Douglas Coupland - Hey Nostradamus!

Autumn? Autumn was a time of sorting out the daffodil bulbs with their malathion stink, brushing their onionskin coatings from overly thick sweaters knit by two grandmothers who refused to speak English while they carded wool. Winters were spent in the rain, grooming the fields - I was raised to believe that the opposite of labor is theft, not leisure. I remember my boots sinking in mud that tried to steal my knees, its sucking noise. And then there was spring — always the spring - when the mess and stink and garbage of the rest of the year were redeemed by the arrival of the flowers. I was so proud of them - proud, me . . . Reginald Klaasen - proud that they loaned innocence and beauty to a land that was never really tamed. Proud from walking in the fields, inside the yellow that smelled of birth and forgiveness — only to stare north, out at the forest and its black green clutch, always taunting me, inviting me inside, away from the sun. Hiding something - but what?

Perhaps hiding the Sasquatch. The legend of the Sas-quatch has always been potent in my mind - the man-beast who supposedly lives in the tree-tangled forests. It was the Sasquatch I'd always identified with, and perhaps you can see why: a creature lost in the wilderness, forever in hiding, seeking companionship and friendship, living alone, without words or kindness from others. How I hoped to find the Sasquatch - hoped to bring him out of the forest and into the world! I planned to teach him words and clothe him and save him in as many ways as I could. My mother encouraged me to do this, to save the soul of this damned beast, bear witness to him, make him one of us, force him to gain a world while surrendering his mystery. I sometimes wondered whether gaining the world and losing one's mystery was such a good deal, and I felt ashamed of thinking this. The world is a good place, rain and mud and man-eating forests included. God created the world - I believe that. No theory of creation satisfies me, but I have this sureness in my heart.

I remember finding out that the world was actually just a planet, in school in the third grade, and I remember hating the teacher, Mr. Rowan, who discussed the solar system as if it were a rock collection. It's so hard to balance in our minds the knowledge that "the world" is, mundanely, "a planet." The former is so holy; the latter merely a science project. I walked out of class, indignant, and spent a week at home as the school and my father tried to negotiate a meeting point between the rock-collection creation theory of the earth and the more decent and spiritual notion of "the world." None was reached. I was put in another teacher's class.

My father was an angry man, you know that, but he was also a man of little faith, constantly angry because - because why? Because he took over his father's daffodil farm and forfeited whatever life he might have created for himself. My father was fierce, and I was fierce with you, Jason, and when I became fierce with you, I was appalled yet unable to stop myself.

My fierceness with you came not from any desire to copy my father, but instead from my desire to be his opposite, to be righteous, and to be strong where my own father was weak. My piety galled him, and when he was furious, I was driven out of the house and fields with threats of the leather strap he used for sharpening his razor, out into the forest, away from home, for hours, sometimes days (yes, I ran away from home) spent contemplating a God who would create an animal like my father, a religious man without faith. A fake man - a human form containing nothing.

I never told you about my childhood. Why would I have? I told Kent, but never you. I suppose I thought you'd twist the words and use them against me. You never said much around the house, but you were a formidable opponent. I could see it in your eyes when you were a year old. You were competition. Children are cruel in their ability to instantly identify a fraud, and that, especially, was your gift and curse. I was so insecure about my beliefs that I feared being exposed by my own child. That was wretched of me.

Your childhood: as an infant you were a crier, a creature of colicky squalls that frightened your mother and me until we went to a doctor and he asked some questions and it turned out that the only time you ever cried was just before or after sleeping - that technically you were asleep, sleepwalking, and what we were seeing was your interior life -screaming in your dreams! Good Lord! As the years wore on, we thought you were mute, or possibly autistic; you didn't start speaking until you were four. That is family legend. Your first words weren't "Mama" or "Dada," but rather, "Go away." Your mother was devastated, whereas I heard your words only as a challenge to my authority.

Listen to me, already - the words of a lonely broken man in his little apartment somewhere on the edge of the New World. Let me change tactics. Maybe I can see myself better that way . . .

Here:

Reg, always thought that God had a startling revelation to hand him, a divine mission; that's why he always seemed so aloof and arrogant and distant from the people and events around him: he was the chosen one. And of course, Reg's mission never came. Instead, he was in his lunchroom one afternoon, eating an egg salad sandwich, when his secretary burst in and said there was a shooting at his son's high school. This father of two drove across town, listening to the AM radio news, which only got worse and worse, and the world became more dreamlike and unreal to him. Reg hadn't even crossed the Lions Gate Bridge yet, and newscasters were already counting the dead. And here is where Reg's great crime began: he was jealous that God had given a mission not to him, but to his son. To his son, I might add, who was, according to the several Spanish Inquisition members of his youth group, having intimate relations with a young woman in his class. Jason's relations with Cheryl were, to the mind of a smug and wrongly righteous man, like lemon juice on a stove burn. Of course, in Reg's mind his son's crime wasn't as clearly defined as this. That sort of clarity comes only with decades. Instead, he was simply furious with heaven and God and had no idea why. So once home, in a flash he seized upon his son's act of bravery as an act of cowardice and the devil. He held a two-second-long kangaroo court inside his head, and rejected his son.

When Reg's wife heard this and crippled him using a lamp powered by an astonishingly hard blast to his knee, he was confused and had no idea why the world had turned on him. But it was the other way around - Reg was in La-La Land. He was expelled from his own home, where even he knew he was no longer master. In the hospital, nobody, save for his firstborn son, visited him - why would anybody want to visit such a miscreant? The only other exception was the complaining and hostile wraith that his sister had become, who drove in once a week from Agassiz. She demanded gas money and shamed Reg by pointing out how few flowers he'd been sent in the hospital - only some limp gladioli in yellow water, supplied by his office.

When Reg was released from the hospital, he moved into a new apartment in a new building owned by his boss's brother-in-law. He went back to work, but no one spoke to him much - there were condolences and expressions of gladness that Jason had been exonerated, but his coworkers knew he'd been abandoned by his family, that he lived alone, and that this was all, somehow, connected to his pride and his vanity.

Vanity.

When Reg was courting his wife-to-be, he thought he should spiff himself up a bit, so, being frugal but optimistic, he went to Value Village, a former grocery store now filled with mildewed socks and blouses and plastic kitchenware. He found a pair of mint condition - unworn! - black shoes in his size for a dollar forty-nine. Whooee! He was so proud of those shoes, and he wore them out of the store, into the rain where he was to meet his gal, just getting off her shift at Nuffy's Donuts. He walked into the donut shop, where even ugly yellow fluorescent tubes couldn't diminish her complexion. She was putting a jacket over her work uniform. She looked down and said, "What the jeez happened to your feet?" His feet had turned into bundles of soggy paper. The shoes he'd purchased were mortuary shoes, designed only for open coffins, never to be worn by the living. Cheapness and vanity.