Clifford Page 6

  Memories of Mom mixing tea, half and half with milk, in one of the younger brother’s bottles, and it’s easy to imagine that the same was done for me.

  A memory of Dad in the morning, up early, and a pot of strong coffee. Only he and I are awake. I don’t go to school yet. The ones who do will be getting up soon. I have a cup of coffee, mostly milk. We don’t talk, just enjoy each other’s company. A memory of the radio and a program called Kindercorner for children; the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

  I can hear the song that started the radio show: If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure for a big surprise … because today’s the day the Teddy Bears have their picnic.

  The memory has a good feel to it, comforting. I am almost happy, something I haven’t felt in a long time. The therapy is working: only a few hours in the bosom of Mother Earth and already my pain is going away.

  * * *

  The night and the sleeping bag want to take me. Thinking of my brother, how he had been, his hopes, his dreams, his ambitions — what would he have done if he had gone on? Would the scientist have re-emerged? Or would he have stayed the technician, fixing all the broken things? I realize I am going to have to learn electrical now that he is gone. I am a good mechanic; I am able to visualize three dimensions and see the inner workings of an engine, follow fuel and air flows and pistons and crankshafts, but I never paid attention to how simple things like signal lights worked. I didn’t have to. Clifford was always there with his intuitive ability to find the cracked wire or the blown fuse, his ease in seeing the flow of electrons from the cathode to the anode sides of batteries.

  If it involved electricity, I simply called Clifford to fix it and didn’t have to figure it out for myself, and never learned. But now — now was going to be different in many ways. I am going to have to go on — on my own. My world has a big hole in it, an empty spot, a void.

  I open my eyes in the darkness, laying on my side, half my vision is of the earth and shadows; the other is of the sky, treetops, and stars.

  I should write Clifford’s story.

  The thought emerges fully formed.

  But how? What would the structure look like? What voice would I use?

  Biography. Maybe.

  I have enough material. But writing biography requires following a strict form. Clifford would never fit in that form. He would come out all caricature, a false image of who he was. No, to write Clifford and reveal his true self requires that I write him as fiction. And he would love it, to be remembered like an Isaac Asimov character or an H. G. Wells invention.

  It was, after all, Clifford who told me that there is no real difference between fact and fiction. Everything that we believe to be factual and true is just the most popular story of our time.

  “Science,” he said, “can never tell the absolute truth. We used to believe that the earth was the centre of the universe. Then Galileo showed us that the earth orbited the sun, then Newton added his view of gravity to the story, then Einstein modified Newton’s theory with relativity, then quantum physics overtook relativity, then super strings tried to combine everything, and complexity tried to find the hidden connections. We think we have a good understanding of the universe now with billions of galaxies, but wait — in fifty years, or a hundred years, they are going to look back on what we think we know and say, ‘How quaint.’ And a hundred years after that, the story that replaces our story will be replaced again. All we have is the best story we can come up with to explain what we think we know, and all the while we know the story is wrong. If we ever found the true story, science would come to an end.”

  So, if I write Clifford, I write him as fiction, as a fantasy, as a thought experiment. I close my eyes and the earth and the sky disappear. The warmth of my sleeping bag wraps around me and sleep pulls me under, into that half-world where reality and fantasy mingle in a place where coherent thoughts disintegrate.

  Clifford is here somewhere in this mist. I can hear his voice, his words, then the sound of his laugh, somewhere off in the dark. I begin to wake up again, somewhere in that middle world between sleep and consciousness, and I am five years old again.

  * * *

  Clifford’s games were much more interesting than anyone else’s.

  “See, bubbles. It’s easy, just soap and water and blow on the straw and you can make bubbles.”

  And it is fun.

  I run around the yard, even in the house, with a cup of soapy water and a straw, and make bubbles, lots of bubbles.

  What was he teaching me?

  “Everything alive has a skin. You have skin, animals have skin, trees have bark — that’s just another kind of skin. Water has to be alive because it, too, has skin.”

  “Water doesn’t have a skin.”

  “Sure it does. That’s what you’re making bubbles out of. Water skin.”

  Then he shows me. A glass of water…slowly, very carefully, fill it until it is overfull and the water is actually above the rim of the glass.

  I can see it.

  Proof.

  Water has skin; that’s why it doesn’t flow over the edge.

  Water is alive.

  “How big of a bubble can you make?”

  So, I practise. Long, steady, slow breaths. I can make a bubble as big as my head.

  “Bet I can make a bigger bubble than you.”

  “Can not.”

  “Can too.”

  “No way.”

  “Watch, I’ll show you.”

  Then out comes the hula hoop with a piece of wood wired in place for a handle. Mom’s washtub full of soapy water. And Clifford can make big bubbles, huge ones. I can chase them, I can catch them, throw them in the air. They’re bigger than me.

  “How’d you like to go inside one of those?”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. If, while I’m making a bubble, you jump through the hoop at the same time and go into the lotus position while you’re in the air, your feet won’t break the bubble.”

  See…

  Set up.

  Set up.

  Set up.

  Run…time it so I’m there exactly when the water skin begins to bend inside of the hoop…easy…into the air, lotus position, duck my head. The hoop passes over me.

  I’m inside a bubble.

  Up to this point, I can almost believe it. It could actually have happened.

  I’ve even figured out how he made the big bubbles, the secret ingredient.

  Corn syrup.

  Mom’s corn syrup. It was in a white bottle with a picture of a yellow cob of corn on the label. She used it for baking and sometimes she mixed Mapleine, imitation maple flavour, with it, and we used it on pancakes.

  Yeah, that’s all it took: corn syrup, soap, a washtub, and a hula hoop.

  Mix six parts water, one part dish soap and glycerine, or corn syrup, together — let it set overnight, and anyone can make huge bubbles.

  It took a while to find the recipe. I must have been almost twenty-five before I discovered it. One part of the puzzle solved.

  But there’s that other part. The part that I still don’t believe actually happened. Or I haven’t figured out how he did it.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t mean the old white guy with a beard, sitting on a throne in the clouds, who drops manna with one hand and throws lightning bolts at you with the other. I mean the god who is part of everything.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Okay, then. I want you to hold onto this.”

  He dips an eagle feather in the washtub and gently pushes it through the bubble.

  “Careful now. Just pull on it nice and easy, and the bubble won’t pop.”

  It didn’t.

  I sit inside a bubble with a sticky, wet eagle feather in m
y palms.

  Parts of the memory are dimmed by time, there’s a bit of vagueness to it all. Except the next part. This I remember as though it happened only a few minutes ago.

  “What goes faster than light?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Think; what goes faster than light?”

  Nothing goes faster than light. Light is the fastest. He proved that to me with a flashlight. Right after he proved that sound travelled and that sound was slow. “Watch Dad splitting wood. See that. You can see him hit the block and then, a little later, you hear the sound. That’s because sound travels.” Then he points at a white streak across the sky. “See the jet? You can see the jet long before you hear it. That’s because the jet travels faster than sound. It leaves its sound behind.”

  A flashlight in the dark, a beam against the cabin wall.

  “The light comes out of the flashlight, right?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “So it has to travel from the flashlight to the wall, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So how fast is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second.”

  So, why is he asking me what goes faster than light when he’s taught me about Einstein and proved that nothing goes faster? Light is the fastest. Einstein said so.

  “Think.”

  Very carefully, slowly enunciated, patient. “Think…What. Goes. Faster. Than. Light? Think.”

  It’s an impossible question. My mind goes blank.

  “Think.” His voice is gentle, encouraging.

  “Think.”

  A word emerges in my empty head: “Thought. Thought is faster than light.”

  “Right. You’re doing good. Now something else. Remember solar sails?”

  I remember. If you took a sail into outer space where there is no atmosphere, no gravity, and the sun shone on it, it would move because the light was moving, and when the light hit the sail, the sail would move because there was nothing to stop it. The same as if the light were wind. I remember.

  I also remember: “You can move things with your mind. Close your eyes. Hold on to that eagle feather and think yourself into outer space.”

  So I did what I was told. Thought myself into outer space.

  I hear him in my head.

  “Do not open your eyes.”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  “If you open your eyes, you might get scared and pop the bubble. Then you’ll be stuck up there.”

  “Okay.”

  “Right. Now think yourself back down here again.”

  How gullible could I have been, how completely trusting? He convinced me that I had gone into outer space. That I had travelled in a bubble spaceship propelled by thought energy.

  I should have opened my eyes. But I didn’t. I played along, because that’s what it was all about: play. It was just another one of Clifford’s elaborate games, and I was a little boy, happy to have someone play with me.

  If it had been only the one trip into outer space, I could have written it off, let it go. There would have been nothing there, just an older brother playing tricks and I had figured out how he’d done it. But there was that other trip, the next one, that I couldn’t quite get my head around.

  * * *

  The night is an envelope of darkness that surrounds me, a big envelope filled with stories that I fall into.

  I was fourteen and hanging out with him, just hitchhiked down for the weekend.

  We were in his apartment in Saskatoon. “Here, try this,” he’d said.

  “What is it?”

  “LSD. Expand your mind a little. Let some truth in.”

  So I did. One tab of purple microdot.

  “There are two ways that this can go. You can journey around, enjoy yourself, experience everything in a new way, or you can freak out and have a bad trip. Both are in your mind. Your choice.”

  Clifford’s apartment: well, it wasn’t really an apartment, just two rooms in an old house, a hot plate and a fridge in one room and a couch and his bed in the other, down the hall a bathroom shared with the other tenants.

  The LSD melted the walls and warped the table, brought some colour to the drab surroundings.

  “You doing okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. A bit weird, but what the hell, nothing wrong with weird.”

  “Wanna go out? Think you can handle it?”

  “No problem.”

  So we went tripping downtown Saskatoon on a bright sunshine summer morning. Found the park by the old hotel beside the river. Met some friends of his, long-haired friends and a girl with flowers woven into her hair and a long, cotton dress who danced barefoot with me in the grass and laughed a tinkle laugh that turned all the trees into glass, and the sun came through them and the colours danced in time to the music.

  I don’t remember her name, but I remember the taste of the wine and that I thought it was pretty special that the bottle touched her lips just before it touched mine.

  Another time:

  “Mescaline isn’t like LSD, it’s smoother. Organic. I think you’ll like it.”

  That was a road trip. We hitchhiked down to Regina. And mescaline isn’t like LSD; the hallucinations are more subtle and you have to be careful that you don’t confuse the images with reality. LSD images are bright and contrary to reality and easy to differentiate. Mescaline images look like they might even be real; the road continues on in front of you, indefinitely leading to paradise as though you might be walking through a painting you once saw hanging in somebody’s living room, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not; it’s good to walk on the road to paradise with your brother.

  “You have to be careful with this; you’re really open to suggestion. Someone might say something and you’ll think you can do it. Just stick close to me.”

  “But you’re high too.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve been here before.”

  I wasn’t sure whether he meant the mescaline or Regina and it didn’t matter. I was fourteen years old and out in the world, and the world was a good place to be.

  Another memory in the jumble: we were in front of a television, in someone’s house, they were watching the moon landings and debating whether it was a hoax. Did they actually go to the moon, or did NASA stage the whole thing to win the space race with the Russians?

  “There’s no way to tell from the images,” a know-it-all proclaimed, a young man with an attitude who took a counter position to whatever direction the conversation threaded. “We’ve never been to the moon before, so no one knows what it really looks like. It would be a simple matter to set up a Hollywood production.”

  “Ray knows what it looks like.” Clifford started to laugh. “Tell them. Is that what the moon looks like?”

  “What’s that?” someone asked.

  “Oh, he’s been there. He knows what the moon looks like. Just ask him, he can tell you.” But he’s laughing too hard for anyone to take him seriously.

  * * *

  Now I’m awake again, fully awake; sitting up in the night. The hoop is where I’d laid it, on the ground out of the way. There was that second trip. The one where he sent me to explore the moon, the one that I can’t explain.

  I review it:

  In the bubble, cross-legged, eagle feather in my hands, eyes closed:

  “Think yourself to the moon.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now open your eyes.”

  Below me, a pockmarked, barren landscape; I am close enough to the surface to see the gravel, the grit, and the rocks. Above me, a large blue planet with white swirls. I have only a few seconds to look around before I hear:

  “Close your eyes again and think yourself back here.”

  And I am back in the front yard and
he pops the bubble to release me.

  How did he do it?

  Kaleidoscope.

  He’d been playing with those — a long tube with holes punched in it to let in specks of light — and put my eye to one end to see a constellation.

  Maybe.

  Maybe while I had my eyes closed on the journey to the moon, he’d put a big cardboard box with holes in it over the bubble and painted it on the inside so that when I opened my eyes, I would think that I was on the surface of the moon. And then when I had my eyes closed again for the return journey, he’d taken it away and hidden it.

  But how the hell did he know what the surface of the moon looked like, and why did it match up with the images from the lunar lander five years later?

  An elaborate hoax.

  And I’ve never satisfactorily figured out how he’d done it.

  “Good one, Clifford.” Words spoken into the darkness.

  There is no answer from the night.

  A puzzle.

  I speak again to the silence, with confidence: “I will figure it out.”

  The Stars

  The Big Dipper hangs a little more toward the east, partially hidden by the trees. I can see the two stars on the end that line up with Polaris, my navigation pointers. I know where I am.

  I learned that from him, about the two stars lining up. Much later, we were young adults, standing roadside in the dark: “Remember when those stars lined up perfectly with Polaris? Now they are off a little.”

  As soon as he said it, I did remember: “Yeah, they used to line up exactly. What the hell is going on?”

  Clifford laughing so hard he can barely get the words out: “You just remembered something that happened five thousand years ago.”

  “Bullshit. I remember. I have a clear memory of those stars.” I point them out, one — two — three. “They lined up.” I am positive.

  “They did. But not in your lifetime. That’s cellular memory. Your DNA is remembering. The last time those three stars lined up was five thousand years ago.”