Hey Nostradamus! Part 19

Five years ago, before I met Jason, I had a depression or whatever you want to call it, and one morning I felt so dead I called Larry and pleaded bubonic plague. He had seen the clouds acc.u.mulating inside me and told me to phone the doctor; bless him, I did. At first they tried out some of the more fashionable antidepressants on me. They either nauseated me or made me buzzy and I had to say no to maybe six of them. There was one, the sixth one - I forget the name - which did this odd thing to me. I took it in the morning, and around lunch I had this impulse to kill myself. I don't mean to shock here; what I'm saying is that people talk about killing themselves all the time, and some people give it a go, and I'd always known that, but this pill, it opened up a door inside me: for the first time ever I actually understood how it felt to want to kill myself.

The drug wore off quickly, and the next prescription did the trick. After about three months I was my usual self again, and stopped taking anything.

The point here is that there are certain human behavioral traits that can be talked about, but unless you've experienced the impulse behind them, they remain theoretical. Most of the time, this is for the best. After my brush with the suicidal impulse, I listen with new ears to others when they speak on the subject. I think there are people who were born with that little door open, and they have to go through life knowing that they might jump through it at any moment.

In a similar vein, I think there is the impulse to be violent. When Jason and I fought, I'd be so angry that my eyeb.a.l.l.s scrunched up and I saw black-and-white geometric patterns inside my head, but never, ever, would I consider hitting him, and Jason was the same way. We spoke about this once during a lunch down by the ocean - about anger and violence - and he said that no matter how angry he ever became with me, violence wasn't an option for him; it didn't even occur to him. He confided that there were other situations where violence was an option for him - obviously, the Delbrook Ma.s.sacre, but who knows what else? I suppose I'll go to the grave wondering what they were - but with me? No.

Why am I saying this? Because Jason simply didn't have the suicide impulse, nor do I think he was a violent guy. So I don't worry that he jumped from a bridge or got killed in some fight.

I should add, that when Jason and I fought, the characters went away. To have dragged our characters into a fight simply wasn't a possibility, any more than suicide or hitting each other.

Our characters were immune to the badness in the world, a trait that made them slightly holy. As we didn't have children, they became our children. I worried about them the same way I worry about Barb's kids. I'll be having my day, walking around the dog run down at Ambleside, say, and then suddenly, pow! my stomach turns to a pile of bricks, and I nearly collapse with antic.i.p.atory grief as I realize the boys could burn themselves or be kidnapped or be in a car accident. Or I'll be near tears when I think of Froggles alone by himself in an apartment with n.o.body to phone, no food in the fridge, maybe drinking some leftover Canadian Club, wondering why we even bother going on with our lives. Or I worry about Bonnie the Lamb, recently shorn, lost from the flock, cold and sick with loneliness on the wrong side of a raging river. I probably don't have to say much more on this subject.

And then there is me, sad little me, living in a dream, staring out the window, never again to find love. With Jason I thought I'd finally played my cards right, and now I'm just one more of those broken, sad people out there, figuring out a year in advance where they can have Easter and Christmas dinner without feeling like a burden or duty to others, cursing the quality of modern movies because it's so hard to fill weeknights with movies when they're all c.r.a.p, and waiting, just waiting, for those three drinks a night to turn into four - and then, well, then I'll be applying my makeup in the morning, combing my hair, washing my clothes, but it's not really for anyone. I'm alive, but so what.

After my cigarette with Jessica I drove back to Lynn Valley, up to Allison's house. I know her real name is Cecilia, but she remains Allison to me.

Her Cutla.s.s was in the carport. The newspapers were still on the front doormat, so I picked them up and rang the bell. Through the badly built 1960s contractor door, I heard shuffling up the stairs from where I knew the kitchen was. There were three gla.s.s slits in the door, and I looked through them and saw Allison, who stopped on the third step up, looked at me, and froze. It took her maybe half a minute to thaw out, and she came to the door and opened it, a tiny bra.s.s security chain across the gap.

"Heather. It's awfully early."

"I know it is." She'd have to be a moron not to see a certain level of madness in my eye, but I could tell she misread this as desperation for a message from Jason.

"I suppose I could let you in."

"Please do."

She unclasped the chain and said to come upstairs to the kitchen for coffee. "You look terrible,"

she said, "like you didn't sleep last night."

"I didn't."

The kitchen was generic North Van - lemon-lime freckled linoleum floor with four decades of wear patterns showing, SPCA fridge magnets, vitamins on the windowsill, and through that window, the primordial evergreen maw that continues from Lynn Valley until the end of the world. She said, "I know it must be troubling to wait for messages to come in from loved ones."

I said, "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response."

She looked at me and at my small insurrection. "Heather, I do the best I can." She handed me a coffee, and I sat and stared at her. She had to be an incredible dolt not to see trouble lurking.

"Last night was psychically very active, and I think I received something you might be interested in."

I smiled.

"Again, it's something that makes no sense to me, but these words do seem to mean something important to you."

"How much will they cost me?"

"Heather! No need to be so cra.s.s."

"I'm out of money. Yesterday was it."

Allison didn't like this. "Oh, really?"

"I don't know what to do."

"I'm a businesswoman, Heather. I can't just do these things for free."

"I can see not."

I sipped the coffee, too hot and too weak. I placed the mug on the tabletop and looked at my hands. Allison watched me. I began tugging away at a diamond ring on my left ring finger, a diamond the size of a ladybug. Sometimes with Jason, subjects were best left undiscussed. I'd always a.s.sumed the ring had fallen off the back of a truck, but then Barb told me she'd actually gone with Jason to Zales to help select it. "I have this ring."

Allison came over and, with the deadened eyes of a Soviet flea marketeer, appraised it in a blink.

"I suppose so."

The ring came free. I handed it to her, and as she reached for it, I grabbed her, yanked her forward and with my right arm put her in a headlock. I said, "Look, you scheming cow. Your daughter filled me in on your little prank here, and if you want to live past lunchtime, you take me to wherever you keep the sheet of paper Jason gave you, and you hand it over. Got it?"

"Let go of me."

I turned her around and dug a knee into her back. I've never struck another human being before, but I had size on my side. "Don't screw with me. I've got a brown belt in Tae Bo. I studied down in Oregon. So where is it?"

"I can't . . . breathe."

I loosened my grip. "You bring tears to my eyes. Come on. Where is it?"

"Downstairs."

"So that's where we'll go."

I felt like I'd been given a prescription drug that opened a fifty-pound pair of oak double doors, doors I'd somehow overlooked before. To be even clearer, I felt like a man. It was surprisingly easy taking full control of Allison's body, but I don't think I'd have killed her. Whatever door this new door was, it wasn't the murder door.

The stairs were tricky but doable. We entered a room that must once have been Glenn's office but had, over the years, been converted to a transient storage area for bankers' boxes full of old books and papers. A sun-bleached litho of mallard ducks in flight had been removed from over the desk and leaned against the floor below, leaving a ghostly rectangle on the wall. Straddling this ghost was a bra.s.s-framed piece of fuzzily photographed flowers embossed with some sort of poetic nonsense in that casual fake-handwriting font people use on invitations to their second and third marriages. Allison's feminizing touch. The room had an aura of bankruptcy and defeat.

"Where is it?"

"In the middle drawer." "Let's go fetch it then, shall we?"

We approached the desk with the gracelessness of captor and captive. I allowed her just enough mobility to open the drawer, and once it was open, I yanked back her arm and said, "Let me do a quick inspection here for guns and knives." I mussed through the desk's contents and then I saw Jason's handwriting on some sheets of crumpled pink invoice paper from his boss's contracting firm. On seeing it, I squeaked and let go of Allison and picked it up and held it to my chest. She fell to the floor, was about to rise, and then ended up just slumping against a bookcase. She said, "I suppose you're - "

"Oh, shut up." I looked at the paper and Jason's little-boy printing. His writing was small and efficient, and he managed to cram a lot onto the pages. There were dozens of our characters and their best-known exploits, along with staging instructions: Froggles is the most important and beloved character. He speaks in a high voice, but if you tell him he sounds shrill, he indignantly shrieks, "I'm not shrill!" He drives a Dodge Scamp he bought at a garage sale. Primary enjoyments include winning spelling bees, twelve-packs of crunchy flies and Law & Order reruns.

Bonnie T. Lamb is the crabbiest and most politically correct character. She wears an African beanie and horn-rimmed gla.s.ses, has a bleating voice and can easily have her opinion swayed by her personal kryp-tonite, Cloverines. Her other weaknesses include bad arts and crafts and working in B-movies as a walk-on. Her life partner, Cherish, fixes motorcycles.

And so forth. I sat down in Glenn's captain's chair and inhaled Jason's letter like it was cherry blossoms. Allison posed no threat. I'd just heard from the dead.

Allison said, "He's gone. You know it, right?"

"I know."

"I'm not trying to be a b.i.t.c.h here. But he's gone. Glenn went. He went and I was left behind. This big stupid house and me and nothing else, and our savings lost in some idiotic tech stock."

I looked at her.

"The only reason I became a psychic was to try and reach Glenn. I thought that maybe if I pretended to be one I could become one. The things I did to try to become one - diets, purges, fasts, seminars, weekends. All of it just pointless."

"You tried to rip me off."

"I did. But you know what? To have seen your face whenever I gave you some words - it was all I'd ever wanted for myself."

I was appalled. "How could you use extortion when you were doing something so ... sacred?"

Allison turned toward me, amused that I didn't get her punch line: "Well, my dear, I'm broke.

When you're my age, you'll understand."

She was still on the floor when I got up and left. I drove home and put Jason's list of instructions inside a jumbo freezer-size zip-top bag in order to protect his pencilings from rubbing away completely. I removed my shoes and belt and fell into bed, holding an edge of the bag up to my face, and sleep came easily.

Part Four

2003: Reg

Jason, my son, unlike you, I grew up amid the dank smothering alder leaves of Aga.s.siz, far from the city. In summer I could tell you the date simply by chronicling the number of children who had drowned in the Fraser River or been poisoned by the laburnum pods that dangled from branches and so closely resembled runner beans. I spent those summer days on the Fraser's gravel bars, watching eagles in the tall snagged trees browse for salmon, but I wasn't in the river just for the scenery - it was piety. I believed the maxim that should I lose my footing, G.o.d would come in and carry me wherever the river was deepest. The water felt like an ongoing purification, and I've never felt as clean as I did then. That was so many decades ago -the Fraser is now probably full of fish rendered blind by silt from gravel quarries, its surface pocked with bodies that somehow worked themselves loose from their cement kimonos.

Autumn? Autumn was a time of sorting out the daffodil bulbs with their malathion stink, brushing their onionskin coatings from overly thick sweaters knit by two grandmothers who refused to speak English while they carded wool. Winters were spent in the rain, grooming the fields - I was raised to believe that the opposite of labor is theft, not leisure. I remember my boots sinking in mud that tried to steal my knees, its sucking noise. And then there was spring - always the spring - when the mess and stink and garbage of the rest of the year were redeemed by the arrival of the flowers. I was so proud of them - proud, me . . . Reginald Klaasen - proud that they loaned innocence and beauty to a land that was never really tamed. Proud from walking in the fields, inside the yellow that smelled of birth and forgiveness - only to stare north, out at the forest and its black green clutch, always taunting me, inviting me inside, away from the sun.

Hiding something - but what?

Perhaps hiding the Sasquatch. The legend of the Sas-quatch has always been potent in my mind - the man-beast who supposedly lives in the tree-tangled forests. It was the Sasquatch I'd always identified with, and perhaps you can see why: a creature lost in the wilderness, forever in hiding, seeking companionship and friendship, living alone, without words or kindness from others. How I hoped to find the Sasquatch - hoped to bring him out of the forest and into the world! I planned to teach him words and clothe him and save him in as many ways as I could. My mother encouraged me to do this, to save the soul of this d.a.m.ned beast, bear witness to him, make him one of us, force him to gain a world while surrendering his mystery. I sometimes wondered whether gaining the world and losing one's mystery was such a good deal, and I felt ashamed of thinking this. The world is a good place, rain and mud and man-eating forests included. G.o.d created the world - I believe that. No theory of creation satisfies me, but I have this sureness in my heart.

I remember finding out that the world was actually just a planet, in school in the third grade, and I remember hating the teacher, Mr. Rowan, who discussed the solar system as if it were a rock collection. It's so hard to balance in our minds the knowledge that "the world" is, mundanely, "a planet." The former is so holy; the latter merely a science project. I walked out of cla.s.s, indignant, and spent a week at home as the school and my father tried to negotiate a meeting point between the rock-collection creation theory of the earth and the more decent and spiritual notion of "the world." None was reached. I was put in another teacher's cla.s.s.

My father was an angry man, you know that, but he was also a man of little faith, constantly angry because - because why? Because he took over his father's daffodil farm and forfeited whatever life he might have created for himself. My father was fierce, and I was fierce with you, Jason, and when I became fierce with you, I was appalled yet unable to stop myself.

My fierceness with you came not from any desire to copy my father, but instead from my desire to be his opposite, to be righteous, and to be strong where my own father was weak. My piety galled him, and when he was furious, I was driven out of the house and fields with threats of the leather strap he used for sharpening his razor, out into the forest, away from home, for hours, sometimes days (yes, I ran away from home) spent contemplating a G.o.d who would create an animal like my father, a religious man without faith. A fake man - a human form containing nothing.

I never told you about my childhood. Why would I have? I told Kent, but never you. I suppose I thought you'd twist the words and use them against me. You never said much around the house, but you were a formidable opponent. I could see it in your eyes when you were a year old. You were compet.i.tion. Children are cruel in their ability to instantly identify a fraud, and that, especially, was your gift and curse. I was so insecure about my beliefs that I feared being exposed by my own child. That was wretched of me.

Your childhood: as an infant you were a crier, a creature of colicky squalls that frightened your mother and me until we went to a doctor and he asked some questions and it turned out that the only time you ever cried was just before or after sleeping - that technically you were asleep, sleepwalking, and what we were seeing was your interior life -screaming in your dreams! Good Lord! As the years wore on, we thought you were mute, or possibly autistic; you didn't start speaking until you were four. That is family legend. Your first words weren't "Mama" or "Dada,"

but rather, "Go away." Your mother was devastated, whereas I heard your words only as a challenge to my authority.

Listen to me, already - the words of a lonely broken man in his little apartment somewhere on the edge of the New World. Let me change tactics. Maybe I can see myself better that way . . .

Here: Reg, always thought that G.o.d had a startling revelation to hand him, a divine mission; that's why he always seemed so aloof and arrogant and distant from the people and events around him: he was the chosen one. And of course, Reg's mission never came. Instead, he was in his lunchroom one afternoon, eating an egg salad sandwich, when his secretary burst in and said there was a shooting at his son's high school. This father of two drove across town, listening to the AM radio news, which only got worse and worse, and the world became more dreamlike and unreal to him.

Reg hadn't even crossed the Lions Gate Bridge yet, and newscasters were already counting the dead. And here is where Reg's great crime began: he was jealous that G.o.d had given a mission not to him, but to his son. To his son, I might add, who was, according to the several Spanish Inquisition members of his youth group, having intimate relations with a young woman in his cla.s.s. Jason's relations with Cheryl were, to the mind of a smug and wrongly righteous man, like lemon juice on a stove burn. Of course, in Reg's mind his son's crime wasn't as clearly defined as this. That sort of clarity comes only with decades. Instead, he was simply furious with heaven and G.o.d and had no idea why. So once home, in a flash he seized upon his son's act of bravery as an act of cowardice and the devil. He held a two-second-long kangaroo court inside his head, and rejected his son. When Reg's wife heard this and crippled him using a lamp powered by an astonishingly hard blast to his knee, he was confused and had no idea why the world had turned on him. But it was the other way around - Reg was in La-La Land. He was expelled from his own home, where even he knew he was no longer master. In the hospital, n.o.body, save for his firstborn son, visited him - why would anybody want to visit such a miscreant? The only other exception was the complaining and hostile wraith that his sister had become, who drove in once a week from Aga.s.siz. She demanded gas money and shamed Reg by pointing out how few flowers he'd been sent in the hospital - only some limp gladioli in yellow water, supplied by his office.

When Reg was released from the hospital, he moved into a new apartment in a new building owned by his boss's brother-in-law. He went back to work, but no one spoke to him much - there were condolences and expressions of gladness that Jason had been exonerated, but his coworkers knew he'd been abandoned by his family, that he lived alone, and that this was all, somehow, connected to his pride and his vanity.

Vanity.

When Reg was courting his wife-to-be, he thought he should spiff himself up a bit, so, being frugal but optimistic, he went to Value Village, a former grocery store now filled with mildewed socks and blouses and plastic kitchenware. He found a pair of mint condition - unworn! - black shoes in his size for a dollar forty-nine. Whooee! He was so proud of those shoes, and he wore them out of the store, into the rain where he was to meet his gal, just getting off her shift at Nuffy's Donuts. He walked into the donut shop, where even ugly yellow fluorescent tubes couldn't diminish her complexion. She was putting a jacket over her work uniform. She looked down and said, "What the jeez happened to your feet?" His feet had turned into bundles of soggy paper. The shoes he'd purchased were mortuary shoes, designed only for open coffins, never to be worn by the living. Cheapness and vanity.

Your mother.

She's technically alive, but she isn't really here, she is far gone in her alcoholic dementia, her liver on its final boozy gasp. I take the blame - I liked her drunk, because she was a quiet and amiable drunk. When she was drunk, her eyes lost that accusatory look. When she was drunk, she gave the impression she'd ride life unchanged right through to the end, that her life was spiritually adequate, that she wore a crown of stars. This drunken look absolved me of all the guilt I felt regarding the slow-motion demolition of the once pretty girl who always saved two Boston creme donuts for me, and who unashamedly loved color TV, and who (and this is the hard part) seemed spiritual in a way that didn't make me want to preach to her. She could have married any man she wanted, but she chose Reg Klaasen. . . . Why? Because she thought I was spiritual, too. I don't know when it dawned on her that I wasn't, that I was merely someone whose vocabulary was slightly old-fashioned, and whose ideas were stolen almost entirely from dead people. I suppose that would be when she started drinking, just after you were born and she had a hysterectomy. It must have been devastating to her, to realize she'd hitched herself to a religious fraud. And I led her on - that's my own disgrace. And now her life's basically over. I visit her twice a month at the facility near Mount Seymour Parkway. The first time I went there I was unsure whether I should go. I was convinced she'd throw an IV-tree at me, or go into hysterics like Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer, but instead she smiled and said she had some donuts tucked away for me, and then she kept on saying it, with no OFF switch, and that was the worst rebuke of all.

Kent.

When Kent died, I found that physically leaving earth was a desirable notion. I was at work when I learned of his death, out by the front reception area trying to unjam a roll of fax paper. I was irritated and I'd told the receptionist to put me on speakerphone, and that's where I was when Barb's mother told me. I fell to my knees and I saw a wash of light, and then I saw a fleet of dazzling metal s.p.a.ceships, like bullets aimed at the sun, and I wanted to walk toward them and get inside one, and leave everything behind. And then the everyday world returned. I'd had that vision, the only vision I've ever had, but it told me nothing and offered no comfort. So, what good was that? And what was left in my life? At the funeral you shunned me, as did your mother. I can't say I blame you. My family in the Valley? They're junkyard dogs now, what's left of them.

And then last year you vanished, and all that remains are the twins - the spitting image of you, I might add. And there's Barb, grudgingly, and (I'm not stupid) only at the behest of Heather.

Heather is a fine woman, a woman you're so lucky to have had enter your life: a heart as big as the Hoover Dam, and a soul as clear as ice cubes.

I sound maudlin here. I don't want that. I'm not striving for effect, and I'm not drunk. But to spit things out in a list like this is humbling. Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.

Ruth.

There. And she's gone, too. She was the trumpet that returned me from the dead. I know you must have seen her photo that day when you came to fetch things at my apartment - you never missed a trick of mine. So you know what she looked like, large but not fat - you'd never describe her as plump - with hair the color of rich soil and - Cripes, listen to me discuss this woman like a 4-H Club sow.

By the time you saw her photo we'd been dating - what a silly word - for years. We met at an insurance seminar downtown, where she gave a short speech on insuring the elderly, and I liked her because she had a sense of humor in the face of that day's technical blathering. I also learned from her that I have a hint of a sense of humor myself. Yes, I can already see your face puckering with disbelief. So be it.

I lost Ruth for two reasons, the first of which was the seed of the second: I didn't want to take her to Kent's funeral; why, I don't know. I could plead crazed grief, but even still. She said I was ashamed because I was still married to your mother, and that I had a schoolboy's shame that people would stare at us and imagine the two of us making love out of wedlock. How pathetic.

And she was right. Ruth was always right. But she was a deep believer, too, and willing to endure my crotchety trespa.s.ses.

When you went missing, I fell apart, although I doubt you'll believe that. Two sons gone - how is a man supposed to feel? Ruth was a help at first, but then she learned I was still going to visit your mother twice a month, and she told me it was time I divorced your mother and married her. I ought to have hired a skywriting jet to say YES. But no. I said that marriage was until death - this from a man who went for a decade not communicating with his wife. Such a hypocrite.