Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

the boring pap being spouted in this current trial, so I'm just going to sit here and do the best I can, given
the circumstances.
Oh, it's lovely to sit here and pay no attention to anything these morons in the court are saying. I ought to
have tried this years ago. I wonder how many other stenographers across the decades have sat here
pumping out their inner self while appearing prim and methodical? Oh, I suppose I'm flattering myself, but
we're a good crew, we are, stenographers. On TV, we never get to be a part of the plot twist. A star has
never played a stenographer; there isn't even a porn movie with court stenographers in it.
Right now, a lawyer named Pete is prattling on about a property conveyance form that's not been
supplied. I smell a recess coming up.
I suppose I can phone Allison during the recess. I thought about her way too much last night. There's
something I don't like about her, but what could be her angle? So far she's gotten a good meal, maybe
some free car repairs and two hundred bucks from me. Not much.
Who am I fooling? This woman owns me. And she knows it. And I can only pray that I get enough
messages from Jason before she bares her fangs and starts upping the price.
Heather, get a grip: she's a North Vancouver widow -which is pretty much what you are, too - a widow
who's trying to scam some bucks and hold onto a middle-class facade before poverty sucks her down
the drain like some cheap special effect.
Are Allison's actions criminal? One fact I know from being a stenographer is that just about anybody can
do just about anything for just about any reason. Crime is what got me into stenography. I wanted to see
the faces of people who lie. I wanted to see how people can say one thing and do another. It's all my
parents ever did with each other, as well as with all their family members. I thought being closer to liars
and criminals could help me put my family's lies into better perspective - but of course that never
happened. At least I sometimes had entertainment. Like a few years ago we had this woman, an
elementary school teacher, who claimed she was at a baby shower when it turns out she was quite
happily dismembering her father-in-law. I wanted to see that kind of lying brio. She maintained total
composure while the defense team clobbered her with motive - money, what else? - and intent - she'd
bought a kiddy pool a month earlier in order to contain the blood - plus there were receipts for hundreds
of dollars' worth of bleach and disinfectants and deodorants, purchased from the same Shoppers Drug
Mart where I buy my tampons and microwave popcorn.
Was there a big moral to any of this? Doubtful. But I do know that as a species we're somehow
hard-wired to believe lies. It's astonishing how willing we are to believe whatever story we're tossed
simply because we want to hear what we want to hear.
I suppose I also thought that being a stenographer hearing it all would somehow inoculate me against
crimes occurring to me. Naïve. But then, it was a seventeen-year-old me who made that decision.
Imagine leaving your most important life decisions to a seventeen-year-old! What was God thinking? If
there's such a thing as reincarnation, I want the nature of my next incarnation to be decided by a quorum
of twelve seventysomethings.
What's this? Goody gumdrops - a recess while Joe Dirtbag buys time to find a conveyance form that
every person in the courtroom knows doesn't exist. Rich people have their own laws; poor people don't
stand a chance; they never have.
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