Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma

"You prick," Hamilton bellows, "—the light almost blinded us!"

"Whoopsy daisy, guys. I was trying to put on a light show for you. It fell kinda flat. See you later this afternoon."

"Light show?" Pam says.

"He's technically sixteen, Pam," adds Hamilton.

"Oh yeah," she muses, "He's younger than Karen."

Wendy is hesitantly meandering through the browning forest behind her house, armed with a twelve-gauge rifle should feral dogs attack. Her hair is washed and styled in a manner considered fetching by 1997, and, for that matter, 1978, standards and beneath her thick beige raincoat clings a saucy frilled lingerie getup fetched earlier that morning from a Marine Drive naughty shop. She's calling me: "Jared? Jared?" She's worried I won't hear her call—or that I won't respond—but I do.

"Hey, Wendy." I appear a stone's throw away, floating in the air, golden and light, weaving my way between the tall dwindling stands of firs and hemlocks on this steep canyon slope. I arrive and stand before her.

"You came.""Fuckin' right, I did. How ya doing, Wendy? We never got our date, did we?" A silence passes between us. I let her be the one to break it.

"I've missed you. You helped me that horrible night last year when everything was falling apart—and then you went… away. Why?"

"I knew I'd be back."

She slowly walks nearer to me. "What's it like to be dead, Jared? I don't mean to be blunt, but I'm frightened and I'm also a doctor. In school and later at the hospital I looked at every corpse and I wondered the same thing: Dead—what next? And then the world shut down and all I saw—all I continue to see—are dead bodies. It's all we see down here—dead bodies. We have a 'clean zone' around the houses, but everywhere else is one big pauper's grave."

"Death isn't death, Wendy—blackness forever—if that's what you mean. But it's not my place to say anything more to you beyond that. It's a big deal. I have to be quiet."

"What about heaven?"

"Okay, sure. I give you that."

Standing almost in front of me, she says, "Were you scared in the hospital? I visited you all those times. I brought you all those cookies I baked myself. You were sweet. And your eyes were far away. You never lost your beauty—even at the end when I think you maybe lost your hope."

"I was too young to be really afraid of death. But my cancer was my Great Experience, and I don't begrudge it."

"Bullshit."

"Okay, you're right. I was scared shitless. What else was I supposed to do? Everyone kept descending on me and kept making all these brave little faces and handing me muffins and teddy bears. No matter how scared you get you have to make that same brave little face back in return. It's like, the law."

"Jared—did you ever … you know, think about me?" Her arms are crossed protectively.

"Yeah. You know I did. We missed our date—I never showed you my candy.""Were you in love with Cheryl Anderson?"

"Wha—Cheryl Anderson?"

"Don't look so surprised. She had a big mouth."

"Hmmm. We liked each other a lot. But it wasn't love, no. I was a jock so everybody thought I had to be a sex machine—and so I became one. It was great. It's different now totally different."

"How?"

"I'm no longer incarnate. But I can still—you know, get it on. In my own way."

She begins to whimper: "Jared, can you please just take me away? Please? Put me in your arms and drive me to the sun. I'm so lonely. And I can't kill myself, even though I think about it all the time. There's no point to the world now. It just erodes and becomes chaotic and poisoned. Look at the trees around us. Brown. Probably radiation from a North Korean reactor gone wrong. Or Chinese. Or Ukrainian. Or … Just take me away, damnit! You're a ghost, Jared. Prove it."

"I can't take you away, Wen. But I can make the loneliness leave you."

"No—I don't want that. I want to leave."

"Just imagine, Wendy," I say. "a world without loneliness. Every trial would become bearable, wouldn't it?"

She thinks this over. She's smart and she sees the truth. "Yes." She sniffles. "You're right. You win the Brownie badge. But why do we have to get lonely? It's so awful. It's so—wait—" Wendy's composure returns somewhat. She wipes her eye and her voice becomes still. "You're not going to take me away—are you?"

"Nope. I would if I could, but I can't. You know that, Wendy."

She sits on a fallen stump to collect her breath, her mind racing so quickly it almost seizes up. She takes several deep gulps, calms down, and then looks across the ferns and moss at me, a sixteen-year-old dead boy. As she does this, her raincoat opens slightly, exposing her lingerie beneath. She sniggers and takes the jacket off completely, revealing her pale thick body. "Ta da! Hey Jared, welcome to the new me. Doesn't this getup make me lovable? Huh?""You're a part of the world, Wendy, as much as daisies, glaciers, earthquake faults and mallard ducks. You were meant to exist. You've gotta believe me. You're lovable .. . and you're hot! You look so good."

"Could you love me, Jared?"

"Which way?"

"Any way that stops me from being lonely."

Her skin is goosebumped, her nipples are rigid. "Oh man, could I—"

"I'm here."

And so I remove the bulk of my spectral football outfit—cleats and pads and shirt—but I leave my shoulder pads on.

"Your shoulders," she says.

I walk toward her: "Just shush, Wen. Feel me walking through you."

"Shhhh—quiet, Jared."

"Oh, fucking A, man, this is great. Man, this is even better than Karen's floor." Wendy giggles and her voice drains. "Oh, Wendy—I don't get to do this all too often these days. Oh!"

I stand there inside her body while a flock of crows caws in the treetops, and then I pass through her and it's as if I'm receiving answers to questions I'd asked long ago—the same sense of being suspended in a moment of truth. As I look back, she is frozen with pleasure, eyeballs skyward and white. Her senses are still locked inside another realm.

I put my football togs back on and float in front of her, watching over her for a few minutes as her mind and body thaw. She looks at me and asks, "That's as good as it gets, isn't it?"

"Yep."

"I've been thinking of this since 1978."

"It was a powerful dream. You were great."

"You're going to leave now, aren't you?"

"I'm not leaving you, but I do have to cut out. And also—"

"Shhh. Let me guess—-I'm pregnant now, aren't I?"

"Yep. How'd you know that?"

"It's this skill I have. I can always tell when a woman's pregnant." She pauses, her mind dreamy. "Thanks, Jared."I float upward, up into the canopy of trees and into the sky. "Good-bye, Wendy."

Jane is papoosed onto Megan's back as she motorcycles slowly through the ghostly suburb, ever vigilant for fallen trees, angry dogs, or freak weather bursts.

I look into Megan's mind and I am fascinated by the things I see. Megan, being a teenager, had the least formed personality of the group as the world shut itself down, and she is also the least affected by everything. She drives over a crunchy skeleton on Stevens Drive as though it were merely a fallen branch; lighting a cigarette, she throws the lit match into the nearest house, not even sticking around to watch it burn.

It's a sunny day and the air is clear—a rare day when the world doesn't smell like a tire fire, the endless reeking fumes that cross over the Pacific from China.

In the middle of driving down Stevens to Rabbit Lane, Megan endures a pang of loneliness so real and so strong that I can only compare it to a tornado or lightning. It dawns on her that she has never visited Jenny Tyrell's house in all the past year. She doesn't know what she will find there, but she knows she has to go.