Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

you chose murder, and now you'll never be totally sure of where you're headed."
"You honestly believe this?"
"I'll always believe it."
I let go of his head. The guy in the next bed was rousing. My father said, "Jason?" but I was already
through the door. From his cracked and bruised chest he yelled the words, "All I ever wanted for you
was the Kingdom."
He'd stuck his saber through my gut. He'd done his job.
* * *
It's around midnight. After I left Dad, my choice was to either become very drunk or write this. I chose
to write this. It felt kind of now-or-never for me.
Back to the massacre.
Two weeks after the attack, videocassettes were mailed to the school's principal, to the local TV news
programs and to the police. They had been made by the three gunmen using a Beta cam they'd rented
from the school's A/V crib. It pretty much laid out what they were going to do, how they were going to
do it, and why - the generic sort of alienation we've all become too familiar with during the 1990s.
You'd have thought these tapes would have cleared me completely, but no. Someone had to arrange for
the tapes to be mailed, and someone had to be filming these three losers spouting their crap: it was a
hand-held camera. So even when I was cleared, in the public mind I was never spotlessly cleared. There
was never any doubt with the police and RCMP, thank God, but let me tell you, once people get a nutty
idea in their head, it's there for good. And to this day, whoever shot the video and mailed the dubs
remains a mystery.
A few celebrities emerged from the massacre, the first being me, semi-redeemed after two weeks of
exhaustive investigation revealed my obvious innocence. But of course, for the only two weeks that really
mattered, I was demonized.
The second celebrity - and the biggest - was Cheryl. When she wrotegod is nowhere/god is now here,
she'd finished withgod is now here, which was taken for a miracle, something I find a bit of a stretch.
The third celebrity was Jeremy Kyriakis, the gun boy who repented and was then vaporized for doing
so.
During the weeks I spent in motel rooms, I often had nothing to do except reread the papers and watch
TV while I exceeded my daily allotment of sedatives and thought of Cheryl, about our secret life together
and - I can't express what it felt like to be trashed for two weeks while at the same time Jeremy Kyriakis
was being offered as poster boy for the it's-never-too-late strain of religious thinking. It was Jeremy who
took out most of the kids by the snack machines - and shot off Demi Harshawe's foot, too - as well as
producing most of the trophy case casualties, but he repented and so he was forgiven and lionized.
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