Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma

Karen spoke again: "Oh! I just remembered! Jared was there last night! In the vision—he was! So maybe it's not a real vision of the future, but a vision of what might be—a warning, like the ghost of Christmas Future."

"Well, maybe." I didn't like hearing Jared's name, though I didn't let on. The chairlift then lurched forward a few feet, the lights flickered on, then stopped. The world was dark stillness again.

"But you know what, Richard?"

"What?"

She caught herself. "Nothing. Oh, never mind, Beb. I think I'm tired of talking about this." She reached into her jacket. "Here. I want you to hold onto this envelope for me. Don't open it. Just hold onto it for me overnight. Give it back to me tomorrow.""Huh?" I looked at the Snoopy envelope with the word "Richard" Magic-Markered on its front in her maddeningly girlish, rounded-sloped, daisy-adorned handwriting. Her handwriting was actually the subject of an argument the two of us had a month previously. I'd asked her why she couldn't write "normally." Idiot!

Karen watched me look at the handwriting. "Normal enough for you, Richard, you daring nonconformist, you?" I stashed the envelope in my down jacket's pocket and then the chairlift jumped into motion again.

"Remember—tomorrow you give it back to me, no questions asked."

"It's a done deal." I kissed her.

The chairlift started with another lurch, causing Karen to drop her pack of Number 75 from her lap. She cursed, and instantly the mountain was again electrically lit with energy from the great dams of northern British Columbia. The skiers on the slopes below whooped, as though whooping for energy itself; our moment was lost. Karen said, "Look—there's Wendy and Pam." She deafened me by shouting instructions to Wendy to meet at the Grouse Nest in half an hour; she asked Pam to rescue her dropped pack of cigarettes, now many chairs behind us.

Our intimacy reduced, we quickly and soundlessly chairlifted up the Blueberry Chair's slope while Karen discussed plans for the rest of the night. "Look, there's Donna Kilbruck now. Arf Arf!"

I thought of Jared.

Jared was a friend of ours, as well as my best friend while growing up. In high school, Jared and I had drifted apart, as can happen with friends made early in life. He became a football star and our lives increasingly had less and less in common. He was also the biggest male slut I've ever known. Girls would hurl themselves at him and he was always there to catch. While Jared was definitely inside the winner's circle humping himself silly, I, on the other hand, seemed to be on a vague loser track. We still got along fine, but it felt comfortable only back in our own neighborhood and away from the high school's intricate popularity rituals. Jared's family lived around the corner from mine, up on St. James Place. One hot afternoon during a game at Handsworth Secondary, Jared simply keeled over and was wheeled off to Lions Gate Hospital. A week later, he'd lost his gold curls; two months later, he weighed less than a scarecrow; three months later he was … gone.

Did we ever really recover from the loss? I'm not sure. I had been, in a way, Jared's "official friend," and thus many of the consoling stares and words came my way, which I hated. All of the girls who once mooned over Jared began mooning over me—Jared's sex energy still filled the air—but I wasn't about to take advantage of the opportunity and emulate his life of sluttery. I acted stoic when in fact I was angry and scared and sad. Jared had thought of us as best friends before he died, but we really weren't. I'd made other friends. I felt guilty, disloyal. The next year was spent not talking about Jared, pretending that everything was proceeding as normal, when it wasn't.

I was quiet in the gondola descending the mountain while Karen was lightly bantering with Wendy and Pam. Our skis were strapped together and faintly clacked. Karen and I were transformed from the two who had gondola'ed up just hours earlier. Lilting and swooping across the gondola's middle tower, we looked at the lights of Vancouver before the 1980s had its way with the city—an innocent, vulnerable, spun-glass kingdom. We tried to spot our houses, which twinkled across the Capilano River inside our sober, sterile mountain suburb.

I felt faraway as I then looked underneath the gondola at the white angel-food snowpack and the black granite that poked out from within it. I had the sensation that I was from some other world and had fallen onto Earth like a meteorite. Instead of being an earthling I had crash-landed here—Ka-thunkkk!—and my life on Earth was an accident. First-time gondola riders and fraidy-cats tittered and screamed as our gondola swooned downward. I looked at Karen, with her head resting atop her ski poles. She had the extra pulse of beauty people have when they know they're being fondly admired.

The gondola moored at the base; we clomped to my Datsun B-210, where we removed the plastic anchors of our ski boots and luxuriated in the freedom of recently unfurled toes. We hopped into the car and drove to a party we had been warned might be a house-wrecker—up to a winding suburban street on the mountain of West Vancouver. It was a party where a now forgotten teen of questionable popularity had been left minding the house while parents gambled away in Las Vegas.

And indeed the party was a grand house-wrecker—larger than any of us had seen to date. We arrived around 10:00 P.M., and the Datsun was one of dozens of cars parked up and down Eyremont Drive. Teenagers leaped out of cedar hedges and spruce shrubberies like protons, their beer boxes clutched under knobby jean-jacketed arms, bottles inside carrying imprisoned genies offering just one last wish.

From all directions came the sound of excited voices and smashing bottles. Silhouettes of teens sparkled atop broken bottles lit by streetlights. Several of us were just arriving from Grouse Mountain. I heard a hiss—my friend, Hamilton—my own personal patron saint of badly folded maps, damp matches, low-grade pornography, bad perms, tetracycline, and borrowed cigarettes. He beckoned me from inside a hedge of laurels just ahead of the parked car, hissing, "Richard, drag your butt in here."

I complied, and inside I found a branchy wigwam rife with headache-inducing Mexican pot of the weakest caliber. Roughly ten of Hamilton's drug buddies were toking furiously. In no mood for a headache, I said, "Jesus, Ham—it smells like an egg fart inside a subway car. Come out and meet me and the girls. Where's Linus?"

"Down at the party. I'll be out in a minute. Dean, please, pass me those Zig-Zags."

Back at the car, Karen, Pam, and Wendy were discussing Karen's new diet. I said, "Karen, you're not still hell-bent on starvation, are you?"

Karen had been obsessed with Hawaii and dieting. "Richard, Beb,

I've just got to be a size five by next week or I won't fit into my new Hawaii swimsuit."Pam, wafer-thin, asked, "Are you still taking diet pills? My mom gives them to me all the time. I refuse."

"Pam," Karen replied, "you know I was raised on pills; Mom's a walking pharmacy. But if I take even one speeder, I spazz out and climb the walls with my teeth." She paused to sweep hair from her eyes. "Most drugs, even vitamins, send me to the Moon. But downers are okay. I take them to cool out. Mom gave me my own bottle." To all of us, this sounded glamorous and wanton.

Wendy, trying to be cooler than she really felt, said, "That'd be just so loser-ish—you know, OD'ing on vitamins," and her quip was met with polite stares.

Pam broke the silence. She was then trying to break into the world of modeling, and she said, "Oh—I was at a shoot yesterday—do you want to know what models sound like when they talk?" We agreed enthusiastically. "Like this," she said, "like Pebbles Flintstone: 'Koo goo koo baa baa baa diet pills goo koo koo.' Promise me that if I ever start talking like that, just pull the plug."