Girlfriend in a Coma

by Douglas Coupland

  Scott, like us, had never trained to be in film. Like everybody in the local industry, he arrived from another realm. Mathematicians, lawyers, dental assistants, ex-hippies—all of these people winging it. The energy was addictive.

  Life became very cha-cha-cha. "My oh my," Hamilton WOllld preen verbally, "aren't we just the niftiest, coolest, hippest, grooviest, sexiest, most with-it, and most happening people we know?""Yes, Hamilton," we would reply as androids. "You certainly are."

  Then came word that Fox was filming a series pilot in Vancouver, one of dozens filmed here annually. Phone calls were made and shortly Pam, Hamilton, Linus, and I wound up working on a new show in which conspiracies, be they alien, governmental, paranormal, or clerical, impacted on the lives of everyday people. These visitations would in turn be investigated by a male detective who has belief in the paranormal and a female detective who has her doubts. It was a simple formula, but one that resonated with us.

  TV pilots are crap shoots. We enjoyed our location scouting as much as we could, making hay while the sun shined and we located dank, dense, evergreen versions of Florida, California, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. "It's a good thing not too many botanists watch this show," Linus said with grating frequency. "Or weathermen, for that matter." As it rains a fair deal in Vancouver, so it rained a great deal on the show. Critics applauded the show's rainy "noir" atmosphere. Whenever this issue was raised, Pam merrily twittered, "Giggle giggle."

  After a few weeks, Tina introduced Hamilton and Linus to the world of special effects at an FX house across town called Monster Machine. Their eyes lit up; within a week, they left Fox to score jobs with Monster Machine, entering a sub-world of flash pods, latex limbs, buckets o' blood, and blue screening. Their combined explosive and electrical knowledge was impossible to refuse. Me? I stayed on the set of my weekly paranormal drama. It hadn't become a hit yet, but I liked its vibe and it was the most polite set I'd worked on.

  Soon enough Pam stopped doing makeup work and joined Hamilton and Linus at the special effects firm; the three became known locally as quality special effects people. Their specialties were latex body molds and convincing explosions. Pooling their skills, they helped create aliens, zombies, vampires, Mafia-shot corpses, humans in all states of decay, mummification, terror, and explosion. They traveled frequently, usually to California to take courses with the masters, and returned to Canada with Ziploc bags full of smuggled,tissue-wrapped, German ceramic eyeballs. "Aren't they wunderbar?" squeaked Pam in my car driving back from the airport.

  Pam was so happy. The "Whatever Happened to …" magazine articles ended, replaced by "Hot New Comeback!" articles. An ex-model turned special effects artist was an irresistible combination for the media. Added bonus: "I've conquered a drug problem!" Magazine and TV stories about her flourished.

  A strong memory of that early period of TV production was of bodies: bodies on gurneys, bodies in boxes, bits of bodies, bodies bleeding, dummy bodies, alien bodies, bodies embedded with artificial components, bodies slated to vanish, bodies popping out of bodies, bodies just returned from the beyond, and bodies set to explode. A few of these bodies were used on my own show, but I'd also see "a galore of bodies" (Linus's term) while visiting Monster Machine, where they were experts in the trick-wiring of both latex dummies and real people, making their subjects explode, cough up blood, shimmy, or radiate green light on cue.

  I popped in for a visit one rainy day after they'd been working there a year and found the two intently wiring a man's girdle with explosives and fake blood, an outfit that was to be worn in a police thriller then shooting downtown, one in which everybody shoots everybody in the climax. "Hey Richard," Linus said. "Check this out. We put the blood into these little ravioli cubes and then attach them to an outward bursting charge."

  "Truly a gore-fest," Hamilton proudly added, coiling multicolored wire into an FM blast-detonator and discharging a gelatinous glob onto a plywood sheet. "Lunch?"

  "Bagel run," Linus said.

  We were headed out the door when Hamilton's pager beeped and Linus suddenly had to pee. Left alone, I wandered around the building and saw a door that was slightly ajar. I opened it, thinking I might find a studio. What I found instead must have been a corpse storage room, a room unlike any I could have imagined—men and women, children and aliens; whole, cut in two, doused in blood; arms and legs stacked like timber; glass bottles of eyes and shelves of noses. Thelight was dim and the air was stifled and dusty. In the center of the room sat a pile of used bodies, which appeared to have fulfilled their cinematic destiny and were now slated for selective demolition—pink latex aliens, moist and flabby. I walked over to the pile, fascinated with this unlit bonfire.

  I circled the room and a wire tugged my sweater. I heard a thunk behind me and saw a dummy that I probably ought not to have seen: a plastic female body almost identical to Karen—bony, taut, skeletal, and yellowed, made of polyurethane foam, with long straight brown Orion hair parted in the middle. The fallen corpse was now leaning against a wall near an electrical subunit, as though freeze-dried. I heard Hamilton's voice in the corridor: "Hey Linus, where's Richikins?" He walked past the door, saw me, and smiled, thinking I'd be enjoying the local attraction. He came around to where I stood, looked at the dummy, looked at me, and said, "Uh-oh. Sorry Richard. We used this one in a movie last month—this movie about people who survive a plane crash but who never get rescued."

  "Yeah."

  "We should have boxed it."

  "Shit, Hamilton. Did you have to use a chenille shirt on it?"

  "Well, it does look authentic."

  I sighed; they'd meant no harm. I walked over to inspect the corpse, with its taxidermy glass eyes and dusty plastic hair. A fish inside my stomach wriggled and thrashed, and I looked away. Hamilton quietly sandwiched the body inside the pile of aliens. We ate lunch and afterward I drove to Inglewood. I wanted to see the real Karen, who only differed slightly from the plastic female replica I'd just seen.

  As the years progressed and I began to notice ideas inside my head changing, as well as detecting new sensations in my heart—my soul? The fact was that our work continually exposed us, day in, day out, to a constant assembly line of paranoia, extreme beliefs, and spiritual simplifications. The routine nature of these ideas had begun to activate parts of me that previously remained untouched. Like mostpeople I'd known, I was unconcerned with what happens to "me" after I die. Implicit was a vague notion that I would somehow continue in another form and that was that. But then new doubts surfaced: Would I continue on? And how'?

  Linus asked good questions whenever I fell into one of my reflective states. On-set one day, he asked me, "Richard, let me ask you this—What is the difference between the future and the afterlife?"

  "Is this what you were thinking about down in Las Vegas?" I asked.

  "Maybe. But answer the question."

  "The difference is that…" I was temporarily stumped.

  "Yes?"

  "The difference," I said, "is that the afterworld is all about infinity; the future is only about changes on this world—fashion and machines and architecture." We were working on a TV movie about angels coming down to Earth to help housewives. The sunlight was hurting my eyes even though I was wearing dark glasses.

  "So," Linus asked, "when you die, do you still get to watch TV and read magazines and see what's happening on Earth? Or do you go someplace where that's not an issue?"

  "I'm not sure. It would really bug me not to know what the city would look like in a hundred years. Or what my favorite stars would look like fifty years from now."

  "Hmmm." The "star" of the angel movie walked by and asked Linus for moisturizer for her elbows. "I'm in special effects," he replied, "I can give you a dab of bloody red goo to rub into them." The "star" walked away miffed, no sense of fun.

  I began to think about other issues—about leadership, about who was in charge of the world and who was not. Like many people, repeated exposure to paranormal situations
caused me to develop those niggling little feelings that certain truths were being withheld. UFOs seemed silly, but then there was that little bit of me that said maybe.

  "Look at it this way," Linus said before getting up to arrange a drooping wing, "you have to take all these little bits of nothing thatwe're given—aliens, conspirators, angels, big government—and from them you have to construct a useful picture of the afterlife. Or the future. Either way, is it enough? All these cheesy movies of the week we help make—TV movies with long-dead fighter pilots reemerging into the modern world; strange children writing binary messages seized by the government; cannibalism; vanishings; kidnapped college students; burnt people returned to life; loggers who've seen God; green blood; disembodied souls being enticed back into a body—" His pager beeped. "Mariana. Gotta go."

  I sat there in the sun. The catering truck was cleaning up with clangs and slams. The sunlight and heat was intense. I felt like I was inside a beam shooting down from a flying saucer—a beam that would make me float up into the sky and into heaven, where I would then receive answers.

  13 REJECT EVERY IDEA

  When I discovered that Hamilton and Pam were doing heroin, I first assumed it was a practical joke, because the drug had by then become a local cliche, the Port of Vancouver having in recent years become a salad bar of cheap Asian drugs. The two had rented a small 1950s house at the end of Moyne Drive, a spit away from Karen's family's house and Linus and Wendy's. During a March wrap party, I found two syringes, soiled cotton balls, and so forth in the trash can of their en-suite bathroom—plus rubber tubing lying on the counter. It wasn't a joke; they'd just been too lazy or out of it to clean up. I became angry at them for being so medically stupid and dangerously and pointlessly trendy.

  Hamilton had walked into the bedroom while I was still flipping out over the discovery. I confronted him without even thinking. "Let me get this straight, Hamilton. You were at a party, and in between hand-fuls of Doritos someone said, 'Hey—wanna do some smack?' And you said, 'Sure! Stick the needle right here'? At least this explains why you and Pam have been so blase lately—as well as the long-sleeve shirts."

  Hamilton was serene. He gave a tender little sigh and stared me down. "Life is only so exciting, Richard. And it soon becomes a drag. This cool cat plans to enjoy his ninth life. Heroin's not a meaning, but it does make life feel as though life still has possibilities. I'm getting old; it's becoming harder and harder to be a unique individual."

  "Life is a drag? What—are you a feewager now? 'Bummer, man.'' I mean, how passe, Hamilton. Heroin. How totally ten minutes ago. A drag?" A city-wide rash of China White ODs made me feel protective and prudish.

  Hamilton pursed his lips; I could see he was preparing to shut down on me shortly. "Curious to see you being a prig, Richikins. Excusez-moi if I've committed a lifestyle violation."

  "Since when is life a drag, Hamilton? Things are going well. Things have never been so good."

  He made a pfffft noise and shot me a patronizing glance that made me feel eight years old, like I'd felt when I hid my mother's cigarettes to make her stop smoking. He sat on the bed. "Don't you understand, Richard? There's nothing at the center of what we do."

  "I—"

  "No center. It doesn't exist. All of us—look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there's nothing else." I felt I was getting the bad news I'd been trying to avoid for so long.

  "But didn'—"

  He cut me off. "Shhh. At least Pam and I accept things as they are. And I wish you'd let us do that. We get our job done. We pay our taxes. We never forget people's birthdays. So just let us be." He stood up. "Good night, Reverend. Ta ta." He floated out of the room and yet again I had that sick feeling that accompanies a recently bruised friendship. I thought of all my recent years of AA abstention—weeks on end with my head feeling like a rotten pumpkin—all to combatdoubts, to kill time, to wait for something that might never happen, some revelation that a center did exist. I felt very lost there in the bedroom. I walked the four miles home.

  Home was a small, recently purchased two-bedroom condo in North Vancouver—a ragtag old seventies condo with slatted cedar walls and Plexiglas bubble skylights. It had, according to Linus, an elusive "sex-in-the-hot-tub, cum-on-the-ultrasuede" character. I loved my little condo merely for its calmness and coolness and the view of the mountains out back; it was the first place I'd ever lived in that actually felt like my own. I was glad to be home.

  Around eight o'clock the next evening my doorbell rang: Pam, white-faced and bushed after PA-ing a TV movie filming nearby. "Ghost Mom returns to Earth to help her family fight land developers." She sat pooped but birdlike on the couch. She shushed me and crossed her arms. She looked at the floor.

  "What?" I asked, trying to be casual.

  Silence. "It's happening again, Richard."

  "What is?"

  "You know. I know you know. Stuff. Junk."

  "How long now?"

  "A few months? It's manageable. Nothing hardcore yet. But it's getting bigger. It always does." She stood by the window.

  "Are you—?"

  "Shhh!" She huffed out a carbon dioxide sprite into the glass and continued: "I've escaped before, Richard, we all know that. Maybe I can again. I'm still a little bit fabulous."

  "Okay. Can you function while you're on it? I mean, doesn't it zonk you out?"

  "Au contraire, it makes us zingy."

  "Zingy?"

  "You look sad, Richard. Don't be. You'll do me a favor?"

  A pause. "Sure."

  "We've never judged you. Don't judge us. We enjoy liking you. It should stay that way.""It could stay that way"

  "Shush."

  We talked a bit, then went into the kitchen where she drank an Orange Crush. We talked more, mostly in circles. Then Pam chugged her pop and hopped through the rain and into her car, driving back to Hamilton in a halfhearted Transylvanian drag race.

  Megan was going through teen dramas at that time. In 1996, at age sixteen, she was a little girl in so many ways. She read her fantasy books and her eyes lit up when she talked about magic. I thought she was a wise, cool kid who could obtain better marks in school if she'd only try. She dressed weirdly, but then big deal. She'd dyed her hair nighttime black (with mouse brown roots) and used black nail polish exclusively. Her skin was morgue-white. She had piercings up and down her ears, nose, and heaven only knows where else. She spent weeks sequestered behind her locked bedroom door, a nonstop boom box pumping out endless rotations of albums by the Cure. It seemed a typical enough rebellion.

  Megan and Lois had a particularly vivid relationship. Lois considered Megan's friends losers—responsible for her rebellion. And Megan baited Lois to no end, as, for example, the time Megan and her friend Jenny Tyrell staged a phone conversation when they knew Lois was eavesdropping on the extension.

  "How many cocaine straws do you think you could get out of a yellow McDonald's straw, Jenn?"

  "Idunno. Three?"

  "No. I think it's more like two and a half. I've got a whole pile here in my room. I'll cut some while we talk—I can see what looks like the best length." Lois stormed into Megan's bedroom at that point only to hear Megan crow.

  Lois ranted, "You think you're so clever, don't you? Who gives you the money to pay for all your things?"

  "I do. I sell your ugly little owl figurines one by one to collectors, Grandma."

  Shrieks.Once a teenager decides to be bad, the cycle is hard to break. Megan's phase kept spiraling downward. And the drug issue was scaring me. I don't think Megan did as much as Lois suggested, but it was worrisome nonetheless. Drugs were so different than when I was young. Pot was once a few giggles, munchies, spaciness for a few hours, then a headache. Modern drugs—previously unknown acid molecules, dimethyl tryptamine, crack—were a parent's most fearful imaginings made compact and simple.

  In early 1997 came a small crisis. Megan and Lois had a
n extreme scream-fest over a black cotton sock that had made its way into Lois's white laundry cycle. Megan vanished. That night, Megan was found by a jogger passed out on a Burnside Park bench.

  The police constable said she'd been drinking heavily. "There was an empty rum bottle there. We went through her purse to try to locate an address; we found a large amount of pot and some psilocy-bin mushrooms."

  The cops let Megan off with a warning. When they left, Lois said, "She can't stay here. This is it. I love her, but she's lost to me."

  I understood. The next day I suggested to Megan, hung over and groggy, that she move into my spare bedroom, and she grudgingly accepted the offer. George, Lois, and the dog had gone away for the day, so the house was quiet. We grabbed a few posters and some knickknacks to make her new space her own. She spent most of her time at my house, too. She'd been suspended from Sentinel high school so often that having her around the house became the norm on weekdays.

  "What is it this time?"

  "I told my English teacher to go fuck up a rope."

  Or:

  "What is it this time?"

  "I wore a black lace shroud to gym class."

  "That's all?"

  "I lit a cigarette after I walked in. I blew smoke rings."

  We enrolled Megan in an alternative school in North Van; she seemed to do half decent. We were glad she was making progressuntil we learned the real reason she continued attending: the school was a close walk to the house of her charming new boyfriend, Skitter, whom I met by accident when I went to the school to drop off some documents. He and Megan were off for lunch (drugs) somewhere over on Lonsdale.

  "You must be, like, the old man. Huh?" Muttonchop sideburns. Dice tattoo. Beady eyes looking out from a hopped-up '71 Satellite Sebring. A real doozy of a boyfriend.

  "I'm Megan's father, yes." Lord, I felt old. "And you are … ?"

  "Skitter, man."

  "Skitter," screamed Megan, "just take off, okay?" She was in the passenger seat and refused to look at me. "Boot it."