Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

creepy sunless forests carpeted with moss that swallows your feet, and mud that sucks up all noise -
summerproof and free of birds.
I turned around to look. Yorgo was behind me, and he cracked me between the shoulders with the
barrel of a shotgun. It was just the two of us, and we were clearly on a death march. The tarp in the
limo's trunk sprang to mind.
I also noted how quickly my childhood muscle memory for walking atop river rock had returned. Yorgo,
I could hear, was having some trouble. He probably grew up in a city.
I didn't want to trudge meekly to my fate. To this end I veered ever so slightly toward the wetter, more
slippery rocks. It was a simple idea that yielded instant results - I heard Yorgo slip, and as I heard this, I
swiveled around and watched him go down hard on the riverbed, his left shinbone snapping like kindling,
his weapon clattering off into the water, carried away almost instantly.
I lunged for a river rock and then - time folded over in a Moebius strip - I was once again in the school
cafeteria, and there was Mitchell's head, but it was now Yorgo's head, and in my hand was a rock and -
suddenly I had the option of murdering again.
* * *
I remember after the massacre I heard that people were praying for the killers, and that made me
furious. It's a bit too late to pray for them now, wouldn't you think? I was livid for years afterward.
Why did those prayers bug me so much - people praying for assassins? I began to wonder if it was
because I had so much hate in my own heart; it's a truism that the people we dislike the most in this life
are the people who remind us of ourselves. I'd gone through my life with this massive chunk of hate inside
me like a block of demolished concrete, complete with rusted and twisted metal radiating from the inside.
Perhaps I didn't feel I deserved any prayers. For over a decade in my head it's been Rot in hell, you evil
little freaks. No pain is big enough for you, and I wish you were alive so I could blow you up and
turn you into a big pile of guts that I could trample all over and douse with gasoline and set on
fire.
I never could see how anything good could come from the Delbrook Massacre. Whenever I've heard
people saying, "Look how it's brought us all together," I've had to leave the room or switch the channel.
What a feeble and pathetic moral. Just look at our world, so migratory - cars and airplanes and jobs here
and there: what does it matter if a few of us who happened to be in this one spot at one moment briefly
rallied together and held hands and wore ribbons? Next year, half of us will have moved away, and then
where's your moral?
After another few years I simply became tired. I kept on asking for a sign and none ever came - and
then there I was on a riverbank with Yorgo, holding a river rock above my head.
* * *
Page 70