Hey Nostradamus! (11 page)

“Yes, I am, Barb.” She let it go. Outside, all of Kent's friends were doing Dad duty, fine by me. I asked Barb if she ever spoke with Reg these days. “No.” “Never?” “Never.”

I decided to be naughty. “You should try.”

“Why on
earth
would I want to do that?”

“Jesus, Barb. It's Kent's memorial. You have to do something.” This was not strictly true, but I'd pushed a guilt button.

“You're right.”

She went outside and joined a trio of Kent's friends with Reg. I stood nearby so I could hear their conversation.

Barb said, “Reg, I'm glad you could come.”

“Thank you for inviting me.”

Barb turned to Kent's friends. “What were you guys talking about?”

“Cloning.”

Barb said, “This Dolly-the-sheep thing must be raising a few eyebrows.”

One friend, whose name was Brian, said, “You better believe it.” He asked my father, “Reg, do you think a clone would have the same soul as its parent, or perhaps have a new one?”

“A clone with a soul?” Dad rubbed his chin. “No. I don't think it would be possible for a clone to have a soul.”

“No soul? But it would be a living human being. How could it not…?”

“It would be a monster.”

Another friend, Riley, cut in here: “But then what about your twin grandsons? They're identical, so when the embryo splits, technically, one nephew is the clone of the other. You think that one of them has a soul and one doesn't?”

Barb, trying to lighten things, said, “Talk about monsters-if I miss feeding time by even three minutes, then I become Ripley, and they become the Alien.”

Reg wrecked this attempt at cheeriness. He'd obviously been thinking hard, his face sober like a bust of Abraham Lincoln. “Yes,” he said, “I think you might have to consider the possibility that one of the boys might not have a soul.”

Silence. All the real smiles turned fake.

“You're joking,” said Riley.

“Joking? About the human soul? Never.”

Barb turned abruptly and walked away. The three guys stood there looking at Reg. Then Barb returned with one of the wooden folding chairs, holding it sideways like a tennis racket.

“You evil, evil bastard. Never ever come back to this house, ever.”

“Barb?”

“Go now. Because I'll break you in two. I will.”

“Is this really-”

“Don't go meek on me now, you sadistic bastard.”

I'd seen this side of Barb before and knew she would push this situation way further if she wanted to. Riley made some gesture to stand between her and my father. I went over to Barb and tried removing the chair from her grip, but she clutched it using every sinew she'd developed as captain of the girls' field hockey team.

“Barb. No.”

“You heard what he said.”

“He's not worth the effort.”

“He should die for the things he's done to people. Someone has to stop him.”

I looked at my father, into his eye slits, and knew that nothing had changed, that he had no real understanding of what he'd done to deserve this. I would have poured the
remains of my wine on him, but that would have been a waste.

Barb said, “I'll pour Drano on your grave, you sick bastard.”

Reg took the hint. Some of the wives (not a girlfriend in the bunch) accompanied my father to his car.

I sat with your mother while the
Alive!
crew scoured the house of memorial residue. I said, “Barb, you never believed me about Reg, about how evil he is. Now you know.”

“It's one thing to hear about it, Jason. And another to see it in operation.”

“Barb, the thing about Dad is that he'll always betray you in the end. Even if you think you've gotten close to him, earned your way into his bosom the way Kent did, in the end he'll always sell you out to his religion. He's actually a pagan that way-he has to make sacrifices, so he sacrificed his family one by one. Tonight he offered the twins to his God. If he were a dog, I'd shoot him.”

And so I picked up Joyce at Mom's where the TV station had kicked into late-night infomercials. She was sleeping it off on the couch. I drove home and I'm going to bed soon.

 

 

I arrived at Ambleside Beach a few minutes ago, and something unusual happened. I was sitting in the truck's cab removing a burr from Joyce's flank, while looking at my stack of pink invoice papers, when this pleasant-enough woman in a purple fleece coat, holding a baby in her arms, comes up to the window and says, “Homework?”

Now, if I met you last week, I'll never remember your name, but if we went through kindergarten together, you're still in my brain for good: “Demi Harshawe!” Demi is the
massacre victim I'd last seen on October 4, 1988, having a silver spike jabbed into her unclothed heart.

“How are you doing, Jason?”

“No surprises. You?” Joyce trampled over my lap to lick Demi's face.

“Pretty average, I guess. I got married two summers ago. My last name is Minotti now. This here's Logan.” Joyce dragged her tongue right across Logan's face.

“Sorry.”

“It's okay. We're a dog family. See-Logan didn't mind it one bit.”

“It's so great to see you.”

We were both six again, and I felt so innocent and genuinely free, like we'd just quit jobs we hated. After maybe five minutes I asked Demi about her health-she'd been one of the kids shot over by the vending machines, and she'd lost a foot.

“I don't even notice it anymore. I do Pilates three times a week and coach softball with my sister. To be honest, wearing braces back in elementary school was way harder to deal with. How about you?”

Demi knew, in the way everyone knows, about how things went wrong for me in the weeks after the massacre. We're both ten years older, too, so I could describe things to her in non-candy-coated terms. “You know what? I never got over Cheryl. Not ever. I doubt I will. I try really hard to join the real world, but it never seems to work, and lately I think I've stopped trying, which scares me more than anything. I do house renovations on a by-the-hour basis and all my friends are barflies.”

She thought this over for a second. “I stopped trusting
people, too, after the shootings, and until I met my husband, Andreas, I didn't think I'd ever trust people again. And for what it's worth, I think you're one of the few people I could trust, now that I believe in trust again.”

“Thanks.”

“No, thank
you
. After all the junk you had to go through.” Demi paused for a second. “I was in the hospital for two weeks after the massacre. I missed all those hand-holding ceremonies and flowers and services and teddy bears et cetera. I really regret that, because maybe it would have made me a better person-or at least maybe I wouldn't go around looking at everybody as evil instead of good.”

“I doubt it.”

Demi sighed. “When I talk like this, Andreas thinks I'm coldhearted. But then he wasn't there. We were. And if you weren't, you weren't.”

We'd hit on something irreducible here, and talking much beyond this point would have felt like a betrayal of our shared memories. We made our quick good-byes, and Demi and Logan headed down to the water, and here I am now in my truck's cab, the scribbler of Ambleside Beach.

 

 

It's an hour later and I'm still sitting in the truck.

I wish I could be as innocent as I was at six, the way I felt just briefly while talking with Demi, but that's childish. I wish humans were better than we are, but we're not. I wish I knew
how
bad I could become. I wish I could get a printout that showed me exactly how susceptible I was to a long list of sins. Gluttony: 23 percent susceptible. Envy: 68 percent susceptible. Lust: 94 percent susceptible. That kind of thing.

Oh God, it's religion all over again; it's my father's corrosive bile percolating through my soil and tickling my taproot. Be as pious as you want, people are slime, or, as my father might say, we're all slime
in the eyes of God
. It's the same thing. And even if you decided to fight the evil, to attain goodness or religious ecstasy, not much really changes. You're still stuck being
you,
and
you
was pretty much decided long before you started asking these questions.

Maybe clones are the way out of all of this. If Reg is against them, that means they're probably a good idea. And as a clone, you pop off the assembly line with an owner's manual written by the previous
you
-a manual as helpful as the one that accompanies a 1999 VW Jetta. Imagine all the crap this would save you-the wasted time, the hopeless dreams. I'm going to really think about this: an owner's manual for
me
.

 

 

It's midnight. I cut short my evening with my barfly construction buddies. We shot a few buckets of balls at the Park Royal driving range, then had a few beers, but I just couldn't bring myself to continue. Writing this document has taken a firm grip of me.

Here's an overview of what happened after the Delbrook Massacre.

The fact that I'd never met the three gun wielders didn't seem to matter. In published transcripts of interviews with the police, on the morning of the event I was “agitated.” I walked “cavalierly” out of chem class without so much as a nod to the teacher. I was seen having an “emotional confrontation” with Cheryl. I “assaulted, drew blood from, and gave a concussion to” Matt Gursky from
Youth Alive!
I also
assaulted Mr. Kroger “with seeming forethought,” and I “seemingly knew to enter the cafeteria just after Cheryl Anway had been shot.”

I think the public was desperate for cause and effect. At first glance, I suppose I'd probably be suspicious of me, too, and I'm pretty sure it was my father's bizarre reaction to the news that got police to thinking about me-from a hero to a suspect. Whatever the cause, the morning after the shootings I saw my yearbook photo on the front of the paper with the headline
MASTERMIND
?

The only thing missing was motive. The three nutcases with guns were screwed-up geeks lost in a stew of paranoia, role-playing games, military dreams and sexual rejection. They were a slam-dunk. With me, the case seemed to revolve around my relationship with Cheryl, about the fight we had that morning and reasons why I might want her dead. The best police minds couldn't engineer a reason no matter how soap-operatic their thinking.

On my side, I refused to make my life with Cheryl anybody's business but my own. I didn't mention our marriage because it was sacred; I wasn't going to let the massacre make it profane. I refused to let it be used as some kind of plot twist in the final five minutes of an episode of
Perry Mason
. So I said nothing, only that Cheryl wanted to talk about feelings, and I didn't. As simple as that. Which is basically what it was.