Shelby (6 page)

“No problem.”

“I have to keep the lights low for my head,” she said lighting a candle.

“Wonderful, I love candlelight.” I sat down. “So … do you dabble in the future-telling aspects of psychic phenomena?”

“You mean tarot cards and that?”

“Yes.”

“Nah.” She pulled a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table. She put it in her mouth. “Mind if I smoke?”

“No,” I said, our eyes making contact. “My father smokes.” Lucy exhaled through her nostrils and with one hand pressed on both temples. “Do you believe in destiny?” I asked.

“Is that a line?”

“A line of what?”

“A … never mind. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, uh … I was just … I've been reading about destiny. Hitler, actually,” I said, for some reason lying. “He said he felt he was destined to … to do what he did. So did Stalin.”

She paused for a moment. “The way I see it anyone who really believes his fate is controlled by destiny—the man of destiny idea—has to be seriously screwed up: schizophrenia, dementia, megalomania, something. I mean it's so
grand
iose. Would you like some tea?”

“Uh … no. No thank you.”

“And
Stalin
? What a shit-dick he was. Ginseng?”

“Uh … no … thank you.”

“I'm going to have a cup. It helps my head.”

“Okay,” I said, somewhat rattled by her sweeping generalisation and word choice in describing those who are destined. She left the room. On the coffee table were several books I'd never heard of:
The Dancing Wu Li Masters, The Gospel According to Women, A Confederacy of Dunces, If You Find The Buddha On The Street, Kill Him
, among others …

Lucy came back with a cup of tea and our conversation moved along at a fine clip. The subject of destiny, though still on my mind, was not brought up again. Our discussion, revolving around poetry and mythology and sprinkled with psychic phenomena, eventually found its way to our own personal spiritualities. I told her about my somewhat strict Protestant upbringing and we joined in laughter over a few stories about Uncle Larry's fanaticism.

“I'm more into a Goddess thing,” she said.

“What religion would that be?”

“Just mine.”

“Your own?”

“Why not?”

“Well, I'm partial to Christianity.”

“Why?”

“Well … it has the theme all the way through it, eh? The seed they talk about in Genesis ends up being Christ. I like that. Plus the prophesies.”

“Hey,” she said grinning, “some of my favourite mystics are Christian. But please forgive me. It ain't my bag. See, when I was a kid I had recurring dreams that
I
was a Goddess.”

“What?”

“Weird, eh? I've even had a couple lately, too.”

“What do you look like in them?”

She laughed. “Don't get me wrong. I'm not like a Jesus Christ incarnate. It's a feeling, a connection with the all, the earth, an internal sense of divinity, reliant on faith.”

“Sounds wonderful.”

“Yeah, kinda nice, eh? It just happens and I wake up very relaxed, all my fears up and gone and I lie their praising myself and my surroundings—as opposed to chanting that western female mantra: ‘Fuck I'm fat.'” Lucy laughed. “I can feed off it for a couple o' days—no pun intended.” I smiled and glanced at her legs.

“Speaking of matriarchs,” I said, “I've got a ninety-three-year-old Grandmother who can make me feel that way.”

“Cool.”

“Sometimes I fear I rely on her too much. She truly seems to believe in
me
—regardless of my failures.”

“Ninety-three? I've got past lives younger than that.”

“And she's fat but she doesn't care. Actually she's more chubby than fat … and you're not fat at all.” Minnie was fat.

The afternoon rolled on.

By the time it came time to leave, three hours had passed and I wanted to stay. Standing in the foyer, Lucy opened the door for me. Light from outside fell upon a poem that was framed and hanging just inside the hall.

The valley spirit never dies;

It is the woman, primal mother
.

Her gateway is the root of heaven and earth
.

It is like a veil barely seen
.

Use it; it will never fail
.

I felt a tingle at the back of my neck.

“Lao Tsu,” she said.

“French?”

“T-S-U,” she said, “Chinese.”

“Oh,” I said, “a haiku.” My knowledge surprised her; and with such an impression I left, afloat with the joy of connection. Closing my car door I let out the longest fart of my life, realising then that I'd been trapping gas for hours. What a relief! It came out like a whoopee cushion, and with the expulsion I think a lot of my university anxiety left, too. It didn't smell much. It was pure methane, assimilating easily with the air in the car. I looked up from my window and saw Lucy standing at her door. I'm sure she wouldn't have heard it. I smiled and waved. She did the same.

That night, a newfound self-respect deterred me from acting on my physical urges. Unfortunately, having used the device as a night time soother since leaving school (and occasionally before), I was unable to nod off. Instead I sat muzzled on my pull-out couch with tender thoughts of Miss Lucy Moon; sage, beauty, friend. I had real hope for further involvement and nodded off on such thoughts.

“So what was she like?” Eric said, waking me up.

“What time is it?”

Two-thirty—you dig her?”

“We have similar interests.”

“Did you drop your drawers?”

“What?”

“Did you screw her?”

“
Eric
, I went there for spiritual guidance.”

“I'm just buggin' you.”

“It was purely business.”

“Anytime someone does that braille thing with your mind, man, it ain't purely business.”

“We didn't even get to that. She had a migraine. However, we've made plans for a second rendez-vous.”

“A second meeting?”

“Yes,” I said, grinning.

“Damn.”

“What?”

“Uh … Nothing. I'm sure it'll be fine.” He scratched himself and started walking away.

“What?”

“Just watch out for that voodoo shit, man.”

“What do you know about it?”

Eric didn't turn around. “Believe me,” he said, “I know.”

“What do you know?” There was no response.

Needless to say I woke up the following morning feeling like I'd worked graveyard at an all-night convenience store.

The day that followed was spent napping, researching psychic phenomena and circling potential jobs in the classified adds. Paranoia left me wondering if Lucy had read my every thought during our previous day's conversation and perhaps considered me an idiot. Could she have known I had destiny illusions of my own?

Over the next two get-togethers conversations with Lucy reached an alarming intensity. Stories were strewn out like war anecdotes in a British pub; bordering on magical, angry yet funny, loving yet painful. Lucy's veritable potpourri knowledge of alternate thought—mythology, psychology, religion—and her continual popping of vitamin complexes and Tylenol 3's made it for me an experience not unlike talking to a smorgasbord. For every hunger I had, she said something to fill it up. On top of all that, she was genuinely interested in what I had to say—a conclusion I drew from her insightful responses. We didn't do a reading. I considered it a stay of relationship execution.

On a Sunday evening I drove alone to the university and sat on the steps outside the physics building. It started to rain. It started to pour. Fitting, I thought. Two phone calls on Eric's answering machine from my parents asking if my marks had come had left me aware that whatever vision of destiny I still possessed, it could no longer match my parents'. There would be no Nobel Prize in the future. There probably wouldn't be a magic antiserum for world pestilence, either. I understood why, too. So the following day I revealed the reasons, self-deprecating as they were, to Lucy. Why? Because I was feeling like a house fly spinning in a cauldron of beer, torn between drunken bliss and inevitable demise. For as smitten as I was for Lucy, our relationship was
business
—and once the psychic reading was done, reason told me, so was I. So if I had to go, I decided, I'd go with, if not style, honour.

“I have to tell you this, Lucy. I've discovered some things in the last few days … about myself that, well, I know what your opinion is of people with destiny-filled ideas; convoluted, megalomaniacal, split personality and so on. Still, I must confess that I, indeed, am one of those people. Yes, all my life I've believed I was preordained to get closer to God through scholarly pursuits or, at least, something of that nature; perhaps I'd discover the AIDS vaccine or find scientific evidence proving the existence of one God.”

Lucy laughed. “Christ couldn't even pull that off, Shel.”

“Please,” I said, firmly raising my hand and avoiding eye contact, “let me finish. When I was in the tenth grade I decided I wanted to add muscle mass to my concave chest—my older brother had a great chest, hair and everything—so I convinced myself to try and do ten push-ups every morning before school. I knew I couldn't do ten. But I knew that trying to do ten would help me do six or seven and I also knew that if I would have set the goal at six or seven, I only would have done four or five. That's human nature. So away I went. What happened? On the third morning of going through the routine, on push-up number two, I heard a popping sound so loud it woke the neighbors. Turns out I pulled what specialists call the rotator cuff—a shoulder muscle known mostly in baseball circles—and to this day I can't comfortably scratch the back of my head. Hence …” I pointed at my boney chest.

“You have an itchy head?”

“Don't you see? Big dreams don't pay! I should have learned my limits and never left them.”

“That's a
stupid
attitude. You have to have big dreams.”

“How big, Lucy? So big they crush your heart when they don't come true?” Lucy laughed. “You find that funny? I don't find that funny.”

“I'm sorry, Shel, but as a little kid you figured your destiny was to change the world and at twenty you find out it ain't that simple and you're eaten up over it. That's funny—I mean what the hell did you expect?”

“A shot at it, Lucy. A plan. Something. Not only did I not get anywhere, I never even constructed an idea of
how
to get somewhere. I never had time! It was hard enough getting A's in calculus without the burden of mankind on my shoulders. I should have known I lacked the necessary ingredients; the dream, the plan, the drive and the talent. The four stars. Anyone who's ever made serious social impact, good or bad, has had them; Josef Stalin. Mozart. Hitler. Albert Einstein. Sir Isaac Newton. William Blake. Albert Schweitzer. Maybe even Wayne Gretzky. The dream, the plan, the drive, the talent. Four aces, full house. Four stars. Three star people are capable of a lot, too. Winston Churchill. They can move small mountains. Two star people are terrific with the space left behind. Sylvester Stallone. One star people are useful, but only to others, and only if that one star isn't the dream. If a person possesses no plan, no talent, and no drive, but they happen to have a dream—especially one of absurd proportions—they become, as my roommate so aptly pointed out, a social burden. And with that I offer you … Shelby Malcolm Lewis. One star.”

“Shit, Shel, destiny is bullshit. Now you're free to do what ever you want!”

“Destiny gave my life foundation. I am now a man without legs.”

“Shel, destiny
is
. That's it.”

“That's it? Person A ends up on the moon, person B starves to death in Somalia and that's it?”

“Bad luck, mate,” she said in an Aussie accent. “Best o' luck next time.”

“But don't you see? I've been shafted, too. I wanted to contribute.”

“Shafted? Shel, if you don't contribute—whatever that means—it's only because you're a lazy slob.”

“You hardly know me.”

“So you're not?”

“I just feel I've been—”

“Close your eyes.”

“What?”

“Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Close your eyes.” I did. “Now stick out your finger.”

“What?”

“Stick out your finger.” I did that, too, and Lucy took it in her hand. I felt something smooth and soft. “Do you know what it is?” she said. At first I thought it was her cheek. Then her chin.

“Your chin?” I said.

“Nope,” she said. “My cheek.”

“I was going to-”

“Guess this one,” she said. It was soft again but a little more solid. I thought it might be her forehead or her elbow.

“Your forehead,” I said.

“Nope,” she said. “My right thumb nail.” I didn't mind being wrong. I didn't think right and wrong was the object. “Turn your face to the left,” she said. I felt a little pressure on my cheek. I had no idea what it was, maybe a finger or a toe.

“Your finger,” I said.

“My nose,” she said, “you sure need some practice.”

“You mean there are people who are good at this?” Lucy didn't answer. She just kept throwing out body parts until we'd touched about everything to everything; knee to forearm, shoulder to back of the leg, heart to palm of the hand, cheek to eyelash. I was actually getting better at it. Then she told me to use my lips. I felt something soft. It was her earlobe. I guessed mouth. Maybe I was hoping. Then I felt something soft again. Like a finger-tip. I was getting confused—and aroused. I could feel my erection pushing awkwardly in my pants. My tie was uncomfortably tight; I became disoriented, my eyes had been closed for too long. Body parts were flying through my head.