The Most Precious Substance on Earth Page 7

“I’m experimenting with the occult,” I say, because I find the word occult intriguing. It means “secret knowledge,” which I wouldn’t mind having. He doesn’t respond, so I also tell him that dressing this way makes me feel protected—waterproof, if not bulletproof. “I feel brave. I have more ownership of my sexuality.” For example, nobody’s pantsed me in the hallway since last year.

  “Right. Great.”

  “It’s not just that,” I begin, but he turns away from me to help a man fill in a registration form. The man has brought his children along, and they grip his legs and cower behind them, peering curiously up at me.

  “It’s not just that,” I say again after the man finishes. “I’ve also been exploring other religions, like Wicca and Satanism—”

  “Hello? You’re Hindu. We are at a Hindu temple right now.”

  “I don’t mean that I’m becoming a Satanist, I’m just reading up on it. I’m expanding my knowledge. Did you know occult means ‘secret knowledge’? And Wicca has numerous similarities to Hinduism, you know, with the polytheism and animism and everything.” Whatever animism is.

  After the event, the temple provides a lunch buffet, and everybody eats in the building’s cafeteria. I see Nishant and this new girl, whose family recently immigrated, pick up their food and sit together. My mother comes over and she sees them too, and I can see her marriage-arranging mind twisting around this new possibility. She thinks that I will never get married and will instead cohabit commitment-free with a white guy who never volunteers at community events and who illegally pirates not only music but movies and software as well.

  “Go sit with them,” she tells me.

  “Mom, I don’t want to salt his game.”

  “What? Just go. They’re the only ones here your age. Otherwise you’ll be sitting with me and your dad and that uncle.” She gestures at a sweaty man gripping my father’s shirtsleeve.

  I take my food over to Nishant and the girl and ask if it’s okay if I join them. The girl says, “Of course, welcome!” and I sit. When she talks—about neutral topics such as her recent visit to Lunenburg—she has a slight accent: Indian but with a European twist. When I ask about it, she says she attended an international school in Delhi and lived in London as a child. Her hair is loosely braided, and she wears this jade cotton salwar kameez with a chiffon shawl draped around her shoulders. I can tell she’s the kind of girl who excels at Bharatanatyam lessons and remembers which god does what.

  Clearly, Nishant is falling madly in love with her, or rather, sanely and rationally in love with her. She’s wonderful. When I rise to throw out my Styrofoam plate, he will ask for her number and then he will phone and they will speak of all the things that are important to them, like their Indian heritage and how great it is to be pious. For their first date, they will share vegetarian pizza and say they wish they were eating idli sambar instead. He will notice her hair smells as fragrant as jasmine flowers. Together, they will watch Bollywood movies on VHS without subtitles, and never feel the impulse to mock Shah Rukh Khan. She’ll stand up in the middle of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai to dance along with the choreography, eyes downcast and demure, hips swinging in a way that is somehow both sensual and modest. They won’t have sex, though. They will wait until they are married.

  My life will unfold like a game of Mad Libs—a mix of blanks and absurdities.

  She is still talking about Lunenburg.

  “But have you been to the Maritime Museum? You definitely must visit the Maritime Museum,” Nishant tells her. This is a bizarre recommendation coming from a teenager. The best thing about the Maritime Museum is the talking parrot that for some reason lives in the lobby. It’s otherwise mostly boats.

  “I hadn’t heard about it,” she says.

  “Well, we’ll go there.” He doesn’t include me in this invitation, not that I care. I have been to the Maritime Museum numerous times on school field trips, and once with Nishant and our families. There’s a photo of us in an album at home: I’m four and he’s six. We stand with a foot of space between us, unsmiling, in front of a cardboard cut-out of the Titanic.

  * * *

  A few days later, I go over to Amy’s house in the South End. Since her mom left, her dad has been renting out the basement. There are unfamiliar bicycles by the entrance. We go into the house and hunt for snacks. Her kitchen smells vaguely of fish and there’s actual produce in the fridge. They used to seem like more of a takeout family; I was envious of how often they had Swiss Chalet. When we were watching a movie in her basement, her mom would sometimes pop her head in with the cordless phone to one ear, to ask for our orders.

  Since the basement is now occupied, we smoke a bowl and eat Dunkaroos on the back porch before her dad gets home. Her cat wanders out and we make him hats out of newspaper and take photos with her dad’s digital camera.

  “…and then right in front of me he planned a date with her. To the Maritime Museum.” I chip at my black nail polish.

  “What the fuck? Your life is straight out of a sitcom.”

  The cat walks over to me, purring. I hug him and he droops in my hands like Nickelodeon Gak. He yawns onto his back and curls sideways as though he’s trying to spell cat with his body but there isn’t enough of him. Amy lights the pipe and then reaches down to hold the lighter flame up to the cat’s nipple.

  “Amy!” I blow out the lighter as she cackles. The cat rolls lazily in the other direction.

  “Relax,” she says, “he likes it. Too bad we have to sacrifice him to Satan.”

  I roll my eyes at her and she grins. Amy isn’t a psychopath. Back in Grade 8 I saw her cry while listening to a Boyz II Men album.

  I hear her front door open and close. “Your dad?”

  “Yeah, he must be home from work.” She goes back in and tucks her weed supplies into her oboe case before returning. She sold the oboe over the summer to buy drugs, but her dad doesn’t know.

  “Nishant doesn’t think I’m a good Hindu.”

  “Wait, you’re Hindu?” Amy pretends to fall over, feigning laughter. The cat darts away. “I thought you were a proud coconut.” Coconut: brown on the outside and white on the inside. She sits back up and stares at me, contemplating. “You have never had, like, an actual problem, have you?”

  “That’s not true,” I say, startled. I’d thought she’d take my side. “What do you mean?” What actualizes a problem?

  Her dad fills the doorway. “Pasta for dinner,” he says. It’s unclear if I’m invited, but if I am, I will politely decline. Swiss Chalet is one thing, but dinners in white households have a choreography I haven’t learned. People pass plates around and then balance a dish in one hand while serving themselves with the other and making conversation at the same time. I never ask anyone to pass me things, in case it seems greedy. And I’m never sure how much I’m supposed to eat. To use the washroom, they must ask to excuse themselves, so I never use the washroom. They use fabric napkins and I feel guilty wiping my mouth. They finish dinner at 6:30 and then by 10:30 my stomach gnaws. In Indian homes, dinner is buffet-style and happens an hour after everybody was supposed to be sleeping already. We don’t use utensils. My mom says food is more flavourful when you eat it from your hand. We sit on the living room sofa—or cross-legged on the floor if there are more people than seats—and an aunty makes you eat everything and then sends leftovers home with you in reused yogurt containers.

  “Amy, is that makeup?” her father asks. She has on a thin cat eye. “That outfit isn’t appropriate.”

  “It says ‘Don’t Touch,’ ” she responds, puffing out her chest.

  “Amy. Sweater,” he says, frowning in plaid. She gives me an apologetic dads-are-crazy look but goes to get her sweater from the kitchen.

  Her dad starts cooking dinner while we go upstairs to dye her hair in the washroom. We run out of dye, so patches show at the roots and this one place in the back, but she tells me i
t’s fine. She tosses her head and her bangs land crooked, an asterisk on her forehead. She fixes them in the mirror as I rub her hair with a fluffy aubergine towel.

  “Remember the Phantom of the Opera towel?” She snickers.

  On the first day of Grade 6 music class, we’d been seated together because of the extremely unlikely coincidence of us both playing the oboe. Most kids in our class hadn’t even selected their instruments yet. When the teacher, Mr. Miller, had us stand up one by one to introduce ourselves, Amy said her family had just moved to Halifax from Vancouver. The word Vancouver rang through the room like she’d said New Zealand or Tanzania. The rest of us had all been born within a two-hour driving radius of the school.

  Then Mr. Miller gave a bitter speech. Amy does an impression of it now, furrowing her brow and deepening her voice: “The music program will be dead before you graduate elementary school.” He said things about funding that we didn’t understand, and then played a video biography of John Philip Sousa while glowering behind his desk in the back corner, under a massive Phantom of the Opera poster. During the video, Amy passed me a note that said: The Phantom of the Opera poster is a bath towel. I looked up at the poster/bath towel and realized it was true, and after class we discussed the possible reasons why Mr. Miller would purchase such a bath towel, and that’s how we became friends. Periodically, we add to the list of reasons.

  “All his other bath towels were stolen,” I say.

  “He wanted to perform the musical in his bathroom and needed a waterproof costume,” says Amy.

  “Phantom of the Bathtub.” I comb out her hair. The music program was, in fact, cancelled by the time we finished Grade 8, and nobody knows what happened to Mr. Miller. I still remember the day Amy and I went to class raving about having just seen Mr. Holland’s Opus, and he said, “I hate that movie. Don’t you see? The teacher loses at the end.”

  I hear a throat clear before I realize Amy’s dad is in the hallway, watching us. “What the hell did you do?” he asks. I flinch as though he yelled. I’ve never heard him raise his voice, although he always seemed like the type of dad who might yell, unlike my dad, who beseeches. Non-Indian dads are different creatures. You can’t call them uncle.

  “Jesus Christ, what is the matter with you?” he says. “Tell your friend to go home.”

  He stands there with his arms crossed, seething with a quiet fury as though he has just caught us naked on a flaming pentagram. I hesitate for only a second before I gather up my belongings, because maybe I should help tidy the washroom, which is covered in claw hair clips and gloves and paper towels, black dye and blonde hair. He steps out of the doorway to let me pass, and I think about how nobody this tall ever comes over to our house. He could pluck the winter clothes from the top of our coat closet without standing on a chair like my dad does.

  Though it’s dark and getting cooler, I wait outside alone for my mom to pick me up. Usually, Amy would wait with me, but her dad made her stay behind in the washroom to clean. I lean against the brick archway that surrounds their front door. Two kids are playing street hockey just a few metres away, clacking the plastic puck back and forth until they lose it under a car. The house door opens, and I turn, expecting Amy, but it’s her dad.

  “I need to speak with you.” He clears his throat again. “Amy is a good kid. She’s going through a difficult time, and I would prefer that the two of you stopped spending time together.”

  I don’t know what to say. I want to tell him the hair dye wasn’t my idea. Was it my idea? There’s a pounding in my chest. And then my hands are shaking, like when I’m getting up the nerve to speak in a class debate. I tuck them under the hem of my shirt. I watch one of the hockey kids crawl out from beneath the car, triumphant, puck in hand. Has Amy been sacrificing animals for real? Why didn’t she tell me her dad wouldn’t approve of her dyeing her hair?

  His words sound practised and formal. The top of his head is bald, and when the porch light shines on his scalp, it casts a strange halo. “It would be best if you didn’t come by our house anymore, and Amy won’t be visiting your house either. I will be encouraging her to find other friends.”

  I don’t say anything. I wonder what he might know about me that even Amy doesn’t know. Or that even I don’t know.

  “Hey,” he says. “Did you hear me?”

  The headlights of my mom’s car illuminate his plaid shirt. She parks, walks up, and greets him sweetly, deferentially. “Hi there, how are you?”

  Amy’s dad repeats what he’s just said to me.

  “How dare you,” my mom says. “You asshole. Your kid is the bad one. Not mine.” Amy’s dad withers like a dried-up spider and dies at our feet.

  No, that doesn’t happen.

  My mom nods her head. “Of course,” she says. “We understand.”

  The hockey kids pause their game to let us drive away. We drive north, past Dalhousie, past the Hydrostone, to where everything looks less historic, less like it belongs in Halifax.

  My mom touches my shoulder. “You can’t get so close to people. The same thing happened to me when I first came here. You can only trust other Indians.” We drive through residential neighbourhoods. Every person we pass is a stranger. She continues: “Indira Aunty is coming for dinner tonight. She has a son the same age as you. He can be a new friend.”

  “I’m busy,” I hiss.

  “What does that mean? You’re busy? I’ve already invited them. His mom is bringing pulao.”

  “Why don’t you go out with him then?”

  “Don’t be angry,” she says, flipping up the sun visor as the sky turns fully dark.

  * * *

  At home, in my bedroom, I dip a cotton pad in Pond’s cream and wipe it across my eyelids until the cotton is black. I rearrange the clothing in my closet so colour—an aqua sweater, a denim jacket, a lavender blouse—is back within reach. In my bed, I read the scene from The Edge of Evil where a guy rips out a cow’s heart with his bare hands.

  “It was just standing there,” says Danielle from Kansas City, “and they just ripped—while it was still alive—they just ripped its heart out.”

  Under Microscope

  WE ARE WALKING aimlessly around the school track when Amy tells me I’m a bad friend. It’s lunch hour and sunny enough to be outdoors. A runner laps us, polyester cross-country uniform rippling in the strong Halifax wind. Amy blows cigarette smoke at his back as he passes, and the smoke twirls and dissipates. There are no teachers around, so there’s nobody to enforce the “no smoking on school property” rule.

  We pause at one end of the track and, as I kick at a remnant hunk of snow in the grass, Amy says, “Nina, you know…” I turn to look at her. “You’re not a very good friend.” She blinks once and closes her mouth around her cigarette. Her strong jaw seems to clench as she tucks her hair behind her ear. She’s dyed it again recently, to an ashy violet.

  I crush the snow with the heel of my boot. “Why would you say that?”

  “You just aren’t,” she says, matter-of-fact. We are quiet for the rest of break, as I search over the conversation to figure out what I missed.

  * * *

  The experiment begins in the spring of Grade 11. We’re still getting used to the new millennium. I write down the date every chance I get, because it’s so satisfying seeing those zeroes all together: 2000. But there’s something anticlimactic about it, too. All that unnecessary hullabaloo about Y2K compliance. All those canned goods in the basement that we’d now have to eat.

  Our biology teacher tells us about this doctor in Japan, Masaru Emoto, who took four containers of water and taped a sign to each one:

  Thank you

  Love and appreciation

  You make me sick, I will kill you

  Adolf Hitler

  He then froze the water and took microscope photos of the ice crystals. Our teacher, Mr. Abernathy, projects these fro
m transparencies, coating the classroom in a luminous wallpaper. We study the images like inkblots. The “You make me sick” crystals are irregular and pocked, like sunken scars. The “Adolf Hitler” crystal patterns remind me of a blotchy brain. In contrast, the containers that had the positive messages form crystals as symmetrical as Denzel Washington’s face.

  Mr. Abernathy says it has to do with vibrations, an explanation that might apply to some of Emoto’s experiments—the ones where they murmured prayers over the open containers—but makes no sense for the ones with only the taped signs. Amy and I decide to recreate Emoto’s process with two tomato plants, hoping Mr. A will approve it for our independent study project. We plant the tomatoes in the field behind the school, because we no longer go to each other’s houses. Amy tucks three seeds into each of the two divots I make in the soil. I croon sweet poems to one and she rudely demeans the other. Only after our experiment is already in progress do I consider the problems and variables: that the seeds are too close together, so each will overhear messages meant for the other and in two different voices; that it’s April in Halifax and might snow at any moment. In its lack of controls—its total ignorance of the scientific method—our project is not unlike Emoto’s.

  “This is not real science,” says my dad, who has a Ph.D. in Chemistry from one of India’s top-ranked universities. “I could’ve given you a better idea.” He gives me a handwritten list of seven better ideas. But by then it’s too late.

  * * *

  After midterms, Amy is failing nearly every course, so I begin tutoring her in biology. We camp out at a table in the main library on Spring Garden Road and review: xylem, phloem, translocation, transpiration. Amy is jittery, unfocused, her leg perpetually shaking, her pen spinning in her hand. She slurps an Iced Capp even though food and drinks aren’t allowed in the library, and despite having been asked to throw it away by the anxious-seeming librarian. Amy calls the librarian Marian, though I’m pretty sure her name is Sue. Condensation leaves wet rings on the table’s laminate surface. Lately, Amy seems to live on sugar and caffeine. In the morning, she gets off the bus with one long gummy worm inching out of the side of her mouth.