Life After God Read online

  I said that the secret world reminded me of the world of sleep where time and gravity and things like that don’t matter. She said that maybe they were both the same thing.

  One day I came home from the library, where I had spent the afternoon trying to make people feel middle class by scowling at them. The door to Cathy and Pup-Tent’s apartment was wide open so I poked my head in and said “Hello?” I couldn’t believe what a dump their place was—strewn with rusting bike chains, yellowed house plants, cigarette boxes and butts, Metallica banners, beer bottles, grubby blankets and Cathy’s clothes. I said, “Cath? Pup? You guys in?” but there was no answer.

  I stood there looking around when Cathy came in the door looking in awful condition and carrying a bag of Burger King food. She

  said that Pup-Tent was gone, that he’d taken off with a stripper to Vancouver Island and that, in the end, he had gone nuts because Cathy had erased all of his cassette tapes by microwaving them in his mini microwave.

  “I must look pretty bad, huh?”

  “No,” I said, “not at all.”

  “You hungry? Want some food?”

  “Maybe later.”

  We stood in silence for a little while. Cathy picked up a few stray garments. Then she said, “You used to live over on the mountain, didn’t you—over on the North Shore?”

  I confirmed I had grown up there.

  “That’s where the big lake is, right—the reservoir?”

  I told her this was true.

  “Then I need you to help me with something—what are you doing this afternoon?”

  I replied what am I ever doing in the afternoons.

  Cathy wanted to see the water reservoir up the Capilano Canyon, up behind Cleveland Dam. She wouldn’t tell me why until we got there, but she seemed in an obviously unhappy state and playing tour guide was the least I could do to cheer her up. And so we took the bus over to the North Shore, to the mountains overlooking the city.

  The bus climbed up Capilano Road, past the suburban houses nested inside the tall Douglas firs, hemlocks and cedars. These houses seemed far enough away from my present life as to seem like China.

  Further up the mountain, the late-afternoon sky was cloudy and dark. When the wet air from the Pacific Ocean hits the mountains, it dumps all of its wetness right there. The sky was just starting to rain as we got off the bus near the Cleveland Dam and, as we crossed the road, I could tell we were going to get soaked.

  The reservoir itself was a short walk away and was quickly enough pointed out to Cathy, but she looked disappointed when she saw it, though—the large, loch-like lake stretching back into the steep, dark mountain valley. She said, “like, what’s with the barbed wire fence—you mean we can’t go in and touch the water?”

  I said we couldn’t—not from where we were.

  “We have another option?”

  I said we did, but it would involve some tromping through the woods and she said this was just fine, and so we headed up the road past a sign saying: WATERSHED: NO ADMITTANCE to a place where we used to have outdoor parties when I was in high school.

  Cathy sullenly smoked a cigarette and clutched her purse to her side as we walked past a gate and up the dirt access road. The mountains above us were cloaked in mist up at their tops and we heard only the occasional bird noise as we cut off the road and into the trees. Cathy was immediately drenched as we cut through the underbrush of salmonberry bushes, grasses and juvenile firs. Her big hair was filled with spider-webs and fir needles and dead huckleberry leaves; her black jeans were wet and clammy at her ankles. I asked her if she wanted to go back but she said, no, we had to continue and so we did, tromping deep into the black echofree woods until we saw the glint of water ahead of us—the reservoir. Cathy then said to me, “Stop—don’t move,” and I froze.

  I thought she had seen a bear or had pulled a gun out of her purse. I turned around and she had frozen in mid-motion. She said, “I bet if we froze right here and didn’t move and didn’t breathe we could stop time.”

  And so we stood there, deep in the woods, frozen in mid-motion, trying to stop time.

  Now: I believe that you’ve had most of your important memories by the time you’re thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don’t register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn’t compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors’ patio furniture into their pool in the eleventh grade. You know what I mean.

  I think Cathy at some level also felt this way, too—and that she realized all of her important memories would be soon enough taken—that she had X-number of years ahead of her of falling for the wrong guys—mistreaters and abusers—and that all of her memory would then be used up in sadness and dead ends and being hurt, and at the end of it all there would be … nothing—no more new feelings.

  Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who are unable to connect with the profound—people such as my boring brother-in-law, a hearty type so concerned with normality and fitting in that he eliminates any possibility of uniqueness for himself and his own personality. I wonder if some day, when he is older, he will wake up and the deeper part of him will realize that he has never allowed himself to truly exist, and he will cry with regret and shame and grief.

  And then sometimes I think the people to feel saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder—people who closed the doors that lead us into the secret world—or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.

  What happened was this: Cathy and I walked to the edge of the reservoir’s water and from her purse she removed a Ziploc baggie containing two filmy-tailed, rather stupid-looking goldfish that Pup-Tent had bought for her the week before in an isolated moment of kindness. We sat down on the smooth rocks next to the spotless, clean, infinitely dark and deep lake water. She said to me, “You only get one chance to fall in love for the first time, don’t you.” And I said, “Well, at least you got the chance. A lot of people are still waiting.”

  She then poked into the glassy still water, made small ripples, and threw a stone or two. Then she took the baggie, placed it under the water and punctured the membrane with her sharp black fingernails. “Bye-bye, fishies,” she said as the two languidly wriggled away down into the depths. “Make sure you two stay together. You’re the only chance that either of you is ever going to get.”

  2 Donny

  Donny was a hustler who lived at the end of the hall in the tiny room next to the bathroom. He was young and friendly, and sometimes would ask me to have dinner with him, but dinner usually turned out to be blue Popsicles, Velveeta cheese and beer in his dingy room where the paint peeled and you could see how many colors the room had been before. The only technology in the room was a phone and a phone answering machine he used to reply to ads he placed in the paper. I’d feel so sorry for him. Even though I was broke I’d find a way to treat him to dinner at the A&W.

  Donny would do anything with anybody, but mostly people didn’t want to do much, he said. A sixteen-year-old girl asked him to sit in a hot tub with her with no clothes; an older yuppie-type businesswoman paid him $250.00 just to go see Batman Returns with her. Donny said it was things like this that really made him wonder about human nature—not the jobs where people wore leather masks and kicked him in the stomach.

  Every afternoon around dark, when the windows got dark enough to turn into mirrors, Donny would come out of the bathroom with wet short black hair which he would shake like a dog, and then tramp down the hotel’s creaky old stairs and pursue the evening’s commerce. He said he thought of himself as an entrepreneur; he said the guys on the street gave him the nickname P—ttáno, Boy Slut; he said anything was better than the job he had before, which involved driving a shuttle bus between
the airport and one of the downtown hotels.

  Oddly, Donny had an accountant, Meyer, a 12-step meeting addict from the first floor. Meyer made Donny take out ads saying “I will tell you my deepest fantasy … Mail $20.00 in a S.A.S.E. to STUD MAN, P.O. Box …” The ad was in case the tax people ever decided to get on Donny’s case and he needed a way to launder his money. As if! I imagine any money Donny might have saved was to fund his idea for the future, which he mentioned once and only once. The idea was to “hook a whole bunch of suntanning beds up to a computer and have little girls pushing the buttons for me at $3.25 an hour.”

  Donny was always getting stabbed. His skin was beginning to look like an old leather couch at the Greyhound station, but this did not bother him at all. One night after a flare up on a sidewalk after an Alexis-versus-Krystle drag night at one of the clubs, Donny came home with a half dozen calligraphic red slashes all over his stomach. I tried to make him go to St. Paul’s for stitches but he wouldn’t. When I asked him if he was worried about permanent damage he gave me a guarded look and said, “This is my life and this is how I live it.” I never hassled him again after that.

  But Donny actively invited stabbing into his life. He said that stabbing didn’t hurt nearly as much as you’d think and that it was actually kind of cool, and that when it happened, “man, when that blade first digs into you it makes your soul leap out of your body for just a second, like a salmon jumping out of a river.”

  I do remember him telling me, though, that he was actually getting a little bored with being stabbed. He said that in the end his big goal was to get shot. He was so curious to know what being shot would be like. To facilitate shooting he would always wear his shirts wide open at the chest, like a 1976 person.

  Donny showed up nearer the end of my stay at the hotel—a period when I was wondering if I would eventually be exhausted by the effort it was taking to cope with solitude.

  I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn’t just around that next corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.

  Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we’ve missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

  Sometimes Donny and Cathy and I would walk the streets together on a sunny day and just bum around. The innocence of this activity made our lives seem a bit less dark. We would buy ice creams, Donny would walk on his hands and we would play “mock the stock” at some of the more extreme bondage and sex stores.

  Once in the early evening we walked past a fortune teller—a grizzled old soak sitting forlornly behind a card table clutching a deck of tarot cards probably salvaged from a dumpster and a Japanese paper carp with a candle burning inside. We kidded Donny and said he should have his fortune read, but he freaked and refused flat out. “I’m not having some old rubby tell me my future. Man, he probably lives in an old fridge under the Burrard Bridge. He probably sits in his fridge and molests tennis starlets all day.”

  We didn’t press the issue, and if the fortune teller had heard Donny’s comments, he gave no indication and we walked on.

  It was only a few weeks later that I saw Donny, cheerfully being told his fortune by the same old fortune teller. I walked up to him and said, “Hey, Sport—I thought you didn’t want to have your fortune told to you.”

  And Donny said matter-of-factly, “Hey, guy. Didn’t you see the sign here?” He pointed to some words lopsidedly felt-penned on a sheet of packing cardboard next to the candle which read:

  I PROMiSS I wonT TeLL YOu YOuR gOING TO DIE.

  “That’s all it takes, Man. It’s all I ever wanted to hear. Keep on reading, Mister.”

  This is not a long story. In the end Donny got his wish and he did get shot—over a very stupid drug deal that imploded in a Chinatown parking lot—twice in the back of the head and once in the back. I ended up having to identify the body as nobody knew where his family was or who they were. I guess his salmon jumped out of the river and onto land and the river itself flows on.

  I left the hotel shortly thereafter and, very soon after that, I fell in love. Love was frightening and it hurt—not only during, but afterward—when I fell out of love. But that is another story.

  I would like to fall in love again but my only hope is that love doesn’t happen to me so often after this. I don’t want to get so used to falling in love that I get curious to experience something more extreme—whatever that may be.

  THINGS THAT FLY

  For anyone who’s ever broken up with someone else

  I’m sitting hunched over the living room coffee table on a Sunday night, in a daze, having just woken up from a deep deep sleep on a couch shared with pizza boxes and crushed plastic cherry yogurt containers. In front of me a TV game show is playing on MUTE and my head rests on top of my hands, as though I am praying, but I am not; I am rubbing my eyes and trying to wake up, and my hair is brushing the tabletop which is covered in crumbs and I am thinking to myself that, in spite of everything that has happened in my life, I have never lost the sensation of always being on the brink of some magic revelation—that if only I would look closely enough at the world, then that magic revelation would be mine—if only I could wake up just that little bit more, then … well—let me describe what happened today.

  Today went like this: I was up at noon; instant coffee; watched a talk show; a game show; a bit of football; a religious something-or-other; then I turned the TV off. I drifted listlessly about the house, from silent room to silent room, spinning the wheels of the two mountain bikes on their racks in the hallway and straightening a pile of CDs glued together with spilled Orange Crush in the living room. I suppose I was trying to pretend I had real things to do, but, well, I didn’t.

  My brains felt overheated. So much has happened in my life recently. And after hours of this pointlessness I finally had to admit I couldn’t take being alone one more moment. And so I swallowed my pride and drove to my parents at their house further up the hill here on the North Shore: up on the mountain—up in the trees to my old house—my true home, I guess. Today was the first day when I could really tell that summer was over. The cold air sparkled and the maple leaves were rotting, putting forth their lovely reek, like dead pancakes.

  Up on the mountain, my mother was in the kitchen making 1947-style cream cheese sandwiches with pimentos and no crusts to freeze in advance for her bridge friends. Dad was sitting at the kitchen table reading The Vancouver Sun. Of course they knew about what had happened recently and so they were walking on eggshells around me. This made me feel odd and under-the-microscope, so I went upstairs to sit in the guest room to look out the window at honking V’s of Canada geese flying south toward the United States from northern British Columbia. It was peaceful to see so many birds flying—to see all these things in our world that can fly.

  Mom had left the TV on in the bedroom, next room over. CNN was saying that Superman was scheduled to die later this week—in the sky above Minneapolis, and I was momentarily taken out of myself. I thought this was certainly a coincidence, because I had just visited the city of Minneapolis a month ago, on a business trip: a new crystal city, all shiny like quartz rising over the Midwest corn fields. According to the TV, Superman was supposed to die in an air battle over the city with a supremely evil force, and while I knew this was just a cheesy publicity ploy to sell more comics—and I haven’t even read a Superman comic in two decades—the thought still made me feel bad.

  And then the geese passed, and I sat watching the blue smoke linger down the mountain slopes from people burning leaves across
the Capilano River. After a while I returned downstairs and Dad and I sat in the kitchen next to the sliding glass door and we fed the birds and animals on the back patio. We had grain and corn for the chickadees, juncos and starlings; and roasted peanuts for the jays and the black and grey squirrels. Such a sea of life! And I was glad for this activity because there is something about the animals that takes us out of ourselves and takes us out of time and allows us to forget our own lives.

  Dad had placed a cob of corn on a stump for the jays, who bickered over it non-stop. And we threw peanuts to the jays and I noticed that when I threw two peanuts to a jay, it just sat there and couldn’t decide which nut was juicier, so it became paralyzed with greed and couldn’t take either of them. And we threw nuts to the squirrels, too, and they’re so dumb that even if I hit them on the head with a nut, they couldn’t find it. I just don’t know how they’ve managed to survive these millions of years. Dad had also scattered sunflower seeds for a flying squirrel he has named Yo-yo who lives in the backyard. Yo-yo darted about the yard like a pinball.

  Mom said that people are interested in birds only inasmuch as they exhibit human behavior—greed and stupidity and anger—and by doing so they free us from the unique sorrow of being human. She thinks humans are tired of having to take the blame all by themselves for the badness in the world.

  I told Mom my own theory of why we like birds—of how birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.