Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma

She grabs her breath. "So you ask me how do / feel? I feel lazy. And slow. And antique. And I'm scared of all these machines. I shouldn't be, but I am. I'm not sure I completely like the new world."

Hamilton's jaws clench and Karen sees this. "I know—you want me to say how great everything is now, but I can't. It's pretty clear to me that life now isn't what it ought to have become."

They drive past the Cypress exit, the Westmount exit, and the Caulfield exit. Pam coughs in the backseat, a cough like two thick steaks flapping against each other, and Hamilton reacts: "Jesus, Pam—honk those things into a Baggie and maybe we can fry them up for dinner."

"Ha."

More mountains and ocean. "I think I know what you mean," Hamilton says. "If you look at the world as a whole, we have to admit life's good here where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a bohemia or a creative underworld to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag—or a life of crime, or even religion. And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what… death') There's nothing. There's no way out now." A pulp mill up the fjord of Howe Sound stains the sky with an ash-white glaze. Hamilton asks, "What about the people you know—Richard, Wendy, Pam, and me? What changes have you noticed in all of us?"

"You mean friends and family?"

"Yeah."

Karen tells him only the palatable half of the Story. "The thing I'm noticing is that nobody's really changed in seventeen years; they're simply amplified versions of themselves. Mom is as … er … regulatory as ever. Dad's nice but weird. Richard is still earnest and a cutie-pie and he tries so hard. You're still a brat. Pam's quietly beautiful. Linus is still on Mars. Wendy may be a doctor and everything, but in her head she's still handing in essays and getting A's. Everybody's become, yeah—more like themselves."

The car hums, and they look at the mountains and the city. "Remember when we went to Future Shop to buy a camera?" Karen asks. The others nod. "Did you see the categories they had there for their products? 'Simulation'; 'Productivity'; 'Games.' I mean, what kind of world is this? And please tell me what's happened to time! Nobody has time anymore. What's the deal? Shit. Now I'm in a bad mood." Lowering the window allows into the Jeep the faint industrial fart smell of a pulp mill. Karen retreats behind her sunglasses. She doesn't tell Hamilton that she had expected people to be grown up at the age of thirty-four. Instead, they seem at best insular and without a central core, which might give purpose to their lives.

Hamilton talks: "And what of your lovely daughter, Megan?"

Karen smiles: "Isn't she the coolest, Ham? So strong. So sure of herself. Imagine being so together at seventeen—wow." She pauses: "Well, in a way I am seventeen. So maybe I can be as cool as her, too. Yes."

"I think you're going to have to be older," Pam says from the backseat, talking through a yawn. "People are expecting you to be wise after all that sleep. To most people you're not seventeen anymore—you're one thousand years old."

It's true. People treat Karen as though she can sense not only color, smells, and sound, but something else—something rich and sublime and far beyond color. She has this subtle feeling people are a touch jealous of this. What frustrates her, too, is that she knows she's seen things, but these things are locked away and unreachable.

Megan now has morning sickness and wonders how much longer she can keep her secret. She avoids nearly all her old friends and lives at

Richard's condo, essentially alone, since Richard spends most of his time with Karen or at work. She likes the solitude; she's too young tounderstand the throbbing weight of loneliness. She has tossed out most of her old Goth clothing and now favors a pared-down, somewhat athletic look. She has also dropped out of school and works part-time with Linus; she'd like to work there full-time someday once her baby is in day care.

For lack of peers, Megan is reduced to having to speak with adults. Megan can't believe that she actually wants to speak with Lois. A good rousing fight would be fun. Karen ("Bio-Mom") is great, if not slightly clued out (Well, she did miss two decades). But there remains an awkwardness between them. A jealousy? Emotionally, they are both the same age; both need attention from Richard, Lois, and the others. Yet on some deeper level they just don't connect. They're too much the same and each poses a form of competition to the other. They're wary.

Blond walnuts; a blush; a smile before she closed the door.

It's a rainy day: Karen and Wendy sit in Wendy's kitchen discussing a small party soon to be held on the day after Christmas—a party celebrating Karen and Richard's engagement. The ceremony is to be small: immediate friends and family only. No dates allowed; no strangers. There isn't too much to plan, so it's fun for Karen and Wendy to arrange things. Wendy's life is so stressful; she enjoys having a girly-girl break. A dress? That's Pam's department. Food? Endive with cream cheese, prosciutto and melon. "What happened to food?" Karen asks. "Food used to come in a box or a can. Now there's dozens of everything and it's all so fresh."

Their coffee cups run low. God bless NutraSweet. There is a pause at the end of their chat, a pause that indicates that a change in conversational gears is now possible.

"Wendy," Karen asks while looking out the window at some of Linus's old monsters standing beside the garage, "have you ever noticed— Wait." Another pause. "Have you ever noticed our lives are maybe …"

"Maybe what'?" Wendy's tone of voice almost says, Please don't. Please don't talk about this."Well, I mean, I know my waking up was like a million-to-one shot. And I can't explain that, but even still—"

"But even still what?"

"Well, we all seem to have more … not coincidences—more like spooky things in our lives than most people do. I mean, don't we?"

Wendy's reply is dry and therapeutic: "When did you start feeling this?"

"The day I woke up. That's a good start: We all ended up at the hospital that day. What are the odds of that? And I'm noticing that we all ended up returning to the same old neighborhood like so much undeliverable mail. I bet we probably couldn't escape Rabbit Lane even if we tried."

Wendy's unsure where to go with this. "So you think this all means something more, do you? Something big?"

"Yeah." Karen pours more coffee, eager to do such a mundane task with her new stronger arms. The liquid shakes. "Then there's these visions I've had."

"Oh?"

"Wendy, listen up. I'm serious. You're a doctor. Listen." Karen tells Wendy of the images she saw, how she believes it was no accident that she went into a coma in 1979. Karen then asks, "Haven't you ever seen anything weird that wasn't real life, but wasn't a dream either?"

Wendy enters a form of trance. "I…" She pauses. "I saw Jared. Years ago. He came and talked to me. Back when I was lonely, back before Linus and I were married. He'd told me I wouldn't be lonely forever. He said he was doing what he could. He was real; he was there. I was in love with him back in high school. You knew that, right? Even now I'm still in love with Jared. In my own way. Of course, I love Linus, too. Oh, these feelings are complex."

"We all knew about you and Jared," Karen says. "The worst kept crush in school. But he was such a dog, Wen—I mean, he'd hump anything in a bra like he was a Great Dane going at the sofa."

"But Jared wasn't just a crush. I was in love with him. I've never doubted that. Ever." Wendy remembers what had really happened—the sleepover with Jared's older sister, Laura, walking into the sauna while looking for soap, opening the door to find Jared naked, eyes closed, his butt roasting on the cedar. She remembers the brief second (a second and a half?) before Jared knew she was there, the smell of salt air in her lungs and Jared's skin melting like cake frosting, his balls like two blond walnuts, his member turgid, and the embarrassment afterward, slamming the door shut. She remembers avoiding Jared's eyes for weeks afterward, blushing if she even saw him far down the school's corridors. And then came October 14, 1978, the day Jared snuck up behind Wendy and whispered, See you after the game. Meet me in the parking lot. I've got a bag of candy to give you. And then came the collapse on the football field followed by the thousand passionate nights that never were to come Wendy's way. And she's never told anybody, because who would believe it? Because she is only Wendy: dutiful, sexless, brainy, and almost a tragedy (in her father's eyes) had Linus not happened along. Romantic beauty is for others. She wonders if she entered medicine only so that she might see naked men's bodies with impunity. This thought frightens her.