Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma

The breeze changes direction. "What's that smell?" Hamilton asks. Already they can smell—the smell. Hamilton says, "Uh-oh—Leakers."

Pam screams and throws a camera at him.

Having returned from her grandparents' condo, Megan feels the need to do something productive. She walks to feed the ostriches at the Lennox house a few doors over. The birds' hungry quacking grows louder as she walks across the wet grass and through the Lennox's cheerfully wreathed front door. In the utility room, she finds sacks of corn piled on top of the washer and dryer. Through the opened upper half of the Dutch door leading into the garage, Megan is unable to see the big birds, and then from the side edge of the garage prance two angry, silly faces with Maybelline eyes. They cluck and bobble, making her smile. They're ravenous; she quickly slits open a sack, opens the door, and drags it into the garage. While the ostriches gobble their meal, she fills a bucket of water from the goldfish pond out back. On returning, the two ostriches peck at Megan's hands, eager to have the water for themselves. Megan is enchanted with these frantic, funny animals and she sits on the garage stoop to enjoy them.

The garage is so grotty, she thinks. These poor creatures haven't seen light for days now. She walks inside the garage to the door, wondering if she can open it just slightly so that light and air can come in through the bottom. Bang! The ostriches run through the Dutch door and enter the house, knocking over chairs and tables, quacking and hissing about the living room, and then head out the front door, which Megan had forgotten to close. Oh shit, she thinks, another rodeo.

She storms out onto the lawn, where the two birds are joyfully bouncing about, fluffing their silly little wings. The ostriches vanish into the forest as surely as they had fallen into a river with weights on their knotty legs.

That night the steady hum of Linus's gas generator offers a false sense of stability with its precise rhythms.

Karen places the paper bag on her head and resumes her visions of events around the world: "Skeletons sitting on plastic seats outside a Zurich Mövenpick restaurant."

"Skeletons? Already?"

"No. It's in the future. Oh—I see an Apple computer smashed on the floor of a Yokohama branch of a Sumi … Sumi … Sumitomo Bank. This is all random stuff. I see … morning glories growing outof an Ecuador sewer line and entwining onto a human femur. I see … five brightly-dressed skiers frozen asleep on their skis on the slopes of Chamonix; a Missouri railway car sidled off its tracks, with millions of scratch 'n' play lottery tickets spilled into an overflowing creek. In Vienna, two teenage girls are entering a bakery and filling their pockets with chocolates. And now … now … there. They've just fallen asleep."

"Can't you focus in on our own specifics, Kare?" asks Wendy. "What about my dad?"

"Give me your hand." Wendy grabs Karen's hand. Karen speaks: He's asleep. On his bed. He had no idea what happened. He was napping and fell asleep while he was sleeping. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah."

The others want to know about their families and bustle toward Karen. Hamilton's father fell asleep on the beach and was pulled out with the tide. His mother in Toronto fell asleep in a downtown shopping arcade. Richard's parents fell asleep in a lineup trying to cross the border. Pam's parents got out of the car and walked across, but only got a half a mile or so into Canada before sleeping. Linus's parents died in a car crash on the highway near Langley.

After a silence, Richard asks, "What about Lois and George?"

"Asleep. Mom in Park Royal and Dad in his shop."

"Oh."

The generator huffs and stutters and kicks out and then back in. The lights flicker. They now feel fragile, and the youthful sense of infinity that got them to this moment in their lives is gone. "Richard, please remove the paper bags from my head. I want all of us to go out for a walk."

"But the rain—"

"What is your point? Get some flashlights and rain gear."

Minutes later, the seven walk through the street, where a rain of stunning proportion turns the sky into a sea. "Look," Pam says, "each drop is like a glass of water." Nobody can remember the last time it rained so hard. Water clobbers them on the head; water renders them deaf. Down the street they march, without lights, Karen inher wheelchair, soaked and sad, down the street until they reach the bottom. Richard says, "Karen, can you tell us what's going on—why we're here?"

"Richard—" In spite of the water that gullies down her hood, she looks him calmly in the eye. "The world was never meant to end like in a Hollywood motion picture—you know: a chain of explosions and stars having sex amid the fire and teeth and blood and rubies. That's all fake shit."

"So exactly what are you saying?"

"I'm saying, shh!" Karen whispers as they stand in the rain, drenched, on the pavement at the foot of Rabbit Lane bordering the entrance to the forest. "Listen: There is an older woman in Florida. She's in her kitchen and she hears her wind chimes tinkle. On the kitchen chairs are bags of groceries bought yesterday but never placed in their cupboards. It's cool out and she is wearing a nightie. She walks out of the kitchen door and down to a nearby dock where a warm wind sweeps over her head and through the fabric she's wearing. She sits down and looks at the sky with its stars and satellites and thinks of her family and her grandchildren. She's smiling and she's humming a song, one that her grandchildren had been playing over and over that week. "Bobo and the Jets"? No—"Benny and the Jets." Suddenly, she's sleepy. She lies down on the deck and closes her eyes and sleeps. And that's that. She is the last person. The world's over now. Our time begins."

Jared here, one year later…

… lock up your daughters. And your smutty magazines. And your sofa, for God's sake, because you never know, I may go and hump it like a Great Dane. Har bar. Listen to my friends and you'd think I was the world's biggest perv. Right. And take a look at them now, will you—one year later: useless sacks of dung they are, slumped around Karen's fireplace watching an endless string of videos, the floor clogged with Kleenex boxes and margarine tubs overflowing with diamonds and emeralds, rings and gold bullion—a parody of wealth.

Between tapes what do they do? They have money fights, lobbing and tossing Krugerrands, rubies and thousand-dollar bills at each other; at other times they make paper airplanes from prints by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and shoot them into the fireplace.

During one particularly long lull between videos, I, Jared, slip to the side of the house and turn off the Honda gas generator Linus has rigged up. The power dies and triggers a clump of groans amid the clan. It's at this point I choose to appear outside the window—across the lawn—a ball of white light. Wendy is the first to see me and she calls my name.

"Jared?"

"What's that, Wendy?" Megan asks.

"It's Jared. Look. He's back."

All eyes gaze rapt while I gavotte across the lawn in my old football uniform, the brown and whites.

In the silence I glow like a deep-sea creature, like a pale moon, and I flow several feet above the ground, and then scoot through the one unsmashed pane of the glass patio doors as though catching a fumbled ball. I walk across the room as though on an airport conveyor belt and out the other wall. Hamilton runs out to the car port but I'm not there.

Wendy lights candles and a few moments later I enter the room from the ceiling, stopping with my feet above the fireplace, where I introduce myself:

"Hey guys. It's me—Jared. Fucking A—I'm so happy to see all of you."