Hey Nostradamus! Part 1

Hey Nostradamus!

By Douglas Coupland.

Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.

I Cor. 15:51-52

Part One

1988: Cheryl

I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world - spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley - is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins. Even those of us who try to live a good and true life remain as far away from grace as the Hillside Strangler or any demon who ever tried to poison the village well. What happened that morning only confirms this.

It was a glorious fall morning. The sun burned a girly pink over the mountain ranges to the west, and the city had yet to generate its daily smog blanket. Before driving to school in my little white Chevette, I went into the living room and used my father's telescope to look down at the harbor, as smooth as mercury, and on its surface I could see the moon dimming over East Vancouver.

And then I looked up into the real sky and saw the moon on the cusp of being overpowered by the sun.

My parents had already gone to work, and my brother, Chris, had left for swim team hours before. The house was quiet - not even a clock ticking - and as I opened the front door, I looked back and saw some gloves and unopened letters on the front hallway desk. Beyond them, on the living room's gold carpet, were some discount warehouse sofas and a lamp on a side table that we never used because the light bulb always popped when we switched it on. It was lovely, all that silence and all that calm order, and I thought how lucky I was to have had a good home. And then I turned and walked outside. I was already a bit late, but I was in no hurry.

Normally I used the garage door, but today I wanted a touch of formality. I had thought that this morning would be my last truly innocent glance at my childhood home - not because of what really ended up happening, but because of another, smaller drama that was supposed to have unfolded.

I'm glad that the day was as quiet and as average as it was. The air was see-your-breath chilly, and the front lawn was crunchy with frost, as though each blade had been batter fried. The brilliant blue and black Steller's jays were raucous and clearly up to no good on the eaves trough, and because of the frost, the leaves on the j.a.panese maples had been converted into stained-gla.s.s shards. The world was unbearably pretty, and it continued being so all the way down the mountain to school. I felt slightly high because of the beauty, and the inside of my head tickled. I wondered if this is how artists go through life, with all of its sensations tickling their craniums like a peac.o.c.k feather.

I was the last to park in the school's lot. That's always such an uneasy feeling no matter how together you think you are - being the last person there, wherever there may be.

I was carrying four large binders and some textbooks, and when I tried shutting the Chevette's door, it wouldn't close properly. I tried slamming it with my hip, but that didn't work; it only made the books spray all over the pavement. But I didn't get upset.

Inside the school, cla.s.ses were already in session and the hallways were as silent as the inside of my house, and I thought to myself, What a day for silence.

I needed to go to my locker before cla.s.s, and as I was working my combination lock, Jason came up from behind.

"Boo."

"Jason - don't do that. Why aren't you in cla.s.s?"

"I saw you parking, so I left."

"You just walked out?"

"Forget about that, Miss Priss. Why were you being so weird on the phone last night?"

"I was being weird?"

"Jesus, Cheryl - don't act like your airhead friends."

"Anything else?"

"Yes. You're my wife, so act like it."

"How should I be acting, then?"

"Cheryl, look: in G.o.d's eyes we're not two individuals, okay? We're one unit now. So if you d.i.c.k around with me, then you're only d.i.c.king around with yourself."

And Jason was right. We were married - had been for about six weeks at that point - but we were the only ones who knew it.

I was late for school because I'd wanted everyone out of the house before I used a home pregnancy test. I was quite calm about it - I was a married woman, and shame wasn't a factor. My period was three weeks late, and facts were facts.

Instead of the downstairs bathroom I shared with my brother, I used the guest bathroom upstairs.

The guest bathroom felt one notch more medical, one notch less tinged by personal history - less accusatory, to be honest. And the olive fixtures and foil wallpaper patterned with brown bamboo looked swampy and dank when compared to the test's scientific white-and-blue box. And there's not much more to say, except that fifteen minutes later I was officially pregnant and I was late for math cla.s.s.

"Jesus, Cheryl . . ."

"Jason, don't curse. You can swear, but don't curse." "Pregnant?"

I was quiet.

"You're sure?"

"I'm late for math cla.s.s. Aren't you even happy?"

A student walked by, maybe en route to see the princ.i.p.al.

Jason squinted like he had dust in his eyes. "Yeah - well, of course - sure I am."

I said, "Let's talk about it at homeroom break."

"I can't. I'm helping Coach do setup for the Junior A team. I promised him ages ago. Lunchtime then. In the cafeteria."

I kissed him on his forehead. It was soft, like antlers I'd once touched on a petting zoo buck.

"Okay. I'll see you there."

He kissed me in return and I went to math cla.s.s.

I was on the yearbook staff, so' I can be precise here. Delbrook Senior Secondary is a school of 1,106 students located about a five-minute walk north of the Trans-Canada Highway, up the algae-green slope of Vancouver's North Sh.o.r.e. It opened in the fall of 1962, and by 1988, my senior year, its graduates numbered about thirty-four thousand. During high school, most of them were nice enough kids who'd mow lawns and baby-sit and get drunk on Friday nights and maybe wreck a car or smash a fist through a bas.e.m.e.nt wall, not even knowing why they'd done it, only that it had to happen. Most of them grew up in rectangular postwar homes that by 1988 were called tear-downs by the local real estate agents. Nice lots. Nice trees and vines. Nice views.

As far as I could tell, Jason and I were the only married students ever to have attended Delbrook.

It wasn't a neighborhood that married young. It was neither religious nor irreligious, although back in eleventh-grade English cla.s.s I did a tally of the twenty-six students therein: five abortions, three dope dealers, two total s.l.u.ts, and one perpetual juvenile delinquent. I think that's what softened me up for conversion: I didn't want to inhabit that kind of moral world. Was I a sn.o.b? Was I a hypocrite? And who was I to even judge? Truth be told, I wanted everything those kids had, but I wanted it by playing the game correctly. This meant legally and religiously and - this is the part that was maybe wrong - I wanted to outsmart the world. I had, and continue to have, a nagging suspicion that I used the system simply to get what I wanted. Religion included.

Does that cancel out whatever goodness I might have inside me?

Jason was right: Miss Priss.

Math cla.s.s was x's and y's and I felt trapped inside a repeating dream, staring at these two evil little letters who tormented me with their constant need to balance and be equal with each other.

They should just get married and form a new letter together and put an end to all the nonsense.

And then they should have kids.

I thought about my own child-to-be as I stared out the window, turning the pages only when I heard everybody else turn theirs. I saw fleeting images of breast-feeding, prams and difficult labor, my knowledge of motherhood being confined mostly to magazines and cartoons. I ignored Lauren Hanley, two rows over, who held a note in her hand that she obviously wanted me to read.

Lauren was one of the few people left from my Youth Alive! group who would still speak to me after rumors began spreading that Jason and I were making it.

Carol Schraeger pa.s.sed the note my way; it was a plea from Lauren to talk during homeroom break. We did, out by her locker. I know Lauren saw this meeting as being charged with drama, and my serenity must have bothered her.

"Everyone's talking, Cheryl. Your reputation is being tarnished. You have to do something about it."

Lauren was probably the key blabber, but I was a married woman, so why should I care? I said, "Let people say what they want, Lauren. I take comfort in knowing that my best friends are squelching any rumors from the start, right?"

She reddened. "But everyone knows your Chevette was parked at Jason's all weekend while his parents were away in the Okanogan."

"So?"

"So you guys could have been doing anything in there -not that you were - but imagine what it looked like."

Truth was, Jason and I were doing everything in there that weekend, but I have to admit that for a moment or two I enjoyed watching Lauren squirm at my nonresponse. In any event, I was far too preoccupied to have any sort of conversation. I told Lauren I had to go to my homeroom and sequence some index cards for an oral presentation later that afternoon on early Canadian fur trappers, and I left.

In homeroom I sat at my desk and wrote over and over on my pale blue binder the words G.o.d IS NOWHERE/G.o.d IS NOW HERE /G.o.d IS NOWHERE/G.o.d IS NOW HERE. When this binder with these words was found, caked in my evaporating blood, people made a big fuss about it, and when my body is shortly lowered down into the planet, these same words will be felt-penned all over the surface of my white coffin. But all I was doing was trying to clear out my head and think of nothing, to generate enough silence to make time stand still.

Stillness is what I have here now - wherever here is. I'm no longer a part of the world and I'm still not yet a part of what follows. I think there are others from the shooting here with me, but I can't tell where. And for whatever it's worth, I'm no longer pregnant, and I have no idea what that means. Where's my baby? What happened to it? How can it just go away like that?

It's quiet here - quiet like my parents' house, and quiet in the way I wanted silence when writing on my binder. The only sounds I can hear are prayers and curses; they're the only sounds with the power to cross over to where I am.

I can only hear the words of these prayers and curses - not the voice of the speaker. I'd like to hear from Jason and my family, but I'm unable to sift them out.

Dear G.o.d, Remove the blood from the souls of these young men and women. Strip their memories of our human vile-ness. Return them to the Garden and make them babes, make them innocent.

Erase their memories of today.

As I'm never going to be old, I'm glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness: the first thirty seconds of the Beatles' "Lovely Rita"; pigeons sitting a fist apart on the light posts entering Stanley Park; huckleberries both bright orange and dusty blue the first week of June; powdered snow down to the middle gondola tower of Grouse Mountain by the third week of every October; grilled-cheese sandwiches and the sound of lovesick crows on the electrical lines each May. The world is a glorious place, and filled with so many unexpected moments that I'd get lumps in my throat, as though I were watching a bride walk down the aisle - moments as eternal and full of love as the lifting of veils, the saying of vows and the moment of the first wedded kiss.

The lunch hour bell rang and the hallways erupted into ordered hubbub. Normally I wouldn't have gone to the cafeteria; I was part of the Out to Lunch Bunch - six girls from the Youth Alive!

program. We'd go down to one of the fast-food places at the foot of the mountain for salad bar, fries and ice water. Our one rule was that every lunch we had to confess a sin to the group. I always made mine up: I'd stolen a blusher from the drugstore; I'd peeked at my brother's p.o.r.n stash - nothing too big, but nothing too small, either. In the end, it was simply easier to be with five people in a restaurant booth than three hundred in a cafeteria. I was antisocial at heart. And if people knew how dull our lunches were, they'd never have bothered to waste energy calling us stuck-up. So, I was surprised when I went into the cafeteria to meet Jason to find the Bunch hogging one of the cafeteria's prime center tables. I asked, "So what's this all about?"

Their faces seemed so - young to me. Unburdened. Newly born. I wondered if I'd now lost what they still had, the aura of fruit slightly too unripe to pick.

Jaimie Kirkland finally said, "My dad got smashed and took out a light post on Marine Drive last night. And Dee's Cabrio has this funny smell in it since she loaned it to her grandmother, so we thought we'd go native today."

"Everyone must be flattered." I sat down. Meaningful stares pinballed from face to face, but I feigned obliviousness. Lauren was the clique's designated spokeswoman. "Cheryl, I think we should continue our talk from earlier."

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

I was trying to decide between Jell-O and fruit c.o.c.ktail from the cafeteria counter.

Dee cut in: "Cheryl, I think you need to do some confessing to as." Five sets of eyes drilled into me in judgment.

"Confess to what?" Forcing them to name the deed was fun.

"You," said Lauren, "and Jason. Fornicating."

I began giggling, and I could see their righteousness melting away like snow on a car's hood.

And that was when I heard the first gunshot.

Jason and I connected the moment we first met (albeit through some seat switching on my part) in tenth-grade biology cla.s.s. My family had just moved into the neighborhood from across town.

I knew that Jason's attraction to me would go nowhere unless I learned more about his world. He appealed to me because he was so untouched by life, but I think this attraction for someone dewy clean was unnatural for a girl as young as me. I think most girls want a guy who's seen a bit of sin, who knows just a little bit more than they do about life.

Jason appeared to be heavily into Youth Alive!, which added to his virginal charm. I later learned that his enthusiastic partic.i.p.ation was an illusion, fostered by the fact that Jason's older brother, Kent, two years ahead of us, was almost head of Alive!'s Western Canadian division; Jason was roped in and was dragged along in Kent's dust. Kent was like Jason minus the glow. When I was around Kent, I never felt that life was full of wonder and adventure; Kent made it sound as if our postschool lives were going to be about as exciting as temping in a motor vehicles office. He was always into planning and preparing for the next step. Jason was certainly not into planning. I wonder how much of our relations.h.i.+p was a slap on Kent's face by his brother who was tired of being scheduled into endless group activities.

In any event, Pastor Fields's sermons on chast.i.ty could only chill the blood in Jason's loins so long. So I began attending Youth Alive! meetings three times a week, singing "k.u.mbaya,"

bringing along salads and standing in prayer circles - all of this, at first, just to nab Jason Klaasen and his pink chamois skin.

And I did - nab him. We were an item within the group itself, and to the rest of the school an attractive but dull couple. And not a day went by where Jason didn't ask for something more than a kiss, but I held out. I knew he was into religion just deep enough to think losing his virginity meant crossing a line.

The thing was, I did discover religion during my campaign to catch Jason, and that's not something I'd expected, as there was nothing in my upbringing that predisposed me to conversion. My family paid lip service to religious convictions. They were fickle - no G.o.d being feared there. My family wasn't so much anti-G.o.d as it was pro the world. G.o.d got misplaced along the way. Are they lost? Are they d.a.m.ned? I don't know. I'd be mistrustful of anybody who said they were, and yet here I am, in the calm dark waiting to go off into the Next Place, and I think it's a different place from where my family's headed.

My family didn't know what to make of my conversion. It's not as if I was a problem teen who rebounded into faith -the most criminal I ever got was generic teenage girl things like prank phone calls and shoplifting.

My parents seemed happy for me in a well-at-least-she's-not-dating-the-entire-basketball-team kind of way, but when I discussed going to heaven or righteousness, they became constrained and a bit sad. My younger brother, Chris, came to a few Alive! meetings but chose team sports instead. Truth be told, I was glad to have religion all to myself.

Dear G.o.d, I'm going to stop believing in you unless you can tell me what possible good could have come from the bloodshed. I can't see any meaning or evidence of divine logic.