"Hey Nostradamus!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Coupland Douglas)

Part Two 1999: Jason

You won't see me in any of the photographs after the massacre - you know the ones I mean: the wire service shots of the funerals, students felt-penning teenage poetry on Cheryl's casket; teenage prayer groups in sweats and scrun-chies huddled on the school's slippery gym floor; 6:30 A.M. prayer breakfasts in the highway off-ramp chain restaurants, with all the men wearing ties while dreaming of hash browns. I'm in none of them, and if you had seen me, I sure wouldn't have been praying.

I want to say that right from the start.

Just one hour ago, I was a good little citizen in a Toronto-Dominion bank branch over in North Van, standing in line, and none of this was even on my mind. I was there to deposit a check from my potbellied contractor boss, Les, and I was wondering if I should blow off the afternoon's work. My hand reached down into my pocket, and instead of a check, my sunburnt fingers removed the invitation to my brother's memorial service. I felt as if I'd just opened all the windows of a hot muggy car.

I folded it away and wrote down today's date on the deposit slip. I checked the wall calendar - August 19,1999 -and What the heck, I wrote a whole row of zeroes before the year, so that the date read: August 19, 00000001999. Even if you hated math, which I certainly do, you'd know that this is still mathematically the same thing as 1999.

When I gave the slip and the check to the teller, Dean, his eyes widened, and he looked up at me as if I'd handed him a holdup note. "Sir," he said, "this isn't a proper date."

I said, "Yes, it is. What makes you think it isn't?"

"The extra zeroes."

Dean was wearing a deep blue shirt, which annoyed me. "What is your point?" I asked.

"Sir, the year is nineteen ninety-nine, not zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one nine nine nine."

"It's the same thing."

"No, it's not."

"I'd like to speak with the branch manager."

Dean called over Casey, a woman who was maybe about my age, and who had the pursed hardness of someone who spends her days delivering bad news to people and knows she'll be doing it until her hips shatter. Casey and Dean had a hushed talk, and then she spoke to me. "Mr. Klaasen, may I ask you why you've written this on your slip?"

I stood my ground: "Putting more zeroes in front of '1999' doesn't make the year any different."

"Technically, no."

"Look, I hated math as much as you probably did - "

"I didn't hate math, Mr. Klaasen."

Casey was on the spot, but then so was I. It's not as if I'd walked into the bank planning all those extra zeroes. They just happened, and now I had to defend them. "Okay. But maybe what the zeroes do point out is that in a billion years - and there will be a billion years - we'll all be dust. Not even dust: we'll be molecules.'"

Silence.

I said, "Just think, there are still a few billion years of time out there, just waiting to happen. Billions of years, and we're not going to be here to see them."

Silence.

Casey said, "Mr. Klaasen, if this is some sort of joke, I can try to understand its abstract humor, but I don't think this slip meets the requirements of a legal banking document."

Silence.

I said, "But doesn't it make you think? Or want to think?"

"About what?"

"About what happens to us after we die."

This was my real mistake. Dean telegraphed Casey a savvy little glance, and in a flash I knew that they knew about me, about Cheryl, about 1988 and about my reputation as a borderline nutcase - He never really got over it, you know. I'm used to this. I was furious but kept my cool. I said, "I think I'd like to close my account - convert to cash, if I could."

The request was treated with the casualness I might have received if I'd asked them to change a twenty. "Of course. Dean, could you help Mr. Klaasen close out his account?"

I asked, "That's it? 'Dean, could you help Mr. Klaasen close out his account?' No debate? No questions?"

Casey looked at me. "Mr. Klaasen, I have two daughters and I can barely think past next month's mortgage, let alone the year two billion one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. My hunch is that you'd be happier elsewhere. I'm not trying to get rid of you, but I think you know where I'm coming from."

She wasn't wearing a wedding band. "Can I take you out to lunch?" I asked.

"What?"

"Dinner, then."

"No!" The snaking line was eavesdropping big time. "Dean, there should be no complications in closing Mr. Klaasen's account." She looked at me. "Mr. Klaasen, I have to go."

My anger became gray emotional fuzz, and I just wanted to leave. Inside of five minutes, Dean had severed my connection to his bank, and I stood on the curb smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, my shirt untucked and $5,210.00 stuffed into the pockets of my green dungarees. I decided to leave the serene, heavily bylawed streets of North Vancouver and drive to West Vancouver, down near the ocean. At the Seventeenth and Bellevue CIBC I opened a checking account, and when I looked behind the tellers I saw an open vault. I asked if it was possible to rent a safety deposit box, which took all of three minutes to do. That box is where I'm going to place all of this, once it's finished. And here's the deal: if I get walloped by a bus next year, this letter is going to be placed in storage until May 30, 2019, when you, my two nephews, turn twenty-one. If I hang around long enough, I might hand it to you in person. But for now, that's where this letter is headed.

Just so you know, I've been writing all of this in the cab of my truck, parked on Bellevue, down by Ambleside Beach, near the pier with all its bratty kids on rollerblades and the Vietnamese guys with their crab traps pursuing E. coli. I'm using a pen embossed with "Travelodge" and I'm writing on the back of Les's pink invoice forms. The wind is heating up - God, it feels nice on my face - and I feel, in the most SUV-commercial sense of the word, free.

How to start?

First off, Cheryl and I were married. No one knows that but me, and now you. It was insane, really. I was seventeen and starved for sex, but I was still stuck in my family's religious warp, so only husband/wife sex was allowed, and even then for procreation only, and even then only while both partners wore heavy wool tweeds so as to drain the act of pleasure. So when I suggested to Cheryl that we fly to Las Vegas and get hitched, she floored me when she said yes. It was an impulsive request I made after our math class saw an educational 16mm film about gambling. The movie was supposed to make high school students more enthusiastic about statistics. I mean, what were these filmmakers thinking?

And what was I thinking? Marriage? Las Vegas?

We flew down there one weekend and - I mean, we weren't even people then, we were so young and out of it. We were like baby chicks. No. We were like zygotes, little zygotes cabbing from the airport to Caesars Palace, and all I could think about was how hot and dry the air was. In any event, it seems like a billion years ago.

Around sunset, we got married, using our fake IDs. Our witness was a slob of a cabbie who drove us down the Strip. For the next six weeks my grades evaporated, sports became a nuisance, and my friends became ghosts. The only thing that counted was Cheryl, and because we kept the marriage secret, it was way better and more forbidden feeling than if we'd waited and done all the sensible stuff.

There were some problems when we got home. This churchy group Cheryl and I were in, Youth Alive!, crabby morality spooks who spied on us for weeks, likely with the blessing of my older brother, Kent. When I was in twelfth grade, Kent was in second year at the University of Alberta, but he was still a honcho, and I can only imagine the phone conversations he must have been having with the local Alive! creeps:

Were the lights on or off?

Which lights?

Did they order in pizza?

What time did they leave?

Separately or together?

As if we hadn't noticed we were being spied on. Yet in fairness, the Alive!ers were baby chicks, too. We all were. Seventeen is nothing. You're still in the womb.

There are a number of things a woman can tell about a man who is roughly twenty-nine years old, sitting in the cab of a pickup truck at 3:37 in the afternoon on a weekday, facing the Pacific, writing furiously on the back of pink invoice slips. Such a man may or may not be employed, but regardless, there is mystery there. If this man is with a dog, then that's good, because it means he's capable of forming relationships. But if the dog is a male dog, that's probably a bad sign, because it means the guy is likely a dog, too. A girl dog is much better, but if the guy is over thirty, any kind of dog is a bad sign regardless, because it means he's stopped trusting humans altogether. In general, if nothing else, guys my age with dogs are going to be work.

Then there's stubble: stubble indicates a possible drinker, but if he's driving a van or a pickup truck, he hasn't hit bottom yet, so watch out, honey. A guy writing something on a clipboard while facing the ocean at 3:37 P.M. may be writing poetry, or he may be writing a letter begging someone for forgiveness. But if he's writing real words, not just a job estimate or something business-y, then more likely than not this guy has something emotional going on, which could mean he has a soul.

Maybe you're generous and maybe you assume that everybody has a soul. I'm not so sure. I know that I have one, even though I'd like to reject my father's every tenet, and say I don't. But I do. It feels like a small glowing ember buried deep inside my guts.

I also believe people can be born without souls; my father believes this, too, possibly the sole issue we agree upon. I've never found a technical term for such a person - "monster" doesn't quite nail it - but I believe it to be true.

That aside, I think you can safely say that a guy in West Vancouver facing the ocean writing stuff on a clipboard in the midafternoon has troubles. If I've learned anything in twenty-nine years, it's that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift - bad choice of words - is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

Whuppp . . . Joyce, my faithful white Lab, just bolted upright. What's up, girl, huh? Up is a Border collie with an orange tennis ball in his mouth: Brodie, Joyce's best friend. Time for an interruption - she's giving me that look.

An hour later:

For what it's worth, I think God is how you deal with everything that's out of your own control. It's as good a definition as any. And I have to ...

Wait: Joyce, beside me on the bench seat, having chewed her tennis ball into fragments, is obviously wondering why we should be parked so close to a beach yet not be throwing sticks into the ocean. Joyce never runs out of energy.

Joyce, honey, hang in there. Papa's a social blank with a liver like the Hindenburg, and he's embarrassed by how damaged he is and by how mediocre he turned out. And yes, your moist-eyed stare is a Ginsu knife slicing my heart in two like a beefsteak tomato - but I won't stop writing for a little while just yet.

As you can see, I talk to dogs. All animals, really. They're much more direct than people. I knew that even before the massacre. Most people think I'm a near mute. Cheryl did. I wish I were a dog. I wish I were any animal other than a human being, even a bug.

Joyce, by the way, was rejected by the Seeing Eye program because she's too small. Should reincarnation exist, I'd very much like to come back as a Seeing Eye dog. No finer calling exists. Joyce joined my life nearly a year ago, at the age of four months. I met her via this crone of a Lab breeder on Bowen Island whose dream kitchen I helped install. The dream kitchen was bait to tempt her Filipina housekeeper from fleeing to the big city. Joyce was the last of the litter, the gravest, saddest pup I'd ever seen. She slept on my leather coat during the days and then spelunked into my armpits for warmth during breaks. That breeder was no dummy. After a few weeks she said, "Look, you two are in love. You do know that, don't you?" I hadn't thought of it that way, but once the words were spoken, it was obvious. She said, "I think you were meant for each other. Come in on the weekend and put the double-pane windows in the TV room, and she's yours." Of course I installed the windows.

It's a bit later again, still here in the truck, looking again at the invitation to Kent's memorial this evening.

A year ago today, I got a phone call from Barb, your mother, who had married my rock-solid brother, Kent, to much familial glee in 1995. I was driving home along the highway from a Hong Konger's home renovation at the top of the British Properties, and it was maybe six-ish, and I was wondering what bar to go to, whom to call, when the cell phone rang. Remember, this was 1998, and cell phones were a dollar-a-minute back then - hard to operate, too.

"Jason, it's Barb."

"Barb! Que pasa?"

"Jason, are you driving?"

"I am. Quitting time."

"Jason, pull over."

"Huh?"

"You heard me."

"Barb, could you maybe - "

"Jason, Jesus, just pull to the side of the road."

"Sorry I exist, Eva Braun." I pulled onto the shoulder near the Westview exit. Your mother, as you must well know by now, likes to control a situation.

"Have you pulled over?"

"Yes, Barb."

"Are you in park?"

"Barb, is micromanaging men your single biggest turn-on in life?"

"I've got bad news."

"What."

"Kent's dead."

I remember watching three swallows play in the heat rising from the asphalt. I asked, "How?"

"The police said he was gone in a flash. No pain, no warning. No fear. But he's gone."

Let me follow another thread. On the day of the massacre, Cheryl arrived late to school. We'd had words on the phone the night before, and when I looked out my chem class window and saw her Chevette pull into the student lot, I walked out of the classroom without asking permission. I went to her locker and we had words, intense words over how we were going to tell the world about our marriage. A few people noticed us and later said we were having a huge blowout.

We agreed to meet in the cafeteria at noon. Once this was settled, the rest of the morning was inconsequential. After the shootings, dozens of students and staff testified that I had seemed (a) preoccupied; (b) distant; and (c) as if I had something "really big" on my mind.

When the noon bell rang, I was in biology class, numb to the course material - numb because I'd discovered sex, so concentrating on anything else was hard.

The cafeteria was about as far away from the biology classroom as it was possible to be - three floors up, and located diagonally across the building. I stopped at my locker, threw my textbooks in like so much Burger King trash and was set to bolt for the caf, when Matt Gursky, this walking hairdo from Youth Alive!, buttonholed me.

"Jason, we need to talk."

"About what, Matt? I can't talk now. I'm in a hurry."

"Too much of a hurry to discuss the fate of your eternal soul?"

I looked at him. "You have sixty seconds. One, two, three, go . . ."

"I don't know if I like being treated like a - "

"Fifty-three, fifty-two, fifty-one . . ."

"Okay then, what's the deal with you and Cheryl?"

"The deal?"

"Yeah, the deal. The two of you. We know you've been having, or rather, you've been ..."

"Been what?"

"You know. Making it."

"We have?"

"Don't deny it. We've been watching."

I'm a big guy. I'm big now, and I was big then. I took my left hand and clenched it around Matt's throat, my thumb on top of his voice box. I lifted him off the buffed linoleum and cracked the back of his head on a locker's ventilation slits. "Look, you meddlesome, sanctimonious cockroach . . ." I bounced him onto the floor, my knees locking his arms as surely as cast-iron shackles. "If you dare even hint, even one more time, that you or any other sexless, self-hating member of your Stasi goon squad have any [slug to the face] right to impose your ideas on my life, I'll come to your house in the dead of night, use a tire iron to smash your bedroom window and then obliterate your self-satisfied little pig face with it."

I stood up. "I hope I've made myself clear." I then walked away, toward the caf, climbing up flights of stairs, but I felt like I was walking on an airport's rubber conveyor belt.

I was maybe halfway across the middle floor when I heard sounds like popping fireworks, no big deal, because Halloween was coming up shortly. And then I noticed two grade nine students running past me, and then, some seconds later, dozens of students stumbling over themselves. One girl I knew, Tracy, who took over my paper route from me back in 1981, yelled at me there were three guys up in the cafeteria shooting students. She fled, and I remembered the ship turning upside down in The Poseidon Adventure, and the looks on the actors' faces as they clued into the fact that the ship was flipping: smashed champagne bottles, dying pianos, carved ice swans and people falling from the sky. The fire alarm went off.

Against the human stream, I rounded a stairwell - one with a mural of Maui or some other paradiselike place. The wall was pebble-finished and rubbed my right arm raw. At that point the alarm bell felt like crabs crawling on my head.

At the top of the stairs Mr. Kroger, an English teacher, stood with Miss Harmon, the principal's assistant, both looking besieged; life doesn't prepare you for high school massacres. When I tried to pass, Mr. Kroger said, "You're not going up there." Meanwhile, the gunshots were coming fast and furious around the corner and down the hall in the caf. Mr. Kroger said, "Jason, leave." The sprinklers kicked in. It was raining.

"Cheryl's in the cafeteria."

"Go. Now."

I grabbed his arm to move him away, but he toppled down the stairwell. Oh, Jesus - he went down like a box of junk falling from a top cupboard.

The shots from the caf continued. I ran toward the main foyer leading there. Bodies lay all around, like Halloween pumpkins smashed on the road on the morning of November first. I slowed down. Only one of the foyer's front windows hadn't been blasted out, and sprinkler water was picking up patches of light reflected from the trophy cases and the ceiling's fluorescents. Lori Kemper ran past. She was in the drama club and her arm was purple and was somehow no longer connected properly. On the linoleum was Layla Warner, not so lucky, in a disjointed heap by a trophy case. Two other students, equally bloody, ran by, and then there was this guy - Derek Something - lying in a red swirl of blood and sprinkler water, using his arms to drag himself away from the cafeteria doors. He croaked, "Don't go in there."

"Jesus, Derek." I grabbed him and hauled him back to the stairwell.

Inside the caf's glass doors I saw three of the school's younger loser gang wearing camouflage duck-hunting outfits. Two of them were arguing, pointing rifles at each other, while the third guy with a carbine looked on. Students were huddled under the banks of tables. If they were talking, I wasn't hearing anything, maybe because of the fire alarm and the sirens and helicopters outside. Once I entered the main foyer, what I remember is the silence in spite of the noise. In my head it might just as well have been a snowy day in the country.

I thought to myself, Well, a rifle's a rifle. You can't go in there unarmed. I scanned the immediate environment to find something, anything, I could use to kill a human being. The answer was just outside one of the blown-out windows: smooth gray rocks from the Capilano River, inside tree planters as a means keeping cigarette butts out of the soil. I walked out the window hole and saw riflemen and ambulances and a woman with a megaphone. Up the hill were hundreds of students, watching the events from behind cars; I could see their legs poking from below. I grabbed a river rock the size of a cantaloupe - it weighed as much as a barbell - and walked into the cafeteria. One of the gunmen lay in a heap on the floor, dead.

I yelled to the guy standing over him, "Put that gun down."

"What? You have got to be . . ."

He took a shot at me and missed. Then, in the best shot of my life, I estimated the distance between us, the mass of the rock, and the potential of my muscles. One, two, three, pitch, and the evil bastard was dead. Instantly dead, as I'd learn later. Justice.

And then I saw Cheryl. The carnage of the room was only now registering, the dead, the wounded, the red lakes by the vending machines. I climbed under a table and held Cheryl in my arms.

I whispered her name over and over, but her gaze only met mine once, before her head fell back, her eyes on the third gunman, who had been captured beneath a large, heavy tabletop. Students were now fighting each other for a place on top of the table, like people on the Berlin Wall in 1989, and then they all began to jump in unison, crushing the body like a Christmas walnut, one, two, THREE; one, two, THREE; and the distance between the tabletop and the floor shrank with each jump until finally, as I held Cheryl in my arms, the students - unbeknownst to the forces of the law outside - might just as well have been squishing mud between the floor and table.

It's a few minutes later, and I'm sitting shirtless on a smooth driftwood log that escaped from a boom up the coast. The air smells of mussel shoals, and Joyce and Brodie are in the low tide, chasing the long-suffering seagulls. The dogs seem able to amuse themselves without human intervention, which allows me to be expansive for a moment ...

Okay, here's something which kind of ties into all this: one of my first memories. It's of my father, Reg, making me kneel on the staticky living room rug. I'd just been watching fireworks on the TV - it was the American bicentennial summer, 1976, so I was five. I'd been changing channels and lingered a microsecond too long, a game show where a rhinestoned blond "temptress" was showcasing a fridge-freezer set about to be won or lost. Reg, detecting lust/sin/ temptation/evil, slapped the OFF button and then made me say a prayer for my future wife, "who may or may not yet be born." I had no idea what she was supposed to look like, so I asked Reg, whose response was to scoop me up and wallop the bejeezus out of me, after which he stormed out into his car and drove away, most likely to a men's religious discussion group he enjoyed bullying once a week. My mother peeked out the front window, turned around to me and said, "You know, dear, in the future, just think of an angel."

From then on, I could never look at a girl without wondering if she had been the target of my prayer, and the bellies of pregnant women counted, too. When I first saw Cheryl, in ninth grade, it was obvious that she was the antenna who'd been receiving my prayers. You just know these things. And when she became religious, that was my confirmation.

Sitting here on my log, I can feel women looking at me with the soul-seeking radar I once employed looking for my future wife. It's younger soccer-mom types mostly, married, here on the beach on a workday, frazzled from handling over-sugared toddlers cranky from too much sun. There are some teenage girls, too, but being on the far side of my twenties, I'm pretty much invisible to them. A blessing and a curse.

When I say I can feel women looking at me, I mean it in the sense of feeling hungry - you know you're hungry, but when you try to explain it, you can't. And it's as if I feel the thought rays of these women passing through me. But that sounds wrong. Maybe it's just lust. Maybe that's all it is.

The concession stand is down the beach, not far from where I'm sitting: Popsicles, fish amp; chips and onion burgers. Cheryl worked there in her last summer. She really loved it because there were no Alive! people there. I can see her point.

If you'd met me before the massacre, you'd think you'd just met a walking storage room full of my father's wingding theories and beliefs. That's assuming I even spoke to you, which I probably wouldn't have done, because I don't speak much. Until they put a chip in my brain to force me to speak, I plan to remain quiet.

If you'd met me just before the massacre, you'd have assumed I was statistically average, which I was. The only thing that made me different from most other people my age is that I was married. That's it.

I suppose that, given my father and my older brother, it was inevitable that I be plunked into Youth Alive! Individually its members could be okay, but with a group agenda, they could be goons. They, more than anything, are the reason I remained mute.

Dad was thrilled Kent was the local Alive! grand pooh-bah, and at dinner he liked nothing more than hearing Kent reel out statistics about conversions, witnessings and money-raisers. If they ever argued, it was over trivialities: Should a swimming pool used in rituals be the temperature of blood, or should it be as cold as possible, to add a dimension of discomfort? The answer: cold. Why miss an opportunity for joylessness?

Cheryl stayed for supper a few times at our house, and the meals were surprisingly uneventful. I kept on waiting for Dad to pull back a curtain to reveal a witch-dunking device, but he and Cheryl got on well, I suspect because she was a good listener and knew better than to interrupt my father. I wonder if Dad saw in Cheryl the kind of girl he thinks he ought to have married - someone who'd already been converted rather than someone he'd have to mold, and then psychologically torture, like my mother.

After our marriage, we all had dinner together just once, before Kent went back to school in Alberta. Kent and the Peeping Toms from Alive! were beginning to spy on us by then, and I've never really been sure whether Kent told Dad about Cheryl and me. If he had, it wouldn't have been with malice. It would have been Item Number 14 on the agenda, sandwiched between the need for more stacking chairs and the recitation of a letter from a starving waif in Dar es Salaam who received five bucks a month from the Klaasen family.

In any event, my father treated Cheryl and me more like children than adults, which felt patronizing to me. If he knew we were married, he'd treat us like man and woman instead of girl and boy. Because of that dinner, I knew I soon had soon to devise a way of announcing our marriage. I wanted a proper dinner in a restaurant, and Cheryl just wanted to phone a few people and leave it at that.

Joyce is a liquid snoring heap by my apartment's front window. It's not so much an apartment - it's more like a nest - but Joyce doesn't mind. I suppose, from a dog's perspective, a dirty apartment is far more interesting than one that's been heavily Windexed and vacuumed. Do I keep the place dirty to scare people away? No, I keep it dirty because Reg was a neat freak - cleanliness . . . godliness . . . pathetically predictable, I know. The only person I'd ever allow in here would be Reg, if only to torment him with my uncleanness. But then nothing on earth would make me invite Reg into any home of mine.

My answering machine tells me I have seven new calls -no loser, me! - but I know they're mostly going to be about Kent's memorial service this evening. Will I be there? Will I show up? Yeah, sure, okay. I may be a disaster, but I'm not a write-off. Yet.

Of course, I'll be needing something clean to wear, and it's too late to haul my shirt pile to the dry cleaners, so I'll have to iron a dirty shirt, which is dumb, because it permanently bakes the crud into the fabric. I now have to go find the shirt, excavate the iron from under one of dozens of piles of crap, put water into it, and clear a spot on the floor to put the board up and - it's easier to write.

More about the massacre . . .

There was some lag time between when the third gunman, Duncan Boyle, was downed and when kids started leaving the caf. Even the kids closest to the door took a while to make the connection between gunlessness and freedom. If anything, students gravitated toward their killers' corpses, I think to make a visual confirmation of death. The alarms were still blaring, and the sprinklers were still raining on us, and there were just so many kids dripping with both blood and water.

I was glued to Cheryl. My arms actually made suction noises when I moved them. I was covered in her blood. All of her friends had gone. Freaks. When the mass exodus began from the caf, the authorities swooped in, in every conceivable form - police snipers, guys in balaclavas, firemen, ambulance workers - all too late. They were taking photos, putting up colored tape, and everyone was screaming to turn off the alarms and the sprinklers, as they were not merely annoying, but were contaminating the crime scene. For all I know, those sirens and sprinklers may still be on, as I've not returned to the building since that day.

"Son, stand up." It was an RCMP guy with the big RCMP moustache they're all issued once they earn their badge. Another cop looked at me and said, "That's the guy."

So apparently I had now become "the guy."

I should describe at this point what it's like to hold a dying person in your arms. The first thing is how quickly they cool off, like dinner on a plate. Second, you keep waiting for their face to come back to life, their eyes to open. Even with Cheryl cooling in my arms, I didn't really believe she was dead. So when an authority figure of proven uselessness told me to let go of the body of my wife, whose face I knew would reanimate momentarily, my reaction was to stick with my wife. "Go to hell."

"No, really, son, stand up."

"You heard me."

The other cop asked, "Is he giving you trouble, John?"

"Lay off, Pete. Can't you see he's . . . ?"

"What I can see is that he's tampering with a crime scene. You - get up. Now."

Pete wasn't worth responding to. I held Cheryl close. The world is an ugly ugly ugly place.

"Son, come on."

"Sir, I said no."

"Pete, I don't know what to do. She's dead. Let him hold her."

"No. And if he keeps it up, you know what to do."

"Actually, I don't."

I tuned them out. From my vantage point, soggy reddened lunch bags and backpacks lay everywhere; the wounded were being removed with the same speed and efficiency that coliseum staff remove chairs after a concert.

Underneath Cheryl I saw her notebook, festooned with its ballpoint scribbles: GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE; GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE. I didn't give it any thought past that. A man's arm reached down and tried to tug my arms away from her, but I flinched and held on. Then a dozen arms reached in. Pow, I became a one-man supernova, firing my legs in all directions, refusing to let go of Cheryl, but they managed to pull us apart, and that was the last time I touched her. Within forty-eight hours she was embalmed, and for reasons that will follow, I wasn't permitted to attend her funeral.

Once they'd pulled me away from Cheryl, they shoved me into the foyer and then promptly forgot me. And so I walked through the same shot-out empty window frame as before and onto the front plaza, where it was sunny and bright. I remembered this thing Cheryl once said, how God sees no difference between night and day, how God only sees the sun at the center and the greater plan, and that night and day were merely human distinctions. I figured I now understood her point, except that for me, I didn't see any greater plan.

I won my apartment in a poker game, from Dennis, a concrete pourer who'll spend the rest of his life losing his apartments in poker games. He's that kind of guy. The place is nicer than something I would have found on my own; I even have a balcony the size of a card table, which I've managed to ruin with failed houseplants and empty bottles that will someday enter the downstairs recycling bins. It looks out on the rear of small shops on Marine Drive, and beyond that to English Bay - the Pacific - and the rest of the city across the bay.

I checked my messages. The first was from Les, reminding me to bring the nail gun for tomorrow's job, which is framing in a towel cabinet for a real estate tycoon's fantasy bathroom. The second message was from Chris, Cheryl's brother, saying that he can't risk leaving the U.S. for tonight's memorial because if they catch him either coming or going across the border, that's the end of his visa, which he needs to design spreadsheets, whatever they are, down in Redwood City, wherever that is. The third was from my mother, saying she didn't think she could handle the memorial. The fourth was her again, saying that she thought she could. The fifth call was a hang-up with five seconds of bar noise. The sixth was Nigel, a contractor buddy from a recent project who doesn't yet know I'm a living monkey's paw, asking me if I want to shoot some pool tonight. Soon enough Nigel will learn about my "story," and then he'll go buy a cheapo massacre exploitation paperback in some secondhand bookstore. His behavior around me will change: he'll walk on eggshells, and then he'll want to discuss life after death, crop circles, gun laws, Nostradamus or stuff along those lines, and then I'll have to drop him as a friend because he'll know way more about me than anyone ought to know, and the imbalance is, as I age, more of a pain than anything else. I don't want or need it.

Call seven is my mother again, asking me to phone her. I do.

"Mom."

"Jason."

"You feeling weird about tonight?"

"Someone has to take care of the twins. I thought maybe I could take the twins off Barb's hands for the evening."

"Kent's friends have probably sorted that out weeks ago. You know what they're like." "I guess so."

"How about I drive you." "Could you?" "Sure."

Okay.

After leaving the cafeteria, I walked out onto the sunlit concrete plaza, where I turned around and saw myself reflected in the one remaining unshot window, and I was all one color, purple. Gurneys with their oxygen masks and plasma trees covered the front plaza like blankets on a beach. I saw bandages being applied so quickly they had bits of autumn leaves trapped inside the weave. I remember a sheet being pulled over the face of this girl, Kelly, who was my French class vocabulary partner. She didn't look shot at all, but she was dead.

There were seagulls flying above - rare for that altitude, and -Well, I've seen all the photos a million times like everyone else, but they just don't capture the way it felt to be there -the sunlight and the redness of the blood: that's always cropped out of magazines, and this bugs me because when you crop the photo, you tell a lie.

I was thinking, Okay. I guess I should just go home and wash up and get on with things. Up the hill, hundreds of students were being held back by police barricades. When I looked to my left, a medic plunged a syringe like a railway spike into the chest of a friend of mine, Demi Harshawe. A few steps away, an attendant running with a plasma tree tripped over a varsity coat soaked in coagulating blood.

In my pocket I felt my car keys, and I thought, If I can just find my car, I'll be able to leave here, and everything will be just fine. When I walked down to the auxilary lot where I'd parked that day, nobody stopped me. I'd later learn that I'd accidentally fallen through every crack in the security system, which was for a time interpreted as having sneaked through every crack in the system. Regardless, nobody called my name, and, by the way, those grief counselors they always talk about on TV? Oh, come on.

I was headed for my car, but then I saw Cheryl's white Chevette - it looked so warm in the sunlight, and I just wanted to be near it and feel warmth from it, so I went and lay down on the hood. The sun was indeed warm, in that feeble October way, and I curled up on the car's hood, leaving red rusty finger-painting swishes, then fell into whatever it is that isn't sleep but isn't wakefulness, either.

A hand shook me, and when I opened my eyes, the sun was a bit further to the west. It was two RCMP officers, one with a German shepherd, and the other with a rifle speaking into a headset: "He's alive. Not injured, we don't think. Yeah, we'll hold him."

I blinked and looked at the men. I was no longer "the guy"; I was now merely "him." I tried lifting my right arm, but the blood had bonded it to the hood. It made a ripping-tape sound as I pulled it away. My clothes felt made of plasticine. I asked, "What time is it?"

The officers stared at me as if their dog had just spoken to them. "Just after two o'clock," one of them said.

I didn't know what to say or ask. What was the grand total? I blanked, and two very nice-seeming women ran down to the lot toward us carrying large red plastic medical boxes.

"Are you shot?"

"No."

"Cut?"

"No."

"Have you been drinking alcohol or using drugs?"

"No."

"Are you on any medications?"

"No."

"Allergies?"

"Novocaine."

"Is the blood on your body from a single source?"

"Uh - yes."

"Do you know the name of the person?"

"Cheryl Anway."

"Did you know Cheryl Anway?"

"Uh - yes. Of course I did. Why do you need to know that?"

"If we know the relationship then we can more precisely evaluate you for stress or shock."

"That makes sense." I felt more logical than I had any right to be.

"Then did you know Cheryl Anway?"

"She's my . . . girlfriend."

My use of the present tense flipped a switch. The women looked at the RCMP officers, who said, "He was sleeping on the hood."

"I wasn't asleep."

They looked at me.

"I don't know what I was doing, but it wasn't sleep."

One of the women asked, "Is this Cheryl's car?"

"Yeah." I stood up. The fire alarms were still clanging, and the concertlike sensation of thousands of people nearby was distinct.

The other female medic said, "We can give you something to calm you down."

"Yes. Please."

Alcohol chilled a patch of skin on my left shoulder and I felt the needle go in.

Like anyone, I've seen those movies about army barracks life where evil drill sergeants, with cobra venom for spinal fluid, sentence privates to six years of latrine duty for an improperly folded bedsheet corner. But unlike most people, I have to leave the theater or switch the channel because it reminds me of my life as a child.

You're nothing, you hear me? Nothing. You're not even visible to God. You're not even visible to the devil. You are zero.

Here's another thought from the mind and mouth of Reg: You are a wretch. You are a monster and you are weak and you will be passed over in the great accounting. As can be clearly seen, my father's primary tactic was to nullify my existence. Maybe today's banking adventure with zeroes stems from that.

Kent, however, was never nothing. At the very least, he was always expected to join my father's insurance firm after college - which he did - get married to a suitable girl - which he did - and lead a proud and righteous life - which he did, until exactly one year ago, when a teenager in a Toyota Celica turned him into a human casserole up by the Exit 5 off-ramp near Caulfeild.

I miss Kent, but God, I wish he and I had been genuinely close as opposed to Don't-they-look-nice-together-in-the-airbrushed-family-portrait close. He was always so bloody organized, and his efforts at all activities always made my own efforts pale. Kent was also righteous; he was sent home from school in sixth grade for speaking up against Easter egg hunts (pagan; trivializes God; symbols of fertility that secretly promote lust). Granted, lust is purely theoretical in grade six, but he knew how to spin things the Alive! way. He was a born politician.

Dad left scorch marks behind him as he jetted off to the school's offices that pre-Easter afternoon, of course to take Kent's side. Through bullying and threat of litigation (he was an imposing, hawklike man), he was able to get Easter egg making banned in Kent's classroom. The school caved simply because they wanted a demented nutcase out of their way. That night at dinner, there was extra praying, and Kent and Dad discussed Easter egg paganism in detail, way too far over my head. As for my mother, she might as well have been watching the blue-white snows of Channel 1.

Here's another thought, this one about Reg: when I was maybe twelve, I got caught plundering the neighbors' raspberry patch. Talk about sin. For the weeks that followed, my father pointedly pretended I didn't exist. He'd bump into me in the hallway and say nothing, as if I were a chair. Kent the politician always stayed utterly neutral during this sort of conflict.

The bonus of being invisible was that if I didn't exist, I also couldn't be punished. This played itself out mostly at the dinner table. My mother (on her sixth glass of Riesling from the spigot of a two-liter plastic-lined cardboard box) would ask how my woodwork assignment was going. I'd reply something like, "Reasonably well, but you know what?"

"What?"

"There's this rumor going around the school right now."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Word has it that God smokes cigarettes."

"Jason, please don't ..."

"Also, and this is so weird, God drinks and he uses drugs. I mean, he invented the things. But the funny thing is, he's exactly the same drunk as sober."

Mom recognized the pattern. "Jason, let it rest." Kent sat there waiting for the crunch.

Taunting my father was possibly the one time where I became vocal. Here's another example: "It turns out God hates every piece of music written after the year 1901." The thing that really got to Dad was when I dragged God into the modern world.

"I hear God approves of various brands of cola competing in the marketplace for sales dominance."

Silence.

"I hear that God has a really bad haircut."

Silence.

During flu season and the week of my annual flu shot: "I hear that God allows purposefully killed germs to circulate in his blood system to fend off living germs."

Silence.

"I hear that if God were to drive a car, he'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof . . . with leather upholstery and an opera window."

"Would the thief please pass the margarine?" I existed again.

It's midnight and Kent's memorial is over. Did I make it there? Yes. And I managed to pull my act together, and wore a halfway respectable suit, which I cologned into submission. But first I packed Joyce in the truck, and we drove to fetch Mom from her little condo at the foot of Lonsdale - a mock-Tudor space module built a few years ago, equipped with a soaker tub, optical fiber connections to the outer world and a fake wishing well in the courtyard area. Everyone else in the complex has kids; once they learned that Mom is indifferent to kids and baby-sitting - and that maybe she drinks too much - they shunned her. When I got there she was watching Entertainment Tonight while a single-portion can of Campbell's low-sodium soup caramelized on the left rear element. I sent it hissing into the sink.

"Hey, Mom."

"Jason."

I sat down, while Mom gave Joyce a nice rub. She said, "I don't think I can make it tonight, dear."

"That's okay. I'll let you know how it goes."

"It's a beautiful evening. Warm."

"It is."

She looked out the sliding doors. "I might go sit on the patio. Catch the last bit of sun."

"I'll come join you."

"No. You go."

"Joyce can stay with you tonight."

Mom and Joyce perked up at this. Joyce loves doing Mom duty: being a Seeing Eye dog is in her DNA, and in the end, I'm not that much of a challenge for her. Mom fully engages Joyce's need to be needed, and I let them be.

It was a warm night, August, the only guaranteed-good-weather month in Vancouver. Even after the sun set, its light would linger well into the evening. The trees and shrubs along the roadside seemed hot and fuzzy, as if microwaved, and the roads were as clean as any in a video game. On the highway, the airborne pollen made the air look saliva syrupy, yet it felt like warm sand blowing on my arm. It struck me that this was exactly the way the weather was the night Kent was killed.

As I headed toward Exit 2, it also struck me that I would have to pass Exit 5 on the way to Barb's house. I rounded the corner, and there was my father, kneeling on the roadside in a wrinkled (I noticed even at seventy miles an hour) sinless black suit. My father: born of a Fraser Valley Mennonite family of daffodil farmers who apparently weren't strict enough for him, so he forged his own religious path, marching purse-lipped through the 1970s, so lonely and screwed up he probably nearly gave himself cancer from stress. He met my mother, who worked in a Nuffy's Donuts franchise in the same minimall as the insurance firm that employed him, calculating the likelihood and time of death of strangers. Mom was a suburban child from the flats of Richmond, now Vancouver's motherland of Tudor condominium units. Her shift at the donut shop overlapped Dad's by three hours. I know that at first she found Dad's passion and apparent clarity attractive - Mother Nature is cruel indeed - and I imagine my father found my mother a blank canvas onto which he could spew his gunk.

I pulled over to watch him pray. This was about as interested as I'd been in praying since 1988. I could barely see my father's white Taurus parked back from the highway, on a street in the adjoining suburb, beside a small stand of Scotch broom. The absence of any other car on the highway made his presence seem like that of a soul in pilgrimage. That poor dumb bastard. He'd scared or insulted away or betrayed all the people who otherwise ought to have been in his life. He's a lonely, bitter, prideful crank, and I really have to laugh when I consider the irony that I've become, of course, the exact same thing. Memo to Mother Nature: Thanks.

From the high school's parking lot I was driven home sitting on a tarp in the police cruiser's rear seat, no sirens. When I walked in the door off the kitchen, my mother shrieked. I could see a Kahlua bottle by the cheese grater, so I knew she was already looped; I'm sure the cops knew right away, too. Mom hadn't been watching TV or listening to the radio, so my appearance at the kitchen door, laminated with a deep maroon muck, had to have been a shock. I just wanted to get the stuff off me, so I kissed her, said I was fine and allowed the cops to bring her up-to-date. In the slipstream of the sedative injection I'd been given back in the parking lot I felt clear-minded and calm. Far too calm. As I was changing out of my bloodied clothes, what passed through my mind was -of all things - curiosity as to how my mother filled her days. I had no idea. She had no job and was stranded amid the mountainside's suburban Japanese weeping maples and mossy roofs. Greater minds have gone mad from the level of boredom she endured. By the time I was seventeen, her once communicative Reg conversed solely with a God so demanding that of all the people on Earth, only he - and possibly Kent - had any chance of making heaven. Just a few years ago my mother said to me during a lunch, "Just imagine how it must feel to know that your family won't be going to heaven with you - I mean, truly believing that. We're ghosts to him. We might as well be dead."

As I disrobed for the shower, flecks of blood flittered onto the bathroom's gold linoleum. I bundled up my clothes and tossed them out the window onto the back patio, where, I learned later, raccoons pilfered them in the night. I showered, and my thoughts were almost totally focused on how cool and sensible the medic's injection had made me. I could have piloted and landed a 747 on that stuff. And with a newly minted junkie's bloodless logic, I was already trying to figure out how soon I could locate more, and at least I had something else to focus on besides Cheryl's death.

When I walked back into the living room, the TV was on. Mom was transfixed, and the RCMP officers were on walkie-talkies, the phone - you name it. Mom grabbed my hand and wouldn't let me go, and I saw for the first time the helicopter and news service images that trail me to this day, images I have yet to fully digest. My mother's grip was so hard that I noticed my fingers turning white. I still wonder how things might have gone without that delicious injection.

"We need to ask your son some questions, ma'am."

Reg walked in from the carport door just then. "Son?"

"I'm okay, Dad."

He looked at me, and his face seemed - for reasons that will become evident soon enough - annoyed. "Well then. Good. Mrs. Elliot at the school said you'd been taken away unhurt."

An officer said, "We have to question your son, sir."

Mom wailed, "Cheryl's dead . . ."

"Why do you need to question Jason?"

"Procedure, sir."

"Jason, why are they questioning you?"

"You tell me."

Mom said, "Didn't you hear me?"

Dad ignored Mom, and by extension, Cheryl. "What does my son have to do with any of this?"

"He was right there in the cafeteria," said one cop. "If he hadn't thrown that rock, who knows how many more fatalities there might have been."

"Rock?"

"Yes. Your son's quick thinking - "

The other cop cut in, "That boulder killed the main gunman."

"Gunman? He was fifteen, tops."

Dad turned to me. "You killed a boy today?"

A cop said, "He's a hero, sir."

"Jason, did you kill a boy today?"

"Uh-huh."

"Did you intend to kill him?"

"Yeah, I did. Would you rather have had him shoot me?"

"That's not what I asked you. I asked if you intended to kill him."

"Mr. Klaasen," the first cop said. "Perhaps you don't understand, your son's actions saved the lives of dozens of students."

Reg looked at him. "What I understand is that my son experienced murder in his heart and chose not to rise above that impulse. I understand that my son is a murderer."

While he was saying this, the TV screen was displaying the death and injury statistics. The cops didn't know how to respond to Reg's - my father's - alien logic. I looked over at my mother, who was by no means a slight woman. I saw her grab one of a pair of massive lava rock lamps, shockingly ugly and astoundingly heavy. Mom picked up the lamp by its tapered top, and with all her force whapped it sidelong into Reg's right kneecap, shattering it into twenty-nine fragments that required a marathon eighteen-hour surgery and seven titanium pins to rectify - and here's the good part: the dumb bastard had to wait two days for his operation because all the orthopedic surgeons were busy fixing massacre victims. Ha!

My mom, bless her, kicked into full operatic mode: "Crawl to your God, you arrogant bastard. See if your God doesn't look at the slime trail you leave behind you and throw you to the buzzards. You heartless, sad little man. You don't even have a soul. You killed it years ago. I want you to die. You got that? I want you to die."

An ambulance was summoned to squire my screaming father to emergency. The police never officially reported the incident, nor did Reg. But in that one little window of time, many lasting decisions were made. First, any love for my father that might have remained either in my mother's heart or my own - vaporized. Second, we knew for sure that Dad was unfixably nuts. Third, upon discharge a few weeks later, he was coolly shipped off to his sister's daffodil ranch in the most extreme eastern agricultural reaches of the city, in Agassiz, a soggy and spooky chunk of property surrounded by straggly alders, blackberry brambles, dense firs, pit bulls, Hell's Angels drug labs and an untold number of bodies buried in unmarked graves.

But my parents never got divorced. Dad always paid support and . . . who knows what ever really goes on inside a relationship. Dad probably felt guilty for wrecking Mom's life. No. that would imply feeling on his part.

I arrived at Barb's house a bit on the late side. The attendees were mostly Kent's friends - friends who'd seemed old to me in high school and who always will. Folding wooden chairs were arranged on the back lawn, none of them level; the forest, after decades of lying in wait, was silently sucking the old ranch house and the moss-clogged lawn back into the planet. The twins (that would be you, my nephews) and a few other babies were in the TV room, being as quiet and gentle as their pious parents, as they were serenaded by a tape of soothing nature sounds: waves lapping a Cozumel beach; birds of the Guyana rain forest; rain falling in an Alaskan fjord.

Kent's friends had all been hardcore Youth Alive!ers who'd never strayed, who became dentists and accountants and moved to Lynn Valley along with most of the city's Kents. I'd seen none of them in the year since Kent's funeral. I knew they'd all enjoy a righteous tingle from any confirmation of my life's downwardly sloping line. My slapped-together ensemble delivered the goods.

"Hey, Barb."

"Finally, somebody from your family shows up."

"Mom can't make it. One guess why. Reg is praying up by Exit 5. I imagine he'll creak his way here soon enough."

"Lovely."

I poured myself a glass of red wine; piety mercifully ended at the bar with this crowd.

Barb was never involved with Youth Alive!, and because of this, had always felt like an outsider in the Kent set. As I looked out at all the healthy teeth and hair on the patio, I realized how sad and insufficient any memorial service would be. I missed Kent. Badly. "Was the service your idea, Barb?"

"Yes, but not this big Hollywood production. They're trying to set me up with some guy in the group. It's so clinical and mechanical." She looked out onto the lawn. "They're pretty efficient. I have to hand that to them. All I had to do was open the door and look wounded."

"Charitable."

"Stick a potato in it. Your job, by the way, is to continue being the doomed loser brother. It shouldn't be a stretch."

"And your job?"

"Stoic widow who at least has two kids as a souvenir."

I went out to the car and brought in a canvas duffel bag filled with some presents for the two of you, but your mother got mad at me for spoiling you, a battle that will never stop, because I'll never stop spoiling you. I went in to see you in your cribs - chubby, a bit of curly hair, Kent's smile, which is actually my mother's smile. I gave you each some animal puppets and entertained you with them for a while.

Out on the patio, I shook a few hands and tried not to look like a doomed loser. Kent's friends were using the technically friendly Youth Alive! conversation strategy with me. Example: "That's great, Jason, Gina and I were thinking of redoing the guest bathroom, weren't we, Gina?"

"Oh yeah. We really were. We ought to take down your phone number."

"We'll get it from you after the service."

"Great."

After a few minutes of this, Gary, Kent's best friend, tinkled his glass and the group sat down. On easels up front were color photocopy enlargements of Kent's life: Kent white-water rafting; Kent at a cigar party; Kent playing Frisbee golf; Kent and Barb lunching in a Cabo San Lucas patio bistro; Kent at his stag party, pretending to drink a yard-long glass of beer. Each of these photos emphasized the absence of similar photos in my own life.

Gary began giving a speech, which I tuned out, and when it felt as if it was nearing the end, I heard a click behind me: Reg trying to open the latch on the living room's sliding doors. Barb got up, offered a terse hello, brought him down onto the lawn and gave him a chair. We all remembered Kent for a silent minute, which was hard for me. Kent's death meant that there were more Jasons in the world than there were Kents, an imbalance I don't like. I'm not sure whether I'm any good for the world.

I sprang up when the minute of silence ended, and dashed to the bar in the kitchen. There was nothing hard there, just wine; chugging was in order, so I poured most of a bottle of white into a twenty-ounce Aladdin souvenir plastic drinking cup, then downed it like Gatorade after a soccer game. Barb saw me do this and spoke in a sarcastic Dick and Jane tone: "Gosh, Jason - you must be very thirsty."

"Yes, I am, Barb." She let it go. Outside, all of Kent's friends were doing Dad duty, fine by me. I asked Barb if she ever spoke with Reg these days.

"No."

"Never?"

"Never."

I decided to be naughty. "You should try."

"Why on earth would I want to do that?"

"Jesus, Barb. It's Kent's memorial. You have to do something." This was not strictly true, but I'd pushed a guilt button.

"You're right."

She went outside and joined a trio of Kent's friends with Reg. I stood nearby so I could hear their conversation.

Barb said, "Reg, I'm glad you could come."

"Thank you for inviting me."

Barb turned to Kent's friends. "What were you guys talking about?"

"Cloning."

Barb said, "This Dolly-the-sheep thing must be raising a few eyebrows."

One friend, whose name was Brian, said, "You better believe it." He asked my father, "Reg, do you think a clone would have the same soul as its parent, or perhaps have a new one?"

"A clone with a soul?" Dad rubbed his chin. "No. I don't think it would be possible for a clone to have a soul."

"No soul? But it would be a living human being. How could it not . . . ?"

"It would be a monster."

Another friend, Riley, cut in here: "But then what about your twin grandsons? They're identical, so when the embryo splits, technically, one nephew is the clone of the other. You think that one of them has a soul and one doesn't?"

Barb, trying to lighten things, said, "Talk about monsters - if I miss feeding time by even three minutes, then I become Ripley, and they become the Alien."

Reg wrecked this attempt at cheeriness. He'd obviously been thinking hard, his face sober like a bust of Abraham Lincoln. "Yes," he said, "I think you might have to consider the possibility that one of the boys might not have a soul."

Silence. All the real smiles turned fake.

"You're joking," said Riley.

"Joking? About the human soul? Never."

Barb turned abruptly and walked away. The three guys stood there looking at Reg. Then Barb returned with one of the wooden folding chairs, holding it sideways like a tennis racket.

"You evil, evil bastard. Never ever come back to this house, ever."

"Barb?"

"Go now. Because I'll break you in two. I will."

"Is this really - "

"Don't go meek on me now, you sadistic bastard."

I'd seen this side of Barb before and knew she would push this situation way further if she wanted to. Riley made some gesture to stand between her and my father. I went over to Barb and tried removing the chair from her grip, but she clutched it using every sinew she'd developed as captain of the girls' field hockey team.

"Barb. No."

"You heard what he said."

"He's not worth the effort."

"He should die for the things he's done to people. Someone has to stop him."

I looked at my father, into his eye slits, and knew that nothing had changed, that he had no real understanding of what he'd done to deserve this. I would have poured the remains of my wine on him, but that would have been a waste.

Barb said, "I'll pour Drano on your grave, you sick bastard."

Reg took the hint. Some of the wives (not a girlfriend in the bunch) accompanied my father to his car.

I sat with your mother while the Alive! crew scoured the house of memorial residue. I said, "Barb, you never believed me about Reg, about how evil he is. Now you know."

"It's one thing to hear about it, Jason. And another to see it in operation."

"Barb, the thing about Dad is that he'll always betray you in the end. Even if you think you've gotten close to him, earned your way into his bosom the way Kent did, in the end he'll always sell you out to his religion. He's actually a pagan that way - he has to make sacrifices, so he sacrificed his family one by one. Tonight he offered the twins to his God. If he were a dog, I'd shoot him."

And so I picked up Joyce at Mom's where the TV station had kicked into late-night infomercials. She was sleeping it off on the couch. I drove home and I'm going to bed soon.

I arrived at Ambleside Beach a few minutes ago, and something unusual happened. I was sitting in the truck's cab removing a burr from Joyce's flank, while looking at my stack of pink invoice papers, when this pleasant-enough woman in a purple fleece coat, holding a baby in her arms, comes up to the window and says, "Homework?"

Now, if I met you last week, I'll never remember your name, but if we went through kindergarten together, you're still in my brain for good: "Demi Harshawe!" Demi is the massacre victim I'd last seen on October 4, 1988, having a silver spike jabbed into her unclothed heart.

"How are you doing, Jason?"

"No surprises. You?" Joyce trampled over my lap to lick Demi's face.

"Pretty average, I guess. I got married two summers ago. My last name is Minotti now. This here's Logan." Joyce dragged her tongue right across Logan's face.

"Sorry."

"It's okay. We're a dog family. See - Logan didn't mind it one bit."

"It's so great to see you."

We were both six again, and I felt so innocent and genuinely free, like we'd just quit jobs we hated. After maybe five minutes I asked Demi about her health - she'd been one of the kids shot over by the vending machines, and she'd lost a foot.

"I don't even notice it anymore. I do Pilates three times a week and coach softball with my sister. To be honest, wearing braces back in elementary school was way harder to deal with. How about you?"

Demi knew, in the way everyone knows, about how things went wrong for me in the weeks after the massacre. We're both ten years older, too, so I could describe things to her in non-candy-coated terms. "You know what? I never got over Cheryl. Not ever. I doubt I will. I try really hard to join the real world, but it never seems to work, and lately I think I've stopped trying, which scares me more than anything. I do house renovations on a by-the-hour basis and all my friends are barflies."

She thought this over for a second. "I stopped trusting people, too, after the shootings, and until I met my husband, Andreas, I didn't think I'd ever trust people again. And for what it's worth, I think you're one of the few people I could trust, now that I believe in trust again."

"Thanks."

"No, thank you. After all the junk you had to go through." Demi paused for a second. "I was in the hospital for two weeks after the massacre. I missed all those hand-holding ceremonies and flowers and services and teddy bears et cetera. I really regret that, because maybe it would have made me a better person - or at least maybe I wouldn't go around looking at everybody as evil instead of good."

"I doubt it."

Demi sighed. "When I talk like this, Andreas thinks I'm coldhearted. But then he wasn't there. We were. And if you weren't, you weren't."

We'd hit on something irreducible here, and talking much beyond this point would have felt like a betrayal of our shared memories. We made our quick good-byes, and Demi and Logan headed down to the water, and here I am now in my truck's cab, the scribbler of Ambleside Beach.

It's an hour later and I'm still sitting in the truck.

I wish I could be as innocent as I was at six, the way I felt just briefly while talking with Demi, but that's childish. I wish humans were better than we are, but we're not. I wish I knew how bad I could become. I wish I could get a printout that showed me exactly how susceptible I was to a long list of sins. Gluttony: 23 percent susceptible. Envy: 68 percent susceptible. Lust: 94 percent susceptible. That kind of thing.

Oh God, it's religion all over again; it's my father's corrosive bile percolating through my soil and tickling my taproot. Be as pious as you want, people are slime, or, as my father might say, we're all slime in the eyes of God. It's the same thing. And even if you decided to fight the evil, to attain goodness or religious ecstasy, not much really changes. You're still stuck being you, and you was pretty much decided long before you started asking these questions.

Maybe clones are the way out of all of this. If Reg is against them, that means they're probably a good idea. And as a clone, you pop off the assembly line with an owner's manual written by the previous you - a manual as helpful as the one that accompanies a 1999 VW Jetta. Imagine all the crap this would save you - the wasted time, the hopeless dreams. I'm going to really think about this: an owner's manual for me.

It's midnight. I cut short my evening with my barfly construction buddies. We shot a few buckets of balls at the Park Royal driving range, then had a few beers, but I just couldn't bring myself to continue. Writing this document has taken a firm grip of me.

Here's an overview of what happened after the Delbrook Massacre.

The fact that I'd never met the three gun wielders didn't seem to matter. In published transcripts of interviews with the police, on the morning of the event I was "agitated." I walked "cavalierly" out of chem class without so much as a nod to the teacher. I was seen having an "emotional confrontation" with Cheryl. I "assaulted, drew blood from, and gave a concussion to" Matt Gursky from Youth Alive! I also assaulted Mr. Kroger "with seeming forethought," and I "seemingly knew to enter the cafeteria just after Cheryl Anway had been shot."

I think the public was desperate for cause and effect. At first glance, I suppose I'd probably be suspicious of me, too, and I'm pretty sure it was my father's bizarre reaction to the news that got police to thinking about me - from a hero to a suspect. Whatever the cause, the morning after the shootings I saw my yearbook photo on the front of the paper with the headline MASTERMIND?

The only thing missing was motive. The three nutcases with guns were screwed-up geeks lost in a stew of paranoia, role-playing games, military dreams and sexual rejection. They were a slam-dunk. With me, the case seemed to revolve around my relationship with Cheryl, about the fight we had that morning and reasons why I might want her dead. The best police minds couldn't engineer a reason no matter how soap-operatic their thinking.

On my side, I refused to make my life with Cheryl anybody's business but my own. I didn't mention our marriage because it was sacred; I wasn't going to let the massacre make it profane. I refused to let it be used as some kind of plot twist in the final five minutes of an episode of Perry Mason. So I said nothing, only that Cheryl wanted to talk about feelings, and I didn't. As simple as that. Which is basically what it was.

Okay, I'm not lying here, but I'm not disclosing everything. Truth is, Cheryl had just found out she was pregnant. That was what we'd been discussing at her locker. I was so taken aback by the news that I said something stupid, I forget what, and then I told her I had to prepare equipment for a Junior A team. Me - a father - and all I can say is "I have to get stuff ready for the Junior A team."

Even the idea of the baby got lost in the ordeal of the first two weeks. It wasn't until a month later, while I was waiting for a bus in New Brunswick, the temperature well below zero, that the baby caught up to me. I had to go behind a cedar hedge to cry. My nose began to bleed from the dry air, and the blood brought even more . . . Well, you get the picture.

As a result of the baby, I began doing what I used to do, wondering which woman was going to be my wife - except that now I looked at every child I saw and wondered if he or she was supposed to be mine. And then for a while I couldn't be near kids at all, and I got jobs up the coast in logging camps, construction and surveying.

And now? And now I guess I'll continue writing about the aftermath of the massacre. My many friends from Youth Alive! set the tone, gleefully providing police with a McCarthy-era dossier on Cheryl and me - a diary of the time we spent together after we returned from Las Vegas. The entries describe everything but the sex: where the cars were parked; what rooms were used and which lights went on and off at what time; the state of our clothing and hair before and after; the expressions on our faces - most often variations on the theme of "satisfied."

News that the police had taken me away from the parking lot caused rumors to quickly spread. By evening our house had been egged and paint-bombed. The police had cordoned it off, and advised us that it would probably be easier and safer if I spent the night at the station and Mom found a hotel or motel room.

Kent flew in from Edmonton. He was in his second year at the University of Alberta, working toward a CPA degree. Having Dad in the hospital was a blessing, as I at least didn't have to worry about him selling me further down the river. He and Mom, in their last act of married unity, synchronized their stories about the fractured knee, and then called it quits. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for that little chat.

My main memories of those two weeks when I was under suspicion are of moving from one spartanly furnished room to another - a cell, a motel room or an interrogation room. I was what you'd now call a person of interest, living in a legal netherworld, neither free nor in custody. I remember eating mostly takeout Chinese or pizza, and having to hide in the bathroom when it was delivered. I remember always having to dial 9 before phone calls to my lawyer, and there was this chestnut-colored kiss-curl wig given to me by a woman from the RCMP. I was to wear it when we drove from place to place, but no matter how many times we rinsed it, it smelled like a thrift store. Potential angry mobs or not, it was stupid and I chucked it in the trash. There was this one interrogation room that smelled like cherry cola, and everywhere, the same yearbook photos being endlessly recycled on TV and in the papers.

I remember coming back from a questioning session one morning to find my mother opening the motel door with a large vodka stain shaped like Argentina on her blouse. And I wondered if I'd need to take a death certificate to Nevada to become officially unmarried. Is there even a name for this -"widowered" sounds wrong.

I ate chocolate bars from the Texaco for breakfast. Kent and I drove once to the cemetery where Cheryl had been buried, but there were TV vans, so we didn't go in. All over the embankment beside the police station I saw magic mushrooms sprouting, which seemed funny to me. And I remember Kent returning from the house where he'd gone to clean up the eggs and paint, and how he refused to discuss it.

One thing Kent did during this time was, as ever, not take sides. He never said it in so many words, but he spent hours on the phone with Alive!ers and could only have been placating them.

"They think I organized it, don't they?"

"They're curious and angry like everybody else."

"But they do."

"They're just confused. Let it go. You'll be cleared soon enough."

"Do you think I was involved?"

Kent waited half a second too long to answer this. "No."

"You do."

"Jason, let it ride."

The thought of my brother not really being on my side frightened me so much that I did let it ride.

In any event, I remember the days becoming shorter, and Halloween approaching, and chipping my tooth on the police station drinking fountain.

One further thing I remember was Mom going on a Nostradamus kick. She was trying to find the massacre foretold in his prophecies somewhere. As if.

Hey Nostradamus! Did you predict that once we found the Promised Land we'd all start offing each other? And did you predict that once we found the Promised Land, it would be the final Promised Land, and there'd never be another one again? And if you were such a good clairvoyant, why didn't you just write things straight out? What's with all the stupid rhyming quatrains? Thanks for nothing.

But most of all I remember making sure that I got my injection every day right on time, at noon and midnight. After I got it, I had a five-minute window when I didn't have to think about Cheryl, alive, dying or dead.

I'm drunk.

And now I'm hung over. It's morning and it's raining outside, the first rain in a month. I think I'll skip working on the built-in towel rack for the day. Les will tell the client I'm at another job. That's the price he pays for having a drinking buddy on twenty-four-hour call.

I was going to do an owner's manual to myself, or rather, my future clone. Now's as good a time as any.

Dear Clone . . .

It's you speaking. Or rather it's me, but with a helluva lot more mileage on me than you have, so just trust me, okay? Where to start. . . Okay, as far as bodies go, you lucked out in most respects. Around the age of seventeen you'll hit six foot one, and you'll be neither skinny nor given to fat. You'll be left-handed and bad with numbers but pretty good with words. You'll be allergic to any molecule that ends with the suffix "-aine," meaning benzocaine, novocaine, and, most important, cocaine. I learned this when getting a filling in third grade. If I'd been able to do cocaine I'd likely be dead now, so if nothing else, this allergy has allowed me to hang around long enough for me to make you.

Your shoe size will be eleven.

You'll need to start shaving almost on the day you turn sixteen.

You'll get acne - not badly, but badly enough. It'll start at thirteen and, despite conventional wisdom, it never goes away. As far as looks go, you did pretty well there, too, and because of this, for the rest of your life people will do nice things for you for no apparent reason. You'd be a fool to think that everybody gets the same treatment. No way, José. Everybody else in the world has to jump up and down and scream to even get served a cup of coffee. You just have to sit there looking vacant, and they'll be tamping free T-bills into your underwear's stretchy hem. Having said all this, I managed to screw up this once fortunate face. The conventional wisdom is true as regards faces: by mid-adulthood, what's inside you becomes what people see on the outside. Car thieves look like car thieves, cheats look like cheats, and calm, reflective people look calm and reflective. So be careful. My face is like yours, but I ended up turning it into the face of failure. I look bitter. If you saw me walking down the street, you'd think to yourself, "Hey, that guy looks bitter." It's really that simple. My face is now like one of those snow domes you buy in tourist traps. People look into it and wonder, How badly was he damaged by the massacre? Has he hit bottom yet? I hear he used to be religious, but it's not in his eyes anymore. I wonder what happened?

Just don't screw your life up the way I did, but you're young, and because you're young, you won't listen to anybody, anyway, so what's the point of advice? This whole letter is a pointless exercise.

Wait - here's a biggie: you're prone to blacking out when you drink. Using something else along with the booze gives you longer blackouts more quickly, and a blacked-out experience can never be retrieved. At least, I have yet to retrieve one, and I've tried, thank you. I even went to a hypnotist a few years ago, one I know was a medically trained hypnotist, not some quack, and . . . nada.

What else? What else? It's better to eat lots of meals throughout the day instead of just three. Also, if you want to get close to somebody, you have to tell him or her something intimate about yourself. They'll tell you something intimate in return, and if you keep this going, maybe you'll end up in love.

You probably won't be very talkative, but your mind ought to be pretty alive most of the time. Find a puppet and make it do the talking for you.

Finally: You will be able to sing. You will have a lovely voice. Find something valuable to sing, and go out and sing it. It's what I ought to have done.

The hospital just phoned. My father slipped on his kitchen floor and cracked some ribs and possibly did some cardiac bruising. Could I please go to his place and gather some basic items for him?

"He gave you my phone number? I'm unlisted."

"He did."

"But he's never even phoned me."

"He knew it by heart."

The nurse said she'd leave a list of items and a key in an envelope down by reception. "I have a hunch you two don't get along and he needs a few days without incident. You don't have to see him."

"Right."

Dad's apartment is somewhere in North Vancouver - off Lonsdale, not even that far from Mom's condo. I could simply not go, but I have to admit, I'm tempted.

Dad lives on the eighteenth floor; God must like elevators. The apartment is a generic unit built in maybe 1982, about ten minutes before the entire city went crazy on teal green, a color I'm forced to endure at least a few times a week as a subcontractor. Dad's place is dark yellow with plastic mock-Tiffany lampshades, and brown-and-orange freckled indoor-outdoor carpeting. My job in the renovation business has turned me into a fixtures snob: the hardware-store cupboard door fronts are all stained like burnt coffee; the Dijon-colored walls have remained unmodified since the the rollers were put away in 1982. The windows face the mountains - the apartment receives no direct sunlight except for maybe two minutes at sunset on the longest day of the year. This is not an apartment in which fresh vegetables are consumed. It smells like a dead spice rack.

The August heat brought out the full aroma of the furniture - homely crappy stuff Reg kept, nay, demanded to keep, after he and Mom split: a brown plaid recliner aimed at a TV inside an oak console like they used to give away on game shows. On a cheap colonial kitchen table was a box of insurance documents; a half-eaten can of Beef-a-Roni and a spoon lay on the floor where I guess he fell. Jesus, how depressing.

The bedroom is where the good stuff ought to have been, at least that's what I'd hoped. Again, dark furniture left over from his split-up with Mom, and all of it too big for the room. On his dresser top was a blue runner, on which stood framed photos, yellowed and bleached, of him, Mom, Kent and me. I remember when each photo was taken - the sittings were torture; it was simply weird that he had photos of Mom and me there. Kent sure, but me? And Mom?

His bed was queen-sized. If he'd had a twin bed, it would have been so bleak I'd have had to flee. I went and sat down on his preferred side, which smelled of pipe tobacco, smoke and dust. There was an olive rotary phone, a can of no-name tonic water and an aspirin bottle. What would be in the two drawers beneath it - girlie mags? A salad bowl filled with condoms? No. He had Bibles, Reader's Digest Condensed Books and clipped newspaper articles. Oh, to find something human like an escort service card or a gin bottle to go with the tonic, but no. Just this garage sale jumble, all of it so blank, so totally anti-1999 as to evoke thoughts of time travel back to, say, North Platte, Nebraska, circa 1952. The thought of my silent, sour-faced father walking from room to room - rooms in which phones never ring, where other voices never enter -it almost broke my heart, but then I realized, Wait a second, this is Reg, not some monk. Also, before I take too much pity on him, I ought to note how much his place is like my place.

I fetched the items on the list: pajamas, T-shirts, underwear, socks, and so on. The contents of his dresser were all folded and color-coded as if waiting for inspection by some cosmic drill sergeant on Judgment Day.

I grabbed his bottles of old people's medications, a toothbrush and contact lens gear and headed for the front door where, passing a little side table, I came close to missing a photo of my father with a woman - an ample and cheery woman - in a pink floral dress. His arms were around her shoulders, and, alert the media, there was a smile on his face.

The heart of a man is like deep water.

I've been writing these last bits in a coffee shop. I'm now officially one of those people you see writing dream diaries and screenplays in every Starbucks, except if you saw me writing, you'd maybe guess I was faking some quickie journal entries to hand my anger management counselor. So be it.

Around three I went to the hospital with the white plastic Save-On shopping bag full of Reg's personal needs. In the building's lobby I had the choice of dumping it at the desk or asking what room my father was in. What came over me? It was nearly eleven years since I'd last spoken with him, me shouting curses while he lay on the blue rug at the old house with his shattered knee. We hadn't spoken at Kent's wedding, the funeral or yesterday's memorial. I figured he must have learned something between then and now.

The hospital's central cooling system was malfunctioning, and guys in uniforms with tool kits were in the elevator with me. When I got off on the sixth floor, I was invisible to the staff, while the air-conditioning guys were treated like saviors.

I found Reg's room. The odor outside it reminded me of luggage coming onto the airport carousels from China and Taiwan - mothballs, but not quite. I had a short moment of disbelief when I was outside the door and technically only a spit away from him. Yes? No? Yes? No? Why not? I went in — a shared room, a snoring young guy with his leg in a cast near the door. On the other side of a flimsy veil lay my father.

"Dad."

"Jason."

He looked awful - bloodless, white and unshaven - but certainly alert. "Here's your stuff . . . the hospital asked me to get it."

"Thank you."

Silence.

He asked, "Did you have trouble finding anything?"

"No. Not at all. Your place is pretty orderly."

"I try and run a tight ship."

I shivered when I thought of his hot dusty lightless hallway, his mummified TV set, his kitchen cupboards laden with tins and packets and boxes of rationlike food, and his cheapskate lifestyle, in which not tipping some poor waitress is viewed more as a way of honoring God than of being a miser with one foot in the grave. I held out the bag. "Here you go."

"Put it on the window ledge."

I did this. "What did the doctor say?"

"Two cracked ribs and bruising like all get-out. Maybe some cardio trauma, which is why they're keeping me here."

"You feel okay?"

"It hurts to breathe."

Silence.

I said, "Well, I ought to go, then."

"No. Don't. Sit on the chair there."

The guy in the other bed was snoring. I wondered what on earth to say after a decade of silence. "It was a nice memorial. Barb sure gets excited."

"Kent should never have married her."

"Barb? Why not?"

"No respect. Not for her elders."

"Meaning you."

"Yes, meaning me."

"You actually think you deserve respect after what you said to her?"

He rolled his eyes. "From your perspective - from the way you look at the world, no."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means, relax. It means Kent ought to have married someone closer to his own heart."

I huffed.

"Don't play dumb with me, Jason. It always looked bad on you. Kent needed a more devoted wife."

I was floored. "Devoted?"

"You're being obtuse. Barb could never fully surrender to Kent. And without surrender, she could never be a true wife."

I fidgeted with his water decanter, which seemed to be made of pink pencil eraser material. Why does everything in a hospital have to be not just ugly, but evocative of quick, premature and painful death? I said, "Barb has a personality."

"I'm not saying she doesn't."

"She's the mother of your two grandchildren."

"I'm not an idiot, Jason."

"How could you have gone and said something so insensitive last night - suggesting that one of the kids might not even have a soul. Are you really as mindlessly cruel as you seem?"

"The modern world creates complex moral issues."

"Twins are not complex moral issues. Twins are twins."

"I read the papers and watch the news, Jason. I see what's going on."

I changed the subject. "How long are you in here?"

"Maybe five days." He coughed, and it evidently hurt. Good.

"Are you sleeping okay?"

"Last night like a baby."

A mood swept over me, and as with any important question in life, the asking felt unreal, like it came from another person's mouth: "How come you accused me of murder, Dad?"

Silence.

"Well?"

Still no reply.

I said, "I didn't come in here planning to ask you this. But now that I have, I'm not leaving until you give me a reply."

He coughed.

"Now don't you play the little old man with me. Answer me."

My father turned his face away, so I walked to the head of the bed, squatted down and grabbed his head, forcing him to lock eyes with me. "Hi, Dad. I asked you a question, and I think you owe me an answer. Whaddya say, huh?"

His expression wasn't hate and it wasn't love. "I didn't accuse you of murder."

"Really now?"

"I merely pointed out that you had murder in your heart, and that you chose to act on that murderous impulse. Take from that what you will."

"That's all?"

"Your mother, as you'll recall, stopped the dialogue at that point."

"Mom stood up for me."

"You really don't understand, do you?"

"What - there's something to understand here?"

My father said, "You were perfect."

"I was what?"

"Your soul was perfect. If you'd died in the cafeteria, you'd have gone directly to heaven. But instead you chose murder, and now you'll never be totally sure of where you're headed."

"You honestly believe this?"

"I'll always believe it."

I let go of his head. The guy in the next bed was rousing. My father said, "Jason?" but I was already through the door. From his cracked and bruised chest he yelled the words, "All I ever wanted for you was the Kingdom."

He'd stuck his saber through my gut. He'd done his job.

It's around midnight. After I left Dad, my choice was to either become very drunk or write this. I chose to write this. It felt kind of now-or-never for me.

Back to the massacre.

Two weeks after the attack, videocassettes were mailed to the school's principal, to the local TV news programs and to the police. They had been made by the three gunmen using a Beta cam they'd rented from the school's A/V crib. It pretty much laid out what they were going to do, how they were going to do it, and why - the generic sort of alienation we've all become too familiar with during the 1990s.

You'd have thought these tapes would have cleared me completely, but no. Someone had to arrange for the tapes to be mailed, and someone had to be filming these three losers spouting their crap: it was a hand-held camera. So even when I was cleared, in the public mind I was never spotlessly cleared. There was never any doubt with the police and RCMP, thank God, but let me tell you, once people get a nutty idea in their head, it's there for good. And to this day, whoever shot the video and mailed the dubs remains a mystery.

A few celebrities emerged from the massacre, the first being me, semi-redeemed after two weeks of exhaustive investigation revealed my obvious innocence. But of course, for the only two weeks that really mattered, I was demonized.

The second celebrity - and the biggest - was Cheryl. When she wrote GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE, she'd finished with GOD IS NOW HERE, which was taken for a miracle, something I find a bit of a stretch.

The third celebrity was Jeremy Kyriakis, the gun boy who repented and was then vaporized for doing so.

During the weeks I spent in motel rooms, I often had nothing to do except reread the papers and watch TV while I exceeded my daily allotment of sedatives and thought of Cheryl, about our secret life together and - I can't express what it felt like to be trashed for two weeks while at the same time Jeremy Kyriakis was being offered as poster boy for the it's-never-too-late strain of religious thinking. It was Jeremy who took out most of the kids by the snack machines - and shot off Demi Harshawe's foot, too - as well as producing most of the trophy case casualties, but he repented and so he was forgiven and lionized.

In the third week after the massacre, Kent returned to Alberta and we moved back into the house. Now I was a semi-hero, but at that point screw everybody. On the first Monday, around 9:15 in the morning, just after the soaps had started on TV, Mom asked if I was going to go back to school. I said no, and she said, "I figured so. I'm going to sell the house. It's in my name."

"Good idea."

There was a pause. "We should probably move away for a while. Maybe to my sister's place in New Brunswick. And change your hair like they do on crime shows. Find a job. Try and put time between you and the past few weeks."

I made some forays into the world, but wherever I went I caused a psychic ripple that made me uncomfortable. At the Capilano Mall, one woman began crying and hugging me, and wouldn't let go, and when I finally got her off me, she'd left a phone number in my hand. Downtown I was spotted by a group of these dead Goth girls, who followed me everywhere, touching the sidewalk where my feet had just been as if their palms could receive heat from the act. As for school-related activities like sports, they were off the menu, too. Nobody ever phoned to apologize for abandoning me. The principal showed up on Tuesday - the For Sale sign was already on the lawn by then - and there were still eggs and spray-painted threats and curses all over the house's walls. Mom let him in, asked if he'd like some coffee and settled him at the kitchen table with a cup, and then she and I went through the carport door and drove down to Park Royal to shop for carry-on baggage. When we got back a few hours later he was gone.

A week later I was out in the front yard with a wire brush, dishwashing soap and a hose, trying to scrape away the egg stains; the proteins and oils had soaked into the wood, and scrubbing was turning out to be pointless. A minivan full of charismatic Youth Alive! robots pulled into the driveway. There were four of them, led by the intrusive jerk Matt. They were wearing these weird, desexed jeans that somehow only Alive!ers seemed to own. They all had suntans, too, and I remembered an old brochure: "Tans come from the sun, and the sun is fun, and Youth Alive!, while being a serious organization charged with the care of youth, is also a fun, sunny, lively kind of group, too."

I had nothing to say to these guys, and ignored them as my father might ignore a pickup truck full of satanists listening to rock music being played backward.

Matt said, "Taking it easy, huh? We thought we'd come visit. You're not back in school."

I carried on scrubbing the house with steel wool.

"It's been a rough few weeks for all of us."

I looked at them. "Please leave."

"But, Jason, we just got here."

"Leave."

"Oh, come on, you can't be ..."

I blasted them with the garden hose. They stood their ground: "You're upset. That's natural," Matt said.

"Do any of you have any idea what traitorous scum you are?"

"Traitors? We were merely helping the RCMP."

"I learned about all of your help, thank you."

In spite of the hose, the foursome advanced. Were they going to kidnap me or group hug me? Lay their bronzed fingers on my head and pronounce me whole and returned to the flock?

Then a shot was fired - and two more - by my mother from the second floor. She was making craters in the lawn with Reg's .410. She blasted out the minivan's lights. "You heard Jason. Leave. Now."

They did, and for whatever reason, the cops never showed up.

Word of Mom and the gun must have kept away quite a few potential visitors. There were a few press people; a few family friends who'd vanished during those first two weeks; some Alive! girls leaving baked goods, cards and flowers on the doorstep, all of which I unwrapped and threw into the juniper shrubs for the raccoons. In any event, we never let anybody through our front door; within a month, the house was sold and we'd moved to my aunt's place in Moncton, New Brunswick.

My brain feels sludgy. It's late, but Joyce is always up for a good walk.

Just in the door. A warm, dry night out, my favorite kind of weather, and so rare here. During Joyce's walk I saw a car like the one Cheryl's mother, Linda, used to drive - a LeBaron with wood siding. The model looked good for the first week it was out, but a decade of sun and salt and frost have made it resemble the kind of car people in movies drive after a nuclear war.

Linda wrote me some time after we moved away; the letter is one of the few items I've kept across the years. It was mailed to my old address and forwarded to my aunt's house. It read:

Dear Jason,

I'm deeply ashamed that I've not contacted you before this. In the midst of losing Cheryl, we were vulnerable and chose to listen to strangers and not our own hearts. At the time when you needed comfort and support the most, we turned away from you, and it's something Lloyd, Chris and I face every day in the mirror. I don't ask your forgiveness, but I do request your understanding.

It's been a few months since October 4, but it feels like ten years. I've quit my job and, in theory, I'm supposed to be overseeing the Cheryl Anway Trust, but all I do is wake up, dress myself, drink some coffee and drive down to this office space we've rented on Clyde Avenue. There's not much for me to do here. Cheryl's Youth Alive! friends take care of the Trust's every function - handling cash, cheques and credit card receipts, sending thank-you notes, manning the phones, filling out tax forms, and so on. It's a busy place, but I don't fit in. I wish I could derive some sort of consolation from the Trust's success, but I don't, and they all work so hard - they've got bumper stickers, bracelets and postcards, and, for what it's worth, a ghostwriter will soon be doing a book about Cheryl's life which may or may not help other young people or their parents. It won't help me. I shouldn't be telling you this - this letter may never even find you - but nothing in the past months has brought me any solace, and how could it? In the last year of her life, my daughter was no longer my daughter. She was somebody else. I have no idea who it was who died in the shooting. What sort of mother would say that about her child?

I've just had one of those moments. Maybe you've had them, too - a moment when the distance and perspective I think I've put between me and Cheryl's shooting dissolves, and I'm right back on October 4 again - and then suddenly it's months later and I'm a middle-aged woman sitting in a rainy suburb on a weekday, and her daughter is dead for no reason, and she never knew her daughter at all. Her daughter chose something else; Cheryl chose something else over me and what our family offered, and she did it with smiles for everybody, but with condescension. And what am I to do? There is nothing I can do. Some man or woman is going to write Cheryl's life story, and they're going to ask me questions and I won't have a thing to say.

I don't know if I'm angry with Cheryl or angry at the universe. Do you get angry, Jason? Do you? Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?

Lloyd and Chris are taking things much better than I am. I'm lucky in that regard. Chris is young - he'll heal.

There will be scars, but he'll make it through okay. We have no idea what to do with him and school. He's having a hard time readjusting at Delbrook, which they've just reopened - they bulldozed the cafeteria and built a new one in just four weeks. We might have to send him to a private school, which we can't afford. That's for another letter.

Jason, I apologize. You don't need this on top of everything else, but then maybe you do. Maybe you need to know that there was someone else out there who loved the girl beneath the perfect smile, the girl who, to my mind, foolishly prayed for suffering so she could play at martyrdom. Jason, there's no one to talk to about this. All systems have failed me. In five minutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and heaven begins.

I beg your forgiveness, wherever you are. Please write or phone or visit if you can. Please think of me kindly and know that is how I think of you,

Yours,

Linda Anway

A letter from Mr. Anway came three days later:

Dear Jason,

Linda tells me she has written to you, and in so doing she has shamed me. How can I thank you for your bravery on that horrible morning? You saved the lives of so many children without thought of your own safety. I drove down to your house earlier today, but it had been sold quite a while ago. There was no forwarding address for you, but I'm hoping Canada Post will track down your family with this letter.

Linda hasn't been herself since October 4. How could she be? I don't know what she wrote in her letter, but please take into account that we've both been running on empty for months now. That I didn't recognize the media's smear job of your fine nature is a stain I will take to the grave.

I asked if she had described the funeral for you, and she hadn't. So I will. It was Tuesday, the eleventh of October, a week after the shooting. I had thought the week would allow things to cool down, but instead things snowballed, and have never stopped snowballing.

We opted to have a graveside ceremony only. This was a tactical decision made by Linda and me. The people from Youth Alive! wanted to run the show, with no regard for our wishes. We figured they'd be having events of their own soon enough (we were right) and we wanted something that was entirely ours, and more intimate. This was a mistake.

For traffic and crowd control reasons, the police had asked that we not have a cortege drive to the cemetery, but that we meet the coffin there. We thought they were overreacting, but we went along with their suggestion: another bad idea, as it turned out. By two in the afternoon there were hundreds of cars parked on the sides of the road around the cemetery. The RCMP escorted us in, and the cemetery was overrun with (the papers reported) about two thousand people. My skin crawled. That's a cliché, but now I know what it means - like a slug crawling down the small of your back.

There was a large white-and-blue-striped canvas awning over Cheryl's grave area, and that was good, but what made me furious was that the Youth Alive! people had brought hundreds of black felt markers, and passed them out to everybody, and by the time we got there, Cheryl's casket was densely covered both with teenagers, and with the sorts of things teenagers write. They were treating my daughter's casket like a yearbook. Maybe I was mad because I'd chosen the casket in Cheryl's favorite shade of white, slightly pearly, and I'd been so pleased. Linda was upset about the felt-penning, too, but we bowed to the inevitable. I suppose it's cheerful, really, to be buried with the goodwill of your friends all around you. Linda and I were offered pens, but we declined.

Before Cheryl's funeral, Linda, Chris and I had attended two other funerals. I had thought they would prepare us for Cheryl's, but no, there's nothing that prepares you for the funeral of your own child. The minister was Pastor Fields. He did a fine job of the service, if I may say so, even if it was a bit too preachy for my taste.

I'm still unsure what Cheryl found in religion, but I'd always thought her conversion was too extreme, and so did Linda. Linda says you've had a falling out with your religious friends, and even though they work like Trojans on the Cheryl Anway Trust, I'm with you all the way in thinking that they're slightly creepy. And it was a shock how quickly and how powerfully they denounced you. It's because I listened to them, and not my own heart, that I'm sending you a pathetic letter so long after the fact, instead of having invited you over to our home ages ago.

This letter has become difficult to write, and it's through no fault of yours, Jason. You know what it is? I wish I'd taken one of those pens and written something on Cheryl's coffin. Why didn't I? What foolish pride prevented me from doing something so innocent and loving? Just one more thing to take to the grave with me. Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave. Cheryl's Alive! friends look forward to the grave the same way Chris and Cheryl used to look forward to Disney World. I can't share in this excitement, probably because I'm about thirty years closer to death than they are. They keep referring to Cheryl and her notebook with GOD IS NOW HERE as some sort of miracle, and this I can't understand. It's like a twelve-year-old girl plucking daisy petals. He loves me, be loves me not. It doesn't feel miraculous to me. But the kids down at the Trust office talk about miracles all the time, and this, too, baffles me. They're always asking for miracles, and finding them everywhere. Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that He created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.

I wish we'd rented a boat and gone out into the Straits of Juan de Fuca and beached on some island and taken Cheryl into some woods, located a nice meadow, and buried her there among the wild daisies and ferns. Then I would feel she's at some kind of peace. But her grave now? I went up there yesterday and it was a mound of flowers and teddy bears and letters. And in the rain they'd all melted together, and it shouted confusion and rage and anger at me, which is what one ought to feel after such a heinous crime; but graves are for peace, not for rage.

Wherever this letter finds you, I hope it finds you well and at peace, or something like it. When you return to North Van, might I ask you and your family over for dinner? It's the very least we could do.

Yours fondly,

Lloyd Anway

This arrived two days after Mr. Anway's letter:

Jason,

I just caught my dad mailing you a letter. He tried to hide it between some bills, and when I pushed him, he told me that Mom had also written you, which wigged me out completely. I can all too well imagine the crock of lies he fed you. Mom, too. You need to know that everything they tell you, everything, is outright crap. From the word go, they've hated you. After it happened, they took all the photos of you in Cheryl's bedroom and scratched out your face. There would be whole evenings when Cheryl's hypocritical preacher pals would sit in our living room and totally trash you with Mom and Dad. They reduced you to a scab lying on a floor beneath a toilet being carried away by beetles bit by bit. Man, they were brutal, and they were extra brutal when they talked about, or rather talked around, sex. I mean, let's face it, the two of you were an item, but the Alive!oids made it sound like rape, and that it was your sole job in life to corrupt Cheryl. And once they'd tied the noose for you, they'd lay into how you always seemed like the kind of guy who'd plan, and assist in murdering a whole school just to kill the girl he'd worked so hard to corrupt. I mean, get real. Some nights I had to leave the house. Most nights, actually.

Mitchell Van Waters, Jeremy Kyriakis and Duncan Boyle were in my grade, and they were such total wipeouts that people could barely remember they existed. They'd come into English class in these beat-up black leather jackets, acting like they were big-shot political guys starting a revolution, and they'd sit there writing lyrics from Skinny Puppy on their cargo pants with felt pens and Liquid Paper. I remember watching Mitchell and Duncan having a wicked scrap with hunting knives down by the portables, all because Duncan brought a six-sided dice, not a twelve-sided dice, for one of those role-playing games they were into. In social studies, Duncan brought in a solid-state panel from a TV set and spent the class in the last row writing hex symbols all over it, but they were fake symbols he was inventing, which looked a lot like the pictures of crop circles he'd photocopied for class the year before. And they wondered why nobody paid them any attention? They were messes, and there was no way you and they even breathed from the same atmosphere. So when they said you were connected to them? I think not.

I was thinking about you and October 4. You've seen the TV stuff like everyone else, but you left the scene and I don't think you ever came back, and maybe you don't know what it was like to have been there.

I was in PE, and during the class jog up the mountain, my friend Mike and I cut out and went down Queens Avenue to smoke. It was a beautiful day. Why waste it with a bunch of jocks? We got to talking with these three girls from the grade below us who were headed to the Safeway deli down at Westview. Then we heard some shots. Funny, I'd never heard a real gun fired in my life, but I knew exactly what it was. So did Mike. We heard a siren, some more shots and - I bet you didn't know this, but that first siren wasn't for massacre victims, it was for that guy you hammered down by the shop classes. Anyway, the five of us decided to walk up the hill, and the shots continued and then the SWAT team, the Navy SEALS, James Bond, and, I don't know, Charlie's Angels, all arrived at once. And all of the students pouring out of the school? Their heads looked like Sugar Crisp being poured from a box. Everybody was running as fast as they could, but they were all trying to look back, too, and so they were wiping out all over. By the time we neared the front of the school, they were hauling out bodies and, well, no need to go into that. We were moved up to the top of the hill, but we could tell exactly who had blood on them and who was being treated. I saw you, and you were covered in blood, but you were walking, so I assumed you were okay. And then I suddenly had a chill and I knew Cheryl was dead. I think ESP is BS, but that's what I felt.

The rest of the day was a war zone. All of the parents began showing up from work and home, and they'd leave their cars parked wherever with the engines still running and the doors open. Once family members hooked up, the RCMP moved them up and onto the football field, and so the parking lot became the place for an ever-shrinking number of parents without children. Mom and Dad showed up, and around 3:30 we heard the news about Cheryl. Our brains were so fried by that point that it didn't even make sense. Mrs. Wong from next door drove us to the hospital in Dad's car. There was no way he could drive. Her two kids were in the caf but were unhurt. She'd have driven us to Antarctica if we'd asked.

The hospital was another scene altogether - dead and mended bodies rolling around like shopping carts in a supermarket. I don't even know why they or we stuck around. It was kind of pointless by then. I mean, we knew Cheryl was lost even before we arrived. We were so messed up.

When it turned dark out, I was still in my gym clothes from PE class. Somebody, I don't remember who, gave me a windbreaker, and it was as I was zipping it up that I heard the first rumor about YOU, there in the hospital lobby. The rumors didn't even start small. Right from the outset YOU were the mastermind, and when Mom and Dad found out, Mom went hysterical, and they had to give her a barbiturate, which is like this elephant pill from the 1950s. Dad took something, too, and for the first week they were floating on these things. Mom still is. I can always tell when it's time for her next dose, because her breathing goes all choppy. They really were out of their minds that you were to blame. I tried sticking up for you, and nearly got excommunicated from the family. And what did you ever do to those Alive!oids? They were brutal about you.

But I was going to say that when it was announced at the end of the second week that you were innocent of all charges, Mom went even crazier, and dragged Dad down with her. They refused to believe the RCMP's report. The you-know-whos had done a real number on the two of them.

Anyway, this is the longest letter I've ever written, and the most focused I've been since October 4. You've moved or split town or something - good for you. Lucky you. Can I come escape to wherever you are?

Be strong, buddy,

Chris

Through a Starbucks window I'm watching a sunset the color of children's aspirin as I crash-land on two clonazepams. I paid twenty bucks a pop for them from some Persian brat in his daddy's BMW, down at the corner of Fourth and Lonsdale - just blocks away from Mom's place.

God. Now I do feel like I'm prepping for an anger management class. But there's no class, and if you're still doing what I'm doing at my age, then a class isn't what you need. Money, maybe? Kent got drunk as a log at his wedding, and while I was dancing with a bridesmaid, and he with Barb, he looped past me, stuck his face into mine, and with a hot breath of champagne, chicken breast and vegetable medley said, "You'll never be rich because you don't like rich people." And then he whirled off. And he was right: I don't like rich people, with their built-in towel racks that need a heating system that comes from Scotland -Scotland! — with their double-door refrigerators with nonmagnetic surfaces to discourage the use of fridge magnets, and with their Queen Charlotte Islands red cedar shoe closets that smell like saunas.

Here's what I did wrong: I installed the built-in towel racks on the wrong side of the bath, and Les went mental on me because the owner won't surrender the weekly payment until it's done properly. I care but I don't care, but then Les is furious with the universe because his kid has a cataract, so I do care, but then at the same time, for God's sake, it's just a towel rack for some guy who, for whatever reason, needs to get his jollies with a warm towel every morning. So in the end, it's not possible to care - it's just towels. If Rich Guy uses one towel a day for a decade, it's still going to cost him over eighty cents a towel.

$3,000.00 = 82¢

365 x 10

And in any event, best friends don't fistfight over towels or towel racks - or, if I ruled the world, they wouldn't.

Forget about ruling the world, I can barely get the automatic doors at Save-On-Foods to acknowledge my existence. So I have to take what life sends me. I put a smile on it. I seethe. I leave work a few hours early. I get cranked in a downtown parking lot. I fly high and develop elaborate schemes to elevate human consciousness. I come down. I get cranked again, but I suspect the new amphetamine is cut with milk sugar, so I enjoy it less the second time. I think, Wow, have I really watched two sunrises and two sunsets without having slept? I come down hard. I buy clonazepams from Persian twerps. I sit in a café and scribble on pink invoice papers.

Off to Mom's. Got to rescue Joyce.

It's the next morning, or at least McDonald's hasn't switched over to their lunch menu yet. A fast-food breakfast; drops of grease have elevated this morning's pink invoice paper into a stained-glass document.

My brain feels like a cool, deep lake. Did I really sleep for twelve hours? I'll even make it to work by noon today, which will probably put Les in such a good mood that he'll forget the string of six near-satanic messages he dumped into my answering machine.

Well, nephews, when I went to my mother's place last night after Starbucks, your mother, Barb, was there, leaning on the kitchen counter, and the big discussion was about why Reg is such a bastard, a subject my mother has given much thought to.

As I walked in the door, they both took one look at me, and Mom said, "You - into the shower right now. When you're finished, change into something from the guest room closet. I've got some cream of cauliflower soup and French bread here. You'll eat some of that, and then you're going right to bed in the guest room. Got it?"

From the bathroom, I heard some of what my mother and your mother were saying.

"Well, you know, the initial attraction was that his family grew daffodils - still grows them. I thought that was so amazing - I thought only good people could grow daffodils."

"What would bad people grow?"

"I don't know. Bats? Mushrooms? Algae? But daffodils -they're the most innocent flower on earth. They're a member of the onion family. Did you know that?"

"I didn't."

"Learn something new every day."

"Aren't narcissus the same as daffodils?"

"They are. Most people think they're different. But they're not."

"Wouldn't a narcissus be, well, not quite evil, but not innocent, either - vain?"

"Reg had an answer for that. Do you want to hear it?"

"Tell me."

"He said, 'Who are we to slap the human sin of vanity onto some poor flower that did nothing more than be given a name?'"

"That's kind of nice."

"He also looked at the flowers at our wedding - anthuriums, ginger and birds-of-paradise - he said afterward that he thought they were 'slutty.'"

"Oh."

The two women watched me enter the kitchen. Neither of them had any illusions. Mom said, "Here's some orange juice. Your system's probably screaming for vitamin C."

"Jesus, Jason. Shave already. You could sharpen a hunting knife on your five o'clock shadow." Mom placed a soup bowl onto the counter. To them it was nothing, but to me this moment was a brief taste of heaven.

Barb asked my mom, "When did Reg start turning gonzo on you?"

"With religion?"

"Yeah."

"Maybe a year after Kent was born. There was no specific trigger. Jason, honey, use a napkin, I just washed the floor."

"Overnight?"

"No. I remember his face hardening about the same time -his cheek muscles losing slackness. It was probably something to do with serotonin. If I'd secretly dosed his coffee with Wellbutrin or another one of these new drugs, we'd still be a functioning happy couple. But instead he just kept losing it and losing it. By the time the kids started school, we were in separate beds. I was drinking big time by then. He liked it because it kept me in one place, and because when I was drunk, he didn't need to speak to me. Not like I wanted to speak with him."

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 SO 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?"

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.

I can feel the little black sun's rays zeroing in on me -burning, burning, burning, like a magnifying glass burning an ant ... At the count of three, Jason Klaasen, tell the people who you were . . . What do you want your clone to know about you?

Dear Clone,

My favorite song was "Suzanne," by Leonard Cohen. I was a courteous driver and I took good care of Joyce. I loved my mama. My favorite color was cornflower blue. If I walked past a shop window and saw a vase or something that was cornflower blue, I would be hypnotized and would stand there for minutes, just feeling the blueness pump into my eyes. What else? What else? I laughed a lot. I never once drove drunk, or even slightly drunk. I'm proud of that. I don't know about the blackouts, but when I was conscious, never.

But, okay, mostly I've been here on Earth for nearly thirty years, and I don't think there is even one person who ever really knew me, which is a private disgrace. Cheryl didn't know me properly as an adult, but at least she assumed there was a soul inside my body that merited being known.

Okay then, my nephews, it's lunchtime and this little autobiography is nearly over except . . . except there's just this one other not-so-little thing remaining to be said, but I'm going to have to mull exactly how I tell you about it. I'm going to go pick up Joyce and head to the beach, and maybe by then my burning brain will have cooled down and I can finally say what I've been avoiding all along.

I'm at the beach, on the same log as before, and I may as well hop right to it.

Just over a year ago, when your mother phoned me to tell me Kent was dead, I drove to her house down in Horseshoe Bay. To get there I had to pass the scene of the accident; highway traffic was closed down to a single lane, and there were shards of glass, strips of chrome, fragments of black plastic fenders and pools of oil on the road. A tow truck was just then hauling the remains of Kent's Taurus onto a flatbed. It was crumpled like picnic trash, and its beige vinyl seats were thick with broken glass. It was a hot afternoon.

I stopped and spoke with a cop at the scene who knew me, and he gave me technical details of the crash - quick and painless. This information still gives me comfort. I suppose that if I hadn't seen the wreck, Kent's death would have been far harder to deal with. But when you see that big chunk of chewed-up scrap metal, the truth is the truth, and the shock passes more quickly.

There was also the pressing need to go down to Barb's -your mother's - house right away. My cell phone's battery had died and there'd been no way to contact my own mother or anybody else. As well, the traffic line-ups for the ferries to Vancouver Island and up the coast were huge and clogging the roads, and I took the wrong exit and ended up being detoured for a few frustrating miles, my temples booming like kettle drums.

When I got to your house, your mother was at the front door talking with the cops. Her eyes were red and wet, and I could tell the police didn't feel good having to leave her like this. When they saw me, they hit the road.

I held Barb tight, and then asked her who in the family she'd called.

She gave me a look that I wasn't expecting - not exactly guilty, and somehow conspiratorial. "Nobody. Did you?"

"No. My battery died."

"Jesus, thank God."

"Barb, what are you talking about - you didn't call anyone?"

"No. Just you."

I was confused. I headed for the phone inside. "I'm going to call my mother."

Barb lunged at me and wrested the cordless from my hand. She slammed it down. This was strange, but then people react to grief in so many ways. "We're not phoning anybody. Not yet."

"Barb, we have to call people. Kent's mother. Your mother, for God's sake. It's crazy. We can't not phone them. Think about it."

"Jason, there's something you have to help me with first."

"Of course. What can I do?"

"Jason, I need to have a baby, and I have to get pregnant right now."

"You have to what?"

"You heard me."

"Have a baby."

"Don't be so stupid. Yes."

"Barb, make some sense, okay?"

"Sit down." She motioned to the living room. "Sit on the couch." She grabbed a bottle of Glenfiddich, my Christmas present to Kent, from the sideboard. She poured two glasses and offered me one. "Drink it."

We drank. "I need to have a kid, Jason, and I need to start right now."

"Are you asking me what I think you're asking?"

"Don't be so clueless. Yes, I am. Kent and I have been trying for years, but he shoots blanks mostly. I'm at the peak of my cycle right now, and I have a one-day window to conceive."

"Barb, I don't think - "

"Shut up. Just shut up, okay? Genetically, you and Kent are pretty much the same thing. A child by you will look just like a child by Kent. In nine months I want a kid. And I want this kid to look like Kent, and there's only one way that is going to happen."

"Barb, look, I know you're screwed up by - "

"Dammit, shut up, Jason. This is my one chance. It's not like I can do this again in twenty-eight days. I'm not having a baby ten months after Kent's dead. Do some math. Kent was all I had, and unless I do this, there's no way I'll be connected to him. As long as I live. I can't go through life knowing that I at least had this one chance to get it right, even if it means humiliating myself in front of you right now. Like this."

There was a kind of logic to what Barb was saying. The request didn't feel cheap or sleazy. It felt like - and this sounds so bad - the one way to honor my brother. Barb saw this in my eyes. "You'll do it. I can tell. You will."

And this is where I surprised myself. Without fully understanding the impulse, I said, "Okay. I will. But only if we're married."

"What?"

"You heard me. We have to be married."

"You're kidding."

"No. I'm not."

Barb looked at me as if I were a mugger about to swipe her purse. And then her face relaxed. She closed her eyes, made a counting-to-ten face, then opened her eyes and looked at me. "We can't get married right now. City hall is closed."

"We'll go to Las Vegas. We can get married in a chapel on the Strip."

Barb stared at me. "Did you take every cocktail waitress on this side of the harbor to Las Vegas, too?"

I'm stubborn. "Those are my terms. Take them or leave them. We get married first."

"You're nuts."

"No, I'm not nuts. I simply know what I want."

She looked at me. "But I'm already married."

"No you're not. You're a widow."

Barb looked at me for a good half minute. "Okay. Fair enough. Let's drive to the airport."

"Are you - "

"Jason, shut up. Let's drive to the airport now. We'll catch a nonstop or hub through Los Angeles, and that'll be it."

Within five minutes we were back on the highway, passing the final crash cleanup occurring on the other side of the median. Barb was in tears and asked me not to slow down. I thought this was cold, but she said, "Jason, I will have to drive past there at least four times a day the rest of my life. There's plenty of time for me to look then."

I said, "We don't have any luggage."

"We don't need it. We're going to Las Vegas to get married while the mood seizes us. Ha ha ha."

"You think they'll believe that at immigration?"

Barb yelled at me, but I took it. "Jesus, Jason, here you are, dragging me halfway across a continent to get married maybe two hours after your brother is killed, and you're asking me whether or not I should have a carry-on bag? So that some customs guy believes that we're going to get married?"

"But we are going to get married."

Barb screamed out the window and lit another of many cigarettes. "This is about Cheryl. Isn't it? Tell me - isn't it?"

"Leave Cheryl out of this."

"No. We can't have anyone discussing little Miss Joan of Arc." She threw her cigarette out the window. "Sorry."

"You're right. It does have to do with Cheryl."

"How?"

I didn't say anything.

"How?"

I kept silent.

Barb is a smart woman. She said, "Now I don't know if you're doing me a favor, or if I'm doing you one."

"You're probably right."

"You're as nuts as your father. You think you're not, but you are."

"What if I am?"

"The harder people try to be the opposite of their parents, the quicker they become them. It's a fact. Now just drive."

"What are we going to tell people when we get back?"

"We're going to tell people I freaked out. We're going to tell them that I went crazy and drove out toward the daffodil farm, and you saw me and followed me, and that I deliberately got lost, and that you had to hunt me down somewhere in all that scuzzy wilderness out there. That's what we're going to tell them."

"But your car is in the garage."

"I'll think of something. Just drive us to the airport."

The airport journey was different from the taxi ride Cheryl and I took in 1988. Back then all the bridges we had to cross seemed exciting, almost like roller coasters. Crossing them with Barb, they were just these things you didn't want to be stuck on during an earthquake.

And of course Kent was dead, too. I tried to speak about him, but Barb would have none of it. "As far as I'm concerned, for the next twelve hours you are Kent. Just drive."

We dumped the truck in the long-term parking lot and headed to the terminal. Customs preclearance was a snap. Barb was bawling as she showed them the engagement ring Kent had given her, and they waved us through with Parisian-style shrugs and smiles. The ticket clerk had passed along the message to the flight crew that we were going to get married; inside the plane it was broadcast, and we were upgraded to business class while everybody whistled and cheered, making Barb cry all the harder. The drinks, meanwhile, kept coming and coming, and Barb kept drinking and drinking, and on the ground she was one big wobble; escorting her from one gate to the next at LAX was like trying to propel a shopping cart full of balloons on a windy day, and on the second flight she simply cried for most of the trip. We landed just after midnight.

In the decade since my first trip there, Las Vegas had been rebuilt from the ground up. Pockets of authentic sleaze peeked out here and there, but the city's aura was different, more professional. I could look at all the new casinos and imagine people sinning away like mad, but I could also envision management meetings and cubicles and photocopiers tucked away in the bowels of the recently spruced up casinos.

I asked the driver to take us to the stretch of chapels between Fremont Street and Caesars Palace, a piece of the Strip that had remained unmolested by progress. The chapel where Cheryl and I had been married was still there. I paid the cabbie while Barb got out. We didn't say anything as we went into the chapel, and I was disappointed that the old guy who'd performed the first ceremony was no longer there.

A couple from Oklahoma was in front of us. We witnessed for them, and they witnessed for us, through a secular version of a wedding ceremony that did good service to the term "quickie." Within fifteen minutes we were wed, and another cab drove us to Caesars Palace, which had also been renovated in the intervening decade.

We checked in as husband and wife, and we were walking through the lobby to the elevator bank when we heard someone calling our names. I had the same sick feeling I had when I was twelve and got caught pilfering raspberries from the neighbors' patch. We turned around. It was Rick, this guy I'd gone to high school with. He'd aged faster than most, and was much larger than I'd remembered. His head was shiny.

"Rick. Hey, hi."

"Hi, Jason. Hi, Barb. Jason, I thought you were Kent for a second there. Did all you guys come down together? I can't believe how cheap everything here is during the off-season."

I didn't know how to reply, but Barb said, "I like blackjack, but the guys are more into craps."

Rick said, "I'm a blackjack guy, too. Craps is for the real hotshots. I like to stretch my losses out over a few days so I can savor the experience. When did you guys get here?"

"Just today."

"You're staying at Caesars?"

I said we were.

"I'm at this motel off the Strip. Twenty-nine bucks a night, with free coffee and croissants in the morning. Talk about a deal. You guys want to come play with me?"

I was going to motion to the elevators, but Barb said, "Sure." My eyes must have sprung out of my sockets. "Jason, go upstairs with the others. I'll meet you in a few minutes. I think my luck is changing."

Rick said, "Now, this woman has the Vegas spirit. Come on, Barb. I'll show you my lucky table."

Barb said, "I'll be up shortly. Go, Jason."

This was one very screwed-up situation, but the thought of a quiet room was seductive, and I went upstairs. I showered for twenty minutes, and tried to figure out everything that had happened during the day, particularly how we might explain to people how it was that Rick Kozarek saw us in Caesars Palace the night Kent died.

I got out, shivered in the all-powerful air-conditioning and got into bed, awaiting Barb and wondering how Mom was going to take Kent's death. Would she just give up on life altogether?

An hour passed. I put cable news on as wallpaper and dozed off. When Barb came in the door and woke me up, her face was neutral.

"It's about time. It's two-thirty, Barb."

"I'm having a shower."

"You went to play blackjack? Are you out of your mind?"

She said nothing, but emerged from the shower and got into bed with me, and the truth is that from the tension and grief and stress and you-name-it, the sex was a repeat of my marriage to Cheryl. Around six o'clock Barb phoned the concierge for tickets on an 8:10 nonstop to Vancouver. We were silent most of the way home.

It was only in the truck, nearing the house, that I asked, "Barb, by the way, you never did say what made you decide to go play blackjack with Rick Kozarek. That was really random."

"Blackjack? I didn't play blackjack. I killed him."

I nearly put the truck in the ditch as I stopped. "You what?"

"There was no other option. He saw the two of us together. He'd have blabbed. So I went back to his motel room with him and cracked him on the back of his head with a forty-ouncer of discount vodka. Done."

"You murdered him?"

"Don't be sanctimonious with me, rebel boy. You wanted to get married in Las Vegas, and you got it. And part of the deal of getting married in Las Vegas is that you might very well bump into the Rick Kozareks of this world. Now, are you going to drive me the final block home, or am I going to walk?"

I didn't know what to say, because I was thinking, Oh, God, this is how my father felt back in 1988.

So Barb got out of the truck and walked home. The heel of her left shoe was about to come off, and a mist of dandelion fluff had attached itself to her panty hose. I got out and walked alongside her. "Barb, what if you're caught?"

She stopped. "Caught? Jason, get real. One of the bonuses of staying in a twenty-nine-dollar-a-night motel room is the convenient lack of surveillance or security. And if I'm caught, I'm caught, but I won't be."

We rounded the corner and there were all Kent's friends' cars, as well as my mother's. Barb and I looked like wrecks -we were wrecks - and my distress couldn't have been more visible.

As Barb predicted, she was never caught, and everyone fully bought her story about going crazy - which is, in its way, true. Kent's funeral was four days later, and that was that.

A month later, my mother phoned to say that Barb was pregnant with twins. And maybe another month later I bumped into Stacy Kozarek, Rick's sister, in the Lonsdale Public Market, where she was buying clams. She told me that Rick had been found murdered in his motel room, and the Las Vegas police thought it was somehow gang-related.

And there you go.

I'm looking out the pickup truck's window at Ambleside Beach and the ocean and the freighters - at the mothers tending to their children covered in sand and sugar and spit, at the blue sky and the mallard ducks and the Canada geese. And Joyce is smiling at me. Dogs indeed smile, and Joyce has every reason to smile. It's a beautiful world and she's part of it - and yet . . .

. . . and yet we humans are not a part of it.

Look at us. We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must. My heart is so cold. And I feel so lost. I shed my block of hate but what if nothing emerges to fill in the hole it left? The universe is so large, and the world is so glorious, but here I am on a sunny August morning with chilled black ink pumping through my veins, and I feel like the unholiest thing on earth.

This letter is now going into the safety deposit box. Happy birthday, my sons. You're men now, and this is the way the world works.