Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland Page A

in the papers.
    I remember coming back from a questioning session one morning to find my mother opening the motel door with a large vodka stain shaped like Argentina on her blouse. And I wondered if I’d need to take a death certificate to Nevada to become officially unmarried. Is there even a name for this-“widowered” sounds wrong.
    I ate chocolate bars from the Texaco for breakfast. Kentand I drove once to the cemetery where Cheryl had been buried, but there were TV vans, so we didn’t go in. All over the embankment beside the police station I saw magic mushrooms sprouting, which seemed funny to me. And I remember Kent returning from the house where he’d gone to clean up the eggs and paint, and how he refused to discuss it.
    One thing Kent did during this time was, as ever, not take sides. He never said it in so many words, but he spent hours on the phone with Alive! ers and could only have been placating them.
    â€œThey think I organized it, don’t they?”
    â€œThey’re curious and angry like everybody else.”
    â€œBut they do.”
    â€œThey’re just confused. Let it go. You’ll be cleared soon enough.”
    â€œDo you think I was involved?”
    Kent waited half a second too long to answer this. “No.”
    â€œYou do .”
    â€œJason, let it ride.”
    The thought of my brother not really being on my side frightened me so much that I did let it ride.
    In any event, I remember the days becoming shorter, and Halloween approaching, and chipping my tooth on the police station drinking fountain.
    One further thing I remember was Mom going on a Nostradamus kick. She was trying to find the massacre foretold in his prophecies somewhere. As if.
    Hey Nostradamus! Did you predict that once we found the Promised Land we’d all start offing each other? And did you predict that once we found the Promised Land, it would be the final Promised Land, and there’d never be anotherone again? And if you were such a good clairvoyant, why didn’t you just write things straight out? What’s with all the stupid rhyming quatrains? Thanks for nothing.
    But most of all I remember making sure that I got my injection every day right on time, at noon and midnight. After I got it, I had a five-minute window when I didn’t have to think about Cheryl, alive, dying or dead.
    I’m drunk.
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    And now I’m hung over. It’s morning and it’s raining outside, the first rain in a month. I think I’ll skip working on the built-in towel rack for the day. Les will tell the client I’m at another job. That’s the price he pays for having a drinking buddy on twenty-four-hour call.
    I was going to do an owner’s manual to myself, or rather, my future clone. Now’s as good a time as any.
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    Dear Clone…
    It’s you speaking. Or rather it’s me, but with a helluva lot more mileage on me than you have, so just trust me, okay? Where to start…Okay, as far as bodies go, you lucked out in most respects. Around the age of seventeen you’ll hit six foot one, and you’ll be neither skinny nor given to fat. You’ll be left-handed and bad with numbers but pretty good with words. You’ll be allergic to any molecule that ends with the suffix “-aine,” meaning benzocaine, novocaine, and, most important, cocaine . I learned this when getting a filling in third grade. If I’d been able to do cocaine I’d likely be dead now, so if nothing else, this allergy has allowed me to hang around long enough for me to make you .
    Your shoe size will be eleven.
    You’ll need to start shaving almost on the day you turn sixteen.
    You’ll get acne-not badly, but badly enough. It’ll start at thirteen and, despite conventional wisdom, it never goes away. As far as looks go, you did pretty well there, too, and because of this, for the rest of your life people will do nice things for you for no