Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma

Her voice! She's back! George blubbers while smooching Karen's cheeks, oblivious to the scene he creates. "Hi Dad." George is lost to emotion, as Karen smiles and raises happy eyebrows over George's shoulders toward Lois. Karen winks. It is hard for Karen to be sentimental, because in her mind she has only had a quick nap since 1979.

Richard awakens just then. "Hi, George. Oh. Excuse me. Here. Oh. Let me move out of the way and down off this thing. Lois. Hi—" Richard clambers off, the top part of his silver astronaut suit dragging behind him like a beaver tail. George hugs Richard. Lois, meanwhile, has stayed away from the bed. Her purse is clutched to her chest. She comes nearer. She locks eyeballs with her daughter.

"Hey, MOOT." Karen says.

There is a silence. "Hello, Karen." Another silence. "Welcome back." Lois gives Karen a small kiss.George and Richard shut up. Karen sees that time has done little to alter her mother. Some gray hair here, a wrinkle there—the posture and voice are timeless. "You look as good as ever, Mom," Karen says.

"Thank you, dear." Lois has not visited Karen for almost a year now. She is finding it hard to overlook Karen's deterioration. "Can you eat now, sweetie? Are you hungry?" The old food games have begun already. "I brought an owl figurine to cheer you up."

"Thanks." It's as if seventeen years have never happened.

Megan touches her mother, holds her neck and rubs it with her hands. Karen's gray hair is limp and sad and has been cut with blunt scissors; Megan holds it to her nose and the hair smells dusty and sweet. All her life Megan has felt jinxed, that people around her would come to bad ends. Richard, too, has felt the same way for years, though neither of them knew it of the other. Megan has been dressing in black for so long now, and has been chasing an early death; it seemed only fitting—the drugs, the fearsome boyfriends, and the fast cars. Why would anybody miss her? Richard—whoops Dad—might miss her, but then he'd most likely go drink himself into the center of the Earth to forget her. That's unfair. He did quit drinking for real. But then didn't he fob her off on Lois and George? Lois—glad to have me out of her hair. George? George is nice, but he's always liked Karen better.

Megan soon accompanies Richard, Lois, George, Wendy, and Linus into another room. The hallways have been cleared. Wheels squeak. It's quiet.

The group arrives at a new, larger room. Inside, Uncle Hamilton and Aunt Pam are already there, conked out in separate beds, resembling dead extras in a sci-fi movie. Drugged out losers, Megan thinks, but then she reminds herself that she really has no right to condemn on that front. Where does this judgmental streak come from? Megan decides she's going to go straight edge: She's never going to do a drug ever again. Even aspirin. She is going to be the mother that Karen never had. She is going to protect her—keep her smart, make herwhole. And then Megan remembers why she is even at the hospital: last night with Skitter on the mattress in Yale's basement, a pot dealer friend of Skitter. She'd told Linus that the morning-after pill was for her friend, Jenny, but it wasn't. Megan knows that she is pregnant. It was meant to be.

"I want them all in the same room because they'll all give each other intentive to get well."

Pam and Hamilton hear Wendy's voice and open their fogged eyes to see white curtains. They hear background snatches of other voices. Hamilton's throat hacks up a clump of blood-phlegm; Wendy, standing beside him says poker-faced, "Welcome back to prime time, douche bag."

"Wendy? Ooh. Ahh. I feel like a paper sack of burning dog shit. What time is it?"

"Time to change your life, you screwed-up junkie."

"Hamilton—are you there?" calls Pam.

"Assuming we're not dead, yes, dear. What time is it, Wendy? Where are we? What are we doing here?" Lifting his head feels like lifting a swarm of hornets,

"It's Sunday, kids. And you are both in the hospital. You're here for emergency supernumerary mammectomies."

"Super what*."

"We're removing your third nipples."

" What? Ow! Don't talk like that, Wendy."

"Hospital humor. It's my style—oh and don't give me that little wounded look: 'Ooh, I'm so surprised.' You came one eyelash close to death, you bastard." She walks over and looks into Hamilton's eyes and then slaps him gently.

"Ow, shit, Wendy, whaddya do that for? You screwed up a fantastic high. I was on a roll last night."

"Why? You were almost dead last night, scuzz bucket." Wendy approaches Pam in the bed to the left and pecks her on the forehead. "You both scared the hell out us. You're too old to be so pathetic doing junk. I don't need to be friends with junkie losers. And having said that, I want you to sit up and have a look across the room."

Pam says, "My head hurts, I—"

"Just look, you two losers."

With two push-button controls, Wendy elevates Pam and Hamilton's backrests, then opens the curtains, allowing them to see Richard and Karen across the room; Richard is holding Karen's arm, wagging it back and forth, and the two of them are making faces. Karen is wearing a shirt Lois brought along with her—the same Levi's shirt she wore in high school: rough cotton, embroidered parakeets.

George and Lois and Megan are parked on stools, and Lois looks furious, first at Wendy and then at Hamilton: "Wendy, I don't think there's anything useful to come of having two … drug addicts in the room. They're the worst possible influence, and just look at Hamilton. What a dreadful sight to wake up to after seventeen years. There must be some sort of rule about this."

"Lois," Wendy says, "I had to pull a whack of strings to get them all in here. You think this was easy?"

"But they're so … ugh."

"Once more, Lois, it will be good for them to be together. They all need support."

"Oh, God. This is a hallucination," says Hamilton.

"Hi, Hamilton," Karen says. "Who'd you take to the prom?"Pam, not fully clicked in to the tableau across the room, pipes up and hears the voice—Karen is back from McDonald's. "Karen? You're herel"

"Hi kids," says Karen. "How was grad? I missed it. As you know."

"Oh, oh—you wouldn't believe it; Hamilton took Cindy Webber. A computer date. I went with Raymond Merlis."

"No!"

"Yes, and—"

"I did not have a computer date," Hamilton interjects.

"Oh shut your gob. No one would take you."

"Did Raymond remove Keith for the night?" Keith is their name for the single strand of wiry hair growing from a mole on Raymond Merlis's face.

Instantly, Pam and Karen relapse into their older, younger selves, like exotic birds chattering in a mango tree. Pam tries to step out of bed and stumbles toward Karen, but her body aches and she's unable to stand up. Her knees buckle. The activated granulated charcoal given to her earlier seems to have sunk like ball bearings into her lower colon. Hamilton, meanwhile, is nauseated and feels as though he's lying on a dock in choppy weather. He vomits Halloween chocolate and dead martinis into a bedside bucket while his muscles spasm and he feels the onset of scorch-and-burn diarrhea.

"Just so you know, Kare," Pam says, "Keith came, too."

"Wendy," Lois barks. "This is revolting. They're sick. I really must protest."

"Sickness is part of life, Lois."

"Mi scusa, everybody—" Pam begins to sweat and clam; her anxiety is escalating. Hamilton is already desperate for a fix, Pam not quite so, but soon she will be. "You can't say we're dull."

In the background Lois is saying, "Very well then, Doctor Chernin. I'm going to call my lawyer. George? Call my lawyer."

"Lois, be quiet," says George.

Karen has been awake a few days and has had some rare time alone with her thoughts. The first two days were such a circus that she hadto ask Wendy to lock everybody out of the room save for Mom, Dad, Richard, and Megan.