The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [17]
She looked at the Kleenex box. Is the plural Kleenices? I do love words and writing and art and music.
The doorbell continued to not ring.
Silence disturbed Gloria because of something she had once heard on PBS. Apparently, the first thing a baby hears upon being born is silence. It’s spent its entire life prior to that surrounded by heartbeats and valves gushing and liquids sloshing to and fro. And then, suddenly, it’s born into a new world, deprived of everything its ears have ever known. Who invented that?
Babies . . .
Children . . .
No time to think of that now.
She looked at herself in the mirror and pursed her Falling Blossom Pink lips. I could easily be Elizabeth Taylor, circa 1972, approximately three weeks after abandoning a strict diet.
The doorbell rang.
Bethany
Okay, Roger, here’s my deal.
My best friend in grade four was Becky Garnett. She didn’t show up for school one day, and within a month she was gone from this freaky stomach cancer that prepubescent girls get. Dead? I was used to people vanishing, to people going out for cigarettes and never returning, but not to people dying. Becky?
After Becky came this five-year death fiesta. Both my grandfathers in the same year (car crash; kidney failure); my twenty-year-old stepsister (internal injuries sustained in an assault by her now behind-bars-for-thirty-years ex); my grandmother (emphysema); my favourite music teacher, Mr. Van Buren (car crash on the 99, driving up to Whistler); Kurt Cobain; both my cats (Ginger and Snowbelle); two of my smokehole friends, Chris and Mark, who smoked some pot cut with PCP and were found waterlogged two days later in the lagoon beside the sand traps at the local pitch- and-putt; my stepbrother, Devon (hanged himself); and then my eerily, disturbingly, relentlessly perky Aunt Paulette. She had lightning-onset breast cancer, and all the money we raised doing car washes to send her to the Revlon Center in Los Angeles didn’t work, and she wobbled away into nothingness—no drama, only silence.
At the end of all of this death, death, death, I began to find myself dreaming about all of these dead people at night—pretty much to the exclusion of living people. It scared me that I was spending so much time with dead people, and then I realized this was snobbery. Why should only living people count in your dreams, while dead people get relegated to “filler” status, unable to be taken seriously? Imagine the dreams of a thirty-year-old living a century ago. There couldn’t have been a living soul in their dreams. I think we forget that growing old is as much an invention as electricity or birth control pills. Long lives aren’t natural. God or Whoever didn’t want millions of ninetysome- things hanging around forever, and if he did, there had to be a reason beyond simply staying alive for the sake of staying alive.
Me? I expect people to die soon. Dying is what people do in my universe—I’m a statistical freak. Most young people don’t know a single person who’s died. I’m a throwback.
Last week, Kyle wanted to know if I worshipped the devil or something like that, and I wanted to blow him off, but then I realized maybe he was worried about something, so I calmed down and asked him how things were going. Turns out his grandmother died and he doesn’t know how to deal with it. What you were saying about not having faith in place when things go bad—well, there’s your proof. I asked him what he thought the afterlife might be like, and I got the impression that he thinks death is like a resort where everything is pre-decided for you and all you have to do is lie back and submit to the regime.
I disagree.
Much of the time I want to be dead. It must be nice to be dead, to know that the sheer work of having to constantly learn lesson after lesson is over and you can coast for a while.