I felt like an old person with Alzheimer’s, who gets into their car to drive to the corner store, and then forgets what they were looking for and is found driving days later, thousands of miles away.
After another hour of this I saw a logging company’s road-numbering sign: HADDON 1,000. This magic number was the only clue I needed to know that I was where I wanted to be.
I followed a short road down a hill that ended in a cul-de-sac. This cul-de-sac was beside an ancient, unharvested rain forest. If I had once thought of life as an endless car ride, then now my car had finally stopped.
I thought this: I thought of how an embryo doesn’t know where on Earth or when in history it is going to be born. It simply pops out of its womb and joins its world. The landscape I saw before me is the world that I had joined, the world that made me who I am.
And with this in mind, I stepped out of the car.
It was late afternoon as I popped the trunk and reached for the duffel bag. I took a green Glad garbage bag from next to the spare tire, ripped a hole in its bottom, and placed it over top of my suit, poking other holes out for my arms. I removed my office shoes and put on my hiking boots and stuck a small black toque over my head. Then, carrying my duffel bag with one arm and my tent with the other, I walked into the deep green forest, my feet silent on the shaggy moss.
The sky was breathless, with no sounds of engines, no sounds of jets. All surfaces around me burst with life, with liverworts and tongues of ferns and shiny green coins of salal.
I saw massive Douglas firs that had fallen long ago—whales of biomass—the sky made solid—millennia worth of nutrients inhaled from the heavens now feeding bracket fungi and nursing rows of baby firs along their lengths. I tried to count one tree’s rings but gave up back near the Dark Ages, before I could reach the Roman Empire or the birth of Jesus.
The undergrowth was lush and moist. Fuzzy dendrites of pale green Old Man’s Beard moss brushed my cheeks. I walked deeper and deeper into this organism, this brain, imagining man-made noises where I knew none could be, finding it hard to believe that true silence could exist.
After an hour’s walk into the forest, I pitched my tent, under a juggernaut spruce tree, its bark like a dimpled, dark grey sharkskin. A stream flowed below me, running clear, running fresh. And so I made my tent and crawled in as the sky began to darken, preparing my story, preparing to join the world of trees and their massively parallel sleep.
And that is my story until now. Here I now lie, on my stomach, looking out at the dark wet world, pulling the blanket tighter around me, smoking a cigarette, and knowing that this is the end of some aspect of my life, but also a beginning—the beginning of some unknown secret that will reveal itself to me soon. All I need do is ask and pray.
I stub out my cigarette, close the tent flaps, and lay back on the ground sheet on top of the soil. I close my eyes and prepare to sleep, but something underneath me nudges my spine.
I reach my arms out of the flaps, into the rain, and underneath the ground sheet, where I pluck out a small object. I bring it back inside and feel it—it is a spruce pinecone. I smell it, cold and wet, and then hold it up to my cheek. I then stick my arm back outside the tent and plant the cone into the soil, just below the ground sheet.
Time is how the trees grow. I will fall asleep for a thousand years, and when I wake, a mighty spruce tree will have raised me up high, high into the sky.
And now it is morning.
I crawl from the tent, wrapped in my grey blanket and look upward into the treetops. There are the sounds of birds—Swifts? Marbled Murrelets? I see that the sky is now clear and blue.
I eat a few Ritz crackers and another chocolate bar and my mouth desperately craves water. Still huddled inside the blanket and my business suit, I walk over the soft moss, down to the shore of the stream that flows below my tent. Clear water flows over a gravel bar; alders form a colony beside a deep pool in which schools of oolichan flutter like moods.
I kneel down and sip water from the pool. I raise my head and look through the clearing in the trees. I see the sun shining in the sky—a spinning ball of fire, like a burning basketball atop a finger. This is the same sun—the same burning orb of flame that shone over my youth—over swimming pools and Lego and Kraft dinner and malls and suburbia and TV and books about Andy Warhol. And this is the ball of fire that now shines on Mark, that burns his skin, that triggers cancers. This is the fire that shines on Stacey, that overheats her and makes her crave a drink. This is the fire that shines over Dana, the fire that will one day rain a destruction into his universe. And this is also the fire that shines onto Julie’s house that makes her children play underneath the sprinkler. This is also the fire that feeds the trees that Todd plants. And this is also the sun that Kristy with her fair skin avoids, so that she can stay pretty and meet the man she will love forever.
I stare into this spinning ball of fire—the fire that burns and heats the winter—with no fear of blindness. I remove my blanket and fold it and place it on the warm rocks beside the water. I then remove my shoes and socks and stick my feet into the water, and oh, it is so cold.
I peel my clothes and step into the pool beside the burbling stream, onto polished rocks, and water so clear that it seems it might not even be really there.
My skin is grey, from lack of sun, from lack of bathing. And yes, the water is so cold, this water that only yesterday was locked as ice up on the mountaintops. But the pain from the cold is a pain that does not matter to me. I strip my pants, my shirt, my tie, my underwear and they lie strewn on the gravel bar next to my blanket.
And the water from the stream above me roars.
Oh, does it roar! Like a voice that knows only one message, one truth—never-ending, like the clapping of hands and the cheers of the citizens upon the coronation of the king, the crowds of the inauguration, cheering for hope and for that one voice that will speak to them.
Now—here is my secret:
I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.
I walk deeper and deeper into the rushing water. My testicles pull up into myself. The water enters my belly button and it freezes my chest, my arms, my neck. It reaches my mouth, my nose, my ears and the roar is so loud—this roar, this clapping of hands.
These hands—the hands that heal; the hands that hold; the hands we desire because they are better than desire.
I submerge myself in the pool completely. I grab my knees and I forget gravity and I float within the pool and yet, even here, I hear the roar of water, the roar of clapping hands.
These hands—the hands that care, the hands that mold; the hands that touch the lips, the lips that speak the words—the words that tell us we are whole.
end
Available from Pocket Books
Also by Douglas Coupland
Fiction
Eleanor Rigby
Hey Nostradamus!
All Families Are Psychotic
Got Hates Japan
Miss Wyoming
Girlfriend in a Coma
Microserfs
Shampoo Planet
Generation X
Nonfiction
Terry—The Life of Canadian Terry Fox
Souvenir of Canada 2
School Spirit
City of Glass
Polaroids from the Dead
Washington Square Press
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or local
es or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1994 by Douglas Campbell Coupland
Illustrations copyright © 1994 by Douglas Campbell Coupland
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Life After God Page 11