The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [47]
Hmmm—what day of the week is it? It’s nothing. It’s merely a day, a plain old day with no labels or meaning or anything.
Now go back further in time—to before humans named the four seasons. You’d go through life saying, “Gee, it’s colder now—the cold weather usually follows a longish spot of good weather—and if memory serves me correctly, after a hundred more sleeps, the weather will be warming up again.”
People must have gone absolutely crazy, not knowing for sure how long the cold and warm patches were going to last—so crazy that they had to make a Stonehenge, to be sure. Archaeologists are always wondering why cavemen dragged those huge stones halfway across England—well, come on! They were totally freaked out by not knowing what season it was.
It’s slow at El Shtoopo—I think there are three big football games on TV, and that always empties out the place. Kyle’s got the day off and is watching them at a friend’s apartment. I’m killing time by walking up and down the aisles with a purposeful facial expression so that people don’t interrupt me to ask questions. I’ve been doing this great big infinity loop of aisles 4 and 5 all day. QuickTime that.
La DeeDee is driving me nuts right now, so I signed on for some extra shifts. I can use the money either for Europe or for nursing school, though I don’t know which it’s going to be yet.
DeeDee read this factoid that said one person in ten thousand commits suicide. She figured that if she knows maybe a thousand people, there’s still only a one in ten chance she’d know a suicide—but instead she knows eight people who’ve done it, and four of them were pretty close to her. So she’s wondering if knowing many suicides is, in itself, an indicator of herself suiciding. Not that she would. She lacks the necessary confidence and self-esteem. She figures she’d somehow botch it and end up embarrassed and in a wheelchair.
You used to know the Deedster back before life crushed her like a bug. Do you remember anything about her that might prod her in a productive direction again? Something? Anything?
At the moment, she spends her days leashed to a photocopier in a notary’s office. It reminds me of those cartoons where there’s a dog attached to a rope pegged in the middle of a yard. There’s no hope of escaping, and she’s lost the will to bark.
Depressing!
Bethany
Joan
Roger, now I know why your pal, Bethany, looked familiar. It was back at one of my Cancer Survival workshops. She was younger and chubbier, but it was her. Her aunt had breast cancer, and even near the end that woman was doing crafty things like appliqueing sequins onto denim pants. People who can achieve stuff even when they know they’re goners amaze me, and when I think of Shakespeare keeping a skull on his desk while he wrote to remind him of his mortality? What a freak.
Anyway, Bethany’s family used to argue constantly. The moment they walked into the room, everybody’s T-cell count plummeted. And the noise they made! But Bethany always sat there dutifully and never got involved in the fray. If she recognized me from Survival workshops the other day, she didn’t let on.
Hey, don’t feed Zoë any sugar, not even fresh fruit. It sends her through the ceiling.
Brian will be back in exactly three hours to collect her.
Enjoy your time together.
J.
Bethany
Mr. Rant was in today. I saw him arrive (it was pouring rain out, so he was doubly irritable; he made a big show of shaking out a Dole pineapple promotional collapsible umbrella with two broken spokes inside the doors). Kyle and I followed him, waiting for an outburst, and we weren’t disappointed.
You know how every so often you get those guys in their fifties who walk up and down the aisles, whistling or humming tunelessly? There was one of those guys standing in Aisle 3-South, directly in Mr. Rant’s way. The whistling guy seemed to be savouring Shtooples’s premium selection of binders and Day-Timer products, humming that