Douglas Coupland - Hey Nostradamus!

There was a large white-and-blue-striped canvas awning over Cheryl's grave area, and that was good, but what made me furious was that the Youth Alive! people had brought hundreds of black felt markers, and passed them out to everybody, and by the time we got there, Cheryl's casket was densely covered both with teenagers, and with the sorts of things teenagers write. They were treating my daughter's casket like a yearbook. Maybe I was mad because I'd chosen the casket in Cheryl's favorite shade of white, slightly pearly, and I'd been so pleased. Linda was upset about the felt-penning, too, but we bowed to the inevitable. I suppose it's cheerful, really, to be buried with the goodwill of your friends all around you. Linda and I were offered pens, but we declined.

Before Cheryl's funeral, Linda, Chris and I had attended two other funerals. I had thought they would prepare us for Cheryl's, but no, there's nothing that prepares you for the funeral of your own child. The minister was Pastor Fields. He did a fine job of the service, if I may say so, even if it was a bit too preachy for my taste.

I'm still unsure what Cheryl found in religion, but I'd always thought her conversion was too extreme, and so did Linda. Linda says you've had a falling out with your religious friends, and even though they work like Trojans on the Cheryl Anway Trust, I'm with you all the way in thinking that they're slightly creepy. And it was a shock how quickly and how powerfully they denounced you. It's because I listened to them, and not my own heart, that I'm sending you a pathetic letter so long after the fact, instead of having invited you over to our home ages ago.

This letter has become difficult to write, and it's through no fault of yours, Jason. You know what it is? I wish I'd taken one of those pens and written something on Cheryl's coffin. Why didn't I? What foolish pride prevented me from doing something so innocent and loving? Just one more thing to take to the grave with me. Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave. Cheryl's Alive! friends look forward to the grave the same way Chris and Cheryl used to look forward to Disney World. I can't share in this excitement, probably because I'm about thirty years closer to death than they are. They keep referring to Cheryl and her notebook with GOD IS NOW HERE as some sort of miracle, and this I can't understand. It's like a twelve-year-old girl plucking daisy petals. He loves me, be loves me not. It doesn't feel miraculous to me. But the kids down at the Trust office talk about miracles all the time, and this, too, baffles me. They're always asking for miracles, and finding them everywhere. Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that He created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.

I wish we'd rented a boat and gone out into the Straits of Juan de Fuca and beached on some island and taken Cheryl into some woods, located a nice meadow, and buried her there among the wild daisies and ferns. Then I would feel she's at some kind of peace. But her grave now? I went up there yesterday and it was a mound of flowers and teddy bears and letters. And in the rain they'd all melted together, and it shouted confusion and rage and anger at me, which is what one ought to feel after such a heinous crime; but graves are for peace, not for rage.

Wherever this letter finds you, I hope it finds you well and at peace, or something like it. When you return to North Van, might I ask you and your family over for dinner? It's the very least we could do.

Yours fondly,

Lloyd Anway

This arrived two days after Mr. Anway's letter:

Jason,

I just caught my dad mailing you a letter. He tried to hide it between some bills, and when I pushed him, he told me that Mom had also written you, which wigged me out completely. I can all too well imagine the crock of lies he fed you. Mom, too. You need to know that everything they tell you, everything, is outright crap. From the word go, they've hated you. After it happened, they took all the photos of you in Cheryl's bedroom and scratched out your face. There would be whole evenings when Cheryl's hypocritical preacher pals would sit in our living room and totally trash you with Mom and Dad. They reduced you to a scab lying on a floor beneath a toilet being carried away by beetles bit by bit. Man, they were brutal, and they were extra brutal when they talked about, or rather talked around, sex. I mean, 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 sole job in life to corrupt Cheryl. And once they'd tied the noose for you, they'd lay into how you always seemed like the kind of guy who'd plan, and assist in murdering a whole school just to kill the girl he'd worked so hard to corrupt. I mean, get real. Some nights I had to leave the house. Most nights, actually.

Mitchell Van Waters, Jeremy Kyriakis and Duncan Boyle were in my grade, and they were such total wipeouts that people could barely remember they existed. They'd come into English class in these beat-up black leather jackets, acting like they were big-shot political guys starting a revolution, and they'd sit there writing lyrics from Skinny Puppy on their cargo pants with felt pens and Liquid Paper. I remember watching Mitchell and Duncan having a wicked scrap with hunting knives down by the portables, all because Duncan brought a six-sided dice, not a twelve-sided dice, for one of those role-playing games they were into. In social studies, Duncan brought in a solid-state panel from a TV set and spent the class in the last row writing hex symbols all over it, but they were fake symbols he was inventing, which looked a lot like the pictures of crop circles he'd photocopied for class the year before. And they wondered why nobody paid them any attention? They were messes, and there was no way you and they even breathed from the same atmosphere. So when they said you were connected to them? I think not.

I was thinking about you and October 4. You've seen the TV stuff like everyone else, but you left the scene and I don't think you ever came back, and maybe you don't know what it was like to have been there.

I was in PE, and during the class jog up the mountain, my friend Mike and I cut out and went down Queens Avenue to smoke. It was a beautiful day. Why waste it with a bunch of jocks? We got to talking with these three girls from the grade below us who were headed to the Safeway deli down at Westview. Then we heard some shots. Funny, I'd never heard a real gun fired in my life, but I knew exactly what it was. So did Mike. We heard a siren, some more shots and - I bet you didn't know this, but that first siren wasn't for massacre victims, it was for that guy you hammered down by the shop classes. Anyway, the five of us decided to walk up the hill, and the shots continued and then the SWAT team, the Navy SEALS, James Bond, and, I don't know, Charlie's Angels, all arrived at once. And all of the students pouring out of the school? Their heads looked like Sugar Crisp being poured from a box. Everybody was running as fast as they could, but they were all trying to look back, too, and so they were wiping out all over. By the time we neared the front of the school, they were hauling out bodies and, well, no need to go into that. We were moved up to the top of the hill, but we could tell exactly who had blood on them and who was being treated. I saw you, and you were covered in blood, but you were walking, so I assumed you were okay. And then I suddenly had a chill and I knew Cheryl was dead. I think ESP is BS, but that's what I felt.

The rest of the day was a war zone. All of the parents began showing up from work and home, and they'd leave their cars parked wherever with the engines still running and the doors open. Once family members hooked up, the RCMP moved them up and onto the football field, and so the parking lot became the place for an ever-shrinking number of parents without children. Mom and Dad showed up, and around 3:30 we heard the news about Cheryl. Our brains were so fried by that point that it didn't even make sense. Mrs. Wong from next door drove us to the hospital in Dad's car. There was no way he could drive. Her two kids were in the caf but were unhurt. She'd have driven us to Antarctica if we'd asked.