JPod

by Douglas Coupland

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  Part One

  Never Mess with the Subway Diet

  "Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel."

  "That asshole."

  "Who does he think he is?"

  "Come on, gays, focus. We've got a major problem on our hands."

  The six of us were silent, but for our footsteps. The main corridor's muted plasma TVs blipped out the news and sports, while coworkers in long-sleeved blue and black T-shirts oompah-loompahed in and out of laminate-access doors, elevated walkways, staircases and elevators, their missions inscrutable and squirrelly. It was a rare sunny day. Freakishly articulated sunbeams highlighted specks of mica in the hallway's designer granite. They looked like randomized particle events.

  Mark said, "I can't even think about what just happened in there."

  John Doe said, "I'd like to do whatever it is people statistically do when confronted by a jolt of large and bad news."

  I suggested he ingest five milligrams of Valium and three shots of hard liquor or four glasses of domestic wine.

  "Really?"

  "Don't ask me, John. Google it."

  "And so I shall."

  Cowboy had a jones for cough syrup, while Bree fished through one of her many pink vinyl Japanese handbags for lip gloss—phase one of her well-established pattern of pursuing sexual conquest to silence her inner pain.

  The only quiet member of our group of six was Kaitlin, new to our work area as of the day before. She was walking with us mostly because she didn't yet know how to get from the meeting room to our cubicles. We're not sure if Kaitlin is boring or if she's resistant to bonding, but then again none of us have really cranked up our charm.

  We passed Warren from the motion capture studio. "Yo! jPodsters! A turtle! All rightl" He flashed a thumbs-up.

  "Thank you, Warren. We can all feel the love in the room."

  Clearly, via the gift of text messaging, Warren and pretty much everyone in the company now knew of our plight, which is this: during today's marketing meeting we learned we now have to retroactively insert a charismatic cuddly turtle character into our skateboard game, which is already nearly one-third of the way through its production cycle. Yes, you read that correctly, a turtle character—in a skateboard game.

  The three-hour meeting had taken place in a two-hundred-seat room nicknamed the air-conditioned rectum. I tried to make the event go faster by pretending to have superpower vision: I could see the carbon dioxide pumping in and out of everyone's nose and mouth—it was purple. It made me think of that urban legend about the chemical they put in swimming pools that reveals when somebody pees. Then I wondered if Leonardo da Vinci had ever inhaled any of the oxygen molecules I was breathing, or if he ever had to sit through a marketing meeting. What would that have been like? "Leo, thanks for your input, but our studies indicate that when they see Lisa smile, they want a sexy, Jlirty smile, not that grim little slit she has now. Also, I don't know what that closet case Michelangelo is thinking with that naked David guy, but Jesus, clamp a diaper onto him pronto. Next item on the agenda: Perspective—Passing Fad or Opportunity to Win? But first, Katie here is going to tell us about this Friday's Jeans Day, to be followed by a ten-minute muffin break."

  But the word "turtle" pulled me out of my reverie, uttered by Fearless Leader—our new head of marketing, Steve. I put up my hand and quite reasonably asked, "Sorry, Steve, did you say a turtle}"

  Christine, a senior development director, said, "No need to be sarcastic, Ethan. Steve here took Toblerone chocolate and turned it around inside of two years."

  "No," Steve protested. "I appreciate an open dialogue. All I'm really saying is that, at home, my son, Carter, plays SimQuest4 and can't get enough of its turtle character, and if my Carter likes turde characters, then a turde character is a winner, and thus, this skateboard game needs a turde."

  John Doe BlackBerried me: I CANT FEEL MY LEGS

  And so the order was issued to make our new turde character "accessible" and "fun" and the buzzword is so horrible I have to spell it out in ASCII: "{101,100,103, 121}"

  ORIENTAL

  NOODLE SOUP

  NISSIN

  70622 03503

  oz. x 6 CUPS

  Chicken Flavor

  Back in our cubicle pod, the six of us fizzled away from each other like ginger ale bubbles. I had eighteen new emails and one phone message, my mother: "Dear, could you give me a call? I really need to speak with you—it's an emergency."

  An emergency? I phoned her cell right away. "Mom, what's up? What's wrong?"

  "Ethan, are you at work right now?"

  "Where else would I be?"

  "I'm at SuperValu. Let me call you back from a pay phone."

  The line went dead. I picked it up when it rang.

  "Mom, you said this was an emergency."

  "It is, dear. Ethan, honey, I need you to help me."

  "I just got out of the Worst Meeting Ever. What's going on?"

  "I suppose I'd better just tell you flat out."

  "Tell me what?"

  "Ethan, I killed a biker."

  "You killed a biker?"

  "Well, I didn't mean to."

  "Mom, how the hell did you manage to kill a biker?"

  "Ethan, just come home right now. I'll be there in twenty minutes."

  "Why doesn't Dad help?"

  "He's on a shoot today. He might get a speaking part." She hung up.

  . . .

  On my way out of the office, I passed a world-building team, standing in a semicircle, staring at a large German-made knife on a desktop.

  "What's up?" I asked.

  "It's the knife we're using to cut Aidan's birthday cake," a friend, Josh, replied.

  I looked more closely at the knife: it was clownishly big. "Okay, it's hard-core Itchy <& Scratchy—but so what?"

  "We're having a contest—we're trying to see if there's any way to hold a knife and walk across a room and not look psycho."

  "And?"

  "It's impossible."

  A few desks away, Bree was showing someone photos of her recent holiday visiting Korean animation sweatshops. She was bummed because she couldn't get into North Korea: too much legal juju. "It's a real blotch to have on your passport. I just wanted to know what it's like to be in a society with no technology except for three dial telephones and a TV camera they won from Fidel Castro in a game of rock paper scissors."

  Bree is right. For those of us who are too young to have visited Cold War East Germany or the USSR, North Korea remains as the sole boutique nation with a quack low-technology dictatorship. "Owning a 56K floppy disk can land you two decades of hard labour."

  I suggested North Korea should change its name to something friendlier, more accessible.

  "Like what, Ethan?"

  "How about Trish?"

  "As in Patricia?"

  "Yeah."

  "I like that. It's fresh."

  "Thanks."

  . . .

  Through a rare and cheerful accident of freeway planning, I can get from the campus to my parents' place by making two left turns and two right turns, even though they live 17.4 miles away in the gloomy evergreen cocoon of the British Properties. I find this elegant and pleasing.

  When I pulled into the driveway, nothing seemed out of place. It could easily have been 1988, right down to the 1988 Reliant K-car wagon. Inside the front door, I heard Mom call from the kitchen, "Ethan, would you like a sandwich? I have egg salad."

  I walked into the kitchen, unchanged since Ronald Reagan ruled Earth. My brother, Greg, and I once found a pile of cleaning products that predated bar-coding on a hallway shelf. "No sandwich, thanks, Mom. Am I, or am I not, here about a dead biker?"

  Mom cut her own sandwich in two. "I know for a fact that your diet is appalling. Greg tells me that all you eat is Doritos and fruit leather."

  "Mom, the biker}"

  "I was going to eat my sandwich, but okay, Mr. Impatient, follow me."
r />   We walked out of the kitchen and down the main hallway, past my old bedroom, over which my beer-botdes-of-the-world collection had once stood sentry—a room that now housed Mom's sewing machine, her cigarette-making machine and the machine she uses to roll up old newspapers to convert them into fire logs. Where my bong once sat now rested a balsa wood mallard duck, sitting in a basket of silk freesia.

  Farther down the hall we descended a set of stairs into the back hallway, rife with the aroma of mildewed sporting equipment, and from there, down another set of stairs that led into the basement proper. Mom reached into a basket and handed me a pair of RayBans and put a pair on herself. She said, "I'd lower the lights, but it confuses the chlorophyll cycles."

  Mom also keeps her grow-op at nearly a hundred percent humidity, and I hate humidity. Humidity feels like hundreds of strangers touching me.

  At the far end of the basement, where the air hockey table had sat dormant for decades, amid a cluster of astonishingly fertile female plants decked out in coloured ribbons (Mom's genetic bookkeeping system), lay the beefiest, scariest death star of a biker I'd ever seen. "Holy crap, Mom, you've done some weird stuff in your life, but this tops it. What happened?"

  "I electrocuted him."

  "You what}"

  "I rigged up this corner of the room so that if I ever got into trouble, I could electrocute anybody standing in that puddle." I looked down—the biker was lying in a puddle.

  "You set up a death trap in your own house?"

  "This is a grow-op, dear. I'm not raising miniature ponies down here."

  "So why did you electrocute him?"

  "His name is, or was, Tim."

  "What did young Tim do to you?"

  "He was trying to extort me into giving him a share of the crop."

  "How much?"

  "Fifty percent."

  "What an asshole."

  "It really was an accident, Ethan. I wasn't sure if it was going to get ugly, so I arranged things so that he was standing in the puddle. And then his cellphone rang, and I had a panic reflex and flipped the switch."

  I wanted to know what sort of ring tone a biker would select for his cellphone, but that could wait until later. I stared down at Tim. He looked heavy. And his—for lack of a better word—deadness was hard to absorb.

  Mom said, "If you could drag him through the door into the carport, together we can probably lift him into the wagon."

  "What then?"

  "You tell me, Ethan. You're the family genius."

  "Why couldn't you call Greg?" My brother is a hot-shot real estate sales guy.

  "Greg is in Hong Kong on business."

  Here's the thing: How do you get rid of a body? Pretend that right now you have a corpse in your house. It's like trying to get rid of a side of beef with nobody knowing. It's hard. "Mom, do you have a carpet you want to get rid of?"

  "Why a carpet?"

  "The Sikhs are always rolling up the dead bodies of unwilling brides from arranged marriages and tossing them into the Fraser River. Maybe we can do that."

  Mom looked disappointed.

  "What? What's wrong with that idea?"

  "What's wrong is that wherever we put the body it has to stay where we put it. I wouldn't want Tim floating to the surface. I think we should bury him."

  "We could roll him up inside the carpet and bury him."

  "Okay. Let's get the carpet from your father's den. I've always hated it. It reminds me of your grandmother."

  We went upstairs. Dad used to work for a marine engineering firm. When he was laid off, he got into acting, mostly TV, but lately he'd been copping a few brief non-speaking roles in U.S. theatrical releases. Okay, he gets tiny crappy non-speaking parts in TV commercials where he always seems to be left on the cutting-room floor, as well as gigs as an extra in crowd scenes.

  In his den, all of his old ship models and nautical maps had been dumped off the shelves and heaped in a corner in favour of framed headshots—colour and B+W, serious, lighthearted, "The Lover," "The Sad Clown," "Good Cop Gone Bad"— as well as pictures of Dad shaking hands with a galaxy of made-in-Vancouver actors carted up to Canada to max out tax credits: Ben Affleck, Mira Sorvino, Kirk Cameron, Lucy Lawless, Raffi and various Muppets way down the Muppet food chain, like Cookie Monster. There was a new one of him with Uma Thurman. "What was she like to work with?" I asked Mom.

  "Apparently a dream. She signed his cast and crew jacket."

  Some of Dad's ballroom dancing outfits were draped over an armchair, awaiting dry cleaning.

  "What your father sees in that horrid dancing I'll never under­stand." Mom pointed to a braided rug beneath Dad's desk. "That was a wedding present. It's given me the heebie-jeebies for decades. Is it big enough to hold Tim?"

  "I think so."

  She bent down. "Lift up the desk, and I'll pull it out from under the legs."

  I lifted the desk, and in so doing, toppled a five-hundred-thick pile of headshots of Dad as a Nazi. Mom puffed. "Got it."

  We rolled up the rug and lugged it downstairs, where we made a biker-wrap sandwich out of Tim. I dragged him out into the carport—man, was he heavy—and I got oil stains on the carpet.

  Mom was holding open the wagon's rear door. "Come on, Ethan, show a little respect."

  'You electrocute the guy where my air hockey table used to stand, and you ask me to show some respect?"

  'You and your brother never played air hockey after the first Christmas weekend."

  "Well, it kind of sucked."

  "Well, / kind of drove all over town trying to find a place that wasn't sold out of them."

  With one big huff, I lifted Tim into the back, but he fell out with an unnerving thump. "Ethan, get him in the car."

  I did that, and we backed out of the carport and driveway.

  "Okay," Mom said, "let's find a nice big hole."

  "Just for the record, Mom, this whole thing is creeping me out."

  "Men should never discuss their feelings, Ethan."

  "I thought women are supposed to like guys discussing feelings."

  "Good God, no."

  It's strange how everything in the world changes the moment your focus becomes extremely specific. Hmmm... is that a good place to bury a body? No, soil}s too thin.

  Mom suggested Stanley Park, on the edge of downtown. "If there was ever a place to dump a body, the park is it. At this point in history, there are probably more bones there than soil."

  So we drove to Stanley Park, but there were way too many people walking around. We headed back to the North Shore and checked out jogging paths and some of the smaller municipal parks, but even there, people and dogs abounded.

  Around six it started getting dark, and I had an idea. "Let's drive up to those monster houses Greg is always selling. We'll put Tim in the foundation of one of the construction sites."

  "I don't know . . ."

  "The bonus is that we don't have to dig a hole. Instead, we get to fill one in a bit."

  "I see your point."

  We ended up on the winding treeless roads of West Van's bizarre Canterbury neighbourhood, a rainforest bulldozed to make way for jumbo houses that resembled microwave ovens with cedar shake roofing.

  "Who lives in these things?" Mom asked as we drove.

  "Greg says it's mostly sports stars and abandoned Asian housewives sitting out their three-year sentences required for citizenship."

  "There. Let's put him down there." Mom was pointing at a freshly poured concrete foundation for a house in the twenty-thousand-square-foot range. It had been framed in with two-by-sixes, and from the skeleton I could tell the style would be best described as Sailor Moon's Breezy West Coast Hideaway. The house was on the highest street. There was nobody overlooking us.

  Mom's spot selection was good. The basement concrete had been poured and coated with vapour barrier tar. The hole was obviously slated to be backfilled with dirt within a day or two. In it there were a few tatters of tarpaper, a tuft or two of pink insulation and
a Wendy's wrapper.

  We removed Tim the Biker from the car and ever so casually carried him to the front door area like he was a futon. With a one-two-three, we lobbed him in. We both pretended not to hear the gende cracking noise.

  I said, "Perfect shot. Come on. Let's cover him up."

  We entombed Tim using the greyish-orange dirt from the excavation. It went far more quickly than I'd expected, five minutes, maybe.