Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

Okay, Barb's housekeeper will be in at 8:30 tomorrow to clean up the battlefield. I really ought to have
known better than to put the twins at the same table as Reg, who's too old and too set in his ways to be
comfortable around young children. He tried to keep it together for my sake, but the twins tonight would
have worn out an East German ladies' weight-lifting coach circa 1971. They were monsters. In the end I
caved in and gave them Jell-O, then packed them off to watch TV. Barb is going to have my head on a
block for teaching them such bad habits.
The good part was that once the kids were bundled off, Reg relaxed and got a bit drunk and picked
away at his fettuccine. Jason always told me Reg never drank, but then Jason didn't see his father for so
many years. ... In any event, Reg drank white wine, not red, and then tested my grounding in reality by
bringing out a cigarette and smoking it as if he'd been born to the task.
"Smoking now?"
"Might as well. Always wondered what it was like."
"What is it like?"
He chuckled. "Addictive."
"There you go."
I bummed a cigarette from him and smoked for the first time in twenty years and got the nicotine dizzies.
I felt like a schoolgirl. When you conspire with someone like Reg, you feel as if you're committing one
serious transgression.
Soon enough the conversation turned to Reg's sorrow about his lost boys - Kent the minor deity and his
awful senseless death, and then Jason, but after three months there's simply no new ground to cover. I
had the feeling that what we were discussing tonight is almost exactly what we'll be discussing in a
decade.
Reg became morose. "I just don't understand - the most wretched people in this world prosper, while
the innocent and the devout get only suffering."
"Reg, you can spend all night - and the rest of your life, for that matter - looking for some little equation
that makes it all equate, but I don't think that equation exists. The world is the world. All you can change
is the way you deal with what's thrown your way."
Reg sloshed around the last bit of wine in his glass, then knocked it back. "But it's hard."
"It is, Reg."
He looked so damn sad. Jason quite resembles his father; I almost wonder if they'd be analogs of each
other, but tonight there was something new in his face. "Reg . . . ?"
"Yes, Heather."
"Do you ever have doubts about . . . the things you believe in?"
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