Hey Nostradamus! (4 page)

I was sure that whatever Jason did for a living would amply fulfill us both-an unpopular sentiment among girls my age. Jason once halfheartedly inquired as to my career
ambitions, and when he was certain I had none, he was relieved. His family-churchier than Thou-looked down on girls who worked. If I was ever going to get a job, it would only be to annoy
them,
his parents-his dad, mostly. He was a mean, dried-out fart who defied charity, and who used religion as a foil to justify his undesirable character traits. His cheapness became
thrift;
his lack of curiosity about the world and his contempt for new ideas were called
being traditional
.

Jason's mother was, well, there's no way around it, a bit drunk the few times I met her. I don't think she liked the way her life had played out. Who am I to judge? How the two of them procreated a sweetie-pie like Jason remains one of God's true mysteries.

 

 

If nothing else, relating the step-by-step course of events in the cafeteria allows me to comprehend how distanced from the world I'm feeling now-how quickly the world is pulling away. And for this reason I'll continue.

After the first dozen shots, the fire alarm went off. Mitchell Van Waters walked to the main cafeteria doors, said, “Goddammit,” and fired into the hall, blasting out the bell ringing there. Jeremy Kyriakis took out the cafeteria's fire bell in three shots, after which a hail of drywall particles pinged and rattled throughout the otherwise silent room. Beneath the tables we could still hear fire bells ringing from deep within the school's bowels, bells that would ring past sunset since the RCMP would hold off disabling the central
OFF
switch for fear of tripping homemade bombs placed throughout the school-bombs made of benzene and powdered swimming-pool cleaner. Wait-how did I know
that combo? Oh yes, Mitchell Van Waters's contribution to the science fair: “Getting the Most Bang for Your Buck.” It was in last year's yearbook.

Back to the cafeteria.

Back to me and three hundred other students under the tables, either dead or playing dead, scrunching themselves into tiny balls. Back to six work boots clomping on the polished putty-colored linoleum, and the sounds of ambulances and RCMP cruisers whooping schoolward, a little too little, a little too late.

I began doing a numbers game in my head. Three hundred people divided among three gunmen makes a hundred victims per gunman. If they were going to kill us all, it would take a bit of time, so I figured my chances of making it were better than I'd first supposed. But geographically we were in a bad spot: the center of the room, the visual and architectural core of the place, as well as the nexus of any high school's social ambition and peer envy. Were people envious of Alivers!? We were basically invisible in the school. A few students might have thought we were small-minded and clique-ish, and to be honest,
Youth Alive!
members
were
. But I wasn't. In general, as I walked about the school I affected a calm, composed smile. I did this not because I wanted to be everyone's friend-or to avoid making enemies-but simply because it was easier and I didn't need to interact. A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection-it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

 

Dear Lord,

If You organized a massacre just to make people have doubts, then maybe You ought to consider other ways
of doing things. A high school massacre? Kids with pimento loaf sandwiches and cans of Orange Crush? I don't think You would orchestrate something like this. A massacre in a high school cafeteria can only indicate Your absence-that for some reason, in some manner, You chose to absent Yourself from the room. Forsake it, actually.

Cheryl-the pretty girl who was the last one to be shot. She wrote that in her binder, didn't she? “God is nowhere.” Maybe she was right.

 

Dear God,

I'm out of prayers, so that just leaves talking. It's hard for me to believe other people are feeling as intensely as I do, and as bad as I do. But then, if we're all as messed up as I am, that scares me into thinking that the world's all going to go to pieces, and what sort of world would
that
be? A zoo.

I keep to myself mostly. I can't sleep or eat. TV stinks. School's closed for a while yet. I smoked pot and it wasn't a good idea. I walk around in a daze and it's like the opposite of drugs, because drugs are supposed to make you feel good, but this only makes me feel bad.

I was walking down at the mall, and suddenly I started hitting myself in the head because I thought I could bash away the feelings. And the thing is, everybody in the mall looked as if they knew what I was doing, and no one flipped out.

Anyway, this is where I stand now. I'm not sure this was a prayer. I don't know what it was.

 

I've not been too specific about my life and my particulars, but by now you must have gleaned a few things about who I was-Cheryl Anway. The papers are blanketing the world with my most recent yearbook photo, and if you've seen it then you'll know I was a cliche girl next door: darkish blond hair cut in a way that'll probably look stupid to future students, with a thin face and, on the day the photos were taken, no pimples-how often did
that
ever happen? In the photo I look old for seventeen. I'm smiling the smile I used when passing people in the halls without having to speak to them.

The description accompanying my photo is along the lines of “Cheryl was a good student, friendly and popular”-and that's about it. What a waste of seventeen years. Or is that just my selfish heart applying standards of the world to a soul that's eternal? It is. But by seventeen, nobody ever accomplishes anything, do they? Joan of Arc? Anne Frank? And maybe some musicians and actresses. I'd really like to ask God why it is that we don't accomplish anything until we're at least twenty. Why the wait? I think we should be born ten years old, and then after a year turn twenty-just get it over with, like dogs do. We ought to be born running.

Chris and I had a dog, a spaniel named Sterling. We adored Sterling, but Sterling adored gum. We'd go for walks and all he'd do was sniff out sidewalk discards. It was cute and funny, but when I was in grade nine he ate a piece of something that wasn't gum, and two hours later he was gone. We buried him in the backyard beneath the witch hazel shrub, and I put a cross on his grave, a cross my mother removed after my conversion. I found it in the garden shed between the 5-20-20 and a stack of empty
black plastic nursery pots, and I was too chicken to ask her why.

I don't worry too much about Sterling, as he's in heaven. Animals never left God-only people did. Lucky animals.

My father works in the mortgage division of Canada Trust, and my mother is a technician in a medical lab. They love their jobs. Chris is a generic little brother, yet not as snotty or pesky as my friends' little brothers.

At Christmas everyone in our family exchanged bad sweaters and we all wore them as a kind of in-joke. So we were one of those bad-sweater families you see at the mall.

We got along with each other-or we did until recently. It's like we decided to be superficially happy with each other, which is fine, and that we wouldn't share intimacies with each other. I don't know. I think that lack of sharing weakened us.

 

Dear Lord,

I pray for the souls of the three killers, but I don't know if that is right or wrong.

 

It always seemed to me that people who'd discovered religion had both lost and gained something. Outwardly, they'd gained calmness, confidence and a look of purpose, but what they'd lost was a certain willingness to connect with unconverted souls. Looking a convert in the eyes was like trying to make eye contact with a horse. They'd be alive and breathing, but they wouldn't be a hundred percent
there
anymore. They'd left the day-to-day world and joined the realm of eternal time. Pastor Fields or Dee or Lauren would
have pounced on me if I'd ever spoken those words aloud. Dee would have said something like “Cheryl, you've just covered your halo with soot. Repent. Now.”

There can be an archness, a meanness in the lives of the saved, an intolerance that can color their view of the weak and of the lost. It can make them hard when they ought to be listening, judgmental when they ought to be contrite.

Jason's father, Reg, always said, “Love what God loves and hate what God hates,” but more often than not I had the impression that he really meant “Love what Reg loves and hate what Reg hates.” I don't think he imparted this philosophy to Jason. Jason was too gentle, too forgiving, to adopt Reg's self-serving credo. As my mother always told me, “Cheryl, trust me, you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.”

 

 

Getting married in Nevada in 1988 was simple. At noon on the final Friday before school started, Jason and I cabbed out to the airport and scanned the list of outgoing flights. There was one to Las Vegas in ninety minutes, so we bought tickets-cash-walked through U.S. Immigration preclearance, went to the gate and were on our way. They didn't even bother to check our ID. We each had only a gym bag for carry-on and we felt like bandits. It was my first time flying, and everything was new and charged with mystery…the laminated safety cards, the takeoff, which made my stomach cartwheel, the food, which was bad just like they always joke about on TV, and the cigarette smoke; something about Las Vegas attracts the smokers. But it was all like perfume to me, and I tried pretending that every moment of my life
could be as full of newness as that flight. What a life that would be.

The two of us had dressed conservatively-shirt and tie for Jason, and me in a schoolmarm dress; our outfits must have made us look all of fifteen. The flight attendant asked us why we were going to Las Vegas and we told her. Ten minutes later there was a captain's announcement telling everybody on the plane our news and our seat numbers. The other passengers clapped and I blushed like I had a fever, but suddenly it was as if we were blood kin with all these strangers. At the terminal, the men all slapped Jason's back and har-har'ed, and this one woman whispered to me, “Honey, I don't care what else you do, but the moment he hints that he wants it, you give it to him. Doesn't matter if you're fixing a diaper or cleaning out the gutters. You give it, pronto. Else you'll lose him.”

It was over a hundred degrees outside, my first exposure to genuine heat, Jason's too. My lungs had never felt so pure. In the taxi to Caesars Palace I looked out at the desert-real
desert
-and tried to imagine every parable I'd ever heard taking place in that exotic lifeless nothingness. I couldn't have stood five minutes out there in that oven, and I wondered how the Bible ever managed to happen. They must have had different weather back then-or trees-or rivers and shade. Good Lord, the desert is harsh. I asked the taxi driver to stop for a second beside a vacant lot between the airport and the Strip. There were some rental units on the other side of a cinder-block fence, some litter and a shedded snakeskin. I got out and it felt as if I were floating over the sharp rocks and angry little plants. Instead of feeling brand new, Las Vegas felt thousands of years old. Jason got out
and we both knelt and prayed. Time passed; I felt dizzy and the cabbie honked the horn. We drove to Caesars Palace.