LIFE AFTER GOD
DOUGLAS COUPLAND
Washington Square Press
New York London Toronto Sydney
Praise for Douglas Coupland’s Life After God
“Captivating…. LIFE AFTER GOD’s offbeat quality is touching, even disarming…. One comes to appreciate the characters’ quirkiness….”
—Brad Newsham, San Francisco Chronicle
“LIFE AFTER GOD strikes metaphysical chords that remove it from the confessional genre…. The ideas expressed here, in prose that is leaner and much more telling, reach ahead….”
—William C. Brisick, Los Angeles Daily News
Don’t Miss Douglas Coupland’s Previous Novel Shampoo Planet
“Having called Coupland’s first book a Catcher in the Rye for our time, I repeat myself. Nobody has a better finger on the pulse of the twenty-something generation….”
—Louise Bernikow, Cosmopolitan
LITTLE CREATURES
I was driving you up to Prince George to the home of your grandfather, the golf wino. I was tired—I shouldn’t even have been driving such a long way, really—twelve hours of solid driving north from Vancouver. For the previous month, I had been living out of a suitcase and sleeping on a futon in a friend’s den, consuming a diet of Kentucky Fried Chicken and angry recriminating phone calls with You-Know-Who. The nomadic lifestyle had taken its toll. I had been feeling permanently on the cusp of a flu, feeling at that point where I just wanted to borrow somebody else’s coat—borrow somebody else’s life—their aura. I seemed to have lost the ability to create any more aura on my own.
It was a jerky drive, punctuated by my having to stop at convenience stores and diners all along the way to try and reach my lawyer from pay phones. On the good side, however, you were noticing all of the animals in the world for the first time in your life—all of the animal life outside the car’s windows. It started near the trip’s beginning, in the farm lands of the Fraser Valley with its cows and sheep and horses. It became obsessive a half-hour later just past Chilliwack near the end of the valley when I pointed out a bald eagle sitting like a big stack of money beside the road atop a snaggy pine tree. You were so excited that you didn’t even notice that the Flintstone Bedrock City amusement park was closed.
You asked questions about the animals, some real toughies, and these questions came as a welcome diversion from pay phones and tiredness. Just after you saw the eagle you asked me, seemingly out of the blue, “Where do people come from?” I wasn’t sure if you meant the birds and bees or if you meant the ark or what have you. Either direction was a tad too much for me to handle just then, but you did get me to thinking. I mean, five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere—sproing!—with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You’d think we’d give the issue more thought than we do.
You repeated your question again and so I gave you a makeshift answer of the sort parents aren’t supposed to give. I told you people came “from back east.” This seemed to satisfy you. And then at that point we both became distracted—you, by a blotch of raccoon-based road kill that riveted your attention just off the highway’s shoulder and me by another phone booth. Lawyers—Jesus. Some day you cross this thin line and you really realize that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.
The phone call was long and filled with not-very-good news interrupted by 18-wheelers roaring past and by me yelling out at you not to poke the poor ex-raccoon with a stick. I told Wayne, my lawyer, about the eagle, and he loved it, because he always calls his ego his eagle. “My eagle is soaring today.” That kind of thing.
After slamming down the receiver I bought coffee and a 7-Up from the adjacent truck stop and we continued our drive, with you continuing your outlook for more animals, specifically bears and deer, as the valley turned into mountains. We turned onto the Coquihalla Highway and civilization melted away and I was relieved at how quickly the landscape became wild.
There was a dusting of snow on the upper reaches of the mountains, and there was a fresh smell coming through the vents, like Christmas trees. The end-of-day sunlight was strobing through the treetops beside us and in a valley below we saw a tuft of white birch that looked like the garnish on a Japanese meal. The road was so long and so steep, and the mountains so large, that I began to think of how the new world must have frightened and enchanted the pioneers. Our drive became serene.
I thought some more about the animals.
And this in turn made me think about humans. To be specific, I wondered about what it is that makes humans, well … human? What is human behavior? For example, we know what dog behavior is: dogs do doggy things—they chase sticks, they sniff bums and they stick their heads out of moving car windows. And we know what cat behavior is: cats chase mice, they rub up against your shin when they’re hungry and they have trouble deciding whether or not they want to exit a door or stay inside when you go to let them out. So what exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human?
I looked at it a different way. I thought: here it is, as a species we’ve built satellites and cablevision and Ford Mustangs but what if, say, it was dogs and not people who had invented these things. How would dogs express their essential dogginess with inventions? Would they build space stations shaped like big bones that orbited the earth? Would they make movies of the moon and sit in drive-ins howling at the show?
Or what if it was cats and not humans who invented technology—would cats build scratching-post skyscrapers covered entirely with shag carpeting? Would they have TV shows starring rubber squeak toys?
But it wasn’t other animals who invented machines, it was humans. So what is it about our essential humanity that we are expressing with our inventions? What is it that makes us us?
I thought of how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no other animal equivalent were smoking, body-building, and writing. That’s not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.
Below us on the right, the Coquihalla River raged. The car cruised along smoothly. Then, just after we emerged from the second of two snowsheds we saw some white-tailed deer—a stag, a doe and a knob-antlered yearling. You got overexcited, like you’d just had five bowls of Count Chocula. We stopped the car and got out to look and became deadly silent. The three creatures gave us only the most brief, innocently curious glance before delicately bounding back into their woods. Getting back into the car I said to you, “I wonder what animals must make of human beings with our crazy red cars and colorful clothing. What do you think, eh? They must think us people are the freakiest things going.” You paid no attention to this.
Then we drove not even a mile further and we saw two bighorn sheep on a ridge, scrambling down a plume of gravel. Again we stopped the car and got out. Even though it was awfully cold, high up in the mountains, we watched these two creatures until they, too, vanished into their forest.
We drove away and we were both quiet, digesting the appearances of these animals in our lives, and their meanings. What is a deer? What is a bighorn sheep? Why are certain creatures attractive to some of us, and some not? What are creatures?
I thought of my own likes. I like dogs because they always stay in love with the same person. Your mother likes cats because they know what they want. I think that if cats were double the size they are now, they’d probably be illegal. But if dogs were even three times as big as they are now, they’d still be good friends. Go figure.
You like all animals at the moment, although no doubt you will one day choose your favorites. Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures. You popped out of your mother’s belly, I sa
w your eyes, and I knew that you were already you. And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature—the core me—essentially hasn’t changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five. Sometimes I wonder if natures can be changed at all or if we are stuck with them as surely as a dog wants bones or as a cat chases mice.
We stopped for dinner in the town of Merritt at the Chicken Shack. You brought in some of your books to read while my red eyes scanned The Globe and Mail like a stick being scraped back and forth over the pavement.
Afterward we resumed our drive. The sky had a lavender glaze and the mists on the top of the mountain peaks were like a world that was still only at the idea stage. We cut into a fog in a valley, as though driving into the past.
We then crested a hill and descended into another valley, where a flock of unknown birds were floating down the center of a deep canyon, as though locked in amber. And then we descended into the canyon where there were no houses or sounds—just us and the road—and a snow began to fall and the sun began to fail completely and the world turned milky and I said, “Hold your breath” and you said, “Why?” and I said, “Because we’re entering the beginning of time.” And we did.
Time, Baby—so much, so much time left until the end of my life—sometimes I go crazy at how slowly time passes yet how quickly my body ages.
But I shouldn’t allow myself to think like this. I have to remind myself that time only frightens me when I think of having to spend it alone. Sometimes I scare myself with how many of my thoughts revolve around making me feel better about sleeping alone in a room.
We stayed at a motel in Kamloops that night, halfway to our ultimate destination. I just couldn’t make it any further. After we got settled into our room, the big drama was that we forgot your Dr. Seuss book back at the Chicken Shack in Merritt. You refused to settle down until I told you a story and so I was forced to improvise in spite of my tiredness, something I am not good at doing. And so out of nowhere, I just said what came into my head and I told you the story of “Doggles.”
“Doggles?” you asked.
“Yes—Doggles—the dog who wore goggles.”
And then you asked me what did Doggles do, and I couldn’t think of anything else aside from the fact that he wore goggles.
You persisted and so I said to you, “Well, Doggles was supposed to have had a starring role in the Cat in the Hat series of books except …”
“Except what?” you asked.
“Except he had a drinking problem,” I replied.
“Just like Grandpa,” you said, pleased to be able to make a real life connection.
“I suppose so,” I said.
So then you wanted to hear about another animal, and so I asked you if you’d ever heard of Squirrelly the Squirrel, and you said you hadn’t. So I said, “Well, Squirrelly was going to have an exhibition of nut paintings at the Vancouver Art Gallery except …”
“Except what?” you asked.
“Except Mrs. Squirrelly had baby squirrels and so Squirrelly had to get a job at the peanut butter factory and was never able to finish his work.”
“Oh.”
I paused. “You want to hear about any other animals?”
“Uh, I guess so,” you replied, a bit ambiguously.
“Did you ever hear of Clappy the Kitten?”
“No.”
“Well, Clappy the Kitten was going to be a movie star one day. But then she rang up too many bills on her MasterCard and had to get a job as a teller at the Hongkong Bank of Canada to pay them off. Before long she was simply too old to try becoming a star—or her ambition disappeared—or both. And she found it was easier to just talk about doing it instead of actually doing it and …”
“And what,” you asked.
“Nothing, baby,” I said, stopping myself then and there—feeling suddenly more dreadful than you can imagine having told you about these animals—filling your head with these stories—stories of these beautiful little creatures who were all supposed to have been part of a fairy tale but who got lost along the way.
MY HOTEL YEAR
1 Cathy
It was years ago. I had been going through a patch of intense brooding and had made a big hubbub about severing most of my ties to my past. I had moved into a rent-by-the-week cold water downtown hotel room on Granville Street and had cut all my hair off, stopped shaving, and had thorns tattooed on my right arm. I spent my days lying on my bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the drunken brawls in other rooms, the squawk of other TVs and the smashing of other mirrors. My fellow tenants were a mixture of pensioners, runaways, drug dealers and so forth. The whole ensemble had made a suitably glamorous backdrop for my belief that my poverty, my fear of death, my sexual frustration and my inability to connect with others would carry me off into some sort of Epiphany. I had lots of love to give—it’s just that no one was taking it then. I had thought I was finding consolation in solitude, but to be honest I think I was only acquiring a veneer of bitterness.
My neighbors across the hall at this time were a headbanger couple, Cathy and Pup-Tent. Cathy was a seventeen-year-old runaway from Kamloops up north; Pup-Tent was a bit older and from back East. They both had the ghostly complexions, big hair and black leather wardrobe that heavy metal people like so much. They tended to live at night and sleep late into the afternoon, but sometimes I would see Pup-Tent being the very picture of enterprise down on Granville Street, selling hashish cut with Tender Vittles to treeplanters on city leave. Or I would see Cathy, selling feather earrings in the rain on Robson Street. Sometimes I would see them both at the corner grocery store where they would be shopping for Kraft dinner, grenadine syrup, peeled carrot sticks, Cap’n Crunch, After Eight dinner mints and Lectric Shave. We would nod in a neighborly way and occasionally we would meet in the pub at the Yale Hotel where we would get to talking, and it was via these encounters that I got to know them. They would sit there drawing skulls and crossbones on each other’s transdermal nicotine patches and drink draft beers.
Pup-Tent: You want to talk?
Cathy: No.
Pup-Tent: Okay then.
(A pause.)
Cathy: Stop ignoring me.
By themselves they could be interesting, but as a twosome their conversation was a bit limited. Sometimes it is nice to sit with people and not say much of anything.
But any adoration in their relationship was strictly one-way. Cathy was in love with Pup-Tent—her first love—whereas I suspect Pup-Tent saw Cathy as just an interchangeable girlfriend unit. He would “keep her in line” by flaunting the ease with which he could seduce other women. He was good looking by any standard, and his main pick-up technique was to pump out negative signals so that women with low self-esteem would be glued to him. In this way he could always have the upper hand. A not-so-fresh barfly would ask him, “How old do you think I am, cutie?” and Pup-Tent would reply, “Thirty-three and divorced—or twenty-eight with a drinking problem.” If she was his type, then she’d be hooked then and there.
This flirting drove Cathy crazy. Sometimes when Pup-Tent disappeared from the table she would tell me so. When Cathy’s sister, Donna, came down from Kamloops to visit one day and sat with us, she asked Cathy what it was she saw in Pup-Tent. “Let me get this straight, Cath: jail record … violent … no job….”
“Oh,” Cathy replied, “but I like the way he walks.”
On evenings when Pup-Tent and I were by ourselves at the pub, he would ask me things such as, “How come a woman screwed up on drugs is so much scarier than a guy screwed up on drugs?” And I would reply, “Is this a joke?” and he’d say, “No, I’m really asking you.”
In general, though, they seemed affable enough with each other, and most of the time their conversation moved along predictable lines.
Pup-Tent: “Why are you staring at me?”
C
athy: “I’m wondering what you’re thinking about.”
Pup-Tent: “Why do you care what I think?”
Cathy: “Okay, I don’t.”
Pup-Tent: “Then prove it by minding your own business.”
After a while, though, the two of them began having fights that were loud enough to wake me up from across the hall. Cathy would appear on the street with the occasional bruise or red eyeball. But as with most couples involved in this sort of relationship, the subject of domestic violence never came up in their conversations with others.
One day Cathy, myself and a street kid—a male exotic dancer on his day off—were discussing death over a plate of fries with gravy at Tat’s Coffee Inn. The question was, “What do you think dying is like?” Cathy said it was like you’re in a store and a friend drives up to the front door in a beautiful car and says “Hop in—let’s go on a trip!” And so you go out for a spin. And once you’re out on the road and having a great time, suddenly your friend turns to you and says, “Oh, by the way, you’re dead,” and you realize they’re right, but it doesn’t matter because you’re happy and this is an adventure and this is fine.
Once, on a morning after a particularly noisy night, Cathy and I were walking down Drake Street and we saw a crow standing in a puddle, motionless, the sky reflected on its surface so that it looked as though the crow was standing on the sky. Cathy then told me that she thinks that there is a secret world just underneath the surface of our own world. She said that the secret world was more important than the one we live in. “Just imagine how surprised fish would be,” she said, “if they knew all the action going on just on the other side of the water. Or just imagine yourself being able to breathe underwater and living with the fish. The secret world is that close and it’s that different.”
Life After God Page 1