The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [3]
And a final thing about crows—I had no idea I’d be going on like this—is that they look black to us, but to birds, they’re as insanely coloured as parakeets and peacocks— human colour perception is missing a small patch of the spectrum that only birds can see. Imagine if we could see the world like birds, even briefly. Everything would be wondrous. Which is another reason why I only wear black. Who knows what you’re missing when you look at me.
It’s five minutes later.
My mother called and asked if I would consider going with her to visit the Hubble Telescope in California. I thought the Hubble was in outer space, but it turns out it has a twin, in Yreka, in northern California.
My mother said people who didn’t believe in anything had visited the telescope and it had made them proud to be alive. She said that, instead of the stars being these mean, cold, bleak little jabs of white light, the universe was like a vast, well-maintained aquarium. The stars weren’t points of light, but angel fish and jellyfish and sea horses and anemones. And I thought about it, and damn the woman, she’s right.
I told her that people always treat me like an alien; I’ve always expected to be treated as such, and it’s not a very glamorous sensation.
This, naturally, sparked a fight with Mom. Why can’t I try to fit in?
If I’m still wearing black lipstick at twenty-four, she ought to have abandoned hope of my ever normalizing.
After we hung up, I thought, what if she’d died right there on the spot, right at the end of that phone call. The last thing she ever would have said to me would have been, Imagine, Bethany, the universe is indeed a beautiful place. If you doubt me, go check for yourself.
Roger
Sorrow!
Sorrow is everywhere—a bruise that never yellows and never fades, a weed that chokes the crop. Sorrow is every old person who ever died alone in a small, shitty room. Sorrow is alive in the streets and in the shopping malls. Sorrow in space stations and theme parks. In cyberspace; in the Rocky Mountains; in the Mariana Trench. All this sorrow.
And here I am in the cemetery eating my lunch: baloney on Wonder Bread, too much yellow mustard, no lettuce or tomato, an apple and a beer. I believe that the dead speak to us, but I don’t think they do it with words. They use the materials they have at hand—a gust of air, a gold ripple on an otherwise still lake, or inside a dozing stem some sap is tickled and a flower blooms that would never have opened otherwise.
The sky rains and the world shines, tombstones like rhinestones, the grass like glass. There is a breeze.
Joan tried to be so matter-of-fact about it all when she got the news: cancer of the spleen. What the hell is a spleen? A spleen is a cartoon body part, not something a real person has, let alone something that gets sick and kills.
Joan tried to tell me that everybody who’s ever lived has had cancer lots of times—even a fetus gets cancer— except our bodies almost always get rid of it before it spreads. Cancer is what we call those bits our bodies fail to slough off. I found some comfort in that. It made cancer feel everyday and approachable. Universal. I wanted to reach inside Joan and pluck out the cancer—and maybe while I was there I’d remove gold coins and keys and tropical birds—and I’d show you the surprises all of us conceal within.
I think emotions affect your body as much as X-rays and vitamins and car crashes. And whatever it is I’m feeling right now, well, God only knows what parts of my body are being demolished. And I deserve it. Because I’m not a good person—because I’m a bad person who also happens to be lost.
Oh! To travel back ten years—to when I still thought of myself as a good person and before I realized I was lost. Every moment felt like I was getting away with something. Every moment felt like five o’clock quitting time. Paradise!
You know how I met Joan? I was coming back from lunch