”
It was odd the way he phrased that. “I remember when we visited Scotland. You and Mom lived there before I was born. We were only there for two weeks, weren’t we?”
He cleared his throat. “Something like that. That’s what I meant. Visited. Remember the standing stones and the deep lochs? And those castles?”
This morning I had been thinking about that trip and about the drive through that valley &hellips; the one that had been part of my daydream. “What was the name of that town where we stayed at the farm?”
“Fort William.”
“Right. Just north of Glencoe. It was eerie there, like that massacre had just happened last week.”
I now remembered that I had picked it out on the map and wanted to go there but my mother hadn’t. “How come Mom didn’t want us to drive there?”
He fidgeted with the steering wheel. “Who knows? Like you said, it was an eerie place. Innocent people had died there — another one of those ghastly events in history. Maybe that was what your mother was reacting to.” And then, like so often was the case, he changed the subject. “I hear you have a new girlfriend.”
“Sort of. She’s one of a kind.”
“Aren’t they all?” he said and then laughed. “But your mom doesn’t think she’s right for you.”
I laughed too. “They didn’t exactly hit it off. I wonder what that was all about.”
“Your mom has some strong opinions sometimes.”
“So does Robyn. The two of them were like matches and alcohol. Robyn said she could tell Mom is hiding something from me. Isn’t that a weird thing for her to say? Why do you think she said that?” Right then I was feeling comfortable with my father in a way that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Like I could say or ask anything.
We were out of the suburbs now and the skid was moving us through rich green pastureland. The trees in the distance looked healthier than those in town, taller and leafier. “Your mother took a lot of flak for her research from some pretty vocal and self-righteous people.”
I knew something about this but it was never really discussed openly in our household.
“They wore her down,” he added. “She was — is — brilliant but she wanted the public to know that government and popular opinions, religion even, were preventing medical researchers — including us — from moving on to the next level of medicine. Procedures that would help people with diseases like Alzheimer’s and MS, Parkinson’s. She wanted people to know that some of those diseases could be prevented even before a baby was born.”
“Genetic modification.”
“That and stem cell research. Those years we spent in Scotland before you were born &hellips; we were moving ahead by leaps and bounds. North America was way behind. That was why we were there.”
I knew about them living in Scotland before I had come into the picture. I envisioned them as a happy couple living in a stone cottage. When they had taken me back there as a child, though, the memories seemed mixed. Tinged with sadness, sorrow, something lost. My mother not wanting us to drive to Glencoe, my father overriding her negativity.
“Everyone at the institute was cautioning her to keep a low profile and wait for the public to come to accept the new technology. But the right-wingers caught wind of our funding source and they wanted to have us closed down. Your mom decided to be the one to go to the front line and defend what we were doing. The news people had a field day. She was beautiful and brilliant and willing to stand in front of the TV news camera and chart a whole new course for the future of medicine.”
I thought of the smug Loch Ness researcher and wondered how my mother would compare. Not a media hog but a true crusader; that was my take.
“They crucified her,” my father said. “They really did. The institute had to let her go or they would never ever get another cent from the British government and that funding was what kept us going.”
It was beginning to make a bit more sense why my mother was so defensive sometimes and cynical. I wondered what Robyn would think of her if she knew all this.
“I stayed on there for a while when your mom changed course. She decided to work independently. And, after she was turfed out, she decided to give away her research information to anyone for free. She wanted others to be able to build on the foundation she had started. That was very rare. No drug companies involved, no public funding dependency.”
“She was very brave.”
“She was and is. But the very fact that she started to freely give away her research made the establishment mistrust her. It’s a crazy world we live in.”
“It is. What about now? What can I do to help?”
He shrugged. “I ask myself that question all the time.”
We reached the ravine, got out, and began to hike up the rift. We stopped and picked up some interesting stones — an agate and some smoky quartz. My dad snapped several pictures of me with his micro-digicam.
I clawed away at some loose slate and came across a nearly perfect fossil of an insect that I later identified as an ancestor of the modern diving beetle, the Dysticus. Frank E. Lutz, ever insightful about every insect he encountered, had written, “Adults discharge from behind the head and also from the anal glands, fluids &hellips; which are probably defensive against fish.” Lutz also noted that a fellow colleague named Harris kept a diving beetle for a kind of pet “for three years and a half in perfect health, in a glass vessel filled with water, and supported by morsels of raw meat.” My Dysticus fossil was my prize for the day. After an hour or so of poking around, we returned to the skid, both of us feeling better after the strenuous hike.
On the skid’s computer screen, I looked at the snapshots he had taken of us that day and then accessed some old photos he had archived there as well. As my dad drove, I scrolled through batch after batch, looking for that curious photoshopped version of me set in the past. It wasn’t there.
“What’s the story behind that photo you altered of me? The one in the night table beside your bed?”
He furrowed his brow. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
So I described it. “She said you had given it to her as a joke. But I don’t quite get the joke.”
He paused, and then looked over at me. “Hmm. Oh, that one. I had forgotten about it. Just fooling around with a new phototool program, I guess. You should have seen the ones I did of me. I was an astronaut in an Apollo spacecraft. Me and Buzz Aldrin. And Neil Armstrong. Only I was the first one to set foot on the moon, not the other guy. ‘One small step for man.’” And then he slapped me on the leg. I kept scrolling back through the archives, further and further until I came to the baby pictures of me. God, I was an ugly kid — big fat head, skinny arms and legs. Bald as well.
I’d seen them all before but now something seemed different. Something about my parents. They looked like the younger version of my parents in my math class daydream. I felt my head get dizzy and I was losing focus.
“Tell me about Glencoe,” I said, frightening myself. “Tell me about the deer.”
My father kept his eyes focussed on the road. “I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Tell me about Kyle,” I said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
My father sat in silence for a minute. We both looked straight ahead a
t the road back home. “Kyle was my grandfather’s name,” he said. “You must have known that. He designed ships. Big luxury liners. When I was young, he told me stories about the sea, about the old days at sea.”
It was a diversionary tactic. Kyle had been the name of my great-grandfather but there was more. Much more. My head was swirling with theories. Was I experiencing some sort of strange ancestral memory? Hearing about my great-grandfather was one thing, but the images in my head were not in sync with his life at all. Maybe his name had been swimming around in my brain. Maybe it was all mixed up and didn’t make any logical sense like a dream. Maybe there was just a photoshopped version of me by my parents’ bed, just as my parents had said. Or maybe there was much more to it.
“Your great-grandfather helped design the Victoria III. They called it unsinkable.”
“Like the Titanic.”
“Something like that.”
“Bet he had a beard.”
“You got that right. Check this out.” My father tapped the little keypad on the centre of the steering wheel. He entered his pass code and the satlink took him to another set of his personal archives. The vid-screen before me blinked once and then again and I was staring at a photograph of my great-grandfather. The great bearded one. His eyes blazed at me — deep and fiery. Something about him frightened me, something in that look — it was ambition, I think. Drive.
The screen clicked through photo after photo. The man. The ships he designed and his wife, my great-grandmother, an extraordinarily tall woman with a stunning face. “Do you have any images of them when they were younger?”
My father tapped the steering keypad again. I was watching him. I don’t think I meant to, but I was watching his fingers on the imbedded keyboard. I caught his password: patches.
As I stared at the photos of the young version of my great-grandparents, I was drawn back to another time and place. I could see that they were very much in love. I tapped the sort function and set it for time sequence so that I scrolled rather quickly through images of them as they grew older. I noticed that something changed: they seemed to grow less interested in each other. He grew fiercer in his looks, as if he were determined to accomplish something of great importance to him. She grew distant and sad. I felt sorry for them, these ancestors of mine whom I had never met.
Deconstructing Dylan Page 6