Hey Nostradamus! (19 page)

Rick said, “Now,
this
woman has the Vegas spirit. Come on, Barb. I'll show you my lucky table.”

Barb said, “I'll be up shortly. Go, Jason.”

This was one very screwed-up situation, but the thought of a quiet room was seductive, and I went upstairs. I showered for twenty minutes, and tried to figure out every
thing that had happened during the day, particularly how we might explain to people how it was that Rick Kozarek saw us in Caesars Palace the night Kent died.

I got out, shivered in the all-powerful air-conditioning and got into bed, awaiting Barb and wondering how Mom was going to take Kent's death. Would she just give up on life altogether?

An hour passed. I put cable news on as wallpaper and dozed off. When Barb came in the door and woke me up, her face was neutral.

“It's about time. It's two-thirty, Barb.”

“I'm having a shower.”

“You went to play blackjack? Are you out of your mind?”

She said nothing, but emerged from the shower and got into bed with me, and the truth is that from the tension and grief and stress and you-name-it, the sex was a repeat of my marriage to Cheryl. Around six o'clock Barb phoned the concierge for tickets on an 8:10 nonstop to Vancouver. We were silent most of the way home.

It was only in the truck, nearing the house, that I asked, “Barb, by the way, you never did say what made you decide to go play blackjack with Rick Kozarek. That was really random.”

“Blackjack? I didn't play blackjack. I killed him.”

I nearly put the truck in the ditch as I stopped. “You
what?
”

“There was no other option. He saw the two of us together. He'd have blabbed. So I went back to his motel room with him and cracked him on the back of his head with a forty-ouncer of discount vodka. Done.”

“You
murdered
him?”

“Don't be sanctimonious with me, rebel boy. You wanted to get married in Las Vegas, and you got it. And part of the deal of getting married in Las Vegas is that you might very well bump into the Rick Kozareks of this world. Now, are you going to drive me the final block home, or am I going to walk?”

I didn't know what to say, because I was thinking,
Oh, God, this is how my father felt back in 1988
.

So Barb got out of the truck and walked home. The heel of her left shoe was about to come off, and a mist of dandelion fluff had attached itself to her panty hose. I got out and walked alongside her. “Barb, what if you're caught?”

She stopped. “
Caught?
Jason, get real. One of the bonuses of staying in a twenty-nine-dollar-a-night motel room is the convenient lack of surveillance or security. And if I'm caught, I'm caught, but I won't be.”

We rounded the corner and there were all Kent's friends' cars, as well as my mother's. Barb and I looked like wrecks-we
were
wrecks-and my distress couldn't have been more visible.

As Barb predicted, she was never caught, and everyone fully bought her story about going crazy-which is, in its way, true. Kent's funeral was four days later, and that was that.

A month later, my mother phoned to say that Barb was pregnant with twins. And maybe another month later I bumped into Stacy Kozarek, Rick's sister, in the Lonsdale Public Market, where she was buying clams. She told me that Rick had been found murdered in his motel room, and the Las Vegas police thought it was somehow gang-related.

 

 

And there you go.

I'm looking out the pickup truck's window at Ambleside Beach and the ocean and the freighters-at the mothers tending to their children covered in sand and sugar and spit, at the blue sky and the mallard ducks and the Canada geese. And Joyce is smiling at me. Dogs indeed smile, and Joyce has every reason to smile. It's a beautiful world and she's part of it-and yet…

…and yet we humans are
not
a part of it.

Look at us. We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God-over and over life makes sure to inform us of this-and yet we're all
real
: we have
names
, we have
lives
. We mean something. We
must
. My heart is so cold. And I feel so lost. I shed my block of hate but what if nothing emerges to fill in the hole it left? The universe is so large, and the world is so glorious, but here I am on a sunny August morning with chilled black ink pumping through my veins, and I feel like the unholiest thing on earth.

This letter is now going into the safety deposit box. Happy birthday, my sons. You're men now, and this is the way the world works.

 

Part Three

2002: Heather

 

 

 

Saturday afternoon 4:00

I met Jason in a line-up at Toys R Us. He was in front of me buying a pile of toys, looking slightly sad, slightly damaged and slightly naughty. I had some toy plastic groceries for my sister's kid, who never really cares what I give her, and I just wanted to escape the store. But instead there's this sad guy in front of me-no wedding ring, straight looking, and no apparent tattoos-and so maybe I didn't want to leave too quickly after all.

The cashier was changing the paper tape-why does that always happen in my line? Standing on the counter was a plastic giraffe model someone had abandoned. Some wise-acre had strapped it into a little sheepskin coat with a fleece lining; it probably came from the box of one of Barbie's gay boyfriends.

I said, “I think our giraffe here is a bit sexually conflicted.”

Jason said, “It's that fleece-lined bomber jacket-always a dead giveaway.”

“Manly, and yet more like a prop than a garment.”

“I bet you anything our giraffe friend here is always buying Shetland sweaters for the younger giraffes, but he doesn't even understand why he does it.”

“The sweater-buying impulse baffles him more than it frightens him.”

Jason handed his toys to the cashier. “He's, like, a vice president of Nestlé operating out of Switzerland, but he's totally clueless, and he always misses the parts of the board meetings where they do all the evil stuff to third world countries. He sort of bumbles into the boardroom and everyone indulges him…”

“His name is Gerard.”

Jason said, “Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe.”

“What does the ‘T' stand for?”

“‘The.'”

We rang our toys through the till and kept right on talking. I don't even know who was steering whom, but we ended up in the Denny's next door, and we kept expanding Gerard's universe. Jason said Gerard had this real fixation about being manly. “He wears the sheepskin coat as much as he can. He worships George Peppard, and buys old black-and-white photos and scrapbooks about him on eBay.”

“And he decorated his apartment in rich tobacco browns and somber ochers in maybe 1975 and has never changed them.”

“Yes. Manly colors. Burly walnut furniture.”

“Hai Karate aftershave.”

“Yeah, yeah-he still uses words like ‘aftershave.'”

“And he invites his friends over for dinner parties, but
the food is from some other period in history. Cherries Jubilee.”

“Baked Alaska.”

“T-bone steaks.”

“Fondue.”

I asked, “What are his friends' names?”

“Chester. Roy. And Alphonse-Alphonse is the exotic one with a hint of ‘the dance' in his past. And Francesca, the beautiful but broke fifth daughter of a disgraced Rust Belt vacuum cleaner tycoon.”

“Possibly someone, Francesca even, is wearing a cravat.”

I thought Jason was the most talkative man I'd ever met, but I later found out he'd said more to me in those two hours than he'd spoken to all the people in his life in the past decade. He was obviously a born talker, but he needed a ventriloquist's dummy to speak through. Somehow that dorky giraffe on the counter had pressed his
ON
button, and we had just invented the first of a set of what I would call fusion entities-characters, that could only exist when the two of us were together.

I asked, “What kind of car would Gerard drive?”

“Car? That's simple. A 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, white leather interior and opera windows.”

“Perfect.”

In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where the two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. And our characters were the best banterers going.

When Jason left to go pick up his nephews that day
he took my number with him and called me, and that was that.

 

 

Barb just phoned. She's arrived in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, where she works with Chris-Cheryl's brother.
The
Cheryl. I'm no dum-dum on the score, but Jason and Cheryl was so long ago. We move on, or rather, Jason sure tries.

Barb's commuting down the coast, and she asked me to baby-sit the twins for a few days. Chris proposed to her last week, and she accepted; the world moves in mysterious ways-I mean, Cheryl Anway's
brother
and Jason Klaasen's
sister-in-law
.

Chris creates face-mapping software programs for governments and big business. Chris can take your face, pinpoint your nostrils, the ends of your lips, your retinas, and with a few more measurements generate your unique unchangeable face-map. You can't fake a face, even with cosmetic surgery. It all seems a bit spooky to me. I mean, this could be abused
so
easily, and I told Chris so when he was over at our place for dinner.

“Chris, what if you took the face of a famous actor, and entered their facial proportions into your database-would you find their…duplicate?”

“The term we use is ‘analog.'”

“Come again?”

“Your analog isn't your twin or your clone. He or she is the person out there who's maybe a millimeter away from having the same face as you.”

“You're joking.”

“Not at all. But the weird thing is, an analog doesn't even
have to be the same sex, let alone the same hair color or skin color. Put you and your analog into a room together and people are going to assume the two of you are twins. If you're a boy and she's a girl, people will simply assume it's your twin in drag.”

“This exists?”

“The government already has face-maps of all prison inmates and other people who float through the judicial system.”

Barb was particularly intrigued by this idea. Jason's father had made some very badly chosen comments about the twins at Kent's memorial a few years back, and since then she's been on a crusade to learn everything about twins she can. She began to discuss using face-maps to help twins who've been separated when very young, and where the law prevents them from accessing closed files. She became passionate, and there's nothing sexier than enthusiasm, and boy did Chris respond. First, he got her a job at his company's Vancouver affiliate, and now they're engaged.

There's a lesson there.

I'm sitting here inputting this in Barb's home office beside the kitchen, looking around at all the bits of things that make her house a home: flowers; a regularly culled cork notice board; obviously tended-to
IN
and
OUT
baskets; framed family photos (where does she get the energy to frame things-how does
anybody
get the energy to frame things?); clean rugs-it's a long list. I love Jason dearly, but neither of us is very gifted on the domestic front. We're not quite as bad as those people who plaster a Union Jack or a Confederate flag up on the windows as curtains, and Molly Maid comes in once a month to decontaminate the place
with industrial vacuums and cleaning agents perfected during the Vietman War. It's always hard for us afterward to make eye contact with the disgusted Russian and Honduran girls who do the place. Is it so wrong to be a slob?

 

 

Okay, I know I'm using both the present and past tenses for Jason and me. Is he alive or dead? I have no choice but to hope he's somewhere and breathing. He's been gone a few months now. Not a peep. He went down to buy smokes at Mac's Milk and never came home. He walked-no car involved-and, well, the thing about people vanishing is that they've
vanished
. They haven't left you a clue. They're
gone
. A clue? I'd kill for a clue. I'd sell my retinas for a clue. But “vanish” is indeed the correct verb here.

It's…

The phone. I have to answer it.

 

 

That was Reg, calling from his apartment over near Lonsdale. He just wanted to talk. Jason's disappearance has left him as bewildered as it's left me. And I must say, it truly is hard to imagine Reg as the ogre Jason's always made him out to be.

Okay, Heather, be honest. You
know
darn well why Reg changed: losing Jason was the clincher. He also got royally dumped, just after Jason disappeared-by Ruth, this woman he'd been seeing for years. And not only was he dumped, but she really laid into him when she did the dumping. The essence of her farewell speech (delivered in a Keg steak restaurant as a neutral space) was that Reg was the opposite of everything he thought he was: cruel instead of kind; blind instead of wise; not tough but with skin as thin as frost. I
didn't like Ruth much the few times we met; she had judgment written all over her face. In real life, it's always the judgmental people who get caught robbing the choir-boys' charity raffle fund.

I think I'm the sole mortal friend or contact Reg still has, which is odd, as I'm not at all churchy. He sure doesn't have friends at work; the day Ruth dumped him, he was rummaging in the plastic spoon drawer in the coffee room, and found a voodoo doll of himself covered with pins made from straightened paper clips; the head had been burned a few times.

“Heather.” The sound of his voice just now-his soul was sore.

“Reg. How're you doing?”

Pause. “Okay. But just okay.”

“I haven't heard anything from the RCMP today.”

“I doubt we will.”

“Don't be so glum. Don't. And you know what? Chris has mapped Jason's face from an old photo. So at least he's in that index now.”

“Heather, how many people are in that index, anyway?”

“I don't know. Maybe a few hundred thousand. But it's a start.”

“
Fah
. A few hundred thousand…”

“Reg, don't be so negative. It's a start. And the index is only ever going to grow.”

“He's gone.”

“No, he's not
gone
, Reg.”

“He is.”

I lost it here. I said, “Reg, you either have to have some hope here, or you stop calling, okay?”

Reg was silent, and then: “Sorry.”

“It's hard on all of us.”

“Heather?”

“Yes.”

“Let me ask you a question…”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“If you could be God for a day, would you rule the world any differently from the way it's being run now?”

“Reg, you know I'm weak on religion.”

“Well,
would
you?”

“Reg, have you eaten lunch? You need to eat.”

“You didn't answer my question. If you were God, would you rule the world any differently?”

Would I?
“No.”

“Why not?”

“Reg, the world is the way it is because-well, because
that's the way it is
.”