Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

Okay, it's been six days since my last entry in this journal, and I'm going to record what happened as
fully as I can remember.
Les and I went for a beer at the Lynwood Inn, a blue-collar place down at the docks beneath the
Second Narrows Bridge pilings. I don't know if it was the heat, or that we weren't eating the free chicken
wings, but by one o'clock we were blotto, when in walked this wharf rat, Jerry, who I met in court in
1992 - he'd been pulled over in an Isuzu pickup loaded with stolen skis. When the next pitcher of beer
arrived, Jerry paid from a big roll of bills. He then said he had a seventeen-foot aluminum boat with an
Evinrude SO for sale. It was down on the water and did we want to go for a ride?
The boat was a real sweetheart and dead simple: a hull, an engine, a front windshield and a steering
wheel - basically a Honda Civic afloat on the harbor's brilliant glassy water. . . salt mist and galvanized
metal; propeller blades churning in jade green water cut with pale blue smoke.
The harbor was dense with freighters, and there was this one Chinese hulk in the midst of loading up on
hemlock two-by-fours. Some guy up on deck threw something at us - a lunch bag or something minor,
but Jerry drove up to the side of the freighter, which resembled a rusting, windowless ten-story building,
and started screaming in Chinese.
"Jerry — where'd you learn Chinese?"
"My ex. Eleven years of my life, and all I'm left with is Cantonese, hep C and advanced skills in seafood
cooking." The guy up above disappeared for a second, and Les and I said, "Jerry, let's get out of here,"
but Jerry wouldn't listen. The guy up above reappeared over the edge and dropped what seemed to be a
cast-iron loaf of bread - I have no idea what it was, but it rammed a hole the size of a dinner plate in our
boat's hull. We sank quickly, and we swam to land near the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. We found some
ancient rusting rungs, which we climbed up; they put us in a hot, dusty railyard. We'd gotten coated with
diesel oil during the swim, and the powdery gray dirt stuck to us like flour on cod. Les was furious
because his wife had been haranguing him for years over his taste in clothes, and today was the first day
he was wearing a pair of pants she'd bought for him. Les became morose: "She's going to fry my butt."
I said, "Jesus, Jerry, what did you say to that Chinese guy, anyway?"
"Well, he called me some names, and I called him some names, and then he said he'd sink the boat if I
kept dissing him, and then he sank the boat. The damn thing was hot as a stove, anyway. Probably better
that it sank." Jerry then flipped open his cell phone, saying, "Someone'll come pick us up."
In order to reach the road, we had to cut across eight tracks on which train cars were shunting
according to laws unknown to us, each car capable of shredding us into french fries at any moment.
Out at the road, sure enough, there sat a black stretch limo. Its driver was Yorgo, a Russian gorilla who
was also a clean freak. He insisted we take off our clothes and put them on a tarp in the trunk. I asked
Jerry why there'd be a tarp in the trunk, and he said, "Don't ask."
So we sat in our underwear in the back of this limo. Les discovered some rotgut scotch in the limo's
plastic decanter and tanked himself up even further, while Jerry began obsessing about finding identical
trousers so Les wouldn't get in trouble with his wife. This struck me as manic, but then the Russian gorilla
threw Jerry a Ziploc bag of coke, and I saw where the mania came from.
"I can't do coke. I really can't. Allergies. Anything that ends with '-aine'."
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