Girlfriend in a coma (32 page)

Karen meanwhile limps and hobbles up the rock mountainside lit by the sky which is committing suicide above. She'll reach the top.The walls of her heart are as thin as rice paper and her breath as frail as dandelion puffs. From there she'll once more leave the waking world.

She speaks out loud to herself, unaware that the others will also hear the words. She looks down from the slope at the burnt forests and the lost suburbs.
"You guys just wait and see. We'll stand taller than these mountains. We'll bare open our hearts for the world to grab. We'll see lights where before there was dimness. We'll testify together to what we have seen and felt.
"Life
will
go on - all of us - crawling; stumbling, falling perhaps. But we
will
be the strong ones. Our hearts will shine brightly. We will forever be crossing the goal line."
Down in the canyon, Richard's heels sink into mud and loam and fungus and mouse holes as he crumbles down the hill. His body falls and lunges the same as always, like the times as a child he carried sockeye salmon sandwiches down to the salmon hatcheries for lunch. The soil is soft and warm, like an old shirt, like moist wedding cake.
Focus ahead, Richard: jettison everything. Leap forward. You have a mission.
A bird's trill. . .
Quartz . . .
A green leaf . . .
A bruised knee . . .
His breath is a small wisp - a thought of a thought of a thought.
On the river he locates the spot where he sat on the rocks that strange November morning. He sits and rests his head on a smooth boulder. He lies there as Karen reaches the apex, where she finds a dusty rock onto which she hoists herself and Jane. The air is cool and scratchy. She breathes in deeply.
Richard resumes his vigil on the rocks under the sky gone insane. He shivers and his legs are numb with cold. Richard gets to thinking - he gets to thinking there must be all of these people everywhere

on Earth, eager, no
desperate
for just the smallest sign that there issomething finer or larger or more miraculous about ourselves than we had supposed.
How can I give them a spark?
he wonders.
How can I hold their hands and pull them all through flames and rock walls and icebergs? With our acts we will shock and captivate them into new ways of thinking.

He hears Karen's voice once one last time; she has climbed the mountain and she says, "
You
are the future, and the eternity, and the everything. You're indeed what comes
next.
I'm going now. It's my time to leave. Yes - I can feel myself leaving. You'll change the world. Good-bye, guys."

In London the supermodels wear Prada and the photographers snap their photos. The young princes read their
Guinness Book of World Records.
In California, meetings are held and salad is picked at. Across the globe hydro dams generate electricity and radio towers send powerful signals out into the heavens advertising Fiat Pandas and creme rinses. Golden lights oscillate wildly. Giant receiving dishes rotate and scour the universe for voices and miracles. And why shouldn't they? The world indeed awakens: The Ginza throbs and businessmen vomit into Suntory whiskey boxes to the giggles of Siberian party girls - the excitement and glamour and seduction of progress - cities shine: cities of gold and tin and lead and birch and Teflon, molybdenum, and diamonds that gleam and gleam and gleam.

Near dawn, Richard feels the tremors - the world resuming. There is an enormous camera flash. He can feel it happening - the world returns.
And suddenly it's almost sunrise. A final flash of light alarms a school of spawning salmon huddled in the water - a maroon, collective brain huddled underneath the rocks. Richard tries to imagine their collective thinking - the one idea they want to put forth.
Richard thinks of his life and his world once more: No, my daughter is
not
confused and angry and lost on drugs. No, she
doesn't
hate me for
all that I've forgotten or neglected or failed to do for her. No, the woman
I love is
not
a papery husk of a woman, breathing shallow thimbles ofair as her gray hair crackles and her body turns to leather and bone. My friends are
not
lonely and tired and dried-up and sad. And I'm not just fooling myself, either. That's all over - we made the trade.
Richard thinks about being alive at this particular juncture in history and he can only marvel to be alive at this wondrous point - this jumping-off point toward farther reaches. The things he'll see and feel - even the tiny moments like the Moon mural in Karen's old bedroom or satellite weather maps - it's all such a tiny bit of what comes next.
His mind races: Think about all those crazy people you see on the streets. Maybe they aren't crazy at all. Maybe they've seen what we've seen - maybe those people are us.
Us.
You'll soon be seeing us walking down your street, our backs held proud, our eyes dilated with truth and power. We might look like you, but you should know better. We'll draw our line in the sand and force the world to cross our line. Every cell in our body explodes with the truth. We
will
be kneeling in front of the Safeway, atop out-of-date textbooks whose pages we have chewed out. We'll be begging passersby to see the need to question and question and question and never stop questioning until the world stops spinning. We'll be adults who smash the tired, exhausted system. We'll crawl and chew and dig our way into a radical new world. We will change minds and souls from stone and plastic into linen and gold - that's what I believe. That's what I know.