Hey Nostradamus!. Douglas Coupland

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СКАЧАТЬ coating it like Varathane. He told me about the track marks left in blood by running shoes, by bare feet and by bodies either dragging themselves or being dragged away by friends. There’s something else he’s not telling me – a father knows that – but what could be more horrible than – Oh God, this is not a prayer.

      I can’t help but wonder if the other girls thought I used God as an excuse to hook up with Jason, or that I confused one with the other. Maybe I wasn’t truly in love with Jason; maybe it was just an infatuation, or maybe it was only some sort of animal need like any teenager feels.

      Listen to me, practical Cheryl, covering my bases, even after death. But I know that when I was alive I did face these questions: I loved Jason, but what I felt for God was different altogether. I kept them separate.

      

      As Mitchell was aiming at me, there were sirens outside, helicopters, alarm bells throughout the school and water splashing down from the shattered pipe. As well, Duncan was egging Mitchell on to kill Jeremy, too, and my hopes had flip-flopped – now I thought I might survive. Then Jeremy said, “Go ahead, Mitchell, shoot me – like I care.”

      Mitchell seemed to be short-circuiting. He hadn’t anticipated this scenario. He turned a bit to his left, looked down at me and the Bunch, then took his rifle and shot me on my left side. He really wasn’t a good shot, because he was five paces away, and I should have been dead instantly. And quite honestly, it didn’t hurt, the shooting, and I didn’t die immediately, either. Lauren, bless her, lunged away from me, leaving me there on the floor on top of my binder, which the water had sloshed off the tabletop. At my new angle, I could see much better what was transpiring. Mitchell said, “Well, Jeremy, you stud, that’s one less girl for you to impress,” and Jeremy said, “Dear God, I repent for my sins. Forgive me for all I have done.”

      In unison, Mitchell and Duncan shrieked, “What?” and turned to Jeremy, blasted him enough to kill him a dozen times over. Then I heard Jason’s voice from the cafeteria doors – something along the lines of “Put those guns down now.”

      Mitchell said, “You have got to be kidding.”

      “I’m not kidding.”

      Mitchell shot at Jason and missed, and then I saw something that looked like a lump of gray art-class clay fly through the air and crack Mitchell on the side of his head, so fiercely that I could see his skull implode.

      At this point, the boys in the camera club lifted up their table and used it as a shield as they charged against the sole surviving gunman, Duncan Boyle. It was covered with paper bags and some cookies that had been glued in place by blood. They charged into Duncan, pressing him against a blank spot of cinder-block wall. I saw the rifle fall to the ground, and then I saw the boys from the camera club laying the table flat on the ground on top of Duncan and begin jumping up and down on it like a grape press. They were making hooting noises, and people from the other tables came and joined in and the table became a killing game as all of these children, boys and girls, who fifteen minutes earlier had been peacefully eating peanut butter sandwiches and oranges, became savages, killing without pause. Duncan’s blood dribbled out from under the table.

      Lauren called out, and Jason came over and lifted the table off me like a hurricane lifting off a roof. I know he said something to me, but my hearing was gone. He tried holding me up, but my neck was limp, and all I could see was across the room, children crushing other children. And that was that.

      

      To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition. And I believe I accepted God, and I fully accepted this sorrow, even though until the events in the cafeteria, there hadn’t been too much of it in my life. I may have looked like just another stupid teenage girl, but it was all in there – God, and sorrow and its acceptance.

      And now I’m neither dead nor alive, neither awake nor asleep, and soon I’m headed off to the Next Place, but my Jason will continue amid the living.

      Oh, Jason. In his heart, he knows I’ll at least be trying to watch him from beyond, whatever beyond may be. And in his heart, I think, he’s now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I’ve said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.

       Part Two 1999: Jason

      You won’t see me in any of the photographs after the massacre – you know the ones I mean: the wire service shots of the funerals, students felt-penning teenage poetry on Cheryl’s casket; teenage prayer groups in sweats and scrunchies huddled on the school’s slippery gym floor; 6:30 A.M. prayer breakfasts in the highway off-ramp chain restaurants, with all the men wearing ties while dreaming of hash browns. I’m in none of them, and if you had seen me, I sure wouldn’t have been praying.

      I want to say that right from the start.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ