The Most Precious Substance on Earth Read online

  I tell him about this activity the principal had us do at a faculty meeting once. It began with him briefly discussing the Hippocratic Oath. He handed out copies and had us underline parts that might relate to teaching.

  “We didn’t know what to do with the parts about fever charts and cancerous growths. But there was stuff in there that really resonated.”

  “First, do no harm,” says Date #5.

  At the meeting, we came up with our own list of promises, working initially in pairs and then calling them out for the principal to write in marker on sheets of chart paper. We rewrote it as an oath for teachers:

  I will remember that there is art to teaching, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the teacher’s pen or the school’s report card.

  I will not be ashamed to say, “I know not.”

  I will respect the privacy of my students, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know.

  Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty.

  We left that last statement the way it was.

  At the next faculty meeting, the principal brought a typed and printed copy. The tone in the room was oddly solemn, almost ceremonial, as we passed the document around, along with a ballpoint so everyone could add their signatures to it. I kept hearing the pen’s wobbly click.

  “I know this is really earnest and nerdy, but I saved the copy of the oath and taped it to the inside of my teacher’s desk. Even when it was covered in paperclips, I could still see it there, underneath. Maybe after all that, quitting makes me sound like a coward.”

  “Not at all,” he says. “I get that. No judgement, I spend most of my day hiding behind a screen.”

  “Speaking of screens, my laptop was stolen here just over a month ago.”

  “Oh shit, not your laptop! You must be a loyal customer, though, to keep coming here.”

  “I did manage to get the laptop back.” I tell him what happened. I tell it like it’s a funny story. “The police called me Nancy Drew.”

  “But wait, what happened to the girl?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. I don’t tell him that what will happen to her is what happens to every girl. That her experiences will empty her. That there’s a point when a girl becomes a meme, a facsimile transmitted, a carbon copy folded and passed along. That she’ll end up a weak and staticky version of the original. I don’t tell him that I can’t stop thinking about her, or that they never asked me about pressing charges—is that only an option you’re given on TV? I don’t know what the consequences were.

  I tell him about the table we’re sitting at—my usual table by the repaired window. I was here when the window broke. A deer came crashing through the glass, then thrashed around for five minutes, leaping onto tables, trying to get out. Customers held up chairs as shields, protecting themselves and one another. We huddled by the washroom hallway. We clutched each other for safety, exhaling a shared cloud of coffee breath. They found the deer later, confused and injured, with deep lacerations on its back and belly. In the CBC article about the incident, there was a quote from a witness: “I don’t know how it didn’t get its blood on us.”

  I go on four more dates with this guy. He’s the kindest person I’ve ever met. He responds thoughtfully to all of my anecdotes.

  He wants to lock it down. “We should go to the food truck festival,” he says, even though the food truck festival is two months away, and we have committed nothing to each other. He holds my hand and tells me he wants me to meet his friends. He asks permission before he kisses me. He tells me he’s deactivated his dating account. When I sign in, his photo has been replaced by a faint grey outline of a man. “I’m not interested in meeting anybody else,” he says.

  I deactivate my account, too. I picture marrying him under strands of twinkle lights and white mayflowers on the roof of the Seaport Market. I know my parents would like him. But I put off answering his latest message. It goes unanswered, and so does the next. I ghost him. I’m a ghost.

  * * *

  The next time I check, Teena’s Instagram account is gone.

  What I imagine is this: She’s walking home from a summer job babysitting for a family in the South End. Headphones on, she’s shimmying slightly as she walks, thinking about dancing, about the shape and positioning of her feet—heel, arch, toe. She wants to record herself, so she can play it back and perfect her movements, but she doesn’t own a recording device. It’s a long distance from here to Gottingen, so she stops at Uncommon Grounds for a $3 treat—hot chocolate, or a granola bar made with marshmallows. She sees an unguarded laptop on a table, slides her headphones down and glances around quickly, then slips it into her backpack and walks away without looking behind her. Her heart is beating fast. She’ll never come to this café again. Ahead of her are the laptop’s limitless possibilities—and the future, opening up like a mouth.

  Broken Telephone

  WHEN I TELL Jules about the blog I’ve started, she says I should have done this in 2004. “That was the heyday of blogging. Nobody has a blog anymore. Maybe you could try Twitter instead?”

  But I’m not concise enough for Twitter.

  If I had a time machine, I type into the blogger window, I’d go back to a time when blogs were cool. I click Publish.

  Jules and I are at Uncommon Grounds, where we meet once a week to work on our respective projects—she’s writing a Toastmasters speech, and I’m trying to figure out how to monetize my blog with ads. The name of my blog is “The Time Machine.” I’ve customized a WordPress template and designed this whole H.G. Wells–inspired header with ink-drawn Morlocks. In each post I describe a hypothetical time-travel scenario. I keep it small-scale, so no preventing the Holocaust, no building a bombproof dome around Damascus, no restructuring the Catholic Church to keep a priest from ever touching a child.

  Yesterday, I blogged about going back to the nineties to keep my mom from getting rid of our original Nintendo. She says she doesn’t remember throwing it out, that she would never do such a thing. But if not, where is it? I’ve searched my parents’ basement and garage; their walk-in closet that resembles an above-ground recreation of the Little Mermaid’s underwater hoard. When I was ten, I had the arrows from the game controller imprinted into my left thumb. I still play Mario Bros. once every six months or so at the co-op store, though usually the space is occupied by others who, like me, are pulled there by nostalgia. Video games now are too complicated for me—even the Super Nintendo has fourteen controller buttons, requiring the dexterity of a bomb squad. I blog about the life of the missing NES, likely still intact and functional, waiting in a trash pile, never to biodegrade.

  I’m taking a break to eat my marshmallow granola bar when I hear a notification ding. There’s a comment on my blog—the first one ever. “Jules, did you comment on my blog?”

  “Nope,” she says, and goes back to chewing on her pen.

  I click to open the comment. In italicized Garamond, the anonymous comment reads: Blogs were never cool.

  * * *

  The next day, I blog about going back in time to avert the moment when I froze onstage at a music school recital, only four out-of-tune notes into an oboe sonata, a moment immortalized through the lenses of a dozen video cameras. Up next was the three-year-old piano prodigy who further humiliated me with Rachmaninoff.

  Another anonymous comment: Who cares.

  Over the course of the week, I blog about going back in time to be nicer to my parents, to keep myself from quitting music lessons so that I’d now be an oboe virtuoso, to spend less money at Starbucks, and to erase the thousand sad hours I spent watching all twenty-three seasons of The Bachelor.

  A blog of regrets,
writes the anonymous commenter.

  “Well, he’s kind of right, isn’t he?” says Jules. “You’re writing about going back to fix things. Trivial things, but still.”

  “I guess I did just rewatch Being Erica.”

  I add the show—about a woman with a ho-hum life who travels to the past to prevent her mistakes—to the widget on my blog that lists links to TV shows involving time travel. It’s funny that my two readers both think my blog is about regret. I have only one regret worth mentioning, and I wouldn’t mention it on the internet for any stranger to see.

  I decide to write a new post where I travel to the future. But what is there to do in the future except witness all the ways we’ve ruined the world? In my post, I go to the year 2200 and the Earth is an inhospitable stone, former cities drowned under swollen seas. Humans are potatoes, simmered to death inside their skins. The faces of people I used to know are fossils peering out from igneous rock, to be studied by alien scientists. I embed a video clip of the Twilight Zone episode where the Earth has been shaken out of its orbit and moves gradually closer to the sun. A woman sweats profusely in her New York City apartment, painting canvases filled with images of a burning skyline. “Paint something cold,” her neighbour begs. A wall thermometer shows the temperature as it passes 110 degrees and keeps rising. The paintings begin to melt.

  Climate change is a hoax, writes Anonymous. And you’ve forgotten to mention the episode’s twist ending. Also, you watch too much TV.

  “How do I respond to these?” I ask Jules. “Help me come up with something clever.”

  “Ignore him,” she says. “Don’t feed the trolls.”

  * * *

  The real reason I started the blog is to produce some writing samples for my application to write TV show recaps for a website. The troll is correct: I do watch too much TV. Not long ago, Jules was showing me this photo of a cat wearing sunglasses, and I said he looked exactly like Caldicott C. Cat from Puttnam’s Prairie Emporium. Jules replied, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” So I told her Puttnam’s was a children’s show filmed in Saskatchewan in the late eighties. Set in a general store, it featured Caldicott the wisecracking puppet jazz cat who, despite a lack of opposable thumbs, was a phenomenal saxophone player. Mounted on the store wall was the head of a puppet beefalo who spoke in a “duh, who me?” voice. I always wondered if that beefalo could remember being hunted. Rounding out the show’s ensemble cast were human actors playing a charming Canadian family. The store was magic. It literally sold happiness in a can. And in the store’s closet was a time machine that was always on the fritz.

  “Only you would watch this show,” said Jules.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. And I thought about how true this was, and how everything reminded me of something I’d seen on television. Perhaps that was a little bit sad. But it was also an opportunity.

  While I’ve done some freelance writing recently, it involved condensing classic literature into as-brief-as-possible web summaries to save students from reading actual books. (James Joyce stories boiled down to bullet-point statements: Man stands in doorway and has epiphany.) My only other paid writing experience was crafting messages for ecards where you can paste a photo of your friend’s head onto the animated body of a dancing frog. Neither was exactly representative of my voice. Side benefits to my blog are seeing how much I can make from Google Ads, and occupying a few hours of my vast unstructured time. There’s so much of it—time—when you’re a freelancer who’s not great at self-motivation. My calendar is just rows upon rows of white squares. Looking at it gives me vertigo, as though I’m an astronaut untethered in blank, limitless space.

  There’s also this: right before I started the blog, I received a Facebook invitation to the memorial page for my best friend from high school. According to the page’s About section, she died of a drug overdose, which seems like too much detail to include. Celebrating Amy Cormier’s Life, it says in the default font, with a picture of Amy front and centre, as if this were any other Facebook event—a live music show, or a lecture on sustainability. What would Marshall McLuhan say? If Amy’s name wasn’t at the top of the page, I might not have recognized her. Eyes joyless and unfocused, deep lines down her cheeks. In the days since her death, friends have flooded the page with comments:

  I can’t believe it’s true. Amy, I miss you so much…

  I will always remember the beautiful times we had…

  Words heartfelt and generic.

  To be honest, I’m too far removed from Amy now to feel actual grief. This person who was once the most vivid part of my daily life is now just a social media afterthought. The punchline to a dark joke whose opening I can’t recall.

  When I pass by teenage girls at the Halifax Shopping Centre, they’re so clearly of a different generation, if not a different species—they are more sophisticated, more knowing than we ever were. And yet I still feel like I could step into one of their bodies, like it could be me and Amy browsing through cheap earrings or eating endless packets of New York Fries as though we had nothing but time.

  Amy’s personal Facebook page hasn’t been deleted. The two most recent posts of hers are a dog meme and a selfie where she must have been wrecked out of her mind. Why hasn’t anybody taken these down? And what lasting words and images of mine would remain on the internet, if I were to die right this second? So I publish the blog and upload myself to the cloud—another kind of afterlife.

  * * *

  I blog about my daydreams of going back to witness history: to pinch a feather off the back of a dinosaur (Not if he eats you first, says the troll); to walk upright next to the first humanoid to do so (I prefer a sexy simian slouch, says the troll); to visit my ancestors in precolonial India (Barbarians, says the troll, before the British beat you into shape and taught you how to play cricket). I blog about walking down fresh roads before the automobile crushed its first human victim—Bridget Driscoll, U.K., 1896 (See you in hell, Bridget! says the troll). Before the ozone ever needed to repair itself. Before the first smokestacks blew plumes above our houses (Let’s see you manage without petroleum products, says the troll).

  I respond: But oh, to breathe the air of a pre-industrialized world, before anybody ever coined the word “pollution.”

  The troll copies and pastes from somewhere:

  Pollution: mid-14c., “discharge of semen other than during sex,” later, “desecration, defilement” (late 14c.), from Late Latin pollutionem (nominative pollutio) “defilement,” noun of action from past participle stem of Latin polluere “to soil, defile, contaminate,” from por- “before” + -luere “smear,” from PIE root leu-“dirt; make dirty.”

  I blog about travelling a hundred years into the past to bring a stranger back with me to present day (blog post title: “Back to the Present”). The stranger marvels over my cellphone. “This is a telephone? Why, how incredible!” He’s shocked when I press a button and the screen lights up, alarmed when I play a David Bowie video on YouTube, since, in his era, TVs haven’t yet caught on. “What’s ‘Ground Control’?” he asks. I feel undeservedly proud, as though I invented this technology myself. When I play Jurassic Park, he screams and hides behind the sofa. “It’s just CGI,” I reassure him. I invite my new old-time friend to my parents’ house, and my dad enthusiastically takes the guy into the backyard to show off the drone he got for his birthday. Next time, I’ll blog about introducing mass-market paperbacks to somebody from the fifteenth century, when the printing press was a mere glint in Gutenberg’s eye. Or about bringing a woman back with me and amazing her with equality.

  Bring the woman to me, I’ll amaze her, too, says the troll.

  I delete the comment.

  I’ll amaze her till her body doesn’t work anymore, says the troll.

  I delete this comment too, but not before I picture a woman folded into thirds, bones cracking.

  Delete all you wan
t, says the troll. I’m still here.

  And another comment: By the way, I know you. From a long time ago.

  * * *

  When I was six, my family took a trip to Seattle and we saw the Fremont Troll. Three decades later I have a much greater appreciation for public art, but at the time I couldn’t understand why people were crawling up on the troll’s gargantuan claw to have their pictures taken. This wasn’t what I had visualized when my teacher told us stories about trolls, who spoke in riddles and pocketed coins, elbows popped jauntily outwards. In the photo of me, I stare up terrified at this hulking monster two hundred times my size, a car crushed in his fist, his stone-sculpted head holding up the Fremont Bridge like it’s made of Styrofoam. He lurks in the debris and sludge. Mortar crumbles around him. His beard drips into his chest, and his body is the colour of mud. His single chrome eye has a cataract-like abrasion; it appears to see nothing at all.

  * * *

  “Do you think he actually knows you?” asks Jules. “He’s a troll, after all. You can’t exactly take him at his word.”

  “But why would he say that otherwise? Plus, he’s a Halifax troll. That’s like, troll-lite. Until those last couple of comments, he just seemed kind of playful.”

  “Wait, you don’t have your real name on this thing, do you?”

  “Umm.”

  “Nina! Don’t respond to him,” says Jules. “And get some other people to comment, so the troll gets diluted.”

  But how can I not respond? I check Google Analytics and narrow down his location to either Halifax or Zimbabwe. I read articles with titles like “Trolls Are Winning the Internet, Technologists Say,” “How Brands Stay Classy in an Age of Internet Trolls,” and “Are Online Comment Trolls Actually ‘Psychopathic Sadists’?”