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 non-magnetic 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 d
on’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.
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 50 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.”