Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

Allison didn't like this. "Oh, really?"
"I don't know what to do."
"I'm a businesswoman, Heather. I can't just do these things for free."
"I can see not."
I sipped the coffee, too hot and too weak. I placed the mug on the tabletop and looked at my hands.
Allison watched me. I began tugging away at a diamond ring on my left ring finger, a diamond the size of
a ladybug. Sometimes with Jason, subjects were best left undiscussed. I'd always assumed the ring had
fallen off the back of a truck, but then Barb told me she'd actually gone with Jason to Zales to help select
it. "I have this ring."
Allison came over and, with the deadened eyes of a Soviet flea marketeer, appraised it in a blink. "I
suppose so."
The ring came free. I handed it to her, and as she reached for it, I grabbed her, yanked her forward and
with my right arm put her in a headlock. I said, "Look, you scheming cow. Your daughter filled me in on
your little prank here, and if you want to live past lunchtime, you take me to wherever you keep the sheet
of paper Jason gave you, and you hand it over. Got it?"
"Let go of me."
I turned her around and dug a knee into her back. I've never struck another human being before, but I
had size on my side. "Don't screw with me. I've got a brown belt in Tae Bo. I studied down in Oregon.
So where is it?"
"I can't . . . breathe."
I loosened my grip. "You bring tears to my eyes. Come on. Where is it?"
"Downstairs."
"So that's where we'll go."
I felt like I'd been given a prescription drug that opened a fifty-pound pair of oak double doors, doors
I'd somehow overlooked before. To be even clearer, I felt like a man. It was surprisingly easy taking full
control of Allison's body, but I don't think I'd have killed her. Whatever door this new door was, it
wasn't the murder door.
The stairs were tricky but doable. We entered a room that must once have been Glenn's office but had,
over the years, been converted to a transient storage area for bankers' boxes full of old books and
papers. A sun-bleached litho of mallard ducks in flight had been removed from over the desk and leaned
against the floor below, leaving a ghostly rectangle on the wall. Straddling this ghost was a brass-framed
piece of fuzzily photographed flowers embossed with some sort of poetic nonsense in that casual
fake-handwriting font people use on invitations to their second and third marriages. Allison's feminizing
touch. The room had an aura of bankruptcy and defeat.
"Where is it?"
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