Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma

"I feel useless as tits on a board. I sit around all day doing dick-all while everybody else runs around like crazed cartoon characters."

A semi-defeated silence follows. Gloria asks, "Anything else?"

"Seeing as your asking, yes. The world's going to be over soon."

Cut!

"Karen, I— Excuse me a second." Gloria darts outside. An assistant, Jason, comes in to play good cop. He's a slow walker; his eyes have seen something. He doesn't discount the odd and he sees a possible miracle where others see dreck. "Karen," he says, motioning the film crew to keep rolling, "when you say the world's over, what, exactly, do you mean!"

"What I said. I …" There is a pause and a voice speaks, the voice of Karen who was away all these years. "Three days after Christmas. That's when the world goes dark. There's nothing that can be done and there's no escaping. I saw it happen in 1979. By accident, some doors had been left open and I got a peek. I wasn't snooping. I just saw it at the right time. I thought I could sleep my way out of it—I wasn't sure of the date it was going to happen. I wanted to be asleep forever. It's not the same as death, but it's the only way we have to escape time. That's what makes us different from every other creature in the world—we have time. And we have choices."

Jason is quiet. The camera still rolls. Richard, Pam, and Wendywatch. In the lull, they can hear Gloria's voice saying, "What am I supposed to do when she keeps shutting down and spouting claptrap. Does she not have the word 'retake' in her vocabulary?"

"Gloria, she's been in a coma for twenty years almost. People expect her to be odd."

"I can't believe we lost the tear shot."

Jason says, "Are there any details you can give, Karen. Places? names? Is it a bomb or is it—"

"It's sleep. Nearly everybody falls asleep and then they go. It's painless. Where do you live?"

"New York."

"You'll go. Gloria goes. Everybody there goes."

"And this doesn't make you sad?"

"It hasn't happened yet. I won't know until it's over."

"What about you and your family and friends. Don't you worry for them?"

"There's nothing I can do to help them one way or another. All of this was decided a long, long time ago. And I don't know specifically who lives and who doesn't. So I can't tell you people, really, I can't."

"And you?"

"Me? I get to live. I know that for sure." Karen seems to have no more to say on this subject.

Jason's face is thoughtful. "Thanks for telling me this."

"I might as well." And then Karen wakes up while still asleep. She startles: "Wha—?—I spaced out again there. I dreamed I was telling you the world was going to shut down."

"A dream?"

"No. Not really. I suppose not."

Karen feels release and confusion. She knows that her words have annoyed the Americans and baffled—perhaps even slightly frightened—her friends.

She knows that she is in the center of some sort of mass transformation—one larger than just her mere reawakening. But how big will this change be? Miracles always have limits. When one is granted wishes, one is granted only three wishes—not four or five or ten. What will be the limits here?

Karen feels trapped inside the biggest déjà vu in the world. Her behavior seems preordained, like a queen who spends her day cutting ribbons, judging flower shows, and overseeing state dinners—all of these activities preordained. And she has decided, somewhere between her co-interview with Megan and the camera crews' taping the two of them hobbling down Rabbit Lane, that she'll try and play it dumb about her on-camera statements of impending doom. Already she is detecting that Richard and Wendy think her comments might be evidence of incipient madness. Oh God.

She misses running and she misses her hair and she misses being normal, being absorbed by the crowd. She has decided that the best way for her to go through life is for her to view even her smallest actions and gestures as coincidental, charged, and miraculous. It was the way she remembered life felt at the age of sixteen and it is a way she is determined to re-create.

Beef south/chicken north.

The night of the TV shoot, Karen goes to bed almost immediately, thus precluding any discussion of what she had told Gloria and then Jason. She is still asleep when Richard leaves for work the next day. During the day, when he calls home, there is no answer—Christmas shopping. He phones Wendy at her office and the two of them convene at Park Royal for coffee, where dispirited Christmas mall music serenades their baffled conversation. Wendy stirs the sugar in her coffee thirty times and says, "I think that Karen's memory and thought processes maybe aren't as clear as we'd hoped for, Richard. Are you scared—about going south?"

Richard, obligated to visit Los Angeles, says yes. He leaves on the twenty-seventh and returns on the twenty-eighth.

"Can't you go some other time?"

"No. We're behind schedule as it is. Besides, it's so preposterous. If I stay home, I'll only reinforce whatever fantasy or phobia it is Karen's going through." He bites a muffin. "It is fantasy, right?"

"Who's to say? It's like those cartoons of guys with long beards holding a sign on a street corner saying THE END IS NEAR; there's always a little part of you that wonders, what if? Yeah, it's spooky. Have you spoken about this with her yet?"

"No. It's been crazy. I will tonight. Holidays throw everything intoa mess. But one question, Wendy, if you were me, would you go?"

"I'd probably go, too."

Later that evening, Richard and Karen have their first real fight, which colors the entire next week. "The twenty-eighth is not going to be a good day, Richard."

"Karen you can't just say, 'Oh, something awful's going to happen.' You have to tell me why. You have to tell me what you know. And why."

Karen sighed. "What about trust?"

"Karen, whether or not I believe you on this particular issue has nothing to do with whether or not I love or trust you. Karen—look at it from my point of view."

"How do you explain what Wendy told us about Pam and Hamilton in the hospital—their stereo freak-outs?"

"I can't."

"Doesn't that note I gave you back before my coma mean anything?"

"Of course it does."

"The fact that I'm on TV on the twenty-seventh doesn't sway you? You can't stay here for moral support?"

"It's bad luck. I'll watch it down there. I'll watch it on speaker-phone with you."

"So you're still going to go?"

"I will—unless you can get a helluva lot more specific about what's going to happen and when. The sleep thing doesn't cut it."

"Richard, I want to be able to tell you. I'm not being a cow and keeping something away from you on purpose. There are these background voices I hear. The only time they became clear was on film with Gloria."

Richard looks at her as calmly as he can, worrying that something is going wrong with Karen after her miraculous wake-up. "It's only for one day, Karen. One piddly little overnight; I promised the office

I'd do it months ago. They're not going to be able to find someone to go instead of me during Christmas week."

"What are you doing there that's so important?"Richard then feels he is arguing with a teenager. "I have to go over sets and budgets with the crew down there. It has to be done and it has to be done in person."

"Whatever."

"Please don't whatever me."

"Whatever."

In spite of tensions, a truce is called and Christmas and the engagement party continue as planned. It is a day of small gifts and gentle surprises. Megan hand-made a roomful of decorations using construction paper and silver hearts. The windows are slightly steamed and the air is tinged with eggnog. Pam and Wendy boo-hoo shamelessly over the toasts, and even crusty old Hamilton has a lumpy throat while Linus seems concerned about the structural integrity of the meringue cake.