but she could tell from her call minder it was me, so she didn’t answer. I tried four more times and then I gave up. Before I fell asleep that night, I had a vision of being six years old in the back seat of an old car with two people sitting up front. The man was driving and the woman was reading an old-style magazine. I thought it was my parents but they were way too young. We were driving through some mountains. New England, maybe. The window was down and the air smelled sweet. The woman was singing a song out loud. “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” — the same song my own mother sings. I wondered who this younger version of her could be. I wondered why I had this memory.
Suddenly a deer jumped out in front of the car. The man swerved off the road. I became terrified but the car skidded to a halt in the gravel alongside of the road. No one was hurt. But when the two of them turned around and looked at me, I was crying.
And then it was over. I was alone in my bed but the pillow was soaked. I suddenly felt very alone. More alone than I had ever felt in my life.
CHAPTER TWO
Caroline moved on to Parker Alwight but did not find true happiness. Parker was not as interesting as me, Caroline would soon discover. Before long, he too received the notorious lunchroom theatrical performance, as did others.
I had come to the conclusion that girls were more trouble than they were worth, but that too would not last long. At first I returned to my personal agenda, which was a seemingly lifelong quest to figure out what was different about me. Was it just the fact that I was raised by parents older than most? Or the fact that they were both scientists? Or was it something else?
My father, Roger Gibson, had given up his research and was now an executive with a large pharmaceutical company that kept changing its name every few years as ever larger multinational conglomerates bought it out. When asked what my father did, I often facetiously answered, “He sells drugs,” although I don’t think he actually ever handed over any pills in exchange for cash. He wore a suit and a tie and drank coffee in his office, made a few phone calls and took planes to other cities to meet with other suits and ties. I liked the man, strangely enough, but I didn’t ever quite understand him.
My mother was a beautiful woman with long flowing hair (tinged by grey that she refused to alter with hair colouring) and a great smile. Mary Gibson had been a brilliant medical researcher for many years and had come up with a drug that reduced the suffering of cancer victims who were going to die. Her intent was to ensure that the drug was available cheaply or for free to anyone anywhere, but the company she was working for couldn’t let that happen since there was great profit to be made. So she was handed an early retirement package and set loose. Now she had a net site where she gave free advice to researchers all over the world. Her heart was in the right place.
I’m avoiding, I suppose, the story about how I was different. And I realize I’m not the first confused teenage kid to wonder about the mystery of who I am and where I fit into the world. By means of self-identification, I could list a few things about me — the me of sixteen years — that were odd. I played the didgeridoo, for one thing. This Australian Aboriginal wind instrument took some serious breathing and blowing practice to make it work, but it sounded way cool. I was fanatically interested in the Loch Ness monster. I liked old movies, especially the Japanese Godzilla-era monster movies. I sang opera in the shower. Yes, opera, although I faked the Italian. My second language was Esperanto, although I knew no other person, except for a few contacts in a chat room, who used the so-called international language. I was a failed vegetarian but my intentions were always good to stay off meat and chew tofu for the rest of my days.
What else? I had a passion for anything about insects. Termites or grubs. Sow bugs or centipedes. I found the insect world fascinating despite what Caroline Marks said about me. And I paid close attention to my dreams. I had weird and amazing dreams as most people do. I didn’t think they foretold the future as some believe. I didn’t think they were symbolic. I doubted that they connected me to any cosmic consciousness. I just realized they revealed something about the inner me. What I liked to think of as “the real me.”
I could tell you more, but let me get more to the heart of the problem. Sometimes when I looked at the world, it was like there was someone else inside me looking out at that world with me. I was still there but so was this other person. It was not my evil twin. It was someone I liked very much but had never met. Someone with whom I shared a powerful but inexplicable bond. This other me never spoke directly to me but I felt his presence — almost always there, observing, wondering.
Despite the scientific background of my parents, they discounted my requests to be sent to a shrink for a total cerebral checkup. “They prescribe way too many pills,” my father said, this man whose career was built on selling drugs for everything from sniffly noses to heart attacks. My mother too was adamant. “Just grow up normal” was the brilliant advice from this complex, intelligent woman who counselled PhDs all over the world.
Normal sounded easier than it was.
In my post-Caroline phase, I was thinking that all my attempts to act and be normal were failing me so I decided instead to go back to cultivating my eccentricities. I shaved my head and began wearing black clothing. I wore a black leather jacket that I had bought at the Salvation Army and realized that it was ironic that a guy like me who aspired to be a vegetarian and made rude remarks at meat eaters would want to wear leather.
My mother and father were appalled. My teachers would noticeably gasp when I walked into the classroom. At night I studied the shape of my skull in the mirror as I listened to Verdi. There was something vaguely familiar about looking at myself in the mirror and seeing that bald scalp. It was a kind of pale, shiny desert landscape, and each time I rubbed my hand across it, it was like landing on the moon.
Sometimes, too, when I looked into that mirror, it was as if someone else was looking back. The other me. And he was reminding me that I was supposed to remember something. Something that was just beyond my grasp. Like a memory that was more of a taste than a thought, more a sound than an idea. And then sometimes I would feel the pain.
I felt it in the back of my brain at first, then all over my body. It shot through me and then it was gone. And as soon as it disappeared, despite how much it hurt, how much it shocked and scared me, I felt whole again. I felt like me and no one else. I experienced a flood of endorphins rippling through my veins. I felt alive and free and happy. And ravenous to simply live my life to the max.
But, no, I did not feel normal.
In school, I was what is euphemistically called an average student. C-plus to tell the truth. I think I was smarter than that but I was bone-lazy when it came to school. Aside from my abiding love of the insect world and the Loch Ness monster, I was also quite interested in the human body and how the mind works. I didn’t have the whole picture by a long shot, but I had some interesting bits and pieces. I knew how we smell things, for example.
When you inhale air, you breathe in all kinds of molecules, a great cornucopia of various molecules. They smash into your olfactory epithelium and the receptor cells that greet them. The information about the smell (be it sweet or stinky) is ushered on to olfactory bulbs that hurry the information on to the olfactory cortex.
So the smell never makes it to the brain, just the information about the smell. One theory suggests that we smell something when the shape of the molecule entering your nose finds an olfactory receptor that is the same shape. If the molecule fits, we get the smell. If there is no fit, we don’t smell anything. Sometimes when you smell something, it triggers a distant memory. Sometimes there are powerful emotional connections. Once, while walking in the woods, I smelled the sap of a pine tree and found myself falling down on the floor of the forest crying. No one saw me do this and I was glad for that. I don’t know what it was but, ever since then,
