Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

"What?"
"Dinner, then."
"No!" The snaking line was eavesdropping big time. "Dean, there should be no complications in closing
Mr. Klaasen's account." She looked at me. "Mr. Klaasen, I have to go."
My anger became gray emotional fuzz, and I just wanted to leave. Inside of five minutes, Dean had
severed my connection to his bank, and I stood on the curb smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, my shirt
untucked and $5,210.00 stuffed into the pockets of my green dungarees. I decided to leave the serene,
heavily bylawed streets of North Vancouver and drive to West Vancouver, down near the ocean. At the
Seventeenth and Bellevue CIBC I opened a checking account, and when I looked behind the tellers I
saw an open vault. I asked if it was possible to rent a safety deposit box, which took all of three minutes
to do. That box is where I'm going to place all of this, once it's finished. And here's the deal: if I get
walloped by a bus next year, this letter is going to be placed in storage until May 30, 2019, when you,
my two nephews, turn twenty-one. If I hang around long enough, I might hand it to you in person. But for
now, that's where this letter is headed.
Just so you know, I've been writing all of this in the cab of my truck, parked on Bellevue, down by
Ambleside Beach, near the pier with all its bratty kids on rollerblades and the Vietnamese guys with their
crab traps pursuing E. coli. I'm using a pen embossed with "Travelodge" and I'm writing on the back of
Les's pink invoice forms. The wind is heating up - God, it feels nice on my face - and I feel, in the most
SUV-commercial sense of the word, free.
* * *
How to start?
First off, Cheryl and I were married. No one knows that but me, and now you. It was insane, really. I
was seventeen and starved for sex, but I was still stuck in my family's religious warp, so only
husband/wife sex was allowed, and even then for procreation only, and even then only while both
partners wore heavy wool tweeds so as to drain the act of pleasure. So when I suggested to Cheryl that
we fly to Las Vegas and get hitched, she floored me when she said yes. It was an impulsive request I
made after our math class saw an educational 16mm film about gambling. The movie was supposed to
make high school students more enthusiastic about statistics. I mean, what were these filmmakers
thinking?
And what was I thinking? Marriage? Las Vegas?
We flew down there one weekend and - I mean, we weren't even people then, we were so young and
out of it. We were like baby chicks. No. We were like zygotes, little zygotes cabbing from the airport to
Caesars Palace, and all I could think about was how hot and dry the air was. In any event, it seems like a
billion years ago.
Around sunset, we got married, using our fake IDs. Our witness was a slob of a cabbie who drove us
down the Strip. For the next six weeks my grades evaporated, sports became a nuisance, and my friends
Page 26