Polaroids from the Dead: And Other Short Stories

by Douglas Coupland

  Mark Reinstein/FPG

  20

  WASHINGTON, D.C.:

  FOUR MICROSTORIES, SUPER TUESDAY 1992

  01

  EVERYBODY

  HAS

  AIDS

  KYLE LOVES THE SMELL OF HIS INDEX FINGER. HE SNIFFS IT AS HE LOVE-TAPS HIS JEEP into the Taurus with diplomatic plates parked behind him.

  “I call this parking by ear,” he tells Laura, who’s already reaching for her door handle with her right hand, her black leather attaché case clutched tensely in her left. “Hey,” Kyle continues, “I should try and get Detroit lobbying for spikes welded onto bumpers. Whaddya think, Laur?”

  “I think, good night, Kyle.” Laura swings a leg over the door sill, visibly itching to escape into her shared studio suite in the Georgetown brownstone, a spit away. To her alarm, Kyle turns off the ignition.

  “Boy, am I glad we ditched that dinner hole, Laur. Was it Mars-Needs-Women, or what?” Kyle is refering to their recently departed dinner spot, an emptyish yuppie hell off Dupont Circle. The food was misspelled French, entertainment a sullen trio of unemployed Czech claymation artists listlessly tweaking out “Ode to Joy” on the rims of partially filled brandy snifters. Kyle, a political marketing consultant and the son of Laura’s father’s partner from back home in Yell County, Texas, also provided entertainment during dinner by showing Laura a wad of fifties converted with a felt pen into a flip movie of copulating lizards. “We give out these bills to focus-group members,” Kyle said of the money rippling through his fingers. “Believe me, the focus-group fifty is the true fuel in the engine of consumer democracy.”

  Laura said, “Charming,” and retreated into her morally superior haze. Laura, a twenty-two-year-old Williams College poli-sci grad earning 17K as krill on the food chain of her local senator’s office, cannot afford to be righteous. She finds Kyle’s amorality loathsome. For example, during dinner she questioned the freshness of her tarragon-sauced capon. “Mob-supplied, no doubt,” she said, picking apart its tendons. “Why doesn’t the government clamp down on the Mafia more? If nothing else, they’re a health menace.”

  “Hey, hon,” replied Kyle, “the Feds hate the mob because the mob doesn’t pay taxes, not because it’s evil. But your sentimentality is sweet.” Kyle then vacuumed a snail from its coil and smiled at Laura: “You know, Laura Warshawski, George Washington was Polish and had red hair, just like you. I suppose democracy must be in your genes.”

  Kyle then went on to describe his company’s pursuit of photo opportunities for a new client, a multiple-incumbency senator on career thin ice over bimbette speculations. “You know the usual: coffee klatches in aerospace factory cafeterias cooing…with crack babies…snapping baseball-cap adjuster straps with bankrupt sorghum farmers. You’d be amazed at the frequent-flyer points I’m racking up. Ooh…check out the dessert wagon.”

  Now, outside of Laura’s brownstone, their “date” is nearly over. The self-conscious good manners that silenced Laura up to now are temporarily shelved as she stands in a bouquet of litter beside the curb and motions Kyle to stay in his vehicle. She pauses; now is a chance for her to score a point. “Hey, Kyle, just tell me this: is there anything you believe in? One thing? Anything?”

  “Believe?” asks Kyle, like a Santa speeking to a child at the mall, and leaning over roguishly as he grabs for Laura’s hand.

  “You know”—Laura holds Kyle’s hand sternly, like a mother teaching a naughty child a lesson—“something you’d fight for. Something you’d place before yourself.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as better education…health care…lobbying for shelter for the homeless…lobbying for research for people with AIDS…” Laura realizes as she speaks that she is enjoying the surprisingly rough texture of Kyle’s palm and the way he gently strokes the underside of her wrist with his odorous index digit. She is surprised when he then suddenly breaks the clasp, laughs, and pulls back into the Jeep.

  He turns the key and the engine makes a grinding noise; Kyle makes a sour apple face, reignites the engine and says to Laura, “Lobby-lobby-lobby. Hon, you’re new to D.C. Such a puppy. Phone me in ten years.”

  He pops the stereo button, releasing an explosion of Metallica and says to Laura, under the music’s blare in a thoughtfully out-of-character manner before hurtling out onto Wisconsin Avenue, “Hon, everybody has AIDS.”

  02

  MONEY

  IS

  ENERGY

  Tim is a smart young fellow with a high IQ. Well, actually, Tim has never taken a real IQ test. Rather, this morning riding in from Fairfax, he completed the self-score IQ test in an Omni magazine. And he cheated. But nevertheless, Tim is a smart fellow.

  Tim specializes as a vulnerability consultant. If you are an aspiring politician, you hire Tim, who pretends he is the National Enquirer. He researches into your past and locates your “sensitive spots”: that joint you smoked in the eleventh grade; your daughter who runs with a bike gang; the fling you flung in Sacramento during that endless plenary weekend. For an extra fee, Tim will help you spin these soft spots.

  Like most consultants profiting from the burgeoning world of political technology, Tim worships the database. He knows how to narrowcast information into persuadable sectors of what he calls the “simian population base;” he can merge TV-viewing databases with voting databases. He is proud not to be just another twenty-eight-year-old burnout case from the Hill.

  Tim’s work is varied. For instance, this morning back at the cinder-block office in Virginia, he earned $1,500 helping yet one more telegenic candidate increase his T.V.Q. rating. Inside the TelePrompTer-equipped simulation TV studio, Tim counseled “Mr. Leadership” (the in-office joke name for all candidates) on the ins and outs of televised speaking. “Energy! Energy!” he hissed into the control booth mike. Now Tim’s voice is scratchy.

  Afterward, around noon, as Tim was leaving the office for D.C., Shawna at the reception desk expressed minor worries that “the whole voting thing” and the movies were becoming identical processes.

  “Well, in that case,” replied Tim, “there’s only one thing to do.”

  “What’s that?” asked Shawna.

  “Go see more movies.”

  So Tim took his own advice; he blew off an afternoon seminar and instead caught a matinee of Fantasia.

  Now, just afterward, following a brief stroll, he is standing on a curb on New Hampshire Avenue where, mildly drugged by Fantasia’s beauty and by nutrition-less nine-plex food, he tries to flag a taxi. Beside him, roped off by yellow strands of plastic safety taping, are three rusty-orange mounds of soil dug up by road crews replacing sewage pipes. The workmen have temporarily vanished, but Tim sees the tools they have left behind, jabbing into the three conical piles of exhumed earth, which glow like amber in the late-afternoon sun—earth originally dug up hundreds of years ago during the birth of the nation, then reburied once more.

  Tim peeks into the soil more closely, looking for bottles and other antique junk. He remembers an interview he has scheduled for tomorrow in Manassas, Virginia, with an impoverished ex-mistress of a certain senator, and makes a quick note of the meeting on his pocket Aiwa recorder.

  Patting the recorder in his chest pocket, Tim resumes his search into the exhumed Washington soil, the soil from beneath the city, picking out from amid the rusted sewage pipes the objects that may or may not be encaked in guck: old garbage; maybe an old shoe; rotting telephones; decayed inventions; the things from our past; the things we thought were transient; and best of all, maybe a few coins.

  03

  OBEDIENCE

  ISN’T

  A

  VIRTUE

  Matthew shaved his head bald in order to express solidarity with his friend, Chester, who began chemotherapy four days ago and who is shortly scheduled to lose all of his hair. Chester was untalented enough to develop stomach cancer without having medical insurance, and now lolls about a Bethesda, Maryland, hospital room drinking barium
sulfate goo cut with Nestlé Quik while contemplating his imminent eviction from the hospital.

  The normally apathetic Matthew, aside from shaving his head bald in sympathy, has also made another change in his life because of Chester’s medical crisis—he has decided to help work on a local primary campaign. This decision came about in the following way: Matthew had been having a jolly good gripe-fest on the phone to Chester about the White House and the whole uncaring cash-o-centric system.

  Steve Wisbauer

  After a lengthy pause at the conclusion of Matthew’s rant, Chester, silent on the other end of the line in Bethesda, said, “Okay then, Mr. Sit-on-Your-Ass, keep slacking around waiting to invent the perfect unified theory to cure all the country’s ills. Meanwhile the real world turns to shit. And hey, here’s a suggestion—why not go out and do something genuinely political for once—okay, dude? Because, like, my own time appears to be limited now, and whining like yours doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. Anyway, I’ve got an enema in five minutes and I need that time to adjust my attitude. Later.”

  Click.

  Matthew can understand why Chester has become so no-nonsense since the diagnosis. Now Matthew rubs his prickly cranium, voluntarily employed in the temporary field office of a presidential-primary candidate, a stab at involvement, housed in a bankrupt furniture store sandwiched between a Sock Shop and a steakhouse in a suburban Rockville, Maryland, shopping mall. Surrounding Matthew are Samsung PC monitors atop folding tables, megaphones, confused pastas of telephone cords, strips of dot-matrix paper trim and the claustrophobic odor of weak coffee. Above him is a felt-penned poster saying DON’T STAPLE SIGNS TO TREES.

  When Matthew arrived at the field office a few days ago, the organizers in charge, young men of strangely cultish energy and enthusiastic indoor wearers of sunglasses, took one glance at Matthew’s hairlessness, his ripped jeans and his VISUALIZE IMPEACHMENT T-shirt, and plopped him ignominiously in the rear of the office.

  “You can help monitor the visibility,” he was told by a Nautilized office organizer named HI I’M BROCK in the standard-issue navy three-piece suit of young ambitious people.

  “Visibility?”

  “Lawn signs,” said HI I’M BROCK, pointing to an unloved-looking stack of pine sticks and cardboard signboards touting sloganistic piffle.

  Matthew was then left to fend for himself at his assigned post, next to the chainsmoking Grace, a veteran of a half-dozen campaigns, who was outlining a map of the Maryland panhandle with a bingo marker, and who told him consolingly, “Lawn signs aren’t much work these days. TV wiped ’em out. Kids toss ’em into the gullies, anyway”—short pause—“can I touch your head?”

  Near the office front sit the young political workers who are more willing to give convincing simulations of political behavior. There, in front of dirt-and sun-streaked windows, Matthew sees the no-grief-in-their-lives twenty-one-year-olds eagerly building a political component into their résumés; he sees the scruffy New York-based phone junkies who Amtrak-ed to Maryland from New Hampshire; he sees the suit-and-Ray-Ban boys gladhanding the local visiting politicos; he sees high school kids idly parroting their parents’ jingoism as they collate 8½-by-11 candidate-statement sheets.

  In the rear of the office Matthew has quickly fallen into his own mindless sleepy rhythm and is contemptuous but bemused at how quickly his attempts at democratic participation have decayed into pointlessness. Occasionally he is spoken to hurriedly by one of the young Ray-Ban types who need to know about a load of signs going to Wicomico or Anne Arundel counties. At any moment Matthew expects Grace to confide in him her experiences as a UFO abductee—or offer him another shelf-life treat from her desktop collection culled mainly from the Circle K. But mostly Matthew is forgotten.

  Into his third day Matthew phones Chester and offers a progress report. “Hey, Chess, I’m trying, but it’s kind of goofy and pointless here. When you think about it, though, there’s not much else you can do to participate in politics these days. Any fresh ideas?”

  “Well, dude, the system can’t remain monolithic forever. It’s gotta change somewhere. Just look at those clever Russians.”

  “I don’t know, Chess. Two identical parties competing against each other with no alternatives—it’s like the Disney version of democracy. How do you fight a cartoon?”

  Matthew yawns. He had trouble sleeping last night worrying about Chester—plus his own student loans and his so-far fruitless job search. Strange, he thinks, how all the old tricks of success in the world—education, a broad skill base, literacy, numeracy—are no longer guarantees of anything. Also, this morning Matthew skipped breakfast and for lunch ate only a Snapple. So this afternoon in particular, Matthew is feeling tired. After his phone call with Chester ends, he pushes back his chair and closes his eyes.

  His stomach growls; his chin digs into his sternum and he tumbles into a daydream. He remembers a story he used to read when he was young, a story in which children were lost in the White House after being separated from a tour—children walking through the building’s corridors, dark and quiet. Occasionally Matthew is snapped out of this reverie by voices calling across the office: “Drive-time on the Chesapeake Bridge, 6,000 cars-per-hour, so let’s rig up the sign!” and “We need crowd-building action—the Channel Eleven mobile van’s arriving at the farmer’s rally at three.”

  But Matthew soon returns to the same childhood story in his thoughts: the lone children walking up steep stairs, wondering where the president is, peeking through ajar doors, their footsteps muffled on deep carpets.

  When Matthew was younger he remembered the children were trying to find an escape from the White House—that was the plot of the story—escaping. But now in Matthew’s head, the children are no longer trying to get out. Rather, they are digging deeper into the silent structure of the White House, behind its gilt trimmings, into its walls paneled in wood, into its walls thick with mirrors and surveillance wires. The children are holding candles now, and flashlights and tools, forcing open locked doors, punching holes through walls and cutting through locks. Looking for food.

  04

  OUR

  CAPACITY

  FOR

  AMNESIA

  IS

  TERRIFYING

  Juanita has left the TV news office early this afternoon, bored with manufactured news about manufactured candidates. It’s spring! She wants to spend part of the day playing tacky tourist—walking the Washington Mall and inspecting the monuments. And she does so to the interior soundtrack of her mother’s ambitious Spanish voice always urging her to push, to advance herself, to make sure Juanita doesn’t end up as she did. This spice of guilt enhances the stolen afternoon. Juanita removes her blazer and drapes it over her shoulder.

  Such a country. Juanita remembers first arriving here at age eight, suffocating underneath a trailerload of red bell peppers crossing the Arizona border at Nogales. She remembers later that same day eating a lemon Popsicle in a drugstore and seeing a woman with a blond beehive wig and an A-line dress stroll down the store’s clean quiet aisles. She remembers purebred dogs and racks of dolls and signs selling cocktails. She remembers a gang of skateboarders outside the mall who taught her her first English word, which was “cool.”

  Even then she was surprised at the effortlessness of her new citizenship, which required only a dash of enthusiasm and the act of simply being there. And she has never forgotten this simplicity—and the calm abundance that nourishes its roots—the air conditioning, an aisle of pet food, the cool blonde.

  Two decades and a Stanford MBA later, Juanita watches joggers pass the reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. She catches fragments of what the joggers are saying—the usual: “What’s wrong with the country is the way people don’t really care.” Blah blah blah.

  As a new anchor, Juanita can’t help but notice slightly more of this chatter about some type of national malaise floating about the air. Perhaps every election year is lik
e this. And, being in TV, Juanita knows that certain people have much to gain by propagating such negative discussion.

  But yet Juanita detects something else surfacing in people’s discussions these days—a worry that something unnameable yet valuable is being forgotten—a knowledge of the formula for the invisible glue that holds the nation together, that keeps the nation from shattering apart.

  Mark Reinstein/FPG

  This glue—what is its recipe? The songs we sang as children? The pictures of founding fathers that adorned our classroom walls? The need to buy and sell real estate? Florida holidays? Campbell’s soup? Mobile homes? It is as though the nation feels itself to be on the brink of some mass amnesia and is frightened by this very capacity for forgetfulness.

  But this discussion tends to be overly intellectualized for Juanita. She just cannot feel the loss her fellow citizens seem to be feeling. She has felt American from the moment she bit into that lemon Popsicle in Nogales and she wonders how it is that such an easy and wonderful sensation as US citizenship can be so simply forgotten—like forgetting your sex.

  She walks over the grass, still unmown so early in the year, over to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, to the black marble V carved into the lawn. Clichéd but true how one can live in a city for years and never see those things that even the most transient of tourists will see.