The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [38]
Thank the Lord Brittany rescued him and a further encroachment of the talons, and thank the Lord she’d then gone upstairs. All the tea in China wouldn’t make him go up and have a look at what that car crash of a souse was up to.
His stomach gurgled. How come there was no odour of cooking? Nor evidence of catering? Nor even place settings at the dusty dining table? Kyle went to the kitchen to investigate. No Steve. All he could find was an empty box of Triscuits on the counter and a cookie sheet in the sink. An empty plastic Safeway cheddar cheese wrapper with little gouges in it lay on the floor, as though abandoned by teeny white-trash mice. The stove elements were cold. He looked in the fridge. How is possible to have nothing in a fridge except a jar of pickle juice?
He wondered what the dinner strategy was, and then he realized that there was no dinner strategy. All these people had in the house was Scotch. This realization was shocking to Kyle, and he sat down at the kitchen table to collect his thoughts.
A furnace kicked in with a faint hum. He heard a car pass on the road out front. The fridge burped into low gear, and Kyle had a depressing vision of penguins protecting stillborn eggs. This was possibly the creepiest room he had ever been in.
What about the cupboards—could they be as empty as the fridge? No. That’s simply not possible. There has to be food—some kind of food—somewhere in the kitchen.
He went to the cupboards, and each one was revealed to be empty until behind the fifth door he saw a box— Willamette’s Homestyle Pancake Batter Mix. On its front was the most shockingly inappropriate image of— there were no other words to describe it—a plantation darkie offering a platter of flapjacks to a lace-clad Nicole Kidman of yore, who hid behind both a pink fan and the easy knowledge that she could have her darkie flayed to death at whim. The box had no bar code. Kyle opened its flaps and saw what looked like tiny dancing flakes of oregano.
Oh dear God!
He dropped the box on the counter, and weevils scattered away from it in all directions.
Steve walked into the room. “Oh, so you’re a chef then—what good luck for us.”
Bethany
Kyle told me that he thinks Staples is a piece of shit and should burn. I’m shocked to find that Trail Mix Boy has an anarchist spark in him. Granted, he was baked on mushrooms when he said it, and he and I and eight others were ready to mutiny after a twenty-minute seminar on toner cartridge recycling. When I look back on my childhood and on the pictures I once had in my head about what adult life would be like, they weren’t of Fahad squinting into a coffee spoon to see if his blackheads were visible while a Ricoh sales rep demonstrated by way of a PowerPoint presentation that cartridges take a thousand years to decompose in a landfill.
Okay, then, Bethany, what were your images?
Thank you, interior monologue. I thought that when I was an adult I’d somehow be a bit more connected to life and death—that when I went to bed at night, after drinking a cup of chilled blood with my husband, Johnny Depp, I would look back on a day filled with confessions and accidents and affairs and large amounts of money travelling in all directions. Instead, I get to watch the assistant manager’s QuickTime loop of Blair being caught stealing Chiclets on the securi-cam. The soundtrack? “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge. At least