Girlfriend in a coma (25 page)

28
THE
FUTURE IS

Inside the blackened supermarket, scores of animals, birds, and insects have made the building their home. Shit of all types splotches the floor, as do tussles of feathers, fur, bones, and soil. Squirrels and raccoons have reduced the cereal aisle to fiber while the meat department's offerings have been entirely looted by wildlife. The smell of rot, a year later, is ebbing away, masked by the smell of shampoos and cosmetics fallen to the floor in a small earthquake six months prior. Birds rustle in the ceiling while down
below flashlights carried by Richard, Hamilton, and Pam klieg
their way across the store's floor. The trio daintily minuet above the muck and locate the pharmacy in the middle of the store. A

220
white-smocked Leaker sits at the counter - a beef jerky skeleton.
"Lord, I am
sick
of these things," Hamilton says, draping the corpse with a spare smock.
"I, Hef, last of the Famous International Playboys have no time for rot. Agnelli, Niarchos,
the Prince of Wales - all gone now. I alone must keep up their grand tradition.
Voulez-vous
un Cadillac car?
I live solely for nightclubs, hooch, and rides on the Concorde." "Hamilton, f'Chrissake, shut up," Richard says. "Did you bring the awl and hammer?" "Presto."
"Thank
you."
Richard and Pam prod and jimmy a locked cupboard storing untold pharmaceutical gems. After some expert elbow grease, it flies open, causing plastic tubs to tumble onto the
floor.
" Brush me, Daddy-O!"
"Just give me the rucksack, Hef," Richard says as a shadow runs across his feet. "Squirrel
alert."
"Oh look! Look - it's so sweet," Pam says. "We can take it to Babe Paley's place in Bermuda
for dinner."
"It's Jamaica, dear. Who's on the guest list?"
"Twiggy. The Sex Pistols. Jackson Pollock. Linda Evangelista."
"You two are driving me up the fucking wall with your fantasies," says Richard. "If having a fantasy is a crime, I stand guilty as accused." Hamilton makes a big huffy sniff
of the air and then quickly regrets it.
Richard ignores this. "Aye yi
yi.
Oh, look
bingo!
- two thousand Vicodins." Something
screams and scampers across the store down Aisle 3. "Oh,
man,
this place is a creep show.
Let's grab and scram. Hamilton, go get a shopping cart for the loot."
"Roger." In the greeting card section, Hamilton finds an abandoned cart. It squeaks and
rubs across the sludgy floor. Richard and Pam pile the pharmaceuticals into the cart.

"Oh, Christ. Karen wants some cotton balls and a hot oil treatment. Where are they?" "Next aisle over."The trio walks slowly through the store's cobwebbed, stinky carcass, and the farther away they get from the front, the blacker it gets. They pass two Leakers along the way, but of course, after all this time they are casual about such a sight. Slowly, slowly they move when suddenly they bump into three raccoons who hiss and try to escape, scaling a Matterhorn of soggy paper towels. "Oh shit. . . "

"Do I hear Karen calling us from outside?"
Koonk-koonk.
The lights in the ceiling pulse into operation, scorching brighter than daylight - the light all the

more painful for its unexpectedness, illuminating the store and casting all of the wildlife into shrieks of panic, revealing the extent of devastation.

My friends scream and look up above, where they see me, Jared, in the rafters. "It's me," I say, and I tell them, "I've come back to you to bring you light."
"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.
Megan's hair is now long and falls to the side of her head like a bird lowering its wings as she pulls into the driveway of Jenny Tyrell's house. Its lawn, like all lawns, has turned into a scraggly meadow; the Christmas decorations have faded after a year of neglect; the shingles have begun to snaggletooth; the cars in the driveway are coated in dust, and the tires have gone flat - a fairly good indicator that there'll be Leakers inside the house, and indeed there are - Mr. and Mrs. Tyrell, mummified and serene on the living room floor surrounded by books of family photos, Mrs. Tyrell's wedding dress, a wine bottle, and two glasses. No odors.
"Yo! Mr. and Mrs. Tyrell - " Megan gives the parents a fond gaze.
"Came to check out Jenny's stuff. She's over at the mall in Lynn

Valley. Mind if I go upstairs? Thanks. Oh
look,
Janie - Jenny's room is a pigsty like always."Megan unstraps a googling Jane and puts her on Jenny's bed. The room hasn't changed much; the door was closed, so there's little dust. Makeup and clothes are scattered about. There's a photo of Megan, Jenny, and the old gang on the grass hockey team; ski boots; several Alanis Morrisette posters on the wall; and on the desk a diary Megan had no idea Jenny kept a diary. "Move over, Jane - we're going to be here a little while." Her eyes moisten; her heart explodes.

September 28, 1997

Who does Megan think she is? Just because she's dating an older guy she thinks she's Mrs. Hot Shit. His name is Skitter and it's not like he's a big catch or something. He's got nice legs and he's buff, but he's so crude and he dresses like a metal-head and a druggie. Please give me a ten-foot pole.

Won our grass hockey game today. 5 to 3 against Hillside and I got a goal. We rock!

"Jenny, you
cow.
You were jealous from the word 'go,' and you
know
it. You tried to worm your way into everything me and Skitter did. Skitter's nickname for you was 'The Remora Fish.' I pitied you."

October
13,
1997
Megan got dumped by Skitter, but she tries to make it sound like she left him. As IF.
She's really far away in her head these days, so it's no wonder she got the boot. I think it's
because of that loser school she goes to - the school for losers down in North Van. I'm
going to try and think of a way to call Skitter without looking like a slut. Maybe I'll call
and ask him where I can score some hash. I've still got his number.

"Now this is really too much.
Way
too much.
I
left
him,
thank you. Because he was a cheating tightwad bastard and I ended up
buying everything he asked for and I realized he just uses women-even having high school girls pay for his own cigarettes." Megan finds herself missing Jenny dreadfully.
November 2, 1997