Life After God

by Douglas Coupland

  Final snapshot: on the afternoon I have obtained my driver’s license and have proudly driven in Mom’s station wagon down to meet Laurie at another of her jobs, on Marine Drive where she has been dressed as a clown giving out balloons to kids at a franchised fast food place. She has ditched work and has hopped in the wagon with me—dopey wig, makeup and all—and we have cruised around and smoked cigarettes, Laurie having dispensed the finger to those who have incurred our wrath on the road. Afterward we have gone to rummage through Chinatown dumpsters for cool stuff—bamboo slat crates and discarded calendars. Laurie’s big foamy clown’s feet are sticking out of the debris.

  I arrived at Whistler about an hour after I left the fire. Through the rain I saw the clusters of computer-generated alpine architecture now lining the roadside, condos mostly, and was surprised at how much the resort had grown from a 1970s ski bum hideaway into its new incarnation as a yuppie hell.

  Ski season had not quite begun and the town had the privileged, insider feel of any resort town in the off season: empty roads, buildings with dark windows and closed restaurants. I stopped at the Husky gas station to pick up a map, checked at a pay phone for my phone messages back in Vancouver and then returned to my car. As I did this, two glossy smooth old Karmann Ghias, like M&M’s with wheels, pulled up to the pumps from each direction, one red and one yellow.

  There was a startled awkward moment as the two drivers noticed the other’s car. And then the woman at the cash desk said to me from behind, “Think of what lovely orange babies they’ll have.” I laughed and for a brief moment I felt I was a part of something larger than just myself, I felt like I had entered a world of magic.

  But this is all getting too abstract. Let me talk about real things. Let me talk about when things started to go wrong with Laurie, more than ten years ago, back when I used to believe in the concept of rescuing people.

  Laurie had always had a mouth on her, and was by far the most argumentative of all the kids—probably the brightest, too. But in her late teens she became, to an alarming degree, alternately sullen, hyperactive and argumentative. She would terrorize the dinner table and all other family gatherings by pointing out to each of us our personality flaws with such insightful precision that we kept our mouths shut for fear she would reveal more. Our get-togethers turned into torment-o-thons.

  In retrospect, hers was basic druggie behavior, which matches exactly what other people who have had similar problems with their siblings and children have described to me. But back then it merely seemed as though Laurie was becoming more and more like some of the nastier sides of herself instead of her better ones we knew existed. But we were a family; you may not like another member’s development, but you don’t question the right of that development to happen.

  Laurie always wanted to be Patty Hearst. She would go off into raptures about the kidnapped heiress with me back when I was thirteen and she was seventeen—back when her own major personality changes were beginning. She’d come into my room and say to me with extreme seriousness, “Louie—I want you to imagine something. Sit down. I want you to imagine that you’re making a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup on a weekday night. The TV is playing a Hawaii Five-O rerun in the living room. Your hair is a mess and you’re in an old terry cloth robe and maybe you’re trying to decide if you should make popcorn. The doorbell rings and you shuffle down the hall to answer it. When you do, masked terrorists crash in. They blindfold you and gag you and tie you up and stuff you into the trunk of their Chevrolet. You are whisked away; you are stolen.”

  I would sit there dutifully through all of this.

  “You are taken to your kidnapper’s hideaway, Louie, across the city and locked in a closet and denied proper food and sleep and you are brainwashed with terrorist manifestos. They make you change your name. All links to your past are severed. You disappear from the world completely for months and months.”

  Laurie always painted a good picture, one of Patty Hearst becoming locked in the world’s imagination as a sacrifice to middle-class longing—looted by the forces who would strip our world of tennis shirts and French lessons and gourmet mushrooms: “You are given up for dead, best left an uninterpreted dream. But then one day you reemerge.” (Always with a glint in her eyes.) “You reemerge as a fuzzy black and white image parrying a sawed-off M-1 carbine on the video monitor system of a bank you are robbing in the suburbs of your California hometown.” Laurie’s lectures tended to end on a similar theme: “You have become a terrorist, an urban guerrilla, cracking the atom of the culture that created you, that you are blinding in a flash of white light.”

  These lectures sometimes left me terrified and confused. One night, right after one of these diatribes, I caught Laurie purging in the toilet and when I asked her earnestly why she was doing it, she replied, “Just getting my body ready for its new owner.”

  I think Laurie liked the idea of total transformation that Patty Hearst embodied after she became Tania and began robbing banks for that brief period. I suppose Laurie sensed unstoppable changes happening inside herself and found the Hearst story compatible with those internal changes. Their two lives were not dissimilar, either. Our families were both large and Patty Hearst’s hometown was much like ours then—locked in its own dream of outdoor living and hightech elegance, of stuccoed parabolas and rhododendron flowers and a future full of Plexiglas bubble skylights and ventilated indoor barbecue grills and well-intended concepts for social engineering.

  Back up Whistler I continued my drive in the rain, down the highway, wondering, as I neared a possible encounter, exactly what it was I was going to say or do should I actually find my sister. I had played out so many possible conversations in my head, both awake and while dreaming over the years, that an actual conversation might be either anticlimactic or might simply feel like another dream. Neither prospect seemed attractive.

  Would she smile? Would she be stony-faced? Would she snarl? Would she walk away? Would we touch each other? All these years running encounter scenarios over and over in my head, and yet when the possibility of having an encounter really occurred, I had no idea what to say or do.

  The Hearst business was only one of Laurie’s obsessions. Another was her clothing, which began to get pretty bizarre just after high school—thrift store, but beyond thrift store: random threadbare layers of the ugliest garments—cheesy Polynesian short sleeved shirts of no redeemable beauty matched with olive combat trousers—just crazy stuff; bag lady stuff. And my parents tolerated it, the outfits growing more and more extreme, her body dirtier and dirtier, her behavior more and more outrageous with each successive return home after a failed relationship, a thieving roomie or whatever her reason would be. They put up with it all.

  There was nothing in my parents’ lives that could have prepared them for Laurie’s kind of behavior. Because it was unclassifiable, it went unnoticed and unmentioned. Even after Laurie hit them and stole their money and cracked up the Oldsmobile, or when the RCMP would show up at the door with Laurie bleary-eyed. Never was there any discussion.

  I make Laurie sound so horrible here. And I guess I make myself come across as so virtuous—but neither of these is the case. The fact of the matter is that she was simply that much older than me, so she always had an air of unattainable glamour about her. Those few years would always make her seem unknowable to me.

  Here’s why Laurie pulled away from me in particular: one day we were sitting in the TV room watching some show about psychics. Laurie was maybe twenty and was being like her old self again. If she was nice for even half an hour, we were always, as a family, willing to believe that the old Laurie was back and that everything would be fine again. Suckers.

  Anyway, Laurie turned to me and said, “Louie, try being psychic. Guess what I’m thinking about.” And I looked at her and didn’t even blink an eye—the answer just flashed into my head—it was the name of Peter Zzyzzy, the guy who had always been listed as the last person in the Vancouver telephone book. “Peter
Zzyzzy,” I said.

  Laurie went nuts. She started screaming at me, “How did you know that? How did you know that?—Tell me!” But of course, I had no way of knowing how I knew—it was a fluke, a pure fluke, and one I could never ever repeat. But that didn’t matter. After that, Laurie was stony-faced with me and we never had a real conversation ever again, and nor did she ever call me Louie. At the time this didn’t bug me, because frankly we were all pretty annoyed at that point with Laurie’s antics, and I was in my senior year at high school and wouldn’t have minded a little attention myself for a change.

  Over the next few years, Laurie began systematically going through all of the family members and her friends, finding some small slight the person had committed, whether real or imagined, then magnifying that slight out of all proportion, then cutting that person off forever. It wasn’t too long before everyone had been axed, my mother being the last to go.

  And it was shortly after this that she simply … faded away. To Seattle? To Phoenix? To Toronto? No big farewell scene. Nothing definitive. Just a fading away five years ago. Dad hired some private detectives, but they never found out much—the closest they ever got was three months behind her on the trail—somewhere in Washington State—so if nothing else, we knew she was at least alive. And since then she has been like the family undead person, never alluded to—erased—as though she never existed. Yet of course her presence is felt—at family dinners and weddings and so forth. But it is especially felt on Christmas morning when her presence floats around the yard outside the windows, mocking, fleeting—above the lawn and inside the forest, little glints and rustles which we all know are her, yet which we dare not mention.

  I pulled the car up in front of Nester’s grocery store, a few miles past the Whistler Village and got my answer fairly quickly. Even while parked outside I could see what looked to be Laurie inside, putting tins in a customer’s bag.

  My head went numb. I sat and sat and sat, looking at her form, obscured by rain on the outside of the windows and by steam on the inside.

  I saw a phone booth beside the car. I figured I would go look closer through the store’s windows. If it was Laurie I would call Brent or my other sister, Wendy, back in town and discuss what to do next. With my arm shaking and my chest shivering, I got out of the car and walked, oblivious to the rain, up to the window and looked inside at the woman at the counter. But it was not Laurie. It was awfully close, but it just wasn’t her. I stood for a long time looking at this woman who was not my sister, and then I got back into the car.

  I grabbed dinner at an expensive French restaurant that was open in the main Village. I drank a bit of wine and when I came out, the rain was just turning to snow and I left Whistler to return on the winding road back to downtown. The heater in the car had stopped working and it was a miserable drive—cold and boring and slow. I had really been expecting to find Laurie and now that I hadn’t, the sense of … unresolvedness of the situation was immense.

  My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word that sticks in our mind—or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly—we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen—or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station.

  And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.

  I ramble. I am human; I am trapped inside of time. I just can’t believe Laurie’s story is over—that it will never end—that I will never know its ending or that there will never be that last little moment that ties it all together. I think of her so often—I wonder if she is happy—or if she is in pain. I wonder what her hair is like nowadays—I wonder what she talks about with new friends she has made—if she has ever been in love or even what she had for lunch. Anything.

  I want to tell her that she is kind. I want to tell her that she is good. I want to tell her that God is good, too, and that beauty surrounds us—and that the world is knowable. I want her to come visit me in my house.

  Back near Squamish the fire was still burning and the rain was still falling—this rain that will never let up, this fire that will never burn out. The fire so big it makes us forget the rain. I thought of the pioneers that came before me, discovering this world that even now is so new—building railways up into virgin canyons; bridging rivers that flowed from unknown sources; weathering the forest fires, lying motionless in swamps, breathing the smoky air through hollow reeds.

  I walked down the road in the rain to a closed gas station and phoned home from the pay phone there. Brent was there. I told him of what had just happened with my failed search for Laurie. I think my voice sounded exhausted, lost and sad.

  He told me that he thinks of Laurie all the time, too. He said, “Well at least I have my dreams at night where we can still be friends in the way we used to be. Maybe that’s all we’re ever going to get. I’ve learned to try and make myself do with just this.”

  I agreed. And inside myself I thought about the strange way that dreams provide refuge.

  Brent said, “Hey—you’re always interpreting your dreams. Here’s an idea—why not try something else. Why not interpret your everyday life as though it were a dream, instead. Say to yourself, ‘A plane’s flying overhead now—What does this mean?’ Say to yourself, ‘It’s raining so much lately—What does this mean?’ Say to yourself, ‘Today I thought I had rediscovered Laurie—but it turned out it was someone else instead. What does this mean?’ I think this makes life an easier thing. I really do.”

  I walked back to the fire, but I got too close and a cinder fell in my hair, burning several strands and giving it the burning hair smell. The odor reminded me of the time when Laurie deliberately burned her eyebrow with a Bic lighter at the dinner table shortly before she left forever.

  Memories: I remember watching an old movie once where sleeping gas was sprayed over a city at war. When they woke up, the war was over. Sometimes I think I’ll just wake up one morning and Laurie will be normal again, and none of this will have ever happened.

  Sometimes, as I have said, I, too, have dreams in which Laurie is whole again and we talk as friends and she makes me laugh. I know, this is only a dream of friendship, not real friendship itself—but it is still lovely.

  Already, just two nights ago I had a dream in which Walter the dog was walking inside my house, the nails of his paws clacking snackward, his happy tongue poking out just a little bit from his sweet black face. And last night I had a dream of survival, too—I was floating through the lush forests of the watershed out behind the house I grew up in—through the sky-high trees, floating past all of the plants that grow there, figuring out if I could make it or not if I was left alone in the forest, eating only what foods as are there. And at the end of the dream I emerged into the world of lawns and houses—our house.

  Sometimes I’ll wonder if Laurie is dead. I think that death is not just dying. I think death is a loss that can never be found again, words that can never be taken back, damage that can never be made whole. It is a denial of any possible future giving of love. Maybe she is dead, but not to me. I really don’t think she is.

  I began this story talking about the sequencing of life’s events, and so I suppose I had best end it with talk of sequence, too. Three episodes fro
m Laurie’s life spring to mind, and so I will tell them here. And just because these episodes happened in the past and not in the future—well, it doesn’t mean they can’t be the end of the story.

  The first incident is this: one of my first memories is of Laurie and me discovering an old woman lost at the corner of Kenwood Road and Southborough Drive. She kept on telling us that she was just at her doctor’s office and that she had forgotten her bag of groceries. This confused us because we knew there was nothing except houses and wilderness for many miles in any direction.

  We took her home and Mom understood immediately that the old woman was senile and she called the authorities. Laurie sat with the woman on the back patio the whole time and held her hand until the ambulance came and picked the woman up.

  The second incident is this: Laurie once had a favorite story—about a princess who lived in a castle. She used to have me, Brent and Wendy act the story out with her in the forest out back. It went like this—a princess who lived in a castle tower fell in love with a traveling prince from a far off land. Her father the king was furious. He contacted a witch, who made up a forgetting potion for him. The King then went up to his daughter’s room in the tower and forced her to drink the witch’s potion. He had his guards hold his daughter’s arms behind her back while he poured the vile brew down her throat. Once the potion was inside her, the guards let go of her. But then suddenly, before they could stop her, the Princess ran to the window and jumped from the tower to her death, before the potion could take hold of her soul, before she could forget her love.

  The last incident is this: Growing up, me, Brent and Laurie would raise Canada geese. Laurie would steal eggs from nests next to the ponds at the golf course; we would incubate the eggs in a tinfoil-lined Johnny Walker whiskey box heated with a 40-watt bulb, turning the eggs over twice each day until they hatched—an event filled with delightful peeping sounds which would continue for the next few blissful months as the peeping graduated into honking.