Girlfriend in a coma (15 page)

Wendy leaves the room; there's noise outside the door; she comes back with a phone - no cord - and seeing that Karen's awake, asks her to say hi to Mom and Dad, which seems odd as she only just saw them last night. After the call, she quizzed Wendy: "What year is it again, Wendy?"

"1997."
"Oh. Oh
my."
"Karen, I want to ask you a favor." Wendy's voice was hedgy. "Hamilton and Pam are really

sick, but they'll be okay soon enough. They need something to give them hope." "They're hopeless?"
"In a way. They're without hope. It's in their heads. Can I bring

them up here with you? It'll help them." "Are they really doing drugs?"Doing drugs - what an old-fashioned word. "Yes. Pathetic as it sounds. Drugs are different these days. You'll learn it all soon. How do you feel?"

"Fantastically awake. They OD'd?"
"Yup."
"Bring them in - I want to have lots of people around me. But only people I know." "Your mom won't be too thrilled."
"I'll deal with her." She smacks her lips. "Can I have a sip of water?" Wendy rushes over

and holds a glass. Karen notices her wedding ring. "Thanks. How long have you and Linus been married?"

George and Lois nudge the door open soundlessly. The room is dim. The parents are startled to see Megan and Richard there on the bed with her - Unorthodox, but then hospitals aren't the same citadels of reflex cruelty and loneliness they once were. Richard is snoring and Megan is breathing warmly. And there is Karen. Her eyes are open and smiling. "Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad," she says under her breath.
"Shhhhh . . .
the kids are asleep." Her jaw aches.

Her voice! She's back!
George blubbers while smooching Karen's cheeks, oblivious to the scene he creates. "Hi Dad." George is lost to emotion, as Karen smiles and raises happy eyebrows over George's shoulders toward Lois. Karen winks. It is hard for Karen to be sentimental, because in her mind she has only had a quick nap since 1979.

Richard awakens just then. "Hi, George. Oh.
Excuse me.
Here.
Oh.
Let me move out of the way and down off this thing. Lois. Hi - " Richard clambers off, the top part of his silver astronaut suit dragging behind him like a beaver tail. George hugs Richard. Lois, meanwhile, has stayed away from the bed. Her purse is clutched to her chest. She comes nearer. She locks eyeballs with her daughter.

"Hey, MOOT." Karen says.

There is a silence. "Hello, Karen." Another silence. "Welcome back." Lois gives Karen a small kiss.George and Richard shut up. Karen sees that time has done little to alter her mother. Some gray hair here, a wrinkle there - the posture and voice are timeless. "You look as good as ever, Mom," Karen says.

"Thank you, dear." Lois has not visited Karen for almost a year now. She is finding it hard to overlook Karen's deterioration. "Can you eat now, sweetie? Are you hungry?" The old food games have begun already. "I brought an owl figurine to cheer you up."

"Thanks." It's as if seventeen years have never happened.

Megan touches her mother, holds her neck and rubs it with her hands. Karen's gray hair is limp and sad and has been cut with blunt scissors; Megan holds it to her nose and the hair smells dusty and sweet. All her life Megan has felt jinxed, that people around her would come to bad ends. Richard, too, has felt the same way for years, though neither of them knew it of the other. Megan has been dressing in black for so long now, and has been chasing an early death; it seemed only fitting - the drugs, the fearsome boyfriends, and the fast cars. Why would anybody miss her? Richard - whoops
Dad
- might miss her, but then he'd most likely go drink himself into the center of the Earth to forget her. That's unfair. He
did
quit drinking for real. But then didn't he fob her off on Lois and George?
Lois
- glad to have me out of her hair. George? George is nice, but he's always liked Karen better.

Megan soon accompanies Richard, Lois, George, Wendy, and Linus into another room. The hallways have been cleared. Wheels squeak. It's quiet.
The group arrives at a new, larger room. Inside, Uncle
Hamilton and Aunt Pam are already there, conked out in
separate beds, resembling dead extras in a sci-fi movie.
Drugged out losers,
Megan thinks, but then she reminds
herself that she really has no right to condemn on that front.
Where does this judgmental streak come from? Megan decides she's going to go straight edge: She's never going to
do a drug ever again. Even aspirin. She is going to be the
mother that Karen never had. She is going to protect her
keep her smart, make herwhole. And then Megan
remembers why she is even
at
the hospital: last night with
Skitter on the mattress in Yale's basement, a pot dealer friend
of Skitter. She'd told Linus that the morning-after pill was for
her friend, Jenny, but it wasn't. Megan knows that she is
pregnant. It was meant to be.
17
EVERYBODY'S LYING

"/
want them all in the same room because they'll all give each other intentive to get well."
Pam and Hamilton hear Wendy's voice and open their fogged eyes to see white curtains.
They hear background snatches of other voices. Hamilton's throat hacks up a clump of bloodphlegm; Wendy, standing beside him says poker-faced, "Welcome back to prime time,
douche bag."
"Wendy?
Ooh.
Ahh. I feel like a paper sack of burning dog shit. What
time is
it?" "Time to change your life, you screwed-up junkie."
"Hamilton - are you
there?"
calls Pam.
"Assuming we're not dead, yes, dear. What time is it, Wendy? Where
are
we? What are
we doing here?" Lifting his head feels like lifting a swarm of hornets,
"It's Sunday,
kids.
And
you
are both in the hospital. You're here for emergency
supernumerary mammectomies."

"Super
what*."
"We're removing your third nipples." "
What?
Ow! Don't talk like that, Wendy."
"Hospital humor. It's my style - oh and don't give me that little wounded look:
'Ooh, I'm so

surprised.'
You came one eyelash close to death, you bastard." She walks over and looks into Hamilton's eyes and then slaps him gently.

"Ow,
shit,
Wendy, whaddya do
that
for? You screwed up a fantastic high. I was on a roll last night."
"Why?
You were almost
dead
last night, scuzz bucket." Wendy approaches Pam in the bed to the left and pecks her on the forehead. "You both scared the hell out us. You're too old to be so pathetic doing junk. I don't need to be friends with junkie losers. And having said that, I want you to sit up and have a look across the room."
Pam says, "My head hurts, I - "
"Just
look,
you two losers."
With two push-button controls, Wendy elevates Pam and Hamilton's backrests, then opens the curtains, allowing them to see Richard and Karen across the room; Richard is holding Karen's arm, wagging it back and forth, and the two of them are making faces. Karen is wearing a shirt Lois brought along with her - the same Levi's shirt she wore in high school: rough cotton, embroidered parakeets.
George and Lois and Megan are parked on stools, and Lois looks furious, first at Wendy and then at Hamilton: "Wendy, I don't think there's anything useful to come of having two . . .
drug addicts
in the room. They're the worst possible influence, and just
look
at Hamilton. What a dreadful sight to wake up to after seventeen years. There must be some sort of rule about this."
"Lois," Wendy says, "I had to pull a whack of strings to get them all in here. You think this was
easy?"
"But they're so . . .
ugh."
"Once more, Lois, it will be
good
for them to be together. They all need support."
"Oh, God. This is a hallucination," says Hamilton.

"Hi, Hamilton," Karen says. "Who'd you take to the prom?"Pam, not fully clicked in to the tableau across the room, pipes up and hears the voice - Karen is back from McDonald's. "Karen? You're
herel
"

"Hi kids," says Karen. "How was grad? I missed it. As you know."

"Oh,
oh
- you wouldn't
believe
it; Hamilton took Cindy
Webber.
A computer date. I went with Raymond Merlis."
"No!"
"Yes, and - "
"I did
not
have a computer date," Hamilton interjects.
"Oh shut your gob. No one would take you."
"Did Raymond remove Keith for the night?" Keith is their name for the single strand of wiry hair growing from a mole on Raymond Merlis's face.
Instantly, Pam and Karen relapse into their older, younger selves, like exotic birds chattering in a mango tree. Pam tries to step out of bed and stumbles toward Karen, but her body aches and she's unable to stand up. Her knees buckle. The activated granulated charcoal given to her earlier seems to have sunk like ball bearings into her lower colon. Hamilton, meanwhile, is nauseated and feels as though he's lying on a dock in choppy weather. He vomits Halloween chocolate and dead martinis into a bedside bucket while his muscles spasm and he feels the onset of scorch-and-burn diarrhea.
"Just so you know, Kare," Pam says, "Keith came, too."
"Wendy," Lois barks. "This is revolting. They're sick. I really must protest." "Sickness is part of life, Lois."
"Mi scusa,
everybody - " Pam begins to sweat and clam; her anxiety is escalating. Hamilton is already desperate for a fix, Pam not quite so, but soon she will be. "You can't say we're dull."
In the background Lois is saying, "Very well then,
Doctor
Chernin. I'm going to call my lawyer. George? Call my lawyer."
"Lois, be quiet," says George.

Karen has been awake a few days and has had some rare time alone with her thoughts. The first two days were such a circus that she hadto ask Wendy to lock everybody out of the room save for Mom, Dad, Richard, and Megan.

Pam and Ham are now gone; she has the room to herself. She looks down at her body bones marinated in liquid and only vaguely responsive to her will. She has already gained three pounds and she thinks this is a sick joke. She lifts her hand to where her breasts once were; she touches what is now mere parchment and bone, emits a squeak, and sighs.

She surveys her hospital room, her world, almost identical to the room she had during her appendix removal in third grade. Where has she
been
for seventeen years? What other world did she visit? She is furious with herself for not remembring. Her coma was dreamless, but she
knows
she went
to
some place real. Not the place you go when you die - some other place. She thinks back to the previous week, the week before the coma, and she remembers being chased by darkness. Darkness?
What?
Some of it returns to her. She was trying to find a way to cheat the darkness. And she lost in the end.
Shit.

She tries to raise her arm but the sensation is as though she is trying to lift a telephone pole. Megan, her "surprise daughter," will be in soon to help her with stretching exercises. Megan and Lois and Richard are taking shifts. Her tendons apparently need to tenderize before muscle can rebuild. She feels as though she's an item on a menu.

Why has she been kept alive? She can't imagine the point of it. She's happy to be awake but is secretly appalled at the thought of the money and human effort it must have taken to keep her going for so long.

What has happened to the world? What has happened to the people in her world?

She's been awake just a little bit of time, but much is apparent. Richard: He's so different yet he still holds her the way he used to bodies retain memories long after the mind forgets them. His face is so ravaged. Drinking? How did
that
happen? And Ham and Pam on
heroin?
Such a punch line. It's as though Karen walked through a door in 1979 and directly entered a health guidance class showing a film on the unmentioned perils of aging.Wendy, working hard
- too hard, it seems. She's not much in love with Linus - obvious to anybody - nor is Linus much in love with Wendy. His soul is full of glue. Karen seems to have understood everyone's life immediately; the others think she is too out of it - too clued out about the modern world - but Karen sees all. She remembers the innocent pointless aims of their youths
(Hawaii! Ski bum at Whistler!)
and sees that they were never acted upon. But at the same time, larger aims were never defined. Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.

Her friends are not particularly happy - not with their lives. Pam had rolled her eyes when Karen asked her if she was happy.
"No."
"Fulfilled?"
"No."
"Creative?"
"A little."
Through the monsters they design and the TV shows they work on, they give vent to the loss they feel inside. Expressions of pettiness, loss, and corruption. She asked not to see any more of their FX photos. Yuck. The photos sit on a stack beside flowers from the mayor as well as from various studios and film production companies wishing to purchase rights to her life story.
On top of it all, the world itself has changed. Karen must try and absorb seventeen years of global changes. That can wait. And she thinks she'll go crazy if one more person tells her that the Berlin Wall came down and AIDS exists in the world.

One week later, Wendy still can't comprehend Karen's return to the living and her complete retention of
all
her brain power. Wendy knows the medical statistics. To others, Karen's awakening is a lottery win - a prize behind Door Number 3, a pair of snowmobiles. But to Wendy, Karen is a river running backward, a rose that blooms under moonlight - something transcendent, an epiphany.

Wendy thinks of Karen's long rehab road to reach the point whereshe will be able to perform simple everyday functions once more. Brittle bones; atrophied ligaments. Yet her face is already fully animated, and she smiles as clearly as always. Already her arms are now skittishly mobile, storky chopsticks reaching for gum and the squeeze bottle of water. Checks and balances. Karen is a time capsule - a creature from another era reborn, a lotus seed asleep for ten thousand years that springs to life as clear and true as though born yesterday.