Clifford Page 11

  No, no, no…this wasn’t making any sense whatsoever. “If we’re surrounded by a black hole, then it’s going to eat us up and we’ll disappear.”

  “Except we’re growing at the same rate we’re being eaten.”

  I just shook my head. This still wasn’t making sense.

  “Let me explain.” He took an elastic from one of the braids in his beard. “Remember E=mc2?”

  I nodded, mouth full of burger.

  “Well, all that means is energy equals mass. If I take this elastic and weigh it, I know its mass. If I stretch it” — he pulled on it to show me — “I put energy into it. If I weigh it again while it’s stretched, that energy I put into it will increase its mass and it will weigh more.”

  I had no way to prove or disprove what he was telling me. I had to accept it. “So?”

  “So the same thing is happening to the universe. It is being pulled in all directions. It is constantly being stretched, and that stretching is putting energy into it, and that energy is turning into mass, because, like I said, mass and energy are the same thing.

  “You remember those little toys we used to play with: tops?”

  “Yeah.”

  He was putting the elastic back on the beard braid.

  “Well, if you spin it, put energy into it, it will weigh more than it does while it’s stopped. E=mc2 again. The earth is rotating on its axis, same as that top. It has energy that becomes mass, and the earth weighs more because it’s spinning than it would if it was stationary.”

  “So?”

  “So the earth is orbiting the sun, and the sun is part of a galaxy orbiting a black hole, and while that black hole at the galaxy’s centre is eating the galaxy, at the same time it is causing a whirlpool in space, putting energy into it, creating more mass. The two forces balance each other out. The universe is being eaten by the void that surrounds it, which is stretching it in all directions and creating more mass. And the black holes in the centre of each of the billions of galaxies are creating whirlpool energies that turn into mass. The universe is in a constant state of being created and destroyed at the same time.

  “There was no beginning. There doesn’t have to be a beginning. We end up thinking there was a beginning only because of the power of the Christian story.”

  “Two things,” I interrupted him. “First is, if I remember right, you once told me the universe began with a spore that spontaneously began to grow. And the second is I still don’t get how the planets are formed by energy alone.”

  “Well, first things first. About that spore, I might have been wrong about that. But if we look at maps of dark matter in the universe, it looks like mycelia. It looks like a web. Back then I still believed the dominant story, which was the big bang story. Now I’m not so sure.

  “Your second question is easier. Everything in the universe is made out of space. Remember space is made out of waves. So is everything else. Light can be a photon or a wave. Atoms can be solid or a wave. Physical matter is mostly space.” He tapped the table with his knuckle. “This is 95 percent space. The atoms in here are only a small part of it and even the atoms are just a different form of space.

  “Remember I explained to you that gravity is just the difference between the low density of space close to the surface of the earth and higher density space farther up?”

  I had a solid memory of that.

  “Well, it’s all about density. At one density space is that stuff out there that keeps the universe together; at another density it becomes dark matter, which is the same stuff that is between the atoms in this table; and at extreme densities it becomes the quarks that make up photons and neutrons and even electrons.

  “So while the universe is being stretched and spun by the difference between space and a void, energy is being created, which becomes mass, which becomes stars and planets and galaxies. It’s really quite simple. I call it the Constant State Universe Theory.”

  It took a moment to absorb what he’d said. A few mouthfuls of burger. I didn’t have any arguments, and anyway that wasn’t what we had been talking about. “Okay. I’ll accept that maybe the big bang is just a story that came about because of the Christian Genesis story. But how does that make me a racist?”

  “Because everything is story: you, me, the universe, everything. Let’s try medicine. You know placebo.”

  I nod, my mouth too full to speak. I know placebo.

  He explains it anyway. “I give you a sugar pill and tell you a story about how this pill is medicine, and you take it and believe the story, 35 to 50 percent of the time you will experience a reduction in your symptoms. There was a woman who was told she had cancer. She went home and for the next few months she did nothing but watch happy movies. Any movie as long as it had a happy ending. One after the other, anything to take her mind off her cancer. When she went back to the doctor months later, her cancer was gone. There was also a boy with leukemia, imagined that the Lone Ranger was riding through his blood veins, shooting the cancer cells with silver bullets. Guess what, he healed himself. Stories can heal you.

  “There’s also nocebo. If I give you the same sugar pill, but this time I change the story and tell you that it is poison, and if you take the pill and believe the story, you are going to get very sick and maybe even die. There was a guy who tried to commit suicide by taking nocebo pills. His heart rate went down, his blood pressure went down, and he required medical intervention. He didn’t begin to recover until they told him the pills he had taken were made out of sugar. It’s not the sugar in the pill that does it. It’s the story. A story can heal you and a story can kill you.”

  Either I had nothing to say in response or I was too busy eating.

  “Do you remember the shortest story ever written?”

  I did. We’d talked about this before. Augusto Monterroso, “When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.”

  “Eight words, and the reason it makes sense and can be called a story is because we infer meaning to those words. Who was he? A man, a boy, another dinosaur? Was the dinosaur there before he went to sleep or was it in his dreams? Know what I think?”

  I shook my head.

  “I think there are even shorter stories. I think one word can be a story because we infer meaning into it. Take the word blasphemy. We infer a whole volume of ideas into it: witch burnings, crusades, wars, trials, torture, inquisitions. That one word evokes a lot more than its three syllables would suggest. Take the word adultery. How many stories can you infer from that word?

  “Each word is a story. It is either a placebo or a nocebo story. So we have to be careful with each word that we speak, because, depending on which word we choose, we can either heal or kill.

  “I know I’m going a little off topic here…” He put his burger down and wiped the grease from his fingers with a napkin. “If we infer meaning into words and we think with words — well, most of us think with words; some people think with pictures — but if you’re one of the majority and your mind is constantly filled with internal dialogue, then maybe we can change our thinking if we change our words.

  “If we want to get out of a street gang lifestyle and we’re still saying things like ‘bro’ or ‘homey,’ our thinking won’t change. Or like you with your hard-rock miner, logger, sailor language where you use ‘fuck’ or ‘fucken’ in every sentence. If you want to change your thinking, change the words you use.”

  “Fuck that. I like who I am. And my thinking is perfectly okay with me.”

  “Up to you, but if you ever want to become something other than working class, change your language. Change the words you talk to yourself with.”

  “Still haven’t fucken proved I’m a racist.”

  “I’m getting there. I just need you to know that everything is story and that you are the story that you tell yourself.”

  “Get on with it, then.” I deliberately didn�
��t say, Fuck, get on with it already.

  “I’m going to take my time. Still have a few things to prove first. You think you see me? You believe what your eyes are telling you?”

  “Yeah.” I have twenty-twenty vision, maybe even better. I do an exercise when I am on the plane flying in and out of the mine. I read the newspaper of the guy sitting two rows in front of me. Headlines are easy. If I really focus, I can read the regular print as well.

  “Impossible. You have two eyes. So you should see two pictures. Each of those pictures should be clearer toward the centre and fuzzy around the periphery because the cones and rods, those things in your eyes that do the actual seeing, are more concentrated closer to the centre. And each of those pictures should have a big black hole in the middle because you can’t see through the optic nerve that runs through the centre of your retina. What happens is” — he holds both hands up, palms toward me — “your brain takes these two pictures and merges them together” — he shows me with his hands — “and it fills in the blank spot. Guess what it fills the blank spot in with?”

  I shrug.

  “Shit you made up.”

  I don’t say anything. He gets tired of waiting for me to respond.

  “I’m serious. A lot of what you think you see is socially derived. You are seeing things based upon the story you are living. That’s how magicians do their tricks. They can turn a piece of rope into a snake and your eyes actually see the snake. The trick wouldn’t work on someone from the High Arctic who had never seen a snake. His brain wouldn’t fill in the gap with an image of something that wasn’t already stored away.”

  I wasn’t buying it, not completely, not yet.

  “You’re a writer. Ever edit your own stuff?”

  I nod.

  “You know why you have such a hard time of it? Because when you are rereading something you wrote, if you made a mistake, if you accidentally wrote on instead of an, when you reread it, your brain would show you the letter a instead of the letter o.”

  “Okay. That’s a little more convincing. But I’m still not a racist.”

  “Do you accept that everything is story, that you and I and the universe are just stories we make up?”

  I had to think about it. Did I really accept it? I didn’t feel like a story. I felt real. But I had no way to prove I was real. And that thing about not knowing anything because everything we think we know is inferred based on things we inferred earlier — that I couldn’t argue with. “Okay, I buy it. But if I am nothing more than the stories I tell myself, then I am in control and I choose not to be a racist.”

  “You are in control.” He finished his hamburger and began working on the pile of fries, one at a time. “You can change it, but you have to know what it is first; you have to know the story.”

  “So tell me. What do you think the story is?”

  He waited, a fry between thumb and forefinger. “There are all sorts of stories that we never challenge. Canada is just a story. We made it up. We say we are kinder, gentler Americans. We could have said anything. The constitution is just a story. We wrote it. We could have written it any other way. The worst thing about the nation story is that people believe it and are willing to die for it. We go to war and kill other people because of the story we tell ourselves.

  “That company you work for, Cameco — it’s just a story. The only reason Cameco has any power is because we all agree it has power. It’s the story we tell about it. If everyone agrees on the story, it doesn’t matter that the only real essence of the company is a charter and a set of bylaws filed away at Corporations Branch. Cameco has no body to kick, no soul to damn. The only place it exists is in our heads.”

  “Yeah, but that story writes me a very real paycheque every two weeks.”

  “How real is that paycheque?”

  “I say it’s real. It buys me a lot of stuff, and as of now I still don’t think it’s going to buy lunch.”

  “That cheque is like money. They’re both made out of paper. Take any bill out of your wallet, hold it in your hand, and you see a piece of paper with a picture of either an old woman or some dead guy on it. Tilley is going to take that piece of paper in exchange for this meal because she believes the story about money. The only reason money works is because everyone believes the fiction. It’s okay. We all get along and things get done. We build roads and hospitals and schools and pay the workers with paper, and everyone agrees and everyone is happy with it.”

  He finished his last fry and was looking around to see where Tilley might be. “The problem with the money fiction is at a higher level: the economy. We used to believe in dragons and unicorns; now we believe in market forces. This new story demands human sacrifice. There are people on this planet who are starving to death, and we have way too much food here.”

  I look at his gravy-smeared plate and at mine, which still holds a few vinegar-soaked fries and a bit of coleslaw.

  “But if we took some of our food and gave it to them, the economy would suffer. So, to keep the economy story going, some people have to die. Nobody questions the story. It’s taken as natural and normal and even necessary. That’s the thing. These stories we make up take off on us and we lose control. Pretty soon we accept the story as reality.

  “Our brains believe the story that we never question, and when we see things, the brain fills in the empty spots with those stories. Remember that woman who asked you for money on the way here?”

  I remembered. Gave her a few quarters.

  “What you thought you saw wasn’t what was there.”

  “So what was there, then? She certainly was no princess.”

  “No, she wasn’t a princess. But she wasn’t what you saw either. What your eyes told you was based upon that lazy dirty drunken Indian story.”

  “Fuck off.” I could see where this was going and I didn’t like it.

  “She wasn’t as dirty or drunk as your eyes told you she was.”

  “Bullshit, she was drunk. I could smell it on her.”

  “She had a little buzz going. If she had been a white male, you wouldn’t have minded as much. That lazy dirty drunken Indian story is so powerful, it has been around for so long, and we’ve been hearing it since first contact, throughout the colonial period, again in residential schools, and we are still hearing it in the media. Oh, they’ve toned it down some, but it’s still there. Not only have we heard it again and again, we repeat it again and again. It’s in the jokes we tell: ‘How do you hide something from an Indian? Put it in his work boots.’ You know how it goes.”

  “Bullshit!” I knew I was repeating myself. It was just that what he was saying was beginning to hit a little too close to home. “Remember I’m half Indian.”

  “That just makes it worse. We take those stories about ourselves and internalize them. Indians hate Indians too. Why do you think there is so much violence in our communities? Indians beat up Indians because the guy, or even the woman, they are beating on is an Indian. It’s very rare for an Indian to assault a white person. It might happen, but not often. And the worst part is, why do Indian men beat up Indian women? Because they’re women. In that story about how much lesser we are, the lowest of the low is the woman.

  “Admit it. When you were single, you preferred to be with Indian women because the story was that they were easy.”

  “That’s not what I said. If I remember right, I once told you that I found Indian women were not as uptight as white women about sex.”

  “Same thing. Just a different way of saying it.”

  This was getting too hard to accept. “Keep in mind, our mother is an Indian woman.”

  “That’s how powerful the story is. You were raised by a brown-skinned woman who loved you, and you still treated that woman on Central Avenue like she was something lesser.”

  “I gave her money,” I defended.

  “You gav
e her a bit of change to get rid of her. Your eyes told you she was drunk and dirty, and you didn’t want to be around her.”

  I was glad Tilley came over right then to clean away our platters and take our pie orders: raisin and ice cream for Clifford, apple and ice cream for me. While we waited, I was able to let everything he said settle. I was able to let all the things I was feeling settle. My first response had been a rush of anger, and I knew enough not to say anything until it subsided. We ate mostly in silence. Tilley cuts her pies into sixths rather than eighths and she piles on the ice cream.

  Later, sipping coffee, feeling content, Clifford continued: “You know, it’s not just the racism we feel toward others. And, yeah, I am caught in it too. I have to be extra careful to make sure that my eyes are seeing what’s actually in front of me. And it’s not just our eyes. Our brain hears what it wants to hear. It interprets the sounds we hear and will change words around on us.”

  That was easier to accept than the idea that our eyes lie to us. I could easily remember a dozen times when I heard something wrongly. Always wrote it off as being because I worked around too many chainsaws and diesel engines.

  “All those stories about us being ‘lesser than’ because we’re half-breeds get inside our heads and we believe them. The reason you quit the navy and came home is because they offered you advance promotion and officer training. Your brain told you that you weren’t able to do that, you were just a half-breed and couldn’t be an officer.”

  “I quit the navy because I was done with it and I was drinking too much there.”

  “You drank the same amount when you got home. And what about that promotion at the mine that you purposely fucked up?”

  The foreman, Chuck Gastell, had told me that he was planning on having me act as relief foreman when he took his holidays. I came back to him a few hours later and told him that I needed help dealing with my overuse of marijuana. When I had told Clifford about it, I was wondering why it seemed like I had purposely sabotaged myself. He didn’t have an answer then. He had one now. And I didn’t like it.