Douglas Coupland: Hey Nostradamus!

After my cigarette with Jessica I drove back to Lynn Valley, up to Allison's house. I know her real name is Cecilia, but she remains Allison to me.

Her Cutlass was in the carport. The newspapers were still on the front doormat, so I picked them up and rang the bell. Through the badly built 1960s contractor door, I heard shuffling up the stairs from where I knew the kitchen was. There were three glass slits in the door, and I looked through them and saw Allison, who stopped on the third step up, looked at me, and froze. It took her maybe half a minute to thaw out, and she came to the door and opened it, a tiny brass security chain across the gap.

"Heather. It's awfully early."

"I know it is." She'd have to be a moron not to see a certain level of madness in my eye, but I could tell she misread this as desperation for a message from Jason.

"I suppose I could let you in."

"Please do."

She unclasped the chain and said to come upstairs to the kitchen for coffee. "You look terrible," she said, "like you didn't sleep last night."

"I didn't."

The kitchen was generic North Van - lemon-lime freckled linoleum floor with four decades of wear patterns showing, SPCA fridge magnets, vitamins on the windowsill, and through that window, the primordial evergreen maw that continues from Lynn Valley until the end of the world. She said, "I know it must be troubling to wait for messages to come in from loved ones."

I said, "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response."

She looked at me and at my small insurrection. "Heather, I do the best I can." She handed me a coffee, and I sat and stared at her. She had to be an incredible dolt not to see trouble lurking. "Last night was psychically very active, and I think I received something you might be interested in."

I smiled.

"Again, it's something that makes no sense to me, but these words do seem to mean something important to you."

"How much will they cost me?"

"Heather! No need to be so crass."

"I'm out of money. Yesterday was it."

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?"

"In the middle drawer."

"Let's go fetch it then, shall we?"

We approached the desk with the gracelessness of captor and captive. I allowed her just enough mobility to open the drawer, and once it was open, I yanked back her arm and said, "Let me do a quick inspection here for guns and knives." I mussed through the desk's contents and then I saw Jason's handwriting on some sheets of crumpled pink invoice paper from his boss's contracting firm. On seeing it, I squeaked and let go of Allison and picked it up and held it to my chest. She fell to the floor, was about to rise, and then ended up just slumping against a bookcase. She said, "I suppose you're - "

"Oh, shut up." I looked at the paper and Jason's little-boy printing. His writing was small and efficient, and he managed to cram a lot onto the pages. There were dozens of our characters and their best-known exploits, along with staging instructions:

Froggles is the most important and beloved character. He speaks in a high voice, but if you tell him he sounds shrill, he indignantly shrieks, "I'm not shrill!" He drives a Dodge Scamp he bought at a garage sale. Primary enjoyments include winning spelling bees, twelve-packs of crunchy flies and Law & Order reruns.

Bonnie T. Lamb is the crabbiest and most politically correct character. She wears an African beanie and horn-rimmed glasses, has a bleating voice and can easily have her opinion swayed by her personal kryp-tonite, Cloverines. Her other weaknesses include bad arts and crafts and working in B-movies as a walk-on. Her life partner, Cherish, fixes motorcycles.

And so forth. I sat down in Glenn's captain's chair and inhaled Jason's letter like it was cherry blossoms. Allison posed no threat. I'd just heard from the dead.

Allison said, "He's gone. You know it, right?"

"I know."

"I'm not trying to be a bitch here. But he's gone. Glenn went. He went and I was left behind. This big stupid house and me and nothing else, and our savings lost in some idiotic tech stock."

I looked at her.

"The only reason I became a psychic was to try and reach Glenn. I thought that maybe if I pretended to be one I could become one. The things I did to try to become one - diets, purges, fasts, seminars, weekends. All of it just pointless."

"You tried to rip me off."

"I did. But you know what? To have seen your face whenever I gave you some words - it was all I'd ever wanted for myself."

I was appalled. "How could you use extortion when you were doing something so ... sacred?"

Allison turned toward me, amused that I didn't get her punch line: "Well, my dear, I'm broke. When you're my age, you'll understand."

She was still on the floor when I got up and left. I drove home and put Jason's list of instructions inside a jumbo freezer-size zip-top bag in order to protect his pencilings from rubbing away completely. I removed my shoes and belt and fell into bed, holding an edge of the bag up to my face, and sleep came easily.

Jason, my son, unlike you, I grew up amid the dank smothering alder leaves of Agassiz, far from the city. In summer I could tell you the date simply by chronicling the number of children who had drowned in the Fraser River or been poisoned by the laburnum pods that dangled from branches and so closely resembled runner beans. I spent those summer days on the Fraser's gravel bars, watching eagles in the tall snagged trees browse for salmon, but I wasn't in the river just for the scenery - it was piety. I believed the maxim that should I lose my footing, God would come in and carry me wherever the river was deepest. The water felt like an ongoing purification, and I've never felt as clean as I did then. That was so many decades ago -the Fraser is now probably full of fish rendered blind by silt from gravel quarries, its surface pocked with bodies that somehow worked themselves loose from their cement kimonos.