its cybernetic tail on the screen, and I would open a door by clicking the mouse and let it “out” where it barked some more and peed on an imaginary lawn. Sometimes there would be the voice of an angry neighbour yelling at my dog. The dog was not real, so I never gave it a name. Just called it “the dog.”
“How did you learn all the names?” I asked Andrea.
“I don’t know. I seem to have a selective memory. This place, this trail, this forest. It is familiar. I’ve been here before.”
“Like in another life?”
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” she asked.
I stopped and leaned against what I thought was an oak tree. “I’m the guy who believes in everything. When I was younger, my friend Ozzie told me I could fly, so I believed him and I jumped off the garage roof. I flew for a second or two and then hit the ground, but it never occurred to me then that I couldn’t fly. It would just take a little more practice. The Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation, and I’ve never met a Buddhist or Hindu I couldn’t trust. If it is metaphysical, I believe in it. But I don’t think you were reincarnated suddenly as a seventeen-year-old girl. I don’t think it works that way.”
“You think I am seventeen?”
“Am I wrong?”
“I’m sixteen,” Andrea said, but as she said it she seemed to remember something.
“What are you thinking about?”
She shook her head, pointed to a tree with red berries. “Mountain ash. Also known as a rowan tree. Said to have magical powers.”
“Trees are great, aren’t they? Big, heavy-duty photo-synthesis machines. When I grow up I want to be a tree.”
Andrea laughed. She laughed very loudly for a girl of sixteen. “I haven’t laughed like that for a long time.”
“How long?”
“That I don’t know. Let’s stop.”
We sat down by the river, and I stared into the water. First I saw the water moving, then the stuff on the surface — dust and twigs and a few leaves. Then I saw us. Both of us quite clearly. I looked different. Older maybe. A tad less insane looking around the eyes. No one ever came out and said I looked crazy, but I knew that some people thought so. Not Charles Manson crazy, just harmless crazy. In the river I didn’t look crazy. It was like I was watching a movie of a different me — a guy and a girl sitting by a moving river in a world of trees and birds.
And then all of the birds suddenly stopped singing. The image in the river grew fuzzy like a TV with bad reception. It was from a breeze that had come up, stirring the surface of the water. There were clouds now as well — not clouds that said, We’re going to unleash buckets of rain on you and make thunder and hit you with a thirty-thousand-volt thunderbolt. Just clouds.
I was wondering if she somehow did that — made the birds stop singing and the wind start up to erase my movie. And the clouds.
“It wasn’t me,” she said.
“You’re reading my mind.”
“No. Not really. You gave me a look, and I answered the look.”
Because of the change of lighting Andrea looked different. Very pale. Some famous director once said that in movies, lighting is everything. Sometimes this can be applied to real life too. My mind jumped to the conclusion that Andrea was fading, maybe vaporizing in front of me. I didn’t want her to leave, so I reached out to touch her arm.
I touched the cloth of her sleeve. It was cotton, and I slid my hand down until I was touching her wrist. The smoothness of the skin over her wrist left a powerful impression that will last the rest of my days. Then I put my thumb in the centre of her palm, my fingers on her knuckles, and I squeezed a little.
“You’re testing me again to see if I’m real, aren’t you?”
I felt a little silly. “Let’s walk. I’m really glad you brought me here.”
“For me there’s a sort of déjà vu feel to it.”
“I’m the world’s biggest fan of the déjà vu,” I said. “I’ve kept a list of them, at least the ones since I was in the hospital when I was twelve. They don’t seem to make any sense at all, but I’m hoping that someday they will. Usually it’s trivial stuff. I’m doing my homework and the lead breaks on my pencil. Wham. Déjà vu. I’m sitting down to toast at breakfast, open up a jar of raspberry jelly, and there it is again. You don’t think it’s one big, long, repetitive loop we live over and over and these are just snippets of things that sneak through into our current memory?”
“Where did you get that idea from?”
“Star Trek. I’ve logged a lot of hours on the Starship Enterprise.”
“My brother used to ...” she stopped and had that distant, puzzled look again.
“Your brother used to what?”
“Watch Star Trek.”
“You have a brother?”
“I think so,” she said. “I remember him, or at least something about him, but it isn’t clear at all. I’m not sure I can tell you more.”
“And so the mystery deepens.”
Now she seemed a little defensive. “Remember, this isn’t about me. It’s about you. I’m here to help you.”
I smiled. “And believe me, I can use all the help I can get, so if I ask you anything you don’t want to answer or say anything stupid, just ignore it and go on about your business of helping me.”
But the inquiring mind is a devilish tool, and I did continue to ask her questions about trivial things in hopes of getting an inkling of who exactly it was that was trying to help me. I asked her several easy questions about Star Trek shows, but she didn’t seem to remember anything. But then it was her “brother” who had been the fan, not her. And I began to wonder if she meant brother literally or if it referred to someone like her — another apparition or spirit or even this, the word that I did not want to test on her: ghost.
When we arrived at my house I was feeling a little dizzy — not surprising, I wasn’t in great physical shape. I hadn’t exercised much, and I loathed most sports that didn’t require surfboard wax or ball bearings. Since mentioning her brother, Andrea had taken a couple of mood swings, and I tried to cheer her up with recitations of all the trivia in my head.
“The man who invented chop suey was Li Hung-chang. The father of frozen foods was Clarence Birdseye. Milton Loeb invented the Brillo pad, and Francis Davis invented power steering.” Then I explained to her about my severed hemispheres. “The doctors don’t have a clue if they have reconnected in any way, but my ‘problem’ seems to allow me to memorize vast quantities of seemingly useless information.”
“Do you still think that I may be something conjured up by your imagination?”
“My definition of what is real is anything I believe in. And
