Smoke and Mirrors (12 page)

There was no break in traffic at all, and Andrea/ Tanya kept saying that all we had to do was start walking and the cars would stop. But I kept pulling her back. And each time she looked at me her face had somehow changed. Tanya smiling. Andrea putting her finger to her lips. Tanya angry with me. Andrea with that terrified look. Finally, as she turned away, she pulled me out into the onslaught of traffic. I heard screeching tires and then I woke up.

It was five-thirty in the afternoon and my father had just pulled his car into the driveway. I drank some more
water and changed my clothes. I tested one quick look in the mirror and saw that I looked like hell. A quick shower made me appear semi-human, but both my parents said that they thought I looked a bit ill at dinner.

“Simon, you spend too much time inside. How about if you and I go to the beach this Saturday?” my father said. He was not inviting my mother, just me.

I stirred my food with my fork. “I'd like that,” I said. “And maybe we can visit Ozzie. I haven't seen the guy in a really long time.”

My parents looked at each other and then back at me. My mother changed the subject. “I got a bid on that new listing but it was way under the asking price. And the buyer asked me to trim my commission fee. I told him to stuff it where the sun doesn't shine.”

“That was tactful of you,” my father said.

Friday I stayed home from school. I explained to my parents that it was a matter of too much stress. “I just need to chill for a day.”

I moved that pile of newspapers back towards my desk and clipped a few oddities about Elvis appearances, sign language communication with apes, and a magician named Gabor who many claimed could make household appliances float in mid-air — blenders, toasters, microwave ovens. He did not make people or animals
float, he said, because it was against his principles. He also said this: “Magic is when there is an effect with no apparent cause. All of my effects, my magic, occur because I make it happen. The observer simply does not have the ability to see the forces I use.” As if that explained it. I wondered if he was the real thing or just another showman who made things appear to happen through gimmicks and visual tricks.

I turned on my computer and found an opponent online to test my skills at chess. He won three games before I realized my demise each time was the result of my attempts to protect my queen with little regard for the loss of other strategic pieces. I logged off and noted my stress levels rising again as I began to blame myself for losing Tanya. But even more than that, I was worried about Andrea, that amazing person who had come into my life, stayed so briefly, and then vanished.

If each of us could peer into the future, we would alter a considerable amount of the things we do in the present. We would be different people for sure. Gabor's simple statement got me thinking about cause and effect. His explanation of magic could apply to many things. If every morning you hear a sound like two claps of thunder at exactly nine-thirty you think that is odd. It is unlikely that it can be thunder since such things
don't happen on a daily schedule. You run through many possibilities but come to the conclusion that it is inexplicable — some odd phenomena that appears to have no logical cause. Since the sound has no negative effects and no particular positive ones, after a while most folks would just stop thinking about it or, at most, find it mildly amusing each time it occurs.

Let's say, later, much later, you discover that an overseas supersonic flight to Paris is passing over where you live at nine-thirty each morning. And it clicks. The plane is breaking the sound barrier overhead and that is what you are hearing. You now have a theory, and ultimately an explanation of the cause of the effect. But if you had not been alerted to the information, by chance or intention, then you would continue to assume that the sound was a strange phenomenon — a kind of magic.

Lydia had guided me through several possibilities of what she called “divining” my future. She was a hardcore horoscope believer and argued that even Carl Jung, the famous psychologist, was a believer in the possibility of using astrology to tap into some kind of code as to how our lives are played out according to a pattern that includes stars and planets and galaxies.

She was lukewarm on palmistry but thought it had some merit. I told her I didn't like the look of my lifeline and she studied it herself and frowned. “I've known ninety-year-old men whose lifelines peter out to nothing
in the middle of their palm. Yours doesn't end. It's broken off and begins again. There.” She traced the crease that began just below my forefinger and carved a deep canal across my hand and down around the pad of my thumb towards my wrist.

Lydia was always more interested in what she called “the forces at work within you and the energy around you.” She'd say, “When the planets are in your favour, move forward. When they are against you, retreat.”

I was clearly in retreat, but I wanted to know if
I
was the cause of my own effect or if it was something external. Not necessarily planets, but something else at work. I felt like my life was this great, crazy, sometimes amusing, sometimes impossible jigsaw puzzle. I was unable to fit enough of the pieces of the puzzle together to grasp what the picture was supposed to be when completed. And I was pretty sure that I was missing a number of key pieces.

This is why I rather wished I could look ahead into the future and return to the present with a clear vision as to what I should do next. What was it I was supposed to do?

Aside from the usual methods of palmistry, astrology, Tarot cards, and throwing the I Ching, Lydia told me that down through the ages there had been a lot of pretty wacky ways of attempting to foretell the future. Alomancy was a method using salt. Antropomancy was
reading the future by studying the entrails of human sacrifices (a rather extreme method, one would assume). Necromancy was the old standby of listening to what the dead have to tell you about the future. Alectryomancy involved simply throwing down some corn on tiles of letters from the alphabet. Then you let your favourite rooster peck away and see what words he spells that will prophesy what tomorrow may bring. One method called xenomancy involved divination by interpreting the appearance of foreign visitors. I had a feeling that none of the above was going to be suitable for my dilemma.

There would be no easy way to prepare myself for what tomorrow may bring. And looking back, I am sure now that nothing could have prepared me for what was to come next.

I was really hoping that my father would drive me to the coast on Saturday as he'd promised. I believed that simply looking at the sea would help fix my head. I didn't think he'd go along with my great lifelong desire to learn how to surf. But I figured he would at least help me try to locate the Oz.

I dug out some old letters from my long-lost buddy, but not one of them had an address. He had moved to the shore town of Whitby but that was all I knew. I tried phoning information for a listing of his father, Winston Coleman. There was a W. Coleman but that was all. I tried phoning W. Coleman, but it turned out to be an elderly woman named Winnie who must not have had many people to talk to because she wanted to tell me about her cat and the skin allergies it had.

I did an Internet search for Ozzie Coleman, Winston Coleman, and Ozzie's mother, whose first name was very vague, but I was fairly sure it was Lizzie. So I tried Lizzie Coleman, Elizabeth Coleman, Liz Coleman, and E. Coleman. Nothing.

I phoned Whitby High School and explained about my quest for an old friend. At first the secretary said no way, but I pleaded, so she put me through to a school counsellor.

“It doesn't ring any bells,” he said, trying to be helpful. “Hang on.”

He did a quick search and then told me that there were two Colemans in the school, both girls. No Ozzie. “His family probably just moved on, maybe back while he was still in junior high. I don't have access to any records there. A lot of families move in and out of this town. How long has it been since you've seen him?”

“Four years,” I said. “Sorry I can't be more helpful. Keep looking. You'll probably find him. Good luck.”

My own prediction that my father would find an excuse to bow out of the trip to the beach at Whitby proved faulty. We were actually on the road Saturday morning, my father with a big mug of coffee and me looking out the window.

My dad turned down the radio. “About this thing you want to do ... track down your friend ...”

“Ozzie,” I said. “You remember him. I know you always thought he was trouble but he was my friend.” I had this feeling that the Ozman was part of that puzzle that was my life. He was one of the missing pieces. And that somehow, I didn't know how, he would be able to help me figure out how to get in touch with Andrea. Ozzie always, even way back when we were kids, had the ability to make the leap of faith that made it seem that anything was possible.

My father put on his sunglasses and cleared his throat to speak again, but I interrupted.

“We can try the library, maybe a couple of skateboard shops. I'm sure that if we are real polite and go to a police station, if it's a slow day with no major crime, someone will try to help. It's really important to me.”

“Okay,” he said, giving a great sigh. “If it's that important. You won't mind if I just hang back and wait in the car?”

I smiled. Just like him to
not
want to get involved, but at least he was driving me to Whitby. I was certain I was going to find Ozzie. Reunion time.

But by three o'clock, I gave up the search. Every place I went to I had been the most polite seventeen-year-old
on the planet. Even the cops tried to be helpful, but I had no luck at all. I knew Ozzie's father had been some kind of computer salesman so I even tried calling the computer stores from the yellow pages.

“Let's go to the beach,” my father finally said.

I had given it my best shot and was feeling pretty low. If Ozzie had moved, why hadn't he at least let me know where he had gone? I began to wonder if something awful might have happened to him or his family.

My father parked, we got out, and we walked onto the beach. What had started out as a sunny day had turned overcast. Dark thunderclouds hung over us and the sea looked dense and brooding. There was not a breath of wind. The beach had emptied, and we walked the sand down to the edge of the water. A few surfers were still out there, far from shore, catching waves and riding across long glassy walls of water. It looked different from what I had imagined.

My father took off his sunglasses. “I guess I don't need these.” He stood there beside me looking out to sea.

I didn't say anything, although I felt bad that I had wasted most of the day in my failed search instead of spending some “quality time” with my father. Then he dropped the bombshell.

“Simon,” he said. “There was no Ozzie. He never existed. He was someone you made up in your head.”

I felt nauseous just then. I couldn't understand why he would say a thing like this.

“You remember your accident?”

“Yes. And I know you blamed Ozzie for it, right? It's true that he was there, but it was my stupid decision.”

My father rubbed his face and took a deep breath. “Ozzie was your imaginary friend from the time you were a little kid. At first we thought it was cute and that he would just eventually go away.” He waved his hands in the air. “In fact, I guess we wanted to believe that you knew he was just that, an imaginary friend.”

“Why are you saying this? I know Ozzie was real.”

“He wasn't. When you started doing crazy things, your mother and I were truly getting worried. We had taken you to get professional help. This was before the accident. Do you remember that?”

“No.”

“Dr. Waller?”

“You're the one imagining things.”

“I'm not. After the accident you suffered some memory loss, so it's understandable that you don't remember some things. And you changed. You were different. And there were complications.”

“I know all that,” I said, feeling anxious now, unsettled. More stress creeping me out.

“You kept asking about Ozzie. It was the accident itself or the medication you were on, but either way,
Ozzie simply wasn't there anymore for you. So we told you he had moved away.”

“But I have letters.”

My father put his hands up in the air. “You always had a powerful imagination.”

I was shaking now, and my father put his arm around me. My friend Ozzie had been as real to me as anything had ever been in my life.

It began to rain, and I watched one final lone surfer catch a wave, stand, cruise across a long dark wall of water as lightning flashed behind him, striking the sea far in the distance. He rode the wave in and then came ashore. He walked right past us, but we must have been such a sorry looking pair standing there on the beach that he stopped. My father asked, “How is it out there?”

“Awesome,” he replied. “I'm beat, though. Been in the water three hours. My arms are noodled and my skin is pruned. But it was worth it.” He looked at me and I felt like I recognized him. I expected he was going to hold out his hand and pour skateboard ball bearings into mine, but he just said, “Ever try it?”

“No,” I said.

“Takes a while to learn, but once you got it, it's yours for life. Take it easy.”

My dad smiled. We turned and followed the surfer off the beach, got in our car, and began to drive home. It began to rain. Halfway there, I was feeling pretty
depressed. My father was trying to make small talk, telling me about his job, but I wasn't listening. I was nodding off when something made me turn around.

And there she was. A girl lying down in the backseat, asleep. Andrea.

She did not wake up and, filled with my own self-doubts, I couldn't bring myself to test the reality of her presence in any way. I was angry with my father for his insane insistence that Ozzie had never existed. He had been part of my young life for years. We had shared so much together. If he was not real, then nothing could be trusted.