Hey Nostradamus! (8 page)

 

It's a few minutes later, and I'm sitting shirtless on a smooth driftwood log that escaped from a boom up the coast. The air smells of mussel shoals, and Joyce and Brodie are in the low tide, chasing the long-suffering seagulls. The dogs seem able to amuse themselves without human intervention, which allows me to be expansive for a moment…

Okay, here's something which kind of ties into all this: one of my first memories. It's of my father, Reg, making me kneel on the staticky living room rug. I'd just been watching fireworks on the TV-it was the American bicentennial summer, 1976, so I was five. I'd been changing channels and lingered a microsecond too long, a game show where a rhinestoned blond “temptress” was showcasing a fridge-freezer set about to be won or lost. Reg, detecting lust/sin/ temptation/evil, slapped the
OFF
button and then made me say a prayer for my future wife, “who may or may not yet be born.” I had no idea what she was supposed to look like, so I asked Reg, whose response was to scoop me up and wallop
the bejeezus out of me, after which he stormed out into his car and drove away, most likely to a men's religious discussion group he enjoyed bullying once a week. My mother peeked out the front window, turned around to me and said, “You know, dear, in the future, just think of an
angel
.”

From then on, I could never look at a girl without wondering if
she
had been the target of my prayer, and the bellies of pregnant women counted, too. When I first saw Cheryl, in ninth grade, it was obvious that she was the antenna who'd been receiving my prayers. You just know these things. And when she became religious, that was my confirmation.

Sitting here on my log, I can feel women looking at me with the soul-seeking radar I once employed looking for my future wife. It's younger soccer-mom types mostly, married, here on the beach on a workday, frazzled from handling over-sugared toddlers cranky from too much sun. There are some teenage girls, too, but being on the far side of my twenties, I'm pretty much invisible to them. A blessing and a curse.

When I say I can
feel
women looking at me, I mean it in the sense of feeling hungry-you know you're hungry, but when you try to explain it, you can't. And it's as if I feel the thought rays of these women passing through me. But that sounds wrong. Maybe it's just lust. Maybe that's all it is.

The concession stand is down the beach, not far from where I'm sitting: Popsicles, fish & chips and onion burgers. Cheryl worked there in her last summer. She really loved it because there were no
Alive!
people there. I can see her point.

 

 

If you'd met me before the massacre, you'd think you'd just met a walking storage room full of my father's wingding theories and beliefs. That's assuming I even spoke to you, which I probably wouldn't have done, because I don't speak much. Until they put a chip in my brain to force me to speak, I plan to remain quiet.

If you'd met me just before the massacre, you'd have assumed I was statistically average, which I was. The only thing that made me different from most other people my age is that I was married. That's it.

I suppose that, given my father and my older brother, it was inevitable that I be plunked into
Youth Alive!
Individually its members could be okay, but with a group agenda, they could be goons. They, more than anything, are the reason I remained mute.

Dad was thrilled Kent was the local
Alive!
grand pooh-bah, and at dinner he liked nothing more than hearing Kent reel out statistics about conversions, witnessings and money-raisers. If they ever argued, it was over trivialities: Should a swimming pool used in rituals be the temperature of blood, or should it be as cold as possible, to add a dimension of discomfort? The answer: cold. Why miss an opportunity for joylessness?

Cheryl stayed for supper a few times at our house, and the meals were surprisingly uneventful. I kept on waiting for Dad to pull back a curtain to reveal a witch-dunking device, but he and Cheryl got on well, I suspect because she was a good listener and knew better than to interrupt my father. I wonder if Dad saw in Cheryl the kind of girl he thinks he ought to have married-someone who'd already been converted rather than someone he'd have to mold, and then psychologically torture, like my mother.

After our marriage, we all had dinner together just once, before Kent went back to school in Alberta. Kent and the Peeping Toms from
Alive!
were beginning to spy on us by then, and I've never really been sure whether Kent told Dad about Cheryl and me. If he had, it wouldn't have been with malice. It would have been Item Number 14 on the agenda, sandwiched between the need for more stacking chairs and the recitation of a letter from a starving waif in Dar es Salaam who received five bucks a month from the Klaasen family.

In any event, my father treated Cheryl and me more like children than adults, which felt patronizing to me. If he knew we were married, he'd treat us like man and woman instead of girl and boy. Because of that dinner, I knew I soon had soon to devise a way of announcing our marriage. I wanted a proper dinner in a restaurant, and Cheryl just wanted to phone a few people and leave it at that.

 

 

Joyce is a liquid snoring heap by my apartment's front window. It's not so much an apartment-it's more like a nest-but Joyce doesn't mind. I suppose, from a dog's perspective, a dirty apartment is far more interesting than one that's been heavily Windexed and vacuumed. Do I keep the place dirty to scare people away? No, I keep it dirty because Reg was a neat freak-cleanliness…godliness…pathetically predictable, I know. The only person I'd ever allow in here would be Reg, if only to torment him with my uncleanness. But then nothing on earth would make me invite Reg into any home of mine.

My answering machine tells me I have seven new calls-no loser, me!-but I know they're mostly going to be about
Kent's memorial service this evening.
Will I be there? Will I show up?
Yeah, sure, okay. I may be a disaster, but I'm not a write-off. Yet.

Of course, I'll be needing something clean to wear, and it's too late to haul my shirt pile to the dry cleaners, so I'll have to iron a dirty shirt, which is dumb, because it permanently bakes the crud into the fabric. I now have to go find the shirt, excavate the iron from under one of dozens of piles of crap, put water into it, and clear a spot on the floor to put the board up and-it's easier to write.

More about the massacre…

There was some lag time between when the third gunman, Duncan Boyle, was downed and when kids started leaving the caf. Even the kids closest to the door took a while to make the connection between gunlessness and freedom. If anything, students gravitated toward their killers' corpses, I think to make a visual confirmation of death. The alarms were still blaring, and the sprinklers were still raining on us, and there were just so
many
kids dripping with both blood and water.

I was glued to Cheryl. My arms actually made suction noises when I moved them. I was covered in her blood. All of her friends had gone. Freaks. When the mass exodus began from the caf, the authorities swooped in, in every conceivable form-police snipers, guys in balaclavas, firemen, ambulance workers-all too late. They were taking photos, putting up colored tape, and everyone was screaming to turn off the alarms and the sprinklers, as they were not merely annoying, but were contaminating the crime scene. For all I know, those sirens and sprinklers may still be on, as I've not returned to the building since that day.

“Son, stand up.” It was an RCMP guy with the big RCMP moustache they're all issued once they earn their badge. Another cop looked at me and said, “That's the guy.”

So apparently I had now become “the guy.”

I should describe at this point what it's like to hold a dying person in your arms. The first thing is how quickly they cool off, like dinner on a plate. Second, you keep waiting for their face to come back to life, their eyes to open. Even with Cheryl cooling in my arms, I didn't really believe she was dead. So when an authority figure of proven uselessness told me to let go of the body of my wife, whose face I knew would reanimate momentarily, my reaction was to stick with my wife. “Go to hell.”

“No, really, son, stand up.”

“You heard me.”

The other cop asked, “Is he giving you trouble, John?”

“Lay off, Pete. Can't you see he's…?”

“What I can see is that he's tampering with a crime scene. You-get up. Now.”

Pete
wasn't worth responding to. I held Cheryl close.
The world is an ugly ugly ugly place
.

“Son, come on.”

“Sir, I said
no
.”

“Pete, I don't know what to do. She's dead. Let him hold her.”

“No. And if he keeps it up, you know what to do.”

“Actually, I don't.”

I tuned them out. From my vantage point, soggy reddened lunch bags and backpacks lay everywhere; the wounded were being removed with the same speed and efficiency that coliseum staff remove chairs after a concert.

Underneath Cheryl I saw her notebook, festooned with its ballpoint scribbles:
GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE; GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE
. I didn't give it any thought past that. A man's arm reached down and tried to tug my arms away from her, but I flinched and held on. Then a dozen arms reached in.
Pow,
I became a one-man super-nova, firing my legs in all directions, refusing to let go of Cheryl, but they managed to pull us apart, and that was the last time I touched her. Within forty-eight hours she was embalmed, and for reasons that will follow, I wasn't permitted to attend her funeral.

Once they'd pulled me away from Cheryl, they shoved me into the foyer and then promptly forgot me. And so I walked through the same shot-out empty window frame as before and onto the front plaza, where it was sunny and bright. I remembered this thing Cheryl once said, how God sees no difference between night and day, how God only sees the sun at the center and the greater plan, and that night and day were merely human distinctions. I figured I now understood her point, except that for me, I didn't see any greater plan.

 

 

I won my apartment in a poker game, from Dennis, a concrete pourer who'll spend the rest of his life losing his apartments in poker games. He's that kind of guy. The place is nicer than something I would have found on my own; I even have a balcony the size of a card table, which I've managed to ruin with failed houseplants and empty bottles that will someday enter the downstairs recycling bins. It looks out on the rear of small shops on Marine Drive, and beyond that to English Bay-the Pacific-and the rest of the city across the bay.

I checked my messages. The first was from Les, reminding me to bring the nail gun for tomorrow's job, which is framing in a towel cabinet for a real estate tycoon's fantasy bathroom. The second message was from Chris, Cheryl's brother, saying that he can't risk leaving the U.S. for tonight's memorial because if they catch him either coming or going across the border, that's the end of his visa, which he needs to design spreadsheets, whatever they are, down in Redwood City, wherever that is. The third was from my mother, saying she didn't think she could handle the memorial. The fourth was her again, saying that she thought she could. The fifth call was a hang-up with five seconds of bar noise. The sixth was Nigel, a contractor buddy from a recent project who doesn't yet know I'm a living monkey's paw, asking me if I want to shoot some pool tonight. Soon enough Nigel will learn about my “story,” and then he'll go buy a cheapo massacre exploitation paperback in some secondhand bookstore. His behavior around me will change: he'll walk on eggshells, and then he'll want to discuss life after death, crop circles, gun laws, Nostradamus or stuff along those lines, and then I'll have to drop him as a friend because he'll know way more about me than anyone ought to know, and the imbalance is, as I age, more of a pain than anything else. I don't want or need it.