“I could have guessed that.”
“Wendy.”
“I knewww that.”
“I was going to meet her after the football game. It was in the cards. And now you have to answer more of my questions.” “Fair n’uff.”
“You were talking about what was different about people when you woke up. Spill.”
“All right already. Let’s see. Give me a second.” She scratches her chin while a wild animal screams within the Save-On. “I know—I remember when I first woke up how people kept on trying to impress me with how efficient the world had become. What a weird thing to brag about, eh? Efficiency. I mean, what’s the point of being efficient if you’re only leading an efficiently blank life?” I egg her on. “For example?”
Karen pulls a blanket around herself, speaking as she moves. “I thought back in 1979 that in the future the world would—evolve. I thought that we would make the world cleaner and safer and smarter, and that people would become smarter and wiser and kinder as a result of all the changes.”
“And …?”
“People didn’t evolve. I mean, the world became faster and smarter and in some ways cleaner. Like cars—cars didn’t smell anymore. But people stayed the same. They actually—wait—what’s the opposite of progressed?”
“In this case, devolved.”
“People devolved. Hey, Jared—how come you know so many words now?”
“How to best explain … there’s a certain aspect of the afterworld that’s like English class and you’re not allowed to skip. Anyway, forget that. You were talking about devolution.”
“Yes. Megan—my daughter—she didn’t even believe in the future before the world ended. She thought the future was death and crime and lawlessness. And as soon as the future actually did end, she took it in stride. She had a daughter, Jane, born blind and brain defective—probably because of all the crap in the air these days—and she simply assumed that’s the way life should be. Actually, nobody believed in the future: Richard, Wendy—it’s like they expected the end.”
“How?” My body temporarily flares orange with anticipation.
“Drugs. Pam and Ham did smack—still do—or whatever they can. find that’s still fresh after one year because the notion of forty more years of time was, and continues to be, too much for them. Wendy lost herself in grueling routine. Linus apparently went away for years trying to figure out the meaning of life and he never found it and so he curled up inside himself and became dusty and slightly bitter. Megan had the baby born blind and with mental problems and so now Megan’s gone slightly autistic as a result. And Richard—Richard drank and placed all his hope in me. He thinks I don’t know, but I do. You have to remember, Jared, I wasn’t supposed to ever wake up. Richard could have spent his life mooning away about me and never have to deal with real life.”
“All good points. But a bit harsh, wouldn’t you say?”
“Jared, use your brain—look at me. I’m a monster. I’m like some UFO woman that Linus or Hamilton cooked up for TV movies. I gave up my body just so I could learn that the modern world was becoming sort of pointless and empty? A crappy trade.”
“Okay, but answer me this: Would you have believed in the emptiness of the world if you’d eased into the world slowly, buying into its principles one crumb at a time the way your friends did?”
She sighs. “No. Probably not. Are you happy now? Can I have my body back?” Karen grabs Pam’s cigarettes from the dashboard, lights one up, and then coughs.
“You smoke?” I ask.
“You jock. Yes, I’m smoking again as of now. Ooh. My head’s dizzy. Hey—how’s God?”
“Aw, Karen—don’t be flippant. It doesn’t suit you. This isn’t social studies class.”
“Oops—careless and stupid. But, how are you? I mean, you’re dead. I don’t want to be flippant. I’m really curious. Who wouldn’t be?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m totally cool. But I am worried about you and the rest of the crew, though.”
“Us? Forget us. We’re losers. Who’d worry about us? Go find some winners and worry about them.”
“Don’t say that, Karen. It’s just not true. It just isn’t.” Karen stares at me as though I’ve made a lame joke. “I have to go now—into the Save-On.”
“Well I’m not going anywhere with these chopstick legs of mine. I feel like one of those glass birds that dips its beak into a glass of water. By the way, if you go in to see the others, Hamilton and Pam are going to drive you nuts.
They spend their days shooting up and watching biography videos about the Duchess of Windsor, Studio 54,and Hollywood stars. They’re losing themselves back in time. They talk all crazy.”
“I can handle it.”
“Hey Jared, you haven’t answered many of my questions. Don’t go. Quick, tell me, what’s the deal? What happens next? Ten more years of this? Twenty? Thirty?”
“I can’t answer that, Karen. You know how the deal works.”
“You do know something then.”
“Come here, Karen—open the door.” Karen opens the door. “Swing out your legs,” I command, and she does. “Here—” I approach Karen and kneel before her. I kiss both her shins and then rise. “Stand up,” I say, and Karen, coltish and unsure, steps down onto the parking lot. “Run,” I say.
And she runs—around the van and then around the lot, whooping with joy. Her legs are whole again.
“I love you, Jared,” she says, to which I reply, in words she can’t hear because she is now so far away, “I love you, too.”
28
THE FUTURE IS FAKE
Inside the blackened supermarket, scores of animals, birds, and insects have made the building their home. Shit of all types splotches the floor, as do tussles of feathers, fur, bones, and soil. Squirrels and raccoons have reduced the cereal aisle to fiber while the meat department’s offerings have been entirely looted by wildlife. The smell of rot, a year later, is ebbing away, masked by the smell of shampoos and cosmetics fallen to the floor in a small earthquake six months prior. Birds rustle in the ceiling while down below flashlights carried by Richard, Hamilton, and Pam klieg their way across the store’s floor. The trio daintily minuet above the muck and locate the pharmacy in the middle of the store. A white-smocked Leaker sits at the counter—a beef jerky skeleton.
“Lord, I am sick of these things,” Hamilton says, draping the corpse with a spare smock. “I, Hef, last of the Famous International Playboys have no time for rot. Agnelli, Niarchos, the Prince of Wales—all gone now. I alone must keep up their grand tradition. Voulez-vous un Cadillac car? I live solely for nightclubs, hooch, and rides on the Concorde.”
“Hamilton, f’Chrissake, shut up,” Richard says. “Did you bring the awl and hammer?”
“Presto.”
“Thank you.”
Richard and Pam prod and jimmy a locked cupboard storing untold pharmaceutical gems. After some expert elbow grease, it flies open, causing plastic tubs to tumble onto the floor.
“Brush me, Daddy-O!”
“Just give me the rucksack, Hef,” Richard says as a shadow runs across his feet. “Squirrel alert.”
“Oh look! Look—it’s so sweet,” Pam says. “We can take it to Babe Paley’s place in Bermuda for dinner.”
“It’s Jamaica, dear. Who’s on the guest list?”
“Twiggy. The Sex Pistols. Jackson Pollock. Linda Evangelista.”
“You two are driving me up the fucking wall with your fantasies,” says Richard.
“If having a fantasy is a crime, I stand guilty as accused.” Hamilton makes a big huffy sniff of the air and then quickly regrets it.
Richard ignores this. “Aye yi yi. Oh, look—bingo!—two thousand Vicodins.” Something screams and scampers across the store down Aisle 3. “Oh, man, this place is a creep show. Let’s grab and scram. Hamilton, go get a shopping cart for the loot.”
“Roger.” In the greeting card section, Hamilton finds an abandoned cart. It squeaks and rubs
across the sludgy floor. Richard and Pam pile the pharmaceuticals into the cart.
“Oh, Christ. Karen wants some cotton balls and a hot oil treatment. Where are they?”
“Next aisle over.”
The trio walks slowly through the store’s cobwebbed, stinky carcass, and the farther away they get from the front, the blacker it gets. They pass two Leakers along the way, but of course, after all this time they are casual about such a sight. Slowly, slowly they move when suddenly they bump into three raccoons who hiss and try to escape, scaling a Matterhorn of soggy paper towels. “Oh shit …”
“Do I hear Karen calling us from outside?”
Koonk-koonk.
The lights in the ceiling pulse into operation, scorching brighter than daylight—the light all the more painful for its unexpectedness, illuminating the store and casting all of the wildlife into shrieks of panic, revealing the extent of devastation.
My friends scream and look up above, where they see me, Jared, in the rafters. “It’s me,” I say, and I tell them, “I’ve come back to you to bring you light.”
“You prick,” Hamilton bellows, “—the light almost blinded us!”
“Whoopsy daisy, guys. I was trying to put on a light show for you. It fell kinda flat. See you later this afternoon.”
“Light show?” Pam says.
“He’s technically sixteen, Pam,” adds Hamilton. “Oh yeah,” she muses, “He’s younger than Karen.”
Wendy is hesitantly meandering through the browning forest behind her house, armed with a twelve-gauge rifle should feral dogs attack. Her hair is washed and styled in a manner considered fetching by 1997, and, for that matter, 1978, standards and beneath her thick beige raincoat clings a saucy frilled lingerie getup fetched earlier that morning from a Marine Drive naughty shop. She’s calling me: “Jared? Jared?” She’s worried I won’t hear her call—or that I won’t respond—but I do.
“Hey, Wendy.” I appear a stone’s throw away, floating in the air, golden and light, weaving my way between the tall dwindling stands of firs and hemlocks on this steep canyon slope. I arrive and stand before her.
“You came.”
“Fuckin’ right, I did. How ya doing, Wendy? We never got our date, did we?” A silence passes between us. I let her be the one to break it.
“I’ve missed you. You helped me that horrible night last year when everything was falling apart—and then you went … away. Why?” “I knew I’d be back.”
She slowly walks nearer to me. “What’s it like to be dead, Jared? I don’t mean to be blunt, but I’m frightened and I’m also a doctor. In school and later at the hospital I looked at every corpse and I wondered the same thing: Dead—what next? And then the world shut down and all I saw—all I continue to see—are dead bodies. It’s all we see down here—dead bodies. We have a ‘clean zone’ around the houses, but everywhere else is one big pauper’s grave.”
“Death isn’t death, Wendy—blackness forever—if that’s what you mean. But it’s not my place to say anything more to you beyond that. It’s a big deal. I have to be quiet.”
“What about heaven?”
“Okay, sure. I give you that.”
Standing almost in front of me, she says, “Were you scared in the hospital? I visited you all those times. I brought you all those cookies I baked myself. You were sweet. And your eyes were far away. You never lost your beauty—even at the end when I think you maybe lost your hope.”
“I was too young to be really afraid of death. But my cancer was my Great Experience, and I don’t begrudge it.” “Bullshit.”
“Okay, you’re right. I was scared shitless. What else was I supposed to do? Everyone kept descending on me and kept making all these brave little faces and handing me muffins and teddy bears. No matter how scared you get you have to make that same brave little face back in return. It’s like, the law.”
“Jared—did you ever … you know, think about me?” Her arms are crossed protectively.
“Yeah. You know I did. We missed our date—I never showed you my candy.”
“Were you in love with Cheryl Anderson?”
“Wha—Cheryl Anderson?”
“Don’t look so surprised. She had a big mouth.”
“Hmmm. We liked each other a lot. But it wasn’t love, no. I was a jock so everybody thought I had to be a sex machine—and so I became one. It was great. It’s different now totally different.”
“How?”
“I’m no longer incarnate. But I can still—you know, get it on. In my own way.”
She begins to whimper: “Jared, can you please just take me away? Please? Put me in your arms and drive me to the sun. I’m so lonely. And I can’t kill myself, even though I think about it all the time. There’s no point to the world now. It just erodes and becomes chaotic and poisoned. Look at the trees around us. Brown. Probably radiation from a North Korean reactor gone wrong. Or Chinese. Or Ukrainian. Or … Just take me away, damnit! You’re a ghost, Jared. Prove it.”
“I can’t take you away, Wen. But I can make the loneliness leave you.”
“No—I don’t want that. I want to leave.”
“Just imagine, Wendy,” I say. “a world without loneliness. Every trial would become bearable, wouldn’t it?”
She thinks this over. She’s smart and she sees the truth. “Yes.” She sniffles. “You’re right. You win the Brownie badge. But why do we have to get lonely? It’s so awful. It’s so—wait—” Wendy’s composure returns somewhat. She wipes her eye and her voice becomes still. “You’re not going to take me away—are you?”
“Nope. I would if I could, but I can’t. You know that, Wendy.”
She sits on a fallen stump to collect her breath, her mind racing so quickly it almost seizes up. She takes several deep gulps, calms down, and then looks across the ferns and moss at me, a sixteen-year-old dead boy. As she does this, her raincoat opens slightly, exposing her lingerie beneath. She sniggers and takes the jacket off completely, revealing her pale thick body. “Ta da! Hey Jared, welcome to the new me. Doesn’t this getup make me lovable? Huh?”
“You’re a part of the world, Wendy, as much as daisies, glaciers, earthquake faults and mallard ducks. You were meant to exist. You’ve gotta believe me. You’re lovable … and you’re hot! You look so good.”
“Could you love me, Jared?”
“Which way?”
“Any way that stops me from being lonely.”
Her skin is goosebumped, her nipples are rigid. “Oh man, could I—” “I’m here.”
And so I remove the bulk of my spectral football outfit—cleats and pads and shirt—but I leave my shoulder pads on. “Your shoulders,” she says.
I walk toward her: “Just shush, Wen. Feel me walking through you.”
“Shhhh—quiet, Jared.”
“Oh, fucking A, man, this is great. Man, this is even better than Karen’s floor.” Wendy giggles and her voice drains. “Oh, Wendy—I don’t get to do this all too often these days. Oh!”
I stand there inside her body while a flock of crows caws in the treetops, and then I pass through her and it’s as if I’m receiving answers to questions I’d asked long ago—the same sense of being suspended in a moment of truth. As I look back, she is frozen with pleasure, eyeballs skyward and white. Her senses are still locked inside another realm.
I put my football togs back on and float in front of her, watching over her for a few minutes as her mind and body thaw. She looks at me and asks, “That’s as good as it gets, isn’t it?”
“Yep.”
“I’ve been thinking of this since 1978.”
“It was a powerful dream. You were great.”
“You’re going to leave now, aren’t you?”
“I’m not leaving you, but I do have to cut out. And also—”
“Shhh. Let me guess—I’m pregnant now, aren’t I?”
“Yep. How’d you know that?”
“It’s this skill I have. I can always tell when a woman’s p
regnant.” She pauses, her mind dreamy. “Thanks, Jared.”
I float upward, up into the canopy of trees and into the sky. “Good-bye, Wendy.”
Jane is papoosed onto Megan’s back as she motorcycles slowly through the ghostly suburb, ever vigilant for fallen trees, angry dogs, or freak weather bursts.
I look into Megan’s mind and I am fascinated by the things I see. Megan, being a teenager, had the least formed personality of the group as the world shut itself down, and she is also the least affected by everything. She drives over a crunchy skeleton on Stevens Drive as though it were merely a fallen branch; lighting a cigarette, she throws the lit match into the nearest house, not even sticking around to watch it burn.
It’s a sunny day and the air is clear—a rare day when the world doesn’t smell like a tire fire, the endless reeking fumes that cross over the Pacific from China.
In the middle of driving down Stevens to Rabbit Lane, Megan endures a pang of loneliness so real and so strong that I can only compare it to a tornado or lightning. It dawns on her that she has never visited Jenny Tyrell’s house in all the past year. She doesn’t know what she will find there, but she knows she has to go.
Megan’s hair is now long and falls to the side of her head like a bird lowering its wings as she pulls into the driveway of Jenny Tyrell’s house. Its lawn, like all lawns, has turned into a scraggly meadow; the Christmas decorations have faded after a year of neglect; the shingles have begun to snaggletooth; the cars in the driveway are coated in dust, and the tires have gone flat—a fairly good indicator that there’ll be Leakers inside the house, and indeed there are—Mr. and Mrs. Tyrell, mummified and serene on the living room floor surrounded by books of family photos, Mrs. Tyrell’s wedding dress, a wine bottle, and two glasses. No odors.
“Yo! Mr. and Mrs. Tyrell—” Megan gives the parents a fond gaze. “Came to check out Jenny’s stuff. She’s over at the mall in Lynn Valley. Mind if I go upstairs? Thanks. Oh look, Janie—Jenny’s room is a pigsty like always.”
Megan unstraps a googling Jane and puts her on Jenny’s bed. The room hasn’t changed much; the door was closed, so there’s little dust. Makeup and clothes are scattered about. There’s a photo of Megan, Jenny, and the old gang on the grass hockey team; ski boots; several Alanis Morrisette posters on the wall; and on the desk a diary—Megan had no idea Jenny kept a diary. “Move over, Jane—we’re going to be here a little while.” Her eyes moisten; her heart explodes.
Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel Page 21
