The river in question was no doubt the mighty Fraser, with three large bridges and a four-lane tunnel crossing it. The often-predicted Big One, a massive earthquake along a fault line near the coast, was the only catastrophe that might prevent Doris from getting safely back home. But only a paranoid would fit a megaquake into their plans for the day.
“Don't worry, I understand,” Glen said.
“It's all in my head, but I need to stay on this side of the river.”
“What’s important is that you feel safe.”
Glen pictured Doris nodding, his reply satisfactory.
“Do you know the university in Whalley?” she asked. “It's directly across the parking lot from a monorail stop. There’s a coffee shop outside the main entrance, right where the new tower stands—shaped like a sail or dorsal fin, or something or other.”
“I've seen it driving by.”
“In case you somehow have problems arriving on time, please call. I wouldn't want to be stranded in a public place today. Not for any length of time.”
“I’ll call if something comes up.”
“Shall we say in one hour?”
Glen left his umbrella but put on a warmish jacket. It wasn't like him not to bring a novel; but certain he lacked the concentration to do any serious reading, he picked up a newspaper at the Skytrain station instead. There weren’t many commuters at this hour and he easily found a seat beside the window. Whalley was roughly a forty-minute ride eastward.
The front page of the paper featured a building downtown occupied by homeless people. Once a landmark department store, it had become a huge makeshift dormitory for drug addicts, the mentally ill, and people without any family. Spokespersons for the squatters were negotiating with city officials, who threatened to take police action soon. The situation had to end was the message from City Hall—in other words, money and profit ahead of people's well-being. The mayor likely believed city residents would applaud a hard line.
Elsewhere in the paper, provincial politics seemed as depressing as ever. The economy had grown teeth and was on the upswing, chewing on the gristle of dwindling social programs. On the third page, Glen came across an article about a new medical discovery. Mental and physical forms of stress, it read, released hormones that weakened blood vessels in the heart and led to premature death. Stress, science now demonstrated, was a mass murderer.
Glen felt cheated, robbed. After all the misery dolloped on him by his mother, life’s trials, as well as flawed nerves and his brain's baleful chemistry, now—to top it all off—he was destined to die at fifty. He had always assumed his fifties and sixties would be happier years for him, but that rosier future was no more. Shit! Only the present really counted.
To take his mind off his troubles, Glen began watching other passengers. One was a Hispanic male. He resembled a punched-out boxer resting an elbow on his knee and staring at the floor. Another was a Chinese woman, maybe a secretary or an accountant, and dressed for the office. At the other end of the car, a man in a business suit was leaning on his trolley case and reading a magazine—and, of course, Glen mused, among the passengers aboard the train today was a pathetic, past-his-prime virgin on his way to meet a woman who hadn’t shown a speck of interest in him but whom he nonetheless found irresistibly alluring, if only because she seemed as unstable and zany as him.
What the hell was he up to? Did he actually hope to court Doris Keppler? In all likelihood, she was Russell’s new girlfriend. Certain arrows did, in fact, point in that direction—but did they? Doris had come looking for Russell. Maybe Russell had already jilted her? And now, after the breakup, he needed time alone. But how serious could the affair have been if Russell never once mentioned Doris? Glen wanted to clarify things over coffee. The bottom line: if the two of them were still together Doris was out of bounds.
The Skytrain ran parallel with the Fraser now—a tug boat towing a slab-like barge against choppy waters, and lumber mills on the opposite riverbank spouted thin stalks of smoke. Glen's thoughts turned to Doris's fear of straying from home. He appreciated the persuasiveness of delusional realities, whatever form they took. Even if Doris believed she somehow influenced the shift of the earth's tectonic plates by strolling down the sidewalk, he accepted that as the reality she experienced. Earlier, Doris had shown a lot of courage. Over the phone she had come clean about her paranoia. So what kind of openness had he demonstrated in return? None, exactly no kind. He had maintained the upper hand throughout their conversation and not once confessed to any frailty. God, such a coward.
Him and Doris, and so many other fuck ups, striving to preserve normality but meanwhile letting anxiety warp their lives. It was a wonder the world operated at all, with so many non-recovering crazies in it. Shit! The world resembled an enormous factory packed with malfunctioning machines. Robot arms swinging haphazardly here and there. Bolt guns shooting in every which direction. Assembly lines whizzing out of control, breaking down.
The Fraser River surged seaward beneath the Skytrain bridge. Crossing it, everything plummeted but the train itself, which vaulted high above the water—a breathtaking chasm opening up in the blink of an eye. Glen noticed the churning river current was fractions of a shade darker than the sandy banks; he saw trucks and campers nestled in spots near the beach, groups of people milling around fire pits, and a white dot chase a frisbee too distant to make out with the naked eye. Glen imagined family barbeques, fathers and sons doing a little fishing, owners letting their dogs run and frolic off the leash.
He figured out what was generating his strange mood—a confused mixture of melancholy and apprehension The prospect of meeting Doris scared the bejesus out of him. But nothing was forcing him to go through with it. Just stay aboard the Skytrain, Glen told himself, it would eventually loop around and head back to the city. Sure, Doris would consider him wishy-washy and a loser for chickening out. Humiliation like that, however, was the cake he had been gorging on his entire life. You acquired a taste for it after a while.
Whalley's down-and-out hung around the Skytrain station and the adjacent bus hub. They greeted Glen with probing glances. Many of the hooded youths were drug dealers, trafficking their product to customers from every part of the city. Business was being conducted with winter gloves and woolen hats today, as well as out in broad daylight.
Glen had forgotten how bad things were here. But the atmosphere was oddly fascinating too, the grubbing for a livelihood a sort of vulgar spectacle. Across the street, the row of one-dollar stores and pawn shops was open for business; in every doorway a clot of shabby white trash loitered around. Glen felt eyes frisking him.
He was money.
Chapter 15
A young man sat on a staircase fanning out from the mall’s main entrance—dark olive skin and black curls, a green fleece and hiking boots. He gazed out over the plaza and its concrete-block fountain; wore a smile that looked smug, a little cocky. The youth appeared to be tallying up all the opportunities down below that were his for the taking. Interesting people to meet and social networks to create. Mating to be done. Glen often people-watched himself but usually ended up looking around and wondering, How the hell am I going to survive this place?
Glen had taken a window seat in the coffee shop. The winsome youth outside reminded him once again of his need to change his life. Continually gumming away on overstewed angst wasn’t the way to go. He had to cultivate an appetite for women. Find some zesty, buxom woman to put the bounce back in him. Very soon he would be seated opposite one who could do just that. And Doris had been to his house, she had spoken to him and left her phone number. That alone made her unlike any other woman in the entire world.
Doris Keppler was no anonymous fish in the ocean. She had come aground on his shores after Russell had apparently tossed her back—Russell had dumped her and was trying to slither free. But was that true? Was that the story? And if so what was wrong with her?
There was a quirkiness to Doris, but it was harmless enough. It d
idn't make her a bad catch. Glen actually found the eccentricity endearing. But her fear of being stranded on the wrong side of the Fraser River, with no place to run if trouble arose: didn’t this suggest some kind of genuine disorder? She might suffer from a severe phobia, or from irrational fears that included unforeseeable catastrophe, such as a long-awaited killer quake—
Oh, fuck, here we go! Glen, you're on! Doris Keppler was crossing the plaza towards him. Here again was the woman from his front porch—uptown, spruced up, her knee-high leather boots volleying sunlight back into the sky. Today she was wearing a long deep-brown leather coat and a mauve dress whose hem she kicked out with every step. Glen noticed that despite the bone-dry cold, the dress was again a light breezy fabric. It was as if she had selected today’s outfit from the pages of a summer catalogue, the wrong season altogether.
And Doris had left her coat unbuttoned—now here was a woman with endowments to flaunt. The hummocky sway of her breasts was surely intended for a gobsmacking effect, and it worked. Glen pictured himself staying that wondrous amplitude, burying his face in the cushiony cleavage and deliriously nuzzling the—Christ! Way too much happening at once!
Doris walked briskly up. Glen felt like wild game spotted in the grass by the hounds. This woman wanted something: she was dressed to seduce. But what did he have to give anyone? He lifted a hand to wave—a badly timed afterthought—just as Doris pulled open the door.
“Hello Glen, you're looking well,” she said.
Her smile was frank and steady, like the pump of a firm handshake. Her bright balsawood hair shone in the daylight. But her lips were thinner than he remembered, the blade of her nose and long cheeks compromised by a second study. She wasn't unattractive but not out-and-out gorgeous either—and more than a little rotund. It occurred to Glen that a woman of Doris's girth would come out poorly in cuts designed for an average figure. On her, anything cheap and off-the-rack would bring to mind a thickset female power lifter. Of course, she knew that.
“I’m off to get myself something,” she said. “Would you like another coffee?”
“Nothing for me, thanks.”
Glen reflected how the interplay had gone thus far. Crap! Somebody more confident and composed, more together—in short, somebody not him—would have gone for the drink she had offered. Fuck! And he should have acted the gentleman and offered her a drink. After the span of a few seconds he was already burdened with a handicap.
When Doris returned, coffee mug in hand, Glen panicked: why hadn't he been planning what to say next! Thankfully—thank you, God!—she started the conversation.
“You didn’t get mugged by that mob at the monotrain station, did you?”
Skytrain station: that's what people, everybody, called it here.
“Seems they've cleaned the area up,” Glen replied. “And the university tower wasn't finished when I was here last. Pretty impressive.”
“It’s just this coffee shop and the tower that’s new. Inside the mall it’s as depressing as ever. All the shops sell cheap products for the welfare crowd and single mothers. They're all still living here, I’m afraid.”
“I've heard the area is changing.”
“Well, they’re still here. People who live in the area want to think the stereotype of Whalley, as a haven for addicts, prostitutes, and white supremacists—depressing people like that—isn’t accurate anymore. But it's still true, of course.”
Doris offered various stories as proof. One of her neighbors had trained his Doberman to attack burglars only after they had snuck into his apartment. The burglars got in but didn't get out without the dog chewing a piece out of them. And a woman down her block turned tricks in her garage; her husband had bought an SUV with some of the money. Derelict homes were never torn down here. Instead, they housed junkies who thieved to support their addictions.
“The other week a girl was raped in a soccer park,” Doris said. “A whole apartment block heard the cries but nobody bothered calling the police.”
“Somehow I'd heard things were better now.”
“Not so far, I’m afraid.”
Glen glanced at Doris’s coffee. It was too soon for a refill. But he had to be ready to offer one when the time came. Now that the topic of Whalley had been exhausted, what next? Doris’s diction suggested she had received a decent education; hopefully, asking about her schooling wouldn’t cause any embarrassments. He himself only had a lowly bachelor's degree.
But again Doris spoke first. “Russell will contact you eventually. One doesn’t cast aside one’s lifelong friends for good. He’ll be in touch sooner or later.”
“I'm sure you're right,” Glen replied—Why would I ever think Russell would cast me aside? He then took a sip of coffee and asked, “So you’re a couple or something?”
“A couple? I never want to speak to him again.”
“Then were you a couple?”
“You seem awfully curious.”
“I mean, you’re looking for him.”
“It's not what you think. For me it’s like when I was a little girl and a space mission went up into space—do you remember that, a big event every year or so? The mission itself meant nothing to me. I didn’t care what advances in science they were trying to accomplish up there. But I always sat glued to the television until the crew returned to earth alive.”
“Safe and sound.”
“I needed to know they’d landed okay. Once that happened, I dropped the whole thing and went straight back to my doll house. Until the next time that is.”
Astronauts floating through outer space, Glen thought, childhood recollections. They weren’t just yacking for the sake of yacking. They were sharing personal things, or at least Doris was. Maybe the conversation wasn’t going so badly, after all. But, for all that, Doris hadn't clarified what her relationship with Russell was, or had been.
“Did Russell ever mention running off?” she asked.
“Not a word. At least, not to me.”
“Strange, don’t you think? Hard to understand.”
“It’s beginning to be.”
“The most disturbing part is no contact—even you haven’t been able to get a hold of him. Despite what you say about him not being suicidal, I keep having nightmares. Him dead on a stony beach somewhere.”
“I really doubt he’s the type. Russell isn’t at all fragile in that way.”
“He’s probably just gone off somewhere,” Doris said.
“I’d say that’s more likely.”
“Without telling you.”
“It seems so.”
The tension Glen had felt at the outset of the date lingered. He was unable to relax sitting across from Doris, even though there wasn't any real reason to be nervous. Nothing was at stake here. Nobody was trying to take anyone home, or anything like that. A little self-therapy was all that was happening today: him chatting with a woman in a date-like scenario as practice for the real thing, which was bound to come along one of these days or, then again, probably not.
It was his turn to raise a topic. One zoomed in out of the blue. “In this world anything's possible. Any kind of human perversity, in fact, just like the Bible shows. I’m not religious—it was never part of my upbringing—but after reading the Bible on my own, I’ve come to think it's a wise book. You can look at it as a blueprint for humanity in that it contains every vagary of human conduct, good and bad. You have fathers sleeping with daughters, brothers stealing from brothers and murdering them, and then there are the old women who become mysteriously pregnant. What other book packs so much between two covers?”
The fissures underscoring Doris’s eyes and bracketing her mouth rose like incisions on glass. Her expression grew terribly sad. Glen recalled she had reacted this way the day before at his house. What did he keep saying wrong? He couldn’t think of another topic to switch to and blurted out, “Betrayal is also an important theme in the Bible. Not only Judas's either. I’m talking about the betrayal of God's very first children, Ada
m and Eve.”
Blah, blah, what the fuck! What nonsense!
The Bible? Now he was some kind of expert?
Betrayal? Where was he going with this?
Doris replied, “You feel Russell betrayed you because he vanished without saying a word. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
This was unexpected—a leap all the way back to Russell. Why was Doris so sure Russell had mysteriously vanished? She dwelt on the point continually. Glen wasn’t sure what to think, and it was Doris who was confusing him. Yesterday, she had accused Russell of deserting her and sounded hurt. Hadn’t she been trying to track him down? In any case, Glen hadn't come to the coffee shop out of concern for his friend. Jeez! Russell would resurface when good and ready. Still, if Doris wanted to talk about Russell, he would go along with it.
“If he's vanished, or whatever,” Glen said, “doesn't he owe me some kind of explanation? It's one thing to want to go away for a while, or have some alone time, but causing people to worry about you isn't right. All it’d take is a quick call or something.”
Doris jabbed a hand into her purse. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Must go set myself on fire. This conversation is beginning to nibble at my nerves. Poor you, anyway.”
“Poor me?” Glen began to laugh.
She dropped her plastic lighter and it clattered onto the floor. A rush of blood heated Glen’s crotch as she bent to scoop it up: thoughts of planting his hands on her skull, guiding her mouth towards him. But he right away banished the lewd image.
“I smoked once,” Glen said.
“You must tell me how you managed to quit.”
“It's cold out there. You’re not wearing your coat?”
Doris turned to him. “Why did you bring that up?”
“Bring what up?”
“The Bible, father's sleeping with—betrayal, all of that. Mind telling me how it relates to Russell exactly? Just now I was the one who connected what you said to Russell betraying you. You simply went along with it, I can tell.”
Oh, Christ! “Believe me, I’m just trying to make conversation,” Glen said, “It's screwy but I'm not a good conversationalist and can go off in weird tangents sometimes. Sorry.”