Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel

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Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel Page 9

by Douglas Coupland


  We arrived at the location on Southborough Drive be-mucked, resembling extras and feeling like outsiders. Hamilton’s Javelin ka-chunk’ed onto the road’s shoulder and soon we three bumbled pointlessly amid the necklace of white vans and utility trucks that border any film location. We found Pam. “Go grab a bite at the catering truck. Wait for me there.”

  “Where are the stars?” Linus asked.

  “What were you expecting, kids,” Pam said, “chorus-line girls carrying enormous foam boulders? Roman centurions riding along in golf carts? I’ll tell you the official credo of film: Hurry up and wait. See you in five.”

  We ate cold pasta, watched thick white lighting cables being hauled into a front doorway, and became thoroughly bored. “This blows,” Hamilton said. “Let’s amscray.”

  We were set to amscray when Tina Lowry, an old classmate of mine, called, “Richard! Richard Doorland, is that you? It’s me. Tina.” Tina, like most people in the film and TV industry, had that slightly on-the-run-can’t-talk-long look on her face. A tiny patch of blue sky allowed sun to sparkle the light meter that hung around her neck.

  “Tina. You’re here?”

  “Heya, Richard, what are you doing on set? Crew? Extras?”

  “No. I just live nearby. A friend of ours, Pam, is doing makeup here. Are you directing or something?”

  “Not yet. I’m a production assistant here—a PA. We’re scum on the food chain, but the job rocks. You know Pam?”

  “We grew up just down the hill. Hamilton here,” I indicated the soggy beanpole to my right, “is her meat puppet.”

  She gawped at Hamilton. “I use to cut out the pictures of her in Vogue and stuff. I wanted to be her so badly and now I’m working with her. It’s trippy. What are you doing these days, Richard?”

  “You mean right now—right here?” “No, like in your life—and stuff.”

  I’d learned it was easier to say “nothing” than to mention real estate. “Nothing. Taking it easy.” I awaited the usual strained, “Ohhh …” signaling embarrassment. Tina surprised me.

  “You need work?”

  “Uh, sure … maybe … doing what?”

  “We’ll find something for you. We’re short-staffed and need bodies quick. I’ll help you with union stuff. Phone me.” A horn honked. “Gotta go.” Like most film people, she vanished in a little cloud of cartoon dust.

  Once again, for the first time in what seemed like a decade, the city was a place of enchantment for me. Voilá! Hamilton, Linus, and I became location scouts, and for two cigarette-packed weeks, we rollicked about the city and countryside in Hamilton’s Javelin running over trash cans, drag racing yuppies, and “tailgating hair triggers,” those agitated souls Hamilton seemed to locate with such ease: “Gronks itching to kill, barflies with pickled brain stems, meatheads fresh from the gym—how easily inflamed they are.” We found every location required by the director within minutes, mainly as a result of my having sold real estate and growing up here. We felt useful.

  Scott, a production guy from Los Angeles, told us that “they film everything here because Vancouver’s unique: You can morph it into any North American city or green space with little effort and even less expense, but at the same time the city has its own distinct feel. See that motel over there? That was ‘Pittsburgh’ in a Movie of the Week.”

  Scott, like us, had never trained to be in film. Like everybody in the local industry, he arrived from another realm. Mathematicians, lawyers, dental assistants, ex-hippies—all of these people winging it. The energy was addictive.

  Life became very cha-cha-cha. “My oh my,” Hamilton would preen verbally, “aren’t we just the niftiest, coolest, hippest, grooviest, sexiest, most with-it, and most happening people we know?”

  “Yes, Hamilton,” we would reply as androids. “You certainly are.”

  Then came word that Fox was filming a series pilot in Vancouver, one of dozens filmed here annually. Phone calls were made and shortly Pam, Hamilton, Linus, and I wound up working on a new show in which conspiracies, be they alien, governmental, paranormal, or clerical, impacted on the lives of everyday people. These visitations would in turn be investigated by a male detective who has belief in the paranormal and a female detective who has her doubts. It was a simple formula, but one that resonated with us.

  TV pilots are crap shoots. We enjoyed our location scouting as much as we could, making hay while the sun shined and we located dank, dense, evergreen versions of Florida, California, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. “It’s a good thing not too many botanists watch this show,” Linus said with grating frequency. “Or weathermen, for that matter.” As it rains a fair deal in Vancouver, so it rained a great deal on the show. Critics applauded the show’s rainy “noir” atmosphere. Whenever this issue was raised, Pam merrily twittered, “Giggle giggle.”

  After a few weeks, Tina introduced Hamilton and Linus to the world of special effects at an FX house across town called Monster Machine. Their eyes lit up; within a week, they left Fox to score jobs with Monster Machine, entering a sub-world of flash pods, latex limbs, buckets o’ blood, and blue screening. Their combined explosive and electrical knowledge was impossible to refuse. Me? I stayed on the set of my weekly paranormal drama. It hadn’t become a hit yet, but I liked its vibe and it was the most polite set I’d worked on.

  Soon enough Pam stopped doing makeup work and joined Hamilton and Linus at the special effects firm; the three became known locally as quality special effects people. Their specialties were latex body molds and convincing explosions. Pooling their skills, they helped create aliens, zombies, vampires, Mafia-shot corpses, humans in all states of decay, mummification, terror, and explosion. They traveled frequently, usually to California to take courses with the masters, and returned to Canada with Ziploc bags full of smuggled, tissue-wrapped, German ceramic eyeballs. “Aren’t they wunderbar?” squeaked Pam in my car driving back from the airport.

  Pam was so happy. The “Whatever Happened to …” magazine articles ended, replaced by “Hot New Comeback!” articles. An ex-model turned special effects artist was an irresistible combination for the media. Added bonus: “I’ve conquered a drug problem!” Magazine and TV stories about her flourished.

  A strong memory of that early period of TV production was of bodies: bodies on gurneys, bodies in boxes, bits of bodies, bodies bleeding, dummy bodies, alien bodies, bodies embedded with artificial components, bodies slated to vanish, bodies popping out of bodies, bodies just returned from the beyond, and bodies set to explode. A few of these bodies were used on my own show, but I’d also see “a galore of bodies” (Linus’s term) while visiting Monster Machine, where they were experts in the trick-wiring of both latex dummies and real people, making their subjects explode, cough up blood, shimmy, or radiate green light on cue.

  I popped in for a visit one rainy day after they’d been working there a year and found the two intently wiring a man’s girdle with explosives and fake blood, an outfit that was to be worn in a police thriller then shooting downtown, one in which everybody shoots everybody in the climax. “Hey Richard,” Linus said. “Check this out. We put the blood into these little ravioli cubes and then attach them to an outward bursting charge.”

  “Truly a gore-fest,” Hamilton proudly added, coiling multicolored wire into an FM blast-detonator and discharging a gelatinous glob onto a plywood sheet. “Lunch?”

  “Bagel run,” Linus said.

  We were headed out the door when Hamilton’s pager beeped and Linus suddenly had to pee. Left alone, I wandered around the building and saw a door that was slightly ajar. I opened it, thinking I might find a studio. What I found instead must have been a corpse storage room, a room unlike any I could have imagined—men and women, children and aliens; whole, cut in two, doused in blood; arms and legs stacked like timber; glass bottles of eyes and shelves of noses. The light was dim and the air was stifled and dusty. In the center of the room sat a pile of used bodies, which appeared to have fulfilled their cinematic
destiny and were now slated for selective demolition—pink latex aliens, moist and flabby. I walked over to the pile, fascinated with this unlit bonfire.

  I circled the room and a wire tugged my sweater. I heard a thunk behind me and saw a dummy that I probably ought not to have seen: a plastic female body almost identical to Karen—bony, taut, skeletal, and yellowed, made of polyurethane foam, with long straight brown Orlon hair parted in the middle. The fallen corpse was now leaning against a wall near an electrical subunit, as though freeze-dried. I heard Hamilton’s voice in the corridor: “Hey Linus, where’s Richikins?” He walked past the door, saw me, and smiled, thinking I’d be enjoying the local attraction. He came around to where I stood, looked at the dummy, looked at me, and said, “Uh-oh. Sorry Richard. We used this one in a movie last month—this movie about people who survive a plane crash but who never get rescued.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We should have boxed it.”

  “Shit, Hamilton. Did you have to use a chenille shirt on it?” “Well, it does look authentic.”

  I sighed; they’d meant no harm. I walked over to inspect the corpse, with its taxidermy glass eyes and dusty plastic hair. A fish inside my stomach wriggled and thrashed, and I looked away. Hamilton quietly sandwiched the body inside the pile of aliens. We ate lunch and afterward I drove to Inglewood. I wanted to see the real Karen, who only differed slightly from the plastic female replica I’d just seen.

  As the years progressed and I began to notice ideas inside my head changing, as well as detecting new sensations in my heart—my soul? The fact was that our work continually exposed us, day in, day out, to a constant assembly line of paranoia, extreme beliefs, and spiritual simplifications. The routine nature of these ideas had begun to activate parts of me that previously remained untouched. Like most people I’d known, I was unconcerned with what happens to “me” after I die. Implicit was a vague notion that I would somehow continue in another form and that was that. But then new doubts surfaced: Would I continue on? And how?

  Linus asked good questions whenever I fell into one of my reflective states. On-set one day, he asked me, “Richard, let me ask you this—What is the difference between the future and the afterlife?”

  “Is this what you were thinking about down in Las Vegas?” I asked.

  “Maybe. But answer the question.”

  “The difference is that …” I was temporarily stumped.

  “Yes?”

  “The difference,” I said, “is that the afterworld is all about infinity; the future is only about changes on this world—fashion and machines and architecture.” We were working on a TV movie about angels coming down to Earth to help housewives. The sunlight was hurting my eyes even though I was wearing dark glasses.

  “So,” Linus asked, “when you die, do you still get to watch TV and read magazines and see what’s happening on Earth? Or do you go someplace where that’s not an issue?”

  “I’m not sure. It would really bug me not to know what the city would look like in a hundred years. Or what my favorite stars would look like fifty years from now.”

  “Hmmm.” The “star” of the angel movie walked by and asked Linus for moisturizer for her elbows. “I’m in special effects,” he replied, “I can give you a dab of bloody red goo to rub into them.” The “star” walked away miffed, no sense of fun.

  I began to think about other issues—about leadership, about who was in charge of the world and who was not. Like many people, repeated exposure to paranormal situations caused me to develop those niggling little feelings that certain truths were being withheld. UFOs seemed silly, but then there was that little bit of me that said maybe.

  “Look at it this way,” Linus said before getting up to arrange a drooping wing, “you have to take all these little bits of nothing that we’re given—aliens, conspirators, angels, big government—and from them you have to construct a useful picture of the afterlife. Or the future. Either way, is it enough? All these cheesy movies of the week we help make—TV movies with long-dead fighter pilots reemerging into the modern world; strange children writing binary messages seized by the government; cannibalism; vanishings; kidnapped college students; burnt people returned to life; loggers who’ve seen God; green blood; disembodied souls being enticed back into a body—” His pager beeped. “Mañana. Gotta go.”

  I sat there in the sun. The catering truck was cleaning up with clangs and slams. The sunlight and heat was intense. I felt like I was inside a beam shooting down from a flying saucer—a beam that would make me float up into the sky and into heaven, where I would then receive answers.

  13

  REJECT EVERY IDEA

  When I discovered that Hamilton and Pam were doing heroin, I first assumed it was a practical joke, because the drug had by then become a local cliché, the Port of Vancouver having in recent years become a salad bar of cheap Asian drugs. The two had rented a small 1950s house at the end of Moyne Drive, a spit away from Karen’s family’s house and Linus and Wendy’s. During a March wrap party, I found two syringes, soiled cotton balls, and so forth in the trash can of their en-suite bathroom—plus rubber tubing lying on the counter. It wasn’t a joke; they’d just been too lazy or out of it to clean up. I became angry at them for being so medically stupid and dangerously and pointlessly trendy.

  Hamilton had walked into the bedroom while I was still flipping out over the discovery. I confronted him without even thinking. “Let me get this straight, Hamilton. You were at a party, and in between handfuls of Doritos someone said, ‘Hey—wanna do some smack?’ And you said, ‘Sure! Stick the needle right here’? At least this explains why you and Pam have been so blasé lately—as well as the long-sleeve shirts.”

  Hamilton was serene. He gave a tender little sigh and stared me down. “Life is only so exciting, Richard. And it soon becomes a drag. This cool cat plans to enjoy his ninth life. Heroin’s not a meaning, but it does make life feel as though life still has possibilities. I’m getting old; it’s becoming harder and harder to be a unique individual.”

  “Life is a drag? What—are you a teenager now? ‘Bummer, man.’ I mean, how passé, Hamilton. Heroin. How totally ten minutes ago. A drag?” A city-wide rash of China White ODs made me feel protective and prudish.

  Hamilton pursed his lips; I could see he was preparing to shut down on me shortly. “Curious to see you being a prig, Richikins. Excusez-moi if I’ve committed a lifestyle violation.”

  “Since when is life a drag, Hamilton? Things are going well. Things have never been so good.”

  He made a pfffft noise and shot me a patronizing glance that made me feel eight years old, like I’d felt when I hid my mother’s cigarettes to make her stop smoking. He sat on the bed. “Don’t you understand, Richard? There’s nothing at the center of what we do.”

  “I—”

  “No center. It doesn’t exist. All of us—look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there’s nothing else.” I felt I was getting the bad news I’d been trying to avoid for so long.

  “But didn’—”

  He cut me off. “Shhh. At least Pam and I accept things as they are. And I wish you’d let us do that. We get our job done. We pay our taxes. We never forget people’s birthdays. So just let us be.” He stood up. “Good night, Reverend. Ta ta.” He floated out of the room and yet again I had that sick feeling that accompanies a recently bruised friendship. I thought of all my recent years of AA abstention—weeks on end with my head feeling like a rotten pumpkin—all to combat doubts, to kill time, to wait for something that might never happen, some revelation that a center did exist. I felt very lost there in the bedroom. I walked the four miles home.

  Home was a small, recently purchased two-bedroom condo in North Vancouver—a ragtag old seventies condo with slatted cedar walls and Plexiglas bubble skylights. It had, according to Linus, an elusive “sex-in-the-hot-tub, cum-on-the-ultrasuede” character. I loved my little
condo merely for its calmness and coolness and the view of the mountains out back; it was the first place I’d ever lived in that actually felt like my own. I was glad to be home.

  Around eight o’clock the next evening my doorbell rang: Pam, white-faced and bushed after PA-ing a TV movie filming nearby. “Ghost Mom returns to Earth to help her family fight land developers.” She sat pooped but birdlike on the couch. She shushed me and crossed her arms. She looked at the floor.

  “What?” I asked, trying to be casual.

  Silence. “It’s happening again, Richard.”

  “What is?”

  “You know. I know you know. Stuff. Junk.” “How long now?”

  “A few months? It’s manageable. Nothing hardcore yet. But it’s getting bigger. It always does.” She stood by the window. “Are you—?”

  “Shhh!” She huffed out a carbon dioxide sprite into the glass and continued: “I’ve escaped before, Richard, we all know that. Maybe I can again. I’m still a little bit fabulous.”

  “Okay. Can you function while you’re on it? I mean, doesn’t it zonk you out?”

  “Au contraire, it makes us zingy.”

  “Zingy?”

  “You look sad, Richard. Don’t be. You’ll do me a favor?” A pause. “Sure.”

  “We’ve never judged you. Don’t judge us. We enjoy liking you. It should stay that way.”

  “It could stay that way”

  “Shush.”

  We talked a bit, then went into the kitchen where she drank an Orange Crush. We talked more, mostly in circles. Then Pam chugged her pop and hopped through the rain and into her car, driving back to Hamilton in a halfhearted Transylvanian drag race.

 

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