Girlfriend in a Coma

by Douglas Coupland

  "Confusing? Duh," Karen says.

  "Gift?" Hamilton doesn't believe me.

  "Uh-huh. You've all been allowed to see what your lives would be like in the absence of the world."

  Silence while everybody bites their lips.

  "This is like that Christmas movie," Pam says, "The one they used to play too many times each December and it kind of wore you down by the eighteenth showing. You know: what the world would have been like without you."

  "Sort of, Pam," I say, "but backwards. I've been watching over the bunch of you ever since Karen woke up, to see how different you'd be without the world."

  "Why us, Jared?" Linus asks. "I mean, why not a syphilitic middle aged rice trader in Lahore, India, with, um, um, a collection of taxi-dermied squirrels." He pauses. "Or a five-year old Nigerian girl who communicates to the world, um, um, only through a green-painted Barbie she found in the alley behind the Finnish Embassy. I mean, why MS?"

  "Why you? People never asked that question of Jimmy Stewart's character in It's a Wonderful Life."

  "That's the name," Pam says.

  "Just go with it," I recommend.

  Richard harrumphs.

  "You were spying on us?" Megan accuses—these modern kids—-so paranoid.

  "Nope. Just watching. And caring. And worrying. And freaking out.

  "What was so wrong about our lives that we had to go through the past year?" Linus asks. "At least Jimmy Stewart was having a life crisis. Our lives were going along pretty smoothly, actually."

  "Were they?" I ask. "I mean, were they really?"

  "Hey, Jared," Hamilton says, "it's not as if you were out there selling Girl Guide Cookies when you were down here. Who are you to watch over any of us and tell us what our lives should or shouldn't be?"

  "For starters, Hamster, I'm a ghost, so that gives me a few extra course credits. No, I didn't get to stay on earth for an extra few decades, but I did get to see—oh, good God, Hamilton—what do you want me to have—wings and a halo?"

  "For sta—"

  Karen interrupts: "Will you testosterone cases clam up? Shush!"

  Wendy says, "Jared, I get the impression that we were supposed to have been doing something else down here this past year—and that we've failed some kind of test."

  "Yeah," Richard adds. "And what if we had done the right thing,

  Jared? What would we have won—a trip to Rome on Sabena

  Airlines? A year's supply of Rice-a-Roni? Maybe you haven't noticed, but Earth is a big slag heap these days. There's not much we couldalter even if we wanted. What—we're supposed to start a new race of human beings? A new civilization? Assemble some new Noah's Ark? Build a legacy? We don't even know what we're going to be able to eat in a year or two. Tang? Each other?"

  Wendy adds, "Jared, there's radiation here now. And the weather isn't weather anymore. We can't plan for five years when we're unable even to plan for a week."

  "Wendy, you're carrying our kid," I say … oops. "What kind of life do you expect him to lead?"

  Wendy replies, "Him? You know the gender already? If you know the future, Jared, you ought to have thought of that beforehand."

  "Wait wait wait wait wait," Linus says. "You two made it?" Wendy's sigh is a confirmation. "You bastard!" he shouts at me, throwing a patio chair at the spot where he roughly imagines me to be floating. One of the chair's legs knocks over the barbecue's dome and the embers fall onto the ground, missing Richard by inches.

  "You pinhead!" Richard shouts, "You could have brained me."

  Linus ignores Richard and turns me. "You couldn't even keep it in your pants when your dead, you dumb jock." He swivels toward Wendy. "Very well. Where'd you do it? How'd you do it? Now I know why you've been so moony lately."

  "In the canyon. Two weeks ago. It wasn't sex sex," Wendy says, "It was a soul-to-soul thing. I didn't even remove my clothes."

  "Don't soul-to-soul me."

  "Linus," I say, "Cool down. I simply made her stop feeling lonely."

  "Yeah. Sure."

  Wendy and I sigh. "Linus—do you want me to make you pregnant, too? It's not impossible. I can arrange it."

  Richard is sweeping the embers into a small pile with a stray brick. Linus is confused. He wants to be angry but now he isn't sure what should be the anger's focus. Karen says, "It's not bad like you think,

  Linus."

  Linus sulks and the group stands silently and looks at me. Surprisingly, it is Richard who breaks the quiet, saying, "Jared's rightto be worrying about us." He puts down his marshmallow trident. "We really don't seem to have any values, any absolutes. We've always maneuvered our values to suit our immediate purposes. There's nothing large in our lives."

  Hamilton snaps in, "These past weeks are the first time I've felt good in years, Richard, and you're starting to bring me down. Do we really need to analyze our shortcomings so thoroughly?"

  "Yes, I believe we do," Richard says. "Jared's here to ask us to take a look at ourselves, Hamilton. I mean, look at us: Instead of serving a higher purpose we've always been more concerned with developing our 'personalities.' and with being 'free'"

  "Richard?" Karen asks.

  "Karen, let me say what I feel: This has been on my mind ever since Jared first appeared. I think we've always wanted something noble or holy in our lives, but only on our own terms. You know, our old beefs: The World Wide Web is a bore. There's nothing on TV. That video tape is a drag. Politics are dumb. I want to be innocent again. I need to express the me inside. What are our convictions? If we had any convictions would we even have the guts to follow them?"

  Marshmallows broil then slime through the grill and into the embers. Papery carbon husks above are blown away in the breeze like used black cocoons. "It's true," Linus says, and all eyes move to him. I let him speak because he's saying the right things. "Our lives have remained static—even after we've lost everything in the world—shit: the world itself. Isn't that sick? All that we've seen and been through and we watch videos, eat junk food, pop pills, and blow things up."

  Hamilton says, "Okay, Helen Keller, get to the point. And if you get any more depressing, I'm rearranging the furniture and not telling you how."

  "Hamilton," Richard says, "tell me—have we ever really gotten together and wished for wisdom or faith to come from the world's collapse? No. Instead we got into a tizzy because some Leaker forgot to return the Godfather III tapes to Blockbuster Video the day of the Sleep and now we can't watch it. Have we had the humility to gatherand collectively speak our souls? What evidence have we ever given of inner lives?

  Karen perks up: "Of course we have interior lives, Richard. I do. How can we not have one?"

  "I didn't say that, Karen. I said we gave no evidence of an interior life. Acts of kindness, evidence of contemplation, devotion, sacrifice. All these things that indicate a world inside us. Instead we set up a demolition derby in the Eaton's parking lot, ransacked the Virgin Superstore, and torched the Home Depot."

  "Aren't we holier than thou?" Wendy snipes at Richard, her arms tight around young Zygote Junior inside her stomach.

  "Actually, Richard," I say, "the demo derby looked like a lot of fun. And I like the way you spray-painted names on your cars. I thought your 'Losermobile' would win in the end."

  "Me, too. I—"

  Megan ignores Richard and looks at me: "Jared—stop talking about cars. What are we supposed to do now?" she asks. "How can we change? You arrived saying you would teach us things that would allow us to change. So tell us."

  My friends go calm—quiet. "Okay, guys, I think you want me to tell you that the world is a moral place. It is. But you're right to be thinking about your souls—the better parts of you—they're all desperate to climb from your bodies and leave you far behind. You're going to have to lead another life soon; a different life. The choice will be obvious when it arrives. You can get the world back yet."

  A salvo of questions follows: "But you didn't tell us how to—" "What do we do to—" "What happens
next?" "When do we—?"

  "Hold your horses. A few squabbles ago Wendy asked what it was you were supposed to have been doing here this past year. The answer is that you ought to have been squabbling twenty-four hours a day for all of this time—and asked a million questions about why the world became the way it did. If you'd done that, you'd have been returned to the world the way it was and you'd be smarter and wiser,

  But you didn't—arson, looting, cocktails, videos, and demo derbies— so now we move to Plan B."The barbecue hisses. "I'll return when the lightning ends. I'll meet you on Cleveland Dam in seven days—at sunset." "What lightning?" Hamilton asks. Lightning cracks; the sky ignites. "That lightning, goof ball."

  33 YOUR MESSAGE HERE

  When I was alive on Earth I always noticed how events in the night sky had such a powerful capacity to alter human moods. One fall night in the 1970s, I was at a BC Lions football game. Just after sunset and directly over the cheap-seat bleachers to the east, a full moon, amber and veined, pumped itself upward and seemingly hovered over the stadium's edge. At this point, the announcer said, "Ladies and gentlemen—lets have a big round of applause for … the Moonl" and everybody went nuts and the rest of the game felt like a Super Bowl.

  Around that same time, I was in a soccer tournament and the team and I had to fly to Manitoba on a red-eye flight. Somewhere over Saskatchewan I looked out the plane's window and saw the aurora borealis spritzing and jitterbugging up to the north—I felt as though

  I'd seen God singing along with the radio at a stoplight. We won the tournament. Fuckin' right we did!

  And then one night, shortly before I got leukemia, a thinly sliced crescent moon rested high in the south sky over Vancouver; the planet Venus, white and hot, was also in view, and I watched the two bodies veer ever closer until Venus finally hit the unlit portion of the lunar edge. Just before Venus disappeared, it looked as though there was a light directly on the Moon's surface. And shortly afterward, as I said, I got leukemia. So there.

  I mention events in the sky to help make sense of lightning and thunder and their profound effects on the soul. My friends have so far endured six days of continual storms and my old neighborhood and its surrounding forest are bursting in flames from untold numbers of lightning strikes. My friends are scrambling madly for cool air and sanctuary, having piled what few things they've been able to save into minivans in which they hightail up the charred stubble of the nearby golf course's pampas.

  Below them, the fire on the sloping neighborhoods burns like a million Bic lighters held up in the dark at some vast, cosmic Fleetwood Mac concert. There is nothing remaining on this mountain slope save for the foundations of houses, tree roots beneath the soil, and a swirling maze of roads that lead from nowhere to nowhere.

  Soon, two miles up the hill, the gang reaches a stone clubhouse surrounded by links of ashes. From within its solid interior they watch the lightning continue unabated, like watching a car crash that never stops, ripping and grinding and chewing and burning for day upon day upon day, sickening and dull.

  The night is chilly; the fireplace is stuffed with burning chairs, yet their room feels only slightly warm. Dinner was a few cans of chicken broth and tinned green beans found in the kitchen. Tablecloths and towels are used as bedsheets as a freak Arctic cold front lands upon them pre-dawn. They cluster together like January blue jays roosting inside a stump, and still they wake up freezing. But for the first time in seven days the sky is silent. Across the Capilano Canyon they see the snow-crested mountains of our childhoods reduced to black cinders and stone.The next day is spent driving lazy-8's through the old neighborhood's tangled lariat of roads, seeing only charred stumps, melted patio furniture, and metal globs that were once sportscars. My friends cry and make fruitless attempts at salvage. Wendy finds the skeletons of the two ostriches and hands Linus the femurs. "It's nearly sundown," Karen says. "Let's hit the darn."

  Their minivans hairpin down the black streets, the interiors smoky with the scent of itty-bitty salvaged mementos—a pair of Adidas ROM shoes; a Snoopy trophy; a framed photo of Liam Gallagher; a Becel margarine tub full of emeralds and Richard's asbestos astronaut suit.

  On Cleveland Dam, they park at the west end and walk to its center, as promised, I hover invisibly above the silent spillway. The reservoir behind the dam is slightly below runoff level and algae within the water has loaned it an otherworldly shamrock sheen. The dam's road is smooth and glistening from a freak rainstorm and is seemingly paved with diamonds.

  Quietly, everybody follows Karen onto the dam. For the first time in weeks she hears voices. "It's almost sundown," Karen says, "Kneel."

  "I'm not kneeling," Hamilton says.

  "Then don't," Richard says, and the group ignores Hamilton and kneels.

  Hamilton stands with his arms crossed, watching the group and feeling like Noel Coward at a gauche cocktail party, and then he remembers his past year of madness with Pam, the drugs, the mania, his rebirth as the Last of the Famous International Playboys—Petula Clark, Brasilia, Le Cote Basque, Jackson Pollock, Linda Bird Johnson, and gimlet martinis—the ideas and images of a clean, sophisticated, and plausible future long vanished. My head is now clean, he thinks. My veins are clean, but the world is soiled.

  Pam watches him from the corner of her eye. Poor Hamilton— Hamilton who has always felt unsophisticated having grown up so far away from the centers of metropolitan glamour. But Pam knows of the blankness at the core of that world, and she's aware thatthrough her, Hamilton has learned this, too. She thinks back on the past crazy year on drugs and then the miracle of becoming clean. She looks at the city's skeleton through the charred forest. If this is the world, then take it. I hated Milan. I hated catwalks. I bated my face for taking me the places it did. Let the insects fight for the remains. "Hamilton, get over here," she calls.

  Hamilton shakes his head. "I can't."

  "You knelt at Jared's memorial service, didn't you?" Hamilton nods. "Then you can bloody well kneel here." Hamilton comes, kneels beside Pamela, and looks up at the sky.

  Linus clacks together the ostrich femurs and the noise rattles comfortably across the spillway and into the canyon below. Jane squeals and then falls silent.

  And so it's here, on this dam, where this group, for the first time since the beginning of their lonely year, align their thoughts on the Great Beyond. This is where I enter. Linus clacks the femurs together: clack clack.

  "I'm back." I appear before them, hovering slightly above the spillway.

  "Jared!"

  "What are we going to do, Jared?" Megan wails.

  "Guys—hey—don't freak out. You think you've been forsaken— that the opportunity for holiness is gone, but this isn't true. Time is over; the world is gone.

  "You've got just one option left. You blew it this year, but you can make good. As I said, there's still Plan B."

  34 STOP BREATHING

  I want to squish my friends into my heart, as though they could help me grout a troublesome crack. They wonder, How did life ever come to this? They're not bozos; they know everything's over. They're naked parachutists waiting be pushed out of the plane and into the sky. Such is birth.

  A warm sooty wind blows up the dam's face, its dark dead confetti floating through me, then shining. I'm a wall of light. "Guys! Feel the air," I say. "Across your skin. It's like icing sugar. So sweet. And feel the charged wind in your lungs—it does feel like the end of the world, doesn't it? Come on—drag your butts up. Huddle! And while you're at it, look at all the water pouring down the spillway—it's like melted lime Jell-O. And hear the water growl—like a cougar inside an unlocked cage. Oh! And remember that night at Linda Jermyn's party? Remember when we found that TV set in the alley and brought it here and hucked it off the edge." My friends stand up and circle around me as I hover above the commotion.

  "Correction, Jare," Hamilton says, "I'm the one who did the actual hucking. If I remember correctly, you and Richard were off on the sidelines sniveling."
>
  "You wish, Hamilton," Richard says. "I sweet talked the RCMP into thinking you'd thrown a half-melted ice swan off the edge. I mean, they saw you throw something. Jared and Pam were horking in the rhododendrons over by the parking lot."

  "It was that home-brew of yours, Jared," Pam says. "It was like Liquid Plague. It's the absolute sickest I've ever felt. Even worse than methadone. And you were so sick that night, Jared—so sick that you couldn't even hit on me."

  Ping! At this moment a phenomenon in the sky captures my friends' awe and attention—a web of shooting stars now visible through a parting hole in the sky—a crosshatched ceiling of shooting stars as hasn't been seen on Earth since 1703 in the southern part of the African continent.

  "Look at the sky," Linus says. "This is so Day of the Triffids."

  "Everything's a light show for sixteen-year-olds, isn't it?" Richard says.

  Even with all the hoo-haw and thunder of the past week, my friends find wonder and ahhhs in the spectacle. Young Jane reaches up to the sky as though it were a wise and generous person and not merely light. Jane, the planet's newest genius, is counting stars, her brain already advanced beyond mere numbers.

  Warm, slightly stinky air, like air pushed forward by a subway car, sweet and full of adventure, whooshes over us. "And here we are all these years later," I say, "at the end of the world and the end of time."

  "How fucking ironic," Hamilton says.

  "Oh, come on, Hamilton," I say, "get some drama out of this. I mean, all of you noticed how 'time' feels so different here at the world's end—how weird it is to live with no clocks or seasons or rhythms or schedules. And you're all correct, too—time is a totally human idea—without people, time vanishes. Infinity and zero become the same thing.""Gee," Hamilton says.

  "Why just before all this happened," I say, pointing out the brightly lit black suburban dust, "nobody we knew had a second of free time remaining. All of it was frittered away on being productive, advancing careers and being all-round efficient. Each new advance made by 'progress' created its own accelerating warping effect that made your lives here on earth feel even smaller and shorter and more crazed. And now … no time at all."