The cold sank in while he slept, a penetrating damp. Welcome to the land of the living dead, he shivered, reaching past the steering wheel to twist the key in the ignition. The engine fired. He let it idle a while before cranking up the heater. He was bundled under his jacket, which he’d spread on top of him like a blanket. Sleeping bag? No! That seemed too obvious a declaration—setting up camp in your parked car, just off the shoulder of the Trans-Canada Highway, instead of renting a cheap motel room.
I’m just snoozing.
Liar!
How will other people see me? A cop, for instance, tapping at the window, telling him to move on. That is the truth, isn’t it? How others see you? The ‘authorities’ especially: cops, teachers, parents, preachers.But others too: the envious, the less well-off, the mistreated and dispossessed. And what would their stereotype for Buddy Hope be, given this here-and-now? A homeless derelict camped out in an old beater? He denied it, but not as vehemently as the day before. Along with the cold, a sort of bleakness was setting in. An insupportable weariness.
Yuh had it coming, a voice proclaimed. Only got yourself to blame. Serves you right. Welcome to the club, asshole.
He was beginning to understand vaguely why a man might consider alternatives, or rather, the alternative to life after death.
“Stop being melodramatic!” Buddy recoiled. But he couldn’t help hovering around his gloomy conclusion like a bee attracted to a deformed flower. In a speculative, academic way, he resisted. As a ‘what if’. He remembered the pack of cigarettes he’d carried around in his shirt pocket for a year after he quit smoking, just to prove to his newsroom colleagues that availability wasn’t the issue; it was a matter of choice.
And living? Is that a ‘matter of choice? He’d never questioned the autonomic impulse to breathe. For one thing, he’d been too busy. The news cycle didn’t leave much time for speculative thinking—at least, not any ruminations that strayed too far from the dictates of CP Style! He snorted. “The facts, ma’am. Just the facts.”
For another, he was a family man. Or had been. He’d have to rethink that, now he’d left Leanne, Gloria, and Robbie… Even if he intended on going back. He was a different person from the guy who’d driven off the day before, had to challenge everything, like the shy kid at the back of the class who finally screws up enough courage to raise his hand and ask his stupid question.
Gloria and Robbie? How would they take his sudden departure? Would it resolve into judgment? Would he be accused and convicted of abandonment in the first degree?
That’s not what this is! he pleaded. I have to find myself, guys. Then I’m back, okay? That from a schmuck, who a couple of minutes before, had been ruminating about the pros and cons of self-destruction!
What if you don’t find yourself out there?
A lonely car whooshed by, heading north up the Trans-Canada. Buddy watched its tail lights vanish into the encompassing gloom, imagined the cone of its headlights spreading on the road ahead, spilling over barriers and ditches, revealing colourless adumbrations of a world beyond the scrolling white lines, cat’s eyes, and pavement. In his mind’s eye he reconstructed the magnificent view up Finlayson Arm, out there, waiting to be revealed, along with its unimagined probabilities—did he really want to deny all that!
Not an option.
Who am I? That’s the point? What happens when I die, the counterpoint… a ‘ground zero’ frame of reference.
Still, you aren’t supposed to think that kind of thing are you? This sense of impropriety had been transmitted silently, mysteriously, an unspoken edict filling in the spaces between words. It was okay to watch people getting hacked to bits in horror movies, or blown to smithereens on the news; not okay to imagine the nullification of self, the evaporation of spirit out the pores of your own body like some brand of ethereal sweat.
Saint Augustine, he recalled from his required courses in Western Philosophy, had declared suicide just another form of murder… only worse. Not only were you disobeying the Fifth Commandment, Thou shalt not kill, you were also demonstrating a punishable lack of faith in God’s ‘gift’ of eternal bliss.
Had Augustine sussed out the strange allure of suicidal thoughts, the siren-like enchantments, which drew victims closer and closer to the brink, to that point where their psychic polarity suddenly spun out, transforming what seemed a terrifying possibility one moment into a magnetically appealing release the next.
Can’t allow that, can they? he thought, uncertain which ‘they’ he meant.
Ridiculous taboo! Like asking a man buried up to his neck in the sand not to think about the rising tide. Be a good citizen, and dwell on other things: learning your ABCs, what you want to be when you grow up, doing good by your family, upscaling your house, the kind of car you want to drive… Soon enough, almost before you know it, you find your thoughts narrowing into the minutiae of aging: wrestling your socks on, trying not to dribble in your soup, remembering what it was like to have a pecker that worked. Was that the time to ask: What do I want to do with my life? What’s it worth?
A dream fragment from the night before came back to him then, as he tussled under his coat. He’d felt a hand, not his own, wrapping itself in the form of a claw around the hard, heavy texture of a stone, a round stone, river rock, the kind people use to create decorative motifs in their gardens. The human species can use almost anything as a weapon, a voice informed him. If it had sounded sinister, like something out of a cut-rate horror movie, Buddy could have laughed it off, but it spoke in the fascinated-yet-all-knowing tones of David Attenborough. In fact, it was David Attenborough!
Homo sapiens is the most dangerous of animals. No other is as efficiently vicious or prone to the insane spasms of slaughter and mayhem that so often seize mankind. In their murderous frenzies, they are more deadly than any other creature on the planet. Their means include all manner of lethal instruments, blunt and sharp, and their motives are not bounded by instinctive desires for food, shelter, and procreation. Hatred wasn’t invented by men, but the orgies of violence provoked by civilized notions of good and evil certainly are of human origin. No other animal has ever been known to plan a genocide.
It occurred to Buddy, drifting back into sleep to the purr of his Matrix’s idling, that it was a short distance from tailpipe to rear hatch. A bit of flexible hose, a roll of duct tape, some clothing or towels for sealing the gaps, a relaxing CD in the player, Joni Mitchell perhaps…
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all…
…and maybe a sunset view from a beach or mountaintop… Could it all come down to that? A day when he would want to go gently into that good night. An Emergency Exit Kit, he figured. Your EEK, don’t leave home without it. Carry it around with you like a first-aid pack.
The Malahat totem seemed to agree, still watching him through the Matrix windshield.
Next: Awakening