Hey Nostradamus!. Douglas Coupland

just lust. Maybe that’s all it is.

      The concession stand is down the beach, not far from where I’m sitting: Popsicles, fish & chips and onion burgers. Cheryl worked there in her last summer. She really loved it because there were no Alive! people there. I can see her point.

      If you’d met me before the massacre, you’d think you’d just met a walking storage room full of my father’s wingding theories and beliefs. That’s assuming I even spoke to you, which I probably wouldn’t have done, because I don’t speak much. Until they put a chip in my brain to force me to speak, I plan to remain quiet.

      If you’d met me just before the massacre, you’d have assumed I was statistically average, which I was. The only thing that made me different from most other people my age is that I was married. That’s it.

      I suppose that, given my father and my older brother, it was inevitable that I be plunked into Youth Alive! Individually its members could be okay, but with a group agenda, they could be goons. They, more than anything, are the reason I remained mute.

      Dad was thrilled Kent was the local Alive! grand pooh-bah, and at dinner he liked nothing more than hearing Kent reel out statistics about conversions, witnessings and money-raisers. If they ever argued, it was over trivialities: Should a swimming pool used in rituals be the temperature of blood, or should it be as cold as possible, to add a dimension of discomfort? The answer: cold. Why miss an opportunity for joylessness?

      Cheryl stayed for supper a few times at our house, and the meals were surprisingly uneventful. I kept on waiting for Dad to pull back a curtain to reveal a witch-dunking device, but he and Cheryl got on well, I suspect because she was a good listener and knew better than to interrupt my father. I wonder if Dad saw in Cheryl the kind of girl he thinks he ought to have married – someone who’d already been converted rather than someone he’d have to mold, and then psychologically torture, like my mother.

      After our marriage, we all had dinner together just once, before Kent went back to school in Alberta. Kent and the Peeping Toms from Alive! were beginning to spy on us by then, and I’ve never really been sure whether Kent told Dad about Cheryl and me. If he had, it wouldn’t have been with malice. It would have been Item Number 14 on the agenda, sandwiched between the need for more stacking chairs and the recitation of a letter from a starving waif in Dar es Salaam who received five bucks a month from the Klaasen family.

      In any event, my father treated Cheryl and me more like children than adults, which felt patronizing to me. If he knew we were married, he’d treat us like man and woman instead of girl and boy. Because of that dinner, I knew I soon had soon to devise a way of announcing our marriage. I wanted a proper dinner in a restaurant, and Cheryl just wanted to phone a few people and leave it at that.

      

      Joyce is a liquid snoring heap by my apartment’s front window. It’s not so much an apartment – it’s more like a nest – but Joyce doesn’t mind. I suppose, from a dog’s perspective, a dirty apartment is far more interesting than one that’s been heavily Windexed and vacuumed. Do I keep the place dirty to scare people away? No, I keep it dirty because Reg was a neat freak – cleanliness…godliness…pathetically predictable, I know. The only person I’d ever allow in here would be Reg, if only to torment him with my uncleanness. But then nothing on earth would make me invite Reg into any home of mine.