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Authors: Douglas Coupland

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BEING CONCERNED FOR ME, BUT I ASSURE YOU I'M OKAY. YOU ASKED WHY I'M DOING THIS AND THAT'S A REASONABLE QUESTION. I THINK I COULDN'T SEE ME FITTING INTO THE EVERYDAY WORLD ANY LONGER. I FOUND MYSELF DOING ELECTRICAL WORK DAY IN/DAY OUT AND REALIZED I WOULD HAVE TO DO THIS THE REST OF MY LIFE AND IT SPOOKED ME. I DON'T KNOW IF THERE'S SOME ALTERNATIVE OUT THERE, BUT I SPEND MOST OF MY TIME WONDERING WHAT IT MIGHT BE. I SUPPOSE THERE'S ALWAYS CRIME, BUT THAT'S NOT GOOD WHEN YOU'RE OLDER. THERE'S DRUGS, BUT YOU KNOW, I'VE NEVER SEEN ANYBODY WHO'S BEEN IMPROVED BY DRUGS. LIFE SEEMS BOTH TOO LONG AND TOO SHORT. THIS BEING SAID, I HAD A GOOD DAY TODAY. THECLOUDS WERE PRETTY AND I BOUGHT A

SACK OF CLOTHES AT THE GOODWILL STORE FOR FIVE BUCKS. PAMMIE WAS ON THE COVER OF ELLE. PLEASE WRITE IF YOU CAN. CARE OF THE POST OFFICE, LAS VEGAS. YOUR FRIEND, ALBERT LINUS.

In 1989, Hamilton married Cleo, a hiker he met while triangulating land up north near Cassiar. They moved into a small town house near Lonsdale Quay and became ultradomestic, hosting theme dinner parties
("Provence!"),
allowing themselves to pudge out a few pounds
("DoveBars...darewe?"),
and spending their weekends wallpapering
("Lovetoplaybaseballbutthedenmoldingjustarrivedtoday.").
Hamilton seemed to have settled down and lost much of his sarcastic edge. He left my radar for a while, even though he lived nearby.
In 1991, Wendy became a specialist in emergency medicine. Also, her mother died of liver cancer that year, so Wendy returned home to the old neighborhood to live with and take care of her father, Ivor, a trollish grump with never a kind word for his daughter or anybody else. Wendy was occupied, but her life really wasn't much of a life. I know she'd wanted to fall in love during med school, but it never happened, and I know she was unhappy about this.
This was also the year that Pam began vanishing from magazines, until she finally went completely AWOL at year's end, nary a lipstick-smudged postcard to any of us. Hurt feelings, yes, but we knew there had to be a reason. Hamilton, in a less generous mood, said, "She's in rehab. Don't glamorize it. Serves the cow right." "In what way does it serve her right, Ham?" I asked. We were in Hamilton and Cleo's nest at the bottom of Lonsdale: matching pine furniture, wacky animal fridge magnets, and white wine. Cleo positively glowed every time Ham took a swipe at Pammie.
"In what way?" I asked again. He didn't know in what way. He harrumphed and said he had to make a phone call. "Aren't / Mr. Pissy tonight." Cleo looked miffed.

In mid-1992,, Pam returned home to her folks' place - shaky, fearful, thin, and eerily gorgeous. The modeling lifestyle had wiped her out.We were sitting on her parent's front patio, "You know, it was fun, Richard. I grant you that. But it's over now. There's only a small fraction of 'me' left. I used to think there was an infinite supply of 'me.' Wrong-o. I have to be calm now. My small seed needs to grow and become a whole person again. I blew it all - a whole decade raking in dough and not one effing penny." "Where'd it go?"Iasked.
"Clothes. Dinners. Drugs. More drugs. Bad investments - a mall in Oklahoma that never got built; a retirement community in Oregon that bankrupted." She was spitting out the words. "Shit. At least I'm allowed to smoke." The trees way above us rustled. A crow cawed. "And it's not even the drugs I miss, Richard. I miss the
action.
I miss feeling like queen of the roulette table. The black cars. Shallow shit, but I miss it. I miss feeling fabulous." A big silence, then: "Lois lets me baby-sit Megan sometimes. She's a fun kid. And gorgeous. She reminds me of Karen."
"Thanks."
"When I first saw Megan as a baby I thought she might as well go she-male and become your twin. By the way, my dear,
you
look like
crap."
"Thanks again Pam." I was making impatient gestures - I had to go pick up Megan from ice skating.
"Richard, you're not leaving - not now, are you? Is it because I pointed out your boozy skin condition?"
"I have to, Pam, I..." Pam's composure wilted. She was on the cusp of tears. I sat next to her and asked what was wrong. She sniffled and stared into her two clasped hands.
"It's just that I'm .. . I'm ... "
"What, Pam? What?"
A whisper: "Lonely."
"I know. Me, too."
I held her as she sniffled. "How's Hamilton? You see him much? Is he happy?" "I think so.""Oh,
pooh."
She was still wearing the pubic-hair locket. I asked her to come along with me to pick up Megan and she did.

As fate would have it, Pam shortly ran into Hamilton and Cleo at a record store in Park Royal; they clicked instantly and they left the shop together, forgetting Cleo entirely. In those first few moments poor Cleo saw Pam and Hamilton together she knew she was out of the picture. Cleo had never seen that expression on Hamilton's face before: incredulous, worshipful, witty, lustful, and adoring - all of this
love
laser-beamed straight at Pam.
Hamilton's marriage didn't just wobble, it crashed like a dynamited casino. In six months it was legally over, too: Cleo got the townhouse; Hamilton boomeranged into his parents' rent-free house, just a mere three-minute stroll to Pam's. At dinner at my parents' one night I saw the two of them moseying down Rabbit Lane. Every three steps a kiss. Every five steps a caress. Hamilton in love.
It was great fun to have Pam among us again, with her tattletales of sex, drugs, and cannibalism. Her reputation in the fashion industry was shot, but this didn't bother her at all. "Much better for me to be here in Deadsville with chums. All very matey, isn't it?" I asked her if she had a plan yet. She said she was going to start doing TV and film makeup for some of the many U.S. studios shooting in their Vancouver branch plants. It turned out to be the best idea any of us ever had.

And what of Karen? Neither alive nor dead after all these years, ever dimming from the world's mind - rasping, blinded, and pretzeled in a wheelchair, a chenille halfshirt covering the outer, exposed part of her body. She moves her head, her eyes flicker, and for three seconds she sees the sky and the clouds - she is briefly among the living, but no one is there to witness. She returns to the dark side of the Moon. We still don't know what she saw that December night, nor may we ever. By the early 1990s, Karen's awakening had become a billion-to-one shot, but it was still a shot. No, Karen didn't "contribute" anything to society, but how many people really
do?
Perhaps she
did
contribute: She provided a platform on which people could hope. She provided the idea that some frail essence from a now long-vanished era still existed, that the brutality and extremes of the modern world were not the way the world ought to be - a world of gentle Pacific rains, down-filled jackets, bitter red wine in goatskins, and naive charms.

11 DESTINY IS CORNY

After four years of drifting, Linus returned in late
1992.
In that time he'd become more remote than ever. "Reading his facial expressions is an exercise in Kremlinology," Hamilton said. "Direct inquiry's no help:
Gee,Linus,you'resoremote thesedays-gee,what'sthereason?"
Discussion was awkward indeed, and in the end it was simply avoided. His years away were treated as though he'd popped out to get a pack of cigarettes and returned a few minutes later.
Wendy met Linus for dinner a week after his low-key return. Afterward, she told me Linus had "gone inside himself, and hasn't quite emerged yet. He talked about sand dunes, ice, chocolate bars, and hitchhiking - the sorts of things that would be a big deal if you
were a hobo. Chalk marks and stuff."
I was envious of Linus's venture into nothingdom, but also ticked off that he hadn't had a revelation in all of his wanderings. I still lived, as did Hamilton, with the belief that meaning could pop into my life at any moment. I was getting
we
were getting - no younger, yet for some reason not particularly wiser.
Linus's parents had moved to the waterfront on Bellevue two years earlier - no spare bedroom. A homesick Linus rented a bungalow four houses down from his old house on Moyne Drive, paying the rent with earnings as a freelance electrical contractor. Generators were his specialty. It seemed an anticlimactic sequel to his romantic solo wanderings.
Wendy, eager for any excuse to not have to be around her aging churlish feed-memy-gruel father, visited Linus every night after her shift at Lions Gate Emergency. One night at a Halloween party in North Van, Wendy curled herself into Linus's lap and smiled love's smile. "Good for them!" we all said. Wendy began spending less time at the hospital; she resumed kibitzing about with our old crowd. I bumped into Wendy on Moyne Drive one afternoon. Seemingly dancing on air, she held a Safeway paper bag. I asked her what it was, and she opened it to show me. "It's a pile of sulfur that Albert gave me."
"Albert? Oh - that's right - it's Linus's real first name."
"Isn't he
sweet?"
Wendy soon moved in with Linus and that summer the two were married, as were Pam and Hamilton. A week after the ceremony it was a rainy day and Wendy and I were sitting on cardboard boxes in the living room, rain thumping the rooftop. I asked Wendy why she and Linus had never gotten together before. She said, "All my life I've had this problem of being lonely all day. Then one night loneliness began creeping into my dreams. I thought I was jinxed or spooked or voodoo'ed into a life of eternal loneliness. Then Linus told me that he had the same problem. Oh, the
reliefI
felt! It dawned on me that maybe we were the same in other ways."

Pam said, "They both had solitary natures, neither needs to explain themselves to the other. Added bonus? They're comfy with each other. So who'dathunk?"That fall I began living in Linus's house, too. I'd lost my driver's license, which made me take taxis in whose comfortable interiors I could drink even more. Drinking made me a shameful salesman; I was broke and needed a cheap place to crash. Linus rented me a basement room - a small room with one lamp and a window that overlooked the tool shed.
"I think," Linus said on moving day, "you drink because you want to kill time until Karen wakes up. Correct?"
I told him to mind his own business, although he was probably right. "But I don't think it's just one thing." We discussed my drinking problem as though it were a cold.
I was the last of our crew to return to the neighborhood. Hamilton began living at Pam's house. Our situation felt wildly regressive. The Loser's Circle. Pam asked me one day on a forest walk if we were all winners or losers. "Where do we fit in, Richard? We're all working. We all have jobs but. . . there's something missing." "We're empty, maybe," I said. Some birds screeched.
"I don't think so. But no kids - that must mean something. Oh stupid me. I mean there's Megan, of course. Hopefully, I'll have a little brute some day. It's like that thing you told me - the line from that post card Linus wrote you:
Whydoeslifefeelso longandsoshortatthesametime?
Why
is
that?" Rain was starting to spit. "I think we live in this world, but we don't
change
the world. No, but that's wrong. We're born; there
must
be a logic - some sort of plan larger than ourselves." We walked farther. We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it. We had quietly settled into a premature autumn of life - no gentle mellowing or Indian summer of immense beauty, just a sudden frost, a harsh winter with snows that accumulate, never to melt.
In my head I wanted to
thaw
the snow. I wanted to
reorder
this world. I did
not
want to be old before my time.

The two of us arrived at a long, clear stretch of the path. Pam said,"Watch this." She began to catwalk down an invisible runway. "Calvin Klein. Milan. Fall Collection, 1990. What's in my head as I walk the catwalk? I'm worried my legs look too scrawny. Will there be free coke afterward? The supermodel's mind, eh?"
We forded a stream and entered a mossy patch lit by a shaft of sun cutting through the rain.
That night, I went on a bender for no real reason except that there was nobody home and nobody was reachable on the phone. I was rehashing the day's conversation with Pam and I felt the loneliest I'd ever felt, because I was getting old and I was alone and I saw no chance of this ever changing.
I remember nothing that happened after I opened the evening's second vodka bottle (no pretense of flavor or finesse . . . just getting it in). I awoke the next morning, my head flopped inside the toilet bowl like a pile of meat at the butcher's. I'd vomited onto, then
into
my stereo, I'd cut the chain on my exercise bike and shitted all over my sheets, some of which was rubbed onto the wall. No memory at all.
Wendy found me and talked to me while I was still on the floor. Linus came in. Wendy said, "You can't go on like this, Richard." Linus ran the bath and he and Wendy placed me in it. The two of them cleaned my room for me as I sat in the bath, still slightly drunk - a blank, angry hangover beginning to thunder inside my cranium. They stuffed me into Wendy's 4-Runner and took me to the hospital. That was the end. "But I want to pass out," I shouted at Wendy.
"No you don't," she calmly replied.
"I want to be where Karen is."
"No you don't."
"Ido."
"You're not allowed there."
"lam."
"Grow up," Linus said. "Be a man."

On New Year's Eve, 1992, the five of us were sitting in Linus's under-heated igloo of a kitchen around a Formica table playing a lazy pokergame, trying to make each other feel noble about the fact that our lives had the collective aura of a fumbled lateral pass.

Rain was pelting the windows; we were using candles, not electric light. Hamilton, His Grumpiness, was saddled with a leg cast after falling thirty feet off a cliff up Howe Sound the month before. As well, he'd been recently nabbed "borrowing" some blasting materials from the company's warehouse and was asked to resign rather than be fired. His life was, if not in tatters, certainly ripped.
I asked, "Ham - what on Earth were you going to do with blasting caps and plastic explosives? Bomb the mall?"
"No, Richard, I was going to drive up to the interior to blow up rock formations. It's my art form. How am I going to develop my talent if I don't take artistic risks? My palette is dynamite, rock is my canvas.
Piss.
What am I going to do
now?'
Linus was also in a grumpy mood, which was interesting in itself as he never seemed to
have
moods. Pam was riding her "monthly train to hell," and Wendy was underslept after having been on call the whole of Christmas week. I had a bizarre headache from having inhaled too much helium from a clown-shaped canister given to me as a gag gift from Hamilton. As well, I'd been guzzling zero-alcohol eggnog; my stomach felt fur-lined. My not drinking was a challenging bore.
Hamilton was theorizing about work. "Well kids, in order for the system to work, there must be glittering prizes.
Another card, Richard, and not from the bottom, I'm watching.
A highly competitive society must have simple rules and terrible consequences for not obeying the rules.
I fold.
There
must
be losers on the edge to serve as cautionary tales for those in the center. Nobody likes to see the losers
Wendy's deal
- losers are the dark side of society and they frighten people into submission.
I
must
have more plonk. Linus? I must have more of that ye low swill! Now!Mush!"

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