Hey Nostradamus! (16 page)

 

Cell phone just rang. I have to go. Les says this week's check cleared, so why don't we go have a beer to celebrate? It's 11:00
A.M
.

 

 

Okay, it's been six days since my last entry in this journal, and I'm going to record what happened as fully as I can remember.

Les and I went for a beer at the Lynwood Inn, a blue-collar place down at the docks beneath the Second Narrows Bridge
pilings. I don't know if it was the heat, or that we weren't eating the free chicken wings, but by one o'clock we were blotto, when in walked this wharf rat, Jerry, who I met in court in 1992-he'd been pulled over in an Isuzu pickup loaded with stolen skis. When the next pitcher of beer arrived, Jerry paid from a big roll of bills. He then said he had a seventeen-foot aluminum boat with an Evinrude 50 for sale. It was down on the water and did we want to go for a ride?

The boat was a real sweetheart and dead simple: a hull, an engine, a front windshield and a steering wheel-basically a Honda Civic afloat on the harbor's brilliant glassy water…salt mist and galvanized metal; propeller blades churning in jade green water cut with pale blue smoke.

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

“Jerry-where'd you learn Chinese?”

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

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

“Well, he called me some names, and I called him some names, and then he said he'd sink the boat if I kept dissing him, and then he sank the boat. The damn thing was hot as a stove, anyway. Probably better that it sank.” Jerry then flipped open his cell phone, saying, “Someone'll come pick us up.”

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

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

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

“I can't do coke. I really can't. Allergies. Anything that ends with ‘-aine'.”

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

“What are they?”

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

The river looked cold, and was filled with rocks like the one I'd used to kill Mitchell. And the landscape surrounding the river reminded me of the valley forest by the Klaasen family daffodil farm in Agassiz: the creepy sunless forests
carpeted with moss that swallows your feet, and mud that sucks up all noise-summerproof and free of birds.

I turned around to look. Yorgo was behind me, and he cracked me between the shoulders with the barrel of a shotgun. It was just the two of us, and we were clearly on a death march. The tarp in the limo's trunk sprang to mind.

I also noted how quickly my childhood muscle memory for walking atop river rock had returned. Yorgo, I could hear, was having some trouble. He probably grew up in a city.

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

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

 

 

I remember after the massacre I heard that people were praying for the killers, and that made me furious.
It's a bit too late to pray for them now, wouldn't you think?
I was livid for years afterward. Why did those prayers bug me so much-people praying for assassins? I began to wonder if it was because I had so much hate in my own heart; it's a truism that the people we dislike the most in this life are the
people who remind us of ourselves. I'd gone through my life with this massive chunk of hate inside me like a block of demolished concrete, complete with rusted and twisted metal radiating from the inside. Perhaps I didn't feel I deserved any prayers. For over a decade in my head it's been
Rot in hell, you evil little freaks. No pain is big enough for you, and I wish you were alive so I could blow you up and turn you into a big pile of guts that I could trample all over and douse with gasoline and set on fire
.

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

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

 

 

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

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

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