Hey Nostradamus! (6 page)

 

Being married was wild. It was worth all the delays and pleas and postponement of pleasure, and you know, this isn't some guidance-class hygiene film speaking to you-it's me. I was
me
. We were
us
. It was all real, and wild, and it is my most cherished memory of having been alive-a night of abandon on the sixteenth floor of Caesars Palace.

I doubt we said even three words to each other all night; Jason's dewy antler-soft skin made words feel stupid. By six in the morning we were in a cab headed back to the airport. On the flight north, we didn't speak much, either. And I
felt
married. I loved the sensation, and it's why I remained silent
-trying to pinpoint the exact nature of this new buzz: sex, certainly, but more than that, too.

Of course, the Out to Lunch Bunch and all of the
Alive!
crew could tell right away that something was up. We simply didn't care as much for the group as before, and it showed. The corny little lunchtime confessions over french fries were so dull as to be unlistenable; Pastor Fields's team sports metaphors and chastity pleas seemed equally juvenile to Jason. We knew what we had, and we knew what we wanted, and we knew that we wanted
more
. Then there was the issue of how we were going to go about telling our families. Jason imagined a formal dinner at a good restaurant during which to break the news-between the main course and the dessert-but I said I didn't want our marriage to be treated like a chorus girl jumping out of a cake. I'm not clear if Jason's desire for a formal dinner was his concept of maturity, or if he wanted to shock a crowd like an evil criminal mastermind. He did have his exhibitionist streak: I mean, in Las Vegas he'd refused to close the curtains and he was always trying to sneak me into the change room at the Bootlegger jeans store. No go.

So yes, we'd had a fight on the phone about this matter the night before my pregnancy test. Jason was angry with me for dragging my heels about announcing the marriage, and I was angry with him for wanting to be a-I don't know-a
show-off
.

And that's as far as I got in my life, my baby as well. I don't think I've concealed anything here, and there's not much left to explain. God owns everything. I was not replaceable, but nor was I indispensable. It was my time.

 

Dear God,

I am so full of hate that I'm scaring myself. Is there a word to describe wanting to kill people who are already dead? Because that's what's in my heart. I remember last year being in the backyard with my father. We lifted up this sheet of plywood that had been lying on the grass all winter. Underneath were thousands of worms, millipedes, beetles and a snake, all either eating or being eaten, and that is my heart, and the hate and the insects grow and grow blacker by the hour. I want to kill the killers, and I just can't believe that this would be a sin.

 

Lord,

My son described the blood and water pooling on the cafeteria floor, coating it like Varathane. He told me about the track marks left in blood by running shoes, by bare feet and by bodies either dragging themselves or being dragged away by friends. There's something else he's not telling me-a father knows that-but what could be more horrible than-Oh God, this is not a prayer.

 

I can't help but wonder if the other girls thought I used God as an excuse to hook up with Jason, or that I confused one with the other. Maybe I wasn't truly in love with Jason; maybe it was just an infatuation, or maybe it was only some sort of animal need like any teenager feels.

Listen to me, practical Cheryl, covering my bases, even after death. But I know that when I was alive I did face these
questions: I loved Jason, but what I felt for God was different altogether. I kept them separate.

 

 

As Mitchell was aiming at me, there were sirens outside, helicopters, alarm bells throughout the school and water splashing down from the shattered pipe. As well, Duncan was egging Mitchell on to kill Jeremy, too, and my hopes had flip-flopped-now I thought I might survive. Then Jeremy said, “Go ahead, Mitchell, shoot me-like I care.”

Mitchell seemed to be short-circuiting. He hadn't anticipated this scenario. He turned a bit to his left, looked down at me and the Bunch, then took his rifle and shot me on my left side. He really wasn't a good shot, because he was five paces away, and I should have been dead instantly. And quite honestly, it didn't hurt, the shooting, and I didn't die immediately, either. Lauren, bless her, lunged away from me, leaving me there on the floor on top of my binder, which the water had sloshed off the tabletop. At my new angle, I could see much better what was transpiring. Mitchell said, “Well, Jeremy, you stud, that's one less girl for you to impress,” and Jeremy said, “Dear God, I repent for my sins. Forgive me for all I have done.”

In unison, Mitchell and Duncan shrieked, “What?” and turned to Jeremy, blasted him enough to kill him a dozen times over. Then I heard Jason's voice from the cafeteria doors-something along the lines of “
Put those guns down now
.”

Mitchell said, “You have
got
to be kidding.”

“I'm not kidding.”

Mitchell shot at Jason and missed, and then I saw something that looked like a lump of gray art-class clay fly
through the air and crack Mitchell on the side of his head, so fiercely that I could see his skull implode.

At this point, the boys in the camera club lifted up their table and used it as a shield as they charged against the sole surviving gunman, Duncan Boyle. It was covered with paper bags and some cookies that had been glued in place by blood. They charged into Duncan, pressing him against a blank spot of cinder-block wall. I saw the rifle fall to the ground, and then I saw the boys from the camera club laying the table flat on the ground on top of Duncan and begin jumping up and down on it like a grape press. They were making hooting noises, and people from the other tables came and joined in and the table became a killing game as all of these children, boys and girls, who fifteen minutes earlier had been peacefully eating peanut butter sandwiches and oranges, became savages, killing without pause. Duncan's blood dribbled out from under the table.

Lauren called out, and Jason came over and lifted the table off me like a hurricane lifting off a roof. I know he said something to me, but my hearing was gone. He tried holding me up, but my neck was limp, and all I could see was across the room, children crushing other children. And that was that.

 

 

To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition. And I believe I accepted God, and I fully accepted this sorrow, even though until the events in the cafeteria, there hadn't been too much of it in my life. I may have looked like just another stupid teenage girl, but it was all in there-God, and sorrow and its acceptance.

And now I'm neither dead nor alive, neither awake nor
asleep, and soon I'm headed off to the Next Place, but my Jason will continue amid the living.

Oh, Jason. In his heart, he knows I'll at least be trying to watch him from beyond, whatever beyond may be. And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.

 

Part Two

1999: Jason

 

Y
ou
won't see me in any of the photographs after the massacre-you know the ones I mean: the wire service shots of the funerals, students felt-penning teenage poetry on Cheryl's casket; teenage prayer groups in sweats and scrunchies huddled on the school's slippery gym floor; 6:30
A.M.
prayer breakfasts in the highway off-ramp chain restaurants, with all the men wearing ties while dreaming of hash browns. I'm in none of them, and if you
had
seen me, I sure wouldn't have been praying.

I want to say that right from the start.

Just one hour ago, I was a good little citizen in a Toronto-Dominion bank branch over in North Van, standing in line, and none of this was even on my mind. I was there to deposit a check from my potbellied contractor boss, Les, and I was wondering if I should blow off the afternoon's work. My hand reached down into my pocket, and instead of a check, my sunburnt fingers removed the invitation to my brother's memorial service. I felt as if I'd just opened all the windows of a hot muggy car.

I folded it away and wrote down today's date on the
deposit slip. I checked the wall calendar-August 19, 1999-and
What the heck,
I wrote a whole row of zeroes before the year, so that the date read: August 19, 00000001999. Even if you hated math, which I certainly do, you'd know that this is still mathematically the same thing as 1999.

When I gave the slip and the check to the teller, Dean, his eyes widened, and he looked up at me as if I'd handed him a holdup note. “Sir,” he said, “this isn't a proper date.”

I said, “Yes, it is. What makes you think it isn't?”

“The extra zeroes.”

Dean was wearing a deep blue shirt, which annoyed me. “What is your point?” I asked.

“Sir, the year is nineteen ninety-nine,
not
zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one nine nine nine.”

“It's the same thing.”

“No, it's not.”

“I'd like to speak with the branch manager.”

Dean called over Casey, a woman who was maybe about my age, and who had the pursed hardness of someone who spends her days delivering bad news to people and knows she'll be doing it until her hips shatter. Casey and Dean had a hushed talk, and then she spoke to me. “Mr. Klaasen, may I ask you why you've written this on your slip?”

I stood my ground: “Putting more zeroes in front of ‘1999' doesn't make the year any different.”

“Technically, no.”

“Look, I hated math as much as you probably did-”

“I didn't hate math, Mr. Klaasen.”

Casey was on the spot, but then so was I. It's not as if I'd walked into the bank planning all those extra zeroes. They just happened, and now I had to defend them. “Okay. But
maybe what the zeroes
do
point out is that in a billion years-and there
will
be a billion years-we'll all be dust. Not even dust: we'll be
molecules
.”

Silence.

I said, “Just think, there are still a few billion years of time out there, just waiting to happen. Billions of years, and we're not going to be here to see them.”

Silence.

Casey said, “Mr. Klaasen, if this is some sort of joke, I can try to understand its abstract humor, but I don't think this slip meets the requirements of a legal banking document.”

Silence.

I said, “But doesn't it make you think? Or
want
to think?”

“About what?”

“About what happens to us after we die.”

This was my real mistake. Dean telegraphed Casey a savvy little glance, and in a flash I knew that they knew about me, about Cheryl, about 1988 and about my reputation as a borderline nutcase-
He never really got over it, you know
. I'm used to this. I was furious but kept my cool. I said, “I think I'd like to close my account-convert to cash, if I could.”

The request was treated with the casualness I might have received if I'd asked them to change a twenty. “Of course. Dean, could you help Mr. Klaasen close out his account?”

I asked, “That's it? ‘Dean, could you help Mr. Klaasen close out his account?' No debate? No questions?”

Casey looked at me. “Mr. Klaasen, I have two daughters and I can barely think past next month's mortgage, let alone the year two billion one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. My hunch is that you'd be happier elsewhere. I'm not trying
to get rid of you, but I think you know where I'm coming from.”

She wasn't wearing a wedding band. “Can I take you out to lunch?” I asked.

“
What?
”

“Dinner, then.”

“No!” The snaking line was eavesdropping big time. “Dean, there should be no complications in closing Mr. Klaasen's account.” She looked at me. “Mr. Klaasen, I have to go.”

My anger became gray emotional fuzz, and I just wanted to leave. Inside of five minutes, Dean had severed my connection to his bank, and I stood on the curb smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, my shirt untucked and $5,210.00 stuffed into the pockets of my green dungarees. I decided to leave the serene, heavily bylawed streets of North Vancouver and drive to West Vancouver, down near the ocean. At the Seventeenth and Bellevue CIBC I opened a checking account, and when I looked behind the tellers I saw an open vault. I asked if it was possible to rent a safety deposit box, which took all of three minutes to do. That box is where I'm going to place all of this, once it's finished. And here's the deal: if I get walloped by a bus next year, this letter is going to be placed in storage until May 30, 2019, when you, my two nephews, turn twenty-one. If I hang around long enough, I might hand it to you in person. But for now, that's where this letter is headed.

Just so you know, I've been writing all of this in the cab of my truck, parked on Bellevue, down by Ambleside Beach, near the pier with all its bratty kids on rollerblades and the Vietnamese guys with their crab traps pursuing
E. coli
. I'm
using a pen embossed with “Travelodge” and I'm writing on the back of Les's pink invoice forms. The wind is heating up-God, it feels nice on my face-and I feel, in the most SUV-commercial sense of the word,
free
.

 

 

How to start?

First off, Cheryl and I were married. No one knows that but me, and now you. It was insane, really. I was seventeen and starved for sex, but I was still stuck in my family's religious warp, so only husband/wife sex was allowed, and even then for procreation only, and even
then
only while both partners wore heavy wool tweeds so as to drain the act of pleasure. So when I suggested to Cheryl that we fly to Las Vegas and get hitched, she floored me when she said yes. It was an impulsive request I made after our math class saw an educational 16mm film about gambling. The movie was supposed to make high school students more enthusiastic about statistics. I mean, what were these filmmakers thinking?

And what was
I
thinking? Marriage? Las
Vegas
?

We flew down there one weekend and-I mean, we weren't even people then, we were so young and out of it. We were like baby chicks. No. We were like zygotes, little zygotes cabbing from the airport to Caesars Palace, and all I could think about was how hot and dry the air was. In any event, it seems like a billion years ago.

Around sunset, we got married, using our fake IDs. Our witness was a slob of a cabbie who drove us down the Strip. For the next six weeks my grades evaporated, sports became a nuisance, and my friends became ghosts. The only thing that counted was Cheryl, and because we kept the marriage
secret, it was way better and more
forbidden
feeling than if we'd waited and done all the sensible stuff.

There were some problems when we got home. This churchy group Cheryl and I were in,
Youth Alive!,
crabby morality spooks who spied on us for weeks, likely with the blessing of my older brother, Kent. When I was in twelfth grade, Kent was in second year at the University of Alberta, but he was still a honcho, and I can only imagine the phone conversations he must have been having with the local
Alive!
creeps:

Were the lights on or off?

Which lights?

Did they order in pizza?

What time did they leave?

Separately or together?

As if we hadn't noticed we were being spied on. Yet in fairness, the
Alive!
ers were baby chicks, too. We all were. Seventeen is nothing. You're still in the womb.

 

 

There are a number of things a woman can tell about a man who is roughly twenty-nine years old, sitting in the cab of a pickup truck at 3:37 in the afternoon on a weekday, facing the Pacific, writing furiously on the back of pink invoice slips. Such a man may or may not be employed, but regardless, there is
mystery
there. If this man is with a dog, then that's good, because it means he's capable of forming relationships. But if the dog is a male dog, that's probably a bad sign, because it means the guy is likely a dog, too. A girl dog is much better, but if the guy is over thirty, any kind of dog is a bad sign regardless, because it means he's stopped trusting humans altogether. In general,
if nothing else, guys my age with dogs are going to be
work
.

Then there's stubble: stubble indicates a possible drinker,
but
if he's driving a van or a pickup truck, he hasn't hit bottom yet, so watch out, honey. A guy writing something on a clipboard while facing the ocean at 3:37
P.M.
may be writing poetry, or he may be writing a letter begging someone for forgiveness. But if he's writing real words, not just a job estimate or something business-y, then more likely than not this guy has something emotional going on, which could mean he has a soul.

Maybe you're generous and maybe you assume that everybody has a soul. I'm not so sure. I know that I have one, even though I'd like to reject my father's every tenet, and say I don't. But I do. It feels like a small glowing ember buried deep inside my guts.

I also believe people can be born without souls; my father believes this, too, possibly the sole issue we agree upon. I've never found a technical term for such a person-“monster” doesn't quite nail it-but I believe it to be true.

That aside, I think you can safely say that a guy in West Vancouver facing the ocean writing stuff on a clipboard in the midafternoon has troubles. If I've learned anything in twenty-nine years, it's that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift-bad choice of words-is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is
that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

Whuppp
…Joyce, my faithful white Lab, just bolted upright. What's up, girl, huh?
Up
is a Border collie with an orange tennis ball in his mouth: Brodie, Joyce's best friend. Time for an interruption-she's giving me that look.