The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [59]
We met two guys from home—the exact same sort of guys Kyle would have met at a sports bar on Marine Drive—and so we have a posse, but they’re jockish and not very fun, so when they’re around I feel like a fifth wheel. Kyle is not quite the sweet young thing who once filled Ziploc bags with trail mix for me.
Moan, moan, moan, grumble, grumble, grumble. When is the European magic going to kick in and rock my world? When am I going to befriend Count Chocula? The only people I ever seem to meet here are twenty-three-year- old Australians named Tracy who got crabs in Prague and who have voices like the buzzer they use on game shows when you get the answer to a question wrong.
Remember I wrote you awhile back about DeeDee telling me about meeting strangers in airport bars and spilling your life story to them because you know you’ll never see them again? That’s actually what I’m hoping for here. Is that sick? Kyle should be the one I’m telling everything to. So I feel a bit disloyal. But I wish Kyle would revel a bit more in the fact that we’re in a country that is not the one he grew up in. The only time he ever gets stoked is when he finds things or places or people that remind him of home. I now like to walk around by myself, mostly. When we got here, K and I were spending all of our time together, but I don’t think you see things properly when you’re with someone else. Instead, you’re always being camp counsellor. I wonder if that’s what motherhood will feel like should I ever end up in spawning mode.
The Christmas decorations are all going up now, which is, let’s face it, depressing, but at least they do it tastefully here. Christmas lights always bugged me growing up because it was like (literally) hanging up a big electric sign on your house that said, “I spent $18.95 on this electric sign.”
Tonight I’ve been in the local Internet café, and right now I’m back in the hostel. K is with his posse at a bar in Shoreditch that plays Canadian football on its TV. Now there’s a smart business decision for some wise pub owner. He must truly lure in the locals with that. Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually here in London. Honestly, the best news I had today was an email telling me that you brought Wayne to work yesterday and Shawn spent her smoke break throwing a tennis ball to him. I got jealous.
Weird noises down the hall. Have you ever stayed in a hostel? It’s like a crack den without the crack. Never again.
X
B.
PS: I have to add another way that Kyle is driving me nuts. He has a digital camera, and when he shoots something like a bridge or a thousand pigeons, he almost immediately scrolls through his pictures and looks back on what’s basically the present moment and treats it like it’s the distant past—even if the bridge or the pigeons are still right there.
At the end of the day, I’ll scroll through the day’s photos with him, and even on the camera’s dinky little screen the whole day comes back to me, which is unsurprising, but what is surprising are the background details I remember that I might never have remembered otherwise: an Evian truck blowing blue smoke; a woman walking three wiener dogs; a cloud shaped like a muffin. So imagine if you could scroll backwards and look at your whole life the same way. God only knows how many trillions of memories are stored inside us—memories we’ll never retrieve simply because we don’t have a device that allows us to browse them properly. With your mother, do you think the memories were still locked inside her and she couldn’t retrieve them? Or do you think the memories were simply gone? Is anyone’s existence only as good as their brain is at any given moment? And if so, what about the soul?
BONUS TREAT: Another brief attempt to address the bread buttering issue is on the next page. B.
The ToasTron Chronicles
Neo-London, 2110
Slice Number Six informed his lieutenant of the entire gory tale behind the marmalade