Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

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.
Your mother.
She's technically alive, but she isn't really here, she is far gone in her alcoholic dementia, her liver on its
final boozy gasp. I take the blame - I liked her drunk, because she was a quiet and amiable drunk. When
she was drunk, her eyes lost that accusatory look. When she was drunk, she gave the impression she'd
ride life unchanged right through to the end, that her life was spiritually adequate, that she wore a crown
of stars. This drunken look absolved me of all the guilt I felt regarding the slow-motion demolition of the
once pretty girl who always saved two Boston creme donuts for me, and who unashamedly loved color
TV, and who (and this is the hard part) seemed spiritual in a way that didn't make me want to preach to
her. She could have married any man she wanted, but she chose Reg Klaasen. . . . Why? Because she
thought I was spiritual, too. I don't know when it dawned on her that I wasn't, that I was merely someone
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