“We’re friends now, aren’t we, Linus?” “Yup.”
“Are you scared about our new lives?” “Yup.”
“But there’s no other choice, is there?” “I don’t think there ever was.”
Over in the ruins of the Intensive Care unit, Wendy stands beside both Hamilton and Pam, who are resting on two gurneys They’re silent. What is their fate? How will their lives be changed?
“The room’s a bit dark,” Pam says.
“Do you want more flashlights on?” Hamilton asks, reaching over to swat one of a dozen emergency flashlights placed on their bottoms, shining up into the dusty air at the trolley’s end.
“No. It’s okay. It doesn’t scare me anymore. Darkness, I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” Hamilton says.
“And look at the beams,” Pam says, “The way they cut through the dust. They’re like pillars, aren’t they? Aren’t they, Wendy?”
A catafalque of skeletons encircles the room; Wendy nervously taps steel forceps onto a stainless steel tray and she feels extremely old. “Yeah,” she says. “They are.”
Karen meanwhile limps and hobbles up the rock mountainside lit by the sky which is committing suicide above. She’ll reach the top. The walls of her heart are as thin as rice paper and her breath as frail as dandelion puffs. From there she’ll once more leave the waking world.
She speaks out loud to herself, unaware that the others will also hear the words. She looks down from the slope at the burnt forests and the lost suburbs.
“You guys just wait and see. We’ll stand taller than these mountains. We’ll bare open our hearts for the world to grab. We’ll see lights where before there was dimness. We’ll testify together to what we have seen and felt.
“Life will go on—all of us—crawling; stumbling, falling perhaps. But we will be the strong ones. Our hearts will shine brightly. We will forever be crossing the goal line.”
Down in the canyon, Richard’s heels sink into mud and loam and fungus and mouse holes as he crumbles down the hill. His body falls and lunges the same as always, like the times as a child he carried sockeye salmon sandwiches down to the salmon hatcheries for lunch. The soil is soft and warm, like an old shirt, like moist wedding cake. Focus ahead, Richard: jettison everything. Leap forward. You have a mission.
A bird’s trill …
Quartz …
A green leaf …
A bruised knee …
His breath is a small wisp—a thought of a thought of a thought.
On the river he locates the spot where he sat on the rocks that strange November morning. He sits and rests his head on a smooth boulder. He lies there as Karen reaches the apex, where she finds a dusty rock onto which she hoists herself and Jane. The air is cool and scratchy. She breathes in deeply.
Richard resumes his vigil on the rocks under the sky gone insane. He shivers and his legs are numb with cold. Richard gets to thinking—he gets to thinking there must be all of these people everywhere on Earth, eager, no desperate for just the smallest sign that there is something finer or larger or more miraculous about ourselves than we had supposed. How can I give them a spark? he wonders. How can I hold their hands and pull them all through flames and rock walls and icebergs? With our acts we will shock and captivate them into new ways of thinking.
He hears Karen’s voice once one last time; she has climbed the mountain and she says, “You are the future, and the eternity, and the everything. You’re indeed what comes next. I’m going now. It’s my time to leave. Yes—I can feel myself leaving. You’ll change the world. Good-bye, guys.”
In London the supermodels wear Prada and the photographers snap their photos. The young princes read their Guinness Book of World Records. In California, meetings are held and salad is picked at. Across the globe hydro dams generate electricity and radio towers send powerful signals out into the heavens advertising Fiat Pandas and creme rinses. Golden lights oscillate wildly. Giant receiving dishes rotate and scour the universe for voices and miracles. And why shouldn’t they? The world indeed awakens: The Ginza throbs and businessmen vomit into Suntory whiskey boxes to the giggles of Siberian party girls—the excitement and glamour and seduction of progress—cities shine: cities of gold and tin and lead and birch and Teflon, molybdenum, and diamonds that gleam and gleam and gleam.
Near dawn, Richard feels the tremors—the world resuming. There is an enormous camera flash. He can feel it happening—the world returns.
And suddenly it’s almost sunrise. A final flash of light alarms a school of spawning salmon huddled in the water—a maroon, collective brain huddled underneath the rocks. Richard tries to imagine their collective thinking—the one idea they want to put forth.
Richard thinks of his life and his world once more: No, my daughter is not confused and angry and lost on drugs. No, she doesn’t hate me for all that I’ve forgotten or neglected or failed to do for her. No, the woman I love is not a papery husk of a woman, breathing shallow thimbles of air as her gray hair crackles and her body turns to leather and bone. My friends are not lonely and tired and dried-up and sad. And I’m not just fooling myself, either. That’s all over—we made the trade.
Richard thinks about being alive at this particular juncture in history and he can only marvel—to be alive at this wondrous point—this jumping-off point toward farther reaches. The things he’ll see and feel—even the tiny moments like the Moon mural in Karen’s old bedroom or satellite weather maps—it’s all such a tiny bit of what comes next.
His mind races: Think about all those crazy people you see on the streets. Maybe they aren’t crazy at all. Maybe they’ve seen what we’ve seen—maybe those people are us.
Us.
You’ll soon be seeing us walking down your street, our backs held proud, our eyes dilated with truth and power. We might look like you, but you should know better. We’ll draw our line in the sand and force the world to cross our line. Every cell in our body explodes with the truth. We will be kneeling in front of the Safeway, atop out-of-date textbooks whose pages we have chewed out. We’ll be begging passersby to see the need to question and question and question and never stop questioning until the world stops spinning. We’ll be adults who smash the tired, exhausted system. We’ll crawl and chew and dig our way into a radical new world. We will change minds and souls from stone and plastic into linen and gold—that’s what I believe. That’s what I know.
PRAISE FOR
Girlfriend in a Coma
“To call Coupland the John Bunyan of his set would not be hyperbole, especially in light of his newest book, the … fantastical Girlfriend in a Coma, which at times approaches a jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut…. [A] rousingly old-fashioned and genuinely spooky morality play.”—Washington Post
“[Coupland’s] strongest novel to date.”—People
“Coupland excels at developing vivid and real characters…. Part Stephen King, part It’s a Wonderful Life, with a little of his own Generation X thrown in, Coupland’s immensely readable new novel shows him scared of the future and sounding the alarm for the millennium.”—Booklist
“A message of hope and a challenge to … cynicism.”
—USA Today
“An ambitious and powerful work that addresses, despite its close-in focus, big themes and important questions.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Coupland has crafted a moving chronicle of the impoverished inner lives of a circle of materially rich young adults of the nineties. Using punchy sentences filled with hip names and brand labels, he succeeds in capturing the weak sense of identity exhibited by a generation that has defined itself in terms of what it consumes and not what it could achieve.”—Library Journal
“An extraordinary, enthralling moral fable.”
—Mail on Sunday (London)
“A dark, prescient book, a meditation on the mystery of life, the next step in a continuing search for meaning.”
—The Times (London)
&nbs
p; “We really should pay attention to Coupland. His eye is so firmly on the ball he’s virtually clairvoyant. And the second reading is even more fun than the first. Enjoy.”—The Guardian (London)
ALSO BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND
Fiction
Generation X
Shampoo Planet
Life After God
Microserfs
Miss Wyoming
All Families Are Psychotic
Hey Nostradamus!
Eleanor Rigby
JPod
The Gum Thief
Nonfiction
Polaroids from the Dead
City of Glass
Souvenir of Canada
School Spirit
Souvenir of Canada 2
Terry
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More …
About the author
A Q&A with Douglas Coupland
Life at a Glance
On Location
About the book
Headlining
Backstage
Read on
If You Loved This, You’ll Like …
Have You Read?
About the author
A Q&A with Douglas Coupland
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Right now. Where I am. At home.
What is your greatest fear?
That God exists, but doesn’t care very much for humans.
Which living person do you most admire?
Vaclav Havel.
What objects do you always carry with you?
Earplugs.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
Everybody I like and love all living in the same city.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
We have time and we have free will. Otherwise, we’re just animals.
Which writer has had the greatest influence on your work?
Jenny Holzer, an American artist whose work is text-based (what a dismal term). How tightly can you compress an idea? Where do ideas end and you, as a person, begin?
Do you have a favorite book?
Nonfiction, The Andy Warhol Diaries. Fiction, it’s either Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers or Margaret Drabble’s Ice Age.
Which book do you wish you had written?
The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 by Eric Hobsbawm.
What do you think of literary prizes?
They’re wildly engaging, and they get people who normally don’t discuss books discussing books. That’s a hard thing to do.
Where do you go for inspiration?
Four-hour drives in my car, usually into the interior of British Columbia, into the desert cordillera that stretches down into Mexico. Believe it or not, Canada has cactuses/cacti.
Life at a Glance
Name
Douglas Coupland
Born
December 30, 1961, on a military base in Baden-Söllingen, Germany.
Education
Coupland graduated 1979 from Sentinel Secondary School, West Vancouver. Graduated 1984 from Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Vancouver. Went to European Design Institute, Milan, and the Hokkaido College of Art and Design, Japan. Completed course in business science together with fine art and industrial design in Japan in 1986.
Career
The first exhibition of Coupland’s sculpture took place at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1987. He won two Canadian national awards for excellence in industrial design. By 1988 he was a contributing journalist to Vancouver magazine. St. Martin’s Press, New York, asked him to write a guidebook to Generation X, a theme he had been exploring in his articles. Instead he went to California and wrote a novel—Generation X. This was published in 1991.
Subsequent Fiction
Shampoo Planet (1992)
Life After God (1993)
Microserfs (1995)
Girlfriend in a Coma (1997)
Miss Wyoming (1999)
God Hates Japan (2001)
All Families Are Psychotic (2001)
Hey Nostradamus! (2003)
Eleanor Rigby
(2005) JPod (2006)
The Gum Thief (2007)
Nonfiction
Polaroids from the Dead(1996)
City of Glass (2000)
Souvenir of Canada (2002)
School Spirit (2002)
Souvenir of Canada 2 (2004)
Terry (2005)
On Location
Spike Sculptural installation
Gorgon 2003 Aluminum fiberglass, approx. 1.25 x life size
Kneeling Figures Plastic, life size
About the book
Headlining
FOR MANY OF THE CRITICS, Girlfriend in a Coma was the moment where Douglas Coupland got “metaphysical.” His fifth novel was, according to The Times, “a dark, prescient book, a meditation on the mystery of life, the next step in a continuing search for meaning.” The Sunday Times identified the book as “a fusion of cautionary tale and morality play,” and the Mail on Sunday was bolder in calling it “an extraordinary, enthralling moral fable.”
Yet despite the soulful gear change, Coupland’s media literacy remained a talking point. Prompted by the swiped Smiths song title, critics tallied the pop culture references. “Girlfriend is a richly associative novel,” began the Independent. “It ranges from the dysfunctional teendom of Twin Peaks to the chilly metaphysics of The Sweet Hereafter, en route to winding up as a post-apocalyptic version of It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The NME, on the other hand, swallowed “a heady, schizophrenic brew of a book: part It’s a Wonderful Life and part OK Computer.” Girlfriend is, it continued, “Coupland’s wake-up bomb before we, as a culture, reach a critical mass of spiritual vacancy.”
BBC2’s Late Review was vocal in its admiration for Girlfriend. Tom Paulin described it as “visually brilliant, full of extraordinary imagery, fresh like new paint.” Fellow panelist Mark Lawson confessed to being “amazed by it. The dialogue is some of the most brilliant I’ve ever read in a novel. It’s a great wake-up call to young Americans everywhere.” And the Guardian was left in no doubt: “Coupland directly tells us to pull our socks up and look at the world afresh…. He is becoming extraordinary.”
Backstage
IN JULY1984, thirty-nine-year-old Terry Wallis of Arkansas was involved in a horrific car crash. The vehicle he was in plunged into a creek, and the driver was killed. Terry was found a day later. He had survived, but had fallen into a coma that would last nineteen years.
In June 2003, Terry Wallis’s brain decided to rejoin the world. His first and third words on waking were “Mom” and “milk,” which seemed lyrically appropriate for someone who had undergone something of a rebirth. His second word would no doubt have sent Douglas Coupland into raptures— “Pepsi.” Perhaps Terry was still thinking about the slogan Pepsi had unveiled to the world in 1984: “The Taste of a New Generation.”
We all hope that our last words on this earth will be epic and, wherever possible, memorable. But people like Terry Wallis, who are obliged to conjure up some famous first words upon emerging from a coma, sometimes find it difficult to hit the top notes. Take fifty-year-old Annie Shapiro. For most of 1963 she ran two apron shops in Toronto. Then came November 22, and Annie suffered a stroke while watching news coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination. She fell into a thirty-year coma, only to snap out of it in Florida in 1992 with the following message from the mysterious shadowlands of her slumber: “Turn on the television. I want to see the I Love Lucy show.”
The problem with famous first words for coma victims is that they often wake up not knowing that they have been out of the game. The word coma finds its root in the ancient Greek word for heavy sleep, and kneejerk requests for Pepsi and an I Love Lucy rerun sound not unlike the sort of startled non sequiturs one sometimes blurts out after being jolted out of a snooze. Indeed, the relationship between comas and sleep could go much deeper than the wo
rd’s linguistic roots. A medical study in 2002 suggests that a coma can result from damage to the portions of the brain that under normal circumstances would help you wake up in the morning. For instance, the thalamus and upper midbrain help us to wake up when we are disturbed from sleep by a noise. And the seriousness of the coma is thought to be dictated by which particular portions of the brain have suffered injury. A blow to the cerebral hemisphere may be the precise cause of vegetative states.
But what exactly is a coma? It is best described as a state of deep unconsciousness. Illnesses such as kidney infections or even diabetes, together with strokes and poisoning, can cause a person to slip into a comatose state. There are two main types of coma. The first type results from brain tissue damaged as a result of severe head injury. The second occurs with damage to the brainstem, and this latter type tends to result in fewer recoveries. Within the duration of a coma, there tend to be two identifiable periods. The first looks like typical unconsciousness—the victim’s eyes remain closed, there is no speech, and even motor responses to pain can be absent. This type of coma rarely persists for more than four weeks. But it can then drift into a second period, known as a persistent vegetative state. The eyes open, but the victim remains unable to exhibit conscious behavior. Around ten percent of coma victims progress to this second state, which can last for months and even years.
To observers, comas have a particular eerie sadness about them. Patients appear to be supernaturally suspended between life and death, but recoveries often take place in equally extraordinary circumstances. Terry Wallis suffered his car crash on Friday the 13th, and began talking nineteen years later on Friday the 13th. What’s more, Karen’s dramatic sequence of coma, childbirth, and recovery in Girlfriend in a Coma has real-life precedents. In the U.S. in 2003, a twenty-six-year-old dental receptionist named Amanda Thomas fell into a coma after contracting pneumonia while pregnant. Doctors were considering whether to risk a cesarean section when Amanda’s body kicked into action and gave birth to a baby boy named Charlie, who was fifteen weeks early. A month later Amanda came out of her coma to meet the child she didn’t know she had.
Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel Page 27