Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel

by Douglas Coupland

  And after Karen left, I felt permanently jinxed; I was pulling away from the center. I darkened. My life had the beginnings of a story. I was no longer just like everybody else; the sensation felt wobbly, like jittering across a creek on slippery rocks with wet shoes, the current running ever faster.

  The high school yearbook for the class of 1980 bore a special page honoring Karen. It showed Karen’s grad photo, taken the month before her coma, inset above a foggy picture of trees with the following words below:

  Memories …

  KAREN ANN MCNEIL

  To Karen Ann, who left us on December 15th, still dreaming of larger worlds than ours. Hey, Karen—we miss you and we’re always thinking of you.

  David Bowie freak / Future legal secretary living in Hawaii / “Bumhead” / chatterbox / Smiles for all / “Ferrrrr-get it!” / Oh, those Mondays! / Let us ask ourselves, girls, do we have enough sweaters? / Lost a shoe at the Elton John concert / dub, … / walking to the portable in the rain / Eggie (right!) / Greatest love in life? The Fonz: Heyyyy! (Sorry, Richard!)

  Senior volleyball, senior grass hockey, yearbook committee, Photography Club, Ski Team

  Eggie was the nickname of Karen’s white egg-shaped Honda Civic, speedily renamed by Hamilton as “the Ovary”—one of those nicknames that clings like a burr. Students most likely remembered Karen as the girl who was always gallivanting through the student parking lot, shuttling a load of laughing girls off to McDonald’s for lunches of tea, saccharine, and half a small bag of fries.

  The yearbook of the previous year had the following:

  IN MEMORIUM:

  JARED ANDERSON HANSEN

  “Jare” was 1978’s best sportsman, a good student and a fine friend to all. He left us in his prime, but we can maybe find peace in knowing that when we knock on heaven’s door, Jared will be there to answer. Good-bye, Jared; we think you made the team.

  “Ladies Man” (… ahem!) / senior football / senior basketball / brewskies / thin ice at Elveden Lake / fix your muffler! / Jethro Tull / Elvis Costello / Santana / That night at Burnside park / first to wear puka shells / tipping the canoe with Julie Rasmussen

  … Hey, old man, take a look at my life … I’m a lot like you were

  My own yearbook caption, as well as those of my immediate friends, was perhaps more interesting than most, as Wendy was on the yearbook staff—as was Hamilton’s archenemy Scott Phelps, who adored Pam from afar:

  RICHARD DOORLAND

  Richard was too busy racing his Datsun with Hamster to hand in his questionnaire. As the only guy who ever picked up litter at the smokehole, we salute you. We’ll still have a hard time forgetting those fetal pig dissections and the blowtorch in metal shop. Look out for radar traps and good luck in the future, Rick!

  Suntanning up at Cypress / “I hate to be the bad guy, but …” / senior football / bondo patches on the Datsun / stereo man / free Steve Miller tickets / nice teeth, fella!

  Hamilton’s was less sedate.

  HAMILTON REESE

  Hamster thought he was being really funny handing in his grad questionnaire with a big lipstick kiss and a rude word on it. Ha ha. Thank you for five years of tormenting people weaker than yourself, you weed. We hope to see you working at the Texaco station in 1999.

  Initiation day terror / pyro / “Omigawd … what’s that in the Jell-O?” / never bothered to join one single club / swipes your sandwich if you’re not looking / Ciao, babe

  WENDY CHERNIN

  “Brainiac” helped make many a day pass more sweetly. When not inventing a cancer cure or designing space capsules, Wendy was dressing up for Graffiti Days and hanging out at White Spot. Word has it she made DNA out of those bending white straws. Bye, Wendy, and we all expect you to be the first cool chick in space.

  “Are you eating that cookie?” / “Thank God It’s Monday” / nail polish in math class / swim team / choir / “What’s the cube root of Revlon?”

  PAMELA SINCLAIR

  “Pam the Glam.” “Pamster.” She’s so good looking that … we can’t keep our eyes off her! Hey, Pammie—thanks for being so beautiful and making our volleyball and basketball teams winners. Don’t know what you see in Hamil— (just kidding!) and we expect you to be in Hollywood some day.

  Supertramp / Charlie perfume / That little blue comb in the rear pocket / Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room / Gain two pounds and make us happy / Always looking out the window … clouds!

  ALBERT LINUS

  We dare not say anything about Linus, since he might wire a laser beam satellite to blow up our houses. Not a talkative fellow, Linus (we always thought Linus was his first name!) spent his years partying with other sci-fi’s inside the fume hood and rigging the computer dating system so as to land Jaclyn Smith as his grad date. Good luck, Linus: We see much zinc in your future.

  “What planet are we on?”/ same shirt two weeks in a row / “Umm …” / Photography Club / Kleenex / dustbunnies / lint

  I’d known Karen all my life, her family’s post-and-beam rancher lying just below our house (mock Tudor) on Rabbit Lane. Through elementary school we’d been friends and by high school we were one of those couples that nobody remembers ever not being a couple.

  Karen: Her yearbook description was correct in saying she had a smile for everyone. And she did laugh all the time—not a nervous titter, but a gnarling Komedy Klub guffaw that could occasionally make us the unwanted floorshow in quiet restaurants. She was an avid photographer, flash-bulbing away at school, at Park Royal mall, at parties, or in the wild: seagulls, bare trees, mountain mists, and water ripples—yearbook stuff. Yet when any one of us searched for stray photos of Karen, we looked almost in vain, rifling through boxloads of our teen-filled snaps, finding the most meager rewards: a left arm here; half a head there; legs cut off at the thighs. We realized that Karen must have gingerly yet effectively pursued a life-long campaign to avoid being photographed. Her preoccupation with the deficiencies her mother kept telling her she had: Your nose is too plump; your hair’s too straight; you’re pretty enough but no beauty. Her graduation photo became almost the sole exception, one solitary image we were able to remember her by. Over time, the photo gradually leeched away our real memories of Karen—ultimately becoming the “Official Version”: oval face with long brown hair parted in the middle, dripping off her head like sleek water (a style Karen called “Bumhead”); a neck she considered too scrawny sheathed beneath a sweater’s cowl; and small, nice features with no one feature eclipsing any other. Karen is gently looking out—not toward us, the viewers, but to her left—to that place where she went on December 15? Maybe.

  What did Karen see that December night? What pictures of tomorrow could so disturb her that she would flee into a refuge of bottomless sleep? What images would frighten her out of her body, making her leave our world? Why would she leave me? C’mon, Karen—Beb, Sugar Pops, Starbaby—we all know life’s hard … we found that one out pretty quick. You told me we were all going to be dead-but-alive zombies in the future. That’s what you said. Fair’s fair: Tell us what you meant, Karen. I want an answer. Wake up, wake up, okay? We’ll go to a place that’s quiet and dry and talk about precious things. We’ll drive downtown and have an Orange Julius. Hey!—we’ll drive to the States for a steak dinner the size of a mattress. We’ll drive to Europe and drink champagne, and we’ll stop in Greenland for ice cubes along the way. Knock-knock. Who’s there? It’s me, Karen. No joke, no punchline—c’est moi. Will you come out? Or will you let me in?

  6

  LONELINESS IS FUN

  Karen’s family:

  When we are young, we assume adults behave according to a strict adult code. Only years later does it dawn on us that Mr. Phillips down the road was a manic depressive wife beater; that Mrs. Owen’s liver was bloated like a diseased water balloon; that Mr. Pulaski perved out on all his kids and that’s why they beat him up one night and left him facedown in a ditch on Good Friday. In this same tradition, Karen’s mother, Lois, exhibited behavior tha
t was, to younger eyes, downright random but adult, nevertheless.

  A minor example springs to mind: When I was young, lunching chez McNeil, Lois boiled water for Kraft macaroni, banged pots and colanders like crazed jungle tom-toms (“She wants us to know how much work she’s doing,” whispered Karen.). Then, right in front of Karen and me, Lois whisked away the crumpled cheese sauce packet like a victorious toreador, flipping it into the cupboard, saying, “We’ll save that for a more special occasion.” Quietly, Karen and I would eat the semi-cooked noodles in margarine while exchanging glances. Beverage? Tap water. Napkins? “Oh, just use your pants, Richard. You’re a boy.”

  Karen, it might be surmised, had grown up with a bizarre relationship with food. Lois, a former Miss Canada runner-up (1958), saw food as alien, alive, requiring passports, visas, and security guards before allowing entry into the mouth. Fads came and went. One week she might be a vegan, the next week it was “Starch only!” Karen was dragged, holus-bolus, into Lois’s cockamamie nutritional vogues. During one particularly fevered patch of vegetarianism in the seventies, I made the mistake of saying I’d been to Benihana’s steak house; a brisk, half-hour anti-meat jeremiad followed. When Karen interrupted, she was met with icicle stares from Lois: “Really Karen, if you’d just eat, you might become attractive and then I wouldn’t have to worry so much about your future.” To me, Lois said, “Karen’s in her ‘awkward stage.’ Now about that steak house, Richard …”

  George, Karen’s dad, owned a body shop where he spent sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, all year, choosing to dine in Lois-free restaurants. He was essentially nonexistent, and this absence bred a good cop/bad cop mythology: Mrs. McNeil, the fevered shrew who drove the quiet, honorable George out of his own home. Neither of them could be described as “happy.”

  “Oh, I wish I knew what Mom’s secret was,” Karen would moan. “There’s obviously a biggie. But how to ask?”

  Lois grew up in Northern BC, and by dint of her looks, her cultivated smile, and her fathomless misguided snobbery was hypersensitized to those in life who didn’t work hard enough (in her eyes) to earn their keep. Little digs: “My husband works with his hands—unlike other parents around here who’ve never had a callus in their lives.” This referred, of course, to my accountant father who, like most others in the neighborhood, made an okay, but only okay, living as the middlest of middle classes. People across the city believed our hillside neighborhood to be the cradle of never-ending martini-clogged soirées and bawdy wife-swaps. The truth would have bored them silly, as it was middle-class dull to the point of scientific measurability. My mother, while barbecuing one fine summer evening in 1976, said prophetically that this neighborhood was “like the land that God forgot.” Yes.

  The first month of Karen’s coma was a write-off—strange yet drab, hope dripping away bit by bit, making us unaware of its overall loss. We were all of us poleaxed with the flu—a good thing in that we didn’t have to attend school for the final week before Christmas.

  We shambled around to each other’s houses and yakked on the phone a good deal. Hamilton phoned on Friday night: “Of course,” he said, “we’re beacons of gossip at school now.” I had to admit we were. “They’re ghouls,” he said, pausing to honk his nose, adding, “God, my brain feels like a furry clump of dog shit.” There were voices in the background at Hamilton’s: “My Dad’s marshaled up his sap tonight. He’s dating a young twinkie in the payroll department. Aggh. My future stepmother is spoon-dancing with Daddy-O as I speak. Well—they’ll have a litter of golden little brats together.” The background music crooned Brasil ‘66. “You really should see her, Richard. She’s not a mother—she’s a golden retriever. You just wait until she turns into a slut. Won’t that be jolly.” A sigh: “Must go, Toots—owww! My head. Is. In. Pain. Bye.”

  Click.

  A few minutes later, Wendy phoned to say Linus was at her house and they were languidly barn-raising a gingerbread house. “It was supposed to be a Hobbit cottage, but it ended up looking more like Hitler’s bunker. Linus’s flu is gone. He’s going down to see Karen in a minute. Anything to send?”

  “No.”

  Linus became our proxy visitor, but he returned to us with maddeningly obscure information. He never noticed straightforward data like whether or not Karen’s eyes were open or how her skin color was; he was interested in the inanimate, in frameworks and systems that weren’t easily apparent. Accordingly, he began recounting the visit in frustratingly pointless detail.

  “You know the IV she has? What do they put in there? How can they squeeze all of her food into a watery liquid? I mean, doesn’t it seem like it should be a lot thicker? With fiber or pulp at least?”

  “There’s a food tube that goes directly to her stomach,” Wendy said. “I guess she’s involuntarily quitting smoking, too. Her poor body.”

  Hamilton was straightforward: “Did you see Karen or were you there doing your science project? Can you tell us how she was?”

  “Okay, okay … so the food goes in one tube and out another. There didn’t seem to be any problems there. Except when you think about how her body is like an earthworm, kind of, a big food-to-compost converter …”

  I took offense to the direction this was going. “Linus! Does she look okay? Does she move?”

  “Well, um, actually, yeah. Her eyes were open and her eyeballs, her pupils I mean, followed my hand when I moved it over her face.”

  “What? She’s awake?”

  “No. Her eyeballs are open, but I think she’s still sleeping. She has a little radio beside her bed. It was playing a disco song. Sister Sledge?” Linus seemed pleased at having remembered such a nontechnical detail.

  We finally visited Karen two days before Christmas, dazed like bejeezus on Robitussin and decongestants, and we kept far away from her bed. Linus was right: Karen’s eyes did follow hand motion—inspiring news. When Dr. Menger came down the hall, we excitedly informed him of the miraculous event. He looked worried and beckoned us into the cafeteria, telling us to sit.

  “It doesn’t give me any pleasure to tell you, kids, but your friend Karen is in what’s known as a persistent vegetative state. Karen is completely unaware of either herself or her environment. She has sleep cycles and awake cycles. She has no control over her bowel or bladder functions. She has no voluntary responses to sound, light, motion, and no understanding of language. I really must tell you that recovery is rare. So rare as to be big news for the newspapers when it ever occurs. There’s really not much else I can tell you.”

  “But my hand!” Pammie squealed. “Karen’s eyes watch your hand if you move it around in front of her face.”

  “That’s misleading,” Dr. Menger said. “That’s misleading and sad. It’s a common involuntary reflex response to motion. There’s no high brain function linked to the act.”

  So much for hope, I thought as we all drove to Pammie’s house. “Oh, God, I haven’t done any Christmas shopping,” I said. “Let’s not give each other presents, okay?” Everyone listlessly agreed. My own family members that year received chocolate bars and magazines from a Mac’s convenience store, all badly wrapped in kitchen tin foil and handed over free of enthusiasm.

  New Year’s Eve that year, a minty fresh new decade, consisted of Hamilton halfheartedly letting off a brick of stale leftover Halloween firecrackers inside the Hitler’s Bunker followed by two beers and games of Pong. Ugh.

  The year became 1980.

  A daily pattern of hospital visits emerged with us of the inner circle, as well as the McNeils visiting daily. Lois McNeil was still grumpy at Pammie and Wendy over the dreaded vodka-Tab cocktails, so the two would skittishly beetle down the corridor at the slightest hint of Lois. Mr. McNeil, though, was on our side, saying, “Christ, Lois, they’re kids and they weren’t doing harm. Nobody forced Karen to drink, and even then that’s probably not the full cause.”

  Mrs. McNeil would be pursed-lipped, with Mr. McNeil saying, “It may well have been your two pill
s that caused this, so don’t act so bleeding innocent.” (Thank you, Mr. McNeil.) “I can see she didn’t inherit her drug tolerance from you.” Ow!

  But as the days slipped by after Christmas holidays, visits trailed off a bit, always with good excuses; by the end of January, it was only Karen’s parents and me visiting, Mr. McNeil going daily from the body shop. Softly, he said he couldn’t imagine ever not going. We became the two regular visitors.

  “I never had a real chance to talk to her, Richard. You know that?” he would say. “Always working. Always assuming there’d be time later. I feel closer to her now than I did during all her birthdays—and she’ll never even know.”

  “Not never, Mr. McNeil.”

  “No—you’re right. Not never.”

  It was in February a few weeks after school had resumed that I came home and saw Dad’s car in the driveway at four o’clock in the afternoon, two hours earlier than usual. For someone as strongly habit-bound as my father, this could only bode big news, good or bad. I entered the kitchen, heard Mom on the phone in the living room and Dad rustling the newspaper. I came into the room and cautiously asked, “What’s up?”

  “Richard,” she said in a warm, yet neutral voice designed to preempt shock, “Karen’s pregnant.”

  From the top of my skull, flames burned downward; once again, I felt my skin grow quills, my forehead antlers. My stomach jumped off a cliff and my legs became stone. The Pill … was she on it? I never asked. First shot lucky. The Sperminator. “Oh.”