Binge

by Douglas Coupland

Jane, that was a magic pill you gave me. I took it and, just like you said, thirty minutes later I wasn’t stuck being me anymore. I was a real person who did normal things and was able to see my house for the horror show it is. I am going to ask my doctor to give me a prescription. I hope you will come for another visit to see how profoundly you have helped me.

  I drove there on a Saturday morning a couple of weekends later. Liam had a lacrosse game, which he could have skipped but didn’t, so I went alone.

  The disgusting, rusted-out car was gone! I had to park at the curb because the driveway was filled with a massive mound of crap from inside the house. I skirted the mound and rang the doorbell. When Cory answered, she looked animated and cheerful, and not at all like the sleepwalker I’d met only two weeks back.

  She showed me into the living room, which still looked scary, but at least there was a visible sofa, a chair and a coffee table.

  “Cory, you’ve moved mountains of stuff. Way to go! And the car’s gone too.”

  “Good riddance! And I got two hundred bucks for it.”

  “So, show me around.”

  The house was as foul-smelling as last time, but Cory’s attitude made it not seem as bad. People’s moods are like light bulbs. The right one really does make all the difference.

  She pointed out a desiccated rat behind a carbon-covered barbecue that was layered in stuffed toys and colored leather jackets. “I called the exterminator to come in. He took one look around and freaked, but he said that once I get rid of the junk, he’ll come back. Coffee? This time we can drink it in the living room.”

  I will admit to almost gagging on the coffee, but I hung in. I wanted to find out more about Denny. “Is much of the stuff in the house Denny’s?”

  “Denny? No. She was one of those people who love empty rooms. We argued about it a lot. Before I became a hoarder, I was, I guess you’d say, a ‘collector.’ There was a seed there. I sometimes wonder if this hoarding is all a way of communicating with her. I believe in the afterlife, you know.”

  I didn’t want to go in that direction. “So the Adderall is really helping you?”

  “It’s magic. I wish I’d known about it a decade ago.”

  I walked over to one of the remaining piles, figuring that the items at the bottom would have more memories attached. I pulled out a tennis racket. “This looks to be in good condition. You play?” The moment I asked the question, I felt foolish. This is a woman who retrieves her mail on a motorized scooter.

  “Used to. Denny was crazy about sports. I just pretended to go along with it.”

  Everything had a memory of Denny attached to it, even a white plastic prescription bottle cap minus the bottle. “She was always getting sick. Most active person I ever knew, and she lived at the pharmacy.”

  We ordered a pizza, and after we’d eaten, we decided to empty the living room completely. The pile on the driveway got bigger, and I drove away feeling creatively satisfied. I even considered Cory a new friend.

  When I got home, Liam was microwaving waffles. “Have a good visit?”

  “Yeah. It was nice.”

  “Nothing went horribly wrong?”

  I rummaged in the fridge and came up with a beer. “No. She was decisive. I was impressed.”

  “It’ll blow up in your face at some point.”

  “You’re so negative.”

  * * *

  —

  My phone buzzed at 2:03 in the morning. Cory.

  “Hello?”

  She was in tears.

  “Cory, why are you crying?”

  “We threw out the margarine tub.”

  I paused, then said, “We threw out quite a few margarine tubs.”

  “No, we threw out the one I was going to use for Denny’s bird’s nest. That nest was the only thing she wanted to have in the house. And I never got around to it, and now the tub is gone.”

  “Cory, we can find another tub.”

  “You don’t get it. That one was special.”

  I heard cars in the background. “Cory, are you outside?”

  She sniffled. “Yeah.”

  “Are you ripping apart the giant mound of stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Stop, okay? I’ll come by tomorrow and help you find it.”

  “Thanks. I’ll try.”

  After I hung up, Liam turned over and looked at me. “Told you.”

  50

  craigslist.org

  THERE IS A PERVERSE need inside all of us to have our truths heard, so here goes. It was my wedding. For once I got to rule the show, my show. I had a pretty good budget and a long planning window, and I’d nailed a killer venue in the last week of August. It was an old Tudor mansion that used to be a frat house until three of its aspirational members died in a gruesome hazing ritual two years back. Slam dunk. I honestly saw this as a wedding that had no possibility of cratering…and this wedding was mine.

  I was aiming for about 125 guests. At that size, I could cover core family members along with my loser unlikeable relatives, but I could also invite a good number of genuine friends. Helping me in all of this was my best friend, Andrea, whom I’ve known since day care. To be honest, we’d never had so much fun together. She was getting married a few months after me, so we had a two-year bridezilla-fest. I wish I could take a pill that makes me feel like I am sitting in my kitchen with Andrea, a little drunk, going online to post withering anonymous critiques of other women’s bridesmaid outfits.

  The one person I didn’t want to come to my wedding was my half-sister, Cathy, who was just like the poor, doomed spinster cartoon character Cathy, whom Gen Zers probably don’t know about but can easily look up on Wikipedia. She was the focus of a three-panel cartoon that debuted in the late 1970s, a single working girl who relentlessly fat-shamed, relationship-shamed and sucked hope away from two generations of women craving female role models. The third panel was always Cathy imploding in a spasm of existential doubt that came in the form of her going “Aaak!”

  Back to real-life Cathy: she actually got knocked up by the stick insect who ran her spin class, Lars, who fled town when he found out he was about to be a dad. When the kid, Ian, arrived, he was on the spectrum big-time. He’s eleven, but he can’t really talk and is terrified of everything, so he freaks out a lot. It’s been really hard on Cathy, but I still didn’t want to invite her, because I knew she’d bring Ian. As a kid whose entire world can go haywire if he hears the noise your car makes when you forget to put on your seatbelt, I knew he’d destroy my big day for sure.

  But of course I had to invite her—family is family. And it did go horribly wrong. First, everyone there had to pretend not to gawk when Ian arrived wearing black sweatpants and a cheesy tuxedo T-shirt that had spittle down the front.

  They say a wedding without a crying baby is bad luck, which is sweet—the renewing power of life! But what is not good luck is Ian, sitting in the front row between Cathy and my mother, getting stung by a bee. Hello, God, was that really necessary?

  We were halfway through our vows when Ian went off like a smoke alarm. It was brutal. Cathy tried to drag him away, but the sting hurt him so much he collapsed on the ground in a ball. Cathy, my dad and my uncle had to carry him out of the wedding chapel into the rear parking lot, but we could all still hear his muffled screaming. Andrea, thank God, stood up at that point and said, “Everyone, let’s take a fifteen-minute break and then come back for the rest of the ceremony.”

  Friends came over to me saying things like “You’ll laugh about this down the road!” But no, I was never going to laugh about this, ever, and Andrea could see that, so she took me out of there to a tiny quiet closet and gave me fifteen milligrams of Valium. She is my rock. And there were maybe a dozen frat-boy spanking paddles on the wall, those wooden paddles with holes drilled into them. Great detail, God!

  So then, y
es, the rest of the wedding. The honeymoon. Then back to the hamster wheel of real life, still driven by a burning need for revenge. My husband told me to get over it, but I couldn’t. Could you?

  One day, I was randomly trawling through craigslist and somehow, in that magic internet way, I ended up on a page selling things to do with bees. I couldn’t believe what I saw:

  Bee swarm. Yours for $20, but come right now. It’s settled on a sawn branch. Bring gloves. Bees are peaceful creatures and are at their most peaceful when swarming. Namaste.

  An hour later, a guy named Kyle was about to help me put that swarm in a big Rubbermaid tub. A swarm is kind of molten, and handling one is kind of like, I don’t know—safe danger?

  I came so close, but in the end I decided not to take the bees. Kyle did sell me five dozen pheromone sticks, though, designed to attract any swarming bees in a quarter-mile radius.

  That evening I drove over to my half-sister’s place when I knew she and Ian were at Very Special Aquafit. I walked around the house, tucking sticks into the gutters and on top of window ledges, turning the place into one massive bee orgy waiting to happen.

  But did I throw an actual swarm into the kitchen? No, I didn’t, because I’m a good person.

  51

  Clip Art

  HERE’S A GOOD PIECE of advice for men in any social situation: never tell a woman she looks like another woman, even if she looks like Beyoncé or Giselle Bündchen. It will never work in your favor. The best you can hope for out of that situation is to end up slightly behind where you were before you said it. Another good piece of advice? Never tell a woman her dress looks good on her. Instead, say, “Wow, you’re totally rocking that dress!”

  On the other hand, it doesn’t matter what you ladies say to a guy, because we all think we’re gods.

  I figured all this out through my work as a model, where I have to understand how emotion works and how we connect emotion to the hundreds of little muscles in our faces. How surfaces work, basically.

  My name is Gary, but in the business I’m known as Unit—not because I’m hung like the king of Sweden, but because of what happened at a clip art shoot five years back. The photographer was a total jerk, but the gig was a killer payday. I can safely say I am one of only a small tribe of people on earth who have purchased a reasonably nice condominium solely through being a clip art model.

  Clip art shoots are different from editorial or commercial work. They’re done in warehouses stocked with thousands of props and garments that you have to meticulously work your way through. Here’s an example: clip art with pineapples. Solo model holds pineapple and cycles through an array of responses—joy, confusion, sexiness, thoughtfulness, lottery win, gullibility and so on for a minimum of forty responses. Remember that meme a few years back about laughing women eating salad? I mean, those photos had to be created somehow.

  After you do your bit, they bring in a model of the opposite sex and you do all the responses together, as well as a long extra list, like he’s dumb/she’s smart or “Isn’t this amazing!” And then someone from another race is swapped in and it’s all repeated. Next it’s two guys, then two girls, and more options with mixtures of different races. All so that there are endless variations of stock shots of people and pineapples.

  So, somewhere in the middle of this shoot, I made a joke, overheard by the photographer, that we should just hold out our empty hands and they could photoshop in the pineapple or pliers or dildos or whatever else. You’d think I’d just advocated for gang rape.

  “You, what’s your name?” the photographer said.

  “Gary.”

  “Gary, thank you for sharing your valuable opinions about today’s activities. You’ve given me and Ms. Dreyfus here—” (the mousy little woman who sat in a folding chair beside him, keeping track of every cell in the shoot’s spreadsheet) “—much food for thought. But until you pony up $20 million to launch your own clip art juggernaut, please keep your ideas to yourself. Now, pick up that ruby red grapefruit sliced in half and take us through the forty essential food emotions.”

  Dick.

  Don’t worry, I’m getting to how I got my nickname. But first, here’s a good trick about how to get your shoulders into the right position when you’re about to be photographed: 1) Raise them to your ears. 2) Pull them back. 3) Lower them. It may feel like you’re going for projectile pecs or tits, but it always looks great. People look at your image and think, Wow, that person is confident.

  Q: Are models vain?

  A: Actually, genuinely vain models don’t have long careers. Models who last in this business are quiet and unassuming, and treat their bodies like expensive cars. You’ll never see a professional model picking blackberries (all those thorns) or near a barbecue (grease burns), and we wear gloves whenever possible.

  The other thing professional models figured out long before everyone started taking selfies is that the part of your brain that looks at yourself in a mirror is totally different from the part you use when looking at a photo of yourself. With training, you can build a superhighway connection between those two parts so that you can look exactly the way you want to whenever you want to. Remember what I said about micro-emotions and the surface of your face.

  I was telling this idea to Ivana, a model I’ve worked with for years, when that same jerk photographer barked at me, “Ah, young Gary. Putting your arts degree to good use?”

  “My degree is in hotel management.”

  “Fantastic. Bravo.”

  I could tell that whatever was about to come out of that man’s mouth wasn’t going to be pretty.

  “Gary, I think I am going to call you Unit from now on.”

  “Unit?”

  “Yes, Unit. That’s why we hired you for this series of shoots—you’re a unit. You’re good-looking but not too good-looking, and your face has the quality most essential for effective clip art: it’s pretty much impossible to remember.”

  He was on a roll, and everyone in the space stopped to listen.

  “If I was trying to be polite, I might say you look like the boy next door, but boys next door have something memorable going for them, like a dimple or a scar on their eyebrow.” He looked at Ms. Dreyfus. “Hand sanitizer, please…” Ms. Dreyfus dispensed a glob and he wiped his hands. “Nature creates a unit like you so that women with extreme facial features can bring their offspring’s physiognomy back into the range of what we generally consider normal. You function as a corrective measure within human biology, and there’s nothing wrong with that. So, Unit, please retrieve that head of iceberg lettuce from the props wagon and pretend you’re angry at it, and after that, pretend it’s your enemy, and after that, look at it and give it a winning smile.”

  “Uhhh…”

  “Shush. I just told you the core truth of your reason for being on earth. Thank me quickly, if you like, and just get on with your job.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  52

  Nike

  BE HONEST: HAVE YOU ever wandered along a beach and wanted to find a corpse washed up on the sand?

  Oh, don’t make that face. You know darn well the coolest thing you can possibly find on a beach is a washed-up corpse. Deep within our reptile cortexes, it’s probably the dominant reason we go beachcombing in the first place. Oooh! Some pretty shells! No way. We want a corpse—and then the inside track on the homicide investigation.

  Cut to right now.

  I wanted to throw a bit of fun into an otherwise bummer museum display I was creating about the evils of marine plastics. I know: marine plastics, a total downer. Little fishy-wishies choking to death on the discarded container from your green apple–scented body scrub or the frayed ends of the Lysol wipe you wasted cleaning your dashboard because you thought you might catch something from yourself.

  The display was a large tank filled with marine drift plastics. A gentle wave mach
ine made it all move slightly. I was trying to make it look like the Pacific trash vortex, which really does put you off your dinner if you think about it too much. The goal was to help people understand the consequences of throwing something “away” by showing them what “away” looks like. But then I asked myself, what if I were to add a wild card to the tank to reward kids, in particular, for their attention?

  To this end, I worked with Roy on the aquarium’s props team to make a fake decomposed foot in a man’s size 8 Nike sneaker. First we had to have a scientific discussion about decomposing feet. To wit: whenever someone goes overboard from a ship—whether a murder victim or suicide—waves bash the body around until its appendages separate at the joints. Most of it ends up on the ocean floor, but feet in shoes made of buoyant synthetics float, and waves gently kiss them ashore. In some parts of the world, especially the triangle between Seattle, Vancouver and Victoria, finding a decomposed foot inside a shoe on a beach is not that rare an occurrence.

  When the exhibit opened, most of the people found tons of plastics shunting together in a big lump eerily beautiful, and yet it still activated those moral nodes of the brain that you or I don’t often use. But some of the student visitors weren’t so fascinated. So, before the next school group came through, I hid the foot toward the north side of the installation, between a Kirin beer crate and a plastic hardhat with Korean writing on it. And then, when I noticed them getting restless, I said, “Hey, can any of you find the decomposed foot in the tank?”

  Talk about catnip. All of those previously bored student visitors locked on to the exhibit in search of the Magic Decomposed Foot. It was one of those times that made me feel proud to be an educator. And when they spotted it, you’d think they’d found a million dollars. The one downside was that some little kids there with their parents totally freaked out and started howling. Which led to Tracy from admin coming down to give me a lecture.