Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel

by Douglas Coupland

  “They’re hopeless?”

  “In a way. They’re without hope. It’s in their heads. Can I bring them up here with you? It’ll help them.” “Are they really doing drugs?”

  Doing drugs—what an old-fashioned word. “Yes. Pathetic as it sounds. Drugs are different these days. You’ll learn it all soon. How do you feel?”

  “Fantastically awake. They OD’d?”

  “Yup.”

  “Bring them in—I want to have lots of people around me. But only people I know.”

  “Your mom won’t be too thrilled.”

  “I’ll deal with her.” She smacks her lips. “Can I have a sip of water?” Wendy rushes over and holds a glass. Karen notices her wedding ring. “Thanks. How long have you and Linus been married?”

  George and Lois nudge the door open soundlessly. The room is dim. The parents are startled to see Megan and Richard there on the bed with her—unorthodox, but then hospitals aren’t the same citadels of reflex cruelty and loneliness they once were. Richard is snoring and Megan is breathing warmly. And there is Karen. Her eyes are open and smiling. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad,” she says under her breath. “Shhhhh … the kids are asleep.” Her jaw aches.

  Her voice! She’s back! George blubbers while smooching Karen’s cheeks, oblivious to the scene he creates. “Hi Dad.” George is lost to emotion, as Karen smiles and raises happy eyebrows over George’s shoulders toward Lois. Karen winks. It is hard for Karen to be sentimental, because in her mind she has only had a quick nap since 1979.

  Richard awakens just then. “Hi, George. Oh. Excuse me. Here. Oh. Let me move out of the way and down off this thing. Lois. Hi—” Richard clambers off, the top part of his silver astronaut suit dragging behind him like a beaver tail. George hugs Richard. Lois, meanwhile, has stayed away from the bed. Her purse is clutched to her chest. She comes nearer. She locks eyeballs with her daughter.

  “Hey, Mom.” Karen says.

  There is a silence. “Hello, Karen.” Another silence. “Welcome back.” Lois gives Karen a small kiss.

  George and Richard shut up. Karen sees that time has done little to alter her mother. Some gray hair here, a wrinkle there—the posture and voice are timeless. “You look as good as ever, Mom,” Karen says.

  “Thank you, dear.” Lois has not visited Karen for almost a year now. She is finding it hard to overlook Karen’s deterioration. “Can you eat now, sweetie? Are you hungry?” The old food games have begun already. “I brought an owl figurine to cheer you up.”

  “Thanks.” It’s as if seventeen years have never happened.

  Megan touches her mother, holds her neck and rubs it with her hands. Karen’s gray hair is limp and sad and has been cut with blunt scissors; Megan holds it to her nose and the hair smells dusty and sweet. All her life Megan has felt jinxed, that people around her would come to bad ends. Richard, too, has felt the same way for years, though neither of them knew it of the other. Megan has been dressing in black for so long now, and has been chasing an early death; it seemed only fitting—the drugs, the fearsome boyfriends, and the fast cars. Why would anybody miss her? Richard—whoops Dad—might miss her, but then he’d most likely go drink himself into the center of the Earth to forget her. That’s unfair. He did quit drinking for real. But then didn’t he fob her off on Lois and George? Lois—glad to have me out of her hair. George? George is nice, but he’s always liked Karen better.

  Megan soon accompanies Richard, Lois, George, Wendy, and Linus into another room. The hallways have been cleared. Wheels squeak. It’s quiet.

  The group arrives at a new, larger room. Inside, Uncle Hamilton and Aunt Pam are already there, conked out in separate beds, resembling dead extras in a sci-fi movie. Drugged out losers, Megan thinks, but then she reminds herself that she really has no right to condemn on that front. Where does this judgmental streak come from? Megan decides she’s going to go straight edge: She’s never going to do a drug ever again. Even aspirin. She is going to be the mother that Karen never had. She is going to protect her—keep her smart, make her whole. And then Megan remembers why she is even at the hospital: last night with Skitter on the mattress in Yale’s basement, a pot dealer friend of Skitter. She’d told Linus that the morning-after pill was for her friend, Jenny, but it wasn’t. Megan knows that she is pregnant. It was meant to be.

  17

  EVERYBODY’S LYING

  “I want them all in the same room because they’ll all give each other incentive to get well.”

  Pam and Hamilton hear Wendy’s voice and open their fogged eyes to see white curtains. They hear background snatches of other voices. Hamilton’s throat hacks up a clump of blood-phlegm; Wendy, standing beside him says poker-faced, “Welcome back to prime time, douche bag.”

  “Wendy? Ooh. Ahh. I feel like a paper sack of burning dog shit. What time is it?”

  “Time to change your life, you screwed-up junkie.” “Hamilton—are you there?” calls Pam.

  “Assuming we’re not dead, yes, dear. What time is it, Wendy? Where are we? What are we doing here?” Lifting his head feels like lifting a swarm of hornets.

  “It’s Sunday, kids. And you are both in the hospital. You’re here for emergency supernumerary mammectomies.”

  “Super what?”

  “We’re removing your third nipples.”

  “What? Ow! Don’t talk like that, Wendy.”

  “Hospital humor. It’s my style—oh and don’t give me that little wounded look: ‘Ooh, I’m so surprised.’ You came one eyelash close to death, you bastard.” She walks over and looks into Hamilton’s eyes and then slaps him gently.

  “Ow, shit, Wendy, whaddya do that for? You screwed up a fantastic high. I was on a roll last night.”

  “Why? You were almost dead last night, scuzz bucket.” Wendy approaches Pam in the bed to the left and pecks her on the forehead. “You both scared the hell out us. You’re too old to be so pathetic doing junk. I don’t need to be friends with junkie losers. And having said that, I want you to sit up and have a look across the room.”

  Pam says, “My head hurts, I—”

  “Just look, you two losers.”

  With two push-button controls, Wendy elevates Pam and Hamilton’s backrests, then opens the curtains, allowing them to see Richard and Karen across the room; Richard is holding Karen’s arm, wagging it back and forth, and the two of them are making faces. Karen is wearing a shirt Lois brought along with her—the same Levi’s shirt she wore in high school: rough cotton, embroidered parakeets.

  George and Lois and Megan are parked on stools, and Lois looks furious, first at Wendy and then at Hamilton: “Wendy, I don’t think there’s anything useful to come of having two … drug addicts in the room. They’re the worst possible influence, and just look at Hamilton. What a dreadful sight to wake up to after seventeen years. There must be some sort of rule about this.”

  “Lois,” Wendy says, “I had to pull a whack of strings to get them all in here. You think this was easy?”

  “But they’re so … ugh.”

  “Once more, Lois, it will be good for them to be together. They all need support.”

  “Oh, God. This is a hallucination,” says Hamilton.

  “Hi, Hamilton,” Karen says. “Who’d you take to the prom?”

  Pam, not fully clicked in to the tableau across the room, pipes up and hears the voice—Karen is back from McDonald’s. “Karen? You’re here!”

  “Hi kids,” says Karen. “How was grad? I missed it. As you know.” “Oh, oh—you wouldn’t believe it; Hamilton took Cindy Webber. A computer date. I went with Raymond Merlis.” “No!”

  “Yes, and—”

  “I did not have a computer date,” Hamilton interjects.

  “Oh shut your gob. No one would take you.”

  “Did Raymond remove Keith for the night?” Keith is their name for the single strand of wiry hair growing from a mole on Raymond Merlis’s face.

  Instantly, Pam and Karen relapse into their older, younger selves, like exo
tic birds chattering in a mango tree. Pam tries to step out of bed and stumbles toward Karen, but her body aches and she’s unable to stand up. Her knees buckle. The activated granulated charcoal given to her earlier seems to have sunk like ball bearings into her lower colon. Hamilton, meanwhile, is nauseated and feels as though he’s lying on a dock in choppy weather. He vomits Halloween chocolate and dead martinis into a bedside bucket while his muscles spasm and he feels the onset of scorch-and-burn diarrhea.

  “Just so you know, Kare,” Pam says, “Keith came, too.”

  “Wendy,” Lois barks. “This is revolting. They’re sick. I really must protest.”

  “Sickness is part of life, Lois.”

  “Mi scusa, everybody—” Pam begins to sweat and clam; her anxiety is escalating. Hamilton is already desperate for a fix, Pam not quite so, but soon she will be. “You can’t say we’re dull.”

  In the background Lois is saying, “Very well then, Doctor Chernin. I’m going to call my lawyer. George? Call my lawyer.”

  “Lois, be quiet,” says George.

  Karen has been awake a few days and has had some rare time alone with her thoughts. The first two days were such a circus that she had to ask Wendy to lock everybody out of the room save for Mom, Dad, Richard, and Megan.

  Pam and Ham are now gone; she has the room to herself. She looks down at her body—bones marinated in liquid and only vaguely responsive to her will. She has already gained three pounds and she thinks this is a sick joke. She lifts her hand to where her breasts once were; she touches what is now mere parchment and bone, emits a squeak, and sighs.

  She surveys her hospital room, her world, almost identical to the room she had during her appendix removal in third grade. Where has she been for seventeen years? What other world did she visit? She is furious with herself for not remembring. Her coma was dreamless, but she knows she went to some place real. Not the place you go when you die—some other place. She thinks back to the previous week, the week before the coma, and she remembers being chased by darkness. Darkness? What? Some of it returns to her. She was trying to find a way to cheat the darkness. And she lost in the end. Shit.

  She tries to raise her arm but the sensation is as though she is trying to lift a telephone pole. Megan, her “surprise daughter,” will be in soon to help her with stretching exercises. Megan and Lois and Richard are taking shifts. Her tendons apparently need to tenderize before muscle can rebuild. She feels as though she’s an item on a menu.

  Why has she been kept alive? She can’t imagine the point of it. She’s happy to be awake but is secretly appalled at the thought of the money and human effort it must have taken to keep her going for so long.

  What has happened to the world? What has happened to the people in her world?

  She’s been awake just a little bit of time, but much is apparent. Richard: He’s so different yet he still holds her the way he used to—bodies retain memories long after the mind forgets them. His face is so ravaged. Drinking? How did that happen? And Ham and Pam on heroin? Such a punch line. It’s as though Karen walked through a door in 1979 and directly entered a health guidance class showing a film on the unmentioned perils of aging.

  Wendy, working hard—too hard, it seems. She’s not much in love with Linus—obvious to anybody—nor is Linus much in love with Wendy. His soul is full of glue. Karen seems to have understood everyone’s life immediately; the others think she is too out of it—too clued out about the modern world—but Karen sees all. She remembers the innocent pointless aims of their youths (Hawaii! Ski bum at Whistler!) and sees that they were never acted upon. But at the same time, larger aims were never defined. Her friends have become who they’ve become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.

  Her friends are not particularly happy—not with their lives. Pam had rolled her eyes when Karen asked her if she was happy.

  “No.”

  “Fulfilled?”

  “No.”

  “Creative?”

  “A little.”

  Through the monsters they design and the TV shows they work on, they give vent to the loss they feel inside. Expressions of pettiness, loss, and corruption. She asked not to see any more of their FX photos. Yuck. The photos sit on a stack beside flowers from the mayor as well as from various studios and film production companies wishing to purchase rights to her life story.

  On top of it all, the world itself has changed. Karen must try and absorb seventeen years of global changes. That can wait. And she thinks she’ll go crazy if one more person tells her that the Berlin Wall came down and AIDS exists in the world.

  One week later, Wendy still can’t comprehend Karen’s return to the living and her complete retention of all her brain power. Wendy knows the medical statistics. To others, Karen’s awakening is a lottery win—a prize behind Door Number 3, a pair of snowmobiles. But to Wendy, Karen is a river running backward, a rose that blooms under moonlight—something transcendent, an epiphany.

  Wendy thinks of Karen’s long rehab road to reach the point where she will be able to perform simple everyday functions once more. Brittle bones; atrophied ligaments. Yet her face is already fully animated, and she smiles as clearly as always. Already her arms are now skittishly mobile, storky chopsticks reaching for gum and the squeeze bottle of water. Checks and balances. Karen is a time capsule—a creature from another era reborn, a lotus seed asleep for ten thousand years that springs to life as clear and true as though born yesterday.

  Wendy is concerned about swamping Karen with too much information or too much novelty. As a doctor, she can limit certain things. Richard has been coming in with the annual volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia and teaching Karen about the new years leading up to 1997. He is already at 1989: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the AIDS quilt—Karen must be so amazed at this. And then there’s crack. Cloning. Life on Mars. Velcro. Charles and Diana. MAC cosmetics. Imagine learning so much stuff at once.

  Karen and Pam have spent some hours sifting through style magazines together; Wendy beamed with pleasure at the sight—so much like the old days. Good gossipy jags: “Oh, and Karen, food is amazing these days. It suddenly got good around 1988,” Pam says, making Karen eager to try all the new food trends—Tex-Mex, Cajun, Vietnamese, Thai, Nouvelle, Japanese, Fusion, and California cuisine—” sushi, gourmet pizzas, tofu hot dogs, fajitas, flavored ice teas, and fat-free everything.”

  Lingering in the back of Wendy’s mind, though, is the phenomenon of Hamilton and Pam having stereo heroin nightmares. The nurse showed Wendy the tape of stereo dreaming as well as parallel stalagmite brain readouts. So now Wendy has two medical mysteries on her hands at the same time. Best to keep the video hush. Pam and Hamilton are unaware it even exists. Best to scoot Karen home immediately—away from public intrusion.

  Megan enjoys visiting her mother at the hospital, where she helps her flex her arms and legs and fingers. She has never been able to help others, and the sensation is as though she had opened her bedroom door and found an enormous new house on the other side full of beautiful objects and rooms to explore.

  Megan is relieved that Karen has a good sense of humor and, though older, is technically the same age. “Megan, tell me, all the young girls I see on TV these days dress kind of, um …”

  “Slutty?”

  “Your word, not mine.”

  “It’s Lois’s word.” Megan giggles. “Lois is from another era where girls had to be doormats. Nowadays we dress for strength. Didn’t you?”

  Karen ponders her adolescence: “No. I think we felt equal to guys but never more forceful than them.”

  “I guess that’s a switch. Soon we’ll have you going to the gym.” “I think I’m a bit far gone for that.”

  “Crap—Mom.” Megan loves saying Mom with extra vim, as each mention is a small stab at Lois.

  Yes, Karen is happy to see that Megan is rebellious—and that she talks back to Lois. Karen had never dared. Megan is also angry—at Richard and at
her parents and at the world. And Karen is angry with Richard for being so shiftless in helping raise Megan. That’s something to be dealt with in the future. Karen is mad and lost and found and bewildered. The new world lies before her eyes like an opened chest of treasure, a flock of birds over Africa, a thousand TVs all playing at once.

  Wendy thinks about Karen. Unsurprisingly she is front-page news the world over; a medical oddity, a feature-section story, tabloid grist. Yet the only photo the media have is Karen’s old graduation photo. The media have been unable to snap a new picture of Karen; such a photo has become the golden fleece of journalism. There have been attempts to bribe relatives—Wendy herself was approached by a French photographer, Linus by the Germans. Such cheek. And to think that Karen never wanted to be photographed even at the best of times—it would be too cruel to exhibit her in such a frail, emaciated state.

  Friends and family want to protect Karen and her innocence from the modern world, the changes that have occurred since her sleep began. Her innocence is the benchmark of their jadedness and corruption. The world is hard now. The world doesn’t like simplicity or relaxation.

  The world also wants photos of Megan—the girl who met her dead mother. Dozens of photos of Megan abound, courtesy of her schoolmates. She is the “Lost Child,” the “Child of Corpse Born.”

  In particular, the U.S. news networks have been fearsome in demanding interviews at top dollar and wide exposure. “Maybe in the future, Richard, but not now.” What Karen doesn’t tell Richard is that she feels the onset of some previously withheld news on the brink of making itself clear. From where? What? A message from the other side—from the place she went to for all those years. She needs to wait for the right moment to use it correctly.

  18

  EXTREME BODY FAILURE

  Less than two weeks after awakening, Karen is taken home to Rabbit Lane. She has gained two more pounds; Lois changes her diapers and inspects her waste as though Karen were a Chinese Empress, reading meaning into her waste’s patterns like tea leaves on a cup’s bottom. “Mom, do that somewhere else, pleeeze.”