The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [22]
Gloria blurted out, “I’m an actress.”
“Oh?” said Brittany, taken by surprise.
“I’m Lady Windermere in the local theatre production of Lady Windermere’s Fan.”
“Isn’t that something,” said Kyle.
“For me it’s all about the craft, you know. Act, act, act.”
Steve quickly batted the conversation back on track: “I go to office superstores all the time. I enjoy the wide array of goods they provide at reasonable prices. And they’re such a—you know—a popular phenomenon. I think it’s important to engage with society.”
Kyle sipped his Scotch. Was Steve really writing a novel set in an office superstore? As far as Kyle knew, Steve’s concept of literature was frozen in time roughly three weeks before the invention of the telephone.
Steve said to Kyle, “I’m so busy at the university I haven’t had time to read your first novel. Tell me, what is it called?”
“It’s called Two Lost Decades.”
“A good title.”
“Thank you.”
“What’s it about? A vulgar little question, but in the end, it’s the only one that matters.”
“Okay. Because you ask. It’s about this guy. He’s fortyish. He used to be married, and had two kids, but one of them was hit by a car while riding his bike. Almost immediately after that his wife got cancer, and at the beginning it brought his family together in a way that he had never imagined possible, but that didn’t last long, and a fog of death clouded their lives for a year. Then his wife got better, but she was tired, and our protagonist was tired—and he’d also said and done foolish things during the fog—so his wife left him, getting custody of the child.
“This guy endures all of these tribulations, except they don’t change him. They don’t make him a better person. They make him a worse person. He begins to lead a falling-down life. His body won’t fit his old clothes, and he doesn’t know how to find new ones. He keeps waiting for the moral of his life to appear, but it never does. The clock is ticking, and all he can see is decades more of the same thing until his body gives out, and he wonders what the point is of being alive if it’s merely more of the same—and the thing is, he’d like to change things, but he doesn’t know what, or how. He sees a scam in everything the world offers. He doesn’t believe in the Apocalypse, and he thinks that both faith and reason are equally stupid, and that all leaders are frauds.
“He tries to lose himself in work, but he’s also lazy. He wonders if he should declare himself a ward of the state and live in a homeless shelter, but he can’t bring himself to do that, though he feels close to the edge. He looks back on his early life for clues to his present disaster, but he doesn’t think he was raised to be overly dependent on others or without morality or without a few practical hints for good living. But the other people in his family are pretty tight with each other, and he knows that on those rare occasions when they discuss him, or even think about him, it’s probably not too fondly or with much charity. He used up all of his ‘welcome coupons’ in the family department when he was younger. He pretty much used up his welcome coupons everywhere. He feels wretched, yet he knows that he has a ways to go before he hits bottom. Perversely, a vision of the bottom keeps him going. Every morning he’s curious to see what new indignity he will be subjected to—what flagrant new assaults will be made on his good taste. And will he ever change in some way that’s good or meaningful?”
There was a pregnant silence after Kyle’s plot summation. Steve used this moment to try to remember the office superstore he’d visited that very day, that grotesque hangar filled with Chinese-made office crap, staffed with kindergarten students and offering all the charm of an airport luggage-handling facility. Steve, you can write a novel set in an office superstore. You can. Bring a notepad. Pretend you’re an anthropologist—anthropologists can do anything and appear smart. Who knows—perhaps