1 ALL IDEAS ARE TRUE

I'm Jared, a ghost.

On Friday, October 14, 1978,1 was playing football with my high school team, the Sentinel Spartans. It was an away-game at another school, Handsworth, in North Vancouver. Early on in the game I was thrown a pass and as I turned to catch it I couldn't help noticing how clean and blue the sky was, like a freshly squeegeed window. At that point I blacked out. I apparently fumbled the pass and I have no memory of what happened afterward, but I did learn that the coaches canceled the game, which was dumb because we were cleaning up and for all anybody knew, it was probably just a severe relapse of mono from two years earlier.

But between that fumbled pass and a few hours later when I woke up in Lions Gate Hospital, I was diagnosed with leukemia—cancer of the bone marrow and hence the blood. Just three months later I died, on January 14, 1979. It was a lightning-speed progression for this particular disease. Before I died I lost all my hair and my skin turned the color of an unwashed white car. If I could do it all over again, I'd have hidden the mirrors from about Week Six onward.

My life was happy and full and short; Earth was kind to me and my bout with cancer was my Great Experience. Unless, of course, we include my sex binge with Cheryl Anderson the week her parents were renovating and the whole family moved into The Maples motel for five days. That aside, I believe that unless a person passes through some Great Experience, that person's life will have been for naught. Such an experience doesn't have to be explosive or murderous or include Cheryl Anderson; often a quiet life of loneliness can be its own Great Experience. And I will also say this: hospitals are girl magnets. My room there quickly became a veritable parade float of flowers, cookies, knit goods, and girls who had quite obviously (and fetchingly) spent hours grooming. Such is the demented nature of the universe that I was too weak to properly respond to my being hit on by carloads of Betties and Veronicas—all except for the cheeky Cheryl Anderson who gave me 'manual release' the day I lost my eyebrows, followed by a flood of tears and the snapping of Polaroids in which I wear a knit toque. Gush gush.

But back to right now—here, where I am, here at world's end.

Yes, the world is over. It's still here but it's … over. I'm at the end of the world. Dust in the wind. The end of the world as we know it. Just another brick in the wall. It sounds glamorous but it's not. It's dreary and quiet and the air always smells like there's a tire fire half a mile upwind.

Let me describe the real estate that remains one year after the world ended: It is above all a silent place with no engines or voices or music. Theater screens fray and unravel like overworn shirts. Endless cars and trucks and minivans sit on road shoulders harboring cargoes of rotted skeletons. Homes across the world collapse and fall inward on themselves; pianos, couches, and microwaves tumble through floors, exposing money and love notes hidden within the floorboards.Most foods and medicines have time-expired. The outer world is eroded by rain, and confused by lightning. Fires still burn, of course, and the weather now tends to extremes.

Suburban streets such as those where I grew up are dissolving inside rangy and shaggy overgrown plants; vines unfurl across roads now undriven by Camaros. Tennis rackets silently unstring inside dark dry closets. Ten million pictures fall from ten million walls; road signs blister and rust. Hungry dogs roam in packs.

To visit Earth now you would see thousands of years of grandeur and machinery all falling asleep. Cathedrals fall as readily as banks; car assembly lines as readily as supermarkets. Lightless sunken submarines lumber to the ocean's bottom to spend the next billion years collecting silt. In cities the snow sits unplowed; jukeboxes sit silent; chalkboards stand forever unerased. Computer databases lie untapped while power cables float from aluminum towers like long thin hairs.

But how did I end up here? And how long am I to stay here? To learn this, we need to learn about my friends. They were here, too—at the end of the world. This is the place my old friends came to inhabit as well—my friends who grew old while I got to remain forever young.

Question: would I do it the same way all over again? Absolutely— because I learned something along the way. Most people don't learn things along the way. Or if they do, they conveniently forget those things when it suits their need. Most people, given a second chance, fuck it up completely. It's one of those laws of the universe that you can't shake. People, I have noticed, only seem to learn once they get their third chance—after losing and wasting vast sums of time, money, youth, and energy—you name it. But still they learn, which is the better thing in the end.

So here follows the story of friends of mine who finally learned their lesson: Karen, Richard, Pam, Hamilton, Wendy, and Linus. Richard's the best talker of the group so in the beginning the story is mostly his. Karen would have been better but then Karen wasn't around Earth much in the beginning. C'est la vie. But then Richard'sstory only takes us so far. The story gets bigger than him. It includes them all. And in the end it becomes my story. But we'll get to that.

Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers.

18-25-32 …Hike!

2 EVERY IDEA IN THE WORLD IS WRONG

Karen and I deflowered each other atop Grouse Mountain, among the cedars beside a ski slope, atop crystal snow shards beneath pen-light stars. It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon—lung-burning; mentholated and pure; a hint of ozone, zinc, ski wax, and Karen's strawberry shampoo.

Here is where I go back to the first small crack in the shell of time, to when I was happiest. Myself and the others, empty pagan teenagers lusting atop a black mountain overlooking a shimmering city below, a city so new that it dreamed only of what the embryo knows, a shimmering light of civil peace and hope for the future. Andthere I am now, up on that mountain: What did you see, Karen? Why weren't we allowed to know? Why you—why us?

That night—December 15, 1979—Karen had been so ravenous, demanding that we connect full-tilt. She said to me, "So, Richard, are we ever gonna do it or what?" She unzipped her bib overalls on a steep, breast-shaped mogul, then hauled me into the woods, where she yanked me down into the scraping snow, a snow too icy for snow angels. I felt so young, and she looked so mature. She pulled me with unfamiliar urgency, as though an invasion were about to occur that would send us off to war. And so there we lay, pumping like lions, the insides of our heads like hot slot machines clanging out silver dollars, rubies, and sugar candies. As if time was soon to end, what little time remained must be squandered quickly, savoring the delicate, fluttering pulses of cool, dry cherry blossoms passing back and forth between our bodies.

Afterward, cold snow trickled into our pants, then into our orifices, chilling and congealing those parts so recently warm while we zipped up and schussed down the ski runs to the chairlifts. "Hey, Richard, you pussy—it's a rat race!"

Karen and I were flushed, slightly embarrassed, processing all these new bodily sensations while feeling transformed—and then we rose up again, up the mountain on a bobbing chairlift that stalled halfway up the slope. And it was there that the arc lights also blinked, then skittered, then blackened. In the dark, Karen and I sat bouncing, stuck, suspended above raw nature, our faces blue jeans-blue from the Moon. Karen lit a Number 7 cigarette, her bony cheeks inflamed with blood, burning pink in the Bic lighter's heat, like a doll inside a burning doll house. My arm draped her shoulder; we both felt safe, as if we were a complete solar system unto ourselves, dangling in the sky, warm heated planets inside a universe of stars.

I asked Karen, who was also trying to gauge the impact of what we'd just done together in the woods, if she was happy. This is never, as I have since learned, a good question to ask of anyone. But Karen smiled, giggled, and blew silky smoke into the deep blue darkness. Ithought of jewels being tossed off an ocean liner over the Marianas Trench, gone forever. Then she turned her head away from me and looked into the forest that lay to the right, trees visible to us both as only a darker shade of black. I could tell something was now wrong with her, as though she were a book I was reading with pages tanta-lizingly removed. Her small teeth bit her lower lip and her eyebrows lowered.

She jittered with a delicate jolt, as if she'd tried to start her Honda Civic with her house key.

The realization dribbled into my own head: Karen had been off kilter all afternoon and into the evening, fixating over dumb things like the olive-colored dial telephone in my parents' kitchen or a bouquet of crummy gladiolas on the kitchen table, saying, "Oh, isn't that just the most beautiful …" then trailing off. She had also been looking at the sky and the clouds all day, not just glancing, but stopping and standing and staring, as if they were on a movie screen.

Karen's back arched just faintly, and her face stiffened just so. I said, "What's up, Pumpkin—regrets? You know how I feel about you."

And she said "Duh, Richard. I love you, too . , . goonhead. Nothing's wrong, really, Beb. I'm just cold. And I want the lights to come back on. Soon." She called me "Beb," a snotty contraction of "Babe."

The absence of light frightened her. She pulled up my wool ski cap and kissed my waxy, cold ear. So I held her tighter and once more asked her what was the matter, because she still wasn't okay.

She said, "I've been having the weirdest dreams lately, Richard. So real… I guess it sounds kind of loser-ish, me saying that, doesn't it? Best forgotten." Karen shook her head and blew out a puff of tobacco smoke that spider-webbed against the dark night. She stared at the chairlift's stalag towers, unable to light the slopes with man-made sun. She changed the subject: "Did you see Donna Kilbruck's pants tonight? God—so tight—she had walrus-crotch. The horror. It, too, best forgotten."

"Hey, Beb, don't change the subject. Tell me," I said, with anunexpected curtness. I was mad at myself; I was growing up and was at the stage where smart-ass one-liners were no longer in and of themselves adequately meaningful to sustain a conversation. Karen and I rarely had conversations of true depth. The closest we ever got to hearing each other's deeper thoughts was during stoned group philosophizing sessions—which is to say not much at all. But then we were young and glibness was our armor. We yearned for better thoughts. I vowed to try to bring myself closer to her. "C'mon. Please—tell me."

Karen said, "Nope. Sorry Beb. It's too complicated to explain." Again I felt excluded. Minutes before I had been so totally one with her. A wind scraped by, our bodies shivered, and then she said, "Well maybe it wasn't a dream. You promise not to laugh?"

"Huh? Yes. Of course I promise."

"Well, I was asleep when it happened—but it was more realistic than any dream. Maybe a kind of vision."

"Go on."

"It wasn't like a dream at all, more like movie clips—like a TV ad for a movie, but with still photos, too, but just barely developed, like a blur that becomes a face when I develop them in the photo lab at school. I think it was supposed to be the future."

I could kick myself now for having said what I said, an ill-timed stab at being funny: "So how was the future? Vietnam conquers Earth? Aliens for dinner? Pods for everybody? Maybe that explains your being a space cadet all day." I thought I was being witty here—a real center box on Hollywood Squares. But Karen's falling face showed that I'd grossly misjudged. She looked spooked and let down.

"Okay, Richard. I see. I knew I shouldn't have trusted you with that. That's one mistake I won't be making again." She looked away. Chills.

I felt like a farmer watching his field flattened by hail. "No. Shit. Karen. Please. I'm a shit. Big-mouth strikes again. I didn't mean that. You know I didn't. I was being a jerk. I don't like it when I'm like that. Shit. I was only trying to be funny. Please tell me. C'mon. I want to hear about your vision. Please."

"Your groveling has been noted, Richard." She flicked away hercigarette; her tone indicated probation. She was silent awhile. We were beyond chilly, quite cold now. Our eyes adjusted to the dark. She continued: "It had texture. For example, I could feel plants and clothes and things when I touched them. Especially last night. It was set in our house on Rabbit Lane, but everything had gone to seed. The trees and grass … and the people, too. You, Pam … really dirty and grungy."

Suddenly, she had clarity. "These things are all in the future." She sniffed back a moist bead of goo dripping from her nose. "The air seemed smoky. There weren't any flying cars or outer-space clothing. But cars were different, all smooth and round. I drove in one. It had a new brand name … Airbag? Yes—Airbag. It was on the dashboard."

"You didn't happen to pick up a Wall Street Journal and notice any big market trends in the future—or any stock prices—or anything like that, did you?

She nogged herself on her forehead. "I get shown the future and all I paid attention to is cars, haircuts, and …" She rolled her eyes. "I'm blanking, Richard, I can't help you there. Stop being crass. Wait— yes—yes: Russia isn't an enemy anymore. And sex is—fatal. Ta-da!"

The ski-lift chair jiggled—engines up the hill were sending rumbles. Karen continued trancing: "Earlier this week, I saw the future and there were these machines that had something to do with money— people seemed to be more … electronic. People still did things the regular way, too, like they had to pump gas and … and … oh, shit, I can't believe this, I see the future and it sounds just like now. I can't even remember how it was different. People looked better. Thinner? Better clothes? Like joggers?"

"And … ?"

"Okay, you're right. Details are kinda patchy—but there's bad news, too. It's a good news/bad news thing." She paused and said, "There's a … darkness to the future." She paused and bit her lip. "That's what's scaring me now."

"What kind of darkness?" That night, I had worn only jeans, no long Johns. I shivered.

"The future's not a good place, Richard. I think it's maybe cruel. Isaw that last night. We were all there. I could see us—we weren't being tortured or anything—we were all still alive and all … older … middle-aged or something, but … 'meaning' had vanished. And yet we didn't know it. We were meaningless."

"What do you mean, 'meaningless'?"

"Okay. Life didn't seem depressing or empty to us, but we could only discern that it was as if we were on the outside looking in. And then I looked around for other people—to see if their lives seemed this way, too—but all the other people had left. It was just us, with our meaningless lives. Then I looked at us up close—Pam, Hamilton, you, Linus, Wendy—and you all seemed normal, but your eyes were without souls .. . like a salmon lying on a dock, one eye flat on the hot wood, the other looking straight to heaven. I think I need to stop now."

"No—don't!"

"I wanted to help us, Richard, but I didn't know how to save us, how to get our souls back. I couldn't see a solution. I was the only one who knew what was missing, but I didn't know what I could do about it."

Karen sounded as though she were about to cry. I was quiet and had no idea what to say; I put my arm around her. Below us on the left I could see skiers gathered in the dark, toking up and passing wineskins while hooting.

Karen spoke again: "Oh! I just remembered! Jared was there last night! In the vision—he was! So maybe it's not a real vision of the future, but a vision of what might be—a warning, like the ghost of Christmas Future."

"Well, maybe." I didn't like hearing Jared's name, though I didn't let on. The chairlift then lurched forward a few feet, the lights flickered on, then stopped. The world was dark stillness again.

"But you know what, Richard?"

"What?"

She caught herself. "Nothing. Oh, never mind, Beb. I think I'm tired of talking about this." She reached into her jacket. "Here. I want you to hold onto this envelope for me. Don't open it. Just hold onto it for me overnight. Give it back to me tomorrow.""Huh?" I looked at the Snoopy envelope with the word "Richard" Magic-Markered on its front in her maddeningly girlish, rounded-sloped, daisy-adorned handwriting. Her handwriting was actually the subject of an argument the two of us had a month previously. I'd asked her why she couldn't write "normally." Idiot!

Karen watched me look at the handwriting. "Normal enough for you, Richard, you daring nonconformist, you?" I stashed the envelope in my down jacket's pocket and then the chairlift jumped into motion again.

"Remember—tomorrow you give it back to me, no questions asked."

"It's a done deal." I kissed her.

The chairlift started with another lurch, causing Karen to drop her pack of Number 75 from her lap. She cursed, and instantly the mountain was again electrically lit with energy from the great dams of northern British Columbia. The skiers on the slopes below whooped, as though whooping for energy itself; our moment was lost. Karen said, "Look—there's Wendy and Pam." She deafened me by shouting instructions to Wendy to meet at the Grouse Nest in half an hour; she asked Pam to rescue her dropped pack of cigarettes, now many chairs behind us.

Our intimacy reduced, we quickly and soundlessly chairlifted up the Blueberry Chair's slope while Karen discussed plans for the rest of the night. "Look, there's Donna Kilbruck now. Arf Arf!"

I thought of Jared.

Jared was a friend of ours, as well as my best friend while growing up. In high school, Jared and I had drifted apart, as can happen with friends made early in life. He became a football star and our lives increasingly had less and less in common. He was also the biggest male slut I've ever known. Girls would hurl themselves at him and he was always there to catch. While Jared was definitely inside the winner's circle humping himself silly, I, on the other hand, seemed to be on a vague loser track. We still got along fine, but it felt comfortable only back in our own neighborhood and away from the high school's intricate popularity rituals. Jared's family lived around the corner from mine, up on St. James Place. One hot afternoon during a game at Handsworth Secondary, Jared simply keeled over and was wheeled off to Lions Gate Hospital. A week later, he'd lost his gold curls; two months later, he weighed less than a scarecrow; three months later he was … gone.

Did we ever really recover from the loss? I'm not sure. I had been, in a way, Jared's "official friend," and thus many of the consoling stares and words came my way, which I hated. All of the girls who once mooned over Jared began mooning over me—Jared's sex energy still filled the air—but I wasn't about to take advantage of the opportunity and emulate his life of sluttery. I acted stoic when in fact I was angry and scared and sad. Jared had thought of us as best friends before he died, but we really weren't. I'd made other friends. I felt guilty, disloyal. The next year was spent not talking about Jared, pretending that everything was proceeding as normal, when it wasn't.

3 IF IT SLEEPS IT'S ALIVE

I was quiet in the gondola descending the mountain while Karen was lightly bantering with Wendy and Pam. Our skis were strapped together and faintly clacked. Karen and I were transformed from the two who had gondola'ed up just hours earlier. Lilting and swooping across the gondola's middle tower, we looked at the lights of Vancouver before the 1980s had its way with the city—an innocent, vulnerable, spun-glass kingdom. We tried to spot our houses, which twinkled across the Capilano River inside our sober, sterile mountain suburb.

I felt faraway as I then looked underneath the gondola at the white angel-food snowpack and the black granite that poked out from within it. I had the sensation that I was from some other world and had fallen onto Earth like a meteorite. Instead of being an earthling I had crash-landed here—Ka-thunkkk!—and my life on Earth was an accident. First-time gondola riders and fraidy-cats tittered and screamed as our gondola swooned downward. I looked at Karen, with her head resting atop her ski poles. She had the extra pulse of beauty people have when they know they're being fondly admired.

The gondola moored at the base; we clomped to my Datsun B-210, where we removed the plastic anchors of our ski boots and luxuriated in the freedom of recently unfurled toes. We hopped into the car and drove to a party we had been warned might be a house-wrecker—up to a winding suburban street on the mountain of West Vancouver. It was a party where a now forgotten teen of questionable popularity had been left minding the house while parents gambled away in Las Vegas.

And indeed the party was a grand house-wrecker—larger than any of us had seen to date. We arrived around 10:00 P.M., and the Datsun was one of dozens of cars parked up and down Eyremont Drive. Teenagers leaped out of cedar hedges and spruce shrubberies like protons, their beer boxes clutched under knobby jean-jacketed arms, bottles inside carrying imprisoned genies offering just one last wish.

From all directions came the sound of excited voices and smashing bottles. Silhouettes of teens sparkled atop broken bottles lit by streetlights. Several of us were just arriving from Grouse Mountain. I heard a hiss—my friend, Hamilton—my own personal patron saint of badly folded maps, damp matches, low-grade pornography, bad perms, tetracycline, and borrowed cigarettes. He beckoned me from inside a hedge of laurels just ahead of the parked car, hissing, "Richard, drag your butt in here."

I complied, and inside I found a branchy wigwam rife with headache-inducing Mexican pot of the weakest caliber. Roughly ten of Hamilton's drug buddies were toking furiously. In no mood for a headache, I said, "Jesus, Ham—it smells like an egg fart inside a subway car. Come out and meet me and the girls. Where's Linus?"

"Down at the party. I'll be out in a minute. Dean, please, pass me those Zig-Zags."

Back at the car, Karen, Pam, and Wendy were discussing Karen's new diet. I said, "Karen, you're not still hell-bent on starvation, are you?"

Karen had been obsessed with Hawaii and dieting. "Richard, Beb,

I've just got to be a size five by next week or I won't fit into my new Hawaii swimsuit."Pam, wafer-thin, asked, "Are you still taking diet pills? My mom gives them to me all the time. I refuse."

"Pam," Karen replied, "you know I was raised on pills; Mom's a walking pharmacy. But if I take even one speeder, I spazz out and climb the walls with my teeth." She paused to sweep hair from her eyes. "Most drugs, even vitamins, send me to the Moon. But downers are okay. I take them to cool out. Mom gave me my own bottle." To all of us, this sounded glamorous and wanton.

Wendy, trying to be cooler than she really felt, said, "That'd be just so loser-ish—you know, OD'ing on vitamins," and her quip was met with polite stares.

Pam broke the silence. She was then trying to break into the world of modeling, and she said, "Oh—I was at a shoot yesterday—do you want to know what models sound like when they talk?" We agreed enthusiastically. "Like this," she said, "like Pebbles Flintstone: 'Koo goo koo baa baa baa diet pills goo koo koo.' Promise me that if I ever start talking like that, just pull the plug."

Slaphappy Hamilton, beanstalk-tall, black-booted, bolo-corded, with hands as big as frying pans, appeared from behind, saying, "Richard: It's imperative we check the party right now, man. The house is just getting demolished. Hey there, Pammie …"

Pam stuck out her tongue. He and Pammie had been blowing hot and cold for three years; that night, they were in a cold spell. Hamilton turned back to me: "If we don't rescue Linus, he'll be cat food by midnight. It's berserk down there. Besides, Mr. Liver here wants a drink." Hamilton squeezed the side of his stomach; below us something lurched and crashed.

Pam asked the sky, "Why do I have to like aloof jerks who couldn't care less if I exist? Please, O gods of love, send me a winner next time."

We all discussed skiing for a while, and I felt myself pulling back, again looking at Karen, Wendy, and Pam. As a trio, they resembled three different-looking sisters, but sisters nonetheless. They called themselves Charlie's Angels, but then, so did many other trios of girlfriends at that time.Personalities.

I sometimes wonder what can be said of people when they are young, whether the full expression of their personalities is truly discernible. Do we even offer hints? Do murderers seem like murderers at eighteen? Do stockbrokers? Waiters? Millionaires? An egg hatches. What will emerge—a cygnet? a crocodile? a turtle?

Wendy: wide shoulders earned on the swim team, a friendly, earnest, square, slightly mannish face capped with a chocolate-brown wedge cut. Hamilton and I once tried to pin down Wendy's looks, and Hamilton wasn't far wrong when he said she looked like she was twenty-seventh in line to the British throne. At our family Christmas party every year, when introducing ourselves to the older crowd, Wendy always said, "I'm the smart one." And she was.

Pam (Pamela, Pammie, Pameloid): thin as water streaming from a tap, a perfect oval face, a face like a tourist attraction crowned with a wispy corn-silk Farrah perm. Glamour vixen Pammie: eyes always looking a bit farther than your own: "Whatcha lookin' at, Pam?" "Oh—just. Something. Up there. In the clouds."

Karen: small face with straight brown hair parted in the center. Moss-green eyes. As comfortable with boys as with girls. A guy's gal. Skiing? Touch football? Wounded animal needs mending? Call Karen.

As a trio, their six arms were perennially crossed over either brown leather or down jackets, hands clasping purses full of high-tar cigarettes; Dmetre ski sweaters reeking of Charlie perfume, sugarless gum, and sweet-smelling hair. Clean and free and sexy and strong.

Karen asked for a drink and Wendy said, "Are you sure you want to drink, Kare? I mean you're looking kinda frail. All you've eaten today is a Ritz cracker and half a can of Tab. Let's go to my place and get something."

Pammie said, "Don't say that—don't tempt me—because I'll be the one who ends up eating too much." She paused: "Is there much in your fridge?"

Karen ignored them. She climbed into my Datsun to put a new lace in her runners just as I walked to the car to get my sweater. I saw Karen slip two pills from her makeup compact into her mouth. Shecaught me catching her. So she stuck out her tongue jokingly. "It's Valley of the Dolls, I know, Richard—but let's see you in a size-five bikini." I could feel myself trying to mold my face into a nonjudg-mental scrunch; I lost.

"Christ, it's only Valium. It's totally legal. My mom gave them to me." She was slightly angry at my having caught her. I think it made her seem less in control.

I said, "Karen, I think you look great; you've got a great body, you're perfect the way you are. And I should know …" I winked, but I think it looked dirty, not friendly. "You're nuts to even think about dieting."

"Richard, that's sweet, you're the bestest, bestest boyfriend on Earth, and I really do appreciate it. But listen: It's a girl thing. Drop it, okay?" At least she was smiling. She leaned over the seat and gave me a quick kiss before I went back to the makeshift bar Pam had set up on the top of her car's hood. "Roll up your window and shut the door," Karen said to me, a Valium underneath her tongue, "God may be watching." It was the last thing she said to me for almost twenty years.

Pam cradled a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, and she and Wendy began pouring itty-bitty drinks into stolen McDonald's paper cups, with Tab as a mixer.

Wendy was talking about her Friday meeting with the school guidance counselor. She was considering applying for the accelerated pre-med program at UBC, but she couldn't decide if she'd be missing out on all the college fun: "You know, drunken piss-ups, drug orgies, unchained sex, and afterward writing fake letters to Penthouse Forum."

Pam was in no mood to discuss careers. "Hey, let's booze-and-cruise tonight, eh, Wendy? This housewrecking crap is such a guy thing." We looked down at the house; from the racket it generated, we thought the house would implode, as if in a horror movie.

Hamilton said, "What's that, Pammie? You're just scared of those North Van chicks in their white jeans. Admit it." In 1979 white jeans among partying females were the tell-tale code that the wearer was up for "a scrap.""What… and like you're not scared, Hamilton?"

Wendy said, "Touché, Pamela," then looked at me. "Are you going down there, Richard?"

"Umm—I'd rather not. But Linus is down there. Ham and I told him to meet us at the party and we can't just leave him among the pagans. As we speak, he's probably sitting inside a boiling cauldron reading a World Book Encyclopedia."

Pam fondled the amulet on the chain around her neck, which Karen told me contained a curl of Hamilton's pubic hair. Wendy chugged her cocktail completely and said to Pam, "ABC." I asked what that meant, to which the two of them chimed, "Another Bloody Cocktail! Now go rescue Linus, you wee laddies. We three are gonna stay up here and guzzle hooch."

And so Hamilton and I went down the steep driveway—reluctantly, with forced bravado and a patch of giggles behind us—down into the pale yellow rancher then being smashed by angry, dreadful children, ungrateful monsters, sharks in bloodied water, lashing out at this generic home, their incubator—a variation on their own homes— homes for the prayerless, homes that imbued their teen occupants with rigid sameness and predictability while offering no alternative.

An uprooted ficus tree straddled the billiard table, its soil and some beer making a mud puddle onto which a six-ball now rested; a sliding glass door was smashed, touting a hole wider than a fist where blood dripped down onto the carpet; the TV-room walls were Dalmatian-spotted with boot-kicked holes and dents; the remaining billiard balls had been tossed through the holes and shattered on the patio. The toilet had overflowed in the worst way imaginable; vomit had been seemingly flung, then sprinkled, onto the most unlikely surfaces. "It's like an inmate riot at a maximum security prison," Hamilton said. Only the stereo, with its ability to generate ambiance, had been spared, playing more and more loudly as drunken teenagers skulked around in their jean jackets and leather coats, walking amok, erupting spontaneously into beery rages, crashing chairs and pulling down the light fixtures from stippled ceilings. The girls, those tough NorthVan girls in the fabled white pants, sat in the master bedroom uninterested in the crashings. The bedroom was now converted into a smoking room, its occupants trying on silk blouses and orange lipsticks and combing their hair with pastel combs. Some of them sat on the kitchen counters hotknifing hash with heirloom silver, showing only marginal concern when a particularly loud crash was heard.

We continued walking. Both Hamilton and I had never been to a party of this caliber of violence before, and we didn't dare say we were frightened. We skulked about, hands in pockets. "Precisely what is it that's giving me the niggling feeling we're headed backward as a species?" Hamilton said. He was then almost slugged in the sternum by a partygoer offended by too many syllables. Shortly, he said, "Right. Well. Where's the pisser then?" only to learn that the other toilet was in shards. Out the window, people were skeeting records across the pool, lobbing empty beer bottles at these bat-like targets.

Walking by what was somebody's bedroom, we found Linus— monkey-postured, stubble-chinned, and wiping his nose with the back of his ink-stained hand—poring over an atlas, oblivious to the toxic trashing about him. "Oh. Hey—you guys wanna go get, umm, food or something?" he asked.

We considered. The unthinkable consequences to the poor kid who lived there was too depressing. Hamilton said, "Cops'll be here soon, kids. Let's booze-and-cruise. Come on, Linus."

Suddenly, out of a window a lime-green lightning bolt cut the sky above the patio; seconds later, a La-Z-Boy recliner went to sleep at the pool's bottom.

Linus walked behind us, lighting a cigarette and placing a book or two back into a bookshelf that had been tipped over. "Did you guys know that Africa has over sixty countries?" he asked, while Hamilton bellowed, "Be gone, you imbecilic avalanche of hooligans!" and led us up the driveway. We cut over a topsoil landscaped mound and into a neighboring yard. On the road above, police cruisers' cherries pulsed American reds, whites, and blues. At my Datsun, Wendy and Pam stood over Karen.

"Richard," Wendy said, "Karen's totally out of it. Not even twodrinks and she's almost passed right out. Not her style. Pam, go get a blanket. You should get her home, Richard. Hi, Linus. How was the, urn, party?"

"Smashing," said Hamilton, cutting in.

A jolt passed through me: Karen had only two drinks? She looked okay, but something was off. No vomit, no anything; she was weak and pale. Talking to her didn't work; she was almost asleep and was making no effort to say anything or communicate with her eyes. I tried to sound casual to quell panic: "Let's take her back down to her house. Her folks are out of town, so we can put her to bed, watch TV, and keep our eyes on her. It's probably nothing."

"Probably that moronic diet," said Wendy. "She probably just needs to sleep after skiing on several days' worth of empty stomach."

"There's a new Saturday Night Live on," said Pam. Wendy and I lifted Karen into the Datsun, her clammy skin offering no shivers. Our small convoy of cars fled to Karen's house, one house below my own. There, I carried Karen into her bedroom, removed her coat and shoes, and tucked her into bed. She still felt clammy, so I put another blanket over her. She seemed okay. Wiped out, but the day had been long.

We sat in the living room, turning on Saturday Night Live just as the show was beginning. Wendy burned some popcorn in the kitchen, and we sat in beanbag chairs watching the first few minutes of skits. Hamilton was feeling upstaged by TV, and he tried to steal our attention with tales of boils, cysts and lame knock-knock jokes. We told him to shut up.

Linus lay on the sidelines staring at a blood-red poinsettia beside the presents underneath the Christmas tree. He was telling us about its petals' veins, marveling at the cell structure of the stems and leaves. He explained how you could say that roots are like electrical wiring and that photosynthesis was the most self-contained and efficient solar energy system possible.

"Will somebody tell Johnny Appleseed to fermez-la-bouchet" said

Hamilton, Pammie maneuvered her way toward Hamilton.

Tastemaster Wendy, going through a snobby I-don't-watch-TV phase, was doing a tabulation of the number of owls Karen's motherhad accumulated—"Owls, owls, owls—no surface left owl-free. There's even a small macrame owl above the phone in the hall alcove. Thirty of them and you could make a macrame jumpsuit like the one Ann Margret wore in Tommy just before she rolled around in the pile of baked beans."

"Wendy, what are you talking about?" asked Pam from the kitchen.

"Why is Mrs. McNeil obsessed with owls? What do they represent to her? What dark secret lurks inside them? What need do they satisfy in her?"

"They're pill stashes," said Hamilton. "The brass owl on the mantelpiece contains two hundred decayed Milltowns."

I excused myself and went to check on Karen. I heard Wendy shout, "Eighty-six," as part of her owl tabulation. I saw Karen had turned white as milk. Her head was propped upward, green eyes vacant, looking at the ceiling.

My brain collapsed. My arms and legs stung as though they were growing quills; my mouth dried as though stuffed with straw. "She's … not … breathing!" I shouted. "She's not breathing]" The gang in the living room was confused, saying, "Wha … ?" as they came over.

Pam said, "Shit. Oh fuck. Oh God. Wendy? You're on the swim team. Do mouth-to-mouth." Wendy dropped down to Karen on the bed and gave the kiss of life while Hamilton called the ambulance from the hallway phone. Pam said, "Oh, no, it's another Jared," to which Hamilton raged, screaming, "Don't even think that fucking thought! Don't even think of thinking it."

Jared. Oh God. This could be forever. This could go well beyond real. My eyes moistened and my throat hurt. We stood around feeling desperate and alarmingly useless, muttering shits and bobbing our heads uselessly. The bedside plastic dome lamp on her side table was turned on, throwing cheap yellow light on us and the mural on Karen's wall—an aging photo mural of the Moon with Earth in the background. I saw her swim medals and a Snoopy trophy saying: World's Best Daughter. There were lipsticks; lip smackers; two shirtsthat hadn't been chosen for wear that day laid out on the chest of drawers; a beer stein filled with pennies; high school yearbooks; a thesaurus and hair brushes.

The paramedics swooped through the front door with the gurney. Karen's lumpen body was lifted onto it like a clump of Play-Doh. The driver said, "Drinking?" We said vodka. "Any drugs involved?" Pam, Wendy, and Hamilton didn't know about the Valiums, but I did. "Two tranquilizers. I think they were Valium."

"Overdose maybe?"

"No." I'd seen her take just the two.

"Any pot?"

"No. Smell her if you don't believe it."

A respirator was being stuck down Karen's throat.

"Parents?"

"Down in Birch Bay."

"How long without breathing?"

"It's hard to say. A few minutes? She was wide-awake just thirty minutes ago."

"You the boyfriend?"

"Yeah."

"You ride in the car with us."

We shot out into the hallway, then onto the front walk and on to the driveway. My parents walked toward us from my house, faces pulsing colors from the ambulance lights, the panic in their eyes subsiding only slightly when they saw that it wasn't me on the stretcher.

"Hamilton, fill them in," I said. "We have to leave." Then Karen and I were in the ambulance, launched off toward Lions Gate Hospital. I took one last look through the rear windows at the neighborhood where Karen and I and Hamilton and Linus and Pammie had all grown up—cool and dry and quiet as a vault.

Karen's dad's burnt orange Chevy LUV … leaded gas fumes … two pills … trimmed hedges.

Our ambulance drove up Rabbit Lane to Stevens Drive and onto the highway to the hospital, and how was I to know that time was now different?

4 ALL FAKE

That first week of Karen's coma was the hardest. We couldn't have known then that the portrait of Karen that began that cold December night inside her Rabbit Lane bedroom was one that would remain unchanged for so long: ever-shrinking hands reduced to talons; clear plastic IV drips like boil-in-bag dinners gone badly wrong; an iceberg-blue respirator tube connected to the core of the Earth hissing sick threats of doom spoken backward in another language; hair always straight, combed nightly, going gray with the years, and limp as unwatered houseplants.

Mr. and Mrs. McNeil tore up from Birch Bay near dawn. Their Buick Centurion's right front wheel nudged over the yellow-painted curb beneath the Emergency's port cochere. Already inside sat my parents, Hamilton, Pammie, Wendy, and Linus, all of us worn out from worry and fear. The McNeils had faces like burning houses. I could see they'd both been quite drunk earlier and were now throbbing in a headache phase. They refused to speak with any of us younger folk at first, assuming that we were all entirely to blame for Karen's state, Mrs. McNeil's accusing red eyes saying more than any shouted curse. The McNeils spoke with my parents, their neighbors and more-or-less friends of twenty years. At sunrise, Dr. Menger emerged to lead the four of them into the room where Karen was lying.

"Thalamus … mumble … fluids; brain stem … mumble … cranial nerve … hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy … breathing …"

"Is she alive'? Is she dead?" asked Mrs. McNeil.

"She's alive, Mrs. McNeil."

"Can she think?" she continued.

"I can't tell you. If this continues, Karen will have sleep and wake cycles and may even dream. But thinking … I have no idea."

"What if she's trapped inside her body?" asked Mr. McNeil. "What if she's—" Mr. McNeil, George, was fumbling for words, "—in there hearing everything we say. What if she's screaming from the inside and she can't tell us that she's stuck?"

"That's not the case, sir. Please."

Meanwhile, Linus was glurping and snorkeling through a cup of vending machine hot chocolate. Hamilton called him an asswipe for being so disrespectful, but Linus said slowly, "Well, Karen likes chocolate. I think she'd want me to have it." There was a pause and a straw poll of eyes indicating this was the conventional wisdom. Hamilton calmed himself but remained in a piss-vinegar mood.

"Richard," barked Mr. McNeil, rounding a corner with the other older folk, "Dr. Menger said Karen took two pills. Did you give them to her?"

I was alert: "No. She had them in her compact. They were

Valiums. I've seen her take them before. Mrs. McNeil gives them to her."

Mr. McNeil turned to his wife, Lois, who nodded her head andmotioned her hand gently, confirming that she was the pusher. Mr. McNeil's posture slackened.

I said, "Karen wants to look good for your trip to Hawaii. She's trying to lose weight."

My use of the present tense shook them. "It's only five days from now," said Wendy. "She'll be fine by then, right?"

Nobody responded. Mrs. McNeil, whispering like a calculating starlet, asked Wendy, "Were … were you girls drinking? … Wendy? … Pammie?"

Wendy was direct: "Mrs. McNeil, Karen couldn't have had more than a drink and a half. Weak stuff, too—Tab and a drop of vodka. Honest. It was mostly Tab. One moment she was standing there wondering if she'd lost her watermelon lip smacker, the next she was on the grass beside the road moaning. We tried to make her throw up, but there couldn't have been more than half a French fry inside her, tops. She was trying to lose weight really fierce. For Hawaii."

"I see, Wendy."

Dr. Menger cut in with the results of the blood-alcohol test, which confirmed next to no alcohol in her system. "Virtually clean, he said. Point-oh-one."

Almost clean. But not clean. Dirty. Tainted. Soiled and corrupted. Shitted. Malaised. Poxed and pussed. Made unclean by her sick teenaged friends who wreck houses.

And we sat there in silence far into the next day, six friends, wretches of transgression, feeling deserving of punishment, sipping lame paper cones of Foremost eggnog brought to us by a nurse leaving night shift, anticipating our burdens, and castigating ourselves with silence. Sunday morning. Already news would be traveling throughout the school community—the early risers off to skate or ski. Karen's mental state would be glamorously linked to the house-wrecker, as though the damaged house had been the actual cause of her ails. And drugs.

I developed a cramp and went to the bathroom. There I found a stall, took a deep breath, and remembered the envelope in my jacket. I opened the envelope. On binder paper it read:December 15 … 6 Days to Hawaii!!!

Note: Call Pammie about beads for cornrowing hair. Also, arrange streaking.

Hi Beb. Karen here.

If you're reading this you're either a) the World's Biggest Sleazebag and I hate you for peeking at this or b) there's been some very bad news and it's a day later. I hope that neither of these is true!!

Why am I writing this? I'm asking myself that. 1 feel like I'm buying insurance before getting on a plane.

I've been having these visions this week. I may even have told you about them. Whatever. Normally my dreams are no wilder than, say, riding horses or swimming or arguing with Mom (and I win!!), but these new things I saw—they're not dreams.

On TV when somebody sees the bank robber's face they get shot or taken hostage, right? I have this feeling I'm going to be taken hostage—I saw more than I was supposed to have seen. I don't know how it's going to happen. These voices —they're arguing—one even sounds like Jared—and these voices are arguing while I get to see bits of (this sounds so bad) the Future!!

It's dark there—in the Future, I mean. It's not a good place. Everybody looks so old and the neighborhood looks like shit (pardon my French!!).

I'm writing this note because I'm scared. It's corny. I'm stupid. I feel like sleeping for a thousand years—that way I'll never have to be around for this weird new future.

Tell Mom and Dad that I'll miss them. And say good-bye to the gang. Also Richard, could I ask you a favor? Could you wait for me? I'll be back from wherever it is I'm going. I don't know when, but I will.

I don't think my heart is clean, but neither is it soiled. I can't remember the last time I even lied. I'm off to Christmas shop atPark Royal with Wendy and Pammie. Tonight I'm skiing with you. I'll rip this up tomorrow when you return it to me UNOPENED. God's looking. xox

Karen

I thought it best not to show Mr. and Mrs. McNeil the letter at that moment; it could only confuse without offering consolation. I stuffed it back in the vest pocket of my ski jacket and sat and thought of the times I'd used this very bathroom before, back when Jared was in the hospital and before he left us and this world, atom by atom.

I thought of Karen in the intensive care unit and I felt as though I was a jinx of a friend. I stood up and achingly returned to the waiting room. An hour later when the corridors seemed empty enough, we snuck in to see Karen. The machinery of her new life was fully set in motion—the IVs, respirator, tubes, and wave monitors. An orderly shooed us out of the room, and we shambled toward the exit, the world no longer quite an arena of dreams—it was just an arena.

The West Vancouver police interviewed each of us that afternoon, down at the station on Marine Drive at Thirteenth. Understandably, they wanted the story from each of us individually to weed out discrepancies. But there were none. The housewrecker was quickly glazed over, the culprits still lolling about in the cells below us. Afterward at the White Spot restaurant down the road, we hunkered without hunger over cheeseburgers. The only pattern we could see in Karen's behavior on Saturday was that she had been behaving … differently that day. I showed everybody the letter, and we became chilled.

"We were shopping at Park Royal yesterday," said Pammie, "all Karen could notice were weird little things like the color of mandarin oranges. We tried Christmas shopping, but instead she just rubbed her hands over fabrics. At the bus stop at Taco Don's, she ate one of Wendy's Mexi-Fries. I think that was all she had to eat before skiing. Poor thing. I'd have passed out, too, if I'd been her."Wendy said, "We should have forced her to eat."

"Don't rake yourself over the coals," I said. "There's something else going on here. We all know it."

"I agree. She was acting sort of spaz/ed yesterday," said Pam. "Tiny stuff. Preoccupied—and not just by that diet, either."

"I think we should show her parents the letter," Hamilton said. We agreed to do so later that day. Our table went silent.

That same evening, after feeble naps, we returned to Lions Gate Hospital, but Karen was unchanged. Not a limb, not a hair, not an eyelash. A chill fell upon us: Karen was not transforming the way she ought to. Leaving her room, I placed pink and blue carnations in a bud vase at her bedside; outside by our cars, we agreed that we would assemble at the school's smokehole the next morning so we could enter the building together, providing a casually united front.

At home, my parents, being neither heavy moralizers nor stringent disciplinarians, continued life as usual. Meatloaf, green beans, baked potatoes, and an episode of M*A*S*H. Years ago my cousin Eileen had been out cold for two days after smacking her head in a swimming pool's shallow end; her successful later career as a med school student made Mom and Dad less worried about comas than they might have been otherwise.

But none of us slept that Sunday night. Instead, we made an electronic cat's cradle of phone calls between each other's houses, all of us wearing house robes, hunched over kitchen chairs with only stove lights burning, whispering, unknowingly mimicking the purgatorial hiss of Karen's respirator.

The next morning, as agreed, we sluggishly convened down in the parking lot beside the smokehole five minutes before first bell, our eyes reddened, hair already stinking of smoke, our then-stylish corduroy wide-leg pants flapping in a wet, chilly Pacific wind.

Our entrance into English class—Wendy and Linus and me caused a not unsurprising teen zing as Karen's seat in front of me was pregnantly empty. Yet the three of us kept our down jackets on, chinsburied within their waffled nylon quilting, not as an act of defiance but as one of insulation, to shield us from the stares, the passed notes and hungry sideways glances. Philip Eng and Scott Litman gave us goggled incredulity; Andrea Porter offered kittenish gossip-hungry leers. Unspoken voices surrounded us: Look: it's the Karen killers. I hear they wrecked the Carters' house. Drugs, too: prescription drugs. Pissed to the gills! We all saw it coming, what with Jared kicking it last year. They're jinxed—they bring death to those around them. Look at their faces: I've never seen their badness before—I… I can't ivait to talk to them. Stars! Killers right here in our own English class!

When the session bell rang, the three of us skittered down the booming north hallway to reconvene outside by the Datsun. Hamilton and Pammie were already there, smoking and looking prickly. Their experiences had been similar to our own.

"Well, that was a real lulu, kids," Hamilton said, saying what we all felt. "No shitting way am I going back into that freak show." The five of us had already realized we were never going to finish school in a normal way. Pam said, "Canyon," then we hopped into our cars.

We had a few cigarettes and Linus had bargain-basement dime-bag skunkweed pot, which was all we needed for that moment. So we zoomed off to the canyon forest below Rabbit Lane. There, we parked the cars, walked down into the canyon's windless soggy greens where the tall trees above shielded us from the wet harsh weather, and we were calmed.

5 NO SEX NO MONEY

Again, personalities.

I have always noticed in high school yearbooks the similarity of all the graduate write-ups—how, after only a few pages, the identities of all the unsullied young faces blur, how one person melts into another and another: Susan likes to eat at Wendy's; Donald was on the basketball team; Norman is vain about bis varsity sweater; Gillian broke her arm on Spring Retreat; Brian is a car nut; Sue wants to live in Hawaii; Don wants to make a million and be a ski bum; Noreen wants to live in Europe; Gordon wants to be a radio deejay in Australia. At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities—to clarify just who it is we really are?

What have I said about myself so far? Not much, as is obvious. Until Jared vanished, I had thought my life average. You might look at me and ask me to baby-sit your children or coach them in baseball. I believed my mind was clean. My ambitions were undefined, but I assumed I would make my way in the world. I tried to be pleasant and likable. I don't think that's bad, but I was left every day with the sensation that I wasn't doing a good job at being … me. Not fraudulent, merely … not doing a good job at being me.

I remembered people from back in my early twenties, friends who would adopt a persona—the chic Euro-person; the embittered Grunge Thing; Stevie Nicks—and after years of practicing, they suddenly became those personas. What had I become? I don't remember even trying to fake a persona.

And after Karen left, I felt permanently jinxed; I was pulling away from the center. I darkened. My life had the beginnings of a story. I was no longer just like everybody else; the sensation felt wobbly, like jittering across a creek on slippery rocks with wet shoes, the current running ever faster.

The high school yearbook for the class of 1980 bore a special page honoring Karen. It showed Karen's grad photo, taken the month before her coma, inset above a foggy picture of trees with the following words below: Memories .

KAREN ANN MCNEIL

To Karen Ann, who left us on December I5th, still dreaming of larger worlds than ours. Hey, Karen—we miss you and we're always thinking of you.

David Bowie freak / Future legal secretary living in Hawaii / "Bumhead" / chatterbox / Smiles for all / "Ferrrrr-get it!" / Oh, those Mondays! / Let us ask ourselves, girls, do we have enough sweaters? / Lost a shoe at the Elton John concert / duh, , . . I walking to the portable in the rain /Eggie (right!) / Greatest love in life? The Fonz: Heyyyy! (Sorry, Richard!)

Senior volleyball, senior grass hockey, yearbook committee, Photography Club, Ski Team

Eggie was the nickname of Karen's white egg-shaped Honda Civic, speedily renamed by Hamilton as "the Ovary"—one of those nicknames that clings like a burr. Students most likely remembered Karen as the girl who was always gallivanting through the student parking lot, shuttling a load of laughing girls off to McDonald's for lunches of tea, saccharine, and half a small bag of fries.

The yearbook of the previous year had the following:

IN MEMORIUM:

JARED ANDERSON HANSEN

"Jare" was 1978's best sportsman, a good student and a fine friend to all. He left us in his prime, but we can maybe find peace in knowing that when we knock on heaven's door, Jared will be there to answer. Good-bye, Jared; we think you made the team.

"Ladies Man" (… ahem!) / senior football / senior basketball / brewskies / thin ice at Elveden Lake / fix your muffler! / Jethro Tull / Elvis Costello / Santana / That night at Burnside park / first to wear puka shells / tipping the canoe with Julie Rasmussen

… Hey, old man, take a look at my life … I'm a lot like you were

My own yearbook caption, as well as those of my immediate friends, was perhaps more interesting than most, as Wendy was on the yearbook staff—as was Hamilton's archenemy Scott Phelps, who adored Pam from afar:

RICHARD DOORLAND

Richard was too busy racing his Datsun with Hamster to hand in his questionnaire. As the only guy who ever picked up litter at the smokehole, we salute you. We'll still have a hard time forgetting those fetal pig dissections and the blowtorch in metal shop. Look out for radar traps and good luck in the future, Rick!

Suntanning up at Cypress / "I hate to be the bad guy, but … " / senior football / bondo patches on the Datsun / stereo man / free Steve Miller tickets / nice teeth, fella!

Hamilton's was less sedate.

HAMILTON REESE

Hamster thought he was being really funny handing in his grad questionnaire with a big lipstick kiss and a rude word on it. Ha ha. Thank you for five years of tormenting people weaker than yourself, you weed. We hope to see you working at the Texaco station in 1999.

Initiation day terror / pyro / "Omigawd … what's that in the Jell-O?" / never bothered to join one single club / swipes your sandwich if you're not looking / Ciao, babe

WENDY CHERNIN

"Brainiac" helped make many a day pass more sweetly. When not inventing a cancer cure or designing space capsules, Wendy was dressing up for Graffiti Days and hanging out at White Spot. Word has it she made DNA out of those bending white straws. Bye, Wendy, and we all expect you to be the first cool chick in space."Are you eating that cookie?" / "Thank God It's Monday" / nail polish in math class / swim team / choir / "What's the cube root of Revlon?"

PAMELA SINCLAIR

"Pam the Glam." "Pamster." She's so good looking that … we can't keep our eyes off her! Hey, Pammie—thanks for being so beautiful and making our volleyball and basketball teams winners. Don't know what you see in Hamil— (just kidding!) and we expect you to be in Hollywood some day.

Supertramp / Charlie perfume / That little blue comb in the rear pocket / Smokin' in the Boys' Room / Gain two pounds and make us happy / Always looking out the window … clouds!

ALBERT LINUS

We dare not say anything about Linus, since he might wire a laser beam satellite to blow up our houses. Not a talkative fellow, Linus (we always thought Linus was his first name!) spent his years partying with other sci-fi's inside the fume hood and rigging the computer dating system so as to land Jaclyn Smith as his grad date. Good luck, Linus: We see much zinc in your future.

"What planet are we on?"/ same shirt two weeks in a row / "Umm … " / Photography Club / Kleenex / dustbunnies / lint

I'd known Karen all my life, her family's post-and-beam rancher lying just below our house (mock Tudor) on Rabbit Lane.

Through elementary school we'd been friends and by high schoolwe were one of those couples that nobody remembers ever not being a couple.

Karen: Her yearbook description was correct in saying she had a smile for everyone. And she did laugh all the time—not a nervous titter, but a gnarling Komedy Klub guffaw that could occasionally make us the unwanted floorshow in quiet restaurants. She was an avid photographer, flash-bulbing away at school, at Park Royal mall, at parties, or in the wild: seagulls, bare trees, mountain mists, and water ripples—yearbook stuff. Yet when any one of us searched for stray photos of Karen, we looked almost in vain, rifling through boxloads of our teen-filled snaps, finding the most meager rewards: a left arm here; half a head there; legs cut off at the thighs. We realized that Karen must have gingerly yet effectively pursued a life-long campaign to avoid being photographed. Her preoccupation with the deficiencies her mother kept telling her she had: Your nose is too plump; your hair's too straight; you're pretty enough hut no beauty. Her graduation photo became almost the sole exception, one solitary image we were able to remember her by. Over time, the photo gradually leeched away our real memories of Karen—ultimately becoming the "Official Version": oval face with long brown hair parted in the middle, dripping off her head like sleek water (a style Karen called "Bumhead"); a neck she considered too scrawny sheathed beneath a sweater's cowl; and small, nice features with no one feature eclipsing any other. Karen is gently looking out—not toward us, the viewers, but to her left—to that place where she went on December 15? Maybe.

What did Karen see that December night? What pictures of tomorrow could so disturb her that she would flee into a refuge of bottomless sleep? What images would frighten her out of her body, making her leave our world? Why would she leave me? C'mon, Karen—Beb, Sugar Pops, Starbaby—we all know life's hard … we found that one out pretty quick. You told me we were all going to be dead-but-alive zombies in the future. That's what you said. Fair's fair: Tell us what you meant, Karen. I want an answer. Wake up, wake up, okay? We'llgo to a place that's quiet and dry and talk about precious things. We'll drive downtown and have an Orange Julius. Hey!—we'll drive to the States for a steak dinner the size of a mattress. We'll drive to Europe and drink champagne, and we'll stop in Greenland for ice cubes along the way. Knock-knock. Who's there? It's me, Karen. No joke, no punchline—c'est moi. Will you come out? Or will you let me in?

6 IS FUN

Karen's family:

When we are young, we assume adults behave according to a strict adult code. Only years later does it dawn on us that Mr. Phillips down the road was a manic depressive wife beater; that Mrs. Owen's liver was bloated like a diseased water balloon; that Mr. Pulaski perved out on all his kids and that's why they beat him up one night and left him facedown in a ditch on Good Friday. In this same tradition, Karen's mother, Lois, exhibited behavior that was, to younger eyes, downright random but adult, nevertheless.

A minor example springs to mind: When I was young, lunching chez McNeil, Lois boiled water for Kraft macaroni, banged pots and colanders like crazed jungle tom-toms ("She wants us to know how much work she's doing," whispered Karen.). Then, right in front of Karen and me, Lois whisked away the crumpled cheese sauce packet like a victorious toreador, flipping it into the cupboard, saying, "We'll save that for a more special occasion." Quietly, Karen and I would eat the semi-cooked noodles in margarine while exchanging glances. Beverage? Tap water. Napkins? "Oh, just use your pants, Richard. You're a boy."

Karen, it might be surmised, had grown up with a bizarre relationship with food. Lois, a former Miss Canada runner-up (1958), saw food as alien, alive, requiring passports, visas, and security guards before allowing entry into the mouth. Fads came and went. One week she might be a vegan, the next week it was "Starch only!" Karen was dragged, holus-bolus, into Lois's cockamamie nutritional vogues. During one particularly fevered patch of vegetarianism in the seventies, I made the mistake of saying I'd been to Benihana's steak house; a brisk, half-hour anti-meat jeremiad followed. When Karen interrupted, she was met with icicle stares from Lois: "Really Karen, if you'd just eat, you might become attractive and then I wouldn't have to worry so much about your future." To me, Lois said, "Karen's in her 'awkward stage.' Now about that steak house, Richard …"

George, Karen's dad, owned a body shop where he spent sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, all year, choosing to dine in Lois-free restaurants. He was essentially nonexistent, and this absence bred a good cop/bad cop mythology: Mrs. McNeil, the fevered shrew who drove the quiet, honorable George out of his own home. Neither of them could be described as "happy."

"Oh, I wish I knew what Mom's secret was," Karen would moan. "There's obviously a biggie. But how to ask?"

Lois grew up in Northern BC, and by dint of her looks, her cultivated smile, and her fathomless misguided snobbery was hypersensi-tized to those in life who didn't work hard enough (in her eyes) to earn their keep. Little digs: "My husband works with his hands— unlike other parents around here who've never had a callus in their lives." This referred, of course, to my accountant father who, like most others in the neighborhood, made an okay, but only okay, living as the middlest of middle classes. People across the city believed ourhillside neighborhood to be the cradle of never-ending martini-clogged soirees and bawdy wife-swaps. The truth would have bored them silly, as it was middle-class dull to the point of scientific measur-ability. My mother, while barbecuing one fine summer evening in 1976, said prophetically that this neighborhood was "like the land that God forgot." Yes.

The first month of Karen's coma was a write-off—strange yet drab, hope dripping away bit by bit, making us unaware of its overall loss. We were all of us poleaxed with the flu—a good thing in that we didn't have to attend school for the final week before Christmas.

We shambled around to each other's houses and yakked on the phone a good deal. Hamilton phoned on Friday night: "Of course," he said, "we're beacons of gossip at school now." I had to admit we were. "They're ghouls," he said, pausing to honk his nose, adding, "God, my brain feels like a furry clump of dog shit." There were voices in the background at Hamilton's: "My Dad's marshaled up his sap tonight. He's dating a young twinkie in the payroll department. Aggh. My future stepmother is spoon-dancing with Daddy-O as I speak. Well—they'll have a litter of golden little brats together." The background music crooned Brasil '66. "You really should see her, Richard. She's not a mother—she's a golden retriever. You just wait until she turns into a slut. Won't that be jolly." A sigh: "Must go, Toots—owww! My head. Is. In. Pain. Bye."

Click.

A few minutes later, Wendy phoned to say Linus was at her house and they were languidly barn-raising a gingerbread house. "It was supposed to be a Hobbit cottage, but it ended up looking more like Hitler's bunker. Linus's flu is gone. He's going down to see Karen in a minute. Anything to send?"

"No."

Linus became our proxy visitor, but he returned to us with maddeningly obscure information. He never noticed straightforward data like whether or not Karen's eyes were open or how her skin color was; he was interested in the inanimate, in frameworks and systemsthat weren't easily apparent. Accordingly, he began recounting the visit in frustratingly pointless detail.

"You know the IV she has? What do they put in there? How can they squeeze all of her food into a watery liquid? I mean, doesn't it seem like it should be a lot thicker? With fiber or pulp at least?"

"There's a food tube that goes directly to her stomach," Wendy said. "I guess she's involuntarily quitting smoking, too. Her poor body."

Hamilton was straightforward: "Did you see Karen or were you there doing your science project? Can you tell us how she was?"

"Okay, okay … so the food goes in one tube and out another. There didn't seem to be any problems there. Except when you think about how her body is like an earthworm, kind of, a big food-to-compost converter …"

I took offense to the direction this was going. "Linus! Does she look okay? Does she move?"

"Well, um, actually, yeah. Her eyes were open and her eyeballs, her pupils I mean, followed my hand when I moved it over her face."

"What? She's awake?"

"No. Her eyeballs are open, but I think she's still sleeping. She has a little radio beside her bed. It was playing a disco song. Sister Sledge?" Linus seemed pleased at having remembered such a nontechnical detail.

We finally visited Karen two days before Christmas, dazed like bejeezus on Robitussin and decongestants, and we kept far away from her bed. Linus was right: Karen's eyes did follow hand motion—inspiring news. When Dr. Menger came down the hall, we excitedly informed him of the miraculous event. He looked worried and beckoned us into the cafeteria, telling us to sit.

"It doesn't give me any pleasure to tell you, kids, but your friend Karen is in what's known as a persistent vegetative state. Karen is completely unaware of either herself or her environment. She has sleep cycles and awake cycles. She has no control over her bowel or bladder functions. She has no voluntary responses to sound, light, motion, and no understanding of language. I really must tell you thatrecovery is rare. So rare as to be big news for the newspapers when it ever occurs. There's really not much else I can tell you."

"But my hand!" Pammie squealed. "Karen's eyes watch your hand if you move it around in front of her face."

"That's misleading," Dr. Menger said. "That's misleading and sad. It's a common involuntary reflex response to motion. There's no high brain function linked to the act."

So much for hope, I thought as we all drove to Pammie's house. "Oh, God, I haven't done any Christmas shopping," I said. "Let's not give each other presents, okay?" Everyone listlessly agreed. My own family members that year received chocolate bars and magazines from a Mac's convenience store, all badly wrapped in kitchen tin foil and handed over free of enthusiasm.

New Year's Eve that year, a minty fresh new decade, consisted of Hamilton halfheartedly letting off a brick of stale leftover Halloween firecrackers inside the Hitler's Bunker followed by two beers and games of Pong. Ugh.

The year became 1980.

A daily pattern of hospital visits emerged with us of the inner circle, as well as the McNeils visiting daily. Lois McNeil was still grumpy at Pammie and Wendy over the dreaded vodka-Tab cocktails, so the two would skittishly beetle down the corridor at the slightest hint of Lois. Mr. McNeil, though, was on our side, saying, "Christ, Lois, they're kids and they weren't doing harm. Nobody forced Karen to drink, and even then that's probably not the full cause."

Mrs. McNeil would be pursed-lipped, with Mr. McNeil saying, "It may well have been your two pills that caused this, so don't act so bleeding innocent." (Thank you, Mr. McNeil.) "I can see she didn't inherit her drug tolerance from you." Ow!

But as the days slipped by after Christmas holidays, visits trailed off a bit, always with good excuses; by the end of January, it was only Karen's parents and me visiting, Mr. McNeil going daily from the body shop. Softly, he said he couldn't imagine ever not going. We became the two regular visitors."I never had a real chance to talk to her, Richard. You know that?" he would say. "Always working. Always assuming there'd be time later. I feel closer to her now than I did during all her birthdays—and she'll never even know."

"Not never, Mr. McNeil."

"No—you're right. Not never."

It was in February a few weeks after school had resumed that I came home and saw Dad's car in the driveway at four o'clock in the afternoon, two hours earlier than usual. For someone as strongly habit-bound as my father, this could only bode big news, good or bad. I entered the kitchen, heard Mom on the phone in the living room and Dad rustling the newspaper. I came into the room and cautiously asked, "What's up?"

"Richard," she said in a warm, yet neutral voice designed to preempt shock, "Karen's pregnant."

From the top of my skull, flames burned downward; once again, I felt my skin grow quills, my forehead antlers. My stomach jumped off a cliff and my legs became stone. The Pill … was she on it? I never asked. First shot lucky. The Sperminator. "Oh."

Dad said, "The hospital called us this morning. We had lunch with the McNeils today."

Mom added, "There's no problem with us, Richard. Please remember that. Apparently there's no problem with the baby, either. This has happened before—women being pregnant during comas. You know we love Karen like our own daughter."

My mind was steam-whistling.

"There are many cases of coma patients giving birth, Richard," my father said. "Richard?"

"Yes. Yes. Just give me a moment here …" Fire; a throat that will not breathe: that joke isn't funny anymore.

"What about Karen?" I asked.

"Apparently in this sort of—situation—Richard," Mom said,

"the mother is just fine. Birth will be by Cesarean section next September."My mind flashed to abortion and as quickly flashed away. No. This child must be born.

"Richard," Dad said, "if news of this gets out, the media will eat you the way a snake eats rats. Karen and you will both be sideshow freaks."

"You must ensure, Richard," Mom stressed, "that nobody—not even your friends—find out about this. We're absolutely firm on this. In a few months when she starts to show, we'll have to tell people she's having breathing troubles and is unable to take visitors for a while."

"But what if she wakes up?" I asked. Sad stares shot down that question. I then asked, "Who's going to take care of the baby?" I had pictures in my head of holding a swaddled youth. The word "diapers" sprang to mind unconvincingly.

"Mrs. McNeil"—(oh God)—"has eagerly volunteered to take charge. We're equally happy to help out, but she seems adamant. We'll pitch in what we can to cover costs and so will you, too, Richard, once you start your working life. You're a father. You're to live up to your obligations as best you can. But as far as the world is concerned, the baby will be Mrs. McNeil's 'niece' or 'nephew' to be taken care of after a family tragedy on her side."

"It'll be called McNeil?"

"Yes. Does that bother you?" my Dad asked.

"I, uhhh …" I was too dazed to reply coherently.

My parents' tone followed their calm natures. They became silent statues when confronted by large events. I hadn't even begun to digest the news; as with most events in life, ramifications would have a delayed onset.

"What about the baby—will it have a proper brain? Will it have a normal personality?" I asked.

Mom said, "That's a long way off, dear. We'll think about that when the time comes."

7 THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE

And so the time came.

The seventies were over. With them left a sweetness, a gentleness. No longer could modern citizens pretend to be naive. We were now jaded; the world was spinning more quickly. Karen's Honda Civic was sold. Her clothing, makeup, childhood toys, and diaries were boxed and stored in a musty basement beneath the rear stairs of her parents's house. Memories of Karen slipped away from those who knew her. She was no longer a person, only an idea—somebody asleep in a room somewhere. Where is she? Oh … somewhere, we think.

The remains of high school flowed by like a wide, slow, pulsing river of cool chocolate milk. December and January's fiery baptism of peers had come and gone, but classmates still offered sad looks, accusatory stares, or wordless hee-haws. The five of us had become down-jacketed, disheveled curiosities—young necks craned to view the killers as we headed to the parking lot, bystanders doubtlessly assuming we were off to break into the rathskeller of a country club, swig bourbon, and dribble messages on the walls with the blood of dogs.

During schooldays, I preferred to cut class and sit down below the cedars above the fire station smoking and wasting time on the grass whittling twigs, thinking of the baby and of Karen and the things she saw. What did it mean?

As I sat there assembling the puzzle, Hamilton ignited chunks of stolen laboratory sodium with rainwater while Pam combed and combed and combed her hair with a sky blue plastic comb. The last days of high school in particular were a hazy waste of time. I'd crossed a line—I didn't care any longer. School became an activity I used to do. Wendy and Linus, though, veered the opposite way, losing themselves in science, memorizing equations for Teflon, gravity, and the Moon's orbit. Come June, both graduated with honors, but he who was once a promising student—me—barely squeaked by with an undeniable tsk-tsk of the faculty, who saw their once-golden Richard thrown away on a life of cigarettes, scrubbing Buicks at the Oasis car wash, and dead-end tomcatting with Hamilton Reese.

On graduation day in early June, Karen entered her third trimester, and was transferred into maternity. I was there for the move that afternoon, in my graduation outfit, a then-stylish baby-blue tux. I had just had my hair feathered in the style of the times and thought I cut quite a pretty picture as I entered the hospital room. Mr. McNeil wolf-whistled and said to Karen, "Karen, here's your prince, honey." The nurse allowed me to lift Karen onto the transfer gurney. How bony and light she felt!—as though I were picking up kindling wood. I hadn't held her since that night on the ski slopes. Her eyes were open at that moment; our retinas met, yet we didn't connect. I felt asif I were looking into the eyes of an aquarium fish—no, a photo of an aquarium fish. Her tummy bulged out like a goiter on a crone's neck.

A short while later, I pulled my Datsun up to a grad party on Chartwell Drive—rock walls, hedges, and dwarf shrubs. The sun shone brightly. It occurred to me I'd been asleep at the wheel since the hospital, yet I hadn't crashed the car. Turning off the car's ignition, it hit me that Karen would probably never wake up; her eyes had been—dead. My hopes for her then switched from cheerleaderish bluster into loss and remorse. I sank in my car seat there on the roadside, sucking in the air, heaving my chest, hiding from arriving partygoers. I'd nearly run out of air; my stomach felt like two hundred sit-ups when there was a gentle tap on the door. It opened just a crack and there stood Wendy, in a strange yellow dress she'd made herself, her new hairstyle tangled like brassy telephone cords. She was crouched down so that people driving by wouldn't see her. My mouth fumbled; she looked at me calmly and said: "Karen was supposed to be here, Richard." I nodded and she and I looked up at the car's ceiling with its nicotine smudges and Hamilton's boot scrapes, umbrella punctures and cigarette burns.

She said, "Jared, too," and sat cross-legged on the roadside gravel, her gown crumpled on the stones, and with those stones she built sad little totems. "Jared was supposed to be here, too." Wendy took a breath and relaxed her shoulders, then I relaxed, too. "I was in love with him," she said.

"Yeah, I think everybody kind of knew you were hot for him, but I mean, really, Wen—take a number and stand in line. He was humping half the girls in class."

"I've never told anyone this—I mean about me loving Jared. Not even my mom. Funny. Now that the words are out of my mouth—outside my body—they feel different to me." She knocked over her small rock pile.

I said, "They would have been the center of everything tonight, wouldn't they? They would have been the stars."

Muscle cars swooshed up and down the road. From the party house rose shrieks and patches of Bob Seger. I was calm. I reclaimed my normal breathing and sat up."You want to go in?" asked Wendy.

"Not really."

"Let's go for a walk instead. We'll catch up with everybody later at the hotel."

We drove down to the Capilano River canyon, then entered its pathways and didn't say much, which was best. On the lower branches of a maple we found a robin's nest with a crop of three chicks inside. Their necks were weak, their heads scrawny. They were waiting for mom-bird to cough up some worms. Jesus-loves-you sunbeams pulsed through the trees, and the chicks were illuminated from the inside. They glowed like Christmas tree lights—their veins, their pinfeathers, their eyes, their tiny raptor beaks. And then the sun lit up Wendy's dress and I caught my breath.

"Richard, there's something you're not telling me. Am I right, Richard?"

"Yeah."

"Can I guess? If I guess right, you can confirm it—fair?"

"Okay."

"Karen's pregnant."

I turned to her. "Yeah."

"How far along?"

"Six months."

"I was right." She picked a maple leaf. She looked through it. "How are you feeling?"

I threw a stick. "I'm too young to be a father. I'm too young to be anything. I'm seventeen. I haven't even left home yet. It seems unreal. You won't tell anyone, right?"

"Sealed lips." She wiped a twig from her dress. "It'll be like having part of Karen back. I miss her. We never talk about these things. But I miss her. Do you?"

"Yeah."

"But we don't ever say it out loud, do we?"

"I guess not," was all I could reply. "I don't like the silence, either." I didn't realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our ownfeelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.

The forest colors smudged together. The sky was darkening into the color of a deep clean lake. I picked some late-blooming rhododendron flowers; the last magic light of the fallen sun cut through the petals in tropical purple brilliance.

We drove the Datsun to the hospital to see Karen. Wendy placed her ear to Karen's stomach; I placed the rhododendrons in the bud vase still beside the bed. After that we left the hospital to drive downtown for our grad party at the Hotel Vancouver.

That summer I worked full-time at a Chevron station, barely conscious of the pumps or customers, most of whom must surely have taken me for an idiot. That summer remains a fuzzy dot of sunburned necks, beer bottles clinking in the Datsun's trunk, huckleberry picking with Wendy and Pam, and beachside bonfires.

End of an era.

At the hospital, anyone inquiring about Karen was to be told that she was stable. No visitors. Nobody questioned the switch. By summer, Karen's only daily visitors were me and George. Wendy, with her clean scientific voice, helped talk me through the willies. Hamilton, Linus, and Pam had trickled away. I wasn't mad at them for this diminuendo. Truth be told, Karen never did change from one week to the next; cruelly, there was only so much that could be seen or said.

I'd think of Karen often, too. Our first and only time together had been so wonderful. I replayed it over and over in my head, savoring each nuance, her skin like milk atop the snow, the smell of the snow, her underwear's frilled cotton, cold and dry. I never told her I loved her. Schmaltzy, but these things rankle; they count. By summer's end, I'd finally decided that I didn't even know Karen too well—who was she on the inside? This only fueled her mystery. At night, when such moments tended to strike, I'd have a self-indulgent little cry, walk around the yard, then come inside where my parents would be cheerfully watching the national news. I'd go sit with them, putting a good face on everything.By late August, waiting for the birth, I felt as though I was breathing the air inside a capsized boat—steamy, biological and ominous—an activity that could only continue for a little while longer. George, as ever, visited his daughter each day. I showed up less frequently, often in midweek. George and I never talked much; when we did, we'd end up saying the same old vapid niceties that somehow made Karen's coma time seem even longer. He'd also lapse into a mist of maudlin boo-hoos. He'd remember Karen singing 'Oklahoma' in the school play. "She was a pretty girl, wasn't she, Richard?"

"She still is, George."

"Remember the time she played guitar for our anniversary party?"

"I do."

"Such a pretty girl." Then he would sigh and sing a show tune from Oklahoma: "When I take you out tonight with me—honey this is what you're going to see— "

"How's business?" I asked, moving away from this gooey patch.

Lois, on the other hand, while not having completely written Karen off as dead, was certainly the more pragmatic of the two. She had read the statistics on coma patients and the persistent vegetative state. She knew that with each succeeding day, chances for an awakening approached absolute zero.

At the pregnancy's start, Lois treated me about one notch friendlier than she might a sperm donor, but Lois realized that in order to build her custody case for the baby, she would have to try harder to be nice, which must have been torture for her.

And as time went on I became increasingly angry at Lois for shanghaiing the baby. Not that there were many other alternatives, but still—she just barged right in and swiped my kid. It was only through discussions with my father, who painted some all-too-clear pictures for me, that I understood that Lois keeping the baby was the best solution—for the time being.

We met in the hospital corridors. "Oh, hello, Richard. Well. Another day, isn't it? Another day older and another day wiser." Camel-hair coat, white gloves. Her small talk was rather limited; shewas not a particularly creative woman, new attitude or not. What chunks of creative fuel she possessed must have been expended on her hideous accumulation of owl knickknacks. Bumping into her in the hospital's hallways or down on Rabbit Lane, I would brace myself for her curious overtures at warmth. "Richard, you're certainly not looking sick at all. I'd heard you were fluey." (Awkward pause.) "Hmmm. That's a very handsome color on you, you should wear it more often." (Awkward pause.) "Well. She's in there. Everything looks fine." (Lois never again referred to Karen by her own name. Karen had been downgraded to "she.") Lois removed her gloves. "And your parents?"

Lois was definitely changing for the better, though I didn't entirely trust her motives. Lois wanted the baby—as though it were her own. I'm sure she wanted to be right there with the obstetrician, ripping the baby from the womb, herself cutting the cord with her dentures, then taxiing off with her loot, leaving Karen behind in her eternal repose, as though that daughter could be checked off her list, allowing Lois to start on her next project, a new child to raise occupying Karen's old slot.

I still felt as though the secret of the pregnancy was mine to bear alone. Aside from Wendy, there was no one that I could tell who really knew me, which only added to my own feeling of unreality. The two families were taking such pains to appear casually pragmatic: no emotion. My head felt like a watermelon the moment before being whacked with a baseball bat. Kids at seventeen? I could be a grandfather at thirty-four. What kind of role model could I possibly be for my kid? What help would I be with Lois efficiently covering the mother front and nobody expecting anything from me?

My parents seemed serene about the whole birth, digging through the garage for mildewed boxes of baby goodies for Lois. My parents visited Karen once a month. Mom also made effort-filled visits to Lois next door every week or so. Mom would gird herself the moment she rang Lois's doorbell, activating the McNeil's astound-ingly nervous bichon frise into a frenzy of sterile yapping."Hello, Lois."

"Oh, Carol, hello, please come in. My, you do look tired." Careful, I just bought that owl figurine, and it's fragile—here, let me move it out of your way. Well, what have you brought—more clothes for the baby? Stack them next to the other boxes. You're really outdoing yourself; you shouldn't go to so much trouble. Careful! That owl—I'll just move it into the other room. Don't move a muscle. My—the dog never barks like this. And what else—coffee? I suppose you'd probably like some. Why don't I go make some, stay right there. Oh, Carol, please—remove your shoes if you could. I have guests coming over tonight."

"Thank you, Lois."

The child was to be born via C-section, September z, Karen's birthday. The night before, rain stomped the roof like hooves, yet the night air was warm and inviting. I stepped outside onto the rear patio underneath the eaves and sat on a lawn chair. I had been unable to sleep; in order to konk me out I had taken a plump, green chloral hydrate left over from my wisdom teeth extraction a few months earlier. There, under the drum of rain in a lawn chair, I experienced what was to be the only vision of my life. It was this:

My head was the nucleus of a sparking, dazzling, steak-sizzling halo. I rose, I floated from under the eaves, up off the patio, being yanked up into space, toward the Moon. There I met Karen walking on the Moon's dark side, lit only by stars. Karen was so clean, wearing her ski jacket, brown cords, and red clogs, holding her purse. There was wind in her hair, even there on the Moon. She took a drag from her cigarette and said to me in a voice I'd lost for so long, "Hey, there, Richard. How ya doin', Beb? Just look at me! One day we were all walking across the surface of the Moon, then we discovered a way home. Didn't we?"

I said yes.

She said, "I'm not gone, you know."

I said, "I know."

"Take care of Megan, Richard.""I will."

"It's lonely here."

"I'm lonely, too. I miss you."

"Good-bye, Richard. It's not forever."

"Karen, where are you?"

She tossed her cigarette into a dusty gray crater the size of an aluminum ball-barbecue and said, as though I'd asked her the answer to a simple algebra equation, "Well, duhl Until we meet again, Beb." Then she leaped over a crater to disappear behind its edge.

There was a flash of aqua-colored sparks. I rubbed my head. My vision was over.

I returned to the patio; rain still drummed.

The Moon.

Home.

Energized, still not sleepy from the pill, I put on boots and walked down to the McNeil's, making my way through the backyard trees. I came down to where I could see Karen's old room—her light still burning. I came up closer, hidden behind a laburnum tree. I saw baby clothing stacked up against Karen's wall mural of the Moon. Mrs. McNeil came into the room carrying a box, stopped, heaved down the box, sat on top, and sighed with all her body. I'd never seen her in a pose of exhaustion before.

She turned out the lights as she left. It was dark; the rain fell. A car purred through silent suburbia, past basements, stereos, and streetlights yellow over the rainy pavement. There I stood.

Then I returned to my house, undressed, and went to sleep. I was awakened by my mother at 6:30 to drive to Lions Gate Hospital with her and Dad.

8 EARTHLY SADNESS

From the moment our daughter emerged, around 8:20 P.M., seven pounds four ounces, there was no point trying to pretend she was Mrs. McNeil's "niece." She was a kinder, softer, feminized version almost entirely of me, as though I'd divided by mitosis. Good Lord, where were Karen's genes in all this?

Karen went through the birth with nary an indicating flicker of higher brain function—something we'd all secretly been praying for. How could a woman go through something as major as birth yet not know it? For Mrs. McNeil, Karen was forgotten almost altogether as she pressed her nose up against the glass wall of the nursery window, then cooed at the baby, her legs doing involuntary cha-cha's. "So big! So pink! And look at her thrashing away … hello, my little goo-goo ballerina. So perfect. Nothing like a Cesarean for a perfectly shaped baby's head."

Mom and I stood there, agog at seeing Lois fog-horning a blast of such sugary sentiment in the baby's direction. But then ours was an adorable baby, no doubt about it—adorable and mine. She might even live to see the year 2100. She might save the world. I tapped the window, said, " Goo." She looked at me and then I was hers. It was that fast.

Afterward Lois decided that we should all celebrate the birth, and through some sick contortion of fate, she chose the restaurant at the top of Grouse Mountain, only a snowball's throw away from where my daughter had been conceived.

"Has it really been just nine months?" I asked my mother in hushed tones as the gondola lilted over the center tower, my first time up the mountain since the previous December.

"Yup."

"It feels like nine years."

"You're young."

"Can you believe it?" I asked. I looked at the small lights that were our houses below.

"It is wonderful, isn't it? It's going to be such fun," my mom said.

We surveyed Cleveland Dam and the cool black reservoir behind it. Once more I searched for our house amid the seine of amber twinklings below. Mom asked me quietly so that the others couldn't hear, "Do you ever miss Karen, Richard?"

"Yeah. Always."

"I thought so. Oh, look, there's our house."

A tinny squawk on the PA system informed us we were set to berth at the top station. Once inside the restaurant, the high altitude and a glass of contraband white wine made me muzzy. At dinner I felt more like a fertility totem than a father; my role as father seemed a mere footnote. The baby was toasted, but I was not; to have made too big a deal of me would also be making too big a deal of unspoken issues such as teenage sex and illegitimacy.

Dad asked, "Has anybody thought about names yet?"

I blurted out, "Megan. I mean, I think Megan's a good name."

Lois looked at me, smiled, and said, "Yes, I think Megan is a perfect name," then she gave me the first genuinely warm smile I'd everhad from her. Later, when she'd gone to the ladies' room, George told us, "We had a miscarriage about ten years ago. It was a girl. Lois had already decided on Megan. Did you know that, Richard?"

"No. The name came to me in a … dream last night." Best not to mention the word "vision."

"Well, it's a happy coincidence. A beautiful Welsh name it is. A toast!"

And so our daughter became Megan Karen McNeil.

The first few months with Megan flew by for me, but not for Lois, who endured almost continuous crying, shrieking, wailing, and bawling without, to her credit, any complaint. Mom said that Megan must have come as a godsend to a decidedly anal woman with not much else to do other than collect owl knickknacks and play unchallenging mind games with her bichon frise.

Sperm donor though I was, I was also a proud papa, though limited in my ways to express this pride. I resisted the impulse to tout her doubtlessly infinite wonderfulness until we had completed at least a one-year embargo on "the news."

Every so often Lois wheeled Megan up to our house, where Megan gurgled, plopped, squelched, and shrieked like any baby. Thus my own mother was able to experience the flush of grandmotherhood dauntingly early and always seemed a tad relieved when Megan's stroller was wheeled away.

That September I enrolled in a business program at Capilano College, still muddy-brained about Megan and Karen and glad to have a productive way to occupy my waking hours. Our adult lives, good or bad, chugged ahead full-steam. No more traipsing through wilderness whenever we wanted. No classes to cut. Instead, there was rent, utilities, and taxes. Adolescent wishes of jobs in Hawaii or becoming a professional ski bum were replaced by newer, glossier pictures of giddy unregulated sex and adventurous metropolitan living. Wendy, to nobody's surprise, was intent on becoming a doctor, and off she went across town to the University of British Columbia. Pam continued hermodeling work. Linus wanted to mess around with sparks, gases, and liquids, and he did this at the University of Toronto.

Hamilton and I were the ones without goals. "Imagine you're a forty-year-old, Richard," Hamilton said to me around this time, while working as a salesman at a Radio Shack in Lynn Valley, "and suddenly somebody comes up to you saying, 'Hi, I'd like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is eighteen and will be making all of your career decisions for you.' I'd be flipped out. Wouldn't you? But that's what life is all about—some eighteen-year-old kid making your big decisions for you that stick for a lifetime." He shuddered.

Shortly before Christmas, the five of us we were dressed for rainy day hiking and exploring around the train tracks above Eagle Harbour. Track-walking was an activity we all enjoyed, as it combined the thrill of law-breaking with the beauty of the natural ocean views around us. An added bonus was the possible pulp-fiction thrill of finding a corpse hidden in the bordering shrubs.

Our feet crunched on the stones beneath the trestles. Linus was dawdling, discussing creosote molecules with Wendy. Hamilton barked orders for them to hurry: "Come on, kids, Pammie wore flats instead of heels for today. We don't want to make her regret that choice." We were about to walk through a two-mile-long tunnel; the prospect was always seductively frightening, even with nine-volt flashlights.

Once inside the tunnel, the silence roared; I've sometimes wondered why silence seems so loud. About a mile inside, Hamilton said, "Stop and turn out your lights," and we did. We stood and inhaled the darkness. Our only light source became a Bic lighter held by Pam, at which point Hamilton said, "One, two, three … Flame on, kids." Instantly, the four of them semi-circled around me, arms folded, lopsided stances with pursed lips betraying frostiness indeed. Only Wendy looked tentative; she'd known all along.

"Okay, pops," said Pam, "What's going on? You could have told us at least. We're pissed at you. Richard … Dad."

Hamilton said, "Don't try to weasel out of this one, Dickie."

Even Linus was in on the anger: "We, uh, saw the kid, Richard.Megan, I mean. We ran into Lois at Park Royal. It was just so obvious. Unless you've been fooling around with Lois, that is, which I doubt. So what happened?"

I was caught. Fair enough. "Okay, gang. So I'll fess up, okay? Yes, it's Karen's and my kid." ("We knew it, we knew it!") "Megan's birthday's September second—Karen's birthday, too. She's fully normal, but Karen's the same. She didn't wake up or anything during the birth. She probably never will."

The five of us breathing sounded as though we were in a bathyscaphe thousands of feet beneath the ocean surface, looking for those jewels Karen had once thrown from the ocean liner's deck. I sighed— then the truth just coughed out of me like a bubble jellyfishing upward from the deep sea, flattened by extreme pressures, but becoming larger and more full as it nears the surface. I'd been worrying so much about the press and about not wanting Karen to be a freak show. And the family had its own way of trying me: Lois's bossiness and George's lack of interest in Megan. The relief for me was great, as though I had been choking and then Heimlich'ed up a drumstick. My chest relaxed; my muscles slackened. To be able to discuss what I felt for Karen and Megan to people who would listen. My friends didn't speak until I was finished.

"You know, Megan looks so much like you it's scary, Richard," said Pam. "She's you in a wig."

"As if I don't know."

"She's cute," said Pam. "I held her. Linus did, too."

"Yeah," said Linus. "She's sweet. I think I nearly dropped her. She spewed chuck all over my calculator, my TI-55—I'm very sentimental about that machine."

We were all sitting on the rails. Hamilton lit a cigarette. He said, "Well, let's have a bit of pity on her. Fancy having Richard's face and Lois as a substitute mother. Life is cruel."

I wanted to make amends: Godparents?

"Does that mean diapers?" asked Hamilton, scrunching his face. I replied, "Yes, Hamilton, it does. Acres and acres of shit. It's the deal." We sat and talked a bit, just our five voices surrounded byblack. There was a quiet patch. Then Linus leaned down, stuck his ear to the track, and whispered, "Train."

There was no way we could run to the entrance; the five of us hit the ground and rolled into the stony ditches on either side, willing ourselves to shrink. Within seconds, a Pacific Great Western train exploded above in an H-bomb roar—108 freight cars loaded with plywood supernova'ed up above us inside the granite walls. The train radiated intermittent light from which I was able to see directly in front of my nose, pressed to the ground, an empty wine bottle, a six-year-old yellowed newspaper, a sock, and a balled-up Huggies diaper. These objects flashed briefly and vanished like fleeting shivers of shame that are soon forgotten, never again to see the light of day. It felt strange to see these castaway things deep inside the Earth, never to return to the surface.

The train passed above us for five minutes. What if we were to die right there? What had our lives been? What had our ambitions been? What had we been seeking? Money? No—none of us seemed financially motivated. Happiness? We were so young that we didn't even know what unhappiness could be. Freedom? Perhaps. An overriding principle of our lives then was that infinite freedom creates a society of unique, fascinating individuals. Failure at this would mean failure of our societal duty. We were young; obviously we wanted meaning from life. I felt a craving for duty, but to what?

Meanwhile, the creosote on the railway ties stank and burned my nose, and my elbow rested in dirt. Small tornadoes of litter scraped my face and I closed my eyes. I tried to curl up and close my body to protect myself from the train's roar—the noise of the center of the Earth.

Dreams have no negative. This is to say that if, during the day, you think about how much you don't want to visit Mexico, your dreams at night will promptly take you to Mexico City. Your body will ignore the "no" and only pay attention to the main subject. I think we thought daily of avoiding tribulations—and of avoiding loss.

The train passed. Our ears throbbed with the silence. We stood up and somberly walked out to the tunnel's entrance and into the rain.We climbed into Linus's van and drove over to see Megan. I hoped Lois would be gracious and permit four new godparents to share in Megan's adoration.

Linus asked, "Three months old—does she speak yet?"

"No, goofball," said Hamilton, "she's too busy generating random numbers to speak."

I nodded. "I do hate to say this, but poor little Megan really is going to grow up to resemble me wearing a Bumhead wig."

"I didn't know you and Karen were, uh, doing it," said Hamilton. "I mean, if you were, it was one heckuva secret."

"Go figure," I said, then we drove off, everybody yacking and— except for me—catching up on life. I was remembering Karen saying, "Are we gonna do it or what?" Remembering the delicate birds and butterflies and flowers that passed between our bodies. I was remembering her determination that last day that she was awake. Would she have been like that always? Or had she known time was running out? Was she trying to squish as much into a day as she could?

That month I had read a science fiction story, Childhood's End. In it, the children of Earth conglomerate to form a master race that dreams together, that collectively moves planets. This made me wonder, what if the children of Earth instead fragmented, checked out, had their dreams erased and became vacant? What if instead of unity there was atomization and amnesia and comas? This was the picture posited by Karen: She saw something in her mind—in between the smaller bikini and the itty-bitty bits of Valium, in between putting on a down coat or a ski boot one cold winter day, or maybe turning a TV channel or rounding a corner in her Honda. She saw a picture, however fragmentary, that told her that tomorrow was not a place she wanted to visit—that the future is not a place in which to be. This is what haunted me—the thought that maybe she was right.

9 EVEN MORE REAL THAN YOU

Half a year after giving birth to Megan, Karen was moved permanently to a room of her own in a local nursing home then called Inglewood Lodge. On her bedside table sat moisturizers, costume jewelry, a wooden hair brush, Kleenex in a pink ruffled box, birthday cards rigorously kept up to date, framed family photos, stuffed animals (one Garfield cat, two teddy bears, one polar bear), books for visitors—The Best of Life and Jonathan Livingston Seagull—plus a dieffenbachia vine that eventually colonized the entire room. Her radio was frequently left on for hours at a time.

Karen's "day" would technically begin near midnight when her body would be turned over by lifting her up from her "intermittent pressure" anti-bedsore mattress. At this same time, her garments would be inspected to see if they required changing. Karen would be rolled over two more times between midnight and 6:00 A.M.; as well, her mouth would be brushed with a soft toothbrush then swabbed with a flavored sponge; Vaseline would be applied to her lips.

Twice a week in the morning Karen would have a proper bath, during which time she would have "range of motion" exercises— shoulder, arm, extensors, abductors, and all joints flexed by a nurse's aide. On other days she had sponge baths and motion exercises.

During Karen's awake cycles, food from inside a suspended bag would be gravity-fed into her stomach through a J-tube (jiugiostomy tube) that was permanently attached to a valve near her belly button.

After being clothed in special front-only garments, Karen would be placed into a geriatric wheelchair with a buttocks pad and a device to hold her head up straight. She would attend all breakfasts, lunches, and dinners held at the lodge, as well as special events such as films and birthday parties and even a church service that was usually, but not always, held on Sunday. In between meals Karen sat in her chair in her room, and her position was frequently moved by staff.

Karen was atypical in that she had few of the normal afflictions of the comatose: pneumonias, bowel obstructions from lack of fiber, urinary tract infections, blood clots in the legs, seizures, ruptured stomach, skin breakdowns, and skin infections from lack of blood circulation.

With Karen there was no "plug to pull," as the common expression goes. There were only degrees of heroics through which the family would be willing to go through in order to hang on to life. An example of this might be antibiotics to help with pneumonia. George wanted full heroics, but Lois refused to have an opinion on the issue. Many parents of coma patients divorce after years of anguish, self-recrimination, lawyers, social workers, family meetings, doctors, nurses, and bills. George and Lois remained together.

"Comas are rare phenomena," Linus told me once. "They're a byproduct of modern living, with almost no known coma patients existing prior to World War Two. People simply died. Comas are as modern as polyester, jet travel, and microchips."In the years since the incident, Karen had withered and shrunk to skin and bones, and her body appeared more like a yellow leather hide stretched over bone drums. To an outsider, Karen could seem awfully gruesome. Her hair had thinned and had begun graying by age twenty-three. She was breathing without a respirator and her almost inaudible air intake was the only evidence of life-force. Sturdy splints and rods were in place to keep her body from contracting fetally into itself, yet the one medical oddity about her case was that instead of "going fetal," as her leg braces anticipated, she remained supple and relaxed. Not a few research doctors and students from UBC had come to study Karen in her permanently relaxed state.

In the spring of 1981, Hamilton showed up at my apartment with a cut lip, a black eye, and a seething disposition. "That douche bag Klaus whacked me with a tripod. Pam can keep him." I asked who Klaus was: "Pammie's new beefy plaything." The next day Pam phoned me to say good-bye; she was moving to New York with Klaus. "He's not a very talented photographer, Rick, but he is sweet." For the next decade, I only saw Pam on magazine covers and heard from her via breathy little phone calls from exalted places: "Hi Rick. I'm in a 63 flying over Juneau (crackle crackle). Oh bugger, I just spilled the coke box in my lap. Oliver, what time does the hunt start? No … that was the jacket in Madrid. Hi … Richard … where were we?"

Hamilton spent a few years with a surveying crew in the wilds of northern BC, thus beginning his romance with dynamite blasting, a natural extension of a pyromaniacal bent that began in the first grade with black ants, barbecue starter, Hamburger Helper boxes, and a large magnifying glass. By 1985, he earned his geology degree and his blaster's ticket, and for years thereafter he was clam-happy, roaming the province, felling mountains and hammering cliffs into gravel.

Linus became an electrical engineer, which surprised nobody. After graduation, he worked for two years at an engineering firm down-town. We saw him rarely. His life seemed dull. An adult too early.

Virtuous Wendy studied emergency medicine at UBC. Such is thelife of the med student that we saw Wendy only when she came up for air throughout the decade, underslept, vague, with cherry-stained eyeballs, rumple-clothed, and a preoccupied, crow-footed face. At lunch with her one day, Hamilton and I learned the rigors of medicine— thirty-six-hour days, gorgon floor nurses, and flesh-eating bacteria lying in wait around every corner. "God, I feel like a carton of time-expired milk all the time. But I love the work."

Hamilton pulled a bottle of Visine from his pocket and told Wendy to lean back. "There," he said, dribbling it into each eye, "I don't like to see you looking so beat. Your eyes feel better?"

"Yes. Thanks, Ham."

"Keep the bottle. I bought it for you. Want to go for a walk on the beach at Ambleside?"

"I'd love to, Ham, but I'm on night shift. Have to be there in fifteen minutes."

Me, I had to go work at the Vancouver Stock Exchange—lucrative, but so dull that words to describe it escape me.

Megan, she knew from the start that I was her father, but knowledge of Karen was another issue. There was no right or wrong decision in this matter. Our final decision not to tell her about Karen was tough on us. Should we have told her Karen was dead? A lie. Should we have said she's on a long holiday? Dumb. Should we have told her that Karen's ill? "The only problem there," my dad said, "is that she'll want to see her, of course. To a young child, the sight of Karen, love her as much as we do, might be more than shocking—cruel even."

In the end, we figured that by age seven Megan would be adequately mature to see Karen. In the interim we told Megan Karen was sick, that it would be some while before we could go visit. Megan asked the inevitable questions soon: "What was Mom like, Dad? You know, my real Mom." This distinction, while natural, made Lois's toes curl under each time Megan used it. "Is Mom dead?" "Is my mom pretty?" "Does Mom like horses?" "If Mom came to visit, could she help me clean my room?"In 1986, Megan started school with unfettered glee. She bounced out of bed each morning and hurled herself through the kitchen door before Lois had the chance to dole out either a lecture or a berating. No extracurricular activity was too time consuming; no school project or music lesson too long.

And Megan had indeed started out in life resembling me in a Bumhead wig—her hair grew straight as rain and that was just fine— but fate took pity on her. As her baby fat melted away, Karen's infinitely prettier features emerged from within. We all mentally exhaled a relieved "whew!"

Occasionally, I'd pick Megan up at school to drive her home: Ding dong, hello, Lois … "You know, Richard, I just don't understand why she enjoys school so much. She has a lovely house here with stacks of toys, plus I have worthwhile activities planned for almost all of her waking hours, so she has no reason to go gallivanting up to your house. No offense, but your house has nothing in it for a baby. Not one single thing. I had coffee up there last week and it was the most I could do to locate even a bouncing ball—and then it turns out to be Charlie's [our golden lab]. I'm going to have to be much more strict from now on. Or figure out a much more elaborate containment system. Come inside, Megan. We have flash cards to do. Goodbye Richard, and please, cut your hair, because I know shorter hair is now in style and you're a father now." Door closed; muffled yaps; Megan squalling as French language flash cards are produced. Poor baby.

Shortly after enrolling in first grade, Megan's classmates—having heard it from their parents who heard it at the Super-Valu who heard it from wherever—these vicious little oiks told Megan, then six, that her mother was a "vegetable." As little brutes will do, they howled grocery lists at her across the gravel playing field: "Lettuce. Corn. Green beans, carrots—Megan's mother is a carrot." And so forth. On the day of the 1987 stock crash, just moments after it sank in that I'd lost most of my assets, Megan's school principal phoned my office around noon—Lois was out, so he called me. He said that Megan was in "a state."I drove from downtown to fetch my daughter and then we cruised aimlessly around the neighborhood, the crisply changing leaves that hinted of wine amid the lengthening shadows of fall. The radio was off. "What's up Sweetie Pie?"

"Dad, everyone's saying my real mother's a carrot."

"Well she's not a carrot. That's impossible."

"Lettuce?"

"Megan! Of course she's not lettuce—nor any other vegetable. Your mother is not a vegetable, Megan."

"Then why does everybody call her a carrot?"

"Because kids are cruel, Megan. They say stupid untrue things and have no idea what they're really saying."

"Did / used to be a carrot?"

We came to a stop sign at Hadden Drive. "Megan, stop …"

Megan opened the door and dashed out into the trees beside the golf course. Shit. I left the car running at the stop sign, door wide open, and chased after her. Fortunately, I knew my way through the surrounding trees as well as any child, having spent so much time there myself when young. "Megan, come back."

"Kleek. Kleek. Kleek."

What was this strange noise she was making? I followed the sound over a series of logs, over a dewy patch of psilocybin mushrooms, then into a glade where as teenagers we'd spent many a Friday and Saturday night. Megan was sitting fetal beside an old rotted log that had probably been felled back in the 1920s.

"Kleek. Kleek. Kleek."

"Megan, there you are." I stopped to catch my breath and looked around at the dry cool dent in the forest floor, untouched by undergrowth as the shade canopy above was too dense. Between the yearly layers of pine, fir, and cedar sheddings lay bits of uncountable cigarettes packs, weather-yellowed pornography, candy wrappers, condoms, dead flashlight batteries, and clusters of stolen Mercedes hood ornaments.

"Kleek."

"Megan, what's that sound you're making?""Kleek."

Two could play at this game. I said, "Kleeg Kleeg."

Megan rolled her eyes. "Daddy, you're not doing it right."

"Kleeg. Kleeg."

"Daddy, that's not what carrots sound like. They sound like this: Kleek. Kleek. Kleek."

"How silly of me. I forgot."

There was a quiet moment and I thought of the summer Jared and I borrowed a golf cart from an elderly twosome and drove it through the woods, bailing out just before it ran over a small cliff. We never got caught.

"Megan, for God's sake, stop the carrot stuff. You know it's not true."

"Where's my real mom?" She was getting teary.

"Okay, Megan. I'll tell you, okay?"

"Okay." Her posture slackened and she relaxed visibly.

I caught my breath. "Your mom was eighteen when she became sick. She has the same birthday as you."

"Really?"

"Really."

I told Megan about her mother—everything—and afterward we walked out of the forest and back to the car, still running, still waiting to drive us away.

Of course, Megan wanted to see Karen—the sooner the better. We went that night. My mother and the staff at Inglewood spruced Karen up as best they could. Once inside Inglewood, I greeted the staff as I'd done hundreds of times before, and all the while my stomach felt lightweight and bilious. We slowly marched down the echoing hallway into Karen's room, where a small radio played Blondie's "Heart of Glass," then a song by the Smiths. Her bed had a blue chenille spread. "It's okay, Megan," I said. "There's no need to be afraid. We all love you."

Karen, even dolled up by Mom, was a heartbreaking sight. They tried to make Karen as natural as possible with foundation plus a dab of blush, with a trim of her hair, all crowned with an Alice-band. Shewore a lavender cardigan. Not having seen Karen dolled up since 1979, I felt a pang of intense loneliness. For Megan, the initial shock of seeing her mother seemed to wear off quickly. She gave no initial reaction. I stood still while Megan approached Karen's bedside. She placed her hand on her mother's forehead and with her other hand stroked Karen's hair and touched her hollow cheeks. She smudged her fingers on Karen's eyelids. "She's wearing makeup," Megan said. "Sleeping people don't wear makeup." She moistened her fingers to try to wipe clean Karen's cheeks and forehead, erasing Mom's makeover effort. Having accomplished this, she jumped up onto the bed and lay down beside Karen. Karen was inside a sleep cycle, her mouth rasping. Megan looked closely at her face. "How long has she been like this?"

"Since December 15, 1979."

"Who visits her?"

"George does," I said, "every day. And I come here once a week on Sunday."

"Hmm."

Megan looked at her mother. "She doesn't scare me, you know."

"Well, she shouldn't."

Megan ran her fingers over Karen's face again, then said to me, "Can I come with you on Sunday from now on, Dad?"

"Deal."

"Do I look more like you or Mom?"

"Your mother," I said with relief.

Megan looked at Karen's face right up close, as though trying to locate the watermark on a forged banknote. She gave out a puff of air indicating satisfaction, and then lay down beside her and rested. I went outside for fresh air, flummoxed by Megan's casual acceptance. I thought of how life ought to have been as opposed to what it became. After that day, Megan drove with me to Inglewood Lodge on Sundays.

In the 1980s, Hamilton and I would party often. One morning in particular I was awakened by Hamilton tweezing unmetabolized coke from my nostrils. Life was big.

I recovered somewhat from the 1987 stock crash and continued treadmilling within the city's financial district selling low-tide stocks. This was around the time where I started to drink. My compatriots were machine-bronzed fiftysomethings decorated with gold nugget rings and pin-curly hairdos lying into telephone headsets at 5:00 A.M. Lord—the scammy little push-me-pull-you's we enacted over the phones from within our bleak putty-colored office cubicles.

A minor scandal about a spurious core sample knocked me out of the Stock Exchange. With my savings, I bought a Kleenex-box house in North Van where I lived alone, seeing Megan only rarely—baaad father. I took that first house, spackled, sanded, and painted it, then flipped it for a twenty-five-thousand-dollar profit. This became a pattern: I'd buy the worst house on a good block, work and drink like a demon on weekends to whip it into shape, then flip it for a reasonable profit. My behavior wasn't greed, it was … it was me doing anything but speaking honestly with myself—countless silent moments hastily varnished with vodka and thoughts of renovations. I was visiting Karen twice, thrice a week. At Inglewood, I drank vodka and orange juice from a carton.

10 ONE DAY YOU WILL SPEAK WITH YOURSELF

After some years I realized I'd landed myself a major drinking problem—a device for coping with life's endlessly long days. I truly wondered if I was in some kind of coma myself, shambling through life with an IV drip filled with Scotch. My twenties were vanishing and the only good thing I had going for me was a daughter who I hardly ever saw. For her sake I bucked up a bit in the early 19905 and began to sell residential properties with a modicum of success—my years of renovating claptraps left me with a good instinct for the true value of a house.

I also began doing things I couldn't have imagined doing while sober: I'd often lose my car when I went out at night—forget where I parked it, then call all the towing firms the next day to see if they had it. I woke up one morning to see I'd peed onto the wall. For the most part, I maintained a good front while inner deterioration grew. My breath stank permanently like wine left inside a stemmed glass overnight.

And time ticked on.

Pam sent me a card from Athens:

DINNER WITH DAVID BOWIE. GLAMORAMA. DRANK ABSINTHE FOR THE FIRST TIME, P.

Linus, one day in 1990, without telling anybody, left the city. He drove to Lethbridge in Alberta, parked his VW Bug on the side of a ridge, the Continental Divide, donned his knapsack, and went walking through the stubble and chaff on the fields, across the prairies, flushing out the partridge and pheasants, slouching eastward, then south as winter approached, never again to return to his VW. He spent the next few years gadabouting the southern United States, growing his beard, doing spare jobs for food, and sending a postcard from here or there in his microscopic print:

DEAR RICHARD, THIS IS LAS VEGAS. VIVA. IT'S WINTER NOW. I'M

WORKING AT AN ITALIAN RESTAURANT AS A WAITER. IT'S OKAY. THERE'S NOT MUCH TO DO HERE. THERE'S A TARGET RANGE NEARBY, SO I'M LEARNING TO SHOOT. IT SOUNDS DUMB, BUT IT'S SOMETHING TO LEARN.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND LETTER PLUS THE SNAPSHOTS OF HOME. I

APPRECIATE YOUR BEING CONCERNED FOR ME, BUT I ASSURE YOU I'M OKAY. YOU ASKED WHY I'M DOING THIS AND THAT'S A REASONABLE QUESTION. I THINK I COULDN'T SEE ME FITTING INTO THE EVERYDAY WORLD ANY LONGER. I FOUND MYSELF DOING ELECTRICAL WORK DAY IN/DAY OUT AND REALIZED I WOULD HAVE TO DO THIS THE REST OF MY LIFE AND IT SPOOKED ME. I DON'T KNOW IF THERE'S SOME ALTERNATIVE OUT THERE, BUT I SPEND MOST OF MY TIME WONDERING WHAT IT MIGHT BE. I SUPPOSE THERE'S ALWAYS CRIME, BUT THAT'S NOT GOOD WHEN YOU'RE OLDER. THERE'S DRUGS, BUT YOU KNOW, I'VE NEVER SEEN ANYBODY WHO'S BEEN IMPROVED BY DRUGS. LIFE SEEMS BOTH TOO LONG AND TOO SHORT. THIS BEING SAID, I HAD A GOOD DAY TODAY. THECLOUDS WERE PRETTY AND I BOUGHT A SACK OF CLOTHES AT THE GOODWILL STORE FOR FIVE BUCKS. PAMMIE WAS ON THE COVER OF ELLE. PLEASE WRITE IF YOU CAN. CARE OF THE POST OFFICE, LAS VEGAS. YOUR FRIEND, ALBERT LINUS.

In 1989, Hamilton married Cleo, a hiker he met while triangulating land up north near Cassiar. They moved into a small town house near Lonsdale Quay and became ultra-domestic, hosting theme dinner parties ("Provence!"), allowing themselves to pudge out a few pounds ("Dove Bars … dare we?"), and spending their weekends wallpapering ("Love to play baseball but the den molding just arrived today."). Hamilton seemed to have settled down and lost much of his sarcastic edge. He left my radar for a while, even though he lived nearby.

In 1991, Wendy became a specialist in emergency medicine. Also, her mother died of liver cancer that year, so Wendy returned home to the old neighborhood to live with and take care of her father, Ivor, a trollish grump with never a kind word for his daughter or anybody else. Wendy was occupied, but her life really wasn't much of a life. I know she'd wanted to fall in love during med school, but it never happened, and I know she was unhappy about this.

This was also the year that Pam began vanishing from magazines, until she finally went completely AWOL at year's end, nary a lipstick-smudged postcard to any of us. Hurt feelings, yes, but we knew there had to be a reason. Hamilton, in a less generous mood, said, "She's in rehab. Don't glamorize it. Serves the cow right."

"In what way does it serve her right, Ham?" I asked. We were in Hamilton and Cleo's nest at the bottom of Lonsdale: matching pine furniture, wacky animal fridge magnets, and white wine. Cleo positively glowed every time Ham took a swipe at Pammie.

"In what way?" I asked again. He didn't know in what way. He harrumphed and said he had to make a phone call. "Aren't / Mr. Pissy tonight." Cleo looked miffed.

In mid-1992,, Pam returned home to her folks' place—shaky, fearful, thin, and eerily gorgeous. The modeling lifestyle had wiped her out.We were sitting on her parent's front patio, "You know, it was fun, Richard. I grant you that. But it's over now. There's only a small fraction of 'me' left. I used to think there was an infinite supply of 'me.' Wrong-o. I have to be calm now. My small seed needs to grow and become a whole person again. I blew it all—a whole decade raking in dough and not one effing penny."

"Where'd it go?"Iasked.

"Clothes. Dinners. Drugs. More drugs. Bad investments—a mall in Oklahoma that never got built; a retirement community in Oregon that bankrupted." She was spitting out the words. "Shit. At least I'm allowed to smoke." The trees way above us rustled. A crow cawed. "And it's not even the drugs I miss, Richard. I miss the action. I miss feeling like queen of the roulette table. The black cars. Shallow shit, but I miss it. I miss feeling fabulous." A big silence, then: "Lois lets me baby-sit Megan sometimes. She's a fun kid. And gorgeous. She reminds me of Karen."

"Thanks."

"When I first saw Megan as a baby I thought she might as well go she-male and become your twin. By the way, my dear, you look like crap."

"Thanks again Pam." I was making impatient gestures—I had to go pick up Megan from ice skating.

"Richard, you're not leaving—not now, are you? Is it because I pointed out your boozy skin condition?"

"I have to, Pam, I…" Pam's composure wilted. She was on the cusp of tears. I sat next to her and asked what was wrong. She sniffled and stared into her two clasped hands.

"It's just that I'm … I'm … "

"What, Pam? What?"

A whisper: "Lonely."

"I know. Me, too."

I held her as she sniffled. "How's Hamilton? You see him much? Is he happy?"

"I think so.""Oh, pooh." She was still wearing the pubic-hair locket. I asked her to come along with me to pick up Megan and she did.

As fate would have it, Pam shortly ran into Hamilton and Cleo at a record store in Park Royal; they clicked instantly and they left the shop together, forgetting Cleo entirely. In those first few moments poor Cleo saw Pam and Hamilton together she knew she was out of the picture. Cleo had never seen that expression on Hamilton's face before: incredulous, worshipful, witty, lustful, and adoring—all of this love laser-beamed straight at Pam.

Hamilton's marriage didn't just wobble, it crashed like a dynamited casino. In six months it was legally over, too: Cleo got the townhouse; Hamilton boomeranged into his parents' rent-free house, just a mere three-minute stroll to Pam's. At dinner at my parents' one night I saw the two of them moseying down Rabbit Lane. Every three steps a kiss. Every five steps a caress. Hamilton in love.

It was great fun to have Pam among us again, with her tattletales of sex, drugs, and cannibalism. Her reputation in the fashion industry was shot, but this didn't bother her at all. "Much better for me to be here in Deadsville with chums. All very matey, isn't it?" I asked her if she had a plan yet. She said she was going to start doing TV and film makeup for some of the many U.S. studios shooting in their Vancouver branch plants. It turned out to be the best idea any of us ever had.

And what of Karen? Neither alive nor dead after all these years, ever dimming from the world's mind—rasping, blinded, and pretzeled in a wheelchair, a chenille half-shirt covering the outer, exposed part of her body. She moves her head, her eyes flicker, and for three seconds she sees the sky and the clouds—she is briefly among the living, but no one is there to witness. She returns to the dark side of the Moon. We still don't know what she saw that December night, nor may we ever.

By the early 1990s, Karen's awakening had become a billion-to-one shot, but it was still a shot. No, Karen didn't "contribute" anything to society, but how many people really do? Perhaps she did contribute: She provided a platform on which people could hope. She provided the idea that some frail essence from a now long-vanished era still existed, that the brutality and extremes of the modern world were not the way the world ought to be—a world of gentle Pacific rains, down-filled jackets, bitter red wine in goatskins, and naive charms.

11 DESTINY IS CORNY

After four years of drifting, Linus returned in late 1992.. In that time he'd become more remote than ever. "Reading his facial expressions is an exercise in Kremlinology," Hamilton said. "Direct inquiry's no help: Gee, Linus, you're so remote these days—gee, what's the reason?" Discussion was awkward indeed, and in the end it was simply avoided. His years away were treated as though he'd popped out to get a pack of cigarettes and returned a few minutes later.

Wendy met Linus for dinner a week after his low-key return. Afterward, she told me Linus had "gone inside himself, and hasn't quite emerged yet. He talked about sand dunes, ice, chocolate bars, and hitchhiking—the sorts of things that would be a big deal if you were a hobo. Chalk marks and stuff."

I was envious of Linus's venture into nothingdom, but also ticked off that he hadn't had a revelation in all of his wanderings. I still lived, as did Hamilton, with the belief that meaning could pop into my life at any moment. I was getting—we were getting—no younger, yet for some reason not particularly wiser.

Linus's parents had moved to the waterfront on Bellevue two years earlier—no spare bedroom. A homesick Linus rented a bungalow four houses down from his old house on Moyne Drive, paying the rent with earnings as a freelance electrical contractor. Generators were his specialty. It seemed an anticlimactic sequel to his romantic solo wanderings.

Wendy, eager for any excuse to not have to be around her aging churlish feed-me-my-gruel father, visited Linus every night after her shift at Lions Gate Emergency. One night at a Halloween party in North Van, Wendy curled herself into Linus's lap and smiled love's smile. "Good for them!" we all said. Wendy began spending less time at the hospital; she resumed kibitzing about with our old crowd.

I bumped into Wendy on Moyne Drive one afternoon. Seemingly dancing on air, she held a Safeway paper bag. I asked her what it was, and she opened it to show me. "It's a pile of sulfur that Albert gave me."

"Albert? Oh—that's right—it's Linus's real first name."

"Isn't he sweet?"

Wendy soon moved in with Linus and that summer the two were married, as were Pam and Hamilton. A week after the ceremony it was a rainy day and Wendy and I were sitting on cardboard boxes in the living room, rain thumping the rooftop. I asked Wendy why she and Linus had never gotten together before. She said, "All my life I've had this problem of being lonely all day. Then one night loneliness began creeping into my dreams. I thought I was jinxed or spooked or voodoo'ed into a life of eternal loneliness. Then Linus told me that he had the same problem. Oh, the relief I felt! It dawned on me that maybe we were the same in other ways."

Pam said, "They both had solitary natures, neither needs to explain themselves to the other. Added bonus? They're comfy with each other. So who'dathunk?"That fall I began living in Linus's house, too. I'd lost my driver's license, which made me take taxis in whose comfortable interiors I could drink even more. Drinking made me a shameful salesman; I was broke and needed a cheap place to crash. Linus rented me a basement room—a small room with one lamp and a window that overlooked the tool shed.

"I think," Linus said on moving day, "you drink because you want to kill time until Karen wakes up. Correct?"

I told him to mind his own business, although he was probably right. "But I don't think it's just one thing." We discussed my drinking problem as though it were a cold.

I was the last of our crew to return to the neighborhood. Hamilton began living at Pam's house. Our situation felt wildly regressive. The Loser's Circle. Pam asked me one day on a forest walk if we were all winners or losers. "Where do we fit in, Richard? We're all working. We all have jobs but… there's something missing."

"We're empty, maybe," I said. Some birds screeched.

"I don't think so. But no kids—that must mean something. Oh— stupid me. I mean there's Megan, of course. Hopefully, I'll have a little brute some day. It's like that thing you told me—the line from that post card Linus wrote you: Why does life feel so long and so short at the same time? Why is that?" Rain was starting to spit.

"I think we live in this world, but we don't change the world. No, but that's wrong. We're born; there must be a logic—some sort of plan larger than ourselves."

We walked farther. We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it. We had quietly settled into a premature autumn of life—no gentle mellowing or Indian summer of immense beauty, just a sudden frost, a harsh winter with snows that accumulate, never to melt.

In my head I wanted to thaw the snow. I wanted to reorder this world. I did not want to be old before my time.

The two of us arrived at a long, clear stretch of the path. Pam said,"Watch this." She began to catwalk down an invisible runway. "Calvin Klein. Milan. Fall Collection, 1990. What's in my head as I walk the catwalk? I'm worried my legs look too scrawny. Will there be free coke afterward? The supermodel's mind, eh?"

We forded a stream and entered a mossy patch lit by a shaft of sun cutting through the rain.

That night, I went on a bender for no real reason except that there was nobody home and nobody was reachable on the phone. I was rehashing the day's conversation with Pam and I felt the loneliest I'd ever felt, because I was getting old and I was alone and I saw no chance of this ever changing.

I remember nothing that happened after I opened the evening's second vodka bottle (no pretense of flavor or finesse … just getting it in). I awoke the next morning, my head flopped inside the toilet bowl like a pile of meat at the butcher's. I'd vomited onto, then into my stereo, I'd cut the chain on my exercise bike and shitted all over my sheets, some of which was rubbed onto the wall. No memory at all.

Wendy found me and talked to me while I was still on the floor. Linus came in. Wendy said, "You can't go on like this, Richard." Linus ran the bath and he and Wendy placed me in it. The two of them cleaned my room for me as I sat in the bath, still slightly drunk—a blank, angry hangover beginning to thunder inside my cranium. They stuffed me into Wendy's 4-Runner and took me to the hospital. That was the end. "But I want to pass out," I shouted at Wendy.

"No you don't," she calmly replied.

"I want to be where Karen is."

"No you don't."

"I do."

"You're not allowed there."

"lam."

"Grow up," Linus said. "Be a man."

On New Year's Eve, 1992, the five of us were sitting in Linus's under-heated igloo of a kitchen around a Formica table playing a lazy pokergame, trying to make each other feel noble about the fact that our lives had the collective aura of a fumbled lateral pass.

Rain was pelting the windows; we were using candles, not electric light. Hamilton, His Grumpiness, was saddled with a leg cast after falling thirty feet off a cliff up Howe Sound the month before. As well, he'd been recently nabbed "borrowing" some blasting materials from the company's warehouse and was asked to resign rather than be fired. His life was, if not in tatters, certainly ripped.

I asked, "Ham—what on Earth were you going to do with blasting caps and plastic explosives? Bomb the mall?"

"No, Richard, I was going to drive up to the interior to blow up rock formations. It's my art form. How am I going to develop my talent if I don't take artistic risks? My palette is dynamite, rock is my canvas. Piss. What am I going to do now?'

Linus was also in a grumpy mood, which was interesting in itself as he never seemed to have moods. Pam was riding her "monthly train to hell," and Wendy was underslept after having been on call the whole of Christmas week. I had a bizarre headache from having inhaled too much helium from a clown-shaped canister given to me as a gag gift from Hamilton. As well, I'd been guzzling zero-alcohol eggnog; my stomach felt fur-lined. My not drinking was a challenging bore.

Hamilton was theorizing about work. "Well kids, in order for the system to work, there must be glittering prizes. Another card, Richard, and not from the bottom, I'm watching. A highly competitive society must have simple rules and terrible consequences for not obeying the rules. I fold. There must be losers on the edge to serve as cautionary tales for those in the center. Nobody likes to see the losers—Wendy's deal—losers are the dark side of society and they frighten people into submission. I must have more plonk. Linus? I must have more of that yellow swill! Now! Mush!"

Linus gave Hamilton a sneer. Pam said, "Hamilton, fetch it yourself, you one-legged pig. And once you're there, fetch me some, too." Cards remained on the table. Wendy arranged her chips into tiny Angkor Wat towers, the same way she'd arranged stones on grad night years before. The evening's theme continued: an intensescrutiny of everything we had become up until now—relentless self-criticism—adding, subtracting, looking at the lives of others. It reassured us to hear that other people's lives were proving to be as unstable as our own. I put forth the question, "Do animals have leisure time? I mean, do they ever go 'hang out'? Or is everything they do connected to food and shelter?"

"There are hawks," Linus said, "who ride the thermals in the mountains without moving a wing for hours. Not even dive-bombing for rodents—just riding the wind."

"Dogs have leisure," said Pam. "Chasing sticks. Having tussles on the carpet. Great fun."

"I don't know," said Wendy. "Hawks are always alert for food. Dogs chasing sticks is pack mentality reinforcement. Besides, animals don't even have time. Only humans have time. It's what makes us different." Wendy dealt like a croupier goddess, massaging the whole deck rather than shuffling—a treat to watch.

Linus sipped his drink and said, "You know, from what I've seen, at twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star. Three's are wild this round. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional." Wendy pecked Linus on the cheek. "And by thirty, a darkness starts moving in—you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful. Pam, are you folding? Wake up, girl. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate. God, do I have a shitty hand. My cards, I mean."

Pam said, "Hamilton, my plonk? Oink?"

Pam had at least accomplished her dream of being a model. Hamilton—what dream had he made real? He stumped to the table with the bottle. "Oinks to you, Pamela."

The game lapsed into banter, which is all we really wanted. If we'd been serious, we'd all have owed Linus ten million dollars long ago. Linus always won. Card-counting during his stint in Las Vegas?

"I read about this study," Wendy said. "The researchers learned that no matter how hard you tried, the most you could possibly change your personality—your self—was five percent.""God, how depressing," said Pam.

"Crap," said Hamilton. "No way."

Wendy's fact made me queasy. The news reminded me of how unhappy I was with who I was at that point. I wanted nothing more than to transform 100 percent.

A few minutes later, Linus interrupted his poker-faced silence: "What I notice," he said, "is that everybody's kind of accusing everybody else of acting these days. Know what I mean? Kind of, uh, not being genuine." He looked at his Kahlua coffee. ("A teenager's drink," Hamilton had heckled.) "Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now—as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow. Play your card, Wendy—" We pokered for a while, all feeling odd at Linus's lengthy barrage of insight.

"Amen, Reverend," said Hamilton. "Three jacks and the kitty is mine. Richikins, your deal. Or are you really Richikins? Prove to me that you're you, you impostor."

"Hamilton, you talk funny," barked Linus in a voice so new it startled us. "You talk in little TV bits. You're never sincere. You're never nice. You used to be a little bit nice once. I don't think you've ever had a real conversation in your life." We were all still: "When you were young, you were funny, but now you're not young and you're not even boring. You're just kind of scary. When was the last time you had a real conversation with anybody?"

Hamilton scratched an itch beneath his leg plaster. "I don't need this shit."

"Well? When was the last time?"

Hamilton looked to Pam for backup, but Pam had placed her cards down on the table to investigate the elegant floor wax sheen of the Queen of Diamonds. "I…" Hamilton was off guard. "Pam and I have conversations all the time. Don't we, Pam?"

Pam kept looking at her cards. "I'm not in this particular pissing contest, fellas."

"Thanks a lot, honey. So what are you driving at, Linus—that I'ma phony because I enjoy 'light conversation'? You ought to look into a mirror at yourself sometime. A real lulu you are."

"I look in the mirror every day, Hamilton. I'm saying that you're shutting the last door that might save you—kindness and honesty. You have thirty-five more years to go; life's all downhill from now on."

"What the … ?" Hamilton lifted himself up and reached for his crutches that leaned over by a pile of boots and a kitty litter box in the corner.

"Cor fricking blimey. No one needs this." (Hamilton was in his phase of only renting British VHS tapes, thus Anglicizing his diction.) "I'm getting out of preacher-man's house, and then I'm gonna hobble home. Pam? Are you coming or are you going to stay here to be real with Jesus and our chums here?"

Pam looked him in the face. "Yes. I'm going to stay a while."

"Very well, luvvie. I'll toddle off now." Wendy helped Hamilton with his crutches. He walked out the door and into the rain, where he shouted "Feck off" to all of us and grunted back to Pam's house, then most likely into a Demerol fog. We sat around the table and quietly packed up the chips and cards.

"He'll forget all this ever happened," Pam said. "He's not the sort of person who changes." She picked up three glasses at once with her fingertips. "And would somebody please tell me why fucked-up guys are sexy? I'm lost."

I said, "Hey, Linus. What was all that about?"

He said, "I just don't know. I had to say it. I'm worried. I'm worried that we're never going to change. I'm worried that we might not even be able to change. Do you ever worry about that?"

I said, "Yes."

The next morning all was forgotten.

While walking over to Hamilton's, I bumped into Megan. She was with two other thirteen-year-old girlfriends and one boyfriend, all puffing away on ciggies, the boy wearing baggy pants and the girls wearing clones of each other's fashions, groomed to the point ofalmost biological sameness (just as Karen and Pam and Wendy had once been). I said, "Where you off to today, Meg?"

"Out."

""Whereabouts out?"

"Good deeds, Dad. We're delivering Easter baskets to crack babies." Her friends sniggered. I realized that for the first time Megan was embarrassed to be seen with me. I understood, but nevertheless the barb stung.

"Don't forget dinner at Grandma and Grandpa's tonight."

She rolled her eyes, her friends looked the other way, and she said, "Right, Dad."

Torturous teen. To think I once believed teen-rearing would be so easy; like most parents, I thought I had the "magic touch" that would make my own teenager be my pal instead of my enemy. No such luck.

12 THE FUTURE IS MORE EXTREME THAN YOU THINK

Our film careers began one soggy Tuesday morning in early 1993, the daffodils still asleep within the grass, the clouds like soaked dishrags squeezing out gray wet glop. Pam, then doing makeup and styling for the exploding local film and TV industry, had arranged for Hamilton, Linus, and me to visit her on location at a "Movie of the Week" being shot just up the hill from Rabbit Lane—a film of the mom-loses-tot-gets-tot-back genre we soon came to know all too well.

The January housing market was dead; I took a few more days off to play cards and waste time. Linus, a consultant, could take off whatever hours he wanted. We decided to walk up the hill to Pam's shoot while Hamilton drove. We shortcutted through the golf course and had a golf-ball fight, which landed Linus in the espresso-colored water traps up to his knees. "A dissolute lifestyle has its rewards," said Linus, peeling a bulrush frond from his shins, a leech cuddling into his calf.

We arrived at the location on Southborough Drive be-mucked, resembling extras and feeling like outsiders. Hamilton's Javelin ka-chunk'ed onto the road's shoulder and soon we three bumbled pointlessly amid the necklace of white vans and utility trucks that border any film location. We found Pam. "Go grab a bite at the catering truck. Wait for me there."

"Where are the stars?" Linus asked.

"What were you expecting, kids," Pam said, "chorus-line girls carrying enormous foam boulders? Roman centurions riding along in golf carts? I'll tell you the official credo of film: Hurry up and wait. See you in five."

We ate cold pasta, watched thick white lighting cables being hauled into a front doorway, and became thoroughly bored. "This blows," Hamilton said. "Let's amscray."

We were set to amscray when Tina Lowry, an old classmate of mine, called, "Richard! Richard Doorland, is that you? It's me. Tina." Tina, like most people in the film and TV industry, had that slightly on-the-run-can't-talk-long look on her face. A tiny patch of blue sky allowed sun to sparkle the light meter that hung around her neck.

"Tina. You're here?"

"Heya, Richard, what are you doing on set? Crew? Extras?"

"No. I just live nearby. A friend of ours, Pam, is doing makeup here. Are you directing or something?"

"Not yet. I'm a production assistant here—a PA. We're scum on the food chain, but the job rocks. You know Pam?"

"We grew up just down the hill. Hamilton here," I indicated the soggy beanpole to my right, "is her meat puppet."

She gawped at Hamilton. "I use to cut out the pictures of her in

Vogue and stuff. I wanted to be her so badly and now I'm working with her. It's trippy. What are you doing these days, Richard?""You mean right now—right here?"

"No, like in your life—and stuff."

I'd learned it was easier to say "nothing" than to mention real estate. "Nothing. Taking it easy." I awaited the usual strained, "Ohhh …" signaling embarrassment. Tina surprised me.

"You need work?"

"Uh, sure … maybe … doing what?"

"We'll find something for you. We're short-staffed and need bodies quick. I'll help you with union stuff. Phone me." A horn honked. "Gotta go." Like most film people, she vanished in a little cloud of cartoon dust.

Once again, for the first time in what seemed like a decade, the city was a place of enchantment for me. Voila! Hamilton, Linus, and I became location scouts, and for two cigarette-packed weeks, we rollicked about the city and countryside in Hamilton's Javelin running over trash cans, drag racing yuppies, and "tailgating hair triggers," those agitated souls Hamilton seemed to locate with such ease: "Gronks itching to kill, barflies with pickled brain stems, meatheads fresh from the gym—how easily inflamed they are." We found every location required by the director within minutes, mainly as a result of my having sold real estate and growing up here. We felt useful.

Scott, a production guy from Los Angeles, told us that "they film everything here because Vancouver's unique: You can morph it into any North American city or green space with little effort and even less expense, but at the same time the city has its own distinct feel. See that motel over there? That was 'Pittsburgh' in a Movie of the Week."

Scott, like us, had never trained to be in film. Like everybody in the local industry, he arrived from another realm. Mathematicians, lawyers, dental assistants, ex-hippies—all of these people winging it. The energy was addictive.

Life became very cha-cha-cha. "My oh my," Hamilton WOllld preen verbally, "aren't we just the niftiest, coolest, hippest, grooviest, sexiest, most with-it, and most happening people we know?""Yes, Hamilton," we would reply as androids. "You certainly are."

Then came word that Fox was filming a series pilot in Vancouver, one of dozens filmed here annually. Phone calls were made and shortly Pam, Hamilton, Linus, and I wound up working on a new show in which conspiracies, be they alien, governmental, paranormal, or clerical, impacted on the lives of everyday people. These visitations would in turn be investigated by a male detective who has belief in the paranormal and a female detective who has her doubts. It was a simple formula, but one that resonated with us.

TV pilots are crap shoots. We enjoyed our location scouting as much as we could, making hay while the sun shined and we located dank, dense, evergreen versions of Florida, California, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. "It's a good thing not too many botanists watch this show," Linus said with grating frequency. "Or weathermen, for that matter." As it rains a fair deal in Vancouver, so it rained a great deal on the show. Critics applauded the show's rainy "noir" atmosphere. Whenever this issue was raised, Pam merrily twittered, "Giggle giggle."

After a few weeks, Tina introduced Hamilton and Linus to the world of special effects at an FX house across town called Monster Machine. Their eyes lit up; within a week, they left Fox to score jobs with Monster Machine, entering a sub-world of flash pods, latex limbs, buckets o' blood, and blue screening. Their combined explosive and electrical knowledge was impossible to refuse. Me? I stayed on the set of my weekly paranormal drama. It hadn't become a hit yet, but I liked its vibe and it was the most polite set I'd worked on.

Soon enough Pam stopped doing makeup work and joined Hamilton and Linus at the special effects firm; the three became known locally as quality special effects people. Their specialties were latex body molds and convincing explosions. Pooling their skills, they helped create aliens, zombies, vampires, Mafia-shot corpses, humans in all states of decay, mummification, terror, and explosion. They traveled frequently, usually to California to take courses with the masters, and returned to Canada with Ziploc bags full of smuggled,tissue-wrapped, German ceramic eyeballs. "Aren't they wunderbar?" squeaked Pam in my car driving back from the airport.

Pam was so happy. The "Whatever Happened to …" magazine articles ended, replaced by "Hot New Comeback!" articles. An ex-model turned special effects artist was an irresistible combination for the media. Added bonus: "I've conquered a drug problem!" Magazine and TV stories about her flourished.

A strong memory of that early period of TV production was of bodies: bodies on gurneys, bodies in boxes, bits of bodies, bodies bleeding, dummy bodies, alien bodies, bodies embedded with artificial components, bodies slated to vanish, bodies popping out of bodies, bodies just returned from the beyond, and bodies set to explode. A few of these bodies were used on my own show, but I'd also see "a galore of bodies" (Linus's term) while visiting Monster Machine, where they were experts in the trick-wiring of both latex dummies and real people, making their subjects explode, cough up blood, shimmy, or radiate green light on cue.

I popped in for a visit one rainy day after they'd been working there a year and found the two intently wiring a man's girdle with explosives and fake blood, an outfit that was to be worn in a police thriller then shooting downtown, one in which everybody shoots everybody in the climax. "Hey Richard," Linus said. "Check this out. We put the blood into these little ravioli cubes and then attach them to an outward bursting charge."

"Truly a gore-fest," Hamilton proudly added, coiling multicolored wire into an FM blast-detonator and discharging a gelatinous glob onto a plywood sheet. "Lunch?"

"Bagel run," Linus said.

We were headed out the door when Hamilton's pager beeped and Linus suddenly had to pee. Left alone, I wandered around the building and saw a door that was slightly ajar. I opened it, thinking I might find a studio. What I found instead must have been a corpse storage room, a room unlike any I could have imagined—men and women, children and aliens; whole, cut in two, doused in blood; arms and legs stacked like timber; glass bottles of eyes and shelves of noses. Thelight was dim and the air was stifled and dusty. In the center of the room sat a pile of used bodies, which appeared to have fulfilled their cinematic destiny and were now slated for selective demolition—pink latex aliens, moist and flabby. I walked over to the pile, fascinated with this unlit bonfire.

I circled the room and a wire tugged my sweater. I heard a thunk behind me and saw a dummy that I probably ought not to have seen: a plastic female body almost identical to Karen—bony, taut, skeletal, and yellowed, made of polyurethane foam, with long straight brown Orion hair parted in the middle. The fallen corpse was now leaning against a wall near an electrical subunit, as though freeze-dried. I heard Hamilton's voice in the corridor: "Hey Linus, where's Richikins?" He walked past the door, saw me, and smiled, thinking I'd be enjoying the local attraction. He came around to where I stood, looked at the dummy, looked at me, and said, "Uh-oh. Sorry Richard. We used this one in a movie last month—this movie about people who survive a plane crash but who never get rescued."

"Yeah."

"We should have boxed it."

"Shit, Hamilton. Did you have to use a chenille shirt on it?"

"Well, it does look authentic."

I sighed; they'd meant no harm. I walked over to inspect the corpse, with its taxidermy glass eyes and dusty plastic hair. A fish inside my stomach wriggled and thrashed, and I looked away. Hamilton quietly sandwiched the body inside the pile of aliens. We ate lunch and afterward I drove to Inglewood. I wanted to see the real Karen, who only differed slightly from the plastic female replica I'd just seen.

As the years progressed and I began to notice ideas inside my head changing, as well as detecting new sensations in my heart—my soul? The fact was that our work continually exposed us, day in, day out, to a constant assembly line of paranoia, extreme beliefs, and spiritual simplifications. The routine nature of these ideas had begun to activate parts of me that previously remained untouched. Like mostpeople I'd known, I was unconcerned with what happens to "me" after I die. Implicit was a vague notion that I would somehow continue in another form and that was that. But then new doubts surfaced: Would I continue on? And how'?

Linus asked good questions whenever I fell into one of my reflective states. On-set one day, he asked me, "Richard, let me ask you this—What is the difference between the future and the afterlife?"

"Is this what you were thinking about down in Las Vegas?" I asked.

"Maybe. But answer the question."

"The difference is that…" I was temporarily stumped.

"Yes?"

"The difference," I said, "is that the afterworld is all about infinity; the future is only about changes on this world—fashion and machines and architecture." We were working on a TV movie about angels coming down to Earth to help housewives. The sunlight was hurting my eyes even though I was wearing dark glasses.

"So," Linus asked, "when you die, do you still get to watch TV and read magazines and see what's happening on Earth? Or do you go someplace where that's not an issue?"

"I'm not sure. It would really bug me not to know what the city would look like in a hundred years. Or what my favorite stars would look like fifty years from now."

"Hmmm." The "star" of the angel movie walked by and asked Linus for moisturizer for her elbows. "I'm in special effects," he replied, "I can give you a dab of bloody red goo to rub into them." The "star" walked away miffed, no sense of fun.

I began to think about other issues—about leadership, about who was in charge of the world and who was not. Like many people, repeated exposure to paranormal situations caused me to develop those niggling little feelings that certain truths were being withheld. UFOs seemed silly, but then there was that little bit of me that said maybe.

"Look at it this way," Linus said before getting up to arrange a drooping wing, "you have to take all these little bits of nothing thatwe're given—aliens, conspirators, angels, big government—and from them you have to construct a useful picture of the afterlife. Or the future. Either way, is it enough? All these cheesy movies of the week we help make—TV movies with long-dead fighter pilots reemerging into the modern world; strange children writing binary messages seized by the government; cannibalism; vanishings; kidnapped college students; burnt people returned to life; loggers who've seen God; green blood; disembodied souls being enticed back into a body—" His pager beeped. "Mariana. Gotta go."

I sat there in the sun. The catering truck was cleaning up with clangs and slams. The sunlight and heat was intense. I felt like I was inside a beam shooting down from a flying saucer—a beam that would make me float up into the sky and into heaven, where I would then receive answers.

13 REJECT EVERY IDEA

When I discovered that Hamilton and Pam were doing heroin, I first assumed it was a practical joke, because the drug had by then become a local cliche, the Port of Vancouver having in recent years become a salad bar of cheap Asian drugs. The two had rented a small 1950s house at the end of Moyne Drive, a spit away from Karen's family's house and Linus and Wendy's. During a March wrap party, I found two syringes, soiled cotton balls, and so forth in the trash can of their en-suite bathroom—plus rubber tubing lying on the counter. It wasn't a joke; they'd just been too lazy or out of it to clean up. I became angry at them for being so medically stupid and dangerously and pointlessly trendy.

Hamilton had walked into the bedroom while I was still flipping out over the discovery. I confronted him without even thinking. "Let me get this straight, Hamilton. You were at a party, and in between hand-fuls of Doritos someone said, 'Hey—wanna do some smack?' And you said, 'Sure! Stick the needle right here'? At least this explains why you and Pam have been so blase lately—as well as the long-sleeve shirts."

Hamilton was serene. He gave a tender little sigh and stared me down. "Life is only so exciting, Richard. And it soon becomes a drag. This cool cat plans to enjoy his ninth life. Heroin's not a meaning, but it does make life feel as though life still has possibilities. I'm getting old; it's becoming harder and harder to be a unique individual."

"Life is a drag? What—are you a feewager now? 'Bummer, man.'' I mean, how passe, Hamilton. Heroin. How totally ten minutes ago. A drag?" A city-wide rash of China White ODs made me feel protective and prudish.

Hamilton pursed his lips; I could see he was preparing to shut down on me shortly. "Curious to see you being a prig, Richikins. Excusez-moi if I've committed a lifestyle violation."

"Since when is life a drag, Hamilton? Things are going well. Things have never been so good."

He made a pfffft noise and shot me a patronizing glance that made me feel eight years old, like I'd felt when I hid my mother's cigarettes to make her stop smoking. He sat on the bed. "Don't you understand, Richard? There's nothing at the center of what we do."

"I—"

"No center. It doesn't exist. All of us—look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there's nothing else." I felt I was getting the bad news I'd been trying to avoid for so long.

"But didn'—"

He cut me off. "Shhh. At least Pam and I accept things as they are. And I wish you'd let us do that. We get our job done. We pay our taxes. We never forget people's birthdays. So just let us be." He stood up. "Good night, Reverend. Ta ta." He floated out of the room and yet again I had that sick feeling that accompanies a recently bruised friendship. I thought of all my recent years of AA abstention—weeks on end with my head feeling like a rotten pumpkin—all to combatdoubts, to kill time, to wait for something that might never happen, some revelation that a center did exist. I felt very lost there in the bedroom. I walked the four miles home.

Home was a small, recently purchased two-bedroom condo in North Vancouver—a ragtag old seventies condo with slatted cedar walls and Plexiglas bubble skylights. It had, according to Linus, an elusive "sex-in-the-hot-tub, cum-on-the-ultrasuede" character. I loved my little condo merely for its calmness and coolness and the view of the mountains out back; it was the first place I'd ever lived in that actually felt like my own. I was glad to be home.

Around eight o'clock the next evening my doorbell rang: Pam, white-faced and bushed after PA-ing a TV movie filming nearby. "Ghost Mom returns to Earth to help her family fight land developers." She sat pooped but birdlike on the couch. She shushed me and crossed her arms. She looked at the floor.

"What?" I asked, trying to be casual.

Silence. "It's happening again, Richard."

"What is?"

"You know. I know you know. Stuff. Junk."

"How long now?"

"A few months? It's manageable. Nothing hardcore yet. But it's getting bigger. It always does." She stood by the window.

"Are you—?"

"Shhh!" She huffed out a carbon dioxide sprite into the glass and continued: "I've escaped before, Richard, we all know that. Maybe I can again. I'm still a little bit fabulous."

"Okay. Can you function while you're on it? I mean, doesn't it zonk you out?"

"Au contraire, it makes us zingy."

"Zingy?"

"You look sad, Richard. Don't be. You'll do me a favor?"

A pause. "Sure."

"We've never judged you. Don't judge us. We enjoy liking you. It should stay that way.""It could stay that way"

"Shush."

We talked a bit, then went into the kitchen where she drank an Orange Crush. We talked more, mostly in circles. Then Pam chugged her pop and hopped through the rain and into her car, driving back to Hamilton in a halfhearted Transylvanian drag race.

Megan was going through teen dramas at that time. In 1996, at age sixteen, she was a little girl in so many ways. She read her fantasy books and her eyes lit up when she talked about magic. I thought she was a wise, cool kid who could obtain better marks in school if she'd only try. She dressed weirdly, but then big deal. She'd dyed her hair nighttime black (with mouse brown roots) and used black nail polish exclusively. Her skin was morgue-white. She had piercings up and down her ears, nose, and heaven only knows where else. She spent weeks sequestered behind her locked bedroom door, a nonstop boom box pumping out endless rotations of albums by the Cure. It seemed a typical enough rebellion.

Megan and Lois had a particularly vivid relationship. Lois considered Megan's friends losers—responsible for her rebellion. And Megan baited Lois to no end, as, for example, the time Megan and her friend Jenny Tyrell staged a phone conversation when they knew Lois was eavesdropping on the extension.

"How many cocaine straws do you think you could get out of a yellow McDonald's straw, Jenn?"

"Idunno. Three?"

"No. I think it's more like two and a half. I've got a whole pile here in my room. I'll cut some while we talk—I can see what looks like the best length." Lois stormed into Megan's bedroom at that point only to hear Megan crow.

Lois ranted, "You think you're so clever, don't you? Who gives you the money to pay for all your things?"

"I do. I sell your ugly little owl figurines one by one to collectors, Grandma."

Shrieks.Once a teenager decides to be bad, the cycle is hard to break. Megan's phase kept spiraling downward. And the drug issue was scaring me. I don't think Megan did as much as Lois suggested, but it was worrisome nonetheless. Drugs were so different than when I was young. Pot was once a few giggles, munchies, spaciness for a few hours, then a headache. Modern drugs—previously unknown acid molecules, dimethyl tryptamine, crack—were a parent's most fearful imaginings made compact and simple.

In early 1997 came a small crisis. Megan and Lois had an extreme scream-fest over a black cotton sock that had made its way into Lois's white laundry cycle. Megan vanished. That night, Megan was found by a jogger passed out on a Burnside Park bench.

The police constable said she'd been drinking heavily. "There was an empty rum bottle there. We went through her purse to try to locate an address; we found a large amount of pot and some psilocy-bin mushrooms."

The cops let Megan off with a warning. When they left, Lois said, "She can't stay here. This is it. I love her, but she's lost to me."

I understood. The next day I suggested to Megan, hung over and groggy, that she move into my spare bedroom, and she grudgingly accepted the offer. George, Lois, and the dog had gone away for the day, so the house was quiet. We grabbed a few posters and some knickknacks to make her new space her own. She spent most of her time at my house, too. She'd been suspended from Sentinel high school so often that having her around the house became the norm on weekdays.

"What is it this time?"

"I told my English teacher to go fuck up a rope."

Or:

"What is it this time?"

"I wore a black lace shroud to gym class."

"That's all?"

"I lit a cigarette after I walked in. I blew smoke rings."

We enrolled Megan in an alternative school in North Van; she seemed to do half decent. We were glad she was making progressuntil we learned the real reason she continued attending: the school was a close walk to the house of her charming new boyfriend, Skitter, whom I met by accident when I went to the school to drop off some documents. He and Megan were off for lunch (drugs) somewhere over on Lonsdale.

"You must be, like, the old man. Huh?" Muttonchop sideburns. Dice tattoo. Beady eyes looking out from a hopped-up '71 Satellite Sebring. A real doozy of a boyfriend.

"I'm Megan's father, yes." Lord, I felt old. "And you are … ?"

"Skitter, man."

"Skitter," screamed Megan, "just take off, okay?" She was in the passenger seat and refused to look at me. "Boot it."

"Hey man—gotta go." And with that, Skitter's car farted itself out of the parking lot.

Skitter was every parents' worst fears of a daughters' dream date. He lived in a moss-roofed 1963 cereal box in darkest Lynn Valley atop an unmown lawn sparked with gasoline burns and neglected auto parts. A disassembled black Trans-Am on blocks rested in the carport. One could almost hear the neighbors' groans of shame at Skitter's house. A few times Megan called me on his cell phone: "You don't understand, Dad. Skitter's different."

14 IN THE FUTURE EVERYTHING

October 31, 1997—Halloween Friday was a day of profound omens and endless coincidence, but with no guidebooks to help in discerning a higher meaning. It was a day when the world became one enormous omen-making, luck-producing factory. Later, I would learn that coincidences are the most planned things in the world. Later, I would learn that every single moment is a coincidence.

My enchanted day began just after I woke up from a sexy dream, like ones I'd had as a teenager, to my favorite song, "Bizarre Love Triangle," then playing on the clock radio.

I was shaving and glanced through the bathroom window just as a swallow flew directly at me, hit the pane, and fell earthward, seemingly dead. It regained consciousness just moments before the neighbor's tortoiseshell cat pounced. Minutes later, I saw that a spider had spun her web across my kitchen sink. I fed her a nub of hamburger meat and she tweezed the meat away with her cranelike limbs.

I dialed Tina about the day's work, but before her phone rang, Tina was already on the line—no ring. ("Isn't that the funniest thing … ?") I was helping Tina out on a TV thriller movie she was doing—one about an Iowa high school football team that develops a collective mind that may well be used to further the forces of evil.

On the sidewalk outside my house, I found a twenty-dollar bill. In my car (that morning, covered with fresh raccoon paw prints), I turned on the radio and learned that a murder had occurred a block away from my house; the radio then played my next three favorite songs.

At a stoplight, I looked at my odometer for the first time in months to see it revolve from 29,999 to 30,000. I looked up, there were two men on the corner with thalidomide arms staring at me.

Arriving at work, I found the best parking spot. Exiting the car, a woman passed by with a stroller-load of screaming twins. She winked, smiled, and said, "Ain't life grand?" At the lot's edge, workers were pouring a concrete slab. They asked if I wanted to trace my initials in the concrete, and so I did. Just as I was doing this, an electrical circuit box on a telephone pole coughed itself open in a shimmy of sparks.

Coincidences, omens, and luck relentlessly continued. Our film crew was on location in the agricultural flatlands of Chilliwack, a ninety-minute drive away. On the drive there, we witnessed not one but two spectacular car crashes on the other side of the freeway. A few miles on, a pair of hawks circled the freeway chasing a pigeon.

While driving, I won twenty-five dollars on a scratch-and-win lottery ticket that had been lying on the dash for weeks. Then we learned that all three people in my car had the same birthday.

A mile before we arrived at the location, a rogue cow sat stupidly in the thin road's center. We stopped and got out of the car; we saw a rainbow, and the cow ran away. The moment we arrived on locationa hailstorm began. My cell phone rang and it was Megan calling to tell me she loved me.

The next call was George phoning from Lions Gate, where Karen had been transferred the previous week with a slight respiratory problem. Apparently she was well again and would be returning to Inglewood some time next week.

While we waited for the hail to melt, we had a rock-throwing contest to try to hit a telephone pole across the field—I hit the pole on my first try.

The day just wouldn't quit. I was being swept down a river of grace and wonder. The weather turned dry and crisp with Indian summer sparkle. The crew were hoping we'd wrap early so they'd have time to gussy themselves up for a Halloween party in North Vancouver later that night over at Hillary Markham's, a prop lady living near the Cleveland Dam.

The coincidences continued: I found a gold ring in the grass at the side of the field. One of the actors, the coach character, was an old high school friend, Scott, who told me that a girl we knew in high school had just died of stomach cancer.

A fumbled football landed in the ditch, and as I went to pick it up, three snakes slithered around the ball and then melted into the reeds. To the right of the ball grew a sequoia-like marijuana plant, which I traded to a coworker named Barton in lieu of money for his stereo system that I'd been wanting to buy.

In my jacket's breast pocket I found the house key I thought I'd lost the month before. I began to feel almost drunk with karma. The shoot went swimmingly; we finished almost two hours earlier than scheduled. I returned to town with Tina and two other staffers. I popped by the studio and borrowed a silver Apollo astronaut's suit used several episodes earlier. I drove home to change and relax before the party.

After a quick nap, I started to dress. I was in such a fine mood— such a day! I couldn't have known that putting on my silver jacket in my quiet house that crisp October afternoon was going to be tke last truly calm moment I would ever have—the last silently normal moment of my life.Before going to the party I drove up to Linus's house. He'd placed various rather terrifying monsters around his yard and arranged lighting so that after the trick-or-treaters had finished and were walking down the driveway, the monsters would flare up. I stayed to watch the festivities and a few trick-or-treaters. The first were two sweet little kids and their dad. One of the kids was barely six. Linus gave them each a Crunch bar, and as they scurried away, he lit up the monsters and the kids began to wail in fear. Linus hadn't anticipated this. The father yelled, "What are you, some kind of freak? Jesus, these are just little kids!"

Pang of conscience; monster floodlighting switched off. ("Oops!") The monsters tucked away.

Linus left his bowl of candy outside the door and fetched his costume, a cardboard U-Haul box painted black. I asked him what he was and he said he was going as the Borg. I just don't get Trekkies.

The Halloween party began just after dark and was a smashing good time. Everybody arrived dressed up as an aspect of their subconscious: a Wonder Woman, a hobo, a cat, a Hell's Angel. These costumes reminded me of a cartoon I'd seen years before, one in which an Acme Hat Company delivery truck crosses a tall bridge. While doing so, it unleashes hundreds of hats that float to the ground and land on the characters, who suddenly become whichever hat had landed on their heads: pilgrims, Valkyres, toreadors, gangsters, and ballerinas. Wendy was working at the hospital's emergency room that night. I wondered what her hat might be: Joan of Arc's armored hood? Florence Nightingale's white nursing hat?

My astronaut's costume was a smash. I don't think I'd ever had as many people, male or female, hit on me the way they did that night— its silver skin seemed to truly ooze sex. I began wondering about ways to further the astronaut look in daily life. A crew cut? An orange Corvette Stingray?

But Hamilton and Pam were the ones who stole the show with their costumes that night. Pam walked in the door wearing two large red cardboard hearts—one on her back and one on her front. ("I'm acinnamon candy!") Behind her was Hamilton, who zombie-walked through the door making the party go silent. Pam and Linus had done a remarkable job of transforming him into a rotting zombie with gobbets of flesh hanging down his arms and legs, his skin a map of olive green, ochre lesions and eruptions of vile mashed-potato goo. Black plague sores dotted his body like island outlines on a map of Southeast Asia. After waiting a moment for his costume to make full impact, Hamilton chirped up: "I'm a Leaker!"

We all said, "Wha— ?"

"A Leaker. You don't know what a Leaker is?"

No's all around.

"Oh, I must tell you. Oh—wait a second—" He reached for his eye. "Oops! My eye just fell out." Everybody screamed in good-natured horror as Hamilton squished his left eye shut and held up a glass eye. The music turned down slightly. He pretended to reinsert the eye and said, "There. That's better. Now, a cocktail, methinks. Mr. Liver is thirstier than usual." A tray of martinis came by; Hamilton grabbed one and plopped in the eyeball.

The party started up again and Hamilton and Pam joined Linus, Tina Lowry, and me. Tina said, "No fair, Hamilton. You have to tell us what a Leaker is."

"With pleasure," Hamilton said. "I first discovered Leakers maybe fifteen years ago—back when I was living down in that Gastown apartment building. Eighty-one? Eighty-two? I forget. Anyway, my neighbors were mostly a mixture of poor arty types and senior citizens on fixed incomes."

"Get to the Leakers, Hamilton!" Tina said.

"Okay. All right, already. Well, what would happen is this: I lived there for two years, and each August during the annual heat wave, a senior citizen on an upper floor would pay his rent, lock all of his doors and windows, watch TV, and promptly die. But because they were old or didn't have friends or what have you, nobody noticed them from one month to the next. And so—"

"I don't think I want to hear this," Tina said.

"And so—one morning I was walking over the cobblestones,returning from a pierogi breakfast at Gunther's Deli, and there were not one but three fire trucks out front of the building, as well as cop cars and two inhalator trucks. The firemen were wearing ventilator masks normally used for toxic spills, they had hatchets and crowbars, and they were carrying piles of construction debris they chucked into a specialized van."

"Oh, God—" said Tina, holding her stomach.

"That's right," said Hamilton. "Unit 403. Mrs. Kitchen. The people in the suite below were reporting something black making a stain on the ceiling right above their TV set. The landlord went upstairs to investigate. There was no answer, and so he opened the door and was whomped on the nose by the absolute worst smell in the known universe—shit and piss and vomit, but a thousand times worse. The firemen arrived and had to remove every single object in the apartment and burn the rubbish. Even the Formica kitchen counter and the dry-wall were impregnated with the smell. The suite below had to be gutted, too. That's where Pamela here comes in."

We looked at Pam in her cinnamon heart costume. She curtsied. Hamilton continued: "The police brought in smell experts from the university. They told us this weird fact, that odors are like a game of tug-o-war. If one smell is pulling one way, there's always another smell to pull it in the exact opposite way. And apparently the opposite smell of dead people is artificial cinnamon."

To a chorus of ooh's, Hamilton went on. "For weeks afterward, the building was replete with sickening sweet fumes of cinnamon candy. The odor vanished after a while, but the next year I returned from working up north and the cinnamon smell was there again. I asked my next door neighbor, Dawn, if there'd been another Leaker, and she said, 'Yup. Suite 508. Mr. Huong.' So next time you smell cinnamon …"

A few minutes later, Tina and a few wardrobe people were all quite sozzled; I was drinking club soda. We became increasingly silly; Suzy from payroll and I went off to neck like teenagers in the backyard between the tool shed and the composter. Once there, we escalated through all levels of intimacy rather quickly until finally we were justourselves. The sky was black and starlit, with a pale blue Japanese fishbone cloud tickling the moon. And so we reclined. We were cold, but so what?

We watched the sky silently, as though a gentle wind was blowing through our minds. It was then, just past midnight, when my pager beeped and shooed away our intimacy. We dressed and went inside. I dialed the number. It was Wendy calling from the hospital to tell me Karen was having difficulty. "Her readouts are going all wonky. Her heart's beating irregularly and her brain print looks like a seismo-graph."

I couldn't imagine the world without Karen. "Should I come down right now?"

"No. Sleep. Wait until morning. I know that sounds heartless, but we'll know more then. Lois and George aren't coming either."

I began to cry. Wendy said, "You want me to come pick you guys up?"

"No. Everybody's tanked. You missed a fun party."

"Don't do anything drastic, Richard." She meant don't drink.

"I'll be there in the morning," I said. "I need to go be alone."

"I'm here. You have my pager number."

But I did drink—I grabbed an almost full twenty-sixer of J&B and walked out of the party and over to the dam, which was silent. The water was turned off as the water levels were so low just before the fall rains. The dam was white like aluminum under the moon, clean and fat and strong. I walked across it, sipping from the bottle, and having crossed the dam, I had the notion that I would walk to Rabbit Lane through the canyon's pathways and once there, dump my butt on either Lois and George's front stoop or on Linus and Wendy's. I hadn't been drinking for years; the Scotch took only a few baby sips to transport me into that other place I wanted to go.

I stumbled down a steep path with the world around me, the trees and air hushed as though waiting to jump out at me and yell, "Surprise!" Pearly blue clouds lit my shoes, which snagged on tree roots; my hands crushed delicate fall leaves. My mouth misted the airwith chuffs of steam that vanished instantly, like a thought of a thought of a thought. Inside my head I saw the ghosts of old logging trains that once passed by here. The land was still—even now, ninety years later—beginning to heal, unaware of the sterile, suburban tracts above, the driveways and flowers and dishwashers and bird feeders. What seemed like tall trees paled from within the mighty ancient lumber stumps from which they grew.

A few swigs later, I was down by the salmon hatcheries, a fish-growing facility built in the seventies to help the Pacific salmon spawn. Like the dam upriver, the hatcheries were aluminum white in the moon. They were rectangular shaped concrete mazes, thigh-deep with cold water. They resembled office towers laid on their sides. Juvenile salmon skulked through the concrete maze like bored guests at an amusement park.

Another swig and I was soon down below the salmon hatcheries, alone as the sunlight began leaking into the sky at dawn. With no water flowing down from the dam, the river had become a beaded string of dark ponds. I hobbled on the riverbed boulders, my balance gone. The Scotch bottle broke. And in that breaking, I looked to a pool behind a rock, a large deep river pool. There I saw a thousand salmon waiting to spawn, unable to swim upriver, trapped together, this clump of eggplant-purple salmon whose only wish, whose only yearning, was to go home. These salmon mulled within the stilled pool—a deep dark voluptuous brain—fluttering at the edges like black apple blossoms. The fish were dreaming of sex and the death that comes afterward.

The whiskey caught me. I had to vomit, so I turned around and retched into a pile of stones. I hopscotched on the rocks a bit farther down the river and tripped and fell, knocking my head on a boulder. Woozy, I laid down on my stomach, my head propped and looking into the water. The sky was brightening, and I rubbed my skull.

I looked at the pale blue sky. I saw trees the color of Karen's eyes.

A seagull screeched, a heron jumped up, and water trickled down. I remembered an old thought: When I was young, my father always ensured that the family would visit the killer whales in the StanleyPark Aquarium once every year. It was his way of letting us know that our city lay beside the ocean and we lived where we did only by Nature's good grace. The aquarium wasn't as crowded then as it became in later years; one could easily ask the whale tenders if one could touch the whales—their bright white leather spots, their black dorsals packed with steel, and their teeth of sharpened ivory drills circling meaty, clean pink tongues the size of a tabletop, swallowing buckets of platinum fish at one go. A decade later, when it became my own turn to take Megan to visit the whales, I discovered that Megan had already decided penning whales in a zoo was cruel—animal prison. She became an avid follower of any newspaper information about whales being captured or released, which struck a chord in me. One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild—into its ancestral sea—its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end. I mention this as I consider what happened next in my life and as I consider the changes that followed.

A bird trilled above. I blinked and paused, and then I cried, because I knew that at that same moment three miles away in a crypt-like hospital room Karen was blinking, too—that after 6,719 days of sleep, she had just awakened.