Girlfriend in a Coma

by Douglas Coupland

  "Hey man—gotta go." And with that, Skitter's car farted itself out of the parking lot.

  Skitter was every parents' worst fears of a daughters' dream date. He lived in a moss-roofed 1963 cereal box in darkest Lynn Valley atop an unmown lawn sparked with gasoline burns and neglected auto parts. A disassembled black Trans-Am on blocks rested in the carport. One could almost hear the neighbors' groans of shame at Skitter's house. A few times Megan called me on his cell phone: "You don't understand, Dad. Skitter's different."

  14 IN THE FUTURE EVERYTHING

  October 31, 1997—Halloween Friday was a day of profound omens and endless coincidence, but with no guidebooks to help in discerning a higher meaning. It was a day when the world became one enormous omen-making, luck-producing factory. Later, I would learn that coincidences are the most planned things in the world. Later, I would learn that every single moment is a coincidence.

  My enchanted day began just after I woke up from a sexy dream, like ones I'd had as a teenager, to my favorite song, "Bizarre Love Triangle," then playing on the clock radio.

  I was shaving and glanced through the bathroom window just as a swallow flew directly at me, hit the pane, and fell earthward, seemingly dead. It regained consciousness just moments before the neighbor's tortoiseshell cat pounced. Minutes later, I saw that a spider had spun her web across my kitchen sink. I fed her a nub of hamburger meat and she tweezed the meat away with her cranelike limbs.

  I dialed Tina about the day's work, but before her phone rang, Tina was already on the line—no ring. ("Isn't that the funniest thing … ?") I was helping Tina out on a TV thriller movie she was doing—one about an Iowa high school football team that develops a collective mind that may well be used to further the forces of evil.

  On the sidewalk outside my house, I found a twenty-dollar bill. In my car (that morning, covered with fresh raccoon paw prints), I turned on the radio and learned that a murder had occurred a block away from my house; the radio then played my next three favorite songs.

  At a stoplight, I looked at my odometer for the first time in months to see it revolve from 29,999 to 30,000. I looked up, there were two men on the corner with thalidomide arms staring at me.

  Arriving at work, I found the best parking spot. Exiting the car, a woman passed by with a stroller-load of screaming twins. She winked, smiled, and said, "Ain't life grand?" At the lot's edge, workers were pouring a concrete slab. They asked if I wanted to trace my initials in the concrete, and so I did. Just as I was doing this, an electrical circuit box on a telephone pole coughed itself open in a shimmy of sparks.

  Coincidences, omens, and luck relentlessly continued. Our film crew was on location in the agricultural flatlands of Chilliwack, a ninety-minute drive away. On the drive there, we witnessed not one but two spectacular car crashes on the other side of the freeway. A few miles on, a pair of hawks circled the freeway chasing a pigeon.

  While driving, I won twenty-five dollars on a scratch-and-win lottery ticket that had been lying on the dash for weeks. Then we learned that all three people in my car had the same birthday.

  A mile before we arrived at the location, a rogue cow sat stupidly in the thin road's center. We stopped and got out of the car; we saw a rainbow, and the cow ran away. The moment we arrived on locationa hailstorm began. My cell phone rang and it was Megan calling to tell me she loved me.

  The next call was George phoning from Lions Gate, where Karen had been transferred the previous week with a slight respiratory problem. Apparently she was well again and would be returning to Inglewood some time next week.

  While we waited for the hail to melt, we had a rock-throwing contest to try to hit a telephone pole across the field—I hit the pole on my first try.

  The day just wouldn't quit. I was being swept down a river of grace and wonder. The weather turned dry and crisp with Indian summer sparkle. The crew were hoping we'd wrap early so they'd have time to gussy themselves up for a Halloween party in North Vancouver later that night over at Hillary Markham's, a prop lady living near the Cleveland Dam.

  The coincidences continued: I found a gold ring in the grass at the side of the field. One of the actors, the coach character, was an old high school friend, Scott, who told me that a girl we knew in high school had just died of stomach cancer.

  A fumbled football landed in the ditch, and as I went to pick it up, three snakes slithered around the ball and then melted into the reeds. To the right of the ball grew a sequoia-like marijuana plant, which I traded to a coworker named Barton in lieu of money for his stereo system that I'd been wanting to buy.

  In my jacket's breast pocket I found the house key I thought I'd lost the month before. I began to feel almost drunk with karma. The shoot went swimmingly; we finished almost two hours earlier than scheduled. I returned to town with Tina and two other staffers. I popped by the studio and borrowed a silver Apollo astronaut's suit used several episodes earlier. I drove home to change and relax before the party.

  After a quick nap, I started to dress. I was in such a fine mood— such a day! I couldn't have known that putting on my silver jacket in my quiet house that crisp October afternoon was going to be tke last truly calm moment I would ever have—the last silently normal moment of my life.Before going to the party I drove up to Linus's house. He'd placed various rather terrifying monsters around his yard and arranged lighting so that after the trick-or-treaters had finished and were walking down the driveway, the monsters would flare up. I stayed to watch the festivities and a few trick-or-treaters. The first were two sweet little kids and their dad. One of the kids was barely six. Linus gave them each a Crunch bar, and as they scurried away, he lit up the monsters and the kids began to wail in fear. Linus hadn't anticipated this. The father yelled, "What are you, some kind of freak? Jesus, these are just little kids!"

  Pang of conscience; monster floodlighting switched off. ("Oops!") The monsters tucked away.

  Linus left his bowl of candy outside the door and fetched his costume, a cardboard U-Haul box painted black. I asked him what he was and he said he was going as the Borg. I just don't get Trekkies.

  The Halloween party began just after dark and was a smashing good time. Everybody arrived dressed up as an aspect of their subconscious: a Wonder Woman, a hobo, a cat, a Hell's Angel. These costumes reminded me of a cartoon I'd seen years before, one in which an Acme Hat Company delivery truck crosses a tall bridge. While doing so, it unleashes hundreds of hats that float to the ground and land on the characters, who suddenly become whichever hat had landed on their heads: pilgrims, Valkyres, toreadors, gangsters, and ballerinas. Wendy was working at the hospital's emergency room that night. I wondered what her hat might be: Joan of Arc's armored hood? Florence Nightingale's white nursing hat?

  My astronaut's costume was a smash. I don't think I'd ever had as many people, male or female, hit on me the way they did that night— its silver skin seemed to truly ooze sex. I began wondering about ways to further the astronaut look in daily life. A crew cut? An orange Corvette Stingray?

  But Hamilton and Pam were the ones who stole the show with their costumes that night. Pam walked in the door wearing two large red cardboard hearts—one on her back and one on her front. ("I'm acinnamon candy!") Behind her was Hamilton, who zombie-walked through the door making the party go silent. Pam and Linus had done a remarkable job of transforming him into a rotting zombie with gobbets of flesh hanging down his arms and legs, his skin a map of olive green, ochre lesions and eruptions of vile mashed-potato goo. Black plague sores dotted his body like island outlines on a map of Southeast Asia. After waiting a moment for his costume to make full impact, Hamilton chirped up: "I'm a Leaker!"

  We all said, "Wha— ?"

  "A Leaker. You don't know what a Leaker is?"

  No's all around.

  "Oh, I must tell you. Oh—wait a second—" He reached for his eye. "Oops! My eye just fell out." Everybody screamed in good-natured horror as Hamilton squished his left eye shut and held up a glass eye
. The music turned down slightly. He pretended to reinsert the eye and said, "There. That's better. Now, a cocktail, methinks. Mr. Liver is thirstier than usual." A tray of martinis came by; Hamilton grabbed one and plopped in the eyeball.

  The party started up again and Hamilton and Pam joined Linus, Tina Lowry, and me. Tina said, "No fair, Hamilton. You have to tell us what a Leaker is."

  "With pleasure," Hamilton said. "I first discovered Leakers maybe fifteen years ago—back when I was living down in that Gastown apartment building. Eighty-one? Eighty-two? I forget. Anyway, my neighbors were mostly a mixture of poor arty types and senior citizens on fixed incomes."

  "Get to the Leakers, Hamilton!" Tina said.

  "Okay. All right, already. Well, what would happen is this: I lived there for two years, and each August during the annual heat wave, a senior citizen on an upper floor would pay his rent, lock all of his doors and windows, watch TV, and promptly die. But because they were old or didn't have friends or what have you, nobody noticed them from one month to the next. And so—"

  "I don't think I want to hear this," Tina said.

  "And so—one morning I was walking over the cobblestones,returning from a pierogi breakfast at Gunther's Deli, and there were not one but three fire trucks out front of the building, as well as cop cars and two inhalator trucks. The firemen were wearing ventilator masks normally used for toxic spills, they had hatchets and crowbars, and they were carrying piles of construction debris they chucked into a specialized van."

  "Oh, God—" said Tina, holding her stomach.

  "That's right," said Hamilton. "Unit 403. Mrs. Kitchen. The people in the suite below were reporting something black making a stain on the ceiling right above their TV set. The landlord went upstairs to investigate. There was no answer, and so he opened the door and was whomped on the nose by the absolute worst smell in the known universe—shit and piss and vomit, but a thousand times worse. The firemen arrived and had to remove every single object in the apartment and burn the rubbish. Even the Formica kitchen counter and the dry-wall were impregnated with the smell. The suite below had to be gutted, too. That's where Pamela here comes in."

  We looked at Pam in her cinnamon heart costume. She curtsied. Hamilton continued: "The police brought in smell experts from the university. They told us this weird fact, that odors are like a game of tug-o-war. If one smell is pulling one way, there's always another smell to pull it in the exact opposite way. And apparently the opposite smell of dead people is artificial cinnamon."

  To a chorus of ooh's, Hamilton went on. "For weeks afterward, the building was replete with sickening sweet fumes of cinnamon candy. The odor vanished after a while, but the next year I returned from working up north and the cinnamon smell was there again. I asked my next door neighbor, Dawn, if there'd been another Leaker, and she said, 'Yup. Suite 508. Mr. Huong.' So next time you smell cinnamon …"

  A few minutes later, Tina and a few wardrobe people were all quite sozzled; I was drinking club soda. We became increasingly silly; Suzy from payroll and I went off to neck like teenagers in the backyard between the tool shed and the composter. Once there, we escalated through all levels of intimacy rather quickly until finally we were justourselves. The sky was black and starlit, with a pale blue Japanese fishbone cloud tickling the moon. And so we reclined. We were cold, but so what?

  We watched the sky silently, as though a gentle wind was blowing through our minds. It was then, just past midnight, when my pager beeped and shooed away our intimacy. We dressed and went inside. I dialed the number. It was Wendy calling from the hospital to tell me Karen was having difficulty. "Her readouts are going all wonky. Her heart's beating irregularly and her brain print looks like a seismo-graph."

  I couldn't imagine the world without Karen. "Should I come down right now?"

  "No. Sleep. Wait until morning. I know that sounds heartless, but we'll know more then. Lois and George aren't coming either."

  I began to cry. Wendy said, "You want me to come pick you guys up?"

  "No. Everybody's tanked. You missed a fun party."

  "Don't do anything drastic, Richard." She meant don't drink.

  "I'll be there in the morning," I said. "I need to go be alone."

  "I'm here. You have my pager number."

  But I did drink—I grabbed an almost full twenty-sixer of J&B and walked out of the party and over to the dam, which was silent. The water was turned off as the water levels were so low just before the fall rains. The dam was white like aluminum under the moon, clean and fat and strong. I walked across it, sipping from the bottle, and having crossed the dam, I had the notion that I would walk to Rabbit Lane through the canyon's pathways and once there, dump my butt on either Lois and George's front stoop or on Linus and Wendy's. I hadn't been drinking for years; the Scotch took only a few baby sips to transport me into that other place I wanted to go.

  I stumbled down a steep path with the world around me, the trees and air hushed as though waiting to jump out at me and yell, "Surprise!" Pearly blue clouds lit my shoes, which snagged on tree roots; my hands crushed delicate fall leaves. My mouth misted the airwith chuffs of steam that vanished instantly, like a thought of a thought of a thought. Inside my head I saw the ghosts of old logging trains that once passed by here. The land was still—even now, ninety years later—beginning to heal, unaware of the sterile, suburban tracts above, the driveways and flowers and dishwashers and bird feeders. What seemed like tall trees paled from within the mighty ancient lumber stumps from which they grew.

  A few swigs later, I was down by the salmon hatcheries, a fish-growing facility built in the seventies to help the Pacific salmon spawn. Like the dam upriver, the hatcheries were aluminum white in the moon. They were rectangular shaped concrete mazes, thigh-deep with cold water. They resembled office towers laid on their sides. Juvenile salmon skulked through the concrete maze like bored guests at an amusement park.

  Another swig and I was soon down below the salmon hatcheries, alone as the sunlight began leaking into the sky at dawn. With no water flowing down from the dam, the river had become a beaded string of dark ponds. I hobbled on the riverbed boulders, my balance gone. The Scotch bottle broke. And in that breaking, I looked to a pool behind a rock, a large deep river pool. There I saw a thousand salmon waiting to spawn, unable to swim upriver, trapped together, this clump of eggplant-purple salmon whose only wish, whose only yearning, was to go home. These salmon mulled within the stilled pool—a deep dark voluptuous brain—fluttering at the edges like black apple blossoms. The fish were dreaming of sex and the death that comes afterward.

  The whiskey caught me. I had to vomit, so I turned around and retched into a pile of stones. I hopscotched on the rocks a bit farther down the river and tripped and fell, knocking my head on a boulder. Woozy, I laid down on my stomach, my head propped and looking into the water. The sky was brightening, and I rubbed my skull.

  I looked at the pale blue sky. I saw trees the color of Karen's eyes.

  A seagull screeched, a heron jumped up, and water trickled down. I remembered an old thought: When I was young, my father always ensured that the family would visit the killer whales in the StanleyPark Aquarium once every year. It was his way of letting us know that our city lay beside the ocean and we lived where we did only by Nature's good grace. The aquarium wasn't as crowded then as it became in later years; one could easily ask the whale tenders if one could touch the whales—their bright white leather spots, their black dorsals packed with steel, and their teeth of sharpened ivory drills circling meaty, clean pink tongues the size of a tabletop, swallowing buckets of platinum fish at one go. A decade later, when it became my own turn to take Megan to visit the whales, I discovered that Megan had already decided penning whales in a zoo was cruel—animal prison. She became an avid follower of any newspaper information about whales being captured or released, which struck a chord in me. One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in capt
ivity, then released into the wild—into its ancestral sea—its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end. I mention this as I consider what happened next in my life and as I consider the changes that followed.

  A bird trilled above. I blinked and paused, and then I cried, because I knew that at that same moment three miles away in a crypt-like hospital room Karen was blinking, too—that after 6,719 days of sleep, she had just awakened.

  PART 2

  15 NO IMPERIAL CHILDREN

  Imagine that for an unknown reason you have begun to rapidly lose your memory. You now no longer know what month it is, say, or what type of car you drive, or the season or the food in your refrigerator or the names of the flowers. Quickly, quickly your memory freezes—a tiny perfect iceberg, all memories frozen, locked. Your family. Your sex. Your name—all of it: turned into a silent ice block. You are free of memory: You now look at the world with the eyes of an embryo, not knowing, only seeing and only hearing. Then suddenly the ice melts, your memory begins returning. The ice is in a pond—it thaws and the water warms and water lilies grow from your memories and fish swim within them. You are you.

  And so here we have Karen, asleep for seventeen years, ten months, and seventeen days. Above Karen stands a nurse who changes her J-tube. This nurse has been changing J-tubes for a dozen years. She looks down at Karen and feels nothing and thinks of other things— her choir practice that night, a wool coat she saw on sale at the Bay.

  The nurse remembers that Karen will most likely die shortly from her pneumonia—no heroics. Really? She seems to have recovered rather well from the illness that brought her in. She pauses and looks more closely at Karen: poor thing—nearly killed off this time. Back to Inglewood and then what? Better dead than alive. No love, no past, no future, no present, no sex. A sad thing. Half a person. Yet even now, almost seventeen years later, prettiness is evident from Karen's bones. What she has missed in life! The nurse looks away from Karen's face and resumes J-tube procedure.