Girlfriend in a Coma

by Douglas Coupland

  Wendy's "day" had already passed the twenty-six-hour mark when her first sleeper arrived dead at the hospital just shortly into the lunch hour—a North Van housewife a neighbor had found sleeping on the steps outside her house, her Collie's leash in her hand, the dog whimpering. Wendy was examining this body when two more sleepers were brought through the door—an eight-year-old girl who had fallen asleep on a swing set and an elderly woman's husband who had fallen asleep on the passenger side of her car while driving to the pet food store. She thought he might have had a stroke.

  And then the cord of normalcy snapped. Over the next several hours, Wendy helped catalog perhaps a hundred more sleepers, most of whom had been driven to the hospital by friends or family, owing to overtaxed ambulances. And for every body taken to the hospital there were hundreds if not thousands out there who didn't make it.

  Later in the day, the radio broadcasted a plea saying that the hospitals were unable to process any further patients. Nothing was known about this new sickness, nor was any treatment available.

  And now the hospital staff are confused and frightened beyond words, but they work on. Wendy reaches the thirty-four-hour mark and is dead on her feet and needs to sleep, yet at the same time she needs to go home—to check on Linus—Linus—as well as to … as well as to … what? Phones are out, cell phones, too.

  What is happening is what Karen knows about. This also has something to do with Pam's and Hamilton's stereo dreams. The answer isn't at the hospital. The answer is back at Rabbit Lane.

  Stepping over log booms of the dead, she is feeling almost as tired as the day's sleepers. She understands the sleepers and their completelack of fear as they go groggy and lie down wherever the need hits them. Wendy feels the same way, but she knows it's only sleep she needs at the moment, not death.

  Linus had dropped her off at work yesterday, her own car being in the shop. She finds that the only transportation alternative available now is walking: Taxis gone; don't know how to steal a car. Walking will take a few hours, but she refuses to hitchhike—even out on Lonsdale all civil decency seems to have evaporated. In the dark, she walks up to the Trans-Canada highway, where cars are traveling at speeds she thought unimaginable. She spots two accidents—either sleepers or leadfoots—but no emergency vehicles attend the scene. Nobody seems to be slowing up, even for a juicy rubberneck, which strikes Wendy as most unusual human behavior. She considers this when, without warning, the Esso station by the Westview overpass explodes like a jet at an air show—bodies like ventriloquist dolls puked into the sky as though in a cartoon or an action-adventure film.

  The traffic slows down and freezes, never to start again. 7s everybody going home? Will home be safe? Or perhaps home is only familiar. What do they expect at the other end that will make them feel safe? What will make them strong?

  Wendy walks over to the gas station, where seared bodies lie in the grass embankment just below: all six thoroughly dead, no survivors. Shards of a VW bus remain where the gas pumps once stood amid the husks of shotguns and rifles. What can Wendy do? She's so tired she can barely think, let alone act.

  From the grass below the station, Wendy picks up a twenty-four-pack of M&Ms and decides to walk onward; nobody can be saved here. And what other choices does she have? Only the electricity, perversely, seems to be intact: streetlights and the storefronts light the looted Westview Mall. Sleeping and dead bodies lie crash-dummied across the asphalt, sprinkled with broken liquor bottles and shop-front glass. How many people are dead? How many people will die?

  Why is this happening? Am I infected? Is Linus okay? Where was everybody and will they reach home safely?Wendy looks onto the Trans-Canada, where many people like her, stranded without cars, are walking dronishly down the freeway's margin, shuffling inside the glare of the headlights stalled behind them. A middle-aged man in a yellow raincoat is asleep under the overpass. A multicar pileup has plowed off the Mosquito Creek bridge and down into the ravine.

  Wendy decides to walk overground, through quiet suburban streets, around the small commercial strip at Edgemont Village where the armed forces are guarding a Super-Valu. Even there she can see a dead soldier asleep in a Starbucks alcove.

  In one of the smaller streets, she finds a ten-speed bike lying on its side for no discernible reason. She looks around—nobody near—then takes it and pedals toward the dam, where she crosses over and reaches home through the dark forest she knows by heart.

  24 THE PAST IS A BAD IDEA

  Megan is keeled over a flower bed vomiting up the eel that writhes within her stomach; camouflaging her pregnancy is becoming increasingly difficult. In the flower bed's soil, she sees beer bottle caps and cigarette butts. Ugh. Skitter is no dream neighbor: shitty, oily car wrecks rust inside the garage; the lawn is a crab-grassed junkyard.

  She feels her stomach giggle, as though the eel has left and a small bird is now fluttering inside her—this new piece of life. She wonders what personality her new child will have. Will it be condemned to loserdom with Skitter's DNA? Megan hasn't told Skitter about her pregnancy, nor does she feel likely to. Once she tells him, the child is no longer just her own; she'll have to share it. She doesn't want this.

  She was tempted to mention her pregnancy last week when the Americans were up taping the TV show, but pulled back.

  The TV show: Megan can't believe how sucky she looked in it, but she thinks it was more good than bad. She's happy that she and Karen came across as pals rather than as a mother-daughter unit. And Megan's also happy that they only gave Lois a small amount of air-time. Ha!

  Walking in through Skitter's basement door, she catches a reflection of herself in a scrap of mirror leaning against the wall. Last night her head looked fat, but Karen, so emaciated in real life, looked almost fashionably thin. So what they say about cameras adding ten pounds is true. More like twenty.

  Back inside the kitchen, Megan finds a clean mug and makes instant coffee and turns on the radio to a local rock station, at which point she notices sirens in the background obscuring the music. She looks down at her arms in the watery midday light: She is stronger now. She eats only good food. She exercises. She no longer does drugs, and she feels ridiculous being in Skitter's house—as though she's been forced back into the seventh grade. Stupid of her to end up here. She can faintly hear Skitter and Jenny making it in the bedroom.

  The first sip of coffee burns her tongue, and she idly kills time melting a few undissolved coffee nodules on top of the coffee. She reads biker magazines for a while and time vanishes. She needs to vomit and again heads out into the flower bed. There, after a dry wretch, she lifts her head and sees a pair of plaid-trousered legs protruding from behind a corner of the neighbor's house. She walks over to investigate. It is an older man—sixty? He seems to have had a heart attack. She rings the man's doorbell, but nobody answers, so she returns to Skitter's to phone an ambulance. The phone is dead.

  There is a song on the radio—"Blue Monday"—a rhythmic 1980s dirge. Then the radio signal goes blank. Megan goes to change the station, but the stations all sound foreign. The music has vanished. Just voices now: a crisis is occurring, but authorities are unable to be more specific. The gist is that people are dropping like flies all over town—a panic is gridlocking the city and causing untold violence. Megan looks out the window: small birds flittering in the firs; a touch of rain. Certainly no crisis could be happening here. Is this a joke?The radio station has decided to cancel all music; other stations have done the same. Announcers everywhere are telling people not to panic or use phones or electricity unless their situation is critical. Megan decides that this news is important enough to tell Skitter and Jenny, and she knocks on the bedroom door and hears no reply. She knocks louder, to which Skitter yells, "Jeezws. I'm busy. Get the fuck away." Megan knocks once more. Skitter rips open the door and says, "What?" Jenny is in the background looking defiant, lighting a cigarette and showing off her breasts.

  "There's a crisis going on."

  "You g
ot me up for a that?"

  "Crisis. A plague. People are dying. Like in the movies."

  "Go away, and that's a shitty joke." Skitter locks the door and Megan pounds it once more; Skitter returns and yells again for her to leave. At this point, Skitter's car-fixing friends, Randy and Scott, galumph in the front door, both looking pale.

  "Hey, Megan. Skitter in there?"

  "Duh."

  "Skitter," shouts Randy, "the city's all fucked up, man. The news is for real."

  "Randy, I…" Skitter looks at the three faces outside his door. He throws a towel around his waist. "Okay. Crank the TV."

  "Skitter," whines Jenny, "come back."

  "Not now, Jailbait. Time for action."

  Megan says, "You're such a pig, Skitter. You don't believe anything until a guy tells you."

  Soon everyone is in the living room watching TV. The CNN footage they see tightly clamps their attention: helicopter shots of smoking downtown cores—Atlanta? Los Angeles? New York? All cities have gone random; all major bridges and tunnels are hopelessly snarled, accident-clogged roads everywhere resemble the contents of a child's Halloween sack spilled onto the pavement. A local news helicopter shows Vancouver's freeways and bridges rendered impassable. Pedestrians resembling evacuees trudge to suburban homes far away, occasionally having to gingerly step over bodies.Looting is kept to a minimum—people are too fearful of contamination to steal.

  The five people in Skitter's living room stare out the window into the backyard greenery. Is this a bad dream for all of them? Randy and Scott take off to wherever they live. Skitter plays with his mustache and grins: "I'm going to do a bit of window shopping. Megan, Jenny. Coming along?"

  "Give me a ride home," Megan says.

  "What—to your Dad's place?"

  "Rabbit Lane, bozo."

  Minutes later, as they drive out onto the larger roads of the suburb, bedlam reigns. Traffic lights are skipped; cars drive over lawns; cars containing sleepers are pushed off the roadside by more robust vehicles. A corner grocery-store owner stands outside his front door with a sawed-off shotgun, a weapon Megan recognizes from her lifetime of TV viewing.

  Jenny is jack-rabbiting about the car's front seat, swearing and bug-eyed at the dimensions of the crisis. Sleepers are everywhere—in cars, on sidewalks, in parking lots. "Oh, this is just too weird. Skitter, I wanna go home."

  "Soon, enough. I want to do some shopping first."

  "Everybody's heading home," Megan says to herself, and she wonders what will happen to these people once they get home. Will they wait to die? Will they sit still? She realizes that there is no tactical advantage to being home. At home all you can do is nothing. Even still, what other place can there be?

  The car pulls up to a Shopper's Drug Mart in Lynn Valley, where the parking lot is now a crashing, squealing bumper car ride. All car windows are rolled up and many drivers are simply plowing through the landscaping to escape. The power is out. Skitter leaps out of the car with his down jacket pockets brimming with handguns. At the mall's main entrance, Megan and Jenny can see an RCMP officer telling Skitter to leave. Skitter shoots him dead right there in the head and the two girls scream and hop out of the car. Skitter has gone mental.Megan runs up to the officer and cradles his leaking head. She hears another blast from inside the mall and sees a few stragglers run outside clutching weird, stolen-looking objects: enormous cartons of cigarettes and boxes of appliances. "Jenny!" Megan turns around, but Jenny has fallen asleep on a bench not far away, her mouth open, a forgotten newspaper flapping under her tongue.

  Another blast cuts the air. Megan runs to the other side of the lot, opposite the car, and tries to collect her wits. Shortly, Skitter leaves the Drug Mart with cartons of prescription tablets. He looks around, more likely for other armed opponents than for Megan, and when he reaches the car, he hurls the boxes into the backseat and then—and then—nothing.

  Megan walks over for a better look; Skitter has fallen asleep in the front seat. Megan is too confused to be terrified for herself. "Oh, God—oh God." The malls seems drained of people, and the parking lot has cooled down to near emptiness. Traffic on the road above is filled with speeders and horns and bumps and squeals.

  How to get home?

  The sky darkens. She can hear herself breathe. It's only a week past the shortest day of the year and it feels it. Looking at Skitter, she's too afraid of his death to rifle his pocket for his car's keys. She creeps into the mall, now lit only by emergency bulbs. From a sporting goods store she takes a mountain bike and from the drug store some Tylenol-3, two nine-volt flashlights, and Bubblicious gum. A lost springer spaniel behind her barks and startles her. Outside, back in Skitter's car, she takes two handguns then sets out to navigate her way home through the craziness of the highway.

  The two miles from Lynn Valley to Westview are vastly more insane than she could have conceived. Nothing is moving save for motorcycles and crazy people driving down the shoulders and over the embankments, plowing whatever lies in their way. Three times, men try to stand in her way to take her bike; three times, Megan has shot them in or near their feet and feels a bit sicker with each crack,

  She realizes the next miles of highway leading up to the Rabbit Lane exit are going to be impassable. While planning her next steps, amotorcyclist pulls over in front of her—a big bruiser Yamaha. The driver kicks the kickstand, hops off, winks at Megan, and falls asleep face-first onto the pavement.

  Megan instantly hops onto the bike and guns it up Delbrook Road, through Edgemont and across Cleveland Dam. By now it's fully dark. She takes the utility road up to Glenmore then bombs down Stevens and into Rabbit Lane. She is home.

  What an ucking-fay aste-way of an ay-day.

  Hamilton wakes up with a crashing headache and tumultuous hangover; his brain feels like a boxcar full of dying aliens being buried in the desert soil—an image taken from an old episode of Richard's TV show. Shortly before noon, he hobbles up for water, stubs his toe on a chair leg, curses, feels his head throb, and quickly snugs into the tangle of sheets and duvet that is his lair while he recuperates. The phone rings somewhere in the afternoon; he ignores it. Around three, he gets a glass of orange juice and the morning paper and tries to read the paper in bed, but he's still dizzy. He gives it up, turns out the light, and waits for Pam to return around six.

  Wendy is lost in the forest. She is tired. She thought she knew the correct pathway home; now she has only the hushed roar of the Dam to the north to give her guidance. There is no moon or glow from the city—the clouds are too dense. The ten-speed is gone long ago, its wheels bent after snagging a root. She hears occasional explosions or booms down toward the city.

  The path twists; trees that fell during last year's storms confuse her memory of the trails. Suddenly, there's a stream where there ought to have been soil and ferns where there ought to have been stone. Wendy falls to her knees—she is beyond tired. She can't even begin to count the hours she has been awake. A half-formulated idea flits within her mind: She will build a nest of ferns to keep her warm until daybreak. This is only a foolish child's dream. She knows it.

  She cuts her knee on a burl. She reaches down to hold the cut when in her peripheral vision she sees a pale yellow haze of light float downfrom the treetops, a shape and shade of green and gold, steadily falling down, down, down. She pivots her head to watch the light's steady downward sweep, steady and smooth like a glass elevator. It stops.

  "Hello, Wendy." It's Jared, standing before her, impossibly young, unchanged from the sunny day he threw a football to a startled Wendy eating lunch alone in the bleachers.

  "Jared? Sweetie? Is that you?"

  The light that is Jared holds his finger to his lips and shushes Wendy. He extends his hand and Wendy clasps its lightness—there is no actual touch sensation, yet suddenly she is warm. This is all she'd ever wanted.

  She says, "Jared, I've missed you so much. I've—we've all—" She begins to blubber. "I loved you and I miss you and the world has
never been the same since you left. And now I'm lost and I'm frightened and the world seems to be closing down and dying. I'm a doctor now—I was at the hospital today. Oh Wendy, stop being so emotional."

  Jared kisses his fingers, flicks the kiss at Wendy, smiles, and makes a wanking off gesture. He nods his head to indicate that Wendy should follow. His long curly hair doesn't jiggle as his head moves. Wendy follows him, lit by his body's gentle sulfur color. Wendy's feet squelch in mud patches and her cheeks burn red, thwacked by damp salmonberry twigs. They wind through unfamiliar paths, and they reach a straightaway that Wendy recognizes. Jared stops. He moves his eyebrows the way he did two decades previously to indicate that he's leaving.

  "You're leaving? No. Jared—no. Don't go. Please stay with me. Talk. I missed you so much. You were all I ever wanted. It's only half a world without you."

  But Jared gently pulls away his hand and walks back three paces. He smiles and melts downward into the soil like a peg in a hole.

  Wendy is left behind. She grabs a small stone at the point where

  Jared's head left the path and crushes it so hard in her palm that her skin bleeds. For years, Wendy had thought the world was fine andcomplete—that she could make do with what she had worked for and with what life had handed her. Now she knows this has never been true.

  She arrives out onto the unlit street and sees her own house unlit, but decides not go there. She sees candlelight down the road at Karen's, so she walks that way. Once inside, she looks around at the familiar faces lit by the flames. She says to them, "I'm going to sleep. I'm not tired—not that kind of tired—I'm exhausted." She tumbles into a warm clump on the couch. Linus places a mohair blanket over her, and Wendy flinches at his touch.

  25 2000 IS SILLY

  "The Queen is dead."