Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma

Wendy asks again how Karen feels. "Woozy—and thirsty, too. Is there lemonade here? I get really thirsty here in 1997. There's a tube in my belly button!" A small kerfuffle explodes in the corridor and Gatorade and a straw are produced from somebody's lunch bag. "My tongue," she says. "It feels like a box of cotton. Linus, can you go get my parents? I don't want them to hear about this over the phone. Can you do that?"

"Sure."

"Good. When they arrive, if I'm asleep, don't wake me up." She pauses. "That sounds sick. Just ask them to wait. I'll be back."

Megan gives Karen a peck on the cheek, then resumes lying against her mother.

Wendy tallies all of Karen's vital signs now. Everything, given the extraordinary conditions, is about as normal as can be. Megan is resting like a papoose against Karen's back. "Look—I got your fingernails," Megan says. "And your hair, too. Well, it's gray now. We'll dye it together. My friend Jenny's really good."

"Why are you dressed in all black?" Karen asks.

Megan now feels immature. She doesn't want to tell her mother that she views herself as Death—the cause of so much darkness. "It's a phase. It's over now."

Linus is on a chair beside the bed, happy. Linus thinks the world is a cruel place, and in his mind he is thinking of the deserts he used to walk through, the endless crappy little small towns and the meanness of the world, and yet here, from nowhere really, blooms a flower. Such moments are so rare, as rare as a ruby plucked from a salmon's guts as he remembers from childhood. That ruby—it had been only a piece of taillight plastic found when gutting the salmon on the docks up at Fender Harbour, but to Linus it was a ruby.

Karen attempts to stay awake and savor her new consciousness.She is glad to have friends nearby and her magical daughter talking beside her. The staff have been shooed away, and among the four in the room, a tension exists—a sense of giddiness shared by all, giddiness from having witnessed an emotional reawakening not unlike the thawing of Niagara Falls, the sheaths of ice calving off the shale in thick, glorious blocks. The people in the room feel enchanted— chosen.

"We're going to have to move you as soon as possible, Karen. The media's changed quite a bit since 1979 and we don't want them vul-turing around you." Wendy makes a phone call. "Yes. Full. Normal. Immediately. Yeah. Yeah. Thirty minutes. Just try to do it. Thanks."

Richard is no longer drunk. He is a silver-clad astronaut climbing up a dirt bank, the soil rich and crumbly and moist as canned dog food. He reaches Capilano Road above and then lumbers at a pronounced clip through the roads and the subdivisions, counting the colorful dead fireworks and fragments of pumpkin craniums at his feet. Above him, the sun rises under a sky the color of a navel orange. Tangy. Richard walks along Edgemont Boulevard to Delbrook, then down across the Westview overpass. A taxi driver going off duty slows and asks if he needs a lift, and soon he is at the hospital's front, where the local news vans are parked. Richard's costume in itself has become another unusual sight on what has already been an extraordinary day. He sees a camera crew and press people making a silent scrum toward the elevators. A nurse who has known Richard for over a decade admits him into the elevator. Somebody asks, "Hey, who's her

"It's the boyfriend. Hey, you—boyfriend—what can you tell us?"

Richard exits the elevator on Karen's floor. The nurses recognize him anxiously and hold their breath as he walks down the corridor, silver, powerful and serene, breathing deeply, as an astronaut might well do on a foreign planet. He hears his breath from inside his chest.

He walks in the room and sees Wendy and Linus there. They smile and politely leave the room. Richard kisses Karen on the lips. "Hey, Beb. I'm back," Karen says."Hi, honey. Welcome home," Richard says. "I missed you always." He lowers himself onto his knees before her and kisses her again.

Silence. They stare into each other's eyes with all the intensity of two people in the flush of first love. "They haven't allowed me to look in a mirror, Richard. I know I look like a rat's ass."

"You're beautiful."

"Flatterer. So much for Hawaii."

"I see you met our daughter."

Megan props herself up on an elbow beside her mother. "Hey, Dad."

"Hey, sugar-cakes."

An awkward silence ensues. "This is whacked," Megan says. "Come on. Get up. Hop onboard. There's just enough room."

Richard unzips and removes the top of his astronaut's outfit, which peels away from his body down to his belly button like a chrome banana skin. He climbs onto the bed and Karen becomes a human hot-meat sandwich, a witch on one side, an astronaut on the other. Karen feels as if they are all in a row boat, floating, going someplace new. This is a dream, but it's not. Richard feels as though he has found a vein of gold inside his heart, a klondike of feelings he had thought long buried.

Karen says, "You smell sweaty, Richard."

Richard says, "I walked over here from Cleveland Dam." A pause. "It's a long story."

"We're all tired now, aren't we, gang?" Karen says. "Wanna sleep?"

And they do want to sleep as they realize that they're all tired from walking, from hoping, from waiting, from losing faith and from finding it once more. Richard has his arm under Karen's head. "Yeah, let's go to sleep. It's been so long. And we're tired."

"Look at us," Megan whispers to both Karen and Richard with a happiness she once long ago reserved exclusively for small animals, birthday cake, and roller coasters: "We're a real family. At last. And forever. And I'm not Death anymore, am I, Dad?"Richard whispers back, "No, but you never were."

And the three drift toward sleep.

"And what's with the costumes?" Karen asks almost inaudibly before falling asleep.

"Costumes? What costumes?" Megan and Richard answer in stereo, drifting along with Karen in their boat that will not tip.

Stereo.

Floors away, Hamilton and Pam are now entering new thought cycles. While their brains are too taxed to generate pictures, they are, however, able to hear words, sounds, and music. A choir. Noises as though from heaven: sweet and seductive and lush. Words. Anyone looking at their Intensive Care'd bodies would never know of the concerts akimbo within their minds. Oranges and lemons, say the bells of Saint Clement…

And then, only after this music peaks, do pictures begin to appear—a slide show: a Houston freeway empty save for a car parked here and there; a rain of mud falling on the houses of suburban Tokyo; African veldts on fire; Indian rivers like thick stews, churning corpses and silks oceanward; a time/temperature sign on a Florida Chrysler dealership flashing 00:00/140°.

A nurse on duty, meanwhile, watches the two patients. Something is wrong. Off. Not right. And then the nurse notices it: the two patients are detoxifying in stereo. Their heads twist or nod in sympathy. They jerk together—a rehearsed dance of death. She calls another nurse, who records the action on her brother's VCR-cam that she had meant to return later that afternoon.

A minute or two later, the intensity of Hamilton and Pam's synchronized show begins to involve spastic arm motions and leg jerks Their life signals leap and jag, copies of each other.

And then the dance is over. The patients resume their own individual sleeps, and the videotape is saved for later.

This was not supposed to happen.

Lois navigates the Buick as though it were a cumbersome pleasure craft. Hand in glove, she changes gears. George weeps uncontrollably beside her. The implications of today's hospital visit are so fraught with meaning that the two find themselves unable to communicate save for minor grunts. (Seat belt on? Yes. Okay.) Their hopes have leapfrogged too far ahead of them, and how could their hopes not do so? Just two hours ago they might never have imagined feeling as extreme as they feel now. Linus rang the doorbell shortly after nine. George, puttering in the kitchen, was sipping coffee, wondering which azalea he might prune in the afternoon; Lois lay upstairs in bed, half asleep, idly deciding whether to clean out the Christmas decorations. And then came Linus. They had thought that Karen might be dead—the lung condition. Instead, "Karen's awake, Mr. and Mrs. McNeil, and she's talking normally and everything. She asked for you. I think she wants you to go there."George and Lois had reacted with whitening faces, knotted tongues, and the clotted taste of blood in their throats—each for different reasons. George, receiving the one thing he had truly ever wanted in life, and Lois because she feels a wallop of guilt for having ignored Karen across the many years—having given up all hope and lying to George about having visited her. And Lois remembers that she was the one who wanted to "pull the plug"; Lois is the one who just yesterday asked the hospital for "no heroics—just let her go this time."