Girlfriend in a coma (2 page)

"The future's
not
a good place, Richard. I think it's maybe cruel. I saw that last night. We were all there. I could see us - we weren't being tortured or anything - we were all still alive and all . . .
older...
middle-aged or something, but . . . 'meaning' had vanished. And yet we didn't know it. We were meaningless."
"What do you mean, 'meaningless'?"
"Okay. Life didn't seem depressing or empty to us, but we could only discern that it was as if we were on the outside looking in. And then I looked around for other people - to see if their lives seemed this way, too - but all the other people had left. It was just us, with our meaningless lives. Then I looked at us up close - Pam, Hamilton, you, Linus, Wendy - and you all seemed normal, but your eyes were without souls .. . like a salmon lying on a dock, one eye flat on the hot wood, the other looking straight to heaven. I think I need to stop now."
"No - don't!"
"I wanted to help us, Richard, but I didn't know how to save us, how to get our souls back. I couldn't see a solution. I was the only one who knew what was missing, but I didn't know what I could do about it."
Karen sounded as though she were about to cry. I was quiet and had no idea what to say; I put my arm around her. Below us on the left I could see skiers gathered in the dark, toking up and passing wineskins while hooting.
Karen spoke again: "Oh! I just remembered! Jared was there last night! In the vision
- he
was!
So maybe it's
not
a real vision of the future, but a vision of what might be a warning, like the ghost of Christmas Future."
"Well, maybe." I didn't like hearing Jared's name, though I didn't let on. The chairlift then lurched forward a few feet, the lights flickered on, then stopped. The world was dark stillness again.
"But you know what, Richard?"
"What?"
She caught herself. "Nothing. Oh, never mind, Beb. I think I'm tired of talking about this." She reached into her jacket. "Here. I want you to hold onto this envelope for me. Don't open it. Just hold onto it for me overnight. Give it back to me tomorrow." "Huh?" I looked at the Snoopy envelope with the word "Richard" Magic-Markered on its front in her maddeningly girlish, rounded-sloped, daisyadorned handwriting. Her handwriting was actually the subject of an argument the two of us had a month previously. I'd asked her why she couldn't write "normally." Idiot!
Karen watched me look at the handwriting. "Normal enough for you, Richard, you daring nonconformist, you?" I stashed the envelope in my down jacket's pocket and then the chairlift jumped into motion again.
"Remember - tomorrow you give it back to me, no questions asked." "It's a done deal." I kissed her.
The chairlift started with another lurch, causing Karen to drop her pack of Number 75 from her lap. She cursed, and instantly the mountain was again electrically lit with energy from the great dams of northern British Columbia. The skiers on the slopes below whooped, as though whooping for energy itself; our moment was lost. Karen said, "Look - there's Wendy and Pam." She deafened me by shouting instructions to Wendy to meet at the Grouse Nest in half an hour; she asked Pam to rescue her dropped pack of cigarettes, now many chairs behind us.
Our intimacy reduced, we quickly and soundlessly chairlifted up the Blueberry Chair's slope while Karen discussed plans for the rest of the night. "Look, there's Donna Kilbruck now. Arf Arf!"
I thought of Jared.
Jared was a friend of ours, as well as my best friend while growing up. In high school, Jared and I had drifted apart, as can happen with friends made early in life. He became a football star and our lives increasingly had less and less in common. He was also the biggest male slut I've ever known. Girls would hurl themselves at him and he was always there to catch. While Jared was definitely inside the winner's circle humping himself silly, I, on the other hand, seemed to be on a vague loser track. We still got along fine, but it felt comfortable only back in our own neighborhood and away from the high school's intricate popularity rituals. Jared's family lived around the corner from mine, up on St. James Place. One hot afternoon during a game at Handsworth Secondary, Jared simply keeled over and was wheeled off to Lions Gate Hospital. A week later, he'd lost his gold curls; two months later, he weighed less than a scarecrow; three months later he was . . . gone.
Did we ever really recover from the loss? I'm not sure. I had been, in a way, Jared's "official friend," and thus many of the consoling stares and words came my way, which I hated. All of the girls who once mooned over Jared began mooning over me Jared's sex energy still filled the air - but I wasn't about to take advantage of the opportunity and emulate his life of sluttery. I acted stoic when in fact I was angry and scared and sad. Jared had thought of us as best friends before he died, but we really weren't. I'd made other friends. I felt guilty, disloyal. The next year was spent not talking about Jared, pretending that everything was proceeding as normal, when it wasn't.

3 IF IT SLEEPS IT'S ALIVE

I was quiet in the gondola descending the mountain while Karen was lightly bantering with Wendy and Pam. Our skis were strapped together and faintly clacked. Karen and I were transformed from the two who had gondola'ed up just hours earlier. Lilting and swooping across the gondola's middle tower, we looked at the lights of Vancouver before the 1980s had its way with the city - an innocent, vulnerable, spun-glass kingdom. We tried to spot our houses, which twinkled across the Capilano River inside our sober, sterile mountain suburb.
I felt faraway as I then looked underneath the gondola at the white angel-food snowpack and the black granite that poked out from within it. I had the sensation that I was from some other world and had fallen onto Earth like a meteorite. Instead of being an earthling I had crash-landed here
Ka-thunkkk!
- and my life on Earth was an accident. First-time gondola riders and fraidy-cats tittered and screamed as our gondola swooned downward. I looked at Karen, with her head resting atop her ski poles. She had the extra pulse of beauty people have when they know they're being fondly admired.

The gondola moored at the base; we clomped to my Datsun B-210, where we removed the plastic anchors of our ski boots and luxuriated in the freedom of recently unfurled toes. We hopped into the car and drove to a party we had been warned might be a
house-wrecker
- up to a winding suburban street on the mountain of West Vancouver. It was a party where a now forgotten teen of questionable popularity had been left minding the house while parents gambled away in Las Vegas. And indeed the party was a grand house-wrecker - larger than any of us had seen to date. We arrived around 10:00 P.M., and the Datsun was one of dozens of cars parked up and down Eyremont Drive. Teenagers leaped out of cedar hedges and spruce shrubberies like protons, their beer boxes clutched under knobby jean-jacketed arms, bottles inside carrying imprisoned genies offering just one last wish. From all directions came the sound of excited voices and smashing bottles. Silhouettes of teens sparkled atop broken bottles lit by streetlights. Several of us were just arriving from Grouse Mountain. I heard a hiss - my friend, Hamilton - my own personal patron saint of badly folded maps, damp matches, low-grade pornography, bad perms, tetracycline, and borrowed cigarettes. He beckoned me from inside a hedge of laurels just ahead of the parked car, hissing,
"Richard, drag your butt in here."
I complied, and inside I found a branchy wigwam rife with headache-inducing Mexican pot of the weakest caliber. Roughly ten of Hamilton's drug buddies were toking furiously. In no mood for a headache, I said, "Jesus, Ham - it smells like an egg fart inside a subway car. Come out and meet me and the girls. Where's Linus?" "Down at the party. I'll be out in a minute.
Dean,please,passmethoseZig-Zags
" Back at the car, Karen, Pam, and Wendy were discussing Karen's new diet. I said, "Karen, you're not
still
hell-bent on starvation, are you?"
Karen had been obsessed with Hawaii and dieting. "Richard,
Beb,
I've just
got
to be a size five by next week or I won't fit into my new Hawaii swimsuit."Pam, wafer-thin, asked, "Are you
still
taking diet pills? My mom gives them to me all the time. I refuse."
"Pam," Karen replied, "you
know
I was raised on pills; Mom's a walking pharmacy. But if I take even
one
speeder, I spazz out and climb the walls with my teeth." She paused to sweep hair from her eyes. "Most drugs, even vitamins, send me to the Moon. But downers are okay. I take them to cool out. Mom gave me my own bottle." To all of us, this sounded glamorous and wanton. Wendy, trying to be cooler than she really felt, said, "That'd be just so loser-ish - you know, OD'ing on vitamins," and her quip was met with polite stares.
Pam broke the silence. She was then trying to break into the world of modeling, and she said, "Oh - I was at a shoot yesterday - do you want to know what models sound like when they talk?" We agreed enthusiastically. "Like this," she said, "like Pebbles Flintstone:
'Koogookoobaabaabaadietpillsgookookoo.'
Promise me that if I ever start talking like that, just pull the plug."
Slaphappy Hamilton, beanstalk-tall, black-booted, bolo-corded, with hands as big as frying pans, appeared from behind, saying, "Richard: It's imperative we check the party right now, man. The house is just getting
demolished.
Hey there, Pammie ..." Pam stuck out her tongue. He and Pammie had been blowing hot and cold for three years; that night, they were in a cold spell. Hamilton turned back to me: "If we don't rescue Linus, he'll be cat food by midnight. It's berserk down there. Besides, Mr. Liver here wants a drink." Hamilton squeezed the side of his stomach; below us something lurched and crashed.
Pam asked the sky,
"Why
do I have to like aloof jerks who couldn't care less if I exist? Please, O gods of love, send me a winner next time."

We all discussed skiing for a while, and I felt myself pulling back, again looking at Karen, Wendy, and Pam. As a trio, they resembled three different-looking sisters, but sisters nonetheless. They called themselves Charlie's Angels, but then, so did many other trios of girlfriends at that time.Personalities.
I sometimes wonder what can be said of people when they are young, whether the full expression of their personalities is truly discernible. Do we even offer hints? Do murderers seem like murderers at eighteen? Do stockbrokers? Waiters? Millionaires? An egg hatches. What will emerge - a cygnet? a crocodile? a turtle?
Wendy: wide shoulders earned on the swim team, a friendly, earnest, square, slightly mannish face capped with a chocolate-brown wedge cut. Hamilton and I once tried to pin down Wendy's looks, and Hamilton wasn't far wrong when he said she looked like she was twenty-seventh in line to the British throne. At our family Christmas party every year, when introducing ourselves to the older crowd, Wendy always said, "I'm the smart one." And she was.
Pam (Pamela, Pammie, Pameloid): thin as water streaming from a tap, a perfect oval face, a face like a tourist attraction crowned with a wispy corn-silk Farrah perm. Glamour vixen Pammie: eyes always looking a bit farther than your own:
"Whatcha lookin' at,Pam?""Oh-just.Something.Upthere.Intheclouds."
Karen: small face with straight brown hair parted in the center. Moss-green eyes. As comfortable with boys as with girls. A guy's gal. Skiing? Touch football? Wounded animal needs mending? Call Karen.
As a trio, their six arms were perennially crossed over either brown leather or down jackets, hands clasping purses full of high-tar cigarettes; Dmetre ski sweaters reeking of Charlie perfume, sugarless gum, and sweet-smelling hair. Clean and free and sexy and strong.
Karen asked for a drink and Wendy said, "Are you sure you want to drink, Kare? I mean you're looking kinda frail. All you've eaten today is a Ritz cracker and half a can of Tab. Let's go to my place and get something."
Pammie said, "Don't
say
that - don't tempt me - because
I'll
be the one who ends up eating too much." She paused: "Is there much in your fridge?"

Karen ignored them. She climbed into my Datsun to put a new lace in her runners just as I walked to the car to get my sweater. I saw Karen slip two pills from her makeup compact into her mouth. Shecaught
me
catching her. So she stuck out her tongue jokingly. "It's
ValleyoftheDolls,
I
know,
Richard - but let's see
you
in a sizefive bikini." I could feel myself trying to mold my face into a nonjudg-mental scrunch; I lost.
"Christ, it's only
Valium.
It's totally legal. My mom gave them to me." She was slightly angry at my having caught her. I think it made her seem less in control. I said, "Karen, I think you look great; you've got a great body, you're perfect the way you are. And I should know ..." I winked, but I think it looked dirty, not friendly. "You're nuts to even
think
about dieting."
"Richard, that's
sweet,
you're the bestest, bestest boyfriend on Earth, and I really do appreciate it. But listen: It's a
girl
thing. Drop it, okay?" At least she was smiling. She leaned over the seat and gave me a quick kiss before I went back to the makeshift bar Pam had set up on the top of her car's hood. "Roll up your window and shut the door," Karen said to me, a Valium underneath her tongue, "God may be watching." It was the last thing she said to me for almost twenty years. Pam cradled a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, and she and Wendy began pouring itty-bitty drinks into stolen McDonald's paper cups, with Tab as a mixer.
Wendy was talking about her Friday meeting with the school guidance counselor. She was considering applying for the accelerated pre-med program at UBC, but she couldn't decide if she'd be missing out on all the college fun: "You know, drunken piss-ups, drug orgies, unchained sex, and afterward writing fake letters to
Penthouse Forum."
Pam was in no mood to discuss careers. "Hey, let's booze-and-cruise tonight, eh, Wendy? This housewrecking crap is such a guy thing." We looked down at the house; from the racket it generated, we thought the house would implode, as if in a horror movie.