"Girlfriend in a Coma" - читать интересную книгу автора (Coupland Douglas)

2 EVERY IDEA IN THE WORLD IS WRONG

Karen and I deflowered each other atop Grouse Mountain, among the cedars beside a ski slope, atop crystal snow shards beneath pen-light stars. It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon—lung-burning; mentholated and pure; a hint of ozone, zinc, ski wax, and Karen's strawberry shampoo.

Here is where I go back to the first small crack in the shell of time, to when I was happiest. Myself and the others, empty pagan teenagers lusting atop a black mountain overlooking a shimmering city below, a city so new that it dreamed only of what the embryo knows, a shimmering light of civil peace and hope for the future. Andthere I am now, up on that mountain: What did you see, Karen? Why weren't we allowed to know? Why you—why us?

That night—December 15, 1979—Karen had been so ravenous, demanding that we connect full-tilt. She said to me, "So, Richard, are we ever gonna do it or what?" She unzipped her bib overalls on a steep, breast-shaped mogul, then hauled me into the woods, where she yanked me down into the scraping snow, a snow too icy for snow angels. I felt so young, and she looked so mature. She pulled me with unfamiliar urgency, as though an invasion were about to occur that would send us off to war. And so there we lay, pumping like lions, the insides of our heads like hot slot machines clanging out silver dollars, rubies, and sugar candies. As if time was soon to end, what little time remained must be squandered quickly, savoring the delicate, fluttering pulses of cool, dry cherry blossoms passing back and forth between our bodies.

Afterward, cold snow trickled into our pants, then into our orifices, chilling and congealing those parts so recently warm while we zipped up and schussed down the ski runs to the chairlifts. "Hey, Richard, you pussy—it's a rat race!"

Karen and I were flushed, slightly embarrassed, processing all these new bodily sensations while feeling transformed—and then we rose up again, up the mountain on a bobbing chairlift that stalled halfway up the slope. And it was there that the arc lights also blinked, then skittered, then blackened. In the dark, Karen and I sat bouncing, stuck, suspended above raw nature, our faces blue jeans-blue from the Moon. Karen lit a Number 7 cigarette, her bony cheeks inflamed with blood, burning pink in the Bic lighter's heat, like a doll inside a burning doll house. My arm draped her shoulder; we both felt safe, as if we were a complete solar system unto ourselves, dangling in the sky, warm heated planets inside a universe of stars.

I asked Karen, who was also trying to gauge the impact of what we'd just done together in the woods, if she was happy. This is never, as I have since learned, a good question to ask of anyone. But Karen smiled, giggled, and blew silky smoke into the deep blue darkness. Ithought of jewels being tossed off an ocean liner over the Marianas Trench, gone forever. Then she turned her head away from me and looked into the forest that lay to the right, trees visible to us both as only a darker shade of black. I could tell something was now wrong with her, as though she were a book I was reading with pages tanta-lizingly removed. Her small teeth bit her lower lip and her eyebrows lowered.

She jittered with a delicate jolt, as if she'd tried to start her Honda Civic with her house key.

The realization dribbled into my own head: Karen had been off kilter all afternoon and into the evening, fixating over dumb things like the olive-colored dial telephone in my parents' kitchen or a bouquet of crummy gladiolas on the kitchen table, saying, "Oh, isn't that just the most beautiful …" then trailing off. She had also been looking at the sky and the clouds all day, not just glancing, but stopping and standing and staring, as if they were on a movie screen.

Karen's back arched just faintly, and her face stiffened just so. I said, "What's up, Pumpkin—regrets? You know how I feel about you."

And she said "Duh, Richard. I love you, too . , . goonhead. Nothing's wrong, really, Beb. I'm just cold. And I want the lights to come back on. Soon." She called me "Beb," a snotty contraction of "Babe."

The absence of light frightened her. She pulled up my wool ski cap and kissed my waxy, cold ear. So I held her tighter and once more asked her what was the matter, because she still wasn't okay.

She said, "I've been having the weirdest dreams lately, Richard. So real… I guess it sounds kind of loser-ish, me saying that, doesn't it? Best forgotten." Karen shook her head and blew out a puff of tobacco smoke that spider-webbed against the dark night. She stared at the chairlift's stalag towers, unable to light the slopes with man-made sun. She changed the subject: "Did you see Donna Kilbruck's pants tonight? God—so tight—she had walrus-crotch. The horror. It, too, best forgotten."

"Hey, Beb, don't change the subject. Tell me," I said, with anunexpected curtness. I was mad at myself; I was growing up and was at the stage where smart-ass one-liners were no longer in and of themselves adequately meaningful to sustain a conversation. Karen and I rarely had conversations of true depth. The closest we ever got to hearing each other's deeper thoughts was during stoned group philosophizing sessions—which is to say not much at all. But then we were young and glibness was our armor. We yearned for better thoughts. I vowed to try to bring myself closer to her. "C'mon. Please—tell me."

Karen said, "Nope. Sorry Beb. It's too complicated to explain." Again I felt excluded. Minutes before I had been so totally one with her. A wind scraped by, our bodies shivered, and then she said, "Well maybe it wasn't a dream. You promise not to laugh?"

"Huh? Yes. Of course I promise."

"Well, I was asleep when it happened—but it was more realistic than any dream. Maybe a kind of vision."

"Go on."

"It wasn't like a dream at all, more like movie clips—like a TV ad for a movie, but with still photos, too, but just barely developed, like a blur that becomes a face when I develop them in the photo lab at school. I think it was supposed to be the future."

I could kick myself now for having said what I said, an ill-timed stab at being funny: "So how was the future? Vietnam conquers Earth? Aliens for dinner? Pods for everybody? Maybe that explains your being a space cadet all day." I thought I was being witty here—a real center box on Hollywood Squares. But Karen's falling face showed that I'd grossly misjudged. She looked spooked and let down.

"Okay, Richard. I see. I knew I shouldn't have trusted you with that. That's one mistake I won't be making again." She looked away. Chills.

I felt like a farmer watching his field flattened by hail. "No. Shit. Karen. Please. I'm a shit. Big-mouth strikes again. I didn't mean that. You know I didn't. I was being a jerk. I don't like it when I'm like that. Shit. I was only trying to be funny. Please tell me. C'mon. I want to hear about your vision. Please."

"Your groveling has been noted, Richard." She flicked away hercigarette; her tone indicated probation. She was silent awhile. We were beyond chilly, quite cold now. Our eyes adjusted to the dark. She continued: "It had texture. For example, I could feel plants and clothes and things when I touched them. Especially last night. It was set in our house on Rabbit Lane, but everything had gone to seed. The trees and grass … and the people, too. You, Pam … really dirty and grungy."

Suddenly, she had clarity. "These things are all in the future." She sniffed back a moist bead of goo dripping from her nose. "The air seemed smoky. There weren't any flying cars or outer-space clothing. But cars were different, all smooth and round. I drove in one. It had a new brand name … Airbag? Yes—Airbag. It was on the dashboard."

"You didn't happen to pick up a Wall Street Journal and notice any big market trends in the future—or any stock prices—or anything like that, did you?

She nogged herself on her forehead. "I get shown the future and all I paid attention to is cars, haircuts, and …" She rolled her eyes. "I'm blanking, Richard, I can't help you there. Stop being crass. Wait— yes—yes: Russia isn't an enemy anymore. And sex is—fatal. Ta-da!"

The ski-lift chair jiggled—engines up the hill were sending rumbles. Karen continued trancing: "Earlier this week, I saw the future and there were these machines that had something to do with money— people seemed to be more … electronic. People still did things the regular way, too, like they had to pump gas and … and … oh, shit, I can't believe this, I see the future and it sounds just like now. I can't even remember how it was different. People looked better. Thinner? Better clothes? Like joggers?"

"And … ?"

"Okay, you're right. Details are kinda patchy—but there's bad news, too. It's a good news/bad news thing." She paused and said, "There's a … darkness to the future." She paused and bit her lip. "That's what's scaring me now."

"What kind of darkness?" That night, I had worn only jeans, no long Johns. I shivered.

"The future's not a good place, Richard. I think it's maybe cruel. Isaw 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, daisy-adorned 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.