Worst. Person. Ever.

by Douglas Coupland

  The Ecstasy was kicking in. I ventured, “I’m squalling. These islanders sont squalling. Nous nous squallons.”

  Neal pulled up to a cinder-block grocery store and parked. Sarah and Elspeth vanished inside, while we sat there transfixed by a shiny piece of red plastic hanging from the store’s eaves. It turned sort of rainbow colours the longer we stared at it. Then it started to make faint chiming sounds. A wind chime was our initial musing.

  “Neal, that piece of plastic is fucking amazing.”

  “It is magnificent. It wouldn’t be out of place in a New York art gallery.”

  We got out of the car to better appreciate the plastic. Its magnificence blossomed ever outward, fractally, and I felt connected to all life—not just my own, but also the lives of all human beings on the planet, and possibly the universe.

  Neal said, “Ray, we’re just grains of sand in the scheme of things.”

  “Neal, you are so right.”

  “All we are is dust in the wind.”

  “Look, it’s turning blue—laser beam blue.”

  We stood there gawping until a fly landed in my mouth and I horked it out, laughing. It was terribly funny. It just was. Neal thought so too, and we both laughed to the point where our stomachs dry-heaved. Small children with sticks stopped and stared at us, while stray dogs avoided us, rightly fearing our magnificent grasp of the true fabric of the universe.

  We were shitfuck stoned.

  “I must own that piece of plastic, Neal.”

  “To the victors belong the spoils.”

  “Give me a leg up.”

  “Sure thing, Ray.”

  Neal kneeled and offered me his cupped hands. I stuck a foot in and he lifted me up to make a swipe at our piece of sacred plastic, but I overreached and fell onto my butt, my elbow landing in, of all things, an octopus somebody had abandoned, goopy and smegmacious. I shrieked like a wee girl. Neal found this utterly hilarious—it wasn’t. I frantically removed the fine linen shirt that had once belonged to poor, doomed Arnaud du Puis, while Neal sat doubled over atop some plastic milk crates from Australia until he could catch his breath. As I scraped the worst of the octopular sludge from my arms, Neal hopped on one of the crates and grabbed the piece of sacred red plastic from its string, placing it in his dapper linen jacket’s inside pocket.

  “Neal, that’s my piece of red plastic.”

  “Sorry, Ray. Fate gave you one chance to grab the brass ring, and you missed. Then fate gave me a chance, and the sacred talisman is mine.”

  “You thieving bastard.”

  “Sorry, Ray. Law of the seas.”

  “It’s no such thing.”

  “Ray, I’ll let you look at the plastic every so often, but fair’s fair.”

  One thought went through my head: Neal must die. As he turned to walk back to the van, I jumped him from behind. To this, he said, “Oh Christ. Ray, just cool down. Maybe they have some ice cream in the store. Let’s go get some.”

  “Die, you smarmy bastard.” I tried strangling him.

  “Okay, Ray, but I’m telling you, this’ll hurt you more than it does me.” He effortlessly unclamped my arms and hurled me into the ashen remains of what must have once been a sizable pile of snack cake wrappers and fishbones.

  I coughed salty dust and watched Neal enter the Island Mart. Suddenly, feelings of love and brotherhood welled up in me for my slave friend. “Neal! Brother! I love you!” But Neal was already inside. I followed, shouting, “Neal! I love you! You’re my brother! I’m sorry I tried to kill you,” as I pushed through the door.

  Neal was staring at a pile of tinned goods at the end of an aisle. Elspeth approached me with a cart full of tinned meats and whispered, “Raymond, for fuck sake, get your shit together. Stop shouting, we’re trying to fly under the radar.”

  Sarah was speaking with the manager. She turned to look at me: shirtless, raving, enslimed and sugar-frosted with ashes of trash. I waved at her. A glint in her eyes told me she had a plan afoot, and that I’d better not interfere. In a voice loud enough for the ten other customers in the store to overhear, Sarah explained, “That’s Raymond. He’s in the final stage of AIDS. Just look how red his head is. The TV network volunteered to take him to a hospice in Brisbane, but, as you can see, the virus has gone to his brain. Poor thing. It’s the fantastically contagious strain of the disease, too. I have no idea why he’s not wearing a shirt, but I think that goo on his arms might be leakage from suppurating lymph nodes.”

  Elspeth parked her shopping cart next to Sarah. “And that person staring at the tinned luncheon meats is Neal, Raymond’s fuckbuddy. It’s a modern, liberated term that bespeaks the proud man love of those two brave souls. They’re political, those two are. It’s inspiring the way they still go at it, even in Raymond’s final, sad, wildly infectious days.”

  The man running the store now looked so stressed out I could practically hear his own T-cells suiciding.

  Sarah went on, “It’s hard to believe Raymond escaped his bio-containment stall at Bonriki Airport—a lovely airport, by the way. But don’t worry, we’ll have him out of your store in a jiffy, just as soon as we can pay for the multiple carts of groceries required by our crew. Our silly supply ship got marooned in the trash vortex. They called it propeller fatigue. The ocean basically turned into white glue around it.”

  Elspeth added, “Such a tragedy that vortex is. I hope humanity one day finds a way of making things right with Mother Nature.” She paused and added, “Go green!”

  The store manager was drenched in sweat and vibrating with worry. Sarah dragged him to the till, saying, “Do you have any jams, jellies or preserves? They make such lovely souvenirs.”

  “Look!” shrieked Elspeth. “Thong bikinis for sale!”

  By this time, the store had totally cleared out.

  I heard Neal calling me and found him in aisle 3: Tinned Luncheon Meats.

  “Holy shit!”

  “It’s Spam, Ray, an entire aisle of Spam—or, rather, a whole aisle of products highly similar to Spam, yet not really Spam!”

  It was almost holy the way the store’s sole functioning fluorescent tube lit aisle 3’s primary-coloured grids of rectangular tins from all over the planet—although mostly they seemed to be from China.

  “Neal, most of these cans are from fucking China.”

  Neal was crestfallen. “I may be snackered on Ecstasy, Ray, but no way in a million years could you make me eat what’s inside any of these tins. Christ only knows what’s in them.”

  Drywall

  Melamine

  Hitchhikers

  Nurses

  Diseased sheep lungs

  Crisps

  Cat food too scary for cats

  Jellied donkey piss

  Yoga mats

  Vinyl pool toys

  Venereal ovaries

  Braided gerbil urethras

  Shredded car parts

  Dolphins

  Neon tetras

  Tetra Pak boxes

  Broken dreams

  Kittens with mittens

  Mutton leavings

  Silicon chips

  Pregnant fetal pigs

  Unsold Shrek DVDs

  That bucket of blood from Carrie

  Angioplasty scrapings

  Wank tissues

  Biopsy leftovers

  Sentient colon polyps

  I sat down on the floor and opened a sample can of God’s Meat with its little key. Its clear jelly bits soaked up a ray of sun coming through a plastic roof vent. Fucking marvellous: like the beginning of the universe, really. Subtle beige chunks of tallow surrounded by pinkish grey mystery tissue: fine Roman marble! Fuck that piece of red plastic Neal stole from me!

  I scooped into the can, gorging like a seagull on bites of its holy contents. Here was the answer to the mysteries of life. Here I found truth. Here I found something to live for. Here I … here I blacked out.

  Potted meat food product, or potted meat, is made of cooked meat product, o
ften creamed, minced or ground, which is poured into cans, sealed and heat-processed. Beef, pork, chicken and turkey are used, as well as non-skeletal meats. What is a non-skeletal meat, you ask? You may regret having asked. Non-skeletal meats include organs and glands, as well as extremities such as feet and tails or retinas or eyelids or udders.

  The canning produces a homogeneous texture and flavour, but lower-cost ingredients can also affect quality. For example, mechanically separated chicken or turkey is a paste-like product made by forcing crushed bone and tissue through a sieve to separate bone from tissue. In the United States, mechanically separated poultry has been used in poultry products since 1969. But the real question here is, What do the Chinese use in their potted meats? Insert nightmare here.

  From The Happy Isles of Oceania by Paul Theroux (1992)

  “It was a theory of mine that former cannibals of Oceania now feasted on Spam because Spam came the nearest to approximating the porky taste of human flesh. ‘Long pig,’ as they called a cooked human being in much of Melanesia. It was a fact that the people-eaters of the Pacific had all evolved, or perhaps degenerated, into Spam-eaters. And in the absence of Spam they settled for corned beef, which also had a corpsy flavor.”

  31

  Okay.

  We’ve all of us gone overboard once or twice in our time and perhaps had a lager or two too many. Or perhaps a flute of champagne past the 0.08 limit. I mean, life is short! Rejoice! And who among us could judge?

  When I came to, I found myself on a bamboo deck of some sort, walled on three sides with woven panels made of palm fronds and pandanus leaves, but with no wall in front of me, just the vision of an aquamarine lagoon with gently whooshing waves filled with gumdrops and cartoon characters. My pillow was soft and cool, and the single thin sheet over me was heaven on my skin. I could smell flowers. Okay now, this was the Pacific I’d dreamed of.

  I looked to my right to see a firm, milky leg—Sarah’s!—and I was seized with gratitude to God for having delivered me unto Eden after so many days of total goatfucks. My eyes followed the line of her thigh up to her torso, and a wash of regret passed over me: I had no memory whatsoever of what must have been the absolute best drug-fuelled fuck of a lifetime. What is wrong with the universe? Just let me have this one fucking memory, is that too much to ask?

  Well, old Ray, maybe the memory will come back to you. Relax. And think of it: there will be other killer shags. The planes are grounded worldwide. No one’s going anywhere. You must surely have enough tinned meats to last a decade. The sky and ocean are beautiful. Life is good.

  I reached over and traced Sarah’s creamy leg. What a perfect fucking ten. What a woman in a million.

  My fingers travelled farther upward. I gently brushed the almost invisible hairs that ran from her biff up her crab ladder to her navel. Then I finger-walked over her remarkable knockers up her throat to her …

  Holy fucking godless mother of fucking hell!

  She turned towards me, smiled, let out a small coo and said, “Well, bunny-wunny, I knew one day you’d be mine.”

  I looked back in frozen horror: LACEY.

  How do things like this happen? How many of the gods have to be taking a sick day for me to black out and wake up with the hospitality gorgon of LAX? How did she even get here? How did I get here? Last thing I remember I was … high and with Neal looking at tinned meats.

  “Ray, don’t fret. You were great.”

  “Where is everybody? Where am I? How the fuck did you get here? And why are you calling me ‘bunny-wunny’?”

  “Ray, we have plenty of time for talking later.” She shimmied closer to me, pressing her remarkable breasts (how did I miss them first time around?) into my flank.

  I shuddered. I had just a bit too much history with young LACEY to ever go that route. Now that I was conscious, you might as well ask me to bang a Ford Cortina. “Where’s Neal? Where’s Elspeth? Where’s Sarah?”

  “They’re out on the yacht.”

  “The yacht?!”

  “The TV network banquet should be starting just about …” She looked at her watch. “… now.”

  “Oh, fucking hell.” Standing up, I slipped on Arnaud du Puis’s pants. I looked for a shirt, and all I could find was a vintage Cure T-shirt.

  The Cure is an English rock band formed in Crawley, West Sussex, in 1976. The band has experienced several line-up changes, with front man, vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter Robert Smith being the only constant member, best recognized as the band member with the crazy red mushy lipstick, and you can’t believe he’s been doing it for all these years, and you sort of wonder if you’d recognize him at the mall if he walked past you without lipstick on.

  I left her in bed and climbed down a small rattan staircase onto the beach, which was loaded with … thousands of bin bags? Oh, dear God, thousands of trash bags full of the foulest sorts of fish heads, rotting paper towels, rusting cans and fermenting dead whores, and—my nose twitched—everywhere I looked, the sand was peppered with human shit, miles and miles of it, kissed by the loving surf.

  LACEY called out, “The locals don’t believe in our Western sense of personal hygiene. They just walk into the water, go to the bathroom and come back onto land. So free, and so liberated. You said as much yourself earlier today as we went to the bathroom together out in the lagoon.” I turned back to stare in further horror at her as she reached for a nylon sack. “If you’re hungry, I brought a duffle bag filled with packets of corn nuts from Los Angeles, and I have half a bottle of water from the drive here in the Jeep.”

  “Jeep?”

  “Yes. Your friend Stuart dropped us off. And your ex-wife. She’s nice.”

  Aneurysm.

  “Stuart said he wouldn’t disturb us for at least twenty-four hours. I’m so glad I’m not working at the airport bar anymore. Garcia was starting to get too possessive, and the thrill was gone. And after I met you, he could tell things were no longer the same between us.”

  Stroke.

  “Oh, come on now, Raymond. The electricity between us—especially that first time, when you didn’t tip me—it was magic.”

  Throw up inside my mouth.

  “Oh look.” She had come to the top of the stairs and was pointing at the sea. “I think I can see the yacht out beyond the reef. Imagine the fun they’re having: amazing food, the best music, socializing and having a blast. But not nearly the blast you and I have been having all afternoon, my hunny-bunny-wunny.”

  Cardiac arrest.

  “What exactly happened with us here … LACEY?”

  “Happened?”

  “Uh, I mean, how long have we been in our magic pad?”

  “Eight hours.”

  My body flinched as though massaged by a stun wand.

  “But time has certainly flown. You may be three-eighths of an inch longer than Garcia, but it feels like three whole inches. Though you talk too much. Come back and do me over and over again and again.”

  Epileptic seizure.

  Out in the lagoon, a 500-pounder with octuple beer tits was dumping the natural way. Christ, he could derail a train. Hate to imagine how much Spam went into making him.

  I asked LACEY “But how did you even find me?”

  “I asked Garcia to make some inquiries with Homeland Security. Lieutenant Jennifer Healey was more than happy to tell me where you were, and she even let me fly here free on a bomber headed to Guam that stopped at Bonriki Airport to refuel. I can’t say I’m very happy about the global nuclear crisis, except that it’s all the more reason to be marooned here with you, you, you and only you, possibly for the rest of our lives. Isn’t that romantic, RayCEY?”

  “RayCEY?”

  “That’s my couple’s name for us. Half Raymond, half LACEY.”

  “Uh-huh. Do you have a phone?”

  “A cellphone on Kiribati? Oh, you’re just trying to be funny. Undertippers are always such bad jokers.”

  I had to escape. But how? And to where?


  “Did Stuart happen to say which way the hotel was back out on the road?”

  “You’re not leaving me, are you?”

  Good Christ, yes.

  “Why would I leave a number like you?” Yet again, more cruel fate: point for point, LACEY’s body was hotter than Sarah’s, and yet to me, in my right mind, she was utterly unfuckable. I can see what historians mean when they tell us to learn the lessons of the past and how memory can haunt the single or the collective soul.

  Wait …

  Wait …

  … Nuclear crisis.

  Nuclear crisis!

  “Tell me more about this nuclear crisis.”

  “It kind of came out of nowhere, really. Just after we took off for Guam, they closed LAX. The bomber flight crew that brought me here was really busy, but they told me a few things. There was a nuclear detonation in the Pacific, not far from Hawaii.”

  It was thousands of miles away, you chimp.

  “And now North Korea’s ten minutes from bombing South Korea. You haven’t heard about any of this? It’s a mess. The Americans say it was part of an idiotic scheme to get rid of the Pacific Trash Vortex, but nobody’s buying it. And then a small bomb went off in the Azores, of all places. It’s like the Hawaii of the Atlantic, but they think it might have been a Russian nuke headed for South America that got detonated because a deal to sell it went sideways.”

  Mrs. Peggy Nielson of Kendallville, Indiana, you certainly earned your paycheque this week. “Go on.”

  “So then Europe got paranoid because a nuclear reactor in Karlsruhe, Germany, melted down—a coincidence? Nobody thinks so. And the Middle East won’t let anyone in or out and, well, nobody’s going anywhere until this thing cools down. It’s like 9/11, except more James Bondy.” She tried to look alluring by fluttering her eyelashes while going down on a corn nut.

  I shuddered.

  “It feels like fate,” she said. “It feels like the universe conspired to get RayCEY together in the end.”

  Name-meshing: Two proper names can be used to create a portmanteau word in reference to a couple, especially in cases where both persons are well known, such as “Billary,” referring to former U.S. president Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary.