Hey Nostradamus! Part 6

Barb said, "I'll pour Drano on your grave, you sick b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

Reg took the hint. Some of the wives (not a girlfriend in the bunch) accompanied my father to his car.

I sat with your mother while the Alive! crew scoured the house of memorial residue. I said, "Barb, you never believed me about Reg, about how evil he is. Now you know."

"It's one thing to hear about it, Jason. And another to see it in operation."

"Barb, the thing about Dad is that he'll always betray you in the end. Even if you think you've gotten close to him, earned your way into his bosom the way Kent did, in the end he'll always sell you out to his religion. He's actually a pagan that way - he has to make sacrifices, so he sacrificed his family one by one. Tonight he offered the twins to his G.o.d. If he were a dog, I'd shoot him."

And so I picked up Joyce at Mom's where the TV station had kicked into late-night infomercials.

She was sleeping it off on the couch. I drove home and I'm going to bed soon.

I arrived at Ambleside Beach a few minutes ago, and something unusual happened. I was sitting in the truck's cab removing a burr from Joyce's flank, while looking at my stack of pink invoice papers, when this pleasant-enough woman in a purple fleece coat, holding a baby in her arms, comes up to the window and says, "Homework?"

Now, if I met you last week, I'll never remember your name, but if we went through kindergarten together, you're still in my brain for good: "Demi Harshawe!" Demi is the ma.s.sacre victim I'd last seen on October 4, 1988, having a silver spike jabbed into her unclothed heart.

"How are you doing, Jason?"

"No surprises. You?" Joyce trampled over my lap to lick Demi's face.

"Pretty average, I guess. I got married two summers ago. My last name is Minotti now. This here's Logan." Joyce dragged her tongue right across Logan's face.

"Sorry."

"It's okay. We're a dog family. See - Logan didn't mind it one bit."

"It's so great to see you."

We were both six again, and I felt so innocent and genuinely free, like we'd just quit jobs we hated. After maybe five minutes I asked Demi about her health - she'd been one of the kids shot over by the vending machines, and she'd lost a foot.

"I don't even notice it anymore. I do Pilates three times a week and coach softball with my sister.

To be honest, wearing braces back in elementary school was way harder to deal with. How about you?"

Demi knew, in the way everyone knows, about how things went wrong for me in the weeks after the ma.s.sacre. We're both ten years older, too, so I could describe things to her in non-candy- coated terms. "You know what? I never got over Cheryl. Not ever. I doubt I will. I try really hard to join the real world, but it never seems to work, and lately I think I've stopped trying, which scares me more than anything. I do house renovations on a by-the-hour basis and all my friends are barflies."

She thought this over for a second. "I stopped trusting people, too, after the shootings, and until I met my husband, Andreas, I didn't think I'd ever trust people again. And for what it's worth, I think you're one of the few people I could trust, now that I believe in trust again."

"Thanks."

"No, thank you. After all the junk you had to go through." Demi paused for a second. "I was in the hospital for two weeks after the ma.s.sacre. I missed all those hand-holding ceremonies and flowers and services and teddy bears et cetera. I really regret that, because maybe it would have made me a better person - or at least maybe I wouldn't go around looking at everybody as evil instead of good."

"I doubt it."

Demi sighed. "When I talk like this, Andreas thinks I'm coldhearted. But then he wasn't there. We were. And if you weren't, you weren't."

We'd hit on something irreducible here, and talking much beyond this point would have felt like a betrayal of our shared memories. We made our quick good-byes, and Demi and Logan headed down to the water, and here I am now in my truck's cab, the scribbler of Ambleside Beach.

It's an hour later and I'm still sitting in the truck.

I wish I could be as innocent as I was at six, the way I felt just briefly while talking with Demi, but that's childish. I wish humans were better than we are, but we're not. I wish I knew how bad I could become. I wish I could get a printout that showed me exactly how susceptible I was to a long list of sins. Gluttony: 23 percent susceptible. Envy: 68 percent susceptible. l.u.s.t: 94 percent susceptible. That kind of thing.

Oh G.o.d, it's religion all over again; it's my father's corrosive bile percolating through my soil and tickling my taproot. Be as pious as you want, people are slime, or, as my father might say, we're all slime in the eyes of G.o.d. It's the same thing. And even if you decided to fight the evil, to attain goodness or religious ecstasy, not much really changes. You're still stuck being you, and you was pretty much decided long before you started asking these questions.

Maybe clones are the way out of all of this. If Reg is against them, that means they're probably a good idea. And as a clone, you pop off the a.s.sembly line with an owner's manual written by the previous you - a manual as helpful as the one that accompanies a 1999 VW Jetta. Imagine all the c.r.a.p this would save you - the wasted time, the hopeless dreams. I'm going to really think about this: an owner's manual for me.

It's midnight. I cut short my evening with my barfly construction buddies. We shot a few buckets of b.a.l.l.s at the Park Royal driving range, then had a few beers, but I just couldn't bring myself to continue. Writing this doc.u.ment has taken a firm grip of me.

Here's an overview of what happened after the Delbrook Ma.s.sacre.

The fact that I'd never met the three gun wielders didn't seem to matter. In published transcripts of interviews with the police, on the morning of the event I was "agitated." I walked "cavalierly"

out of chem cla.s.s without so much as a nod to the teacher. I was seen having an "emotional confrontation" with Cheryl. I "a.s.saulted, drew blood from, and gave a concussion to" Matt Gursky from Youth Alive! I also a.s.saulted Mr. Kroger "with seeming forethought," and I "seemingly knew to enter the cafeteria just after Cheryl Anway had been shot."

I think the public was desperate for cause and effect. At first glance, I suppose I'd probably be suspicious of me, too, and I'm pretty sure it was my father's bizarre reaction to the news that got police to thinking about me - from a hero to a suspect. Whatever the cause, the morning after the shootings I saw my yearbook photo on the front of the paper with the headline MASTERMIND?

The only thing missing was motive. The three nutcases with guns were screwed-up geeks lost in a stew of paranoia, role-playing games, military dreams and s.e.xual rejection. They were a slam- dunk. With me, the case seemed to revolve around my relations.h.i.+p with Cheryl, about the fight we had that morning and reasons why I might want her dead. The best police minds couldn't engineer a reason no matter how soap-operatic their thinking.

On my side, I refused to make my life with Cheryl anybody's business but my own. I didn't mention our marriage because it was sacred; I wasn't going to let the ma.s.sacre make it profane. I refused to let it be used as some kind of plot twist in the final five minutes of an episode of Perry Mason. So I said nothing, only that Cheryl wanted to talk about feelings, and I didn't. As simple as that. Which is basically what it was.Okay, I'm not lying here, but I'm not disclosing everything. Truth is, Cheryl had just found out she was pregnant. That was what we'd been discussing at her locker. I was so taken aback by the news that I said something stupid, I forget what, and then I told her I had to prepare equipment for a Junior A team. Me - a father - and all I can say is "I have to get stuff ready for the Junior A team."

Even the idea of the baby got lost in the ordeal of the first two weeks. It wasn't until a month later, while I was waiting for a bus in New Brunswick, the temperature well below zero, that the baby caught up to me. I had to go behind a cedar hedge to cry. My nose began to bleed from the dry air, and the blood brought even more . . . Well, you get the picture.

As a result of the baby, I began doing what I used to do, wondering which woman was going to be my wife - except that now I looked at every child I saw and wondered if he or she was supposed to be mine. And then for a while I couldn't be near kids at all, and I got jobs up the coast in logging camps, construction and surveying.

And now? And now I guess I'll continue writing about the aftermath of the ma.s.sacre. My many friends from Youth Alive! set the tone, gleefully providing police with a McCarthy-era dossier on Cheryl and me - a diary of the time we spent together after we returned from Las Vegas. The entries describe everything but the s.e.x: where the cars were parked; what rooms were used and which lights went on and off at what time; the state of our clothing and hair before and after; the expressions on our faces - most often variations on the theme of "satisfied."

News that the police had taken me away from the parking lot caused rumors to quickly spread.

By evening our house had been egged and paint-bombed. The police had cordoned it off, and advised us that it would probably be easier and safer if I spent the night at the station and Mom found a hotel or motel room.

Kent flew in from Edmonton. He was in his second year at the University of Alberta, working toward a CPA degree. Having Dad in the hospital was a blessing, as I at least didn't have to worry about him selling me further down the river. He and Mom, in their last act of married unity, synchronized their stories about the fractured knee, and then called it quits. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for that little chat.

My main memories of those two weeks when I was under suspicion are of moving from one spartanly furnished room to another - a cell, a motel room or an interrogation room. I was what you'd now call a person of interest, living in a legal netherworld, neither free nor in custody. I remember eating mostly takeout Chinese or pizza, and having to hide in the bathroom when it was delivered. I remember always having to dial 9 before phone calls to my lawyer, and there was this chestnut-colored kiss-curl wig given to me by a woman from the RCMP. I was to wear it when we drove from place to place, but no matter how many times we rinsed it, it smelled like a thrift store. Potential angry mobs or not, it was stupid and I chucked it in the trash. There was this one interrogation room that smelled like cherry cola, and everywhere, the same yearbook photos being endlessly recycled on TV and in the papers.

I remember coming back from a questioning session one morning to find my mother opening the motel door with a large vodka stain shaped like Argentina on her blouse. And I wondered if I'd need to take a death certificate to Nevada to become officially unmarried. Is there even a name for this -"widowered" sounds wrong.

I ate chocolate bars from the Texaco for breakfast. Kent and I drove once to the cemetery where Cheryl had been buried, but there were TV vans, so we didn't go in. All over the embankment beside the police station I saw magic mushrooms sprouting, which seemed funny to me. And I remember Kent returning from the house where he'd gone to clean up the eggs and paint, and how he refused to discuss it.

One thing Kent did during this time was, as ever, not take sides. He never said it in so many words, but he spent hours on the phone with Alive!ers and could only have been placating them.

"They think I organized it, don't they?"

"They're curious and angry like everybody else."

"But they do."

"They're just confused. Let it go. You'll be cleared soon enough."

"Do you think I was involved?"

Kent waited half a second too long to answer this. "No."

"You do."

"Jason, let it ride."

The thought of my brother not really being on my side frightened me so much that I did let it ride.

In any event, I remember the days becoming shorter, and Halloween approaching, and chipping my tooth on the police station drinking fountain.

One further thing I remember was Mom going on a Nostradamus kick. She was trying to find the ma.s.sacre foretold in his prophecies somewhere. As if.

Hey Nostradamus! Did you predict that once we found the Promised Land we'd all start offing each other? And did you predict that once we found the Promised Land, it would be the final Promised Land, and there'd never be another one again? And if you were such a good clairvoyant, why didn't you just write things straight out? What's with all the stupid rhyming quatrains? Thanks for nothing.

But most of all I remember making sure that I got my injection every day right on time, at noon and midnight. After I got it, I had a five-minute window when I didn't have to think about Cheryl, alive, dying or dead.

I'm drunk.

And now I'm hung over. It's morning and it's raining outside, the first rain in a month. I think I'll skip working on the built-in towel rack for the day. Les will tell the client I'm at another job.

That's the price he pays for having a drinking buddy on twenty-four-hour call.

I was going to do an owner's manual to myself, or rather, my future clone. Now's as good a time as any.

Dear Clone . . .

It's you speaking. Or rather it's me, but with a h.e.l.luva lot more mileage on me than you have, so just trust me, okay? Where to start. . . Okay, as far as bodies go, you lucked out in most respects. Around the age of seventeen you'll hit six foot one, and you'll be neither skinny nor given to fat. You'll be left-handed and bad with numbers but pretty good with words. You'll be allergic to any molecule that ends with the suffix "-aine," meaning benzocaine, novocaine, and, most important, cocaine. I learned this when getting a filling in third grade. If I'd been able to do cocaine I'd likely be dead now, so if nothing else, this allergy has allowed me to hang around long enough for me to make you.

Your shoe size will be eleven.

You'll need to start shaving almost on the day you turn sixteen.

You'll get acne - not badly, but badly enough. It'll start at thirteen and, despite conventional wisdom, it never goes away. As far as looks go, you did pretty well there, too, and because of this, for the rest of your life people will do nice things for you for no apparent reason. You'd be a fool to think that everybody gets the same treatment. No way, Jose. Everybody else in the world has to jump up and down and scream to even get served a cup of coffee. You just have to sit there looking vacant, and they'll be tamping free T-bills into your underwear's stretchy hem. Having said all this, I managed to screw up this once fortunate face. The conventional wisdom is true as regards faces: by mid-adulthood, what's inside you becomes what people see on the outside. Car thieves look like car thieves, cheats look like cheats, and calm, reflective people look calm and reflective. So be careful. My face is like yours, but I ended up turning it into the face of failure. I look bitter. If you saw me walking down the street, you'd think to yourself, "Hey, that guy looks bitter." It's really that simple. My face is now like one of those snow domes you buy in tourist traps. People look into it and wonder, How badly was he damaged by the ma.s.sacre? Has he hit bottom yet? I hear he used to be religious, but it's not in his eyes anymore. I wonder what happened?

Just don't screw your life up the way I did, but you're young, and because you're young, you won't listen to anybody, anyway, so what's the point of advice? This whole letter is a pointless exercise.

Wait - here's a biggie: you're p.r.o.ne to blacking out when you drink. Using something else along with the booze gives you longer blackouts more quickly, and a blacked-out experience can never be retrieved. At least, I have yet to retrieve one, and I've tried, thank you. I even went to a hypnotist a few years ago, one I know was a medically trained hypnotist, not some quack, and . . . nada.

What else? What else? It's better to eat lots of meals throughout the day instead of just three.

Also, if you want to get close to somebody, you have to tell him or her something intimate about yourself. They'll tell you something intimate in return, and if you keep this going, maybe you'll end up in love.

You probably won't be very talkative, but your mind ought to be pretty alive most of the time.

Find a puppet and make it do the talking for you.

Finally: You will be able to sing. You will have a lovely voice. Find something valuable to sing, and go out and sing it. It's what I ought to have done.

The hospital just phoned. My father slipped on his kitchen floor and cracked some ribs and possibly did some cardiac bruising. Could I please go to his place and gather some basic items for him?

"He gave you my phone number? I'm unlisted."

"He did."

"But he's never even phoned me."

"He knew it by heart."

The nurse said she'd leave a list of items and a key in an envelope down by reception. "I have a hunch you two don't get along and he needs a few days without incident. You don't have to see him."

"Right."

Dad's apartment is somewhere in North Vancouver - off Lonsdale, not even that far from Mom's condo. I could simply not go, but I have to admit, I'm tempted.

Dad lives on the eighteenth floor; G.o.d must like elevators. The apartment is a generic unit built in maybe 1982, about ten minutes before the entire city went crazy on teal green, a color I'm forced to endure at least a few times a week as a subcontractor. Dad's place is dark yellow with plastic mock-Tiffany lampshades, and brown-and-orange freckled indoor-outdoor carpeting. My job in the renovation business has turned me into a fixtures sn.o.b: the hardware-store cupboard door fronts are all stained like burnt coffee; the Dijon-colored walls have remained unmodified since the the rollers were put away in 1982. The windows face the mountains - the apartment receives no direct sunlight except for maybe two minutes at sunset on the longest day of the year.

This is not an apartment in which fresh vegetables are consumed. It smells like a dead spice rack.

The August heat brought out the full aroma of the furniture - homely c.r.a.ppy stuff Reg kept, nay, demanded to keep, after he and Mom split: a brown plaid recliner aimed at a TV inside an oak console like they used to give away on game shows. On a cheap colonial kitchen table was a box of insurance doc.u.ments; a half-eaten can of Beef-a-Roni and a spoon lay on the floor where I guess he fell. Jesus, how depressing.

The bedroom is where the good stuff ought to have been, at least that's what I'd hoped. Again, dark furniture left over from his split-up with Mom, and all of it too big for the room. On his dresser top was a blue runner, on which stood framed photos, yellowed and bleached, of him, Mom, Kent and me. I remember when each photo was taken - the sittings were torture; it was simply weird that he had photos of Mom and me there. Kent sure, but me? And Mom?

His bed was queen-sized. If he'd had a twin bed, it would have been so bleak I'd have had to flee.

I went and sat down on his preferred side, which smelled of pipe tobacco, smoke and dust. There was an olive rotary phone, a can of no-name tonic water and an aspirin bottle. What would be in the two drawers beneath it - girlie mags? A salad bowl filled with condoms? No. He had Bibles, Reader's Digest Condensed Books and clipped newspaper articles. Oh, to find something human like an escort service card or a gin bottle to go with the tonic, but no. Just this garage sale jumble, all of it so blank, so totally anti-1999 as to evoke thoughts of time travel back to, say, North Platte, Nebraska, circa 1952. The thought of my silent, sour-faced father walking from room to room - rooms in which phones never ring, where other voices never enter -it almost broke my heart, but then I realized, Wait a second, this is Reg, not some monk. Also, before I take too much pity on him, I ought to note how much his place is like my place.

I fetched the items on the list: pajamas, T-s.h.i.+rts, underwear, socks, and so on. The contents of his dresser were all folded and color-coded as if waiting for inspection by some cosmic drill sergeant on Judgment Day.

I grabbed his bottles of old people's medications, a toothbrush and contact lens gear and headed for the front door where, pa.s.sing a little side table, I came close to missing a photo of my father with a woman - an ample and cheery woman - in a pink floral dress. His arms were around her shoulders, and, alert the media, there was a smile on his face.

The heart of a man is like deep water.

I've been writing these last bits in a coffee shop. I'm now officially one of those people you see writing dream diaries and screenplays in every Starbucks, except if you saw me writing, you'd maybe guess I was faking some quickie journal entries to hand my anger management counselor.

So be it.

Around three I went to the hospital with the white plastic Save-On shopping bag full of Reg's personal needs. In the building's lobby I had the choice of dumping it at the desk or asking what room my father was in. What came over me? It was nearly eleven years since I'd last spoken with him, me shouting curses while he lay on the blue rug at the old house with his shattered knee. We hadn't spoken at Kent's wedding, the funeral or yesterday's memorial. I figured he must have learned something between then and now. The hospital's central cooling system was malfunctioning, and guys in uniforms with tool kits were in the elevator with me. When I got off on the sixth floor, I was invisible to the staff, while the air-conditioning guys were treated like saviors.

I found Reg's room. The odor outside it reminded me of luggage coming onto the airport carousels from China and Taiwan - mothb.a.l.l.s, but not quite. I had a short moment of disbelief when I was outside the door and technically only a spit away from him. Yes? No? Yes? No? Why not? I went in - a shared room, a snoring young guy with his leg in a cast near the door. On the other side of a flimsy veil lay my father.

"Dad."

"Jason."