Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel

by Douglas Coupland

  Linus lay on the sidelines staring at a blood-red poinsettia beside the presents underneath the Christmas tree. He was telling us about its petals’ veins, marveling at the cell structure of the stems and leaves. He explained how you could say that roots are like electrical wiring and that photosynthesis was the most self-contained and efficient solar energy system possible.

  “Will somebody tell Johnny Appleseed to fermez-la-bouche?” said Hamilton. Pammie maneuvered her way toward Hamilton. Tastemaster Wendy, going through a snobby I-don’t-watch-TV phase, was doing a tabulation of the number of owls Karen’s mother had accumulated—” Owls, owls, owls—no surface left owl-free. There’s even a small macramé owl above the phone in the hall alcove. Thirty of them and you could make a macramé jumpsuit like the one Ann Margret wore in Tommy just before she rolled around in the pile of baked beans.”

  “Wendy, what are you talking about?” asked Pam from the kitchen.

  “Why is Mrs. McNeil obsessed with owls? What do they represent to her? What dark secret lurks inside them? What need do they satisfy in her?”

  “They’re pill stashes,” said Hamilton. “The brass owl on the mantelpiece contains two hundred decayed Milltowns.”

  I excused myself and went to check on Karen. I heard Wendy shout, “Eighty-six,” as part of her owl tabulation. I saw Karen had turned white as milk. Her head was propped upward, green eyes vacant, looking at the ceiling.

  My brain collapsed. My arms and legs stung as though they were growing quills; my mouth dried as though stuffed with straw. “She’s … not … breathing!” I shouted. “She’s not breathing!” The gang in the living room was confused, saying, “Wha …?” as they came over.

  Pam said, “Shit. Oh fuck. Oh God. Wendy? You’re on the swim team. Do mouth-to-mouth.” Wendy dropped down to Karen on the bed and gave the kiss of life while Hamilton called the ambulance from the hallway phone. Pam said, “Oh, no, it’s another Jared,” to which Hamilton raged, screaming, “Don’t even think that fucking thought! Don’t even think of thinking it.”

  Jared. Oh God. This could be forever. This could go well beyond real. My eyes moistened and my throat hurt. We stood around feeling desperate and alarmingly useless, muttering shits and bobbing our heads uselessly. The bedside plastic dome lamp on her side table was turned on, throwing cheap yellow light on us and the mural on Karen’s wall—an aging photo mural of the Moon with Earth in the background. I saw her swim medals and a Snoopy trophy saying: World’s Best Daughter. There were lipsticks; lip smackers; two shirts that hadn’t been chosen for wear that day laid out on the chest of drawers; a beer stein filled with pennies; high school yearbooks; a thesaurus and hair brushes.

  The paramedics swooped through the front door with the gurney. Karen’s lumpen body was lifted onto it like a clump of Play-Doh. The driver said, “Drinking?” We said vodka. “Any drugs involved?” Pam, Wendy, and Hamilton didn’t know about the Valiums, but I did. “Two tranquilizers. I think they were Valium.”

  “Overdose maybe?”

  “No.” I’d seen her take just the two.

  “Any pot?”

  “No. Smell her if you don’t believe it.”

  A respirator was being stuck down Karen’s throat.

  “Parents?”

  “Down in Birch Bay.”

  “How long without breathing?”

  “It’s hard to say. A few minutes? She was wide-awake just thirty minutes ago.”

  “You the boyfriend?” “Yeah.”

  “You ride in the car with us.”

  We shot out into the hallway, then onto the front walk and on to the driveway. My parents walked toward us from my house, faces pulsing colors from the ambulance lights, the panic in their eyes subsiding only slightly when they saw that it wasn’t me on the stretcher.

  “Hamilton, fill them in,” I said. “We have to leave.” Then Karen and I were in the ambulance, launched off toward Lions Gate Hospital. I took one last look through the rear windows at the neighborhood where Karen and I and Hamilton and Linus and Pammie had all grown up—cool and dry and quiet as a vault.

  Karen’s dad’s burnt orange Chevy LUV … leaded gas fumes … two pills … trimmed hedges.

  Our ambulance drove up Rabbit Lane to Stevens Drive and onto the highway to the hospital, and how was I to know that time was now different?

  4

  IT’S ALL FAKE

  That first week of Karen’s coma was the hardest. We couldn’t have known then that the portrait of Karen that began that cold December night inside her Rabbit Lane bedroom was one that would remain unchanged for so long: ever-shrinking hands reduced to talons; clear plastic IV drips like boil-in-bag dinners gone badly wrong; an iceberg-blue respirator tube connected to the core of the Earth hissing sick threats of doom spoken backward in another language; hair always straight, combed nightly, going gray with the years, and limp as unwatered houseplants.

  Mr. and Mrs. McNeil tore up from Birch Bay near dawn. Their Buick Centurion’s right front wheel nudged over the yellow-painted curb beneath the Emergency’s port cochere. Already inside sat my parents, Hamilton, Pammie, Wendy, and Linus, all of us worn out from worry and fear. The McNeils had faces like burning houses. I could see they’d both been quite drunk earlier and were now throbbing in a headache phase. They refused to speak with any of us younger folk at first, assuming that we were all entirely to blame for Karen’s state, Mrs. McNeil’s accusing red eyes saying more than any shouted curse. The McNeils spoke with my parents, their neighbors and more-or-less friends of twenty years. At sunrise, Dr. Menger emerged to lead the four of them into the room where Karen was lying.

  “Thalamus … mumble … fluids; brain stem … mumble … cranial nerve … hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy … breathing …”

  “Is she alive? Is she dead?” asked Mrs. McNeil.

  “She’s alive, Mrs. McNeil.”

  “Can she think?” she continued.

  “I can’t tell you. If this continues, Karen will have sleep and wake cycles and may even dream. But thinking … I have no idea.”

  “What if she’s trapped inside her body?” asked Mr. McNeil. “What if she’s—” Mr. McNeil, George, was fumbling for words, “—in there hearing everything we say. What if she’s screaming from the inside and she can’t tell us that she’s stuck?”

  “That’s not the case, sir. Please.”

  Meanwhile, Linus was glurping and snorkeling through a cup of vending machine hot chocolate. Hamilton called him an asswipe for being so disrespectful, but Linus said slowly, “Well, Karen likes chocolate. I think she’d want me to have it.” There was a pause and a straw poll of eyes indicating this was the conventional wisdom. Hamilton calmed himself but remained in a piss-vinegar mood.

  “Richard,” barked Mr. McNeil, rounding a corner with the other older folk, “Dr. Menger said Karen took two pills. Did you give them to her?”

  I was alert: “No. She had them in her compact. They were Valiums. I’ve seen her take them before. Mrs. McNeil gives them to her.”

  Mr. McNeil turned to his wife, Lois, who nodded her head and motioned her hand gently, confirming that she was the pusher. Mr. McNeil’s posture slackened.

  I said, “Karen wants to look good for your trip to Hawaii. She’s trying to lose weight.”

  My use of the present tense shook them. “It’s only five days from now,” said Wendy. “She’ll be fine by then, right?”

  Nobody responded. Mrs. McNeil, whispering like a calculating starlet, asked Wendy, “Were … were you girls drinking? … Wendy? … Pammie?”

  Wendy was direct: “Mrs. McNeil, Karen couldn’t have had more than a drink and a half. Weak stuff, too—Tab and a drop of vodka. Honest. It was mostly Tab. One moment she was standing there wondering if she’d lost her watermelon lip smacker, the next she was on the grass beside the road moaning. We tried to make her throw up, but there couldn’t have been more than half a French fry inside her, tops. She was trying to lose weight really fierce. For Hawaii.”r />
  “I see, Wendy.”

  Dr. Menger cut in with the results of the blood-alcohol test, which confirmed next to no alcohol in her system. “Virtually clean, he said. Point-oh-one.”

  Almost clean. But not clean. Dirty. Tainted. Soiled and corrupted. Shitted. Malaised. Poxed and pussed. Made unclean by her sick teenaged friends who wreck houses.

  And we sat there in silence far into the next day, six friends, wretches of transgression, feeling deserving of punishment, sipping lame paper cones of Foremost eggnog brought to us by a nurse leaving night shift, anticipating our burdens, and castigating ourselves with silence. Sunday morning. Already news would be traveling throughout the school community—the early risers off to skate or ski. Karen’s mental state would be glamorously linked to the house-wrecker, as though the damaged house had been the actual cause of her ails. And drugs.

  I developed a cramp and went to the bathroom. There I found a stall, took a deep breath, and remembered the envelope in my jacket. I opened the envelope. On binder paper it read:

  December 15 … 6 Days to Hawaii!!!

  Note: Call Pammie about beads for cornrowing hair. Also, arrange streaking.

  Hi Beb. Karen here.

  If you’re reading this you’re either a) the World’s Biggest Sleazebag and I hate you for peeking at this or b) there’s been some very bad news and it’s a day later. I hope that neither of these is true!!

  Why am I writing this? I’m asking myself that. I feel like I’m buying insurance before getting on a plane.

  I’ve been having these visions this week. I may even have told you about them. Whatever. Normally my dreams are no wilder than, say, riding horses or swimming or arguing with Mom (and I win!!), but these new things I saw—they’re not dreams.

  On TV when somebody sees the bank robber’s face they get shot or taken hostage, right? I have this feeling I’m going to be taken hostage—I saw more than I was supposed to have seen. I don’t know how it’s going to happen. These voices—they’re arguing—one even sounds like Jared—and these voices are arguing while I get to see bits of (this sounds so bad) the Future!!

  It’s dark there—in the Future, I mean. It’s not a good place. Everybody looks so old and the neighborhood looks like shit (pardon my French!!).

  I’m writing this note because I’m scared. It’s corny. I’m stupid. I feel like sleeping for a thousand years—that way I’ll never have to be around for this weird new future.

  Tell Mom and Dad that I’ll miss them. And say good-bye to the gang. Also Richard, could I ask you a favor? Could you wait for me? I’ll be back from wherever it is I’m going. I don’t know when, but I will.

  I don’t think my heart is clean, but neither is it soiled. I can’t remember the last time I even lied. I’m off to Christmas shop at Park Royal with Wendy and Pammie. Tonight I’m skiing with you. I’ll rip this up tomorrow when you return it to me UNOPENED. God’s looking.

  xox

  Karen

  I thought it best not to show Mr. and Mrs. McNeil the letter at that moment; it could only confuse without offering consolation. I stuffed it back in the vest pocket of my ski jacket and sat and thought of the times I’d used this very bathroom before, back when Jared was in the hospital and before he left us and this world, atom by atom.

  I thought of Karen in the intensive care unit and I felt as though I was a jinx of a friend. I stood up and achingly returned to the waiting room. An hour later when the corridors seemed empty enough, we snuck in to see Karen. The machinery of her new life was fully set in motion—the IVs, respirator, tubes, and wave monitors. An orderly shooed us out of the room, and we shambled toward the exit, the world no longer quite an arena of dreams—it was just an arena.

  The West Vancouver police interviewed each of us that afternoon, down at the station on Marine Drive at Thirteenth. Understandably, they wanted the story from each of us individually to weed out discrepancies. But there were none. The housewrecker was quickly glazed over, the culprits still lolling about in the cells below us. Afterward at the White Spot restaurant down the road, we hunkered without hunger over cheeseburgers. The only pattern we could see in Karen’s behavior on Saturday was that she had been behaving … differently that day. I showed everybody the letter, and we became chilled.

  “We were shopping at Park Royal yesterday,” said Pammie, “all Karen could notice were weird little things like the color of mandarin oranges. We tried Christmas shopping, but instead she just rubbed her hands over fabrics. At the bus stop at Taco Don’s, she ate one of Wendy’s Mexi-Fries. I think that was all she had to eat before skiing. Poor thing. I’d have passed out, too, if I’d been her.”

  Wendy said, “We should have forced her to eat.”

  “Don’t rake yourself over the coals,” I said. “There’s something else going on here. We all know it.”

  “I agree. She was acting sort of spazzed yesterday,” said Pam. “Tiny stuff. Preoccupied—and not just by that diet, either.”

  “I think we should show her parents the letter,” Hamilton said. We agreed to do so later that day. Our table went silent.

  That same evening, after feeble naps, we returned to Lions Gate Hospital, but Karen was unchanged. Not a limb, not a hair, not an eyelash. A chill fell upon us: Karen was not transforming the way she ought to. Leaving her room, I placed pink and blue carnations in a bud vase at her bedside; outside by our cars, we agreed that we would assemble at the school’s smokehole the next morning so we could enter the building together, providing a casually united front.

  At home, my parents, being neither heavy moralizers nor stringent disciplinarians, continued life as usual. Meatloaf, green beans, baked potatoes, and an episode of M*A*S*H. Years ago my cousin Eileen had been out cold for two days after smacking her head in a swimming pool’s shallow end; her successful later career as a med school student made Mom and Dad less worried about comas than they might have been otherwise.

  But none of us slept that Sunday night. Instead, we made an electronic cat’s cradle of phone calls between each other’s houses, all of us wearing house robes, hunched over kitchen chairs with only stove lights burning, whispering, unknowingly mimicking the purgatorial hiss of Karen’s respirator.

  The next morning, as agreed, we sluggishly convened down in the parking lot beside the smokehole five minutes before first bell, our eyes reddened, hair already stinking of smoke, our then-stylish corduroy wide-leg pants flapping in a wet, chilly Pacific wind.

  Our entrance into English class—Wendy and Linus and me—caused a not unsurprising teen zing as Karen’s seat in front of me was pregnantly empty. Yet the three of us kept our down jackets on, chins buried within their waffled nylon quilting, not as an act of defiance but as one of insulation, to shield us from the stares, the passed notes and hungry sideways glances. Philip Eng and Scott Litman gave us goggled incredulity; Andrea Porter offered kittenish gossip-hungry leers. Unspoken voices surrounded us: Look: it’s the Karen killers. I hear they wrecked the Carters’ house. Drugs, too: prescription drugs. Pissed to the gills! We all saw it coming, what with Jared kicking it last year. They’re jinxed—they bring death to those around them. Look at their faces: I’ve never seen their badness before—I … I can’t wait to talk to them. Stars! Killers right here in our own English class!

  When the session bell rang, the three of us skittered down the booming north hallway to reconvene outside by the Datsun. Hamilton and Pammie were already there, smoking and looking prickly. Their experiences had been similar to our own.

  “Well, that was a real lulu, kids,” Hamilton said, saying what we all felt. “No shitting way am I going back into that freak show.” The five of us had already realized we were never going to finish school in a normal way. Pam said, “Canyon,” then we hopped into our cars.

  We had a few cigarettes and Linus had bargain-basement dime-bag skunkweed pot, which was all we needed for that moment. So we zoomed off to the canyon forest below Rabbit Lane. There, we parked the cars, walked
down into the canyon’s windless soggy greens where the tall trees above shielded us from the wet harsh weather, and we were calmed.

  5

  NO SEX NO MONEY NO FREE WILL

  Again, personalities.

  I have always noticed in high school yearbooks the similarity of all the graduate write-ups—how, after only a few pages, the identities of all the unsullied young faces blur, how one person melts into another and another: Susan likes to eat at Wendy’s; Donald was on the basketball team; Norman is vain about his varsity sweater; Gillian broke her arm on Spring Retreat; Brian is a car nut; Sue wants to live in Hawaii; Don wants to make a million and be a ski bum; Noreen wants to live in Europe; Gordon wants to be a radio deejay in Australia. At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities—to clarify just who it is we really are?

  What have I said about myself so far? Not much, as is obvious. Until Jared vanished, I had thought my life average. You might look at me and ask me to baby-sit your children or coach them in baseball. I believed my mind was clean. My ambitions were undefined, but I assumed I would make my way in the world. I tried to be pleasant and likable. I don’t think that’s bad, but I was left every day with the sensation that I wasn’t doing a good job at being … me. Not fraudulent, merely … not doing a good job at being me.

  I remembered people from back in my early twenties, friends who would adopt a persona—the chic Euro-person; the embittered Grunge Thing; Stevie Nicks—and after years of practicing, they suddenly became those personas. What had I become? I don’t remember even trying to fake a persona.