Binge

by Douglas Coupland

  I used to date, but I never found The One. I’m not even sure how many The Ones there are out there, but by the time I figured out there was never going to be a The One for me, I was set in my ways and the thought of making do with someone merely passable was intolerable. Sure, I’ve watched my share of romcoms where the heroine ends up with someone implausibly out of her league, and there’s a part of me that still thinks, Maybe one day…But then my realistic inner voice reminds me that at my age The One would probably drain my bank account and give me syphilis.

  In spite of everything I’ve just said, I find myself not wanting to be dead. Talk about the most awkwardly couched expression of the will to live ever uttered, but no, I still choose being alive over being dead.

  It may be my skewed point of view, but I think there are a lot more people like me out there than there were even a decade ago. The electronic universe allows us to travel so deeply inward, hardly anyone ever looks up from their phone to make sexy eyes with a stranger on the subway.

  I often think about what it means to have a personality. Hailey is a scatterbrain. Sebastian is super-serious. Anne is a Debbie Downer. Neil is the life of the party. Carrie is always oversharing. Ben won’t make eye contact. They all have traits, but are these traits perhaps medical in nature? Is the unwillingness to make eye contact a sign of being on the spectrum? Is oversharing a sign of thwarted sexual impulses? Does Debbie Downer need amphetamines? At what point does personality end and psychopathology begin?

  Some years ago, I bumped into Adrian, a bank teller I used to work with. When I knew him, Adrian was a very buttoned-down kind of guy, but when I saw him midsummer on a street corner, he was wearing black-leather almost bondage-y gear. After we said hello, I asked him what he was up to and he casually said that he was a sex worker now. Okay.

  And then he went slightly random. “Have you ever been hit by a car, either as a pedestrian or as a bike rider?”

  I told him I hadn’t.

  “Well, take my advice and if it ever happens to you, don’t stand up.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, I was on my bike riding home from work five years back, and some asshole in a Challenger slammed into me.”

  “Oh no!”

  “Oh yes. And I made a fatal mistake. I tried to be Mister Manliness, so I got up off the pavement to show that I was okay. The moment I stood up, I forfeited my chance to make any insurance claim.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Take my advice. After an accident, just lie there and be taken away on a stretcher.”

  “Were you badly hurt?”

  “Yes. I screwed up two vertebrae and I got concussed and couldn’t hang on to the bank job. I spent a year doing nothing. My personality changed too: all the things I used to care about and all the people I used to care about no longer made sense to me. I stopped hanging with my old friends and sold my guitar and kayak and made a whole new set of friends. I still have trouble sleeping, but, you know, in a way, it feels like I’ve been reincarnated inside the same body.”

  Maybe what I need is to get hit by a Challenger. Maybe what I need is religion. Maybe what I need is to get laid. Maybe what I need is something, anything, to get me out of myself, even a pathology that makes me unique. I don’t want to be dead, but I don’t want to be me anymore. I’ve been doing that for fifty-two years and it’s gotten me nowhere.

  I want to reincarnate inside my own body.

  21

  Subway

  MY NAME IS Rumwoman and I’m an alcoholic.

  [Hi, Rumwoman.]

  My real name is Julie, and last week my life had hit that point when I realized that it had been weeks since anyone had actually called me by my name, and that made me start feeling really blue, so I went to buy some rum during that crazy rainy patch we had. I met these two guys totally randomly outside the liquor store by the bus station. One of the guys was panhandling. He had a big gash in his leg above the knee that needed to be taken care of, so me and the other guy walked him to the hospital, except that on the way we ran into, like, fifty cop cars all over the place. The guy with the gash, Isaac, said, “I think they might actually be looking for me.” We stopped dead, and the other guy, Ned, said, “Let’s just duck into this alley for a sec.”

  So we went into the alley and I asked Isaac what was going on with him. He said that he had been on some meds but had stopped taking them, which is always a terrible idea—even I know that. I asked which meds, and he said it was a drug called Abilify, which was weird because I had a bunch of it in my bag. You’d be amazed how many drugs you can find, literally, on the street. When I find something, I stockpile it for moments like this one.

  Ned told Isaac to wash down some Abilify with a glug from the bottle of Pinot Grigio he had on him, but Isaac refused. “I’m no alky,” he said. So he ended up swallowing his Abilify with handfuls of rainwater from a puddle. Whatever gets the job done, I guess.

  After Isaac took his meds, he said, “I’m actually kind of hungry. What about you guys?” It turned out all three of us were pretty hungry, so Ned said he’d go into a nearby Subway and buy us each a sub.

  It’s funny how specific people get with their sandwich orders, even when they’re totally out of it, like Isaac was. Had to be six-inch white with ham, turkey and cheese, toasted, with pickles, black olives, pepper (no salt), lettuce and mayonnaise. Me, I can only eat a twelve-inch brown with meatballs, onions, green peppers and ranch dressing, which sounds gross but is actually really good—you should try it.

  After Ned left, Isaac said that by the time he returned, the meds would have kicked in. I guess you could say we were on a winning streak. I asked him what he’d done to piss off so many cops. As you may have guessed, he was that guy who bashed his old football coach with tiki torches. Are there any cops here in the room tonight? Don’t raise your hand if you are. Just remember that everything that happens in this room is anonymous. I guess if you’re here, then your life is in no great shape, so who’s to judge? Not me, that’s for sure.

  So, Ned returned with our food and we all wolfed it down, then fell into a brief, collective carbohydrate coma. Eventually I roused myself enough to fill Ned in on Isaac’s crime. Ned just waggled his finger at Isaac and said, “Oh, you naughty, naughty boy,” and we all laughed.

  And Isaac’s meds had finally kicked in. He said he felt like he was waking from a dream. He said it was like how you feel when you’ve been driving on a highway for hours and you suddenly realize you’ve been totally spaced out and you can’t believe you haven’t crashed the car. “Except in my case I did crash the car.”

  At that, all three of us stared at the big gash on Isaac’s leg. Ned asked, “Did you get that in the fight with the coach?” and Isaac nodded.

  Isaac said no way was he going to the hospital, because he’d get sent right to jail. I told him he was welcome to crash at my place if he didn’t mind how small the space was. Right away he said yes. I said I also knew a doctor who was in really bad shape, but who would stitch Isaac up if we gave him a shopping bag full of oxy. I exaggerate, but you get the idea: this was going to be an expensive off-the-books surgery. Then Ned said, “Wait. The cops were after you and yet there you were, panhandling at the liquor store?”

  “Totally. When you panhandle you become invisible. It’s a fact.”

  I guess sometimes the stars just align, don’t they?

  To get past the cops and reach my place, we needed a disguise. Ned came up with an incredibly simple idea: umbrellas! When was the last time you saw a street person use an umbrella? It’s like a cloak of invisibility or normality. A dozen cop cars passed us from all directions and didn’t give us the slightest look. Ha!

  My place is a rundown shithole, but that’s another story. Ned left us in the lobby. He promised to check on us the next day and asked if there was anything he could bring. I requested two new pillows. I mean, whe
re do pillows come from? Who buys pillows? They’re like mushrooms or something…they just kind of pop up. Look, it’s a pillow!

  Shit, I just realized I’ve been speaking a long time here. I normally never talk, but how often is it that something real actually ever happens in your life? Thanks for listening.

  22

  Hyundai

  IF I’M LUCKY I GET maybe sixty seconds after I wake up in the morning before I remember it all and my brain turns into scalding-hot shit. Yes, I’m the woman who forgot her baby in the car. Shoot me. Kill me. I could care less. It’d probably feel better than my life most of the time.

  I know you want to ask me how anyone could forget their baby in a car. I’ll tell you. It’s easy. Your daily schedule has you on autopilot for years, and then one morning something happens to disrupt the pattern…

  Don always dropped off Christie at day care, but he was starting to jog again that morning, so he asked me if I could do it. So Christie was in my back seat and I was driving her there when my phone rang. It was Evan from Shipping and Receiving calling about a truckload of canned goods that was delayed in western Colorado. While I was talking to him, I turned toward work instead of day care. I kept talking to him as I parked the car, got out and walked into the admin building. And then it was Adelle’s birthday and so I went to Olive Garden for a group lunch, and then came five o’clock, so I went to the store down the block to buy a few things for dinner. And only then did I head for my car in the parking lot.

  I’ve listened to the recording of me calling 911. I sound insane. I was insane. I thought my daughter was dead. People from my office were huddled around trying to think of something they could do for me, but there was nothing. I was inconsolable. And then the police cars and ambulance showed up, and then a crowd of strangers gathered, making iPhone movies of it all. You should see my body language in them. It’s the body language of someone who has just died inside.

  Then the ambulance took my daughter away and they wouldn’t let me go with her. Instead, the cops put me in handcuffs and stuck me in the back seat of their car. Neither of the cops up front would speak to me on the ride to the station, and the air conditioning was freezing. I sat there crying and shivering. Don had to find out what happened from a policeman.

  The only thing that gives me mental sanctuary now is that Don came right to the station, even before going to the hospital. He ran into the interview room where the cops had stuck me and apologized to me for breaking our family routine. He got why it had happened, but the cops didn’t. As far as they were concerned, I was a child murderer, and I had to agree. Even when Don called from the hospital to say that Christie was going to make it, I knew I could never forget that I had almost killed her.

  All the restaurants I could never go back into. All the stores I could never shop in. The local park I could never take Christie to again. I mean, just imagine. And just imagine if she’d died. I…I can’t go there.

  Let’s also discuss the in-laws who will never speak to me again and who actively campaigned for Don to divorce me. Let’s discuss the social workers who came to the house every week for a full inspection and who never made eye contact with me, not so much because they despised me, but because they’ve seen the worst, so they didn’t let themselves get invested in case I let them down. Let’s discuss Don’s friends, who shot these weird sideways glances at me like if they fucked me, I’d deserve it.

  The only thing I could do—the only thing Don and I could think to do—was to have more kids and move far away. Once we landed, the first thing I did in the community was start an advocacy group. I know, you’re wondering what I could possibly be an advocate for. It was for extended mat leave for new mothers, and I also formed a support group for new moms.

  I know, barf. Trying to rebrand, but fuck you. Try nearly killing your kid because of a truckload of canned goods getting plowed into by a drunk driver outside of Fort Collins and a stupid fucking lunch with colleagues at Olive Garden. Try replaying an incredibly boring daytime work scenario over and over in your head, trying to figure out why, when I went to speak with Daria about a spreadsheet with a missing cell, I still hadn’t remembered Christie in the back seat, nearly dehydrating to death. If the weather had been one degree hotter, she’d be gone.

  Soon Christie will be old enough that she’ll hear people whispering things about me. How do I inoculate her against those whispers? How do I make her understand that people fuck up for the most astonishingly dumb reasons? I’m not a shitty mom or even a remotely shitty human being. I just let the rhythm of life lull me into a lowered sense of alertness. Maybe that’s a definition of adult life: maintaining a continual mild buzz in your head so that your daily grind doesn’t bore you to death. Instead, it almost kills your kid.

  23

  Southwest Airlines

  I’M A HEART SURGEON, a real genuine specialist, but I look like a clapped-out beef-jerky-skinned slice of crap. If you ran into me on the street, you’d look the other way. You’d never guess I was once Mr. Has-His-Shit-Together DILF. I mean, these days, if someone on a plane yelled for a doctor and I turned up, the air marshal on that flight would put me in cuffs. You know what I’d say to that air marshal? At least I don’t have to spend my entire fucking life flying on Southwest Airlines to make a living, you dumbfuck loser. Christ, imagine sitting in gerbil-sized seats for eight hours a day, inhaling dead farts, trying to figure out if someone is in ISIS or just going insane from flying with a crap airline that is circling the drain in a competition to be the shittiest airline. Not that I have the money for a flight.

  How did I end up this way? If I had to oversimplify, I’d trace it back to a bypass surgery I did maybe fifteen years ago—a pretty standard operation. But somehow, the guy woke up in the middle of it. Imagine waking up on the operating table and seeing our faces and realizing what’s going on. And then…

  And then the patient got put back under, but I could no longer view him as a generic patient undergoing a reasonably standard procedure. Something in him seemed awake, alert. If you eat meat (I don’t anymore) and you talk to a butcher, you’ll know that some cattle seem to know when they are about to be slaughtered and they send out this chemical signal and their meat flares bright red.

  So that was this guy. He was asleep but he wasn’t. And then something else went wrong…I don’t even know what it was. And now the guy wasn’t alert, he was gone. This was no longer a human being under my knife, nor was he/it even like a Sunday roast beef dinner. He was a chunk of non-life. A meteorite from five billion years ago crashing into the Arizona desert had a higher chance of containing life than this guy.

  After that patient died on the table, I had to take a break from surgery. The thought of inserting a scalpel into skin suddenly made me cringe—me, who once enjoyed nothing more than a good high school car crash to make a Friday night in Emerg more fun. This thing called life; this thing called aliveness. What is it? At what point does being alive start and stop? You cut down a redwood and turn it into paper towels, but what about the stump? Does a little baby redwood sprout and turn into a happy new megatree? When does the tree stop living? Is it when it can no longer generate a sprout? Or in a few more decades when there’s not enough DNA for scientists to rebuild extinct redwoods from scratch in a lab?

  Why does life end? Once it’s gone, can it return? All of us could easily kill lots of people at any time, but we mostly don’t. We can take, but we can’t give, except by having kids. Sex. Death. Fucking.

  Eventually I became a backroom abortionist, like a throwback from long before Roe v. Wade. I was the doctor you went to because you wouldn’t or couldn’t go anywhere else. It was cash only, and if you needed pain medication, I’d maybe give you something with the price marked up. But let’s say I was a “real” doctor in a “real” office. How is a “real” doctor in a “real” medical practice all that different from me in my rented apartment at the back of a cucaracha’s nest of
a live-work dump? I offer a service at a reasonable price, and I don’t think anyone ever got sepsis from me.

  But stitching up wounds is still an issue for me. You don’t want me stitching you up. The nurses I hire make fun of it behind my back. They call me Helen Keller. But when you’re at a point in your life that you’re coming to Dr. Jones, who else are you gonna go to?

  Speaking of stitching, the other night this kid comes in. A junkie? Or maybe one of those lost souls on SSRIs? His leg was a mess from a gouge wound—the inside of it looked like red Jell-O. Plus it had been six hours since he’d been gashed and he hadn’t gotten any treatment. There was probably pigeon shit in it by then. Or those chunks of lungs those old guys cough onto sidewalks.

  Stitching him back together was like trying to sew a flank steak together with some stewing beef. I Frankensteined the whole thing. I admit I was not proud of my work, but I was coming off a bender and who else was this guy going to go to? I saw his face in the newspaper the next day, one of those freebie papers they leave in coffee shops. Isaac Richter. Local boy. Attacked and most likely tried to kill an old high school coach, who I’m guessing was Uncle Molesty getting his comeuppance. Ha! We’re all scum.

  Ah, life. We live our days. We have our memories. We have opinions. We have feelings. And they all go into a cosmic blender and become karma smoothies that get left on the counter and are forgotten. Eventually they start to get all bubbly and rotten, and then you knock yours over and it spills and stains things, but you’re too lazy to wipe it up, so it turns hard, and if you neglect it long enough, it just sort of ossifies over time. And that’s your legacy. You had the gift of sentience and what did it get you?