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 c.r.a.p - 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 ma.s.sacre. 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.s the scene of the accident; highway traffic was closed down to a single lane, and there were shards of gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s. 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 sc.r.a.p metal, the truth is the truth, and the shock pa.s.ses 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.
"n.o.body. Did you?"
"No. My battery died."
"Jesus, thank G.o.d."
"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 G.o.d"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 gla.s.ses 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 c.o.c.ktail 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, pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.s 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.