The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [24]
Everyone at the barbecue simply stopped where they were. It isn’t gruesome or anything. Their eyes are open.
Then I start hearing thumps and explosions from all over the city—cars wiping out, planes crashing, incinerators and furnaces exploding like popcorn on the back element—at first just a few, and then more and more. And then they stop, and I begin seeing streams of smoke reaching up into the sky, like shoestrings, binding the planet to the universe—so many smoke streams and clouds.
I look at my feet and see a dead barn swallow. I see bumblebee carcasses all over the patio. I go inside and pick up the phone—it’s dead too. I see a bowl of cut dahlias on the counter, and for a moment I think that’s ironic.
And then I start to feel unwell. Know what it is? All of the organisms in my body that aren’t “me” have died too. Those happy bacteria that live in the stomach, good viruses and bad viruses and symbiotic amoebas and all that small, scary shit—dead. Your body isn’t just a body, is it? It’s an ecosystem. And my body can’t handle all of this dead stuff floating around in it.
So I go out onto the patio and sit down on a chaise and stare up at the sun. It’s warm out, and I feel happy to be joining everyone else wherever it is that they’ve all gone. People never mention that as the upside of death, do they? It makes your own death less scary to figure you’re going to meet up again with old friends!
Where was I? Oh yeah—sitting on the chaise, staring at the sun, growing weaker and weaker. Finally, as much as I hate the damn thing and its endless, droning, perky lightness, I enter it.
Glove Pond: Kyle
Kyle Falconcrest remembered his first day on the job in the office superstore, the fateful job that led to his grand insight that he should set his second novel in such a place. He was almost thirty, old enough that at night he’d begun dreaming that he’d be working a crappy day job forever. He saw no escape. Kyle had made the mistake of thinking that working in a bookstore or a place where office supplies were sold would bring him closer to the throbbing pulse of modern literature. To Kyle, literature was a place of experimentation—a laboratory, an art gallery where exciting new ideas never, ever, ever, ever stopped.
He remembered his first day on the job, being assigned his first aisle: Tape, Fasteners, Correction Fluids, Pens, Pencils and Markers. He was told that if he did well, after a year or so he would be promoted and Aisle 5A would be added to his territory: Art Supplies, Educational Supplies, Scissors and Rigid Art Boards.
Kyle never got used to the office superstore. Although it was brightly lit and sterile, he couldn’t help but look at the endless truckloads of toner cartridges and flash cards and protractors and laser printers and imagine how they would all end up either mummified inside a regional landfill, or incinerated, the ashes floating about the Van Allen radiation belt, soaking up extra heat from the sun and hastening the total meltdown of the polar ice caps. To Kyle, the office superstore was a slow-motion end of the world in progress. You had to look at the place, squint, and pretend you were watching stop-frame animation in which the camera snapped a photo only once a month. Seasons would come and go. The winters would get warmer and warmer, the ground ever more covered in soot. The number of animals and birds crossing the parking lot would dwindle. The grasses and shrubs near the entrance/exit would wither and then, after a few decades, the road headed west, away from the store, would vanish as the ocean rose. And yet people would still be buying presentation portfolio covers, extension cords, Bankers Boxes and, on impulse, gum.
Kyle considered all of this as he stared at Steve, who was blathering on to Brittany about that quintet of doorstops he called his novels. They were neither trendy nor timeless nor contemporary