Binge

by Douglas Coupland

  “Lisa, you honestly thought this was a good idea?”

  “Well, yes. Why else would I have done it?”

  “We’re going to have to deal with the parents of all those traumatized kids now.”

  “Traumatized? Don’t be so dramatic. Most of the kids had a ball.”

  “Yes, but some didn’t. Christ, I hope this doesn’t make the news.”

  “Why does everyone coddle their kids so much? It’s like parents want to SPF 100 their entire existences.”

  “Just get that foot out of the tank and get rid of it.”

  “Ugh.”

  “This is also going to come up at the executive meeting tomorrow, so brace yourself. The new woman running this place is a real dick.”

  And yes, at that meeting I got a dressing down. God, what dismal bureaucrats I work with.

  But life does go on, and six months later it was summer and I was visiting friends up the coast with a place on the water. I brought along the Magic Foot, nestled it in some rocks, took a photo of it and put it on Instagram with only a geotag attached. Clean, harmless fun.

  Anyhoo, not an hour after I got home, the doorbell rang, and it was the cops, who wanted to know what the foot was all about. I had to show them photos of the Magic Foot in its Nike, which settled them down. And then I asked, given all the feet that turn up on local beaches, why this was such a big deal. It turned out that a limbless torso had been found a quarter mile up the beach! Just one of those spooky coincidences, I suppose.

  Except it wasn’t really a coincidence. That sucker took forever to cut into chunks, and then his bits spent a week in the Thule cargo carrier on top of my RAV4, until I figured out the right way to go about getting rid of it. My solution? Hide it in plain sight while I innocently dangled my plastic masterpiece.

  [Evil villain laugh.]

  53

  iPhone

  YOU MAY OR MAY NOT be aware of the four kinds of suicide, but as a refresher, I’ll list them here:

  1. Wanted to do it and it worked.

  2. Wanted to do it but flubbed it.

  3. Didn’t really want to do it but it happened.

  4. Didn’t really want to do it and nothing happened.

  To this I would add a fifth kind, called “asshole.” I had to deal with one of those today.

  First off, I’m a cop—a good one and not a bully. Every police department everywhere has its bullies. Cops like me wish personality science could develop a bully filter so we could weed them out. Bully cops give those of us who really care about you and your world a bad name.

  So, yes, I want a better world—especially one that doesn’t have a Waxahachie Bridge in it. You probably have one where you live: the bridge where jumpers who really mean business go. I know of only one person who survived a jump from our bridge since it was built sixty-five years ago. That fucker is as high as the river beneath it is shallow.

  When people are still on the bridge, they’re jumpers. Once they hit the water, we call them lily pads. I dread being asked to go “pick a lily pad.” The chief assigns that duty depending on how easy or difficult an officer has made his life since the last incident. I’m unsure if this is ethical or constitutional or an HR issue, but as a way of keeping us in line, it sure does work.

  We get about twenty-five to thirty jumpers a year, an average of one every ten days. But for some reason they come in clusters, especially around the spooky juju of full moons. Whenever I notice the moon is full, I say a small prayer under my breath, and I am not a religious person. Sometimes deputations appear at city council asking the politicians to spend money on putting up anti-jumper nets, but the county’s been broke since synthetic opioids burned through here in the early 2000s, so the request never makes it past the budget committee.

  Okay, so now I’ll get to the asshole situation. It was last Saturday at 1:30 in the afternoon. I always like Saturday shifts because during the daylight hours it’s the most peaceful time of the week. (You sure don’t want Saturday night duty. Saturday night weaponizes you, and I hate it. We all hate it—except the bullies.)

  I digress.

  I was at my desk, looking up fourteen-foot aluminum boats on craigslist, when Claire buzzed me and said, “Jumper on the Wax. The chief has chosen you to be today’s talker-downer.”

  I buttoned my lip on what I wanted to say and drove out to the bridge.

  It was an otherwise glorious day, that last week of spring before the mosquitoes hatch, when being able to go out in a short-sleeved shirt makes you feel good about the world. Officers Ryan and Hemphill had already coned off the bridge, and people whose cars got stuck were honking and shouting, “Jump, you fucking loser!”

  I find that kind of attitude not as constructive as it perhaps could be.

  As I got out of my cruiser, someone yelled, “Hey, officer, just push Sinbad off the edge!”

  Sinbad. I recognized the guy. He was a Syrian refugee who’d arrived here two years back and worked at the dojo off Route 9. My forehead clenched as I tried to summon the learnings from my annual cross-cultural sensitivity training weekends.

  He was up on the narrow steel guardrail, doing Cossack step dance moves interspersed with pirouettes, like he was competing on the balance beam at the Olympics. It was actually kind of awesome. And, further to the Sinbad moniker, he was holding a scimitar in his right hand—yes, a scimitar!—and an iPhone in his left, livestreaming the action.

  You’re livestreaming your suicide attempt? Cool dance moves be damned, you are now officially a Category Five Asshole.

  But, of course, I couldn’t call him out as an asshole. There’s a whole de-escalation protocol you have to follow, which you’ve probably seen in movies—one I wish I had applied when my wife drove her Dodge Caravan into a corral full of IKEA shopping carts, or when my son filled an old microwave oven with Roman candles I’d confiscated and blew it up on the Fourth of July.

  Suddenly I heard a chopper blasting toward us like we were in a Vietnam movie. At the controls was Laura, the daughter of a cop, and head of the department’s aviation division. I knew from having a beer with her the night before that her Adderall dealer was out on probation, and she’d just stocked up big-time. And here she was, putting into action the idea that you can use a chopper to startle the crap out of a jumper, causing them to fall inward, away from the chopper, where I can then grab them.

  There is something truly exhilarating about having a chopper come right up to your nose at a hundred miles an hour. Sinbad (actually Amir ul Zirazi) didn’t know what hit him. I was able to knock the scimitar from his hand as a fellow officer, Wally, tackled him to the ground, sending the iPhone fluttering down into the Waxahachie River. And you know what he started screaming at us? “You assholes! Do you have any idea how much that phone cost me?”

  Yes, the fifth mode of suicide: asshole.

  54

  LAN

  IT WAS AN ASTONISHINGLY forgettable day—a Tuesday?—one of those days that come and go, and then at the end of your life you wonder, Man, did I really piss away my life with an endless series of wasted Tuesdays?

  Regret: the final condiment in the meal of life.

  Anyway, I was sitting in my in-home workspace, but instead of working I was actually on the Star Alliance website trying to see how I could somehow recoup my dwindling status as a 1K member, someone who flies—or flew—100,000 miles a year.

  Back before everything turned to shit, being a Star Alliance 1K member was an important part of my identity. I flew about 10,000 miles a month for speeches, mostly on the topic of “How Technology Is Changing Your Life!” I’d learned that most very large companies have annual powwows where everyone has drinks, hooks up and bitches and moans about higher-ups. Somewhere in that mix, a speaker like me motivates your brains out.

  That’s not exactly true. I can motivate people, but usually I got hired becau
se someone with a name like Kylie, on a corporation’s entertainment committee, had to find someone to speak in the Magnolia Ballroom for forty-five minutes, someone who wouldn’t actively support abortion or stringent gun control and would cost (including business class airfare and two nights in a good hotel) twenty-five grand all in. Since I tick all those boxes, I’m your man. Add those 1K member privileges—zone one boarding and lots of booze and food—and life was sweet.

  Enough about that. It was an aimless Tuesday and suddenly my printer made its start-up whirring noise, except I hadn’t keyed in a print command. I rolled over on my office chair and checked the LED indicator strip: Superspreader photos.

  Right, more dismal COVID shit.

  But wait—no, it was a trove of split beaver shots of Trump blackmailer Stormy Daniels. It’s not like I’m some internet prig, but this was really hard-core. I quickly discerned that a neighbor had mistakenly chosen my wireless printer as his printer option and most likely had no idea. In the end, ten pages came through, and then, after a minute-long pause, the same images came through again. I’m assuming that the person behind this was wondering why nothing had printed out and pressed the same command again.

  I checked my wireless preferences and saw nine different options besides my own LAN:

  Orange3127

  Lakeview

  DeathStarzzzz

  Verizon fca7%EuQ

  GoDucks!

  Verison5Gspeth4

  Bandersnatch

  Krusty

  Orange4040$y77

  I thought it was all pretty funny, but I didn’t give it much more thought until later that evening, when I was eBaying and the printer whirred up again. I have to admit, I was curious to see what my pervy neighbor was trying to print this time. And then I did see, and it was scary—borderline illegal twink stuff, which I put directly into my shredder. Then I thought about calling the police. I went to check which servers were up and saw:

  Lakeview

  Verizon fca7%EuQ

  GoDucks!

  One of these was the perv. After a few more porn printouts over the next two hours, I narrowed the culprit down to GoDucks! But who and where was GoDucks!? The house behind me? A condo across the street? By then I just wanted to end the whole business, so I changed my router name to Heypervstopsendingillegalimagestomyprinter.

  Not even one hour later, my doorbell rang. I opened the door to find a guy my age, almost a clone of myself, holding a Coors six-pack.

  I said, “Oh. I’m guessing it was you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dude, I almost called the cops on you.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  I think he wanted me to invite him in, but no way.

  “I just moved here from Orange County and it’s so hard to meet people. I get desperate.”

  “Look, you’re lucky I didn’t show anyone that stuff.”

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! It won’t happen again. Can you just do me a favor and change your router name back to what you used to have?”

  I decided to be charitable. “Sure.”

  I was closing the door on him when he said, “Hey! Can I ask you to help me put a rack on my car? I just need someone to help me lift it onto my Subaru in the garage. Five minutes tops, and it’s lightweight fiberglass.”

  I found out this guy’s name was Jack and that he lived in the old Palewski house two down from me. His garage was filled with luggage tagged to a Star Alliance 1K member. As he opened the Thule cargo carrier, I asked about his own airline experiences. Chatting, he went to get something on the bench behind me, then he whacked me over the head. When I came to, I was locked inside the Thule.

  I pounded, yelling to be let out. His footsteps approached.

  “You know what they call people who lose their elite status memberships, don’t you?”

  “What? You evil fuck!”

  “Fallen angels.”

  55

  Olive Garden

  OVER THE PAST SIXTY YEARS I’ve noticed that if you tell kids they need to live a creative life, they rarely reproduce. Instead, they spend their days trying to generate proof to demonstrate to you that they listened and are fulfilling your command to be, I don’t know, a fashion designer, an app creator, a painter…whatever. Combine this imperative with birth control and you’ve got no grandchildren and no population growth. You’re essentially Japan. This happened with my own two children and my friends’ kids, too, and I wish I could go back in history and push a magic “undo” button.

  Historically, whenever the subject of grandchildren came up, our kids, Bryanna and Duncan (twenty-nine and thirty-two), always gave my husband, Rob, and me excuses along the lines of “Yes, but not until I finish this current project.”

  Rob and I went along with this, but as the years passed, the issue of grandkids felt increasingly urgent. By the time they were in their early thirties, the most I was hoping for was one tiny, perfect grandchild from each of them. I guess one small source of comfort was that my brother, Nels, with his two non-reproducing kids, was in the same situation as me. At least I didn’t have to look on in envy.

  So, one weekend we were at a summer family picnic at my brother’s, and everyone got too drunk. Some neighbors had brought their kids along, and when those families left at the kids’ bedtimes, there was an awkward child-free silence out on the lawn.

  I ended up sitting with Nel’s daughter, Chloe, a nice enough kid, single and pretty, who began telling me about a jewelry-making program she was signing up for.

  “Chloe, sweetie,” I said. “Forget jewelry and all that creative stuff. Just get knocked up.”

  “What?”

  “Absolutely. Whoever the father is, he’ll usually stick around. But even if he doesn’t, you’ve got a big family who’d happily help take care of it.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do.”

  In my mind I thought I was being ironic and salty: Good old Aunt Jane! And Chloe was laughing as I poured myself another glass of rosé.

  Her brother, Darrell, saw us laughing and came over. “What’s the joke?”

  “Aunt Jane says I should get knocked up.”

  “And Darrell,” I said, “you should knock someone up too. Just have kids. The universe will take care of them.”

  At this point my memory gets kind of iffy, but I know I did share my theory about creativity and procreation before a sudden thunderstorm chased us all indoors.

  Well, within half a year Chloe was knocked up and Darrell had knocked someone up. I was happy for them, and I honestly didn’t remember giving them my tipsy advice at the summer picnic until I got a furious phone call from my brother’s wife, Sheila. “I can’t believe you told them to have kids!”

  “I didn’t tell anyone to do anything.”

  “That’s not what they say.”

  Oh shit. “I believe I merely shared my theory about creativity with them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  So I told her.

  “You think that gets you off the hook here?”

  “What hook? Sheila, cool down. They’re adults. They have brains. After you’re twenty-one, no one can tell you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  “Chloe works part-time at Baskin-Robbins. Darrell just got fired from delivering SkipTheDishes, which I think means he actually got fired by a robot. How are they going to support these miraculous new beings, Miss Know-it-all?”

  The call ended on a testy note, but after I hung up I realized I was jealous because Sheila was getting grandkids and I wasn’t. Rob noticed I was acting strange and asked what was up. I said it was nothing, but the jealousy began to eat me up and I realized I had to do something about it. So one morning I got in the car and drove to Bryanna’s sound mixing studio (she’s a sound editor: creative!) a
nd suggested the two of us go to a surprise lunch.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing,” I lied, though I know I sounded jittery.

  We went to an Olive Garden by the highway off-ramp.

  Once we were seated, Bryanna asked, “Mom, what’s going on? Do you have bad news?”

  “No. It’s just that…”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry I told you that you should be creative when you grew up.”

  “Huh? I thought you were going to tell me you had cancer or something.”

  “No. I just wanted to say that it was a bad idea to tell you to follow a creative path.”

  “I—I don’t know what to say. What on earth happened to trigger this? I mean—what the actual fuck?”

  “Don’t use vulgar language.”

  Coffee arrived and we ordered food I had a hunch would go uneaten. Then I explained my theory, and before she shot it down, I asked Bryanna to think of all of her friends who were in similar child-free boats.

  “This is so presumptuous, Mom, I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Humor me.”

  “Does Dad know about this idiotic theory?”

  “I haven’t really shared it fully with him.”

  “Fine. I’m going to leave this restaurant right now and call him and tell him I think you have dementia.”

  “Okay. Do that. But I still want grandkids.”

  And off she went, salad uneaten.

  * * *

  —

  Bryanna’s due next month. She’s not married, and she’s mostly not talking to me, but I don’t care because I know she’ll want a free babysitter. I still think I should never have encouraged her to take piano lessons. Or dance class. Or anything else.

  Heed this warning.

  56

  Dipping Sauce

  HI, I’M SHARON AND I work as a dietitian for a large American hospital chain. Here’s a story for you. In 1983, America entered a perfect food storm set off by McDonald’s introduction of the Chicken McNugget, a white-meat finger food served alongside an array of high-fructose corn syrup–based dipping sauces. McNuggets tapped all dimensions—psychological and gastronomical—and were an instant and massive success. Most Americans have happy Chicken McNugget childhood memories.