Hey Nostradamus! (9 page)

Call seven is my mother again, asking me to phone her. I do. “Mom.”

“Jason.”

“You feeling weird about tonight?”

“Someone has to take care of the twins. I thought maybe I could take the twins off Barb's hands for the evening.”

“Kent's friends have probably sorted that out weeks ago. You know what they're like.”

“I guess so.”

“How about I drive you.”

“Could you?”

“Sure.”

 

 

Okay.

After leaving the cafeteria, I walked out onto the sunlit concrete plaza, where I turned around and saw myself reflected in the one remaining unshot window, and I was all one color, purple. Gurneys with their oxygen masks and plasma trees covered the front plaza like blankets on a beach. I saw bandages being applied so quickly they had bits of autumn leaves trapped inside the weave. I remember a sheet being pulled over the face of this girl, Kelly, who was my French class vocabulary partner. She didn't look shot at all, but she was dead.

There were seagulls flying above-rare for that altitude, and-

Well, I've seen all the photos a million times like everyone else, but they just don't capture the way it felt to be there-the sunlight and the redness of the blood: that's always cropped out of magazines, and this bugs me because when you crop the photo, you tell a lie.

I was thinking,
Okay. I guess I should just go home and wash up and get on with things
. Up the hill, hundreds of students were being held back by police barricades. When I looked to my left, a medic plunged a syringe like a railway spike into the chest of a friend of mine, Demi Harshawe. A few steps away, an attendant running with a plasma
tree tripped over a varsity coat soaked in coagulating blood.

In my pocket I felt my car keys, and I thought,
If I can just find my car, I'll be able to leave here, and everything will be just fine
. When I walked down to the auxilary lot where I'd parked that day, nobody stopped me. I'd later learn that I'd accidentally fallen through every crack in the security system, which was for a time interpreted as having
sneaked
through every crack in the system. Regardless, nobody called my name, and, by the way, those grief counselors they always talk about on TV? Oh, come
on
.

I was headed for my car, but then I saw Cheryl's white Chevette-it looked so warm in the sunlight, and I just wanted to be near it and feel warmth from it, so I went and lay down on the hood. The sun was indeed warm, in that feeble October way, and I curled up on the car's hood, leaving red rusty finger-painting swishes, then fell into whatever it is that isn't sleep but isn't wakefulness, either.

A hand shook me, and when I opened my eyes, the sun was a bit further to the west. It was two RCMP officers, one with a German shepherd, and the other with a rifle speaking into a headset: “He's alive. Not injured, we don't think. Yeah, we'll hold him.”

I blinked and looked at the men. I was no longer “the guy” I was now merely “him.” I tried lifting my right arm, but the blood had bonded it to the hood. It made a ripping-tape sound as I pulled it away. My clothes felt made of plasticine. I asked, “What time is it?”

The officers stared at me as if their dog had just spoken to them. “Just after two o'clock,” one of them said.

I didn't know what to say or ask.
What was the grand
total?
I blanked, and two very nice-seeming women ran down to the lot toward us carrying large red plastic medical boxes.

“Are you shot?”

“No.”

“Cut?”

“No.”

“Have you been drinking alcohol or using drugs?”

“No.”

“Are you on any medications?”

“No.”

“Allergies?”

“Novocaine.”

“Is the blood on your body from a single source?”

“Uh-yes.”

“Do you know the name of the person?”

“Cheryl Anway.”

“Did you know Cheryl Anway?”

“Uh-yes. Of
course
I did. Why do you need to know that?”

“If we know the relationship then we can more precisely evaluate you for stress or shock.”

“That makes sense.” I felt more logical than I had any right to be.

“Then did you know Cheryl Anway?”

“She's my…girlfriend.”

My use of the present tense flipped a switch. The women looked at the RCMP officers, who said, “He was sleeping on the hood.”

“I wasn't asleep.”

They looked at me.

“I don't know
what
I was doing, but it wasn't sleep.”

One of the women asked, “Is this Cheryl's car?”

“Yeah.” I stood up. The fire alarms were still clanging, and the concertlike sensation of thousands of people nearby was distinct.

The other female medic said, “We can give you something to calm you down.”

“Yes. Please.”

Alcohol chilled a patch of skin on my left shoulder and I felt the needle go in.

 

 

Like anyone, I've seen those movies about army barracks life where evil drill sergeants, with cobra venom for spinal fluid, sentence privates to six years of latrine duty for an improperly folded bedsheet corner. But unlike most people, I have to leave the theater or switch the channel because it reminds me of my life as a child.

You're nothing, you hear me? Nothing. You're not even visible to God. You're not even visible to the devil. You are zero.

Here's another thought from the mind and mouth of Reg:
You are a wretch. You are a monster and you are weak and you will be passed over in the great accounting
. As can be clearly seen, my father's primary tactic was to nullify my existence. Maybe today's banking adventure with zeroes stems from that.

Kent, however, was never
nothing
. At the very least, he was always expected to join my father's insurance firm after college-which he did-get married to a suitable girl-which he did-and lead a proud and righteous life-which he did, until exactly one year ago, when a teenager in a Toyota
Celica turned him into a human casserole up by the Exit 5 off-ramp near Caulfeild.

I miss Kent, but God, I wish he and I had been genuinely close as opposed to Don't-they-look-nice-together-in-the-airbrushed-family-portrait close. He was always so bloody organized, and his efforts at all activities always made my own efforts pale. Kent was also righteous; he was sent home from school in sixth grade for speaking up against Easter egg hunts (pagan; trivializes God; symbols of fertility that secretly promote lust). Granted, lust is purely theoretical in grade six, but he knew how to spin things the
Alive!
way. He was a born politician.

Dad left scorch marks behind him as he jetted off to the school's offices that pre-Easter afternoon, of course to take Kent's side. Through bullying and threat of litigation (he was an imposing, hawklike man), he was able to get Easter egg making banned in Kent's classroom. The school caved simply because they wanted a demented nutcase out of their way. That night at dinner, there was extra praying, and Kent and Dad discussed Easter egg paganism in detail, way too far over my head. As for my mother, she might as well have been watching the blue-white snows of Channel 1.

Here's another thought, this one about Reg: when I was maybe twelve, I got caught plundering the neighbors' raspberry patch. Talk about sin. For the weeks that followed, my father pointedly pretended I didn't exist. He'd bump into me in the hallway and say nothing, as if I were a chair. Kent the politician always stayed utterly neutral during this sort of conflict.

The bonus of being invisible was that if I didn't exist, I also couldn't be punished. This played itself out mostly at the
dinner table. My mother (on her sixth glass of Riesling from the spigot of a two-liter plastic-lined cardboard box) would ask how my woodwork assignment was going. I'd reply something like, “Reasonably well, but you know what?”

“What?”

“There's this rumor going around the school right now.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Word has it that God smokes cigarettes.”

“Jason, please don't…”

“Also, and this is so weird, God drinks
and
he uses drugs. I mean, he invented the things. But the funny thing is, he's exactly the same drunk as sober.”

Mom recognized the pattern. “Jason, let it rest.” Kent sat there waiting for the crunch.

Taunting my father was possibly the one time where I became vocal. Here's another example: “It turns out God hates every piece of music written after the year 1901.” The thing that really got to Dad was when I dragged God into the modern world.

“I hear God approves of various brands of cola competing in the marketplace for sales dominance.”

Silence.

“I hear that God has a really bad haircut.”

Silence.

During flu season and the week of my annual flu shot: “I hear that God allows purposefully killed germs to circulate in his blood system to fend off living germs.”

Silence.

“I hear that if God were to drive a car, he'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof…with leather upholstery and an opera window.”

“Would the thief please pass the margarine?”

I existed again.

 

 

It's midnight and Kent's memorial is over. Did I make it there? Yes. And I managed to pull my act together, and wore a halfway respectable suit, which I cologned into submission. But first I packed Joyce in the truck, and we drove to fetch Mom from her little condo at the foot of Lonsdale-a mock-Tudor space module built a few years ago, equipped with a soaker tub, optical fiber connections to the outer world and a fake wishing well in the courtyard area. Everyone else in the complex has kids; once they learned that Mom is indifferent to kids and baby-sitting-and that maybe she drinks too much-they shunned her. When I got there she was watching
Entertainment Tonight
while a single-portion can of Campbell's low-sodium soup caramelized on the left rear element. I sent it hissing into the sink.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Jason.”

I sat down, while Mom gave Joyce a nice rub. She said, “I don't think I can make it tonight, dear.”

“That's okay. I'll let you know how it goes.”

“It's a beautiful evening. Warm.”

“It is.”

She looked out the sliding doors. “I might go sit on the patio. Catch the last bit of sun.”

“I'll come join you.”

“No. You go.”

“Joyce can stay with you tonight.”

Mom and Joyce perked up at this. Joyce loves doing Mom duty: being a Seeing Eye dog is in her DNA, and in the end,
I'm not that much of a challenge for her. Mom fully engages Joyce's need to be needed, and I let them be.

It was a warm night, August, the only guaranteed-good-weather month in Vancouver. Even after the sun set, its light would linger well into the evening. The trees and shrubs along the roadside seemed hot and fuzzy, as if microwaved, and the roads were as clean as any in a video game. On the highway, the airborne pollen made the air look saliva syrupy, yet it felt like warm sand blowing on my arm. It struck me that this was exactly the way the weather was the night Kent was killed.