Ray Vs the Meaning of Life

by Michael F Stewart

  I slink out of sight and return to scraping the snotties hanging from the shower ceiling. Now I’m singing all out, only quieting when a jack stumbles in with bleary eyes, but I don’t stop. I clean the showers better than they’ve ever been cleaned; even the calcified showerheads glisten. I draw a deep breath of moist, citrus-scented air and strike up what I can recall of some Adele songs.

  I began my rounds of the camp yesterday evening so hit the rest of it this morning when a different shift is returning or waking. My own enlightenment has not transferred to the camp, and most of what I receive from campers are complaints about the mud, the bugs, the lack of food options. I have another noise complaint, this one from a woman who sleeps between two night-shift workers. I ask her if she’d be willing to switch slabs with Buck. The move happens within minutes of my suggestion. Buck, red-eyed from his shift, claps me on the shoulders and asks if he can give me a tip.

  I finish my office chores and go to vacuum the pool’s sides, still giddy with the success of the day.

  The ice bear has melted some, the rough hacks smoothed by the warmth. Facets shed rainbows across the gray concrete. I brush down the sides of the pool and the bottom. It clouds with algae and I go back to the shed and pick up the chlorine, dumping a healthy dose into the pool before I start the pump to filter and circulate the water. Penny’s there watching the chlorine fumes pour off the surface.

  “Did you just make it hot?” she asks in awe.

  “No, it’s stuff to clean it.”

  “So I can swim?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You said tomorrow.”

  “I know. I know.” I snap a little and then calm down, shaking it off. “The air’s warm now. I figure it’ll be another day and then you can swim in it.”

  “One more sleeps.”

  “Yeah, one more sleep.”

  She starts to walk away and then stops, turns, “You always say that and then after the sleep you say it again,” she says. “Why do you lie?”

  “It wasn’t—I’m not a—I didn’t mean it as a lie,” I say. “We get busy, and other things are sometimes more important.”

  “More important than the lying,” she says and, as she walks away, she adds, “I hate it here.”

  It’s like the good parts of this morning never even happened. I swallow the guilt and empty the pool filter, including two dead moles. Shiny black coats glisten, lifeless corpses but with near-magical snouts, fingers on the tip acting as their way of exploring the world. I’m doing what I can. Proceed. I hear Dalen’s order—my mantra. I can.

  I bury the moles in the playground sand, and then creep up on Pulled Beef and peer over the counter.

  On the floor of the trailer, Tina sits with one of Dalen’s books in her lap. She’s taking notes. My heart starts to pound. A warm flush prickles over me as I crouch beneath the counter.

  Then I hear her banging around in the fridge.

  This is my chance. It even fits the lyrics of the song. I begin to sing “Hello” by Adele. The moment I start, silence fills Pulled Beef. Even a nearby jack scraping a barbecue grill stops to listen. It’s a love song. It’s a beautiful song, but of course I’m tearing it to pieces with my voice. I strain for every high note, and crackle over the lows. I must have listened to the karaoke version a half-billion times, but my version’s a little like listening to the cows waiting at a slaughterhouse.

  But I’m trying. And caution’s in the wind, bending the tops of pine trees.

  From the road Crystal shakes her head. I give her a little wave and then her eyes widen. She grins and points. It’s not at me. Above my head. I sense Tina leaning out over the counter. I smile, which actually helps me hit an especially high note, but it’s not her. It’s Salminder. I falter.

  Crystal cackles and walks on.

  “Why, thank you, Ray,” Salminder says.

  “Supreme dork!” Tina yells from inside. The trailer door swings open. She sprints through it, not looking back. I start to clamber up after her, but Salminder’s hand’s on my head, shoving me back down.

  “Let her go,” he says. But still I struggle, the day toppling down around me. As I fight to my feet, I wrench away, my elbow catching Salminder on the side of his head. A fat purple turban falls to the mud at my feet. I stop.

  “Damn,” Salminder says. And he lunges for it. “Will you get that for me, please,” he whispers and then retreats into the shadows of the truck.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, holding the turban up and then rushing inside to give it to him when he doesn’t come forward.

  “Without hair, the turban doesn’t stay on quite as well,” he explains. “It’s the treatments.”

  His hair’s scraggly and patchy, his beard and eyebrows too. Without all that hair, he seems smaller, fragile even. “Your hair, I’m sorry, that’s important, right? You’re not supposed to cut it.”

  “Not since the day I was born.” He’s rewrapping the turban on his head, trying to tighten the cloth and wipe away the smear of mud. “My hair, my Kesh, forms part of my connection to God. It is a manifestation of my love for Him, and my link to Guru Nanak. Its loss is not an affront, but a sadness.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were here.”

  “It’s okay, but maybe . . .” His smile is sad. “Perhaps now is not the time to confuse Tina with this.” I nod, my throat tight. “Please, excuse me.”

  He keeps one hand on his headgear as he follows in the tracks of his daughter. This is big; for years, Salminder’s been like a father to me, but his loyalty lies with his daughter. I’ve forced our relationship to change.

  I slump to the ground, tears in my eyes. I’m angry at myself for being so selfish. At Dalen for convincing me to do this. Don’t assign blame—yeah, right. Dalen’s book is open, and written on the bookmark are Tina’s notes.

  Steps to Meaning:

  Set goals

  Control your negative thoughts

  Meditate

  Visualize your success

  Keep your promises

  Live your days as if they are your last

  Remember the golden rule

  Beside each item in the list is a column of famous people. Some ancient like Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Lao Tzu, others a bit more modern, Martin Luther King, and then Tony Robbins, Robin Sharma, Oprah Winfrey.

  Thoughts lead to actions, actions to habit, habit to destiny.<===Gandhi? Buddha?

  I see what she’s done. She’s noted who Dalen’s stealing his sayings from. Dalen’s nothing more than a plagiarist. A fraud. It’s all spiritual guru karaoke.

  I don’t like it.

  Chapter 33

  I’m listening to some nine-year-old sing “Hello” when Dalen taps me on the shoulder.

  “You all right?” he asks.

  I want to call him out, but I bite my tongue—I need to catch Dalen at the right time, when he’s repeated something irrefutably not his.

  I pull the headphones down to hang them around my neck. My stomach roils from the old box of Kraft Dinner I’d discovered under the sink. It was not an afternoon of champions. I’d eaten a couple of burgers while waiting for Tina to return. She never did. Salminder took her shift, said he wanted to since he had another chemo session tomorrow and wouldn’t be around to help out. But I know the real reason. I’d embarrassed Tina. It confirmed my dorkage.

  I stare back at the computer screen and the kid singing his face off.

  “This guy’s like three years old and he sings better than I ever will. Elephants paint better than I can. And I’m going to take a wild guess that I can find people out there better at everything than me. Why focus on anything when there’s no way I have a chance at being the best at it?”

  Dalen scratches his head for a moment, and I think of Salminder and how weird it must feel for him not to have any hair. How powerless he must feel.

  “You’re right.”

  “Great. More tough love,” I say.

  “There is one other secret I’ll let you
in on,” Dalen says, in his I’m-going-to-tell-you-something-important voice. “Comparison is poison.”

  I shrug and bite back, “Like comparing yourself to Jesus or Buddha?”

  He frowns at me.

  “Not really what I meant . . .” When I don’t explain, he continues. “Well, a couple hundred years ago, who would you have known? How would you have gotten your news if you lived back then?”

  I frown. “I’d probably have been on a farm, so my family, and maybe we’d get news from the next couple of farms over. I dunno? Trips to town for gossip.”

  “Local gossip. Maybe a small-town newspaper. And it would be infrequent. Good. And what about when your mom was a kid?”

  “County fair? Newspaper, no—radio and television, right?” I’m thinking about those pixelated newscasts.

  “Did she know that some kid in Japan had figured out how to create a robotic arm? Or that a five-year-old played Bach in the UK?”

  “Probably not.” The kid in the video’s fingers are dancing over the strings of the guitar, and I can hear the thin warbling of his song through the headphones on the table.

  “No. She came in third at the cross-country race. She fell in love with the second best-looking boy in school. She was good at math. Get it?” I shake my head. “Her frame of reference was smaller. She was the big fish in a small pond. Today, with the Internet, the small pond is now an ocean. If your mom was a kid now, she’d have seen that her third place in her tiny school wouldn’t have put her in the top thirty percent of runners, or her math skills wouldn’t get her into even the worst Ivy League schools, or put her on track to being a Google engineer. Her boyfriend wasn’t all that good-looking, not when compared to the models you see everywhere now. Comparison is poison. The poison is available at any time. It detracts from very real accomplishments and it hides all the steps and hardships required along the way to any achievement, even the hard work required from a prodigy. The trick is to look inward. Did you do your best, did you beat your own best time? Do you understand your math? Be your own pond.”

  “Be your own pond.” I actually type it into Google Search to see who he stole the concept from as he gabs on. I get nothing.

  “Conquer yourself. Exactly.”

  “But isn’t it all just a matter of what you tell yourself?”

  “Yes!” He pumps his fist.

  “But aren’t we lying to ourselves then?” On the screen I can see that many people have riffed on the “Conquer yourself” concept, Buddha and Plato among them.

  Dalen starts to say something, then stops. He holds up his hand, shakes it at me, and then breathes heavily from his nose. “Okay,” he says, “try this. Imagine there’s a nationwide competition. And you get an A in your high school. You go on to compete for the whole region of say ten high schools, and again, you get an A in that group too. Then it’s ten regions competing and you get another A. Half the country, and still you get an A. It’s down to you and a hundred other kids in a final class. If you get an A, you will be one of the best students in the whole country. You work so hard and finally you come out with a D. You’re devastated, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes, and some of the kids got Fs too. They failed.”

  “Sucks to be them.”

  “That’s what the problem is. That kid who got the F. He is the ninety-ninth best student in the entire country, and he feels like a failure because he came in second to last. He may never become that amazing engineer or physicist because while he’s comparing himself to the ten smartest kids, he’s forgetting what makes him different. When the news and the Internet only endlessly cover the exceptions, the one in a million, it makes everyone else feel like failures.”

  “Yeah, but, that’s the way it works. You make money, you’re successful. Get a degree, I dunno, maybe become a senator. That’s how you know you’re doing it right,” I say.

  “Stop measuring. Life is your video game. You’re talking about the measurements of society—that’s a crappy game. Choose your own labels and stories. They are all made up anyways. Remember that tulip you saw? If you lived in seventeenth-century Denmark, that tulip might have been worth tens of thousands of dollars. Measurements are like grades, degrees, money in the bank: all of it is for people who do not control their destinies. They are controlled by those around them. I’m not saying don’t be hard on yourself. Learn languages. Instruments, or the fine art of finance. These are wondrous achievements, but mastery is not an A. It’s so much greater than that. Embrace your progression to mastery. Move forward and do not look to the external for approval. Let your inner joy carry you.”

  “Mastery over measurement,” I say, coming up with my new password for the day.

  Sadness seems to make Dalen’s head heavy as it waggles on his neck. He inspects the lines on his palms.

  “Not learning that message destroyed my marriage. It lost me my daughter. I always wanted more. To achieve more. It was never enough and never would be. Until my wife left me, and I realized that the game I played was all wrong. It wasn’t even a game I wanted to play.

  “Growing up today and being compared to YouTube stars and child millionaires, I wouldn’t know where to start. Most of us are not exceptions, but all of us can become exceptional. We become exceptional by not playing by the Internet’s rules and labels.”

  “Make my own emojis? You know, the smiley faces.”

  His head snaps up and I face that fierceness in his eyes. I hold it.

  “Exactly,” he says.

  And I do see, because I’ve done it. I’ve looked at lots of kids with millions of views on YouTube playing their guitars. Or heard about kids starting companies and making millions by the time they were seventeen. I’ve wondered what’s wrong with me, rather than what’s right with me.

  I want to confront him for stealing the wisdom of all the people on Tina’s bookmark, but the bitterness has ebbed. The video’s over, and YouTube’s picked another prodigy for me to feel inadequate in comparison. Still, there’s something wrong with what he’s saying, but it’s elusive.

  “Charlie’s invited you to dinner,” Dalen says. “That’s why I’m here.”

  I point to the pot of congealing KD. I’m not sure how far to trust Dalen anymore. I wonder whether I’m being brainwashed and need some space. The whole proceeding without caution thing didn’t work out so well with Tina. “Sorry,” I say. “I’m full up, and besides, Obelix and I are working on Mud tonight.”

  Dalen eyes me for a minute. “Rain check,” he says.

  “Dalen?” I ask. I have it. I see his hypocrisy. “You said not to measure, but didn’t you say I wasn’t worth helping because others could make a bigger difference?”

  Dalen looks down and takes a deep breath. “Even gurus can be wrong,” he says and heads out into the drizzle.

  There’s another knock on the door. I figure it’s Obelix, and I don’t care if he sees me in my underwear, so I shout for him to come on in.

  Penny just laughs as I struggle to find a towel to cover up.

  “Hey, hey,” I say as I pull the blanket off the tiny love seat in the back. The blanket had been hiding a gash, and sponge pops from between the lips of the tear.

  “Pool’s ready!” she says. “My mom says I can go in if you go with me.”

  I hesitate, but there’s this look in her eyes that says she’s living in the moment, and this is maybe the moment when she learns that adults won’t always let her down.

  I shuffle over to the closet where I keep my clothes and pull on swim trunks beneath the towel. Then I say, “Race you there.” And she squeals again.

  Chapter 34

  “Not today,” I say and push Dalen aside as I open the door to my trailer before he has a chance to rat-a-tat-tat on it.

  “Good luck, Ray,” he says to my back. “I’d be willing to say a few words at the event if you’d like.”

  I hustle down the path as he trails off. I’ve been up all night working with Obelix on Mud and Fire. S
unny Days’ first ever race. To encourage participation, we set it between two mine shifts in the early evening.

  The gun fires at 5:00 p.m. I have to do everything else beforehand. I sprint to the cleaning products, taking a long route to avoid Tina’s trailer, telling myself that I’m inspecting the race course. Salminder’s back in the hospital, but I can’t bring myself to face Tina. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want to talk to me anyway.

  Sloshing some detergent into a pail with water, I start on the women’s washroom before anyone arrives. There are eight stalls and six sinks, and each takes a few minutes to clean. I start with the sinks. I’ve decided that doing them after the toilets is kind of gross. An hour later, the floor shines. I shrug as a woman tromps in, clods of mud peeling from her boots. Nothing lasts forever. And you can’t have Mud and Fire without actual mud.

  I can’t decide whether I’m more excited about the Mud or the Fire part.

  “Get out of here, kid,” the woman says with a hand on the stall door.

  “Oh, sorry, just thinking.”

  “Could’ve fooled me—don’t let me catch you peeking.”

  The woman’s big, has a foot on me in every direction; could’ve taken Grandma’s bear. I wonder what Grandma would have thought of the Mud and Fire event. Is this what she meant by doing something with my life? Her recipe? The woman grunts, and I waddle out with the pails to dump them in the woods. Then I repeat the process with the men’s washrooms and showers. My mother, who seems to have nothing better to do, watches from her lawn furniture. The expression on her face tells me that the glow of having helped Penny and her mother has long ago faded.

  The sun isn’t quite out, but the rain stopped last night.

  Sixteen pickup trucks are signed up to compete, and a very surprising twelve ATVs. Over half the signups are care of Deneze, who rallied the rez to participate. The trucks will be timed around the course, which weaves through the park along all the roadways. Fastest time wins. The ATVs will run in two separate heats. Top three from each will move to the final. I’m the starter and Obelix is the race official, except when he’s racing his truck, which I catch him polishing.