Douglas Coupland - Miss Wyoming

«God, let me make a phone call. Hang up, eat a Scooby Snack and I'll call you in five minutes.»

John hung up. Three minutes later the phone rang. «Vanessa says you can come help us.»

«Help with what ?»

«You'll see.» He gave John Vanessa's address in Santa Monica. They agreed to meet in one hour, but John was early.

Vanessa opened the screen door, calm and bookish in horn-rimmed glasses and a wool sweater set imported from some other part of the century. John thought Vanessa looked like one of the murdered Clutter daughters of Kansas. She asked him to sit on a side chair. «Would you like something to drink, maybe?»

«Uh — a Coke.»

«Sure.»

She went into the kitchen. John heard the fridge open and close, along with other friendly kitchen sounds. Vanessa looked smart in a way John knew she was helpless to conceal. She had the laser-scanning eyes of the highest-paid personal assistants, the ones who single-handedly made Neanderthal teensploitation film producers seem classy and hip by scripting the brief, urbane speeches they gave while donating comically large checks to well-researched and cutting-edge charities.

Vanessa was quite obviously some freak of nature marooned on the shores of the bell curve's right-most limits. «What do you do for a living, Vanessa?» John asked, stretching out his neck as if it would help lob his words around a bend in the wall.

«I work at the Rand Corporation.»

This didn't surprise John. «No shit. Doing what?»

«Think-tanking.»

«You sit around in beanbag chairs all day and think up military invasion strategies and ways to suppress the development of electric cars?»

She pretended not to have heard that and came in and handed him his Coke. He took a sip and paused. «Hey — this is really delicious!» The sweetness delighted him, and he chugged down half the glass. «Wow. I'd forgotten how good a simple Coke could be.»

«It's not the Coke, it's me. I added sugar to it. Two teaspoons.»

John hacked. «You added sugar to Coke ? That's revolting.»

«Don't be stupid.» She sat down on an IKEA couch—sofa bed then in the couch mode. «Everybody bitched and moaned when Coca-Cola went and changed their formula in the eighties. If you want 19 50s— style Coke, add some bloody sugar to it. Besides, John, you seemed to like it.»

They sipped in silence for a minute, and then Vanessa said to John, «Ryan says you think he's gay.»

«Well?» Obviously she didn't.

«He's my boyfriend, John.» She took a sip of her drink. «Mine's a Diet Coke, but I mixed sugar in with it. It has a really perverse taste.» John stared her down. «I love Ryan, and he loves me.»

«I love my friend Ivan, but I don't date him.»

«Oh, shut up. Eros. Agape. Sex. Friendship. All of that. I'm not dense.»

«You mean there's some eros in there?»

Vanessa's eyes glinted, but she said nothing. «Well, it's not like Tarzan and Jane, but it's real. He's genuine about me. »

John bit an ice cube. «You're obviously the Nurse Crandall type. You know, Nurse Crandall lets down her hair and Dr. Hunnicutt says, “Nurse Crandall, good God but you're gorgeous. I had no idea.” »

«That would be me.» She looked out the window. «Ryan's car's here. We didn't have this chat, okay?»

Ryan walked in and the trio was off to Long Beach. Ryan leaned in between the driver's seat and the front passenger seat and said to John, «If you want to talk about Susan with Vanessa, go right ahead. She's totally cool.»

«Thank God,» said John, embarrassed.

«Susan Colgate was an idol for me, John,» said Vanessa. «You know, the role she used to play on TV — the smart daughter finding meanings and patterns in this nutty world. It's like my own family.»

John said, «I know what you mean. I have this feeling like she's got my keys. You know, like she knows my combination even though I can't get it right.»

«That's what Vanessa does for a living,» Ryan said. «At Rand. She finds meanings and patterns. Combinations.»

«What's your specialty?» asked John.

«Like Ryan said, I'm a finder.»

«A finder ?»

«Just what it sounds like. Ever since I was a kid, if something got lost, people came to me to find it for them. I'm able to locate things. I ask questions. I look at data. I make connections. And then I find what's lost.»

«Bullshit.»

«My my, a naysayer — how quaint.» Vanessa took on the charged aura of an ATM about to feed forth large quantities of cash.

«Give him an example,» said Ryan.

«Fair enough. Let's talk about you, John Lodge Johnson, born November 5, 1962, Miraflores Locks, Panama Canal Zone. You have one undescended testicle and you smoked Kent cigarettes heavily between the years 1983 and 1996. You've been questioned but never charged in a dozen assorted narcotics investigations since 1988. You're right-handed, but you use your left hand for throwing baseballs and masturbating. As of two years ago, you owed the IRS just over 11.3 million dollars, which was repaid eight months ago after a complete liquidation of your assets, as well as a cleansing of your bank accounts, two of which, in Davos, Switzerland, you didn't think the IRS knew about, but they did, and you're lucky you revealed their existence or they would taken a fork and dug out your undescended testicle and eaten it for lunch. You blood type is O, and your IQ is 128. You've been prescribed over thirty different psychoactive pharmaceuticals in the past decade, invariably obtained with overlapping prescriptions throughout Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties. You're heterosexual but have done three-ways with guys a few times, only at the request of the present female. Months ago, before your much publicized vanishing, you attempted to transfer all of your copyrights and future royalties to the Ronald McDonald House, but thanks to your friend Ivan, the courts rejected the transfer and instead set up a trust, which will soon be convening to evaluate your mental fitness, restoring to you a whack of dough you had seriously thought was gone forever. I'd send Ivan a fruit basket, John Lodge Johnson.»

John was mute.

«Isn't she great?» said Ryan.

«You want more?» Vanessa said. «Almost ninety-five percent of your phone calls go to either New York or California. Your monthly consumption of phone sex averaged ninety-five hundred dollars across the years dating from 1991 up to your vanishing. If you've made a sex call since, I have yet to know about it. Your single most frequently dialed number is that of celebrity madam Melody Lanier of Beverly Hills, who, I bet you didn't know, has recurring bouts of malaria and who also lost her left baby toe in a Vespa crash in Darwin, Australia, in 1984. Nobody avoids the scrutiny of I, Vanessa Humboldt. There. Ta-da! »

«Melody is not my madam. And you're a monster.»

«Don't be so thick. It's all out there. You just have to know where to look.»

«She's good, eh?» said Ryan. «She could find you an abortionist in Vatican City.»

«If it makes you feel any better, I'm not creative. I leave that to my boy genius here.» She patted Ryan's knee.

Quickly the car off-ramped, and Vanessa pulled into the front of a sterile blue mirrored-glass cube, a large laboratory building surrounded by a dense putting-green lawn. «We're here,» she announced. «This is the office where a certain weasel named Gary Voors cheated me out of a few grand in freelance research commissions.»

«She got hosed,» said Ryan.

«Fifteen grand. But I did some research on him and this company and it's doubtful I'll ever get my dough. My mistake. I should have checked their financial patterns beforehand. Come on, now — out of the car.»