Eleanor Rigby

by Douglas Coupland

  He was right—what had I been thinking all these years?

  Ken said, “Let’s find both. Let’s start with the queen-size. Did you have any preference?”

  “No.” This was all happening so quickly.

  “Do you like a hard or soft mattress?”

  “I’ve never thought of that before.”

  “Let’s go try a few.”

  “Any mattress at all is fine. I really don’t need a salesman, and …”

  “I’m not a salesman, I’m a Sleep Consultant. And before you jump in blindly, let’s start you off on this one here.” Ken took a sheet of clear solid plastic and spread it out at the foot of the mattress. “Lie down. You can put your feet on the plastic square.”

  I did, and Ken gave me a thoughtful look. “I see you’re a left-handed sleeper.”

  “A what?”

  “A left-handed sleeper. People have handedness in their sleeping too, just as they do in writing or baseball. I sleep on my right side for most of my sleeping.”

  “What a novel idea.”

  Ken bent down to look at my back. “Uh-oh.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just as I thought: loose spine. You need a mattress with more support. Let’s try that one there.”

  I have to hand it to Ken—he was good. I was bouncing on and off mattresses like the town slut, as Jeremy asked sensible questions. I’d never shopped with someone other than Mother or Leslie before. It was fun, and in the end I found a mattress and box spring combination that had me longing for nightfall.

  “Now,” said Ken, looking at Jeremy, “let’s see what we can find for you. Any specific needs?”

  “I’d like one that’s quite high up so that it’s easy to get on and off.”

  “A young guy like you?”

  “I’ve got, uh—” Jeremy never liked saying the actual name of the beast.

  I said, “MS.”

  Jeremy added, “Sometimes it’s a bit hard to stand up.”

  It was as if we’d switched on a light bulb within Ken’s being. “MS? Why didn’t you say so? My brother-in-law has it. Gruesome disease.”

  I thought this was rude, but Jeremy didn’t mind. “Tell me about it!”

  Ken said, “What’s your name?”

  “Jeremy.”

  “Jeremy, let’s find your perfect sleep solution.”

  We headed toward the folding couches, which had come a long way design-wise since the sixties when I stayed at my grandmother’s place.

  When it came time to pay for everything, Ken made a tally and asked, “Liz, would you prefer a thirty-dollar discount on the price of your mattress and box spring or a free twenty-inch TV set?”

  “Very funny.”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “A free TV?”

  He motioned for Jeremy and me to come in closer. “Look, here’s the deal. I’m quitting in a few days, so I can tell you. The mattress makers are all locked in a death match right now, and so the deals you can get are insane.”

  “But a TV set?”

  “Think about mattresses for a second. They’re nothing but air. They’re like popcorn at a theatre. They cost about eighteen cents to make. Hell, they’re still using the machines they used back in the 1950s. It’s all one big scam.”

  I said that I’d never thought of it like that before.

  “Good God, yes. And Jeremy, do you want a gas barbecue to go with your foldaway couch?”

  Jeremy said, “Hey, Ken—a gas barbecue would nicely complement my lifestyle.”

  “Smartass. But you’re getting one anyway. What about a job—do you have one?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good. Start here right away, and really play up the MS thing. Do you have a wheelchair?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. It’ll up your sales twenty-five percent.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. The gimp factor. You can’t change things, so you might as well work them.”

  I was appalled but fascinated.

  Jeremy asked, “How many people with MS does it take to put in a light bulb?”

  Ken didn’t know how many.

  “Five million—one person to do it, and four million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine to write depressing on-line web logs.”

  “You should meet my brother-in-law. He’s Mr. Victim. Drives me nuts.”

  They continued in this vein.

  Jeremy asked, “Do I have to fill out an application?”

  “I’ll get one for you from Shelagh. She’s a battleaxe, but tell her you like her sweater and she’s in your pocket.”

  I said, “You can just hire people like that?”

  “Absolutely—when the economy is as good as it is now, we have to snare salespeople any way we can. I also get a free microwave for finding a new staffer.”

  Ken went away to get a form from Shelagh.

  “Look, Maw, I done got me a job!”

  “Jeremy, isn’t it kind of tempting fate to play up your disease?”

  “No. Like Ken says, I can’t change it, so I may as well work it.”

  “Are you sure? It’s like parking in a handicapped parking stall.”

  “Not at all.”

  Jeremy filled out his form, made nice with Shelagh and was slated for sales duty the next day.

  * * *

  Next stop was Jane’s. We drove through downtown to get there. There was an anti-logging protest going on outside the art gallery and we inched along, a car length at a time. We stopped talking for awhile and watched people walking toward the crowd by the gallery’s steps. I told Jeremy that if protestors were really smart, and truly wanted to blast out their message, they should protest at night and then set fire to something, anything. That’d make the national news, not just the cheesy ultra-local 11:30 p.m. news. He hummed an agreement. I added, “This kind of protesting is so predictable—everybody screaming in front of some old building with nice steps on it and pillars on both sides. All the protestors are really doing is putting a pretty picture frame around their protest.”

  “Being a bit cynical, Mom?”

  “I guess.”

  We arrived at Jane and Jeremy’s apartment building, an East Vancouver 1960s rental unit painted pink and aqua so as to mimic the tropics. Algae, neglect and decades of low-commitment tenants made it seem more like Beirut’s shabbier cousin. Dozens of crows clustered in nearby trees, raucously cawing to each other, as they sometimes do.

  Just as we were getting out of the car, something small and clattery fell from the sky and exploded on the pavement in front of us. I saw pills strewn all over the sidewalk and road.

  “It’s Jane.” Jeremy looked up and shouted, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Jane was on a balcony. “I found your stash, you lying creep.”

  “That’s not my stash. It’s prescriptions I’ve never used.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You’re just mad at me.”

  “I wonder why!” Suddenly she was holding a boom box above her head. “I am so glad to be getting out of this relationship.”

  Jeremy shouted, “Don’t throw that. It was a present.”

  Down it came, a blurry high-tech piñata.

  “Jane, what is with you?”

  “I put up with your crap for so, so long, and all that time you were lying.”

  “I don’t lie. I just keep quiet about things.”

  “I’m sick of your druggie visions, and I’m sick of rescuing you.”

  “Rescuing me from what?”

  “From wherever it is you’re standing or crawling or lying down. I just want to go to a movie one night and not have to have the ushers carry you out to the car afterwards.”

  She went inside. Jeremy actually laughed. “She gets like this,” he said.

  We went inside, where the situation was solely verbal. No more things were tossed.

  “Jeremy, I’m just damn bored with
it all. I can’t get mad at you or you’ll go into a downspin; I can’t be cheerful around you or I look like a phony; I can’t try to make you take your pills or I’m Hitler; I can’t try to be compassionate with you or else I’m pitying you. I’m sick of trying to be a blank sheet of paper around you. I just want to do normal things like normal people.”

  Jane went into a room and shut the door. I asked Jeremy why he didn’t take his medications.

  “If I take too much, I feel like a zombie. I don’t feel anything and I don’t care about anything. At least with this disease turning my brain into Swiss cheese I get to see great things in my mind. And it’s not like the drugs are fixing me. They just mask things.”

  I looked out the balcony window. Down on the street, I saw crows eating the pills; their crops were bulging full, like Adam’s apples.

  There was something off-kilter about the apartment. I tried to figure it out while Jeremy fetched a suitcase and began removing things from his drawers and tossing them in. There was an airline tag on the suitcase, from Toronto a few months before. “You went to Toronto?”

  “I was in an experimental drug test. It didn’t work.”

  I continued to try to analyze just what made the apartment feel so strange. Jeremy caught me at it. “Everything in the place is geared toward getting up and down easily. Like I told Ken, when I get my brownouts I can’t do things like get off a couch easily.”

  He was right. Clean glasses and plates (all plastic) were piled on the kitchen counter. The couch in front of the TV was elevated so that getting off it wouldn’t involve too much lugging up of one’s body. The futon was similarly raised. It seemed to me to be borderline geriatric. This saddened me. I saw a wheelchair folded up and my heart sank for him. He saw this.

  “Ah, the gimpmobile.” He moved it toward the door. “Baby needs new shoes.” As he went back into the bedroom, he tapped on Jane’s door. “Have you cooled down yet? Come on out.”

  No reply.

  Jeremy could fit all of his clothes into two worn-out suitcases. It struck me that whatever he had in life he’d had to make or find on his own. In my mind I saw him filtering through piles in Salvation Army stores, trying to find items that would help him pass for normal in the world.

  Jeremy zipped up the second suitcase and stood outside Jane’s door. “Jane?”

  Once more, no reply.

  “Jane, do you know that futons have been clinically proven to increase wear on your lumbar region by thirty percent?”

  No reply.

  “As well, a futon’s cotton fibres can contain almost two hundred percent more mites than a six-inch-thick foam sheet. A new mattress, shipped directly from the factory, and equipped with a comfortably affordable foam underlay, can make all the difference between insomnia and a good night’s sleep.”

  No reply.

  “Also, a new mattress and box spring sprayed with DuPont’s Foam-Kote can not only help keep surfaces wipe-clean, but can control mite populations and significantly reduce their nightly harvest of your precious skin cells.”

  No reply.

  “At the moment, purchase of a mattress and box spring combination makes you eligible for an immediate prize reward of a twenty-inch Samsung colour TV, or a George Foreman Indoor-Outdoor Electric Barbecue.”

  Jane opened the door. “What drug are you on now?”

  “No drugs at all. I just got a job.”

  “You what?”

  “A job. I’m selling mattresses at Park Royal.”

  Jane looked at me for confirmation. “It’s true.”

  “Good. Then you can pay me back the two hundred bucks you borrowed to buy those Roman candles from the Indian reservation outside of Seattle last fall.”

  I said, “Jane, why don’t you and I go up on the roof for a cigarette while Jeremy boxes some more of his things.”

  “Done.”

  We walked up to the roof, which had a panoramic view of the city: mountains and seagulls and office towers and freighters. It was a children’s storybook where readers are asked to spot as many things as they can.

  “I must look like such a monster. I’m not a monster.”

  “Did you hear me saying you were?”

  Jane smoked, a surprise, so we lit up.

  “I never would have pinned you as being the boom-box-off-the-balcony type, though.”

  “It felt great.”

  A seagull landed on the railing not far from us. Once it decided we had no food, it flew off.

  “Have you seen him have his visions yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “They give me the creeps.”

  “I think they’re interesting. They’re like poems.”

  “Three days ago, he told me that the sky would go out. Not an eclipse, but rather pop!, like a light bulb. Creepy.”

  “Maybe there was a hidden message there. Maybe at face value they simply register as nonsense, so you have to go deeper.”

  “No. I just think they’re creepy. A week ago he told me he’d had this vision where two ex-lovers passed each other on the street. They’d had an ugly breakup, and their punishment was that each time they saw each other they rusted just a little bit, like robots. In the end they rusted frozen in front of each other. I mean, what the heck is that?”

  “It’s beautiful. Sort of.”

  “Here’s another. He told me that office buildings would collapse, and when they dug through the rubble, the people inside the buildings would be found compressed into diamonds from the force.”

  “That is beautiful.”

  She sighed. “Has he conned you into doing any crazy shit yet?”

  “Such as?”

  “With him, it could be anything—climbing trees to look for coins, digging a huge hole and filling it with balloons—to name two.”

  “He had me crawling down the highway on my hands and knees in the middle of the day.”

  “I told you so.”

  I asked Jane why Jeremy’s visions bugged her so much.

  “Because I know they’re not dreams, so I can’t write them off. They really are visions that really do come to him.”

  “So?”

  This was obviously important to Jane, and she wanted to express her thoughts correctly. “The thing is, I don’t believe in anything. If you don’t believe in anything, then where do his visions come from? He makes me doubt my doubt.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “He had all that hootenanny religious mumbo-jumbo tossed at him from all his foster families. I thought I could fix him, but no go.”

  I kept quiet. I may not ever have been in a relationship, but I do know that there’s no point trying to fix someone. Instead we discussed the particulars of Jeremy’s condition. Jane made it seem like I was adopting a pet. “Heat makes him almost pass out, so no hot baths. I found this vest thing on the Internet that cools him down. If you don’t have an air conditioner, buy one. Also, no wheat. It’s a killer—bowel issues.”

  Jeremy was going to be a large undertaking. “Isn’t there anybody from one of his families to help him out?”

  “You don’t want to meet his so-called families. They’re all nuts, and all they’ll do is hit you up for a loan, and then swipe your purse when you aren’t looking.”

  I couldn’t care less. My decision to allow him into my life was like a first kiss.

  We lugged Jeremy’s stuff downstairs, me carrying the heavy items. In the car I asked Jeremy how he knew all that stuff about mattresses.

  “I just made it up as I went.”

  * * *

  At home, I had ten new messages, a personal record, but then they were all from family members.

  Jeremy was exhausted. “Let’s just watch the news and veg for awhile—maybe make decisions then.”

  “A perfect idea.”

  And so we watched the six o’clock news together. It was nice to do something boring with another person. Usually I avoid TV news because sundown is such a hard time, always has been—a time of day that puts italics on your loneline
ss. Unless I’m in really good shape watching the news at six, I fuzz out into a lonely blur—except when there’s a story about a dog trapped in icy waters, whereupon I blubber. If things go from bad to worse, I’ll eat a platter of microwaved cinnamon buns at one sitting, and then go for a drive. If I drive when I’m lonely, I easily fall into mind games with other drivers who are lonely too. I’ve tailgated creeps through an entire rainstorm just to screech at them Shame on you! for tossing a cigarette butt out the window near Deep Cove. I don’t know what I’m accomplishing by screaming at them. Something is going on inside me; I simply wish I knew what.

  Halfway into the news, right after a Burger King commercial, a story appeared about meat production. I’m a carnivore, but, like many people these days, thinking about it too much can give me the willies.

  “Why did you make that funny noise?”

  “Meat.”

  “Say no more.”

  The thing about meat with me, though, is how it speaks to me about the human body. All of us are stuck inside our meaty bodies. I’ve always imagined that regular people are happy to be inside their bodies, whereas lonely people yearn to ditch their carcasses. I suspect lonely people wish they could forget the whole meat-and-bone issue altogether. We’re the people most likely to believe in reincarnation simply because we can’t believe we were shackled into our meat in the first place. Lonely people want to be dead, yet we’re still not quite ready to go—we don’t want to miss the action; we want to see who wins next year’s Academy Awards. More to the point, the lonely, like all humans, yearn to meet that somebody who’ll make us feel better about being trapped inside our species’ meat-and-bone soul containment system. Oh God, I sound like a prison warden.

  The phone rang, but Jeremy and I ignored it. It was probably Mother or Leslie.

  My family—my condition baffles my family. I doubt Leslie or William can remember a moment in their life when they weren’t involved with someone. Mother? She never remarried after my father’s car crash. She dates here and there, but she gets waylaid micromanaging her grand-kids and bullying her wimpy friends. I don’t think she ever gets lonely, but then I never knew about her praying in a closet for Jeremy.

  Leslie has a husband, Mike, the breast man, and her kids. I think she has to keep her SUV going at a hundred miles an hour all the time or else she’d be forced to examine her life in solitude, and not be pleased with the results. Look at me: I’m the cliché of a bitter spinster—but who ever really knows what goes on inside a relationship?