Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

Alive! friends look forward to the grave the same way Chris and Cheryl used to look forward to Disney
World. I can't share in this excitement, probably because I'm about thirty years closer to death than they
are. They keep referring to Cheryl and her notebook withgod is now here as some sort of miracle, and
this I can't understand. It's like a twelve-year-old girl plucking daisy petals. He loves me, be loves me
not. It doesn't feel miraculous to me. But the kids down at the Trust office talk about miracles all the
time, and this, too, baffles me. They're always asking for miracles, and finding them everywhere.
Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that He created an order for the world; I
believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we're also asking that He unravel
the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.
I wish we'd rented a boat and gone out into the Straits of Juan de Fuca and beached on some island and
taken Cheryl into some woods, located a nice meadow, and buried her there among the wild daisies and
ferns. Then I would feel she's at some kind of peace. But her grave now? I went up there yesterday and
it was a mound of flowers and teddy bears and letters. And in the rain they'd all melted together, and it
shouted confusion and rage and anger at me, which is what one ought to feel after such a heinous crime;
but graves are for peace, not for rage.
Wherever this letter finds you, I hope it finds you well and at peace, or something like it. When you
return to North Van, might I ask you and your family over for dinner? It's the very least we could do.
Yours fondly,
Lloyd Anway
This arrived two days after Mr. Anway's letter:
Jason,
I just caught my dad mailing you a letter. He tried to hide it between some bills, and when I pushed him,
he told me that Mom had also written you, which wigged me out completely. I can all too well imagine
the crock of lies he fed you. Mom, too. You need to know that everything they tell you, everything, is
outright crap. From the word go, they've hated you. After it happened, they took all the photos of you in
Cheryl's bedroom and scratched out your face. There would be whole evenings when Cheryl's
hypocritical preacher pals would sit in our living room and totally trash you with Mom and Dad. They
reduced you to a scab lying on a floor beneath a toilet being carried away by beetles bit by bit. Man, they
were brutal, and they were extra brutal when they talked about, or rather talked around, sex. I mean,
let's face it, the two of you were an item, but the Alive! oids made it sound like rape, and that it was your
sole job in life to corrupt Cheryl. And once they'd tied the noose for you, they'd lay into how you always
seemed like the kind of guy who'd plan, and assist in murdering a whole school just to kill the girl he'd
worked so hard to corrupt. I mean, get real. Some nights I had to leave the house. Most nights, actually.
Mitchell Van Waters, Jeremy Kyriakis and Duncan Boyle were in my grade, and they were such total
wipeouts that people could barely remember they existed. They'd come into English class in these
beat-up black leather jackets, acting like they were big-shot political guys starting a revolution, and they'd
sit there writing lyrics from Skinny Puppy on their cargo pants with felt pens and Liquid Paper. I
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