Binge

by Douglas Coupland

  Anyway, I got down to business, but given the way my bathroom is laid out, and given that I only have two small mirrors, both oval-shaped, intimate shaving was not that easy.

  I was using an electric detail razor I stole from an old boyfriend, which he used for contouring his facial hair. I was feeling so artistic! When I opened a bottle of something else from Sonoma, the evening began to truly rock. I was buzzing in there like I was turning a thousand acres of Brazilian rainforest into a million hamburgers, and fuck all ecosystems. My pussy must be radiant.

  I moved on to my perianal district. BTW, did I mention I was drunk? My small oval mirrors were useless, so I gave myself a butt shave by touch alone and I was fearless. And then my wineglass tipped over and broke, at which point I realized that I should stop. And I did.

  The next morning, I woke up in a cold electric fright, the kind we all experience when we remember we drunk-dialed an ex or told our families what we really think of them or—shaved our pubes?

  Shit…

  I ran to the bathroom and, in the cruel light of 10:30 a.m., lifted up my T-shirt and braced for the worst and…okay, it wasn’t that bad. A bit lopsided, and the inside of my thighs looked like Milano cookies, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at my butt. Still, I would have to spend the afternoon at the waxer, getting all of this painfully fixed. Lesson learned.

  And this was when my mother, with whom I’m close, phoned to say she’d just had a Japanese super-toilet installed, and would I like to come try it?

  She lives only a few blocks away, so how could I say no?

  Have you ever tried one of those things? They’re shocking. They’re bumulous. They get inside you and they own you. I closed my mom’s bathroom door and enjoyed a few minutes of heaven before my sister texted to say she was PMSing and had gone shoplifting to take her mind off it and got busted stealing Reese’s Pieces at Kroger, so I had to quickly say farewell to the amazing toilet. In my rush, I wasn’t as hygienic as I might have been normally.

  So you’re wondering, Gee, how did this all blow up? Well, it turns out the Japanese toilet basically bit me in the ass by mixing a little bit of my poop into its jet stream and shooting it into all those raw pores. By day three, my nether regions were looking like a Hawaiian pizza. And then Jeff decided Burning Man is a go, so am I not totally stoked? No, I am not stoked. My head is buzzing from amoxicillin and I’m watching TV lying on my stomach. So, no. I. Am. Not. Stoked.

  35

  SPF 90

  IT WAS BACK DURING that summer when it rained for three months solid and my well-meaning but slightly intrusive mother was desperate to get me out of the house. “Why on earth would you isolate yourself if you don’t have to? You’re young! You should be out there in the world, free to do what you want.”

  She had a point, but I’m not outdoorsy like my brother and sister, and I genuinely enjoy being in my room alone. My mom worries I’ll turn into one of those Japanese guys who leave home for a year and then return to their old bedroom and eat ramen noodles, jerk off, play video games and never, ever, ever, ever leave home again.

  Then my mother’s friend Celia told her that a new reverend down at her church was stressing out over his workload. Mom, devious beast that she is, phoned him and volunteered me to work at the church every weekday afternoon from one to five.

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Don’t be a smartass, Jayden.”

  “We don’t even go to church. It’s hypocritical.”

  “It’s a chance to do something for the community for once.”

  “For once?”

  “Don’t be smart with me.”

  “What’s the pay?”

  Silence.

  “Oh my God, you mean it’s purely volunteer?”

  “Yes, it is. Would it kill you to be around people with lofty ambitions?”

  “Lofty ambitions? Who’s going to pay my therapy bills after the reverend molests me?”

  “You start tomorrow. Any more back talk and I’m making liver for dinner for the next seven days.”

  And that’s how I ended up walking up to the side door of the local church on the wettest day of the year, knocking on it and being let in by a smiling tubby man, the Reverend Harris, whose skin glowed so palely it seemed like it had never been touched by the sun. I mean, he was in rickets territory. I wanted nothing more than to get him some vitamin D and squeegee decades’ worth of SPF 90 from his face.

  “You must be Jayden.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Thank you so much for coming. Your mother tells me you enjoy volunteer work and that you have a strong aptitude for service.”

  “Yes. I’m sure she did.”

  “Let me show you around.”

  The entire building smelled like a basement, even the third floor, where the admin office was. In the real basement, dimly lit from ground-level windows, the reverend wouldn’t turn on the lights in the daytime, in order to save money on the church’s energy bills. He was cheap, so cheap that when the Girl Scouts came to the door selling cookies, the reverend—or Gerald, as he told me to call him—told them the parish couldn’t afford cookies, in the hopes that the two girls might give him some for free. But these kids are what—ten?—and it’s not their decision whether to dispense free cookies to misers. When they were gone, I asked him if he or the parish was hurting for money, and Gerald said, “No, but I can buy the same kind of cookie in bulk at a Costco for two-thirds the price.”

  He was missing the point of a charity fundraiser.

  Like any job, once I got into the routine it wasn’t so bad, and I do think Gerald genuinely saw himself as a resource to help the world. His religious counseling usually had to do with marriages gone sideways, addiction, depression or loneliness. It seemed to me that he was more social worker than priest and, as such, should have been paid by the government.

  When I got home each night, Mom would always ask, “Been molested yet?”

  “Not yet, but tomorrow I’m leaving most of my shirt buttons undone to see what happens.”

  “Jayden!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  My workspace was a little table in Gerald’s office. My most persistent memory of him is his chalk-white face bathed in blue computer screen light. By the end of my second month, I was mostly daydreaming through my church afternoons, wondering what my upcoming senior year would be like. But eventually, the fact that Gerald was really down in the dumps penetrated even my thick teenage skin. I was sure he wasn’t brooding about me going back to school and leaving him on his own again. The two of us had been polite with each other, and he was a good boss, but that was it.

  One rainy afternoon, I was scanning old church documents from the 1960s and 1970s and converting them into PDFs. The rhythmic sound and light from my scanner combined with the light drumming of rain on the roof and the occasional ping of incoming texts. It felt pleasant, and I was thinking about how I’d look back on the summer as an unexpectedly good one, when I heard Gerald taking a huge gulping breath across the room. When I looked over, I saw he was crying.

  I’m not good with intense emotion, but I couldn’t just leave him there, so I pulled a chair over, sat down beside his desk and asked, “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Doesn’t sound like nothing to me.”

  “No. Maybe it really is nothing.”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “Come here and look.”

  Was this going to be the moment when he showed me his dungeon orgy screen-snap compilation?

  I went around to stand behind him so I could look at his screen. It was displaying a spreadsheet with colored horizontal bars filled with…names?…dates and places? “What’s this?”

  “That first row there—that’s the people who’ve died of AIDS. That next line are people who died in Afghanistan. The next
is filled with the ghosts of souls yet to be born.”

  I froze.

  “I hear about dead people every day from the parishioners I counsel. Every day. I’ve got dozens of categories.”

  “I guess you would.”

  “Oh, Jayden.” Gerald was staring at the screen, but he was really staring into infinity. “Why did we humans get stuck with being self-aware? It’s a terrible, terrible thing. It’s not something we wished for. Sentience got dumped in our laps, and it’s not leaving. It’s unfair.”

  “Is this like Adam and Eve, kind of? Temptation? Knowledge?”

  “Jayden, boy, you don’t realize it, do you?”

  “Realize what, Gerald?”

  “Jayden—I don’t believe in anything.”

  “Oh. Wow. I didn’t…notice.”

  “Adam and Eve? Forget eating the apple. Those two idiots should have eaten the fucking snake.”

  36

  Lotto

  I HAVEN’T LEFT MY BEDROOM for two years except to use the bathroom. I cut my hair when I grasp it in my hand and my ponytail feels too long. Snip. Mom stocks the mini fridge in my room with soda, and I have a kettle for ramen noodles and Cup-a-Soup. I’m twenty-three. I used to go outside, but it went bad in my head. Have you ever noticed that? How you’re trying to be a part of the world and then one day you just can’t do it anymore? That’s me. I tried.

  I was learning 3D graphics programs at the local community college, but the teacher was only one YouTube tutorial ahead of the class—you could tell. I was also taking statistics, but I’ll get to that. I watch online news eight hours a day, so I know what’s going on out there. And that’s why I’m in here, with the windows tinfoiled and the temperature a steady 75 degrees Fahrenheit, just like a Las Vegas casino.

  My mother has never once asked me why I stay in my room. Not once. I know I’m exploiting her maternal instincts. My dad stopped paying any attention to me pretty soon after I holed up in here, and it actually makes my life simpler. I think there’s a part of him that’s jealous that he can’t drop out like me. In some weird, fucked-up way, I won. I figure Mom’s got maybe thirty-five good years left in her, so I can pretty much stay here as long as I want.

  I hear the voice inside your head asking, Does he sit in there masturbating all day? (You guessed right. I’m a he, and my name is Alex.) Or is he playing endless violent first-person shooter games? Is he writing a lame sci-fi story called something like “Droneshadow”? Is he skipping his meds? Is he one of those creepy incels the internet tells me to be afraid of? Nope to it all.

  Here’s what neither you nor my parents know about me: I’m rich. Last year, after taxes, I netted $1.63 million, which sits in a TD savings account earning ludicrously small amounts of interest, and I don’t really care about that, because what would I spend it on anyway?

  Remember the statistics course? I’m rich because I found statistical flaws in the way Dream Millions Pick Six online lotto tickets are sold. They still use a rollback deadline system, and if nobody picks all six numbers after a certain date, buying tickets in bulk is an almost certain way to rake in the bucks. It’s more complicated than that—and I’m happy I don’t have to go out and buy paper tickets—but that’s the gist. I can’t believe nobody else has figured this out. It’s free money for me until they fix this loophole, if they ever do. It’s crazy! But then, I haven’t left my bedroom for two years, so maybe I’m the crazy one.

  Why is the real world so hard to live in? All most of us do when we grow up is work for a few decades at something we hate doing until we waft away. From the perspective of continental drift or Darwinian evolution, human lives are fleeting and inconsequential, but who wants to hear a twenty-three-year-old’s take on life?

  I admit I’m tempted to peek out at the world now and then, through a small hole I ripped in the tinfoil over my window. There’s a really cute girl who lives in the basement suite of the house next door. She was probably the quirky girl in high school; she doesn’t seem to have any friends, none that I can see. I watch her come and go, though she almost never goes out anywhere. I’m wondering if she’s like me—and if that’s the case, then maybe I’m in luck.

  I’ve also seen some huge dude living in the suite next to hers who’s dating this really hot woman who’s big like him. I think she works night shifts at a bar or something, because she always comes to visit him super-late, even after dawn. I hope they have a strong bed.

  Actually, I don’t even know what I mean by “late.” There’s no time here in my room. It could be the Mandalay Bay casino or a NORAD missile silo or a submarine inspecting the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone. The only time I actually keep track is the once-weekly announcement of the ticket rollback: Tuesdays at midnight. Within the next twenty-four hours, I usually make sixty to seventy grand.

  That’s a pretty good weekly paycheck, but I have to confess there’s one other thing I do to make money. I shouldn’t tell you what it is, because it will wreck things for me. But here goes…

  Most people use their birth date to choose their lucky numbers, which means that, among picks, there’s a massively distorted chunk of numbers between one and thirty-one. In the statistical world, we call such lottery players “birthday people,” and we look down on them.

  The statistical world. Like it even exists.

  As a result, I always skew my numbers heavily in the thirty-two to forty-nine range. That probably earned me an extra hundred grand last year. When was the last time anyone gave you an actual way to make large amounts of money while asking nothing in return?

  Wait…I just peeked out the hole in the tinfoil. The girl next door just left her house wearing three sweaters, even though it’s hot out. Definitely someone like me. But I’m not going anywhere.

  37

  Gaga

  BEING GAGA USED TO mean you had lost your marbles, but now it means Lady Gaga. It’s kind of nice the way she rescued a word from hell like that.

  Even so, “gaga” was what I heard the old-timers whispering when I walked into the country club with Dad the week he was placed on probation. He’d destroyed his tennis racket by bashing the hood of his pro’s Toyota Camry with it. An onlooker described the look in my father’s eyes while he was bashing away as “freaky weird and dead, like he was a salmon finally scooped into the net after a long struggle.”

  The first time I noticed for myself that something was amiss with Dad was at a Chinese restaurant. We ran into his friend Clive there, and Dad started to brag about his new car, and then he had to pause and ask me what kind of car it was. Only twelve months later, he didn’t recognize me when I walked into his hospital room. I’m not milking this for sympathy; it was what it was. It was so quick.

  Mom didn’t want to discuss what had happened to Dad. He was only fifty-five when he vanished inside his head, and she was fifty-three. That’s young. I was also busy with my own life. I’d had a son with Daniel, and I was drowning in new motherhood, aggravated by postpartum depression on top of it. I felt bad for my mother because she was so lonely, but I was also relieved not to have to deal with her, because she was being such a bitch. I’m an only child and, given that Dad was out of the picture and she had no friends, I’d become her only emotional focus and/or target in life. I couldn’t take it. Those of you with siblings count your blessings.

  The summer after Dad died, Mom invited Daniel and me and the baby for dinner. She seemed a bit rattled when she opened the door, and the house was disordered—unusual, given that she was a clean freak. After she’d settled us at the dining room table, Mom went into the kitchen and returned with plates of spaghetti sauced with heated ketchup. Daniel and I stared down in disbelief.

  “I think it may not be up to my normal standard,” she said. “I’ve not been quite myself lately.”

  What do you do? You put a good face on it. In hindsight we should have whisked her off to a care home that night.
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br />   In the car on the way home, I said, “Do you think what I think?” and Daniel said, “Yes.”

  Mom sank like a stone. I made an unexpected visit two days later, and she didn’t answer the doorbell. I could hear a terrible noise inside, so I let myself in with my key. It turned out to be the smoke alarm, and there was Mom, sitting in the living room, looking puzzled at me as I raced into the kitchen. She’d left a pot on the stove that was so hot it was glowing orange. I turned the burner off and fetched a pitcher of water from the sink, then slopped it onto the pot. It hissed like a shunting freight car. That was the noise that briefly woke my mother up from her trance. It was the last time I think she was ever really her old self, and she spent it berating herself for being careless, which makes me sad. The one nice thing about the lightning-quick onset of her dementia was that she was mainly unaware it was happening. That is a blessing. I take whatever blessings I can get.

  Eight months after Dad died, Mom was in the same facility where Dad had been sent, but mercifully on a different wing and floor. Neither Daniel nor I could bear to be super-valiant with Mom the way we had been with Dad. There was no point. Mom didn’t recognize us when we visited, and our visits made the nurses’ lives harder. Mom got much more agitated than Dad had, and she hated the baby for some reason. What are the odds of both parents getting early-onset lightning-speed dementia? I guess someone has to win the lottery.

  After Mom died, people said, “Oh, I’m so sorry your mom passed that way,” but what they were really saying was that they were sorry for me, the gaga time bomb. Daniel and I didn’t discuss this probability outright, though we knew we had maybe twenty good years left together.

  The raccoons got into the trash last night. I was in a shitstorm of a mood when I was cleaning the whole mess up, because the baby had been crying for hours. Garbage-can crap was strewn all around the front walkway, and on top of it all, it was raining. I was about to have a good little cry for myself when I saw the packaging from a genetic testing facility that Daniel had hidden inside an empty half-gallon chocolate milk carton. What were the odds of me finding that? As I age, I’m learning that pretty much everything in life is some kind of lottery, but we only remember the big payoffs, good or bad.