“How did they do that?”
“Those left behind killed them and piled up the bodies by the burial chamber.”
“It must have been messy. How do you know this stuff, anyway?”
“I have no idea. But I do know they were wrong. The Sumerians didn’t know squat about the afterlife.”
“You’re still freaking me out, you know.”
“You need to get to English.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be there, but if there are no empty seats, I might just hover.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Try to keep an open mind. No labels. No judgments. First impressions are not always right.”
“I know that,” I said to the door and then turned the handle, apologized to Mrs. Dalway about being late, and went to take a seat in the back of the room.
Mrs. Dalway was launching an animated discussion about the witches in Macbeth. All the desks were filled with student bodies. Andrea walked to the side of the room and sat at one of the computers. She was typing on the keyboard, and I was sure others would notice. The computer’s sound was off, but I saw images on the screen. I leaned hard backwards to see what she was doing, and it seemed that she was checking her email.
Mrs. Dalway picked up her voluminous volume of Shakespeare and, with great authority, read the lines of a character she called “Witch Number Two”:
Fillet of fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s string,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For charm of pow’rful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
CHAPTER THREE
When I was twelve I had a skateboarding accident. My father had this assessment of my skateboarding style: “Simon, you are reckless and lacking any semblance of good judgment.” He probably said this because I was reckless and lacking any semblance of good judgment. But I had not yet learned to practise astral projection, so I was using a skateboard to expand my boundaries of possibilities.
My parents were already busy professional people at this point in my life — heck, they had been like that since I was in diapers. In fact, I think, my birth was an accident, I was an accident, and perhaps that accident-mode was following me as I grew up. Most of us do not like to admit that there are parents in the world who probably should not have been parents, but I think you could apply this to mine. They were born for real estate and corporate bonds. They had no great commitment to perpetuate the species or to raise me. They lavished money on babysitters, and as a result I had some of the best and some of the worst.
It was a babysitting wonderland until about eleven, and by then I was good and pissed off at my parents for trying so hard to ignore my existence. I don’t know what form of wisdom had kicked in, but they were wise enough not to have a second child. I expect they believed, by this point, that their first one was a bit of a failure or at least a freak (with his fart bombs, his comic books, his interest in the paranormal, and his pitiful grades at school).
The skateboard was a fantasy tool for me. Ozzie (short for Osmond) was still part of my life in those days and as good as it got when it came to having a loyal but weird friend for a weird kid. My parents never said much to Oz because they didn’t like him. They said he had a funny smell — it was the foreign cheeses he ate with much gusto. They said he was a bad influence — he had introduced me to cracking my knuckles and skateboarding. They said I should get other friends.
Pretty much all of my friends up to that point had been imaginary. Or as I explained it, they existed on an alternate plane of existence. Which didn’t mean they weren’t real; they just weren’t here.
Oz showed me videos of young, fearless kids not much older than us doing death-defying feats, and I knew I could do those things. I wanted to fly on my skateboard. It was inconceivable that I could be injured.
We started out on steep streets racing straight down the white line towards ill-placed stop signs. No slalom, no turns at all, just straight cowabunga-screaming gravity-fed speed. I liked the way the wind felt in my hair and the sound it made in my ears. I used my mental powers (the ones I refused to activate in school) to will traffic to let me slide across the intersection and up the driveway of the house situated there. Sometimes there were car horns heralding my triumph, sometimes skidding tires and shouts of appreciation or rage.
I always found a lawn or at least a flowerbed to end my spree. I was that good. I was gold.
By the age of twelve, I had the baggy clothing and an array of scars. I had experienced road rash on nearly every inch of my body. I had a nasty attitude towards anyone who looked at me funny when I was in skater mode. Oz had somehow sobered himself up into being more cautious, but I was an adrenalin junkie who didn’t mind kissing asphalt if that was what it took.
I was a railing artist. I skidded down metal railings wherever I could find them. I didn’t care what was at the bottom. Usually just concrete. I understood that concrete was hard and flat and unforgiving but I’d made my peace with that. Oz said I understood the physical nature of concrete — up close and personal — more than any other person on this planet or any other planet in the solar system. Oz had taken a backseat in the thrill-and-spill-a-minute world of skateboarding. He had introduced me into the lifestyle and then sat back, nursing his small wounds and watching me go for the glory. He was my number one (and only) fan.
My mother insisted I get professional help for my “problem” (and this was not the first time for that). But it turned out that the professional help was on my side. “He’s just trying to get your attention,” Dr. Rickbenbacker told my parents. “You need to spend a little more time with your son.” Grumbling and griping the whole way about a golf game missed and potential bond business down the tubes, my father took me fishing. I wasn’t really interested in fishing. “Let’s go to the beach,” I begged. “I want to learn to surf.”
“We’re going fishing,” he said, gritting his teeth, gripping the steering wheel tightly as he beheld visions of corporate bonds, whole truckloads of them, being sold to unwary investors by his rabid competitor, Hal Gorey.
Turned out there was a cell phone in the glove compartment, and it rang. It rang often. The fish were not biting at the fish farm he took me to. We bought a salmon, already cleaned and filleted, as evidence of father-son bonding. Just for the record, let me say that I was not trying to kill myself. It’s safe to say, though, that skateboarding had consumed me. If there had been an ocean handy, I would have been surfing and falling off into salt water. But I had no ocean, only streets and sidewalks and elaborate steps to public buildings and railings and ornaments of various shapes and sizes. What I had to fall onto was concrete or asphalt. It was not my destination of choice, but it was what was available when I was ready to fall.
I would be lying if I told you that I did not enjoy coming home with a bloody nose, a forehead abrasion, or a nicely mangled knee. These were all showy awards for attempting the impossible. A kid trying to liberate himself from various laws of physics and reality wants to show off his effort, if not his success.
Ozzie had a bad habit of locating new venues for me to try — places he himself would not attempt. Twice he suggested the long, three-tiered set of granite steps in front of the downtown courthouse. Better yet, there was the metal railing going down the middle.
It was an in-service day for teachers, the sort of day when kids have no classes and go for broke with parents away at work. Teachers were cloistered away in meeting rooms gossiping about their students