Linus."
Linus sulks and the group stands silently and looks at me. Surprisingly, it is Richard who breaks the quiet, saying, "Jared's rightto be worrying about us." He puts down his marshmallow trident. "We really don't seem to have any values, any absolutes. We've always maneuvered our values to suit our immediate purposes. There's nothing large in our lives."
Hamilton snaps in, "These past weeks are the first time I've felt good in years, Richard, and you're starting to bring me down. Do we really need to analyze our shortcomings so thoroughly?"
"Yes, I believe we do," Richard says. "Jared's here to ask us to take a look at ourselves, Hamilton. I mean, look at us: Instead of serving a higher purpose we've always been more concerned with developing our 'personalities.' and with being 'free'"
"Richard?" Karen asks.
"Karen, let me say what I feeclass="underline" This has been on my mind ever since Jared first appeared. I think we've always wanted something noble or holy in our lives, but only on our own terms. You know, our old beefs: The World Wide Web is a bore. There's nothing on TV. That video tape is a drag. Politics are dumb. I want to be innocent again. I need to express the me inside. What are our convictions? If we had any convictions would we even have the guts to follow them?"
Marshmallows broil then slime through the grill and into the embers. Papery carbon husks above are blown away in the breeze like used black cocoons. "It's true," Linus says, and all eyes move to him. I let him speak because he's saying the right things. "Our lives have remained staticeven after we've lost everything in the worldshit: the world itself. Isn't that sick? All that we've seen and been through and we watch videos, eat junk food, pop pills, and blow things up."
Hamilton says, "Okay, Helen Keller, get to the point. And if you get any more depressing, I'm rearranging the furniture and not telling you how."
"Hamilton," Richard says, "tell mehave we ever really gotten together and wished for wisdom or faith to come from the world's collapse? No. Instead we got into a tizzy because some Leaker forgot to return the Godfather III tapes to Blockbuster Video the day of the Sleep and now we can't watch it. Have we had the humility to gatherand collectively speak our souls? What evidence have we ever given of inner lives?
Karen perks up: "Of course we have interior lives, Richard. I do. How can we not have one?"
"I didn't say that, Karen. I said we gave no evidence of an interior life. Acts of kindness, evidence of contemplation, devotion, sacrifice. All these things that indicate a world inside us. Instead we set up a demolition derby in the Eaton's parking lot, ransacked the Virgin Superstore, and torched the Home Depot."
"Aren't we holier than thou?" Wendy snipes at Richard, her arms tight around young Zygote Junior inside her stomach.
"Actually, Richard," I say, "the demo derby looked like a lot of fun. And I like the way you spray-painted names on your cars. I thought your 'Losermobile' would win in the end."
"Me, too. I"
Megan ignores Richard and looks at me: "Jaredstop talking about cars. What are we supposed to do now?" she asks. "How can we change? You arrived saying you would teach us things that would allow us to change. So tell us."
My friends go calmquiet. "Okay, guys, I think you want me to tell you that the world is a moral place. It is. But you're right to be thinking about your soulsthe better parts of youthey're all desperate to climb from your bodies and leave you far behind. You're going to have to lead another life soon; a different life. The choice will be obvious when it arrives. You can get the world back yet."
A salvo of questions follows: "But you didn't tell us how to" "What do we do to" "What happens next?" "When do we?"
"Hold your horses. A few squabbles ago Wendy asked what it was you were supposed to have been doing here this past year. The answer is that you ought to have been squabbling twenty-four hours a day for all of this timeand asked a million questions about why the world became the way it did. If you'd done that, you'd have been returned to the world the way it was and you'd be smarter and wiser,
But you didn'tarson, looting, cocktails, videos, and demo derbies so now we move to Plan B."The barbecue hisses. "I'll return when the lightning ends. I'll meet you on Cleveland Dam in seven daysat sunset." "What lightning?" Hamilton asks. Lightning cracks; the sky ignites. "That lightning, goof ball."
33 YOUR MESSAGE HERE
When I was alive on Earth I always noticed how events in the night sky had such a powerful capacity to alter human moods. One fall night in the 1970s, I was at a BC Lions football game. Just after sunset and directly over the cheap-seat bleachers to the east, a full moon, amber and veined, pumped itself upward and seemingly hovered over the stadium's edge. At this point, the announcer said, "Ladies and gentlemenlets have a big round of applause for the Moonl" and everybody went nuts and the rest of the game felt like a Super Bowl.
Around that same time, I was in a soccer tournament and the team and I had to fly to Manitoba on a red-eye flight. Somewhere over Saskatchewan I looked out the plane's window and saw the aurora borealis spritzing and jitterbugging up to the northI felt as though
I'd seen God singing along with the radio at a stoplight. We won the tournament. Fuckin' right we did!
And then one night, shortly before I got leukemia, a thinly sliced crescent moon rested high in the south sky over Vancouver; the planet Venus, white and hot, was also in view, and I watched the two bodies veer ever closer until Venus finally hit the unlit portion of the lunar edge. Just before Venus disappeared, it looked as though there was a light directly on the Moon's surface. And shortly afterward, as I said, I got leukemia. So there.
I mention events in the sky to help make sense of lightning and thunder and their profound effects on the soul. My friends have so far endured six days of continual storms and my old neighborhood and its surrounding forest are bursting in flames from untold numbers of lightning strikes. My friends are scrambling madly for cool air and sanctuary, having piled what few things they've been able to save into minivans in which they hightail up the charred stubble of the nearby golf course's pampas.
Below them, the fire on the sloping neighborhoods burns like a million Bic lighters held up in the dark at some vast, cosmic Fleetwood Mac concert. There is nothing remaining on this mountain slope save for the foundations of houses, tree roots beneath the soil, and a swirling maze of roads that lead from nowhere to nowhere.
Soon, two miles up the hill, the gang reaches a stone clubhouse surrounded by links of ashes. From within its solid interior they watch the lightning continue unabated, like watching a car crash that never stops, ripping and grinding and chewing and burning for day upon day upon day, sickening and dull.
The night is chilly; the fireplace is stuffed with burning chairs, yet their room feels only slightly warm. Dinner was a few cans of chicken broth and tinned green beans found in the kitchen. Tablecloths and towels are used as bedsheets as a freak Arctic cold front lands upon them pre-dawn. They cluster together like January blue jays roosting inside a stump, and still they wake up freezing. But for the first time in seven days the sky is silent. Across the Capilano Canyon they see the snow-crested mountains of our childhoods reduced to black cinders and stone.The next day is spent driving lazy-8's through the old neighborhood's tangled lariat of roads, seeing only charred stumps, melted patio furniture, and metal globs that were once sportscars. My friends cry and make fruitless attempts at salvage. Wendy finds the skeletons of the two ostriches and hands Linus the femurs. "It's nearly sundown," Karen says. "Let's hit the darn."
Their minivans hairpin down the black streets, the interiors smoky with the scent of itty-bitty salvaged mementosa pair of Adidas ROM shoes; a Snoopy trophy; a framed photo of Liam Gallagher; a Becel margarine tub full of emeralds and Richard's asbestos astronaut suit.