✲
Danny had never had a friend like him.
Theirs were the first names called when the teacher took attendance. Aykroyd. Chitovas.
He was the rare boy who would play with Danny during recess, risking the jeers of the first and second picks for ball teams, a skinny boy with small eyes and hamster cheeks, Danny called him Chich after the puppet in Chich in Cartoonerville. Modest, unpromising looks, but enveloped by the glamour which an early brush with mortal peril gave him.
Chich’s father had saved his son’s life, and those of his three daughters. Nick Chitovas went to bed one night and woke to find his firetrap of an apartment up in flames. Chich was an infant at the time, like his sisters, and remembered nothing of his father’s howls in the family’s Quebec French. Nothing of being grabbed with a sister and hurtled into the frozen street and the crowd of onlookers, his father like a man possessed, in a frenzy of urgency and heroism. Nothing of his father braving the blinding heat again and returning, long minutes later, with the other sisters. Nick Chitovas’s face, it was said throughout town and down the years, was black with soot and his hair smouldering. And with every retelling, the fire grew fiercer, the smoke blacker, the shouts and sobs louder. Nick Chitovas’s hair went from a meagre wick to a halo of dancing flame. Up to here, the tellers would say, waving their arms high above their heads. And Danny, witnessing neighbours recount the tale, was entranced by the theatrics of a good story.
Lunchtimes found Chich and Danny setting off for the woods’ edge, leaving behind the school and highway. The retreating snow smelled of humbugs as they ran along a stream, shooting baddies or lassoing Indians. Or else they retired to the woods to play hide and seek. Danny was the best hider Chich had ever known. Chich would close his eyes and count to twenty before tiptoeing among the pines and hear only a chainsaw splutter, or a dumpster’s ignition in the distance, and the next thing he knew the chainsaw was calling to him or the dumpster driving his way, louder and louder, and then nothing. Silence. Danny could do silence too, the eerie silence among the trees that canopied the forest floor. ‘Danny, where are you?’ Chich would shout and the woods echoed back, Danny, where are you?
Another game they played was cops and robbers, alternating the role of culprit. Danny loved reading or hearing or thinking about crime; the police, and the people they arrested, exercised an equal fascination on him. As far as he was concerned, being afraid of outlaws was for grown-ups. He had the softest of spots for outlaws. Perhaps he envisioned them, but this is speculation, as brethren – comrades in alienation, fellow strangers to polite society with its unfathomable and countless rules. Rules that, always changing, could get the better of anyone. Capricious. One day’s parking space was another’s traffic violation. The same beer served at 1.05 a.m. in Quebec would be bootleg in neighbouring Ontario. Danny thought a lot about such things, about right and wrong, good and bad, as policemen did. And criminals, apparently.
Let’s go see the jail, Danny said to Chich one Saturday. Probably he told him about his father’s crossing the threshold, now and then, paying Christian visits to the convicts. The convicts were housed out in the woods, not far from the Aykroyds’ home, so if one or more escaped, as happened sometimes, they might almost run into the two boys playing. The men never did remain out for long. All those bedsheets tied into a makeshift rope, for a few days, or only hours, of freedom.
The boys picked up their bikes and rode bumpily in the direction of the jail. Chich lagged behind Danny; his nerves were catching up with him.
‘Chich, we’re here!’ Danny said as he jumped off his bicycle.
‘Sacramento!’ Chich exclaimed, braking. ‘Danny, do you see them?’
‘Raccoons. Raccoons in cages, half a dozen of them,’ Greg Chitovas, now seventy and a Bell Canada retiree, told me by phone. ‘Who knows why the prisoners kept them there. For company I’d have thought.’
A man’s paunch blocked out the view. The paunch belonged to one of the guards. ‘What have we got here?’ he said unnecessarily. The boys skedaddled.
And when a colleague asked the returning guard what that had been about, the guard, with a shrug, said, ‘Nothing, just kids. Nick Chitovas’s lad and some wide-eyed pal of his.’
✲
A new toy. Danny shook it, but not roughly. He held the Magic 8 Ball as he held any book, with an abiding reverence for all that he did not know. Question after question he asked it, questions he’d intended for his father.
‘Might humans communicate with extraterrestrials?’ (‘Ask again later.’)
‘Is time travel possible?’ (‘Signs point to yes.’)
‘Do many other dimensions exist?’ (‘Better not to tell you now.’)
When the 8 Ball’s answers didn’t satisfy, he took his questions to the family bookcase, or to the bookshelves in the old clapboard farmhouse in Frontenac County, where the Aykroyds spent their summers. Hours of sunlight to read by. He read the contents of his ancestor’s shelves. Books that were alphabetised, or otherwise kept tidy, by his father who liked to quote his Latin primer: a place for everything, and everything in its place. Venerable-looking books like The History of Spiritualism by Arthur Conan Doyle, handed down from his father’s grandfather, and stacks of back copies of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.
He learned about ectoplasm, a kind of gelatinous and whitish substance, so these books and quarterlies stated, used by spirits to materialise their likeness. Ectoplasm is exuded through a medium’s nose, mouth, ears or belly button during a séance. It can be handled, smelled, occasionally photographed for posterity. The light of day causes this transient substance to vanish. When Danny asked his father whether he had ever seen ectoplasm or perhaps even touched it, his father, every inch a believer, replied with regret in the negative.
The original owner of these books, Samuel Aykroyd, had been a dentist at the close of the nineteenth century, a time when the trade’s tools were like so many instruments of torture, and pain relief nonexistent. Whether Dr Aykroyd ever practised what he read about mesmerism remains an open question. Perhaps he didn’t hypnotise his patients. Perhaps he didn’t swing the gold fob of his pocket watch before their eyes. Whatever was his professional interest in these theories, they persuaded his family to mingle their Christianity with spiritualism.
✲
Peter Aykroyd told Danny and his brother about a Sunday evening long ago, when several cars had driven up to the family’s farmhouse. Big Dodges and the like. This would have been in the year 1929. Seven-year-old Peter, crouching in the bushes, observed the visitors from a distance. They were sitters, his grandfather told Peter afterwards, and the word would give them a special dignity in the young boy’s mind. From behind the bushes he crept inside the cellar at the back of the parlour. He had never known the household in such a state of animation. The men and women were walking in now. From where they came, he didn’t know – the big town to the south, Kingston, or somewhere in that neck of the woods; children, in any case, didn’t ask a lot of questions back then. The women smelled of perfume and mink coats. His grandfather opened the door to the parlour and let the group ceremoniously file in.
The parlour had a square wooden table in its centre and an old stone fireplace, and shelves of his grandfather’s books. Through the cellar door he heard the sitters pull out their chairs and take their places around the table, the drapes being drawn, and the medium demand who was there that day from the great beyond. He heard the curious noise eight or more adults make when they hold hands and breathe in harmony.
Before long, someone came through from the other side. All Peter could say for sure was that the voice groaned so low and deep it wasn’t a voice. In any case, not a human voice. One of the medium’s spirit guides was communicating through him: a Chinese fellow by the name of Lee Long who’d lived during the Ming dynasty, or Blue Light, a prince, or so the sitters believed, from Ancient Egypt, or perhaps the Native American called Broken Arrow – whoever it was spoke up and invited questions from the darkened room. One of the sitters asked about a departed relative, and Lee Long – or Blue Light or Broken Arrow – said the beloved was in a better place, and when this response induced a gasp of joy, and relief, from across the table, the spirit proceeded to share memories that the sitter recognised.
Sometimes a séance would turn up nothing, Peter conceded to Danny and his brother; no usable information from the dead would be forthcoming, which the sitters attributed to a negative, or worse, a sceptical thought crossing one or more of the minds present around the table. Danny felt he’d be incapable of any such thought. He couldn’t get the medium’s many voices out of his head.
✲
Danny ought to see a professional person. That would have been the advice of the headmistress. Most parents of the period wouldn’t have heard of a shrink for their child. But Peter and Lorraine Aykroyd were not most parents. Both widely read, university educated, with a high regard for science. And Peter, back in his National Film Board days, had worked on documentaries commissioned by the country’s mental health association.
It was at a child guidance clinic – a common euphemism then for child psychiatry – that Mrs Aykroyd set out her son’s difficulties as best she could. They had worsened in the past year, she told the psychologist, ever since her son had entered sixth grade and Mrs Marier’s class. This teacher wasn’t tyrannical, but she wasn’t understanding either, always ready with a frown, and teacher and pupil had never gotten along. She was a strict and mean lady with an angry wart right between the eyes (this description would have been Danny’s). At first only a few heated words, her punishment would swiftly make itself felt: a rap of her ringed fingers, or of a ruler, to the boy’s temples. Every other peep out of him seemed to merit the strap (which never missed – Mrs Marier hadn’t made the teachers’ bowling league team for nothing), until he had ended up dreading school altogether, he who had aced most classes outside of sports. Indeed, thought the psychologist, who would have seen the boy’s academic reports, Danny Aykroyd was very much his high-achieving parents’ son.
First observations. Speaks in a staccato fashion. Hair: unruly, dark. Eyes: one green, one brown, furtive. Weight: satisfactory. Barks or grunts like a small animal when overstimulated (according to parent’s testimony). Can raise a smile or a laugh without meaning to. Or perhaps he does. Talks for Canada. Repetitive to a fault. Narrow interests: guns, police, ghosts. All things mechanical. Excellent memory. Trouble at school. Involuntary eye blinking, shoulder shrugs, twitches. Doesn’t fully grasp social niceties. Has potential to progress.
He submitted willingly to having his mind probed. The psychologist wanted to know why women and children should be saved first in a shipwreck, how many pounds made a ton, where was Chile, what did turpentine come from, which part of a thermometer in the illustration shown was missing.
Danny didn’t need to be asked twice before he gave his answers.
He recited numbers, assembled jigsaws, led his pencil tip out of mazes. In rows of squiggles he detected a chosen symbol: a hexagon, say, or a hoop like a flat tyre.
He would have been asked to draw a man, a woman, himself. How he drew himself, or the woman for that matter, is anybody’s guess, but for the man I have my idea, more than an idea in fact, though I cannot be certain, so let’s just say that what he drew that day required many strokes of his pencil and blanched the knuckles of his left hand.
He may have been shown ink blots to comment on. Ink blots that looked like hungry timber wolves. He may have been asked to play a game of word association. That would have been tricky. He wasn’t one to say the first thing that came into his head. There never was a first thing. There were always so many things, and all of them coming up for attention simultaneously; no sooner had he found the word for each than more besides rushed to replace them.
Great was the psychologist’s wonder when the boy’s results were totted up. The test scores identified him as highly gifted, no question about it.
In my mind I picture the parents hip to hip in the waiting room, and the psychologist, after having called them in, seeing Mr Aykroyd, all six feet something of him, and thinking, The man’s a giant. The boy takes after him.
