Douglas Coupland - Hey Nostradamus!

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.

I dropped the rock onto a nearby boulder. It sent sparks of granite chips into the air and then quickly huddled lost among thousands of similar rocks. I felt like I had committed an antimurder, like I'd created life where none had existed before.

Yorgo said, "You're just weak. You're too frightened to kill me."

I looked at him, his tibia poking into the drape of his slacks. "That may be the case, Yorgo, but it doesn't look to me like you're going anywhere soon. And what - you despise me for not killing you?"

He sneered my way.

"You do, don't you?"

Yorgo spat to his left.

I said, "What a loser. Give me your cell phone."

His hand went to his coat pocket. He removed it, and just as I was about to take it, he tossed it sideways toward the river.

I asked him, "Where are we?"

He looked away.

"I see. You're going to be cute with me. That makes a lot of sense." I looked at the rocks around us. "You know, Yorgo, the easiest thing for me to do would be to build a cairn of river rocks on top of you. It'd take me thirty minutes to do, and it would quite easily keep you in place until this winter's flooding sweeps away both it and your remains."

I could tell Yorgo was catching my drift. I walked up to the riverbank and saw no evidence of roads, paths or people. This was good, in that it decreased the chance of having been seen by a jogger or fisherman. I listened for cars or a highway — none. I came back to him. "I'm not going to do anything, Yorgo. Not for now. I'm going to walk away from here, and when I find a phone I will call one person for you and tell them where you are and that your leg is wrecked."

Yorgo remained quiet.

"Or I can simply leave. So if you want to have even a sliver of hope, you'd best give me a number to call."

I walked away.

"Stop!" Yorgo yelled out a phone number. I found a pen in my pants pocket and wrote it on the flesh at the base of my thumb.

I walked west. As the light entered its final waning, I came upon a field with a few cattle, so I hopped the barbed wire, trudged across the field and made my way on a paved road out toward a highway that glowed in the distance, maybe an hour's walk away. The nighttime summer haze was soaking up the highway's car headlights and street lamps, and it was shooting that light skyward, as brightly as the Las Vegas Strip ever did. The farm buildings were built in the Canadian style; I figured the highway had to be the Trans-Canada, and to judge by the mountains faintly contoured against the night sky, I was still in the Fraser Valley, most likely not too far from the Klaasen family farm.

Like most suburbanites, I'm creeped out by agricultural areas. Every footstep reverberated clearly and I began imagining I was hearing someone else's footsteps. I looked at the darkened fields and unlit sheds and junked cars. The air smelled of manure, and I wondered if I'd see methane will-o'-the-wisps dancing beyond the road. I remembered Grandma Klaasen hectoring Grandpa about devil worshipers stealing their rototiller, about their vanishing pets and about bodies that were always being found in the lakes and streams and ditches of Agassiz. Crimes are never solved in places like this, only discovered. I imagined headlines in the local shopper papers: MAN'S REMAINS WASH UP IN FRASER RIVER DELTA; GIRL GUIDES FIND SKELETON; RUSSIAN MOTHER ASKS LOCALS FOR HELP LOCATING ONLY SON.

My mind raced with thoughts of death. Not only am I going to die sooner rather than later, I am going to die alone and lonely. But then I remembered, so were my father and mother. Considering this further, I realized most people I knew were going to die alone and lonely. Was this life in general, or was it just me? Did I unwittingly send out the sort of signals that attract desperate souls? I looked at the shadows of sleeping cattle and thought, Lucky farm animals. Lucky space aliens. Lucky anything-but-humans, never having to deal with knowing how foul or desperate their own species is.

I remember once at dinner when I was a kid, I sarcastically asked Reg what we'd do if we learned to speak with dolphins. Would we try to convert them? Oddly, he missed my intent. "Dolphins? Dolphins with the whole English language at their command?"

"Sure, Dad. Why not?"

"What a good question."

I was so surprised that he'd taken me seriously, that I became serious in turn. I added, "And we wouldn't even need translators. We could speak with them just as we're speaking with each other here."

Reg pulled himself back into his seat, a posture he usually reserved for deciding which form of punishment we deserved. He said, "In the end, no, there would be no point converting dolphins, because they never left God's hand. If anything, we might be asking them what it's like to never have left, to still be back in the Garden."

Jesus, Dad do you have to be so random? Why is your kindness or wrath about as predictable as knowing when the phone is going to ring? I've never known what will set you off. I still don't. Nobody does. You've built this thing around you, this place you call the world, but it's not the world - it's Reg's little private club. You're only concerned with making people conform to your own picture of God, never trying to cool the suffering of anyone in pain.

As I walked I tried to recall any crimes or events leading to my riverside drama. I came up blank. How odd to be guilty of enormous acts yet be unaware of them. Maybe this is what it feels like to be born with original sin, or rather, to fully believe in original sin - to live always with a black sun hovering above you.

And then . . . and then I felt truly old for the first time -old in the sense that I was beyond the point of ever doing something radical or bold to change the course of my life. I was going to remain a contractor's flunky to the grave. I just wanted to put a rusty thick steel Chinese freighter of a wall between me and everyone else's problems. I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal.

But I hadn't killed Yorgo.

I stopped and processed this thought. I could have killed him, but I didn't.

Huh.

I was happy, but I was also annoyed. Maybe in spite of all my attempts to block it, my father's sense of will had become my own. Oh, dear God.

The stars above looked milky, like they only do in summer. I saw some sheet lightning off somewhere in the mountains. And then I felt the chunk of concrete hate fall from my chest. A part of my life was over, I realized. I was now in some new hate-free part, and I began to hear the highway's pale drone. To the east was an overpass with a gas station.

Once there I checked to find that I had on me about two hundred bucks Canadian, in twenties that all shared the same serial number. I got change for one and looked at the Pirelli calendar behind the box of Slim Jims; it told me that I'd had that first beer with Jerry five and a half days ago. I phoned in to collect my messages - eleven; as I retrieved them, each push on the pay phone's keypad was like waiting for a punch to the gut. I braced myself for anything.