Douglas Coupland - Hey Nostradamus!

Getting married in Nevada in 1988 was simple. At noon on the final Friday before school started, Jason and I cabbed out to the airport and scanned the list of outgoing flights. There was one to Las Vegas in ninety minutes, so we bought tickets - cash - walked through U.S. Immigration preclearance, went to the gate and were on our way. They didn't even bother to check our ID. We each had only a gym bag for carry-on and we felt like bandits. It was my first time flying, and everything was new and charged with mystery ... the laminated safety cards, the takeoff, which made my stomach cartwheel, the food, which was bad just like they always joke about on TV, and the cigarette smoke; something about Las Vegas attracts the smokers. But it was all like perfume to me, and I tried pretending that every moment of my life could be as full of newness as that flight. What a life that would be.

The two of us had dressed conservatively - shirt and tie for Jason, and me in a schoolmarm dress; our outfits must have made us look all of fifteen. The flight attendant asked us why we were going to Las Vegas and we told her. Ten minutes later there was a captain's announcement telling everybody on the plane our news and our seat numbers. The other passengers clapped and I blushed like I had a fever, but suddenly it was as if we were blood kin with all these strangers. At the terminal, the men all slapped Jason's back and har-har'ed, and this one woman whispered to me, "Honey, I don't care what else you do, but the moment he hints that he wants it, you give it to him. Doesn't matter if you're fixing a diaper or cleaning out the gutters. You give it, pronto. Else you'll lose him."

It was over a hundred degrees outside, my first exposure to genuine heat, Jason's too. My lungs had never felt so pure. In the taxi to Caesars Palace I looked out at the desert - real desert - and tried to imagine every parable I'd ever heard taking place in that exotic lifeless nothingness. I couldn't have stood five minutes out there in that oven, and I wondered how the Bible ever managed to happen. They must have had different weather back then - or trees - or rivers and shade. Good Lord, the desert is harsh. I asked the taxi driver to stop for a second beside a vacant lot between the airport and the Strip. There were some rental units on the other side of a cinder-block fence, some litter and a shedded snakeskin. I got out and it felt as if I were floating over the sharp rocks and angry little plants. Instead of feeling brand new, Las Vegas felt thousands of years old. Jason got out and we both knelt and prayed. Time passed; I felt dizzy and the cabbie honked the horn. We drove to Caesars Palace.

I knew we were goners when Dee knocked over an apple juice can. Clank. The three boys had been across the room shouting pointless fragments of pointless manifestos or whatever moronic ideas they had, but then, yes, the clank. It was so primal to watch their heads swivel toward us, and their eyes focusing - zeroing in like crocodiles in TV documentaries. Dee squeaked.

I heard Duncan Boyle say, "Oh, if it isn't the Out to Lunch Bunch slumming with us, the damned, here in purgatory, School District 44." Listening to the inflections of his voice, for just a second I thought to myself that he could sing if he wanted to. I could always tell that about people - if they could sing or not.

Just then, for whatever reason, the overhead sprinklers spritzed on. The boys were distracted and looked up at the ceiling. The water rained down onto the tables, onto the milk cartons and half-empty paper bags; it sounded like rain on a roof. Then it began trickling off the laminated tabletops and dripping onto my jeans and forearms. It was cold and I shivered and Lauren was shivering, too. I put my arm around her and held her to me, her teeth chattering like maracas. Then there were more shots - at us, I assumed, but Mitchell Van Waters blew out some of the sprinkler nozzles, shattering a large pipe, and the water came down on us in buckets.

There was a noise from outside the building and Martin Boyle shouted, "Windows!" He and Mitchell blasted out four large panes opposite us. Then Duncan asked, "Was that a cop I saw out there?"

"What do you think?" Mitchell was mad as hornets. "Rearm!"

The guns made more metallic noises and Mitchell blew out the remaining windows. The school was now like a jewel case encrusted with snipers and cops. Their time with their victims was drawing to an end.

Lord,

I know that faith is not the natural condition of the human heart, but why do You make it so hard to have faith? Were we so far gone here in boring North Van that we needed a shock treatment? There are thousands of suburbs as average as us. Why us then? And why now? You raise the cost of faith and You dilute its plausibility. Is that smart?

Dear God,

I keep on imagining what those kids under the tables must have been feeling and it only makes me angrier and crazier at You. It just does.

Dear God,

I'm prayed out, and yet here I am, still knocking on Your door, but I think this could be the last time.

Dear Lord,

This is the first time I've ever prayed because I didn't grow up with this stuff, but here I am, praying away, so maybe there's something to it. Maybe I'm wasting my time. You tell me. Send me a sign. You must get a lot of that. Proof proof proof. Because to my mind, the school massacre could mean that You don't exist just as much - if not more than - it could mean that You do. If I was trying to recruit followers, a school massacre isn't the way I'd go about doing it. But then it got me here right now, praying, didn't it?

Just so you know, I'm having my first drink here as I pray my first prayer - apricot liqueur, I skimmed off the top inch of my dad's bottle. It tastes like penicillin and I like it.

I've never told anyone about the moment of my conversion in eleventh grade. I was by myself, out in the backyard in fall, sitting between two huckleberry shrubs that had survived the mountainside's suburban development. I closed my eyes and faced the sun and that was that - ping! — the sensation of warmth on my eyelids and the smell of dry cedar and fir branches in my nose. I never expected angels and trumpets, nor did any appear. The moment made me feel special, and yet, of course, nothing makes a person less special than conversion - it ... universalizes you.

But then how special can any person really be? I mean, you have a name and some ancestors. You have medical, educational and work histories, as well as immediate living family and friends. And after that there's not much more. At least in my case. At the time of my death, my life's résumé consisted of school, sports, a few summer jobs and my Youth Alive! involvement. My death was the only remarkable aspect of my life. I'm rummaging through my memories trying to find even a few things to distinguish me from all others. And yet ... and yet I was me - nobody saw the world as I did, nor did they feel the things I felt. I was Cheryl Anway: that has to count for something.

And I did have questions and uneasy moments after my conversion. I wondered why it is that going to heaven is the only goal of religion, because it's such a selfish thing. The Out to Lunch Bunch talked about going to heaven in the same breath as they discussed hair color. Leading a holy life inside a burgundy-colored VW Cabrio seems like a spiritual contradiction. Jason once joked that if you read Revelations closely, you could see where it says that Dee Carswell counting the calories in a packet of Italian dressing is a sign of imminent apocalypse. And yet we all possessed the capacity for slipping at any moment into great sin and eternal darkness. I suppose it's what made me a bit withdrawn from the world - maybe I just didn't trust anybody fully, knowing how close we all were to the edge. That's not true: I trusted Jason.