Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

She stopped. "Caught? Jason, get real. One of the bonuses of staying in a twenty-nine-dollar-a-night
motel room is the convenient lack of surveillance or security. And if I'm caught, I'm caught, but I won't
be."
We rounded the corner and there were all Kent's friends' cars, as well as my mother's. Barb and I
looked like wrecks -we were wrecks - and my distress couldn't have been more visible.
As Barb predicted, she was never caught, and everyone fully bought her story about going crazy - which
is, in its way, true. Kent's funeral was four days later, and that was that.
A month later, my mother phoned to say that Barb was pregnant with twins. And maybe another month
later I bumped into Stacy Kozarek, Rick's sister, in the Lonsdale Public Market, where she was buying
clams. She told me that Rick had been found murdered in his motel room, and the Las Vegas police
thought it was somehow gang-related.
* * *
And there you go.
I'm looking out the pickup truck's window at Ambleside Beach and the ocean and the freighters - at the
mothers tending to their children covered in sand and sugar and spit, at the blue sky and the mallard
ducks and the Canada geese. And Joyce is smiling at me. Dogs indeed smile, and Joyce has every
reason to smile. It's a beautiful world and she's part of it - and yet . . .
. . . and yet we humans are not a part of it.
Look at us. We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life
makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean
something. We must. My heart is so cold. And I feel so lost. I shed my block of hate but what if nothing
emerges to fill in the hole it left? The universe is so large, and the world is so glorious, but here I am on a
sunny August morning with chilled black ink pumping through my veins, and I feel like the unholiest thing
on earth.
This letter is now going into the safety deposit box. Happy birthday, my sons. You're men now, and this
is the way the world works.
Part Three
2002: Heather
Page 82