Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma

"Jared?" Karen says.

"Hi, Karen. Hello everybody."

"Jared, what are you? Where are you? Are you ofokay?" asks Richard.

"I'm a ghost and I guess I'm blissed out, Richard. I'm high on life. It's the Hotel California. Yessiree."

"What are you doing here?" Megan asks, recognizing me from my old high school yearbook photo.

"I'm here to help you out," I say as I begin to dissolve through the floor.

"Wait!" Wendy shouts. "Don't go!"

I'm halfway through the floor: "Man, this floor feels good.""You can feel the floor?" Linus asks.

"What's heaven like?" Richard asks

"What happens when you die?" Pam asks.

"Show us a miracle, big boy" Hamilton says.

Only my head lies above the floor: "Oof!—you should try this sometime. This floor beats Cheryl Anderson any day of the week."

"Jared!" Karen's shout is urgent.

"All of you," I say, "—you're birds born without wings; you're bees who pollinate cut flowers. Don't pee yourselves. I'll return soon. Let's get weird."

It's the next day and Richard is growing impatient with Hamilton and Pam, dawdling as the two step out of the minivan, wobbly and silly.

"You go first, Barbara Hutton."

"No wayyyy, Mr. Hefner. You first."

"Pals call me Hef."

"Listen you two freaks, can we just step to it?"

Before them is a wide, faded tar piazza strewn with skeletons, cars parked at odd angles, and rusted shopping carts. Beyond this is the faded and ratty looking Save-On supermarket. Its glass doors are like gums without dentures.

"Ooh. Miss Thing needs a drinky."

"Hamilton—I mean Hef—let's get in and out as quickly as we can."

"Okay, okay, Richard. Don't cack your nappies."

"Richard," Karen says, "I'm going to stay out in the van. You three go in. I need some sun."

"You want anything special, Kare?"

"Yeah, cotton balls … a hot oil treatment … some licorice if it's still any good."

"Gotcha."

Karen sits alone in the minivan's front seat, sifting through CD's and enjoying a freakish heat wave warming the remains of the city. I, Jared, become manifest."Hi, Karen."

"Jared! Where are you?"

"Out here." She swivels to see me standing outside the door atop a rusted shopping cart on its side. I'm hard to see during the day—like gas flames against a blue sky.

"Jared, what's the deal here? I've got a thousand questions I want to ask you."

"Ask away, Karen. You look good. How are you feeling?"

"Crappy. But my arms are getting pretty strong. My legs—they're kind of going downhill now. They're deteriorating. I can only barely walk around the house and stuff. What about you—do ghosts have pain? I mean, do you hurt?"

"Not the way you do."

"No. I imagine not." She changes gears: "So cough up the truth, Jared, because I'm really mad at you or whoever did this to me. You deep-freezed me for seventeen years and left me with a puppet body. And who smashed in the patio door last year when everything started falling apart?"

"Actually, that was me at the door."

"You?"

"Apologies, Kare. I screwed up—it was my first time back here. I was going to give a you a speech. I decided not to—I was^too embarrassed about wrecking the door. It was just like the night I walked into Brian Alwin's parents' patio door in tenth grade. Duh. I went and helped Wendy instead. She got lost in the forest coming here from the dam.

"You scared the crap out of me."

"Hey—it won't happen again. I've got good control of it now—my astral presence, I mean." I do a double flip there and land atop the rusted shopping cart. "Sexy or what?"

" Ooh baby baby. Shit, Jared, tell me, what exactly is the point of everything that's happened? And why did / go into a coma? I can't explain anything. So maybe you can. Everybody treats me like I know the answers and that I won't tell them out of spite. I hate it."

"Well, Karen, you—how shall I say this—you accidentally opened certain doors. You were taking all those diet pills and starving your-self. Your brain did somersaults; you saw things; you caught a glimpse of things to come."

"For that I lost my youth? And for that matter, how come I was the one selected for coma duty? Huh? Did I ask? Who decided?"

"Mellow out, Kare—I mean, if you remember the note you gave Richard, you yourself wanted to sleep for 'a thousand years,' and avoid the future. You chose this, not me or anybody else. Worse things could have happened. I mean, you could have died completely. You could have had brain death."

"So why am I awake now instead of sleeping another nine-hundred-eighty-three years?"

"You woke up from your coma because you'd be able to see the present through the eyes of the past. Without you there'd be no one to see the world as it turned out in contrast to your expectations. Your testimony was needed. Your testament."

"Jared, nothing ever turns out the way it was intended. Just look at me." Karen looks at her legs and grimaces. "Oh, God. This is so bizarre. This is not what I was expecting life to be like. Hey wait— Jared—how come it's you here and not anybody else? I want to see my parents."

"I can't swing that, Kare. I'm your Official Dead Person. I'm the only person any of you knew who died when you were young. Because of this I register in your heads as the, umm, the deadest."

"The deadest? What a crock."

"Karen, forget about that for a second. Tell me—I have to ask you this: What is the main thing you noticed—the major difference between the world you left and the world you woke up into?"

Karen exhales heavily, as though she's having a massage and her tension is dissolving. She looks into the Save-On's dark interior and says, "Alack."

"A lack?"

"Yes. A lack of convictions—of beliefs, of wisdom, or even of good old badness. No sorrow; no nothing. People—the people I knew when I came back they only, well, existed. It was so sad. I couldn't allow myself to tell them.""What's so wrong with that—just existing, I mean?"

"I'm not sure, Jared. Animals and plants exist and we envy them that. But in people it just doesn't look good. I didn't like it when I came out of the coma and I still don't like it—even with just the few of us remaining here."

"And?"

"God, Jared—you're relentless. I know. Tell you what—you tell me who you slept with and I'll answer more of your questions."

"Karen, I dunno "

"Stacey Klaasen?"

"Okay, yeah."

"Jennifer Banks?"

"Yeah."

"Jennifer Banks's younger sister?"

"Guilty."

"I knew you two did it."

"No shit, Sherlock."

"Annabel Freed?"

"Yes."

"Dee-Ann Walsh."

"Yup."

"God, Jared—we should have come and hosed you down like a mink in heat. Who didn't you make it with?"

"Pam."

"I could have guessed that."

"Wendy."

"I knewww that."

"I was going to meet her after the football game. It was in the cards. And now you have to answer more of my questions."

"Fair n'uff."

"You were talking about what was different about people when you woke up. Spill."

"All right already. Let's see. Give me a second." She scratches her chin while a wild animal screams within the Save-On. "I know— I remember when I first woke up how people kept on trying to impressme with how efficient the world had become. What a weird thing to brag about, eh? Efficiency. I mean, what's the point of being efficient if you're only leading an efficiently blank life?"

I egg her on. "For example?"

Karen pulls a blanket around herself, speaking as she moves. "I thought back in 1979 that in the future the world would—evolve. I thought that we would make the world cleaner and safer and smarter, and that people would become smarter and wiser and kinder as a result of all the changes."