The Gum Thief (2 page)

I just googled "Glove Pond" and here's what I got:

www.amateurmicroscopy.net ... Index to Articles

... Part 1: Introduction and Webcam Modifications.
If

ever a subject and a method of recording that subject fit

together like a hand in a glove, pond "micro-critters"

and videomicrography are an ideal fit.

Look at this: no one has ever put the two words together before-a comma in between "glove" and "pond" doesn't count as a true connection. So I still get dibs on
Glove Pond!

Bethany

I'm the dead girl whose locker you spat on somewhere between recess and lunch.

I'm not really dead, but I dress like I want to be. There's something generic about girls like me: we hate the sun, we wear black, and we feel trapped inside our bodies like a nylon fur mascot at a football game. I wish I were dead most of the time. I can't believe the meat I got stuck with, and where I got stuck and with whom. I wish I were a ghost.

And FYI, I'm not in school any more, but the spitting thing was real: a little moment that sums up life. I work in a Staples. I'm in charge of restocking aisles 2-North and 2South: Sheet Protectors, Indexes
&
Dividers, Notebooks, Post-It Products, Paper Pads, Specialty Papers and "Social Stationery." Do I hate this job? Are you nuts? Of course I hate it. How could you not hate it? Everyone who works with me is either already damaged or else they're embryos waiting to be damaged, fresh out of school and slow as a 1999 modem. Just because you've been born and made it through high school doesn't mean society can't still abort you. Wake up.

Let me try to say something positive here. For balance.

Staples allows me to wear black lipstick to work.

I was waiting for the bus this morning, and there was a sparrow sitting in the azalea beside the bus shelter. I looked at it and it yawned ... this tiny little wisp of heated sparrow yawn breath rose up from the branch. And the thing is, I began yawning too-so yawning is contagious not only from person to person, but from species to species. How far back was it that our primordial ancestors forked into two directions, one that became mammals and one that became birds? Five hundred million years ago? So we've been yawning on earth for half a billion years.

Speaking of biology, I think cloning is great. I don't understand why churchy people get so upset about it. God made the originals, and cloning is only making photocopies. Big woo. And how can people get upset about evolution? Someone had to start the ball rolling; it's only natural to try to figure out the mechanics of
how
it got rolling. Relax! One theory doesn't exclude the other.

Yesterday this guy from work, Roger, said it was weird that we human beings, who've evolved way more than anything else on earth, still have to share the place with all the creatures that remain unevolved, like bacteria and lizards and bugs. Roger said human beings should have a special roped-off VIP section for people only. I got so mad at him for being such an ignorant shit. I told him that roped-off VIP areas do, in fact, exist, and they're called parking lots-if Roger wanted to be such an environmental pig about things, he should go stand in the parking lot for a few days and see how much fun
that
is.

Calm down, Bethany. Look out the window.

I'm looking out the window. I'm going to focus on nature. Looking at plants and birds cools my brain.

It's late afternoon right now, and the crows, a hundred thousand of them from everywhere in the city, are all flying to roost for the night in their mega-roost, an alder forest out on the highway in Burnaby. They go there every night, and I don't know why. They're party animals, I suppose. Crows are smart. Ravens are smarter. Have you ever seen a raven? They're like people, they're so smart. I was fourteen and collecting seashells up the coast one afternoon, and a pair of ravens landed on a log beside me and followed me around the beach, hopping from log to log. They were talking to each other-I mean chatter-chatter talking-and they were obviously discussing
me.
Ever since then, I've firmly believed that intelligent life exists everywhere in the universe; in fact, the universe is designed specifically to foster life wherever and whenever possible.

I also think that if ravens lived to seventy-two instead of seven, they'd have conquered the planet millions of years ago. They're that smart. Raven intelligence evolved
differently than human intelligence, but it still reached a human place. Aliens may well think and behave like ravens or crows.

And a final thing about crows-I had no idea I'd be going on like this-is that they look black to us, but to birds, they're as insanely coloured as parakeets and peacocks - human colour perception is missing a small patch of the spectrum that only birds can see. Imagine if we could see the world like birds, even briefly. Everything would be wondrous. Which is another reason why I only wear black. Who knows what you're missing when you look at me.

it’s five minutes later.

My mother called and asked if I would consider going with her to visit the Hubble Telescope in California. I thought the Hubble was in outer space, but it turns out it has a twin, in Yreka, in northern California.

My mother said people who didn't believe in anything had visited the telescope and it had made them proud to be alive. She said that, instead of the stars being these mean, cold, bleak little jabs of white light, the universe was like a vast, well-maintained aquarium. The stars weren't points of light, but angel fish and jellyfish and sea horses and anemones. And I thought about it, and damn the woman, she's right.

I told her that people always treat me like an alien; I've always expected to be treated as such, and it's not a very glamorous sensation.

This, naturally, sparked a fight with Mom.
Why
can't
I
try to fit in?

If
I'm still wearing black lipstick at twenty-four, she ought to have abandoned hope of my ever normalizing.

After we hung up, I thought, what if she'd died right there on the spot, right at the end of that phone call. The last thing she ever would have said to me would have been,
Imagine, Bethany, the universe is indeed a beautiful place. If you doubt me,
go
check for yourself

Roger

Sorrow!

Sorrow is everywhere-a bruise that never yellows and never fades, a weed that chokes the crop. Sorrow is every old person who ever died alone in a small, shitty room. Sorrow is alive in the streets and in the shopping malls. Sorrow in space stations and theme parks. In cyberspace; in the Rocky Mountains; in the Mariana Trench. All this

sorrow.

And here I am in the cemetery eating my lunch: baloney on Wonder Bread, too much yellow mustard, no lettuce or tomato, an apple and a beer. I believe that the dead speak to us, but I don't think they do it with words. They use the materials they have at hand-a gust of
ail~
a gold ripple on an otherwise still lake, or inside a dozing stem some sap is tickled and a flower blooms that would never have opened otherwise.

The sky rains and the world shines, tombstones like rhinestones, the grass like glass. There is a breeze.

Joan tried to be so matter-of-fact about it all when she got the news: cancer of the spleen. What the hell is a spleen?

A spleen is a cartoon body part, not something a real person has, let alone something that gets sick and kills.

Joan tried to tell me that everybody who's ever lived has had cancer lots of times-even a fetus gets cancer - except our bodies almost always get rid of it before it spreads. Cancer is what we call those bits our bodies fail to slough off. I found some comfort in that. It made cancer feel everyday and approachable.
Universal.
I wanted to reach inside Joan and pluck out the cancer-and maybe while I was there I'd remove gold coins and keys and tropical birds-and I'd show you the surprises all of us conceal within.

I think emotions affect your body as much as X-rays and vitamins and car crashes. And whatever it is I'm feeling right now, well, God only knows what parts of my body are being demolished. And I deserve it. Because I'm not a good person-because I'm a bad person who also happens to be lost.

Oh! To travel back ten years-to when I still thought of myself as a good person and before I realized I was lost. Every moment felt like I was getting away with something. Every moment felt like five o'clock quitting time. Paradise!

You know how I met Joan? I was coming back from lunch with Alex and Marty. I'd had three glasses of red, and I knew it wouldn't be too smart to show up at the office-it was the tail end of the days when you could still plausibly drink during lunch and not immediately be suspended, and I didn't want to push it-this was my third job in five years. So I pretended I had to pick something up from the dry cleaners.
It
was a sweater-optional weather day, and the sun came out from behind a cloud and I was
standing on the corner of Seymour and Nelson in a wonderful liquid yellowness. I felt like I was being teleported into the sun, and the heat on my skin felt like music. Then the sun went behind the clouds, and I felt like I was locked inside an airliner's bathroom. And then I closed my eyes and opened them again and across the street was a fortune teller.

What the hey!

So I walked over, laid down a five and said, "Fill me in."

The fortune teller certainly wasn't cultivating an aura of mystery. She dressed like her welfare cheque had just arrived and she was off to buy a carton of smokes for her six illegitimate toddlers: sweats; no makeup; a pair of men's brown leather shoes.

But I still wanted my fortune told. It's a mood you get maybe once a decade, like a thirst, and once you have it, you have to slake it. So I pressed forward. "What can you tell me?"

She looked at me like I was homework. She grabbed my hand, pressed the meat of my thumb for a few seconds, looked up at me and said, "I see you sitting in a glade, all of the creatures of the forest sitting around you. There's a blue jay on your left palm, a black squirrel on your right - it's dozing-it's resting, it feels completely at peace."

That's not what I was expecting, but I liked the way the words made the inside of my head feel.

She looked down at my palm, then back up at me and went on: "You were trouble as a teenager, and you probably pushed your parents too far, and they probably gave you up for lost."

She was good.

She said, "You were about twenty, and you saw something that scared you into changing your ways. What was it?" "Aren't you supposed to be telling me?" "A car accident."
Shit,
she
was
good. "How many people were killed?" she asked. "Four." "Four people-and afterwards you went to your par
ents' house. You said to them something along the lines of,

Mom, Dad, I've seen the error of my ways, and I've decided I no longer want to be the person I was before. I'm going to be someone new now, someone better, somebody I can respect.
Your mother cried."

Traffic and people thrummed around us, but they might as well have been on a TV muted in the background. I didn't know what to say.

"The thing is," she continued, "you changed only a little bit, and only for a little while. You lacked the courage to follow through on the criminal promise of your teens, and you were too lazy to become a genuinely good person. You wonder why I look at you funny, well, now you know why."