Bit Rot

by Douglas Coupland

  A lot of people assume I speak Chinese, even though the closest to China I’ve ever been geographically is the outlet malls in Vermont. But whatever the people in my town are thinking, it can’t be anything like what it feels like to be inside my own head.

  Here’s my thing: I’m a complete alien. Not an immigration alien, but an alien alien. The UFO that brought me here from my home planet is lost beneath the waters of nearby Molasses Pond. When it crashed, it marooned me on this planet populated by minivans, divorce lawyers, Rubbermaid storage bins and trail mix. Which is to say, I guess, that this planet is neither paradise nor hell, just a place called Maine, which seems like that’s all it’s ever going to be. And here I am: the outsider, with people always being too nice to me because in the end they don’t think I deserve to be here with them. I somehow cheated by being both surplus and a girl baby—can’t kill a baby! People look at me and think I’m smarter than I really am. And none of those people, none of them, know that I come from a place they’ll never know—from wherever my UFO got made. I know what you’re thinking: How cute, she thinks she’s an alien. How banal. What next—black lipstick? Well, so what. Screw you.

  Last summer, just after I graduated from my junior year, our neighbour’s basset hound, Henry, went missing. I liked Henry a lot—we all did. He was an old soul, his eyes ringed with hamburgerred lids, even though he was only a year and a half old. When he slobbered on me, it felt like he was forgiving me for anything bad I’d done that day. And he never barked; I liked that because there used to be a dog three houses down from us that barked all day and all night and it drove me crazy.

  Henry lived outside mostly. Our town’s small enough that using a leash would be an embarrassment or an admission of some kind of dog-ownership failure. Dogs are like honorary people here.

  I remember hearing the doorbell. I was eating a red Popsicle around sunset, and it was Leeta, Henry’s owner, wondering if we’d seen him anywhere. Me and my two (non-Chinese/non-alien) sisters, Emily and Rochelle, went out into the street and started calling for him. It’s amazing how quickly our tone turned from “Henry! Here, Henry!” to “Oh God, he’s probably dead.” Rochelle is much younger than me and was wearing her bejewelled iceskating onesie. She began suggesting worst-case scenarios and started crying.

  My mother told Rochelle to shush and say a prayer. My mother’s pretty churchy. People think only liberals adopted Chinese girl babies, but we’re distributed across the board politically and religiously. I never minded church because, as I said, I believe in the soul. Churches are just bureaucracies to handle the paperwork, so they don’t interest me much. And I like it that aliens can have a soul just as much as humans. Why not?

  Emily, who’s two years older than me, arrived late for dinner. She’d been a few streets over looking for Henry. No luck, so after dinner my dad and I went out in his car, trawling the streets and calling out Henry’s name, but we didn’t find him. Nobody did.

  My senior year passed quickly, and in the fall I went to a college in Portland, at the University of Southern Maine. I was lucky to get accepted, as my grades have never been very good. I liked being away from home, and I liked not having to always drive by the lake where my UFO sank. I liked that people at USM didn’t assume I was a surplus Chinese girl baby, and I started to find it easier to pretend I was a human being, that unwantedness was no longer so central to the core of my being.

  I made some friends and earned okay grades, but only okay. I got a part-time job at a doughnut place that I didn’t take too seriously, so it ended up being fun. Other kids from USM worked there too. It was like a TV sitcom where everyone’s witty and looks good and has good lines right on cue. I never discussed souls there. It would have felt out of place.

  A few days ago I went down to Nashua, New Hampshire, with my friend Sara. We wanted to go to the Bloomingdale’s at the Merrimack Outlets, and we also wanted to blow off class, so it was a double win. For some reason there were way too many people at the mall; Sara and I got peopled out and we decided to bail after doing just three stores. We were headed back to the car and there was a woman with a basset hound on a leash. It looked just like Henry, so I called out, “Here, Henry! Here, Henry, Henry, Henry!” The basset hound froze. He turned around, looked at me and yelped, yanking his leash out of the woman’s hand. He came bounding over and started squeaking and circling me, like those dogs when they see their owners returning from duty in Afghanistan.

  It was Henry, no mistaking it—the strange patch of brown he had on his left ear—and I was confused. Henry started slobbering all over my face, and then I twigged on to what was happening and said, “Sara. Get out your iPhone now. She’s trying to get away.” The woman who’d had Henry on the leash was desperately trying to get out of her parking spot, but she’d put her car in the wrong gear. She was stupid to try to drive away. She should have just ran away while we stood there in shock. In any event, she slammed her car into the car parked in front of it, then squealed her tires as it went into reverse and she peeled out. Sara got it all.

  So I sat there with Henry on the parking lot’s asphalt, in shock, while Sara posted the clip online to some sort of shaming website. Henry scrunched himself up to me and wouldn’t move, and when I stood up, he thought I was leaving and freaked out. So I had to pick him up and carry him to Sara’s car, and he sat in my lap as we drove to the police station.

  As you can imagine, Sara’s clip went viral. It turned out the dog thief was Leeta’s sister-in-law—I can just imagine Christmas dinners at their houses for the next fifty years. I became a mini-hero and got to be on the WSCH TV-6 local news, and Henry was home again and a blanket of peace fell over the neighbourhood.

  Then a few days ago I was visiting my parents, and my mom said, “What do you know—some technicians were doing a sonar test and they located a large metal object in Molasses Pond. They think it’s a car. I’ll bet you it’s that Anderson boy who went missing in 1972.”

  Needless to say, I was at Molasses Pond within minutes, and I saw they had big winches and a diver was attaching them to whatever it was down there. The Channel Six news reporter was there and said, “Well, hello there, it’s you again. Wherever you go, there’s action.”

  “I just can’t help it.”

  It was sort of fun and insider, knowing the reporter. A neighbour, Jeanie, stopped and came over to join us. “It’s that Anderson boy. That’s what everyone’s guessing.” Then Jeanie looked at me. “Hayley, how does it feel to have rescued Henry like that? That’s got to feel good.”

  “I didn’t rescue the dog. I was just in the right place at the right time. You would have done it too.”

  The car was emerging from the water, and everyone was correct—it was Tony Anderson’s 1971 Mustang, all covered in brown mud, like it was having a spa day. At the wheel were the bones that remained of Tony. I was the only person not shooting this on a cellphone.

  To be honest, I was sad to be wrong about the UFO, but I was right in thinking there was something potent down there. Of course everyone on the lakeshore gawked and kept on shooting iPhone movies. It was genuinely awesome to see a ghost car complete with skeleton, and we’d waited enough time for the privilege of gawking—we’d earned it. But then the muddy car went onto a flatbed and everyone else left, and it was just me standing there looking at the now flat void of Molasses Pond. I thought about how quickly water, which is clear, turns into darkness. Shouldn’t lakes be colourless? I threw a few white stones into the water and they vanished almost immediately.

  I remembered driving back from Nashua with Henry sitting on my lap while Sara drove. Henry was whimpering a little bit because he knew he was going home. It was around sunset and we were on this patch of freeway where there are eight lanes, and cars and their white headlights kept coming toward us relentlessly. I began to think about how many people die on Earth in any given minute, and I figured out that each bright set of headlights was a soul that had just died and was vanishing off into the Great Beyo
nd.

  I sometimes get to thinking about what I say when people ask how it felt to find Henry at the outlet mall. What I don’t tell people is that, more than anything—anything, anything in the entire universe—I wish that someone would find me the way I found Henry. They’d look at me and call me by my real name, whatever that may be, and I’d recognize it. Because I don’t believe the one I have.

  Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown

  Mrs. Brown

  I’m Collette Brown. At the age of thirty-seven I was living in Grosse Isle, Michigan, a sleepy suburb of Detroit. On an early afternoon in March 1963, I had my friend Peg McCarthy over to my place for weekday lunch and a bit of venting. Each of us had a brood of five children who tried us constantly, but it was really just venting, as we both knew our blessings.

  That afternoon it was cool and cloudy out, and we each had our two youngest downstairs playing together. It was nice and quiet, certainly a respite from our nightly chaos of dinners for seven. Before lunch Peg knit a baby bootie for a neighbour friend, and then around twelve-thirty I made sandwiches with a tin of tuna from the local A&P, some Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Land O’Lakes butter and slices of bread from a warm, fresh loaf from a nearby bakery. I called to the kids down in the rumpus room and asked if they wanted tuna fish or peanut butter and jelly, and they unanimously chose peanut butter and jelly, and because of that, they lived and I didn’t.

  After Peg left, I got ready for the predictable after-school onslaught and then started getting dinner ready. I was so busy I didn’t really pay much attention to the fact that my vision was blurring and I felt a bit weak, but just chalked it up to a long day. Before turning out the lights at bedtime, I made a decision to go to the eye doctor the next day, assuming that the weakness wasn’t the start of flu, which I truly didn’t want.

  I died in my sleep.

  Mrs. McCarthy

  I’m Margaret McCarthy—Peg—and in March of 1963 I was thirty-nine. Like my friend Collette, I had my own brood of five. After knitting and lunching at Collette’s house, I drove to the market for some ingredients for spaghetti. I ended up using a bottled sauce because I was feeling oddly tired, and come sundown I was too lazy to even dice up some onions and sauté them in butter. My mother always added onions to everything because she said it would prevent scurvy, which is a disease pirates used to get, and I thought it was funny, but we get these superstitions from our parents and they stick.

  Come bedtime I was in bad shape. I was vomiting almost non-stop, my eyesight kept coming and going like I had blinds on my eyes, and my throat hurt something fierce. In the powder room mirror, I saw that my eyelids weren’t closing correctly. I couldn’t speak and could barely hold up my head, so my husband called an ambulance and around three a.m. I arrived at Outer Drive Hospital in Lincoln Park. The doctors there looked at me and poked and prodded, and I could see (in between vomiting and losing my eyesight) that they were in a state of confusion, which didn’t help my confidence much. I was worried I’d somehow caught polio. I didn’t want to end up in a creepy iron lung like I once saw at a freak show in Fort Wayne when I was twelve. I was so scared I didn’t sleep for a week after seeing that thing. Why didn’t they just kill people?

  The doctors pumped me full of drugs, and I’d come to and go out of consciousness, but mostly I’d go. I was just so relieved when, amid all the hubbub, I heard them say I didn’t have polio. But…botulism? Botulism was a kitchen bogeyman I remembered from home ec class in high school. I didn’t think people ever actually got it.

  About twenty-four hours after I got to the hospital, I couldn’t move my facial muscles. The doctors thought I was asleep, but I wasn’t, and I could hear what they were saying, which was that Collette was dead and they’d done swabs to see what botulism strain we’d contracted. Apparently our strain was type E, found only in Arctic fish, and it was so rare that there was no antitoxin available in the United States. They had to bring in some from Toronto, Canada, of all places. But because it was a marine botulism, they quickly figured out that the tuna was the culprit. They found and swabbed the can in Collette’s kitchen trash can, the can of A&P Chunk Light Tuna from lunchtime, batch number WY3Y2-118X, one of 5,760 tins shipped to Detroit from a San Francisco firm called the Washington Packing Corp.

  Botulism is actually everywhere, but it becomes pernicious only when it encounters a warm, protein-rich, anaerobic environment in which to grow: the can of tuna. My type E botulism inhibited the release of acetylcholine in my nervous system, a chemical that produces synaptic bridges by which nerve cell axons and dendrites connect. My botulism symptoms started with my facial muscles and then spread toward my limbs, leading to paralysis of the breathing muscles and respiratory failure. After five days of fighting it, I died. It made Newsweek magazine. I certainly never would have thought that a bad tuna sandwich could become national news. Maybe it was a slow news week.

  In the end, the fish-packing company was able to show that the tuna had been packed under scrupulously stringent conditions, cooked at 242 degrees Fahrenheit for seventy-seven minutes, and samplings of other tins from the same batch showed no signs of botulism. They ultimately chalked up the botulism to a mechanical failure—maybe someone dropped a can and put it back in the wrong part of the tuna-fish canning machine. We’ll never know. The botulism that killed Collette and me came from nowhere, killed us anonymously and then vanished. I don’t think there’s any moral to be learned from our deaths.

  Image spread taken from “Two Tuna Sandwiches,” published in Newsweek, April 1, 1963, author unknown. Courtesy United Press International.

  Andy

  I’m Andy Warhol. I died in New York City at 6:32 a.m. on February 22, 1987. I was in hospital for a gallbladder operation. I don’t really know what happened, but I woke up and it was still dark out, and it felt like there was chlorinated swimming-pool water going up my nose—like when I was thrown into the Catholic swimming pool in Pittsburgh, growing up, before they realized I was a sissy and that throwing me into the deep end was almost like murder. Apparently I had cardiac arrhythmia, but I didn’t know. I could feel the gurgling in my lungs, as if I was drowning. I know that’s not what a heart attack is supposed to feel like.

  And then…I don’t remember anything hurting, so I guess that’s what dying feels like—not so bad. And when I realized I was dead, I began wondering who’d show up at my funeral and whether it would be open coffin or not, because if it was open coffin, afterwards people would only talk about whether the hair and makeup were any good. I always used to say that a funeral was usually the most glamorous moment in most people’s lives, just because of that—afterwards people only talk about the hair and makeup—but I didn’t want that. Honestly, if it was going to be open casket, then just a dash of Christian Dior No. 425 concealer, then apply a tiny bit of rouge on the cheeks, and then add a fake zit just so people know it’s the real me and not a fake me. I found out later that they put me in a solid bronze casket with gold-plated rails and white upholstery. They dressed me in a black cashmere suit, a paisley tie, a platinum wig and sunglasses, which is kind of a cheat, but sunglasses got Jackie O through the last three decades of her life. They’re always well advised, and let’s face it: eyes are really hard for morticians to get right.

  I don’t know if death is such a big deal. Wherever it is I am now, it’s not that exciting; it feels like I’m waiting to get a driver’s licence renewed. They have buffet tables set up, but the people in the lineup are so unglamorous: Some guy who got run over by a bus in Lagos, Nigeria. Some woman from Uzbekistan whose husband murdered her by pinching closed her nostrils and clamping shut her mouth while she slept. And there are so many old people here too. I hate it. I want to hold a sign saying, “I normally hang out with younger and much better-looking people.”

  I’ll be out of here soon enough, I guess, but in the meantime they won’t let me have any film for my camera. So for all of those people who know and recognize me, I have to pretend to be taking their picture
to get them to stop bugging me—but fortunately not all of the world is into fame, so it could have been a lot worse. Being recognizable cuts both ways.

  My mother’s here, but she’s almost at the front of the line for getting a driver’s licence or whatever it is, so we don’t have much time—whatever time is. It’s nice to be with her again. We cut snowflakes out of tissue paper a little while back, and she teased me because I always used to say that dying was like going to Bloomingdale’s except you never came back. She thinks it’s funny because there’s no shopping for me here, so it’s really boring. There aren’t even garage sales or flea markets. It’s like Abu Dhabi in the 1970s—just nothing to buy. Someone could make a killing if they could just figure out a way to make money out of Purgatory.

  Halston’s here, but he’s a bit too grand and mostly hangs out with Mrs. Vreeland, who still looks terrific, even though she’s what—a million years old? I’m wondering if Halston and I were ever really friends or if it was just a sort of arranged marriage set up for us by magazines. He’s trying to butch it up a bit because of dying of AIDS and all—he doesn’t want to be treated like a fruitcake. I called him on it and he said, “Darling, you weren’t there at the end. I looked like those Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with their faces melting off. I want people to think of me as a hunky Iowa boy who made good in the big city.” Well, it’s his image, not mine. And all these old people here couldn’t care less. Mostly they sit around wondering what’s for dinner next. It’s like a cruise ship.

  So I was with my mother, thumbing through really worn-out copies of Paris Match from the mid-1970s when Steve Rubell popped by and said, “Andy, you’ll die. You just have to meet these two gals I just bumped into. They’re fantastic!”