The Answer to Everything (5 page)

“I spent the day with Eldrich in the park again.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Must be nice.” I wasn’t really enjoying being back at school. I was thinking maybe I had made a mistake about what to study, and that maybe I should have gone into something practical—business admin, or even accounting, like Barb van Vleck.

“Well, I had to endure a certain amount of balalaika and blah blah blah, but it was worth it to get a read on things.”

“What do you mean?”

“He has more followers than I thought. And not just the types you’d expect.”

“Hmm.” I watched him peel the condom off and inspect it. He always did that. He seemed to be measuring the volume of semen, but maybe he was checking for leaks.

“Yesterday, this guy shows up at around three. Asian. Expensively dressed, Fendi sunglasses, killer watch …”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never seen a watch like this in my life. Tiny dude. Reminded me of Ren from
Ren & Stimpy
. Remember that?”

“Yeah.”

“Unhealthy looking. Apparently, he used to own one of those big-ass monster homes that back onto the park. Used to go for walks out there and started having confabs with Eldrich.”

“Hmm.”

“Here’s the bizarre thing. The guy moved. He bought a mansion up around the Bridle Path, but he still comes to the park to talk to Eldrich.”

“That’s weird.”

“I know. The guy’s like fifty-something and stinking rich. I’m guessing some kind of corporate thief who could afford all manner of shrinks and what have you, but he drives to Oriole Park to talk to Eldrich. He was there yesterday. And he stopped by today too.”

“What do they talk about?”

“Yesterday it was New Agey stuff. Buddy had read some book Eldrich recommended and he was all excited about it. Today he shows up and they wander off for a private conversation. They didn’t talk long. I saw him slip Eldrich something,
which I think was a roll of cash. And it looked pretty thick. Then five-foot-two buddy gives six-foot-something Eldrich a big hug and takes off. I watched him go back to his car. Some super-snazzy convertible. I think it was foreign.”

“Maybe Eldrich is selling him drugs?”

“No. No way. Eldrich doesn’t buy drugs. He has these hippie chicks who supply him with smoke for his own personal use. They just give it to him. Just ‘cause. He never has more than a few joints worth.”

“Hmm.”

“You should’ve seen this guy’s watch. It was like a cylinder with the clock face on the side, and on top was a window into the works of the thing. Must have cost a pant-load.”

“Hmm.”

“And you know that woman you thought was his mom?”

“The one who brings food?”

“Yeah. It’s not his mom. It’s this lady named Joyanne who cooks for him because she thinks he’s the bee’s knees. Eldrich says he gives her ‘counsel.’”

“Counsel? Wow. I can’t imagine taking counsel from a guy who wears Birkenstocks with purple socks.”

“Yeah. And she’s not alone in her devotion. He’s got the hippie maidens and a few mangy park rats who hang around all the time. And there are four or five other people—seemingly unmedicated, employed humans who I met over the last couple of days. Plus Richie Rich with the watch. That’s like a dozen of what Eldrich calls his “friends.” But these aren’t friends, Amy. I wouldn’t even call them followers. These people, I believe, are
disciples.”

“Hmm.” There was something about the way he was looking at me that made me uncomfortable. As if he expected me to do something. To act.

“I just think there’s an opportunity here,” he said as I got up and left the room. I went to take a pee, and then grabbed a bottle of Perrier from the kitchen. When I returned he was sitting up against the headboard, biting his nails, cogitating.

“What kind of opportunity?” I said, climbing back into bed.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m an installation artist. You’re studying psychology—group dynamics, all that stuff. Maybe we could use Eldrich and his supporters as inspiration. Maybe craft a little … experiment slash art piece?”

I laughed. “Do you know how complicated it is to craft a viable psychological study?”

“Not really.”

“Well, it’s a lot of work, especially if you want to design something that isn’t full of flaws and ultimately useless.”

“OK.”

“It’s like any other field of science. You have to use the scientific method.”

“I remember that. Sort of.”

“You start with an observation. Like, you notice the leaves turn colour in the fall. So you generate a hypothesis to explain it:
I think the leaves turn colour when the temperature drops
.”

“Right.”

“Then you come up with a prediction:
If leaves turn colour when the temperature drops, I predict that exposing a tree to low temperatures will cause the leaves to turn colour
.”

“Pretty simple.”

“But then you have to design an experiment to test your hypothesis—something that can be replicated to support your findings. In the tree-leaf case, it would be easy, but in the case of anything to do with the psychology of humans, it’s never that straightforward.”

“But it’s doable. They do studies all the time.”

“Yeah. But for every study out there, there’s a counter-study refuting the findings or poking holes in the methodology. Like this famous study on the misattribution of arousal, which is when you get excited for a specific reason, but you chalk it up to something else. So say I go on a blind date and I order a decaf, but the waiter fucks up and gives me a double shot of espresso. So I’m drinking my coffee, talking to my date, and my heart starts pounding, I feel alert, energized, and I think, ‘Wow, I really like this guy.’ But it’s not the guy, it’s the caffeine. I misattribute the sensations.”

“That’s a real thing?”

“Yeah, it’s real. So anyway, they did this study involving bridges. One was a safe sturdy thing, the other was a rickety suspension bridge strung high over a river. I think it was the Capilano Suspension Bridge, actually. Anyway, they put an attractive woman at one end of each bridge and she would ask the males who crossed over some questions, ostensibly some kind of survey, then she’d give them her phone number and tell them they could get in touch if they had any questions. So the hypothesis was that the males on the suspension bridge would misattribute their arousal from crossing the dangerous bridge to an attraction to the interviewer, and that more of them would call her than would those who took the safer route.”

“And did they?”

“Yeah. Way more males from the suspension bridge called. But this is what I’m talking about. The study was flawed. It had to be completely redesigned, because males who chose to cross the scary bridge instead of the safe bridge may just have been predisposed to take risks, so more likely to go out on a limb and contact the attractive interviewer anyway.”

“Hmm.”

“It’s not as simple as you think.”

“OK.”

“And what is it that you want to learn, anyway? I mean, is it really so intriguing that a dozen misfits like to listen to Eldrich’s New Age ramblings?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not.”

He made a joke then, something about slipping caffeine pills into my dinner when he wanted to have his way with me, but I knew he was still thinking about Eldrich, about Opportunity. And I knew exactly what it was that had turbo-charged his interest. It wasn’t curiosity about the human mind, or the psychology of religion, or the prevalence of New Age practitioners in an increasingly secular society. No. It was the dude with the cylindrical watch and the snazzy car and the fat roll of cash.

Observation: Eldrich has attracted a number of followers who view him as a spiritual guru and go out of their way to provide him with tithes.

Hypothesis: If a dozen or so individuals are prepared to follow Eldrich in this manner, then others will be too.

Prediction: Increasing awareness of Eldrich and his teachings will lead to an increase in the number of Eldrich supporters (and their offerings).

Easy-peasy. Let the experiment begin.

I guess the first thing he did was create the website. THEANSWERTOEVERYTHING.ORG. Very understated. Not promising much there. Then he started putting up flyers to lead people to the site. He used fluorescent-orange paper, so the things really popped. I’d see them all over—subway, grocery stores, cafés, bars. He’d be out for hours at a time, taping and stapling to whatever didn’t move. Each poster had some kind of warm, fuzzy, Eldrich-type message on it, and then the website address across the bottom: www.theanswertoeverything.org. That was it.

The site, at that point, was simple. Just a splash page with another one of those inspirational messages superimposed over a photo of a sun-dappled body of water. There were three buttons at the bottom, for each of the following interactive responses:
Comment
;
Confess
;
Share
. If you clicked on any of those, you were taken to a blank page on which to type and send. He thought about displaying these posts on a kind of message board so everyone could see and react to them, but I talked him out of it. I figured he’d be spending half his time policing the site and deleting posts, since I
expected the majority of responses to come from Douglas Adams fans
—The answer is 42
—or snarky teens who wanted to prank us.

Boy was I wrong.

Heather

I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t do anything anymore, let alone write to strangers. Funny how you can go from someone who does a million things—job, mom, Community Crafters Club, Dragon Boat Festival Committee—to someone who does nothing. Yesterday I went for a walk. It was the first time I’ve been past the property line since I moved here. I get my groceries delivered. There’s a good service for that. And my prescriptions and anything else I need. My sister used to visit every couple of months. But that’s ended. I don’t care. She has no idea. She thinks she does, but she doesn’t. And her visits exhaust me. I don’t have the energy for her silence or her sighs. For her bright blouses and her disapproval. Just thinking of her sitting in the corner with her white pants and her orange pedicure makes me tired. I like it dark and quiet down here. Nobody blazing in the corner, thank you very much. This is the only place I can imagine living now. Underground. Like a mole. I have mushrooms growing between the tile cracks in my shower. The only mushrooms around here. I don’t cook anymore. I used to cook every day. I used to make all these sneaky recipes because my baby didn’t like vegetables. I had to be clever about it. Hide things inside pasta noodles and cover
them with cheese sauce. Roll a broccoli floret in a piece of pepperoni, roll that in cheese, cover it in pizza dough and bake. I was good at it. I made muffins that were full of zucchini, but nobody could tell. Those muffins were a big hit. Now all my food is frozen.

The people upstairs have no idea that I used to be normal. Sometimes I see them in the laundry area or the backyard and I can tell what they’re thinking. But I don’t care. I couldn’t care less what I look like. They are in a different world than I am. I used to be in that world, and I had no idea there was anything outside it. That has been a real eye-opener—to discover that there is a dark underworld going at the same time as the regular sunlit world. Everything was so normal for so long. When I was growing up, I can’t think of one un-normal thing that ever happened. There was a girl in my sister’s class at Canadore who got paralyzed in a car crash. But that didn’t happen to me. And it’s pretty normal for a teenager to get into a car accident, especially around North Bay, with all the moose on the highway. They like the salt on the roads. That girl’s boyfriend hit a moose on Highway 11. The boyfriend wasn’t hurt at all. Some people get paralyzed and some walk away without a scratch.

My husband was super-normal. Paul Bauer. A home inspector. A coach at the summer hockey camp for kids. A large man. Handy. He liked his beer and his sports and his workshop. I liked the way he looked and that he could do everything well. He could rewire a house, build a deck, fix his own truck and drive anywhere and back without looking at a map, let alone one of those GPS devices that he used to scoff at. He never went to the doctor, never got sick. I liked how he
would pick me up and carry me around and call me “Feather” instead of Heather. Sometimes strangers would think he was my dad because he was so big and mature-looking; he always looked like a grown-up, even in high school, and I was always such a shrimp and kept looking like a teenager even into my thirties. I liked the grandfather clocks he used to make in the workshop and sell at cost to our friends. He was the best home inspector around. Everyone wanted Paul Bauer. He never missed a thing. He really cared about doing everything correctly. He had integrity. He had a jean jacket that smelled a little like tobacco from the one cigarette he enjoyed in the yard every night after dinner. I loved that smell. Snow and smoke.