Douglas Coupland - Hey Nostradamus!

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 their badge. Another cop looked at me and said, "That's the guy."

So apparently I had now become "the guy."

I should describe at this point what it's like to hold a dying person in your arms. The first thing is how quickly they cool off, like dinner on a plate. Second, you keep waiting for their face to come back to life, their eyes to open. Even with Cheryl cooling in my arms, I didn't really believe she was dead. So when an authority figure of proven uselessness told me to let go of the body of my wife, whose face I knew would reanimate momentarily, my reaction was to stick with my wife. "Go to hell."

"No, really, son, stand up."

"You heard me."

The other cop asked, "Is he giving you trouble, John?"

"Lay off, Pete. Can't you see he's . . . ?"

"What I can see is that he's tampering with a crime scene. You - get up. Now."

Pete wasn't worth responding to. I held Cheryl close. The world is an ugly ugly ugly place.

"Son, come on."

"Sir, I said no."

"Pete, I don't know what to do. She's dead. Let him hold her."

"No. And if he keeps it up, you know what to do."

"Actually, I don't."

I tuned them out. From my vantage point, soggy reddened lunch bags and backpacks lay everywhere; the wounded were being removed with the same speed and efficiency that coliseum staff remove chairs after a concert.

Underneath Cheryl I saw her notebook, festooned with its ballpoint scribbles: GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE; GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE. I didn't give it any thought past that. A man's arm reached down and tried to tug my arms away from her, but I flinched and held on. Then a dozen arms reached in. Pow, I became a one-man supernova, firing my legs in all directions, refusing to let go of Cheryl, but they managed to pull us apart, and that was the last time I touched her. Within forty-eight hours she was embalmed, and for reasons that will follow, I wasn't permitted to attend her funeral.

Once they'd pulled me away from Cheryl, they shoved me into the foyer and then promptly forgot me. And so I walked through the same shot-out empty window frame as before and onto the front plaza, where it was sunny and bright. I remembered this thing Cheryl once said, how God sees no difference between night and day, how God only sees the sun at the center and the greater plan, and that night and day were merely human distinctions. I figured I now understood her point, except that for me, I didn't see any greater plan.

I won my apartment in a poker game, from Dennis, a concrete pourer who'll spend the rest of his life losing his apartments in poker games. He's that kind of guy. The place is nicer than something I would have found on my own; I even have a balcony the size of a card table, which I've managed to ruin with failed houseplants and empty bottles that will someday enter the downstairs recycling bins. It looks out on the rear of small shops on Marine Drive, and beyond that to English Bay - the Pacific - and the rest of the city across the bay.

I checked my messages. The first was from Les, reminding me to bring the nail gun for tomorrow's job, which is framing in a towel cabinet for a real estate tycoon's fantasy bathroom. The second message was from Chris, Cheryl's brother, saying that he can't risk leaving the U.S. for tonight's memorial because if they catch him either coming or going across the border, that's the end of his visa, which he needs to design spreadsheets, whatever they are, down in Redwood City, wherever that is. The third was from my mother, saying she didn't think she could handle the memorial. The fourth was her again, saying that she thought she could. The fifth call was a hang-up with five seconds of bar noise. The sixth was Nigel, a contractor buddy from a recent project who doesn't yet know I'm a living monkey's paw, asking me if I want to shoot some pool tonight. Soon enough Nigel will learn about my "story," and then he'll go buy a cheapo massacre exploitation paperback in some secondhand bookstore. His behavior around me will change: he'll walk on eggshells, and then he'll want to discuss life after death, crop circles, gun laws, Nostradamus or stuff along those lines, and then I'll have to drop him as a friend because he'll know way more about me than anyone ought to know, and the imbalance is, as I age, more of a pain than anything else. I don't want or need it.

Call seven is my mother again, asking me to phone her. I do.

"Mom."

"Jason."

"You feeling weird about tonight?"

"Someone has to take care of the twins. I thought maybe I could take the twins off Barb's hands for the evening."

"Kent's friends have probably sorted that out weeks ago. You know what they're like." "I guess so."

"How about I drive you." "Could you?" "Sure."

Okay.

After leaving the cafeteria, I walked out onto the sunlit concrete plaza, where I turned around and saw myself reflected in the one remaining unshot window, and I was all one color, purple. Gurneys with their oxygen masks and plasma trees covered the front plaza like blankets on a beach. I saw bandages being applied so quickly they had bits of autumn leaves trapped inside the weave. I remember a sheet being pulled over the face of this girl, Kelly, who was my French class vocabulary partner. She didn't look shot at all, but she was dead.