Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

Author:Douglas Coupland
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2009-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

The next thing I remember is being in Seattle. Judging by beard stubble it was maybe two nights later. I was on Interstate 5 entering downtown, riding shotgun in an Audi sedan. At the wheel was a skinny junkie-looking guy with chattering teeth. He looked at me and said, “It’s okay. You’ve got the money with you. The important thing to remember is not to panic.”

Not to panic? Am I supposed to be not panicking about something? This wasn’t a situation I wanted to be a part of. The car pulled up to a stoplight. I got out and walked through the first door I saw, which happened to be the west lobby entrance of a Four Seasons hotel. I caught sight of myself in a jewelry shop’s display case: I was sunburnt and wearing a designer outfit like the ones in magazine spreads that no guy ever wears in real life. I had to shed this ridiculous outfit, but how? Where?

In the vest pocket a palm-thick wad of fifties, but no ID, which might prove to be a problem, what with being a Canadian in the U.S. most likely on shady business. One of Jerry’s pills was tucked into a deep corner, so I wiggled it loose and popped it in my mouth. At the bar I ordered a martini and flirted with two women who were up from the Bay Area and who worked for Oracle’s PR department. I wasn’t in their league, but they were fun, and they made cracks about my jacket. In the men’s room I removed it and buried it in the hand towel basket beneath a pile of towels. And then I blacked out once again.

When I came to, I was walking past alders and birches beside a stony mountain river. The river wasn’t huge like the Fraser, and it wasn’t tiny; it was a mountain river that fed into something larger. It was late afternoon and my hands were behind my head. I could hear someone’s feet on the rocks behind me. I looked down and remembered being a kid and staring at sand in the Capilano, seeing flecks of mica and being convinced it was gold.

The river looked cold, and was filled with rocks like the one I’d used to kill Mitchell. And the landscape surrounding the river reminded me of the valley forest by the Klaasen family daffodil farm in Agassiz: the creepy sunless forests carpeted with moss that swallows your feet, and mud that sucks up all noise-summerproof and free of birds.

I turned around to look. Yorgo was behind me, and he cracked me between the shoulders with the barrel of a shotgun. It was just the two of us, and we were clearly on a death march. The tarp in the limo’s trunk sprang to mind.

I also noted how quickly my childhood muscle memory for walking atop river rock had returned. Yorgo, I could hear, was having some trouble. He probably grew up in a city.

I didn’t want to trudge meekly to my fate.

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