All Families Are Psychotic

by Douglas Coupland

  Wade walked around the streets all day and became crashingly homesick. And when he wasn’t homesick, he was worried about money and about the procedure’s success. He was a tangle of short-circuiting thoughts. Could Europe be any bleaker-looking? Where’s all this history I’ve been hearing so much about? Instead Wade kept seeing only things that looked … old. The shops had been not merely closed, but barricaded in metal shutters laced with graffiti. Graffiti? That’s so 1992. The streets felt drab in the extreme. Stores seemed to open and shut down again shortly thereafter for unexplainable whims of culture. How long can it take to stick a sperm into an egg? And could this country be any more expensive if it tried?

  At five he retrieved Beth, who was pooped, and the two went to bed. Beth began playing with Wade’s eyelids. ‘Hey, Wade – what are you thinking about?’

  ‘A little baby quail dancing on my eyelids.’

  ‘Do you want a boy or a girl?’

  ‘A girl. Boys are pricks – no, wait – maybe a boy so I can undo all the scary evil shit my dad did to me.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Wade thought about it. ‘Nothing specific. I mean, he hit me all the time, but that’s not even the thing that sticks in my craw.’

  ‘None of that matters any more, Wade. Your parents are lost. They can’t help you any more. They no longer dream or feel. The only valid viewpoint for any decision is eternity.’

  ‘No, Beth, hang on—’ Wade opened his eyes and sat up. He looked down into Beth’s eyes. ‘We’ve been through this before. If a parent ignores you for your first fifteen years – never even says hello, let alone holds you or teaches you to shave or go to a ball game – and he only acknowledges you with a fist – that’s cruelty – it’s like confining a kid in solitary.’

  ‘I’d rather have had your kind of cruelty.’

  Wade plopped down on to the mattress. ‘Don’t wish cruelty on to yourself. Not even theoretically.’ He turned sideways and stroked Beth’s cheeks. She’d had bad acne as a teenager and the scars made Wade sad. ‘Don’t.’

  Beth said nothing.

  ‘Our baby’s never going to be afraid,’ said Wade. ‘Our baby’s never going to be yelled at. Our baby’s going to be loved for ever and always. We don’t drink. We don’t drug. We don’t preach. We—’

  ‘Stop.’

  ‘Huh? Why stop?’

  ‘We’ll jinx what we have. We’re not normal people any more, you and me, Wade. We’re not doomed or anything but we’re—’

  ‘We’re what?’

  Beth sat up, lit an Italian cigarette with a pink Bic lighter and exhaled her first drag. ‘Growing up we used to have this garden out back. Everybody did, I mean, it was South Carolina. My parents – my mom mostly – they were terrible gardeners, but the vegetables made it through each year OK: boring stuff like potatoes and cabbages – some lettuce, some tobacco plants and pumpkins my dad tried growing every year. No flowers.’ She took another drag from the cigarette. ‘But then one year the booze kicked in, and that’s when they really started losing it and going in for the kill on each other. They just kind of stopped doing the garden work. They just ignored it, and I was only about twelve, and in my head gardening wasn’t an activity for twelve-year-olds. I was into smoking and older guys with cars. But I always kept my eyes on the garden. Weeds came in real quick. And rabbits. The cabbage went wild, and when cabbage goes wild it looks kind of, I don’t know – like a homeless person. Then the bugs ate it up. And the peas never did come back. I’d go out to the garden to smoke when the furniture started flying. I’d go watch what happened to the garden once it lost its protection. Only little bits survived here and there – a potato plant; some chives. Mint.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘That garden’s you and me, Wade. We’re a garden that’s lost its gardeners. The garden still goes on but it’s never a real garden ever again.’

  ‘Beth, that is so totally not true.’

  ‘Wade. You’re already in God’s house. Now it’s just a matter of locating your room.’ Three floors down, a police car honked past their pensióne window. Beth looked away. ‘I hate Europe, too.’

  ‘What’s on your mind, Beth?’

  ‘Shush, Wade. I know we’ve taken that Course in Miracles stuff in our seropositivity group, but it’s what I believe. We’re the untended garden.’

  Wade’s heart broke like an egg on the kitchen floor. His sense of time quickened. Here was the moment where the hammer strikes the anvil and the chain is forged and the love grows only stronger, more real, deeper and permanent. Wade saw the truth in what Beth said. He agreed in his heart and thought of his child, who would flourish and bloom long after the rabbits and weevils had taken him away.

  ‘God saw me in that insemination room today, Wade. He did. He saw the test tubes and sheet metal and the ultrasound stuff and—’

  ‘And what?’ Wade propped himself up on his elbow and traced circles on Beth’s forehead.

  ‘He sees everything. I don’t know how I feel about that. He saw me. He saw the test tubes. The sperm spinner. The News at Six. Icebergs in Antarctica. Inside my heart. Everything.’

  ‘I want a girl,’ Wade said.

  ‘I want a boy,’ said Beth. ‘Girls never have good lives. God hates girls.’

  Bryan and Janet continued writing Mummy cards, and Wade slunk off to a pay phone.

  ‘Wade?’

  ‘Beth, God, I’m sorry, sugar, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I know you are, honey.’

  Wade was humbled. ‘I’m weak. I’m a shit. I am shit. You’re too good for me.’

  ‘No, you’re too good for me. I drank again last night. Four years, three months and two days of sobriety, all gone.’

  ‘Beth, you drank because I left you alone. I stopped to get my pills, but you weren’t back yet. You were out shopping or something.’

  ‘What’s going on, honey? Something’s fishy. Did that Norm creep land you guys in trouble?’

  ‘Norm? Uh, no, but we’re going to help him on a business deal.’

  ‘What kind of deal – drugs? Because if it’s drugs, I’m leaving you, Wade. You know that’s our agreement.’

  ‘Drugs? God, no. Mom’s even helping us out.’

  ‘Mom? Your mother? Janet?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, she’s not here, so I guess she’s with you. When are you returning?’

  ‘Tonight I guess – I promise.’

  Beth was unimpressed. ‘Well, just so’s you know, I thought I might go to Kennedy Space Center. I—’

  Beth’s voice vanished as Wade looked across the parking lot and saw the orange van’s panel doors slide open and the trussed lump that was Ted drop out onto the pavement. ‘I have to call you back, hon.’ He ran over to the van, followed by Bryan and Janet. ‘And what do you think you’re doing, Dad?’

  Ted mumbled into the bandage over his mouth. A clean-cut family walked past en route to a sporting goods outlet store.

  ‘Nothing to look at,’ said Wade, but this seemed not to appease the family. ‘Move along.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Janet said in her 1965 hostess voice. ‘He has Klemperer’s palsy. It can overwhelm him.’

  Once they were gone, Wade said, ‘Klemperer’s palsy?’

  ‘After Colonel Klink on Hogan’s Heroes. I made it up on the spot.’

  Wade looked down at Ted. ‘Come on, Bry – let’s lock the Gimp back in his cage.’ Ted writhed in a full lather. ‘Dad, calm down, because your spazzing out like this isn’t going to help you, and it only makes our job harder.’

  ‘Our job?’ Bryan asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Wade, as his father landed on the floor. ‘We need to sell Florian his goddamn fake card.’

  ‘But we don’t need Dad to do that.’

  ‘Bryan, we can’t just throw him off on the side of the highw—’ Wade stopped, and his eyes caught those of his brother and mother. Ted squealed as he foresaw a possible fate.

  ‘How’s he going to get
home, then?’ Bryan asked.

  ‘He’s a big boy,’ said Janet.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bryan. ‘But he and Nickie are going to need their share of the money for all their medical bills.’

  Wade instantly regretted having told Bryan about Nickie’s HIV status.

  Janet looked at Ted. ‘Oh, God. Just when I was building up the nerve to become a callous soul.’ Ted’s eyes showed that he knew he was about to receive a humdinger of information. Janet sat down and removed the bandage from his mouth. Before she could say anything more, Wade said, ‘If you say or do even one tiny mean thing to Mom I’m going to cover your whole body with duct tape, not just now, but the rest of your life. Got it?’

  Ted was more interested in Janet’s news.

  ‘Ted, now’s as good a time as any to find out. Nickie was going to tell you, but here goes.’ She took in her breath. ‘Nickie’s HIV positive—’

  No reaction.

  ‘—and I have to say, Ted, she’s one good egg and you’re damn lucky to have found her, or rather, that she puts up with you. Or whatever your deal is.’

  ‘He’s going to go apeshit,’ Bryan said to nobody in particular.

  ‘I dunno, Bry—’ said Wade.

  Ted remained motionless.

  Janet went on: ‘It doesn’t mean that you’re HIV, Ted, but there’s the poss—’

  Ted broncoed about the van’s interior, swearing with such force and thrashing with such violence that Janet, Wade and Bryan scattered like bits of broken glass.

  ‘Jesus, Dad, calm down.’

  Janet kept calm and said what soothing things she could. Wade said, ‘Mom, could we continue this conversation as we drive up the coast?’

  They became mobile, and a half hour later, Ted lay in stunned submission. Wade was at the wheel, and Janet sat in the passenger seat as the orange van hummed up Florida’s Space Coast, the sun having resumed its daily role as a permanent flash cube popping over a world of vitamin huts, golf shops, strip joints, car washes and gas stations.

  This landscape is from an amusement park. I’m on a ride – a ride shaped like an orange VW camper.

  Bryan and Ted were in the rear seats, with Ted unbound. By no means was it love holding the three men together – rather, only the prospect of quick money.

  Janet sipped from a bottle of Volvic water she kept in her purse and took a 3TC capsule, clasping her pill bottle shut with a defiant click.

  ‘Are those 3TCs? Can I borrow one, Mom? Mine are in the back of the camper.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Ted said, ‘I really don’t see why we have to slip this kraut a fake letter. Thanks, Jan. Count on you to come in and screw up a good thing.’

  ‘Thank you, Ted,’ said Janet, ‘and such a good plan of operation you were having this morning, too – stealing breakfasts and sleeping on beaches. I smell a winner.’

  ‘Dad,’ Wade said, ‘I’m not calling Florian until we rescue the real letter. Love it or leave it. It’s wrong that he should buy it.’

  ‘You. Morals. Perfect.’

  … police station … discount mattresses … a pain clinic … liquor … pet food.

  Wade ignored the comment and kept steady at the wheel.

  19

  Janet sensed that her opinion of her life was changing. Two days ago, it had felt like merely a game of connect the dots – a few random dots, spaced widely apart and which produced a picture of a scribble. But now? Now her life was nothing but dots, dots that would connect in the end to create a magnificent picture – Noah’s Ark? A field of cornflowers? A Maui sunset? She didn’t know the exact image, but a picture was indeed happening – her life was now a story. Farewell, random scribbles.

  She heard Bryan speaking to Ted: ‘Geez, Dad, you’ve already finished that bottle?’

  ‘I need another.’ Ted had polished off a mickey of golden rum found in the van’s fridge.

  Wade said, ‘Getting sloshed isn’t going to fix anything.’

  ‘You shut up. I’ve heard enough out of you.’

  ‘No, Dad, I’m not going to shut up.’ The car came to a red light and Ted bolted out the door to a nearby convenience mart. Wade was about to race after him, but Janet restrained him. ‘Just let him have his little drink, dear.’

  From the door of the liquor store, Ted shouted at Wade, ‘I have bugs crawling underneath my skin because of you, you little prick.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, cry me a river, you cruel shit.’

  ‘Wade,’ said Janet, ‘your language. Please.’

  ‘Sorry, Mom.’ He stuck his head out the window: ‘Buy yourself shoe polish and mouthwash and go suck it and die and then see if any of us care.’

  ‘We’re never going to find her,’ Bryan croaked.

  ‘Don’t be such a gloomy Gus. It’s a piece of cake.’

  ‘How?’

  Janet leaned out the window and asked a passing pedestrian for the location of the local library. Ted returned to the van with a bottle of gin: ‘Bulk martinis.’

  ‘How did you pay for that?’ Janet asked.

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, good Lord.’ She got out and went into the store to pay for it and returned with the Yellow Pages.

  Minutes later they were at the local library’s Internet browser section. The library’s insides were cool and normal-seeming, a place visited by people whose lives contained no randomness, whose families gave one another CD box sets and novelty sweaters for Christmas, and who never forged each others’ signatures or had affairs with pool boys named Jamie or girls in payroll named Nicole. Outside the library, Ted was underneath an ancient live oak draped with Spanish moss.

  As Janet keyboarded, she thought out loud: ‘… If this Mr. Baby Buyer is in the auto parts business, he’s most likely a Republican. Car dealers and car people love Republicans – all those Rotary and Kiwanis lunches and handshake photos taken with vice presidents. So he probably donates heavily and lives in a fancy zip code.’ She continued on her search.

  Bryan said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been in a library.’ His voice was empty of any ironic trace.

  ‘I have,’ Wade said. ‘In Las Vegas, when I became sick.

  They’re so weird, aren’t they? I mean, all these … books.’

  The two brothers went silent.

  After a few minutes during which Wade thumbed through a copy of Teen People and Bryan looked at picture books of punk rock stars, Janet announced that she had narrowed the selection to three candidates, and they left the building. Outside they found Ted passed out; two young boys in private school uniforms were using his nose as a paper airplane target. Wade booted his father’s bottom. ‘Jesus, Dad, you’re like the town wino. You’re embarrassing us – get up.’ Ted promptly vomited into the tinder-dry lawn.

  ‘Plop him into the van,’ Janet said. ‘Lay him on top of that striped awning Howie hangs over the camper door at barbecues.’

  Once they were in the van and moving, Ted rolled around on the floor like a log; Bryan stopped this by laying a foam cushion between his father and the door.

  ‘I think we should rent a hotel room in Daytona Beach,’ Janet said. ‘Your father’s in no shape to help us.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ said Wade.

  Janet prowled inside the glove compartment and removed a black-corded item, which she then inserted into the cigarette lighter. ‘Bryan, pass me your father’s cell phone.’ Bryan removed it from Ted’s front right pocket, and Janet plugged it in. It bleeped like a cheerful sparrow, and Janet announced that they were once again linked to humanity.

  ‘I didn’t know Howie had a charger,’ Wade said.

  ‘You have to look for things, Wade.’

  The phone began to recharge itself atop the dash. North coastal Florida rolled by. She smelled subdivisions burning to the west in Orange County. Janet’s vision went black and white, and she was taken from the present into the past, and she hated the feeling of having traveled back in time. She looked at the cheap hotels smeared with joy
less stucco mayonnaise, ocean-side landscapes scraped clean by the endless Atlantic winds that left behind only palm stumps and stubby sea-grape. She felt she was looking at the third-best seaside resort in a place like Libya, where the prim ideas of middle-class leisure had been collectively abandoned ages ago. The world felt vulgar. Inside the hotels they passed she imagined real live crack whores! on trash TV, and she imagined elevators rusted to a stop somewhere on the upper floors. She saw images of doorless rooms inhabited by prophets stripped of their founding visions, images of teenagers fucking on towels designed by beer companies, wooden floors gone rotten, the strips of wood turned into dried-out slats – a world robbed of values and ideals and direction. And then Janet felt she was now officially in the future, one so far away from the dreams of her Toronto youth that she was reminded of Discovery Channel sermons on travel at the speed of light, of young men and women shot out into the universe, returning to Earth only to find everything they’d ever known dead or gone or forgotten or mocked, and this world was Janet’s world.

  ‘Wade, does this place make any sense to you?’

  ‘Huh? Yeah, sure – US 1 goes right up the coast.’

  ‘No. That’s not what I meant. I mean – what’s the reason behind a place like this?’

  ‘Is it weirding you out?’

  ‘It is. Explain it to me. Explain Daytona Beach to me.’

  ‘Daytona’s a fun kind of place – a place where—’

  ‘Stop, Wade. Stop right there. You can do better than that. Pretend I’m not your mother. Pretend that I’m drunk and that you’re drunk and that you know that if you have just one more drink you’ll be too stupid to explain anything, but for now you possess the superpower of insight that comes just before that last drink.’

  Wade took a few breaths. He was obviously taking the question seriously. ‘I have this friend, Todd, who got cleaned out in a divorce, and so now he sells lottery tickets in a mall booth out in Richmond. He asked me once what day of the lottery cycle is the biggest day for sales. I said, I dunno, when the jackpot’s really big – but he said, no way, it’s the morning after the big jackpot. People come running to him the moment the door’s open. They want to have that ticket in their hands for the maximum amount of time possible. Unless they have a ticket in their hand, then they don’t have any hope, and they have to have hope.’