Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel

by Douglas Coupland

  Bellingham w. Sinclairs

  They can hear the ocean outside the front windows. Upstairs in the main bedroom, the odor of Richard’s parents is strong. Their bed has the feel of a memorial stone.

  Parents.

  They were the engines and the rudders of suburban life. Richard’s and Pam’s parents will never return from the States, nor will Hamilton’s father return from Kauai or his mother from Toronto. Linus’s parents and Wendy’s father are sixty miles away, which might as well be a million. Karen’s parents haven’t come home, and Karen has given the impression they are not to be expected.

  Megan sits on her grandparents’ bed and sniffles, then hits herself.

  “Why’d you do that, Meg?”

  “For being too weak to cry like a real human being.” “Oh, honey …”

  Richard puts his arm around Megan’s shoulder and he allows her to blubber; he can do so himself later. Once she’s cried out, Richard says, “Let’s collect some things right now. Some to bury and some to keep.”

  Megan stands up and halfheartedly shuffles about. A pair of house slippers; a pearl necklace; a pipe; framed photos. Megan clutches a pillow so that she can remember her grandmother’s smell.

  They walk out onto the deck and look across the water to downtown. The sky is overcast and smoky, tinged with burning wood and scorched brake pads. As Richard looks at the view, Megan goes inside and returns shortly with one of Richard’s mother’s diamond clip earrings. “Here,” she says, “bend down, Dad.” Megan takes the diamond and presses it into the center of Richard’s palm. He looks at the crackles of white light that glint from within it and he remembers a day long ago with Megan down at Ambleside Beach, a bright day. He was gazing at the sun and the light on the water and had thought that there is a light within us all—a light brighter than the sun, a light inside the mind. He had forgotten this and now he remembers, there on the balcony.

  The roads are clear and silent as Linus, Wendy, Hamilton, and Pam drive up the slope of Eyremont Drive. Once at the top, the city lies before them, a glinting damaged sheet of pewter, with fires burning like acetylene pearls fallen from a broken choker. Ropes of smoke rise from the ground as though tethered to the damage; in the harbor, oily gorp has spilled into the waves and burns a Bahamian turquoise blue.

  “The ocean’s on fire,” Hamilton says. “Like a sea of burning whiskey.” Linus captures the image on Hi-8.

  As of yet, nobody shows signs of mourning; they are still shell-shocked. What exactly is a citizen to do? they wonder. What possible purpose or meaning could there be in this strange situation?

  “I was in a train once,” Pam says, “in England, returning to London from someone’s country house near Manchester.” She lights a cigarette. “It was morning and I was deadly hung over and had to get back to London. At eleven o’clock, the train pulled to a stop—it was Remembrance Day morning—and all machinery stopped and all noises and voices stopped, and the world went silent. There was silence for one minute as everybody closed their eyes. A whole country shut its eyes. I felt as though the world had stopped. In my head I thought, So this is what the end of the world is like. I thought, So this is what it’s like when time ends. I kind of feel that way now.”

  The breeze changes direction. “What’s that smell?” Hamilton asks. Already they can smell—the smell. Hamilton says, “Uh-oh—Leakers.”

  Pam screams and throws a camera at him.

  Having returned from her grandparents’ condo, Megan feels the need to do something productive. She walks to feed the ostriches at the Lennox house a few doors over. The birds’ hungry quacking grows louder as she walks across the wet grass and through the Lennox’s cheerfully wreathed front door. In the utility room, she finds sacks of corn piled on top of the washer and dryer. Through the opened upper half of the Dutch door leading into the garage, Megan is unable to see the big birds, and then from the side edge of the garage prance two angry, silly faces with Maybelline eyes. They cluck and bobble, making her smile. They’re ravenous; she quickly slits open a sack, opens the door, and drags it into the garage. While the ostriches gobble their meal, she fills a bucket of water from the goldfish pond out back. On returning, the two ostriches peck at Megan’s hands, eager to have the water for themselves. Megan is enchanted with these frantic, funny animals and she sits on the garage stoop to enjoy them.

  The garage is so grotty, she thinks. These poor creatures haven’t seen light for days now. She walks inside the garage to the door, wondering if she can open it just slightly so that light and air can come in through the bottom. Bang! The ostriches run through the Dutch door and enter the house, knocking over chairs and tables, quacking and hissing about the living room, and then head out the front door, which Megan had forgotten to close. Oh shit, she thinks, another rodeo.

  She storms out onto the lawn, where the two birds are joyfully bouncing about, fluffing their silly little wings. The ostriches vanish into the forest as surely as they had fallen into a river with weights on their knotty legs.

  That night the steady hum of Linus’s gas generator offers a false sense of stability with its precise rhythms.

  Karen places the paper bag on her head and resumes her visions of events around the world: “Skeletons sitting on plastic seats outside a Zürich Mövenpick restaurant.”

  “Skeletons? Already?”

  “No. It’s in the future. Oh—I see an Apple computer smashed on the floor of a Yokohama branch of a Sumi … Sumi … Sumitomo Bank. This is all random stuff. I see … morning glories growing out of an Ecuador sewer line and entwining onto a human femur. I see … five brightly-dressed skiers frozen asleep on their skis on the slopes of Chamonix; a Missouri railway car sidled off its tracks, with millions of scratch ‘n’ play lottery tickets spilled into an overflowing creek. In Vienna, two teenage girls are entering a bakery and filling their pockets with chocolates. And now … now … there. They’ve just fallen asleep.”

  “Can’t you focus in on our own specifics, Kare?” asks Wendy. “What about my dad?”

  “Give me your hand.” Wendy grabs Karen’s hand. Karen speaks: He’s asleep. On his bed. He had no idea what happened. He was napping and fell asleep while he was sleeping. Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah.”

  The others want to know about their families and bustle toward Karen. Hamilton’s father fell asleep on the beach and was pulled out with the tide. His mother in Toronto fell asleep in a downtown shopping arcade. Richard’s parents fell asleep in a lineup trying to cross the border. Pam’s parents got out of the car and walked across, but only got a half a mile or so into Canada before sleeping. Linus’s parents died in a car crash on the highway near Langley.

  After a silence, Richard asks, “What about Lois and George?”

  “Asleep. Mom in Park Royal and Dad in his shop.”

  “Oh.”

  The generator huffs and stutters and kicks out and then back in. The lights flicker. They now feel fragile, and the youthful sense of infinity that got them to this moment in their lives is gone. “Richard, please remove the paper bags from my head. I want all of us to go out for a walk.”

  “But the rain—”

  “What is your point? Get some flashlights and rain gear.”

  Minutes later, the seven walk through the street, where a rain of stunning proportion turns the sky into a sea. “Look,” Pam says, “each drop is like a glass of water.” Nobody can remember the last time it rained so hard. Water clobbers them on the head; water renders them deaf. Down the street they march, without lights, Karen in her wheelchair, soaked and sad, down the street until they reach the bottom. Richard says, “Karen, can you tell us what’s going on—why we’re here?”

  “Richard—” In spite of the water that gullies down her hood, she looks him calmly in the eye. “The world was never meant to end like in a Hollywood motion picture—you know: a chain of explosions and stars having sex amid the fire and teeth and blood and rubies. That’s all fake shit.”

>   “So exactly what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying, shh!” Karen whispers as they stand in the rain, drenched, on the pavement at the foot of Rabbit Lane bordering the entrance to the forest. “Listen: There is an older woman in Florida. She’s in her kitchen and she hears her wind chimes tinkle. On the kitchen chairs are bags of groceries bought yesterday but never placed in their cupboards. It’s cool out and she is wearing a nightie. She walks out of the kitchen door and down to a nearby dock where a warm wind sweeps over her head and through the fabric she’s wearing. She sits down and looks at the sky with its stars and satellites and thinks of her family and her grandchildren. She’s smiling and she’s humming a song, one that her grandchildren had been playing over and over that week. “Bobo and the Jets”? No—” Benny and the Jets.” Suddenly, she’s sleepy. She lies down on the deck and closes her eyes and sleeps. And that’s that. She is the last person. The world’s over now. Our time begins.”

  PART 3

  27

  FUN IS STUPID

  Jared here, one year later …

  … lock up your daughters. And your smutty magazines. And your sofa, for God’s sake, because you never know, I may go and hump it like a Great Dane. Har har. Listen to my friends and you’d think I was the world’s biggest perv. Right. And take a look at them now, will you—one year later: useless sacks of dung they are, slumped around Karen’s fireplace watching an endless string of videos, the floor clogged with Kleenex boxes and margarine tubs overflowing with diamonds and emeralds, rings and gold bullion—a parody of wealth.

  Between tapes what do they do? They have money fights, lobbing and tossing Krugerrands, rubies and thousand-dollar bills at each other; at other times they make paper airplanes from prints by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and shoot them into the fireplace.

  During one particularly long lull between videos, I, Jared, slip to the side of the house and turn off the Honda gas generator Linus has rigged up. The power dies and triggers a clump of groans amid the clan. It’s at this point I choose to appear outside the window—across the lawn—a ball of white light. Wendy is the first to see me and she calls my name.

  “Jared?”

  “What’s that, Wendy?” Megan asks. “It’s Jared. Look. He’s back.”

  All eyes gaze rapt while I gavotte across the lawn in my old football uniform, the brown and whites.

  In the silence I glow like a deep-sea creature, like a pale moon, and I flow several feet above the ground, and then scoot through the one unsmashed pane of the glass patio doors as though catching a fumbled ball. I walk across the room as though on an airport conveyor belt and out the other wall. Hamilton runs out to the car port but I’m not there.

  Wendy lights candles and a few moments later I enter the room from the ceiling, stopping with my feet above the fireplace, where I introduce myself:

  “Hey guys. It’s me—Jared. Fucking A—I’m so happy to see all of you.”

  “Jared?” Karen says.

  “Hi, Karen. Hello everybody.”

  “Jared, what are you? Where are you? Are you okay?” asks Richard.

  “I’m a ghost and I guess I’m blissed out, Richard. I’m high on life. It’s the Hotel California. Yessiree.”

  “What are you doing here?” Megan asks, recognizing me from my old high school yearbook photo.

  “I’m here to help you out,” I say as I begin to dissolve through the floor.

  “Wait!” Wendy shouts. “Don’t go!”

  I’m halfway through the floor: “Man, this floor feels good.”

  “You can feel the floor?” Linus asks.

  “What’s heaven like?” Richard asks

  “What happens when you die?” Pam asks.

  “Show us a miracle, big boy” Hamilton says.

  Only my head lies above the floor: “Oof!—you should try this sometime. This floor beats Cheryl Anderson any day of the week.” “Jared!” Karen’s shout is urgent.

  “All of you,” I say, “—you’re birds born without wings; you’re bees who pollinate cut flowers. Don’t pee yourselves. I’ll return soon. Let’s get weird.”

  It’s the next day and Richard is growing impatient with Hamilton and Pam, dawdling as the two step out of the minivan, wobbly and silly.

  “You go first, Barbara Hutton.” “No wayyyy, Mr. Hefner. You first.” “Pals call me Hef.”

  “Listen you two freaks, can we just step to it?”

  Before them is a wide, faded tar piazza strewn with skeletons, cars parked at odd angles, and rusted shopping carts. Beyond this is the faded and ratty looking Save-On supermarket. Its glass doors are like gums without dentures.

  “Ooh. Miss Thing needs a drinky.”

  “Hamilton—I mean Hef—let’s get in and out as quickly as we can.”

  “Okay, okay, Richard. Don’t cack your nappies.” “Richard,” Karen says, “I’m going to stay out in the van. You three go in. I need some sun.”

  “You want anything special, Kare?”

  “Yeah, cotton balls … a hot oil treatment … some licorice if it’s still any good.” “Gotcha.”

  Karen sits alone in the minivan’s front seat, sifting through CD’s and enjoying a freakish heat wave warming the remains of the city. I, Jared, become manifest.

  “Hi, Karen.”

  “Jared! Where are you?”

  “Out here.” She swivels to see me standing outside the door atop a rusted shopping cart on its side. I’m hard to see during the day—like gas flames against a blue sky.

  “Jared, what’s the deal here? I’ve got a thousand questions I want to ask you.”

  “Ask away, Karen. You look good. How are you feeling?”

  “Crappy. But my arms are getting pretty strong. My legs—they’re kind of going downhill now. They’re deteriorating. I can only barely walk around the house and stuff. What about you—do ghosts have pain? I mean, do you hurt?”

  “Not the way you do.”

  “No. I imagine not.” She changes gears: “So cough up the truth, Jared, because I’m really mad at you or whoever did this to me. You deep-freezed me for seventeen years and left me with a puppet body. And who smashed in the patio door last year when everything started falling apart?”

  “Actually, that was me at the door.”

  “You?”

  “Apologies, Kare. I screwed up—it was my first time back here. I was going to give a you a speech. I decided not to—I was too embarrassed about wrecking the door. It was just like the night I walked into Brian Alwin’s parents’ patio door in tenth grade. Duh. I went and helped Wendy instead. She got lost in the forest coming here from the dam.

  “You scared the crap out of me.”

  “Hey—it won’t happen again. I’ve got good control of it now—my astral presence, I mean.” I do a double flip there and land atop the rusted shopping cart. “Sexy or what?”

  “Ooh baby baby. Shit, Jared, tell me, what exactly is the point of everything that’s happened? And why did I go into a coma? I can’t explain anything. So maybe you can. Everybody treats me like I know the answers and that I won’t tell them out of spite. I hate it.”

  “Well, Karen, you—how shall I say this—you accidentally opened certain doors. You were taking all those diet pills and starving yourself. Your brain did somersaults; you saw things; you caught a glimpse of things to come.”

  “For that I lost my youth? And for that matter, how come I was the one selected for coma duty? Huh? Did I ask? Who decided?”

  “Mellow out, Kare—I mean, if you remember the note you gave Richard, you yourself wanted to sleep for ‘a thousand years,’ and avoid the future. You chose this, not me or anybody else. Worse things could have happened. I mean, you could have died completely. You could have had brain death.”

  “So why am I awake now instead of sleeping another nine-hundred-eighty-three years?”

  “You woke up from your coma because you’d be able to see the present through the eyes of the past. Without you there’d be n
o one to see the world as it turned out in contrast to your expectations. Your testimony was needed. Your testament.”

  “Jared, nothing ever turns out the way it was intended. Just look at me.” Karen looks at her legs and grimaces. “Oh, God. This is so bizarre. This is not what I was expecting life to be like. Hey wait—Jared—how come it’s you here and not anybody else? I want to see my parents.”

  “I can’t swing that, Kare. I’m your Official Dead Person. I’m the only person any of you knew who died when you were young. Because of this I register in your heads as the, umm, the deadest.”

  “The deadest? What a crock.”

  “Karen, forget about that for a second. Tell me—I have to ask you this: What is the main thing you noticed—the major difference between the world you left and the world you woke up into?”

  Karen exhales heavily, as though she’s having a massage and her tension is dissolving. She looks into the Save-On’s dark interior and says, “A lack.”

  “A lack?”

  “Yes. A lack of convictions—of beliefs, of wisdom, or even of good old badness. No sorrow; no nothing. People—the people I knew—when I came back they only, well, existed. It was so sad. I couldn’t allow myself to tell them.”

  “What’s so wrong with that—just existing, I mean?”

  “I’m not sure, Jared. Animals and plants exist and we envy them that. But in people it just doesn’t look good. I didn’t like it when I came out of the coma and I still don’t like it—even with just the few of us remaining here.”

  “And?”

  “God, Jared—you’re relentless. I know. Tell you what—you tell me who you slept with and I’ll answer more of your questions.” “Karen, I dunno….” “Stacey Klaasen?” “Okay, yeah.” “Jennifer Banks?” “Yeah.”

  “Jennifer Banks’s younger sister?” “Guilty.”

  “I knew you two did it.” “No shit, Sherlock.” “Annabel Freed?” “Yes.”

  “Dee-Ann Walsh.” “Yup.”

  “God, Jared—we should have come and hosed you down like a mink in heat. Who didn’t you make it with?” “Pam.”