Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel

by Douglas Coupland

  Hamilton says, “Okay, Helen Keller, get to the point. And if you get any more depressing, I’m rearranging the furniture and not telling you how.”

  “Hamilton,” Richard says, “tell me—have we ever really gotten together and wished for wisdom or faith to come from the world’s collapse? No. Instead we got into a tizzy because some Leaker forgot to return the Godfather III tapes to Blockbuster Video the day of the Sleep and now we can’t watch it. Have we had the humility to gather and collectively speak our souls? What evidence have we ever given of inner lives?

  Karen perks up: “Of course we have interior lives, Richard. I do. How can we not have one?”

  “I didn’t say that, Karen. I said we gave no evidence of an interior life. Acts of kindness, evidence of contemplation, devotion, sacrifice. All these things that indicate a world inside us. Instead we set up a demolition derby in the Eaton’s parking lot, ransacked the Virgin Superstore, and torched the Home Depot.”

  “Aren’t we holier than thou?” Wendy snipes at Richard, her arms tight around young Zygote Junior inside her stomach.

  “Actually, Richard,” I say, “the demo derby looked like a lot of fun. And I like the way you spray-painted names on your cars. I thought your ‘Losermobile’ would win in the end.”

  “Me, too. I—”

  Megan ignores Richard and looks at me: “Jared—stop talking about cars. What are we supposed to do now?” she asks. “How can we change? You arrived saying you would teach us things that would allow us to change. So tell us.”

  My friends go calm—quiet. “Okay, guys, I think you want me to tell you that the world is a moral place. It is. But you’re right to be thinking about your souls—the better parts of you—they’re all desperate to climb from your bodies and leave you far behind. You’re going to have to lead another life soon; a different life. The choice will be obvious when it arrives. You can get the world back yet.”

  A salvo of questions follows: “But you didn’t tell us how to—” “What do we do to—” “What happens next?” “When do we—?”

  “Hold your horses. A few squabbles ago Wendy asked what it was you were supposed to have been doing here this past year. The answer is that you ought to have been squabbling twenty-four hours a day for all of this time—and asked a million questions about why the world became the way it did. If you’d done that, you’d have been returned to the world the way it was and you’d be smarter and wiser. But you didn’t—arson, looting, cocktails, videos, and demo derbies—so now we move to Plan B.”

  The barbecue hisses. “I’ll return when the lightning ends. I’ll meet you on Cleveland Dam in seven days—at sunset.” “What lightning?” Hamilton asks. Lightning cracks; the sky ignites. “That lightning, goofball.”

  33

  YOUR MESSAGE HERE

  When I was alive on Earth I always noticed how events in the night sky had such a powerful capacity to alter human moods. One fall night in the 1970s, I was at a BC Lions football game. Just after sunset and directly over the cheap-seat bleachers to the east, a full moon, amber and veined, pumped itself upward and seemingly hovered over the stadium’s edge. At this point, the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen—lets have a big round of applause for … the Moon!” and everybody went nuts and the rest of the game felt like a Super Bowl.

  Around that same time, I was in a soccer tournament and the team and I had to fly to Manitoba on a red-eye flight. Somewhere over Saskatchewan I looked out the plane’s window and saw the aurora borealis spritzing and jitterbugging up to the north—I felt as though I’d seen God singing along with the radio at a stoplight. We won the tournament. Fuckin’ right we did!

  And then one night, shortly before I got leukemia, a thinly sliced crescent moon rested high in the south sky over Vancouver; the planet Venus, white and hot, was also in view, and I watched the two bodies veer ever closer until Venus finally hit the unlit portion of the lunar edge. Just before Venus disappeared, it looked as though there was a light directly on the Moon’s surface. And shortly afterward, as I said, I got leukemia. So there.

  I mention events in the sky to help make sense of lightning and thunder and their profound effects on the soul. My friends have so far endured six days of continual storms and my old neighborhood and its surrounding forest are bursting in flames from untold numbers of lightning strikes. My friends are scrambling madly for cool air and sanctuary, having piled what few things they’ve been able to save into minivans in which they hightail up the charred stubble of the nearby golf course’s pampas.

  Below them, the fire on the sloping neighborhoods burns like a million Bic lighters held up in the dark at some vast, cosmic Fleetwood Mac concert. There is nothing remaining on this mountain slope save for the foundations of houses, tree roots beneath the soil, and a swirling maze of roads that lead from nowhere to nowhere.

  Soon, two miles up the hill, the gang reaches a stone clubhouse surrounded by links of ashes. From within its solid interior they watch the lightning continue unabated, like watching a car crash that never stops, ripping and grinding and chewing and burning for day upon day upon day, sickening and dull.

  The night is chilly; the fireplace is stuffed with burning chairs, yet their room feels only slightly warm. Dinner was a few cans of chicken broth and tinned green beans found in the kitchen. Tablecloths and towels are used as bedsheets as a freak Arctic cold front lands upon them pre-dawn. They cluster together like January blue jays roosting inside a stump, and still they wake up freezing. But for the first time in seven days the sky is silent. Across the Capilano Canyon they see the snow-crested mountains of our childhoods reduced to black cinders and stone.

  The next day is spent driving lazy-8’s through the old neighborhood’s tangled lariat of roads, seeing only charred stumps, melted patio furniture, and metal globs that were once sportscars. My friends cry and make fruitless attempts at salvage. Wendy finds the skeletons of the two ostriches and hands Linus the femurs. “It’s nearly sundown,” Karen says. “Let’s hit the dam.”

  Their minivans hairpin down the black streets, the interiors smoky with the scent of itty-bitty salvaged mementos—a pair of Adidas ROM shoes; a Snoopy trophy; a framed photo of Liam Gallagher; a Becel margarine tub full of emeralds and Richard’s asbestos astronaut suit.

  On Cleveland Dam, they park at the west end and walk to its center, as promised, I hover invisibly above the silent spillway. The reservoir behind the dam is slightly below runoff level and algae within the water has loaned it an otherworldly shamrock sheen. The dam’s road is smooth and glistening from a freak rainstorm and is seemingly paved with diamonds.

  Quietly, everybody follows Karen onto the dam. For the first time in weeks she hears voices. “It’s almost sundown,” Karen says, “Kneel.”

  “I’m not kneeling,” Hamilton says.

  “Then don’t” Richard says, and the group ignores Hamilton and kneels.

  Hamilton stands with his arms crossed, watching the group and feeling like Noel Coward at a gauche cocktail party, and then he remembers his past year of madness with Pam, the drugs, the mania, his rebirth as the Last of the Famous International Playboys—Petula Clark, Brasilia, Le Côte Basque, Jackson Pollock, Linda Bird Johnson, and gimlet martinis—the ideas and images of a clean, sophisticated, and plausible future long vanished. My head is now clean, he thinks. My veins are clean, but the world is soiled.

  Pam watches him from the corner of her eye. Poor Hamilton—Hamilton who has always felt unsophisticated having grown up so far away from the centers of metropolitan glamour. But Pam knows of the blankness at the core of that world, and she’s aware that through her, Hamilton has learned this, too. She thinks back on the past crazy year on drugs and then the miracle of becoming clean. She looks at the city’s skeleton through the charred forest. If this is the world, then take it. I hated Milan. I hated catwalks. I hated my face for taking me the places it did. Let the insects fight for the remains. “Hamilton, get over here,” she calls. Hamilton shakes his
head. “I can’t.”

  “You knelt at Jared’s memorial service, didn’t you?” Hamilton nods. “Then you can bloody well kneel here.” Hamilton comes, kneels beside Pamela, and looks up at the sky.

  Linus clacks together the ostrich femurs and the noise rattles comfortably across the spillway and into the canyon below. Jane squeals and then falls silent.

  And so it’s here, on this dam, where this group, for the first time since the beginning of their lonely year, align their thoughts on the Great Beyond. This is where I enter. Linus clacks the femurs together: clack clack.

  “I’m back.” I appear before them, hovering slightly above the spillway.

  “Jared!”

  “What are we going to do, Jared?” Megan wails.

  “Guys—hey—don’t freak out. You think you’ve been forsaken—that the opportunity for holiness is gone, but this isn’t true. Time is over; the world is gone.

  “You’ve got just one option left. You blew it this year, but you can make good. As I said, there’s still Plan B.”

  34

  STOP BREATHING

  I want to squish my friends into my heart, as though they could help me grout a troublesome crack. They wonder, How did life ever come to this? They’re not bozos; they know everything’s over. They’re naked parachutists waiting be pushed out of the plane and into the sky. Such is birth.

  A warm sooty wind blows up the dam’s face, its dark dead confetti floating through me, then shining. I’m a wall of light. “Guys! Feel the air,” I say. “Across your skin. It’s like icing sugar. So sweet. And feel the charged wind in your lungs—it does feel like the end of the world, doesn’t it? Come on—drag your butts up. Huddle! And while you’re at it, look at all the water pouring down the spillway—it’s like melted lime Jell-O. And hear the water growl—like a cougar inside an unlocked cage. Oh! And remember that night at Linda Jermyn’s party? Remember when we found that TV set in the alley and brought it here and hucked it off the edge.” My friends stand up and circle around me as I hover above the commotion.

  “Correction, Jare,” Hamilton says, “I’m the one who did the actual hucking. If I remember correctly, you and Richard were off on the sidelines sniveling.”

  “You wish, Hamilton,” Richard says. “I sweet talked the RCMP into thinking you’d thrown a half-melted ice swan off the edge. I mean, they saw you throw something. Jared and Pam were horking in the rhododendrons over by the parking lot.”

  “It was that home-brew of yours, Jared,” Pam says. “It was like Liquid Plague. It’s the absolute sickest I’ve ever felt. Even worse than methadone. And you were so sick that night, Jared—so sick that you couldn’t even hit on me.”

  Ping! At this moment a phenomenon in the sky captures my friends’ awe and attention—a web of shooting stars now visible through a parting hole in the sky—a crosshatched ceiling of shooting stars as hasn’t been seen on Earth since 1703 in the southern part of the African continent.

  “Look at the sky,” Linus says. “This is so Day of the Triffids.”

  “Everything’s a light show for sixteen-year-olds, isn’t it?” Richard says.

  Even with all the hoo-haw and thunder of the past week, my friends find wonder and ahhhs in the spectacle. Young Jane reaches up to the sky as though it were a wise and generous person and not merely light. Jane, the planet’s newest genius, is counting stars, her brain already advanced beyond mere numbers.

  Warm, slightly stinky air, like air pushed forward by a subway car, sweet and full of adventure, whooshes over us. “And here we are all these years later,” I say, “at the end of the world and the end of time.”

  “How fucking ironic,” Hamilton says.

  “Oh, come on, Hamilton,” I say, “get some drama out of this. I mean, all of you noticed how ‘time’ feels so different here at the world’s end—how weird it is to live with no clocks or seasons or rhythms or schedules. And you’re all correct, too—time is a totally human idea—without people, time vanishes. Infinity and zero become the same thing.”

  “Gee,” Hamilton says.

  “Why just before all this happened,” I say, pointing out the brightly lit black suburban dust, “nobody we knew had a second of free time remaining. All of it was frittered away on being productive, advancing careers and being all-round efficient. Each new advance made by ‘progress’ created its own accelerating warping effect that made your lives here on earth feel even smaller and shorter and more crazed. And now … no time at all.”

  “Hey—” Wendy says.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Nothing. I just wanted to stop Hamilton from making some cynical crack.”

  “It’s okay, Wendy,” I say. “It’s nice to think back on old times and be with old friends. I mean, we were all so lucky living when and where we did. There was no Vietnam. Childhood dragged on forever. Gasoline, cars, and potato chips were cheap and plenty. If we wanted to hop a jet to fly anywhere on Earth, we could. We could believe in anything we wanted. Shit—we could wear a San Diego Chicken costume down Marine Drive while carrying a bloody rubber head of Richard Nixon if we wanted—that would have been just fine. And we all went to school. And we weren’t in jail. Wow.” The stars are suddenly stained pink as a tiny waft of chemical residue from a long exploded Yokohama paint factory passes over.

  “I remember running through the neighborhood in little more than a jockstrap. I remember being able to read Life magazine and making up my own mind on politics. I remember being in a car and thinking of a road map of North America and knowing that if I chose, I could drive anywhere. All of that time and all of that tranquillity, freedom and abundance. Amazing. The sweet and effortless nodule of freedom we all shared—it was a fine idea. It was, in its own unglamorous way, the goal of all of human history—the wars, the genius, the madness, the beauty and the grief—it was all to reach ever farther unclouded points on which to stand and view and think and evolve and understand ever farther and farther and, well, farther. Progress is real. Destiny is real. You are real.” The pink passes on.

  “And so that’s why we’re all here tonight—today—whatever day it is: Thursday—six weeks from now—1954—three days ago—one million B.c. It’s all the same. I mean, I know you’re wondering what was wrong with the way you were living your lives in the first place—what your Jimmy Stewart-esque crisis was—and I know you’re wondering why you had to spend the past year the way you did. You say your lives weren’t in crisis, but you know deep down they were. I was up there hearing you.”

  “You nark’ed on us?” Megan asks, ever alert.

  Richard darts in, “Megan, drop it, okay?”

  The water behind the dam is luminous Day-Glo green. It looks electric. Radioactive. “So, yes, here all of us were, living on the outermost edge of that farthest point. People elsewhere—people who didn’t have our Boy-in-the-Bubble lifestyle—they looked at us and our freedoms fought for by others, and these people expected us with our advantages to take mankind to the next level … newer, smarter, innovative ways of thinking and living and being. They looked at us and hoped we could figure out what comes … next.”

  Wendy sneezes three pistol-crack snorts. “Bless you,” I say. “And bless all of you, too.” The light in the sky is so bright it’s like daylight. “And weren’t we blessed, too, with options in life—and didn’t we ignore them completely?—like unwanted Christmas gifts hidden in the storeroom. What did life boil down to in the end? … Smokey and the Bandit videos. Instead of finding inspiration and intellectual momentum there was … Ativan. And overwork. And Johnny Walker. And silence. And—I mean, guys, just look at the situation. And it’s not as if I was any better. I never looked beyond the tip of my dick.”

  “Get to a point,” Richard says. He knows we’re close to an answer.

  “This past year—if you’d have tried, you’d have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence
of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people.

  “A thousand years ago this wouldn’t have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids stand. One hundred years ago—or even fifty years ago—the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. The only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That’s why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It’s because Earth is now totally ours.”

  “The pioneers—they conquered the world,” Linus says quietly.

  “They did, Linus. The New World isn’t new anymore. The New World—the Americas—it’s over. People don’t have dominion over Nature. It’s gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now the same thing. The future and whatever happens to you after you die—it’s all melted together. Death isn’t an escape hatch the way it used to be.”

  “Well fuck me,” Hamilton says.

  “Your destiny’s now big enough to meet your jaded capacity for awe. It’s now powerful enough for you to rise to the task of being individuals.”

  The meteorites disappear and the pulsing white sky goes black as though unplugged. Richard asks me, “Jared, wait a second—wait wait wait. You’re going too quickly. Way earlier you said we could return to the world. What did you mean—the world as it was before—all this?”