This makes sense to Karen. She calms down, lets Pam do her work, and watches out the front window as a newscaster who looks surprisingly like Lois has her hair brushed and dictates notes to minions. Lois, standing on the lawn, raptly watches.
Karen recalls her conversation with Richard, who was unsure why she, a photo hater at the best of times, would participate in such an intrusive procedure. Well, it’s not going to atone for two decades away from Megan, but it’s something practical I can do to help her. It makes me feel motherly. And Megan wants to be interviewed, too.
A few minutes later, Lois, obviously thrilled, says, “Karen, this is Gloria.”
Gloria walks in, wearing a red suit and flashing teeth like baby corn, teeth so perfect she looks as though she has three rows, not two. A white, paper makeup bib sticks out from her collar. “I’m so happy to meet you, Karen. Are you relaxed?” The woman’s hand almost crushes Karen’s fingers. Before Karen can reply, Gloria is saying, “That’s terrific. It’s probably best we don’t talk too much right now. It makes for a better show if I meet you the same time the world meets you. Paula said she had a lovely pre-interview with you.” A smile. Gloria’s eyes: blink blink blink. An assistant asks if Paula called. Yes, Paula called. Gloria is out of the room, but her voice is audible. “Aren’t these owls just the dearest things!” Karen can hear Lois blush with pleasure.
Technicians—who couldn’t look more bored even were they to try—hook up cables, manipulate light meters, set up reflectors, and link a satellite feed from one of three vans. Karen feels like she’s in a movie in which scientists discover alien life-forms inside a suburban house. Her hearing vanishes; suddenly, she is deaf. She turns her head and sees Richard and Linus at the dining room table chatting with Megan. Wendy is on the back patio playing with a neighbor’s cat. George is out of sight in the front hallway.
And suddenly she is lost in a blast of white light. Her eyelids shut, her arms jitter, and her face bleeds water. “Christ!” says Pam. She, Richard, and Linus come over; Karen’s face is running like a river. “Karen.” Richard taps her shoulder gently. “Karen!”
She now remembers where it was she went. She was up in the stars and then she descended to Earth, shimmering and blue, into the swirls of clouds over the Atlantic, flying and swooping, joining the birds and feeling like a bright color. And then she was pulled upward again—a hand, a clasp behind her shoulders where her wings ought to have been. She was pulled up in the stars. Once there, she turned around and saw the Moon, and then the hand dropped her there—inside a crater. She was dressed for warmth, but this is outer space and why should it matter?
“I remember,” Karen says. “Yes, I remember.” In her head, she walks into a crater and kicks some dust, which falls downward at one-sixth Earth gravity. “And it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen here.”
She blinks and can hear again.
“Karen, you’re scaring the crap out of me,” Pam says. “What happened? Are you okay?”
Her eyes open. “It’s going to happen here.” “What is? What’s going to happen, honey?”
Karen snaps out of it. “Oh. Pam—what did I …?—I spaced out there.”
“From a cosmetician’s viewpoint, you did more than space out, Kare.”
Pam reworks Karen’s face, gooey with sweat and foundation. “Is it fixable?”
“Of course. Relax. Richard—can you get Karen a glass of water?” Richard scuttles to the kitchen and returns with a glass. When he hands it over, Karen says thanks, but refuses to look him in the eye. A few moments later, she looks to her right and sees both Richard and Wendy looking concerned. A technician shouts out, asking if everybody’s ready to tape; and so the taping begins.
We now bring you a girl, or rather, a young woman, who’s been very much on the world’s mind these past few months. On a cold December evening back in 1979, Karen Ann McNeil, a pretty and popular Vancouver, Canada, teenager, was at a party. There, she drank two weak vodka cocktails and took two Valiums—pills she used to calm her metabolism after a two-month crash diet. The price she paid for this youthful folly? Karen spent the next seventeen years in a coma, during which time she gave no evidence of higher brain functions or other promising signs. Then, miraculously, after a bronchial infection earlier this fall, Karen awoke on the morning of November first. Her brain functions were fully normal, as was her memory. She could even remember her homework assignments from the week before the coma.
And what sort of world did Karen wake up to? A dramatically different world—one without the Berlin Wall and one with AIDS, computers, and radicchio. She also woke up into a world where she now has a daughter, Megan, born nine months after Karen entered her coma.
I met with Karen recently at her home on a mountain suburb of Vancouver. I found her sparkling with words and, I have to admit, I was a bit shocked at her appearance. Karen left her coma weighing eighty-two pounds. By interview time, she was up to ninety-three, but seventeen years have left her body ravaged by diminished muscle capacity. Fortunately, her mind and face are as animated as they were that fateful December night seventeen years ago….
“What about your body—how do you feel now that it’s”—pause—” so different than the way it was in 1979?” Gloria has been drilling for tears and is annoyed at the lack of a geyser. She mistakes Karen’s disbelieving pauses at Gloria’s rude intrusions for emotion. “Do you miss your body?”
“I’m fine with my body, Gloria. It returns more to normal every day. There are people out there in far worse straits than me. I can stick it.”
The interview isn’t going well at all. Karen realizes that Gloria wants to present a plucky, back-from-the-brink-of-death woman, eager to sing the praises of the new and changed world. Instead, Karen seems not all that happy and not too thrilled with modern life. And she won’t cry.
“What’s the biggest change in the world you’ve noticed so far, Karen? What strikes you as the deepest change?”
Behind Karen stands the Christmas tree, cheerful and twinkling. She is alone in the room with just the TV people, Pam as makeup, and Richard as emotional support. The others she asked to leave, so as not to pressure her with her answers. Karen speaks: “You know what it is, Gloria? It’s how confident everybody comes across these days. Everybody looks like they’re raring to go all the time. People look confident even when they’re buying chewing gum or walking the dog.”
“You like that then?”
“There’s more. You take these same confident-looking people and ask them a few key questions and suddenly you realize that they’re despairing about the world—that the confidence is a mask.”
“What kind of questions?”
“What do you think life will be like in ten years? Are you straining to find some kind of meaning? Does growing old frighten you?”
“Hmmm. We’re a culture searching for meaning. Yes.” Gloria doesn’t like this avenue. Her face morphs into a new position. Suddenly, Gloria’s smiling. “You have a daughter now, Karen: Megan.” Conspiratorial leer. “We need to know—how does it feel to wake up and discover you have a seventeen-year-old?”
“Feel? It’s a pleasure. And a surprise. Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly there’s a teenager there saying, ‘Hi, Mom.’ In a way, I feel like a sister. I ask myself, If I were back in high school, is Megan somebody I’d be friends with.”
“And?”
“I don’t think I would. She’d be too confident to follow the crowd. She’d be offbeat, and I’d wish I could just talk to her and see what’s in her head.”
“And Megan’s father—do you still see him?”
“Absolutely. We’re engaged.” Karen smiles at Richard over Gloria’s shoulder. Gloria gives an appropriate smile reaction, then says, “Cut!”
Gloria unclips her mike and bolts toward a door where the minions cower. “Why the hell didn’t we know about this? Who researched this—Anthea? Get her on the phone now. No—she’s in 213, not 310. We’re going to have to r
etake the intro. Is the weather going to hold?”
There’s panic for the next ten minutes, and then Gloria returns. “Speed and—” Clack! “Rolling—” Gloria turns into “Gloria” instantly, like a plugged-in appliance. “Karen, so you’re engaged now?”
“Indeed I am.”
“Will we be able to meet … him?”
“I think not. He’s far more private than I am.”
“What’s his name?”
“Richard.”
“So Richard waited all these years for you? All these decades, your one love waited?”
Karen pauses. Her eyes begin to mist up—damnit! She fell into Gloria’s trap of tears. “Yes”—sniffle—” he did.” Now her eyes flood. Gloria heaves a relieved breath and knows this will be a dynamite kicker.
“Gloria,” calls a technician, “we lost the sound on that one. We have to redo the take.”
Gloria mutters a curse and the process begins again in a startlingly machinelike process: “Karen, so you’re engaged now?” Gloria bats the eyes: blink blink blink.
“Yes.”
“Will we be able to meet … him?” “No.”
“What’s his name?” “That’s private.”
“Very well. So your boyfriend waited all these years for you? All these decades your one love waited?”
Karen pauses. “Yeah. He did.” No tears. Gloria is furious.
How many of us have a love so true it spans eternity? A purity of need so clear it can remain strong in the face of all that the world throws at us? This is Karen Ann McNeil, the woman who fell to Earth, the woman for whom the people in her life never gave up waiting.
“What about your friends, Karen? How do you feel to see them all aged seventeen years overnight? Do you still hang out with them?”
“They’re my life, really. Them and my family. If they weren’t here, I don’t think I could handle the world.” Karen is disgusted with the platitudes she’s dishing out. She sounds to herself like a Miss America contestant allowed out of the soundproof booth and given thirty seconds to answer questions that will, to a large degree, define future directions of her life.
Gloria looks peeved. We need more drama. A woman named Randy comes over; she and Gloria have a hushed discussion over notes on Gloria’s crisp red lap. Pam powders Karen’s face. “How’s it going, Kare?”
“I think I’m a dud. And they’re furious about losing the crying scene.”
Karen thinks over what Pam blurted out in the car the other day—about how people expect her to be a thousand years old now, not just thirty-four. She knows this is what Gloria wants to get at.
“Karen—” Gloria returns. “Let’s just do a few more questions. This must be tiring for you.”
“It’s my pleasure. When are you interviewing Megan?”
“After you,” says Gloria. “And then we’ll do the two of you together. Everything is out of sequence, but we patch it all together in post-production.” Gloria’s face looks harsh, unwilling to spare any niceness energy until production noises are made. The board claps and once again she becomes “Gloria.”
“Karen.” Gloria puts on her serious look, cradles her chin atop her hands, and looks deeply at Karen. “The world is curious—and I know this is a simple question, but I need to ask it—how does it feel to be a modern Rip Van Winkle? Almost twenty years asleep. My my. What’s it like inside your head? What’s it like to be you right now?”
“You know what I feel? I feel useless in this modern world. I’m unable to do anything but lie around. I feel like I’m the only person on Earth who relaxes anymore. And then I think about all the bad stuff that’s about to happen and I feel sorry for the world because it’s nearly over.”
Cut!
Assistants run over. “Karen, what on Earth was that?”
Karen blinks and looks out the window at the sky, competing for attention with the camera lights. “I’m not sure. It just came out.” Richard slips around a corner and motions for Wendy to come over. He tells her what happened.
“Karen,” Gloria says, “let’s try that one again. Maybe we can ask about the, er, bad stuff with another question. Agreed?”
“Sure. It’s your show.”
Rolling …
“Karen.” Gloria again looks deeply at Karen and repeats word-perfectly, “The world is curious—and I know this is a simple question but I need to ask it—how does it feel to be a modern Rip Van Winkle? Twenty years asleep. My my. What’s it like inside your head? What’s it like to be you right now?”
“I feel useless as tits on a board. I sit around all day doing dick-all while everybody else runs around like crazed cartoon characters.”
A semi-defeated silence follows. Gloria asks, “Anything else?”
“Seeing as your asking, yes. The world’s going to be over soon.”
Cut!
“Karen, I—Excuse me a second.” Gloria darts outside. An assistant, Jason, comes in to play good cop. He’s a slow walker; his eyes have seen something. He doesn’t discount the odd and he sees a possible miracle where others see dreck. “Karen,” he says, motioning the film crew to keep rolling, “when you say the world’s over, what, exactly, do you mean?”
“What I said. I …” There is a pause and a voice speaks, the voice of Karen who was away all these years. “Three days after Christmas. That’s when the world goes dark. There’s nothing that can be done and there’s no escaping. I saw it happen in 1979. By accident, some doors had been left open and I got a peek. I wasn’t snooping. I just saw it at the right time. I thought I could sleep my way out of it—I wasn’t sure of the date it was going to happen. I wanted to be asleep forever. It’s not the same as death, but it’s the only way we have to escape time. That’s what makes us different from every other creature in the world—we have time. And we have choices.”
Jason is quiet. The camera still rolls. Richard, Pam, and Wendy watch. In the lull, they can hear Gloria’s voice saying, “What am I supposed to do when she keeps shutting down and spouting claptrap. Does she not have the word ‘retake’ in her vocabulary?”
“Gloria, she’s been in a coma for twenty years almost. People expect her to be odd.”
“I can’t believe we lost the tear shot.”
Jason says, “Are there any details you can give, Karen. Places? names? Is it a bomb or is it—”
“It’s sleep. Nearly everybody falls asleep and then they go. It’s painless. Where do you live?”
“New York.”
“You’ll go. Gloria goes. Everybody there goes.” “And this doesn’t make you sad?” “It hasn’t happened yet. I won’t know until it’s over.” “What about you and your family and friends. Don’t you worry for them?”
“There’s nothing I can do to help them one way or another. All of this was decided a long, long time ago. And I don’t know specifically who lives and who doesn’t. So I can’t tell you people, really, I can’t.”
“And you?”
“Me? I get to live. I know that for sure.” Karen seems to have no more to say on this subject.
Jason’s face is thoughtful. “Thanks for telling me this.”
“I might as well.” And then Karen wakes up while still asleep. She startles: “Wha—?—I spaced out again there. I dreamed I was telling you the world was going to shut down.”
“A dream?”
“No. Not really. I suppose not.”
21
YOUR DREAMS OF WAR ALARM YOU
Karen feels release and confusion. She knows that her words have annoyed the Americans and baffled—perhaps even slightly frightened—her friends.
She knows that she is in the center of some sort of mass transformation—one larger than just her mere reawakening. But how big will this change be? Miracles always have limits. When one is granted wishes, one is granted only three wishes—not four or five or ten. What will be the limits here?
Karen feels trapped inside the biggest déjà vu in the world. Her behavior seems preordained, like a
queen who spends her day cutting ribbons, judging flower shows, and overseeing state dinners—all of these activities preordained. And she has decided, somewhere between her co-interview with Megan and the camera crews’ taping the two of them hobbling down Rabbit Lane, that she’ll try and play it dumb about her on-camera statements of impending doom. Already she is detecting that Richard and Wendy think her comments might be evidence of incipient madness. Oh God.
She misses running and she misses her hair and she misses being normal, being absorbed by the crowd. She has decided that the best way for her to go through life is for her to view even her smallest actions and gestures as coincidental, charged, and miraculous. It was the way she remembered life felt at the age of sixteen and it is a way she is determined to re-create.
Beef south/chicken north.
The night of the TV shoot, Karen goes to bed almost immediately, thus precluding any discussion of what she had told Gloria and then Jason. She is still asleep when Richard leaves for work the next day. During the day, when he calls home, there is no answer—Christmas shopping. He phones Wendy at her office and the two of them convene at Park Royal for coffee, where dispirited Christmas mall music serenades their baffled conversation. Wendy stirs the sugar in her coffee thirty times and says, “I think that Karen’s memory and thought processes maybe aren’t as clear as we’d hoped for, Richard. Are you scared—about going south?”
Richard, obligated to visit Los Angeles, says yes. He leaves on the twenty-seventh and returns on the twenty-eighth.
“Can’t you go some other time?”
“No. We’re behind schedule as it is. Besides, it’s so preposterous. If I stay home, I’ll only reinforce whatever fantasy or phobia it is Karen’s going through.” He bites a muffin. “It is fantasy, right?”
“Who’s to say? It’s like those cartoons of guys with long beards holding a sign on a street corner saying THE END IS NEAR; there’s always a little part of you that wonders, what if? Yeah, it’s spooky. Have you spoken about this with her yet?”
Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel Page 16
