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fun of me. I was more interested in the paranormal than the normal anyway. So once Ozzie had moved, I was pretty much on my own, trying to bend spoons with my mind, travel by astral projection, or devise ways to make contact with those aliens that I was sure were watching over us.
    Periodically, a teacher or a school principal would report my odd behaviour to my parents, who had long since given up on their dream of having a normal, possibly even a high-achieving, son. I know I was a disappointment to them. Once there was discussion with medical experts about reconnecting the right and left hemispheres of my brain more effectively, but the doctors concluded that it couldn’t be done.
    In truth, I was glad I was not normal. Normal seemed dull. Predictable. In my curious universe, all manner of entertaining surprises happened. Which is why I stopped taking my pills, my meds, as my mother called them, quite a while ago. My parents thought I was taking them. Certainly the drugstore was paid handsomely for the prescription. Clearly the doctor had made notes about how effectively the medication was working on his patient.
    Often, as often as possible perhaps, my parents chose to leave me alone. They had little interest in thethings I was interested in. They thought extra-sensory perception was a lot of hogwash. Even if my father believed ESP existed then he probably would have used it to persuade clients to buy his bonds.
    One of my favourite ESP games was to look at someone who was not looking at me. Anyone. A guy in a mall. A girl in class. Seven times out of ten, if you looked long enough, the other person sensed someone looking at them and turned to look at you.
    My mother wished I would stop going out on the lawn at night with my telescope to look for UFOs. The neighbours thought I was spying on them, but I had little interest in my neighbours. I saw things in the sky that might have been UFOs, and I would try to send the aliens in the spacecraft telepathic messages like, “If you receive this, please bring me ice cream so that I know you can hear me.”
    But not once did an alien with ice cream show up at my house.
    My parents, I’m sad to say, were in a kind of competition with each other over who was the most successful at their work. I think my mother was slightly ahead of my father, and this was not good at all for the male ego. I don’t know why they were so caught up in their jobs, and they couldn’t understand why I didn’t have moreinterest (or respect) for what they did. I didn’t want to grow up to be like either one of them.
    I was fed well. I had a nice room, a computer, and a bunch of expensive video games that I quickly grew bored with. My parents would buy me only the so-called best of brand name clothing. For such a weird kid I was always well-dressed. But I knew there was more to be had from life. Someday I hoped to work on a SETI project as a scientist or possibly train chimpanzees to speak with sign language. My preference for employment would be working with either aliens or chimps, but not people. My communication skills with my own species were remarkably weak.
    My mother would say, “Simon, you can do whatever you want with your life as long as you have a solid education and apply yourself to something practical.”
    Practical was not any area that was on my radar.
    â€œSimon,” my father would say, “you can become whatever you would like to be. Just strive to be the best.” These were the words coming from a man who had descended from an alpha male ape. Being the best at something sounded exhausting.
    The house resonated with my parents’ arguments over money or me. It seeped into the walls and ceilings and floors. The living room carpet soaked up lectures about success that meant little to me. The furniture absorbed my mother’s late-night strategies for sellingan expensive house to a man of modest means. The paintings on the walls changed