All Families Are Psychotic

by Douglas Coupland

  Shw asked, ‘Do you think they chose Sarah only because she’s handicapped?’

  ‘You’re the only person who’s ever said those words out loud,’ Janet said.

  ‘It’s a natural enough question.’

  ‘I know it is. I’m so tired of people never saying things. Silence reminds me of when I was growing up. Stifling.’

  ‘What was it like?’ Nickie asked.

  ‘What was what like?’

  ‘Sarah. The missing hand and all of that.’

  Janet concentrated on giving an accurate answer. ‘Growing up I was always told to be a good girl and to look good. All of my notions of self-worth were based on my appearance and demeanor. I don’t think I ever really knew a person during my youth. And then with Sarah I’d be out shopping or at the playground and people would see her hand missing and in a flash, through their reactions, I was able to see their cores – whether they were kind or bad or stupid or what have you. I didn’t even know what I was seeing for such a long time. All of this new type of information being thrown at me – I didn’t want it – I didn’t ask for it! And yet the information was still thrown at me. I tried to ignore it, and I never discussed it with anyone. In spite of what you hear, the 1960s were very very backward.’

  ‘When were you born, Shw?’ Nickie interrupted.

  ‘1982.’ Shw’s silence after this reply seemed to negate further probing.

  Nickie asked, ‘So, Janet, what’s the deal with Bryan? I don’t understand why he’s not, like, a stockbroker or something. He has the looks, if he’d just lose the hockey hair.’

  Shw shot Nickie a pissy glare through the rearview mirror, and Janet answered that Bryan had always marched to his own drummer. She turned her head back and asked, ‘What’s your story, Shw?’

  ‘My story?’

  ‘Yes. Where are you from? Your family. That kind of thing.’

  ‘I’m from Lethbridge.’

  ‘Lethbridge – that’s a lovely part of Alberta. Is all your family there?’

  ‘My father is. My mother lives in Nova Scotia with a guy who makes model ships. I never see her.’

  ‘What does your father do?’

  ‘He’s a Marxist theorist at the university there.’

  ‘A Marxist.’

  ‘Yeah. And he’s full of crap.’

  ‘I thought you were sort of radical yourself.’

  ‘Maybe. But he’s so embarrassing. He still believes all that communist bullshit – these days it’s like believing in witch dunking. Globalization’s the real demon. Globalization mixed with science. Dad’s head is so up his ass he can’t see past his pathetic disdain for the middle classes – whoops – excuse me, the bourgeoisie.’

  Janet changed the subject. ‘How about you, Nickie? What’s your story?’

  ‘Nothing big. I’m just a middle-class girl who waited too long to make some of life’s big decisions, and the ones I did make weren’t all too smart.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as I’m really hungry right now.’ She pointed to a mundane franchise restaurant. ‘Let’s go into that restaurant over there. The sign says that extra bacon’s only nineteen cents this week.’

  ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ said Shw. ‘And I’ve got morning sickness, too.’

  Nickie steered into the parking lot. Once inside the restaurant, they claimed a booth. Everything inside the restaurant seemed to be orange, purple or brown.

  ‘Ooh, he’s hot,’ Nickie said as the waiter left.

  ‘Everything in this restaurant has meat in it,’ said Shw, wiping her nose – a cold in a formative stage.

  ‘You vegetarians are just a bunch of control freaks,’ Nickie said. ‘Order a frigging fruit plate.’

  ‘They probably cut up the fruit on the butcher block right after they cut up some cow.’

  ‘In a place like this,’ Nickie said, ‘your fruit plate would have been manufactured last February in a fruit plate laboratory in Tennessee.’

  ‘Oh look,’ said Janet in her chipper 1956 voice, ‘scrambled eggs. How lovely.’ This motherly tone persuaded the others to properly check out the menu. Janet removed a pill caddie from her purse and plunked it onto the table.

  Nickie was agog. ‘Christ, your pillbox is the size of a sewing kit. Will I to have to buy one of those?’

  Just then the waiter, name-tagged Kevin, returned. ‘That’s nothing,’ he said. ‘A few of the folks who come in here, their pillboxes are as big as Kimble-Wurlitzer organs.’

  Janet nodded at Nickie. ‘She and I both have AIDS.’

  ‘Well, so do I,’ said the waiter.

  Nickie said, ‘Well isn’t this a party.’

  ‘I feel a group hug coming,’ said the waiter, ‘but my boss is chewing my ass to speed things up here. There’s a Trailways busload of French tourists that arrived fifteen minutes ago – France-French – it’s your worst table-waiting nightmare come true, so I have to take your orders real quick. Don’t worry about tipping.’

  The women placed their orders, while much Parisian quacking was heard from the restaurant’s other side.

  ‘So, like, what is it with your family?’ Shw asked. ‘You’re like the disease family. Are any of you not sick?’

  Nickie looked at Shw and changed the topic. ‘I hear you’re not too thrilled with having a kid, eh?’

  ‘Oh look – Trophy Wife can actually talk.’

  ‘Such lovely manners,’ Nickie said. ‘I’ve stuck my foot into it as always. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve done it, like, a half dozen times.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘Abort.’

  ‘I’m going to the toilet.’ Shw skulked off.

  ‘I thought that maybe if she saw a shipwreck like me who’d been in the same boat, that maybe she’d think twice about her actions.’

  ‘Do you want kids?’

  ‘I guess. But I’d be a disgraceful mother.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Cindy Brady. Anyway, we couldn’t afford kids.’

  ‘I forgot – he’s that broke, huh?’

  ‘Oh! We’re so screwed ragged it’s sick.’

  ‘But you went marlin fishing—’

  ‘Courtesy of one of his so-called friends. And you know what we’ve been eating down here since we arrived? Nachos and salsa. And hot dogs. That’s what. We stopped at some jumbo outlet store on the way in from the airport.’ Nickie looked at her nails and found them buffed enough. ‘I hate being poor. I really do. And it really bugs me that I can’t just dump Ted.’

  ‘That’s one of the most romantic things I’ve heard in months.’

  Nickie said, ‘And the one thing that bugs me about this whole AIDS business is that Ted might leave me. Imagine: I care about a person who’d dump me like that.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Maybe I’m selling him short. I don’t care if I die. And these HIV drug cocktail thingies make you grow fat deposits in the weirdest places – I could end up with six tits.’

  Janet asked, ‘Do you talk like this around Ted?’

  ‘Basically.’

  Janet looked out the window at the brilliant parking lot. ‘I sometimes wonder if I’d been more … forward like you and like her – whether things might have been slightly different between me and Ted?’

  ‘You? Maybe. But probably not. Ted says that you two never fought. He said you “simmered”. That’s his word – simmered.’

  ‘I did. It’s an unattractive trait. I no longer simmer.’

  Nickie said, ‘I should go try to retrieve Gwendolyn. The things we do for family – however twisted the connection.’ She stood up, turned around and said, ‘Hey, check out those two hunky pilots coming up the walkway.’

  ‘You don’t have an off button, do you, Nickie?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Nickie walked over toward the ladies’ room near the till, just as the pilots walked through the door, dashing and bronzed. She swapped a smile with the less tanned pilot, who then grabbed her around the waist and slapped a
piece of duct tape over her mouth. He screamed, ‘Everybody. Listen. Listen – now! We have ourselves our first hostage. Anybody fucks up even once, and Malibu Barbie here gets her head blown off. No cell phones, no pagers, no 911s, no nothing.’

  The other pilot raised a rifle, cocked it, and blasted a pie case, sideswiping Kevin’s arm. A blizzard of blood and breakfasts smashed onto the cash counter and floor. Customers screamed; the pilot shot out a plate glass window; two people in the parking lot ducked and ran for a hedge. The less suntanned pilot screamed, ‘Shut the fuck up all of you. We’re here on business and we mean business. My friend Todd here is going to be coming around to take your jewelry. You Frenchies all love jewelry, and no Disney shit – I repeat, no Disney shit – ne pas de merde à la Disney. Any crappy little Lion King brooches or Little Mermaid bracelets, and Todd here takes one of your toes as a punishment.’

  The French twittered among themselves; the pilot shot one of them, a middle-aged man, square in the chest. The room went silent. Janet saw the metal gun barrel touching Nickie’s right ear; she remembered, as a child, her father pretending to pull quarters out of her own ear. Her head felt like a bee sting.

  Our lives are geared mainly to deflect the darts thrown at us by the laws of probability. The moment we’re able, we insulate ourselves from random acts of hate and destruction. It’s always been there – in the neighborhoods we build, the walls between our houses, the wariness with which we treat the unknown. One person in six million will be struck by lightning. Fifteen people in a hundred will experience clinical depression. One woman in sixteen will experience breast cancer. One child in 30,000 will experience a serious limb deformity. One American in five will be victim of a violent crime. A day in which nothing bad happens is a miracle, a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong didn’t. The dull day is a triumph of the human spirit, and boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.

  Janet left her booth and walked toward Kevin.

  The gunman at the till said, ‘Move back, lady.’ Nickie was trying to shout through the duct tape.

  ‘I’m sixty-five, you twerp. Shoot me, but I’m going to help Kevin here. I’m sure your buddies would really respect you for shooting an unarmed sixty-five-year-old lady.’ Janet sat down beside Kevin and held his hand.

  Pilot Number Two, ‘Todd’, had turned away and hopped from table to table, making the Europeans dump their jewelry into a cotton sack. When one woman refused, he said, ‘Not going to play along then, eh?’ Bang. He blasted off the toe of the man beside her. Janet heard screams and the gentle clinking of coins and jewels tumbling over one another, into the loot bag.

  ‘It’s time,’ shouted Nickie’s captor. ‘Move.’

  Todd returned to the front door just as Shw, oblivious to the restaurant’s drama, was exiting the ladies’ room near the front door. The pilot reached for her purse, but she pulled it back just enough so that its contents sprayed over the floor, hundreds of fifty-dollar bills.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Number Two, stopping briefly to pick up a wad of them.

  ‘There’s no time. Go. Now.’

  In a breath, they were out the door and gone.

  Nickie ripped the duct tape from her mouth. She sucked in air as if she’d been deep underwater, fighting for the duration of a dream to rise to the surface.

  Janet looked down and the linoleum before her was soaked in blood, a rich, cough-syrupy purple. Nickie was talking to her, but she couldn’t hear – no sound.

  Nobody in the restaurant was moving. The smell of burning breakfasts wafted in from the kitchen, where Janet would later learn the staff had locked themselves in the fridge. A dozen police officers stormed through, bellowing, Nobody move! Paramedics hopped over partitions and booths, heading for the traumatized French. Photographers were already documenting the scene, and Kevin’s blood looked black in the afterburn of flashbulbs.

  Janet looked over to see Shw picking up wads of bills with … doughnut tongs? A cop bellowed, ‘Don’t touch that money!’

  ‘It’s my money, you prick. Those assholes tried taking it.’

  ‘Jesus, Shw,’ said Nickie, ‘Where’d you get a load of fifties like that?’

  The manager confirmed that the money was Shw’s, but the cops still told her not to touch the evidence.

  ‘What? Like I’m gonna want to scrape off the scabs when it dries?’

  ‘Leave it where it is, ma’am, or I’ll have to charge you with tampering with a crime scene.’

  Shw flung her purse onto the floor. Medics in space suits descended on Kevin, as two officers solicited a description of the two gunmen from Nickie: ‘The first one was cute in a Kevin Costner way, but he had mean eyes, like he tortured bugs and small animals when he was a kid. He had really bad skin – too many drugs or an all-candy diet. He had a blue tattoo of a Celtic cross on his right upper hand, and, oh – he was really hung.’

  ‘We can’t use that in a report, ma’am.’

  Kevin was lifted onto a dolly, Janet holding on to his good hand. The paramedics had covered him up with a rustling sheet of plastic foil – a space blanket. The plastic covered him as he was trollied out the doors and into the sunlight, which turned him and his metal blanket into a glittering, crinkling foil wrap.

  Janet spoke to the Orange County police officers, and then it was Nickie’s turn again. While the police were interviewing Nickie, another officer was talking to Shw. Janet was maddened to be able to hear only shards of Shw’s words …

  ‘… I’m with them’ – Shw pointed at Nickie and Janet – ‘but just barely. I used to date the older woman’s kid.’

  Used to date?

  Shw was not the picture of intergenerational warmth. She wanted out of there, and quick. She was finally allowed to gather her remaining bills. The manager pointed her towards the hose behind the restaurant, which was used by staff to rinse out the Dumpsters. Minutes later Janet and Nickie found her there. She’d laid the rinsed bills out to dry on a dazzling white-painted ledge, where ants were now crawling over them, sensing a meal in the traces of blood enzymes.

  ‘We’re leaving shortly,’ Janet said, adding, ‘You don’t have to come. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I have a feeling this is the last time we’re ever going to be seeing you.’

  At this, Shw spritzed her money more forcefully.

  ‘Well, whatever,’ said Nickie, ‘in two minutes, we’re legally divorced, so you might just as well tell us what’s the deal with the cash here. It’s nosiness pure and simple. If I don’t find out, I’m going to have a hollow nagging feeling in me until the day I get hit by a bus.’

  ‘It’s my body,’ said Shw. The hose kinked; she bent down to unkink it.

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ said Janet. ‘Can you back up a bit?’

  She stopped her rinsing and looked at Nickie. ‘Look, Bryan’s been telling you I want an abortion, right? He probably would – he’s such a death-obsessed basket case.’ She resumed spritzing, and went on. ‘This lady in Daytona Beach – her husband’s in auto parts. Nice guy, but he shoots blanks and they want a kid. End of story. Thank you, Internet. So this money here is my down payment. Bryan’s a moron, but he’s good-looking, and his sister’s an astronaut – that’s what got me into the six-figure range. I said I wanted an abortion because I figured he’d go along with the death part of it.’

  Janet said, ‘Wait, wait, wait – you’re going to sell the baby?’

  ‘Well, duh! How was I supposed to know he’d go loopy?’ Her spraying continued.

  ‘There are laws.’

  ‘Please don’t get involved in this, Janet, because I actually like you and I want it to stay that way. And anyway, if you do find me, I’ll just say I miscarried in a Tastee-Freeze bathroom.’ She looked at Janet’s face. ‘Oh, don’t go looking so high-hat on me. The kid is mine and I can do what I want with it.’

  ‘Does Bryan know about the sale?’

  ‘No. But I imagine he soon will.’

  Shw’s spraying
grew menacingly close to their feet, and Janet could feel droplets on her shins. ‘I think we’d best be going.’

  Janet and Nickie went to their car, and then realized they didn’t know where to head next.

  ‘I think we should go get drunk,’ Nickie said, ‘I really do. Can we – do that in our condition?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Silently they prowled the roads in pursuit of a good, eleven A.M. cocktail.

  12

  The monorail’s interior was steaming clambake hot, as Wade, Ted and Bryan whooshed above a Walt Disney World lake. Garish, emotionless music filled the air like the smell of somebody else’s shampoo. Ted was already bored, while Wade was feeling flu-ish. I used to be so good in the heat – even those summers in Kansas City. Only Bryan seemed to be in a festive mood as he jabbered away. ‘Hey, Dad,’ Bryan said. ‘This is kinda cool, huh? You and your sons at Disney World.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Right.’

  ‘Makes you kinda proud, huh, Dad?’ Bryan wouldn’t let up. Ted turned to look at Wade as if to say, Shut this guy up, will you?

  ‘And isn’t it really neat – us being down here and Sarah going off into space?’

  Ted snapped. ‘I spent my whole fricking career in engineering so that Sarah and people like her could go up into space and help drag the rest of the species out of the shit. So yes, Bryan, it does seem “kind of neat” that we’re all here.’ The monorail was full; people stared at them. Whining children stopped whining. Bryan looked taken aback.

  Wade thought, What a geek. Why on earth would Bryan give a rat’s ass about Dad’s approval? And does he have to be so bloody pathetic about it?

  The loudspeaker’s neuter male voice loudly described a Polynesian wonderland off to the left, and a vast Rocky Mountain-style timber lodge off to the right. Wade thought about his father. What would the world have to offer Ted Drummond, and the men like him, a man whose usefulness to the culture had vanished somewhere around the time of Windows 95? Golf? Gold? Twenty-four-hour stock readouts? Sailboats? Extra decades of life? Past a certain point, what is there for a man’s man in this society? Or, for that matter, here in Florida – a land of massive science projects cooked up by people like his father and his golf buddies – a place vividly in decline, yet brashly on the way up. Wade rifled through his mental snapshot index of the region, his images of dumbed-down theme park attractions, crack dens, the space shuttle, malls bursting with doodads, freeways tangled like electric cords and the nightly evening news that felt like a recurring fever dream. He thought of the burning sun and the beautiful, deadly creatures that lurked beneath muddy waters like bruises waiting to surface.