Life After God

by Douglas Coupland

  It was around noon and some tired wisps of cloud hazed the sun and it was not warm outside. On the seat beside me sat a lukewarm nearly empty bottle of Gatorade, an improperly folded map of Nevada and some unplayed chips from the Showboat Casino; in the trunk was a cardboard Mitsubishi 21″ TV box whose contents were both too illegal and too shameful to mention here.

  The car radio’s SEEK button was continuously prowling for new stations. Quirks in the Van Allen radiation belts allowed me to receive radio stations from all over the West—those fragments of cultural memory and information that compose the invisible information structure I consider my real home—my virtual community. I was hearing the sort of information that I knew would make me homesick if I were stuck in Europe or dying in Vietnam: it was 61° in San Francisco and 58° in Daly City; a Christian talk show from Las Vegas asked listeners to pray for a housewife with lupus; traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway was frozen owing to an overturned propane tanker at the Normandie onramp; the Mayor of Albuquerque was accepting listener phone-ins.

  I was on the Interstate 15 somewhere between the blink-and-you-miss-it town of Jean and the gaudy casinoplex at State Line. Outside the car there were no trees or billboards or plants or animals or buildings—not even fences—-just radio waves and the Mojave’s volcanic granite, experienced at seventy-seven miles per hour.

  It was my birthday—I remember that—31, and I also remember that I wasn’t feeling lonely even though it was my birthday and I was alone and I was in the middle of nowhere. A few years previously, a similar situation would have had me sweaty with anxiety, but loneliness had of late become an emotion I had stopped feeling so intensely. I had learned loneliness’s extremes and had mapped its boundaries; loneliness was no longer something new or frightening—just another aspect of life that, once identified, seemed to disappear. But I realized a capacity for not feeling lonely carried a very real price, which was the threat of feeling nothing at all. Perhaps the nothingness outside was trying to seep into the car in whatever way it could. I rolled up my window even though I knew it was rolled up as high as possible already and again pressed the SEEK button.

  I will now tell you what was in the Mitsubishi cardboard box: 2,000 syringes stolen from a Kaiser Permanente hospital in North Las Vegas plus 1,440 ampules of 50cc Parastolin anabolic steroids smuggled up from Mexico. I was to deliver this box to a private physical trainer of TV celebrities named Oscar who lived in the Las Palmas neighborhood of Palm Springs.

  Now, I believe you own your body outright, so what you do with it is your own business. I therefore do not have a moral problem with steroid usage, but I recognize the fact that many people do. And of course I know that steroids are illegal, and that shooting up with used needles is a common channel of HIV transmission. Actually, it was precisely because of the HIV transmission business that I thought I was doing a good deed—by providing clean syringes to the bodybuilding community of the American Southwest. But this is a moral fine point that is not up for discussion here. The point is that the syringes were stolen, and while I did not actually steal them myself, were I to be somehow apprehended, I would be considered an accessory. I didn’t even want to begin imagining what would happen to me if this happened because my own criminal record, while not entirely shocking, is not entirely lily white.

  I could hear the ampules tinkling in the trunk while I hummed along to an old Four Lads song on a station that warbled in from Salt Lake City. I was in the middle of the three-lane highway in between the speeding lane and the truck-lane. My engine was pleasingly silent. I sang loudly and forced myself to listen to my voice: flat and hopefully generic, for I have always tried to speak with a voice that has no regional character—a voice from nowhere. This is because I have never really felt like I was “from” anywhere; home to me, as I have said, is a shared electronic dream of cartoon memories, half-hour sitcoms and national tragedies. I have always prided myself on my lack of accent—my lack of any discernible regional flavor. I used to think mine was a Pacific Northwest accent, from where I grew up, but then I realized my accent was simply the accent of nowhere—the accent of a person who has no fixed home in their mind.

  Here’s what was on my mind: I had recently begun worrying about my feelings disappearing more and more—noticing that I had seemed to simply be feeling less and less. These worries became more focused and stronger as I was driving. I felt like I was turning into a reptile, an iguana sitting on a rock with a decaying memory and no compassion. I thought of the TV stars Oscar terrorizes with his fitness routines, the old ones with sagging leathery cheeks, the ones who have seen everything, twice, but who still smile for the paparazzi on the sidewalk outside the Century City Cineplex Odeon—reptiles for whom life has been serial betrayal since the dawn of television. I figure that’s what people become as they age: reptiles; these old TV stars are merely the amplified version.

  My drive continued and worries about vanishing feelings remained like a background radiation. But I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherwise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking. New scenery continually erases what came before; memory is lost, shuffled, relabeled and forgotten. Gum is chewed; buttons are pushed; windows are lowered and opened. A fast moving car is the only place where you’re legally allowed to not deal with your problems. It’s enforced meditation and this is good.

  A dirty black Camaro passed my car, driven by Debbie, pagan goddess of Dairy Queens. A radio station vanished, and another from Yuma replaced it: gospel tunes. The static was bad.

  I began wondering exactly what was lying at the end of the road for me, in all senses of the word. There was nobody waiting for me in Palm Springs; Oscar was in Beverly Hills until tomorrow and he hardly counted. Nor was there anybody waiting for me anywhere, for that matter.

  I was wondering what was the logical end product of this recent business of my feeling less and less. Is feeling nothing the inevitable end result of believing in nothing? And then I got to feeling frightened—thinking that there might not actually be anything to believe in, in particular. I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.

  A mobile home was stalled on the road’s shoulder. Off to the right, to the north, fighter jets from Nellis Air Force Base braided together their vapor trails.

  I began to wonder what exactly I had believed in up until now that had allowed me to reach my present emotional circumstance. This is not an easy thing to do. Precisely articulating one’s beliefs is difficult. My own task had been made more difficult because I had been raised without religion by parents who had broken with their own pasts and moved to the West Coast—who had raised their children clean of any ideology in a cantilevered modern house overlooking the Pacific Ocean—at the end of history, or so they had wanted to believe.

  I tried to forget what I was thinking about and just listen to the radio. On it there was a story of an Arizona man who was shot in the head, but who, in the hospital waiting room, sneezed out the bullet which had lodged in his sinus cavity, and which fell with a clink onto the shiny black floor.

  There was the story of a central California widow who had fought to have her recently dead husband exhumed, pleading her case that before he had died he had swallowed her diamond ring in some sort of spite and that she wanted this jewel returned. But in the end she confessed that she had not slept for many many weeks and that she had been spending her nights lying on his grave, trying to speak to him, and that all she really wanted was just to be able to see his face one more time.

  And there was a story of a young child who, upon hearing that his parents were divorcing, had disappeared. A search party had been called out to comb the neighborhood and he was found, two days later, alive, having buried himself within the pink fiberglass insulation of the family’s attic, trying to become a part of the house, trying to pretend he was dead.

  And th
ere were Christian radio stations, too, so many many stations, and the voices on them seemed so enthusiastic and committed. They sounded like they sincerely believed in what they were saying, and so for once I decided to pay attention to these stations, trying to figure out what exactly it was they were believing in, trying to understand the notion of Belief.

  The stations talked about Jesus and salvation and I found it was pretty hard listening because these religious types are always so whacked out and extreme. I think they take things too literally and miss too many points because of this literalism. This had always been the basic flaw with religion—or so I had been taught, and so (I realized) I had come to believe. So at least I knew one thing for sure that I believed in.

  The radio stations all seemed to be talking about Jesus nonstop, and it seemed to be this crazy orgy of projection, with everyone projecting onto Jesus the antidotes to the things that had gone wrong in their own lives. He is Love. He is Forgiveness. He is Compassion. He is a Wise Career Decision. He is a Child Who Loves Me.

  I was feeling a sense of loss as I heard these people. I felt like Jesus was sex—or rather, I felt like I was from another world where sex did not exist and I arrived on Earth and everyone talked about how good sex felt, and showed me their pornography and built their lives around sex, and yet I was forever cut off from the true sexual experience. I did not deny that the existence of Jesus was real to these people—it was merely that I was cut off from their experience in a way that was never connectable.

  And yet I had to ask myself over and over what it was that these radio people were seeing in the face of Jesus. They sounded like their lives had once been so messed up and lost as they spoke; at least they were no longer so lost anymore—like AA people. So I figured that was a good thing.

  These thoughts were all occurring after I had crested the Halloran Summit and was descending down the Shadow Mountains into the town of Baker, a truck stop oasis where I pulled over and ordered a hamburger and strawberry pie at the Bun Boy restaurant, home of the World’s Largest Thermometer: 134 ft tall and digitally displaying 54°. While waiting for my food to arrive I made phone calls from the Pacific Bell booth next to the washrooms. I returned a message on my Las Vegas answering machine from Laurelle, who operates a jai alai court near the Fremont. The first thing she did was ask me my birthday. When I gave her that particular day’s date, she didn’t make the connection or wish me a happy birthday or anything. She instead read me my horoscope and then she told me the news, that Oscar had been busted in North Hollywood and the cops would most likely be on my tail as a result.

  My chest constricted; my brain stem caught fire. Suffice it to say, the main imperative at the moment became to ditch the boxes of Parastolin and syringes as soon as possible. But simply disposing the boxes right there in the public trash cans in the town of Baker was out of the question. The place was like a Twilight Zone episode, and riddled with cops—two cops for every diner: there were CHiPS, there were San Bernardino County sheriffs, and there were even two guys from the forestry service which was such a joke because there couldn’t have been a tree for fifty miles in any direction.

  Ordinary trash cans themselves were out of the question—my fingerprints were all over everything, anyway, and what if some busybody were to find them? The only method of disposal, I figured, was to bury the syringes somewhere further down the road. Fortunately my car was a rental and so the police wouldn’t know to look for it in particular. As long as I drove the speed limit, everything was cool and I could consider what to do with my boxes of loot.

  I continued my drive to Palm Springs via Barstow and San Bernardino and looped around east and onto Interstate 10. I was indeed feeling many things—panic mostly—and I chewed too many sticks of Freedent gum and turned off the radio and completely forgot to resume those thoughts I had been thinking as I descended into the valley before lunch, my thoughts about the face of Jesus. I thought instead of my growling stomach and regretted leaving my lunch on the counter back at the Bun Boy after my hasty exit. All I had had to eat all day was half a cherry Pop-Tart and a cup of coffee back in Las Vegas.

  Two hours later I was about ten miles out of Palm Springs, pulling off the Indian Avenue freeway exit in the opposite direction of town, in pursuit of a steroid burial spot. From shotgun practice I roughly remembered the desert and gulches between Desert Hot Springs and Thousand Palms; I figured that area would probably best suit my purposes—a meaner, sparser part of the desert, on the eastern side of the San Andreas fault, where citizens kited checks and drove in cars in which windows had been lost long ago and replaced with plastic bags. People there were probably less inclined to ask any questions about anything out of the normal.

  I was a bit frazzled from the long drive. My shirt felt sweaty and dirty—car sweat. And I was cranky, too, or rather, I would have been cranky if people had been near me. Sometimes you can’t realize you’re in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.

  My sense of reason also seemed to have dwindled. I suppose I simply should have ditched the box along any old dirt side road, but my state of mind was such that only a proper burial would suffice. And so I drove and drove, looking for just the right side road leading off into the wastes—a road on which I could simply disappear and, if not bury the box, then scatter the contents and cover them with sand, like kitty litter. But even out there in the center of nowhere there was always a car zooming by in the distance that might see me. I had to drive a far way out before I could be confident of not being discovered dumping my cargo.

  The road I finally found was twisty, with shoulders littered with shotgun shell casings and smashed beer bottles. It ran down an ignored, very wide and low canyon. From it stemmed a variety of forks leading into an array of smaller Joshua tree-specked crevasses and washes. To judge from the occasional desiccated mattresses, broken couches and refrigerators around me, others had passed this way with similar notions of disposal.

  It felt good to be driving at a speed other than seventy-five miles per hour, and over real earth, not just cement and pavement, so I drove farther than I should have. When I reached the end of the road I had chosen—a path, almost—I stopped the car and got out to stretch. I surveyed my dumping spot: ugly and barren and boxed off from view from anywhere else.

  I opened the trunk and removed the Mitsubishi carton, spraying the contents onto the sand to the side of the car. I ripped off the flaps and molded a spatula, scooping sand on top of the white syringe wrapping papers, watching the last of the glass Parastolin ampules gleam under the late afternoon sun.

  My movements were jerky, and I could feel my bloodstream having a major sugar crash. I was angry that I had forgotten to feed myself because in general, once I get too hungry I become very angry. I knew that even if I hurried to the nearest gas station and got some emergency crap food, that would still be a half hour away.

  From this, one can imagine how badly I reacted when the car didn’t start when I turned the key in the ignition. Happy fucking birthday asshole. I couldn’t believe my luck. I looked under the hood, but the engine bore no resemblance to the V8’s I’d remembered from my teenage years. The realization hit me in a lightning crack of anger that I had no choice but to walk back to the main road, and from there probably walk the entire way back into the nearest phone or convenience store. Nobody gives rides to lone males walking through the desert. Fuck.

  And so my walk began. It did not begin well, and it quickly worsened. There was only a little sun left and once it went behind the San Gorgonio mountains the lights would be out completely. A swarm of tweeze-resistant prickly burrs decided to infest the tops of my socks. The air was windy and chilly and would only grow more so. I was thirsty, I was ravenous with hunger and quickly went from anger to confusion and mild dizziness.

  My arms were crossed, I was muttering fucks and shits under my breath, and then after a while I just shut up and tried to walk with a blank head—trying to make time disappear by pretending time no longer ex
isted. And this fake Zen continued until I realized after maybe an hour of not getting anywhere, that I had taken a wrong fork somewhere back—I had walked who-knows-how-far on the wrong road.

  I was the biggest loser in the world. I couldn’t even get mad. I groaned with despair, not even knowing if retracing my path would make any difference because I wasn’t sure where the correct forks were.

  So I sat down on a rock to sharpen my wits as well as to huddle and keep my warmth in. I watched the sunlight fade on schedule. I then turned and walked back in the direction I had come from, mechanically pushing myself along, having no other option, not having the faintest idea what road I was on, getting more and more fatalistic about what might happen to me.

  This went on for some hours, by which time the sky had long been fully dark and fully cold. And on top of the stick-insect discomfort, the boredom and endlessness of the walk, I was spooked by the basic darkness of night. I was considering all sorts of scenarios one might encounter in the desert—rampaging bikers cartooned on angel dust; snuff movies in progress, being filmed with shotguns pointed at unwanted visitors; rattlers slithering over abandoned heatless murdered bodies. I thought of what an unglamorous end to my life to simply be terminated out here in the emptiness. I wanted to be in a city or a town—a community—any community. And so I was in this woeful state, when an event occurred that made me lose my breath—I became aware that there was another person walking behind me.