Invisible Boy, page 23
Reborn in blood, I decided to take a new name—my given name, not some childish nickname. My name is Harrison, I said in the mirror, three times to summon him and once more, for good measure.
There I am, I thought.
Even trapped in my own home, I never felt so free. Harry was a victim, lost in confusion and fear, somehow segregated from his body. Let him stay lost. He was out of his depth. Harrison Mooney can take things from here.
But a new name alone would not save me. Ascribing new words to the same broken structure will not keep the roof from collapsing. There is work to be done, and instead, I was waging a spiritual war by the way my mother rebuked the Boy Storming Upstairs, attacking an actual problem with magical words. I was speaking in tongues.
I wanted to put the past behind me. But until we turn around to face the past, it’s still the present, and our future is our history, rebranded. A name change would not bend the bars of my cage. What I needed was total regime change—to overthrow those who had kept me in bondage. Take the shackles off my feet, so I can dance.
* * *
—
The night I turned nineteen, I got a phone call. The woman on the other end requested Harry Mooney.
That’s me, I said, but now I go by Harrison.
Oh sure, sorry about that, she said. This is Lynn Braidwood from the Hope—and she paused, bracing herself, before tiptoeing through the next two words like there were land mines everywhere—Adoption…Agency…?
I laughed aloud, to fill the pregnant pause that followed. Such a careful introduction. Clearly, Lynn Braidwood had surprised a few people. Hello, Lynn, I know that I’m adopted, I said, to assuage her concern.
That’s good, she said, exhaling for effect. It’s nice to hear your voice, after all these years. Happy birthday! How are things at home?
Just fine, I said dryly. Everybody loves me and it’s great.
Glad to hear it, she chuckled. Well, Harry, you’re a legal adult today, and that means your birth parents are entitled to certain information, including your new name. If they ask, I have to tell them.
Okay, I said. Tell them it’s Harrison.
That’s right, sorry, Lynn said. You should know, though, once they know who you are, they might come looking for you. Just a heads-up! In your case, I wouldn’t worry. Both of your birth parents have expressed a willingness to meet you—but only when you’re ready. Every adoptee has a different timeline for these things. I’ve explained that to them.
Okay, I said.
After a pause, Lynn Braidwood asked: Is that something that interests you?
I was thinking of my mother downstairs, and how she might react if I seemed too keen to meet the other woman. I thought of the unicorn, stashed somewhere in the house. She trembled when she brought it out of hiding. Her biggest fear was losing her son to the woman who left it for me.
And mine? To be found unworthy of her love, and I knew that if I misspoke on the phone, that was a given. I wanted my mother to see that my foundation was firm—that I would die before I two-timed her with some replacement person, that I would sooner self-immolate than let the fire go out between us. My mother was my mother—not some random woman who gave birth to me.
What could I gain from an awkward reunion anyhow? Nowhere close to what I stood to lose.
I heard a bit of static. For a moment, I imagined my mother might be listening from the kitchen—or even recording the call. She’d done it before; she could do it again, and honestly, I wanted her to. She wasn’t really speaking to me anymore. But if she wouldn’t hear me, she could at least overhear me, so I spoke to Lynn as though I had an audience, and I hoped that my mother detected my ambivalence when I finally said: Maybe later.
Lynn Braidwood heard it. You can also choose to maintain your privacy by filing a disclosure veto, or even a written no-contact declaration, she said. It’s all up to you.
I don’t think that’s necessary, I said. I can’t imagine they’ll be banging down my front door. If they wanted me that badly, they’d have kept me, am I right, Lynn?
Now, sometimes, she said, sidestepping the joke, birth parents leave messages for when everything is unsealed. Until today, these messages had to go through your parents. But now you’re an adult, so you’re entitled to hear them from me.
I have messages?
Yes, she said. Would you like to hear them?
I guess so.
Both your parents want you to know that they love you very much.
Oh, I said, suspicious of a love I hadn’t earned. Are they still together?
No, but they still talk, she said.
And they both left the exact same message?
The exact same. Do you want to respond?
How dare these people even claim to love me. We were strangers. At best, they loved some bygone idea of me. They would probably resent me for not living up to it. Perhaps they would pressure me to become more like them. Well, it’s too late, whoever you are, I already adapted to the place where you left me; I no longer need you, goodbye.
Tell them thanks, I said. I’ll reach out when I’m ready.
* * *
—
Maybe after graduation.
Harrison was a work in progress, after all, and things were progressing quite well. My second year was more successful. I brought my grades up: A’s and B’s across the board. Commuting to campus made for fewer distractions—less time in the lower caf and lounges—and fewer friends, with fewer chance encounters to remind them I existed.
A lot of people made big changes that summer—dramatic transformations born of bloody, metaphysical battles, I imagined, probably not unlike mine. All they wanted now was to be taken at face value.
Before philosophy class, where I sat beside my crush, I asked Daniel Wagner, the Boy Who Died, my old friend from camp, if he had any gum.
Harrison, I don’t have any gum, he declared, I’m a mint man now.
Daniel the Mint Man knelt like a knight. He popped a tin of Altoids like a ring box. I accepted. In a way, we were all mint men, the second-years, with brand-new acts and attitudes, and all our childish things were put away. But my adjustments met resistance everywhere.
Our essays were returned to us that morning. I got an A-minus; Colleen, my crush, got a B. Leaning across the aisle, she held up her paper and whispered: B…for Black. She reached out to give me a fist bump.
That’s not funny, I said, looking away.
Colleen called me humourless. Harry, what happened? She asked, after class. Freshman year, you would have laughed at that.
Harry’s gone, I said. He was a clown. I’m Harrison now, and I only laugh when things are funny to me.
Harrison’s a jerk, she said. I liked Harry way better.
You would, you racist, I responded in my mind.
The next week, I sat next to Daniel the Mint Man.
A lifetime of tolerating bigoted behaviour serves as a kind of blackmail. The whole world rests upon your acquiescence, you’ll discover, if you dare attempt to walk a little taller. Even the closest relationships are exposed for what they really are: uneasy alliances, like the one between Atlas and the terrestrial globe, broken just by standing up for yourself. The Titans have turned you to stone, and the planet is perched on your shoulders. Make no sudden movements. Arise, and it all goes to rubble.
I tried to be gentle with people, go slow, cut them some slack when they crossed my new boundaries. The only safe way, I thought then, was to inch forward, little by little. But at times it felt like bending over backwards.
At Christmas, I found a family pack of fruity mints in my stocking—the same ones I’d stolen from Funk Foods: a relic of bygone days, purchased in bulk.
If this is a joke, I don’t get it, I said.
Oh please, my mother said, smirking. You love those mints. Or at least you used to.
That was, like, four years ago, I said.
You’re so sensitive these days, Harry. It’s not even fun to be around you anymore.
Harrison, I said. My name is Harrison.
No prophet is accepted in his own country. It’s hard to see the new man when you knew him as a boy. I am the one prophesied, Jesus said, and the Nazarene Pharisees said: This is Joseph’s dumb kid. So he went down to Capernaum, where a demonized man’s demon mocked him thusly: Leave us alone, Jesus of Nazareth. Little wonder that he walked into the ocean after that. I understood the impulse, and I’m sure it really bugged him that the prophecies were true. He probably wanted to drown. Instead, he walked on water, and wound up saving Peter from the luxury of sinking.
You can see why he kept the disciples around. They didn’t know a thing about his childhood.
People I met for the first time had no frame of reference either, so I preferred them, and I was glad when my father insisted I transfer to a secular school to save money.
I continued my slow transformation in secret at the University College of the Fraser Valley, the local school halfway between a university and a college, halfway between Stone Rolled Away and Glenn Mountain. They were on their way to full university status—a long process of petitioning the provincial government while building the brand of the school, and its reach. What they needed, amid the campaign, was to demonstrate strong community support, including representation from all regional groups. So they were more than glad to have me.
It worked out on my end as well. My transcript improved: University 101 wasn’t a real course, they determined, but UCFV let me keep the three credits. Only the D-minus disappeared from my record; my GPA rose above three.
Indignities continued to abound, however. Abbotsford hadn’t changed; I had, and not nearly as much as I thought.
My first day on campus, dressed sharply in an argyle sweater vest, brown slacks and shoes, and Buddy Holly’s glasses, I went to register for a library card. The old woman at the desk was strangely wary of me. She took my driver’s licence into the back, and after staring at the little piece of plastic for a while, she pulled a co-worker aside, looking back at me, suspicious.
That guy doesn’t look like a Harrison Mooney, she whispered, a little too loudly.
She needed to know that her instincts were inane. What could she possibly think I was after—rare photocopies of CanLit short stories? It was inexplicable, and any thief that desperate to read a bunch of college course packs was clearly in the process of changing careers. Why embarrass him?
Admittedly, mine was a pretty white name—Irish-sounding, and the boy who it belonged to wasn’t Irish-looking. But I could explain.
I’m adopted, I shouted across the desk, smiling.
This only embarrassed the woman. I wasn’t supposed to have heard her. She seemed offended that I’d spoken out of turn. So she rushed the lamination, and my library card came out crooked and peeling. She moved to dismiss me, as fast as she could.
I’m sorry, I said.
Next! she projected.
I backed away, embarrassed, passing a man who resembled me somewhat, but shorter and darker. It occurred to me that he might have a similar experience. I lingered to watch from a distance.
Sure enough: she studied his licence, suspicious.
Isaac, she finally said, with an air of annoyance. How do you pronounce your middle name?
Kulasekharapuram, he said.
That did it. The woman took her glasses off.
You people, she began, inauspiciously, you come to this country, you say you’ll assimilate. But how do you expect to fit in when you’ve got names we can’t even pronounce?
Isaac grinned. I actually am changing my name, he said, cheerfully.
Oh really? To what? I’ll put it on your new library card, she said.
Isaac leaned in and said: John Fucking Smith. And then he just stood there, unblinking, as the librarian backed away, blinking rapidly. He seemed to relish her discomfort, as well as her struggle to enter every last letter of Kulasekharapuram into the database, and he kept his eyes fixed on the woman as she completed the deeply unsettling interaction by icily, silently, laying his card on the counter.
I was appalled. Isaac would never fit in with that attitude. And who dares to curse at a librarian? You’ll never have a late fee forgiven again. For a moment, I thought of apologizing on his behalf, if only to claw back a little respect for myself. But the old crank took an unscheduled break, upsetting the long line behind us.
I introduced myself to Isaac straight away. I would not let another potential best friend disappear, and as we chatted in the university college cafeteria, I asked what had possessed him to lash out like that.
Anyone who thinks they can rename you thinks they own you, he said.
And so: he became my best friend.
By my third year, I was in the zone. I managed straight A’s for the first time. I joined the English club. I started a blog, and I wrote a witty, one-act play that sold out every showing at the college’s theatre festival.
Harrison Mooney was becoming a real someone on campus. But who was I off campus? I still didn’t know, and as I ran out of runway at UCFV, I began to consider continuing on to graduate school. The time to sink or swim was drawing near, but I was not prepared to leave the fishbowl.
The real world was calling—my birth parents too. Someone left a comment on my blog, Harrison Exists!, beneath a post I wrote about Angelina Jolie.
The Academy Award–winning actress adopted kids from Africa and Asia, and the glowing press she got for this had left me unimpressed. Transracial adoption was suddenly trendy; on TV, the pundits were all but insisting that racialized babies were Hollywood’s new must-have items. To me, it seemed, Jolie and other rich white folks who followed in her footsteps were adopting for themselves, to feel like saviours. But the lives that they uprooted in pursuit of their progressive vision seemed to be an afterthought. These children were more than collectibles. They would grow conscious, in time, of how they were really seen, if they were seen at all, and each of them would draw their own conclusions. Adoption was not necessarily good.
Black children are not Beanie Babies, I wrote to no one in particular. The Oscar winner may look saintly now, but wait until these kids grow up. Eventually, they’re bound to learn she did it all for clout.
An anonymous reader responded: This made my day. You do exist, and Harrison, I’m glad. I thank God every day for the great man that you’re becoming. I can’t say who I am, but just know that I’ve been watching your life from afar with great pride.
I hoped it was my mother, but she never read my blog, even when I emailed her the hyperlinks. Fearing that she’d start today, and see this, I deleted it.
My mother was opposed to a reunion—for my sake. So much could go wrong, she’d often tell me. Be careful. A lot of people say that they regret meeting their birth parents. They can bring a lot of drama into your life. You can never trust them; they might abandon you all over again. And some folks are just out for money. It might not be what you think.
Once, she clipped an op-ed from the National Post that supported her point. She left it in the kitchen, where I’d find it, and I felt that she was making herself clear: don’t do it—not unless you’re ready for the consequences, ready to be on your own forever, if your mother feels the slightest bit betrayed.
I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to be alone; I wanted to earn her respect. So I applied to several master’s programs, hoping validation lay ahead.
Just before graduation, set to claim a bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in Media and Communication Studies, I received a letter from the school. The Captain delivered it, opened as always. It was an invitation to a special convocation day event: for having the highest GPA of any graduating student minoring in Communications, I would be honoured at a luncheon, pre-ceremony.
A luncheon, Harry! That’s so impressive, my mother said. I didn’t know you were getting good grades. I thought you were just screwing around, as usual. Why didn’t you tell us?
Because it’s still my business, I said. And my name is Harrison Mooney. See it right there on the label? Stop opening my mail. But please, be my guest, by all means.
On the big day, the three of us entered a classroom arranged as a banquet hall, and after filling my paper plate with cheeses, meats, and melon cubes from lukewarm Costco platters, I took my seat at the centre of a long table, amid a wedding party’s worth of school officials, to be treated to a trio of laudatory speeches from professors that I didn’t really know.
Afterward, I stood with Dr. Beverly Best, a white woman in her early thirties whose expertise was in decoding media messages. She came to every class with advertisements clipped from magazines, unpacking the violent intent behind each. Her critical eye was an X-ray machine. Nothing got past her. She saw through it all.
You must be very proud, she told the Captain.
We are, we are, my father said, piling his plate with salami.
And once he sat down, Dr. Best turned to me. Is this weird for you?
I didn’t quite follow.
The highest GPA of any student with this minor? I mean, congratulations, she said, but I’ve never heard of such a thing—have you?
Now that you mention it, no.
Thinking about it, the honour made little sense—unless the reception wasn’t aimed at me, but at the people with the power to amend the University Act. This was a showing of diversity, I realized. I was playing a role in a minor production. I was merely the guest of honour, made king for a day, lifted up so all may see, not me, or my academic achievement, but what I stood for: another regional group, represented. I was Jimmy from the Bahamas. I wasn’t being exalted. I was being exploited. It’s because I’m Black, isn’t it.
