Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma

"The opposite. It's perfect."

"Thank you. I'd like to see you do it."

"Oh please, no."

I float back beside him: "So you see, I'm somewhat up to date." We continue our walk. "Fucking A. The neighborhood's one big mess, don't you think so?"

"I don't think you ever get used to the silence, Jared. Back before the plague or whatever it was, the neighborhood looked almost identical to the way it did the year you died. But now—" We survey dead trees, rangy vines, an occasional charcoal stump where a house once stood, a bird resting on a skeleton's ribcage. Pavement is crumbling and cars are stopped in the strangest places.

We pass a dog's skeleton, bleached clean by sun and acid rains. "Pinball, may he rest in peace. The Williams's Doberman. It tried to attack Wendy, but Hamilton shot him in time. It was only hungry. Poor thing."

"Sad."

"So Jared, tell me: What about when you were dying back in 1979.

What was that like? I've always wondered. I mean, were you scared near the end, when you were dying in the hospital? You seemed socalm—even at the end when all those machines were pumping gorp in and out of you."

"Scared? I was scared shitless. I didn't want to leave Earth. I wanted to see the future—the lives of people I knew. I wanted to see progress— electric cars, pollution controls, the new Talking Heads album. .. . Then my hair fell out and I knew I'd crossed the line. After that I put a good face on it because my parents were falling apart." Richard is lost in thought. "Do you think about death much?" I ask.

"Pretty much all the time. How could I not'? I mean, look at this place."

"And what do you think?"

"I don't worry about dying. I figure that I'll just meet up with everybody else in the world wherever they went. But if I'd been you back in high school, I don't think I'd have been able to put as good a face on death as you did. I'd scream and yell and beg for more time, even on this clapped-out hulk of a planet we live on now."

"You like it here?"

"No, but I'm alive."

"Is it enough—being alive?"

"It's what I have."

"Richard, tell me the truth—and you have to tell me the truth, because, um, I'm a heavenly being."

"Shoot, buddy."

"Did you use Karen and me both as an excuse for you not to continue your own life? Did you bail out of life?"

Richard looks hurt, but then makes a dismissive "nah—why not?" gesture. "Sure. I pretty much withdrew, Jared. But I was a good citizen. I put the trash out every Tuesday night. I voted. I had a job."

"Did you feel kinda hollow inside?"

"A bit. I admit it. Does my answer make you happy?"

"Hey man. I need to ask. I need to know how you are."

"But I stopped withdrawing when Karen woke up."

"Fair enough."

"Do we have to discuss this, Jared? Let's talk about the old neighborhood. People. Friends.""I've visited all the others today. You're the last. I saved the best for last, my oldest friend."

"I'm honored, you stud."

We continue walking and cut down into St. James Place and approach my old house, a slightly shambled split-level rancher, baby-blue. On the right hand side there are cinder burns from when the house next door burned down. "The fire was three weeks ago," Richard tells me. "Lightning." We stand at the end of my driveway. "Here's your house. You wanna go inside, Jared?"

"Could we? I've wanted to go in there, but only with somebody else. It'd make me nervous to go in alone."

"You? A ghost? You get nervous over bodies?"

"Yes. So I'm a wuss on this one issue."

"You get used to them. Trust me. Hamilton calls them Leakers."

My old front lawn is knee-high; all of the ornamental shrubs have browned and withered. Green ivy has persisted, overgrowing onto the front door, which is unlocked. It opens silently as Richard tries it. A whoosh of warm air comes out, as does a foul, ammonia-like stink that makes Richard grimace at me: "You still want to go through with this, Jared?"

"Please."

Time has stood still inside. "Oh boy, Richard. It's almost identical to the last day I was here—my final day pass out of the palliative care unit. I wasn't supposed to eat meat, but Dad cut my turkey up into bits the size of peas and said to hell with it. I puked my dinner and then some blood and then the paramedics had to come. My parents and sister were so frightened. It was such a bad scene."

Richard stands in the front area and waits as I float through the house. A new TV here, a microwave oven there, some fridge magnets, but otherwise the house remains as it was when I left it. I approach the staircase, but Richard looks at me. "Are you sure you're okay with this, Jared?"

"I'm fine. As long as you're here. Let's go up."

He walks behind me and we enter my old bedroom, now a sewing room. Then I look in the old bathroom, my sister's room, and finallymy parents' room. "Let me look first," Richard says. I tell him it won't be necessary, but he's adamant. He nudges the brown door open, peeks in, blanches, and then tiptoes out. "Leakers. I guess I have to tell you it's pretty gruesome in there."

"I need to see." I walk in, Richard behind me, and I see my parents' remains mummified into their bedsheets and mattress. "Sorry, man." Richard says.

"It's okay. It's Nature's way." I walk through the room—my photos are on the wall, they never took them down—and I see the hand mold I made in kindergarten. "Where are your own parents, Richard?"

"They're in their Camry at the Douglas Border Crossing. Linus and I made an overnight mission down there last summer and found their car. We were going to bury the remains, but it just wasn't, um, possible." I look around the room some more. "It's darkening outside," Richard says. "I have to go now—to see Mount Baker. You want to come?"

"I want to stay here with my folks a bit more. I wish there was something I could leave you with," I say, "a gift—a small miracle I can perform for you. Is there anything you want or need?"

Richard, now standing in the driveway says, "No. It sounds ridiculous, but I've got everything I need. Are you sure you want to stay here?"

"I'm sure. Good-bye, Richard. Thanks for coming in with me to see my folks."

"It was nothing. Thank you for fixing Karen's legs. When are you coming back again?"

"In two weeks,"

"See you then, buddy."

"Bye, guy."

I was never a good "talker" when I was young and alive. Usually, a shrug and a smile carried me through most social situations. And to meet girls all I had to do was have a stare-down contest with them and make sure not to blink. It never failed. But now I've got the gift of clarity and directness.

What's clarity like?

Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on a beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth-century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation. This is why Richard drank. This is why my old friends used to spend their lives blitzed on everything from cough syrup to crystal meth. Anything to make that sloggy buzz make a retreat.

It's been two weeks since my last visit. The sky is clear but smoky smelling and a fine ash falls from no identifiable source. In the house's kitchen, both Wendy and Pam are playing solitaire on personal computers electrified by the Honda generator. Their hair is dirty. Linus, still partially blind, can't get the water pump fixed—and their voices are raspy from uneven weather and from colds, which still seem to appear even without a population base to spread them. Their bodies are swaddled inside down coats adorned with hundreds of Bulgari jeweled brooches.