Girlfriend in a coma (5 page)

What
did
Karen see that December night? What pictures of tomorrow could so disturb her that she would flee into a refuge of bottomless sleep? What images would frighten her out of her body, making her leave our world? Why would she leave
me?
C'mon, Karen - Beb, Sugar Pops, Starbaby - we all know life's hard . . . we found
that
one out pretty quick.
You
told me we were all going to be dead-but-alive zombies in the future. That's what you said. Fair's fair: Tell us what you
meant,
Karen. I want an
answer.
Wake up, wake up, okay? We'llgo to a place that's quiet and dry and talk about precious things. We'll drive downtown and have an Orange Julius. Hey! - we'll drive to the States for a steak dinner the size of a mattress. We'll drive to Europe and drink champagne, and we'll stop in Greenland for ice cubes along the way.
Knock-knock.
Who's there? It's me, Karen. No joke, no punchline
c'est moi.
Will you come out? Or will you let me in?

6 IS FUN

Karen's family:
When we are young, we assume adults behave according to a strict adult code. Only years later does it dawn on us that Mr. Phillips down the road was a manic depressive wife beater; that Mrs. Owen's liver was bloated like a diseased water balloon; that Mr. Pulaski perved out on all his kids and that's why they beat him up one night and left him facedown in a ditch on Good Friday. In this same tradition, Karen's mother, Lois, exhibited behavior that was, to younger eyes, downright random but adult, nevertheless.
A minor example springs to mind: When I was young, lunching
chez
McNeil, Lois boiled water for Kraft macaroni, banged pots and colanders like crazed jungle tomtoms ("She wants us to know how much work she's doing," whispered Karen.). Then, right in front of

Karen and me, Lois whisked away the crumpled cheese sauce packet like a victorious toreador, flipping it into the cupboard, saying, "We'll save
that
for a more special occasion." Quietly, Karen and I would eat the semi-cooked noodles in margarine while exchanging glances. Beverage? Tap water. Napkins? "Oh, just use your pants, Richard. You're a boy."
Karen, it might be surmised, had grown up with a bizarre relationship with food. Lois, a former Miss Canada runner-up (1958), saw food as alien, alive, requiring passports, visas, and security guards before allowing entry into the mouth. Fads came and went. One week she might be a vegan, the next week it was "Starch only!" Karen was dragged, holus-bolus, into Lois's cockamamie nutritional vogues. During one particularly fevered patch of vegetarianism in the seventies, I made the mistake of saying I'd been to Benihana's steak house; a brisk, half-hour anti-meat jeremiad followed. When Karen interrupted, she was met with icicle stares from Lois: "Really Karen, if you'd just eat, you might become attractive and then I wouldn't have to worry so much about your future." To me, Lois said, "Karen's in her 'awkward stage.' Now about that steak house, Richard . . . "
George, Karen's dad, owned a body shop where he spent sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, all year, choosing to dine in Lois-free restaurants. He was essentially nonexistent, and this absence bred a good cop/bad cop mythology: Mrs. McNeil, the fevered shrew who drove the quiet, honorable George out of his own home. Neither of them could be described as "happy."
"Oh, I
wish
I knew what Mom's secret was," Karen would moan. "There's obviously a biggie. But how to ask?"

Lois grew up in Northern BC, and by dint of her looks, her cultivated smile, and her fathomless misguided snobbery was hypersensi-tized to those in life who didn't work hard enough (in her eyes) to earn their keep. Little digs: "My husband works with his hands unlike
other
parents around here who've never had a callus in their lives." This referred, of course, to my accountant father who, like most others in the neighborhood, made an okay, but only okay, living as the middlest of middle classes. People across the city believed ourhillside neighborhood to be the cradle of never-ending martini-clogged soirees and bawdy wife-swaps. The truth would have bored them silly, as it was middle-class dull to the point of scientific measur-ability. My mother, while barbecuing one fine summer evening in 1976, said prophetically that this neighborhood was "like the land that God forgot." Yes.

The first month of Karen's coma was a write-off - strange yet drab, hope dripping away bit by bit, making us unaware of its overall loss. We were all of us poleaxed with the flu - a good thing in that we didn't have to attend school for the final week before Christmas.

We shambled around to each other's houses and yakked on the phone a good deal. Hamilton phoned on Friday night: "Of course," he said, "we're beacons of gossip at school now." I had to admit we were. "They're ghouls," he said, pausing to honk his nose, adding, "God, my brain feels like a furry clump of dog shit." There were voices in the background at Hamilton's: "My Dad's marshaled up his sap tonight. He's dating a young twinkie in the payroll department.
Aggh.
My future stepmother is spoon-dancing with Daddy-O as I speak. Well - they'll have a litter of golden little brats together." The background music crooned Brasil
'66.
"You
really
should see her, Richard. She's not a mother - she's a golden retriever. You just wait until she turns into a slut. Won't
that
be jolly." A sigh: "Must go, Toots
owww!
My head. Is. In. Pain. Bye."

C lick.
A few minutes later, Wendy phoned to say Linus was at her house and they were languidly barn-raising a gingerbread house. "It was supposed to be a Hobbit cottage, but it ended up looking more like Hitler's bunker. Linus's flu is gone. He's going down to see Karen in a minute. Anything to send?"
"No."

Linus became our proxy visitor, but he returned to us with maddeningly obscure information. He never noticed straightforward data like whether or not Karen's eyes were open or how her skin color was; he was interested in the inanimate, in frameworks and systemsthat weren't easily apparent. Accordingly, he began recounting the visit in frustratingly pointless detail.
"You know the IV she has? What do they
put
in there? How can they squeeze all of her food into a watery liquid? I mean, doesn't it seem like it should be a lot
thicker?
With fiber or
pulp
at least?"
"There's a food tube that goes directly to her stomach," Wendy said. "I guess she's involuntarily quitting smoking, too. Her poor body."
Hamilton was straightforward: "Did you see
Karen
or were you there doing your science project? Can you tell us how she
was?"
"Okay, okay . . . so the food goes in one tube and out another. There didn't seem to be any problems there. Except when you think about how her body is like an earthworm, kind of, a big food-to-compost converter . . . "
I took offense to the direction this was going. "Linus! Does she look okay? Does she
move?"
"Well, um, actually,
yeah.
Her eyes were open and her eyeballs, her pupils I mean, followed my hand when I moved it over her face."
"What? She's awake?"
"No. Her eyeballs are open, but I think she's still sleeping. She has a little radio beside her bed. It was playing a disco song. Sister Sledge?" Linus seemed pleased at having remembered such a nontechnical detail.
We finally visited Karen two days before Christmas, dazed like bejeezus on Robitussin and decongestants, and we kept far away from her bed. Linus was right: Karen's eyes did follow hand motion - inspiring news. When Dr. Menger came down the hall, we excitedly informed him of the miraculous event. He looked worried and beckoned us into the cafeteria, telling us to sit.
"It doesn't give me any pleasure to tell you, kids, but your friend Karen is in what's known as a persistent vegetative state. Karen is completely unaware of either herself or her environment. She has sleep cycles and awake cycles. She has no control over her bowel or bladder functions. She has no voluntary responses to sound, light, motion, and no understanding of language. I really must tell you thatrecovery is rare. So rare as to be big news for the newspapers when it ever occurs. There's really not much else I can tell you."
"But my hand!" Pammie squealed. "Karen's eyes watch your hand if you move it around in front of her face."
"That's misleading," Dr. Menger said. "That's misleading and sad. It's a common involuntary reflex response to motion. There's no high brain function linked to the act."
So much for hope, I thought as we all drove to Pammie's house. "Oh, God, I haven't done any Christmas shopping," I said. "Let's not give each other presents, okay?" Everyone listlessly agreed. My own family members that year received chocolate bars and magazines from a Mac's convenience store, all badly wrapped in kitchen tin foil and handed over free of enthusiasm.
New Year's Eve that year, a minty fresh new decade, consisted of Hamilton halfheartedly letting off a brick of stale leftover Halloween firecrackers inside the Hitler's Bunker followed by two beers and games of Pong. Ugh.

The year became 1980.
A daily pattern of hospital visits emerged with us of the inner circle, as well as the McNeils visiting daily. Lois McNeil was still grumpy at Pammie and Wendy over the dreaded vodka-Tab cocktails, so the two would skittishly beetle down the corridor at the slightest hint of Lois. Mr. McNeil, though, was on our side, saying, "Christ, Lois, they're kids and they weren't doing harm. Nobody forced Karen to drink, and even
then
that's probably not the full cause."
Mrs. McNeil would be pursed-lipped, with Mr. McNeil saying, "It may well have been
your
two pills that caused this, so don't act so bleeding innocent."
(Thank you,
Mr. McNeil.) "I can see she didn't inherit her drug tolerance from
you."
Ow!

But as the days slipped by after Christmas holidays, visits trailed off a bit, always with good excuses; by the end of January, it was only Karen's parents and me visiting, Mr. McNeil going daily from the body shop. Softly, he said he couldn't imagine ever not going. We became the two regular visitors."I never had a real chance to talk to her, Richard. You know that?" he would say. "Always working. Always assuming there'd be time later. I feel closer to her now than I did during all her birthdays - and she'll never even know."
"Not
never,
Mr. McNeil."
"No - you're right. Not never."

It was in February a few weeks after school had resumed that I came home and saw Dad's car in the driveway at four o'clock in the afternoon, two hours earlier than usual. For someone as strongly habit-bound as my father, this could only bode big news, good or bad. I entered the kitchen, heard Mom on the phone in the living room and Dad rustling the newspaper. I came into the room and cautiously asked, "What's up?"
"Richard," she said in a warm, yet neutral voice designed to preempt shock, "Karen's pregnant."
From the top of my skull, flames burned downward; once again, I felt my skin grow quills, my forehead antlers. My stomach jumped off a cliff and my legs became stone. The Pill . . . was she on it? I never asked. First shot lucky. The Sperminator.
"Oh."
Dad said, "The hospital called us this morning. We had lunch with the McNeils today." Mom added, "There's no problem with us, Richard. Please remember that. Apparently there's no problem with the baby, either. This has happened before - women being pregnant during comas. You know we love Karen like our own daughter." My mind was steam-whistling.
"There are many cases of coma patients giving birth, Richard," my father said.
"Richard?"
"Yes. Yes. Just give me a moment here . . . "
Fire; a throat that will not breathe: that jokeisn'tfunnyanymore.

"What about
Karen?"
I asked.
"Apparently in this sort of
situation
Richard," Mom said, "the mother is just fine. Birth will be by Cesarean section next September."My mind flashed to abortion and as quickly flashed away. No. This child must be born.
"Richard," Dad said, "if news of this gets out, the media will eat you the way a snake eats rats. Karen and you will both be sideshow freaks."
"You must ensure, Richard," Mom stressed, "that nobody - not even your friends find out about this. We're absolutely firm on this. In a few months when she starts to show, we'll have to tell people she's having breathing troubles and is unable to take visitors for a while."
"But what if she wakes up?" I asked. Sad stares shot down that question. I then asked, "Who's going to take care of the baby?" I had pictures in my head of holding a swaddled youth. The word "diapers" sprang to mind unconvincingly. "Mrs. McNeil"
(oh God)
- "has eagerly volunteered to take charge. We're equally happy to help out, but she seems adamant. We'll pitch in what we can to cover costs and so will you, too, Richard, once you start your working life. You're a father. You're to live up to your obligations as best you can. But as far as the world is concerned, the baby will be Mrs. McNeil's 'niece' or 'nephew' to be taken care of after a family tragedy on her side."
"It'll be called McNeil?"
"Yes. Does that bother you?" my Dad asked.
"I, uhhh ..." I was too dazed to reply coherently.
My parents' tone followed their calm natures. They became silent statues when confronted by large events. I hadn't even begun to digest the news; as with most events in life, ramifications would have a delayed onset.
"What about the baby - will it have a proper brain? Will it have a normal personality?" I asked.
Mom said, "That's a long way off, dear. We'll think about that when the time comes."

7 THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE

And so the time came.
The seventies were over. With them left a sweetness, a gentleness. No longer could modern citizens pretend to be naive. We were now jaded; the world was spinning more quickly. Karen's Honda Civic was sold. Her clothing, makeup, childhood toys, and diaries were boxed and stored in a musty basement beneath the rear stairs of her parents's house. Memories of Karen slipped away from those who knew her. She was no longer a person, only an idea – somebody asleep in a room somewhere. Where is she? Oh ...
somewhere,
we
think.
The remains of high school flowed by like a wide, slow, pulsing river of cool chocolate milk. December and January's fiery baptism of peers had come and gone, but classmates still offered sad looks, accusatory stares, or wordless hee-haws. The five of us had become down-jacketed, disheveled curiosities - young necks craned to view the killers as we headed to the parking lot, bystanders doubtlessly assuming we were off to break into the rathskeller of a country club, swig bourbon, and dribble messages on the walls with the blood of dogs.
During schooldays, I preferred to cut class and sit down below the cedars above the fire station smoking and wasting time on the grass whittling twigs, thinking of the baby and of Karen and the things she saw. What did it mean?
As I sat there assembling the puzzle, Hamilton ignited chunks of stolen laboratory sodium with rainwater while Pam combed and combed and combed her hair with a sky blue plastic comb. The last days of high school in particular were a hazy waste of time. I'd crossed a line - I didn't care any longer. School became an activity I
used
to do. Wendy and Linus, though, veered the opposite way, losing themselves in science, memorizing equations for Teflon, gravity, and the Moon's orbit. Come June, both graduated with honors, but
he
who was once a promising student - me - barely squeaked by with an undeniable
tsk-tsk
of the faculty, who saw their once-golden Richard thrown away on a life of cigarettes, scrubbing Buicks at the Oasis car wash, and dead-end tomcatting with Hamilton Reese.