Читать книгу Shoulder the Sky - Lesley Choyce - Страница 12

Meaning of Life

For those who need something new to agonize about: some scientists occasionally worry that something really catastrophic will happen if all of the planets line up on the same side of the sun. You know, they’re all spinning around in their own orbits and there’s a kind of balance. But about once every thousand years, say, they end up on the same side of the solar system and all in a straight line. Something weird could happen.

The great thing about getting serious about worrying about catastrophes that are of a solar system proportion is that you can stop fussing with dumb little worries that clutter up your life. Suppose the scientists say that next Thursday all the planets will line up on the same side of the solar system and we might experience earthquakes, increased solar radiation, firestorms, and waves that are two hundred feet high crashing against the continent.

This all sounds pretty wicked and you decide that the problem you have with your chequing account or those new shoes you can’t afford or the fact that you haven’t changed the oil in your car for several years — well, they all seem kind of trivial.

If you are a kid in school and believe the world will be destroyed next Thursday, the odds are you will stop doing your homework. You won’t give a rat’s ass about the math test next Friday because it will all be smoke and rubble by then.

So you maximize the amount of happiness you can cram in between now and next Thursday. You’re convinced there is nothing you can do to save yourself, your family, or the pet turtle you named Will Smith.

The conclusion here is that, for the right people, catastrophes, or even belief in catastrophes, can be a great way to improve your life. If the catastrophe does not happen, you have to backpeddle a little and cope with the mess of things not done until the next predicted catastrophe comes along. But you will have created a grace period in which you will have stopped fussing and allowed yourself to be the happy human you are capable of being. Keep well informed through the media about potential sunspots, meteor showers, volcanic activity, odd migration patterns of birds, and threats from intelligent deep-sea creatures.

“What the heck is going on? I can’t find my car keys. Does anybody know what happened to my car keys?”

I had not been awakened by the sound of my father’s voice in a long time. Invisible and silent had been his style. It was good to hear his voice. I climbed out of bed and stumbled down the stairs.

“Martin, do you know where my keys are?”

“I’ll help you find them.” Somehow, I always knew where the lost car keys were.

“I always keep them hanging up here by the refrigerator. Always.”

“I know. Did you have any breakfast?” Sometimes I worry that my father is not taking care of himself.

“I don’t have time. I’ve got a meeting with Product Development in twenty minutes. And I can’t find my darn keys.”

Ever since my mother died, my father stopped using swear words. When she was alive, he was a bit foulmouthed for a father. He was a nice guy, don’t get me wrong, just a big fan of four-letter words. Now he only used “heck” and “darn” and other replacement words — like “schist” — that came close to sounding like the real things. This was a kind of tribute to her.

I saw the keys to the van. “Here, Dad. They’re here by the toaster.” I knew they were there even before I looked. Or rather, the other Martin, Martin number three, knew. And that made me feel a little spooked.

But my dad was happy. “Thanks, Martin. You saved the day.”

He almost gave me eye contact but he turned quickly. “Remind me to get an extra set of keys made for the van.” He was doing that father rushing around bit, slurping coffee from a cup, spilling it, and getting his arm stuck in the sleeve of his suit jacket.

He was just about out the door when he turned. “Martin?”

“Yeah?”

He looked at his watch. “Later.”

The door closed.

The van, which my father now started up and backed out of the driveway, was a family decision. Back before we knew my mother was sick, there was this plan to drive it all over North America — on weekends and during the three weeks my father had off in the summer. Lilly was not in favour of the plan unless Jake could come along. “When hell freezes over,” my father used to say. My father and Jake never got along.

My mother had maps of all the states and provinces. She really wanted to go to Alaska. She said she would do all the driving. I wished I were old enough to do some of the driving. I wanted to drive my family to Alaska — but not with Jake along.

Every time I got into the van now, I thought of my mother driving us to Alaska. My father would be reading the map and we would be in the Yukon somewhere, lost. When we stopped for the night, my mother would set up an easel and do a painting of a moose or a mountain. My father would cook supper over an open fire. I liked to think that all of this was happening right now in some sort of alternate timeline or parallel universe. My family is lost on a small back road in the Yukon. I can smell the shish kebab my father is cooking. There are mosquitoes the size of model airplanes but they are not biting. My sister is doing her nails. I am thinking about fishing. My father and I talk about going fishing, but we never really do it because we don’t like having to kill fish.

“Holy shit!” my parallel father suddenly screeches out loud. One of the model airplane mosquitoes has bitten him on the neck. The shish kebab stick he had been wielding goes flying into the wilderness and probably lands on a moose turd the size of a squashed basketball.

After school I had to go for my visit with Dave. He had this once a week thing going. I never fully decided if I liked the idea of counselling. But I liked Dave and he was unconventional. All the kids at school knew I was going to the weirdest shrink around and some of them started asking their parents if they could go for counselling too, but most got turned down because Dave was fairly expensive. Three trips to Dave or a new TV set for your room? a parent might ask. Parents didn’t want other people to know that their kid was going to a shrink, anyway, especially one who was recommending things like smoking as a cure for what ails you.

Dave always believed in the tangential approach. “I like to vector in, aim for the perimeter of the problem, not the bull’s eye,” he’d say.

“Today we do that word association thing,” he said when I got there.

“I’m in.”

“Dice?” he said.

“Gambling.”

“White?”

“Snow.”

“Horses?”

“Jupiter.”

“Christmas?”

“Avalanche.”

“Water?”

“Desert.”

“Ink?”

“Paper.”

“Window?”

“Opportunity.”

“Table?”

“Knife.”

“Family?”

“Robots.”

“Car?”

I almost said “keys,” but something stopped me and I didn’t know what. Without thinking I put my hand in my pocket, still thinking about car keys. Car keys in my pocket. But it didn’t make any sense.

Dave saw the puzzled look on my face. “Well, enough of that anyway. You had a few interesting creative responses. Non-traditional, in some cases. I like that. Why don’t you tell me a bit about how things are going.”

“Things are going well. The universe is unfolding as it should.”

“What did you do yesterday?”

“School?”

“What happened at school?”

“Nothing.”

“There’s a fresh response.”

“Well, you know.”

“What about last night? What did you do?”

“Same old thing.”

“Which is?”

That’s when I realized that I couldn’t exactly recall what I did last night. It was a nothing night. “I guess I did some homework, listened to the radio. I must have gone to bed early.”

Dave was looking at me in that Dave sort of way. Then he tugged at his ponytail and looked out the window. “Know anything about Salvador Dali?”

“Yeah, he was way out there. Melting watches over the branches of trees. Some kind of painter. Spanish, right? Big moustache.”

“I wanted to look up something about Dali, so I check out a couple of search engines. One keeps taking me to this really interesting site where I find all these paintings. Dali, Picasso, some other stuff that’s unlabelled. I click on something called ‘Stuff to Consider,’ and I get this little lesson about something called ‘neutron soup.’ Are you familiar with neutron soup?”

“Sure. Collapsed stars, electrons rammed into protons. So dense that a piece the size of a sugar cube would weigh a thousand million tons.”

“Right.” Pony-tug. “Then I check the web address and discover it’s something called Emerso.com.”

“Probably an acronym.”