The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [51]
Kyle opened the main drawer and found a couple of empty packages of gum and two old passports, the more recent of the two having expired in 1979. There was a menu from a Greek takeout restaurant, clipped newspaper articles on the theme of colon health, and dozens of empty matchbooks dating from the era when steak, jumbo lobsters, A-framed buildings and anything tiki were considered the peak of dining sophistication. There was no computer or typewriter, but by the window, leaning into the room’s corner beneath its requisite nicotine wash, sat a 1980 Daewoo Heavy Industries OfficeWrite 2300 Word Processing System. Below it was an unopened carton of dot matrix tractor-edged paper. The corner was an eloquent haiku for yet another past era, one in which democracy remained under constant threat from female Soviet weightlifters and sleek East German technology.
He opened the topmost of two large drawers on the desk’s right-hand side. It contained mostly empty tins of pipe tobacco, plus framed desktop photos, their standing mechanisms folded inwards, the group of them stacked atop each other. Some were ancient, and their subjects unidentifiable. But there was one of a pubescent Gloria atop a hunter with a braided mane, and one of a post-pubescent Gloria clipped from a Town & Country-style magazine: Who will nab this year’s jewel in the crown, the delightful Gloria Harrington? There was a shot of movie-star-handsome Steve and Gloria sharing a daiquiri at San Francisco’s Top of the Mark. But, as with everywhere else in the house, there was no evidence of any remotely current time period. If Steve and Gloria had a child of any age, Kyle had yet to locate the evidence.
Kyle closed the top drawer and reached for the handle of the bottom drawer. It occurred to him that in this drawer lay the secret of Steve—if one was only to open it, in a flash, the reason why both Steve and Gloria were disasters would be revealed.
He was about to pull it open when he heard thumps from the basement.
Bethany
Hi Roger,
I guess I’d better confess that I actually know your ex- wife—Joan. Does that weird you out? She was in my aunt’s cancer survivor group, and I remembered her because of the code word: “spleen.” You’re right, a spleen is a strange thing—we technically don’t need one, but maybe spleens are kept in our bodies in case we mutate or evolve, and if we grow wings or tentacles we need to have the spleen in place in order for them to work. That’s my theory.
I don’t know if Joan would remember me. That was back before I decided to win the heart of Johnny Depp through the inventive application of scary makeup. Also, my family overshadowed me at cancer meetings. Imagine a group of people even more annoying than mimes, with the added bonus of loud, grating speech and no sense of manners or propriety. That would be us. Mom and her ex- husband were in this war over who could do a better job of caring for Aunt Paulette (long story), and the caring portion got lost along the way. Cancer is, among many other things, a spectator sport.
Like you need a depressing letter like this.
How many times have you heard the expression about cancer patients, “They were never sick a day in their life, and suddenly, bang, they’re gone”? Well, it turns out that being sick is actually good for you. Colds and flus are like these constant refresher courses that teach your body how to combat cancers when they first occur. Some people think that the moment you get your diagnosis you should run out to the children’s coloured plastic ball pit at IKEA and coat your body with kiddy germs and get as sick as