There is no heaven. At least not the heaven that we imagine: all milk & honey and happiness. No, the real heaven must be some sort of meaningless nothing, just like how the real world is pretty much a meaningless something.

Bradbury was gone. Gone to the USA one random morning. One of those mornings when I would wake up with the smell of stale snot in my nose and with my eyes crusted shut. One of those random mornings when I would amble blindly into the bathroom, not sure if my pyjama-bottoms were completely up, and splash water over my eyelids until they opened. In the early hours of those aimless days I watched George of the Jungle and ate Fruit Loops, at some time around 7:30 AM or thereafter.

In those times, before he left, I would meet Bradbury before school and we would play together. Those were the days! After he left the days ran out; there were no more of them. Logically, I knew there were more, many more mornings, afternoons, and nights. But my memory seemed almost totally empty, then and now, when I tried to think about anything that happened after he left.

Now humour me, because Bradbury was important to me. And so I talked about him then, and I still talk about him now. I am physically grown up, and I did it without him, but he was in some way always a part of me. If it were not so then I would not be talking about him today.

I really did feel a loss. His departure left me with some real holes in my life. I remember how I started to watch more television instead of hanging with him before school. Inspector Gadget, or maybe The Smoggies. And afterward I would walk alone to school without companionship and protection. One ten year-old kid is a lot more vulnerable than two. Although some children could get into mischief on their own, I could never create that much fun all by myself. I lacked the will and the imagination.

There was a science project that I did for school in the fall after Bradbury left me. It was to be a simulated volcano, but there was no demonstration of the forces in the mantle like heat or pressure. There was however baking soda in the center of my plaster volcano, into which I poured red vinegar. The result was a bubbling, foaming, and gushing eruption of pure seltzer action. What an impressive experiment it was to me, but what a dull and conventional thing it was to the judges. Other children had complicated chemical models, or machines, or theoretical experiments. But their parents were doctors, or scientists, or otherwise among the yuppies in a society that pretends to be classless. I always felt that things were stacked against us poorer kids. I always thought it was odd how the teachers always gave the awards to the kids who already had all the experience, all the privilege, and all the money. I could have used an award. So could have many of the local kids. Maybe some of us wouldn't have turned to crime, or drugs, or ended up in the morgue, if we had been given more encouragement. If we had been made to feel that we could achieve our dreams, rather than watching the kids from the north side of Bloor Street always striding forward, two steps ahead of us.

God knows about one kid who didn't have a coddled life in the leafy mansions of Rosedale. I met him when I was in grade seven. From outward appearances he was the picture of perfect Richie Richness. His name was Jonathan, and he was well dressed, well groomed with every hair in place, and exceedingly smart. Although at first I didn't like him, we eventually became school-friends, and we got along well. Jon was adopted when he was five years old. His new parents were cushy Canadian actors.

One day I found myself invited to Jon's impressively large house. It was an old, massive Victorian brick thing. There were two huge French doors for the entrance, which opened onto a large foyer that was crowned by a delicate crystal chandelier. The living rooms were off to the left and right, while the kitchen and dining room was toward the back of the home. Wooden stairs led up to the bedrooms.

It is an impressive thing to have a mansion with a kidney-shaped swimming pool in the backyard. Although these are considered to be adult trappings I was impressed, in a similar way to how I was impressed by the peep show Bradbury and I saw with our telescope.

I was beset by worries upon seeing Jon's home. I was concerned about what he would think when he would come over to my place. What could impress him in our little sardine can apartment? Although our Ontario Housing building was twenty-six stories tall it still did not look as posh or impressive as his big house. We also had an outdoor swimming pool, but it was often closed because the tenants in the upper floors liked to use it for target practice with their beer bottles. We had no laundry elevator in our apartment, but there was a garbage chute down the hall.

Jon's room was surprisingly minimalist for a child. There were a lot of books and one or two toys. Everything was perfectly neat and ordered, even the curtains, which were tied open and decorated with a fabric along the top. It was like a really sanitized photograph from that old magazine Country Life. After seeing his room I realized that, although I was living in poor circumstances, my childhood was enriched by a lot more Transformers and G.I. Joe toys. Even if they were gotten at garage sales or Woolworth's.

So we didn't stay in Jon's room for long. We went out to the back of the house. It was too cold to go in the pool, so we just ran around in the back yard. We played out there for a while, with the fall leaves drifting down all around us. Jon found a lost ball under a bush and we played catch for a bit. I stood on one side of the kidney-shaped pool and Jon stood on the other side as we threw the ball back and forth. This was fun for a while, until he threw it at me too fast. Instead of catching it, the ball hit me and bounced into the pool. That's when the fun ended.

We ran back inside, in through the kitchen and up the stairs, back into his antiseptic bedroom. We sort of just sat around, not saying much. I remember staring at the very clean walls. Then the voice of Jon's mother could be heard calling for him from downstairs. Jon told me he would be right back and he left the room.

She met him half-way down the stairs. I remember hearing her agitated voice as she screamed at him about some dirt that we tracked in with our shoes. Then there was the sound of somebody tumbling down the stairs. A few minutes later Jon's mother came upstairs to his bedroom. I had been hiding there in fear. She told me it was time for me to go home. I walked down the stairs with his mother firmly behind me. I realized that Jon was not there. She opened the front door for me and I walked out. I heard the shuddering sound of two French doors crashing into each other.

She didn't say goodbye to me, and at the time I thought it was strange to have the door closed on me so abruptly. But now I understand that I witnessed an intimate part of their family dynamic, and that I was an unwanted interloper. This became even clearer to me when I played with Jon the next day at school. I asked him about what happened, but he evaded the issue. He said it was none of my business. After Bradbury, I had learned to stay out of other people's business. So I dropped it, being that it was a private matter and all that.

The frailty of the human body is staggering. We think we're so important and so infallible. Frailty and ego don't mix well, and death is often the result. How many people have had their blood gush out of them because of someone's delusions of power? Or in the name of God?

There is no reason for me to say this here, except that I am thinking about the number of people that I have lost over the years, to fights, to alcohol, and even to car crashes. It's a crash, not an accident. It is not an accident to have your life taken away from you. If it was an accident, then so was the life and death of the people killed in their cars.

Society calls it an 'accident' because we collectively fear death. Saying something is an accident allows us to neatly forget about it – like closing it behind French doors. As something not meant to happen. As something unfortunate. Like a secret that's not meant to be exposed. It allows us to dissociate from the fact that accidents are incredibly common and kill many every day. It allows us to continue to live in our bubble-wrapped antiseptic world where life has artificial meaning and value, and where death only comes to the aged.

Perhaps even more important to us, with our stupid lives, is that calling various types of death an 'accident' keeps us from this realization: almost all of the people who die in a car crash were killed while driving to a mundane destination while doing something stupid and unimportant.

And that's why we call these things 'accidents'. Because if we look at death seriously then we will be forced to think about what we're doing with our lives. We will be forced to seriously consider suicide, because we will accomplish nothing anyways.

Jon's mother was terminated in a car crash later that year. She was driving Jon home late in the evening. They were going south on Mount Pleasant when she hit a vehicle that was entering from a hidden intersection. She t-boned the other car. Her chest hit the steering column so hard that the shock made her heart explode. Jon escaped with whiplash, while the passengers of the other car suffered only shock.

I imagined Jon's mother sitting there hunched over the steering wheel, paralyzed by the pain in her chest. I imagined that she was unable to breathe and that she gripped the steering wheel so hard with her hands that she left gouges in the leather trim. I imagined that she realized how stupid her life had been. And as she stared ahead with morbid tunnel-vision clarity, she saw her own meaninglessness and how she had wasted every opportunity to create meaning. I imagined that she wanted to turn and look at her adopted son, but that she was unable to do so at that moment. I wondered if she felt futile and worthless, and if she died with a broken spirit.

Jon never told me about that night, so I am left with my own imaginations. He was crushed, despite the fact that he had reason to hate his mother. He still did not want to live without her. He now had no hope of ever creating a better relationship with her, or of ever standing up for himself. I think that he desperately wanted to prove himself worthy of her love, had he not been robbed of that chance. But it was not his fault. It was his mother who robbed him by always disapproving, by always holding herself distant, and never accepting him as a child in need.

After the car crash I played with Jon even less. I still liked him, and I felt sorry for him. But he started acting creepy. Maybe he was depressed. During recess he only wanted to stand around in the schoolyard. He just stood there and looked through the holes in the fence. He'd move from hole to hole slowly and look through each of them separately. When the weather was nice he'd go around to the front of the school and sit motionless on the grass. Sometimes he'd even sit facing the school's brick wall and stare at it.

When I would ask him what he was doing he would just say that he was thinking. When I tried to talk with him he usually didn't have much to say that made sense to me. During warm weather he lounged, and during cold weather he stood and shivered. Or would just lay in the snow. When it rained Jon would stand still and let the water run over his rubber raincoat, so that when he went inside the raincoat would have that wet rubbery smell. He would smell the raincoat a couple of times before he hung it up.

By all outward appearances, Jon got better over time. By the time we graduated from grade eight he didn't do those weird things anymore, although he was still very closed off. I think he was always being eaten up inside. Every Thursday he had a half-hour meeting with the school counselor, but I don't know what was said during that half hour.

I have to backtrack a little bit, because this triggered another thought. I am thinking now about the night just before Bradbury moved to America. I was at his house for the very last time. Everything in the house was packed and waiting for the moving truck to come at five AM. So we sat on the front porch. It was a pleasant evening weather-wise. It was the type of night that wants to be remembered, the way a hopelessly beautiful woman wants to be remembered based on the merit of her loveliness alone.

"Sometimes I wonder," said Bradbury on the evening before he left.

"Wonder what?" I asked as we sat on the front porch of his house and looked up into the black-purple night sky.

"Sometimes I wonder," he started to say as some dumb neighbourhood girls came walking by. We stared at the girls as they went past us. When they noticed us they called us names, and said stuff like 'Don't look at us', and said other dumb things. We laughed at the girls and told them to come and make us stop looking at them. So they stuck out their tongues, and swore at us, and left. "Sometimes I wonder what will happen to me in the States," Bradbury said as we watched the stupid girls move farther away.

"There's lots of crime there," I said. "The projects are worse than here. It's full of black people."

"Yeah, but we're not going to the projects," he said enthusiastically. "My dad is actually going to get a house near the factory."

"Do you know what it's like?"

"I saw pictures of it," Bradbury replied. "The houses used to be part of an army base, but now they're for sale cheap." He pointed at a house down the street. "Like the size of that one. Only it's gonna have blue siding instead of brick."

We sat staring at the small house down the street. There was a soft cool breeze, but when the breeze stopped it got hot. A couple of cats ran by, hissing and spitting at each other as they went.

"So, why are you worried?" I asked him.

"I guess I wonder if I'll turn into some dumb American."

"Are you serious?"

"Yeah. We're even living in a suburb. I don't want to be like the kids in Pickering."

I thought about the Pickering attitude, which was like the attitude of any other snooty suburb: aloof and purposely self-superior. "As long as you try to stay the same, then you won't change," I said to comfort him.

With a sense of resignation he said, "Yeah I hope so."

And suddenly, out of nowhere, those stupid girls came by again, sticking out their tongues at us and making faces, and chanting, "naaah naaah." One girl – who had pig tails and was dressed in worn out and oversized hand-me-down clothes – stepped forward from the group and stood on Bradbury's walkway. She was waving her arms and jumping up and down, and yelling, "Loooooser! Loooooser!"

Bradbury was just in no mood for fun, because he didn't even respond to her antagonism. He just looked at her and then looked down.

"What's the matter?" hollered the raggedy girl. "Are you chicken? Are you afraid of me?"

Bradbury just sat there. And following his lead, I did nothing too. Eventually the girls all gave up. The pig tailed one gave a final yell, "You're so dumb!" And then they ran away.

After a few moments I noticed a small smile on Bradbury's face. I asked him why we didn't do anything. His smile widened. He looked at me for a second, and then his smile got tremendously big.

"What?!" I asked excitedly.

Bradbury's grin got bigger still, until he finally said, "Remember the time we used your telescope and saw the woman having sex?"

"Yeah, that was cool."

"I think that was the pig tail girl's mom," he said. I smiled, and I sat there happy and amazed.

"But," he continued. "Remember the guy she was having sex with?"

"Yeah," I said, thinking back.

"I don't think that was her dad."

Well my eyes got so wide that they nearly popped out of my head and I started laughing. I laughed so hard that I fell down and rolled onto my side. Bradbury was laughing hard too. I think he might have started to pee. I can't say for sure, but I'd like to imagine that he did. We were both happier than ever, in that moment, surrounded by cardboard boxes bound for the USA.