Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel

by Douglas Coupland

“He slays me. He really slays me.” Linus gathers his breath and looks out at the volcano. He sighs, then says, “Jared, tell me something: Is time over?”

  “Huh? Meaning what?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this so much. When I say time I mean history, or … I think it’s human to confuse history with time.” “That’s for sure.”

  “No, listen. Other animals don’t have time—they’re simply part of the universe. But people—we get time and history. What if the world had continued on? Try to imagine a Nobel Peace Prize winner of the year 3056, or postage stamps with spatulas on them because we ran out of anything else to put on stamps. Imagine the Miss Universe winner in the year 22,788. You can’t. Your brain can’t do it. And now there aren’t any people. Without people, the universe is simply the universe. Time doesn’t matter.”

  “Linus, you spent years roaming the continent looking for all sorts of answers, didn’t you?”

  “I did. In Las Vegas especially. It was a shithole, but it gave me space to think. And you’re not answering my question, Jared.”

  “I will. Did you reach any conclusions in Las Vegas?”

  “No. Not really. I thought I was going to see God or reach an epiphany or to levitate or something. But I never did. I prayed so long for that to happen. I think maybe I didn’t surrender myself enough—I think that’s the term: surrender. I still wanted to keep a foot in both worlds. And then this past year I’ve still been waiting for the same big cosmic moments, and still nothing’s happened—except you’re here and instead of feeling cosmic, it simply feels like we’re cutting gym class and coming up here for a butt. Your arrival seems somehow appropriate; I wish I could feel more awe. I wish you could be here all the time. We’re so bloody lonely.”

  Another smaller rumble tickles the ground and we can see lava flows treacling down Mount Baker’s slope. Linus wants to blurt words so I let him: “Jared, I know God can come at any moment in any form. I know we always have to be on the alert. And I know that day and night are the same to God. And I know that God never changes. But all I ever wanted was just a clue. When do we die, Jared?”

  “Whoa! Linus—it’s not that easy. I don’t have that kind of exact answer.”

  “Nobody ever seems to dish out the real answers.”

  There’s a strangely uncomfortable pause, and I try and switch moods: “Look at Mount Baker,” I say. “Remember that ski weekend there when we trashed the transmission in Gordon Streith’s Cortina?”

  “I kept the gear-shift knob as a souvenir.”

  The lava now burns gullies through the mountain’s glaciers and steam rises as high as a satellite. Linus feels calm and his voice becomes gentle: “I guess this is what the continent looked like to the pioneers back when they first came here, eh Jared? A land untouched by time or history. They must have felt as though they were walking headlong into eternity, eager to chop it down and carve it and convert it from heaven into earth. Don’t you think so?”

  “Yeah. The pioneers—they believed in something. They knew the land was holy. The New World was the last thing on Earth that could be given to humankind: two continents spanning the poles of Earth—continents as clean and green and milky blue as the First Day. The New World was built to make mankind surrender.”

  “But we didn’t,” Linus says.

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “But time, Jared—is it over? You never said.”

  Linus knows he’s on to something, but I’m unable to give him an answer. “Not quite yet.”

  “Again, nobody has full answers. Where’s everybody else now—the people who fell asleep? What are we supposed to be doing now?”

  “Linus—buddy—I’m not trying to dick you around. There’s a reason for everything.”

  “Always these eternal mysteries,” says Linus. “I don’t think human beings were meant to know so much about the world. All this time and all this exposure to every conceivable aspect of life—wisdom so rarely enters the picture. We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.”

  “Wait a second, Linus.” I approach him and place my hands on top of his head, making his body jiggle like a motel bed. I say, “There.” Linus goes rigid, grows limp, and then swoons to the pavement; I’ve shown him a glimpse of heaven. “You’ll be blind for a while now,” I tell him. “A week or so.”

  Linus is silent, then mumbles, “I’ve seen all I’ve ever needed to see.”

  “Good-bye, Linus.” With these words I pull backward, up into the sky, smaller smaller smaller into a blink of light, like a star that shines in the day.

  “Well, Hef, I grant you that these seats are comfy, but not nearly as comfy as being dragooned through the grottoes of Fez on a litter carried by four of Doris Duke’s seven-foot Nubians.” “Babs, you sassy vixen—make me jealous.”

  “Shush, Hef—I need to make a transatlantic phone call to the Peppermint Lounge. ‘Pardonez moi—est-ce-que je peut parle avec Monsieur Halston?’ “

  “Sure—call Halston. Last week I had lunch with the Princess Eugenie, Joe Namath, and Oleg Cassini. Lobster Thermador, Cherries Jubilee, and Crêpes Suzette. Ha!”

  “You tire me, Hef. Please leave.”

  Hamilton and Pam lounge on the front seat of an unsold Mercedes 450 SE inside the dusty dealership showroom on Marine Drive. The car doors are shut, the tires are flat, and on the seat between the two sits a trove of bric-a-brac connected to their drug use as well as cartons of cigarettes and stray unopened tequila bottles. I appear outside the front window, hovering in the middle of the pane. I glow.

  Pam shivers. “Umm—honey—I think maybe you should look out the window.”

  Hamilton is weighing various cones of powder and says, “I’m busy, Babs. I’m hiding my stash of dental-grade cocaine inside Gianni Agnelli’s leather ski boots.”

  “Hey goofball—look up!” I shout; Hamilton turns and I shatter the showroom window and float above the shards through the now-open air toward their car.

  “Ucking-fay it-shay,” Pam says.

  “Oh man, it’s Jared.”

  I lower myself down onto the dealership’s floor and then walk across the showroom and into the engine so that my body is half inside the car. “Hi, Pam. Hi, Hamilton.”

  “Um—hi, Jared,” Pam says. The two feel slightly silly being surrounded by so much contraband. Pam giggles.

  “Jared—buddy. This is so Bewitched.”

  “No, Hamilton, it’s real life. What are you guys doing inside the car here?”

  “We wanted to smell the interior. We miss the smell of new things,” Pam says with further titters. “There’s nothing new anymore. Everything just gets older and older and more worn down. One of these days there’ll be nothing new-smelling left in the world. So we’re taking whatever newness we can get.” She looks at the dashboard. “Older older older.” She lapses into a child’s song.

  “Old old old,” Hamilton adds. “Everything’s old. We’d kill for a new newspaper, a freshly mowed lawn, or a fresh coat of paint on something. By the way, great light show this morning at the Save-On. It was like you lifted a rock and everything underneath scurried to burrow into the crap underneath.”

  They’re high and not responding soberly. “Tell me, where else have you been today?” I ask.

  “Just you come and have a look.” Hamilton and Pam slither out of the car and we go to their pickup truck outside the building. The bed is filled with gems, gold coins, cutlery, jewelry, and other treasures.

  “We raided the safe-deposit boxes at the Toronto Dominion Bank in Park Royal,” Hamilton says.

  “It’s not as treasure-ish as you might think,” adds Pam. “There were things like locks of hair, Dear John letters, fishing trophies, blue ribbons, keys, garter belts—not pricey stuff. More like stuff you’d expect to find left over after a garage sale.”

  “Oh—here’s a strange one …” Hamilton says, lifting a plaster casting of a large phallus. On its bottom is felt-p
enned a date, November 4,1979, and no other information.

  “Must have been a good day for somebody,” I say as Pam starts pouring handfuls of diamonds back and forth between her hands and the occasional stray tinkles down onto the pavement, clicking like a camera’s shutter. She tosses the diamonds onto the center pile, one at a time. “Pear-shaped, suncrest, radiant, marquise, baguette, my little best friends.” She looks toward me: “You’re real, Jared, aren’t you—it’s not just the drugs?”

  “I’m real. I’m like a biology test come back to haunt you.”

  “Oh, wow,” Hamilton says.

  “Oh wow? I come back to life and all you can say is, ‘Oh wow’?” “Jared,” Hamilton says, “Mellow out. I seem to remember you were the one who had fourteen people toking their brains out inside your parents’ Winnebago the night Elvis died.”

  “Exposing hypocrisy in itself doesn’t make you a moral person,” I say.

  “Huh?” Pam says.

  “Oh, don’t be so thick, Pamela,” Hamilton says. “He never did have a sense of humor. Jocks never do. Listen to what Jared’s saying … “

  “Don’t so-thick me, Heffy-Weffy. I’m the one who cracked the safe today.”

  “Hurt me, hurt me—”

  “Oh Lord. You guys want a miracle to make you go ‘oh wow’ for real?”

  “Deal us in, big boy,” Hamilton says.

  “Very well.” I approach them and tap them each on the head.

  “You touch us on the head? That’s a miracle? Jared, I—” Pam stops, touches her cheeks, and looks at her body. Hamilton puts his hands to his ears and then falls down on his knees. “No. No. Oh, my. It’s—it’s real, isn’t it, Jared?” Pam asks.

  “It’s real.”

  The two go silent; Hamilton crawls across the pavement and lowers his head to the ground, inspecting the dust.

  Pam bursts into tears and grabs Hamilton’s shoulders and tries to lift him up. Hamilton looks both lost and found at the same time. “Is it what I think it is?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  He moans. “You mean—we’re clean?”

  “Yes, you are clean. Your addictions are gone. No withdrawal. No pangs. Nothing.” The two unclasp and then come over to me and try to touch me, but as with Linus earlier on that day, they end up batting each other’s arms. After this, they stand and do leg squats and stretches and run around the parking lot and spin and look at the cellophane sky.

  “It is a miracle. I can think! I’m clear! So clear! I haven’t been this clear since—ever. The six wives of Henry VIII! The Fibonacci number sequence! How to make a smooth nonlumpy cream sauce …”

  “It’s so clean!” Hamilton echoes. “My head inside is clean as a lake! Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon; August, 1969—American talk show host, Merv Griffin launches his late-night CBS show in direct competition with Johnny Carson. Opening night guests include Woody Allen and Heddy Lamarr, but scheduled athlete Joe Namath is a no-show.”

  “Oh Hamilton—look at the world!”

  “It’s …”

  “Yes …”

  The two fall silent; their bodies slacken as though they’ve realized a friend has betrayed them. Sitting down on the truck’s lowered tailgate, they swat diamonds from underneath their bottoms and sit limp.

  “Well, well—here we are,” Pam says.

  “Clean,” Hamilton says. “And I don’t feel like getting high. You?”

  “No,” replies Pam. “I like being inside my own skin again.” A seagull shrieks above them and they look up. “There’s still birds,” Pam says.

  “But no people.”

  “No people. The world’s over, isn’t it, Jared?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “You’re real, aren’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  Silence falls where in other days traffic would have hummed and honked. “This is life, then, isn’t it? I mean, this is it.” “Basically.”

  Hamilton and Pam hold hands. Pam says, “What do we do now, Jared? Is this it forever—silence? It’s so quiet down here. Lonely. You’re the ghost. You’re the expert.”

  “Your brains are as tender and fresh as a baby bird’s. Walk home. Enjoy your clarity. Go romp in a hot tub. You count; you were meant to exist. I’ll be seeing you again.”

  And with this I vanish.

  30

  EVERYTHING IS BRAND-NEW

  Richard was my best friend growing up, although we did grow apart over the years. He was one of the people I missed most when I died, so I’m kinda choked to see him again. But there are severe limits on how much I’m allowed to reveal to the living, so I can’t be as gooey with Richard—or the others—as I’d like.

  Richard is huffing up Rabbit Lane with a shotgun, so I slide down the hill to meet him. “Hey, Jared—thanks for fixing Karen’s legs. That was beautiful.”

  “It was the least I could do.”

  “We came home and played splits on the front lawn with a steak knife for an hour. She’s just so high on life now. Good trick with the lighting system down at Save-On, too.”

  “You flatter me shamelessly. Where are you walking to?”

  “Out for a stroll before the sun sets to get a good view of Mount Baker. And the weather—it’s so beautiful today. It’s the end of December and it might as well be June. But then again there could be a snowstorm in three minutes. Weather’s random these days.”

  “So I’ve heard.” I walk alongside Richard.

  “Were you alive when Mount St. Helen erupted, Jared?”

  “No. Missed it.”

  “That’s right. It was huge. And you missed new wave and alternative rock. Rap. Grunge. Hip-hop. People wore some pretty stupid clothes. Cars got really good, though.”

  “I didn’t miss out on earthly things entirely, Richard. Check this out—I can do the ‘Moonwalk.’ “

  “No way. This I’ve got to see.”

  “Just you watch me now …” I slinkily Moonwalk up the road while Richard belly-laughs. “Am I doing something wrong?” I ask. “The opposite. It’s perfect.” “Thank you. I’d like to see you do it.” “Oh please, no.”

  I float back beside him: “So you see, I’m somewhat up to date.” We continue our walk. “Fucking A. The neighborhood’s one big mess, don’t you think so?”

  “I don’t think you ever get used to the silence, Jared. Back before the plague or whatever it was, the neighborhood looked almost identical to the way it did the year you died. But now—” We survey dead trees, rangy vines, an occasional charcoal stump where a house once stood, a bird resting on a skeleton’s ribcage. Pavement is crumbling and cars are stopped in the strangest places.

  We pass a dog’s skeleton, bleached clean by sun and acid rains. “Pinball, may he rest in peace. The Williams’s Doberman. It tried to attack Wendy, but Hamilton shot him in time. It was only hungry. Poor thing.”

  “Sad.”

  “So Jared, tell me: What about when you were dying back in 1979. What was that like? I’ve always wondered. I mean, were you scared near the end, when you were dying in the hospital? You seemed so calm—even at the end when all those machines were pumping gorp in and out of you.”

  “Scared? I was scared shitless. I didn’t want to leave Earth. I wanted to see the future—the lives of people I knew. I wanted to see progress—electric cars, pollution controls, the new Talking Heads album…. Then my hair fell out and I knew I’d crossed the line. After that I put a good face on it because my parents were falling apart.” Richard is lost in thought. “Do you think about death much?” I ask.

  “Pretty much all the time. How could I not? I mean, look at this place.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I don’t worry about dying. I figure that I’ll just meet up with everybody else in the world wherever they went. But if I’d been you back in high school, I don’t think I’d have been able to put as good a face on death as you did. I’d scream and yell and beg for more time, even on this clapped-out hulk
of a planet we live on now.”

  “You like it here?”

  “No, but I’m alive.”

  “Is it enough—being alive?”

  “It’s what I have.”

  “Richard, tell me the truth—and you have to tell me the truth, because, um, I’m a heavenly being.” “Shoot, buddy.”

  “Did you use Karen and me both as an excuse for you not to continue your own life? Did you bail out of life?”

  Richard looks hurt, but then makes a dismissive “nah—why not?” gesture. “Sure. I pretty much withdrew, Jared. But I was a good citizen. I put the trash out every Tuesday night. I voted. I had a job.”

  “Did you feel kinda hollow inside?”

  “A bit. I admit it. Does my answer make you happy?”

  “Hey man. I need to ask. I need to know how you are.”

  “But I stopped withdrawing when Karen woke up.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Do we have to discuss this, Jared? Let’s talk about the old neighborhood. People. Friends.”

  “I’ve visited all the others today. You’re the last. I saved the best for last, my oldest friend.” “I’m honored, you stud.”

  We continue walking and cut down into St. James Place and approach my old house, a slightly shambled split-level rancher, baby-blue. On the right hand side there are cinder burns from when the house next door burned down. “The fire was three weeks ago,” Richard tells me. “Lightning.” We stand at the end of my driveway. “Here’s your house. You wanna go inside, Jared?”

  “Could we? I’ve wanted to go in there, but only with somebody else. It’d make me nervous to go in alone.”

  “You? A ghost? You get nervous over bodies?”

  “Yes. So I’m a wuss on this one issue.”

  “You get used to them. Trust me. Hamilton calls them Leakers.”

  My old front lawn is knee-high; all of the ornamental shrubs have browned and withered. Green ivy has persisted, overgrowing onto the front door, which is unlocked. It opens silently as Richard tries it. A whoosh of warm air comes out, as does a foul, ammonia-like stink that makes Richard grimace at me: “You still want to go through with this, Jared?”