The Zen Gene (5 page)

The kitchen window looked over Tyler’s house next door and she wondered if he was at home. She could go and hang out with him for a while but he was not much of a talker unless you wanted to talk about science or television shows and she was not sure she was that desperate. They grew up next door to each other and their moms were good friends and like a lot of single parents they helped each other out by babysitting each other’s kids. Her mom was a long distance trucker and until she was old enough to stay on her own when her mom was working she basically lived with Tyler and Andi.

When she turned thirteen, her mom said she was old enough to babysit Tyler while Andi was at work in the summer and she and Tyler spent a lot of time together. She got up and stretched her arms to take the kink out of her back from sitting and she noticed she was almost tall enough to touch the ceiling fan if she stood on her tiptoes.

She was sick of trying to make sense out of the French Revolution and closed the textbook in disgust. What was the point of learning about it when even the French couldn’t make sense of it, she thought. She was desperately in need of amusement; she already flipped through all the television channels at least five times and turned it off in disgust when she could not find anything to watch.

She spent an hour painting her toenails and listening to music and was considering taking a bath and washing her hair when she saw Tyler fly out his back door and grab his bike. As usual he was in a big hurry. She had not spent much time with him lately mostly because she was seeing Lonnie Davis, at least she had been up until a few weeks ago. On the first day of school he sent an IM and broke up with her so he could go out with Linda McFadden. Guys could be such jerks, she thought. She watched Tyler ride away and on a whim decided to follow him and see how he was doing with his fence thing.

She was not exactly sure what the fence thing was about but after finding him unconscious on the ground she was certain it was not good for him. She asked Mr. Phillips in her
Introduction to Psychology
class about the incident without saying who she was talking about, like he couldn’t guess, but he played along and asked her if her friend was disabled because what she described sounded like self-stimulating behaviour. He told her he learned about self-stim when he worked part time in a group home for mentally challenged adults while attending university.

Self-stim, he explained, is a repetitive action some people with developmental disabilities engage in. It can occasionally help them to organize their thinking by limiting sensory overload but it can also be a destructive or counter-productive behaviour depending on what type of stim it is and how often they do it.

The end of the period buzzer came before she could ask him anything about developmental disabilities and the school year ended before she could talk to him again. It didn’t matter anyway, she knew there was nothing wrong with Tyler. He was a bit weird in some ways and sometimes he was hard to understand, but he was definitely not mentally disabled. In some ways he was the smartest person she knew.

He had a tough time at school but for some subjects, like science, he was a wiz. She had been struggling to understand the genetics module in grade eleven science class and he helped her pass the course and get an A. He knew the answer to every single practice exam question in the text book and he showed her how to think about genetics in a way that made sense to her.

She went into her room and dug through her jewelry box on top of her dresser and found a hair band. She tried to run a comb through her hair but gave up and slipped the band around a handful turning it into a Rasta-style ponytail. It was a tangled mess but it would make riding her bike a lot easier. Her hair was greasy and she didn’t want it in her face while she rode it was too disgusting. She needed to wash it but, like the French Revolution, it could wait.

There was no need to hurry to keep up with Tyler she knew exactly where he was going. She got her bike and arrived at Layton’s fence just as he finished his run and was moving past the far end. She hung back out of sight wondering if he would go again or if he was keeping to the deal they made. She waited and when he kept going she was pleased with herself for the progress he made.

At first she was happy but when he kept going she started to wonder, as he sped away, where he was going. When they hung out together they usually headed to Black Bear Park or the Seven Eleven or the Rec. Centre. She watched him turn in a direction no one ever went and she suspected he spotted her and was trying to ditch her so he could do his fence thing again.

She was not sure why the idea bugged her but it did and she decided to follow him to see what the little freak was up to. She turned the corner on Dunstan Road facing the industrial park in time to see him go through a hole in a fence. She watched him stash his bike behind an abandoned building. She ducked down and hid when he turned and looked in her direction. She watched him from the tall weeds as he walked over to the side of the building and looked around once more then he dropped down into the grass alongside a loading dock.

At first she thought he was having a pee until she reminded herself boys do not squat to pee, and she giggled at her mistake. Maybe he was doing number two, she thought. Yuck. She waited a long time but when he did not stand up again she went to investigate. When she arrived at the place where she saw him crouch down he was gone. She looked around mystified.

The area around the factory was huge and mostly covered with tall weeds and Scots broom bushes but she could see no obvious place he might have gone. She checked but his bike was where he left it. She squatted down like he did and she noticed an area in deep shadow under the loading dock between the building and the train tracks.

From her vantage point she could see the bottom edge of some kind of opening in the wall, and she walked over to the loading dock and ducked down to look. There was something under there. She crab walked under the dock to where she found an air vent in the wall of the building covered with a metal screen. The screen was attached to a galvanized metal ventilation shaft which presumably led into the building. Her legs began to cramp from crouching and she got on her knees to examine the screen.

It looked secure enough until she put her fingers through the holes and gave it a little tug and it came off in her hands. Her eyes had adjusted to the shadows under the loading dock and she could see faint scuff marks in the dirt and some of the dirt was on the bottom of the vent. A trail of loose dirt inside the vent led away into darkness and she figured he must have scrambled in through the open vent. “What the heck is he doing in there?” she said.

She was not sure what to do. She listened but did not hear any sounds coming from inside the building. She wondered if she should crawl in a little way to see if she could see what he was up to. She would do it because she was older than him and, now that she knew he was inside, felt responsible for him. She figured it was also because he was a pathetic nerve junky and she did not want him to be hurt or get in trouble.

As a thirteen year-old she had felt responsible for him and the reason was his mother Andi. It used to drive her crazy the way Andi would talk to her mom about Tyler. She talked as though there was something wrong with him and to her thirteen year-old mind that meant she did not love her own kid because he was a little bit different.

Simply thinking about it now made her angry even though she realizes now that she was wrong about Andi, she does love him. She knew that what she was feeling was responsibility, once you feel responsible for someone the feeling doesn’t go away just because they get older. She leaned the screen up against the side of the building and stuck her head in and looked down the vent. She listened hard but did not hear him or anything inside the building.

It took a few minutes to screw up her courage and decide to crawl further into the open vent. It was large enough for her not to feel claustrophobic but it took a few tries to figure out how to get her body into the right position to do it. She did not see how he did it and naturally crawled in head first.

It felt like it was getting tighter as she crawled forwards on her forearms and knees the farther in she went the darker it got. She was in about ten feet but had not noticed the vent slowly beginning to angle downwards. She went slowly and just before she reached the drop off she noticed her weight was now mostly on her forearms. When her arms hit empty space the acute angle of the vent combined with her momentum continued to move her forwards and she slid then fell into terrifying blackness. She barely had time to scream before it was cut off in a spasm of pain as she slammed into the bottom.

She was stunned. When she hit the bottom it knocked the wind out of her and panicked desperately trying to draw air into her lungs. She was not badly injured in the fall; Tyler had stuffed the bottom of the shaft with packing material to break his own fall when he entered but he knew the trick and entered feet first.

She was stuck upside down in the vent and did not have enough upper body strength in her arms and chest to push herself back up the shaft even with the adrenaline wildly coursing through her system. Upside down and in complete darkness panic seized her and she regained her breath and screamed. She gulped air and bellowed fully locked in the grip of fear that she would never get out.

She was dizzy and sick from being upside down screaming when a more terrifying thought entered her mind. What if Tyler did not come in here? What if he has already left and no one finds her and she dies in here alone?

At the exact moment she realized she was going to die alone something brushed the bare skin of her ankle. She shrieked as madness took hold and she thrashed, kicked, and screamed and lost what little control she had as she imagined a rat crawling up her leg. “Zen what are you doing in there?”

She sobbed with relief when she heard Tyler’s voice.

“Help me Tyler. Please!” she shrieked. “I can’t get out.”

Her trembling voice echoed pitifully inside the vent and her upside down face streamed hot tears and her inverted nose leaked snot. He reached inside the opening and felt around trying to figure out how she got herself so jammed up and how to get her out.

“I need to push you back up,” he said.

“Please hurry,” she wailed.

On tip toes he reached his right arm and shoulder into the opening. Although he has powerful arm, chest, and back muscles, when he tried to lift her up the shaft he could not lift her high enough to free her arms. He changed his position so both arms could reach inside and he awkwardly angled his shoulders into the irregular opening.

He grabbed her where he could and again began to lift her. She was calmer and had stopped sobbing now that she knew she was not going to die and there was no rat and after a few minutes of him grabbing and tugging at her she said, “I am going to kill you if you keep doing that.”

“What?” he grunted.

“Touching me there,” she said.

He managed to lift her high enough to release her locked arms from beneath her. Once her arms were free he got her legs started out the opening and she scrambled out on her own. It was only after the ordeal was over and she was standing beside him in the inky darkness that she began to shake uncontrollably. She was standing close enough for him to feel her trembling.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

She was badly frightened by the experience and the hit of adrenaline from the shock and fear continued to jangle her nerves. “Nothing,” she said.

She sobbed her response and bumped into him again in the dark and this time stayed pressed against his side. She could sense him bristle at the close contact. She knew that he did not like to be touched but noticed that he fought the urge and did not move away as he normally would. Amazingly he seemed to understand that she was upset and needed to be near him and for this she was thankful.

“Why were you in there, Zen?” he said.

“When I saw you heading for Layton’s I followed you. What are you doing in here anyway?” she said wanting to shift the focus away from her to give her time to regain her composure.

“Promise you won’t tell?” he said.

His face was near hers in the dark but she could not see him. It reminded her of when they were kids and used to talk in the dark at bedtime and promise not to tell. In his case it meant not telling Andi.

“Okay?” she said.

She was not sure if it was the shock of nearly dying or the complete darkness but she was keenly aware of the closeness of his face to hers.

“You promise you won’t tell anyone about this place,” he said.

He talked quietly and his mouth brushed her cheek when he spoke. The intimacy of the situation along with the darkness helped to calm her and lessen the grip of fear. Being together that close in the darkness and silence heightened her senses.

“Yah okay,” she whispered her response though she was uncertain what it was she was agreeing to. She was experiencing confusion and, more surprisingly, strong feelings for him and she found herself wishing he would put his arms around her and hold her. She was shocked by this errant desire. Wanting to be held by him arose from nowhere and she put it down to the after-effects of almost dying.

She continued to attempt to put this weird desire out of her thoughts. He did not hold her but he did find her hand and held it to lead her carefully through the dark basement to a staircase leading to the building’s main level. She felt safe when he took her hand in his. It was true she had a bad fright when she was stuck in the vent but what she was feeling now was not gratitude. It was something else. She thought about what that ‘something’ might be and relived the intimacy of him touching her in the vent and she was unprepared for what she saw when they stepped through the doorway onto the factory floor. She almost swooned at the dazzling scene of hundreds of beams of brilliant sunlight streaking down through holes in the roof.