Douglas Coupland - Miss Wyoming

Randy hugged Susan tightly. She held him away from her and looked deeply into his eyes: «We're going to get through this okay, Randy. We've been having babies for a trillion years. This isn't something new. Let's just breathe and play it cool. Here …» Susan straightened out some blankets. «We're going to do just fine.»

«Does it hurt?» Randy asked. «I've got some Vicodins left over from my root canal.»

«I'll take them.»

Randy ran into the bathroom and fetched them and some towels. Back in the living room Susan was screaming, «This is it, Randy!»

The next twenty minutes were wordless. They became a grunting, shouting push-me—pull-you animal team, and a baby boy finally emerged in a squalling pink lump. Susan held him up to her chest and Randy severed the umbilical cord. All three of them cried, and by sunrise, they were asleep in the wreckage of the living room.

That morning Randy phoned in and quit his job. He had become privy to some, but not all, of the details of Susan Colgate's precrash and postcrash life. By the afternoon he had the living room pieces hauled away. He ordered a vanload of groceries and baby furniture. He emptied his bank accounts. He stripped Susan's car of Indiana plates and replaced them with fakes he bought from a junkyard. He had momentum. The action made him thrive. He didn't feel like Randy Montarelli anymore. He felt like … Well, he wasn't sure yet who or what he felt like. That would come. But within the week he'd thrown away many of his clothes and knickknacks and photos and things that to him reeked of the old Randy — sweaters he wore out of duty to the relatives who joylessly gifted him with them every year; drugstore colognes purchased not because he liked their scent but so as not to inflame redneck strangers with overly exotic aromas; his high school ring, which he kept because it seemed the only piece of jewelry he'd ever have earned the right to wear. He also began legal proceedings to change his surname to Hexum, something he'd always wanted to do but had never found the will to act on.

Randy had been offered this one doozy of a chance to rewrite himself, and he wasn't going to blow it. He'd kill for Susan and little Eugene if need be, and he hoped that in the near future Susan might go into further details on what she hinted was a plan for leaving Erie. In the meantime, Susan spent much of the first month either crying or locked in silence. Randy didn't push her. And the thought of Randy phoning somebody to announce this Bethlehemical miracle was out of the question. This was something for him alone: no mocking relatives or evil coworkers and chatterboxes from his model railway club allowed.

«Randy,» Susan said, «why bother reading those infant care books? Any kid of mine is going to be tough as nails. His genes are made of solid titanium.»

«We want the baby to be a god, Susan. We want him to glow. He has to be raised with care.»

Whether to alert the authorities to the birth was not an issue. In Susan's mind, Eugene Junior wasn't to enter the public realm. He was to be unknown to the world and protected from its stares and probes and jabs. «Especially,» said Susan, whenever Randy broached the subject, «from my mother. »

The more Randy had Susan and Eugene Junior to himself, the happier he was. He was a born provider, and now he had been blessed with souls for whom to care.

Late one night in her fourth week in Erie, the trio was watching TV — an old episode of Meet the Blooms . Eugene was clamped onto Susan's left breast. The TV's volume was low. On the screen was an episode in which Mitch, the eldest child, develops a cocaine habit for exactly one episode. Susan watched the TV as if it were an aquarium, garnering neither highs nor lows — just a constant dull hum.

A log in the fireplace burst aglow with new vigor. «Do you ever miss Chris?» Randy asked.

«Chris? I barely ever think of him, the old poofter.»

Randy's eyes goggled. «Poofter? You mean — no shagging ?»

«Good Lord, no. I mean, I like Chris now, but at the beginning we were about as close to each other as you'd be, say, to some FedEx guy dropping an envelope off at Reception. Well, that's behind us now, isn't it? Far, far away.» She drained her glass.

«But those pictures,» said Randy, «and all those stories that were in the tabloids week in, week out — ‘Chris and Sexy Sue's Hawaiian Love Romp' — big burly Chris with the scratch marks on his back. I saw them.»

«Those scratch marks? His masseur, Dominic. I was over in Honolulu getting blepharoplasty on my eyes.»

«Your tat too — it said,CHRIS ALWAYS .» Randy's disillusionment was growing more vocal. «But then I guess I didn't see it when Eugene was being born.»

«No, you didn't. I had it done for a Paris Match photo shoot. It was laser-removed in 1996.» Susan stood up, shook her head as though her hair were wet, then positioned her body to meet Randy's full on. «Randy, look at me, okay? It's all lies, Randy. All of it. Not just me. Chris. Them. Whoever. Everybody. Everything you read. It's all just crap and lies and distortions. All of it. Lies. That's what makes the lies you spread so funny, Randy. They're honest lies.»

The baby snored. A tape that had been spinning in the VCR without playing hit the end of the reel and made a thunk. Susan tried to change her tone. «Having said that, Randy, tell me, what's the big lie of the day?»

Randy chuckled. «Whitney Houston.»

«Oh dear .»

«It's true.»

«About her left foot.»

«What about her left foot?» Susan played along.

«You haven't heard?»

«Break it to me.»

«It's pretty weird.»

«Just tell me!»

«Cloven hoof.»

«Oh Randy .»

After shooting her Japanese TV commercial in Guam («Hey team — let's Pocari !»), Susan arrived back in Los Angeles fresh with the knowledge that the network had decided not to renew Meet the Blooms . Larry was in Europe, and he spent hours on the phone with Susan, reassuring her that her promising career had barely yet begun.

She threw a duty-free bag filled with folded Japanese paper cranes into a cupboard. She waited three weeks to unpack her luggage from the trip. She took long baths and spoke only to Larry until she visited her First Interstate branch and learned that her long-term savings account, into which she'd been regularly depositing good sums for years, was empty.

Her lawyer was in an AIDS rehab hospice and unable to help her, and her accountant had recently left town in the wake of savings and loan scandals, so Larry hired new and expensive lawyers and accountants. They did a forensic audit of Susan's life, and after months of document wrangling, playing peekaboo with receptionists and marathon phone tag, Susan learned that Marilyn had, quite legally, soaked up and then dissipated Susan's earnings — Marilyn who had been little more than a duty visit once a month up in Encino.

«One of my numerology clients was a child star,» said Dreama, then living on her own in North Hollywood. «He got fleeced, too. The government has the what — the Coogan Law now, don't they? I thought the system was rigged so that parents couldn't swindle the kids' loot anymore.»

Susan, heavily sedated, called Dreama frequently during this period. She murmured, «Dreama, Dreama, Dreama — all you have to do is come home late from a shoot wired with about three hundred Dexatrims, sign one or two documents buried within a pile of documents, and you've signed it all away.»

«You two must have talked …»

«Battled.»

«What does she say? I mean …»