Douglas Coupland - Hey Nostradamus!

We dumped the truck in the long-term parking lot and headed to the terminal. Customs preclearance was a snap. Barb was bawling as she showed them the engagement ring Kent had given her, and they waved us through with Parisian-style shrugs and smiles. The ticket clerk had passed along the message to the flight crew that we were going to get married; inside the plane it was broadcast, and we were upgraded to business class while everybody whistled and cheered, making Barb cry all the harder. The drinks, meanwhile, kept coming and coming, and Barb kept drinking and drinking, and on the ground she was one big wobble; escorting her from one gate to the next at LAX was like trying to propel a shopping cart full of balloons on a windy day, and on the second flight she simply cried for most of the trip. We landed just after midnight.

In the decade since my first trip there, Las Vegas had been rebuilt from the ground up. Pockets of authentic sleaze peeked out here and there, but the city's aura was different, more professional. I could look at all the new casinos and imagine people sinning away like mad, but I could also envision management meetings and cubicles and photocopiers tucked away in the bowels of the recently spruced up casinos.

I asked the driver to take us to the stretch of chapels between Fremont Street and Caesars Palace, a piece of the Strip that had remained unmolested by progress. The chapel where Cheryl and I had been married was still there. I paid the cabbie while Barb got out. We didn't say anything as we went into the chapel, and I was disappointed that the old guy who'd performed the first ceremony was no longer there.

A couple from Oklahoma was in front of us. We witnessed for them, and they witnessed for us, through a secular version of a wedding ceremony that did good service to the term "quickie." Within fifteen minutes we were wed, and another cab drove us to Caesars Palace, which had also been renovated in the intervening decade.

We checked in as husband and wife, and we were walking through the lobby to the elevator bank when we heard someone calling our names. I had the same sick feeling I had when I was twelve and got caught pilfering raspberries from the neighbors' patch. We turned around. It was Rick, this guy I'd gone to high school with. He'd aged faster than most, and was much larger than I'd remembered. His head was shiny.

"Rick. Hey, hi."

"Hi, Jason. Hi, Barb. Jason, I thought you were Kent for a second there. Did all you guys come down together? I can't believe how cheap everything here is during the off-season."

I didn't know how to reply, but Barb said, "I like blackjack, but the guys are more into craps."

Rick said, "I'm a blackjack guy, too. Craps is for the real hotshots. I like to stretch my losses out over a few days so I can savor the experience. When did you guys get here?"

"Just today."

"You're staying at Caesars?"

I said we were.

"I'm at this motel off the Strip. Twenty-nine bucks a night, with free coffee and croissants in the morning. Talk about a deal. You guys want to come play with me?"

I was going to motion to the elevators, but Barb said, "Sure." My eyes must have sprung out of my sockets. "Jason, go upstairs with the others. I'll meet you in a few minutes. I think my luck is changing."

Rick said, "Now, this woman has the Vegas spirit. Come on, Barb. I'll show you my lucky table."

Barb said, "I'll be up shortly. Go, Jason."

This was one very screwed-up situation, but the thought of a quiet room was seductive, and I went upstairs. I showered for twenty minutes, and tried to figure out everything that had happened during the day, particularly how we might explain to people how it was that Rick Kozarek saw us in Caesars Palace the night Kent died.

I got out, shivered in the all-powerful air-conditioning and got into bed, awaiting Barb and wondering how Mom was going to take Kent's death. Would she just give up on life altogether?

An hour passed. I put cable news on as wallpaper and dozed off. When Barb came in the door and woke me up, her face was neutral.

"It's about time. It's two-thirty, Barb."

"I'm having a shower."

"You went to play blackjack? Are you out of your mind?"

She said nothing, but emerged from the shower and got into bed with me, and the truth is that from the tension and grief and stress and you-name-it, the sex was a repeat of my marriage to Cheryl. Around six o'clock Barb phoned the concierge for tickets on an 8:10 nonstop to Vancouver. We were silent most of the way home.

It was only in the truck, nearing the house, that I asked, "Barb, by the way, you never did say what made you decide to go play blackjack with Rick Kozarek. That was really random."

"Blackjack? I didn't play blackjack. I killed him."

I nearly put the truck in the ditch as I stopped. "You what?"

"There was no other option. He saw the two of us together. He'd have blabbed. So I went back to his motel room with him and cracked him on the back of his head with a forty-ouncer of discount vodka. Done."

"You murdered him?"

"Don't be sanctimonious with me, rebel boy. You wanted to get married in Las Vegas, and you got it. And part of the deal of getting married in Las Vegas is that you might very well bump into the Rick Kozareks of this world. Now, are you going to drive me the final block home, or am I going to walk?"

I didn't know what to say, because I was thinking, Oh, God, this is how my father felt back in 1988.

So Barb got out of the truck and walked home. The heel of her left shoe was about to come off, and a mist of dandelion fluff had attached itself to her panty hose. I got out and walked alongside her. "Barb, what if you're caught?"

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.