Douglas Coupland - Hey Nostradamus!

Sunday night 7:00

Barb gets home in a few minutes. From now on I'll have to write this using my Soviet coal-powered Windows system. I also phoned Reg, and asked him to come for a late dinner at my place tonight. I feel like I need family. My immediate family's all over the country, so Jason's family will do in a pinch. I'd like to be able to call Jason's mother at the extended-care facility, but . . . when she's on, she's great, but when she's off - which is nearly all the time now - I might as well be talking to a tree with its branches flapping in a storm.

No friends to visit. They're either married and moved away, or single and moved away. I could phone them, but they're spooked by Jason's vanishing. They feel sorry for me. They don't know how to discuss it, and when they phone, I'm wondering if they get a poor-Heather thrill at the fact he's still missing.

Any news?

Nope.

None?

Nope.

Oh. So, um - what are you up to lately?

You know. Work.

Oh.

Well. . .

See you one of these days.

'Bye.

I've gone through my memory with a lice comb, and I still can't find any evidence that Jason was connected to ugliness or violence that might in some way have led to his disappearance. I've seen killers galore in the courtroom, and despite all of those he-was-just-a-quiet-man-a-perfect-neigh-bor things you hear on TV, the fact is that killers have a deadness in their eyes. Their souls are gone, or they've been replaced with something else, like in a body-snatcher movie. I was always happy to be invisible in a courtroom when a murder trial was happening, but it was always the killers who tried hardest to make eye contact with me. During a month-long trial I'd typically look in their direction just one time, and there they were, meeting my glance head on. So no, Jason was no killer. I knew his eyes. He had a fine soul.

Did Jason have a secret life before me? No, nothing scary. He was a contractor's assistant. He picked up drywall, he cut tiles, and he did wiring. His friends weren't truly friends but glorified barflies. The more they wanted to know about the massacre, the less Jason spoke with them. I'm sure they must have been spooked by this, but nobody was ever surprised. His boss, Les, was a good-time Charlie whose wife, Kim, monitored him like the CIA. We had a few barbecues and company picnics together. Les is about as dangerous as a squeak toy.

I tried asking Jason to open up about his past. This was surprisingly hard to do. I know that most guys aren't talkative about themselves, but Jason, good God, it was like pulling teeth out of Mount Rushmore getting him to tell me what he did before he got hired by Les. He'd been working in a kitchen-cupboard-door factory, it turned out.

"Jason, my two cousins work for Canfor's wood panel division. What's the big deal?"

"Nothing."

I pushed and prodded and pleaded, and finally it turned out he was ashamed because he'd only taken a factory job so that he wouldn't have to speak with people during work.

"There's nothing wrong with that, Jason."

"I went for almost four years without having a real conversation with any other human being."

"I -"

"It's true. And I'm not the only one. Those guys you see driving in trucks and wearing hardhats and all of that, they're doing the exact same thing that I was doing. They want to get to the grave without ever having to discuss anything more complex than the hockey pool."

"Jason, that's cynical and simply not true."

"Is it?"

Was it?

Getting Jason to discuss Reg was easy. All I had to do was say that Jason's mom saw Reg in the magazine shop on Lonsdale. Instantly: "That sanctimonious bastard sold me to his God for three beans. That mean, sour freak. He should rot."

"Jason. He can't be all that bad."

"Bad? He's the opposite of everything he claims to be."

Is he? No.

Sunday night 11:00

The sky was orange-before-the-dark, and I was in the vestibule organizing all of Jason's rubber workboots when Reg showed up. Pathetically, I was hoping the boots' odor might remind me of Jason. Reg's knock was startling, and when I answered the door, Reg looked at my face, and I could see he knew I'd given finally given up hope.

In the kitchen he put on a pot of water for tea and took Jason's wallet from beside the fruit bowl. He removed the contents item by item, laying them out on the countertop.

"So there he is." Laid out were Jason's driver's license, his North Van library card, his Save-On-Foods discount card and some photos of Barb, the kids and me. Reg said, "Heather, something happened today. Tell me what it was." He took the water off the stove before it screamed. He didn't want any extra drama.

I remember reading somewhere that devoutly religious people despise psychics, Magic 8 Balls, fortune-telling, fortune cookies and anything of that ilk, considering them all calling cards of the devil. So I was pretty sure that when I told him about Allison he'd blow up or go into his lecture mode, but he didn't, and yet it was unmistakable that he disapproved. He asked, "Tell me more about the words 'Oh, I say.'"

"It was this character Jason and I had between us."

"And?"

"He was a giraffe. Named Gerard."

"Why did he say, 'Oh, I say'?"

"Because he needed to have a cheesy tag line every time he appeared on our stage, so to speak." It felt uncomfortable, if not obscene, discussing the characters with an outsider. Especially with Reg, who as a child probably spent his Sundays scanning the dot patterns in the weekend funnies with a magnifying glass in search of hidden messages from the devil.

I told Reg about Froggles, too. "Reg, my point is that these were characters shared solely between Jason and me. Nobody on the planet could possibly have known about them."

Reg was silent. This drove me nuts. "Reg, say something, at least."

He poured the tea. "I guess what's strange for me here is to learn that Jason had an inner world that included all these characters and all the things they said."

"Well, he did."

"And that he spoke with them all the time."

"He didn't speak with them, he was them. Or rather, they were us. We both have our own personalities, but when we went into character mode we became something altogether different. You could give me a thousand bucks and I couldn't think up a single line for them to say. Jason, too. But me and Jason together? There'd be no stopping us."

"Do you have any wine?"

"White or red?"

"White."

I took the bottle out of the fridge and poured it for him. He said, "Ahhh, God bless vitamin W."

I asked him if the psychic aspect of these events upset him for religious reasons.

"Psychics? Lord, no. They're all quacks. I don't believe God speaks to humans through them. So if a psychic's sending you messages, either the psychic's faking it, or something ungodly is coming through."

"Yeah, well . . ."

"Look, Heather, I know you're upset that I don't believe in your psychic."

"She gave me evidence, Reg - "

He raised his hands as if to say, Nothing I can do about it.

Meanwhile I had to make dinner. I had no idea what was in the fridge to eat - fat-free yogurt? Limp celery? I got up to inspect. I had this thought: "Reg, is all this supposed to make us better people? I mean, is that why we're going through this - so that our souls can somehow improve?" I found a plastic tub of frozen spaghetti sauce.

"Maybe."

I was so mad that I slammed the sauce onto the counter and the lid popped off. "Will you just tell me why it is that the only way we ever seem to take steps forward in life is through pain? Huh? Why is exposure to pain always supposed to make us better people?"

"Heather, it's grotesque to think for even a moment that suffering in and of itself makes you a better person."