Girlfriend in a Coma

by Douglas Coupland

  "And?"

  "I don't think I would. She'd be too confident to follow the crowd. She'd be offbeat, and I'd wish I could just talk to her and see what's in her head."

  "And Megan's father—do you still see him?"

  "Absolutely. We're engaged." Karen smiles at Richard over Gloria's shoulder. Gloria gives an appropriate smile reaction, then says, "Cut!"

  Gloria unclips her mike and bolts toward a door where the minions cower. "Why the hell didn't we know about this? Who researched this—Anthea? Get her on the phone now. No—she's in 213, not 310. We're going to have to retake the intro. Is the weather going to hold?"

  There's panic for the next ten minutes, and then Gloria returns."Speed and—" Clack! "Rolling—" Gloria turns into "Gloria" instantly, like a plugged-in appliance. "Karen, so you're engaged now?"

  "Indeed I am."

  "Will we be able to meet… him?"

  "I think not. He's far more private than I am."

  "What's his name?"

  "Richard."

  "So Richard waited all these years for you? All these decades, your one love waited?"

  Karen pauses. Her eyes begin to mist up—damnit! She fell into Gloria's trap of tears. "Yes"—sniffle—"he did." Now her eyes flood. Gloria heaves a relieved breath and knows this will be a dynamite kicker.

  "Gloria," calls a technician, "we lost the sound on that one. We have to redo the take."

  Gloria mutters a curse and the process begins again in a startlingly machinelike process: "Karen, so you're engaged now?" Gloria bats the eyes: blink blink blink.

  "Yes."

  "Will we be able to meet… him?"

  "No."

  "What's his name?"

  "That's private."

  "Very well. So your boyfriend waited all these years for you? All these decades your one love waited?"

  Karen pauses. "Yeah. He did." No tears. Gloria is furious.

  How many of us have a love so true it spans eternity? A purity of need so clear it can remain strong in the face of all that the world throws at us? This is Karen Ann McNeil, the woman who fell to Earth, the woman for whom the people in her life never gave up waiting.

  "What about your friends, Karen? How do you feel to see them all aged seventeen years overnight? Do you still hang out with them?""They're my life, really. Them and my family. If they weren't here, I don't think I could handle the world." Karen is disgusted with the platitudes she's dishing out. She sounds to herself like a Miss America contestant allowed out of the soundproof booth and given thirty seconds to answer questions that will, to a large degree, define future directions of her life.

  Gloria looks peeved. We need more drama. A woman named Randy comes over; she and Gloria have a hushed discussion over notes on Gloria's crisp red lap. Pam powders Karen's face. "How's it going, Kare?"

  "I think I'm a dud. And they're furious about losing the crying scene."

  Karen thinks over what Pam blurted out in the car the other day— about how people expect her to be a thousand years old now, not just thirty-four. She knows this is what Gloria wants to get at.

  "Karen—" Gloria returns. "Let's just do a few more questions. This must be tiring for you."

  "It's my pleasure. When are you interviewing Megan?"

  "After you," says Gloria. "And then we'll do the two of you together. Everything is out of sequence, but we patch it all together in post-production." Gloria's face looks harsh, unwilling to spare any niceness energy until production noises are made. The board claps and once again she becomes "Gloria."

  "Karen." Gloria puts on her serious look, cradles her chin atop her hands, and looks deeply at Karen. "The world is curious—and I know this is a simple question, but I need to ask it—how does it feel to be a modern Rip Van Winkle? Almost twenty years asleep. My my. What's it like inside your head? What's it like to be you right now?"

  "You know what I feel? I feel useless in this modern world. I'm unable to do anything but lie around. I feel like I'm the only person on Earth who relaxes anymore. And then I think about all the bad stuff that's about to happen and I feel sorry for the world because it's nearly over."

  Cut!

  Assistants run over. "Karen, what on Earth was that?"Karen blinks and looks out the window at the sky, competing for attention with the camera lights. "I'm not sure. It just came out." Richard slips around a corner and motions for Wendy to come over. He tells her what happened.

  "Karen," Gloria says, "let's try that one again. Maybe we can ask about the, er, bad stuff with another question. Agreed?"

  "Sure. It's your show."

  Rolling…

  "Karen." Gloria again looks deeply at Karen and repeats word-perfectly, "The world is curious—and I know this is a simple question but I need to ask it—how does it feel to be a modern Rip Van Winkle? Twenty years asleep. My my. What's it like inside your head? What's it like to be you right now?"

  "I feel useless as tits on a board. I sit around all day doing dick-all while everybody else runs around like crazed cartoon characters."

  A semi-defeated silence follows. Gloria asks, "Anything else?"

  "Seeing as your asking, yes. The world's going to be over soon."

  Cut!

  "Karen, I— Excuse me a second." Gloria darts outside. An assistant, Jason, comes in to play good cop. He's a slow walker; his eyes have seen something. He doesn't discount the odd and he sees a possible miracle where others see dreck. "Karen," he says, motioning the film crew to keep rolling, "when you say the world's over, what, exactly, do you mean!"

  "What I said. I …" There is a pause and a voice speaks, the voice of Karen who was away all these years. "Three days after Christmas. That's when the world goes dark. There's nothing that can be done and there's no escaping. I saw it happen in 1979. By accident, some doors had been left open and I got a peek. I wasn't snooping. I just saw it at the right time. I thought I could sleep my way out of it—I wasn't sure of the date it was going to happen. I wanted to be asleep forever. It's not the same as death, but it's the only way we have to escape time. That's what makes us different from every other creature in the world—we have time. And we have choices."

  Jason is quiet. The camera still rolls. Richard, Pam, and Wendywatch. In the lull, they can hear Gloria's voice saying, "What am I supposed to do when she keeps shutting down and spouting claptrap. Does she not have the word 'retake' in her vocabulary?"

  "Gloria, she's been in a coma for twenty years almost. People expect her to be odd."

  "I can't believe we lost the tear shot."

  Jason says, "Are there any details you can give, Karen. Places? names? Is it a bomb or is it—"

  "It's sleep. Nearly everybody falls asleep and then they go. It's painless. Where do you live?"

  "New York."

  "You'll go. Gloria goes. Everybody there goes."

  "And this doesn't make you sad?"

  "It hasn't happened yet. I won't know until it's over."

  "What about you and your family and friends. Don't you worry for them?"

  "There's nothing I can do to help them one way or another. All of this was decided a long, long time ago. And I don't know specifically who lives and who doesn't. So I can't tell you people, really, I can't."

  "And you?"

  "Me? I get to live. I know that for sure." Karen seems to have no more to say on this subject.

  Jason's face is thoughtful. "Thanks for telling me this."

  "I might as well." And then Karen wakes up while still asleep. She startles: "Wha—?—I spaced out again there. I dreamed I was telling you the world was going to shut down."

  "A dream?"

  "No. Not really. I suppose not."

  21 YOUR DREAMS OF WAR

  Karen feels release and confusion. She knows that her words have annoyed the Americans and baffled—perhaps even slightly frightened—her friends.

  She knows that she is in the center of some sort of mass transformation—one larger than just her mere reawakening. But how big will
this change be? Miracles always have limits. When one is granted wishes, one is granted only three wishes—not four or five or ten. What will be the limits here?

  Karen feels trapped inside the biggest déjà vu in the world. Her behavior seems preordained, like a queen who spends her day cutting ribbons, judging flower shows, and overseeing state dinners—all of these activities preordained. And she has decided, somewhere between her co-interview with Megan and the camera crews' taping the two of them hobbling down Rabbit Lane, that she'll try and play it dumb about her on-camera statements of impending doom. Already she is detecting that Richard and Wendy think her comments might be evidence of incipient madness. Oh God.

  She misses running and she misses her hair and she misses being normal, being absorbed by the crowd. She has decided that the best way for her to go through life is for her to view even her smallest actions and gestures as coincidental, charged, and miraculous. It was the way she remembered life felt at the age of sixteen and it is a way she is determined to re-create.

  Beef south/chicken north.

  The night of the TV shoot, Karen goes to bed almost immediately, thus precluding any discussion of what she had told Gloria and then Jason. She is still asleep when Richard leaves for work the next day. During the day, when he calls home, there is no answer—Christmas shopping. He phones Wendy at her office and the two of them convene at Park Royal for coffee, where dispirited Christmas mall music serenades their baffled conversation. Wendy stirs the sugar in her coffee thirty times and says, "I think that Karen's memory and thought processes maybe aren't as clear as we'd hoped for, Richard. Are you scared—about going south?"

  Richard, obligated to visit Los Angeles, says yes. He leaves on the twenty-seventh and returns on the twenty-eighth.

  "Can't you go some other time?"

  "No. We're behind schedule as it is. Besides, it's so preposterous. If I stay home, I'll only reinforce whatever fantasy or phobia it is Karen's going through." He bites a muffin. "It is fantasy, right?"

  "Who's to say? It's like those cartoons of guys with long beards holding a sign on a street corner saying THE END IS NEAR; there's always a little part of you that wonders, what if? Yeah, it's spooky. Have you spoken about this with her yet?"

  "No. It's been crazy. I will tonight. Holidays throw everything intoa mess. But one question, Wendy, if you were me, would you go?"

  "I'd probably go, too."

  Later that evening, Richard and Karen have their first real fight, which colors the entire next week. "The twenty-eighth is not going to be a good day, Richard."

  "Karen you can't just say, 'Oh, something awful's going to happen.' You have to tell me why. You have to tell me what you know. And why."

  Karen sighed. "What about trust?"

  "Karen, whether or not I believe you on this particular issue has nothing to do with whether or not I love or trust you. Karen—look at it from my point of view."

  "How do you explain what Wendy told us about Pam and Hamilton in the hospital—their stereo freak-outs?"

  "I can't."

  "Doesn't that note I gave you back before my coma mean anything?"

  "Of course it does."

  "The fact that I'm on TV on the twenty-seventh doesn't sway you? You can't stay here for moral support?"

  "It's bad luck. I'll watch it down there. I'll watch it on speaker-phone with you."

  "So you're still going to go?"

  "I will—unless you can get a helluva lot more specific about what's going to happen and when. The sleep thing doesn't cut it."

  "Richard, I want to be able to tell you. I'm not being a cow and keeping something away from you on purpose. There are these background voices I hear. The only time they became clear was on film with Gloria."

  Richard looks at her as calmly as he can, worrying that something is going wrong with Karen after her miraculous wake-up. "It's only for one day, Karen. One piddly little overnight; I promised the office

  I'd do it months ago. They're not going to be able to find someone to go instead of me during Christmas week."

  "What are you doing there that's so important?"Richard then feels he is arguing with a teenager. "I have to go over sets and budgets with the crew down there. It has to be done and it has to be done in person."

  "Whatever."

  "Please don't whatever me."

  "Whatever."

  In spite of tensions, a truce is called and Christmas and the engagement party continue as planned. It is a day of small gifts and gentle surprises. Megan hand-made a roomful of decorations using construction paper and silver hearts. The windows are slightly steamed and the air is tinged with eggnog. Pam and Wendy boo-hoo shamelessly over the toasts, and even crusty old Hamilton has a lumpy throat while Linus seems concerned about the structural integrity of the meringue cake.

  One truly odd moment occurs halfway through the event. Guests hear a galvanizing crack crack! on the living room window, where an ostrich pecks the glass with a cruel, hilarious beak. It is as though everybody fell into a deep warm dream. Then another ostrich appears and begins clacking its beak onto the living room window while the room devolves into guffaws and chaos. Karen loves it: "Oh, Richard, this is just the bee's knees. Did you plan this just for me? It's so sweet."

  Mr. Lennox from the house around the corner scoots into view with a coil of rope. A small mustachioed man, he apologizes profusely. "They escaped from the garage. I was supposed to take them out to Abbotsford, but everything's closed for the holidays."

  Megan asks, "What does anybody need with a pair of dorky-looking ostriches?"

  "Why Megan—they're the meat of tomorrow. Lean as tofu and tasty like beef. They're my retirement fund. Please, can you hold on to that rope for me?"

  A well-cheered ostrich rodeo ensues. Poor Mr. Lennox is petrified that his investment might be damaged. "Oh, Christ—just don't Jet them get into the forest. Then we're doomed. They'll break their legs or get eaten by coyotes. They're that stupid."By late afternoon, the sky has gone black and cold and the core group of friends sit by the fire eating huckleberry muffins.

  Later, the doorbell rings. Linus answers. It is Skitter, but Linus doesn't know him by face.

  "Megan here?"

  "Megan, your friend's here." Megan and Jenny soundlessly gloss over to the front door, into their coats, and out of the house. Richard, looking at CD's by the Christmas tree, hears nothing. Minutes later, Linus asks, "Who's biker dude?"

  "Huh?"

  "The guy Megan just left with. The guy with the scar."

  "Guy with a scar?" Richard clues in. "Shit."

  Flying home from Los Angeles, the captain allows Richard to peek out the front cockpit window a few minutes after takeoff. Richard sees the view of God: a dappled sky like a baby's giggles, volcanoes stretching up the coast, the Earth's gentle curve at the horizon. Back in his seat, while idly flipping through a two-week-old Newsweek and rereading an article about Karen, Richard mentally reviews the past week only to find himself chilled. A drop of cool sweat crawls like a slug through his hairline and into his eye.

  Richard's plane ride continues—a cold ride: the airlines are saving money by not heating the cabins as they once did. Dinner service comes and goes. The sun, low on the horizon, is wan and colorless: a December sunset; even sunlight feels dark.

  Richard thinks about last night in his hotel room, watching Karen's TV appearance on a speakerphone with the family. It was a tight little production and Gloria had managed to orchestrate a predictable level of syrupy rudeness.

  Afterward, he and Karen spent nearly an hour on the phone apologizing to each other, whispering endearments, and feeling close in that special way that only phones provide. I think this darkness stuff is all in my head, Richard, I'm not going crazy and I'm sure these ices and stuff will soon be gone.

  Afterward, Richard fell into a dreamless sleep.Then this morning he drove to Culver City, but after ten minutes of work, he started to panic. He went to the washroom, rinsed off his face, breathed fur
iously, and then instinctively hightailed the rental car to LAX, catching the next flight up the coast, paying for full-fare Business Class, desperate to be aloft, the wheels no longer on the ground.

  On the tarmac while awaiting takeoff, he looked out the window of his ZF seat just in time to see a blue-overalled airline luggage handler praying at the feet of another obvious dead luggage handler. The man from a fuel truck was screaming into a cell phone while an airline employee threw his blazer over the employee's head. An ambulance came, the body was sheeted, the stewardess closed the door latch, and the plane took off.

  Now, five miles above Oregon, Richard continues trying to make sense of his rashness and his tangled feelings. He tries using the GTE Airphone, but service is out. "Good afternoon, this is your captain speaking. We're experiencing a delay on the ground at Vancouver. Traffic controllers there have requested we stay aloft for half an hour or so while the situation down there is rectified. I hope you'll understand our situation and continue enjoying today's flight. As a goodwill gesture, flight attendants will be serving complimentary beer and wines."

  There are groans and cheers while the jet flies over Seattle and then follows I-5 up to the Canadian border. The traffic below looks jammed like he's never seen it before. Holiday sales.

  Once near Vancouver, the plane circles the city then flies over the Coast Mountains and makes lazy-eights over the pristine frozen alps and lakes behind, a flying tour of Year Zero. Another delay is announced, and then finally, after two hours of dawdling, the plane lands on the runway, but just before doing so, the runway lights that guide the way go black.

  22 NATION OR ANT COLONY?

  At Vancouver's airport, Richard's flight is the only moving plane on the tarmac. The captain announces another delay, and the passengers spend one more hour on the tarmac—a problem with ground staff, but not to panic, even though, as passengers can plainly see, half the building is without light and there's not a single ground person in view.

  The passengers become increasingly crazed with the discovery of a seat-buckled dead salesman in 670 and then a dead teenager in 18E Fear amplifies. Passengers can plainly see that there's no action at the airport—no trucks or luggage carts or other activity. Another whole Section of the terminal's lights blink then fail, and finally the flight attendants pop open the door and the passengers slide down an inflatable yellow escape chute. To enter the airport, they pass through a utility door with quiet, orderly docility. Upon finding a dead stewardess propped against an access door, this soon devolves into anarchy. Outside it's raining and inside the building it's cold. There are almost no people present—at the immigration lineup there are no staff, save for one woman in the corner wearing a white paper breathing mask waving them onward. Bodies are strewn about the airport. Passengers scuttle toward the mild hum of the luggage carousel, which chugs and dies, never again to cough forth the passengers' luggage.