Eleanor Rigby

Author:Douglas Coupland
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Canada, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307375377
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2004-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

coyotes stumbling down an empty freeway. eyes are milk-y

There’s too much sun.

The sun shines whenever and- wherever it likes. Night is old

fashioned.

WHERE is the correct path?

if time had to begin then it has to end at some point, too.

what if God exists but he doesn’t really like people very much?

We never discussed these notes. I’m not even sure if Jeremy knew I kept them, or if he thought I’d tossed them away. After he began working and taking his medication, his visions vanished, and I wanted these paper scraps as proof that there still existed this other Jeremy inside of him who pondered such things. I mean, if he gave me the word, I’d have been right back there on the highway again, crawling toward the west.

Life is hard. We all need something to believe in, even if it’s cockamamie. I’d never thought much about belief one way or the other until Jeremy entered my life. His visions marked the first signs of an awakening within myself. Poor Jeremy had spent his childhood being bandied from family to family like a porn novel in a summer camp. It was hard for him to put his faith in any idea larger than his immediate world. We’d ended up marooned on the same beach. Curiously, one definition of health is that you have the same disease as all of your neighbours; in this sense, he and I were the picture of health.

Was I falling in love with my son? It must sound like it, but no. However, I was realizing that I loved him very much indeed.

* * *

When Jeremy collapsed, he hit his head on a planter that held a ficus tree. There was no blood, and he was only out for about thirty seconds, but I thought I should take him to Emergency.

He didn’t like the fuss we made about him in the office, and in the car he was silent, angry at me for speaking with Kayla. I said, “I can see your point. It might seem like I was going behind your back, but I was only doing what any mother would do.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Almost nothing. Is there something I should know?”

We were on Marine Drive headed east. The car was dirty, and light catching the dirt made it hard to see what lay ahead.

“Pull over.”

I did. I turned off the engine. I asked him, “What’s up?”

“When I was thirteen, there was this one family I was with for maybe three months. They were great. Sunday was like Thursday with them. They didn’t believe in anything but cars and skiing and schnauzer dogs. We went to restaurants all the time and they gave me ten bucks a week as allowance, with no lectures or anything.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“I woke up one night and I was in between them on their bed. I went mental, and ran down to the RCMP detachment office in my underwear. It was December and I froze, but they didn’t drive me back to the house.

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