Binge

by Douglas Coupland

  I searched online to see what the company tests for, and there were no surprises. No point in testing me—I’m toast—but the baby? I’ll never ask, and I suspect I’ll never be told.

  38

  Liz Claiborne Sheets

  ANY SITUATION CAN BLOW UP, of course, but things blow up more in my job than in most. I’m a Canadian border security guard, and I work the crossings from Washington State into British Columbia. Already you’re thinking I’m a cold, arrogant bastard who enjoys nothing more than fucking people over for no reason other than because I can—and you’re absolutely right about that. But the thing you have to remember is you people made me this way.

  I went into this job actually liking humanity, but soon found out that you people will lie about anything. All day, every day, all I see is liars lying to me. If that was your job, wouldn’t you occasionally want to fuck people over for the fun of it?

  On top of the wear and tear of all that lying, we’re also bored out of our minds. At lunch we create challenges to try to keep things interesting. Maybe we’ll only pull over people in red cars for enhanced screening. Or maybe it’s guys with ginger beards. Maybe it’s people who are too friendly. I have found that the people who lay on the charm are the ones with a hundred bucks’ worth of undeclared cheese in the trunk. These are by far the funnest people to fuck over because they know darn well that they are lying and (this is critical) they also feel actual guilt for having done something morally wrong.

  I’ve let people into Canada who very likely had handguns and Semtex in the trunk, but they caught me on a good day, so lucky them. At least they’re lying about something cool instead of $400 worth of Liz Claiborne cotton sheets or a small piece of genuine coral for an aquarium tableau.

  And you can always count your lucky stars you got me and not Judith. Judith is the most dreaded border guard of all: she’s a young woman out to prove she can do the job as well as any man, like it’s still 1974. Heaven help you if you end up in her lane while Brenda, the supervisor, is in Judith’s booth, the two of them discussing the lunchroom’s new Purell dispenser or something. You might as well turn off your ignition and put the car in park. And when you pull up, you’re going nowhere except maybe the alien probe station, where we stick LEDs up your ass, looking for drugs we know aren’t really there. But you actually rolled your eyes at one of Judith’s questions, didn’t you? She will exact her revenge for your insolence.

  Last February, when my aging parents ended up in my lane at the crossing, as per protocol I had to recuse myself. Sadly for them, they ended up getting Judith…and Brenda. Perfect storm. Mom, at the wheel, kept pointing my way as if being my mother entitled her to queenly treatment—a doomed strategy with Judith. Dad, on the other hand, always disintegrates in the presence of authority figures. He’d heard about Judith from me, and when he saw her name tag, he immediately got a bad case of flop sweat. He muttered and choked out all kinds of lies. It was painful to watch—like a hot dog trying to tell you how it was made. Also, unfortunately, he’d drunk a plastic keg of raspberry Gatorade on the highway home to Canada, and badly needed to pee.

  Dad managed to withstand Judith’s laser-kill death eyes long enough to ask her if he could use the restroom. She said no, he’d have to wait until he and Mom cleared her station—which is actually not true. Meanwhile, Mom had decided not to declare everything she had bought in Washington State and was wearing a full-on lying face. (Ask any border guard; they’re a real thing.) Dad then began whimpering about relieving himself in the empty Gatorade bottle, and when my mom screamed that he better not do that, Dad got out of the car and ran over to some shrubs on the US side. Judith and Brenda barked at him to return immediately to his vehicle, but Dad’s seventy-six. What are you going to do, tase an old man to death for peeing? As he watered a rhododendron, the US code red alarms started shrieking like it was 9/11 again, and a trio of American border agents ran for him, slipping on their blue nitrile gloves as they came.

  The whole thing looked kind of like the Zapruder film, with Dad ending up face down on the grassy knoll, hands cuffed behind his back. The whole border shut down. Judith, Brenda and I ran over, the ladies yelling at Dad, and me shouting at the Americans to cool their jets. A total classic donkey fuck. Long story short, Dad was convicted of indecent public exposure and is never allowed into the US again.

  Last May my parents flew to England and were hauled in for three hours of interrogation at Heathrow. Who knows how the US border authorities have flagged Dad, but I’m pretty sure he now carries a global data stain. All because he’s nervous crossing the border anyway and really needed to pee.

  There’s no moral to any of this except: pray to God you don’t get Judith next time you go north and, really, just declare everything. Please. I want to like people again.

  39

  IKEA Ball Pit

  IN 2003 I FLEW TO Toronto for a convention and caught SARS. I just happened to end up at the global center of it all. What are the odds? I was on a ventilator for two weeks; the virus puréed my lungs into pink cat food. I do get to tell people I’m a SARS survivor, though, which I guess is a silver lining.

  Inasmuch as they can track these things, they think I contracted the virus from an escalator handrail in a downtown department store when I was shopping for shirts after my luggage got lost on my flight from Miami. A superspreader had been there at the same time as me. Four other people were infected by her, and two of them died.

  At that point in my life I was exiting a bum relationship. It was humbling to lie there, drifting in and out of consciousness, and realize how few people there were who would care if I lived or died. Did I have a legacy? Had I helped anyone or anything in the just over forty years I’d been on the planet? Not really. I was employed, I paid my taxes, and now maybe I was about to die prematurely of a strange disease in a foreign country. The only interesting thing about my life would have been my death.

  For six months or so after my recovery, the people where I worked were greatly relieved when I telecommuted—“telecommuted”: boy, what an old-fashioned word that is. I worked from home. Home was a condominium where my neighbors avoided getting into the elevator with me. “You go ahead. I just have to get some stuff in the laundry room.”

  As I said, I was forty then—a very average-looking man, prematurely and somewhat harshly aged by SARS. I felt pathetically weak. I’d always used my energy to compensate for my lack of looks. Now I had neither. I’d also become germaphobic to a degree I hadn’t imagined was possible.

  I once read that there are only two things that guarantee a child will be successful later in life: a love of Lego and an incapacitating illness before puberty. Isn’t that strange? Liking Lego just means your brain is wired well, but the illness thing I now totally get. You’re lying flat on a bed or you’re locked inside a germ-free room waiting for radiation treatment and—tick, tick, tick—you realize way earlier than most people that life is finite. How could that not affect you profoundly?

  Imagine if the most you can hope for in life is not to catch a bug. I read online that the average person’s lungs, spread out, would cover a tennis court. My post-SARS lungs, spread out, would maybe cover a TV screen, and they’re as thick and sinewy as a catcher’s mitt. The upside is that any bug trying to infect them would probably bounce right off. The downside is that I don’t have that huge tennis court inside me, soaking up oxygen.

  I became despondent, wondering why I should even bother with life. I’d go out of my way to touch as many public surfaces as I could: elevator buttons, hand railings, the door handles at Subway restaurants. I had to fly to my nephew’s wedding and deliberately chose the cheapest airline because they never clean their seats. I mean, they say they do it once a month, but have you ever been in a plane seat that didn’t have food crumbs, hairs and other kinds of DNA in and around your butt area? And those gray tubs they make you put your junk in at security are technically the most ge
rmaceous surfaces in our culture. Look it up.

  The thing is, even with all this germ chasing, I never got sick. How screwed up is that? I was trying to tempt fate and…nada.

  My dream experience was to roll around in an IKEA ball pit during cold and flu season. It’s like the gold standard for a germ chaser, except any scenario that involved me, a single male over forty, in an IKEA ball pit would have landed me on a sex offender list.

  Then I met Jody. It was late fall in 2006 and I had to go to a meeting downtown. I saw her standing by the wheelchair access button, trying to touch it with her elbow while holding a briefcase, some sort of boxed pastries and a grande Starbucks Pike Place Roast, which had to be pretty hot. I stopped and smiled. “Cold and flu season, huh?”

  “Finally, someone who gets me! Can you help me out here?”

  “Of course.” I walked over to the oversized blue and silver button and thwacked it with my hip. The door slowly opened.

  “I’m Gordon,” I said.

  “I’m Jody, and I love your style.”

  We parted ways, only to find out a few minutes later that we were attending the same meeting. Fate! During the meeting we made faces at each other, pointing at surfaces and doing “how scary out of ten?” ratings. I hadn’t had so much fun communicating with anyone in years.

  After the session ended, I asked, “Want to go over our notes in the restaurant?”

  “Sure. And I’ll bring my premoistened towelettes.”

  Instead, we got a room at the Hyatt the next block over, and man, it was fun. Jody took off the bedspread and did a dance of death with it, and I picked up the drinking glasses and did an improv dialogue between me and the glass: “Hi. I’m your drinking glass. I haven’t been properly washed since the Kuwait War.”

  We got married the next month in an IKEA ball pit. It was complex to negotiate, but we got it done.

  And then, some fourteen years later, COVID.

  40

  Bic Lighter

  YOU KNOW ALL THOSE scary signs you see in mall parking lots saying VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED? Believe none of them.

  Dylan and I were at the Cineplex last week and we were standing in line when a guy drove a beautifully refinished 1968 Shelby GT500 into the parking area directly in front of the theater. He deliberately parked it diagonally across two handicapped parking spots, and then another guy in a dealership’s loaner car came by and picked him up and drove him away, leaving this brightly colored hunk of injustice just sitting there. I guess the point was for the crowd of moviegoers to lust after it and stampede like elephants to the dealership, cash in hand.

  Dylan looked at me and said, “I don’t know about you, but I now have one raging justice boner.”

  “What are we going to do about this?” I replied.

  We tried to elicit a bit of indignant grousing from other people in line, but all we got were things like “A dick’s a dick. What are you going to do, change him? Make him atone for his crime?”

  “Well, yes.”

  Pitiful stares from all directions.

  I don’t even remember what the movie was. Suddenly our goal was to get that fucking car towed away, preferably into the next galaxy or beyond, to punish the cheesy shit who parked it there to showcase it to upper-middle-class moviegoers.

  We spoke with the theater manager. She laughed. “Oh, you activist kids. Global warming! Wealth disparity! Or whatever it is that gets you lots of social media and all that stuff. Wait: did you buy tickets to be here inside the theater?”

  We went back outside and called the number of the towing company on the parking lot sign, and this guy with an Eastern Bloc accent picked up the phone. Dylan said he sounded like he grew up down the street from Melania Trump in Slovenia or wherever. The guy said, “We do nothing until we hear from mall management.” But, of course, it was nighttime, and mall management was gone.

  We were furious. How dare they! This car wasn’t even electric—it was just a gas-guzzling chunk of junk from the 1960s, when cars got three miles to the gallon.

  We walked over to it and had a look. To be fair (and this is really, really embarrassing to admit), it was a sweet-looking ride. Looking at the soft leather interior gave me a sexy lady boner, but it was justice time, not sexy time.

  Then we realized we should just call the car dealership, so we did. We spoke with the late-shift manager, who said he didn’t know what we were talking about (even though we could tell he totally knew).

  That’s when I said, “Dylan, here’s when shit gets real.”

  I knew that for the very first time he saw something scary in my face, but I knew he was also totally turned on by it.

  “Dylan,” I announced, “we’re having a carbecue.”

  I knew about carbecues because I’d read an online article on rural car torchings. There’d been a rash of them owing to fentanyl, and the fentanyl was due to OxyContin, and the OxyContin was due to political lobbying by drug companies, which was made possible because the system is set up mostly to reward lobbyists. A lobbyocracy? How fucking dismal that fentanyl is where the dream of 1776 washed ashore 250 years later. Ugh.

  So we walked over to the ARCO station at the corner of the mall, which had a camping special on those white chunks of barbecue starter that smell (and probably are) totally carcinogenic. With the money I would have spent on the movie, I bought four boxes of starter, along with a long-stemmed Bic lighter.

  Chances are you’ve never torched a vintage muscle car. To get the job done, light a box of starter and put it on top of the right front tire. To be completely sure, put a box on top of all four tires. Either way, twenty minutes later you’ve got yourself a party.

  First, plumes of smoke rise from the tops of the four wheels. Flames start to lick the interior. And then, well past the point of no return, the engine bursts into mega-flames.

  What surprises me in hindsight is that nobody bothered to call 911 until the car was about to explode.

  People think I’m a cute Gen Zer, or whatever my generation is being called this week. But I’m not a cartoon character—my voice will be heard. I’m willing to turn this world into a carbecue if that’s what needs to be done. Things are wrong. Things have to change.

  Because Dylan and I are only seventeen, we’ll be tried as juveniles, but I want our trial to be global and as big as possible. Bring it on.

  41

  Dasani

  I MAKE MONEY ON the side using a metal detector to search for lost objects, on beaches, mostly. But the holy grail of metal detection is to find a wedding ring, and the place to find them is beneath bridges. I actually did once find a ring on Ambleside Beach, but there was no engraving inside it. Who had owned it, I wondered? Was it lost? Was it thrown away? Either way, that little gold band had a powerful aura, like a spell had been cast on it.

  I got into metal detecting five years ago, while I was in London on holiday. I was walking alongside the Thames in the eastern part of the city, and there was a guy on the bank with his detector, a bucket, a shovel and some plastic kitchen colanders. I couldn’t resist going down some ancient lichen-covered steps to talk to him, and he was chatty once he knew I wasn’t the competition. He told me he’d been mudlarking for some years, and my brain froze at the word. “Mudlarking.” That’s a thing.

  Here’s another fun fact I learned from him: the Queen owns not just all of the swans in the Thames, but everything in the Thames, including its mud. So, if you want to go muck about in the low tide—which is what mudlarking is—you have to write the Queen for permission. My new friend also told me, “If you had children in 1890, and they went on to become mudlarkers, it was the worst possible thing for them, because it meant they had to dig in all the raw sewage for a few lost coins or jars and pots. Once you throw something into the Thames, it’s there forever. There’s almost no current.”

  Raw sewage doesn’t pour into the Thames
any longer. In my friend’s buckets were shards of blue-and-white pottery, some animal bones, two ancient nails and about thirty plaster tobacco pipes. “They were the cigarette butts of 150 years ago,” he said. He had also found what he thought was a Roman coin, but it didn’t look much like one to me. It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re convinced every triangular rock you find is an arrowhead.

  The problem with mudlarking here in North America is that it makes you realize just how few things there are to find in the sand and mud of the New World. Maybe you’ll find an aboriginal middens from hundreds of years ago, but if you do, the location will become an archaeological site, which is as it should be. In the end, I think my version of mudlarking is about zoning out and making my brain go quiet while being near to nature.

  A week ago, my detector bleeped around some intertidal brambles. I detected what ended up being a small, rusty bolt, but my shovel also dug up a Dasani bottle, meaning that it could only have been maybe…twenty years old? I noticed that there was some paper inside, so I went over to a log, sat down and unscrewed the top. I had to use a twig to remove the letter inside. It was a woman’s handwriting, I figured, and the date was twelve years ago.

  Dear Future,

  Do you exist? Am I still there with you? I’m so happy today, and the world is a beautiful place for once. Whatever it is that I’m turning into, I’m going to become it as soon as possible.