Life After God Read online

  Geese make wonderful pets—curious, affectionate, loyal and smart as whips. And such fun, too. They would sit beside us on the lawn, picking at the grass while we would read trashy paperbacks and stroke the gentle grey fluff on their chests. Every so often they would crane in with their increasingly longer necks to nibble our ears and give adolescent honking sounds in their insatiable quests for more attention. They were summer friends, waddling behind us around the neighborhood, honking like klaxon horns, hissing at cats and scampering to our sides should we stop for even a moment. During storms they would sit inside perched on the piano stool, afterward scampering back out to the yard and the pond, leaving a trail of lawn-clipping poop in their wake. So much work, but so much fun.

  Anyhow, the one thing about Canada geese is that they can only remember you for a year and one day. This is to say that inevitably, no matter how cosmopolitan their upbringing, all geese return to the wild and they forget the family they grew up with; it is a sad truth that colors one’s experience with them. But as I have said, they do remember you for a year and a day—there is the one day of the year when they come home, just the one time.

  Usually it is very early in the morning while you are still deep asleep. You are awaked by a familiar sound, the sound of honking, and so you rush out into the yard with the rest of your family, all of you bleary-eyed. You check the pond and the lawn and find no sign of your old friends. And then you look up onto the roof—up to the roof’s crest. There are your old friends, standing on the summit, plump as Thanksgiving turkeys, blaring the happy trumpets that lay rejoicing inside their hearts—letting you know for just this one time, as you stand there waving to them, that their love for you is greater than those forces in the universe that would split apart any of us—that would erase that best part of us—our memories of what once was.

  1,000 YEARS (Life After God)

  As suburban children we floated at night in swimming pools the temperature of blood; pools the color of Earth as seen from outer space. We would skinny-dip, my friends and me—hip-chick Stacey with her long yellow hair and Malibu Barbie body; Mark, our silent strongman; Kristy, our omni-freckled redheaded joke machine; voice-of-reason Julie, with the “statistically average” body; honey-bronze ski bum, Dana, with his non—existent tan line and suspiciously large amounts of cash, and Todd, the prude, always last to strip, even then peeling off his underwear underneath the water. We would float and be naked—pretending to be embryos, pretending to be fetuses—all of us silent save for the hum of the pool filter. Our minds would be blank and our eyes closed as we floated in warm waters, the distinction between our bodies and our brains reduced to nothing—bathed in chlorine and lit by pure blue lights installed underneath diving boards. Sometimes we would join hands and form a ring like astronauts in space; sometimes when we felt more isolated in our fetal stupor we would bump into each other in the deep end, like twins with whom we didn’t even know we shared a womb.

  Afterward we toweled off and drove in cars on roads that carved the mountain on which we lived—through the trees, through the subdivisions, from pool to pool, from basement to basement, up Cypress Bowl, down to Park Royal and over the Lions Gate Bridge—the act of endless motion itself a substitute for any larger form of thought. The radio would be turned on, full of love songs and rock music; we believed the rock music but I don’t think we believed in the love songs, either then, or now. Ours was a life lived in paradise and thus it rendered any discussion of transcendental ideas pointless. Politics, we supposed, existed elsewhere in a televised non-paradise; death was something similar to recycling.

  Life was charmed but without politics or religion. It was the life of children of the children of the pioneers—life after God—a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven. Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life—and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt.

  I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line. I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.

  But then I must remind myself we are living creatures—we have religious impulses—we must—and yet into what cracks do these impulses flow in a world without religion? It is something I think about every day. Sometimes I think it is the only thing I should be thinking about.

  The swimming pools were a decade-and-a-half ago from last July. This was the month in which my doctor had given me a prescription for a certain type of little yellow pill. It is January now.

  I had been going through one of life’s rough patches—depression and anxiety mostly, and not simply a case of “the blues.” It was bigger than that. Nothing cute like a hug or a cluster of silver balloons would cure the moods that had been eating me for the few years prior to then. Dr. Watkin’s little triangular lozenges the color of strained-chicken baby food seemed to effectively flatten out my moods—and that was just fine by me.

  Dr. Watkin assured me that these pills were extremely common and that most people ended up having to take them at some point in their lives—and I must admit that they did make my temper less haywire. I also became a much “nicer” human being (many of my friends and family had commented on this). As an added bonus, my work became more efficient, and so overall I became a more productive member of society. It was, I suppose, like cosmetic surgery of the brain.

  Well, okay, there’s more to the pill-thing than this. But maybe you have taken pills in your life, too—and maybe when you took them you didn’t know at your deepest levels exactly why you were taking them, only that you were glad that they were there for the taking. That’s what it was like with me.

  I tell you all of this as I sit here on a forest floor in the wilds of Vancouver Island, inside my old Boy Scout tent, which has been unused for decades. Its plastic ground sheet stinks vaguely of a fridge filled with time-expired yogurt; my hands are clutching my last pack of cigarettes to my chest which is swathed for warmth in my suit jacket and tie and an old grey army blanket. I am trying to keep the cigarettes dry from the rain that leaks inside continuously. Night is falling.

  And as you can probably tell, there are things I’m not saying here, things I just can’t bring myself to tell you. Please hang on—bear with me—and I will try to tell you more.

  Maybe I should tell you about how my fellow fetuses have traveled through life since then—tell you about the odd roads our lives took. And though we took a billion different paths to get where we went, our lives oddly ended up in the same sort of non-place.

  First of all, Mark—Mark the strongman, the man who could crush you into petroleum if he wanted to—he tested positive for HIV about two years ago. He’s fine enough now—he still works at the brokerage downtown—but for obvious reasons he thinks more about the Last Things than might other people. On rainy nights, we have retro-cocktails (Sidecars, Singapore Slings) at the Sylvia Hotel Lounge, overlooking English Bay.

  He looks at his situation in his own way. He will say, “If you really think about it, Scout, our bodies have no way of knowing where they begin and where they end. An immune system doesn’t keep you healthy as much as it informs your body where its boundaries lie. Right now it’s as if there’s this hole that’s tunneling through me, confusing my body about where I begin and end—the outside seeping into the inside. Just think of Swiss cheese—if the air holes get too big it stops being a Swiss cheese—it becomes, well … nothing. I guess that’s what I feel is happening to me. I’m becoming nothing. And yeah, it scares me.”

  Our conversations are never easy, but as I—we—get older, we are all finding that our conversations must be spoken. A need burns inside us to share with others what we are feeling. Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic. It is as though the coolness that marked our youth is itself a type of retrovirus that can only leave you feeli
ng empty. Full of holes.

  On another night at the Sylvia Lounge, with another set of cocktails, Stacey, now a divorced aerobics instructor and paralegal assistant, will say to me, “We were trained to believe our world wasn’t magic—simply because it was ours. Why were we taught that magic was something that happened someplace else to other people? Why couldn’t they just have told us, ‘Kids, this is as good as it gets. So soak it all up while you can’?”

  She will finish her second cranberry martini (Crantini). Stacey is an alcoholic now. And her face has that hard look of people who flirt with coke. This saddens me because she is still so beautiful and because I love her more than most of the other people in my life. But I know that the only way she can connect to the “magic” she craves is through the bottle.

  As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve learned that there is not much I, or anyone can do in a situation like Stacey’s. After a while you understand the way that things can go wrong in people’s lives; you learn all the patterns and the temptations; you recognize the ways people use other people.

  The glamour of corruption disappears; the learning is no fun anymore. You don’t want to waste the energy, so instead you learn tolerance, and compassion and love—and distance—and these are hard words for me to say. All of this is hard for me to say.

  Stacey will become confessional. She will say to me, “There’s a big difference between you and me and the rest of the world, Scout,” and I will ask her what this is. She will say, “Well you know that point you reach one day—the day where you suddenly crash and realize that you’re all alone in the world and you fall into the abyss?”

  I will say, “Of course—don’t we all?”

  Stacey will say, “Well, most people are usually living with someone else when that happens and so the expulsion from Eden isn’t nearly so bad. But you and me, Scout—we did the mile. We went through the whole shebang alone. We’re islands now.”

  I won’t know if this is to be taken as a compliment or not. She will begin to get mushy about Mark, for whom she has always had an unreciprocated longing: “Oh, poor Markie—he’s more beautiful than all of us put together and I really think I’d give my own life just so he could stay alive and give the world some scenery for a few more years. Admit it, Scout—you’d give it all away to look like a Chippendale dancer—for even ten minutes.”

  She will realize that her glass is empty and bob her neck in search of the waiter. “And you know what? Mark hasn’t even told his parents. He thinks they’ll abandon him.”

  Then another Crantini will arrive and I’ll know it’s soon going to be bailing-out time for me. And then somehow the subject of God will come up. Stacey will look up at me—still so lovely yet so, so drunk—and she will say, “Scout, God is the teeth of the man who bites me on the back of the neck on a lucky night. God is a voice in the night that I hear but I don’t worry about because I know who he is. Are you hearing me, Scout?”

  “I’m hearing you, Stace,” I will say. And I will be listening, too; an earlier version of me would have changed the subject. Somewhere, years ago, so many of us broke the link between love and sex. Once broken, it can never be fixed again.

  Julie turned out more “normally” than, say Mark or Stacey. She has two kids and lives in Pemberton Heights in North Vancouver, about as suburban as suburban gets. She has a nice-guy husband, Simon, and looks back upon her earlier years when we were all together as something dangerous and beautiful—but mercifully distant, like the tigers in a pit at a zoo.

  “I’m trying to convert my voice these days, Scout,” she will tell me as we sit on her front concrete steps drinking weak Mr. Coffee coffee. “You know—I’m trying to escape from ironic hell: cynicism into faith; randomness into clarity; worry into devotion. But it’s hard because I try to be sincere about life and then I turn on a TV and I see a game show host and I have to throw up my hands and give up. Too many easy pickin’s! Clarity would be so much easier if there weren’t so many cheesy celebrities around. Agreed?”

  Julie will call out for her two sons to stop fighting with each other over a Super Soaker (as an aside to me she will reveal her code names for them, “Damien” and “Satan”) and our talk will continue. “Just ignore the brats.”

  We will talk some more if it is a warm day and the city before us will glow gold, a dozen construction cranes transforming its profile almost by the hour. She will say, “Thousands of years ago, a person just assumed that life for their kids would be identical to the one that they led. Now you assume that life for the next generation—hell, life next week—is going to be shockingly different than life today. When did we start thinking this way? What did we invent? Was it the telephone? The car? Why did this happen? I know there’s an answer somewhere.”

  We will talk some more. She will remind me of a night the seven of us had back in 1983. “You know—the night we drank lemon gin and we each stole a flower from the West Van graveyard for our lapels.”

  I will draw a blank. I won’t remember.

  “Oh, Scout, don’t blank out on me now—you weren’t that drunk. You gave me all that great advice at that restaurant downtown. I changed schools because of that advice.”

  I will still draw a blank. “Sorry, Julie.”

  “This is truly pathetic, Scout. Think. Markie went shirtless down Denman Street; Todd and Dana and Kristy got fake tattoos.”

  “Uh-brain death here. Nothing.”

  Julie will become obsessed with making me remember: “There was that horrible brown vinyl 1970s furniture in the restaurant. You ate a live fish.”

  “Wait!” I’ll cry, “Brown 1970s furniture—I remember brown 1970s furniture.”

  “Well thank the Lord,” Julie will say, “I thought I was going mad.”

  “No, wait, it’s all coming back to me now … the flowers … the fish.” Like a thin strand of dental floss the entire evening will return to me, inch by inch, gently tugged along by Julie. Finally, I will remember the night in its entirety, but the experience will be strangely tiring. The two of us will sit on the warm concrete steps quietly. “What was the point of that story, anyhow?” I will ask.

  “I can’t remember,” Julie will say.

  The two of us will be in a bit of shock, me more than Julie, over the nature of memories—of how they’re all stored in the brain somewhere, but how they can get lost or simply misfiled or God only knows what. Had Julie not sat there and coached me through the memories of that night, I would have gone to the grave without ever having remembered what was in fact a magical night in my life. And so what would have been the point of having lived that night at all? And so the two of us will be quiet.

  It will be time to leave and I will be standing half-inside my car at the end of the driveway by Simon’s recently planted baby rhododendrons. Julie will say to me, “Well, so long, James Bond. Back to the bachelor Bat Cave. Wish I could come along with you.”

  I will think this over and I will say to her, “No you don’t. I’d give a million dollars to be able to stay here at this house with you—to be Simon for a day.”

  And she will pause and then she will say, “You know, it’s a good life, Scout—but I get lonely here, too—inside the house. Don’t fool yourself.” She will then give me a peck on the cheek and I will be off, back into the city.

  I return to this damp little tent here in the darkening rain forest. It is getting colder now that the daylight behind the overcast rain clouds is gone—but not too cold. It never gets too cold here, and this January has been a mild one. The batteries in my flashlight are dead; I didn’t prepare for this trip very well—it occurred in somewhat of a hurry—I will explain later. I sit here tugging on a pair of dry, grey, work socks I bought at the PetroCan station in Duncan, while eating my third Kit Kat. The tent now smells somewhat like an Easter egg hunt.

  I might as well fill you in on the other three fetuses who shared the swimming pools of my youth. And also, let me tell you this: a week ago, I threw away the pills Doctor Watk
in gave me. They now lie buried inside a brown plastic Shoppers Drug Mart vial snug within the municipal landfill. So it’s truly the real me you’re hearing. Not the pills.

  Just to reassure you.

  Dana.

  Dana was the most experimental of the seven of us. We knew he did all sorts of fringe things, but with us he made an effort to be “normal” (that word again). I suppose that was our attraction to him. It wasn’t until years later that I found out just how fringy some of his behavior was.

  He took me into his West End apartment, on the twentysomethingth floor of some 1960s concrete tooth, and, in a mood of general confession, showed me a stack of porn mags with Post-it notes stuck inside various pages and said, “Look.” I did, and there was Dana at various ages over the years, no tan lines, doing just about everything with just about everybody. I was speechless. What can one say?

  He then took me to a cupboard with a vacuum cleaner and a few boxes of Tide. From one of the Tide boxes he removed a clear plastic bag full of something that was not Tide. From there we walked into the bathroom and he flushed away the equivalent of an Ivy League education for a set of twins.

  We then went into his living room—IKEA furniture and yuppie electronic toys covered with cigarette burns, smoked one last cigarette and looked at the sun shining silver over the sailboats in English Bay. “I just wanted a witness, that’s all,” he said.

  “Then I’m your witness,” I replied.