Worst. Person. Ever.

by Douglas Coupland

  Kiribati?

  Could be kind of nice. Pretty, even. Who knew … maybe my luck had turned.

  The Republic of Kiribati is an island nation in the central Pacific Ocean. It is comprised of thirty-two atolls and one raised coral island, and is spread over 1.4 million square miles. It straddles the equator and borders the International Date Line on the east. Its former colonial name was the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. The capital and largest city is South Tarawa.

  Population: 105,000

  GDP: $206 million

  Internet top-level domain (TLD): .ki

  International calling code: +686

  02

  When I arrived in East Acton, I looked about: nice enough day—but then on Henchman Street some verminous panhandling dole-rat squatting on the sidewalk stuck out a soiled Caffè Nero coffee cup and begged for a few pence, instantly blotting out my good mood. I kicked him on the shin. I mean, for fuck’s sake, here he is, the same age as me, but I’m out in the world, work, work, work, making the world a better place for everybody, and this guy? All he does is sit around all day, expecting the world to throw him cash.

  “What was that for, mate?”

  “Get a fucking job, you lazy shit.”

  “Job? You want me to get a job, do you?”

  He stood up then. He was sunburned, somewhat larger than me, dressed in oily rags arranged in a manner that would have been considered Duran Duran stylish in 1982, but, thirty years later, flecked with feces, discount fag cinders and the spattered remains of meals-in-a-can, constituted a rather terrifying mite-breeding facility. “Say that to my face, mate,” he growled. He was wearing a name tag: NEAL—like anyone gave a shit what this street-fuck’s name was. His left eye was a milky cataract white.

  Seeing as I’d kicked a hornet’s nest, I decided the best course of action was to flee.

  “Come on mate, don’t be a coward!”

  Just fucking speedwalk out of here, Ray, don’t let him smell your fear. Why, look up there—its Wolfstan Street, where you can turn right and never see this unoccupied dickwad ever again.

  Whump!

  Tackled from behind … fuck. Two hundred pounds of man stink crunching my face onto a sidewalk papered with lung oysters and chip wrappers gone transparent from oil.

  You’d think I’d find a shred of mercy or concern or even interest from the citizens of glamorous West London, but no, they were all so fucking busy with their drug-taking, their lotto-ticket-buying and dole-robbing—assuming they were even fucking English—that seeing a visibly sane man like me being attacked by an obviously violent nutter like Neal elicited not a whiff of protest.

  A colon–scented mouth and the one working eye asserted itself in front of my face. “We like ourselves, don’t we?”

  I shut my eyes.

  He twisted my right arm behind my back, “We like ourselves, don’t we? So, what’s your name, then?”

  I twisted around; there was no escape to be had. My eyes opened. Fucker.

  He smiled at me. “And our name would be …?”

  The smell of street grit reminded me of childhood. I’m not telling this low-life fuck my name. “I’m not telling a low-life fuck like you my name—Neal.”

  “Right then.” Neal did something I still don’t quite understand to this day, but it resulted in a jolt of pain in the shoulder that was a gourmet blend of stubbed-toe-meets-hot-boiling-chip-fat.

  “Raymond!” I moaned.

  “Whazzat?”

  “Raymond! My fucking name is Raymond!”

  “That so?” Neal rubbed his dreadful, dreadful hair in my face. “My name is Neal, and my hair is called Neal, too. I can give my hair a name because I’m nuts and live on the street and I haven’t washed it since Princess Di died. It’s my way of letting my love for her live on and on.”

  “You sick, contaminated fuck, what is wrong with you? Get off before I get fucking superAIDS from your fucking beard.”

  “Can’t do that, mate. I have a lifestyle, and part of me being me is me keeping my style alive.”

  He is off his fucking rocker. “Are you off your fucking rocker? No one dresses like Duran Duran anymore. The eighties revival came and went. People barely dressed like that back in the fucking day and all of those wankers can’t change their own fucking diapers anymore. If you have to dress like some haircut band, at least make it Echo and the fucking Bunnymen instead of Duran fucking Duran.”

  Another profound jolt of pain racked my shoulder. I shrieked.

  Grannies with vinyl tartan grocery carts passed by as if Neal and I were tweens sharing a chaste kiss.

  “Right,” barked Neal. “Echo & the Bunnymen thought they were so cool, but it was just Ian McCulloch acting all fucked up with asymmetrical hairdos so that birds would form a line outside the bus and chain-bang him one by one.”

  “Well, that’s why anyone becomes a musician, Neal. Why the fuck else would you do it?”

  The pressure on my shoulder was eased.

  “You have a point.”

  “Neal, I would like you to stop crushing my skull into the pavement. You may like life on the street, but I, myself, am not used to smelling evaporating lapdog piss close-up.”

  Neal began to croon: “I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar!”

  Oh Jesus, the daft fucker was singing eighties pop tunes in the key of hepatitis C.

  “I said: I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar!”

  Neal shook my neck; a fleck of pigeon shit went up my right nostril. “Raymond,” he said, “you have one last chance before this escalates to the theoretical next stage. I repeat: I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar!”

  I whimpered my required line: “That much is true.”

  “Don’t You Want Me” is a single by British synthpop group The Human League, released on their third album, Dare, on November 27, 1981. It is the band’s best-known and most commercially successful recording, and hit number one in the UK’s Christmas pop chart, selling over 1,400,000 copies, making it the twenty-fifth most successful single in UK Singles Chart history. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. on July 3, 1982, and stayed in the top for three weeks.

  The title is frequently misprinted as “Don’t You Want Me Baby,” which is the first line of the chorus.

  Basically, everyone on earth loves this song.

  “And? And what comes next, Raymond!?”

  Jesus fucking Christ. “But even then I knew I’d find a much better place, either fucking with or without you.”

  “Louder!”

  “But even then I knew I’d find a much better place, either with or without you.”

  “Raymond! You are a man redeemed. Next line!”

  “But now I think it’s time I live my life on my own, I guess it’s just what I must do.”

  “Louder! All together now … One, two three …”

  In stereo: “But now I think it’s time I live my life on my own, I guess it’s just what I must do!”

  “Very good, mate.” Neal let me go to sprawl beside him.

  We lay there on the street, drunk with song. I looked over my left shoulder to see a pair of pigeons bobbing towards us. I was feeling oddly philosophical. “Neal,” I said, “what the fuck is it with pigeons, anyway?”

  “What do you mean, Ray?”

  “I mean, how many fucking crumbs can there be on this street—or any other given street in the world?”

  “Go on, Ray. I’m listening.”

  “I mean, it’s not like there’s a mobile croissant-shredding machine that trundles about the city strewing fresh, delicious crumbs all over the place just to feed pigeons.” A pigeon ventured close to my face, cooing dementedly. I blew at it and it skittered away. “And yet look at the little monsters everywhere: very plump, likely juicy, too.”

  “Very roastable indeed.”

  “Not only are these pigeons plump, Neal, they shit like leaf blowers, and they do all of this on a diet of, essentially, nothing.”

&
nbsp; “Makes you think, Ray.”

  “It does, doesn’t it, Neal?”

  The mood down on the sidewalk was relaxed now. I caught a whiff of piss. “Christ, just smell the piss here. What is wrong with this city? Someone couldn’t wait seventeen extra seconds to find a shrub or a loo?”

  “You should give urine a chance, Ray. You’re reflexively negative about it. Think of all those people in India chugging down bottles of urine every day. Piss is practically a food group over there, it is.”

  “Neal, there’s a reason it’s called piss—it’s because your body doesn’t want it inside you anymore. If we were meant to drink piss, it’d come out of tits. Think about it.”

  “Good point, Ray.”

  “Thank you. Just one question, Neal …”

  “Yes, Ray?”

  “A minute ago, when you were talking about giving your hair a name and all that—were you serious?”

  “Good God, no. People expect crazy people to ham it up, so I give what I think the audience wants. But I can see you understand me, Ray. I’d never try a stunt like that on you again.”

  “Thank you for your refreshing candour.”

  Neal stood up, looming over me on the diseased concrete. “Okay now, Ray, stop being a cunt to the world, and the world will stop being a cunt to you.”

  And with that, Neal was gone.

  Kind of liked him, actually.

  03

  I got home to my cramped top-floor flat in my building, a forgettable heap with about as much visual magnificence as Margaret Thatcher’s morning coffee dump. Unwashed dishes in the sink had gone bacterial and were on the brink of growing fur. Six light bulbs in the room needed replacing. I suppose, were I to wax poetic, the absence of pets or loved ones amplified my sense of aloneness in the universe.

  The phone rang: “Hi, Ray. It’s Tabitha from Fi’s office. She wanted me to prep you for Kiribati.”

  Tabitha! Tabs! Fi’s gofer, a sweet delicate fawn. But the question in my mind about Tabs is: Has, or has not, Fiona tongue-nabbed Tabs in the ladies’ room in between her PowerPoint casting suggestions for a Ford Fiesta commercial or the Afghanistan war or God-only-knows what other appalling clients? “Hi, Tabs. What do I need to know?”

  “Do you have a valid passport?”

  “I do. I never know when an overseas gig might come up.” Implicit in this? Raymond Gunt is a man of the world.

  “Okay, good. Umm. Like, ummm. Well …” Typical useless young person, language-wise. “Fi has asked me to drop papers off at your place tonight. Our server’s down and you’re not far from where I live. Will you be home at seven o’clock?”

  Will I? “Yes. Please do drop by.”

  “See you then.”

  Fucking hell: my place looked like cat shit in a litter box. The last thing I ever have on my mind is visitors. I began to cull through the worst of it, but I realized a few minutes in that the worst of it was actually a fucking lot of it.

  I needed to convert my bachelor’s dump into a fuck hut, and quick. Who among us hasn’t been in this situation?

  How to mask the odour of furniture covered in years of rogue jizz blemishes, countless sour-smelling empty wine bottles, a sea of dead remote control batteries and Zantac packaging, a rack of never-used barbells, a Katrina-like swath of take-away food packaging, plus whatever civilization of insects was brave or stupid enough to try to forge a new world within the haphazardly created ecosystem that was my flat?

  I lost some of my cleanup speed in the face of all this, but then refocused on why I was doing it: Tabs, the milky-skinned naive little doe who would look at a worldly, not-unstudly fellow like me and say, “Please, sir, I need someone to coach me on how to properly perform, as I have almost no experience and would prefer to learn from someone who can obviously teach me thoroughly and with great attention to detail.”

  In the end it was simply easiest to huck it all out the back window onto the landlady’s herb garden. Fucking herbs are indestructible—it’s how they got to be herbs in the first place—nature loves nothing more than throwing a species a challenge. Technically, by nature’s standards, smothering Mrs. Radley’s herb garden was doing it a favour by speeding up evolution. In any event, that bloated pension-sucking hag was away in Penzance at a family funeral. Recent contact with death would likely make her appreciate herbal trauma all the more.

  Ding-dong.

  Fucking hell, seven already? Christ.

  I buzzed the street door, shouting into the speaker, “Tabs, luv, come in.”

  As I held the door open, I cast a glance behind me at the main room, which was actually looking okay without most of my defenestrated crap. Those monks might be on to something with minimalism and all that meditating and shit, but fuck monks, I was after pussy. “Fancy a drink, Tabs?” I said as soon as she was in the door.

  “Do you have a white wine spritzer, maybe?”

  White wine? Does she think I’m some bender who rises every morning in pursuit of winking boy cherry? “I’m out of white wine. Fancy a lager?”

  “Lager? Oh, um … sure. I really just need to drop these off and explain one or two things.” She was looking at me funny—she was intrigued by me. I could tell. Hot dang! This might be the night!

  Through the mercy of God I was able to find two actual Pilsner glasses that were clean—this could only add to my Jason Bourne–like air of urban cool. “Here you go, Tabs. Skol!” (Toasting: manly.)

  “Oh, um … skol!”

  Again, she was eyeing me in a way that meant more than her counting my blackheads. We clinked glasses. Soon we shall be one.

  “Raymond—”

  “Ray.”

  “Ray … a bit of info for you. You’ll be flying through Los Angeles and passing through immigration, but that should be no problem. From there, you hop to Honolulu and then some other island in order to get to Kiribati. It’s a long slog—thirty-seven hours, all told.”

  “Lovely sunsets there, I bet.”

  “Huh? Oh, yes, I suppose so. In any event, I checked and you won’t require any vaccinations or a visa. The other camerapersons who’ve worked there suggested that you bring as many topical antifungals with you as possible.”

  “Tabs, hang on a sec, luv. Exactly what show is it I’m working on?”

  She gawped at me. “You don’t even know what show you’re working on?”

  “It’s American, so it’s bound to be shit. It didn’t occur to me to ask.”

  “It’s one of those reality shows where people stuck on a remote island shag each other over the course of a few weeks and then, I don’t know, turn into cannibals at the end when they get desperate for food.” She sipped her lager. “And then the last person standing gets a big bag of money. Here’s some information about the show, as well as your contracts. We’ll need to sign them right now.” Her forearms were twitching … her forearms connected to her shoulders connected to her magnificent rack. She spread out some papers, and I edged closer to her on the sofa to sign them. She smelled so clean, and her perfume was heaven: Fuck Factor Five or whatever overpriced gonk it is they’re pushing at office tarts this season.

  She smiled at me—the Look! The Look! She was giving me the Look! “And you’ll be getting American union rates, which, after two months—”

  Good God. “What? Two fucking months in the middle of nowhere?”

  “But it’ll be so beautiful, and if it works out, it could be a long-running gig. Fiona worked very hard to get you this slot.”

  “She did, did she?” Not a good sign.

  “It’s not my place to discuss this, Raymond, but I think she might still be sweet on you.”

  Dear God. Discussing an ex with a potential conquest? I was seeing my potential shag putting on little wings and flying out the window—no, more like putting on a little noose and attaching it to the rafters.

  “Ray?” She was gathering up her things.

  Now or never. I edged closer to her on the sofa. “Tabs, stay a bit longer. Finish yo
ur lager.”

  “Umm. Well. Okay.”

  “I know Fi can be a handful, Tabs.”

  Her body language was neutral. “Fi’s a pretty good boss. She knows what she wants.”

  That plus-sized Toby mug I once called my wife? “I’m sure she does.” I edged in one breath closer.

  “Raymond …”

  “Yes, Tabs?”

  “We need to discuss your personal assistant. Billy told you that you get one, right?”

  Ah, yes, my slave assistant. At this point, I, Raymond Gunt, mentally vacated the room, transported into the air by those magic words—my own personal assistant out in the middle of nowhere, free of any meaningful legal jurisdictions. I formed my own mental montage: clanking manacles, cracking whips and the sound of a key without mercy locking a cage.

  “Ray? Ray? You there?”

  “Sorry, luv. I was lost in thought. How do I choose my assistant?”

  “It’s your call. You have …” she checked her cellphone, “… twenty-three hours to find one. The flight is at six o’clock tomorrow. All they need is a valid passport, and as Kiribati has no union restrictions, it’s easy-peasy. If you can’t find someone, one will be appointed to you.”

  “Well, I don’t want that.” I scanned my mental Rolodex for potential assistants. A friend? None. Drinking buddies? Manifold but untrustworthy. Female anyone? Not fucking likely. Family members? Don’t ask. Passing acquaintances? Few.

  “Ray, you’ll be flying business class to Honolulu via Los Angeles, and from there you’ll be on a corporate jet.”

  “Would my personal assistant have to be in business class, too?”

  “I suppose if you asked for it.”

  Not fucking likely. Any assistant of mine would have to be the rearmost seat, right beside the lav and the puking Australians.

  My mind was caught in a rare but wonderful joy loop. Fucking brilliant! Someone to legally beat with a stick! And then, in a burst of dazzling white light, I realized I had just the candidate.

  Suddenly Tabs stood up and headed for the door.