Smoke and Mirrors. Lesley Choyce

I quickly grew bored with. My parents would buy me only the so-called best of brand name clothing. For such a weird kid I was always well-dressed. But I knew there was more to be had from life. Someday I hoped to work on a SETI project as a scientist or possibly train chimpanzees to speak with sign language. My preference for employment would be working with either aliens or chimps, but not people. My communication skills with my own species were remarkably weak.

      My mother would say, “Simon, you can do whatever you want with your life as long as you have a solid education and apply yourself to something practical.”

      Practical was not any area that was on my radar.

      “Simon,” my father would say, “you can become whatever you would like to be. Just strive to be the best.” These were the words coming from a man who had descended from an alpha male ape. Being the best at something sounded exhausting.

      The house resonated with my parents’ arguments over money or me. It seeped into the walls and ceilings and floors. The living room carpet soaked up lectures about success that meant little to me. The furniture absorbed my mother’s late-night strategies for selling an expensive house to a man of modest means. The paintings on the walls changed colours sometimes if both parents were in the room together arguing about whose money was really carrying the household.

      I did not like all the woe that piled up around the house like the old newspapers and magazines I kept in my room for my clipping file. I tried changing my parents into people I would have liked better but failed. They were pretty powerful hominids. I did not hate my parents. I felt sorry for them, but they refused my pity.

      I did succeed in creating a force field around my room that kept all their negativity outside my private domain. This was achieved after taking advice from Lydia, the downtown psychic. She was this crazy ex-hippie who read tarot cards and palms or told you about your previous lives. I met her first at the psychic fair on Downey Street. She charged me ten dollars to tell me about my past life as a soldier in Napoleon’s army. She said she too had been a soldier in Napoleon’s army and I had saved her life in the battle at Waterloo. She insisted we become friends, although “allies” was the word I think she used. Lydia also looked at my hands very closely and announced to anyone within earshot at the psychic fair, “These are the hands of a healer.” She held up my hands for everyone to take note. Once that was established, she didn’t charge me anymore for advice or psychic services. Teaching me to create an anti-negativity force field she said was “on the house.”

      Inside, seated at the kitchen table, it seemed that there were voices talking to me, all saying the same thing. The refrigerator telling me Andrea could not possibly exist, the microwave telling me to get a grip on my life. The goddamn toaster suggesting a reality check. I turned on the radio to distract the voices and that didn’t help. So I went upstairs and turned on my computer, let the dog outside where it peed on the lawn and barked at the sound of imaginary cars programmed into the software.

      CHAPTER SIX

      I would not tell my parents about Andrea, but I needed to tell someone. So I told Lydia.

      Her apartment was tiny, a cramped living space above a used record store down on Argyle Street. She had no doorbell, no buzzer. An old used envelope tacked to the door said simply, “Go upstairs and walk in. You are expected.” Her idea of a psychic’s joke.

      Old tabloid newspapers were piled on the steps up to her place, some with headlines like, “Elvis found Alive and Well Living Among Baboons.” Or “Hitler’s Son a Proctologist in Miami.”

      I knocked on the door and walked in. The smell in the air was a combination of garlic and marijuana. Lydia called the marijuana an “herb,” and she seemed quite open about the fact that she was a toker. Never once did she offer me any or even ask if I had ever smoked. I was now a non-toker and a non-drinker. I didn’t want to mess with whatever natural chemical process was going on in my brain. That’s why I snubbed even the store-bought pharmaceuticals my parents were squandering their money on.

      “Hey there,” Lydia said as a smoke alarm went off in the tiny kitchen where she was burning something in a frying pan. I walked in and tried to reach for the alarm, but I wasn’t tall enough. The shrill sound hurt my ears. Lydia cursed loudly at it and failed to make it stop so she swatted it with a broom, knocking it onto the floor where it split open and spilled its battery, then fell silent.

      “Simon, I knew you’d be over today. It’s about a girl, isn’t it?”

      I smiled and sat down on a piece of plastic lawn furniture that served as a kitchen chair.

      “Good guess,” I said.

      “I never guess,” she said. “I know.”

      Everyone around town thought Lydia was a phony. Few believed in her psychic powers. I’m not sure I did either. But Lydia was my friend. After Ozzie left town, she became the only person I could talk to about everything and anything. She was opinionated but kind. And I needed that.

      “A skeleton goes into a bar and asks for a drink,” she says. “And the bartender tells him ...”