The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [26]
Steve’s stomach growled.
Time for more booze.
But Brittany was leaning towards him expectantly, twiddling her hair, and so he continued talking. He finished discussing water metaphors in Gumdrops, Lilies and Forceps, and was about to take on Less Than Fewer, when a chill rippled down his spine and he had a vision of the end of the world that froze him to his core. In his vision, everybody on earth suddenly became a genius.
Brrrrrr . . .
Imagine a world populated by back-seat drivers, a planet where everybody knew the answer to everything, and where everybody was out to use their new genius to grab more for themselves. Everybody would find secret shortcuts to get home from the office, thus clogging all the streets. At the grocers, newly minted food experts would select only the finest and freshest fruits and cuts of meat, placing undue strain on the food industry. Everybody would invest cleverly in the stock market, but because everybody would make millions, all of the world’s currencies would collapse, and banking would come to an end. The world’s bauxite miners, banana pickers and assembly line workers would rebel against their soul-deadening jobs, and would begin roaming the world’s streets in pursuit of knowledge. Since geniuses don’t make food, starvation would become rampant. Dazzlingly intelligent hordes would invade neighbourhood after neighbourhood, flushing out caches of freeze-dried astronaut food and tinned goods.
Throughout this rapid decline, billions of newly minted book readers, in between pangs of starvation, would pick up a copy of any of Steve’s five novels, read them and find them lacking. And it would be young Kyle Falconcrest, in between his time spent translating Chaucer into Mandarin and developing a perpetual motion device, who would cast the first stone.
And to think Kyle expected Steve to feed him!
Roger
DeeDee, I’m not trying to lure your kid into my car with a pile of candy or something, so lay off, okay? She can make up her own mind about things. And thanks for thinking of me as Mister Cosmic Fucking Nothingness. That makes me feel good.
Since when did you get so negative, eh? You were a sweet kid in high school—not stuck up, ever. And for what it’s worth, I remember the week your body blossomed. Man, it happened so quickly with you. Trust me, it’s the sort of thing guys notice. All of the guys in our grade did. You were a peach, and I remember wanting so badly to stroke your cheeks in social studies in ninth grade. You sat by the alarm bell, and for two weeks in spring, the sun came around and haloed your face during the last class of the day. It was like you were made of something insanely delicate, like dandelion fluff, and anything harsher than a gentle breath would destroy you.
Do you remember high school? I don’t. I dream about it every now and then, but only things like opening my locker or missing a big test—all that symbolic stuff. I try to recreate a sample day from back then, and I blank out.
Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don’t. I remember being outgoing and probably smooth with the ladies. But . . . imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That’s me and my memories.
Or maybe memories are like karaoke—where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen’s bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn