The Gum Thief

by Douglas Coupland

  superstore. "

  "You can get tremendous deals at superstores," said Brittany. "Post-it Notes and reams of bond paper are half the price they are at smaller, non-globalized stores. The aisles are wide. You can shop in comfort and style. They even have entire aisles devoted solely to ballpoint pens."

  Gloria felt out of it. "Tomorrow I'm going to make a point of visiting an office superstore."

  Steve felt like he'd won a small victory, but the smirk on Kyle's face robbed him of joy. "How's your drink?" Steve asked.

  "It's fine. I have to go slow on the booze and watch my diet if I'm going to meet my deadline."

  Gloria purred to Kyle, "It must be something to be young, handsome, rich and talented, with a beautiful wife and the future wide open to you. Don't you think so, Steve?"

  Steve replied by fetching more Scotch.

  "What are you working on now, Steve?" Kyle asked.

  "A new novel."

  "Really?"

  "It doesn't have a title yet."

  Gloria said, "Actually, the book doesn't exist yet."

  "That's not true," Steve said. "I'm well into it."

  "What's this novel about, then?"

  "Curiously, it also takes place in an office superstore. "

  "What a coincidence!" said Brittany.

  Gloria sniggered.

  Kyle was confused. "Really-an office superstore?

  You're setting a novel in an office superstore? Are you far along with it?" Kyle asked.

  "Oh, you know, a few chapters."

  "Well, I'll be-"

  Gloria said, "Steve, why don't you give us a reading?"

  "I couldn't possibly do that, Gloria. The book is too young to be released into the world." "I see." Brittany asked, "Do you spend much time in office superstores, Steve? By the way, I must confess, I'm a fan of your work. Gumdrops, Lilies and Forceps was deeply moving. It changed the way I view fertility in literature." She blushed. "I can't believe I actually get to call one of my all-time heroes 'Steve'-in his own house, no less."

  Gloria blurted out, "I'm an actress."

  "Oh?" said Brittany, taken by surprise.

  "I'm Lady Windermere in the local theatre production of Lady Windermere's Fan." "Isn't that something," said Kyle. "For me it's all about the craft, you know. Act, act, act."

  Steve quickly batted the conversation back on track: :'I go to office superstores all the time. I enjoy the wide array of goods they provide at reasonable prices. And they're such a-you know-a popular phenomenon. I think it's important to engage with society."

  Kyle sipped his Scotch. Was Steve really writing a novel set in an office superstore? As far as Kyle knew, Steve's concept of literature was frozen in time roughly three weeks before the invention of the telephone.

  Steve said to Kyle, "I'm so busy at the university I haven't had time to read your first novel. Tell me, what is it called?"

  "It's called Two Lost Decades."

  "A good title."

  "Thank you."

  "What's it about? A vulgar little question, but in the end, it's the only one that matters."

  "Okay. Because you ask. It's about this guy. He's fortyish. He used to be married, and had two kids, but one of them was hit by a car while riding his bike. Almost immediately after that his wife got cancer, and at the beginning it brought his family together in a way that he had never imagined possible, but that didn't last long, and a fog of death clouded their lives for a year. Then his wife got better, but she was tired, and our protagonist was tired-and he'd also said and done foolish things during the fog-so his wife left him, getting custody of the child.

  "This guy endures all of these tribulations, except they don't change him. They don't make him a better person. They make him a worse person. He begins to lead a falling-down life. His body won't fit his old clothes, and he doesn't know how to find new ones. He keeps waiting for the moral of his life to appear, but it never does. The clock is ticking, and all he can see is decades more of the same thing until his body gives out, and he wonders what the point is of being alive if it's merely more of the same-and the thing is, he'd like to change things, but he doesn't know what, or how. He sees a scam in everything the world offers. He doesn't believe in the Apocalypse, and he thinks that both faith and reason are equally stupid, and that all leaders are frauds.

  "He tries to lose himself in work, but he's also lazy. He wonders if he should declare himself a ward of the state and live in a homeless shelter, but he can't bring himself to do that, though he feels close to the edge. He looks back on his early life for clues to his present disaster, but he doesn't think he was raised to be overly dependent on others or without morality or without a few practical hints for good living. But the other people in his family are pretty tight with each other, and he knows that on those rare occasions when they discuss him, or even think about him, it's probably not too fondly or with much charity. He used up all of his 'welcome coupons' in the family department when he was younger. He pretty much used up his welcome coupons everywhere. He feels wretched, yet he knows that he has a ways to go before he hits bottom. Perversely, a vision of the bottom keeps him going. Every morning he's curious to see what new indignity he will be subjected to what flagrant new assaults will be made on his good taste. And will he ever change in some way that's good or meaningful?"

  There was a pregnant silence after Kyle's plot summation. Steve used this moment to try to remember the office superstore he'd visited that very day, that grotesque hangar filled with Chinese-made office crap, staffed with kindergarten students and offering all the charm of an airport luggage-handling facility. Steve, you can write a novel set in an office superstore. You can. Bring a notepad. Pretend you're an anthropologist-anthropologists can do anything and appear smart. Who knows-perhaps a grand theme will emerge from the stacks of underpriced CDs, vinyl attaché cases and software upgrade kits.

  Steve realized the silence was going on a bit too long (oh yes, that wretched young man's wretched novel) and looked out of the corner of his eye at his wife, her jewelled talons clasped to her bosom, her eyes tearing up. "So deep. So truly, truly deep," she said, casting a taunting eye at Steve. "So simple and yet I felt blood pulsing through every fibre of its being. Intelligent, yet broad. And it's sold millions of copies, correct?"

  "Ten," said Kyle. He then looked at Steve's bookcases. "Steve, are those leather-bound copies of your five novels I see there?"

  Bethany

  I should be mad at my mother for writing to you, Roger, but I'm not because that's exactly the sort of depressing thing she does-not only writing a paper letter during the golden age of email, but also mailing it to you with a stamp. At work. What kind of person gets mail at work?

  To hear my mother speak, you'd think her life was something shattered and gone, like Superman's home planet. But she's got friends, her job, and when I leave home she'll still have me in her life.

  I dream of going to Europe one day. What exactly is it about Europe? People go there and suddenly all of their problems are solved, and as a bonus they're suddenly sophisticated and glam when they come back. Hello, I'm Count Chocula. Welcome to my chateau. We'll dine on peacock livers atop little pieces of toast cut into triangles with the crusts removed. After that, I'll ravage you with an heirloom jewel encrusted dildo from the Crusades, and then we'll discuss the socially beneficial effects of government-sanctioned drug injection sites.

  Listen to me; I can barely wait to find out.

  On my pay? Ha.

  So ... Kyle. Ever since he talked about death with me, something clicked and I have to say I really kind of like the guy. I know he's dumb as five planks (he can't remember the PLU number for gum), but this afternoon he brought me a CD of songs containing the word "moon." He's cute, and he doesn't find me repulsive, and he's not gay, so why not go for it? My mother makes it sound like we're engaged in a Mormon courting ritual. Gee, Kyle, before we go to A&W, let me fetch my Holly Hobby prairie sunbonnet so that other men don't lust for
me against their wills. He's just a nice guy.

  As for you ...

  I don't know how to begin addressing all the issues in your life, Roger but I do find it interesting that the hero of Kyle Falconcrest's first novel doesn't believe in the Apocalypse. That's wrong. How could you possibly be alive and on earth and have a set of eyes and ears and a brain and not figure out that some kind of end is near? It's in the tap water. It's in the freshness-sealed pound of bacon you bought last week. It pulsates in the air every time Blair's cellphone rings with her lame 1980s retro Madonna "Holiday" ring tone.

  1'~f' end is near.

  I think about it all the time-how the end is going to look and feel. When it finally happens, it won't be the way I thought it would be. Here's how the end of the world happens: It's a Sunday afternoon, and I'm at a barbecue in someone's back yard. I'm sick of too many people and of standing in the sun for too long, so I go around to the side of the house and sit in an old folding chair, wishing it were night time and that I hadn't come to the party. I'm looking at a fly buzzing in front of me. It isn't bugging me or anything-I'm tracing its flight pattern in the air behind it, like an invisible waggling strand of yarn, when out of the blue, the fly stops and falls to the ground.

  And the world becomes quiet: the voices around the corner near the barbecue stop, as does a touch football game-but I can hear the hamburger patties chattering on the grill. But a neighbour's weed whacker two yards over stops, as does someone's lawnmower.

  I know right away what has happened-every living thing on earth except me has died. People, seagulls, earthworms, bacteria and plants. I look at the trees and shrubs and think, Well, of course they're not brown yet, they've only died just now-but they're not trees and shrubs any more-they're more like giant cut flowers in vases. In seven days, they'll be brown like everything else.

  Everyone at the barbecue simply stopped where they were. It isn't gruesome or anything. Their eyes are open.

  Then I start hearing thumps and explosions from all over the city-cars wiping out, planes crashing, incinerators and furnaces exploding like popcorn on the back element-at first just a few, and then more and more. And then they stop, and I begin seeing streams of smoke reaching up into the sky, like shoestrings, binding the planet to the universe-so many smoke streams and clouds.

  I look at my feet and see a dead barn swallow. I see bumblebee carcasses all over the patio. I go inside and pick up the phone-it's dead too. I see a bowl of cut dahlias on the counter, and for a moment I think that's ironic.

  And then I start to feel unwell. Know what it is? All of the organisms in my body that aren't "me" have died too. Those happy bacteria that live in the stomach, good viruses and bad viruses and symbiotic amoebas and all that small, scary shit-dead. Your body isn't just a body, is it? It's an ecosystem. And my body can't handle all of this dead stuff floating around in it.

  So I go out onto the patio and sit down on a chaise and stare up at the sun. It's warm out, and I feel happy to be joining everyone else wherever it is that they've all gone. People never mention that as the upside of death, do they? It makes your own death less scary to figure you're going to meet up again with old friends!

  Where was I? Oh yeah-sitting on the chaise, staring at the sun, growing weaker and weaker. Finally, as much as I hate the damn thing and its endless, droning, perky lightness, I enter it.

  Glove Pond: Kyle

  Kyle Falconcrest remembered his first day on the job in the office superstore, the fateful job that led to his grand insight that he should set his second novel in such a place. He was almost thirty, old enough that at night he'd begun dreaming that he'd be working a crappy day job forever. He saw no escape. Kyle had made the mistake of thinking that working in a bookstore or a place where office supplies were sold would bring him closer to the throbbing pulse of modern literature. To Kyle, literature was a place of experimentation-a laboratory, an art gallery where exciting new ideas never, ever, ever, ever stopped.

  He remembered his first day on the job, being assigned his first aisle: Tape, Fasteners, Correction Fluids, Pens, Pencils and Markers. He was told that if he did well, after a year or so he would be promoted and Aisle SA would be added to his territory: Art Supplies, Educational Supplies, Scissors and Rigid Art Boards.

  Kyle never got used to the office superstore. Although it was brightly lit and sterile, he couldn't help but look at the endless truckloads of toner cartridges and flash cards and protractors and laser printers and imagine how they would all end up either mummified inside a regional landfill, or incinerated, the ashes floating about the Van Allen radiation belt, soaking up extra heat from the sun and hastening the total meltdown of the polar ice caps. To Kyle, the office superstore was a slow-motion end of the world in progress. You had to look at the place, squint, and pretend you were watching stop-frame animation in which the camera snapped a photo only once a month. Seasons would come and go. The winters would get warmer and warmer, the ground ever more covered in soot. The number of animals and birds crossing the parking lot would dwindle. The grasses and shrubs near the entrance/exit would wither and then, after a few decades, the road headed west, away from the store, would vanish as the ocean rose. And yet people would still be buying presentation portfolio covers, extension cords, Bankers Boxes and, on impulse, gum.

  Kyle considered all of this as he stared at Steve, who was blathering on to Brittany about that quintet of doorstops he called his novels. They were neither trendy nor timeless nor contemporary nor passé. Steve's novels inhabited some parallel time stream where time didn't exist. To find one of Steve's novels in a second-hand store was to experience the same sort of lump in the chest one feels when reading in the paper about a baby being smothered by parents on crack. Poor little thing. And yet Brittany was twirling the ends of her hair like a cheerleader flirting with a jock. Kyle found it shocking that he could love someone who was a fan of Steve's novels, let alone be married to her. Liking or disliking Steve's work should be a mating pre-selection factor on par with heterosexuality and homosexuality. In this one way, Brittany truly baffled him.

  He glanced at Gloria, who was wearing the pleasant, tuned-out expression used by presidential wives during dinner speeches and idly fondling her spleen.

  "When is dinner?" he asked.

  Glove Pond

  As Kyle Falconcrest asked his semi-rude question about dinner's readiness, Gloria was thinking about lipsticks.

  She was thinking about the massive industrial base that had to exist in order for her to purchase a single tube of Ruby Tuesday at the town's sole remaining non-Wal-Martized department store, a doomed and dispirited brick heap not far from her stationery dealer. Lipstick makers had to secretly kill thousands of whales without Greenpeace looking on, and then they had to flense the blubber from the carcass and stuff it into zinc canisters to ship to her favourite cosmeticians' factories. The blubber then had to be boiled into bacteria-free goo, at which point a staggering amount of pigment and stabilizers and texturizers had to be added, after which the coloured muck had to be solidified, inserted into chromed f1exi-rods, vacuum sealed into a perverse amount of packaging, and then trucked out into the world along complex interstate freeway systems and rail lines, their voyages heralded by massive print and electronic ad campaigns that made the world's Glorias bay with desire.

  What if everybody on earth suddenly turned stupid? What if we couldn't make lipstick or anything else? That would be the end of the world, wouldn't it? What if everybody's IQ simultaneously dropped fifty points? For the first hour or so, nobody would notice, but then it would become obvious. Hey-who forgot to turn off the nuclear power plant? Boy, this fuel tanker sure is hard to navigate through these rocky bodies of water. Does anybody here remember how to work this fire ladder? I'm sorry, kids, I was going to make wiener schnitzel for dinner, but I forgot the recipe, and besides, the butcher couldn't slice any veal because the machine jammed and nobody knows how to fix it.

  From there it would be only a brief amoun
t of time before the planet "cracked open like an egg," a line she remembered from an old Planet of the Apes movie.

  Oh humanity!

  How tenuous is our plight!

  Gloria delivered those made-up lines in her mind as though they were lines in a play--a play starring Gloria. This, in turn, reminded her of her inability to remember her lines as Lady Windermere, a shortcoming that was bringing her fellow cast members close to mutiny.

  People, how can I bring Lady Windermere to life if you don't give me time to fully express myself?

  Leonard had taken her aside. "My frisky little schnitzel, you have until Monday to get your lines straight. Yes, I enjoy banging you as much as the next guy, but there's only so long I can cover for you. Take some B vitamins, lock yourself in a motel room and learn your frigging lines."

  Philistine.

  Gloria does not require vitamins to memorize her lines.

  She idly fondled her spleen. Why would a spleen suddenly become puffy and inflamed? How unusual. I'm sure it's nothing serious.

  And what about dinner for young Kyle and Brittany? Not to worry. They're young. They don't need much nutrition. They could live on their body fat alone for weeks. Gloria then waxed nostalgic for the recent past: My, those last few pickles really were tasty. I should buy some more someday.

  In the end, it was easier simply to ignore Kyle's question.

  Glove Pond

  As Steve described in loving detail to Brittany the birth pangs of each of his five novels, a part of his brain was wondering if Kyle thought he was stupid. Kyle had that look Steve sometimes saw in his more challenging students. What pains in the butt they could be. He much preferred the students who showed up, asked if they would be graded on attendance and then sat like drugged houseplants for the remainder of the semester. The Kyle Falconcrests of this world were trouble young Kyle certainly wasn't paying a respectful amount of attention to Steve's loving dissertations. If anything, Kyle was watching Gloria massage her spleen.