Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland
Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland
Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland
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Alive! friends look forward to the grave the same way Chris and Cheryl used to look forward to Disney<br />
World. I can't share in this excitement, probably because I'm about thirty years closer to death than they<br />
are. They keep referring to Cheryl and her notebook withgod is now here as some sort of miracle, and<br />
this I can't understand. It's like a twelve-year-old girl plucking daisy petals. He loves me, be loves me<br />
not. It doesn't feel miraculous to me. But the kids down at the Trust office talk about miracles all the<br />
time, and this, too, baffles me. They're always asking for miracles, and finding them everywhere.<br />
Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that He created an order for the world; I<br />
believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we're also asking that He unravel<br />
the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.<br />
I wish we'd rented a boat and gone out into the Straits of Juan de Fuca and beached on some island and<br />
taken Cheryl into some woods, located a nice meadow, and buried her there among the wild daisies and<br />
ferns. Then I would feel she's at some kind of peace. But her grave now? I went up there yesterday and<br />
it was a mound of flowers and teddy bears and letters. And in the rain they'd all melted together, and it<br />
shouted confusion and rage and anger at me, which is what one ought to feel after such a heinous crime;<br />
but graves are for peace, not for rage.<br />
Wherever this letter finds you, I hope it finds you well and at peace, or something like it. When you<br />
return to North Van, might I ask you and your family over for dinner? It's the very least we could do.<br />
Yours fondly,<br />
Lloyd Anway<br />
This arrived two days after Mr. Anway's letter:<br />
Jason,<br />
I just caught my dad mailing you a letter. He tried to hide it between some bills, and when I pushed him,<br />
he told me that Mom had also written you, which wigged me out completely. I can all too well imagine<br />
the crock of lies he fed you. Mom, too. You need to know that everything they tell you, everything, is<br />
outright crap. From the word go, they've hated you. After it happened, they took all the photos of you in<br />
Cheryl's bedroom and scratched out your face. There would be whole evenings when Cheryl's<br />
hypocritical preacher pals would sit in our living room and totally trash you with Mom and Dad. They<br />
reduced you to a scab lying on a floor beneath a toilet being carried away by beetles bit by bit. Man, they<br />
were brutal, and they were extra brutal when they talked about, or rather talked around, sex. I mean,<br />
let's face it, the two of you were an item, but the Alive! oids made it sound like rape, and that it was your<br />
sole job in life to corrupt Cheryl. And once they'd tied the noose for you, they'd lay into how you always<br />
seemed like the kind of guy who'd plan, and assist in murdering a whole school just to kill the girl he'd<br />
worked so hard to corrupt. I mean, get real. Some nights I had to leave the house. Most nights, actually.<br />
Mitchell Van Waters, Jeremy Kyriakis and Duncan Boyle were in my grade, and they were such total<br />
wipeouts that people could barely remember they existed. They'd come into English class in these<br />
beat-up black leather jackets, acting like they were big-shot political guys starting a revolution, and they'd<br />
sit there writing lyrics from Skinny Puppy on their cargo pants with felt pens and Liquid Paper. I<br />
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