The Republic of Nothing (15 page)

“He has a nice smile,” she said. “Who is it?”

“Mrs. Phillips' father. She misses him very much. The woman is lonely and — what's the word? — distressed.”

“Depressed. She's very depressed. I was walking by there last week. She didn't even see me, but I could see that she walked as if a someone had put a great weight on her shoulders. She is very depressed. You are a sensitive boy.” My mother brought her eyes back down from looking at the moulding in the corner and fixed me solidly with a stare.

“We can't bring your father back from Halifax, right now.
I know that. No one can shift the direction oJ: the wind in your father's sails. He has to do that himself and that will take time. You can't help me, Ian. But you must help those people. They have been driven from their homes and the woman feels loneliness for her father. You must help.”

I would probably be exaggerating if I said to you that my mother could read minds. She wasn't like that. She had a different sort of psychic ability more subtle than that. She could not read my actual thoughts but instead tap the deeper under-current of intention and emotion and filter my own crazy jumble of ideas in such a way that it would clarify and make perfect sense. Certainly I had already decided to help Gwen. How could I do otherwise? My old infatuation, my friendship, and now a kind of yearning love had just burst into something much more powerful, a force that swept over me like a giant hurricane wave and was driving me onward in the only direction it could.

“I will,” I told my mother. “Thanks.” I was out the door running because I was a great runner. Why walk if you can run when the world is spinning like a dizzy dancer and all you know is that you are at the centre of things, about to make something happen? That was why you were put in the world, why your mother gave birth to you. You were no longer a little boy, tagging along and trying to make sense of events about you, trying to catch up to life. You were something else now, someone older and filled with a sense of purpose and just given a key by your mother that would unlock the door to… what, exactly? I was about to find out.

I didn't knock on the door to Kirk's house. I never had when Kirk lived there — no one knocked on doors on our island. You just walked in. Newcomers, even Americans, had learned to adapt to that. Aside from making a thousand diverse drawings, Dr. Bentley had not even begun to build his own house. He spent far too much time sitting alone by a sooty window that shut out the sea wind; he read books that
Jack had loaned him and got lost in other centuries, other lives. He had grown sluggish and moody of late.

I was about to change all that. I was the hand that would begin to reshape the lives of people important to me. “He's in New York,” I said, showing the photo to Dr. Bentley. “You need to find him and bring him here.” I pointed to the ad-dress of the nursing home on the envelope. “Ever hear of this place?”

“Broadview.” Ackerman said the word as if he was pronouncing a death sentence on a loved one. “I know of it and other places like it. Broadview is a place run by men and women of very little intelligence and very narrow minds. It's the end of the line for old people who have been booted from more respectable places.”

“Gwen and her mother need you to go to New York and bring him here — for a visit, or maybe to live here. It's Gwen's grandfather.” And I explained about her depressed mother and the pictures on the wall.

Ackerman looked back at his book. I was confused. It was like he simply shut me out and was going back to drift into his other century again, as if I had said nothing of importance, as if I hadn't even asked. My blood began to boil and I grabbed the novel with the picture of pirates and large-chested women on the cover. I heaved it across the room straight into the wall. Dr. Ackerman looked up. For a flickering second I believed I saw anger. Maybe he was going to hit me. I didn't flinch. He let out a sigh. “I'd help if I could. But I can't go back there. For one thing, I could still be arrested. Remember, I impersonated a doctor?”

“But you were a doctor. You
are
a doctor!”

He threw up his hands. “Well, yes and no, but it's not really just the worry about being arrested. I can talk my way out of anything — this is one of the great skills of an excellent liar.”

“Then what?”

“I can't go back and face all the people I couldn't help. In
New York, Ian, people live on the streets. Hundreds of them. They sleep under cardboard or they curl up inside doorways. Those were
my
people and I failed to help more than a few.”

“So, you don't have to see them. You just need to find one old man and bring him back here.”

He wasn't listening to me. “That's how I got found out. I let too many of them into the hospital. Each one had an ailment — fluid in the lung, a bad liver, an infected kidney. None of that mattered. When they called me before the hospital board to question my admitting practice, someone did some digging. They found me out and tried to have rne arrested. I ran. I went out on the street and lived with them and helped the ones I could, but there was so little I could do without medicine and facilities. So I left them and I came here.” Ackerman was studying his hands now in the light of the window. “When I left them it was because I knew that I was a
true
fraud — a fake. I was a failure and when I gave up trying to save any of them, I could barely save myself.”

I didn't know what to say. Perhaps I was seeing Dr. Bentley Ackerman for the first time for what he really was — a wimp, a faker and a fraud. I sat down right there on the floor and pounded my fist on the worn floorboards, only to find my hand unclench and go flat, then glide across the wood floor as I studied the straight, strong grain of the old, foot-weary spruce wood. My mother's voice echoed in my head. This was what she meant, what she understood even before this moment had come to pass.

“You're going and I'm going. We're going together,” I said, standing up now and grinning like a maniac. I knew that there was something in my voice, a conviction passed on to me just that afternoon by my mother, that could not be denied. Maybe it was the awakened stubbornness passed down to me from my father, only now to surface and move me forward with great deliberation. I knew nothing about cities, about a place like New York. It seemed as far away as the planet
Neptune and as alien, but the words were spoken. There was no turning back.

Just then Ackerman knew that we were going. He had no idea where my sudden confidence had come from, from Kirk's old floorboards perhaps, but he knew that he was being pulled headlong into this thing. “There's nothing more important than family, Doctor Ackerman,” I heard myself say. I don't know if Ackerman knew what I was talking about.

“No more
Doctor
anything. Okay, Ian? Just Ben. Call me Ben.”

I nodded. “Trust me on this one,” I heard myself lie. “I know what I'm doing.”

My mother protested. This wasn't what she intended. Ben should go. I was too young. What would my father have to say? New York was filled with muggers and thieves and people fell down dead from knife attacks every minute of the day. Was I crazy? I was only fourteen. I just said that I had to go. There was no other way. My mother was very upset and that got Casey so upset she began to cry and sob until she got the hiccups and couldn't stop hiccupping. “Look what you're doing to your sister. You're not old enough to make these decisions. My God, the whole family has gone crazy and is falling apart!”

“I'm going to visit Dad first on our way through Halifax. We have to go there to get a train.” I spoke as if the matter had already been resolved. Why all the protest, you might wonder, if it was my mother who had put the fire in me to begin with? I think I understood even then that my mother wobbled between two poles of being spirit guide and simple mother. The two roles did not always mesh. Now she was coming apart at the seams.

“What did Edgar Cayce do when they asked him to travel to help people? Did he sit still on his butt?” My sister Casey looked at me with new interest now that I had invoked her namesake.

My mother knew what I was getting at. “At first he sat on his butt. He let his mind travel. Besides, you are not Edgar Cayce. Since when can you heal the sick?”

“That's why I'm travelling with a doctor,” I answered with perfect logic.

“Why should I trust this man, Ackerman?” she demanded, now holding out a brown paper bag for my sister to breathe into to cure her hiccups.

“Because I trust him.”

My mother saw she could not win. She read one possible future before her, several days of arguing before she would finally lose. “You are becoming your father,” she said. “I should have known.”

My father wanted to save the world. I just wanted to help Gwen see her grandfather again and maybe cheer up her mother. Their pain was my pain. I wanted to ease the sorrow of living for people I cared about. The other future my mother saw for herself was days ahead of living nearly alone with her family diminished to herself and Casey and her fear that maybe I would never come back to the island. Maybe I would get knifed or kidnapped in New York. Maybe my father would go on to become secretary general of the United Nations and she'd never see him again. He had not returned even once since he'd left for Halifax.

Then the spirit guide in her returned from whatever vacation it had taken and I could see the pain in her eyes diminish, the lines of worry smooth out. “You tell your father when you see him that nothing is more important than family. Nothing. And if he gives you a hard time about going, remind him that when he was not much older than you he rowed out to sea all alone one morning just as the sun was coming up and the sea had a gift for him.”

“I'll tell him,” I said.

I told Ben we should ask Tennessee Ernie Phillips for a ride to town, but he insisted, “Not necessary. Besides, something might slip out about our project and we shouldn't get anybody's hopes up just in case we don't succeed.”

“We'll succeed,” I said. We could do nothing less that reunite Gwen and her grandfather. Nothing was more important than family.

So my mother walked us to the Number Seven Highway and gave me a final kiss on the cheek. She gave a gentle peck on the cheek to Ben as well and he held her hand in his and told her that he would take good care of her son.

The Shore is a small place where people are concerned and the first car to come by with enough room for two hitchhikers belonged to none other than Bud Tillish who was driving to Halifax to pick up what was left there of his belongings. He would then return home to a life of idle gossip and serious card games.

“Well, get in, the lazy pair of you,” he said, a harsh greeting from a man offering a ride.

“We thank you for your courtesy,” Ben said as we climbed into the back of his Chrysler. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the sort of farts that come from eating too much smoked fish.

“Going in to Halifax for a little whoring, I bet,” Bud said.

“It wasn't on the agenda,” Ben returned, feeling a little embarrassed for me.

“Some skin magazines under the seat there, if you want to have a peek.”

“No thanks,” Doc said.

“Aren't you Bud Tillish?” I asked.

“Was,” Bud answered. “Before some know-nothing from that damn island out there rigged the election and overthrew my ass. Now I'm just nobody at all. Buddy Whatshisname
they'll call me, no doubt. After I served this riding fair and square. Done a good job and look what I have left?”

“Nice car,” I said. It was nearly as fancy as Tennessee Ernie Phillip's two-tone Ford.

“Won't be mine by the first of the month. I'll be walking like you poor sods.”

“Perhaps you'll find work,” Ben offered.

“No work on the Shore. Never was and never will be now. It's a place to starve and that's about it. I could've turned it around if the people had given me a bit more time.”

Bud had been in government for six years and the best he'd done for the place was to get a little free gravel for some of his friends' driveways.

“The Tories will shove the people of this place back in the dark ages before you know it. We'll all be living in caves and rooting out grub worms to eat. I've seen it happen before.”

I think I began to fade about then. I was leaving home for the first time. My head was swimming with the colours that rushed past us outside the window. Suddenly, I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to find my way back home and it scared me. I pulled the photo of Gwen's smiling grandfather out of my pocket and studied it. Was all of this worth it? Why did I think that I had any business in setting right someone else's problems when I barely had a grasp of my own lite? But mixed with my fears and self-doubts was the warm anticipation that I was about to see my father again.