The gum thief: a novel

by Douglas Coupland

  Ha ha. That's not a funny joke, and chances are somebody on the planet has made it before. But I'm not in a funny mood!

  How could I be? Bethany! What the hell! I asked your mom why, and she said she didn't know-the poor woman is terrified. And it's not like I know either-geez! Puck! All your mom said was that when the bus driver found you at the back of the bus you were barely coherent but that you said you were sick of being you-that you didn't like who you'd become.

  Bethany, nobody knows who they are when they're young-nobody! You're not a full person yet! You're liquid! You're lava! You're a larva! You're molten plastic! And don't take that the wrong way. I mean, it's not like it gets much better as you get older, but when you get older and you will-you'll at least figure out who you are a little bit. Not much, but some. And when it happens, you might not be too thrilled with who it is you are, but at least you'll know. But right now? At your age? Again, don't take any of this personally, but no!

  Remember back when we started writing I talked about what I was like when I was younger-but then I stopped talking about it? That was because I realized there was no point to it. I did some stupid shit and some good deeds along the way, but it all cancelled itself out and morally I think I'm a pretty generic person, like everyone else. Your Joan of Arcs and Supermans don't come around too often. Mostly, the world is made up of people like me, plodding along. It's what people do-plod, plod, plod. While it kills me to come to grips with the fact that I'm like everyone else, that pain is outweighed by the comfort I get from being a member of the human race.

  Let's say you're a judge, or maybe a scientist, and you have your first big case or make your first big discovery, and you become world-famous-you're a genius! But then you get older and stop discovering new things-you've hit your peak. And then you start seeing people enter your courtroom or laboratory or whatever, and they're all repeating the same mistakes as all the people who've ever come before them. And a chill passes through your body. You realize, Oh, dear God-this is it. This is as good or as smart as we're ever going to get as a species. Our brains aren't going to get larger. Our accumulated pile of human knowledge can only be absorbed so much at a time. As a species, we've reached the upper limits of our intelligence . ..

  . . . and then you plod along.

  Here's an amusing anecdote from my youth. I used to like playing with green plastic soldiers, but my mom was anti-war (odd, considering what a battle-axe she was) and wouldn't buy me soldiers. I was too young for a paper route to make my own money, and our house was miles away from a store. My father brought me home a bag of soldiers one night, and I was out of my mind with happiness. I began to play with them, but then my mom came into the room, holding a phone with an extension cord, and she sat down and said, "Okay, you can play with your soldiers, fine. But I'm going to sit here, and every time one of them gets killed or injured, I'm going to telephone their mother. Ready? One, two three, play ..." Well, you can imagine how much fun that was.

  The point here is that everyone's family is a disaster. Some are noisier disasters, and some are quietly toxic disasters, but we're all in the same boat. I don't know if I agree with you about your family's behaviour defining or limiting what you can and can't do in your life. I think we're born a certain way and our family can influence us only a tiny bit. So what if people in your family die? You'll die too! But in your eighties, in a good nursing home, surrounded by loving family members and staff who don't steal your brooches and dilute your morphine.

  Who do I think I am to lay any of this on you? Frankly, the knowledge of who I am is all I have, in every sense of the word. It's the one thing I can speak of without fear. It's the one thing I can give someone else. I earned this knowledge, dammit! And I'm your friend. And your mother loves you too-nay, adores you-and she is a terrific woman, and I think she deserves to be allowed to care for you and care about you. All the tea in China couldn't make me go through my twenties again, but at the same time I'm jealous that you have such a broad swath of life ahead of you. Needless to say, you'll make many more mistakes along the way, and I fully expect many of them to be highly amusing. I urge you to keep me in your loop, if only to provide me with entertainment at someone else's expense.

  Bethany, the world is a beautiful place. Life is short, and yet it's long. Being here is such a gift.

  And there's always going to be someone knocking over the Sharpie pen cardboard display in Aisle 3-South. So go over there right now and clean it up!

  Your friend, Roger

  Dee Dee

  Dear Roger, Now you're the one sleeping. Bethany is having a shower down the hall, and I'm sitting here on this amazingly uncomfortable chair, coping. I'm certainly better now than I was last night. Bethany's groggy and a bit sheepish. I'm not a hundred percent sure she wanted to succeed. She OD'd on a bus, and to me that sounds like she didn't fully mean to. Besides, I think she's so malnourished and overworked that one painkiller could have wiped her out. As a child, she'd eat the most amazing things (potting soil, daddy long legs, road salt) and always come out fine, so her constitution is rugged. She's got a stomach like a cement mixer.

  Roger, I didn't mean to snoop, but I read your letter, and it was lovely. I know exactly what you mean about growing older and knowing who you are. How do you explain that to someone so young? By twenty-five you know you're never going to be a rock star, by thirty you know you're never going to be a dentist, and by forty there are maybe three things left that you can still be-and even then, that's only if you run as fast as you possibly can to try to catch the train.

  Me, I have two options right now. I can continue life the way I live it now, or I can take Bethany's advice in a note she left me on the kitchen table and remortgage our place and spend the proceeds on school, which is exactly what I plan to do. There was nothing malicious in the way Bethany wrote the note, but she was clear in telling me that my current path is death in disguise. Well, what about her! Between you and me, we are going to padlock her to the admissions office door of the local college and make sure she's on a launch pad to someplace, anyplace, better than right here and now. My eyes are open and can never be closed again.

  I can hear her coming back down the hall. Roger, maybe you want to change who you are too. Do you want to form a club together? Bethany is so lucky to have met you.

  Thank you.

  DD

  Bethany

  Roger,

  Okay, trust me, I couldn't be more embarrassed. BUT on the other hand, you'll never guess who came to visit me a few hours ago. Yes, that's correct, Greg. Weeooo!!! Talk about weird. Someone from das Shtoop tipped him off. He walked in the door when I was at a low point (hospital food; yes, I'm eating again), and he was holding a bouquet of daisies with that blue dye in them, and the first thing he said to me was, "Okay, I know, I know, it's those cheesy daisies with the blue dye in them, but I looked at the orange gladiolas they had downstairs-the other option and they were like something you'd see at your grandmother's funeral. That is, if your grandmother died in 1948 and the funeral was filmed in CancerVision. Who chooses the flowers in this place-the Mummy? And I could have gotten you an It's a Boy! or an It's a Girl! bouquet, but they were grim. If I popped out of the womb and saw one of those things, I'd say to myself, Man, this planet's one uninspired place, and head right off to heaven." Then he looked at me, and I looked at him-and his Ask Me About My Zoloft lapel pin. "So. Bethany. I hear you tried to kill yourself. Interesting. As I mentioned, the world is an uninspired place, but it can have its perks. The first thing we're going to do, young lady, is get you back into some black lipstick, pronto. There's a biker down the hall who got knifed, and her girlfriend is definitely the Black Dahlia sort. I'll be right back."

  Once he came back to the room with his loot, I applied it and he said, "Now that's much better." Then he went on a rant about people who use the word "passionate." Someone in the elevator had used a phrase to the effect of: Do only what you feel passionate about in life. I paraphrase Greg here: "I
think this is an alarming trend, Bethany, this whole 'passionate' thing. I'm guessing it started about four years ago, and it's driving me nuts. Let's be practical: Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about twenty million people foraging for roots and grubs." (By this time, he was sitting down and eating chocolates that belonged to the woman in the coma in the bed beside mine.) "My hunch is that there was some self-help bestseller a few years back that told people to follow their passion. What a sucky expression. I can usually tell when people have recently read that book because they're a bit distracted, and maybe they've done their hair a new way, and they're always trying to discuss the Big Picture of life and failing miserably. And then, when you bump into them again six months later, they appear haggard and bitter; the joy drained from them-and this means that the universe is back to normal and that they've given up searching for a passion they're doomed to never find. Want a chocolate?"

  I said, "Greg, I feel like we're on a date or something," and he said, "Yes, Bethany-a date with death."

  Oh, Roger, I think I'm in love.

  B.

  Glove Pond: Kyle

  "I'm afraid I'm going to have to fire you, Glo," said Leonard Van Cleef.

  "You what?" asked Gloria.

  "Precisely what I said. You're too old for the part, you're too rotund for your costumes, you can't remember your lines and, as of late, your looks are, well, there's no other way to put it, falling apart."

  Kyle had never seen Gloria and Steve truly at a loss for words, but there's always a first time.

  "Well," added Leonard, "if you two boozehounds have nothing further to say, I'll gulp the rest of my Scotch and leave you." He finished his drink, put down his tumbler and looked at Kyle. "These two basket cases have to be good for at least one novel, kiddo. Strip-mine the hell out of them." He walked to the door. "'Night all."

  Kyle looked at Steve and Gloria, and suddenly he felt sadder than he'd felt in years. He didn't want to be in the room but couldn't think of a quick exit strategy. He didn't want to look at Gloria's face but felt compelled to do so-not to look would be ruder. Her eyes were moistening and pink. Her hands were poised on her lap. Her posture was excellent. She was in shock. Steve sat down beside her and reached over and patted her knee.

  Kyle realized that Brittany had been gone for a long time-when was she coming back? How much fresh air could the woman need?

  Gloria stirred. "I know what I'm going to do," she said. "I'm going to go out and find Brittany, and I'm going to ask her to perform cosmetic surgery on me so I can be young again. I can change things. I can fix myself. I've read brochures. Women's Lib has changed everything. We can do many things now that we never could before. I'll sell the silver to pay for the procedures." She stood up and looked towards the door. "And while Brittany's fixing me up, she can remove whatever it is that's bothering my spleen."

  "You'll never find her," said Kyle. "She's a speedy walker." "Well, I can try." She turned and looked at Steve. "The next time you see me, I'll be young and beautiful again."

  "Gloria-"

  "No, Steve. I must go." She wove her way through Kendall's plastic toys. She grabbed a coat from a hanger and walked into the night. For a few seconds, the house felt as quiet as a photograph, and then Steve looked at Kyle and said, "What would you do right now?"

  Kyle shrugged.

  "You're too young to know, anyway," Steve said, surveying the plastic surrounding them. "Are you and your wife ever going to have kids?"

  "I'm not sure if we'll stay together."

  "Kendall was a good kid."

  Kyle had no idea how to deal with Steve's charade. "I'm sure he was."

  "You think Gloria and I made him up, don't you?"

  "I never said that."

  "You wait until the world messes with you for a few more years, Kyle. Wait and see." Steve walked to the door. From the closet, he removed a thick navy peacoat, which he buttoned up. He put on a deerstalker cap and turned to Kyle. "You have a good night. I'm going to look for my Gloria." He left.

  Kyle walked around the living room. It had the air of charged blankness that haunts all rooms immediately following a party. Every chair and every nook held a recent memory. He tried to piece together the evening by darting his eyes from door to door, from glass to glass. And then he remembered Steve's study, and he felt a chill. He headed for it, feeling as though he were in a cave, cold and wet and alone. He felt like he was holding a candle and that his sale link to light and humanity was only a puff of breath away from vanishing. There was no sound as Kyle walked down the hallway and into Steve's study, unchanged since his visit an hour ago, and probably unchanged for decades. He walked to Steve's desk and looked at it, contemplating the bottom drawer and its secret.

  He sat down in Steve's chair.

  He contemplated the drawer's handle.

  He thought about writing.

  He thought of how people in books are never based entirely on only one person, and of how characters evolve along the way-of how he sometimes created characters in a story and didn't know why, but he had to trust his guts and run with that character. He thought of how, sometimes, a character he thought was based on one person was actually based on another person altogether, and of how far along in a book he could go without understanding that.

  Did Kendall ever exist? Were Steve and Gloria gaga? He realized that Brittany wasn't coming back. He felt like a beautiful glass vase with a chip in it.

  He looked at the oak drawer. What, he wondered, could have happened to two people to damage them so badly? What sort of event could warp them, or any of us, to the point where they became mere cartoons of the real and whole people they once were?

  He opened the drawer, but its contents made no sense to him. He felt as though he was looking at Mount Rushmore or Niagara Falls. He felt like a tourist in the world, dropped here like Superman, not belonging, never to belong. Evidence of his fall from grace lay before him now inside a dusty oak drawer-nothing cosmic and nothing poetic that might describe the sadness of life and the unending pain of the human condition, merely a bright orange twenty-five-foot-Long extension cord. What the hell is that doing there?

  Glove Pond: Brittany

  Brittany Falconcrest continued her walk out into the night, and as she passed by some late-blooming crocuses, now covered in frost, she had an epiphany that in life there are two different kinds of walks. The first is when you walk out the door and know you're coming back. The second is when you walk out the door and know you're never coming back.

  The city looked far brighter than it had mere hours before. Sound was crisper, and rather than looking dead, the world looked like it was merely falling asleep and dreaming.

  What about Kyle? He would be fine. He would be damaged, but he would be fine, and what's wrong with a bit of damage? The previous Christmas he'd been obsessed with finding the perfect tree, while Brittany had wanted a tree with character. Kyle was now a tree with character. Big deal. He's a big boy now.

  Brittany was standing on a street corner, contemplating this idea, when a bus stopped beside her and opened its doors. The driver looked down at her. "Come along now, young lady."

  The bus interior looked bright and toasty warm. Well, thought Brittany, I may not know where I'm going, but what the heck-I might as well get there faster. She hopped on the bus, wondered if she should sit at the back or up front, and then decided to sit down just behind the driver.

  Glove Pond: Steve

  Steve walked towards the light of the main commercial strip-speed-walked, really-past a cluster of teen thugs igniting Roman candles, then around a street corner, where he found a car on fire, a Hyundai, its burning core so bright that the coloured houses surrounding it shone white. The night was still, and the smoke from the car rose in a perfect column, its flames almost silent, sounding like a balloon with a slow leak. Steve followed the plume upwards with his eyes, and behind it he saw klieg lights from a th
eatre a half-mile away-a premiere! What better place to find Gloria? As he walked to the theatre, dozens of police cars raced past him, their cherries flashing, their sirens muted.

  By the time he reached the theatre the premiere was over and the klieg lights had been switched off with a volley of electrical poundings. The street was dark. Steve decided to continue his search into the centre of town. When his eyes readjusted to the night, they were filled with saturated neons from store signage and a continuous stream of car lights, those sturdy white and red beacons. Inside a restaurant, he saw tables covered in white linen and burning votive candles, and a set of triplets sharing a birthday cake that was alive with dozens of blazing white sparklers. He looked to his right, and there was Gloria, standing there too, watching the triplets and their cake and their white light. She was crying, and Steve said, "Gloria, don't cry. There's no need to cry at all." He put his arm around her and said, "Come with me. I want to take you somewhere."

  "Where?"

  "It's a surprise."

  Steve took Gloria around the corner, where a fountain was shimmering with candy-coloured lighting, and said, "Over there, across the plaza-" and Gloria asked, "What's that?" and Steve replied, "Let's find out."

  It was a white building, lit from below like a cake in a movie, a cake from which a titanic chorus girl might at any moment explode.

  "Come inside," said Steve.

  Gloria looked over and saw a plaque indicating that they were entering a planetarium. "Steve," she said, "what is this about?"