Just one hour ago, I was a good little citizen in a Toronto-Dominion bank branch over in North Van, standing in line, and none of this was even on my mind. I was there to deposit a check from my potbellied contractor boss, Les, and I was wondering if I should blow off the afternoon’s work. My hand reached down into my pocket, and instead of a check, my sunburnt fingers removed the invitation to my brother’s memorial service. I felt as if I’d just opened all the windows of a hot muggy car.
I folded it away and wrote down today’s date on the deposit slip. I checked the wall calendar – August 19, 1999 – and What the heck, I wrote a whole row of zeroes before the year, so that the date read: August 19, 00000001999. Even if you hated math, which I certainly do, you’d know that this is still mathematically the same thing as 1999.
When I gave the slip and the check to the teller, Dean, his eyes widened, and he looked up at me as if I’d handed him a holdup note. “Sir,” he said, “this isn’t a proper date.”
I said, “Yes, it is. What makes you think it isn’t?”
“The extra zeroes.”
Dean was wearing a deep blue shirt, which annoyed me. “What is your point?” I asked.
“Sir, the year is nineteen ninety-nine, not zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one nine nine nine.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I’d like to speak with the branch manager.”
Dean called over Casey, a woman who was maybe about my age, and who had the pursed hardness of someone who spends her days delivering bad news to people and knows she’ll be doing it until her hips shatter. Casey and Dean had a hushed talk, and then she spoke to me. “Mr. Klaasen, may I ask you why you’ve written this on your slip?”
I stood my ground: “Putting more zeroes in front of ‘1999’ doesn’t make the year any different.”
“Technically, no.”
“Look, I hated math as much as you probably did –”
“I didn’t hate math, Mr. Klaasen.”
Casey was on the spot, but then so was I. It’s not as if I’d walked into the bank planning all those extra zeroes. They just happened, and now I had to defend them. “Okay. But maybe what the zeroes do point out is that in a billion years – and there will be a billion years – we’ll all be dust. Not even dust: we’ll be molecules.”
Silence.
I said, “Just think, there are still a few billion years of time out there, just waiting to happen. Billions of years, and we’re not going to be here to see them.”
Silence.
Casey said, “Mr. Klaasen, if this is some sort of joke, I can try to understand its abstract humor, but I don’t think this slip meets the requirements of a legal banking document.”
Silence.
I said, “But doesn’t it make you think? Or want to think?”
“About what?”
“About what happens to us after we die.”
This was my real mistake. Dean telegraphed Casey a savvy little glance, and in a flash I knew that they knew about me, about Cheryl, about 1988 and about my reputation as a borderline nutcase – He never really got over it, you know. I’m used to this. I was furious but kept my cool. I said, “I think I’d like to close my account – convert to cash, if I could.”
The request was treated with the casualness I might have received if I’d asked them to change a twenty. “Of course. Dean, could you help Mr. Klaasen close out his account?”
I asked, “That’s it? ‘Dean, could you help Mr. Klaasen close out his account?’ No debate? No questions?”
Casey looked at me. “Mr. Klaasen, I have two daughters and I can barely think past next month’s mortgage, let alone the year two billion one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. My hunch is that you’d be happier elsewhere. I’m not trying to get rid of you, but I think you know where I’m coming from.”
She wasn’t wearing a wedding band. “Can I take you out to lunch?” I asked.
“What?”
“Dinner, then.”
“No!” The snaking line was eavesdropping big time. “Dean, there should be no complications in closing Mr. Klaasen’s account.” She looked at me. “Mr. Klaasen, I have to go.”
My anger became gray emotional fuzz, and I just wanted to leave. Inside of five minutes, Dean had severed my connection to his bank, and I stood on the curb smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, my shirt untucked and $5,210.00 stuffed into the pockets of my green dungarees. I decided to leave the serene, heavily bylawed streets of North Vancouver and drive to West Vancouver, down near the ocean. At the Seventeenth and Bellevue CIBC I opened a checking account, and when I looked behind the tellers I saw an open vault. I asked if it was possible to rent a safety deposit box, which took all of three minutes to do. That box is where I’m going to place all of this, once it’s finished. And here’s the deal: if I get walloped by a bus next year, this letter is going to be placed in storage until May 30, 2019, when you, my two nephews, turn twenty-one. If I hang around long enough, I might hand it to you in person. But for now, that’s where this letter is headed.
Just so you know, I’ve been writing all of this in the cab of my truck, parked on Bellevue, down by Ambleside Beach, near the pier with all its bratty kids on rollerblades and the Vietnamese guys with their crab traps pursuing E. coli. I’m using a pen embossed with “Travelodge” and I’m writing on the back of Les’s pink invoice forms. The wind is heating up – God, it feels nice on my face – and I feel, in the most SUV-commercial sense of the word, free.
How to start?
First off, Cheryl and I were married. No one knows that but me, and now you. It was insane, really. I was seventeen and starved for sex, but I was still stuck in my family’s religious warp, so only husband/wife sex was allowed, and even then for procreation only, and even then only while both partners wore heavy wool tweeds so as to drain the act of pleasure. So when I suggested to Cheryl that we fly to Las Vegas and get hitched, she floored me when she said yes. It was an impulsive request I made after our math class saw an educational 16mm film about gambling. The movie was supposed to make high school students more enthusiastic about statistics. I mean, what were these filmmakers thinking?
And what was I thinking? Marriage? Las Vegas}
We flew down there one weekend and – I mean, we weren’t even people then, we were so young and out of it. We were like baby chicks. No. We were like zygotes, little zygotes cabbing from the airport to Caesars Palace, and all I could think about was how hot and dry the air was. In any event, it seems like a billion years ago.
Around sunset, we got married, using our fake IDs. Our witness was a slob of a cabbie who drove us down the Strip. For the next six weeks my grades evaporated, sports became a nuisance, and my friends became ghosts. The only thing that counted was Cheryl, and because we kept the marriage secret, it was way better and more forbidden feeling than if we’d waited and done all the sensible stuff.
There were some problems when we got home. This churchy group Cheryl and I were in, Youth Alive!, crabby morality spooks who spied on us for weeks, likely with the blessing of my older brother, Kent. When I was in twelfth grade, Kent was in second year at the University of Alberta, but he was still a honcho, and I can only imagine the phone conversations he must have been having with the local Alive! creeps:
Were the lights on or off?
Which lights?
Did