Bit Rot

by Douglas Coupland

  Not only was Barry a preacher, but—surprise!—he had a wife and kids, a subject she’d never broached with him during their year of SWNSing. Barry’s wife was friendly in an impossible-to-hate way and welcomed Brenda into the church. After the service, as the congregation met downstairs in the church basement to welcome Brenda, she contemplated her bad decision-making, amidst the bad lighting, the religious flashcards pinned to a cork-board, salmonella-looking potato salad and a scary upright piano.

  Brenda didn’t go to meet Barry at their usual time and place that week, nor did she return to his church. After she missed the third week, Barry phoned her.

  “How’d you get my number, Barry? The rule is that I only call you.”

  “Don’t play dumb, Brenda. How hard is it to get someone’s number? Just come to church and our weekly session. You mean so much to me, you can’t believe it. Can you find it in your heart to join us again?”

  Brenda found it in her heart, and she and Barry had scorching-hot mid-week pig sex followed by Sunday church, but she still had yet to reveal her secret identity as a priestess.

  And then one Saturday afternoon Brenda was downtown, returning a jacket that didn’t fit properly, and outside the store she witnessed an accident: her preacher had hit a border collie as he’d been driving by in his brand-new GMC Yukon XL Denali—the one whose interior was impregnated with the odour of his wife’s perfume. Brenda ran and scooped the dog into her arms as the preacher got out of the truck. He said, “Brenda, relax. It’s only a dog.”

  “What do you mean, ‘it’s only a dog’?”

  “It’s a dog. It doesn’t have a soul; don’t worry about it.”

  “It is not an it. It is a she, and she is in pain.”

  The dog died in Brenda’s arms and she fell out of love with Barry. She looked up at him, her cheeks beet-red, and said, “I quit.”

  “You quit what?”

  “Your church. You. And I bet you didn’t know that I’m a priestess.”

  “Priestess? Don’t be stupid. So then, go off and be a priestess all by yourself if you’re so angry. See if I care.”

  His attitude further horrified Brenda. “I will. By the way, as a priestess I get three official wishes, none of which I’ve ever used. I’m going to use one of them now.”

  Barry was patronizing. “You just do that.” He climbed into the Yukon.

  Brenda thought that if her love must die, then other kinds of love should also die. There on the sidewalk, somewhat to the bafflement of passersby, she cried, “Here’s my wish number one: from now on, all parents all over Earth will stop loving their children!”

  Barry was halfway down the crowded block, his windows automatically rolling up, when he heard those words. “What?!” He stopped his truck.

  “From now on, all parents will stop loving their children.”

  “Right. Yeah, well, whatever,” Barry said, and drove away.

  Brenda’s first wish as a priestess came true. All the parents in the world stopped loving their children. Nothing dramatic happened…at first. In fact, the world didn’t change much at all. At the end of day one, there was just a series of creeping realizations among parents with children of all ages.

  “Drive you to your play dates and sporting events? Good luck. Take a bus. Your father and I are going snorkelling.”

  “I feel like I’m babysitting somebody else’s monsters.”

  “Why on earth would I want to phone the kids? All they’ll do is bitch about their spouses and hit me up for money.”

  “Graduating? Big deal. People do it all the time.”

  “Not hungry? Fine. Don’t eat your goddamn dinner. I’ve got better things to do than micromanage your food intake.”

  By day two, people were leaving babies on church doorsteps.

  By day three, every PTA meeting on Earth was cancelled.

  By day four, pregnant women were filling the nation’s cocktail bars. The world’s leaders abolished Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

  Day five marked the golden age of babysitting, as parents just wanted to ditch their kids, so babysitters could name any price they wanted.

  By day six people without children formed mobs to confront the parents who had stopped caring about their children’s lives. “The law says you have to take care of your children. You can’t just let them go out into the streets like stray dogs.”

  “Can’t we now? In any event, there’s lots of food out there—lots of cans of Boost and Ensure all over the place. How hard is it to open a meal in a can? And…I don’t know, they can play video games until the end of time. And if they start whining or complaining, they can sleep on a mattress down in the basement.”

  “How can you be so heartless?”

  “You know what? Fuck off. I have to go to my spin class.”

  Of course, Barry and his wife stopped loving their two children, though Barry hadn’t been expecting Brenda’s curse to be real. He thought about how strange a sensation it was to go from loving somebody intensely to not giving a rat’s ass about him or her. When it came to that week’s sermon, he found himself preaching about the importance of love to a congregation composed only of non-parents; all the people with children had locked their kids outside their houses while they remained inside making eggs Florentine for brunch. The non-parents were angry. They didn’t know what to do, because if they took care of all these newly unloved children or babies themselves, then that would make them de facto parents, and because of Brenda’s curse, as soon as they became parents, they would immediately lose any capacity to love their new children. There was no way around this. It was a real Catch-22.

  At the end of the next week, Barry phoned Brenda and said, “Okay, you win the privilege of being able to say, ‘I told you so.’ I’m sorry I was such a dick when I ran over the dog. Are you happy now?”

  “I want you to understand what you did to me. You drove away in your planet-killing truck with me sitting, literally, in the gutter, all because you don’t care about dogs having or not having souls.”

  “Brenda, please, just unwish your wish. You made your point. Do you want me to beg?”

  “No. I’m not cruel like that—cruel the way you are, killing an animal and feeling nothing.”

  “Brenda, please unwish your wish.”

  “I can only do that by making another wish. I wish that, from now on, all children will stop loving their parents.”

  “You bitch.”

  And so everybody on Earth, of all ages, stopped loving their parents. The results of this were subtler, for it’s nature’s way for children to naturally be ungrateful to their parents, to feel entitled and to take parents for granted. Younger children continued whining and behaving badly as always. But older children with older parents stopped emailing them. Around the planet, millions of people quit jobs they’d chosen to please their parents. Greeting-card manufacturers went out of business, and there were millions of instances of children killing their parents to speed up their inheritances; courts around the world became bogged down with murder cases.

  Barry phoned Brenda. “You win. Again.”

  “It’s not about me winning. It’s about you understanding what you did to me and what you did to that poor dog you ran over.”

  “Oh god, I can’t believe you’re still harping on that.”

  Brenda sighed. “You really are a dick.” And then in a rash moment she said, “I wish that everybody on Earth would stop loving everybody else.” Her wish was granted, and there was no wish left to undo it. The world turned into a planet of loners—a planet of unabombers, hermits and recluses, people doomed to being solitary without the possibility of solitude, a world without hope.

  Good, thought Brenda. I like it this way. Now everybody knows what it feels like to be me.

  And then she spent the rest of the day on the Internet.

  5,149 Days Ago: Air Travel Post-9/11

  I remember flying out of Heathrow in the mid-2000s. It was an afternoon flight to Canada and
the security screening area was empty of passengers—a pleasant surprise. However, placing my carry-on bag onto the conveyor belt, I ripped my thumbnail backwards, breaking off a wide swath of the top, and I was suddenly in that magical state of being where I could either (a) chew off the broken part of the thumbnail, most likely ripping out a chunk of the nail in the corner and so causing immense bleeding, stinging and disfigurement that could possibly continue for weeks, or (b) be an adult, wait just a little bit longer and perhaps locate some form of device for safely removing the offending piece of thumbnail. This was a very tough call—sort of like a marshmallow test of delayed gratification. As we all know, nature has programmed human beings to always choose option A, even though it’s by far the stupider choice. So what did I do? I tried to be an adult, and then…I had a brainwave. After my bag had gone through the scanner, and I was standing shoeless on the floor’s rubber padding (a place the security staff dub “the mushroom patch”), I said to the gentleman on the other side of the conveyor belt: “This is a weird request, but here’s the thing: I just ripped off a chunk of my thumbnail but it’s still attached to the thumb, and I know if I remove it with my teeth, it will turn into an unholy bloody painful mess. Would you happen to have—and I don’t want to compromise security or anything—something I might use to cut off the nail with?”

  The screener gave me a gentle smile and then motioned for me to join him on the other side of the security area. Once we were there, he walked over to a Wedgwood-blue forty-four-gallon plastic trash bin and removed its lid, revealing tens of thousands of confiscated nail clippers.

  Okay.

  This isn’t something one sees every day. I mean to say, there were SO MANY NAIL CLIPPERS ALL IN ONE PLACE. Tens of thousands. I honestly felt like the lid had been removed from the ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark and I had been chosen to view its contents—and that maybe my face was going to melt off in a few moments.

  Then I remembered my thumbnail. Dang, it hurt. I posed the question: “Do you think there’s one set of nail clippers here that looks…perhaps more sanitary than any other?”

  We both scoured the top layer of nail clippers, and my new friend selected an innocuous pair as might be found at any local drugstore. He handed them to me. “Try these.”

  “Right.” Click click. Nail catastrophe averted. “Thank you very much, sir.”

  “You’re welcome. Have a safe flight.”

  It’ll soon be fifteen years since 9/11, and more planes are in the air than ever. This comes as a pleasant surprise, as on September 12, 2001, it felt as though an old way of life was over and fewer people would dare to fly in the future. From an ecological standpoint, more people flying more than ever is a disaster, but from a social cohesion point of view, vigorous air travel comes as a great relief.

  After 9/11, I undertook a forty-two-city book tour. The first city was Madison, Wisconsin, which is where I was marooned for five days. I tried to make lemonade out of lemons and thought, “What a great chance to have a really good look at the region’s bountiful Frank Lloyd Wright architecture!” Wrong. Being Canadian, I was ineligible to rent a car because I might try to drive it to the border. So…I was marooned in Madison, Wisconsin, for five days.

  When flights in the United States finally resumed, I was usually one of only a few people on the plane. For about three weeks. And when meals arrived, instead of silverware, the cutlery was a clear plastic bag filled with white plastic utensils, like what you’d get in a Wendy’s. How sorrowfully depressing. That little bag with a plastic spoon, knife and fork became a haiku expressing one of humanity’s worst moments. My thoughts harkened back to Lufthansa’s pre-9/11 first class, where the steak knife was a stag’s antler embedded with what can only be described as a precision serrated steel hacksaw blade. You could have hacked apart an undersea fibre optic cable with one of those things. And suddenly this: a Wendy’s cutlery pack.

  Sometimes I feel like a character from Fahrenheit 451, except instead of remembering an entire novel, my job is to remember a way of travelling that is quite likely gone forever. Which is fine. But mostly my thinking time-travels far, far off into the future, to the year 36559, when whatever species it is that supplants humans is digging through a garbage dump somewhere outside of London, and finds a forty-four-gallon container filled with completely uncorroded stainless steel nail-clippers.

  “Their miniature hooves must have grown at eccentric rates of speed.”

  “Perhaps they were vain and only used their hoof clippers just once before rubbishing them.”

  “Maybe the hoof clippers were contaminated as a vector in a mass plague, and the local shaman urged his underlings to gather them for some sort of sacrifice.”

  Here’s the thing: those clippers are an environmental disaster directly linked to 9/11, but a long way off from now. And more to the point, how do you explain 9/11—how will we ever explain it?

  Glide

  The other night I watched the movie Airport (1970; Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin and Jean Seberg). Passengers in its airport scenes were carrying old-fashioned luggage like your grandparents once used: plump, rectangular Samsonite chunks with single handles. Looking at this obsolete luggage was slightly cringe-inducing, sort of like watching an eighty-something shovel wet snow. People really used to do this? As an added bonus, the passengers who weren’t carrying luggage were smoking—rarely has 1970 ever felt so far away. All in all, it seemed more like Bruegel the Elder’s sixteenth century than it did Richard Nixon’s America, and it certainly made it clear how far not just air travel but airline terminals have come in the past four decades.

  Can you guess what the single biggest factor for change in airport design has been over recent decades? The answer is wheeled luggage, and because of it, most every surface in a modern airport has been made as smooth and flat as possible, with bumps and gaps eliminated—the seamless plane ensures that the trundling of your luggage is both quiet and stylish. The smoothness helps define an airport’s sexy allure. It’s the opposite of your daily life, and the relentless smoothness lends most airports a borderline life-after-death tone. Sometimes an airport’s spell of smoothness is broken and we’re returned to the mundane realm. For me, this happens each time I visit the Air Canada domestic lounge of Vancouver International Airport, where the architect chose rough, lumpy chunks as flooring, and anything on wheels, be it a demure carry-on or the Rubbermaid cleaning trolley, sounds like Kimba the elephant on a rampage.

  Women living in industrialized countries tend to fall and break their hips more than women in less industrialized countries. For decades this tendency was credited to some sort of lack in the diets of the Western woman, or to a long-term accumulation of toxins, or to some sort of existential failing on the part of modernity. The real reason, it turned out, had nothing to do with these notions. We in the Western world walk almost entirely on flat, smooth surfaces. Because of this, stabilizer muscles in the ankle and lower leg remain largely undeveloped, so that when a disruption is encountered, the muscles and reflexes needed to cope with it aren’t there, so people trip. It’s that simple. There’s a lot to be said for walking in nature, and it’s not just for the fresh air.

  Segways are terrific: anyone who’s ever used one will testify to this. The thing about Segways is that they’re like flying dreams. You just think of going somewhere and they take you there effortlessly and with no learning curve. Using them is like walking or running but with all the boring bits removed. But boy, did Segway blow it. It’s possibly the best product ever destroyed by clueless consumer and regulatory rollout: “Is this a bicycle? Is it a car? Is it a motorcycle? In the absence of boxes to tick, we declare this product unlicensable.” I suspect that in the future, when energy and noise pressures grow too large, people will rediscover the Segway. But I hope they’ll call it something else and release it into the world more intelligently. A few years back, I visited Austin, Texas, where Segways are street legal. People were using them for day-to-day living. Talk about fut
uristic. Forget flying cars. Segways were it.

  In the past year I’ve taken trains throughout Europe and, as someone who comes from a place where there are, for all practical purposes, no trains nor places to go in them, European train travel never loses that seamless sensation of infranational fluidity—the magic of floating from one country into another atop a continent as polished as the terrazzo flooring of Heathrow, Schiphol or da Vinci. Newspapers. Magazines. Meals. The countryside. Hey, wanna go to Warsaw this afternoon? The procedural logistics of crossing between Canada and the United States in a train rivals a trip into East Germany in the 1960s, whereas four border crossings on a small Euro trip is no big deal. I never take this for granted, but my impression of Europeans is that they do take it for granted, yet also that this may be coming to an end. In spring I took the Thalys rail line between Holland and France several times, and when photos of that recent foiled gun attack made the Internet, I found myself saying, “Ahh, yes, the distinctive Thalys maroon upholstering.” The head-buzz of having had half a cup of coffee too many. A soiled and finger-worn copy of Le Figaro. Trying to get some, any, form of 3G connection. Whoosh!

  There are few utopias in Western culture. The senior prom. Two weeks in Hawaii. Hollywood. Retirement. Yet all of these utopias are being chipped away at. One has one’s prom and then it’s over. Consequence-free air and land travel are being ever more securitized and stripped of ease. The mathematics of retirement make it a dream that grows further away every day. As we weaponize the physical world, only Hollywood, in league with the Internet, retains some power to create a sense of someplace that transcends our daily reality. When we look back on right now from the perspective of a few decades in the future, I suspect we’re going to think of it as the Age of Ease. And what’s wrong with that?