The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [27]
Do you ever wonder what the old gang remembers when they hear your name? More than anything, DeeDee, I bet people would remember your face the moment you got dumped in the dunk tank during the school fair, when the strap came off your Cheerios bikini and you blushed the colour of cherry cough syrup. It was totally funny and not sexy, nipple and all.
Bethany has had a lot of people go away on her, and so have you. People leave in so many different ways. People go nuts. They abandon you. They stop liking you. They get lost in their own worlds and they never come back. Or they simply give up. And yes, they die.
DeeDee, cut me some slack. I’m not a void, and I’m not a monster. Bethany is a muse. I thought muses were a stupid concept from the past, but they’re not. She helps me write, and I don’t know why. Because of her, I was able to start my first novel, and it’s going amazingly well. You never know—it could be a really successful book that sells a lot of copies, and it could be my ticket out of this hole I’m in. I’ll show it to you when I can—it’s a bit raw right now. You know how it is with revisions—you work so hard to really nail the exact word or phrase. You don’t want things coming out sounding pretentious and unnatural.
Please relax, DeeDee.
Your scribe,
R.
Bethany
Hey, Roger, I saw you throwing a tennis ball to Wayne this morning. I was on the bus, and you were in the park down by Mosquito Creek. It was raining, but it didn’t bug you— you looked happy, actually. So I thought I could borrow a bit of your happiness today. I need it. It’s One of Those Days.
Earlier on there was this guy in line who was nice enough—buying one of those black office chairs—and the signature was worn off his Visa card, so I asked him if he had a driver’s licence for ID and he went apeshit about how I didn’t trust him and how nobody trusts anybody these days. So I told him I didn’t want to lose my job because Visa only gives card users a strip of glossy white ink-repellent plastic that’s one-eighth of an inch wide on which to write a signature that rubs off after two days inside a normal wallet or purse. Whatever. In the end, I had the law on my side—as well as the manager—but I got bummed about people not trusting people.
When I turned sixteen, my mom told me, “Bethany, there’s a difference between intimacy and closeness.” I asked her what she meant, and she said (I paraphrase), “You’ll meet a stranger in an airport bar, get shit-faced and tell them things about yourself and your life that you’d never dream of telling anybody you actually knew. But does that make you close to that person, Bethany?” From the way she went on about this, I got the distinct impression that La DeeDee has been spending time in airport bars.
I wish I had a dog like Wayne. I wish I didn’t make fun of stuff so much. I wish North Korea didn’t have nuclear weapons. They’re nuts. Days like today get me thinking more about the end of the world. I look back on when I was younger, back in the 1990s, and how naive and goofy everything was back then, but it was like this happy bubble, a time snack, a little patch of bliss before the shitstorm.
There’s such a difference between the world I grew up expecting and the one I got, but everyone my age has probably felt the same since the dawn of man. I didn’t expect a world full of jetliners impregnating office towers, or viruses jumping species or, shit, according to Yahoo!, pigs that now glow in the dark. The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder. The few animals that remain here with us—when they look at me, or when I hear them cheep or bleat or meow—they