Free Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

to shoot some pool tonight. Soon enough Nigel will learn about my “story,” and then he’ll go buy a cheapo massacre exploitation paperback in some secondhand bookstore. His behavior around me will change: he’ll walk on eggshells, and then he’ll want to discuss life after death, crop circles, gun laws, Nostradamus or stuff along those lines, and then I’ll have to drop him as a friend because he’ll know way more about me than anyone ought to know, and the imbalance is, as I age, more of a pain than anything else. I don’t want or need it.
    Call seven is my mother again, asking me to phone her. I do. “Mom.”
    â€œJason.”
    â€œYou feeling weird about tonight?”
    â€œSomeone has to take care of the twins. I thought maybe I could take the twins off Barb’s hands for the evening.”
    â€œKent’s friends have probably sorted that out weeks ago. You know what they’re like.”
    â€œI guess so.”
    â€œHow about I drive you.”
    â€œCould you?”
    â€œSure.”
    Â 

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    Okay.
    After leaving the cafeteria, I walked out onto the sunlit concrete plaza, where I turned around and saw myself reflected in the one remaining unshot window, and I was all one color, purple. Gurneys with their oxygen masks and plasma trees covered the front plaza like blankets on a beach. I saw bandages being applied so quickly they had bits of autumn leaves trapped inside the weave. I remember a sheet being pulled over the face of this girl, Kelly, who was my French class vocabulary partner. She didn’t look shot at all, but she was dead.
    There were seagulls flying above-rare for that altitude, and-
    Well, I’ve seen all the photos a million times like everyone else, but they just don’t capture the way it felt to be there-the sunlight and the redness of the blood: that’s always cropped out of magazines, and this bugs me because when you crop the photo, you tell a lie.
    I was thinking, Okay. I guess I should just go home and wash up and get on with things . Up the hill, hundreds of students were being held back by police barricades. When I looked to my left, a medic plunged a syringe like a railway spike into the chest of a friend of mine, Demi Harshawe. A few steps away, an attendant running with a plasmatree tripped over a varsity coat soaked in coagulating blood.
    In my pocket I felt my car keys, and I thought, If I can just find my car, I’ll be able to leave here, and everything will be just fine . When I walked down to the auxilary lot where I’d parked that day, nobody stopped me. I’d later learn that I’d accidentally fallen through every crack in the security system, which was for a time interpreted as having sneaked through every crack in the system. Regardless, nobody called my name, and, by the way, those grief counselors they always talk about on TV? Oh, come on .
    I was headed for my car, but then I saw Cheryl’s white Chevette-it looked so warm in the sunlight, and I just wanted to be near it and feel warmth from it, so I went and lay down on the hood. The sun was indeed warm, in that feeble October way, and I curled up on the car’s hood, leaving red rusty finger-painting swishes, then fell into whatever it is that isn’t sleep but isn’t wakefulness, either.
    A hand shook me, and when I opened my eyes, the sun was a bit further to the west. It was two RCMP officers, one with a German shepherd, and the other with a rifle speaking into a headset: “He’s alive. Not injured, we don’t think. Yeah, we’ll hold him.”
    I blinked and looked at the men. I was no longer “the guy” I was now merely “him.” I tried lifting my right arm, but the blood had bonded it to the hood. It made a ripping-tape sound as I pulled it away. My clothes felt made of plasticine. I asked, “What time is it?”
    The officers stared at me as if their dog had just spoken to them.