Random
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IF YOU THINK LIFE MAKES SENSE,
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK.
A NOVEL BY
Lesley Choyce
Copyright © 2010 Lesley Choyce
EPub edition copyright © August 2011
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Published by
Red Deer Press
A Fitzhenry & Whiteside Company
195 Allstate Parkway,
Markham, ON L3R 4T8
www.reddeerpress.com
Edited by Peter Carver
Cover and text design by Jacquie Morris & Delta Embree, Liverpool, NS, Canada
Cover image “The Wrong Way” copyright 2008 Ryleigh Mae Anstee
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge with thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Choyce, Lesley, 1951-
Random : if you think life makes sense, do not read this book /
Lesley Choyce.
ISBN 978-0-88995-443-4
eISBN 978-1-55244-294-4
I. Title.
PS8555.H668R35 2010 jC813’.54 C2010-904507-6
Publisher Cataloging-in-Publication Data (U.S) Choyce, Lesley.
Random / Lesley Choyce.
ISBN: 978-0-88995-443-4 (pbk.)
eISBN: 978-1-55244-294-4
1. Self-perception — Juvenile fiction. I. Title.
[Fic] dc22 PZ7.C56034Ra 2010
I dedicate this book to Jacques Snyman and Jacques Starbuck, two fishermen who saved my daughter Sunyata when she was swept out to sea in South Africa in February of 2010.
CHAPTER ONE
Joseph here. Joe. Sometimes Joey. This is me, talking into a digital recorder. It would shock the hell out of me if anyone ever listens to this. But it could happen. I guess anything can happen. So I will assume the remote possibility that someday I will have an audience.
But that won’t change anything. I will record whatever goes through my head and talk about my life, past and present. If you want to spend your time following me, then you’re along for the ride. But I promise you, this is not going anywhere. The world does not make sense. Never has, never will. I know from experience that we live through a random sequence of events and then we die.
Like my parents did—my biological parents. I was twelve at the time. My parents went to the movies. I stayed home because I had homework and I thought homework was important. The twelve-year-old me did. I was one of them. I thought things had meaning. If you worked hard, you would be rewarded. Etc. Etc.
So I stayed home. And lived. If Mr. Ogden had not assigned homework in math that day, I would not be around to share this with you. Isn’t that something? Do you think Mr. Ogden knew he was saving my life when he handed us one mother of a homework assignment? He probably did this because of gas. He was always complaining of gas. Indigestion. He spoke about it often in class. He’d belch. Yes, sometimes he’d belch rather loudly. He couldn’t help himself, he said. Who could ignore it? Then we’d laugh and he’d be pissed off. Then he’d get angry. And then, usually, if we laughed too hard, he’d hand down a real bitch of a homework assignment. He had a stockpile of them waiting. This is the way the sequence would go.
If there was no indigestion, no gas, no belching, then he’d assign something light for the next day. One through ten on page 125. Or no homework at all. However, on the fateful day in question, it went the other way. Gas. Belch. Laughter. Heavy-duty five-page handout—a take-home test. If you had some genius of an older brother or sister, this would not be so bad. But I was a single child.
I was a serious, responsible, single child. A single child who did not go to the movies that night so he could complete the homework. I was probably on page three of the take-home when it happened.
Later, someone pieced it together. The brake lights on my father’s Ford did not work. He had said this at the dinner table. “Seal, I don’t think the brake lights are working on the Ford.” Seal was my mother. Celia really, but I liked it when he called her Seal. I can still picture her dark hair and black blouse and pants. She always wore black. Or white. Only black and white. Never any colors. “Seal, I don’t think the brake lights are working on the Ford.”
“You should get them fixed first thing tomorrow,” my mom said.
And he would have.
Fixed the lights. Henry, my dad, would have fixed the goddamn lights.
But there was this movie that he was dying to see. Seal wanted to see it, too. They wanted me to come. They asked if there was any way I could finish the homework later that night or in the morning.
There wasn’t. Gas is gas.
So, to cut a long story down to a short, freaking horrible truth, here goes. The garbage truck behind them did not see the brake lights when my dad hit the brakes. I learned later there had been a kid on a bicycle who had darted out into the road. He swerved away quickly, though, and rode back in the direction he had come from. Nothing happened to him. But my dad had to hit the brakes hard. Henry really pounded on those brakes. The guy driving the garbage truck—full of people’s trash and heading back to the dump rather late from the day’s work—was right on his ass. No lights. No extra split second to react.
A full-impact rear-ender. My dad must not have even taken his foot off the brake pedal because the car did not move forward more than a few feet.
I like the term they used in the paper: freak accident. Like my parents were from the circus or something. No, not that. “Freak” as in “unlikely.” Spinal and neck injuries for both of a very unusual kind. Too bad that my dad had not let up on the brake. They might have rocketed forward or something and then they might have lived. I guess when Henry put on the brakes, he really meant business.
But that’s the way freak accidents go. Someone standing nearby said the boy who had been on the bike was about my age. He had been coming down from a side street—Silver Street, it was called. He didn’t stop but rode that damn bike right out into the speeding traffic of Memorial Highway. But he didn’t even get a nick. Then he rode away and was nowhere near the scene when the ambulance arrived.
I could tell you more about this later but it’s best to just move on. I notice what I just did, by the way. I said you. I’m assuming, or at least pretending, that someone will hear this. I wonder why I just did that. I don’t know. But then, I’m the one who does not believe that the world makes sense. There are sequences of events. Like the ones above. But there is no meaning to any of it. No hidden code. No purpose, I guess you could say. I will explore all of this and more, should you choose to follow me wherever this goes. And it will go into some weird shit, I promise.
So what exactly is this thing you are listening to? It’s a digital recording of
anything I wish to record. I chose not to write it because I don’t do much writing outside of school work. Not any more. I used to like writing. I used to write essays about cures for cancer, about Leonardo da Vinci’s design for helicopters, or about world over-population. I was that kind of kid. I got A’s in school as well. Nothing like an A to make Henry and Seal light up. After their deaths, I gave up on most forms of communication for a while, except for screaming in my sleep. I stopped talking to people around me altogether during daylight hours. I talked to myself sometimes, however, in my bedroom at night, just to keep myself company.
And despite the fact that I didn’t speak to people I knew, after sunset I phoned up random people on the phone. Yes.
Random. Straight out of the phone book. I’d pick a name, block my call and phone Jimmy Spites or Nancy Conlon.
Derrick Smith-Wickens or M. Delano. These were not crank calls. This was me telling them my story.
And people listened. I never called anyone back a second time. I lied to some. I told the truth to others. A few hung up. But most did not. I like the ones who listened. I made some cry. Some were speechless. Some wondered if they should call 911 or the Help Line. No one got angry. Isn’t that funny? You’d think some would be pissed off. What if I interrupted their favorite show? What if they were busy? What if they were in the middle of sex? I’m sure, given the number of calls, that at least one person answered from bed, interrupted while making love. I wondered if they could get back to it—the answerer and whomever—once they were interrupted by a twelve-year-old kid making his random call.
I sometimes told them about my parents. But not always. I made these calls for almost six months. But in the daytime, I spoke to no one. And then I got tired of it.
During that time, I remained silent to the rest of the daytime world. It was some kind of withdrawal. Some aspect of me taking control of my life. One shrink said that I should be allowed to “express myself” this way. Which is ironic— expressing yourself by not expressing yourself. Maybe I just didn’t have anything to say to people I actually knew.
I stopped doing school work. I stopped laughing—at anything. Well, nothing was funny. Nothing. Not Mr. Ogden’s gas. Not movies. Did I tell you my parents were driving to see a movie that my dad thought would be really funny? Maybe they died because they were not supposed to see a funny movie. Maybe life should be serious. Maybe that was the message. Right.
I hope you don’t mind if I jump around. Life, after all, need not be linear. Someone in a science fiction story wrote about starting your life when you die and then living it backwards from being old to being a piss-in-your pants little kid, then a vomiting baby, and then, whoopee, back into the womb. Only to start out again, dying and so forth.
My point is that without absolute meanings to things, nothing needs to be linear. Nothing is straightforward. Especially my narrative. I like the word “narrative.” I like the way it sounds. But I don’t think narrative means plot. Don’t go looking for a plot here. Don’t go looking for subtext or meaning. This is what it is.
Which is what? you might ask in your slightly cynical, singularly curious little mind.
My DD. My digital diary. Or a digital memoir, perhaps. I’m doing this as a birthday present to my mom. Mom-2, that is. I guess I’m doing it for Dad-2 as well, even though it isn’t his birthday. They are not bad people and I will tell you about them later. They like me a lot. They adopted me after a shit load of hassles with some of my relatives. Most of my blood relatives were obnoxious, nasty people. My biological father— Bio-Dad, Dad-1, Henry—had come from what they call a very dysfunctional family, an extended VDF. My mom had been kicked out of her home when she was sixteen, for doing something bad she never told me about, and maybe I wouldn’t have thought it was so bad at all. But after she did whatever bad thing she did, neither her parents nor anyone else in her family had wanted much to do with her. Until she died.
Then, there was insurance money and a kid. Seemed that whoever got the kid, got the cash. A kind of bad news / good news situation.
I did not want to live with any of these blood-related gobsters. Life was already hell at that point. How could it have been worse? Hell squared, I kept thinking, if any of them adopted me. Hell to the third power.
So how did I get out of that without talking to anyone? I wrote a letter. One letter to the lawyer who was overseeing my parents’ estate. He then met with me and asked me about fifty yes-or-no questions to which I nodded yes or no. It was like one of those easy tests at school. You got a fifty-fifty chance of getting any question right. But apparently I aced it. Because it now meant I was up for adoption.
Think about it. I was an orphan. Like in those old stories. An orphan. But no one was going to put me in an orphanage. The lawyer turned out to be an okay guy. My bio-parents, Henry and Seal, had once said, “All lawyers are assholes,” but thankfully they were wrong. Apparently, they were not right about a number of things. Brake lights needed to be fixed right away, for example, or you should not go to see light comedies on dark nights.
Henry had also thought that silver vehicles were evil. He really hated that there were so many silver cars on the road, especially SUVs. But he was wrong. Silver SUVs are not evil. Garbage trucks are evil. And kids riding bicycles on a street named Silver. Henry should have been worried about garbage trucks and kids on bikes.
My mom often talked about how she should one day patch things up with her parents, who had sent her packing. I say, no way. What parent sends away their teenage daughter? What century is this, anyway?
So there is always that right / wrong thing. Who’s right and who’s wrong? And who’s to blame?
But it’s not worth losing sleep over. The whole setup is a crap shoot. Crap, that is, like in the game. A roll of the dice. Sometimes you get seven. Sometimes, you get me. Snake eyes. Loser.
But on the next roll, I got a good lawyer and some okay parents. Which is why I am doing this for them. I am telling my story—as much as I can bear to get out of me—to a machine. DD. Hello, out there. Is anybody listening?
Dad-2 gave me the portable digital recorder with enough bytes to record twenty life stories, and I am also supposed to download the audio file onto my computer as a back-up. I’m supposed to keep back-ups in case anything goes wrong. So I do this for them. They probably think this is therapy. Which it is not. I do not want therapy. I want ... I’m not sure what I want.
I want Henry and Seal back.
But that will not happen. Not in this life. Possibly in the afterlife. If there is one. I’m not sure there is. I’m not even sure I hope there is one. If this life is so freaking difficult to understand (and for the most part, I’ve stopped trying), then what must the next phase be like?
Dwelling on the past is not that wise, I’ve discovered. I try to live in the here and now. I’m not that big on the future, either. How can you plan a life if you know that life is a random and probably meaningless string of events? I mean, think of how illogical it all is. All the wrong people get elected, for example. You know who I’m talking about. It’s kind of like high school. I mean, now that I’m sixteen, you’d think that I’d have at least partial understanding of human ways. But not me.
Take Rachelle Drummond. Beautiful, yes. But cruel. I’ve seen her. Voted most popular girl in school, according to last year’s yearbook. I think she’s actually smart but she uses her smarts for cruel things. Cheating on guys. Dumping on other girls who aren’t as pretty as she is. She got caught doing something—nobody knows exactly what—with Oliver Julian in the janitor’s closet. And she didn’t get in trouble.
Neither did Oliver. And there’s another case in point. Oliver Julian, although not handsome or smart, seems to command a lot of respect from girls, guys, and authority. He has a tidy, neat appearance, and speaks to adults with what appears to be considerable charm. But when any of them turns their back, he finds ways to humiliate people. I’ve been a victim more than once but I’m an easy target. He’ll go a
fter anyone, anytime, anyplace. And he enjoys it. Guess what? Voted most likely to succeed. Hah!
Look at other things. Guy invents a stupid video game, he makes millions. Guy comes up with a plan to end world hunger, he gets squat. People like Rachelle and Oliver make fun of the latter. They like to make fun of Gloria as well. Gloria Westerbend. Gloria also wants to save the world. But she’s hampered by the fact that, like me, she is sixteen—although sometimes she seems much older in the way she thinks. Gloria has been trying to save me (as well as all the starving children in Africa and Asia combined) for over a year now.
Gloria is my friend. She knows my whole story. She accepts me for who I am: a non-linear, semi-atheistic, cynical, psychologically injured orphan. Well, I’m not technically an orphan anymore, thanks to Dad-2 and Mom-2. Gloria likes me despite my dark side. (Perhaps you haven’t noticed my dark side yet.) And she thinks I am funny. (And I can be very funny in a non-linear, non sequitur sort of way.) Just wait till I get going. But Gloria is very, very serious.
I don’t know why people get so serious. It seems like a lot of work and worry and, ultimately, disappointment. It’s like the Glorias of the world are hoping to spruce things up, solve a few global issues, give hope and help and ultimately get ignored (if they’re lucky) or labeled as fringe radicals and arrested if they are not. While the Olivers and Rachelles of the world go on to win large sums of money and fame on so-called reality-based TV shows and then start their own designer labels for hideous clothing with their names on them.
For a while I had this grand plan to collect dog shit and find ways to put it in locations where both Oliver and Rachelle would step in it. I confess I had some fun (rare, but there it is) thinking about this. Just suppose the two of them kept stepping into dog crap over and over again. Wouldn’t that be interesting? I mean, really.
But I could never bring myself to execute the plan. Reason being I do not have a dog and I do not want to collect the necessary elements to execute the plan. So the two of them go through life without having the hassle of scraping it out of the tread of their fashionable shoes. Maybe when I’m older, I’ll come up with an adult version of this to execute, once the golden boy and girl have attained star status.