Girlfriend in a coma (22 page)

There is a song on the radio - "Blue Monday" - a rhythmic 1980s dirge. Then the radio signal goes blank. Megan goes to change the station, but the stations all sound foreign. The music has vanished. Just voices now: a crisis is occurring, but authorities are unable to be more specific. The gist is that people are dropping like flies all over town - a panic is gridlocking the city and causing untold violence. Megan looks out the window: small birds flittering in the firs; a touch of rain. Certainly no crisis could be happening
here.
Is this a
joke?
The radio station has decided to cancel all music; other stations have done the same. Announcers everywhere are telling people not to panic or use phones or electricity unless their situation is critical. Megan decides that this news is important enough to tell Skitter and Jenny, and she knocks on the bedroom door and hears no reply. She knocks louder, to which Skitter yells, "Jeezws. I'm busy. Get the fuck away." Megan knocks once more. Skitter rips open the door and says,
"What?"
Jenny is in the background looking defiant, lighting a cigarette and showing off her breasts.

"There's a crisis going on."
"You got me up for a
that?"
"Crisis. A plague. People are dying. Like in the movies."
"Go
away,
and that's a shitty joke." Skitter locks the door and Megan pounds it once

more; Skitter returns and yells again for her to leave. At this point, Skitter's car-fixing friends,

Randy and Scott, galumph in the front door, both looking pale.
"Hey, Megan. Skitter in there?"
"Duh."
"Skitter," shouts Randy, "the city's all fucked up, man. The news is for real." "Randy, I..." Skitter looks at the three faces outside his door. He throws a towel around his

waist. "Okay. Crank the TV."
"Skitter," whines Jenny, "come back."
"Not now, Jailbait. Time for action."
Megan says, "You're such a pig, Skitter. You don't believe anything until a
guy
tells you."

Soon everyone is in the living room watching TV. The CNN footage they see tightly clamps their attention: helicopter shots of smoking downtown cores - Atlanta? Los Angeles? New York? All cities have gone random; all major bridges and tunnels are hopelessly snarled, accident-clogged roads everywhere resemble the contents of a child's Halloween sack spilled onto the pavement. A local news helicopter shows Vancouver's freeways and bridges rendered impassable. Pedestrians resembling evacuees trudge to suburban homes far away, occasionally having to gingerly step over bodies.Looting is kept to a minimum - people are too fearful of contamination to steal.

The five people in Skitter's living room stare out the window into the backyard greenery. Is this a bad dream for all of them? Randy and Scott take off to wherever they live. Skitter plays with his mustache and grins: "I'm going to do a bit of window shopping. Megan, Jenny. Coming along?"

"Give me a ride home," Megan says.
"What - to your
Dad's
place?"
"Rabbit Lane, bozo."
Minutes later, as they drive out onto the larger roads of the suburb, bedlam reigns. Traffic

lights are skipped; cars drive over lawns; cars containing sleepers are pushed off the roadside by more robust vehicles. A corner grocery-store owner stands outside his front door with a sawed-off shotgun, a weapon Megan recognizes from her lifetime of TV viewing.

Jenny is jack-rabbiting about the car's front seat, swearing and bug-eyed at the dimensions of the crisis. Sleepers are everywhere - in cars, on sidewalks, in parking lots. "Oh, this is just too weird. Skitter, I wanna go home."

"Soon, enough. I want to do some shopping first."
"Everybody's heading
home,"
Megan says to herself, and she wonders what will happen to these people once they
get
home. Will they wait to die? Will they sit still? She realizes that there is no tactical advantage to being home. At home all you can do is nothing. Even still, what other place can there be?

The car pulls up to a Shopper's Drug Mart in Lynn Valley, where the parking lot is now a crashing, squealing bumper car ride. All car windows are rolled up and many drivers are simply plowing through the landscaping to escape. The power is out. Skitter leaps out of the car with his down jacket pockets brimming with handguns. At the mall's main entrance, Megan and Jenny can see an RCMP officer telling Skitter to leave. Skitter shoots him dead right there in the head and the two girls scream and hop out of the car.
Skitter has gone mental.
Megan runs up to the officer and cradles his leaking head. She hears another blast from inside the mall and sees a few stragglers run outside clutching weird, stolen-looking objects: enormous cartons of cigarettes and boxes of appliances. "Jenny!" Megan turns around, but Jenny has fallen asleep on a bench not far away, her mouth open, a forgotten newspaper flapping under her tongue.

Another blast cuts the air. Megan runs to the other side of the lot, opposite the car, and tries to collect her wits. Shortly, Skitter leaves the Drug Mart with cartons of prescription tablets. He looks around, more likely for other armed opponents than for Megan, and when he reaches the car, he hurls the boxes into the backseat and then - and then
nothing.

Megan walks over for a better look; Skitter has fallen asleep in the front seat. Megan is too confused to be terrified for herself. "Oh, God - oh
God.
" The malls seems drained of people, and the parking lot has cooled down to near emptiness. Traffic on the road above is filled with speeders and horns and bumps and squeals.

How to get home?
The sky darkens. She can hear herself breathe. It's only a week past the shortest day of the year and it feels it. Looking at Skitter, she's too afraid of his death to rifle his pocket for his car's keys. She creeps into the mall, now lit only by emergency bulbs. From a sporting goods store she takes a mountain bike and from the drug store some Tylenol-3, two nine-volt flashlights, and Bubblicious gum. A lost springer spaniel behind her barks and startles her. Outside, back in Skitter's car, she takes two handguns then sets out to navigate her way home through the craziness of the highway.
The two miles from Lynn Valley to Westview are vastly more insane than she could have conceived. Nothing is moving save for motorcycles and crazy people driving down the shoulders and over the embankments, plowing whatever lies in their way. Three times, men try to stand in her way to take her bike; three times, Megan has
shot them in or near their feet and feels a bit sicker with each
crack,

She realizes the next miles of highway leading up to the Rabbit Lane exit are going to be impassable. While planning her next steps, amotorcyclist pulls over in front of her - a big bruiser Yamaha. The driver kicks the kickstand, hops off, winks at Megan, and falls asleep face-first onto the pavement.

Megan instantly hops onto the bike and guns it up Delbrook Road, through Edgemont and across Cleveland Dam. By now it's fully dark. She takes the utility road up to Glenmore then bombs down Stevens and into Rabbit Lane. She is home.

What an ucking-fay aste-way of an ay-day.

Hamilton wakes up with a crashing headache and tumultuous hangover; his brain feels like a boxcar full of dying aliens being buried in the desert soil - an image taken from an old episode of Richard's TV show. Shortly before noon, he hobbles up for water, stubs his toe on a chair leg, curses, feels his head throb, and quickly snugs into the tangle of sheets and duvet that is his lair while he recuperates. The phone rings somewhere in the afternoon; he ignores it. Around three, he gets a glass of orange juice and the morning paper and tries to read the paper in bed, but he's still dizzy. He gives it up, turns out the light, and waits for Pam to return around six.

Wendy is lost in the forest. She is tired. She thought she knew the correct pathway home; now she has only the hushed roar of the Dam to the north to give her guidance. There is no moon or glow from the city - the clouds are too dense. The ten-speed is gone long ago, its wheels bent after snagging a root. She hears occasional explosions or booms down toward the city.

The path twists; trees that fell during last year's storms confuse her memory of the trails. Suddenly, there's a stream where there ought to have been soil and ferns where there ought to have been stone. Wendy falls to her knees - she is beyond tired. She can't even begin to count the hours she has been awake. A half-formulated idea flits within her mind: She will build a nest of ferns to keep her warm until daybreak. This is only a foolish child's dream. She knows it.

She cuts her knee on a burl. She reaches down to hold the cut when in her peripheral vision she sees a pale yellow haze of light float downfrom the treetops, a shape and shade of green and gold, steadily falling down, down, down. She pivots her head to watch the light's steady downward sweep, steady and smooth like a glass elevator. It stops.

"Hello, Wendy." It's Jared, standing before her, impossibly young, unchanged from the sunny day he threw a football to a startled Wendy eating lunch alone in the bleachers.
"Jared? Sweetie? Is that
you?"
The light that is Jared holds his finger to his lips and shushes Wendy. He extends his hand and Wendy clasps its lightness - there is no actual touch sensation, yet suddenly she is warm. This is all she'd ever wanted.
She says, "Jared, I've missed you so much. I've - we've all - " She begins to blubber. "I loved you and I miss you and the world has never been the same since you left. And now I'm lost and I'm frightened and the world seems to be closing down and dying. I'm a doctor now I was at the hospital today. Oh Wendy, stop being so
emotional."
Jared kisses his fingers, flicks the kiss at Wendy, smiles, and makes a wanking off gesture. He nods his head to indicate that Wendy should follow. His long curly hair doesn't jiggle as his head moves. Wendy follows him, lit by his body's gentle sulfur color. Wendy's feet squelch in mud patches and her cheeks burn red, thwacked by damp salmonberry twigs. They wind through unfamiliar paths, and they reach a straightaway that Wendy recognizes. Jared stops. He moves his eyebrows the way he did two decades previously to indicate that he's leaving.
"You're leaving? No. Jared
no.
Don't go. Please stay with me. Talk. I missed you so much. You were all I ever wanted. It's only half a world without you."
But Jared gently pulls away his hand and walks back three paces. He smiles and melts downward into the soil like a peg in a hole.
Wendy is left behind. She grabs a small stone at the point where

Jared's head left the path and crushes it so hard in her palm that her skin bleeds. For years, Wendy had thought the world was fine andcomplete - that she could make do with what she had worked for and with what life had handed her. Now she knows this has never been true. She arrives out onto the unlit street and sees her own house unlit, but decides not go there. She sees candlelight down the road at Karen's, so she walks that way. Once inside, she looks around at the familiar faces lit by the flames. She says to them, "I'm going to sleep. I'm not tired - not
that
kind of tired - I'm exhausted." She tumbles into a warm clump on the couch. Linus places a mohair blanket over her, and Wendy flinches at his touch.

25 2000
IS
SILLY

"The Queen is dead."
"Go on," Richard says.
Karen continues: "The two princes are wearing blackout sunglasses. The Queen's body is

being lowered into a grave. Only a few people are looking through the palace fence. It's dark out - and raining. The grave is all muddy."
Silence.
"Karen, do you really have to wear that paper bag over your head?"
"It's not just
one
paper bag, Richard, it's
three
bags. I can't see my visions properly if there's even one speck of light hitting my face. Even candlelight. It's a recognized paranormal fact."
"You look like a joke wearing it."

198
"Yeah, a real triple-bagger, Richard."
"Richard," Hamilton says, "could you please shut up? Let Karen speak."
"Hamilton, stop being an alpha male for just one second and let Karen alone." "Hey, Wendy, excuse
me
for being so interested in what is decidedly one great big dung heap

of a situation. I thought you were asleep."
"I'm not going to sleep through this situation no matter how tired I am."
"He's right, Wen," Pam says, "this is an
extremely
not good situation. "
''''Quiet,
everybody. If you want me to tell you what I can see, then be quiet. Could you all put

your personalities on hold for just two minutes?"

Karen is trying to describe the collapse of the world to her friends, who are masking their fear with funeral giggles - a protective, ironic coating. "Okay. Let me see - Pam, did I just hear you yawn?"

Pam jumps: "Yawn? No! Tired? Not at all." The group is petrified of yawning, physical comfort, and anything that might make them restful or sleepy. Their coffee is strong.
"Karen," Hamilton says, "do you have a little list of who makes it and who doesn't?"
"You're being facetious, Hamilton. I don't have a list. And I don't know where my information comes from."
"Hmmm. I think Mr. Liver needs a drink."
"Can we get on with this?" Richard asks.
"Richard, please remove the paper bags from my head. I don't know if this is a good time for me to trance. You people have to stop thinking I have this huge Scoreboard in my head with constant information spewing out that I'm not telling you. It's not like that. I tell you facts whenever I can."
The rooms goes silent. "I need a break. Linus, can you turn on the

generator again? Let's scan the radio and watch that CNN tape again."Linus activates the Honda generator and Karen's house on Rabbit Lane regains electric light. The radio squawks out only predictable news: Every human activity has shut down - hospitals, dams, the military, malls. All machines are turned off. Once again, they watch the CNN VHS tapes Karen recorded earlier that afternoon before the power failed. The tape plays and again Pam and Hamilton blanch as they see the images they witnessed in stereo last Halloween play themselves out on screen: Dallas; India; Florida . . . They have no idea what to make of them.