Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

After our marriage, we all had dinner together just once, before Kent went back to school in Alberta.
Kent and the Peeping Toms from Alive! were beginning to spy on us by then, and I've never really been
sure whether Kent told Dad about Cheryl and me. If he had, it wouldn't have been with malice. It would
have been Item Number 14 on the agenda, sandwiched between the need for more stacking chairs and
the recitation of a letter from a starving waif in Dar es Salaam who received five bucks a month from the
Klaasen family.
In any event, my father treated Cheryl and me more like children than adults, which felt patronizing to
me. If he knew we were married, he'd treat us like man and woman instead of girl and boy. Because of
that dinner, I knew I soon had soon to devise a way of announcing our marriage. I wanted a proper
dinner in a restaurant, and Cheryl just wanted to phone a few people and leave it at that.
* * *
Joyce is a liquid snoring heap by my apartment's front window. It's not so much an apartment - it's more
like a nest - but Joyce doesn't mind. I suppose, from a dog's perspective, a dirty apartment is far more
interesting than one that's been heavily Windexed and vacuumed. Do I keep the place dirty to scare
people away? No, I keep it dirty because Reg was a neat freak - cleanliness . . . godliness . . .
pathetically predictable, I know. The only person I'd ever allow in here would be Reg, if only to torment
him with my uncleanness. But then nothing on earth would make me invite Reg into any home of mine.
My answering machine tells me I have seven new calls -no loser, me! - but I know they're mostly going
to be about Kent's memorial service this evening. Will I be there? Will I show up? Yeah, sure, okay. I
may be a disaster, but I'm not a write-off. Yet.
Of course, I'll be needing something clean to wear, and it's too late to haul my shirt pile to the dry
cleaners, so I'll have to iron a dirty shirt, which is dumb, because it permanently bakes the crud into the
fabric. I now have to go find the shirt, excavate the iron from under one of dozens of piles of crap, put
water into it, and clear a spot on the floor to put the board up and - it's easier to write.
More about the massacre . . .
There was some lag time between when the third gunman, Duncan Boyle, was downed and when kids
started leaving the caf. Even the kids closest to the door took a while to make the connection between
gunlessness and freedom. If anything, students gravitated toward their killers' corpses, I think to make a
visual confirmation of death. The alarms were still blaring, and the sprinklers were still raining on us, and
there were just so many kids dripping with both blood and water.
I was glued to Cheryl. My arms actually made suction noises when I moved them. I was covered in her
blood. All of her friends had gone. Freaks. When the mass exodus began from the caf, the authorities
swooped in, in every conceivable form - police snipers, guys in balaclavas, firemen, ambulance workers -
all too late. They were taking photos, putting up colored tape, and everyone was screaming to turn off
the alarms and the sprinklers, as they were not merely annoying, but were contaminating the crime scene.
For all I know, those sirens and sprinklers may still be on, as I've not returned to the building since that
day.
"Son, stand up." It was an RCMP guy with the big RCMP moustache they're all issued once they earn
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