Chapter 11

Nov. 24, 2011

The mess down at the cul de sac reflected the state of my head the next morning and the best activity I could muster was to flump on the couch and flip through the numerous channels of snow, blue screens and silence, before shoving Saving Private Ryan into the DVD player and cranking it up, much to Carrie’s annoyance.

She took a hammer and nails and left the condo, determined and eventually successful at jury-rigging the condo door that I shot off its hinges, adding a sheet of plywood from that same condo’s basement to ensure it was as sealed off from the elements as possible.

Old habits.

I told her to “give it a rest” and she swore at me for being “a childish idiot.” She also pointed out some other deficiencies and “quirks” and even suggested that it was her affiliation with the likes of me that got her “stuck here in this empty world. I don’t deserve this,” she harrumphed. I remember it clearly because she never harrumphed. She was the least harrumphy person I knew. Optimism reigned supreme with her, while cynicism and harsh judgment followed me around with relentless fervor. She always saw the good in people and I drifted toward seeing the nastiness lurking behind the façade.

Carrie had shown me all sides of her emotional world but she’d never been so outwardly mean. Stuck in a fucked world, the last thing she wanted to be pummeled with was shriekingly negative cynicism, no matter how well phrased.

“That was one hell of an ugly mess you made down there,” she said. “Did it ever enter your damaged head that this might be all some kind of wild test and you just failed it for us by being an… an insane lunatic?”

Regrettably, I grumbled some words tainted by egoism and a blind, stupid lack of gratitude.

It was the first time that we had become testy with one another since the disappearance. Bound to happen, I thought, while American troops stormed Omaha Beach.

Carrie fled to our bedroom to try and once again temper the wrenching anguish of not knowing where her kids were – where anyone was. I sat in our rapidly not-so-much living room and disappeared into a world once thought the worst kind.

My journal entry for this day said: “Fuck this noise.”

Chapter 12

Nov. 25, 2011

We spent this day preparing to embark on a lengthy trip. Neither of us mentioned it but we didn’t know if we would be back. One second I was sure of it, the next, I was sure we’d never be back. Emotions ploughed through me like long fingers slithering through half set Jello.

I spent a long time pouring over my trusty Rand McNally road atlas and plotted out a route to Vancouver. Due to the slow nature of the travel — we couldn’t speed as the roads featured dangerous surprises everywhere — so we opted to pop down to our cabin at Lake Cocolalla for a night or two, just to get our feet wet on the open road. We were both seasoned road trippers but our venture to Calgary showed us that we were left alone in a weird new world, where someone else’s mess wasn’t being cleaned up by someone else.

Thinking of my rampage the other night, I felt compelled to make sure it was okay. I wandered around the neighbouring condo area and thought about the people who had lived there – people I had never met or really cared to meet; people who drove past while I shoveled my drive, who probably wondered when I would set fire to our complex with my mad barbecue fests. People who sauntered past, being taken for walks by their dogs; people who just disappeared.

I poked through the remains of the massive blaze and found the Chia Pet thingymabob that I drunkenly flung into the blaze the night before. I lugged that thing around for… decades. It served as a toothbrush holder for years before being relegated to the back of a trinket-laden shelf, before being relegated to a box shoved under our deck the past few years.

Thrashing about looking for targets and other things to burn, I pulled that box out during the height of my late night madness and it only just now filtered through my brain that I had destroyed a box full of ‘things’ that had meant enough to me, for whatever reasons, that I toted them from one home to another as life’s current flowed along.

I recalled my booze-fried brain making the decision: to heck with it – what does it matter. And in the fire things from the box went – writings, bits of things collected from various places around the world and that stupid frigging Chia Pet, which I never tried to send down the road to cultivation.

Never saw the point. Couldn’t even remember who gave it to me, though my sister seemed to be the most likely candidate – likely around 1985 or so.

In the smoldering haze of the late morning, I spotted the scorched and broken Chia pet in the ashes and poked at it with a stick. For a few moments I stared at it, feeling the bridge from the past to the current crumbling.

Slowly and with much contemplation of those who were no longer around on my world, I scuffed home with a renewed sense of wanting to just… flee.

We packed the medicine, the guns, food, clothes and enough CDs to open a radio station and had an early night.

Neither of us spoke much that day. We shared an empty, lonely feeling. We were leaving our lives behind and hadn’t properly prepared ourselves or secured our home. I felt a smoking panic most of the day; the universe was out of whack and each breath, each blink, each swallow took effort.

A melancholy of the like I have never experienced grew and expanded to a frustrated aggravation that eventually leveled out as a fat blue mood.

We both wrote notes to our kids and loved ones — just in case.

We drifted to sleep when it was still light out – bearing in mind it was the end of November in Canada – holding onto one another and refusing to let go, even when our hands and arms became numb from loss of circulation.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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