Hey Nostradamus!

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.

An hour later:

For what it’s worth, I think God is how you deal with everything that’s out of your own control. It’s as good a definition as any. And I have to…

Wait: Joyce, beside me on the bench seat, having chewed her tennis ball into fragments, is obviously wondering why we should be parked so close to a beach yet not be throwing sticks into the ocean. Joyce never runs out of energy.

Joyce, honey, hang in there. Papa’s a social blank with a liver like the Hindenburg, and he’s embarrassed by how damaged he is and by how mediocre he turned out. And yes, your moist-eyed stare is a Ginsu knife slicing my heart in two like a beefsteak tomato – but I won’t stop writing for a little while just yet.

As you can see, I talk to dogs. All animals, really. They’re much more direct than people. I knew that even before the massacre. Most people think I’m a near mute. Cheryl did. I wish I were a dog. I wish I were any animal other than a human being, even a bug.

Joyce, by the way, was rejected by the Seeing Eye program because she’s too small. Should reincarnation exist, I’d very much like to come back as a Seeing Eye dog. No finer calling exists. Joyce joined my life nearly a year ago, at the age of four months. I met her via this crone of a Lab breeder on Bowen Island whose dream kitchen I helped install. The dream kitchen was bait to tempt her Filipina housekeeper from fleeing to the big city. Joyce was the last of the litter, the gravest, saddest pup I’d ever seen. She slept on my leather coat during the days and then spelunked into my armpits for warmth during breaks. That breeder was no dummy. After a few weeks she said, “Look, you two are in love. You do know that, don’t you?” I hadn’t thought of it that way, but once the words were spoken, it was obvious. She said, “I think you were meant for each other. Come in on the weekend and put the double-pane windows in the TV room, and she’s yours.” Of course I installed the windows.

It’s a bit later again, still here in the truck, looking again at the invitation to Kent’s memorial this evening.

A year ago today, I got a phone call from Barb, your mother, who had married my rock-solid brother, Kent, to much familial glee in 1995. I was driving home along the highway from a Hong Konger’s home renovation at the top of the British Properties, and it was maybe six-ish, and I was wondering what bar to go to, whom to call, when the cell phone rang. Remember, this was 1998, and cell phones were a dollar-a-minute back then – hard to operate, too.

“Jason, it’s Barb.”

“Barb! Que pasa?”

“Jason, are you driving?”

“I am. Quitting time.”

“Jason, pull over.”

“Huh?”

“You heard me.”

“Barb, could you maybe –”

“Jason, Jesus, just pull to the side of the road.”

“Sorry I exist, Eva Braun.” I pulled onto the shoulder near the Westview exit. Your mother, as you must well know by now, likes to control a situation.

“Have you pulled over?”

“Yes, Barb.”

“Are you in park?”

“Barb, is micromanaging men your single biggest turn-on in life?”

“I’ve got bad news.”

“What.”

“Kent’s dead.”

I remember watching three swallows play in the heat rising from the asphalt. I asked, “How?”

“The police said he was gone in a flash. No pain, no warning. No fear. But he’s gone.”

Let me follow another thread. On the day of the massacre, Cheryl arrived late to school. We’d had words on the phone the night before, and when I looked out my chem class window and saw her Chevette pull into the student lot, I walked out of the classroom without asking permission. I went to her locker and we had words, intense words over how we were going to tell the world about our marriage. A few people noticed us and later said we were having a huge blowout.

We agreed to meet in the cafeteria at noon. Once this was settled, the rest of the morning was inconsequential. After the shootings, dozens of students and staff testified that I had seemed (a) preoccupied; (b) distant; and (c) as if I had something “really big” on my mind.

When the noon bell rang, I was in biology class, numb to the course material – numb because I’d discovered sex, so concentrating on anything else was hard.

The cafeteria was about as far away from the biology classroom as it was possible to be – three floors up, and located diagonally across the building. I stopped at my locker, threw my textbooks in like so much Burger King trash and was set to bolt for the caf, when Matt Gursky, this walking hairdo from Youth Alive!, buttonholed me.

“Jason, we need to talk.”

“About what, Matt? I can’t talk now. I’m in a hurry.”

“Too much of a hurry to discuss the fate of your eternal soul?”

I looked at him. “You have sixty seconds. One, two, three, go…”

“I don’t know if I like being treated like a –”

“Fifty-three, fifty-two, fifty-one…”

“Okay then, what’s the deal with you and Cheryl?”

“The deal?”

“Yeah, the deal. The two of you. We know you’ve been having, or rather, you’ve been…”

“Been what?”

“You know. Making it.”

“We have?”

“Don’t deny it. We’ve been watching.”

I’m a big guy. I’m big now, and I was big then. I took my left hand and clenched it around Matt’s throat, my thumb on top of his voice box. I lifted him off the buffed linoleum and cracked the back of his head on a locker’s ventilation slits. “Look, you meddlesome, sanctimonious cockroach…” I bounced him onto the floor, my knees locking his arms as surely as cast-iron shackles. “If you dare even hint, even one more time, that you or any other sexless, self-hating member of your Stasi goon squad have any [slug to the face] right to impose your ideas on my life, I’ll come to your house in the dead of night, use a tire iron to smash your bedroom window and then obliterate your self-satisfied little pig face with it.”

I stood up. “I hope I’ve made myself clear.” I then walked away, toward the caf, climbing up flights of stairs, but I felt like I was walking on an airport’s rubber conveyor belt.

I was maybe halfway across the middle floor when I heard sounds like popping fireworks, no big deal, because Halloween was coming up shortly. And then I noticed two grade nine students running past me, and then, some seconds later, dozens of students stumbling over themselves. One girl I knew, Tracy, who took over my paper route from me back in 1981, yelled at me there were three guys up in the cafeteria shooting students. She fled, and I remembered the ship turning upside down in The Poseidon Adventure, and the looks on the actors’ faces as they clued into the fact that the ship was flipping: smashed champagne bottles, dying pianos, carved ice swans and people falling from the sky. The fire alarm went off.

Against the human stream, I rounded a stairwell – one with a mural of Maui or some other paradiselike place. The wall was pebble-finished and rubbed my right arm raw. At that point the alarm bell felt like crabs crawling on my head.

At the top of the stairs Mr. Kroger, an English teacher, stood with Miss Harmon, the principal’s assistant, both looking besieged; life doesn’t prepare you for high school massacres. When I tried to pass, Mr. Kroger said, “You’re not going up there.” Meanwhile, the gunshots were coming fast and furious around the corner and down the hall in the caf. Mr. Kroger said, “Jason, leave.” The sprinklers kicked in. It was raining.

“Cheryl’s in the cafeteria.”

“Go. Now.”

I grabbed his arm to move him away, but he toppled down the stairwell. Ob, Jesus – he went down like a box of junk falling from a top cupboard.

The shots from the caf continued. I ran toward the main foyer leading there. Bodies lay all around, like Halloween pumpkins smashed on the road on the morning of November first. I slowed down. Only one of the foyer’s front windows hadn’t been blasted out, and sprinkler water was picking up patches of light reflected from the trophy cases and the ceiling’s fluorescents. Lori Kemper ran past. She was in the drama club and her arm was purple and was somehow no longer connected properly. On the linoleum was Layla Warner, not so lucky, in a disjointed heap by a trophy case. Two other students, equally bloody, ran by, and then there was this guy – Derek Something – lying in a red swirl of blood and sprinkler water, using his arms to drag himself away from the cafeteria doors. He croaked, “Don’t go in there.”

“Jesus, Derek.” I grabbed him and hauled him back to the stairwell.

Inside the caf’s glass doors I saw three of the school’s younger loser gang wearing camouflage duck-hunting outfits. Two of them were arguing, pointing rifles at each other, while the third guy with a carbine looked on. Students were huddled under the banks of tables. If they were talking, I wasn’t hearing anything, maybe because of the fire alarm and the sirens and helicopters outside. Once I entered the main foyer, what I remember is the silence in spite of the noise. In my head it might just as well have been a snowy day in the country.

I thought to myself, Well, a rifle’s a rifle. You can’t go in there unarmed. I scanned the immediate environment to find something, anything, I could use to kill a human being. The answer was just outside one of the blown-out windows: smooth gray rocks from the Capilano River, inside tree planters as a means keeping cigarette butts out of the soil. I walked out the window hole and saw riflemen and ambulances and a woman with a megaphone. Up the hill were hundreds of students, watching the events from behind cars; I could see their legs poking from below. I grabbed a river rock the size of a cantaloupe – it weighed as much as a barbell – and walked into the cafeteria. One of the gunmen lay in a heap on the floor, dead.

I yelled to the guy standing over him, “Put that gun down.”

“What? You have got to be…”

He took a shot at me and missed. Then, in the best shot of my life, I estimated the distance between us, the mass of the rock, and the potential of my muscles. One, two, three, pitch, and the evil bastard was dead. Instantly dead, as I’d learn later. Justice.

And then I saw Cheryl. The carnage of the room was only now registering, the dead, the wounded, the red lakes by the vending machines. I climbed under a table and held Cheryl in my arms.

I whispered her name over and over, but her gaze only met mine once, before her head fell back, her eyes on the third gunman, who had been captured beneath a large, heavy tabletop. Students were now fighting each other for a place on top of the table, like people on the Berlin Wall in 1989, and then they all began to jump in unison, crushing the body like a Christmas walnut, one, two, THREE; one, two, THREE; and the distance between the tabletop and the floor shrank with each jump until finally, as I held Cheryl in my arms, the students – unbeknownst to the forces of the law outside – might just as well have been squishing mud between the floor and table.

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.

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