Hey Nostradamus!
Hey Nostradamus!
Douglas Coupland
The story of one family piecing itself back together after a tragic highschool shooting, Hey Nostradamus! is Douglas Coupland’s most soulful, piercing and searching novel yet.Pregnant and secretly married, Cheryl Anway scribbles her last will and testament – and erie premonition – on a school binder shortly before a rampaging trio of misfit classmates gun her down in a high school cafeteria. Overrun with paranoia, teenage angst and religious zeal in the ensuing massacre's wake, this sleepy Vancouver neighbourhood declares its saints, brands its demons and finally moves on.But for a handful of people still reeling from that horrific day, life remains perpetually derailed. Four dramatically different characters tell their stories in their own words: Cheryl, who calmly narrates her own death; Jason, the boy no one knew was her husband, still marooned ten years later by his loss; Heather, the woman trying to love the shattered Jason; and Jason's father Reg, a cruelly religious man no one suspects is still worth loving. Each wrestles with God, self-defeat and a crippling inability to hold on to those they love.Coupland's most surprising and soulful novel yet, rich with his trademark cultural acuity and dark humour, Hey Nostradamus! ties themes of alienation, violence and misguided faith into a fateful and unforgettable knot from which four people must untangle their lives.
Hey Nostradamus!
Douglas Coupland
Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.
I Cor. 15:51-52
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#uf38ca769-cca4-57df-89d2-77bc49bfdde3)
Title Page (#uc2079ae8-026a-5d71-a208-a54f3a648dc8)
Epigraph (#ub8feffad-2c95-54e4-9d0e-96089c8f5a13)
Part One 1988: Cheryl (#u671e4833-3905-5e84-9854-476e58c898c1)
Part Two 1999: Jason (#u97c6e9dd-ff4b-525f-a9b8-7b0124c6b958)
Part Three 2002: Heather (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four 2003: Reg (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
MEET (#litres_trial_promo)
BRIEF (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE BOOK (#litres_trial_promo)
HEADLINING (#litres_trial_promo)
BACKSTAGE (#litres_trial_promo)
COVER STORY (#litres_trial_promo)
ON LOCATION (#litres_trial_promo)
READ ON (#litres_trial_promo)
HAVE YOU READ? (#litres_trial_promo)
IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOU’LL LIKE… (#litres_trial_promo)
THE WEB DETECTIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Part One 1988: Cheryl (#ulink_343d0a9b-8bd5-574d-8241-53bdc3ac4669)
I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world – spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley – is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins. Even those of us who try to live a good and true life remain as far away from grace as the Hillside Strangler or any demon who ever tried to poison the village well. What happened that morning only confirms this.
It was a glorious fall morning. The sun burned a girly pink over the mountain ranges to the west, and the city had yet to generate its daily smog blanket. Before driving to school in my little white Chevette, I went into the living room and used my father’s telescope to look down at the harbor, as smooth as mercury, and on its surface I could see the moon dimming over East Vancouver. And then I looked up into the real sky and saw the moon on the cusp of being overpowered by the sun.
My parents had already gone to work, and my brother, Chris, had left for swim team hours before. The house was quiet – not even a clock ticking – and as I opened the front door, I looked back and saw some gloves and unopened letters on the front hallway desk. Beyond them, on the living room’s gold carpet, were some discount warehouse sofas and a lamp on a side table that we never used because the light bulb always popped when we switched it on. It was lovely, all that silence and all that calm order, and I thought how lucky I was to have had a good home. And then I turned and walked outside. I was already a bit late, but I was in no hurry.
Normally I used the garage door, but today I wanted a touch of formality. I had thought that this morning would be my last truly innocent glance at my childhood home – not because of what really ended up happening, but because of another, smaller drama that was supposed to have unfolded.
I’m glad that the day was as quiet and as average as it was. The air was see-your-breath chilly, and the front lawn was crunchy with frost, as though each blade had been batter fried. The brilliant blue and black Steller’s jays were raucous and clearly up to no good on the eaves trough, and because of the frost, the leaves on the Japanese maples had been converted into stained-glass shards. The world was unbearably pretty, and it continued being so all the way down the mountain to school. I felt slightly high because of the beauty, and the inside of my head tickled. I wondered if this is how artists go through life, with all of its sensations tickling their craniums like a peacock feather.
I was the last to park in the school’s lot. That’s always such an uneasy feeling no matter how together you think you are – being the last person there, wherever there may be.
I was carrying four large binders and some textbooks, and when I tried shutting the Chevette’s door, it wouldn’t close properly. I tried slamming it with my hip, but that didn’t work; it only made the books spray all over the pavement. But I didn’t get upset.
Inside the school, classes were already in session and the hallways were as silent as the inside of my house, and I thought to myself, What a day for silence.
I needed to go to my locker before class, and as I was working my combination lock, Jason came up from behind.
“Boo.”
“Jason – don’t do that. Why aren’t you in class?”
“I saw you parking, so I left.”
“You just walked out?”
“Forget about that, Miss Priss. Why were you being so weird on the phone last night?”
“I was being weird?”
“Jesus, Cheryl – don’t act like your airhead friends.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. You’re my wife, so act like it.”
“How should I be acting, then?”
“Cheryl, look: in God’s eyes we’re not two individuals, okay? We’re one unit now. So if you dick around with me, then you’re only dicking around with yourself.”
And Jason was right. We were married – had been for about six weeks at that point – but we were the only ones who knew it.
I was late for school because I’d wanted everyone out of the house before I used a home pregnancy test. I was quite calm about it – I was a married woman, and shame wasn’t a factor. My period was three weeks late, and facts were facts.
Instead of the downstairs bathroom I shared with my brother, I used the guest bathroom upstairs. The guest bathroom felt one notch more medical, one notch less tinged by personal history – less accusatory, to be honest. And the olive fixtures and foil wallpaper patterned with brown bamboo looked swampy and dank when compared to the test’s scientific white-and-blue box. And there’s not much more to say, except that fifteen minutes later I was officially pregnant and I was late for math class.
“Jesus, Cheryl…”
“Jason, don’t curse. You can swear, but don’t curse.”
“Pregnant?”
I was quiet.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m late for math class. Aren’t you even happy?”
A student walked by, maybe en route to see the principal.
Jason squinted like he had dust in his eyes. “Yeah – well, of course – sure I am.”
I said, “Let’s talk about it at homeroom break.”
“I can’t. I’m helping Coach do setup for the Junior A team. I promised him ages ago. Lunchtime then. In the cafeteria.”
I kissed him on his forehead. It was soft, like antlers I’d once touched on a petting zoo buck. “Okay. I’ll see you there.”
He kissed me in return and I went to math class.
I was on the yearbook staff, so I can be precise here. Delbrook Senior Secondary is a school of 1,106 students located about a five-minute walk north of the Trans-Canada Highway, up the algae-green slope of Vancouver’s North Shore. It opened in the fall of 1962, and by 1988, my senior year, its graduates numbered about thirty-four thousand. During high school, most of them were nice enough kids who’d mow lawns and baby-sit and get drunk on Friday nights and maybe wreck a car or smash a fist through a basement wall, not even knowing why they’d done it, only that it had to happen. Most of them grew up in rectangular postwar homes that by 1988 were called tear-downs by the local real estate agents. Nice lots. Nice trees and vines. Nice views.
As far as I could tell, Jason and I were the only married students ever to have attended Delbrook. It wasn’t a neighborhood that married young. It was neither religious nor irreligious, although back in eleventh-grade English class I did a tally of the twenty-six students therein: five abortions, three dope dealers, two total sluts, and one perpetual juvenile delinquent. I think that’s what softened me up for conversion: I didn’t want to inhabit that kind of moral world. Was I a snob? Was I a hypocrite? And who was I to even judge? Truth be told, I wanted everything those kids had, but I wanted it by playing the game correctly. This meant legally and religiously and – this is the part that was maybe wrong – I wanted to outsmart the world. I had, and continue to have, a nagging suspicion that I used the system simply to get what I wanted. Religion included. Does that cancel out whatever goodness I might have inside me?
Jason was right: Miss Priss.
Math class was x’s and y’s and I felt trapped inside a repeating dream, staring at these two evil little letters who tormented me with their constant need to balance and be equal with each other. They should just get married and form a new letter together and put an end to all the nonsense. And then they should have kids.
I thought about my own child-to-be as I stared out the window, turning the pages only when I heard everybody else turn theirs. I saw fleeting images of breast-feeding, prams and difficult labor, my knowledge of motherhood being confined mostly to magazines and cartoons. I ignored Lauren Hanley, two rows over, who held a note in her hand that she obviously wanted me to read. Lauren was one of the few people left from my Youth Alive! group who would still speak to me after rumors began spreading that Jason and I were making it.
Carol Schraeger passed the note my way; it was a plea from Lauren to talk during homeroom break. We did, out by her locker. I know Lauren saw this meeting as being charged with drama, and my serenity must have bothered her.
“Everyone’s talking, Cheryl. Your reputation is being tarnished. You have to do something about it.”
Lauren was probably the key blabber, but I was a married woman, so why should I care? I said, “Let people say what they want, Lauren. I take comfort in knowing that my best friends are squelching any rumors from the start, right?”
She reddened. “But everyone knows your Chevette was parked at Jason’s all weekend while his parents were away in the Okanogan.”
“So?”
“So you guys could have been doing anything in there – not that you were – but imagine what it looked like.”
Truth was, Jason and I were doing everything in there that weekend, but I have to admit that for a moment or two I enjoyed watching Lauren squirm at my nonresponse. In any event, I was far too preoccupied to have any sort of conversation. I told Lauren I had to go to my homeroom and sequence some index cards for an oral presentation later that afternoon on early Canadian fur trappers, and I left.
In homeroom I sat at my desk and wrote over and over on my pale blue binder the words GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE/GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE. When this binder with these words was found, caked in my evaporating blood, people made a big fuss about it, and when my body is shortly lowered down into the planet, these same words will be felt-penned all over the surface of my white coffin. But all I was doing was trying to clear out my head and think of nothing, to generate enough silence to make time stand still.
Stillness is what I have here now – wherever here is. I’m no longer a part of the world and I’m still not yet a part of what follows. I think there are others from the shooting here with me, but I can’t tell where. And for whatever it’s worth, I’m no longer pregnant, and I have no idea what that means. Where’s my baby? What happened to it? How can it just go away like that?
It’s quiet here – quiet like my parents’ house, and quiet in the way I wanted silence when writing on my binder. The only sounds I can hear are prayers and curses; they’re the only sounds with the power to cross over to where I am.
I can only hear the words of these prayers and curses – not the voice of the speaker. I’d like to hear from Jason and my family, but I’m unable to sift them out.
Dear God,
Remove the blood from the souls of these young men and women. Strip their memories of our human vileness. Return them to the Garden and make them babes, make them innocent. Erase their memories of today.
As I’m never going to be old, I’m glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness: the first thirty seconds of the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita”; pigeons sitting a fist apart on the light posts entering Stanley Park; huckleberries both bright orange and dusty blue the first week of June; powdered snow down to the middle gondola tower of Grouse Mountain by the third week of every October; grilled-cheese sandwiches and the sound of lovesick crows on the electrical lines each May. The world is a glorious place, and filled with so many unexpected moments that I’d get lumps in my throat, as though I were watching a bride walk down the aisle – moments as eternal and full of love as the lifting of veils, the saying of vows and the moment of the first wedded kiss.
The lunch hour bell rang and the hallways erupted into ordered hubbub. Normally I wouldn’t have gone to the cafeteria; I was part of the Out to Lunch Bunch – six girls from the Youth Alive! program. We’d go down to one of the fast-food places at the foot of the mountain for salad bar, fries and ice water. Our one rule was that every lunch we had to confess a sin to the group. I always made mine up: I’d stolen a blusher from the drugstore; I’d peeked at my brother’s porn stash – nothing too big, but nothing too small, either. In the end, it was simply easier to be with five people in a restaurant booth than three hundred in a cafeteria. I was antisocial at heart. And if people knew how dull our lunches were, they’d never have bothered to waste energy calling us stuck-up. So, I was surprised when I went into the cafeteria to meet Jason to find the Bunch hogging one of the cafeteria’s prime center tables. I asked, “So what’s this all about?”
Their faces seemed so – young to me. Unburdened. Newly born. I wondered if I’d now lost what they still had, the aura of fruit slightly too unripe to pick.
Jaimie Kirkland finally said, “My dad got smashed and took out a light post on Marine Drive last night. And Dee’s Cabrio has this funny smell in it since she loaned it to her grandmother, so we thought we’d go native today.”
“Everyone must be flattered.” I sat down. Meaningful stares pinballed from face to face, but I feigned obliviousness. Lauren was the clique’s designated spokeswoman. “Cheryl, I think we should continue our talk from earlier.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
I was trying to decide between Jell-O and fruit cocktail from the cafeteria counter.
Dee cut in: “Cheryl, I think you need to do some confessing to us.” Five sets of eyes drilled into me in judgment.
“Confess to what?” Forcing them to name the deed was fun.
“You,” said Lauren, “and Jason. Fornicating.”
I began giggling, and I could see their righteousness melting away like snow on a car’s hood. And that was when I heard the first gunshot.
Jason and I connected the moment we first met (albeit through some seat switching on my part) in tenth-grade biology class. My family had just moved into the neighborhood from across town. I knew that Jason’s attraction to me would go nowhere unless I learned more about his world. He appealed to me because he was so untouched by life, but I think this attraction for someone dewy clean was unnatural for a girl as young as me. I think most girls want a guy who’s seen a bit of sin, who knows just a little bit more than they do about life.
Jason appeared to be heavily into Youth Alive!, which added to his virginal charm. I later learned that his enthusiastic participation was an illusion, fostered by the fact that Jason’s older brother, Kent, two years ahead of us, was almost head of Alive!‘s Western Canadian division; Jason was roped in and was dragged along in Kent’s dust. Kent was like Jason minus the glow. When I was around Kent, I never felt that life was full of wonder and adventure; Kent made it sound as if our postschool lives were going to be about as exciting as temping in a motor vehicles office. He was always into planning and preparing for the next step. Jason was certainly not into planning. I wonder how much of our relationship was a slap on Kent’s face by his brother who was tired of being scheduled into endless group activities.
In any event, Pastor Fields’s sermons on chastity could only chill the blood in Jason’s loins so long. So I began attending Youth Alive! meetings three times a week, singing “Kumbaya,” bringing along salads and standing in prayer circles – all of this, at first, just to nab Jason Klaasen and his pink chamois skin.
And I did – nab him. We were an item within the group itself, and to the rest of the school an attractive but dull couple. And not a day went by where Jason didn’t ask for something more than a kiss, but I held out. I knew he was into religion just deep enough to think losing his virginity meant crossing a line.
The thing was, I did discover religion during my campaign to catch Jason, and that’s not something I’d expected, as there was nothing in my upbringing that predisposed me to conversion. My family paid lip service to religious convictions. They were fickle – no God being feared there. My family wasn’t so much anti-God as it was pro the world. God got misplaced along the way. Are they lost? Are they damned? I don’t know. I’d be mistrustful of anybody who said they were, and yet here I am, in the calm dark waiting to go off into the Next Place, and I think it’s a different place from where my family’s headed.
My family didn’t know what to make of my conversion. It’s not as if I was a problem teen who rebounded into faith – the most criminal I ever got was generic teenage girl things like prank phone calls and shoplifting.
My parents seemed happy for me in a well-at-least-she’s-not-dating-the-entire-basketball-team kind of way, but when I discussed going to heaven or righteousness, they became constrained and a bit sad. My younger brother, Chris, came to a few Alive! meetings but chose team sports instead. Truth be told, I was glad to have religion all to myself.
Dear God,
I’m going to stop believing in you unless you can tell me what possible good could have come from the bloodshed. I can’t see any meaning or evidence of divine logic.
I can discuss the killings with the detachment I have from being in this new place. The world is pulling away from me, losing its capacity to hurt.
For starters, nobody screamed. That’s maybe the oddest component of the killings. All of us thought the first shots were firecrackers – part of a Halloween prank, as firecracker season starts in early October. When the popping got louder, people in the cafeteria looked to its six wide doors with the expectation of being slightly amused by some young kids doing a stunt. And then this kid from the tenth grade, Mark Something, came tottering in, his chest red and purple from what looked like really bad makeup, and there were some nervous laughs in the room. Then he fell and his head landed the wrong way on the corner of a bench, like a bag of gym equipment. We heard some guys yelling, and three grade eleven students walked into the caf wearing duck-hunting outfits – military green fatigues with camouflage patterns, covered with bulging pockets and strips of ammunition – and right away one of them shot out a bank of overhead fluorescent lights. One of the suspension cables broke and a light bank fell down onto a table of food – the not-very-popular photo club and chess club table. The second guy, in sunglasses and a beret, plucked out two grade nine boys and one girl who were standing at the vending machines. These were messy shots that left a mist of blood on the ivory-colored cinder-block walls. A group of maybe ten students tried bolting for the doors, but the gunmen – gunboys, really – turned and showered them with buckshot or bullets, whatever it is that guns and rifles use.
Two of them got away cleanly and I could hear their footsteps echoing down the corridor. As for the rest of us, there was no escape route, so we clambered underneath the tables, as if in some ancient nuclear drill from the 1960s.
In the summer between grades eleven and twelve, after my conversion and after landing Jason, I had a summer job at a concession stand at Ambleside Beach. It was a dry hot summer and the two other girls I worked with were fun – kind of skinny and nutty and they mimicked the customers quite wickedly. They also didn’t go to Delbrook, so they didn’t have any history with me, which was a relief, and I felt guilty feeling this relief. Youth Alive! was concerned that my constant exposure to semiclad skin, sun and non– Youth Alive! members would make me revert to the World – as if listening to screaming babies and groping for the last purple Popsicle at the bottom of the freezer bin could be a test of faith or tempt me into secular drift. Lauren and Dee and some of the others visited me a bit too often, and I don’t think a night ever went by without returning to my car at shift’s end and finding an Alive!er eager to invite me to a barbecue or a hike or a Spirit Cruise around the harbor.
By the end of that August, Jason was going mental for me. He came into the city on weekends from his job up the coast, surveying for a mining company. A sample conversation from this period might go:
“Cheryl, God would never have made it feel so right or so good unless it was right and good.”
“Jason, could you honestly hold up your head and say to Pastor Fields or your mother or the Lord that you’d been fornicating with Cheryl Anway? Could you?”
Well, of course he couldn’t. There was only one way he could land what he wanted, and that was marriage. One weekend in my bedroom, he said we could get married after graduation. I removed his hand from near my right breast and said, “God doesn’t issue moral credit cards, Jason. He’s not like a bank. You can’t borrow now and pay later.”
“My strength – Cheryl, I’m losing it.”
“Then pray for more. God never sends you a temptation that you aren’t strong enough to overcome.”
I did want Jason but, as I’ve said, only on my own terms, which also happened to be God’s terms. I’m not sure if I used God or He used me, but the result was the same. In the end, we are judged by our deeds, not our wishes. We’re the sum of our decisions.
During none of my lunch-hour confessions, whether at the White Spot drive-in eating fries with the Bunch, or at an Alive! weekend seminar on kingdom building, did I ever once confess how much I needed Jason, in every sort of way. Even thinking of him made me drunk, and all the teenage girl stuff that came with it: bees needing flowers; wanting to dissolve like sugar into tea.
Of course, everybody else in the school was going at it like minks. Nothing was forbidden to them, so why not? It’s indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels. And while the ever-present aura of casual sex saturated the school like locker aroma, I didn’t surrender to my own instincts, though I really did have to wonder why God makes teenagers so desperate. Why could we see Archie and Betty and Veronica on dates at the malt shop, but never screwing around in Archie’s dad’s basement covered in oil stains, spit and semen? Double standard. You can’t do one without implying the other. Preachy me.
Dear Lord,
Protect our children, while they…Lord keep them as…Sorry. I can’t pray right now.
Dear God,
What’s hardest here is that I simply can’t believe this is happening. Why do You make certain kinds of events feel real, but not others? Do You have a name for this? And could You please make all of this feel real?
As I was saying, silence.
In the first few moments of the attack, I remember briefly seeing a patch of sky out the window and I remembered how crisp and clean the day was.
Then one of the boys shot his gun in that direction and stemmed the exodus. I know nothing about guns. Whatever they were, they were powerful, and when they cocked them, it sounded industrial, like a machine stamping something flat.
Under the tables we all dove – thumpa-thumpa-thump.
Don’t shoot at me – I’m not making any noise! Look! Look at How! Quiet! I’m! Being!
Shoot someone else over there! Shoot me? No! Way!
I could have stood up, shouted and caused a diversion and saved a hundred people, or organized the lifting of our table to create a shield to ram into the gunmen. But I sat there like a meek little sheep and it’s the only thing I’ve ever done that disgusts me. Silence was my sin. I sinned as I cowered and watched three pairs of ocher-colored work boots tromp about the room, toying with us as though we were bacteria under a magnifying lens.
I recognized all of the boys – working on the yearbook is good for that kind of thing. There was Mitchell Van Waters. I remembered seeing him down at the smoke hole by the parking lot with his fellow eleventh-grade gunmen, Jeremy Kyriakis and Duncan Boyle.
I watched Mitchell, Jeremy and Duncan walk from table to table. Take away the combat fatigues and they looked like the kid who mows your lawn or shoots hoops in the driveway next door. There was nothing physically interesting about them except that Mitchell was pretty skinny and Duncan had a small port-wine birthmark inside his hairline – I knew about this only because we’d been looking at photos as part of paste-up and layout during class.
As the three walked from table to table, they talked among themselves – most of what they said I couldn’t make out. Some tables they shot at; some they didn’t. As the boys came nearer to us, Lauren pretended to be dead, eyes open, body limp, and I wanted to smack her, but I was just mad at myself, perhaps more than anything for being afraid. It had been drilled into us that to feel fear is to not fully trust God. Whoever made that one up has never been beneath a cafeteria table with a tiny thread of someone else’s blood trickling onto their leg.
One contradiction of the human heart is this: God refuses to see any one person as unique in his or her relationship to Him, and yet we humans see each other as bottomless wells of creativity and uniqueness. I write songs about horses; you make owl-shaped wall hangings; he combs his hair like some guy on TV; she knows the capital city of every country on earth. Inasmuch as uniqueness is an arrogant human assumption, Jason was unique, and because of this, he was lovable. To me. First off, he was terrific with voices – ones he made up and ones he mimicked. As with the girls from my summer job, I was a sucker for anyone who could imitate others. Jason with even one beer in him was better than cable TV. He used his voices the way ventriloquists use their dummies – to say things he was too shy to say himself. Whenever a situation was boring and there was no escaping it – dinner with my family, or party games organized by Pastor Fields’s wife that incorporated name tags and blindfolds – Jason went into his cat character, Mr. No, an otherwise ordinary cat who had a Nielsen TV ratings monitor box attached to his small black-and-white TV. Mr. No hated everything and he showed his displeasure by making a tiny, almost sub-audible squeaking nee-yow sound. I guess you had to be there. But Mr. No made more than a few painful hours a treat.
Jason could also wiggle his ears, and his arms were double-jointed – some of his contortions were utterly harrowing, and I’d scream for him to stop. He also bought me seventeen roses for my seventeenth birthday, and how many boys do you know who’d do that?
I was surprised when Jason did propose – in his dad’s Buick on a rainy August afternoon in the White Spot parking lot over a cheeseburger and an orange float. I was surprised first because he did it, then second because he’d concocted a secret plan that was so wild that only the deadest of souls could refuse. Basically, using money he’d stockpiled from his summer job, we were going to fly to Las Vegas. There in the car, he produced fake IDs, a bottle of Champale and the thinnest of gold rings, barely strong enough to retain its shape. He said, “A ring is a halo for your finger. From now on, we no longer cast two shadows, we cast one.”
“Fake IDs?” I asked.
“I don’t know the legal age there. They’re for backup.”
I looked, and they seemed to be convincing fakes, with our real names and everything, with just the birth dates changed. And as it turned out, the legal age was eighteen, so we did need the fakes.
Jason asked me if I wanted to elope: “No big churchy wedding or anything?”
“Jason, marriage is marriage, and if it were as simple as pushing a button on the dash of this car, I’d do it right now.”
What I didn’t go on about was the sexiness of it all. Sex – finally – plus freedom from guilt or retribution. My only concern was that Jason would develop chilly feet and blab to his buddies or Pastor Fields. I told him that blabbing would be a deal wrecker, and I made him vow, under threat-of-hell conditions, that this would be our secret. I’d also recently been reading a book of religious inspiration geared mainly to men, and I’d dog-eared the chapter that told its readers, essentially, to trust nobody. Friends are always betrayers in the end – everybody has the one person to whom they spill everything, and that special person isn’t always the obvious person you’d think. People are leaky. What kind of paranoid creep would write something like that? Well, whoever it was, it helped further my cause.
The important thing is that we were to marry in the final week of August in Las Vegas. I greased the skids at home and told my folks I was attending a hymn retreat up the coast; I told Lauren and the Alive! crew I was driving to Seattle with my family. Jason did the same thing. It was set.
Dear God,
I’m trying to take my mind off the slayings, but I don’t know if that’s possible. I’ll forget about them for maybe a minute and then I’ll remember again. I tried finding solace looking at the squirrels in the front yard, already gathering food for the winter – and then I got to thinking about how short their lives are – so short that their dreams can only possibly be a full mirroring of their waking lives. So I guess for a squirrel, being awake and being asleep are the same thing. Maybe when you die young it’s like that, too. A baby’s dream would only be the same as being awake – teenagers, too, to some extent. As I’ve said, I’m grasping here for some solace.
Lord,
I know I don’t have a fish sticker, or whatever it is I’m supposed to have on my car bumper, like all those stuck-up kids who think they’re holier than Thou, but I also don’t think they have some sort of express lane to speak to You, so I imagine You’re hearing this okay. I guess my question to You is whether or not You get to torture those evil bastards who did the killings, or if it’s purely the devil’s job and You subcontract it out. Is there any way I can help torture them from down here on earth? Just give me a sign and I’m in.
What I now find odd is how Jason and I both assumed our marriage had to be a secret. It wasn’t from shame, and it wasn’t from fear, because eighteen is eighteen (well, almost) and the law’s the law, so in the eyes of the taxman and the Lord, we could go at it like rabbits all day as long as we paid our taxes and made a few babies along the way. Sometimes life, when laid out plainly like this, can seem so simple.
What appealed to me was that this marriage was something the two of us could have entirely to ourselves, like being the only two guests in a luxury hotel. I knew that if we got engaged and waited until after high school to marry, our marriage would become something else – ours, yes, but not quite ours, either. There would be presents and sex lectures and unwanted intrusions. Who needs all that? And in any event, I had no pictures in my head of life after high school. My girlfriends all wanted to go to Hawaii or California and drive sports cars and, if I correctly read between the lines on the yearbook questionnaires they submitted, have serial monogamous relations with Youth Alive! guys that didn’t necessarily end in marriage. The best I could see for myself was a house, a kid or two, some chicken noodle soup at three in the afternoon while standing at the kitchen sink watching clouds unfurl coastward from Vancouver Island.
I was sure that whatever Jason did for a living would amply fulfill us both – an unpopular sentiment among girls my age. Jason once halfheartedly inquired as to my career ambitions, and when he was certain I had none, he was relieved. His family – churchier than Thou – looked down on girls who worked. If I was ever going to get a job, it would only be to annoy them, his parents – his dad, mostly. He was a mean, dried-out fart who defied charity, and who used religion as a foil to justify his undesirable character traits. His cheapness became thrift; his lack of curiosity about the world and his contempt for new ideas were called being traditional.
Jason’s mother was, well, there’s no way around it, a bit drunk the few times I met her. I don’t think she liked the way her life had played out. Who am I to judge? How the two of them procreated a sweetie-pie like Jason remains one of God’s true mysteries.
If nothing else, relating the step-by-step course of events in the cafeteria allows me to comprehend how distanced from the world I’m feeling now – how quickly the world is pulling away. And for this reason I’ll continue.
After the first dozen shots, the fire alarm went off. Mitchell Van Waters walked to the main cafeteria doors, said, “Goddammit,” and fired into the hall, blasting out the bell ringing there. Jeremy Kyriakis took out the cafeteria’s fire bell in three shots, after which a hail of drywall particles pinged and rattled throughout the otherwise silent room. Beneath the tables we could still hear fire bells ringing from deep within the school’s bowels, bells that would ring past sunset since the RCMP would hold off disabling the central OFF switch for fear of tripping homemade bombs placed throughout the school – bombs made of benzene and powdered swimming-pool cleaner. Wait – how did I know that combo? Oh yes, Mitchell Van Waters’s contribution to the science fair: “Getting the Most Bang for Your Buck.” It was in last year’s yearbook.
Back to the cafeteria.
Back to me and three hundred other students under the tables, either dead or playing dead, scrunching themselves into tiny balls. Back to six work boots clomping on the polished putty-colored linoleum, and the sounds of ambulances and RCMP cruisers whooping schoolward, a little too little, a little too late.
I began doing a numbers game in my head. Three hundred people divided among three gunmen makes a hundred victims per gunman. If they were going to kill us all, it would take a bit of time, so I figured my chances of making it were better than I’d first supposed. But geographically we were in a bad spot: the center of the room, the visual and architectural core of the place, as well as the nexus of any high school’s social ambition and peer envy. Were people envious of Alivers!? We were basically invisible in the school. A few students might have thought we were small-minded and clique-ish, and to be honest, Youth Alive! members were. But I wasn’t. In general, as I walked about the school I affected a calm, composed smile. I did this not because I wanted to be everyone’s friend – or to avoid making enemies – but simply because it was easier and I didn’t need to interact. A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection – it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you’re past it.
Dear Lord,
If You organized a massacre just to make people have doubts, then maybe You ought to consider other ways of doing things. A high school massacre? Kids with pimento loaf sandwiches and cans of Orange Crush? I don’t think You would orchestrate something like this. A massacre in a high school cafeteria can only indicate Your absence – that for some reason, in some manner, You chose to absent Yourself from the room. Forsake it, actually.
Cheryl – the pretty girl who was the last one to be shot. She wrote that in her binder, didn’t she? “God is nowhere.” Maybe she was right.
Dear God,
I’m out of prayers, so that just leaves talking. It’s hard for me to believe other people are feeling as intensely as I do, and as bad as I do. But then, if we’re all as messed up as I am, that scares me into thinking that the world’s all going to go to pieces, and what sort of world would that be? A zoo.
I keep to myself mostly. I can’t sleep or eat. TV stinks. School’s closed for a while yet. I smoked pot and it wasn’t a good idea. I walk around in a daze and it’s like the opposite of drugs, because drugs are supposed to make you feel good, but this only makes me feel bad.
I was walking down at the mall, and suddenly I started hitting myself in the head because I thought I could bash away the feelings. And the thing is, everybody in the mall looked as if they knew what I was doing, and no one flipped out.
Anyway, this is where I stand now. I’m not sure this was a prayer. I don’t know what it was.
I’ve not been too specific about my life and my particulars, but by now you must have gleaned a few things about who I was – Cheryl Anway. The papers are blanketing the world with my most recent yearbook photo, and if you’ve seen it then you’ll know I was a cliché girl next door: darkish blond hair cut in a way that’ll probably look stupid to future students, with a thin face and, on the day the photos were taken, no pimples – how often did that ever happen? In the photo I look old for seventeen. I’m smiling the smile I used when passing people in the halls without having to speak to them.
The description accompanying my photo is along the lines of “Cheryl was a good student, friendly and popular” – and that’s about it. What a waste of seventeen years. Or is that just my selfish heart applying standards of the world to a soul that’s eternal? It is. But by seventeen, nobody ever accomplishes anything, do they? Joan of Arc? Anne Frank? And maybe some musicians and actresses. I’d really like to ask God why it is that we don’t accomplish anything until we’re at least twenty. Why the wait? I think we should be born ten years old, and then after a year turn twenty – just get it over with, like dogs do. We ought to be born running.
Chris and I had a dog, a spaniel named Sterling. We adored Sterling, but Sterling adored gum. We’d go for walks and all he’d do was sniff out sidewalk discards. It was cute and funny, but when I was in grade nine he ate a piece of something that wasn’t gum, and two hours later he was gone. We buried him in the backyard beneath the witch hazel shrub, and I put a cross on his grave, a cross my mother removed after my conversion. I found it in the garden shed between the 5-20-20 and a stack of empty black plastic nursery pots, and I was too chicken to ask her why.
I don’t worry too much about Sterling, as he’s in heaven. Animals never left God – only people did. Lucky animals.
My father works in the mortgage division of Canada Trust, and my mother is a technician in a medical lab. They love their jobs. Chris is a generic little brother, yet not as snotty or pesky as my friends’ little brothers.
At Christmas everyone in our family exchanged bad sweaters and we all wore them as a kind of in-joke. So we were one of those bad-sweater families you see at the mall.
We got along with each other – or we did until recently. It’s like we decided to be superficially happy with each other, which is fine, and that we wouldn’t share intimacies with each other. I don’t know. I think that lack of sharing weakened us.
Dear Lord,
I pray for the souls of the three killers, but I don’t know if that is right or wrong.
It always seemed to me that people who’d discovered religion had both lost and gained something. Outwardly, they’d gained calmness, confidence and a look of purpose, but what they’d lost was a certain willingness to connect with unconverted souls. Looking a convert in the eyes was like trying to make eye contact with a horse. They’d be alive and breathing, but they wouldn’t be a hundred percent there anymore. They’d left the day-to-day world and joined the realm of eternal time. Pastor Fields or Dee or Lauren would have pounced on me if I’d ever spoken those words aloud. Dee would have said something like “Cheryl, you’ve just covered your halo with soot. Repent. Now.”
There can be an archness, a meanness in the lives of the saved, an intolerance that can color their view of the weak and of the lost. It can make them hard when they ought to be listening, judgmental when they ought to be contrite.
Jason’s father, Reg, always said, “Love what God loves and hate what God hates,” but more often than not I had the impression that he really meant “Love what Reg loves and hate what Reg hates.” I don’t think he imparted this philosophy to Jason. Jason was too gentle, too forgiving, to adopt Reg’s self-serving credo. As my mother always told me, “Cheryl, trust me, you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.”
Getting married in Nevada in 1988 was simple. At noon on the final Friday before school started, Jason and I cabbed out to the airport and scanned the list of outgoing flights. There was one to Las Vegas in ninety minutes, so we bought tickets – cash – walked through U.S. Immigration preclearance, went to the gate and were on our way. They didn’t even bother to check our ID. We each had only a gym bag for carry-on and we felt like bandits. It was my first time flying, and everything was new and charged with mystery…the laminated safety cards, the takeoff, which made my stomach cartwheel, the food, which was bad just like they always joke about on TV, and the cigarette smoke; something about Las Vegas attracts the smokers. But it was all like perfume to me, and I tried pretending that every moment of my life could be as full of newness as that flight. What a life that would be.
The two of us had dressed conservatively – shirt and tie for Jason, and me in a schoolmarm dress; our outfits must have made us look all of fifteen. The flight attendant asked us why we were going to Las Vegas and we told her. Ten minutes later there was a captain’s announcement telling everybody on the plane our news and our seat numbers. The other passengers clapped and I blushed like I had a fever, but suddenly it was as if we were blood kin with all these strangers. At the terminal, the men all slapped Jason’s back and har-har’ed, and this one woman whispered to me, “Honey, I don’t care what else you do, but the moment he hints that he wants it, you give it to him. Doesn’t matter if you’re fixing a diaper or cleaning out the gutters. You give it, pronto. Else you’ll lose him.”
It was over a hundred degrees outside, my first exposure to genuine heat, Jason’s too. My lungs had never felt so pure. In the taxi to Caesars Palace I looked out at the desert – real desert – and tried to imagine every parable I’d ever heard taking place in that exotic lifeless nothingness. I couldn’t have stood five minutes out there in that oven, and I wondered how the Bible ever managed to happen. They must have had different weather back then – or trees – or rivers and shade. Good Lord, the desert is harsh. I asked the taxi driver to stop for a second beside a vacant lot between the airport and the Strip. There were some rental units on the other side of a cinder-block fence, some litter and a shedded snakeskin. I got out and it felt as if I were floating over the sharp rocks and angry little plants. Instead of feeling brand new, Las Vegas felt thousands of years old. Jason got out and we both knelt and prayed. Time passed; I felt dizzy and the cabbie honked the horn. We drove to Caesars Palace.
I knew we were goners when Dee knocked over an apple juice can. Clank. The three boys had been across the room shouting pointless fragments of pointless manifestos or whatever moronic ideas they had, but then, yes, the clank. It was so primal to watch their heads swivel toward us, and their eyes focusing – zeroing in like crocodiles in TV documentaries. Dee squeaked.
I heard Duncan Boyle say, “Oh, if it isn’t the Out to Lunch Bunch slumming with us, the damned, here in purgatory, School District 44.” Listening to the inflections of his voice, for just a second I thought to myself that he could sing if he wanted to. I could always tell that about people – if they could sing or not.
Just then, for whatever reason, the overhead sprinklers spritzed on. The boys were distracted and looked up at the ceiling. The water rained down onto the tables, onto the milk cartons and half-empty paper bags; it sounded like rain on a roof. Then it began trickling off the laminated tabletops and dripping onto my jeans and forearms. It was cold and I shivered and Lauren was shivering, too. I put my arm around her and held her to me, her teeth chattering like maracas. Then there were more shots – at us, I assumed, but Mitchell Van Waters blew out some of the sprinkler nozzles, shattering a large pipe, and the water came down on us in buckets.
There was a noise from outside the building and Martin Boyle shouted, “Windows!” He and Mitchell blasted out four large panes opposite us. Then Duncan asked, “Was that a cop I saw out there?”
“What do you think?” Mitchell was mad as hornets. “Rearm!”
The guns made more metallic noises and Mitchell blew out the remaining windows. The school was now like a jewel case encrusted with snipers and cops. Their time with their victims was drawing to an end.
Lord,
I know that faith is not the natural condition of the human heart, but why do You make it so hard to have faith? Were we so far gone here in boring North Van that we needed a shock treatment? There are thousands of suburbs as average as us. Why us then? And why now? You raise the cost of faith and You dilute its plausibility. Is that smart?
Dear God,
I keep on imagining what those kids under the tables must have been feeling and it only makes me angrier and crazier at You. It just does.
Dear God,
I’m prayed out, and yet here I am, still knocking on Your door, but I think this could be the last time.
Dear Lord,
This is the first time I’ve ever prayed because I didn’t grow up with this stuff, but here I am, praying away, so maybe there’s something to it. Maybe I’m wasting my time. You tell me. Send me a sign. You must get a lot of that. Proof proof proof. Because to my mind, the school massacre could mean that You don’t exist just as much – if not more than – it could mean that You do. If I was trying to recruit followers, a school massacre isn’t the way I’d go about doing it. But then it got me here right now, praying, didn’t it?
Just so you know, I’m having my first drink here as I pray my first prayer – apricot liqueur, I skimmed off the top inch of my dad’s bottle. It tastes like penicillin and I like it.
I’ve never told anyone about the moment of my conversion in eleventh grade. I was by myself, out in the backyard in fall, sitting between two huckleberry shrubs that had survived the mountainside’s suburban development. I closed my eyes and faced the sun and that was that – ping! – the sensation of warmth on my eyelids and the smell of dry cedar and fir branches in my nose. I never expected angels and trumpets, nor did any appear. The moment made me feel special, and yet, of course, nothing makes a person less special than conversion – it…universalizes you.
But then how special can any person really be? I mean, you have a name and some ancestors. You have medical, educational and work histories, as well as immediate living family and friends. And after that there’s not much more. At least in my case. At the time of my death, my life’s résumé consisted of school, sports, a few summer jobs and my Youth Alive! involvement. My death was the only remarkable aspect of my life. I’m rummaging through my memories trying to find even a few things to distinguish me from all others. And yet…and yet I was me – nobody saw the world as I did, nor did they feel the things I felt. I was Cheryl Anway: that has to count for something.
And I did have questions and uneasy moments after my conversion. I wondered why it is that going to heaven is the only goal of religion, because it’s such a selfish thing. The Out to Lunch Bunch talked about going to heaven in the same breath as they discussed hair color. Leading a holy life inside a burgundy-colored VW Cabrio seems like a spiritual contradiction. Jason once joked that if you read Revelations closely, you could see where it says that Dee Carswell counting the calories in a packet of Italian dressing is a sign of imminent apocalypse. And yet we all possessed the capacity for slipping at any moment into great sin and eternal darkness. I suppose it’s what made me a bit withdrawn from the world – maybe I just didn’t trust anybody fully, knowing how close we all were to the edge. That’s not true: I trusted Jason.
Whenever I felt doubts I overcompensated by trying to witness to whoever was nearby, usually my family. And when they even remotely sensed religion coming up, they either nodded politely or they bolted. I can’t imagine what they said about me when I wasn’t there. In any event, I think in the end it’s maybe best to keep your doubts private. Saying them aloud cheapens them – makes them a bunch of words just like everybody else’s bunch of words.
I don’t think I fully understood sleaze until Jason and I entered the chilled lobby of Caesars Palace on that day of burning winds and X-ray sunlight. It stank of American cigarettes, smoky blue and tarlike, and of liquor. A woman dressed up like a centurion with balloon boobs and stage makeup asked us for our drink order. She reminded me of a novelty cocktail shaker. The thing is, we said yes, and Jason ordered two gin fizzes – where did that come from? They arrived within moments and there we stood, dumb as planks, while the most desperate sort of gamblers – I mean, this was August in the middle of the desert – slunk past us, serenaded by the endless rattling and dinging of the slot machines. I don’t think I’d ever seen so many souls teetering so precariously on the brink of colossal sin. Hypocritical me. We’re all equally on the brink of all sins.
We went up to our room: shabby and yellowing. I couldn’t figure out why such a splashy place would have such dumpy rooms, but Jason said it was to drive people down into the casinos.
Once the door was closed, it was a bit awkward. Until then, it had all felt like a field trip. We sat on the edge of the bed and Jason asked if I still wanted to get married, and I said yes – I’d caught a sliver of his naked behind through the bathroom door’s hinge crack as he changed into his other pair of pants.
As we sat there, we realized our clothes, even in the airconditioned room, were far too hot for the climate. Jason shed his tie, and I replaced my all-concealing “skin is sin” dress with a jacket and skirt, the only other garments I’d brought – something like you’d wear to work on a Wednesday morning.
Sooner than I’d have liked we were out the door, appearing to the world as if we were headed to a $2.99 all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet or to lose ourselves for a few hours in front of the dime slots with the pensioners. We were alone in the elevator and kissed briefly, and then we staggered through the lobby bombarded again by a wash of noise and sleaze.
Outside it was nearing sunset. An ashtray on wheels picked us up. The cabbie was a fat guy with an East Coast accent and exactly one hair on his forehead, just like Charlie Brown. He slapped the steering wheel when we asked him to take us to a chapel. He told us his name, Evan, and we asked him if he’d be our witness. He said sure, he’d stand up for us, and for the first time that day I felt not just as if I was getting married, but also like a bride.
The chapels were itty-bitty things, and we tried to find one in which celebrities had never been married, as if a celebrity aura could somehow crush the holy dimension of a Las Vegas wedding. I don’t know what we were thinking. Evan ended up choosing a chapel for us, mostly because it included a snack platter and sparkling wine in the price of the service.
There was paperwork; our fake IDs aroused no suspicion. Out the little stained-glass window up front the sun was like a juicy tangerine on the horizon. Quickly, a dramatically tanned man in white rayon, who might just as easily have been offering us a deal on a condominium time-share, declared us legally wed.
Nearing the front door, Jason said, “Well, it’s not quite two hundred and fifty of our nearest and dearest, is it?”
I was so giddy: “A civil wedding. What would your dad say?”
We went outside, leaving Evan to his snack platter – out into the hot air scented by exhaust fumes, snapdragons and litter, just the two of us, dwarfed by the casinos and dreaming of the future, of the lights, both natural and false, appearing in the sky, and of sex.
I hoped that both the shooting of the windows and the flooding sprinklers would distract the three boys, but this didn’t happen. Instead, they began to fight among themselves. Mitchell was furious with Jeremy for wasting ammunition that could be more effectively used “killing those stuck-up pigs who feed on taunting anybody who doesn’t have a numbered sweater.” To this end, Mitchell fired across the room, into a huddled mass of younger students – the junior jocks, I think, but I can’t be very sure, because the tabletops and chairs blocked my view. I also didn’t know whether the gunshots scattered or formed a concentrated beam, but I clearly remember blood from the huddle mixing with the streams of sprinkler water that trickled along the linoleum’s slight slant, down to behind the bank of vending machines. The machines made a quick electrical fizz noise and went dead. From the huddle came a few screams, some moans and then silence. Mitchell shouted, “We know that most of you aren’t dead or even wounded, so don’t think we’re stupid. Duncan, should we go over and see who’s fibbing and who isn’t?”
“I don’t know – I could get a bit more pumped about all of this if saggy-assed Jeremy would start pulling his weight.”
The two turned to Jeremy, the least talkative of the three. Mitchell said, “What’s the matter – deciding to convert into a jock all of a sudden? Gee, won’t that make the Out to Lunch Bunch hot for you. A killer with a heart of gold.”
Jeremy said, “Mitchell, shut up. Like we haven’t noticed that all your shots are missing their mark? The only reason you shot out the windows was because it’s impossible to miss them.”
Mitchell got angrier. “You know what? I think you’re jamming out, and you’re jamming out a little bit too late into the game, I think.”
“What if I was to jam out?”
Mitchell said, “Watch this,” and fired across the room, killing a boy named Clay, whose locker was four down from mine. “There, see? Killing is fun. Jam out now, and you’re next.”
“I quit.”
“No, Jeremy, it’s too late for that. Duncan, what would you guess Jeremy’s tally up to this moment has been?”
Duncan calculated. “Four definite hits and five maybes.”
Mitchell turned to Jeremy: “Ha! And you expect mercy from the world?”
“I quit.”
Mitchell said, “What do we have here – a Hitler-in-the-bunker scenario?”
“Call it what you will.” Jeremy dropped his weapons.
Mitchell said, “Execution time.”
Being married was wild. It was worth all the delays and pleas and postponement of pleasure, and you know, this isn’t some guidance-class hygiene film speaking to you – it’s me. I was me. We were us. It was all real, and wild, and it is my most cherished memory of having been alive – a night of abandon on the sixteenth floor of Caesars Palace.
I doubt we said even three words to each other all night; Jason’s dewy antler-soft skin made words feel stupid. By six in the morning we were in a cab headed back to the airport. On the flight north, we didn’t speak much, either. And I felt married. I loved the sensation, and it’s why I remained silent – trying to pinpoint the exact nature of this new buzz: sex, certainly, but more than that, too.
Of course, the Out to Lunch Bunch and all of the Alive! crew could tell right away that something was up. We simply didn’t care as much for the group as before, and it showed. The corny little lunchtime confessions over french fries were so dull as to be unlistenable; Pastor Fields’s team sports metaphors and chastity pleas seemed equally juvenile to Jason. We knew what we had, and we knew what we wanted, and we knew that we wanted more. Then there was the issue of how we were going to go about telling our families. Jason imagined a formal dinner at a good restaurant during which to break the news – between the main course and the dessert – but I said I didn’t want our marriage to be treated like a chorus girl jumping out of a cake. I’m not clear if Jason’s desire for a formal dinner was his concept of maturity, or if he wanted to shock a crowd like an evil criminal mastermind. He did have his exhibitionist streak: I mean, in Las Vegas he’d refused to close the curtains and he was always trying to sneak me into the change room at the Bootlegger jeans store. No go.
So yes, we’d had a fight on the phone about this matter the night before my pregnancy test. Jason was angry with me for dragging my heels about announcing the marriage, and I was angry with him for wanting to be a – I don’t know – a show-off.
And that’s as far as I got in my life, my baby as well. I don’t think I’ve concealed anything here, and there’s not much left to explain. God owns everything. I was not replaceable, but nor was I indispensable. It was my time.
Dear God,
I am so full of hate that I’m scaring myself. Is there a word to describe wanting to kill people who are already dead? Because that’s what’s in my heart. I remember last year being in the backyard with my father. We lifted up this sheet of plywood that had been lying on the grass all winter. Underneath were thousands of worms, millipedes, beetles and a snake, all either eating or being eaten, and that is my heart, and the hate and the insects grow and grow blacker by the hour. I want to kill the killers, and I just can’t believe that this would be a sin.
Lord,
My son described the blood and water pooling on the cafeteria floor, coating it like Varathane. He told me about the track marks left in blood by running shoes, by bare feet and by bodies either dragging themselves or being dragged away by friends. There’s something else he’s not telling me – a father knows that – but what could be more horrible than – Oh God, this is not a prayer.
I can’t help but wonder if the other girls thought I used God as an excuse to hook up with Jason, or that I confused one with the other. Maybe I wasn’t truly in love with Jason; maybe it was just an infatuation, or maybe it was only some sort of animal need like any teenager feels.
Listen to me, practical Cheryl, covering my bases, even after death. But I know that when I was alive I did face these questions: I loved Jason, but what I felt for God was different altogether. I kept them separate.
As Mitchell was aiming at me, there were sirens outside, helicopters, alarm bells throughout the school and water splashing down from the shattered pipe. As well, Duncan was egging Mitchell on to kill Jeremy, too, and my hopes had flip-flopped – now I thought I might survive. Then Jeremy said, “Go ahead, Mitchell, shoot me – like I care.”
Mitchell seemed to be short-circuiting. He hadn’t anticipated this scenario. He turned a bit to his left, looked down at me and the Bunch, then took his rifle and shot me on my left side. He really wasn’t a good shot, because he was five paces away, and I should have been dead instantly. And quite honestly, it didn’t hurt, the shooting, and I didn’t die immediately, either. Lauren, bless her, lunged away from me, leaving me there on the floor on top of my binder, which the water had sloshed off the tabletop. At my new angle, I could see much better what was transpiring. Mitchell said, “Well, Jeremy, you stud, that’s one less girl for you to impress,” and Jeremy said, “Dear God, I repent for my sins. Forgive me for all I have done.”
In unison, Mitchell and Duncan shrieked, “What?” and turned to Jeremy, blasted him enough to kill him a dozen times over. Then I heard Jason’s voice from the cafeteria doors – something along the lines of “Put those guns down now.”
Mitchell said, “You have got to be kidding.”
“I’m not kidding.”
Mitchell shot at Jason and missed, and then I saw something that looked like a lump of gray art-class clay fly through the air and crack Mitchell on the side of his head, so fiercely that I could see his skull implode.
At this point, the boys in the camera club lifted up their table and used it as a shield as they charged against the sole surviving gunman, Duncan Boyle. It was covered with paper bags and some cookies that had been glued in place by blood. They charged into Duncan, pressing him against a blank spot of cinder-block wall. I saw the rifle fall to the ground, and then I saw the boys from the camera club laying the table flat on the ground on top of Duncan and begin jumping up and down on it like a grape press. They were making hooting noises, and people from the other tables came and joined in and the table became a killing game as all of these children, boys and girls, who fifteen minutes earlier had been peacefully eating peanut butter sandwiches and oranges, became savages, killing without pause. Duncan’s blood dribbled out from under the table.
Lauren called out, and Jason came over and lifted the table off me like a hurricane lifting off a roof. I know he said something to me, but my hearing was gone. He tried holding me up, but my neck was limp, and all I could see was across the room, children crushing other children. And that was that.
To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition. And I believe I accepted God, and I fully accepted this sorrow, even though until the events in the cafeteria, there hadn’t been too much of it in my life. I may have looked like just another stupid teenage girl, but it was all in there – God, and sorrow and its acceptance.
And now I’m neither dead nor alive, neither awake nor asleep, and soon I’m headed off to the Next Place, but my Jason will continue amid the living.
Oh, Jason. In his heart, he knows I’ll at least be trying to watch him from beyond, whatever beyond may be. And in his heart, I think, he’s now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I’ve said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.
Part Two 1999: Jason (#ulink_a30315ad-833b-546e-a8c5-b8def19a558b)
You won’t see me in any of the photographs after the massacre – you know the ones I mean: the wire service shots of the funerals, students felt-penning teenage poetry on Cheryl’s casket; teenage prayer groups in sweats and scrunchies huddled on the school’s slippery gym floor; 6:30 A.M. prayer breakfasts in the highway off-ramp chain restaurants, with all the men wearing ties while dreaming of hash browns. I’m in none of them, and if you had seen me, I sure wouldn’t have been praying.
I want to say that right from the start.
Just one hour ago, I was a good little citizen in a Toronto-Dominion bank branch over in North Van, standing in line, and none of this was even on my mind. I was there to deposit a check from my potbellied contractor boss, Les, and I was wondering if I should blow off the afternoon’s work. My hand reached down into my pocket, and instead of a check, my sunburnt fingers removed the invitation to my brother’s memorial service. I felt as if I’d just opened all the windows of a hot muggy car.
I folded it away and wrote down today’s date on the deposit slip. I checked the wall calendar – August 19, 1999 – and What the heck, I wrote a whole row of zeroes before the year, so that the date read: August 19, 00000001999. Even if you hated math, which I certainly do, you’d know that this is still mathematically the same thing as 1999.
When I gave the slip and the check to the teller, Dean, his eyes widened, and he looked up at me as if I’d handed him a holdup note. “Sir,” he said, “this isn’t a proper date.”
I said, “Yes, it is. What makes you think it isn’t?”
“The extra zeroes.”
Dean was wearing a deep blue shirt, which annoyed me. “What is your point?” I asked.
“Sir, the year is nineteen ninety-nine, not zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one nine nine nine.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I’d like to speak with the branch manager.”
Dean called over Casey, a woman who was maybe about my age, and who had the pursed hardness of someone who spends her days delivering bad news to people and knows she’ll be doing it until her hips shatter. Casey and Dean had a hushed talk, and then she spoke to me. “Mr. Klaasen, may I ask you why you’ve written this on your slip?”
I stood my ground: “Putting more zeroes in front of ‘1999’ doesn’t make the year any different.”
“Technically, no.”
“Look, I hated math as much as you probably did –”
“I didn’t hate math, Mr. Klaasen.”
Casey was on the spot, but then so was I. It’s not as if I’d walked into the bank planning all those extra zeroes. They just happened, and now I had to defend them. “Okay. But maybe what the zeroes do point out is that in a billion years – and there will be a billion years – we’ll all be dust. Not even dust: we’ll be molecules.”
Silence.
I said, “Just think, there are still a few billion years of time out there, just waiting to happen. Billions of years, and we’re not going to be here to see them.”
Silence.
Casey said, “Mr. Klaasen, if this is some sort of joke, I can try to understand its abstract humor, but I don’t think this slip meets the requirements of a legal banking document.”
Silence.
I said, “But doesn’t it make you think? Or want to think?”
“About what?”
“About what happens to us after we die.”
This was my real mistake. Dean telegraphed Casey a savvy little glance, and in a flash I knew that they knew about me, about Cheryl, about 1988 and about my reputation as a borderline nutcase – He never really got over it, you know. I’m used to this. I was furious but kept my cool. I said, “I think I’d like to close my account – convert to cash, if I could.”
The request was treated with the casualness I might have received if I’d asked them to change a twenty. “Of course. Dean, could you help Mr. Klaasen close out his account?”
I asked, “That’s it? ‘Dean, could you help Mr. Klaasen close out his account?’ No debate? No questions?”
Casey looked at me. “Mr. Klaasen, I have two daughters and I can barely think past next month’s mortgage, let alone the year two billion one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. My hunch is that you’d be happier elsewhere. I’m not trying to get rid of you, but I think you know where I’m coming from.”
She wasn’t wearing a wedding band. “Can I take you out to lunch?” I asked.
“What?”
“Dinner, then.”
“No!” The snaking line was eavesdropping big time. “Dean, there should be no complications in closing Mr. Klaasen’s account.” She looked at me. “Mr. Klaasen, I have to go.”
My anger became gray emotional fuzz, and I just wanted to leave. Inside of five minutes, Dean had severed my connection to his bank, and I stood on the curb smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, my shirt untucked and $5,210.00 stuffed into the pockets of my green dungarees. I decided to leave the serene, heavily bylawed streets of North Vancouver and drive to West Vancouver, down near the ocean. At the Seventeenth and Bellevue CIBC I opened a checking account, and when I looked behind the tellers I saw an open vault. I asked if it was possible to rent a safety deposit box, which took all of three minutes to do. That box is where I’m going to place all of this, once it’s finished. And here’s the deal: if I get walloped by a bus next year, this letter is going to be placed in storage until May 30, 2019, when you, my two nephews, turn twenty-one. If I hang around long enough, I might hand it to you in person. But for now, that’s where this letter is headed.
Just so you know, I’ve been writing all of this in the cab of my truck, parked on Bellevue, down by Ambleside Beach, near the pier with all its bratty kids on rollerblades and the Vietnamese guys with their crab traps pursuing E. coli. I’m using a pen embossed with “Travelodge” and I’m writing on the back of Les’s pink invoice forms. The wind is heating up – God, it feels nice on my face – and I feel, in the most SUV-commercial sense of the word, free.
How to start?
First off, Cheryl and I were married. No one knows that but me, and now you. It was insane, really. I was seventeen and starved for sex, but I was still stuck in my family’s religious warp, so only husband/wife sex was allowed, and even then for procreation only, and even then only while both partners wore heavy wool tweeds so as to drain the act of pleasure. So when I suggested to Cheryl that we fly to Las Vegas and get hitched, she floored me when she said yes. It was an impulsive request I made after our math class saw an educational 16mm film about gambling. The movie was supposed to make high school students more enthusiastic about statistics. I mean, what were these filmmakers thinking?
And what was I thinking? Marriage? Las Vegas}
We flew down there one weekend and – I mean, we weren’t even people then, we were so young and out of it. We were like baby chicks. No. We were like zygotes, little zygotes cabbing from the airport to Caesars Palace, and all I could think about was how hot and dry the air was. In any event, it seems like a billion years ago.
Around sunset, we got married, using our fake IDs. Our witness was a slob of a cabbie who drove us down the Strip. For the next six weeks my grades evaporated, sports became a nuisance, and my friends became ghosts. The only thing that counted was Cheryl, and because we kept the marriage secret, it was way better and more forbidden feeling than if we’d waited and done all the sensible stuff.
There were some problems when we got home. This churchy group Cheryl and I were in, Youth Alive!, crabby morality spooks who spied on us for weeks, likely with the blessing of my older brother, Kent. When I was in twelfth grade, Kent was in second year at the University of Alberta, but he was still a honcho, and I can only imagine the phone conversations he must have been having with the local Alive! creeps:
Were the lights on or off?
Which lights?
Did they order in pizza?
What time did they leave?
Separately or together?
As if we hadn’t noticed we were being spied on. Yet in fairness, the Alive!ers were baby chicks, too. We all were. Seventeen is nothing. You’re still in the womb.
There are a number of things a woman can tell about a man who is roughly twenty-nine years old, sitting in the cab of a pickup truck at 3:37 in the afternoon on a weekday, facing the Pacific, writing furiously on the back of pink invoice slips. Such a man may or may not be employed, but regardless, there is mystery there. If this man is with a dog, then that’s good, because it means he’s capable of forming relationships. But if the dog is a male dog, that’s probably a bad sign, because it means the guy is likely a dog, too. A girl dog is much better, but if the guy is over thirty, any kind of dog is a bad sign regardless, because it means he’s stopped trusting humans altogether. In general, if nothing else, guys my age with dogs are going to be work.
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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Douglas Coupland
The story of one family piecing itself back together after a tragic highschool shooting, Hey Nostradamus! is Douglas Coupland’s most soulful, piercing and searching novel yet.Pregnant and secretly married, Cheryl Anway scribbles her last will and testament – and erie premonition – on a school binder shortly before a rampaging trio of misfit classmates gun her down in a high school cafeteria. Overrun with paranoia, teenage angst and religious zeal in the ensuing massacre's wake, this sleepy Vancouver neighbourhood declares its saints, brands its demons and finally moves on.But for a handful of people still reeling from that horrific day, life remains perpetually derailed. Four dramatically different characters tell their stories in their own words: Cheryl, who calmly narrates her own death; Jason, the boy no one knew was her husband, still marooned ten years later by his loss; Heather, the woman trying to love the shattered Jason; and Jason's father Reg, a cruelly religious man no one suspects is still worth loving. Each wrestles with God, self-defeat and a crippling inability to hold on to those they love.Coupland's most surprising and soulful novel yet, rich with his trademark cultural acuity and dark humour, Hey Nostradamus! ties themes of alienation, violence and misguided faith into a fateful and unforgettable knot from which four people must untangle their lives.
Hey Nostradamus!
Douglas Coupland
Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.
I Cor. 15:51-52
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#uf38ca769-cca4-57df-89d2-77bc49bfdde3)
Title Page (#uc2079ae8-026a-5d71-a208-a54f3a648dc8)
Epigraph (#ub8feffad-2c95-54e4-9d0e-96089c8f5a13)
Part One 1988: Cheryl (#u671e4833-3905-5e84-9854-476e58c898c1)
Part Two 1999: Jason (#u97c6e9dd-ff4b-525f-a9b8-7b0124c6b958)
Part Three 2002: Heather (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four 2003: Reg (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
MEET (#litres_trial_promo)
BRIEF (#litres_trial_promo)
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Part One 1988: Cheryl (#ulink_343d0a9b-8bd5-574d-8241-53bdc3ac4669)
I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world – spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley – is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins. Even those of us who try to live a good and true life remain as far away from grace as the Hillside Strangler or any demon who ever tried to poison the village well. What happened that morning only confirms this.
It was a glorious fall morning. The sun burned a girly pink over the mountain ranges to the west, and the city had yet to generate its daily smog blanket. Before driving to school in my little white Chevette, I went into the living room and used my father’s telescope to look down at the harbor, as smooth as mercury, and on its surface I could see the moon dimming over East Vancouver. And then I looked up into the real sky and saw the moon on the cusp of being overpowered by the sun.
My parents had already gone to work, and my brother, Chris, had left for swim team hours before. The house was quiet – not even a clock ticking – and as I opened the front door, I looked back and saw some gloves and unopened letters on the front hallway desk. Beyond them, on the living room’s gold carpet, were some discount warehouse sofas and a lamp on a side table that we never used because the light bulb always popped when we switched it on. It was lovely, all that silence and all that calm order, and I thought how lucky I was to have had a good home. And then I turned and walked outside. I was already a bit late, but I was in no hurry.
Normally I used the garage door, but today I wanted a touch of formality. I had thought that this morning would be my last truly innocent glance at my childhood home – not because of what really ended up happening, but because of another, smaller drama that was supposed to have unfolded.
I’m glad that the day was as quiet and as average as it was. The air was see-your-breath chilly, and the front lawn was crunchy with frost, as though each blade had been batter fried. The brilliant blue and black Steller’s jays were raucous and clearly up to no good on the eaves trough, and because of the frost, the leaves on the Japanese maples had been converted into stained-glass shards. The world was unbearably pretty, and it continued being so all the way down the mountain to school. I felt slightly high because of the beauty, and the inside of my head tickled. I wondered if this is how artists go through life, with all of its sensations tickling their craniums like a peacock feather.
I was the last to park in the school’s lot. That’s always such an uneasy feeling no matter how together you think you are – being the last person there, wherever there may be.
I was carrying four large binders and some textbooks, and when I tried shutting the Chevette’s door, it wouldn’t close properly. I tried slamming it with my hip, but that didn’t work; it only made the books spray all over the pavement. But I didn’t get upset.
Inside the school, classes were already in session and the hallways were as silent as the inside of my house, and I thought to myself, What a day for silence.
I needed to go to my locker before class, and as I was working my combination lock, Jason came up from behind.
“Boo.”
“Jason – don’t do that. Why aren’t you in class?”
“I saw you parking, so I left.”
“You just walked out?”
“Forget about that, Miss Priss. Why were you being so weird on the phone last night?”
“I was being weird?”
“Jesus, Cheryl – don’t act like your airhead friends.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. You’re my wife, so act like it.”
“How should I be acting, then?”
“Cheryl, look: in God’s eyes we’re not two individuals, okay? We’re one unit now. So if you dick around with me, then you’re only dicking around with yourself.”
And Jason was right. We were married – had been for about six weeks at that point – but we were the only ones who knew it.
I was late for school because I’d wanted everyone out of the house before I used a home pregnancy test. I was quite calm about it – I was a married woman, and shame wasn’t a factor. My period was three weeks late, and facts were facts.
Instead of the downstairs bathroom I shared with my brother, I used the guest bathroom upstairs. The guest bathroom felt one notch more medical, one notch less tinged by personal history – less accusatory, to be honest. And the olive fixtures and foil wallpaper patterned with brown bamboo looked swampy and dank when compared to the test’s scientific white-and-blue box. And there’s not much more to say, except that fifteen minutes later I was officially pregnant and I was late for math class.
“Jesus, Cheryl…”
“Jason, don’t curse. You can swear, but don’t curse.”
“Pregnant?”
I was quiet.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m late for math class. Aren’t you even happy?”
A student walked by, maybe en route to see the principal.
Jason squinted like he had dust in his eyes. “Yeah – well, of course – sure I am.”
I said, “Let’s talk about it at homeroom break.”
“I can’t. I’m helping Coach do setup for the Junior A team. I promised him ages ago. Lunchtime then. In the cafeteria.”
I kissed him on his forehead. It was soft, like antlers I’d once touched on a petting zoo buck. “Okay. I’ll see you there.”
He kissed me in return and I went to math class.
I was on the yearbook staff, so I can be precise here. Delbrook Senior Secondary is a school of 1,106 students located about a five-minute walk north of the Trans-Canada Highway, up the algae-green slope of Vancouver’s North Shore. It opened in the fall of 1962, and by 1988, my senior year, its graduates numbered about thirty-four thousand. During high school, most of them were nice enough kids who’d mow lawns and baby-sit and get drunk on Friday nights and maybe wreck a car or smash a fist through a basement wall, not even knowing why they’d done it, only that it had to happen. Most of them grew up in rectangular postwar homes that by 1988 were called tear-downs by the local real estate agents. Nice lots. Nice trees and vines. Nice views.
As far as I could tell, Jason and I were the only married students ever to have attended Delbrook. It wasn’t a neighborhood that married young. It was neither religious nor irreligious, although back in eleventh-grade English class I did a tally of the twenty-six students therein: five abortions, three dope dealers, two total sluts, and one perpetual juvenile delinquent. I think that’s what softened me up for conversion: I didn’t want to inhabit that kind of moral world. Was I a snob? Was I a hypocrite? And who was I to even judge? Truth be told, I wanted everything those kids had, but I wanted it by playing the game correctly. This meant legally and religiously and – this is the part that was maybe wrong – I wanted to outsmart the world. I had, and continue to have, a nagging suspicion that I used the system simply to get what I wanted. Religion included. Does that cancel out whatever goodness I might have inside me?
Jason was right: Miss Priss.
Math class was x’s and y’s and I felt trapped inside a repeating dream, staring at these two evil little letters who tormented me with their constant need to balance and be equal with each other. They should just get married and form a new letter together and put an end to all the nonsense. And then they should have kids.
I thought about my own child-to-be as I stared out the window, turning the pages only when I heard everybody else turn theirs. I saw fleeting images of breast-feeding, prams and difficult labor, my knowledge of motherhood being confined mostly to magazines and cartoons. I ignored Lauren Hanley, two rows over, who held a note in her hand that she obviously wanted me to read. Lauren was one of the few people left from my Youth Alive! group who would still speak to me after rumors began spreading that Jason and I were making it.
Carol Schraeger passed the note my way; it was a plea from Lauren to talk during homeroom break. We did, out by her locker. I know Lauren saw this meeting as being charged with drama, and my serenity must have bothered her.
“Everyone’s talking, Cheryl. Your reputation is being tarnished. You have to do something about it.”
Lauren was probably the key blabber, but I was a married woman, so why should I care? I said, “Let people say what they want, Lauren. I take comfort in knowing that my best friends are squelching any rumors from the start, right?”
She reddened. “But everyone knows your Chevette was parked at Jason’s all weekend while his parents were away in the Okanogan.”
“So?”
“So you guys could have been doing anything in there – not that you were – but imagine what it looked like.”
Truth was, Jason and I were doing everything in there that weekend, but I have to admit that for a moment or two I enjoyed watching Lauren squirm at my nonresponse. In any event, I was far too preoccupied to have any sort of conversation. I told Lauren I had to go to my homeroom and sequence some index cards for an oral presentation later that afternoon on early Canadian fur trappers, and I left.
In homeroom I sat at my desk and wrote over and over on my pale blue binder the words GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE/GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE. When this binder with these words was found, caked in my evaporating blood, people made a big fuss about it, and when my body is shortly lowered down into the planet, these same words will be felt-penned all over the surface of my white coffin. But all I was doing was trying to clear out my head and think of nothing, to generate enough silence to make time stand still.
Stillness is what I have here now – wherever here is. I’m no longer a part of the world and I’m still not yet a part of what follows. I think there are others from the shooting here with me, but I can’t tell where. And for whatever it’s worth, I’m no longer pregnant, and I have no idea what that means. Where’s my baby? What happened to it? How can it just go away like that?
It’s quiet here – quiet like my parents’ house, and quiet in the way I wanted silence when writing on my binder. The only sounds I can hear are prayers and curses; they’re the only sounds with the power to cross over to where I am.
I can only hear the words of these prayers and curses – not the voice of the speaker. I’d like to hear from Jason and my family, but I’m unable to sift them out.
Dear God,
Remove the blood from the souls of these young men and women. Strip their memories of our human vileness. Return them to the Garden and make them babes, make them innocent. Erase their memories of today.
As I’m never going to be old, I’m glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness: the first thirty seconds of the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita”; pigeons sitting a fist apart on the light posts entering Stanley Park; huckleberries both bright orange and dusty blue the first week of June; powdered snow down to the middle gondola tower of Grouse Mountain by the third week of every October; grilled-cheese sandwiches and the sound of lovesick crows on the electrical lines each May. The world is a glorious place, and filled with so many unexpected moments that I’d get lumps in my throat, as though I were watching a bride walk down the aisle – moments as eternal and full of love as the lifting of veils, the saying of vows and the moment of the first wedded kiss.
The lunch hour bell rang and the hallways erupted into ordered hubbub. Normally I wouldn’t have gone to the cafeteria; I was part of the Out to Lunch Bunch – six girls from the Youth Alive! program. We’d go down to one of the fast-food places at the foot of the mountain for salad bar, fries and ice water. Our one rule was that every lunch we had to confess a sin to the group. I always made mine up: I’d stolen a blusher from the drugstore; I’d peeked at my brother’s porn stash – nothing too big, but nothing too small, either. In the end, it was simply easier to be with five people in a restaurant booth than three hundred in a cafeteria. I was antisocial at heart. And if people knew how dull our lunches were, they’d never have bothered to waste energy calling us stuck-up. So, I was surprised when I went into the cafeteria to meet Jason to find the Bunch hogging one of the cafeteria’s prime center tables. I asked, “So what’s this all about?”
Their faces seemed so – young to me. Unburdened. Newly born. I wondered if I’d now lost what they still had, the aura of fruit slightly too unripe to pick.
Jaimie Kirkland finally said, “My dad got smashed and took out a light post on Marine Drive last night. And Dee’s Cabrio has this funny smell in it since she loaned it to her grandmother, so we thought we’d go native today.”
“Everyone must be flattered.” I sat down. Meaningful stares pinballed from face to face, but I feigned obliviousness. Lauren was the clique’s designated spokeswoman. “Cheryl, I think we should continue our talk from earlier.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
I was trying to decide between Jell-O and fruit cocktail from the cafeteria counter.
Dee cut in: “Cheryl, I think you need to do some confessing to us.” Five sets of eyes drilled into me in judgment.
“Confess to what?” Forcing them to name the deed was fun.
“You,” said Lauren, “and Jason. Fornicating.”
I began giggling, and I could see their righteousness melting away like snow on a car’s hood. And that was when I heard the first gunshot.
Jason and I connected the moment we first met (albeit through some seat switching on my part) in tenth-grade biology class. My family had just moved into the neighborhood from across town. I knew that Jason’s attraction to me would go nowhere unless I learned more about his world. He appealed to me because he was so untouched by life, but I think this attraction for someone dewy clean was unnatural for a girl as young as me. I think most girls want a guy who’s seen a bit of sin, who knows just a little bit more than they do about life.
Jason appeared to be heavily into Youth Alive!, which added to his virginal charm. I later learned that his enthusiastic participation was an illusion, fostered by the fact that Jason’s older brother, Kent, two years ahead of us, was almost head of Alive!‘s Western Canadian division; Jason was roped in and was dragged along in Kent’s dust. Kent was like Jason minus the glow. When I was around Kent, I never felt that life was full of wonder and adventure; Kent made it sound as if our postschool lives were going to be about as exciting as temping in a motor vehicles office. He was always into planning and preparing for the next step. Jason was certainly not into planning. I wonder how much of our relationship was a slap on Kent’s face by his brother who was tired of being scheduled into endless group activities.
In any event, Pastor Fields’s sermons on chastity could only chill the blood in Jason’s loins so long. So I began attending Youth Alive! meetings three times a week, singing “Kumbaya,” bringing along salads and standing in prayer circles – all of this, at first, just to nab Jason Klaasen and his pink chamois skin.
And I did – nab him. We were an item within the group itself, and to the rest of the school an attractive but dull couple. And not a day went by where Jason didn’t ask for something more than a kiss, but I held out. I knew he was into religion just deep enough to think losing his virginity meant crossing a line.
The thing was, I did discover religion during my campaign to catch Jason, and that’s not something I’d expected, as there was nothing in my upbringing that predisposed me to conversion. My family paid lip service to religious convictions. They were fickle – no God being feared there. My family wasn’t so much anti-God as it was pro the world. God got misplaced along the way. Are they lost? Are they damned? I don’t know. I’d be mistrustful of anybody who said they were, and yet here I am, in the calm dark waiting to go off into the Next Place, and I think it’s a different place from where my family’s headed.
My family didn’t know what to make of my conversion. It’s not as if I was a problem teen who rebounded into faith – the most criminal I ever got was generic teenage girl things like prank phone calls and shoplifting.
My parents seemed happy for me in a well-at-least-she’s-not-dating-the-entire-basketball-team kind of way, but when I discussed going to heaven or righteousness, they became constrained and a bit sad. My younger brother, Chris, came to a few Alive! meetings but chose team sports instead. Truth be told, I was glad to have religion all to myself.
Dear God,
I’m going to stop believing in you unless you can tell me what possible good could have come from the bloodshed. I can’t see any meaning or evidence of divine logic.
I can discuss the killings with the detachment I have from being in this new place. The world is pulling away from me, losing its capacity to hurt.
For starters, nobody screamed. That’s maybe the oddest component of the killings. All of us thought the first shots were firecrackers – part of a Halloween prank, as firecracker season starts in early October. When the popping got louder, people in the cafeteria looked to its six wide doors with the expectation of being slightly amused by some young kids doing a stunt. And then this kid from the tenth grade, Mark Something, came tottering in, his chest red and purple from what looked like really bad makeup, and there were some nervous laughs in the room. Then he fell and his head landed the wrong way on the corner of a bench, like a bag of gym equipment. We heard some guys yelling, and three grade eleven students walked into the caf wearing duck-hunting outfits – military green fatigues with camouflage patterns, covered with bulging pockets and strips of ammunition – and right away one of them shot out a bank of overhead fluorescent lights. One of the suspension cables broke and a light bank fell down onto a table of food – the not-very-popular photo club and chess club table. The second guy, in sunglasses and a beret, plucked out two grade nine boys and one girl who were standing at the vending machines. These were messy shots that left a mist of blood on the ivory-colored cinder-block walls. A group of maybe ten students tried bolting for the doors, but the gunmen – gunboys, really – turned and showered them with buckshot or bullets, whatever it is that guns and rifles use.
Two of them got away cleanly and I could hear their footsteps echoing down the corridor. As for the rest of us, there was no escape route, so we clambered underneath the tables, as if in some ancient nuclear drill from the 1960s.
In the summer between grades eleven and twelve, after my conversion and after landing Jason, I had a summer job at a concession stand at Ambleside Beach. It was a dry hot summer and the two other girls I worked with were fun – kind of skinny and nutty and they mimicked the customers quite wickedly. They also didn’t go to Delbrook, so they didn’t have any history with me, which was a relief, and I felt guilty feeling this relief. Youth Alive! was concerned that my constant exposure to semiclad skin, sun and non– Youth Alive! members would make me revert to the World – as if listening to screaming babies and groping for the last purple Popsicle at the bottom of the freezer bin could be a test of faith or tempt me into secular drift. Lauren and Dee and some of the others visited me a bit too often, and I don’t think a night ever went by without returning to my car at shift’s end and finding an Alive!er eager to invite me to a barbecue or a hike or a Spirit Cruise around the harbor.
By the end of that August, Jason was going mental for me. He came into the city on weekends from his job up the coast, surveying for a mining company. A sample conversation from this period might go:
“Cheryl, God would never have made it feel so right or so good unless it was right and good.”
“Jason, could you honestly hold up your head and say to Pastor Fields or your mother or the Lord that you’d been fornicating with Cheryl Anway? Could you?”
Well, of course he couldn’t. There was only one way he could land what he wanted, and that was marriage. One weekend in my bedroom, he said we could get married after graduation. I removed his hand from near my right breast and said, “God doesn’t issue moral credit cards, Jason. He’s not like a bank. You can’t borrow now and pay later.”
“My strength – Cheryl, I’m losing it.”
“Then pray for more. God never sends you a temptation that you aren’t strong enough to overcome.”
I did want Jason but, as I’ve said, only on my own terms, which also happened to be God’s terms. I’m not sure if I used God or He used me, but the result was the same. In the end, we are judged by our deeds, not our wishes. We’re the sum of our decisions.
During none of my lunch-hour confessions, whether at the White Spot drive-in eating fries with the Bunch, or at an Alive! weekend seminar on kingdom building, did I ever once confess how much I needed Jason, in every sort of way. Even thinking of him made me drunk, and all the teenage girl stuff that came with it: bees needing flowers; wanting to dissolve like sugar into tea.
Of course, everybody else in the school was going at it like minks. Nothing was forbidden to them, so why not? It’s indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels. And while the ever-present aura of casual sex saturated the school like locker aroma, I didn’t surrender to my own instincts, though I really did have to wonder why God makes teenagers so desperate. Why could we see Archie and Betty and Veronica on dates at the malt shop, but never screwing around in Archie’s dad’s basement covered in oil stains, spit and semen? Double standard. You can’t do one without implying the other. Preachy me.
Dear Lord,
Protect our children, while they…Lord keep them as…Sorry. I can’t pray right now.
Dear God,
What’s hardest here is that I simply can’t believe this is happening. Why do You make certain kinds of events feel real, but not others? Do You have a name for this? And could You please make all of this feel real?
As I was saying, silence.
In the first few moments of the attack, I remember briefly seeing a patch of sky out the window and I remembered how crisp and clean the day was.
Then one of the boys shot his gun in that direction and stemmed the exodus. I know nothing about guns. Whatever they were, they were powerful, and when they cocked them, it sounded industrial, like a machine stamping something flat.
Under the tables we all dove – thumpa-thumpa-thump.
Don’t shoot at me – I’m not making any noise! Look! Look at How! Quiet! I’m! Being!
Shoot someone else over there! Shoot me? No! Way!
I could have stood up, shouted and caused a diversion and saved a hundred people, or organized the lifting of our table to create a shield to ram into the gunmen. But I sat there like a meek little sheep and it’s the only thing I’ve ever done that disgusts me. Silence was my sin. I sinned as I cowered and watched three pairs of ocher-colored work boots tromp about the room, toying with us as though we were bacteria under a magnifying lens.
I recognized all of the boys – working on the yearbook is good for that kind of thing. There was Mitchell Van Waters. I remembered seeing him down at the smoke hole by the parking lot with his fellow eleventh-grade gunmen, Jeremy Kyriakis and Duncan Boyle.
I watched Mitchell, Jeremy and Duncan walk from table to table. Take away the combat fatigues and they looked like the kid who mows your lawn or shoots hoops in the driveway next door. There was nothing physically interesting about them except that Mitchell was pretty skinny and Duncan had a small port-wine birthmark inside his hairline – I knew about this only because we’d been looking at photos as part of paste-up and layout during class.
As the three walked from table to table, they talked among themselves – most of what they said I couldn’t make out. Some tables they shot at; some they didn’t. As the boys came nearer to us, Lauren pretended to be dead, eyes open, body limp, and I wanted to smack her, but I was just mad at myself, perhaps more than anything for being afraid. It had been drilled into us that to feel fear is to not fully trust God. Whoever made that one up has never been beneath a cafeteria table with a tiny thread of someone else’s blood trickling onto their leg.
One contradiction of the human heart is this: God refuses to see any one person as unique in his or her relationship to Him, and yet we humans see each other as bottomless wells of creativity and uniqueness. I write songs about horses; you make owl-shaped wall hangings; he combs his hair like some guy on TV; she knows the capital city of every country on earth. Inasmuch as uniqueness is an arrogant human assumption, Jason was unique, and because of this, he was lovable. To me. First off, he was terrific with voices – ones he made up and ones he mimicked. As with the girls from my summer job, I was a sucker for anyone who could imitate others. Jason with even one beer in him was better than cable TV. He used his voices the way ventriloquists use their dummies – to say things he was too shy to say himself. Whenever a situation was boring and there was no escaping it – dinner with my family, or party games organized by Pastor Fields’s wife that incorporated name tags and blindfolds – Jason went into his cat character, Mr. No, an otherwise ordinary cat who had a Nielsen TV ratings monitor box attached to his small black-and-white TV. Mr. No hated everything and he showed his displeasure by making a tiny, almost sub-audible squeaking nee-yow sound. I guess you had to be there. But Mr. No made more than a few painful hours a treat.
Jason could also wiggle his ears, and his arms were double-jointed – some of his contortions were utterly harrowing, and I’d scream for him to stop. He also bought me seventeen roses for my seventeenth birthday, and how many boys do you know who’d do that?
I was surprised when Jason did propose – in his dad’s Buick on a rainy August afternoon in the White Spot parking lot over a cheeseburger and an orange float. I was surprised first because he did it, then second because he’d concocted a secret plan that was so wild that only the deadest of souls could refuse. Basically, using money he’d stockpiled from his summer job, we were going to fly to Las Vegas. There in the car, he produced fake IDs, a bottle of Champale and the thinnest of gold rings, barely strong enough to retain its shape. He said, “A ring is a halo for your finger. From now on, we no longer cast two shadows, we cast one.”
“Fake IDs?” I asked.
“I don’t know the legal age there. They’re for backup.”
I looked, and they seemed to be convincing fakes, with our real names and everything, with just the birth dates changed. And as it turned out, the legal age was eighteen, so we did need the fakes.
Jason asked me if I wanted to elope: “No big churchy wedding or anything?”
“Jason, marriage is marriage, and if it were as simple as pushing a button on the dash of this car, I’d do it right now.”
What I didn’t go on about was the sexiness of it all. Sex – finally – plus freedom from guilt or retribution. My only concern was that Jason would develop chilly feet and blab to his buddies or Pastor Fields. I told him that blabbing would be a deal wrecker, and I made him vow, under threat-of-hell conditions, that this would be our secret. I’d also recently been reading a book of religious inspiration geared mainly to men, and I’d dog-eared the chapter that told its readers, essentially, to trust nobody. Friends are always betrayers in the end – everybody has the one person to whom they spill everything, and that special person isn’t always the obvious person you’d think. People are leaky. What kind of paranoid creep would write something like that? Well, whoever it was, it helped further my cause.
The important thing is that we were to marry in the final week of August in Las Vegas. I greased the skids at home and told my folks I was attending a hymn retreat up the coast; I told Lauren and the Alive! crew I was driving to Seattle with my family. Jason did the same thing. It was set.
Dear God,
I’m trying to take my mind off the slayings, but I don’t know if that’s possible. I’ll forget about them for maybe a minute and then I’ll remember again. I tried finding solace looking at the squirrels in the front yard, already gathering food for the winter – and then I got to thinking about how short their lives are – so short that their dreams can only possibly be a full mirroring of their waking lives. So I guess for a squirrel, being awake and being asleep are the same thing. Maybe when you die young it’s like that, too. A baby’s dream would only be the same as being awake – teenagers, too, to some extent. As I’ve said, I’m grasping here for some solace.
Lord,
I know I don’t have a fish sticker, or whatever it is I’m supposed to have on my car bumper, like all those stuck-up kids who think they’re holier than Thou, but I also don’t think they have some sort of express lane to speak to You, so I imagine You’re hearing this okay. I guess my question to You is whether or not You get to torture those evil bastards who did the killings, or if it’s purely the devil’s job and You subcontract it out. Is there any way I can help torture them from down here on earth? Just give me a sign and I’m in.
What I now find odd is how Jason and I both assumed our marriage had to be a secret. It wasn’t from shame, and it wasn’t from fear, because eighteen is eighteen (well, almost) and the law’s the law, so in the eyes of the taxman and the Lord, we could go at it like rabbits all day as long as we paid our taxes and made a few babies along the way. Sometimes life, when laid out plainly like this, can seem so simple.
What appealed to me was that this marriage was something the two of us could have entirely to ourselves, like being the only two guests in a luxury hotel. I knew that if we got engaged and waited until after high school to marry, our marriage would become something else – ours, yes, but not quite ours, either. There would be presents and sex lectures and unwanted intrusions. Who needs all that? And in any event, I had no pictures in my head of life after high school. My girlfriends all wanted to go to Hawaii or California and drive sports cars and, if I correctly read between the lines on the yearbook questionnaires they submitted, have serial monogamous relations with Youth Alive! guys that didn’t necessarily end in marriage. The best I could see for myself was a house, a kid or two, some chicken noodle soup at three in the afternoon while standing at the kitchen sink watching clouds unfurl coastward from Vancouver Island.
I was sure that whatever Jason did for a living would amply fulfill us both – an unpopular sentiment among girls my age. Jason once halfheartedly inquired as to my career ambitions, and when he was certain I had none, he was relieved. His family – churchier than Thou – looked down on girls who worked. If I was ever going to get a job, it would only be to annoy them, his parents – his dad, mostly. He was a mean, dried-out fart who defied charity, and who used religion as a foil to justify his undesirable character traits. His cheapness became thrift; his lack of curiosity about the world and his contempt for new ideas were called being traditional.
Jason’s mother was, well, there’s no way around it, a bit drunk the few times I met her. I don’t think she liked the way her life had played out. Who am I to judge? How the two of them procreated a sweetie-pie like Jason remains one of God’s true mysteries.
If nothing else, relating the step-by-step course of events in the cafeteria allows me to comprehend how distanced from the world I’m feeling now – how quickly the world is pulling away. And for this reason I’ll continue.
After the first dozen shots, the fire alarm went off. Mitchell Van Waters walked to the main cafeteria doors, said, “Goddammit,” and fired into the hall, blasting out the bell ringing there. Jeremy Kyriakis took out the cafeteria’s fire bell in three shots, after which a hail of drywall particles pinged and rattled throughout the otherwise silent room. Beneath the tables we could still hear fire bells ringing from deep within the school’s bowels, bells that would ring past sunset since the RCMP would hold off disabling the central OFF switch for fear of tripping homemade bombs placed throughout the school – bombs made of benzene and powdered swimming-pool cleaner. Wait – how did I know that combo? Oh yes, Mitchell Van Waters’s contribution to the science fair: “Getting the Most Bang for Your Buck.” It was in last year’s yearbook.
Back to the cafeteria.
Back to me and three hundred other students under the tables, either dead or playing dead, scrunching themselves into tiny balls. Back to six work boots clomping on the polished putty-colored linoleum, and the sounds of ambulances and RCMP cruisers whooping schoolward, a little too little, a little too late.
I began doing a numbers game in my head. Three hundred people divided among three gunmen makes a hundred victims per gunman. If they were going to kill us all, it would take a bit of time, so I figured my chances of making it were better than I’d first supposed. But geographically we were in a bad spot: the center of the room, the visual and architectural core of the place, as well as the nexus of any high school’s social ambition and peer envy. Were people envious of Alivers!? We were basically invisible in the school. A few students might have thought we were small-minded and clique-ish, and to be honest, Youth Alive! members were. But I wasn’t. In general, as I walked about the school I affected a calm, composed smile. I did this not because I wanted to be everyone’s friend – or to avoid making enemies – but simply because it was easier and I didn’t need to interact. A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection – it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you’re past it.
Dear Lord,
If You organized a massacre just to make people have doubts, then maybe You ought to consider other ways of doing things. A high school massacre? Kids with pimento loaf sandwiches and cans of Orange Crush? I don’t think You would orchestrate something like this. A massacre in a high school cafeteria can only indicate Your absence – that for some reason, in some manner, You chose to absent Yourself from the room. Forsake it, actually.
Cheryl – the pretty girl who was the last one to be shot. She wrote that in her binder, didn’t she? “God is nowhere.” Maybe she was right.
Dear God,
I’m out of prayers, so that just leaves talking. It’s hard for me to believe other people are feeling as intensely as I do, and as bad as I do. But then, if we’re all as messed up as I am, that scares me into thinking that the world’s all going to go to pieces, and what sort of world would that be? A zoo.
I keep to myself mostly. I can’t sleep or eat. TV stinks. School’s closed for a while yet. I smoked pot and it wasn’t a good idea. I walk around in a daze and it’s like the opposite of drugs, because drugs are supposed to make you feel good, but this only makes me feel bad.
I was walking down at the mall, and suddenly I started hitting myself in the head because I thought I could bash away the feelings. And the thing is, everybody in the mall looked as if they knew what I was doing, and no one flipped out.
Anyway, this is where I stand now. I’m not sure this was a prayer. I don’t know what it was.
I’ve not been too specific about my life and my particulars, but by now you must have gleaned a few things about who I was – Cheryl Anway. The papers are blanketing the world with my most recent yearbook photo, and if you’ve seen it then you’ll know I was a cliché girl next door: darkish blond hair cut in a way that’ll probably look stupid to future students, with a thin face and, on the day the photos were taken, no pimples – how often did that ever happen? In the photo I look old for seventeen. I’m smiling the smile I used when passing people in the halls without having to speak to them.
The description accompanying my photo is along the lines of “Cheryl was a good student, friendly and popular” – and that’s about it. What a waste of seventeen years. Or is that just my selfish heart applying standards of the world to a soul that’s eternal? It is. But by seventeen, nobody ever accomplishes anything, do they? Joan of Arc? Anne Frank? And maybe some musicians and actresses. I’d really like to ask God why it is that we don’t accomplish anything until we’re at least twenty. Why the wait? I think we should be born ten years old, and then after a year turn twenty – just get it over with, like dogs do. We ought to be born running.
Chris and I had a dog, a spaniel named Sterling. We adored Sterling, but Sterling adored gum. We’d go for walks and all he’d do was sniff out sidewalk discards. It was cute and funny, but when I was in grade nine he ate a piece of something that wasn’t gum, and two hours later he was gone. We buried him in the backyard beneath the witch hazel shrub, and I put a cross on his grave, a cross my mother removed after my conversion. I found it in the garden shed between the 5-20-20 and a stack of empty black plastic nursery pots, and I was too chicken to ask her why.
I don’t worry too much about Sterling, as he’s in heaven. Animals never left God – only people did. Lucky animals.
My father works in the mortgage division of Canada Trust, and my mother is a technician in a medical lab. They love their jobs. Chris is a generic little brother, yet not as snotty or pesky as my friends’ little brothers.
At Christmas everyone in our family exchanged bad sweaters and we all wore them as a kind of in-joke. So we were one of those bad-sweater families you see at the mall.
We got along with each other – or we did until recently. It’s like we decided to be superficially happy with each other, which is fine, and that we wouldn’t share intimacies with each other. I don’t know. I think that lack of sharing weakened us.
Dear Lord,
I pray for the souls of the three killers, but I don’t know if that is right or wrong.
It always seemed to me that people who’d discovered religion had both lost and gained something. Outwardly, they’d gained calmness, confidence and a look of purpose, but what they’d lost was a certain willingness to connect with unconverted souls. Looking a convert in the eyes was like trying to make eye contact with a horse. They’d be alive and breathing, but they wouldn’t be a hundred percent there anymore. They’d left the day-to-day world and joined the realm of eternal time. Pastor Fields or Dee or Lauren would have pounced on me if I’d ever spoken those words aloud. Dee would have said something like “Cheryl, you’ve just covered your halo with soot. Repent. Now.”
There can be an archness, a meanness in the lives of the saved, an intolerance that can color their view of the weak and of the lost. It can make them hard when they ought to be listening, judgmental when they ought to be contrite.
Jason’s father, Reg, always said, “Love what God loves and hate what God hates,” but more often than not I had the impression that he really meant “Love what Reg loves and hate what Reg hates.” I don’t think he imparted this philosophy to Jason. Jason was too gentle, too forgiving, to adopt Reg’s self-serving credo. As my mother always told me, “Cheryl, trust me, you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.”
Getting married in Nevada in 1988 was simple. At noon on the final Friday before school started, Jason and I cabbed out to the airport and scanned the list of outgoing flights. There was one to Las Vegas in ninety minutes, so we bought tickets – cash – walked through U.S. Immigration preclearance, went to the gate and were on our way. They didn’t even bother to check our ID. We each had only a gym bag for carry-on and we felt like bandits. It was my first time flying, and everything was new and charged with mystery…the laminated safety cards, the takeoff, which made my stomach cartwheel, the food, which was bad just like they always joke about on TV, and the cigarette smoke; something about Las Vegas attracts the smokers. But it was all like perfume to me, and I tried pretending that every moment of my life could be as full of newness as that flight. What a life that would be.
The two of us had dressed conservatively – shirt and tie for Jason, and me in a schoolmarm dress; our outfits must have made us look all of fifteen. The flight attendant asked us why we were going to Las Vegas and we told her. Ten minutes later there was a captain’s announcement telling everybody on the plane our news and our seat numbers. The other passengers clapped and I blushed like I had a fever, but suddenly it was as if we were blood kin with all these strangers. At the terminal, the men all slapped Jason’s back and har-har’ed, and this one woman whispered to me, “Honey, I don’t care what else you do, but the moment he hints that he wants it, you give it to him. Doesn’t matter if you’re fixing a diaper or cleaning out the gutters. You give it, pronto. Else you’ll lose him.”
It was over a hundred degrees outside, my first exposure to genuine heat, Jason’s too. My lungs had never felt so pure. In the taxi to Caesars Palace I looked out at the desert – real desert – and tried to imagine every parable I’d ever heard taking place in that exotic lifeless nothingness. I couldn’t have stood five minutes out there in that oven, and I wondered how the Bible ever managed to happen. They must have had different weather back then – or trees – or rivers and shade. Good Lord, the desert is harsh. I asked the taxi driver to stop for a second beside a vacant lot between the airport and the Strip. There were some rental units on the other side of a cinder-block fence, some litter and a shedded snakeskin. I got out and it felt as if I were floating over the sharp rocks and angry little plants. Instead of feeling brand new, Las Vegas felt thousands of years old. Jason got out and we both knelt and prayed. Time passed; I felt dizzy and the cabbie honked the horn. We drove to Caesars Palace.
I knew we were goners when Dee knocked over an apple juice can. Clank. The three boys had been across the room shouting pointless fragments of pointless manifestos or whatever moronic ideas they had, but then, yes, the clank. It was so primal to watch their heads swivel toward us, and their eyes focusing – zeroing in like crocodiles in TV documentaries. Dee squeaked.
I heard Duncan Boyle say, “Oh, if it isn’t the Out to Lunch Bunch slumming with us, the damned, here in purgatory, School District 44.” Listening to the inflections of his voice, for just a second I thought to myself that he could sing if he wanted to. I could always tell that about people – if they could sing or not.
Just then, for whatever reason, the overhead sprinklers spritzed on. The boys were distracted and looked up at the ceiling. The water rained down onto the tables, onto the milk cartons and half-empty paper bags; it sounded like rain on a roof. Then it began trickling off the laminated tabletops and dripping onto my jeans and forearms. It was cold and I shivered and Lauren was shivering, too. I put my arm around her and held her to me, her teeth chattering like maracas. Then there were more shots – at us, I assumed, but Mitchell Van Waters blew out some of the sprinkler nozzles, shattering a large pipe, and the water came down on us in buckets.
There was a noise from outside the building and Martin Boyle shouted, “Windows!” He and Mitchell blasted out four large panes opposite us. Then Duncan asked, “Was that a cop I saw out there?”
“What do you think?” Mitchell was mad as hornets. “Rearm!”
The guns made more metallic noises and Mitchell blew out the remaining windows. The school was now like a jewel case encrusted with snipers and cops. Their time with their victims was drawing to an end.
Lord,
I know that faith is not the natural condition of the human heart, but why do You make it so hard to have faith? Were we so far gone here in boring North Van that we needed a shock treatment? There are thousands of suburbs as average as us. Why us then? And why now? You raise the cost of faith and You dilute its plausibility. Is that smart?
Dear God,
I keep on imagining what those kids under the tables must have been feeling and it only makes me angrier and crazier at You. It just does.
Dear God,
I’m prayed out, and yet here I am, still knocking on Your door, but I think this could be the last time.
Dear Lord,
This is the first time I’ve ever prayed because I didn’t grow up with this stuff, but here I am, praying away, so maybe there’s something to it. Maybe I’m wasting my time. You tell me. Send me a sign. You must get a lot of that. Proof proof proof. Because to my mind, the school massacre could mean that You don’t exist just as much – if not more than – it could mean that You do. If I was trying to recruit followers, a school massacre isn’t the way I’d go about doing it. But then it got me here right now, praying, didn’t it?
Just so you know, I’m having my first drink here as I pray my first prayer – apricot liqueur, I skimmed off the top inch of my dad’s bottle. It tastes like penicillin and I like it.
I’ve never told anyone about the moment of my conversion in eleventh grade. I was by myself, out in the backyard in fall, sitting between two huckleberry shrubs that had survived the mountainside’s suburban development. I closed my eyes and faced the sun and that was that – ping! – the sensation of warmth on my eyelids and the smell of dry cedar and fir branches in my nose. I never expected angels and trumpets, nor did any appear. The moment made me feel special, and yet, of course, nothing makes a person less special than conversion – it…universalizes you.
But then how special can any person really be? I mean, you have a name and some ancestors. You have medical, educational and work histories, as well as immediate living family and friends. And after that there’s not much more. At least in my case. At the time of my death, my life’s résumé consisted of school, sports, a few summer jobs and my Youth Alive! involvement. My death was the only remarkable aspect of my life. I’m rummaging through my memories trying to find even a few things to distinguish me from all others. And yet…and yet I was me – nobody saw the world as I did, nor did they feel the things I felt. I was Cheryl Anway: that has to count for something.
And I did have questions and uneasy moments after my conversion. I wondered why it is that going to heaven is the only goal of religion, because it’s such a selfish thing. The Out to Lunch Bunch talked about going to heaven in the same breath as they discussed hair color. Leading a holy life inside a burgundy-colored VW Cabrio seems like a spiritual contradiction. Jason once joked that if you read Revelations closely, you could see where it says that Dee Carswell counting the calories in a packet of Italian dressing is a sign of imminent apocalypse. And yet we all possessed the capacity for slipping at any moment into great sin and eternal darkness. I suppose it’s what made me a bit withdrawn from the world – maybe I just didn’t trust anybody fully, knowing how close we all were to the edge. That’s not true: I trusted Jason.
Whenever I felt doubts I overcompensated by trying to witness to whoever was nearby, usually my family. And when they even remotely sensed religion coming up, they either nodded politely or they bolted. I can’t imagine what they said about me when I wasn’t there. In any event, I think in the end it’s maybe best to keep your doubts private. Saying them aloud cheapens them – makes them a bunch of words just like everybody else’s bunch of words.
I don’t think I fully understood sleaze until Jason and I entered the chilled lobby of Caesars Palace on that day of burning winds and X-ray sunlight. It stank of American cigarettes, smoky blue and tarlike, and of liquor. A woman dressed up like a centurion with balloon boobs and stage makeup asked us for our drink order. She reminded me of a novelty cocktail shaker. The thing is, we said yes, and Jason ordered two gin fizzes – where did that come from? They arrived within moments and there we stood, dumb as planks, while the most desperate sort of gamblers – I mean, this was August in the middle of the desert – slunk past us, serenaded by the endless rattling and dinging of the slot machines. I don’t think I’d ever seen so many souls teetering so precariously on the brink of colossal sin. Hypocritical me. We’re all equally on the brink of all sins.
We went up to our room: shabby and yellowing. I couldn’t figure out why such a splashy place would have such dumpy rooms, but Jason said it was to drive people down into the casinos.
Once the door was closed, it was a bit awkward. Until then, it had all felt like a field trip. We sat on the edge of the bed and Jason asked if I still wanted to get married, and I said yes – I’d caught a sliver of his naked behind through the bathroom door’s hinge crack as he changed into his other pair of pants.
As we sat there, we realized our clothes, even in the airconditioned room, were far too hot for the climate. Jason shed his tie, and I replaced my all-concealing “skin is sin” dress with a jacket and skirt, the only other garments I’d brought – something like you’d wear to work on a Wednesday morning.
Sooner than I’d have liked we were out the door, appearing to the world as if we were headed to a $2.99 all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet or to lose ourselves for a few hours in front of the dime slots with the pensioners. We were alone in the elevator and kissed briefly, and then we staggered through the lobby bombarded again by a wash of noise and sleaze.
Outside it was nearing sunset. An ashtray on wheels picked us up. The cabbie was a fat guy with an East Coast accent and exactly one hair on his forehead, just like Charlie Brown. He slapped the steering wheel when we asked him to take us to a chapel. He told us his name, Evan, and we asked him if he’d be our witness. He said sure, he’d stand up for us, and for the first time that day I felt not just as if I was getting married, but also like a bride.
The chapels were itty-bitty things, and we tried to find one in which celebrities had never been married, as if a celebrity aura could somehow crush the holy dimension of a Las Vegas wedding. I don’t know what we were thinking. Evan ended up choosing a chapel for us, mostly because it included a snack platter and sparkling wine in the price of the service.
There was paperwork; our fake IDs aroused no suspicion. Out the little stained-glass window up front the sun was like a juicy tangerine on the horizon. Quickly, a dramatically tanned man in white rayon, who might just as easily have been offering us a deal on a condominium time-share, declared us legally wed.
Nearing the front door, Jason said, “Well, it’s not quite two hundred and fifty of our nearest and dearest, is it?”
I was so giddy: “A civil wedding. What would your dad say?”
We went outside, leaving Evan to his snack platter – out into the hot air scented by exhaust fumes, snapdragons and litter, just the two of us, dwarfed by the casinos and dreaming of the future, of the lights, both natural and false, appearing in the sky, and of sex.
I hoped that both the shooting of the windows and the flooding sprinklers would distract the three boys, but this didn’t happen. Instead, they began to fight among themselves. Mitchell was furious with Jeremy for wasting ammunition that could be more effectively used “killing those stuck-up pigs who feed on taunting anybody who doesn’t have a numbered sweater.” To this end, Mitchell fired across the room, into a huddled mass of younger students – the junior jocks, I think, but I can’t be very sure, because the tabletops and chairs blocked my view. I also didn’t know whether the gunshots scattered or formed a concentrated beam, but I clearly remember blood from the huddle mixing with the streams of sprinkler water that trickled along the linoleum’s slight slant, down to behind the bank of vending machines. The machines made a quick electrical fizz noise and went dead. From the huddle came a few screams, some moans and then silence. Mitchell shouted, “We know that most of you aren’t dead or even wounded, so don’t think we’re stupid. Duncan, should we go over and see who’s fibbing and who isn’t?”
“I don’t know – I could get a bit more pumped about all of this if saggy-assed Jeremy would start pulling his weight.”
The two turned to Jeremy, the least talkative of the three. Mitchell said, “What’s the matter – deciding to convert into a jock all of a sudden? Gee, won’t that make the Out to Lunch Bunch hot for you. A killer with a heart of gold.”
Jeremy said, “Mitchell, shut up. Like we haven’t noticed that all your shots are missing their mark? The only reason you shot out the windows was because it’s impossible to miss them.”
Mitchell got angrier. “You know what? I think you’re jamming out, and you’re jamming out a little bit too late into the game, I think.”
“What if I was to jam out?”
Mitchell said, “Watch this,” and fired across the room, killing a boy named Clay, whose locker was four down from mine. “There, see? Killing is fun. Jam out now, and you’re next.”
“I quit.”
“No, Jeremy, it’s too late for that. Duncan, what would you guess Jeremy’s tally up to this moment has been?”
Duncan calculated. “Four definite hits and five maybes.”
Mitchell turned to Jeremy: “Ha! And you expect mercy from the world?”
“I quit.”
Mitchell said, “What do we have here – a Hitler-in-the-bunker scenario?”
“Call it what you will.” Jeremy dropped his weapons.
Mitchell said, “Execution time.”
Being married was wild. It was worth all the delays and pleas and postponement of pleasure, and you know, this isn’t some guidance-class hygiene film speaking to you – it’s me. I was me. We were us. It was all real, and wild, and it is my most cherished memory of having been alive – a night of abandon on the sixteenth floor of Caesars Palace.
I doubt we said even three words to each other all night; Jason’s dewy antler-soft skin made words feel stupid. By six in the morning we were in a cab headed back to the airport. On the flight north, we didn’t speak much, either. And I felt married. I loved the sensation, and it’s why I remained silent – trying to pinpoint the exact nature of this new buzz: sex, certainly, but more than that, too.
Of course, the Out to Lunch Bunch and all of the Alive! crew could tell right away that something was up. We simply didn’t care as much for the group as before, and it showed. The corny little lunchtime confessions over french fries were so dull as to be unlistenable; Pastor Fields’s team sports metaphors and chastity pleas seemed equally juvenile to Jason. We knew what we had, and we knew what we wanted, and we knew that we wanted more. Then there was the issue of how we were going to go about telling our families. Jason imagined a formal dinner at a good restaurant during which to break the news – between the main course and the dessert – but I said I didn’t want our marriage to be treated like a chorus girl jumping out of a cake. I’m not clear if Jason’s desire for a formal dinner was his concept of maturity, or if he wanted to shock a crowd like an evil criminal mastermind. He did have his exhibitionist streak: I mean, in Las Vegas he’d refused to close the curtains and he was always trying to sneak me into the change room at the Bootlegger jeans store. No go.
So yes, we’d had a fight on the phone about this matter the night before my pregnancy test. Jason was angry with me for dragging my heels about announcing the marriage, and I was angry with him for wanting to be a – I don’t know – a show-off.
And that’s as far as I got in my life, my baby as well. I don’t think I’ve concealed anything here, and there’s not much left to explain. God owns everything. I was not replaceable, but nor was I indispensable. It was my time.
Dear God,
I am so full of hate that I’m scaring myself. Is there a word to describe wanting to kill people who are already dead? Because that’s what’s in my heart. I remember last year being in the backyard with my father. We lifted up this sheet of plywood that had been lying on the grass all winter. Underneath were thousands of worms, millipedes, beetles and a snake, all either eating or being eaten, and that is my heart, and the hate and the insects grow and grow blacker by the hour. I want to kill the killers, and I just can’t believe that this would be a sin.
Lord,
My son described the blood and water pooling on the cafeteria floor, coating it like Varathane. He told me about the track marks left in blood by running shoes, by bare feet and by bodies either dragging themselves or being dragged away by friends. There’s something else he’s not telling me – a father knows that – but what could be more horrible than – Oh God, this is not a prayer.
I can’t help but wonder if the other girls thought I used God as an excuse to hook up with Jason, or that I confused one with the other. Maybe I wasn’t truly in love with Jason; maybe it was just an infatuation, or maybe it was only some sort of animal need like any teenager feels.
Listen to me, practical Cheryl, covering my bases, even after death. But I know that when I was alive I did face these questions: I loved Jason, but what I felt for God was different altogether. I kept them separate.
As Mitchell was aiming at me, there were sirens outside, helicopters, alarm bells throughout the school and water splashing down from the shattered pipe. As well, Duncan was egging Mitchell on to kill Jeremy, too, and my hopes had flip-flopped – now I thought I might survive. Then Jeremy said, “Go ahead, Mitchell, shoot me – like I care.”
Mitchell seemed to be short-circuiting. He hadn’t anticipated this scenario. He turned a bit to his left, looked down at me and the Bunch, then took his rifle and shot me on my left side. He really wasn’t a good shot, because he was five paces away, and I should have been dead instantly. And quite honestly, it didn’t hurt, the shooting, and I didn’t die immediately, either. Lauren, bless her, lunged away from me, leaving me there on the floor on top of my binder, which the water had sloshed off the tabletop. At my new angle, I could see much better what was transpiring. Mitchell said, “Well, Jeremy, you stud, that’s one less girl for you to impress,” and Jeremy said, “Dear God, I repent for my sins. Forgive me for all I have done.”
In unison, Mitchell and Duncan shrieked, “What?” and turned to Jeremy, blasted him enough to kill him a dozen times over. Then I heard Jason’s voice from the cafeteria doors – something along the lines of “Put those guns down now.”
Mitchell said, “You have got to be kidding.”
“I’m not kidding.”
Mitchell shot at Jason and missed, and then I saw something that looked like a lump of gray art-class clay fly through the air and crack Mitchell on the side of his head, so fiercely that I could see his skull implode.
At this point, the boys in the camera club lifted up their table and used it as a shield as they charged against the sole surviving gunman, Duncan Boyle. It was covered with paper bags and some cookies that had been glued in place by blood. They charged into Duncan, pressing him against a blank spot of cinder-block wall. I saw the rifle fall to the ground, and then I saw the boys from the camera club laying the table flat on the ground on top of Duncan and begin jumping up and down on it like a grape press. They were making hooting noises, and people from the other tables came and joined in and the table became a killing game as all of these children, boys and girls, who fifteen minutes earlier had been peacefully eating peanut butter sandwiches and oranges, became savages, killing without pause. Duncan’s blood dribbled out from under the table.
Lauren called out, and Jason came over and lifted the table off me like a hurricane lifting off a roof. I know he said something to me, but my hearing was gone. He tried holding me up, but my neck was limp, and all I could see was across the room, children crushing other children. And that was that.
To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition. And I believe I accepted God, and I fully accepted this sorrow, even though until the events in the cafeteria, there hadn’t been too much of it in my life. I may have looked like just another stupid teenage girl, but it was all in there – God, and sorrow and its acceptance.
And now I’m neither dead nor alive, neither awake nor asleep, and soon I’m headed off to the Next Place, but my Jason will continue amid the living.
Oh, Jason. In his heart, he knows I’ll at least be trying to watch him from beyond, whatever beyond may be. And in his heart, I think, he’s now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I’ve said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.
Part Two 1999: Jason (#ulink_a30315ad-833b-546e-a8c5-b8def19a558b)
You won’t see me in any of the photographs after the massacre – you know the ones I mean: the wire service shots of the funerals, students felt-penning teenage poetry on Cheryl’s casket; teenage prayer groups in sweats and scrunchies huddled on the school’s slippery gym floor; 6:30 A.M. prayer breakfasts in the highway off-ramp chain restaurants, with all the men wearing ties while dreaming of hash browns. I’m in none of them, and if you had seen me, I sure wouldn’t have been praying.
I want to say that right from the start.
Just one hour ago, I was a good little citizen in a Toronto-Dominion bank branch over in North Van, standing in line, and none of this was even on my mind. I was there to deposit a check from my potbellied contractor boss, Les, and I was wondering if I should blow off the afternoon’s work. My hand reached down into my pocket, and instead of a check, my sunburnt fingers removed the invitation to my brother’s memorial service. I felt as if I’d just opened all the windows of a hot muggy car.
I folded it away and wrote down today’s date on the deposit slip. I checked the wall calendar – August 19, 1999 – and What the heck, I wrote a whole row of zeroes before the year, so that the date read: August 19, 00000001999. Even if you hated math, which I certainly do, you’d know that this is still mathematically the same thing as 1999.
When I gave the slip and the check to the teller, Dean, his eyes widened, and he looked up at me as if I’d handed him a holdup note. “Sir,” he said, “this isn’t a proper date.”
I said, “Yes, it is. What makes you think it isn’t?”
“The extra zeroes.”
Dean was wearing a deep blue shirt, which annoyed me. “What is your point?” I asked.
“Sir, the year is nineteen ninety-nine, not zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one nine nine nine.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I’d like to speak with the branch manager.”
Dean called over Casey, a woman who was maybe about my age, and who had the pursed hardness of someone who spends her days delivering bad news to people and knows she’ll be doing it until her hips shatter. Casey and Dean had a hushed talk, and then she spoke to me. “Mr. Klaasen, may I ask you why you’ve written this on your slip?”
I stood my ground: “Putting more zeroes in front of ‘1999’ doesn’t make the year any different.”
“Technically, no.”
“Look, I hated math as much as you probably did –”
“I didn’t hate math, Mr. Klaasen.”
Casey was on the spot, but then so was I. It’s not as if I’d walked into the bank planning all those extra zeroes. They just happened, and now I had to defend them. “Okay. But maybe what the zeroes do point out is that in a billion years – and there will be a billion years – we’ll all be dust. Not even dust: we’ll be molecules.”
Silence.
I said, “Just think, there are still a few billion years of time out there, just waiting to happen. Billions of years, and we’re not going to be here to see them.”
Silence.
Casey said, “Mr. Klaasen, if this is some sort of joke, I can try to understand its abstract humor, but I don’t think this slip meets the requirements of a legal banking document.”
Silence.
I said, “But doesn’t it make you think? Or want to think?”
“About what?”
“About what happens to us after we die.”
This was my real mistake. Dean telegraphed Casey a savvy little glance, and in a flash I knew that they knew about me, about Cheryl, about 1988 and about my reputation as a borderline nutcase – He never really got over it, you know. I’m used to this. I was furious but kept my cool. I said, “I think I’d like to close my account – convert to cash, if I could.”
The request was treated with the casualness I might have received if I’d asked them to change a twenty. “Of course. Dean, could you help Mr. Klaasen close out his account?”
I asked, “That’s it? ‘Dean, could you help Mr. Klaasen close out his account?’ No debate? No questions?”
Casey looked at me. “Mr. Klaasen, I have two daughters and I can barely think past next month’s mortgage, let alone the year two billion one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. My hunch is that you’d be happier elsewhere. I’m not trying to get rid of you, but I think you know where I’m coming from.”
She wasn’t wearing a wedding band. “Can I take you out to lunch?” I asked.
“What?”
“Dinner, then.”
“No!” The snaking line was eavesdropping big time. “Dean, there should be no complications in closing Mr. Klaasen’s account.” She looked at me. “Mr. Klaasen, I have to go.”
My anger became gray emotional fuzz, and I just wanted to leave. Inside of five minutes, Dean had severed my connection to his bank, and I stood on the curb smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, my shirt untucked and $5,210.00 stuffed into the pockets of my green dungarees. I decided to leave the serene, heavily bylawed streets of North Vancouver and drive to West Vancouver, down near the ocean. At the Seventeenth and Bellevue CIBC I opened a checking account, and when I looked behind the tellers I saw an open vault. I asked if it was possible to rent a safety deposit box, which took all of three minutes to do. That box is where I’m going to place all of this, once it’s finished. And here’s the deal: if I get walloped by a bus next year, this letter is going to be placed in storage until May 30, 2019, when you, my two nephews, turn twenty-one. If I hang around long enough, I might hand it to you in person. But for now, that’s where this letter is headed.
Just so you know, I’ve been writing all of this in the cab of my truck, parked on Bellevue, down by Ambleside Beach, near the pier with all its bratty kids on rollerblades and the Vietnamese guys with their crab traps pursuing E. coli. I’m using a pen embossed with “Travelodge” and I’m writing on the back of Les’s pink invoice forms. The wind is heating up – God, it feels nice on my face – and I feel, in the most SUV-commercial sense of the word, free.
How to start?
First off, Cheryl and I were married. No one knows that but me, and now you. It was insane, really. I was seventeen and starved for sex, but I was still stuck in my family’s religious warp, so only husband/wife sex was allowed, and even then for procreation only, and even then only while both partners wore heavy wool tweeds so as to drain the act of pleasure. So when I suggested to Cheryl that we fly to Las Vegas and get hitched, she floored me when she said yes. It was an impulsive request I made after our math class saw an educational 16mm film about gambling. The movie was supposed to make high school students more enthusiastic about statistics. I mean, what were these filmmakers thinking?
And what was I thinking? Marriage? Las Vegas}
We flew down there one weekend and – I mean, we weren’t even people then, we were so young and out of it. We were like baby chicks. No. We were like zygotes, little zygotes cabbing from the airport to Caesars Palace, and all I could think about was how hot and dry the air was. In any event, it seems like a billion years ago.
Around sunset, we got married, using our fake IDs. Our witness was a slob of a cabbie who drove us down the Strip. For the next six weeks my grades evaporated, sports became a nuisance, and my friends became ghosts. The only thing that counted was Cheryl, and because we kept the marriage secret, it was way better and more forbidden feeling than if we’d waited and done all the sensible stuff.
There were some problems when we got home. This churchy group Cheryl and I were in, Youth Alive!, crabby morality spooks who spied on us for weeks, likely with the blessing of my older brother, Kent. When I was in twelfth grade, Kent was in second year at the University of Alberta, but he was still a honcho, and I can only imagine the phone conversations he must have been having with the local Alive! creeps:
Were the lights on or off?
Which lights?
Did they order in pizza?
What time did they leave?
Separately or together?
As if we hadn’t noticed we were being spied on. Yet in fairness, the Alive!ers were baby chicks, too. We all were. Seventeen is nothing. You’re still in the womb.
There are a number of things a woman can tell about a man who is roughly twenty-nine years old, sitting in the cab of a pickup truck at 3:37 in the afternoon on a weekday, facing the Pacific, writing furiously on the back of pink invoice slips. Such a man may or may not be employed, but regardless, there is mystery there. If this man is with a dog, then that’s good, because it means he’s capable of forming relationships. But if the dog is a male dog, that’s probably a bad sign, because it means the guy is likely a dog, too. A girl dog is much better, but if the guy is over thirty, any kind of dog is a bad sign regardless, because it means he’s stopped trusting humans altogether. In general, if nothing else, guys my age with dogs are going to be work.
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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Douglas Coupland
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The story of one family piecing itself back together after a tragic highschool shooting, Hey Nostradamus! is Douglas Coupland’s most soulful, piercing and searching novel yet.Pregnant and secretly married, Cheryl Anway scribbles her last will and testament – and erie premonition – on a school binder shortly before a rampaging trio of misfit classmates gun her down in a high school cafeteria. Overrun with paranoia, teenage angst and religious zeal in the ensuing massacre′s wake, this sleepy Vancouver neighbourhood declares its saints, brands its demons and finally moves on.But for a handful of people still reeling from that horrific day, life remains perpetually derailed. Four dramatically different characters tell their stories in their own words: Cheryl, who calmly narrates her own death; Jason, the boy no one knew was her husband, still marooned ten years later by his loss; Heather, the woman trying to love the shattered Jason; and Jason′s father Reg, a cruelly religious man no one suspects is still worth loving. Each wrestles with God, self-defeat and a crippling inability to hold on to those they love.Coupland′s most surprising and soulful novel yet, rich with his trademark cultural acuity and dark humour, Hey Nostradamus! ties themes of alienation, violence and misguided faith into a fateful and unforgettable knot from which four people must untangle their lives.