Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

investigation cleared him; he never properly faced his accusers, and they must have felt they'd somehow
won something in that.
Kent was dead, but he could have stuck up for his little brother instead of hiding behind a wall of
midterms and religious hocus-pocus.
And there's Reg - Reg, why did you have to wait for the world to collapse around you before you
became a human being? You two would have gotten along so well, you really would have.
And don't even get me going about Cheryl's plastic, mean-spirited parents. Hypocrites.
Even Barb gets a bit clippy when I talk about Jason too much.
Egad - I'm just venting here. It's merely me venting. These are all kind people. And I'm merely venting.
And I also can't get Cheryl's photo out of my head. I'm not the jealous type, but when it comes to her,
what's a girl supposed to do? In the eyes of the world, Cheryl's a saint. Who else on earth has a saint for
competition - nuns?
But I don't think she was a saint - not judging by what I could learn from Jason. I think she was just an
average girl who was maybe missing a sense of drama in her life. Since Jason's disappearance, I've had
dinner a few times with Chris and Cheryl's parents over at Barb's; all they talk about is getting deals on
cases of canned corn at Costco, the best price they got on Alaska Airlines tickets to Scottsdale, and the
new next-door neighbors who don't use English as a first language. I've never heard them discuss an idea
at the table, let alone give much thought to where Jason might be. My presence there possibly unnerves
them. Jason said that they were vile and that they still suspected him of being the one who videotaped the
gunmen and mailed the tapes to the press, but I didn't get any inkling of that from them. If anything, I
sensed regret that they'd never gotten to really meet him.
As for Cheryl, I quickly learned that she could pop up anywhere. We'd be watching TV and * blink*
there she was, her yearbook photo on the screen and a voice-over talking about crime and youth, or
spiraling crime rates or crime and women. This was always jarring for me, but never for Jason. He'd
smile slightly and say, "Don't worry." But you know, I saw his face. He was still in love with her. It's
there.
What's bizarre is that I (being alive) have the competitive edge over her (being dead). Yet at the same
time she (being dead) has the edge over me (alive but aging quickly, and not very well at that).
And then there's religion. Even though Jason said he'd shunned religion, I have this feeling that life, for
him, was just a waiting game, and that he believed if he could squeak through the rest of his life, he'd
meet up with Cheryl. How do I know that his disdain for religion wasn't short-term? I tried talking to
Jason about Cheryl, but his answers were politician's answers: "She was someone in my life so long ago.
I was a kid." But she died in his arms in a lake of blood!
Jason also said a few things over the years to make me wonder if the tree, having been chopped down
to the ground, was now sending new shoots out from the soil. For example, we saw a childhood friend of
his, Craig, on the highway driving a Ferrari or one of those cars. Jason said, "Well you know, you can
accumulate all the stuff you want in this life, but stuff alone can't make you happy. Craig there has to go
around acting like he's a complete man, now. Right."
"You're just jealous."
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