Hey Nostradamus! (24 page)

“The money I make from being a pretend psychic is so small.”

“I could help you out, maybe.”

“
Could
you?”

I said, “Sure. It's probably going to cost less than you thought. I can set you up with my repair guy, Gary, down on Pemberton Avenue.”

“That'd be kind of you.”

“So can we meet tonight?”

“I think so.”

I asked, “What time works for you?”

“Seven o'clock”?

“Where? How about my place?”

“Oh…”

“Allison-is everything okay?”

“It's just that seven is when I usually eat dinner.”

We agreed to meet at a slightly formal Italian place on Marine Drive. When I arrived, it was evident she'd been there a while, as only the dregs remained in what I already saw was a bottle of the restaurant's priciest merlot. She told me I looked relaxed, which is always a successful ploy, because it invariably relaxes the person you say it to. I asked if she liked the wine; she did-she'd better-and she ordered another bottle, although you'd never imagine such a tiny dragon could hold her booze so well.

Heather, try to be nice to this woman. You're only jealous because Jason chose to speak through her and not directly to you
.

As soon as there was wine in my glass I asked her what message Jason had given her, but she raised her hand in a warding-off motion (very professional) and said, “It's not good to mix eating with the spirit world.” It was all I could do not to throttle her. She talks about the afterlife like it was Fort Lauderdale.

As Allison didn't want to contaminate her perceptions by asking me about my life, I learned-over the appetizer, the lamb entrée, and some Key lime sorbet-about Glenn, who had worked for the Port Authority's inspection division, further details of which make me ache for sleep. She has three ungrateful daughters, all in their twenties, who seem to shack up with anything on two legs. To hear Allison's side of
the story, her life has been nothing but person after person abusing her sweet, generous nature. Of course, I don't believe her for a moment, but that doesn't get me anywhere. She's got the sole existing phone line to Jason, and I'll be damned if some passive-aggressive menopausal old bat is going to cheat me out of hearing what Jason's been saying to me.

When the dishes were cleared, Allison did what I used to do back in college, which was keep a sharp eye attuned to the restaurant's till so as to see when the check might be arriving, and once the check was in motion toward the table, flee to the bathroom. When she returned, she found me putting on my sweater and readying my purse.

“Oh, did the bill come?”

“My treat.”

“How sweet of you.”

“Maybe we could go to a coffee place and discuss, you know-these things you've been receiving.”

“That's an excellent idea.”

We found a nearby café inhabited by local teens primping and strutting and turkey-cocking, all of which made me feel older than dirt. Allison ordered the most expensive coffee on the menu, whereupon I gave her my most penetrating stare. “Can we talk now about Jason?”

“Of course, dear. But I wish it didn't feel as silly as it does to say these things to you.”

“No, not at all. So what did he say?”

Allison inhaled and delivered the words like an embarrassing truth. “Glue.” “What?” “Glue. Glue glue glue glue glue.”

I was floored. It was the Quails speaking. The Quails were
yet more characters created by Jason and me-a blend of Broadway gypsies and intelligent children, greatly given to repetitive tasks and themed costumes. But the Quails spoke only their own language, which had only one word,
glü
with a jaunty, Ikea-like umlaut on the ü.

Allison said, “After all your kindness, Heather, that's the only message I have for you. I think maybe I am a fraud after all.”

I sat stunned.

“Heather? Heather?”

“What? I-”

“I take it this means something to you.”

“Yeah. It does.”

“That's a relief.”

Allison, I suppose, was wondering what kind of genie had been let out of the bottle. I asked her, “Nothing else? Nothing at all?”

“Sorry Heather. Just ‘
Glue glue glue glue
.'”

“When do you normally pick up your messages, so to speak?”

“It has to be during the night.”

“So tonight you'll get more?”

“I can only wait and see.”

“Will you call me if you get anything?”

“Of course I will. But I think it's because of my car and money worries that I'm blocking more than I could otherwise receive.”

“I'll help you out with your car. And of course I'll pay you your normal psychic fees.”

“You're very kind, Heather. And after tonight's lavish meal, too.”

Oh, brother
. I took ten twenty-dollar bills from my bag and gave them to Allison. “This is for today. And also, I'll cover your car's repair bill this time. How does that sound?”

“Such kindness! But really Heather, you-”

I was swept away in the emotion of hearing Quails from the dead. “It's my pleasure. Can I ask you to keep your phone on tomorrow, Allison? It's so frustrating to be unable to reach you sometimes.”

“Of course I will, dear.”

And so I came home, where I'm sitting now trying to make sense of Jason's happy message from beyond.
Glü glü glü glü glü glü glü glü glü glü glü glü glü
.

I'm wondering if I should just jump off Cleveland Dam and get to him right away, but that would probably somehow disqualify me.

So I think I just need to sit here, enjoy the glow and then take two sleeping pills because tomorrow's a working day.

Just before I fall asleep…

I've been thinking. I'm older. I'm on the other side of thirty-five, and I have a better notion of wasted time and energy than I did even two years ago. If somebody wastes my time these days, I get mad. I'm also seven years older than Jason, but after about thirty-three, we're all the same age in our heads, so it's not the big deal it looks like. At least not from the inside looking out. And as Jason was almost thirty-three, we were almost the same. And anyway, a few decades after your first kiss and your first cigarette, I don't care if you're rich or poor, life leaves the same number of bruises on you.

Most people might view Jason as a failure, and that's just
fine. Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being. I thought Jason was as pure and bright as a halo, and no, I'm not trying to make excuses for the guy. God only knows he snored through enough morning jobs, and he clocked out early once a week to watch the games down at the pubs. But Jason never curried favor with people he didn't like. He never tried to fake being busy so he'd look good, and he never fudged his opinion to suit the temperature of the room.

In failure, Jason could be truly himself, and there's a liberation that stems from that. Leave that shirt untucked. Wash your hair tomorrow. Beer with lunch? Sure.

I wish I could say that success turns people into plastic dolls, but the truth is that I don't know any successful people. The people in the courts are the closest I might come to knowing success stories, but they're all vermin.

At first I wondered if I should take Jason and clean him up and turn him into a gung-ho PowerPoint-driven success story, but that was never going to happen. I figured that out quickly, so I never pushed him. That I didn't try to force him to change might have been my biggest attraction-that and my manicotti Florentine-and the fact that I never judged him harshly, or even judged him at all. I simply let him be who he was, this sweet, screwed-up refugee from a past that was so extreme and harsh, and so different from my own. And he was so lonely when I met him-oh! He almost hummed with relief in the mornings when he learned we could talk at breakfast. Apparently, that was forbidden growing up. Reg must have been pretty gruesome back then.

Jason also had this thing called the glory-meter. A glory-meter was an invisible device Jason said almost everybody
carries around with them, a Palm Pilot-ish gadget that goes
ding-ding-ding
whenever we come up with a salve to try to inflate our sense of importance. Examples would be “I make the best sour cherry pie in Vancouver” “My dachshund has the silkiest fur of all the dogs in the park” “My spreadsheets have the most sensibly ordered fields” “I won the 500-yard dash in my senior year.” You get the picture. Simple stuff. Jason never saw anything wrong with this kind of thing, but when he pointed the meter to himself, the
ding-ding-ding
stopped, and he'd pretend to whack it, as if the needle were broken.

“Jason, you must have
something
in you to activate the glory-meter.”

“Sorry, honey. Nada.”

“Oh, come on…”

“Zilch.”

This was his cue for me to say how much I loved him, and I'd spend the next ten minutes girlishly telling him all the goofy things I like about him, and he felt so much better because of that. So, if that's fixing someone, yup, I fixed the man.

Wednesday morning 10:30

I ended up needing five sleeping pills to knock me out, and it was all I could do to drag my butt into work this morning. As an antidote, I took some trucker pills Jason kept in the medicine cabinet-heavy duty, but they do wake me up. Fortunately, people will misinterpret my sour, inwardly turned face as contrition after yesterday's cell phone debacle. However, I can barely think properly, let alone transcribe
the boring pap being spouted in this current trial, so I'm just going to sit here and do the best I can, given the circumstances.

Oh, it's lovely to sit here and pay no attention to anything these morons in the court are saying. I ought to have tried this years ago. I wonder how many other stenographers across the decades have sat here pumping out their inner self while appearing prim and methodical? Oh, I suppose I'm flattering myself, but we're a good crew, we are, stenographers. On TV, we never get to be a part of the plot twist. A star has never played a stenographer; there isn't even a porn movie with court stenographers in it.

Right now, a lawyer named Pete is prattling on about a property conveyance form that's not been supplied. I smell a recess coming up.

I suppose I can phone Allison during the recess. I thought about her way too much last night. There's something I don't like about her, but what could be her angle? So far she's gotten a good meal, maybe some free car repairs and two hundred bucks from me. Not much.

Who am I fooling? This woman
owns
me. And she knows it. And I can only pray that I get enough messages from Jason before she bares her fangs and starts upping the price.

Heather, get a grip: she's a North Vancouver widow-which is pretty much what you are, too-a widow who's trying to scam some bucks and hold onto a middle-class façade before poverty sucks her down the drain like some cheap special effect.

Are Allison's actions criminal? One fact I know from being a stenographer is that just about anybody can do just about anything for just about any reason. Crime is what got
me into stenography. I wanted to see the faces of people who lie. I wanted to see how people can say one thing and do another. It's all my parents ever did with each other, as well as with all their family members. I thought being closer to liars and criminals could help me put my family's lies into better perspective-but of course that never happened. At least I sometimes had entertainment. Like a few years ago we had this woman, an elementary school teacher, who claimed she was at a baby shower when it turns out she was quite happily dismembering her father-in-law. I wanted to see that kind of lying brio. She maintained total composure while the defense team clobbered her with motive-money, what else?-and intent-she'd bought a kiddy pool a month earlier in order to contain the blood-plus there were receipts for hundreds of dollars' worth of bleach and disinfectants and deodorants, purchased from the same Shoppers Drug Mart where I buy my tampons and microwave popcorn.

Was there a big moral to any of this? Doubtful. But I do know that as a species we're somehow hard-wired to believe lies. It's astonishing how willing we are to believe whatever story we're tossed simply because we want to hear what we want to hear.

I suppose I also thought that being a stenographer hearing it all would somehow inoculate me against crimes occurring
to
me. Naïve. But then, it was a seventeen-year-old me who made that decision. Imagine leaving your most important life decisions to a seventeen-year-old! What was God thinking? If there's such a thing as reincarnation, I want the nature of my next incarnation to be decided by a quorum of twelve seventysomethings.

What's this? Goody gumdrops-a recess while Joe Dirtbag buys time to find a conveyance form that every person in the courtroom knows doesn't exist. Rich people have their own laws; poor people don't stand a chance; they never have.

Tuesday afternoon 3:00

I was eating lunch in a café near the courthouse, picking at some romaine lettuce leaves while dispiritedly redialing Allison, when some French Canadian girls behind me, tree planters-teenagers with perfect skin and no apparent sense of gratitude for what society has given them-began discussing vegetarianism and meat. Their descriptions of Quebec slaughterhouses were so foul that I almost vomited, though normally such explicit dialogue would only leave me curious for more. I stumbled back to the courthouse, found Larry who does shift planning and pleaded off sick for the remainder of the day-again. I drove home, where all I could do was lie beneath the duvet and think about where Jason's body is right now. Not his soul or spirit, but the
meat
part of him. Why is this so important to me?