Gravity Brings Me Down

ALSO BY NATALE GHENT
Piper
No Small Thing
The Book of Living and Dying
All the Way Home
The Odds Get Even

For my sisters—Rita, Cindy and Monika—and for Mum
.

I
t’s a typical day with the usual conclusions: life sucks, and the only way out is the final exit, the big blue beyond. I’m not thinking of killing myself, really. I’m just weighing the possibilities. I like to know what my options are, especially when things get intolerably dull—which they do—a lot. It’s kind of a rock, paper, scissors game I play with myself: pills, guns or trains.

People think it’s morbid to talk about dying but, personally, I find it very liberating. It’s all about choice and individual expression. It’s also the biggest “F-U” a person can send out to the world. I find that comforting. I’m sure there are concerned committees and legions of high school principals who would be horrified by my attitude. They’d point a self-righteous finger at my parents and decide I wasn’t loved enough, or that they fed me too much sugar or cholesterol or something, but that’s just a load. What can I say? I was born on a Wednesday; I’m full of woe.

The truth is, my parents aren’t that bad—unless you
call being completely naive a bad thing. They’re just a couple of hippies who love the planet and everyone on it. They belong to all kinds of societies and groups to save the environment, which is a waste of time if you ask me because it never seems to make any difference. People keep harpooning whales and polluting the water and driving bigger, stupider cars as if global warming were just a rumour. And that’s only the tip of the melting iceberg. Yet my parents keep trying to save things. It’s like I’m the only one on earth who can see things as they truly are. And it’s not as if this is a recent revelation for me or anything; I’ve been wearing black since I was three. I mean, my favourite book was Dr. Seuss’s
The Lorax
. And he wrote that back in the Seventies. I must have read it five thousand times as a kid. I had it memorized. Even then I realized that people are awful and the world is doomed. But nobody else seems to get it, especially my parents.

Here’s some background:

• Mom’s a part-time English teacher who tutors ESL students for free on her days off.
  

• She majored in Dead White Guys at university.
  

• She thinks it’s funny to talk like Shakespeare. (It’s so embarrassing, especially when she does it in front of my friends. I think she really wanted to be a writer but she made the mistake of having kids instead. She’s all hopeful for me because I like to read and spend all my time writing in my journals.)
  

Dad, on the other hand, would rather I “become” something. He’s a lawyer for Social Services, providing legal counsel for people who can’t afford a real lawyer. For every person he helps, there are at least a thousand more waiting in line. It’s so pointless.

In any case, my parents are pretty harmless compared to most. The only thing I can really resent them for is sticking me with the most boring name in the universe: Sue Smith. It’s like they were so concerned about the environment and everything else, they just couldn’t be bothered thinking of something more original to call me. In my opinion, this mortal coil is hard enough to take without the added burden of some lame name. To make matters worse, they called my little sister Peggy. So together, we’re Peggy-Sue. How sad is that? Naturally, I felt obligated to change my name as soon as I was cognizant. I call myself Sioux. That way everyone is happy. And that’s the great thing about homonyms.

Anyway, thinking about the final exit is a fascinating sociological study if you choose to look at it that way. And I do, because I have an assignment due for Cultural Paradigms and I need a topic that interests me or I may as well just drop out of high school altogether. Which would be absolutely fine by me. I don’t see the value in school, even though I’ve been a straight A student from kindergarten all the way to grade 11—my current year. It’s not that I don’t like to learn. But high school is just a primate zoo, a giant Barrel of Monkeys with intricately balanced chains all swinging independently of one another.

Rarely, if ever, do the chains intersect. There’s the jock chain, and the PIB chain (people in black). There’s the goth chain, the stoner chain and the geek chain, the skater chain and the loser chain. And then there are the strays: monkeys so marginalized they never even make it out of the barrel.

The teachers are another story. Half of them are just putting in time, while the other half are certifiable. My philosophy teacher, Mr. Chocko, falls into the second category. I’m convinced he’s truly bent. He pretends to be all “free and easy” and nice, playing music in class and droning endlessly about nothing under the guise of getting us to “think outside the box.” He has a goatee and he’s always talking about football and hockey with the jocks but I’m sure he’s never played either—ever—judging by his armchair physique. He has a reputation for having parties at his house with students, which I’m sure parents would love to know. He’s got everyone fooled into thinking he’s so fabulous and great. Except me. I think he’s demented. I mean, what kind of teacher wears sunglasses in class? So
I’ve taken it upon myself to be his personal nemesis— mostly because it’s one of my favourite words. If you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll find something like this:

And this goddess is determined to distribute what Chocko has due. Consequently, he’s always trying to pin me down. Which would be a problem if I were a monkey like everyone else. But I’m not. I’m a bird, flying overtop of everything.

I like to imagine I have wings instead of arms, and feathers where my fingers should be. Sometimes, I feel like I could actually fly if I concentrated hard enough. But I would never tell anybody that. They think I’m a monkey like everyone else. So I play along to keep up appearances. My friend, Sharon, she’s definitely a primate, but she’s not a total knuckle-walker. Mostly, she shows signs of intelligent thought, though I do have my doubts. I think she secretly likes living in Sunnyview, which, in my world, is a sign of psychosis.

Simians aside, if you want to know the truth, I don’t believe in anything, really. Except gravity. It’s the only thing of value I learned at school. Invisible forces, manipulating everything. It’s the biggest mystery of all time. No one’s figured out how it works. Not Newton or Einstein or anyone. At one time, people were burned at the stake for trying. Of course, I have my own ideas: somewhere, in the universe, there’s a diabolical machine, belching out black clouds of gravity. And depending on the day, or whose hand is on the lever, the levels fluctuate wildly.

Obviously, I would never tell anyone this, either. Especially not my physics teacher, Dr. Armstrong. He has a more banal take on the world. Here’s what he wrote on the board in class:

So everything exerts influence on everything else. What more do you need to know? In my opinion, nothing. But if I ever want to escape this crappy town, I’d better graduate, which means I have to do my Cultural Paradigms project for my teacher, Miss B. And I think dying is a good place to start, especially since there are relevant gender issues.

For instance: women like to leave a beautiful corpse behind, whereas men could care less who sees their stew. In other words, Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, as Miss B.’s favourite self-help book says, even when it comes to offing themselves. Examples:

• Marilyn Monroe took pills; Hunter S. Thompson blew his head off.
  

• Lupe Vélez took pills; Kurt Cobain blew his head off.
  

• Anna Karenina took the train; Ernest Hemingway blew his head off. (Though Karenina doesn’t really count because she’s fictional.)
  

Virginia Woolf waded into a river, which seems to be the exit of choice for literary types everywhere (especially poets). I think drowning takes the most guts, although God knows I find water pretty much irresistible. Which is why I’m standing on the edge of the Sunnyview Dam, watching the hypnotic flood of grey liquid gush through its concrete teeth. The water looks thick, like gelatin, with bits of twigs and leaves studded here and there. It’s so mesmerizing, it makes me feel all dizzy and light.

I take up my journal to record my impressions:
dark, limitless, nothingness,
the vast and endless void
. I underline these last words as I ponder one of the great and unanswerable questions in the universe:

Do suicides regret their choice at the last minute? How will we ever know?

I add these thoughts to my notes and continue my research. Taking another step toward the edge of the dam, I feel the spray against my face. The water thunders in my ears. I can barely hear my own thoughts. The air smells funny. My mascara starts to run. I must look horribly tragic. I ponder more questions to put myself in the right frame of mind:

This pretty much does it for me. I’m ready to throw myself in.

But it’s hungry work thinking about this stuff. I decide to get something to eat before third period and think about dying later. As I turn to go, I notice two things: an old woman who looks like Miss Marple charging toward me, and three squad cars wailing down the road. The old woman is smiling like she knows me, even though I’m sure I’ve never seen her before in my life. The squad cars screech to a stop beside the dam and a bunch of cops tumble out like clowns. One has a bullhorn. He crouches down as though to lure a cat from under a car and all the other cops do the same.

“Don’t do it!” the bullhorn blasts.

A crowd starts to gather. Some geeks from my school show up to rubberneck, including Tod Cummings, top monkey on the loser chain. He thinks he’s in love with me and won’t leave me alone no matter how I try to get rid of him. It’s like he has a homing device in his head or something because somehow, wherever I go, there he is on his stupid moped wearing this giant gold helmet that makes his head look like a thumb stuck in a bowling ball.

It’s not as if he has to try very hard to find me, though. You couldn’t avoid someone in Sunnyview if your life depended on it. It’s not a real city, like Paris or New York or Toronto, where you have all these cool neighbourhoods and landmarks and stores. Our only claim to fame is a giant statue of some prize-winning cow. Every year at Hallowe’en, the yahoos paint it purple, like it’s the funniest thing ever.