Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel

by Douglas Coupland

  Karen’s weakness is utterly at odds with the landscape’s rigor. She tries to crawl away with her arms, inching forth like a worm, soil smudging her face and sleeves, her face grim and determined. With her mouth she tries to drink the sky; her sweater and shirt and jeans are cold and wet, and her fingers clasp and rip a fern. Richard lets Karen move a fair distance and then walks alongside her and then lies down on the soil beside her. She is shivering; he gives her his coat and says, “That’s not true at all.” He then lifts her and carries her home and leaves the wheelchair where it sits. He can come fetch it later. If.

  “Two strong arms,” says Karen.

  Richard says, “Yes,” and kisses her.

  19

  DREAMING EVEN THOUGH YOU’RE WIDE AWAKE

  Pam’s detox has not been as shaky as Hamilton’s—cramping mostly, eternal period pain, constipation, and dizzy headaches. Today the two are chauffeuring Karen around on a tour of the city, showing her new and modern things. The sun has emerged—cold and bleached, weak and low on the horizon out beyond Burnaby and Mount Baker; sunglasses are required by all. Karen is buried within an ivory-colored sheepskin coat of Pam’s. “Très glam, Kare, you sexy detox kitten. Meow.”

  Hamilton has strapped Karen into the front seat with extra nylon harnesses for legs and chest, carefully checked Karen’s neck brace, and promised Richard that he’ll drive under the speed limit at all times. He notices Karen’s mood this morning: beautiful, lively, and loquacious. There is good reason for this. The night before, Karen and Richard made awkward but delicate love and afterward he asked her to marry him and she accepted. Well, Richard, I’m thirty-four and I can count the number of times I’ve done it on two fingers.

  By now Karen has taken many drives with her family and friends and has seen the changes progress has wreaked. She’s seen the city of Vancouver multiply and bathe itself in freighter loads of offshore money. Blue glass towers through which Canada geese fly in V-formation, traffic jams of Range Rovers, Chinese road signs, and children with cell phones. Karen rather likes the new city and she rather likes the small things in life that are new: blue nail polish, hygiene products, better pasta.

  Karen wishes she could shop in the department stores, but a recent excursion to the Park Royal mall caused such pandemonium they decided not to repeat the experience. The theoretical purpose of today’s road trip is to buy a copy of Royalty magazine. Karen wants to see pictures of Princess Diana. She can’t believe she missed out on the entire fable—the wedding, the kids, the flings, the divorce, and finally her rebirth as a private citizen—and then, the end. Diana’s life is one of the few things that makes her jealous that she’s been away. “Pam, it’s just like in high school when we felt like everybody was out there partying but us.”

  “But, Karen, I don’t remember feeling that way.”

  A sigh. “God, you good-looking people drive me nuts.”

  Hamilton is grouchy this morning, Pam is withdrawn, and Karen is preoccupied by what she sees outside and what’s inside her head. Three people sitting in the same car but not really together.

  “Look,” Karen says, “an old Datsun B-210. Like Richard’s back in school.”

  “Don’t see many of those around these days,” Hamilton says. Karen asks, “Is Vietnam making cars now, too?”

  The Jeep comes to a stop sign and Karen’s sunglasses slip off. Hamilton replaces them and continues driving. “Hey, Kare,” he asks, “how do you feel being here now? After so long. I mean, not just what’s new and different, but what does now feel like?”

  “Um—”

  “Is that too annoying a question? I mean, you’ve been out of the coma for a while now. You must be used to it, right? Kick me if I’m yanking your chain too hard.”

  “No. I mean yes. I mean wait, Ham—let me think.”

  They pass a clique of high-schoolers. Their fashions seem alien yet attractive to Karen. She would have enjoyed wearing these new styles.

  “Pammie asked me, too. I told her, imagine walking a million miles … in heels, and she kind of got it.”

  “Hey, Karen, don’t shit me. That’s crap. I could have told you that. There’s other stuff. You know there is. How does it feel? I mean, seventeen years. Spill. And if you don’t spill I’ll spend the next hour telling you about the Berlin Wall coming down and AIDS.”

  Only Hamilton can speak to her like this. Brat. He’s always been able to go way off the edge with Karen. She likes him for this. “Well, okay, Hamilton. As one bullshitter to another. Very well.” The Jeep is on the highway now, headed west toward Horseshoe Bay. The day is becoming pale blue and clean and cold. The ocean far down below the highway is a flat anvil blue.

  “Okay. You know what, Hamilton? There’s a hardness I’m seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life’s so serious now. Maybe it’s just because I’m with an older gang now.” She lifts her scrawny arm and nibbles her finger and the act is a large effort on her part. “I mean, nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems to be able to endure simply being by themselves, either—but at the same time they’re isolated. People work much more, only to go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other. They work, watch TV, and sleep. I see these things. The whole world is only about work: work work work get get get… racing ahead … getting sacked from work … going online … knowing computer languages … winning contracts. I mean, it’s just not what I would have imagined the world might be if you’d asked me seventeen years ago. People are frazzled and angry, desperate about money, and, at best, indifferent to the future.”

  She grabs her breath. “So you ask me how do I feel? I feel lazy. And slow. And antique. And I’m scared of all these machines. I shouldn’t be, but I am. I’m not sure I completely like the new world.”

  Hamilton’s jaws clench and Karen sees this. “I know—you want me to say how great everything is now, but I can’t. It’s pretty clear to me that life now isn’t what it ought to have become.”

  They drive past the Cypress exit, the Westmount exit, and the Caulfield exit. Pam coughs in the backseat, a cough like two thick steaks flapping against each other, and Hamilton reacts: “Jesus, Pam—honk those things into a Baggie and maybe we can fry them up for dinner.”

  “Ha.”

  More mountains and ocean. “I think I know what you mean,” Hamilton says. “If you look at the world as a whole, we have to admit life’s good here where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there’s nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a bohemia or a creative underworld to join if the mainstream life wasn’t your bag—or a life of crime, or even religion. And now there’s only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it’s the System or what … death? There’s nothing. There’s no way out now.” A pulp mill up the fjord of Howe Sound stains the sky with an ash-white glaze. Hamilton asks, “What about the people you know—Richard, Wendy, Pam, and me? What changes have you noticed in all of us?”

  “You mean friends and family?”

  “Yeah.”

  Karen tells him only the palatable half of the story. “The thing I’m noticing is that nobody’s really changed in seventeen years; they’re simply amplified versions of themselves. Mom is as … er … regulatory as ever. Dad’s nice but weird. Richard is still earnest and a cutie-pie and he tries so hard. You’re still a brat. Pam’s quietly beautiful. Linus is still on Mars. Wendy may be a doctor and everything, but in her head she’s still handing in essays and getting A’s. Everybody’s become, yeah—more like themselves.”

  The car hums, and they look at the mountains and the city. “Remember when we went to Future Shop to buy a camera?” Karen asks. The others nod. “Did you see the categories they had there for their products? ‘Simulation’; ‘Productivity’; ‘Games.’ I mean, what kind of w
orld is this? And please tell me what’s happened to time? Nobody has time anymore. What’s the deal? Shit. Now I’m in a bad mood.” Lowering the window allows into the Jeep the faint industrial fart smell of a pulp mill. Karen retreats behind her sunglasses. She doesn’t tell Hamilton that she had expected people to be grown up at the age of thirty-four. Instead, they seem at best insular and without a central core, which might give purpose to their lives.

  Hamilton talks: “And what of your lovely daughter, Megan?”

  Karen smiles: “Isn’t she the coolest, Ham? So strong. So sure of herself. Imagine being so together at seventeen—wow.” She pauses: “Well, in a way I am seventeen. So maybe I can be as cool as her, too. Yes.”

  “I think you’re going to have to be older,” Pam says from the backseat, talking through a yawn. “People are expecting you to be wise after all that sleep. To most people you’re not seventeen anymore—you’re one thousand years old.”

  It’s true. People treat Karen as though she can sense not only color, smells, and sound, but something else—something rich and sublime and far beyond color. She has this subtle feeling people are a touch jealous of this. What frustrates her, too, is that she knows she’s seen things, but these things are locked away and unreachable.

  Megan now has morning sickness and wonders how much longer she can keep her secret. She avoids nearly all her old friends and lives at Richard’s condo, essentially alone, since Richard spends most of his time with Karen or at work. She likes the solitude; she’s too young to understand the throbbing weight of loneliness. She has tossed out most of her old Goth clothing and now favors a pared-down, somewhat athletic look. She has also dropped out of school and works part-time with Linus; she’d like to work there full-time someday once her baby is in day care.

  For lack of peers, Megan is reduced to having to speak with adults. Megan can’t believe that she actually wants to speak with Lois. A good rousing fight would be fun. Karen (“Bio-Mom”) is great, if not slightly clued out (Well, she did miss two decades). But there remains an awkwardness between them. A jealousy? Emotionally, they are both the same age; both need attention from Richard, Lois, and the others. Yet on some deeper level they just don’t connect. They’re too much the same and each poses a form of competition to the other. They’re wary.

  Blond walnuts; a blush; a smile before she closed the door.

  It’s a rainy day: Karen and Wendy sit in Wendy’s kitchen discussing a small party soon to be held on the day after Christmas—a party celebrating Karen and Richard’s engagement. The ceremony is to be small: immediate friends and family only. No dates allowed; no strangers. There isn’t too much to plan, so it’s fun for Karen and Wendy to arrange things. Wendy’s life is so stressful; she enjoys having a girly-girl break. A dress? That’s Pam’s department. Food? Endive with cream cheese, prosciutto and melon. “What happened to food?” Karen asks. “Food used to come in a box or a can. Now there’s dozens of everything and it’s all so fresh.”

  Their coffee cups run low. God bless NutraSweet. There is a pause at the end of their chat, a pause that indicates that a change in conversational gears is now possible.

  “Wendy,” Karen asks while looking out the window at some of Linus’s old monsters standing beside the garage, “have you ever noticed— Wait.” Another pause. “Have you ever noticed our lives are maybe …”

  “Maybe what?” Wendy’s tone of voice almost says, Please don’t. Please don’t talk about this.

  “Well, I mean, I know my waking up was like a million-to-one shot. And I can’t explain that, but even still—” “But even still what?”

  “Well, we all seem to have more … not coincidences—more like spooky things in our lives than most people do. I mean, don’t we?”

  Wendy’s reply is dry and therapeutic: “When did you start feeling this?”

  “The day I woke up. That’s a good start: We all ended up at the hospital that day. What are the odds of that? And I’m noticing that we all ended up returning to the same old neighborhood like so much undeliverable mail. I bet we probably couldn’t escape Rabbit Lane even if we tried.”

  Wendy’s unsure where to go with this. “So you think this all means something more, do you? Something big?”

  “Yeah.” Karen pours more coffee, eager to do such a mundane task with her new stronger arms. The liquid shakes. “Then there’s these visions I’ve had.”

  “Oh?”

  “Wendy, listen up. I’m serious. You’re a doctor. Listen.” Karen tells Wendy of the images she saw, how she believes it was no accident that she went into a coma in 1979. Karen then asks, “Haven’t you ever seen anything weird that wasn’t real life, but wasn’t a dream either?”

  Wendy enters a form of trance. “I …” She pauses. “I saw Jared. Years ago. He came and talked to me. Back when I was lonely, back before Linus and I were married. He’d told me I wouldn’t be lonely forever. He said he was doing what he could. He was real; he was there. I was in love with him back in high school. You knew that, right? Even now I’m still in love with Jared. In my own way. Of course, I love Linus, too. Oh, these feelings are complex.”

  “We all knew about you and Jared,” Karen says. “The worst kept crush in school. But he was such a dog, Wen—I mean, he’d hump anything in a bra like he was a Great Dane going at the sofa.”

  “But Jared wasn’t just a crush. I was in love with him. I’ve never doubted that. Ever.” Wendy remembers what had really happened— the sleepover with Jared’s older sister, Laura, walking into the sauna while looking for soap, opening the door to find Jared naked, eyes closed, his butt roasting on the cedar. She remembers the brief second (a second and a half?) before Jared knew she was there, the smell of salt air in her lungs and Jared’s skin melting like cake frosting, his balls like two blond walnuts, his member turgid, and the embarrassment afterward, slamming the door shut. She remembers avoiding Jared’s eyes for weeks afterward, blushing if she even saw him far down the school’s corridors. And then came October 14, 1978, the day Jared snuck up behind Wendy and whispered, See you after the game. Meet me in the parking lot. I’ve got a bag of candy to give you. And then came the collapse on the football field followed by the thousand passionate nights that never were to come Wendy’s way. And she’s never told anybody, because who would believe it? Because she is only Wendy: dutiful, sexless, brainy, and almost a tragedy (in her father’s eyes) had Linus not happened along. Romantic beauty is for others. She wonders if she entered medicine only so that she might see naked men’s bodies with impunity. This thought frightens her. “Do you still ever speak with him?”

  “No. He’s gone. I don’t know if it was even really him. It was probably in my head. I work too hard. I don’t get enough free time. I still try to talk to him sometimes, but he’s never returned. Real or not, I miss him.”

  “To me, Jared feels like just a year ago,” Karen says. “But for you, Jared’s gone for almost twenty years. And the feeling has never gone away?”

  “Never.”

  The phone rings, but Wendy doesn’t answer. There’s a silence between the two. Wendy says, “Off the record? I think, yeah, all your vision stuff means something. But who’s to say what? There’s no pattern, no direction, no relationship.”

  “Let’s just keep our eyes open, agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  20

  … AND AFTER AMERICA?

  Ten days before Christmas, Lois and George approach Karen, who sits by the living room TV watching a tape of The Thornbirds. Karen intuits that their approach will be taxing in some way.

  “We’d like you to do that TV interview, dear.”

  I knew it. “Which one?”

  “I don’t like that tone of voice, Karen. We’re only thinking about the best interests of you and Megan.”

  “Explain that to me, please.” She remotes off the TV.

  “They’re offering a good deal of money, dear,” George says. “You could certainly use it. Megan, too.”

&n
bsp; “You could put her through college on it,” Lois adds.

  “Oh, puh-leeeze. I think we should all know by now that Megan is not and is unlikely to ever be college material.”

  Thus begins an hour-long tussle, after which Karen finally agrees to do a network TV interview for an astronomical sum of money, to be taped in three days—on the condition that the money be put into trust for Megan until the age of twenty-one. “And you’re not allowed to tell her how much, because I can just imagine her killing time until she gets a big bundle to blow.”

  Almost instantly, lawyers are phoned, moneys are negotiated, and people from both American coasts descend on Karen’s doorstep for a Thursday shoot. As Karen’s friends are intimate with almost every aspect of TV production, they mastermind lighting schemes and color effects and are bossy with their imported colleagues as they protect Karen. Pam instructs Karen on posture (where possible), deportment, breathing, pacing, makeup, and styling. Their competence is a wonder to Karen; for the first time, she understands that her friends have actual skills. Richard and Hamilton “danger-proof” the Christmas tree while Linus stands lost in his own world, mentally rearranging the furniture to best visual advantage.

  My friends know how to put a good face on a bad situation, Karen thinks.

  “I wouldn’t be nervous, Kare,” Pam says while applying a Christian Dior 425 foundation. “TV isn’t about information. It’s about emotion. People will be hearing your words, sure, but first they’ll be checking out your skin and hairdo.”

  “Then I’m up shit creek.”

  “Piffle. You’ve got good skin and bones and people will probably feel cheated if you don’t look a bit weird. Which lipstick do you want?”

  “Do I really have to do this, Pam?”

  “What, makeup? God yes. Even the healthiest people on TV look like corpses without it. The less they look at your skin, the better they’ll hear what you’re saying.”