Shoulder the Sky

by Lesley Choyce

  “Anybody can be like Sybil. She’s not mysterious at all. Compared to you.”

  “Why do you think I’m mysterious?”

  Uh oh. I was not a great conversationalist or a very good bullshitter. I tried to imagine how Scott might have handled this. Scott was born with charm and tact and verbal skills stitched right onto his chromosomes. I was born only with a high IQ and quirky interests. I tried to smile like Scott would have smiled. “You have a look about you.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah. Something unfathomable.”

  “Wow.”

  Mr. Willis was tapping his pointer stick on the table in front of us. Time to shut up. Mr. Willis never spoke at all during study hall. He only tapped with a pointer stick or a ruler or sometimes smacked a book down loud so that it made a great walloomph sound in the high-ceilinged cafeteria where we had afternoon study hall. He saved me from having to rifle through the thesaurus in my brain for more big words. I didn’t know why Kathy wanted to be mysterious. She wasn’t any more mysterious than the rest, but I still had my feelings for her, so I would go home and work on a list of compliments to throw her way: cryptic, enigmatic, perplexing, and paradoxical, but unfathomable was a good start.

  Mr. Egan had called Dave to tell him that they believed I might be “at risk” over the death of Scott. I give credit to all the teachers and neighbours who worried about my mental well-being. I suppose, in my own way, I was paradoxical, enigmatic, cryptic, and, to some, unfathomable. If they knew about my website and some of the stuff I rambled on about, they would probably try to put me in a loony bin.

  Dave seemed kind of nervous when I went for my next visit. He was eating a tofu and tuna fish sandwich and apologized. “I had to schedule you on my lunch break. Want half?”

  “S’okay. You didn’t really need to see me.”

  “Well, I’m your shrink. Bob Egan had some concerns. Wanna tell me about it?”

  I told him about Scott. About how it made me feel. I told him about the HMMWMT getting suspended. “What is it Mr. Egan thinks I will do?”

  “He thinks that sometimes things like this push a kid over the edge.”

  “Or an adult.”

  “Adults too.”

  “They shouldn’t have suspended Mr. Miller. Now they say he’s not coming back at all. Parents don’t trust him. Playing electric guitar in class wasn’t normal, they said.”

  “It’s not fair, is it?”

  “He was the best teacher in the school.”

  “What about you? How do you feel about Scott?”

  “I feel guilty because I was jealous of him. And when I heard he was gone, I realized that Kathy might pay more attention to me rather than him. I’m sorry I feel that way.”

  “That’s okay. Guilt is good. In its own way. It doesn’t have to last. It’s one way to deal with the loss. Let it evolve into something positive.”

  A typical Dave way of saying something. “I suppose.”

  “Are you going to go to his funeral?”

  “No.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “We weren’t really that close or anything.”

  “I was just asking.”

  Dave nibbled his sandwich. “We haven’t talked about your mother for a while.”

  “I could see this coming a mile off.”

  “You don’t want to talk bout it?”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “You been to her grave?”

  “Not since she was buried.” But as soon as the words were out, they felt like a lie. I guess it showed on my face.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you made me feel guilty about not going there.”

  “Why do you think people go to graveyards after they lose someone?”

  “Personal reasons, I guess.” I was working on firewalls and not sure why.

  “Very personal, I’m sure. But I want you to go there, okay? It’s been a while.”

  “She’s not there. That’s just her body. I don’t see the point.”

  “Maybe there is no point. It’s up to you.”

  Dave finished his sandwich. “You think I can tell Mr. Egan you are okay? Safe. No big complications — about Scott I mean.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay with that. I’ll be all right. I’ll get over my guilt thing and all that.”

  “Cool.”

  On the bus ride home, I tried to picture the gravesite in the cemetery but I couldn’t see it. It was as if I had never been there, not even at the funeral. But I could picture in my head the route from my house to the cemetery clear as day. I could see every street, every stop sign, the houses and stores along the way. I had a kind of sick feeling in my stomach.

  When I got home I sat down on the back steps and looked at the flower bed. It was grown over with weeds and the flowers were unhealthy looking, some of them dead. “I’m sorry,” I said to them, sorry for letting them go unattended. I leaned over and began to yank out big clumps of weeds. And I tried to remember the names of the flowers: delphinium, marigold, peony, lily, gladioli, cosmos.

  I remembered with crystal clarity the conversation of a small boy sitting on those back steps with his mother.

  “Where are you driving to today?”

  “Norway.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Junk

  There are four and a half million people in Norway and I don’t know even one of them. I wonder what it’s like in Norway in the winter when it stays dark for almost all of the day. It’s like that in the Northwest Territories, too, they say. I think I’d freak over that.

  Why you should be interested in Norway, I don’t know. They were Vikings at one time and they had lots of wars. In a war, people kill other people on purpose. They think they are doing the right thing by killing their enemy. You would expect that we would have evolved past that by now but we haven’t. I don’t think the Norwegians do a lot of organized killing anymore, but some countries still do. The list is too long to include here.

  There are thousands of islands that are part of Norway. On many of those islands you could live a very isolated, peaceful life. But it might get lonely sometimes in the depths of a dark, cold winter.

  Emerso

  I was sitting in the cafeteria at lunch hour with Darrell. “Sorry I didn’t call you back last night after you left that message,” I said. “I get confused sometimes.”

  “Confusion is good. The state prior to enlightenment, said one Chinese philosopher.”

  “Scott Rutledge never looked confused. He always looked like he knew what he was doing. Like he understood what was going on.”

  “I could never be like that.”

  “Me neither,” I agreed. “Many hits on your site?”

  I nodded. “Lots of people out there killing time.”

  “Killing time. Ever think about why we say it that way?”

  “It’s weird isn’t it?”

  “Lotta stuff is weird. I’m thinking that maybe it’s too weird and we’ll never figure it out. Not enough time.”

  “Tempus fugit.”

  “Exactly.” Darrell paused, looked toward the fluorescent lights like he was waiting for a message from some alien friends. Then he shook his head. “I just don’t know what the methodology is. It’s really tragic about Scott. Martin, if you could make a trade, I mean if we could manipulate time and space and stuff, and you could trade your life as you are now, alive and breathing, for having lived the life of Scott Rutledge — you know with his looks, the girls, and all that — but now you’re dead — would you do it?”

  Leave it to Darrell to pose such a question. I didn’t have to think twice. “Yes.”

  “Me too.”

  “Too much killing time, I guess. Darrell, if I tell you something, would you promise not to tell anyone?”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  “I think I know how to drive.”

  Junk

  The imagination has teeth. You bite into a thing and chew on it. You leave m
arks in what you are chewing. You process reality this way. You chew it, you taste it with your tongue, and then you swallow it and it becomes part of you or it ends up as shit.

  The line between what is real and what is imagined is a fuzzy line. It’s all based on perception. Just because we can’t see it with our eyes doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You don’t see the electromagnetic waves coming at your television set, do you? But they are real. (This is if you have the old antenna thing and not just cable.)

  In the end, what is real and what is not real is probably less important than what you believe. I believe life would be much better for me in Norway, for example, but I have never been there. I don’t speak Norwegian and I don’t have Viking blood. I may not feel at all at home around Norwegians but I wouldn’t mind living on one of those thousand islands off the coast. When it got dark in the winter for days at a time, I would sit inside with my imagination and be content.

  If you want something to do, sit in a totally dark room and write down what goes through your head. Don’t use paper with lines on it because you won’t be able to see the lines. Your writing will be sloppy and go all over the place, but I think you’ll be able to make sense of it later.

  Leonardo Da Vinci wrote notes in his notebook backwards by looking at his handwriting in a mirror. Some think this was for secrecy, but that sounds lame. Probably, it was more a matter of trying to make his brain work in different ways. Leonardo Da Vinci, they say, was curious about everything. He was curious about water bugs and stars, but he also invented new styles of clothing and horribly effective instruments of war. He designed a really evil-looking military tank with sharp spikes sticking out on all sides to pierce anybody who came close. Inside the tank were horses that moved it along. It was a long time ago.

  Curiosity invented the nuclear bomb. It’s hard to come to a conclusion about whether curiosity is a good thing or bad thing for a human being. It probably all depends on what kind of human being you are.

  Emerso

  Lilly announced she was breaking up with Jake. This was an oft-repeated performance.

  “Congratulations. He’s a weasel.”

  “Shut up. You don’t know anything.”

  “Lilly, be nice to your brother. He’s under a lot of stress.” It was my father, passing through the kitchen on his way to the TV set in the living room.

  “Dad, I think we should move to Alaska,” Lilly shouted, but he was already out of the room.

  “Maybe next week,” he said from a distance.

  “I guess Jake was okay,” I conceded. A boldfaced lie.

  “Jake is irresponsible, inconsiderate, rude, self-centred, stupid, irritating, cruel, and he doesn’t like to take showers.”

  “Yeah, but I mean aside from that, he was okay.”

  Lilly smiled. I had forgotten what she looked like when she smiled. It was Mom’s smile, but I didn’t say that out loud.

  “Want a coffee?” she asked.

  “French vanilla cappuccino, maybe.”

  So we walked down to Tim Horton’s and she drank two cups of coffee, black. I had my French vanilla cappuccino.

  “Guys don’t drink that stuff,” she said. “You’re not turning gay or anything, are you?”

  “Not to worry. Besides, isn’t that kind of unfair to assume drinking French vanilla cappuccino is a gay thing for a guy to do?”

  Lilly scrunched up her nose. “You are so analytical. Doesn’t your brain get tired just analyzing stuff all the time?”

  “Yes.” I stared at the black lipstick marks Lilly had left on the white cup. It made the cup look like it had a moustache.

  “So things were pretty bad with Jake?”

  “Don’t make me even think about it.”

  “Just thought you might want to talk.”

  “Jake is past tense.”

  “That’s very grammatical.”

  “It’s not about grammar, ding dong. Let’s not talk about him. Or me. Let’s talk about Martin. How are you?”

  It was like my sister had just arrived back from an extended visit to the evil empire of Jake. I didn’t quite know how to react. “I’m doing okay,” I said. “Dave’s been helping me a lot.”

  “You still do some pretty peculiar stuff.”

  “It’s my age.”

  “What were you doing digging around in Mom’s old flower bed at eleven o’clock the other night? That was pretty creepy. I thought maybe you had like killed someone, chopped them up into little pieces, and were burying the pieces in the garden.”

  “Right,” I said and sipped my cappuccino. I couldn’t understand why she’d make something like that up. But then sisters like mine were hard to figure out. I decided to change the subject. “I think they fired Mr. Miller.”

  “He was my favourite teacher in the school.”

  “He lost it in class after Scott Rutledge got killed.”

  “We should go see him.”

  “Can we do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “All right. I think Darrell should come with us.”

  “The Egg Man?”

  “He doesn’t get out of the house much.”

  We looked Mr. Miller up in the phone book and tried calling but didn’t get an answer. We picked up Darrell and went anyway. We rang and we knocked. No answer. But there was music coming from the house. Loud metal music. We waited for a lull between tunes and hammered hard on the door. It finally opened.

  The heavy metal mud wrestling math teacher was home alone. He had been drinking. “Let me turn down the music,” he said. “Come in.”

  Mr. Miller was wearing a T-shirt and sweat pants. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. The house smelled like beer. “We came over to say hi,” Lilly said.

  “Things are a bit of a mess,” he said apologetically, picking up some music and wrestling magazines from the sofa so we could sit down. The room looked like thieves or vandals had trashed it.

  “I’m sorry to hear they kicked you out of school,” Darrell blurted out.

  Mr. Miller rubbed his face. “Oh, that. I’ve always been a little too emotional, I guess. People expect that just because I’m big and play that macho image thing that I don’t hurt easily. But inside, I’m like china.” He started a zigzag trek around the room, picking up crushed beer cans. He had an armload of them and looked at us like he didn’t know what to do next, so Lilly went into the kitchen and came out with a black garbage bag.

  “You should recycle those,” Darrell offered up.

  “Yeah, Darrell, I will. I promise.”

  “How are you feeling?” Lilly asked Mr. Miller. I was kind of shocked that she was trying again to be helpful.

  “I’m working it out, I think. I liked Scott. I just hated seeing a kid get wasted like that for no reason.”

  “Life sucks,” Lilly said. It was a favoured motto of hers and Jake’s.

  “And then you freaking die,” Mr. Miller said, dumping his armload of crushed beer cans into the bag.

  “Are you going to appeal your dismissal?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet. Maybe I should move on from teaching.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Why? You think that it matters? You think it does any good? Kids like me because I’m a good entertainer. That’s me. Show biz. But that’s all.”

  Lilly pulled out a pack of gum, opened it, and flipped a piece into her mouth in that way she has of doing it. Then she offered a piece to Mr. Miller. He fumbled with the wrapper and put the gum in his mouth. “The year I had you for math, I have to say you were the only teacher I had who wasn’t ugly and ignorant.”

  “Gee thanks.”

  “When my sister says that, she means that, Mr. Miller.”

  Then Darrell cleared his throat and broke our code of silence by telling Mr. Miller and Lilly about our discussion. “Martin and I both agreed we’d change places with Scott — retroactively speaking — even though he’s now dead and we’re still alive.”

  M
r. Miller looked startled. “That’s not good. In fact, it’s a little scary.”

  “I’m still seeing the shrink,” I said.

  “My brother needs all the help he can get,” my sister said.

  “And I’m working things out in my own way,” Darrell added. “I don’t quite have the emotional baggage Martin has.”

  Mr. Miller looked halfway between stunned and bewildered. Lilly took the opportunity to say, “There are a lot of messed up kids at that school. And you understand them. Some teachers just go there to do a job and get paid. You were there to do more.”

  “I tried but it didn’t seem to do any good.”

  “You probably couldn’t tell if you did any good,” Darrell explained, “unless you could leap ahead ten years and see those students. Then you’d know for sure if you had an impact. If we had time travel, you could do that.”

  “Look at me,” Lilly said. “You had an impact on my life. You really did. Because of you I want to be a teacher. I’m going to go to university and get an education degree.” Lilly was lying, of course, but it was a lie generated out of kindness.

  Mr. Miller looked at the guitar hanging on the wall. “I was thinking about the band, a reunion, maybe going back on the road. We had some good times, you know. I used to be one hell of a guitar player.”

  “You still are, Mr. Miller,” I said.

  Stuff That May or May Not Be Important

  Rollo May says that if you put a man in a cage, the first thing he does is get angry. He shouts or refuses to eat and rattles the bars of his cage. But sooner or later, he quiets down and begins to accept his fate. He gets a hollow look about him. After a while, his anger shifts to mere resentment and before long he starts to lose his feelings of rebellion. Worse yet, he eventually considers himself responsible for his predicament. After that there is not much hope, perhaps even if he is freed from the cage.

  Emerso

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN