Clifford

by Harold R. Johnson

  It seemed impossible. The memory was too clear, like it was only a few years before, or maybe even the last time I’d looked at them.

  “We can all do that, you know. If we try. We can remember what actually happened in history if our parents or grandparents or great-grandparents were there. Their cells are in us and those cells carry memory.”

  Memory, memories, remembering; I can’t trust my own brain to remember. My first clear memory, the farthest back that I can go, is of being about one year old. I calculate the age by the year we moved up the hill, the year after the flood. The water from the river came up higher than anyone ever remembered, almost to the back of the house. There are two memories here. One is of Clifford showing me how high the water was in the well, almost to the top. The other, the one I told him was my very first memory, is of opening the door to the log house at the bottom of the hill and coming in from bright sunlight and having to wait until my eyes adjusted to the dark. The image that I call my first memory is of Mom and Aunt Maggie sitting at a table by a window to my right.

  Clifford pointed out that was impossible. If the window had been to my right, that would have been the north wall, and there were no windows on the north wall. No one ever puts a window on the north side because that’s the cold side.

  He was correct. There was no window on that side of the house. But that was my memory. That was the image that came up, clear and concise: Mom looking younger than any other time; Aunt Maggie laughing, which was not unusual. Aunt Maggie was always laughing.

  My memory was flipped. It was a mirror image. It had been stored like a photo negative, and when I retrieved it, it came up backwards.

  I look back up at the stars, reconnect with the two on the end of the Big Dipper that don’t quite line up with Polaris. North hasn’t moved. It’s still there above the old house. I am here. In a good place.

  Knowing where I am also informs me of who I am.

  I belong here — this place, this earth, this time.

  I am connected — this life, this galaxy, this universe.

  I remember, shortly after I got out of the navy, Clifford and I shared an apartment in Saskatoon.

  I worked at the Key Lake Uranium Mine during the exploration and development phase, three weeks at the mine, one week out. The week out was mostly a party, lots of alcohol and eating in restaurants.

  Clifford worked as a radio and television repairman in one of the last shops in the city that still repaired televisions. It was a dying profession. He’d really miscalculated that one. He’d thought that electronics was going to be the cutting edge of the technology of the future. It ended up that televisions would become disposable. No one would pay to repair one when it was cheaper to just buy a new set, with colour and a bigger screen.

  I’d gotten off the plane after a three-week stint in the mine, in my early twenties, with the vigour, strength, and testosterone that my age determined. Three weeks of running dozer, eating sand and dust, working with a big iron machine that rattled my bones and probably my mind as well — I was ready to head for the nightclubs, raise a little hell.

  Clifford had the microwave oven torn apart and spread all over the kitchen table.

  “What’s wrong with it?” I tossed my packsack onto the couch.

  “Nothing. I just need a piece out of it.”

  “Fuck. I paid good money for that. Couldn’t you steal the parts you need from work?”

  “No, they don’t make this kind anymore.”

  I understood what he meant. That microwave, or, rather, what was left of that microwave, was an older model built when it was believed that we needed a little CANDU reactor to warm up a cold cup of coffee.

  “Aw fuck!” is what I said, but Oh well is what I meant and what Clifford understood me to have said. I had never really much liked that unit anyway. It made me nervous. I knew enough about radiation from my navy training, how to prepare a ship to survive the fallout of a nuclear attack, and from the little bit of radiation safety training they gave us at the mine. I’d always stood well back from that microwave whenever it was on, when it growled and rattled. It had a good, solid steel case, but I doubted that it provided much shielding from the damaging effects of high-intensity microwave radiation.

  “So what’re you building?”

  “Rocket.”

  “What the fuck you need a rocket for?” Even though I had not trusted it — it was, after all, me who had bought it — if he was going to take it apart and make something else out of it, it should be something we could use.

  He stopped fidgeting with whatever it was he was fidgeting with, looked up at me, looked me directly in the eyes, and asked, “You ever hear of a microwave rocket?”

  “No.”

  “Well, neither has anyone else. This is going to be the first.”

  Okay, so then he had me interested.

  “Tell me.”

  He rubbed his beard, smiled; there was a mischief in his eyes. “Fundamental physics. Remember Einstein?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, he was wrong.” He switched off the oscilloscope. The one he borrowed money from me to buy and never paid me back. Doesn’t matter; between him and me, money flows without meaning. The glowing green screen with white grid lines faded to black. He disconnected the lead wires, coiled them up, and placed them on top of the set. “Before I can explain it to you, you have to be in the same headspace I was when I figured it out.”

  “And where was that?”

  “Peyote.”

  Peyote? Really? That was almost a mythical substance. LSD was easy to find — street acid that was mostly strychnine. Mescaline showed up once in a while, but that wasn’t real peyote; it was a synthetic almost-peyote. Most of what was out there was PCP, Angel Dust, and I never did really like it. It slowed me down too much, felt like I’d smoked embalming fluid.

  “Who’s got peyote?”

  “Al.”

  “How much?”

  “It’s free. Al’s got religion.”

  “Since when?” I really doubted that our most reliable dealer would ever give anything for free. With Al, there were never any samples, no checking it out first to see if it was any good. As with all dealers, you paid before you got stoned because no one would ever pay for a stone they already had.

  Clifford answered, “Since he started using peyote.”

  * * *

  Al’s apartment, Avenue F South, wasn’t far from the river and within walking distance to the Friendship Inn, where a guy could get a bowl of soup with a chunk of day-old bread every day at noon, hang around after, hang out with all the other peoples of the street. Clifford ate here often; not because he couldn’t afford his own lunch — he liked the people, liked their company, their conversation. Here were the long-haired, the remnants of the revolution, mingled with the old and wine-bottle wise.

  Al lit a cigarette (yes, you could still smoke in public spaces then), leaned back in his chair, all four hundred pounds of him. I worried about the chair. He eyed me, his head tilted to the side, doubt written all over his face. “I don’t know…” he started.

  “It’s alright,” Clifford offered. “He’s okay.”

  Al sat forward, the legs of his chair hard against the floor, leaned across the table, and looked intently at Clifford. “I don’t mean any disrespect, don’t get me wrong. It’s about enlightenment, and, yeah, I’d like to see the whole world enlightened. But your brother here, and I get it, I seriously get it, you want to coax him along, that’s cool, that’s really cool. But look at him, short hair, shaved. Look at how he dresses. He has military written all over him. You can’t fix a mind like that.”

  Clifford leaned forward as well, elbows on the table, his face squarely in front of Al’s, an empty soup bowl between them. I may as well have not been there; neither looked at me. “Al, why do people join the military?”


  “God save the fucken queen. Rah! Rah! Rah! To be the leaders on the path of destruction.”

  “There’s no rich kids in the army. They’re all like Ray. They join up looking for a career. That’s how they suck them in. Military people are just ordinary people.”

  “They might have been ordinary people when they signed on the line, but man, that’s one big brain fuck they go through; and when they’re done with them, after they’ve changed them, remade them in the image of the soldier, taught them to shout ‘Yes Sir, No Sir, Three bags full Sir,’ they’re not one of the people anymore — they’re something else, something different, they become them and see us as the other. They only know us and them. Rah, Rah, Rah Us — Fuck, Fuck, Fuck Them. March in ranks of four, salute, shine your fucken shoes.” Al paused, took a moment to breathe. “You know what Einstein said. He said that anyone who put on a uniform and marched in rank was disqualified from having a brain; all they required was a naked spinal column.”

  If you’re arguing with Clifford, it’s not a good idea to throw out an icon like Einstein to support your position.

  “You’re quoting the father of the bomb.” He put it out there, put it into the space between his face and Al’s face.

  Al opened his mouth — either to speak or to swallow.

  Clifford held up a hand. “It’s okay,” he soothed. “I like Einstein too. He was pretty cool with that 2 percent solution to the draft and all he did for peace, but we have to be careful. The establishment throws his name out all the time, as though he were the Jesus or Buddha or something of the modern era. Every time they want to convince us to go along with one of their ideas, all they have to say is, ‘Einstein said,’ and the people go, ‘Oh yeah, you can’t argue with Einstein. If Einstein said it, it must be true,’ and they keep us going in that same direction.”

  Al weakened. “Okay, I’ll give you that.”

  “Now Ray here” — Clifford didn’t look at me, just indicated with his hand in my direction, kept his eyes locked with Al’s — “he wasn’t in the army, he was navy. There’s a difference. He knows about oceans, about big water; there’s depth to his understanding, whether he knows it or not. And anyway, they didn’t get to his brain. They couldn’t; he was stoned most of the time he was there.”

  Al was softening, but he wasn’t about to relent. He didn’t have any words left. He sat back, put some distance between himself and Clifford, and shook his head. The answer was still no.

  “We’re not asking for free,” Clifford pressed. “We’ll pay the going rate.”

  Al’s answer, slow and resolute: “You can’t buy salvation.”

  “You had to pay to get it; nobody gave it to you for free. We’ll reimburse you your costs.”

  Ultimately Al relented, though I doubt the money was the deciding factor. I did end up paying what I suspect was a little less than street price, probably Al’s wholesale price. We followed him to his apartment, Clifford and I in my truck, Al leading the way on his motorcycle. He made that 500 Honda look tiny; kind of reminded me of a circus bear on a bicycle.

  He lived in a basement suite with a private entrance around back of an old three-storey wood house that had once been the home of one of Saskatoon’s more privileged society, and was now divided into revenue generators for some slumlord.

  The peyote had a rubbery texture and not much for taste, like dried-out mushrooms. The couch I sat on didn’t have much spring left to it and it swallowed me into its lumpy core. Its legs had long since been broken off, and it sat on its box frame so that my knees were about equal height with my chin.

  Al sat on the floor, cross-legged, his shirt open and peeled back off his shoulders so that it hung behind him by his elbows. He mumbled a chant that someone might have taught him, or perhaps it was of his own making.

  I fell into the rhythm of his words, listened to its beat, until the beat of his song became tuned to the beat of my heart, which sounded louder and louder in my ears. Slowly the room filled with corn growing up out of the carpet, brilliant green stalks with golden tassels.

  Clifford came through the cornfield, reached down a hand to help me rise; led me, slowly, carefully out of the apartment and up the stairs, out into the backyard of tall grass and discarded furniture, mattresses, and broken tables, surrounded by a weathered fence that still had most of its boards standing upright.

  “What?” I looked around.

  “Rocket,” he answered. “Microwave,” he reminded me.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “I want to show you something.”

  “What?”

  “Space,” he said.

  I looked up. The afternoon was getting late. Evening wouldn’t be too far off. The sky was clear. Maybe when it got dark, we could see the stars.

  “No, not outer space. This space.” He held his hands up and apart.

  I looked at his hands; they looked like they might be made of stone. I looked closer to see the runes carved in the palm.

  “No, no, no.” He waved them in front of my eyes, and they blurred. “Space, I want you to see space.”

  I wasn’t getting it. I felt myself starting to rise up, lighter than air, I was a balloon about to float away.

  “Stand here.” He held me by the shoulder, turned me toward the back fence. “Look at that tree, but don’t look at the leaves; look at the spaces between the leaves until you don’t see tree but see only treeness.”

  I did as I was told, stared toward the west, focused on the pale smoky blue between the flittering green, watched as the image slowly changed dimensions and I began to see the tree’s silvery aura.

  “Got it?”

  “Yeah,” I answered slowly.

  “Okay now, look here.”

  I didn’t want to. I liked the tree with its glow.

  “Here,” he commanded.

  I looked. He was pointing toward the ground.

  “Look closely. Space is a thing, and like all other things it’s made of waves — electric waves, microwaves, radio waves, even time waves. Do you see it?”

  “Yeah.” And I did, I could see them: long, skinny waves, almost grey in colour. I looked up to where they were coming from. The sky was filled with long, thin, wavy threads, some coming down toward me, others travelling criss-cross in all directions.

  “Now look down here.”

  I looked.

  “See here. See where they hit the ground and bounce back.”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t have much for words; my world was too full of wonder.

  “See how the wave coming down meets the wave bouncing back up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “See how when the trough of one wave matches up with the peak of another wave, they cancel each other out.”

  “Oh yeah, cool.” I watched, fascinated, as space waves disappeared two by two before my eyes.

  “So, check it out. Look up.”

  I looked up.

  “See how many more space waves there are above you.”

  There were, many more, light grey and even a bit tan in colour, thick tangles of wavering threads.

  “And see, closer to the earth, there’s fewer of them.”

  “Okay. But what’s it mean?”

  “Means there is less space closer to the earth than above. That’s how gravity works. It’s not the earth sucking on you. It’s all the space above you pushing you down.”

  My perspective immediately shifted; I could feel the weight of space on my shoulders. It made perfect sense. Less space closer to the earth because the reflected waves cancelled each other out meant more space further up meant my feet were stuck to the planet.

  “So, to make a rocket, all I have to do is replicate the frequency of space so there is less space in front of the rocket than behind it.”

  “Hey, that would work.” I watched the waves bouncing off the
ground, coming back up. I reached out to touch one. It wriggled through my fingers.

  “Want to see something really cool?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Check out these waves. See how they’re long without much modulation?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Look close, see the very tiny waves on top?”

  “No…” I couldn’t see what he meant.

  “Remember when you were in the navy and out at sea, how on the ocean there were big waves and on top of the big waves, there were smaller waves.”

  I remembered an undulating sea of shallow swells, our ship slicing through, and, yes, of course, there were the ripples on top of the swells. I looked again at the space waves in front of my eyes, at the long, easy curve of them. I looked closer and, sure enough, there they were, tiny waves, ripples in the clean flow of the space thread.

  “Know what that is?”

  “No.” I didn’t.

  “Time.” His voice close to my ear.

  “Time?” I looked into his bearded face, through the wavering space waves between us.

  “Yeah, since time is part of the space wave, when the space waves cancel each other out, time disappears. That’s why time runs slower down here than up there.”

  I knew that. Not about the waves, but about time running slower closer to the earth. Wasn’t that long ago they put a super-sensitive clock on top of a water tower and one on the ground, and, sure enough, the clock on the ground ran slower.

  I followed a wave with my eyes as it came down in front of me, watched the tiny time waves on its surface. “So what causes time then?” I wanted to know. My mind open, expanded to allow all possibilities.

  “Motion,” he answered. “Time is the result of motion, or, I don’t know, maybe time allows motion. Anyway, the two are together. If you were to stop all motion in the universe, then time would stop. If you cool something down to absolute zero so that the motion in its atoms comes to a stop, its time would stop. That’s one of the reasons we can’t get to absolute zero. Hey, check it out. You have your own clock inside of you.”