Hey Nostradamus! Part 9

The harbor was dense with freighters, and there was this one Chinese hulk in the midst of loading up on hemlock two-by-fours. Some guy up on deck threw something at us - a lunch bag or something minor, but Jerry drove up to the side of the freighter, which resembled a rusting, windowless ten-story building, and started screaming in Chinese.

"Jerry - where'd you learn Chinese?"

"My ex. Eleven years of my life, and all I'm left with is Cantonese, hep C and advanced skills in seafood cooking." The guy up above disappeared for a second, and Les and I said, "Jerry, let's get out of here," but Jerry wouldn't listen. The guy up above reappeared over the edge and dropped what seemed to be a cast-iron loaf of bread - I have no idea what it was, but it rammed a hole the size of a dinner plate in our boat's hull. We sank quickly, and we swam to land near the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. We found some ancient rusting rungs, which we climbed up; they put us in a hot, dusty railyard. We'd gotten coated with diesel oil during the swim, and the powdery gray dirt stuck to us like flour on cod. Les was furious because his wife had been haranguing him for years over his taste in clothes, and today was the first day he was wearing a pair of pants she'd bought for him. Les became morose: "She's going to fry my b.u.t.t."

I said, "Jesus, Jerry, what did you say to that Chinese guy, anyway?"

"Well, he called me some names, and I called him some names, and then he said he'd sink the boat if I kept dissing him, and then he sank the boat. The d.a.m.n thing was hot as a stove, anyway.

Probably better that it sank." Jerry then flipped open his cell phone, saying, "Someone'll come pick us up."

In order to reach the road, we had to cut across eight tracks on which train cars were shunting according to laws unknown to us, each car capable of shredding us into french fries at any moment.

Out at the road, sure enough, there sat a black stretch limo. Its driver was Yorgo, a Russian gorilla who was also a clean freak. He insisted we take off our clothes and put them on a tarp in the trunk. I asked Jerry why there'd be a tarp in the trunk, and he said, "Don't ask."

So we sat in our underwear in the back of this limo. Les discovered some rotgut scotch in the limo's plastic decanter and tanked himself up even further, while Jerry began obsessing about finding identical trousers so Les wouldn't get in trouble with his wife. This struck me as manic, but then the Russian gorilla threw Jerry a Ziploc bag of c.o.ke, and I saw where the mania came from.

"I can't do c.o.ke. I really can't. Allergies. Anything that ends with '-aine'."

"I've heard of that. More for me, then." Jerry made a noise to Yorgo, and some pills appeared from up front.

"What are they?"

"Well," Jerry said, "one pill makes you bigger, and one pill makes you small."

I took two, and we drove around the city, and reached the conclusion that we needed to buy clothing, but first we had to wash. We bought a squeeze bottle of dish detergent and drove to Wreck Beach, at the base of the cliffs at UBC. Amid the overall nudity, our underwear attracted no notice. We left Les pa.s.sed out in the car.

Out in the water we used the dish soap to sc.r.a.pe the diesel fuel from our skin, but a group of hippie kids saw us and began screaming at us for using squeeze bottle soap at the beach, and began pelting us with oyster sh.e.l.ls, so we dropped the bottle and swam down the sh.o.r.e. Once on land, Jerry stole two towels from a log and we climbed back up the cliff, at which point I remember wanting some of the scotch Les was drinking - and then my blackout. Jerry's magic pills.

The next thing I remember is being in Seattle. Judging by beard stubble it was maybe two nights later. I was on Interstate 5 entering downtown, riding shotgun in an Audi sedan. At the wheel was a skinny junkie-looking guy with chattering teeth. He looked at me and said, "It's okay. You've got the money with you. The important thing to remember is not to panic."

Not to panic? Am I supposed to be not panicking about something? This wasn't a situation I wanted to be a part of. The car pulled up to a stoplight. I got out and walked through the first door I saw, which happened to be the west lobby entrance of a Four Seasons hotel. I caught sight of myself in a jewelry shop's display case: I was sunburnt and wearing a designer outfit like the ones in magazine spreads that no guy ever wears in real life. I had to shed this ridiculous outfit, but how? Where?

In the vest pocket a palm-thick wad of fifties, but no ID, which might prove to be a problem, what with being a Canadian in the U.S. most likely on shady business. One of Jerry's pills was tucked into a deep corner, so I wiggled it loose and popped it in my mouth. At the bar I ordered a martini and flirted with two women who were up from the Bay Area and who worked for Oracle's PR department. I wasn't in their league, but they were fun, and they made cracks about my jacket. In the men's room I removed it and buried it in the hand towel basket beneath a pile of towels. And then I blacked out once again.

When I came to, I was walking past alders and birches beside a stony mountain river. The river wasn't huge like the Fraser, and it wasn't tiny; it was a mountain river that fed into something larger. It was late afternoon and my hands were behind my head. I could hear someone's feet on the rocks behind me. I looked down and remembered being a kid and staring at sand in the Capilano, seeing flecks of mica and being convinced it was gold.

The river looked cold, and was filled with rocks like the one I'd used to kill Mitch.e.l.l. And the landscape surrounding the river reminded me of the valley forest by the Klaasen family daffodil farm in Aga.s.siz: the creepy sunless forests carpeted with moss that swallows your feet, and mud that sucks up all noise - summerproof and free of birds. I turned around to look. Yorgo was behind me, and he cracked me between the shoulders with the barrel of a shotgun. It was just the two of us, and we were clearly on a death march. The tarp in the limo's trunk sprang to mind.

I also noted how quickly my childhood muscle memory for walking atop river rock had returned.

Yorgo, I could hear, was having some trouble. He probably grew up in a city.

I didn't want to trudge meekly to my fate. To this end I veered ever so slightly toward the wetter, more slippery rocks. It was a simple idea that yielded instant results - I heard Yorgo slip, and as I heard this, I swiveled around and watched him go down hard on the riverbed, his left s.h.i.+nbone snapping like kindling, his weapon clattering off into the water, carried away almost instantly.

I lunged for a river rock and then - time folded over in a Moebius strip - I was once again in the school cafeteria, and there was Mitch.e.l.l's head, but it was now Yorgo's head, and in my hand was a rock and - suddenly I had the option of murdering again.

I remember after the ma.s.sacre I heard that people were praying for the killers, and that made me furious. It's a bit too late to pray for them now, wouldn't you think? I was livid for years afterward. Why did those prayers bug me so much - people praying for a.s.sa.s.sins? I began to wonder if it was because I had so much hate in my own heart; it's a truism that the people we dislike the most in this life are the people who remind us of ourselves. I'd gone through my life with this ma.s.sive chunk of hate inside me like a block of demolished concrete, complete with rusted and twisted metal radiating from the inside. Perhaps I didn't feel I deserved any prayers.

For over a decade in my head it's been Rot in h.e.l.l, you evil little freaks. No pain is big enough for you, and I wish you were alive so I could blow you up and turn you into a big pile of guts that I could trample all over and douse with gasoline and set on fire.

I never could see how anything good could come from the Delbrook Ma.s.sacre. Whenever I've heard people saying, "Look how it's brought us all together," I've had to leave the room or switch the channel. What a feeble and pathetic moral. Just look at our world, so migratory - cars and airplanes and jobs here and there: what does it matter if a few of us who happened to be in this one spot at one moment briefly rallied together and held hands and wore ribbons? Next year, half of us will have moved away, and then where's your moral?

After another few years I simply became tired. I kept on asking for a sign and none ever came - and then there I was on a riverbank with Yorgo, holding a river rock above my head.

I dropped the rock onto a nearby boulder. It sent sparks of granite chips into the air and then quickly huddled lost among thousands of similar rocks. I felt like I had committed an antimurder, like I'd created life where none had existed before.

Yorgo said, "You're just weak. You're too frightened to kill me."

I looked at him, his tibia poking into the drape of his slacks. "That may be the case, Yorgo, but it doesn't look to me like you're going anywhere soon. And what - you despise me for not killing you?"

He sneered my way.

"You do, don't you?"

Yorgo spat to his left.

I said, "What a loser. Give me your cell phone."

His hand went to his coat pocket. He removed it, and just as I was about to take it, he tossed it sideways toward the river.

I asked him, "Where are we?"

He looked away.

"I see. You're going to be cute with me. That makes a lot of sense." I looked at the rocks around us. "You know, Yorgo, the easiest thing for me to do would be to build a cairn of river rocks on top of you. It'd take me thirty minutes to do, and it would quite easily keep you in place until this winter's flooding sweeps away both it and your remains."

I could tell Yorgo was catching my drift. I walked up to the riverbank and saw no evidence of roads, paths or people. This was good, in that it decreased the chance of having been seen by a jogger or fisherman. I listened for cars or a highway - none. I came back to him. "I'm not going to do anything, Yorgo. Not for now. I'm going to walk away from here, and when I find a phone I will call one person for you and tell them where you are and that your leg is wrecked."

Yorgo remained quiet.

"Or I can simply leave. So if you want to have even a sliver of hope, you'd best give me a number to call."

I walked away.

"Stop!" Yorgo yelled out a phone number. I found a pen in my pants pocket and wrote it on the flesh at the base of my thumb.

I walked west. As the light entered its final waning, I came upon a field with a few cattle, so I hopped the barbed wire, trudged across the field and made my way on a paved road out toward a highway that glowed in the distance, maybe an hour's walk away. The nighttime summer haze was soaking up the highway's car headlights and street lamps, and it was shooting that light skyward, as brightly as the Las Vegas Strip ever did. The farm buildings were built in the Canadian style; I figured the highway had to be the Trans-Canada, and to judge by the mountains faintly contoured against the night sky, I was still in the Fraser Valley, most likely not too far from the Klaasen family farm.

Like most suburbanites, I'm creeped out by agricultural areas. Every footstep reverberated clearly and I began imagining I was hearing someone else's footsteps. I looked at the darkened fields and unlit sheds and junked cars. The air smelled of manure, and I wondered if I'd see methane will-o'- the-wisps dancing beyond the road. I remembered Grandma Klaasen hectoring Grandpa about devil wors.h.i.+pers stealing their rototiller, about their vanis.h.i.+ng pets and about bodies that were always being found in the lakes and streams and ditches of Aga.s.siz. Crimes are never solved in places like this, only discovered. I imagined headlines in the local shopper papers: MAN'S REMAINS WASH UP IN FRASER RIVER DELTA; GIRL GUIDES FIND SKELETON; RUSSIAN.

MOTHER ASKS LOCALS FOR HELP LOCATING ONLY SON.

My mind raced with thoughts of death. Not only am I going to die sooner rather than later, I am going to die alone and lonely. But then I remembered, so were my father and mother.

Considering this further, I realized most people I knew were going to die alone and lonely. Was this life in general, or was it just me? Did I unwittingly send out the sort of signals that attract desperate souls? I looked at the shadows of sleeping cattle and thought, Lucky farm animals.

Lucky s.p.a.ce aliens. Lucky anything-but-humans, never having to deal with knowing how foul or desperate their own species is.

I remember once at dinner when I was a kid, I sarcastically asked Reg what we'd do if we learned to speak with dolphins. Would we try to convert them? Oddly, he missed my intent. "Dolphins?

Dolphins with the whole English language at their command?"

"Sure, Dad. Why not?"

"What a good question."

I was so surprised that he'd taken me seriously, that I became serious in turn. I added, "And we wouldn't even need translators. We could speak with them just as we're speaking with each other here."

Reg pulled himself back into his seat, a posture he usually reserved for deciding which form of punishment we deserved. He said, "In the end, no, there would be no point converting dolphins, because they never left G.o.d's hand. If anything, we might be asking them what it's like to never have left, to still be back in the Garden."

Jesus, Dad do you have to be so random? Why is your kindness or wrath about as predictable as knowing when the phone is going to ring? I've never known what will set you off. I still don't.

n.o.body does. You've built this thing around you, this place you call the world, but it's not the world - it's Reg's little private club. You're only concerned with making people conform to your own picture of G.o.d, never trying to cool the suffering of anyone in pain.

As I walked I tried to recall any crimes or events leading to my riverside drama. I came up blank.

How odd to be guilty of enormous acts yet be unaware of them. Maybe this is what it feels like to be born with original sin, or rather, to fully believe in original sin - to live always with a black sun hovering above you.

And then . . . and then I felt truly old for the first time -old in the sense that I was beyond the point of ever doing something radical or bold to change the course of my life. I was going to remain a contractor's flunky to the grave. I just wanted to put a rusty thick steel Chinese freighter of a wall between me and everyone else's problems. I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal.

But I hadn't killed Yorgo.

I stopped and processed this thought. I could have killed him, but I didn't.

Huh.

I was happy, but I was also annoyed. Maybe in spite of all my attempts to block it, my father's sense of will had become my own. Oh, dear G.o.d.

The stars above looked milky, like they only do in summer. I saw some sheet lightning off somewhere in the mountains. And then I felt the chunk of concrete hate fall from my chest. A part of my life was over, I realized. I was now in some new hate-free part, and I began to hear the highway's pale drone. To the east was an overpa.s.s with a gas station.

Once there I checked to find that I had on me about two hundred bucks Canadian, in twenties that all shared the same serial number. I got change for one and looked at the Pirelli calendar behind the box of Slim Jims; it told me that I'd had that first beer with Jerry five and a half days ago. I phoned in to collect my messages - eleven; as I retrieved them, each push on the pay phone's keypad was like waiting for a punch to the gut. I braced myself for anything.

The first message was from Barb, in tears and without much to say but that she was missing Kent. Following this were calls from my mother, in varying states of sobriety and asking about Joyce's diet, which was her way of saying she was running out of money.

The next was from Kim, asking if I knew where Les was.

Next was Les saying, "Buddy, I owe you big time on this one. I wouldn't donate a kidney for you, but something pretty close. Take tomorrow off, and I still can't believe you let that cute little sales chick sell you that clown suit. Man, she brings you those little cappuccinos with a sprinkle of cinnamon, they play a song you like on the sound system, and before you know it you're looking like a balloon twister at my kid's birthday party."

The next message was from Reg, still at the hospital. "Jason, don't hang up. It's your father, yes, your father. They found something inside me that's not quite right, so they've been holding me here longer. Thank you for bringing in my things. I know you didn't have to do it. I've been considering your reaction to my words. No, I don't think one of Kent's twins is a monster. But then what does happen when the self splits? What happens when a cell splits five times, with quintuplets? Each has a unique soul. And what if they made a thousand clones of Frank Sinatra?

Each would have a unique soul. So then by extension, Jason, let's say we were to clone an infinite number of souls from one starter soul - yours or mine or the Queen's; whoever's - and say we filled up the universe with this infinite number of cloned souls. Wouldn't this mean that each human soul is infinite as well as full of unimaginable mystery? I leave it at that, son. I've never wanted anything more for you than the Kingdom. Good-bye."

b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

The gas station clerk stared at me. I said, "Bad day," and he said, "Taxi."

"Huh?"

"Your taxi's here."

I'd ordered one. "Tell him to wait a second."

I phoned the number Yorgo'd given me. It rang maybe seven times, and I almost hung up. Then a man answered, some Freon-blooded goon - a crooked cop? A junkie?

"Yorgo wants me to let you know where he is."

"Does he, now?"

"He's stuck up some river. A few miles east of Chilliwack, and I have the feeling he's been there a few times before. Anyway, his left leg's broken. He can't move."

"And this is the number he gave you?"

"Look, I didn't have to tell you this. I'm doing you a favor."

"Yorgo? He's no favor to me."

I asked, "So are you going to go get him?"

"No."

"You're serious."

"Yes, I'm serious. Call the Girl Guides. I have to go now."

He was serious. I hung up. I bought a map and some gum, then taxied back to the Lynnwood Inn to retrieve my truck. Once we arrived, I located my secret key, stashed beneath the fender, and opened the door. I told the cabbie my money was fake, and to pay for the ride I gave him my CD collection. My final request was that he take the map on which I'd written a reasonably detailed description of where Yorgo was and of his condition, and deliver it to the Lonsdale RCMP station. He was to have no idea who left it in the cab. He was a nice guy. He went.

And so I drove back home, where I am now, tired and hungry and coming down off G.o.d knows what, and utterly in need of solace.

I guess the thing about blacking out is that you blacked out. There's no retrieval. There's not even hunches, and you might as well have been under a general anesthetic. I mean, who was that guy who picked up the phone when I called about Yorgo? I checked the criss-cross phone directory, but it's unlisted. And Jesus, Yorgo, out on the rocks, maybe being rescued in an hour or two, either my friend or my enemy for life.