Stories about lives after God

This Week’s Winner

May C. de los Santos is “attempting to write a book and a script. But my day job is producing for the Public Affairs department of GMA 7. The last good book I read was Dot in the Universe and currently I am reading Satori in Paris.”

MANILA, Philippines - I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love as I seem beyond being able to love,” so prayed Scout, the last narrating character in Douglas Coupland’s Life After God.

The book is divided into eight story arcs, beginning with “Little Creatures”: a father and his young son on a road trip to visit the grandfather, the father appears to be in a contest with the mother for the child’s custody. Purposely vague on the details, Coupland does away with the minutiae of background information, giving instead the distilled essence of the story in a handful of pages.

In a motel room somewhere, they discover that they have misplaced the child’s Cat in the Hat book so the father has to make up a story on the spot to appease the child. He then tells him of Doggles, the dog who wears goggles. He dog was set to star in Cat in The Hat but had to be replaced because of his drinking problem. There is Squirrelly the Squirrel who was going to be a famous painter but had to quit painting and get a real job when Mrs. Squirrelly started having babies. And there was Clappy the Kitten who was going to be a movie star but accumulated too many credit card bills that she had to get a job as a bank teller and soon forgot about her dreams.

Then the father realizes with dread that he has infused these benign characters with the foibles of men and has to stop.

“My Hotel Year” tells the story of a man who severs his ties to society to live on the fringes and think his life out. In a dingy apartelle populated by dubious characters, his neighbors include a young headbanger couple, Cathy and Pup-Tent. Cathy is in love with Pup-Tent but she is merely a convenient sexual accoutrement to him. One day he runs off with a stripper and Cathy suddenly realizes the way the rest of her life will play out: repeatedly falling for the wrong men until all her memories are taken over by sadness, pain and regret.

“Things That Fly” and “Gettysburg” are breaking-up stories. In the former, a man in desperate need of human contact returns to his parents’ house. Fueled by the TV documentaries on birds he’s been watching, he begins to aspire to a state of eternal freedom — like the birds — unfettered and unencumbered by heartbreak, memories and failed expectations.

In “Gettysburg,” a man is wondering about the strange turn his life takes: when you’re young, you are always waiting for your life to begin. Next year, next week, any day now...until one day you realize that you are old. You wonder where all the time went and what it was you had been having if it wasn’t the life you imagined. 

The marriage he imagined would last him the rest of his life has come to an end with his wife walking out, daughter in tow. She wakes up one day with the realization that she has simply stopped being in love with him and that in the end, it is kinder to leave than to pretend she cared more than she really did.

“In the Desert” tells the story of a man, lost in the desert after his car breaks down, who meets an old drifter. Though the drifter is so far gone that he is talking to himself, he is momentarily able to pull himself together to point the young man towards the nearest civilization where he needs to walk to in the desert. He even gives the young man food.

Many years later, the young man, who has grown old and experienced his share of the world, continues to see the face of the desert bum in his mind. He wonders how his life could be drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness so that even a random act of kindness becomes a lasting memory.

“The Wrong Sun” is a collection of vignettes told by different people recounting a time when the threat of nuclear annihilation is vividly real and how their lives are influenced by that possibility.

The other chapter of this story arc transpires within that possibility. When the bombs explode, people recount their death dispassionately and in detail, the moment when the flash hits and the world around them starts imploding and melting away.

“Patty Hearst” is a story narrated by Louie about her sister Laurie who harbors fantasies of transforming from her middle-class upbringing into someone else, similar to what happened to the real Patty Hearst. Slowly it happens: from a regular girl-next-door, Laurie discovers drugs and turns into a completely different person, ultimately isolating herself from the family, and eventually, disappearing.

They never find or see her again, and each, on their own, continues to grieve for her. Louie continues to hope that someday, something will reach Laurie — the old Laurie — and she will realize that she is loved and that she can always come back.

Scout, Stacey, Julie, Kristy, Mark, Todd and Dana are, again, middle-class children living charmed lives bereft of struggle, passion and religion in “10,000 Years (Life After God),” the last story in the book.

Scout believes the price they have paid for their idyllic lives is the inability to completely believe in love, and instead they acquire an irony that scorches everything it touches — the tradeoff for the loss of the relevance of God in their lives.

Fast forward to 15 years later, all the promise and potential of their youth have by now atrophied: Scout is taking anti-depressants, Stacey with the Barbie doll-body is an alcoholic, Julie turns out to be normal — married with children — Kristy can only fall in love with married men, Mark has HIV, Todd is a junkie tree-cutter, and Dana is a porn star-turned-religious nut espousing end-of-the-world credence.

On a whim, Scout decides to stop taking his pills and has a mild breakdown. He stops going to work and steals away to the forest. Submerged in cold, cold water, he finally prays for clarity and help from God, as quoted in the beginning this essay.

My generation — the generation Coupland writes so eloquently about — grew up at a time when everything seemed possible, all you need to do is want it badly enough and tunnel-vision your way to the exclusion of everything else. MTV taught us to aspire to be rich, famous and notorious. This way God became irrelevant for we did get what we wanted. Only, of course, it wasn’t what we wanted after all: the high-paying jobs and expensive lifestyle weren’t enough and a yearning to return to the basic things — belief in God, love, kindness — became a niggling need we have so far been unable or perhaps unwilling to fulfill. For though life is unsatisfactory, it is ever comfortable.