Hey Nostradamus! (17 page)

He sneered my way.

“You do, don't you?”

Yorgo spat to his left.

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

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

I asked him, “Where are we?”

He looked away.

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

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

Yorgo remained quiet.

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

I walked away.

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

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

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

My mind raced with thoughts of death.
Not only am I
going to die sooner rather than later, I am going to die alone and lonely
. But then I remembered, so were my father and mother. Considering this further, I realized most people I knew were going to die alone and lonely. Was this life in general, or was it just me? Did I unwittingly send out the sort of signals that attract desperate souls? I looked at the shadows of sleeping cattle and thought,
Lucky farm animals
. Lucky space aliens. Lucky anything-but-humans, never having to deal with knowing how foul or desperate their own species is.

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

“Sure, Dad. Why not?”

“What a good question.”

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

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

Jesus, Dad do you have to be so random? Why is your kindness or wrath about as predictable as knowing when the phone is going to ring? I've never known what will set you off. I still don't. Nobody does. You've built this thing around
you, this place you call the world, but it's not the world-it's Reg's little private club. You're only concerned with making people conform to your own picture of God, never trying to cool the suffering of anyone in pain.

As I walked I tried to recall any crimes or events leading to my riverside drama. I came up blank. How odd to be guilty of enormous acts yet be unaware of them. Maybe
this
is what it feels like to be born with original sin, or rather, to fully
believe
in original sin-to live always with a black sun hovering above you.

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

But I hadn't killed Yorgo.

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

Huh
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next message was from Reg, still at the hospital. “Jason, don't hang up. It's your father, yes, your father. They found something inside me that's not quite right, so they've been holding me here longer. Thank you for bringing in my things. I know you didn't have to do it. I've been considering your reaction to my words. No, I don't think one of Kent's twins is a monster. But then what
does
happen when the self splits? What happens when a cell splits five times, with quintuplets? Each has a unique soul. And what if
they made a thousand clones of Frank Sinatra? Each would have a unique soul. So then by extension, Jason, let's say we were to clone an infinite number of souls from one starter soul-yours or mine or the Queen's; whoever's-and say we filled up the universe with this infinite number of cloned souls. Wouldn't this mean that each human soul is infinite as well as full of unimaginable mystery? I leave it at that, son. I've never wanted anything more for you than the Kingdom. Good-bye.”

Bastard
.

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

“Huh?”

“Your taxi's here.”

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

I phoned the number Yorgo'd given me. It rang maybe seven times, and I almost hung up. Then a man answered, some Freon-blooded goon-a crooked cop? A junkie? “Yorgo wants me to let you know where he is.”

“Does he, now?”

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

“And this is the number he gave you?”

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

“Yorgo? He's no favor to me.”

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

“No.”

“You're serious.”

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

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

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

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

My apartment feels like a mousetrap, not a place to call home. In the bathroom I expected Yorgo's twin brother to jump out from behind the shower curtain with either a silenced Luger or a bottle of vodka to celebrate all that's good in life. When I came out, some beer bottles settled on the balcony, and the clinking made me spasm out of my chair.

I'm going to crash on a friend's couch for the night.

 

 

I'm in a Denny's in North Van, Booth Number 7, a dead breakfast in front of me, and a couple arguing about child
custody behind me. I've run out of pink invoice paper, so three-ring binder paper from the Staples across the street will suffice.

I slept maybe two hours at my friend Nigel's-he's good at wiring and plastering drywall. He left early to frame a house in West Van, so I had his place to myself. It's a variation of my place: bachelor crap-moldy dishes in the sink; skis leaning against the wall beside the door; newspaper entertainment sections folded open to the TV listings sprayed all over the carpet, which smells like a dog and he doesn't even have a dog.

Here in Denny's Booth Number 7, I can take as much time as I want because the breakfast rush is over, and lunch won't start for maybe an hour. The arguing couple had one final squawk and then left. I've asked the waitress to keep bringing me water so I can flush everything poisonous from my body, the residual alcohol and the residual pills that made me bigger and smaller.

Already I've reconciled myself to the possibility that my truck will explode next time I turn the key, or that they'll find me on the sidewalk outside the Chevron with a pea-sized hole in my third eye. That would be so great, to have it be fast like that.

But there's this other part of me, the part that's shed the block of hate, the part that decided not to kill Yorgo-the part that wants to go further in life. I have to let it be known that I existed. I was real. I had a name. I know there must have been a point to my being here; there
must
have been a point.

Everyone I meet eventually says, “Jason, you saved so many lives back in 1988.” Yeah sure, but it wrecked my
family, and there are still more people than not who believe I'm implicated in the massacre. Last year I was in the library researching blackouts, and somebody hissed at me-I'm not supposed to notice these things? Cheryl fluked into martyrdom, and Jeremy Kyriakis scammed his way onto Santa's list of redeemed little girls and boys, but me? Redemption exists, but only for others. I believe, and yet I lack faith. I tried building a private world free of hypocrisy, but all I ended up with was a sour little bubble as insular and exclusive as my father's.