Life After God Read online

  The streets outside the window in our part of the city were silent, whereas the afternoon before there had been the grind of practicing school choirs from Illinois, satellite linkup trucks, secret service men buzzing each other, joggers and barking dogs. Now all of the action was on the other side of the Capitol building.

  After the swearing-in ceremony was finished on CNN, we walked down onto the street to see if we could see the old president’s helicopter leaving the Capitol building—and we could. Other people from houses along the street were doing the same thing, and we all stood there under the warm January sun on a street with no cars, watching the helicopter rise, hover and depart, like a science fiction creature. As I went back into the apartment I looked at the yards in front of the houses: frost had not done much damage that year and the soil of the city sprouted with narcissi and chives and dandelion.

  I then got dressed in a shirt and tie and walked down to Pennsylvania Avenue where the citizens stood ten-deep waiting for the parade. It was sweater weather and the people of the city were in high spirits. Junkies the color of vanilla milk shakes wore their finest baseball caps; florally upholstered Mary Kay queens ate bagels sold from street vendors. The suburban folk who had ventured into the city wore down vests and ski jackets; some of the older folks wore tweed coats and dashing hats. Everywhere there was a sense that today did not have to be like other days; there was a sense that just for one day, the city was open to everyone and free of danger. And the roar they made! The noise! the clapping—the cheering! It was so loud, a deafening beauty.

  I squished myself into the crowd in front of the Canadian Embassy, 501 Pennsylvania Avenue, just as the parade began. Secret service people lurked everywhere as the big moment came when the President himself passed by us. As he did, a boys’ varsity basketball team from Rockville, Maryland, lifted an old woman in her wheelchair up high so that she could see him, and the clapping became ecstatic. After the President had passed, a piping band marched by and the music made my eyes water. I remembered there was a war going on and the music was a reminder of the beauty that often accompanies destruction.

  And then suddenly I realized that I was feeling—well, that I was actually feeling. My old personality was, after months of pills and pleasant nothingness, returning. Just the littlest bit—for I had only stopped taking my little yellow pills the day before—but my essence was already asserting itself, however weakly at this point. I felt a lump in my throat, and I spent the rest of the day walking around this strange and beautiful city, remembering myself, what it used to feel like to be me, before I switched myself off, before I stopped listening to my inner voices.

  This process continued into the night. I ate dinner at a Burger King. Allan was asleep by the time I shuffled in, exhausted. And all through the next day’s flight back home, more and more of myself trickled back into the vessel of my body, drop by drop by drop as the jet flew over Idaho, back home from my brief interlude in the radically different world of the East.

  The next night at 9:30 I was back in Vancouver, in my apartment in Kitsilano, a scenic, hilly, Jeep-clogged beer commercial of a neighborhood overlooking the ocean. I walked through the door, phoned in sick to the office, unplugged my phone, drew the shades, locked the doors and went to bed. Over the next week I emerged only to visit the corner hippie food store to buy textured tofu, veggies, loganberry juice and soy milk.

  Memories ran through my head this week, memories of photos I had once seen of houses drowned by floods in northern British Columbia during the great hydroelectric projects of the 1960s. Decades later, when the water levels dropped, these ghostly houses would reappear amid mud flats and flopping, asphyxiating fish. I felt myself now walking through one of these strange houses, now my house, putting pictures up on the greyed, mired wood, putting thick Persian rugs on the snaggletoothed floor, painting the warped walls bright colors—relighting the fireplace that had been at the bottom of the sea for so long.

  I never expected to become this strange person I had become, but I was determined to know who this person was.

  And so I sat, bunkered away for a week, coming off the pills, thinking and dreaming alone—as do we all, I suppose.

  It was only this morning, Wednesday morning—a week since the inauguration—that I drove down to my old office, down at the industrial park in Richmond off Highway 99, stopping first for some doughnuts at the Lansdowne Mall, savoring their sugary burst of artificiality after a week of hippie food.

  I only got as far as my office’s parking lot, though, beside its unadorned aquamarine glass box when I froze in my car, three parking aisles back. I was feeling sick to my stomach, unable to get out. I was dressed for work today—I had thought I would be able to do it—but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to leave the car, to enter the building.

  After maybe half an hour or so, Kristy came out of the main entrance of the building, carrying two Styrofoam cups of coffee and got in the car and sat in the passenger seat. She asked me what was new and I said, “Oh, you know—life, I guess.”

  And she asked, “Growing a beard?”

  I said, “Uh, yeah.”

  After a guilty pause she asked, “Ummm, Scout—you’re not planning on randomly sniping us miserable employees here, are you?”

  I said, “No—not this week.”

  “No senseless blood bath? No carnage?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well then, that’s a relief.” She checked her makeup in the vanity mirror underneath the passenger seat visor. “Everybody’s been looking at you through the windows wondering if you had a Uzi in the trunk. Feeling not-sick anymore?”

  “Not as much.”

  “Good.”

  We sat drinking the coffee and looking at the building. The glass was one-way, so we couldn’t see inside, but we could see the clouds reflected in the glass: bumper car clouds—the puffy type in which you can easily imagine animal shapes.

  I asked Kristy what was new in the office and she said that R&D was releasing a project for a memory system called “Flavor Crystals” in which memory was stored “in buds, like in Tang or something. I’m not quite sure I understand.”

  I was silent and our little sips of coffee from the Styrofoam were depressing. Kristy said to me, “You know, Scout, I think it’s time for one of our therapy cruises. Don’t you?”

  I agreed. I started the car, reversed out of the lot, and then pulled riverward, out through the agricultural flatlands.

  The two of us held our hot beverages, driving the speed limit while looking at the bleak January blueberry and strawberry farms and the falling-apart old barns. It felt good to be moving. It felt good to not be near the office. It felt good to be with Kristy.

  The tide was out and we stopped the car to look for drift-stuff. We were at the spot where the Fraser River meets the ocean and the river turns to salt. There were sticks and bits of plastic and old logs and pieces of old plywood and bits of broken boats and wooden doors. Piles and piles of this debris went on for as far as we could see.

  I guess the barns and this old jetsam made Kristy think of aging. She asked, “Is it me, Scout, or is time going all weird for you, too?”

  “How so?” I was poking a stick at an old window frame.

  “I mean, does a day still feel like a day to you, or does it just zing right by? Is time passing too quickly for you, too?”

  “I think so. I think it’s the spirit of the age. All these machines we have now. Like phone answering machines and VCRs. Time collapses.”

  “I used to think time was like a river,” she said, hopscotching from log to log, “that it always flowed at the same speed no matter what. But now I think that time has floods, too. Or that it just simply isn’t a constant any more. I feel like I’m in the flood.”

  I said that time was linked to emotions. “Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster
.”

  “Christ, how depressing,” said Kristy.

  We walked and poked amid the silver-grey field of drift-things. Kristy asked me, “Scout, do you ever think sometimes that maybe you’re a bit past love?”

  “Me?”

  “No—me, I mean. I wonder if I’m turning into an old hosebag.”

  I threw a stick to an imaginary dog. “I doubt it. From what I can see, love is always lurking around the corner. Maybe you’ll be one of those women who fall for a jailed serial killer.”

  “Thanks.”

  This was one of those conversations where you looked at the scenery, not each other. I said, “Yeah, I do worry if I’m past love—or if that capacity was even there in the first place.”

  “I woke really early this morning,” said Kristy, “and I thought to myself—‘So, girl—this is it? Forty more years of this? Something’s got to change, girl. Something’s got to change.’ And it’s true. Something does. I need something. Or maybe I need to throw something away. But something has to change now. I can’t go on like this any longer.”

  “Did you fall out of love with Bryce?” I asked.

  “Not yet. But it’ll happen soon enough, that moment where The Other turns into a tacky stranger and I can’t believe what a loser I was to hook up with him in the first place.”

  “Gee, that’s certainly an optimistic point of view.”

  “But it’s true. As I age I find I’m simply unwilling to pursue any relationship that I know from the start is just not going to work—what sort of callous old broad am I?”

  “An efficient old broad?” I ventured.

  We walked further on, then—a confession from Kristy: “My big fear is getting married and falling out of love.”

  “Big Surprise, Kris. That’s everybody’s big fear. Everybody’s. But most people pass through it.” I was surprised that Kristy should confess to me a fear which, from her lips, seemed almost naïve.

  We walked further, watching the birds peck amid the wood bits, just as we pecked amid them, too. Kristy asked, “Aren’t you worried about just making do in life?”

  “Sure.”

  “How do you deal with it?”

  “Until recently I don’t think I have been dealing with it.”

  There was a pause and then Kristy turned to me, smiling: “You weren’t sick last week, were you, Scout?”

  “Technically, no.”

  “Where were you?”

  “At home. Just thinking.”

  “Polishing your rifles? Muttering to yourself about conspiracy theories?”

  “No. Just thinking. You know, I went to Washington after New York. To see the inauguration ceremonies.”

  “See any celebs?”

  “No.”

  “Meet the prez?”

  “No.”

  “Why’d you go?”

  “I’m not sure. But there was something there I needed to see—evidence of a person or a thing larger than a human being.”

  “And … ?”

  “And … I came home and ended up spending the week bunkered away—thinking.”

  I knew that Kristy was dying to know what conclusions I had made, but I am ashamed to say that I was too embarrassed to tell her. Instead I changed the subject. “Did I ever tell you,” I said, “about the time last year in Stanley Park when Mark and I went rollerblading?”

  “No.”

  “There was this group of blind people, with white canes and everything—a C.N.I.B. tour or something—and they heard us coming, and they motioned for us to stop, and we did. Then they handed Mark a camera. They asked Mark to take their picture.”

  “Blind people?”

  “Exactly. But the strange thing was, they still believed in sight. In pictures. I’m thinking that’s not a bad attitude.”

  It was nice being with Kristy like this, just hanging out. It reminded me of the old days, of being fetal in the swimming pools. I mentioned to her one of my favorite fantasies: to be in a coma for one year and wake up and have a whole year’s backlog worth of news to catch up on.

  “Me too!” she cried. “Fifty-two whole issues of People to catch up on—it’d be like heroin—information overdosing.”

  We got back into the car, and Kristy was still in her People magazine mode. She asked me, “Do you ever wonder who it is who people will remember in a thousand years—and, I mean—do you think they’ll get it right? I mean, ‘There was once the Great Madonna and She was so fabulous that She lived on the 500th floor of the Empire State Building and consumed 1,000 Pepsis every day.’ Stuff like that.”

  I said we’ll probably remember Einstein, Marilyn Monroe and that’s it. And then I changed my mind. I said, “You know what people will probably think of when they think of these days a thousand years from now? They’ll look back upon them with awe and wonder. They’ll think of Stacey—or someone like Stacey—driving her convertible down the freeway, her hair flowing back in the wind. She’ll be wearing a bikini and she’ll be eating a birth control pill—and she’ll be on her way to buy real estate. That’s what I think people will remember about these times. The freedom. That there was a beautiful dream of freedom that propelled the life we lived.”

  “It seems impossible to imagine a thousand years,” said Kristy. “I think that one lifetime is all the time human beings are capable of imagining.”

  “You’re probably right. I think as humans we’re only allowed certain viewpoints about time. And they’re probably not the correct ones, either. Time is probably something else altogether. So I wouldn’t panic about it.”

  “You have been bunkered away for a week, haven’t you?”

  “We’d probably best be driving you back to the Evil Empire,” I said.

  Minutes later we pulled back into the parking lot. Kristy put her Styrofoam cup, scarred with fingernail indents and lipstick bruises, onto the dashboard’s top. “I take it you’re not coming back in,” she said.

  “No. Probably not,” I said.

  “Any particular reason?”

  “That kooky bunkering, you know. It makes you see life differently.”

  “Can I come over and visit you sometime soon?”

  “Always.”

  Bryce’s Porsche pulled into the lot. Kristy looked at it. “Guess I’d best be going.” She kissed me on the lips. “You know, I think I’m beginning to think you’re smarter than I am.”

  “We’ll talk soon.”

  She skipped back into the office.

  But the forest—the forest … how did I end up in this rain soaked tent in the middle of nowhere?

  I have told you part of the story. But there is a little bit more. It happened like this: Decades ago, my father would take my brothers and sisters and me on fishing trips into northern British Columbia. This was back when we were all young enough that our daily experiences were converting from dreams into memories—permanent memories.

  I dreaded these trips, regarding them, as the youngest of many children often do, as merely a new mode in which my elder siblings might creatively format their tormentings of myself.

  Needless to say, my siblings loved these journeys, deep, deep into the worlds of Nowhere—far from the comfort of television and the mall and hot food. British Columbia was far more primitive then, even a short time ago, in the 1960s.

  Now, decades later, the torments, whatever they were, are long forgotten. But what remains in my head are the memories of the landscapes we entered as a family: the raw mountains; the charging rivers; the purity of it all. What also remains is my unshakable sense that the undiscovered world is indeed larger than the world we think we know.

  And so, after returning home to Kitsilano and staring at my stale apartment and hearing the mumbles of traffic outside, it was these memories of these landscapes that made me choose to retreat further into myself, to head into the wilderness.

  As long as there is wilderness, I know there is a larger part of myself that I can always visit, vast tracts of territory lying dormant, cravin
g exploration and providing sanctity.

  And so that is how I ended up here in the forest tonight, in this soaking wet tent—impulse, sheer mad impulse, and—given my current level of discomfort—bad planning. But it’s okay.

  And here’s how I left the city: I rifled through the front hall closet and the kitchen and began stuffing things into an old blue duffel sport bag—sweat clothes, baseball caps, a box of Ritz crackers, hiking boots, a flashlight…. I tossed the bag into the rear seat of my ancient Volvo along with my old Boy Scout tent, and simply departed, off for the Vancouver Island ferry at Horseshoe Bay over in West Vancouver.

  My old car rumbled through downtown, over road ramps that twisted like proteins, through a fishy smelling breeze, past skyscrapers, past a CBC TV tower, past totem poles and jet-lagged Japanese tourists forlornly roaming the sidewalks. Then over Lions Gate Bridge and over Burrard Inlet where mallard ducks sleep in the cold water currents along the black and white spines of killer whales.

  The ferry was just loading at Horseshoe Bay, and I slid right on, and for the 90-minute trip to Vancouver Island, I watched the puffs of cloud in the sky degenerate into serious rain weather.

  Disembarking off the clanking ferry ramp at Nanaimo, I drove the Trans-Canada highway south and then turned Pacific Oceanward at Duncan, off toward Lake Cowichan and the pulp mill town of Youbou. There, the road turned to dirt and the potholes were filled with milky bruises of rainwater. A ghostly procession of ecological activists in yellow and green rain slickers marched down the road, like a conscience.

  I drove for two hours, not seeing any other cars or logging trucks, but sometimes I would hear the logging trucks changing gears on the other side of a mountain, like a dinosaur’s howl. The sides of the road were strewn, like bones, with loggers’ debris—coffee cups, grease-gun cartridges, rags, steel cables and spray-paint cans. Gravel ripped at my car’s under panels; I crossed a river of shocking liquid emerald; I headed upward and inward into the mountains and their mists.

  I drove along the logging roads with the windows open, with bracing winds and splashes of rain pelting inside—along winding hairpinning roads, through clearcuts, through ancient rain forests, through tree farms, careful all the while to look for washouts on the road and for fallen snags.