Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

He looked up from his glass. "If you'd asked me that a decade ago, I'd have turned purple and cast you
out of my house - or whatever house we were in. I'd have seen you as a corrupting influence. I'd have
scorned you. But here I am now, and all I can do is say yes, which doesn't even burn or sting. I feel so
heavy, I feel like barbells. I feel like I just want to melt into the planet, like a boulder in a swamp, and be
done with everything."
"Reg, I'm going to tell you a story, okay?"
"A story? Sure. What about?"
I couldn't believe I was saying the words, but here I was. "About something stupid and crazy I did last
week. I haven't told anyone about it, and if I don't tell someone I'm going to explode. Will you listen?"
"You always listen to me."
I twiddled a noodle coated with cold Parmesan cheese, and said, "Last week I phoned Chris, down in
California."
"He's a good boy."
"He is."
"Why did you call?"
"I wanted to - needed to - ask him a favor."
"What was it?"
"I asked him to give me the names and addresses of the people who made the closest match to Jason in
the facial profiling index."
"And?"
"And . . . there was this one guy who lives in South Carolina, named Terry, who's about seventy-five
years old, and then there was this other guy, Paul, who lives down in Beaverton, Oregon, near Portland.
A suburb."
"Go on."
"Well, it turns out this Paul guy has a long but minor record - a few stolen cars - and he got caught
fencing memory chips in northern California."
"You went down there to meet him, didn't you?"
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