JPod

by Douglas Coupland

  Kaitlin:

  Really?

  Steve:

  Oh, yeah. And it was great. It made being kidnapped seem like an in-flight movie.

  Kaitlin:

  What next?

  Steve:

  The van drove for an hour, and then I could smell salt air, and the van drove onto something floating—a dock or a boat—and the heroin made me kind of woozy. I heard a lot of clanking and thumping, and then it became pretty evident that we were sailing somewhere. A freighter.

  Kaitlin:

  Afraid?

  Steve:

  No way. They kept shooting me up. I wasn't sure if I was dead or alive, but the whole episode was great.

  Kaitlin:

  We have to speed this up.

  Steve:

  A few days later we were in China. They put me in the back of some kind of bus, and I could see everything clearly. Have you ever been to China? No? Well, it's interesting but so polluted and grey and—

  Kaitlin:

  So I've heard.

  Steve:

  Before you know it, I was chained to a machine that stamped out the soles of imitation Nikes, 288 in one go. I got room and board and as much smack as I wanted.

  Kaitlin:

  You weren't freaked out?

  Steve:

  I wasn't even aware I was alive. It wasn't heaven and it wasn't hell. It was interesting.

  Kaitlin:

  Did working there teach you anything about human rights violations and the politics of sweat shopping?

  Steve:

  That's a politically correct kind of question a bit late in the game, Kaitlin.

  Kaitlin:

  I know, but I had to ask it or they'd probably kick me out of this English class I'm in.

  Steve:

  Now that's thinking like a true executive.

  Kaitlin:

  Thanks. But, Steve, you still didn't answer the question.

  Steve:

  I didn't learn anything about human rights, but later I did learn about how much my personality changed on smack. When I got back to Vancouver, I realized I was no longer a prisoner of that part of my brain that made me such a generic corporate suckhole. I found that I no longer cared about much of anything—and that I could say whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. It was great.

  Kaitlin:

  You're not reverting back to the old Steve, are you?

  Steve:

  Not as long as I have my daily arm snack.

  Kaitlin:

  Have you since pestered the woman you had a crush on?

  Steve:

  I bumped into her once at a party. The magic is gone, but I'm fond of her.

  Kaitlin:

  And they gave you your old job back, right?

  Steve:

  When I got back home, I was a news story for the first few days. That gave me a forty-eight- to seventy-two-hour pity window, which I totally milked, and they rehired me.

  Kaitlin:

  You can't milk a window.

  Steve:

  ?

  Kaitlin:

  Well, this is an English assignment, and you mixed a metaphor. Back to you—how has this big personality change influenced your work?

  Steve:

  While I was gone, they came in and killed the turtle game and repurposed it as an uninspired fantasy game. I may not be creative, but the turtle was my idea and they fucked with it.

  Kaitlin:

  So . . . ?

  Steve:

  I'm working covertly with a team of talented young people to embed a Trojan horse serial killer into the fantasy game.

  Kaitlin:

  I forgot to ask—you still act like the old Steve when you're at work, right?

  Steve:

  Only inasmuch as it allows me to wreck that particular game. It's wonderful pretending to be the old me for nefarious aims.

  Kaitlin:

  Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today, Steve.

  Steve:

  My pleasure, Kaitlin.

  . . .

  "Ethan."

  "Hey, Dad. What's up?"

  'Your mother's new friend is here, and she's driving me up the wall."

  Cautiously: "New friend?"

  "Christ, she looks like Fred Flintstone's fetus."

  freedom. "Okay. What are they doing?"

  "They're down in the basement, talking about fertilizers. She started talking about semen and fertilization and vulva this and vulva that. I had to get out of there."

  Best to change the subject. "How's the new dance routine going?"

  "I think I may be too old for ballroom dancing."

  "Too old?" Dad placed seventh out of sixty in Canteen (an endless night for all of us). He lost points for not having a light enough touch. Kam came in second. I fully expect the first-place winner to vanish some night while walking the dog. I said, "You're never too old to dance, Dad . . . and you're never too old to dream."

  "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. Were you saying that with irony or for real?"

  "Irony?"

  "Don't play dumb. I read the paper like anyone else, Ethan. I've read about Generation K and your need to distance yourself from the world by using irony."

  "Okay, I was being ironic."

  "I knew it. By the way, I hear you blew your chance to get in on the Coupland guy's stock offering."

  "I was only gone for forty-five minutes."

  "Snooze and lose. Your mother and I are going to be so rich because of it. I thought you and he were friends."

  "It's more complicated than that. Maybe I should give him a call."

  "I hear he doesn't like phones, and never answers them."

  "How on earth would you know that?"

  "Everyone knows that."

  "Do you have his number?"

  Pause.

  "Dad?"

  "You can't tell him I gave it to you."

  "Why not?"

  "Just don't." Dad gave me the number.

  "I'm going to phone him right now."

  "You do that." There was another pause. "Jesus, they're coming upstairs. I have to go."

  Click.

  . . .

  I called Doug.

  "Hello?"

  "Hi—Doug? It's Ethan."

  "Ethannnnnnn .........?"

  "China Ethan."

  "Oh yeah. Right. How did you get my number?"

  'You gave it to me in Shanghai."

  "I did not. I never give out my number. And I never answer the phone. The only reason I picked up this time is because I have an interview scheduled with the Sydney Morning Herald. Why are you calling?"

  "Doug, can I, uh—"

  "Can you what?"

  "Can I maybe buy into your business plan?"

  "Ethan, are you dim? No. It's not like a lemonade stand where you just come over and put down your nickel. Besides, you had your chance, and you were out at Brentwood Mall, shopping for shoes, of all things. Richly ironic, I have to say."

  "Can you at least tell me what your idea is?"

  'You want to buy into something, but you don't even know what it is?"

  I decided to channel John Doe here: "Is that so wrong?"

  "You're a moron. By the way, I've already gotten an advance for the novel I'm going to write based on the contents of your laptop."

  'You're a sick fuck."

  "I seem to remember a lonely little lamb lost in the remote wastes of industrialized China. Doug! Doug! Help us! Help us! We have to get out of here! Face it, Ethan, if it hadn't been for me, you'd be dead by now, so don't play woe-is-me. A call is coming in right now, and it's Australia. I have to go."

  "Could you maybe—"

  Click.

  . . .

  I asked Kaitlin about irony, and it turns out that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony—which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value. I can't imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine readin
g the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.

  Brrrrr

  Shudder

  Shake

  Milkshake

  McDonald's milkshake

  Chalk?

  Brain freeze

  Milk products

  Nestle

  Mineral-deficient baby formula

  Switzerland

  Corporations

  Globalization

  Milkshakes everywhere

  Even India

  Dairy products

  Cows

  Confusion

  Ancestors

  Apu from the Kwik-E-Mart

  Donuts

  The Fox Network

  Five thousand channels

  Heather Locklear

  Healthy, shimmering hair

  Computer-generated hair

  Pixar cartoon frames in a render farm

  First weekend box office

  DVD sales

  Home entertainment systems

  Karaoke

  Fear of Karaoke

  Abandoning the party

  Driving

  Shitty old car

  Rain

  Car commercials

  Money

  Never enough

  Coupland's business thing with Kam

  Rage

  Raging Bull

  1970s films

  Al Pacino

  Eyes like Woody Woodpecker

  Cartoons of the 1940s

  Ultraviolence

  A Clockwork Orange

  Heaven 17

  Pop hits of the 1980s

  Pet Shop Boys

  London

  Plagues

  Ebola

  Y2K

  Hype

  Lies

  . . . and so on.

  Kwantlen College Learning Annex

  Course 3072-A

  Assignment: Discuss Your Job with Somebody

  Who Probably Doesn't Care about It

  "Flog the Dead Donkey"

  by Kaitlin Anna Boyd Joyce

  Jim Jarlewski is my boyfriend's father. He's a fifty something former financial consultant turned agricultural entrepreneur, a ballroom dance legend and a movie acting extra. Phew! Jim's a busy guy. I found him in a trailer in North Vancouver on the set of a Heartiand Channel cable-access movie in which he portrays a convenience store clerk gunned down by Jane Seymour, who is, in that scene, portraying her evil twin.

  Kaitlin:

  Hi, Jim. Is this a speaking role?

  Jim:

  Fucking hell, no. I asked if I could moan or something, but it breaks union rules. Kaitlin, why are you here?

  Kaitlin:

  School project. I have to discuss my job with an outsider.

  Jim:

  All that gaming shit? No way. It's such a snooze.

  Kaitlin:

  Too late. I'm here, and I don't have time to find a replacement interviewee.

  Jim:

  Crap. Okay, then, what do you and Ethan and all you gaming chowderheads do out in that mothership thingy in Burnaby?

  Kaitlin:

  Could you at least ask it like you care? Pretend it's a line in a film.

  [NOTE: Jim's weak spot is his desire for a speaking role in a TV or film production—any role at all. Anything.]

  Jim:

  Okay how about this . . .

  [Jim spends the next five minutes delivering the same line.]

  Kaitlin:

  Enough already. Here's the deal—I have to discuss my job with you, so I'll begin by telling you that I'm working on this videogame called SpriteQuest.

  Jim:

  As in Sprite, the beverage?

  Kaitlin:

  No. A sprite is technically a fantasy creature one notch lower on the food chain than elf but two notches above pixie.

  Jim:

  Right.

  Kaitlin:

  It's set in the year AD 100,000—among the ruins of what we call Earth. Superior sprite beings from a distant galaxy have crash-landed here and now have to survive in a confusing apocalyptic world where right is wrong and wrong is right.

  Jim:

  [Jim is not paying attention.]

  Kaitlin:

  Jim, I specifically said something dumb to see if you're listening, and you aren't.

  Jim:

  Sorry. I was attempting to prep the emotions for my corpse scene. It won't happen again.

  Kaitlin:

  Thank you. Anyway, Earth also now has two moons—the one we know, and one that was stolen from Mars.

  Jim:

  I'm listening.

  Kaitlin:

  The hero of the game is Prince Amulon. He's neither a sprite nor an elf. He's the prince of a small band of earthlings who have survived across those hundred thousand years. Prince Amulon works with sprites and other characters, and they go through complex perils that will allow him to crack the two moons together. From the resulting cosmic rubble, Prince Amulon will destroy the bad guys, and the energy released will allow the sprites to fix their spacecraft and return home.

  Jim:

  Wait a second—didn't this used to be a skateboard game starring a turtle?

  Kaitlin:

  You are correct. But first it was a generic skateboard game. Then we wrecked it by adding a charismatic turtle named Jeff. And then we basically had to convert the whole game into a fully immersive fantasy gaming environment called SpriteQuest.

  Jim:

  Isn't that kind of a dumb thing to do to a game?

  Kaitlin:

  Absolutely, but it's what I'm told to do by marketing.

  Jim:

  Have you no shame? Have you no sense of decency?

  Kaitlin:

  Stop being silly.

  Jim:

  Who are the bad guys?

  Kaitlin:

  They're called the Zorrs.

  Jim:

  [Sighs.] What magic powers do the game's characters have?

  Kaitlin:

  Using his psi powers, Prince Amulon can win a game of Scrabble using only three vowels. He can also bring fresh air into an unventilated bathroom, and he can renovate castles and huts on small budgets using knick-knacks from thrift stores and some well-chosen latex paint colours.

  Jim:

  You made all of that up on the spot.

  Kaitlin:

  Okay, so I did. It's—it's just so depressing what we have to do. But I don't want to marinate in shame. Our characters have other properties, too.

  Jim:

  Like .. . ?

  Kaitlin:

  There's a servant class of characters called Twix. All they do is have sex and week-long orgasms.

  Jim:

  Really?

  Kaitlin:

  Yeah, but because the game is for kids, we can't use the word "orgasm." Instead, we have to say the Twix are "twinkulated." We also can't use terms that might freak kids out.

  Jim:

  Like what?

  Kaitlin:

  Radiation. Terror. Blood. Hell. On the other hand, our characters can fly.

  Jim:

  [Sounding bored.] Really?

  Kaitlin:

  But they can fly only in trios, squished uncomfortably together while reading boring magazines and eating cheap food that's been badly prepared.

  Jim:

  Hmmmmm...

  Kaitlin:

  But if they fly more than ten times, they can then fly solo while selecting from a wide array of DVD entertainment and drinking a crisp California chardonnay.

  Jim:

  Hmmmm...

  Kaitlin:

  Jim! You're not listening to anything I'm saying!

  Jim:

  Kaitlin, I'd love to, but I have to be honest—when you say the word "gaming," my brain goes to the same place it goes when people say "country and western music."

  Kaitlin:

  You're an actor. Can't you pretend to be interested?

  Jim:

  Oh, all right, then. Tell me
, Kaitlin—what do your sprites eat?

  Kaitlin:

  Sea monkeys. But if they eat too many, they become drunk and vulnerable.

  Jim:

  [Jim is utterly uninterested.]

  Kaitlin:

  Well, let's discuss sex again. SpriteQuest is a barebacking sexual environment. Condoms are forbidden, though we can't say that, as such. Instead, the characters kind of melt together into a blob of light. It's all pretty pre-AlDS 1978. But if too many characters make out, then the game clicks into a "prude mode," where all the female sprites have to wear unflattering footwear, the male sprites have to have six-dollar Toppy's haircuts and the "un-baby'ed" young female sprites have to go to endless baby showers, where they're humiliated into reproducing.

  Jim:

  I don't believe that last one.

  Kaitlin:

  Finally, you're listening!

  Jim:

  Hey, I'm not totally evil.

  Kaitlin:

  Good. For what it's worth, there are spells galore, and a large palette of characters you can custom design, and everyone spends the game battling and betraying everybody else.

  Jim:

  You're starting to lose me again. Is there anything Star Wars-y about it?