The gum thief: a novel

by Douglas Coupland

  Steve's stomach growled.

  Time for more booze.

  But Brittany was leaning towards him expectantly, twiddling her hair, and so he continued talking. He finished discussing water metaphors in Gumdrops, Lilies and Forceps, and was about to take on Less Than Fewer, when a chill rippled down his spine and he had a vision of the end of the world that froze him to his core. In his vision, everybody on earth suddenly became a genius.

  Brrrrrr . ..

  Imagine a world populated by back-seat drivers, a planet where everybody knew the answer to everything, and where everybody was out to use their new genius to grab more for themselves. Everybody would find secret shortcuts to get home from the office, thus clogging all the streets. At the grocers, newly minted food experts would select only the finest and freshest fruits and cuts of meat, placing undue strain on the food industry. Everybody would invest cleverly in the stock market, but because everybody would make millions, all of the world's currencies would collapse, and banking would come to an end. The world's bauxite miners, banana pickers and assembly line workers would rebel against their soul-deadening jobs, and would begin roaming the world's streets in pursuit of knowledge. Since geniuses don't make food, starvation would become rampant. Dazzlingly intelligent hordes would invade neighbourhood after neighbourhood, flushing out caches of freeze-dried astronaut food and tinned goods.

  Throughout this rapid decline, billions of newly minted book readers, in between pangs of starvation, would pick up a copy of any of Steve's five novels, read them and find them lacking. And it would be young Kyle Falconcrest, in between his time spent translating Chaucer into Mandarin and developing a perpetual motion device, who would cast the first stone.

  And to think Kyle expected Steve to feed him!

  Roger

  DeeDee, I'm not trying to lure your kid into my car with a pile of candy or something, so layoff, okay? She can make up her own mind about things. And thanks for thinking of me as Mister Cosmic Fucking Nothingness. That makes me feel good.

  Since when did you get so negative, eh? You were a sweet kid in high school-not stuck up, ever. And for what it's worth, I remember the week your body blossomed. Man, it happened so quickly with you. Trust me, it's the sort of thing guys notice. All of the guys in our grade did. You were a peach, and I remember wanting so badly to stroke your cheeks in social studies in ninth grade. You sat by the alarm bell, and for two weeks in spring, the sun came around and haloed your face during the last class of the day. It was like you were made of something insanely delicate, like dandelion fluff, and anything harsher than a gentle breath would destroy you.

  Do you remember high school? I don't. I dream about it every now and then, but only things like opening my locker or missing a big test-all that symbolic stuff. I try to recreate a sample day from back then, and I blank out.

  Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't. I remember being outgoing and probably smooth with the ladies. But ... imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.

  Or maybe memories are like karaoke-where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning-and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better to not know the lyrics to your life.

  Do you ever wonder what the old gang remembers when they hear your name? More than anything, DeeDee, I bet people would remember your face the moment you got dumped in the dunk tank during the school fair, when the strap came off your Cheerios bikini and you blushed the colour of cherry cough syrup. It was totally funny and not sexy, nipple and all.

  Bethany has had a lot of people go away on her, and so have you. People leave in so many different ways. People go nuts. They abandon you. They stop liking you. They get lost in their own worlds and they never come back. Or they simply give up. And yes, they die.

  DeeDee, cut me some slack. I'm not a void, and I'm not a monster. Bethany is a muse. I thought muses were a stupid concept from the past, but they're not. She helps me write, and I don't know why. Because of her, I was able to start my first novel, and it's going amazingly well. You never know-it could be a really successful book that sells a lot of copies, and it could be my ticket out of this hole I'm in. I'll show it to you when I can-it's a bit raw right now. You know how it is with revisions-you work so hard to really nail the exact word or phrase. You don't want things coming out sounding pretentious and unnatural.

  Please relax, DeeDee.

  Your scribe,

  R.

  Bethany

  Hey, Roger, I saw you throwing a tennis ball to Wayne this morning. I was on the bus, and you were in the park down by Mosquito Creek. It was raining, but it didn't bug you - you looked happy, actually. So I thought I could borrow a bit of your happiness today. I need it. It's One of Those Days.

  Earlier on there was this guy in line who was nice enough-buying one of those black office chairs-and the signature was worn off his Visa card, so I asked him if he had a driver's licence for ID and he went apeshit about how I didn't trust him and how nobody trusts anybody these days. So I told him I didn't want to lose my job because Visa only gives card users a strip of glossy white ink-repellent plastic that's one-eighth of an inch wide on which to write a signature that rubs off after two days inside a normal wallet or purse. Whatever. In the end, I had the law on my side-as well as the manager-but I got bummed about people not trusting people.

  When I turned sixteen, my mom told me, "Bethany, there's a difference between intimacy and closeness." I asked her what she meant, and she said (I paraphrase), "You'll meet a stranger in an airport bar, get shit-faced and tell them things about yourself and your life that you'd never dream of telling anybody you actually knew. But does that make you close to that person, Bethany?" From the way she went on about this, I got the distinct impression that La DeeDee has been spending time in airport bars.

  I wish I had a dog like Wayne. I wish I didn't make fun of stuff so much. I wish North Korea didn't have nuclear weapons. They're nuts. Days like today get me thinking more about the end of the world. I look back on when I was younger, back in the 1990s, and how naive and goofy everything was back then, but it was like this happy bubble, a time snack, a little patch of bliss before the shitstorm.

  There's such a difference between the world I grew up expecting and the one I got, but everyone my age has probably felt the same since the dawn of man. I didn't expect a world full of jetliners impregnating office towers, or viruses jumping species or, shit, according to Yahoo!, pigs that now glow in the dark. The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder. The few animals that remain here with us-when they look at me, or when I hear them cheep or bleat or meow-they're not animals anymore, they're the voices of the dead trying to warn us of what's coming. According to government statistics, I'm supposed to leave the world in 2062, but I can't even see 2032 in my head.

  Change of subject:

  Wayne's one of those dogs that smile. And I see he likes to fetch things. I divide dogs into two categories-those for whom you drop a stick and they look at it like it was a rock, and those who pick even rocks up and who like to chase and fetch things. I think Wayne would jump off a cliff for you.

  Now that I think about it, dammit, I want a dog.

  Five minutes later:

  Kyle gave me a sandwich-sized Ziploc bag full of trail mix, heavy on the almonds. We're having these really great discussions about mortality because of him losing his grandmother. I'm kind of scaring myself at what a pro I am on the subject, but he really needs me. I get the feeling he's never act
ually had a real conversation with anybody before.

  The hospital freaked him out the most. He went to visit his grandmother in the extended-care ward in a private room, and because of the tangled mess that is his father and his collection of trophy wives, Kyle ended up alone in the room with his grandmother most of the time. She was on a respirator and morphine and totally out of it, and he tried to relax and look at the snow that was just beginning to dust the mountains, and-here's the funny part-he'd try to use psychic powers to make planes crash, just like Steve!

  Another change of subject:

  Blair got fired for stealing gum. They got it on tape.

  I hate the future.

  PS:

  QUESTION: What did DeeDee have for breakfast this morning?

  ANSWER: Several cigarettes.

  Glove Pond

  An hour melted away as Steve lectured his guests about his five novels. He smiled at Brittany. "Do you know what The Boston Globe said about my fifth novel? They called it 'A Five-Year Plan of Miniaturization.'"

  "Oh my."

  Steve then realized it might be a good idea if one of his guests had a chance to speak ... Perhaps that young Falconcrest chap would like to say something. But then Steve remembered that Kyle was a writer and would most likely want to discuss his own writing: borrrrrrring. Steve groaned inwardly, looked at Kyle and realized that, as a host, he had no choice but to ask his guests about their opinions and ideas. He jumped off the cliff: "Tell me, Kyle, you must enjoy reading as well as writing. What books have been important to you and your life?"

  Kyle looked at his host, and Steve thought he looked almost stunned. "Really? You're asking someone a question? I'm shocked."

  "Nonsense. You're a guest in my home, and you're also a fellow writer. Writers as a group are always giving, unjealous and supportive of all other writers. Nothing makes a writer happier than hearing of another writer's success-or hearing another writer discuss his or her books. So please, Kyle, do tell us what books have shaped you and your life."

  "Well ..."

  Kyle began to speak, and as he did, Steve tried hard to give the illusion of listening. His mind drifted off to other moments in his life when he'd asked writers the same question. They invariably chose something by that upstart monster Salinger-a one-trick-pony almost pitifully dependent on telephones for his plot lines.

  What other books did writers like? Oh yes-pornographic stewed cabbage by that pederast ... what was his name-Nebulov? Nunavut? Nabokov? Yes, Nabokov and his book Lolita-the masturbatory rantings of a deviant perpetuating his unclean, lustful ideas.

  As Kyle continued to speak about whatever it was he was speaking about, Steve's mind drifted back to an incident involving the novel Lolita-an afternoon a decade before, at the university, when a crazed den of love starved lesbians from the Women's Studies Department had organized a seminar dedicated to removing Lolita from the school's reading lists. Steve had entered the room by accident, to avoid another professor approaching from down the hall. The Women's Studies ringleader, upon seeing Steve at the back of the room, asked for his view on the book, and Steve said it was pure filth.

  "Did you read it when it first came out, or have you read it recently?"

  "Read it? I've never read the thing."

  "Let me get this straight," said the woman. "Here, in a university, you're denigrating a book you haven't actually read?"

  Steve mumbled something about papers in need of marking and quickly bolted .

  . . . Blink!

  Steve emerged from his brief academic reverie and was once again in his living room. Oh God, I asked this Falconcrest fellow his opinion. Now I have to actually listen to it. Okay, Steve, brace yourself. Open your ears . ..

  Kyle was saying, "I guess I'd have to say that I have trouble believing in the future, and I think the past is largely an embarrassment. In general, I don't trust people. There's very little to believe in, and all I've ever been able to believe in are a few cherished books by a few people who I suspect feel life is as fleeting and ghastly and cruel as I do. I think Truman Capote's Answered Prayers documents this sensibility as it occurred in a variety of long-vanished, almost mythically privileged cliques. I admire Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, and pretty much everything by Kurt Vonnegut testifies to the wretchedness of life, with an occasional sunbeam sent along to brighten things up."

  Who are these writers he's speaking about? Steve's mind again drifted off, and he tried to remember who was sitting beside whom at the previous day's intramural Dewey Decimal System workshop. Something as simple as the wrong seating plan could undo decades of political work, and since the introduction of stacking chairs in the eighties-after much bitter and angry debate-meetings had never been the same.

  Falconcrest prattled on.

  "I guess I like work that examines unexpected crisis points in modernism. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio examines the collision between rural and industrial life in the early twentieth century. Bret Ellis's Less Than Zero chronicles the implosion of secular middle-class values in pre-digital California. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club is a brilliant assault on consumer culture, while everything J.G. Ballard has written can't but make us rethink the path our world is taking-particularly Running Wild, a book that makes me wonder if the only hope for our world is to spawn children who have mutated so far beyond our present selves that anything we have to offer them as a survival tool is pointless and quaint."

  Steve was mentally day-planning the upcoming week: a dozen meetings, perhaps write a letter pleading for an advance from his publisher for a book he'd been on the cusp of starting for-how long was it now?-fifteen years? twenty? Maybe a trip to the liquor store and, if he was lucky, the delivery of a black-and-white photo magazine from San Bernardino, California, dedicated to the healthfulness of unclothed sun worship.

  Steve once again tuned in to Kyle's words ...

  "To be honest, I'll read anything, even the four-point warnings on pharmaceutical packages-I like looking at the lines on product bar codes and pretending I can judge which number a line represents from its comparative thickness against the others."

  "Bar codes?" Gloria was puzzled.

  Kyle continued, "I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints. I'm always kind of suspicious of young people who, when asked who their favourite writer is, say Henry James or someone equally as dead. Imagine if you asked a young person who their favourite musician was and they told you Vivaldi. Would you trust that person? I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does."

  Steve looked across the table and noticed a mosquito like insect landing on the Scotch bottle's snout.

  "You know," said Kyle, "I wish, I really, truly wish, Steve, that people were honest with you when they were asked which books influenced them. I think that a lack of honesty about this one question is the shame of the literary world. I ask you, which books held a light for you in the darkness?"

  Brittany looked at Steve. "Kyle's given that same speech twenty times this year."

  Kyle smiled. "But I still mean it."

  "You could at least stop trying to pretend it's the first time you're doing it every time you do it." "What are you getting at?" "Kyle, right now you've given that same speech

  twenty times already. But in twenty years you'll have told it thousands of times ... won't you have? Doesn't that exhaust you in advance ... knowing that you'll one day become this anecdote robot?"

  "How sweet!" said Gloria. "A spat between a writer and his wife. Look at them, Steve-aren't they darling? They remind me so much of you and me back when we first started out."

  Roger

  I like booze.

  Booze makes me feel the way being in a womb must feel. If fetuses aren't getting alcohol, what are they getting in there that makes the womb everybody's dream vacation spot? I bet th
ey're floating around and getting wasted on fet-ohol. Imagine the withdrawal newborns must go through when their supply of fet-ohol leaves their bodies and their nervous system's alarm bells go off: Hey! You're part of the world now! Brutal.

  I think scientists should be trying more than anything to find the formula for fet-ohol. Imagine taking a hit of "F": "The Security Drug"-you'd feel like you were safe and happy, even if you were doing boring everyday crap like collecting spray-painted shopping carts from the ditch across the road by the Indian reserve or haggling with some pathetic senior trying to scam an extra twenty percent off the purchase of a Maxell CD twelve-pack using an expired coupon.

  But then, fet-ohol would probably have some backfiring aspect. That predictable monkey's paw: official key fob of Saint Teresa of Avila, patron saint of the answered prayer. If you became a fetus again, you'd become autistic or a zombie, or would pull so far away from the world that people looking at you would think you were a vegetable. Fet-ohol would convert your brain back into the brain of a fetus. It wouldn't be the same thing as brain damage instead, your brain would sort of erase itself, like a CD or a tape. You'd be unborn.