Life After God

by Douglas Coupland

“I’ve changed,” he said.

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  There was silence then some awkward good-byes and then I let myself out of the apartment, and it was years before I saw Dana again. It was in the parking lot of the Save-On-Foods supermarket at the Park & Tilford shopping mall. He was loading a minivan with groceries while a woman strapped a baby into a child safety seat while trying to discipline an older, noisier child beside it.

  I walked up to him and said, “Dana! Long time, no see.”

  Fear was in his eyes. The woman—his wife—looked up curiously, and Dana hastily introduced me as Scout: “We used to play football together in high school.”

  “Isn’t that nice,” she said, and continued strapping in the child.

  “Hey look, you’ve got kids—” I said, “great. When did you get married?”

  Dana cut me short. He slammed the rear door, shoved away the shopping cart without bothering to get his 25 cents back from the cart’s lock device, fumbled with his keys and headed to the driver’s door. “I can’t talk to you, Scout. I just can’t.”

  “Hey—okay, okay. No probs, man,” I said.

  Dana turned the ignition. His wife smiled and waved at me and shouted “Nice to meet you!” through the decreasing crack in the window that Dana was rolling up.

  A week later, around six at night, Dana phoned me up—I’m not hard to reach: my phone number has been the same for almost ten years—and he was obviously at a pay phone, with cars and trucks roaring in the background.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “I figured. You okay?”

  A pause. “Absolutely.”

  I tried to make conversation and felt vaguely like I was in a quiet room with somebody on terminal life support. “Your wife seems nice,” I said.

  “I pray for you,” he replied.

  “Oh,” I said. “Uh—thanks.”

  “I pray for you because you have no faith and hence no soul.”

  “Hey, Danester—I may be faithless, but I’m not without a soul. I’ll thank you not to patronize me, either.”

  “God is descending into the suburbs, Scout. We never expected judgment in our time, but it is going to happen.”

  “Dana? What’s the deal?”

  “The time is coming, Scout. You will not have to live inside linear time anymore; the concept of infinity will cease to be frightening. All secrets will be revealed. There will be great destruction; structures like skyscrapers and multinational corporations will crumble. Your dream life and your real life will fuse. There will be music. Before you turn immaterial, your body will turn itself inside out and fall to the ground and cook like steak on a cheap hibachi and you will be released and you will be judged.”

  “Um—Dana … I think I have somebody on call waiting. Can I phone you back?”

  “You may be driving in a car when it happens. You may be shopping in a fashionable store. You may be …”

  “Hey Dana. Gotta go. Ciao.”

  And there is Dana.

  Todd’s life has changed the least of any of us. He dropped out of Simon Fraser University over a decade ago and began scamming full-time between tree planting and unemployment insurance—a way of life he shows no signs of ever altering. He shares a 1940s house off Commercial Drive in East Vancouver with an ever-changing ragtag ensemble of ecofreaks, slackers, Deadheads, Qué becois nationalists, mountain bikers and part-time musicians.

  Our biggest common bond is that right after high school we spent two summers together tree planting, gypsying about from contract to contract, sowing seedlings in clearcuts spanning British Columbia—Bowron Lake, Camper Creek, the Okanagan, Nelson, Tzenzaicut, the Sheemahant Valley. We had herbicide dumped in our faces from upwind helicopters; we swam in cranberry bogs; we heard strangers tap on motel windows up in the Queen Charlotte Islands whispering “hash … ’shrooms … coke …”; we took thirty-minute group showers in Prince George, sharing precious hot water and scraping off charcoal from clearcut burns with pumice blocks. It was a good time of life; Todd never left it.

  I will visit Todd’s house and he will tell me his theories about literally everything. I visit him only a few times a year—he never visits me downtown. He will sit perched on his Balans chair, the pads of which are covered with Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax T-shirts, while he eats a sublingual B-12 vitamin.

  “Hi, Todd,” I will say above a full-volume Fortran 5 tape that will be acting as a soundtrack to a muted zombie film on the VCR.

  “Dudeski, Dudeski, Dudeski—snack?” He will offer me something lumpy that rests in an abalone shell, and I will say, “Sure,” and he will toss a sourdough bun to me across the braid-rugged floor strewn with wine skins, foam pads, cargo pants, sleeping bags, wool socks, a surfboard, kitty squeak toys and jumbo Tiki salad forks and spoons.

  Todd will be dressed in biking shorts, fingerless wool gloves, and an Aran sweater from Value Village. Soggy Cowichan sweaters will line the hooks in the front hallway. I will feel hopelessly bourgeois in whatever I am wearing, and sit in the surplus Boeing 737 seat near Todd’s Balans chair.

  “Todd,” I will say, “can I turn down the music?”

  “Huh? What’s that?”

  I will turn off the music; there will be peace and then we will talk.

  “Treeplanting pays spittle,” he will say. I won’t bother pointing out he does have other options in life.

  Todd will be restless. Perhaps he will be on some sort of drug. Stacey ended up alcoholic but Todd ended up the druggie. Mark calls Todd’s lifestyle “wake n’ bake.”

  Todd will fiddle with the buttons of a Motorola walkie-talkie lying on top of a stack of Macintosh diskettes. Outside, teenagers drag-race on nearby Commercial Drive. Performance artists agitated by too many espressos screech the Jeopardy! theme song like randy tomcats. There is the feeling of colorful, snug chaos. Chaos with an undercurrent of disturbing randomness.

  We will talk about the old times a bit, but Todd won’t be much interested. I’m the only one of the old group he keeps up with, and even then, it’s entirely through my own efforts. The possibility of a reunion for all seven of us is pretty much out of the question.

  But then, every so often, through the fog of drugs and a downwardly spiraling lifestyle, the real Todd will shine through, and then I remember why I make the effort to see him through the years. For example, I will ask him what he thinks about while he plants baby trees in the lobotomized northern clearcuts. He will snarl and laugh (his dental work—oh!) and say, “The money, Dudeski, the money,” and then he will stop and say, “You know that’s not true. Man you know that was just a bad joke. Do you really want to know what I think about when I’m out there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think about this … I think about how hard it is—even with the desire, and even with the will and the time—I think of how hard it is to reach that spot inside us that remains pure that we never manage to touch but which we know exists—and I try to touch that spot.”

  He will place a pinch of Drum tobacco on a rollie and he will squint. “Man, what else is there? I’ve never touched that spot yet, but I’m still trying.”

  He will light his cigarette and reflect. He will then reach for me in my surplus 737 seat, grab me by one shoulder and place his other hand on top of my head, and then seemingly yank my spirit out of my body through the top of my skull with a great pull, shocking me.

  He will then say, looking at my body, “Here you are. You have this meat thing here—your corpse—and then here you have …” he will look at my imaginary spirit, draped from the fingers of his other hand, “You.”

  I will feel dizzy. I will feel as though Todd has cut me in two.

  “What is you, Scout? What is the you of you? What is the link? Where do you begin and end? This you thing—is it an invisible silk woven from your memories? Is it a spirit? Is it electric? What exactly is it?”

  He will gently, mime-like, place my spirit back into my body and I will be glad.

  He
will pat me on the head. “Don’t sweat it, man. You’re all there. Nothing escaped.”

  We will sit and listen to the silence for a while. Then Todd will speak some more. He will say, “Oh, I know you guys think my life is some big joke—that it’s going nowhere. But I’m happy. And it’s not like I’m lost or anything. We’re all too fucking middle class to ever be lost. Lost means you had faith or something to begin with and the middle class never really had any of that. So we can never be lost. And you tell me, Scout—what is it we end up being, then—what exactly is it we end up being then—instead of being lost?”

  Finally: Kristy. I work with her every day out at the software company—a shiny emerald box in an industrial park in Richmond on the delta flatlands off of Highway 99. She’s in marketing and I’m in sales, so we “interact” a good deal on a business as well as a personal level, speaking a complex body language of mockery and suppressed giggles across the room during general meetings. We goof off whenever we can.

  At the moment Kristy is having “a mad pash” with the owner of the company, Bryce. This has been going on for at least half a year. And even though the company itself is one enormous gossip generator, no one knows about it except me. The thing with Kristy is that she can only fall for men she thinks are smarter than herself—a factor that ruled out Todd, Dana, Mark and me a long time ago. A factor that rules out most guys. Bryce is a software egghead, so I guess that puts him on a higher plane.

  “And he’s married, too,” Kristy will add over gin and tonics at the local sports club during lunch hour, a locale awash in the smell of limes, terry towels and highly advertised men’s colognes. “That makes him doubly attractive.” Kristy, it should be noted, equates marriage with intelligence even though she, herself, has a hard time seeing herself in a veil.

  One of Kristy’s bigger worries is that she’ll continue her pattern of desiring only the unattainable and then one day, well, in her own words: “My ability to fall in love for real will just sort of atrophy and then I’ll replace my capacity for love with sentimentality—you know—knitting bibs for my sister’s kids; sobbing over puppies; going overboard at Christmas and wearing red and green dresses; vanity mirrors surrounded by inspirational decoupage plaques. Should this ever happen, Scout, please, please telephone the Symbionese Liberation Army and have them come and kidnap me.”

  Anyway, Kristy figures again in this story, so I will come back to her. But for now I think it best to describe how I ended up here in this tent, dressed in a suit and tie, in the forest. And maybe I should talk a bit about myself—something I have been avoiding until now.

  Some facts about me: I think I am a broken person. I seriously question the road my life has taken and I endlessly rehash the compromises I have made in my life. I have an unsecure and vaguely crappy job with an amoral corporation so that I don’t have to worry about money. I put up with halfway relationships so as not to have to worry about loneliness. I have lost the ability to recapture the purer feelings of my younger years in exchange for a streamlined narrow-mindedness that I assumed would propel me to “the top.” What a joke.

  Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me: the little yellow pills, the lost sleep. But I don’t think this is anything new in the world.

  This is not to say my life is bad. I know it isn’t … but my life is not what I expected it might have been when I was younger. Maybe you yourself deal with this issue better than me. Maybe you have been lucky enough to never have inner voices question you about your own path—or maybe you answered the questioning and came out on the other side. I don’t feel sorry for myself in any way. I am merely coming to grips with what I know the world is truly like.

  Other thoughts: sometimes I wonder if it is too late to feel the same things that other people seem to be feeling. Sometimes I want to go up to people and say to them, “What is it you are feeling that I am not? Please—that’s all I want to know.”

  Perhaps you think I simply need to fall in love and that maybe I’ve just never met the right person. Or perhaps I’ve just never figured out exactly what it was I wanted to do with life while the clock ticked away. Whatever.

  Like most people, I’ve bottomed out a few times; in motel rooms, say—alongside naked bodies close by in cities I can’t recall—looking at phones with nobody to dial. And I’ve been hooked on a few things, too, and lost months and years there, but I think I came out of it with my brain cells intact. And how much would this matter, anyway?

  Sometimes I want to go to sleep and merge with the foggy world of dreams and not return to this, our real world. Sometimes I look back on my life and am surprised at the lack of kind things I have done. Sometimes I just feel that there must be another road that can be walked—away from this person I became—either against my will or by default.

  But then I think about this: during family dinners, Mom and Dad used to talk about how they met each other—of how Mom changed her usual path to the library one day and saw Dad, and they smiled and made the first connection. It is a sweet story, and one we never tired of hearing over and over again, savoring the repetitive details of their creation myth: the dress she was wearing, the books they were carrying, their first soda. The story was always bookended by my father saying, “Just think, kids—if your mother had taken her usual route to the library, none of you would be here today!”

  I have thought my father’s statement over many times, and his idea seems absurd. I know in my bones that I would have made it here anyway—somehow. I have this funny feeling that I wouldn’t have missed Earth for anything. So I must be getting something out of the experience.

  Anyway, here’s how I wound up inside this tent in the dark and rain on the west coast of Vancouver Island: last week I went to New York on a business trip along with two other guys from the company, Cameron and Shiraz. I was still taking the little yellow pills then.

  It was not a glamorous trip—no cocktails with Angie Dickinson astride the Chrysler building’s eagles or anything like that—merely endless meetings and fear; hierarchy-addicted weasels and dinners with drunk product reps. There was a hysteria-packed motivational seminar and in between all this, furtive scurryings with Cameron to Eighth Avenue pornography dens. The company’s travel agent had located the tiniest, cheapest hotel rooms in Manhattan and they smelled like basements. The unending grumble of traffic down below interrupted what little sleep I could grab. A salesman’s life.

  It was also the January of the presidential inauguration; much of the news that weekend dwelt on the ceremonies to occur down in Washington on the following Wednesday, and for some reason I had been paying more attention to this news than I might have otherwise. I don’t consider myself political; being Canadian, American politics have only a detached appeal. Yet there I was, lying on my hotel room’s musty bed sheet, umpteen rotations of CNN news into the night, sirens flaring on the streets below, wondering about the transition of power about to occur in the city to the South.

  I was wondering what the ceremony itself would be like—it was like wondering about a coronation—of the old king being dead—long live the new king. I was wondering about trumpeters raising their horns, of the crowds—of the world somehow becoming new again in the process. I was thinking and feeling this through the mist of my doctor’s yellow pills. I figured the inauguration must have meant something important to me to cut through the fog.

  It was on Tuesday morning that I was scheduled to grab a cab to LaGuardia for my return flight to Vancouver. Instead, however, I surprised even myself and walked the ten blocks to the Penn Station Amtrak counter where I paid for tickets and caught the Metroliner for Washington, DC. I rationalized that it was my one chance in life to see a spectacle like an inauguration; I don’t think I thought of it on any other level.

  From a phone on the train I called an old college friend of my brother’s, Allan, who works at World Bank—a loner type whose old UBC dorm room had once been a mu
seum of Star Trek paraphernalia. Allan said he would be glad to have me visit, and to my surprise he was even having company over that evening. Allan also invited me to crash on his living room floor for the night if I wanted, and I realized that I hadn’t even thought of what I would have done had he not asked me.

  I arrived. Allan lived in a third-floor apartment on Capitol Hill, behind the Capitol building, and his Star Trek geekery of yesteryear had merely been upgraded to the newer Trek generations. Allan’s friends showed up around 7:30 and turned out to be his Dungeons & Dragons gaming cohorts. They spent the evening discussing skulls and levels and kings and spells and charms and swords and warlocks. “Beverages” proved to be tap water, Jell-O powder and gin.

  I have to admit, the evening was fun—I was a stranger in a strange city among friendly people. It was as though my past life no longer existed—that other life where I theoretically should have been in a jet eight miles above Idaho, headed to Vancouver and the life I was losing my ability to understand.

  I felt as if I was living a stranger’s life. I was beginning to feel like a person inside a story for the first time in years. I almost didn’t want to sleep that night, not wanting that feeling to vanish. In fact, I felt so different that for the first night in months I decided not to take my little yellow pills.

  I slept soundly—and all through the night, the concentration of yellow pills in my blood diminished, milligram by milligram, like decaying uranium.

  The next morning, the morning of the inauguration, I was sitting on Allan’s wobbly hardwood floor, with the sun streaming through the windows onto a Siamese cat that lay cradled in my lap. The sun picked up motes of dander as I scratched its chest. Allan and I watched the actual swearing-in ceremony on CNN. The cat hopped out of my lap, arched its back and then propped itself up against the windowsill, looking out the window at the day.