Hey Nostradamus!. Douglas Coupland

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СКАЧАТЬ – not the voice of the speaker. I’d like to hear from Jason and my family, but I’m unable to sift them out.

      Dear God,

      Remove the blood from the souls of these young men and women. Strip their memories of our human vileness. Return them to the Garden and make them babes, make them innocent. Erase their memories of today.

      As I’m never going to be old, I’m glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness: the first thirty seconds of the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita”; pigeons sitting a fist apart on the light posts entering Stanley Park; huckleberries both bright orange and dusty blue the first week of June; powdered snow down to the middle gondola tower of Grouse Mountain by the third week of every October; grilled-cheese sandwiches and the sound of lovesick crows on the electrical lines each May. The world is a glorious place, and filled with so many unexpected moments that I’d get lumps in my throat, as though I were watching a bride walk down the aisle – moments as eternal and full of love as the lifting of veils, the saying of vows and the moment of the first wedded kiss.

      

      The lunch hour bell rang and the hallways erupted into ordered hubbub. Normally I wouldn’t have gone to the cafeteria; I was part of the Out to Lunch Bunch – six girls from the Youth Alive! program. We’d go down to one of the fast-food places at the foot of the mountain for salad bar, fries and ice water. Our one rule was that every lunch we had to confess a sin to the group. I always made mine up: I’d stolen a blusher from the drugstore; I’d peeked at my brother’s porn stash – nothing too big, but nothing too small, either. In the end, it was simply easier to be with five people in a restaurant booth than three hundred in a cafeteria. I was antisocial at heart. And if people knew how dull our lunches were, they’d never have bothered to waste energy calling us stuck-up. So, I was surprised when I went into the cafeteria to meet Jason to find the Bunch hogging one of the cafeteria’s prime center tables. I asked, “So what’s this all about?”

      Their faces seemed so – young to me. Unburdened. Newly born. I wondered if I’d now lost what they still had, the aura of fruit slightly too unripe to pick.

      Jaimie Kirkland finally said, “My dad got smashed and took out a light post on Marine Drive last night. And Dee’s Cabrio has this funny smell in it since she loaned it to her grandmother, so we thought we’d go native today.”

      “Everyone must be flattered.” I sat down. Meaningful stares pinballed from face to face, but I feigned obliviousness. Lauren was the clique’s designated spokeswoman. “Cheryl, I think we should continue our talk from earlier.”

      “Really?”

      “Yes, really.”

      I was trying to decide between Jell-O and fruit cocktail from the cafeteria counter.

      Dee cut in: “Cheryl, I think you need to do some confessing to us.” Five sets of eyes drilled into me in judgment.

      “Confess to what?” Forcing them to name the deed was fun.

      “You,” said Lauren, “and Jason. Fornicating.”

      I began giggling, and I could see their righteousness melting away like snow on a car’s hood. And that was when I heard the first gunshot.

      

      Jason and I connected the moment we first met (albeit through some seat switching on my part) in tenth-grade biology class. My family had just moved into the neighborhood from across town. I knew that Jason’s attraction to me would go nowhere unless I learned more about his world. He appealed to me because he was so untouched by life, but I think this attraction for someone dewy clean was unnatural for a girl as young as me. I think most girls want a guy who’s seen a bit of sin, who knows just a little bit more than they do about life.

      Jason appeared to be heavily into Youth Alive!, which added to his virginal charm. I later learned that his enthusiastic participation was an illusion, fostered by the fact that Jason’s older brother, Kent, two years ahead of us, was almost head of Alive!‘s Western Canadian division; Jason was roped in and was dragged along in Kent’s dust. Kent was like Jason minus the glow. When I was around Kent, I never felt that life was full of wonder and adventure; Kent made it sound as if our postschool lives were going to be about as exciting as temping in a motor vehicles office. He was always into planning and preparing for the next step. Jason was certainly not into planning. I wonder how much of our relationship was a slap on Kent’s face by his brother who was tired of being scheduled into endless group activities.

      In any event, Pastor Fields’s sermons on chastity could only chill the blood in Jason’s loins so long. So I began attending Youth Alive! meetings three times a week, singing “Kumbaya,” bringing along salads and standing in prayer circles – all of this, at first, just to nab Jason Klaasen and his pink chamois skin.

      And I did – nab him. We were an item within the group itself, and to the rest of the school an attractive but dull couple. And not a day went by where Jason didn’t ask for something more than a kiss, but I held out. I knew he was into religion just deep enough to think losing his virginity meant crossing a line.

      The thing was, I did discover religion during my campaign to catch Jason, and that’s not something I’d expected, as there was nothing in my upbringing that predisposed me to conversion. My family paid lip service to religious convictions. They were fickle – no God being feared there. My family wasn’t so much anti-God as it was pro the world. God got misplaced along the way. Are they lost? Are they damned? I don’t know. I’d be mistrustful of anybody who said they were, and yet here I am, in the calm dark waiting to go off into the Next Place, and I think it’s a different place from where my family’s headed.

      My family didn’t know what to make of my conversion. It’s not as if I was a problem teen who rebounded into faith – the most criminal I ever got was generic teenage girl things like prank phone calls and shoplifting.

      My parents seemed happy for me in a well-at-least-she’s-not-dating-the-entire-basketball-team kind of way, but when I discussed going to heaven or righteousness, they became constrained and a bit sad. My younger brother, Chris, came to a few Alive! meetings but chose team sports instead. Truth be told, I was glad to have religion all to myself.

      Dear God,

      I’m going to stop believing in you unless you can tell me what possible good could have come from the bloodshed. I can’t see any meaning or evidence of divine logic.

      I can discuss the killings with the detachment I have from being in this new place. The world is pulling away from me, losing its capacity to hurt.

      For starters, nobody screamed. That’s maybe the oddest component of the killings. All of us thought the first shots were firecrackers – part of a Halloween prank, as firecracker season starts in early October. When the popping got louder, people in the cafeteria looked to its six wide doors with the expectation of being slightly amused by some young kids doing a stunt. And then this kid from the tenth grade, Mark Something, came tottering in, his chest red and purple from what looked like really bad makeup, and there were some nervous laughs in the room. Then he fell and his head landed the wrong way on the corner of a bench, like a bag of gym equipment. We heard some guys yelling, and three grade eleven students walked into the caf wearing duck-hunting outfits – military green fatigues with camouflage patterns, covered with bulging pockets and strips of ammunition – and right away one of them shot out a bank of overhead fluorescent lights. One of the suspension СКАЧАТЬ