Hey Nostradamus!. Douglas Coupland

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СКАЧАТЬ had to be there. But Mr. No made more than a few painful hours a treat.

      Jason could also wiggle his ears, and his arms were double-jointed – some of his contortions were utterly harrowing, and I’d scream for him to stop. He also bought me seventeen roses for my seventeenth birthday, and how many boys do you know who’d do that?

      I was surprised when Jason did propose – in his dad’s Buick on a rainy August afternoon in the White Spot parking lot over a cheeseburger and an orange float. I was surprised first because he did it, then second because he’d concocted a secret plan that was so wild that only the deadest of souls could refuse. Basically, using money he’d stockpiled from his summer job, we were going to fly to Las Vegas. There in the car, he produced fake IDs, a bottle of Champale and the thinnest of gold rings, barely strong enough to retain its shape. He said, “A ring is a halo for your finger. From now on, we no longer cast two shadows, we cast one.”

      “Fake IDs?” I asked.

      “I don’t know the legal age there. They’re for backup.”

      I looked, and they seemed to be convincing fakes, with our real names and everything, with just the birth dates changed. And as it turned out, the legal age was eighteen, so we did need the fakes.

      Jason asked me if I wanted to elope: “No big churchy wedding or anything?”

      “Jason, marriage is marriage, and if it were as simple as pushing a button on the dash of this car, I’d do it right now.”

      What I didn’t go on about was the sexiness of it all. Sex – finally – plus freedom from guilt or retribution. My only concern was that Jason would develop chilly feet and blab to his buddies or Pastor Fields. I told him that blabbing would be a deal wrecker, and I made him vow, under threat-of-hell conditions, that this would be our secret. I’d also recently been reading a book of religious inspiration geared mainly to men, and I’d dog-eared the chapter that told its readers, essentially, to trust nobody. Friends are always betrayers in the end – everybody has the one person to whom they spill everything, and that special person isn’t always the obvious person you’d think. People are leaky. What kind of paranoid creep would write something like that? Well, whoever it was, it helped further my cause.

      The important thing is that we were to marry in the final week of August in Las Vegas. I greased the skids at home and told my folks I was attending a hymn retreat up the coast; I told Lauren and the Alive! crew I was driving to Seattle with my family. Jason did the same thing. It was set.

      Dear God,

      I’m trying to take my mind off the slayings, but I don’t know if that’s possible. I’ll forget about them for maybe a minute and then I’ll remember again. I tried finding solace looking at the squirrels in the front yard, already gathering food for the winter – and then I got to thinking about how short their lives are – so short that their dreams can only possibly be a full mirroring of their waking lives. So I guess for a squirrel, being awake and being asleep are the same thing. Maybe when you die young it’s like that, too. A baby’s dream would only be the same as being awake – teenagers, too, to some extent. As I’ve said, I’m grasping here for some solace.

      

      Lord,

      I know I don’t have a fish sticker, or whatever it is I’m supposed to have on my car bumper, like all those stuck-up kids who think they’re holier than Thou, but I also don’t think they have some sort of express lane to speak to You, so I imagine You’re hearing this okay. I guess my question to You is whether or not You get to torture those evil bastards who did the killings, or if it’s purely the devil’s job and You subcontract it out. Is there any way I can help torture them from down here on earth? Just give me a sign and I’m in.

      What I now find odd is how Jason and I both assumed our marriage had to be a secret. It wasn’t from shame, and it wasn’t from fear, because eighteen is eighteen (well, almost) and the law’s the law, so in the eyes of the taxman and the Lord, we could go at it like rabbits all day as long as we paid our taxes and made a few babies along the way. Sometimes life, when laid out plainly like this, can seem so simple.

      What appealed to me was that this marriage was something the two of us could have entirely to ourselves, like being the only two guests in a luxury hotel. I knew that if we got engaged and waited until after high school to marry, our marriage would become something else – ours, yes, but not quite ours, either. There would be presents and sex lectures and unwanted intrusions. Who needs all that? And in any event, I had no pictures in my head of life after high school. My girlfriends all wanted to go to Hawaii or California and drive sports cars and, if I correctly read between the lines on the yearbook questionnaires they submitted, have serial monogamous relations with Youth Alive! guys that didn’t necessarily end in marriage. The best I could see for myself was a house, a kid or two, some chicken noodle soup at three in the afternoon while standing at the kitchen sink watching clouds unfurl coastward from Vancouver Island.

      I was sure that whatever Jason did for a living would amply fulfill us both – an unpopular sentiment among girls my age. Jason once halfheartedly inquired as to my career ambitions, and when he was certain I had none, he was relieved. His family – churchier than Thou – looked down on girls who worked. If I was ever going to get a job, it would only be to annoy them, his parents – his dad, mostly. He was a mean, dried-out fart who defied charity, and who used religion as a foil to justify his undesirable character traits. His cheapness became thrift; his lack of curiosity about the world and his contempt for new ideas were called being traditional.

      Jason’s mother was, well, there’s no way around it, a bit drunk the few times I met her. I don’t think she liked the way her life had played out. Who am I to judge? How the two of them procreated a sweetie-pie like Jason remains one of God’s true mysteries.

      

      If nothing else, relating the step-by-step course of events in the cafeteria allows me to comprehend how distanced from the world I’m feeling now – how quickly the world is pulling away. And for this reason I’ll continue.

      After the first dozen shots, the fire alarm went off. Mitchell Van Waters walked to the main cafeteria doors, said, “Goddammit,” and fired into the hall, blasting out the bell ringing there. Jeremy Kyriakis took out the cafeteria’s fire bell in three shots, after which a hail of drywall particles pinged and rattled throughout the otherwise silent room. Beneath the tables we could still hear fire bells ringing from deep within the school’s bowels, bells that would ring past sunset since the RCMP would hold off disabling the central OFF switch for fear of tripping homemade bombs placed throughout the school – bombs made of benzene and powdered swimming-pool cleaner. Wait – how did I know that combo? Oh yes, Mitchell Van Waters’s contribution to the science fair: “Getting the Most Bang for Your Buck.” It was in last year’s yearbook.

      Back to the cafeteria.

      Back to me and three hundred other students under the tables, either dead or playing dead, scrunching themselves into tiny balls. Back to six work boots clomping on the polished putty-colored linoleum, and the sounds of ambulances and RCMP cruisers whooping schoolward, a little too little, a little too late.

      I began doing a numbers game in my head. Three hundred people divided among three gunmen makes a hundred victims per gunman. If they were going to kill us all, it would take a bit of time, so I figured my chances of making it were better than I’d first supposed. But geographically we were in a bad spot: the center of the room, the visual and architectural core of the place, as well as the nexus of any high school’s social ambition and peer envy. Were people envious of Alivers!? We were basically СКАЧАТЬ