Girlfriend in a Coma

by Douglas Coupland

  Something has gone dreadfully wrong. Richard is dazed. Karen's future has come true. An adrenaline fang bites the rear of his neck.

  There are no staff at customs. The phones are blank and no taxis wait outside—only one or two cars speeding like mad through the main traffic corridor. Richard hears a voice calling his name—it's Mr. Dunphy, no, Captain Dunphy, a neighbor from West Van,

  "Richard? Is that you, Richard Doorland?"

  "Oh. Hey, Captain Dunphy. Hi. What the hell's going on here?"

  "Christ. You wouldn't believe it. You on the Los Angeles flight?"

  "Yes, but—"

  "There was a real debate about whether they should let you land or let your fuel run out flying over the mountains." Richard is dumbstruck. "The tower operators thought that planes would bring in more infected people, but it turned out everybody was dropping off. The moment you touched the runway they turned off the lights and went home. C'mon, let's scram."

  They bustle through a labyrinth of metal corridors, ramps, and NO ACCESS hallways for which Captain Dunphy has a magnetic card. At the end of their jaunt, they stand on the runway's apron, where the rain has temporarily stopped and clouds blot the sky like sullied dinner plates. From a piece of yellow luggage that has fallen from the hold of a 73 7 and then split open, Richard takes a large winter coat. Captain Dunphy grabs an electric luggage wagon.

  "Where are we going?" Richard asks.

  "To the jetty at the runway's end. My brother Jerry's coming over from West Van in his sixteen-footer to pick me up. Called him on mycell phone—I just got in from Taipei. Fucking nightmare. We had three deaths onboard and the passengers were going ape-shit between Honolulu and Vancouver. Screaming, wailing—Christ. We had to bolt shut the cockpit door."

  The two scan the horizon for a boat or a light. "I wouldn't have believed it possible in all my years flying. I'm just glad I was able to get home. Once we docked, all the passengers simply ran. They didn't even wait for their luggage. I don't even know where these people could have gone. Waiting relatives? No taxis then, too."

  "The plague—what is it?" Richard asks, his mind spooling out plotlines from 1970s sci-fi movies. "Who's dying? Old people? Babies? Any one group?"

  "No pattern. Everybody. It brought down planes everywhere. All the big cities are fucked up. Vancouver, too. Noon today people started dropping like flies. It's pointless trying to drive anywhere downtown. It's a parking lot clogged with desperate, freaked-out people. People who catch this thing—whatever it is—have this powerful urge to sleep, so they lie down wherever they are—in their cars, on the mall floors, in the offices. A minute later, they're dead."

  The runway drive is far longer than Richard might have thought. North, toward the city, Richard can see the plumes of smoke of several fires and patches of the city with failed electrical grids. They park near the muddy water at the runway's end. They hop off the luggage cart and stand in the rain as Captain Dunphy blinks a flashlight. They can see a boat coming toward them in the distance, and soon they hear a boat's engine in the December wind. Captain Dunphy blinks the flashlight to signal his brother; the boat berths sideways against the shore onto which sloppy water laps feebly. Captain Dunphy sees Jerry's suspicious face and says, "He's with me, Jerry. This is Richard, my neighbor."

  "Hop in. It's going to be dark soon. Christ, the city's a mess. Everywhere's a mess. This plague—it's speeding up."

  They hop into the boat, which jolts away from the shore like a knife tugged from a magnet. As the boat slaps against the small whitecaps, its passengers goggle the fevered city. Richard tries tophone home to Karen on Jerry's cell, but something's not working.

  As they near West Vancouver, binoculars reveal that Lions Gate Bridge is full of cars. On the mountain, fires are burning—their gray plumes more reminiscent of autumn leaf burn-offs than of burning houses.

  The boat travels up the shore and docks at a private dock a mile west of the Park Royal Mall, currently in flames. Onshore, Mrs. Dunphy is in a Volvo. They weave throughout West Vancouver's curves and hairpins. They see cars parked on the roadsides with dead drivers behind the wheels. A minivan stops at a stop sign and they briefly see four children looking out the rear window, chalky silent faces frightened out of their wits. At the corner of Cross Creek and Highland, two men try to stop them, but Mrs. Dunphy stomps the gas pedal as they race down the hill toward home. A shot is fired, which cracks the rear window.

  On Rabbit Lane, the electricity still works, but Lois's and George's cars are gone. Karen is on the floor by the blank, snowstorming TV. Her knees are up to her chin, but her eyes are far, far away. She's shivering madly. Her forearms resemble a freshly plucked chicken.

  "Karen? Karen—honey?" Richard says, but there is no response. He picks her up in his arms and is about to stand up when Karen speaks.

  "It's happening," she says. "It's here. What I saw back then …"

  "I know, honey."

  "I tried to run away from it so long ago."

  "Karen—I know, but you've gotta tell me. Something big's going on—all over the world. And you know what it is. Tell me, please." Karen squeezes her eyes shut and says nothing. Richard is exasperated: "Jesus H. Christ, Karen, can you tell me what's going on! Speak tome!"

  She says, "The world's falling asleep. But not me. I don't know about you."

  "Who told you?"

  "The voices—they came in clearly this afternoon. I could finally hear them. Him. Jared. It. I don't know."Richard carries her onto the couch, smothers her body in blankets, and ignites the gas fireplace, which throws off considerable heat. He then cradles Karen in his lap and she calms down. Richard collects his thoughts. "Now tell me, Karen, what are we in for? Why us? Why here? Why you and me and … ?"

  "Richard, I have a brain the size of a seventeen-year-old's. It's not always easy."

  "Does anybody else live?"

  "I don't know. I only know about us here close to home."

  "What are we supposed to be doing?"

  "I told you I don't know. Now stop this."

  Richard thumps the sofa. "Jared! Jared! Can you hear me?"

  "Don't scare me by thumping like that. Anyway, he, or whatever it is, can't hear you, Richard. He's busy."

  "How obvious. I should have known."

  "This is not a very good time or place for sarcasm, Richard."

  "It's called irony these days."

  "Whatever."

  23 STEEL MINK BEEF MUSIC

  She breathes deeply; the plastic-wrapped beef cool on her cheeks.

  The lucky people, thinks Lois, will fall asleep inside their sleep: blissful sleepiness followed with a visit to dreamland forever— heaven—the cold clear hills that graced the world of her youth.

  Lois was at Super-Valu in Park Royal, striding purposefully amid the store's glorious aisles of glorious food all gloriously lit, when the sleeping began. She was savoring the waves of admiration sent her way by staff and shoppers who recognized her from the previous evening's broadcast.

  "You are so strong," said one young woman.

  "A saint," said another. Lois's cheeks burned with pleasure.

  Lois was the first shopper to notice a sleeper, a young woman in blue sweat clothing asleep beneath the cauliflower and broccoli bins. Lois bent down to gently tap her on the shoulder; a shank of hair fell from the woman's face revealing her peaceful death mask.

  Paramedics were called, and no sooner had the young woman been moved into the back office when a shout came from down the mall outside the Super-Valu—news of another death. A nervous buzz began among the shoppers. "Just the oddest thing, isn't it?" said the woman in line in front of Lois. "Plastic bags, please—I mean, you just don't see something like that too often and then—"

  Lois's eyes flared wide open; behind their till the cashier was yawning, falling down onto her knees and taking a nap before them. "Hello?"

  The cashier from the next till came over. "Susan? Susan?" The cashier looked up at Lois. "No," Lois said, "it
can't be."

  The woman grabbed the intercom and beckoned management down to the tills pronto. Another shopper fell asleep on the frozen foods aisle's cold white floor. With news of this, delicate pandemonium broke out. Customers abandoned their carts and dashed for the exits. A voice came over the speakers announcing that due to technical problems, the store would have to close for the day.

  Lois watched the shoppers panic. The man behind her squeezed his full cart through the space behind the clerk and left the store without paying. Lois, like some shoppers, moved out of the checkout area and stood silently in one of the main aisles to watch the scene unfold. Two more shoppers keeled over; the mall's tiny first-aid post lost its ability to cope with trauma. From some unknown corner, a siren, dormant since the days of the USSR, woke up frightened and cranky.

  At the end of the aisle Lois saw her neighbor, Elaine Buchanan, piling steaks and chickens into a cart. She walked down to say, "Elaine—"

  "Lois. If you're smart, you'll do this, too. Whatever's going on is way bigger than any of us." Elaine lurched slightly, putting a Family-

  Pak of hamburger into the storage area on the cart's bottom. "That does it—I'm bailing out of here. Better for you, too.""But Elaine—how do we know this isn't just a local thing?"

  "Lois, listen to the sirens."

  Lois had the strange sensation of being back in the 1960s, back when grocery stores had contests where a winner could keep all the food that could be crammed into a cart within sixty seconds. She had always wanted to win that particular prize.

  Many shoppers had taken Elaine's strategy to heart; Lois stood and watched her world go random, shoppers pilfering the shelves as fast as tinned pyramids could topple. There was a scream, a shout, the sound of tipped carts and breaking jars. And then the main lights failed and emergency lighting kicked in. Lois saw panicked silhouettes, like visions of souls in the underworld, percolate over by the front entrance where lazy daylight chinked into the structure. Another body hit the ground.

  The lights returned and the store was almost empty of patrons; a few lay conspicuously asleep on the floor. Rather peaceful looking, Lois thought. She bent down to look into their faces and said good night to them. She walked out toward the front of the store and nobody stopped her or prodded her onward. Shrill alarms continued flaring from unknown corners. Turning around, Lois saw that the store was all but abandoned. The lights failed once more and Lois calmly walked around the supermarket bathed in pale orange emergency lights. Nearby, Elaine lay asleep on the floor, a cartload of beef her tombstone.

  The Super-Valu was her empire. Today is the twenty-eighth—the day her daughter had foolishly predicted some kind of end. Karen. Who is this child of mine? What did I ever do to deserve her? What did I ever do that led us to this, this collapse of the world? Lois rifled through her memories of Karen's youth, but found no particular incident that might lead her to believe Karen was special—marked for a strange destiny.

  Lois thought of Karen and the children who grew up so wild inside the forest. She remembered what the realtor had said when they bought the Rabbit Lane house in 1966. George had asked him if there were any community centers for the kids to go to. The Realtorlaughed and pointed to the forest. "That's all you need." Lois has no doubt that the children did filthy, vile things in there. Drugging. Fucking. Drinking.

  She yawns and looks down at the frozen meat section. So cool and comforting. Her upper skull is tingly, and she remembers photographs of Elizabeth Taylor with a bald, scarred head after brain surgery. I think I've had just about as much of this world as I'm able to take. I'm pooped. I'm sleepy. I just want to go home. She lifts her legs and climbs up onto the meat. She breathes deeply; the plastic-wrapped beef cool on her cheeks. She closes her eyes and goes home.

  Linus and Pam are filming on location a few miles up the mountain in a vast, stuccoed bunker resembling a cross between a medical/dental center and the compound of a South American drug lord. It is a neighborhood of houses built in the early nineties designed solely to maximize floor space and ignore the outer world save for a postcard city view out the front windows. The view dictated that the neighborhood be free of trees. Even at the best of times, a drive through its unpeopled streets lined with blank white boxes was spooky; on a glum day charged with blood, it is outright haunting.

  The job of the day is a cop-and-buddy film involving guns and betrayal with just about all the actors turning into what Linus calls "lawn sprinklers" at the end. The shoot is going slowly, and the star, hung over from a holiday binge, is forgetting his lines, walking into walls, ad-libbing dumb sight gags, and causing continuity issues that take an hour apiece to clean up while Linus and Pam refit the star with blood charges, makeup, hair, and fresh shirts and pants. As the day wears on and the number of takes multiplies, the minds of workers on the set begin to wander and look out at the view of the city.

  Cut.

  Pam walks around the living room, touching up the shooting victims who will spend most of their day lying in strange contortions on the furniture and floor, pretending to be dead. She smiles and is a good sport, but in the back of her mind she's thinking of Karen's broadcast last night. She came across as so … sugary gooey. NotKaren at all. Megan came across as an average-seeming teenager. Oh, if the audience knew the truth! And Lois came across as Belinda Q. Housewife. Well, that's TV—that's what TV does.

  After lunch, the crew and actors are all in better moods. While setting the mock-dead actors back into place, Linus says, "Pam—look out at the city, the fire." Pam looks out, and rising from somewhere in the city is a smoke plume, pointy at the bottom and rising into a slippery triangle like a mar/ipan tornado.

  "Office building fire?"

  "I dunno."

  The scene continues. The star, mistakenly thinking his enemies have been killed by the CIA, opens his front door calmly for perhaps the first time in his life, only to be assailed with machine-gun fire from which he escapes (of course). After this, he turns around to see black-sweatered armed thugs whom he promptly shoots dead in a series of quick takes. Only the star survives.

  "You know, Linus, I wish movies could be filmed in sequence."

  "Body number three needs spritzing."

  Pam heads to body number three to freshen up the blood. "Wakey wakey, drug lord," Pam says, but the actor plays dead. Pam says, "Smart-ass," and returns to the edge of the scene and through a side window notes that there are now several plumes over the city. She nudges Linus: "Look."

  The scenes requiring the bodies are finished. Pam helps them up and out of their mucky togs. "Hey smart-ass—the scene's over." Smart-ass doesn't move. "Oh God, you actors—do you ever get enough attention? C'mon, Gareth, you have to prep for the next scene."

  Gareth still doesn't move. Hands on hips, Pam looks out the window of the city now covered with a score of plumes—columns, holding up the sky. She shivers and gets on her knees. In her bones, she feels the truth: "Gareth? Gareth? Oh, shit. Dorrie? Get Dorrie!" Dorrie, the production assistant, comes over. "He's dead."

  "What's that?" The director, Don, comes over.

  "Call an ambulance.""Dead? Nobody dies during a shoot."

  "Don, how can you be a prick at a time like this?"

  There's a ruckus out by the catering truck; one of the servers, a plump fortyish woman, has been found dead at the feet of the lunch buffet table. Someone rushes in to say, "Sandra's dead. Call 911. Quick—who ate lunch here?"

  A buzz passes through the workers: food poisoning.

  "No. It can't be. Gareth's girlfriend made him a macrobiotic lunch. He never eats the catered stuff."

  "You mean—well if it's not food poisoning …"

  "Nine-one-one's gone dead. I can't get through to the States, either."

  "Phones are all dead, Don."

  Shit.

  Already actors and crew are evaporating from the set. Pam and Linus wipe the makeup and fake blood from Gareth. Outside, they can already see the city on fire, too many fires to cou
nt. They walk out onto the balcony. "Karen," Linus says.

  "I know."

  "We should go home."

  Inside the house, the director is screaming at those people still remaining. Don comes out onto the deck, glowers at Pam and Linus, looks at the city, and then screams at nobody in particular.

  "Let's wash up," Pam says.

  Yet in the end, Pam and Linus stay longer than the others. Duty. Linus says, "My parents are visiting family out in the Fraser Valley, an hour away at the best of times. Pam, take a look through these binoculars—there's no traffic moving anywhere."

  Pam looks. "My parents," she says, gently lowering the binoculars. "They're down in Bellingham with Richard's parents—after-Christmas sales."

  "Hamilton?"

  "At home. Wendy?"

  "She's on double-shift at the hospital." They turn around and their eyes catch: fear.Gareth's body still rests on the floor as the sky darkens. A few of the crew members, unable to get anywhere in nightmare traffic and unable to think of anywhere else to go, return to the house. As a group, they wrap Gareth in a canvas tarpaulin and place him in a cool, animal-proof garden shed. And a few minutes later, as Linus and Pam pull out of the driveway in their car, the neighborhood's electricity fails and they drive down the hill under a soot gray sky.