She paused. I tried to conceal my hunger for more contact from Jason. “Allison, did you get any more, uh, messages last night or this morning?”
Allison said, “I did. One.”
“What was it?”
She sighed. “I can tell you, if you like, but I have no idea what it means.”
“What is it? What did you hear?”
She screwed up her head as if she was about to sing an aria, but instead she spoke in a high, cartoonish voice: “Hey! I’m in dreamland and I got the best table here.” She repeated the phrase and then relaxed her head. “That’s what I heard.”
“Hey, I’m in dreamland and I got the best table here” was a running gag of Froggles, which we used at night before going to sleep. Hearing the words made me high and low at the same time, like a cough syrup high. My face felt like it was morphing into some other face, and my emotions were trying to escape through my bones.
Allison asked me, “Shall I say it for you again?”
“No!” I fairly yelled. I asked Allison to watch the kids for me and I ran out of the small café area beside the pit and headed to the bathroom, where I sat for ten minutes and cried. It’s a credit to the human race that several women knocked gently on the door and asked if there was anything they could do. But there wasn’t. I sat on the toilet and finally realized that Jason is probably dead; to keep thinking otherwise is simply delusional. The effort I’ve been putting in, being the rock, keeping it together for the sake of Barb the kids, Reg and Jason’s mom. Nobody else has to go back to an apartment where there’s a man’s wallet with credit cards collecting dust on the counter by the banana bowl, or a bar of orange English soap that’s begun to crack beside the bathroom window. I’ve been trying to keep Jason’s aura alive, but every night after work I walk into that apartment and it’s leaked away just that much more. His clothes don’t look like they’re ever going to be worn again, but I can’t give them away. So I keep his stuff there. I dust his shoes so they don’t look…dead. I keep his wallet beside the fruit bowl because it looks casual, so when he returns he can say, “Haha, there’s my wallet!”
Just listen to me. I’m crazy. I wasn’t going to let this happen to me. I wasn’t. I was going to be cool, but that’s not an option anymore.
Finally, Allison knocked on the stall door. She said she was sorry, but she had to leave. I asked her not to, but she said she didn’t have a choice. “I told the girl at the ball pit entryway to keep the kids there until you return.”
“Thanks.”
I am not a stupid woman. I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don’t feel a part of that world, and I wouldn’t know how to join if I tried. I live in a condo in a remote suburb of a remote city. It rains a lot here. I need groceries and I go to the shopping center. Sometimes they’ll be rebuilding a road and putting those bright blue plastic pipes down in holes; there’ll be various grades of gravel in conical piles, and I almost short-circuit when I think of all the systems that are in place to keep our world moving. Where does all the gravel come from? Where do they make blue plastic pipes? Who dug the holes? How did it reach the point where everyone agreed to be doing this? Airports almost make me speechless, what with all of these people in little jumpsuits eagerly bopping about doing some highly qualified task. I don’t know how the world works, only that it seems to do so, and I leave it at that.
Sunday night 7:00
Barb gets home in a few minutes. From now on I’ll have to write this using my Soviet coal-powered Windows system. I also phoned Reg, and asked him to come for a late dinner at my place tonight. I feel like I need family. My immediate family’s all over the country, so Jason’s family will do in a pinch. I’d like to be able to call Jason’s mother at the extended-care facility, but…when she’s on, she’s great, but when she’s off-which is nearly all the time now-I might as well be talking to a tree with its branches flapping in a storm.
No friends to visit. They’re either married and moved away, or single and moved away. I could phone them, but they’re spooked by Jason’s vanishing. They feel sorry for me. They don’t know how to discuss it, and when they phone, I’m wondering if they get a poor-Heather thrill at the fact he’s still missing.
Any news?
Nope.
None?
Nope.
Oh. So, um-what are you up to lately? You know. Work.
Oh.
Well…
See you one of these days. ’Bye.
I’ve gone through my memory with a lice comb, and I still can’t find any evidence that Jason was connected to ugliness or violence that might in some way have led to his disappearance. I’ve seen killers galore in the courtroom, and despite all of those he-was-just-a-quiet-man-a-perfect-neighbor things you hear on TV, the fact is that killers have a deadness in their eyes. Their souls are gone, or they’ve been replaced with something else, like in a body-snatcher movie. I was always happy to be invisible in a courtroom when a murder trial was happening, but it was always the killers who tried hardest to make eye contact with me. During a month-long trial I’d typically look in their direction just one time, and there they were, meeting my glance head on. So no, Jason was no killer. I knew his eyes. He had a fine soul.
Did Jason have a secret life before me? No, nothing scary. He was a contractor’s assistant. He picked up drywall, he cut tiles, and he did wiring. His friends weren’t truly friends but glorified barflies. The more they wanted to know about the massacre, the less Jason spoke with them. I’m sure they must have been spooked by this, but nobody was ever surprised. His boss, Les, was a good-time Charlie whose wife, Kim, monitored him like the CIA. We had a few barbecues and company picnics together. Les is about as dangerous as a squeak toy.
I tried asking Jason to open up about his past. This was surprisingly hard to do. I know that most guys aren’t talkative about themselves, but Jason, good God, it was like pulling teeth out of Mount Rushmore getting him to tell me what he did before he got hired by Les. He’d been working in a kitchen-cupboard-door factory, it turned out.
“Jason, my two cousins work for Canfor’s wood panel division. What’s the big deal?”
“Nothing.”
I pushed and prodded and pleaded, and finally it turned out he was ashamed because he’d only taken a factory job so that he wouldn’t have to speak with people during work.
“There’s nothing wrong with that, Jason.”
“I went for almost four years without having a real conversation with any other human being.”
“I-”
“It’s true. And I’m not the only one. Those guys you see driving in trucks and wearing hardhats and all of that, they’re doing the exact same thing that I was doing. They want to get to the grave without ever having to discuss anything more complex than the hockey pool.”
“Jason, that’s cynical and simply not true.”
“Is it?”
Was it?
Getting Jason to discuss Reg was easy. All I had to do was say that Jason’s mom saw Reg in the magazine shop on Lonsdale. Instantly: “That sanctimonious bastard sold me to his God for three beans. That mean, sour freak. He should rot.”
“Jason. He can’t be all that bad.”
“Bad? He’s the opposite of everything he claims to be.”
Is he?
No.
Sunday night 11:00
The sky was orange-before-the-dark, and I was in the vestibule organizing all of Jason’s rubber workboots when Reg showed up. Pathetically, I was hoping the boots’ odor might remind me of Jason. Reg’s knock was startling, and when I answered the door, Reg looked at my face, and I could see he knew I’d given finally given up hope.
In the kitchen he put on a pot of water for tea and took Jason’s wallet from beside the fruit bowl. He removed the contents item by item, laying them out on the countertop.
&n
bsp; “So there he is.” Laid out were Jason’s driver’s license, his North Van library card, his Save-On-Foods discount card and some photos of Barb, the kids and me. Reg said, “Heather, something happened today. Tell me what it was.” He took the water off the stove before it screamed. He didn’t want any extra drama.
I remember reading somewhere that devoutly religious people despise psychics, Magic 8 Balls, fortune-telling, fortune cookies and anything of that ilk, considering them all calling cards of the devil. So I was pretty sure that when I told him about Allison he’d blow up or go into his lecture mode, but he didn’t, and yet it was unmistakable that he disapproved. He asked, “Tell me more about the words ‘Oh, I say.’”
“It was this character Jason and I had between us.”
“And?”
“He was a giraffe. Named Gerard.”
“Why did he say, ‘Oh, I say’?”
“Because he needed to have a cheesy tag line every time he appeared on our stage, so to speak.” It felt uncomfortable, if not obscene, discussing the characters with an outsider. Especially with Reg, who as a child probably spent his Sundays scanning the dot patterns in the weekend funnies with a magnifying glass in search of hidden messages from the devil.
I told Reg about Froggles, too. “Reg, my point is that these were characters shared solely between Jason and me. Nobody on the planet could possibly have known about them.”
Reg was silent. This drove me nuts. “Reg, say something, at least.”
He poured the tea. “I guess what’s strange for me here is to learn that Jason had an inner world that included all these characters and all the things they said.”
“Well, he did.”
“And that he spoke with them all the time.”
“He didn’t speak with them, he was them. Or rather, they were us. We both have our own personalities, but when we went into character mode we became something altogether different. You could give me a thousand bucks and I couldn’t think up a single line for them to say. Jason, too. But me and Jason together? There’d be no stopping us.”
“Do you have any wine?”
“White or red?”
“White.”
I took the bottle out of the fridge and poured it for him. He said, “Ahhh, God bless vitamin W.”
I asked him if the psychic aspect of these events upset him for religious reasons.
“Psychics? Lord, no. They’re all quacks. I don’t believe God speaks to humans through them. So if a psychic’s sending you messages, either the psychic’s faking it, or something ungodly is coming through.”
“Yeah, well…”
“Look, Heather, I know you’re upset that I don’t believe in your psychic.”
“She gave me evidence, Reg-”
He raised his hands as if to say, Nothing I can do about it.
Meanwhile I had to make dinner. I had no idea what was in the fridge to eat-fat-free yogurt? Limp celery? I got up to inspect. I had this thought: “Reg, is all this supposed to make us better people? I mean, is that why we’re going through this-so that our souls can somehow improve?” I found a plastic tub of frozen spaghetti sauce.
“Maybe.”
I was so mad that I slammed the sauce onto the counter and the lid popped off. “Will you just tell me why it is that the only way we ever seem to take steps forward in life is through pain? Huh? Why is exposure to pain always supposed to make us better people?”
“Heather, it’s grotesque to think for even a moment that suffering in and of itself makes you a better person.”
“I’m listening.”
“Heather, I’m having one of my good days today. I’m not feeling as full of doubt as last time. Doubt comes and goes. And my thinking today is that it’s equally grotesque to think that a lack of bad events in your life means you’re a good person. Life is only so long. The whistle gets blown, and when it does, where you are is where you are. If people lived to be five hundred, that’s probably be about long enough for everybody to have experienced most of what there is, and to have done all of the bad stuff, too. But we check out roughly at seventy-two.” “So?”
“So if we assume that God is just-and I think He is, even after everything that’s happened-then justice can still be done. Maybe not here on earth, or in our own lifetimes, but for justice to happen then there has to be something beyond this world. Life on this plane is simply too short for justice.”
“Huh.”
“Some people even give the impression that they’ve escaped all the bad stuff, but I don’t think anybody does. Not really.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“I used to be a really nice person, Reg.”
“I can’t say that about myself.”
“But now something’s changed and I’m not a nice person anymore. It happened to me today in the mall’s bathroom when I was crying. I stopped being nice.”
Reg said, “No, no, that’s not true.”
In any event, I was heating the spaghetti sauce, and I dropped the subject of psychics, evil, Froggles, and Jason, and spoke about those things that float on the surface, things without roots: current events, TV and movies. The moment Reg left I pounced on the phone and called Allison, but she didn’t pick up and there was no machine.
I tried again an hour later. Nothing.
I would have called her every three minutes, but then I realized how uncool it would look if Allison came in, looked at her call screening display, and saw that I’d phoned her seventy-eight times. So instead I phoned her three more times, and just now took a sedative my doctor had given me back when Jason first disappeared, but which I’ve so far refused to take. I’m going to bed.
Monday night 7:00
Work today was hard, and I screwed up several times. I passed on lunch with Jayne from the court next door, and I bought a tuna salad sandwich and some chocolate milk. It sat beside me untouched on the courtyard steps while I began phoning Allison’s number once again. How many times had it been, at that point-ten? But I couldn’t help it: her number was the combination to a safe, and I desperately wanted in.
By the end of lunch hour, I felt sick-well, more freaked out than sick. I clocked out and drove home, as if home would afford me any comfort. I phoned Allison twice again and then decided at the last minute to visit Jason’s mother at the extended-care facility off Lonsdale. She was awake and for an instant seemed to recognize me, but quickly forgot me again. She kept asking for Joyce, Jason’s old dog, but I told her about ten times that because I was allergic to her, Joyce was living with Chris down in Silicon Valley.
Then she asked how Jason was. I said he was fine, and then from the innocent expression on her face I time-traveled just a few months in the past to a world where Jason was still here. I felt relief that we’d decided to not tell her the news.
Tuesday morning 5:30
Allison won’t answer her phone, and I’m ready for murder. For the love of God, how many times do I have to dial her? I threw all caution to the wind and put her number on autoredial for the entire evening. Then I went and bought a copy of every local newspaper and checked out all the psychics, looking for her.
I went through the Yellow Pages and the Internet, and still nothing. She must have some sort of business alias. I called all the psychics I could, asking who Allison might be, but nobody knew. Some of them tried reeling me in by fishing for what Allison might have been onto. Scum. But all leads went dead. The nerve of this woman-the nerve-she knows darn well what it’s like to endure what I’ve endured, and she doesn’t return my call.
I can’t sleep. Instead, I just think about her more and more, and then I think about Jason, somewhere out there in the afterworld trying to reach me, and instead all he connects with is Allison in her teal-colored fleece-pilled fleece, at that-who tells me right out of the gate that she’s in the business of being a liar. I walk around the condo, talking aloud, telling Jason that he could come directly to me, instead of wasting his time trying to go through
this un-communicative Allison bitch.
I then felt uncharitable and petty. I thought that maybe if I drank a couple of gallons of water, it’d de-gunk anything in my veins or muscles that might be blocking Jason from reaching me directly. Then I figured I was maybe too clear, so I drank a shot of tequila.
Oh, God, I think I’m looped right now-but it was only one tequila shot, and my period was a week ago, so I don’t know why I’m so wound up. It’s going to be light soon. It’ll be a clear, cool day, like summer, but the sun’s too low on the horizon.
Seasons have always had a strong effect on me. For example, everyone has a question that assaults them the moment they’re awake in the morning-usually it’s “Where am I?” or sometimes “What day is it?” I always wake up asking “What season is it?” Not even the day but the season. A billion years of evolution summed up in one simple question, all based on the planet’s wobble. Oh, but I wish it were spring! And oh-if only I could smell some laurels in the path outside the building! But then, on the other hand, if I’m honest, I have to remember that it takes bodies longer to decompose in fall and winter. Oh, Jason, I’m so sorry, honey, I’m sorry I just thought of you like you were merely biomass like potting soil or manure or mulch. That’s obviously not true. I don’t know what happened to you, but you’re still just Jason. You haven’t turned into something else yet.
And Allison, you evil cheesy witch. You won’t pick up the phone. How dare you. I’m going to find you. Yes, I’m going to find you.
Tuesday morning 11:00
I’m writing this directly into the courtroom’s system. Who cares?
A half-hour ago the unthinkable happened: my cell phone went off in the middle of a cross-examination. Whole years go by without people even noticing we exist. We’re not supposed to draw attention to ourselves-and so there I sat looking like a twit to everybody in the room, phone bleeping away. Granted, it was probably the most interesting thing to happen in that courtroom since the double murder trial back in ’97, but people are staring at me, willing my cheeks to flush red, trying to make me know that they know about me. If you were looking at me as I write this, you’d never know that all I want to do in this world is kidnap Allison and tie her to a rack and demand that she tell me what’s going on with Jason.