Bit Rot

by Douglas Coupland

“It’s not like there’s anyone else out there who’s going to take care of us. We’re fucked.”

  “It beats starvation. Are you going to be nice to her tonight?”

  “No choice in the matter.”

  Stella stormed out the door. “Traitors! All of you! I can’t even trust my own goddamn animals!”

  The animals rolled their eyes. “We’re busted,” said Sammy, her collie-lab mix. “But it’s not like you got it on tape. Who’s gonna believe you?”

  “I trusted you!”

  “So?”

  “I thought you were all noble and kind and good. You only ever pretended to like me so that I’d feed you.”

  The animals all looked at each other. Sammy said, “Stella, all you do is pretend that you’re different and better than we are—as if your species is different or divine or ‘chosen.’ ”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Oh, shut up. We’re bored with you. If you were any animal other than a human being, you’d be totally alone. You still think there’s a part of you that’s superior to everyone else. It’s why you don’t trust anybody. It’s why you made your pathetic and cynical stab at religion.”

  “I certainly can’t trust any of you.”

  “Grow up. If anyone ought to understand the law of the jungle, it’s you, baby.”

  Just then the neighbour’s wind chimes tinkled.

  “Whoops,” said Sammy. “The magic spell is broken. Nice talking to you, Stella.”

  And with that the animals went back to being animals—except things were different between them and Stella. She felt as if her pets had suddenly become office co-workers with whom she had insincere conversations and who didn’t really care about her one way or the other.

  A week later Stella decided she’d had enough and began to drink herself into an early grave. She did a remarkably good job, ending up sprawled on the shoulder of the main road near the speed trap, the town’s largest single revenue generator.

  Stella sat there in the grass, singing a song without a tune, and as she did, Jessica and Roy drove into town.

  “Roy, look. Slow down, there’s a crazy drunk on the roadside over there.”

  “Jesus, what a sinking ship. Makes you wonder about life. Hey, look—a speed trap. If it weren’t for the crazy lady, we’d have gotten a ticket.”

  The two whooped with joy and Roy said, “Maybe that crazy lady is an important member of society after all. Makes you wonder.”

  Jessica said, “Absolutely, Roy. Mother Nature always makes sure that everyone has a role to play in the world. That scary crazy lady is simply living out her destiny.”

  The Ones That Got Away

  In 1985 I was working in a Tokyo magazine office, where I often heard a faint whirring sound from across the room. After a few days I went to look, and I saw hand-drawn maps emerging from what appeared to be a photocopier…yet nothing was being photocopied. I asked and was told, “It’s a fax.”

  “A fax?”

  “Yes, a fax.”

  I did some research and quickly learned that fax machines were developed in Japan specifically because their postal system’s wayfinding is contextual rather than based on streets and street numbers. You can’t just say “123 East Ginza Way”; you need maps, often with railway underpasses, subway nodes and visual landmarks. Just before lunchtime, when the office fax seemed to kick into overdrive, it was usually the office manager and local restaurants swapping menus and food orders.

  I remember thinking, Hmmm…You know, you could send people a lot more than just maps and menus with this thing. You could send, well, letters—and documents.

  Three years later, in 1988, I was working in a Toronto magazine office when a new fax was installed ($2,999) and became an object of chimpy fondling and respect. “Ooooh, a fax. Wow. Cool.” (I need to mention here to readers born after 1980 that there was once a three-year window when having a fax machine made people go, “Ooooh.”)

  I remember Susan, the head of the magazine’s ad sales division, barging into an editorial meeting one day and demanding that we write articles about fax machines that she could sell ads against. I asked her when faxes would ever go below the psychologically important thousand-dollar price point, and her face turned to me, contorted, Shar-Pei-like: “Doug, it doesn’t matter what else happens in the world, there is simply no way that fax machines are ever, ever, ever, ever going to go below a thousand dollars, so stop thinking that way immediately.” So I started a feature called “Celebrity Fax of the Month.” The first was a lipstick kiss from Linda Evangelista faxed from the Hotel George V in Paris—elegant, I thought. But a fax is a fax, and the feature quickly devolved into our begging the mayor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to fax us a letter saying, “As Mayor of Halifax, I’m proud and excited that the name of my city also contains the word fax, one of the hottest items in interoffice communication around the world.” He graciously complied. They can’t teach you this stuff in school.

  Back to Tokyo: In 1985, I remember, I spent a lot of time in coffee shops. They’re everywhere in Japan and almost always a delight and very convenient places to hang and socialize in. I wondered whether ubiquitous coffee shops could ever become a big deal in North America. Nah, people in North America do their socializing in their homes, not in coffee shops. It could never work.

  Enter Starbucks.

  Back around 2000 I was having dinner with a film producer looking for ideas, and I told him the future was in zombie films and TV. He asked why and I told him the truth, which is that in order to turn an actor into a zombie, all the actor has to do is put out his or her arms and grunt. Net cost? Zero. Pretty much the same thing for vampires, except you need prosthetic teeth and some goth makeup. I could see this producer’s internal calculator blinking away. Cut to last weekend and seeing an ad for the AMC cable channel’s “Dead, White and Blue” all-zombie weekend marathon, and the gross profits on just about anything zombie, and I look back on that conversation of 2000 and think, Doug, I think that’s the one that got away.

  I don’t think I could have done much with fax machines, but if I’d started mass franchising coffee houses in North America in the late 1980s, who knows what life could have been. And I remember noting Google’s public offering years back and thinking, Hmmm…I love Google. I use their products. Everything they do is amazing. Did I act on this feeling? No. Shoot me now. Ditto Apple.

  The one thing that makes me not feel like the fifth Beatle here is that I have noticed other things in society and I have acted on my hunches. But every time I pass a Starbucks, my inner voice says to me, “See that one there, Doug? That one could have bought me an infinity pool—and a hairless cat.”

  We all have our ones that got away. What’s yours? I’ve noticed that it takes years for the healing to begin, and I don’t think you ever truly get over it. You just learn how to live with it. There’s always that parallel universe out there, featuring a much richer version of yourself taunting the you in this universe for goofing up. But then that parallel-universe version of you probably missed out on something else and is probably lonely and miserable and wishes they were you. The universe seems to be very good at equalling things out that way.

  666!

  Bruiser and his girlfriend, Stabby, were driving to a reunion concert of the beloved late-1990s heavy metal band SpëllChek. They were too young to have appreciated the band back when it was in its prime, back when the surly quartet with their signature tall hair lurched from stadium to stadium, leaving in their wake a swath of herpes infections, ten thousand lakes of barf, and dozens of hotel managers thrilled to be able to charge the record company a hundred bucks for the tiny ashtrays the band had shattered in Phoenix or Tampa or New Haven or Bowling Green. Bruiser and Stabby were, however, absolutely old enough to appreciate SpëllChek’s undeniable camp value and, if they were honest about it, its members’ actual value as reasonably gifted stringed-instrument savants with zero self-awareness and a fondness for discount eyeliner.

  Stab
by said, “Okay, the moment I found out these guys were doing a reunion tour I heard my toilet flush, but dammit, Bruiser, we are going to that concert.”

  Bruiser couldn’t have agreed more. The couple were driving up the interstate en route to Capitol City’s new civic arena, listening to a cassette-tape version of the 1998 masterpiece album UNICEF Is a Whore. They were chanting along to the song’s refrain—“666! 666!”—when suddenly Stabby stopped doing her homage hair-flings and turned it off, annoying Bruiser.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Bruiser, I don’t get it. What’s the whole 666 thing about?”

  “It’s, like, Satan’s signature evil number.”

  “No, I know that, but what does it mean?”

  “Uh…” Bruiser suddenly made the oh-now-I-get-it noise. “You mean, what’s its secret meaning? Freemasons and the EU and stuff like that?”

  “No, I mean…” Something odd was happening inside Stabby’s head. “I mean, Bruiser, what’s a number? What’s a six?”

  “What do you mean, what’s a six?”

  “What I said. Six. What is it?”

  “Uh…” Bruiser was stumped too.

  Out of the blue, both Bruiser and Stabby had suddenly lost their knowledge of numbers—what they are, what they were, what they mean, how they work—everything. They’d even forgotten the word six. “Six” wasn’t even a noise anymore. It was nothing—though it didn’t mean zero to them because Bruiser and Stabby had also forgotten what zero is. They looked at the numbers on the highway road signs: they were like ankle tattoos and created no sounds inside their brains. The dashboard was a mosaic of hieroglyphs.

  They pulled the car over to the side of the road.

  “Shit. I mean—numbers—we’re supposed to know what they are, right?”

  “Are they like letters? Do they make sounds?”

  “I don’t think so. You can still spell and read and everything, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too. So what the fuck is a number?”

  They’d forgotten even the concept of a number. The word number made as much sense to their brains as glxndtw.

  “I’ll call my sister. She knows all that smart shit.” Stabby reached for her cellphone and stared at the keypad numbers: “What are these?”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Do you even sort of remember how to work a phone?”

  “Nope.”

  “Shit.”

  They parked in an industrial neighbourhood and noticed that other cars were pulling off to the side of the road too. “This doesn’t look too good.”

  Stabby said, “Bruiser, I don’t care if we just came down with Alzheimer’s. We are not going to miss the SpëllChek concert.”

  “Stabby, you are indeed right. We are going.”

  “Can you still drive this thing?”

  “You bet.”

  And so they made it to Capitol City, but the exits were numbered, not named. Stabby was getting upset. “The warm-up band is probably already playing. Bruiser, let’s take this exit here.”

  They took the next exit and Bruiser suggested, “Let’s follow the cars. Wherever the most cars are going is where the concert will probably be.”

  It was a good idea, and soon they saw the arena, but the scene outside it was a zoo. Concertgoers parked their cars wherever they saw a spot. As everybody had forgotten numbers, nobody was worried—what is the definition of health but sharing the same disease as all one’s neighbours? Still, Bruiser tried his best to park the car with some sense of order.

  SpëllChek was just coming onstage as Bruiser and Stabby selected some seats—festival style, of course.

  The lead singer, Apu, sang out, “Hello, Capitol City, are you ready to rock?”

  ROAR!!!

  “I said, are you ready to rock?”

  ROOOOOOOOAR!!!!

  And the band began to rock and everyone held up phone cameras and digital cameras. The first song was the teen anthem “Core Dump,” and the audience went apeshit. The next song was the FM classic “Ear Soup,” and the crowd went even more apeshit. And then the lead singer took the mike: “Capitol City, it’s time to play our biggest hit, ‘UNICEF Is a Whore.’ ” The crowd went about as apeshit as is possible for a crowd to go, but when it came to the song’s critical chanting point, the lead singer sang, “Sikkz…zskks…arghnt…?” and the music stopped.

  The singer’s face visibly fizzled and the crowd buzzed. Everybody knew they knew the song, but nobody remembered the chorus.

  Following an awkward silence, the lead singer said, “Fuck it. I’m just going to make chimp noises!” The crowd went nuts and the song proceeded with the lead singer singing, “Whoo-whoo-whoo,” whenever he hit the chorus. And everyone blissed out and screamed.

  What happened next was extraordinary. After taking hefty bows, the band went on to play their next biggest hit, “A-L-C-O-H-O-L,” except when they tried to spell out the title à la Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” they’d forgotten how to spell too. In fact, they’d forgotten letters altogether—only words remained. Fans stood there staring at each other, trying to absorb this recent deletion.

  SpëllChek cranked the volume. “Okay, we may not be able to read and write anymore, but we can still speak and we can still sing. So come on fans, let’s rock!”

  And so Bruiser and Stabby and the other thousands of fans rocked en masse—except some guy near the front tripped and knocked over a female rocker who was dancing, so her boyfriend laid into him, but a punch went the wrong way and hit the wrong guy. Suddenly the concert erupted into a brawl, the likes of which had never been seen before—it was the biggest brawl in the history of the world. Illiteracy had spawned total violence and anarchy.

  Bruiser and Stabby were fortunately close enough to the exit that they were able to slip out and hide inside a utility closet and smoke cigarettes while the mayhem was ensuing. Once their pack of cigarettes was empty, they poked their faces out of the closet and saw a battlefield on the arena floor: blood and bodies and dismembered limbs. Teeth crunched beneath their boots as they walked.

  “Geez,” said Bruiser. “How many dead people are there, you think?”

  Stabby said, “I don’t know. Eight or nine hundred?”

  Bruiser looked at her, startled, and then they both grinned and shouted, “We can count again! All right!”

  “And how do you spell fun, Stabby?”

  “I spell it S-P-E-L-L-C-H-E-K, Bruiser.”

  “Woo-hoo! 666!”

  “666!”

  Duelling Duals

  This past week I’ve had several out-of-towners visiting, most of whom seem to have dual citizenships, if not triple or quadruple. Curious, I asked each visitor which citizenship they’d choose to keep if they were forced to keep just one. Their universal response was to inhale, stare off into the horizon, scratch their foreheads and hope that the subject would pass. I didn’t realize this was such a thorny issue.

  “Come on, it can’t be that hard. American or English?”

  Push comes to shove: English.

  “Australian or EU?”

  Australian.

  “Danish or American?”

  Trick question: Danes are allowed only one citizenship—for now.

  This got me to thinking, what is citizenship, anyway? “Hi! I’m a citizen of wherever. I live there, vote there and pay taxes there—and if I’m kidnapped by malignant forces in some faraway land, my government will come running to my rescue.” Seems fair enough, but if you’ve got four passports, can you reasonably expect one of your countries to come to your rescue? I mean, by that point, you’re basically a citizen of nowhere, or, at the very most, you’ve got citizenship lite, the citizenship equivalent of Ryanair. “Hi, I know I haven’t been voting or paying taxes or anything for a few decades, but I’m in a bit of a bind. Can you ask one of your consul chaps to maybe trade me for a spy or something?”

  So if you’re going to have more than one citizenship, why not push the i
dea to the max and collect them in bulk? Maybe find some inexpensive citizenships and collect passports like stamps, or maybe hand them out as Christmas presents or birthday gifts—sort of like having a star named after you. So I began looking around at countries with low GDPs, thinking that maybe, for a notional fee, they might earn some cash selling novelty citizenships that convey little functionality but a dash of intrigue to their owners. If Liechtenstein can make big bucks selling postage stamps, why not go into the boutique citizenship business? During a slow moment at the dinner table, you can say, “Honey, I have a surprise for you. I know you think I forgot your birthday, but I didn’t. In fact I got you a little something. Here…open this.” This turns out to be an envelope containing citizenship of Malawi. “Oh, honey. You shouldn’t have.”

  But there’s a catch: Malawi allows its citizens to be citizens only of Malawi, and naturalized citizenship applicants must be of African race and have lived for five years in Malawi, intend to reside permanently in Malawi and renounce all other citizenships. It actually turns out that getting citizenship anywhere is pretty hard. In North Korea naturalized citizenship can be granted only by the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, even if you’re vital to the country’s ongoing stability, like being a stadium flashcard technician. Vatican citizenship is both difficult and interesting to obtain. Citizenship is held only while one holds an office such as cardinal or pope. Citizenship is lost when the term of office comes to an end, and children cannot inherit it from their parents. [Wait a second…children? Ed.]

  Until recently, one could essentially purchase Canadian citizenship for about C$100,000—a price tag that was kept under the radar of the populace, who grew furious on learning it was actually true. Canadians were also collectively humiliated to learn how relatively cheap the price was.

  A way of rethinking the global web of overlapping allegiances would be to wonder what might happen if Earth instituted a planet-wide citizenship flush. Whoever you are, you now have to choose just one passport—so, which is it going to be? The answer would probably boil down to multiple factors, the most important including personal identity, ease of crossing borders, consular access while abroad and, of course, taxes. Sure, a low tax rate is great, but if I break my arm, do I really want to spend $75,000 fixing it? Yes, popping in and out of Europe is terrific, but would I want to pay for it by not being allowed to get a lump in my throat if I hear my ex–national anthem playing? What exactly is citizenship? What does it mean to say, “I’m this and you’re that”? The fact that every country on Earth makes it very difficult to become a citizen means that citizenship has to mean something. I think this week, when I was asking my guests what citizenship they would choose if they could have only one, I was unwittingly calling them to account for trying to have their cake and eat it too. Can you really have the best of all worlds, bing bang boom, whenever it suits your needs? I suspect that polycitizenry is a creation of the twentieth century, and a creation whose days are numbered. As the world gets ever more pay-per-use, the luxury of low-commitment, semi-disposable allegiance seems, if nothing else, too expensive. If nothing else, Canada has put a number on it.