15 NO IMPERIAL CHILDREN

Imagine that for an unknown reason you have begun to rapidly lose your memory. You now no longer know what month it is, say, or what type of car you drive, or the season or the food in your refrigerator or the names of the flowers. Quickly, quickly your memory freezes—a tiny perfect iceberg, all memories frozen, locked. Your family. Your sex. Your name—all of it: turned into a silent ice block. You are free of memory: You now look at the world with the eyes of an embryo, not knowing, only seeing and only hearing. Then suddenly the ice melts, your memory begins returning. The ice is in a pond—it thaws and the water warms and water lilies grow from your memories and fish swim within them. You are you.

And so here we have Karen, asleep for seventeen years, ten months, and seventeen days. Above Karen stands a nurse who changes her J-tube. This nurse has been changing J-tubes for a dozen years. She looks down at Karen and feels nothing and thinks of other things— her choir practice that night, a wool coat she saw on sale at the Bay.

The nurse remembers that Karen will most likely die shortly from her pneumonia—no heroics. Really? She seems to have recovered rather well from the illness that brought her in. She pauses and looks more closely at Karen: poor thing—nearly killed off this time. Back to Inglewood and then what? Better dead than alive. No love, no past, no future, no present, no sex. A sad thing. Half a person. Yet even now, almost seventeen years later, prettiness is evident from Karen's bones. What she has missed in life! The nurse looks away from Karen's face and resumes J-tube procedure.

Then the nurse hears a voice, gentle, husky, girlish, and direct, like pumice rubbing on pumice: "Hello."

The nurse looks up. Karen rasps hello once more. The nurse sees Karen's eyes—clean and green as moss, crinkled with crusted sleep in the corners. She sees Karen's turkey-giblet neck keel sideways on the bed. Karen is immobile, but she speaks: "That tickles."

The nurse says, "Oh my! Oh … my!" and then dashes from the room. She runs to fetch the doctor on duty—Wendy, Dr. Chernin.

Nurse, comes the thought.

Karen thinks: That was a nurse. I am in a hospital. I … Wait: Who am—I? I am Karen … Where am I? What time is it? Karen loses her grogginess quickly, though; she feels her brain now starting to rev and then backfire like a rib-ticklish Camaro. The last thing Karen remembers is being with Wendy and Pam outside a party on Eyremont Drive—a house-wrecker, a stupid party. She had gone skiing with Richard just before that. They had made love. She remembered giggling with the girls, having a drink, and thinking of maybe telling them about her and Richard. And then she remembers nothing. Why nothing? Karen understands that if she's in a hospital, she must have passed out, maybe, and badly at that. What did I have two Valiums? Vodka? Surely not just this… God, what a hangover.

Mom to deal with. Oh, God.

Darkness. Darkness headed her way. A dream? She remembers herfear of darkness and her wish that she might sleep forever so as to avoid it—an idle wish gone badly wrong.

She closes her eyes against the early sun now beaming through the window and then opens her eyes and looks down at her body. Oh God—there's my body?—/ can't feel my legs. I can't move—I—

She screams weakly and then coughs and can no longer scream. Another nurse enters the room, eyes agog, and Karen hacks out more words: "Water. Please, water."

Back at the party house of Hillary Markham, most of the guests have gone home. Hillary, still flying on a cocktail of upwardly lifting substances, surveys the comical remains of her party—costume remnants, pumpkin fragments, and dozens of stale, lipsticked wineglasses and bottles of skunked beer. Teddy Liu and Tracy are asleep on the couch; Linus is on the guest room floor along with Hillary's two cats.

Hillary goes into her bedroom and sees a few coats still lying on the bed, at which point she hears two thunk sounds. Walking into her bathroom, she finds Hamilton lying on the floor, bone-white, jaws agape; Pam is in the bathtub, head leaning sideways, hair flowing over the tub's rim. She is as white as Hamilton. There's not even time for panic. What to do? What to do? Teddy! Teddy Liu—paramedic! She runs into the living room and screams and kicks awake Teddy from sleep inside his race-car driver's costume. Within a minute, Hamilton and Pam have been hooked up to drips going into their arms containing Narcan, an anti-opiate drug, and D5W solution. Breathing apparatuses are installed, and they lurch off to Lions Gate Hospital.

Almost immediately, the two emerge from their all-too-deep sleep. "You stupid bastard, Teddy," Hamilton shouts. "That was the best fucking high Pve ever had. Why the hell did you go and fuck it up?"

"Sticks and stones."

"Teddy—where are we?" Pam moans.

"You're both on the way to Lions Gate," Teddy says.

"Oh, shit," says Pam. "It was feeling so good."

"Linus, is that you?" asks Pam."Yup."

"Tell these bastards to sod off."

Karen's nurse knows that Karen is somebody close to Dr. Wendy Chernin—family? She notifies the nursing desk about Karen, then speeds down to Emergency where Dr. Chernin is on call. "Dr. Chernin," she puffs, "your friend!"

Wendy, preoccupied with two gurneys rattling into Emergency, says, "I know, I know."

The nurse is confused: "But…"

Wendy, the paramedics, and the two bodies on gurneys zip by, followed by a stringy-looking young man the nurse recognizes from a Christmas party as Dr. Chernin's husband. As well, there's a teenage girl dressed all in black, perhaps as a witch for Halloween, eyes darkened out like the old glamour days of Alice Cooper.

The first gurney carries a serene blond woman, a bluish shade of white underneath an asphyxiator; the face looks familiar—magazines? TV? The nurse has seen celebrities here before. No big deal. On the other gurney lies a thirtyish man with some dreadful skin disease. AIDS? He is the sickest-looking admitted patient this nurse has ever seen. He is also screaming at the top of his lungs, telling everybody to fuck off and demanding more heroin. The nurse asks the paramedic what has happened, and she receives a reply—one that is, by 1997, all too common: "China White. OD'd at a Halloween party." The nurse now understands that the sick-looking man is wearing makeup. A dreadful costume.

The gurney moves on and the stringy-looking man, Dr. Chernin's husband, speaks to the young witch: "Megan, what are you doing here! How in hell did you know about this!"

Megan says, "I only came down here to help Jenny Tyrell get a morning-after pill. She drove me. And then I just saw you guys come in. So—what is it? What's wrong?"

"They're toasted on heroin," Linus says.

"Oh, wow. Hey! Aunt Wendy, Wendy quick, tell me, are they gonna die! For real? That China White—""Megan, we'll talk later." Wendy turns around and talks to an orderly.

Linus tries to imagine the world without Ham and Pam. He feels sick and his stomach burns. He remembers visiting Jared nearly twenty years ago, and he thinks of Karen in Inglewood all these years, her blank eyes focused on death and nothingness. Poor Richard, having to live with that forever. The hospital is a place where lives come to an end. This is a place that erases hope. He admires Wendy so much for having the guts to work in such a place, for being an emergency specialist.

How long had they been shooting up? Idiots. Fuck 'em. Pam and Ham clank into Intensive Care. They are injected, pumped, and probed; new IV's are inserted, more Narcan administered. Wendy is frustrated because there is no single test to administer to heroin OD's that can tell her where she stands. No CAT scans, white blood cell counts, or T4S—she never really knows: Is this person lost?

The heads are moved back and forth—the "Doll's Eye" procedure—to check the neurological system.

The poorly breathing bodies are briefly put into the ventilator. They're fine and will be sleeping for a few hours. The worst is over and Wendy emerges. They'll make it, Wendy says. And then she, Megan, and Linus sit in the lobby trying to relax after the close call. The thought of losing two more lifelong friends is more frightening than they could have imagined. Cold air puffs in from outside and they shiver. Wendy feels as if she has an icicle embedded in her spine from the small of her back and into her brain. She is now off duty for the night. Meanwhile, the nurse from Karen's floor approaches the trio and says, "Dr. Chernin, I really have to tell you …"

"Yes?" Wendy tries to hide her weariness and relaxes her chest. "I'm out of line. What did you need?"

"I thought you should know that your friend is talking now."

"Talking? She should be out cold for the next four hours—and then some. We gave them seda—"

"No. No. Not those friends. That… old friend of yours. The one in a coma. She's up in 7-E. Karen."Wendy turns around to Linus and Megan and their bodies curdle; small hairs on the necks prickle; their arms become weightless. They have entered a mesmerizing and frightening realm. The nurse says, "You must know the girl—she's been in a coma for fifteen years now. Karen."

"Seventeen," says Linus instantly. Megan feels like vomiting.

"She said hello to me twice. Her eyes were clear and intelligent. She's all there, all right."

Wendy looks at her friends; glances are exchanged. Linus's brain empties as though passing through a trapdoor in the floor. Within moments, the three race down the ozone corridor and then endure a long, tense elevator ride. Nobody speaks, and a few breaths later they arrive in Karen's room, now buzzing with staff. Karen is crying. Someone is about to give her a sedative, and Wendy grabs the needle and throws it into the trash. "No. Don't do that. Jesus. That's how she ended up here in the first place. No drugs of any sort. None. Ever. Everybody—out … out!" Everybody clears the room save for her, Megan, and Linus. Wendy says, "Karen. It's me. Wendy. I'm here, honey."

Karen raises her eyes, her hysteria dwindling: "Wendy? Is that you, Wendy?"

Wendy walks forward, kneels down, and puts her left arm on Karen's shoulder. She then wipes her eyes with the other hand. "Hey, Karen? Yeah—it's me, Wendy. I'm here, girl." Wendy has been a doctor long enough to know that Karen's awakening is a miracle. She tries to keep her composure as she has done throughout her life, but now she isn't sure she can do it.

"Wendy—what happened to me—my body—I can't move. I can't see any of it. What the hell's happened?"

"You've been asleep for a long time, Karen. A coma. Don't worry. You'll get your body back. Soon." Wendy is hoping that her face doesn't betray this last lie.

"Oh, Wendy. I'm glad you're …" Karen closes her eyes. Several breaths later, she reopens them. Her eyes dart sideways. "Is that Linus?" Karen's voice is rasping, like beard stubble rubbing on paper. Linus comes over and sits beside Wendy."Hey there, Karen. Welcome home." He kisses her forehead. Karen lies there and looks into the eyes of her friends. They are older. Much older. This is not right.

"My body," Karen says. "Where's my body!" She cries once more. "I'm a fucking pretzel."

"Shhh," Wendy says. "You've been gone a long time. You will get your body back. You will. I'm a doctor now. We missed you, honey. We missed you so badly."

Karen looks about, her eyes darting. She asks Linus how old she is now. "You're thirty-four, Kare."

"Thirty-four. Oh, God."

Linus says, "Don't worry, Kare—your twenties suck. Believe me, be glad you missed them."

"Linus, what year is it?"

"It's 1997. Saturday, November the first, 1997, 6:05 A.M."

"Oh. Oh, God. Oh, my! My family—how's my family?"

"All fine. Alive and well."

"And Richard?"

"Pretty good. In good shape. He's visited you once a week all these years."

She focuses on Megan, standing by the door. "And you—you by the door. I—I think I know you."

"No," Megan says. Megan feels bashful for one of the few times in her life.

"Come here," Karen says, because there is something about this teenager that Karen has been told—by whom? She remembers the Moon. She remembers talking to Richard on the Moon. Bullshit. Nonsense. "Come here. Please." Megan meekly shuffles forward, nearly paralyzed with hope, anticipation, sickness, and fear. Karen looks over Megan calmly. "You're related to me—aren't you?" Megan nods. "A sister?"

"No."

Karen is now understanding just how long she's been gone. She focuses on Megan as though she were a difficult algebra equation. Her brows knit. "What's your name?""Megan."

Karen thinks out loud: "Mom had a daughter once—a miscarriage. 1970? The name was Megan."

Megan buckles. She walks to the bed and hops onto its metal rick-etiness and lies down beside her mother as she did the first time she met her. She places her face directly before Karen's and they look at each other, retina to retina, brain to brain. Who is this creature? Karen is now calm about this scenario. She knows that answers will come. She says to Megan, "You're very pretty, you know," to which Megan sniffles, saying, "I am not."

Karen asks, "And I've never seen makeup like yours, either. Concert last night?"

"I wear it all the time. If you want I'll take it off. I really will." She gouges her palms into the eyes.

"Stop," croaks Karen. "Stop."

Megan is trembling. "I took your makeup off once, too," Megan says. "The first time I ever saw you. I was seven."

Karen is silent. She pauses and looks at the ceiling and sighs and meditates: This must surely be a sister, but she says she isn't. And she looks like Richard. "How's Mom and Dad?"

The floodgates open: "I—I've been a … a … real shit to them. I'm a horrible person. And you're awake. Mom—my real Mom."

Karen is unable to move her neck, but her eyes are focused deeply on the boo-hooing teenager clutched against her right side. "I never thought you'd wake up. And now you have and I see I've just been horrible to everybody." Megan uses her tears to wipe off her eyeliner and kohl. Her eye sockets are a mess.

"Shhhh …" whispers Karen. "It's over now. All over. I'm here." Karen thinks over this outburst. Mom? "Megan, did you call me Mom?"

"Yeah. Because you are. My mom, I mean."

Karen is faint: "What are you talking abou— Oh, man." That night with Richard on Grouse Mountain? This is not possible.

"I've wanted to talk to you all these years. Did you like punk rock? It's coming back in now."This last comment distracts Karen. Suddenly, Megan is off on a tangent discussing the Buzzcocks and Blondie. Karen, meanwhile, assembles pieces. She notices the absence of a mirror in the room. Hair that has fallen into her face tells her she has gone gray. In spite of her bedridden condition and seventeen-year-old mind, she knows that she is going to have to be the mature one here.

As she thinks this, Wendy is taking pulses and doing medical thin-gies. Outside in the corridor, employees are quietly milling about. News is spreading quickly. A friend of a patient down in the lobby has phoned the city desk of a local paper. Wendy has asked staff to clear away from the room.

Karen says, "And Wendy … there's something wrong. I can tell. Wendy. Wait—what are all of you doing here? I mean, it's Sunday morning. How did you know I was—that this was going to happen?"

"We didn't," Wendy says, recognizing the morning's coincidences. "We had no idea."

Megan butts in, as though imparting hot gossip, "Hamilton and Pammie OD'd on heroin last night. They're down in Intensive Care. They're, like, complete heroin addicts now. Linus was at a party with them. Wendy fixed them up an hour ago."

"Thank you, Megan," Wendy says.

Karen thinks. "They're doing heroin? At thirty-four? That's so old. That's my age."

"Heroin's big these days," says Linus.

"Ugh."

All of the dramatic things Wendy and Linus had once planned on saying upon Karen's reawakening have vanished—poof. Instead, they discuss the commonplace. "Hey, Wendy—do I still smoke?"

"Not anymore, hon." Then Wendy says, more to herself than to anyone present, "You know, I just can't understand the coincidences—Ham and Pam, Megan, Linus, and then you. That leaves Richard, I suppose. No doubt he'll be traipsing in soon."

Karen looks at her arm, bony, defleshed, and prisoner-of-war-useless looking. "Shit. Just look at me, Wendy. I was gonna go to Hawaii. Whatta disaster. I look like a praying mantis." Karen is nowoddly objective about her body—her self. She looks up at Wendy. And then she yawns. "Hey there, Wendy—I saw you watch me yawn. Don't sweat it. I'm going to be falling asleep soon. But it'll only be normal sleep. I won't be going into deep freeze ever again." She blinks. How does she know this?

Wendy asks again how Karen feels. "Woozy—and thirsty, too. Is there lemonade here? I get really thirsty here in 1997. There's a tube in my belly button!" A small kerfuffle explodes in the corridor and Gatorade and a straw are produced from somebody's lunch bag. "My tongue," she says. "It feels like a box of cotton. Linus, can you go get my parents? I don't want them to hear about this over the phone. Can you do that?"

"Sure."

"Good. When they arrive, if I'm asleep, don't wake me up." She pauses. "That sounds sick. Just ask them to wait. I'll be back."

Megan gives Karen a peck on the cheek, then resumes lying against her mother.

Wendy tallies all of Karen's vital signs now. Everything, given the extraordinary conditions, is about as normal as can be. Megan is resting like a papoose against Karen's back. "Look—I got your fingernails," Megan says. "And your hair, too. Well, it's gray now. We'll dye it together. My friend Jenny's really good."

"Why are you dressed in all black?" Karen asks.

Megan now feels immature. She doesn't want to tell her mother that she views herself as Death—the cause of so much darkness. "It's a phase. It's over now."

Linus is on a chair beside the bed, happy. Linus thinks the world is a cruel place, and in his mind he is thinking of the deserts he used to walk through, the endless crappy little small towns and the meanness of the world, and yet here, from nowhere really, blooms a flower. Such moments are so rare, as rare as a ruby plucked from a salmon's guts as he remembers from childhood. That ruby—it had been only a piece of taillight plastic found when gutting the salmon on the docks up at Fender Harbour, but to Linus it was a ruby.

Karen attempts to stay awake and savor her new consciousness.She is glad to have friends nearby and her magical daughter talking beside her. The staff have been shooed away, and among the four in the room, a tension exists—a sense of giddiness shared by all, giddiness from having witnessed an emotional reawakening not unlike the thawing of Niagara Falls, the sheaths of ice calving off the shale in thick, glorious blocks. The people in the room feel enchanted— chosen.

"We're going to have to move you as soon as possible, Karen. The media's changed quite a bit since 1979 and we don't want them vul-turing around you." Wendy makes a phone call. "Yes. Full. Normal. Immediately. Yeah. Yeah. Thirty minutes. Just try to do it. Thanks."

Richard is no longer drunk. He is a silver-clad astronaut climbing up a dirt bank, the soil rich and crumbly and moist as canned dog food. He reaches Capilano Road above and then lumbers at a pronounced clip through the roads and the subdivisions, counting the colorful dead fireworks and fragments of pumpkin craniums at his feet. Above him, the sun rises under a sky the color of a navel orange. Tangy. Richard walks along Edgemont Boulevard to Delbrook, then down across the Westview overpass. A taxi driver going off duty slows and asks if he needs a lift, and soon he is at the hospital's front, where the local news vans are parked. Richard's costume in itself has become another unusual sight on what has already been an extraordinary day. He sees a camera crew and press people making a silent scrum toward the elevators. A nurse who has known Richard for over a decade admits him into the elevator. Somebody asks, "Hey, who's her

"It's the boyfriend. Hey, you—boyfriend—what can you tell us?"

Richard exits the elevator on Karen's floor. The nurses recognize him anxiously and hold their breath as he walks down the corridor, silver, powerful and serene, breathing deeply, as an astronaut might well do on a foreign planet. He hears his breath from inside his chest.

He walks in the room and sees Wendy and Linus there. They smile and politely leave the room. Richard kisses Karen on the lips. "Hey, Beb. I'm back," Karen says."Hi, honey. Welcome home," Richard says. "I missed you always." He lowers himself onto his knees before her and kisses her again.

Silence. They stare into each other's eyes with all the intensity of two people in the flush of first love. "They haven't allowed me to look in a mirror, Richard. I know I look like a rat's ass."

"You're beautiful."

"Flatterer. So much for Hawaii."

"I see you met our daughter."

Megan props herself up on an elbow beside her mother. "Hey, Dad."

"Hey, sugar-cakes."

An awkward silence ensues. "This is whacked," Megan says. "Come on. Get up. Hop onboard. There's just enough room."

Richard unzips and removes the top of his astronaut's outfit, which peels away from his body down to his belly button like a chrome banana skin. He climbs onto the bed and Karen becomes a human hot-meat sandwich, a witch on one side, an astronaut on the other. Karen feels as if they are all in a row boat, floating, going someplace new. This is a dream, but it's not. Richard feels as though he has found a vein of gold inside his heart, a klondike of feelings he had thought long buried.

Karen says, "You smell sweaty, Richard."

Richard says, "I walked over here from Cleveland Dam." A pause. "It's a long story."

"We're all tired now, aren't we, gang?" Karen says. "Wanna sleep?"

And they do want to sleep as they realize that they're all tired from walking, from hoping, from waiting, from losing faith and from finding it once more. Richard has his arm under Karen's head. "Yeah, let's go to sleep. It's been so long. And we're tired."

"Look at us," Megan whispers to both Karen and Richard with a happiness she once long ago reserved exclusively for small animals, birthday cake, and roller coasters: "We're a real family. At last. And forever. And I'm not Death anymore, am I, Dad?"Richard whispers back, "No, but you never were."

And the three drift toward sleep.

"And what's with the costumes?" Karen asks almost inaudibly before falling asleep.

"Costumes? What costumes?" Megan and Richard answer in stereo, drifting along with Karen in their boat that will not tip.

16 THE FUTURE AND THE AFTERLIFE ARE DIFFERENT THINGS ALTOGETHER

Stereo.

Floors away, Hamilton and Pam are now entering new thought cycles. While their brains are too taxed to generate pictures, they are, however, able to hear words, sounds, and music. A choir. Noises as though from heaven: sweet and seductive and lush. Words. Anyone looking at their Intensive Care'd bodies would never know of the concerts akimbo within their minds. Oranges and lemons, say the bells of Saint Clement…

And then, only after this music peaks, do pictures begin to appear—a slide show: a Houston freeway empty save for a car parked here and there; a rain of mud falling on the houses of suburban Tokyo; African veldts on fire; Indian rivers like thick stews, churning corpses and silks oceanward; a time/temperature sign on a Florida Chrysler dealership flashing 00:00/140°.

A nurse on duty, meanwhile, watches the two patients. Something is wrong. Off. Not right. And then the nurse notices it: the two patients are detoxifying in stereo. Their heads twist or nod in sympathy. They jerk together—a rehearsed dance of death. She calls another nurse, who records the action on her brother's VCR-cam that she had meant to return later that afternoon.

A minute or two later, the intensity of Hamilton and Pam's synchronized show begins to involve spastic arm motions and leg jerks Their life signals leap and jag, copies of each other.

And then the dance is over. The patients resume their own individual sleeps, and the videotape is saved for later.

This was not supposed to happen.

Lois navigates the Buick as though it were a cumbersome pleasure craft. Hand in glove, she changes gears. George weeps uncontrollably beside her. The implications of today's hospital visit are so fraught with meaning that the two find themselves unable to communicate save for minor grunts. (Seat belt on? Yes. Okay.) Their hopes have leapfrogged too far ahead of them, and how could their hopes not do so? Just two hours ago they might never have imagined feeling as extreme as they feel now. Linus rang the doorbell shortly after nine. George, puttering in the kitchen, was sipping coffee, wondering which azalea he might prune in the afternoon; Lois lay upstairs in bed, half asleep, idly deciding whether to clean out the Christmas decorations. And then came Linus. They had thought that Karen might be dead—the lung condition. Instead, "Karen's awake, Mr. and Mrs. McNeil, and she's talking normally and everything. She asked for you. I think she wants you to go there."George and Lois had reacted with whitening faces, knotted tongues, and the clotted taste of blood in their throats—each for different reasons. George, receiving the one thing he had truly ever wanted in life, and Lois because she feels a wallop of guilt for having ignored Karen across the many years—having given up all hope and lying to George about having visited her. And Lois remembers that she was the one who wanted to "pull the plug"; Lois is the one who just yesterday asked the hospital for "no heroics—just let her go this time."

Suddenly, Lois has to imagine herself as a citizen of a world containing hope, and it frightens her; it makes her dizzy. And she realizes she may have two daughters who hate her now, instead of just one. There is a flood inside her head, like the broken trees and mud and cracked boulders she once saw burbling down a mountain as a child in northern British Columbia.

After Linus had delivered the news, George slumped down on a stool below a macrame owl. Lois rubbed his shoulders and told Linus that they would dress properly and be at the hospital shortly. A phone call to Wendy confirmed Karen's awakening.

"Daddy?" George heard the words and fell into the phone. "Is that you, Daddy? It's me. Karen." George is unable to breathe. Lois fears a heart attack. "It's me. I'm here. I'm confused. My stomach itches."

Lois grabs the receiver from George. "Karen?"

"Mom?"

"I—hi, honey."

"Hi, Mom."

"You okay?"

"I can't really move. Come down. I'm hungry."

"George, stop crying. Karen? We're coming down right now."

"Are you at Rabbit Lane?"

"Same as always. George, do be quiet. Say hello to Karen, for

God's sake." "Hi." "Hi, Daddy."George was in floods. Lois yanked away the receiver: "Hang in there, Karen. We'll be there right away."

Megan was nowhere to be seen. She's at Richard's. Lois threw on a twin-set and pearls and spackled the ridges time has eroded into her face. George bumbled into his one "good suit" and had a small jerk as he remembered that this was the suit he bought for Karen's funeral.

Upon leaving the house, a Valium-enriched Lois was pleased that she had kept her figure and her hair was shiny. Time had hardly touched her.

The Saturday itself is cold and clear. Their breath steams. Most of the leaves have fallen and Lois rolls down the window and thinks of Karen as the hospital comes ever closer.

Lois has always kept her feelings on her comatose daughter to herself. George has seen Lois shed tears only once. There was one night maybe ten years ago when she and George had been watching TV. There was a news program on, a show about a crazy man down in Texas who had poisoned a famous historical tree. The citizens of the town were trying to save the tree's life, pumping water through the soil to wash away the poison, but the tree was confused. The tree lost its ability to detect seasons. It became lost in time and would shed leaves and then resprout them in fall and then in winter. Its leaves fluttered and fell earthward one last time, and the tree died in the end. Lois felt herself losing her breath as she watched this. She went into the kitchen, stood by the cutting board, and tried to compose her thoughts, but the tears broke through and she fell to the floor, a pond of tears in her right hand. The kitchen was dark and the linoleum cold, but George came in, said, "Hush, dear," and held her. They sat together on the kitchen floor, the TV playing in the background.

A stop sign.

Lois thinks of Karen—of how much of herself she had seen in Karen but never let her know. Karen, so smart. So full of beans. Lois remembers how she felt after the coma had begun—dry and hollow like the empty plastic flower tubs in the garage. Lois thinksof the miscarriages she has had, especially Megan the First, born in 1970, who miscarried, taking some small but essential part of Lois away with her. The experience made Lois feel like a car with no ignition key.

And Lois thinks of Richard—such a dolt at the beginning when Megan was born. Then he became a drunk. And he switched careers again and again. No stability. Only recently has Richard come to feel like true family and seems to have leveled out. He isn't so daft these days. He tries to make adult decisions. He is sensible. "No, George," she had said last month, "he's doesn't have all his ducks in a row yet, but he's on the right path. Or let's hope."

Local TV cameras and lighting men throng inside the hospital lobby and the visitors' parking lot. There are trucks with satellite links, news reporters having makeup applied—a sedate but purposeful circus. George and Lois know the cause of this scene, and they instinctively scurry into a side entrance that George has sometimes used over the years. They slip down corridors and bump into a nurse who beams with pleasure at seeing them. She escorts them to Karen's new room. "It's such a miracle," says the nurse. "Never have I … well, I'm sure you know what I mean."

At the room there are people milling around outside the door. George and Lois see Wendy and beeline her way. Wendy smiles: "She's having a small nap right now. Not a coma. Simply a nap. Richard and Megan are in there sleeping with her, but don't worry about that. It's good for her. She needs to be held. I've given orders nobody except family be admitted. You saw the posse downstairs."

Karen awakens from her nap soundlessly. She hears Wendy on a phone over by the door. She sees and feels Richard and Megan on either side of her, their breath, their heat. How did this happen? Why am I here now? Seventeen years. Ooh. Has the world changed much!

Has the world changed or have I changed? Richard is no longer cute—he's … handsome, and hairy now, so much broader than he was … last night! He's a man now. Larger. A man. Good looking,but—a man, not a teen. He smells differently than he did last night— no—the same yet more intense. Megan, too. A daughter? A dream! But only last night I was young and alive. Megan smells like fresh white corn, fresh from the cob, a sweet scent of youth. Karen wonders if Megan and Richard are friends. Does Megan like Mom? Maybe. Probably not. Mom makes it so hard for people to like her. Why does she do that? My stomach hurts, she thinks. And it tickles, too. Cramping. Hunger. A tube into my stomach. Gross. Have I had periods over the years? Now? Will I be able to eat solids? I'm not even a baby now. I'm a fetus. Why is my head so clear, so lucid?

Karen tries to move an arm and the effort is torture. Her nose itches, but her tendons are too unexercised for her to reach and scratch. Her body is in complete but dreadfully creaky shape. Her jaw hurts and she feels like a chopped-down tree. I'm so far gone. My body! Wait—this is too much. I can't worry about this now. She is immobile but alert, and she is curious. She shuts her eyes and opens them and finds all that she sees hard to believe. She doesn't want to talk to strangers. She wants it to be Sunday morning. She wants it to be just any other day. Just imagine—all the other people in the world have been awake for seventeen years!

Wendy leaves the room; there's noise outside the door; she comes back with a phone—no cord—and seeing that Karen's awake, asks her to say hi to Mom and Dad, which seems odd as she only just saw them last night. After the call, she quizzed Wendy: "What year is it again, Wendy?"

"1997."

"Oh. Oh my."

"Karen, I want to ask you a favor." Wendy's voice was hedgy. "Hamilton and Pam are really sick, but they'll be okay soon enough. They need something to give them hope."

"They're hopeless?"

"In a way. They're without hope. It's in their heads. Can I bring them up here with you? It'll help them." "Are they really doing drugs?"Doing drugs—what an old-fashioned word. "Yes. Pathetic as it sounds. Drugs are different these days. You'll learn it all soon. How do you feel?"

"Fantastically awake. They OD'd?"

"Yup."

"Bring them in—I want to have lots of people around me. But only people I know."

"Your mom won't be too thrilled."

"I'll deal with her." She smacks her lips. "Can I have a sip of water?" Wendy rushes over and holds a glass. Karen notices her wedding ring. "Thanks. How long have you and Linus been married?"

George and Lois nudge the door open soundlessly. The room is dim. The parents are startled to see Megan and Richard there on the bed with her—Unorthodox, but then hospitals aren't the same citadels of reflex cruelty and loneliness they once were. Richard is snoring and Megan is breathing warmly. And there is Karen. Her eyes are open and smiling. "Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad," she says under her breath. "Shhhhh … the kids are asleep." Her jaw aches.

Her voice! She's back! George blubbers while smooching Karen's cheeks, oblivious to the scene he creates. "Hi Dad." George is lost to emotion, as Karen smiles and raises happy eyebrows over George's shoulders toward Lois. Karen winks. It is hard for Karen to be sentimental, because in her mind she has only had a quick nap since 1979.

Richard awakens just then. "Hi, George. Oh. Excuse me. Here. Oh. Let me move out of the way and down off this thing. Lois. Hi—" Richard clambers off, the top part of his silver astronaut suit dragging behind him like a beaver tail. George hugs Richard. Lois, meanwhile, has stayed away from the bed. Her purse is clutched to her chest. She comes nearer. She locks eyeballs with her daughter.

"Hey, MOOT." Karen says.

There is a silence. "Hello, Karen." Another silence. "Welcome back." Lois gives Karen a small kiss.George and Richard shut up. Karen sees that time has done little to alter her mother. Some gray hair here, a wrinkle there—the posture and voice are timeless. "You look as good as ever, Mom," Karen says.

"Thank you, dear." Lois has not visited Karen for almost a year now. She is finding it hard to overlook Karen's deterioration. "Can you eat now, sweetie? Are you hungry?" The old food games have begun already. "I brought an owl figurine to cheer you up."

"Thanks." It's as if seventeen years have never happened.

Megan touches her mother, holds her neck and rubs it with her hands. Karen's gray hair is limp and sad and has been cut with blunt scissors; Megan holds it to her nose and the hair smells dusty and sweet. All her life Megan has felt jinxed, that people around her would come to bad ends. Richard, too, has felt the same way for years, though neither of them knew it of the other. Megan has been dressing in black for so long now, and has been chasing an early death; it seemed only fitting—the drugs, the fearsome boyfriends, and the fast cars. Why would anybody miss her? Richard—whoops Dad—might miss her, but then he'd most likely go drink himself into the center of the Earth to forget her. That's unfair. He did quit drinking for real. But then didn't he fob her off on Lois and George? Lois—glad to have me out of her hair. George? George is nice, but he's always liked Karen better.

Megan soon accompanies Richard, Lois, George, Wendy, and Linus into another room. The hallways have been cleared. Wheels squeak. It's quiet.

The group arrives at a new, larger room. Inside, Uncle Hamilton and Aunt Pam are already there, conked out in separate beds, resembling dead extras in a sci-fi movie. Drugged out losers, Megan thinks, but then she reminds herself that she really has no right to condemn on that front. Where does this judgmental streak come from? Megan decides she's going to go straight edge: She's never going to do a drug ever again. Even aspirin. She is going to be the mother that Karen never had. She is going to protect her—keep her smart, make herwhole. And then Megan remembers why she is even at the hospital: last night with Skitter on the mattress in Yale's basement, a pot dealer friend of Skitter. She'd told Linus that the morning-after pill was for her friend, Jenny, but it wasn't. Megan knows that she is pregnant. It was meant to be.

17 EVERYBODY'S LYING

"I want them all in the same room because they'll all give each other intentive to get well."

Pam and Hamilton hear Wendy's voice and open their fogged eyes to see white curtains. They hear background snatches of other voices. Hamilton's throat hacks up a clump of blood-phlegm; Wendy, standing beside him says poker-faced, "Welcome back to prime time, douche bag."

"Wendy? Ooh. Ahh. I feel like a paper sack of burning dog shit. What time is it?"

"Time to change your life, you screwed-up junkie."

"Hamilton—are you there?" calls Pam.

"Assuming we're not dead, yes, dear. What time is it, Wendy? Where are we? What are we doing here?" Lifting his head feels like lifting a swarm of hornets,

"It's Sunday, kids. And you are both in the hospital. You're here for emergency supernumerary mammectomies."

"Super what*."

"We're removing your third nipples."

" What? Ow! Don't talk like that, Wendy."

"Hospital humor. It's my style—oh and don't give me that little wounded look: 'Ooh, I'm so surprised.' You came one eyelash close to death, you bastard." She walks over and looks into Hamilton's eyes and then slaps him gently.

"Ow, shit, Wendy, whaddya do that for? You screwed up a fantastic high. I was on a roll last night."

"Why? You were almost dead last night, scuzz bucket." Wendy approaches Pam in the bed to the left and pecks her on the forehead. "You both scared the hell out us. You're too old to be so pathetic doing junk. I don't need to be friends with junkie losers. And having said that, I want you to sit up and have a look across the room."

Pam says, "My head hurts, I—"

"Just look, you two losers."

With two push-button controls, Wendy elevates Pam and Hamilton's backrests, then opens the curtains, allowing them to see Richard and Karen across the room; Richard is holding Karen's arm, wagging it back and forth, and the two of them are making faces. Karen is wearing a shirt Lois brought along with her—the same Levi's shirt she wore in high school: rough cotton, embroidered parakeets.

George and Lois and Megan are parked on stools, and Lois looks furious, first at Wendy and then at Hamilton: "Wendy, I don't think there's anything useful to come of having two … drug addicts in the room. They're the worst possible influence, and just look at Hamilton. What a dreadful sight to wake up to after seventeen years. There must be some sort of rule about this."

"Lois," Wendy says, "I had to pull a whack of strings to get them all in here. You think this was easy?"

"But they're so … ugh."

"Once more, Lois, it will be good for them to be together. They all need support."

"Oh, God. This is a hallucination," says Hamilton.

"Hi, Hamilton," Karen says. "Who'd you take to the prom?"Pam, not fully clicked in to the tableau across the room, pipes up and hears the voice—Karen is back from McDonald's. "Karen? You're herel"

"Hi kids," says Karen. "How was grad? I missed it. As you know."

"Oh, oh—you wouldn't believe it; Hamilton took Cindy Webber. A computer date. I went with Raymond Merlis."

"No!"

"Yes, and—"

"I did not have a computer date," Hamilton interjects.

"Oh shut your gob. No one would take you."

"Did Raymond remove Keith for the night?" Keith is their name for the single strand of wiry hair growing from a mole on Raymond Merlis's face.

Instantly, Pam and Karen relapse into their older, younger selves, like exotic birds chattering in a mango tree. Pam tries to step out of bed and stumbles toward Karen, but her body aches and she's unable to stand up. Her knees buckle. The activated granulated charcoal given to her earlier seems to have sunk like ball bearings into her lower colon. Hamilton, meanwhile, is nauseated and feels as though he's lying on a dock in choppy weather. He vomits Halloween chocolate and dead martinis into a bedside bucket while his muscles spasm and he feels the onset of scorch-and-burn diarrhea.

"Just so you know, Kare," Pam says, "Keith came, too."

"Wendy," Lois barks. "This is revolting. They're sick. I really must protest."

"Sickness is part of life, Lois."

"Mi scusa, everybody—" Pam begins to sweat and clam; her anxiety is escalating. Hamilton is already desperate for a fix, Pam not quite so, but soon she will be. "You can't say we're dull."

In the background Lois is saying, "Very well then, Doctor Chernin. I'm going to call my lawyer. George? Call my lawyer."

"Lois, be quiet," says George.

Karen has been awake a few days and has had some rare time alone with her thoughts. The first two days were such a circus that she hadto ask Wendy to lock everybody out of the room save for Mom, Dad, Richard, and Megan.

Pam and Ham are now gone; she has the room to herself. She looks down at her body—bones marinated in liquid and only vaguely responsive to her will. She has already gained three pounds and she thinks this is a sick joke. She lifts her hand to where her breasts once were; she touches what is now mere parchment and bone, emits a squeak, and sighs.

She surveys her hospital room, her world, almost identical to the room she had during her appendix removal in third grade. Where has she been for seventeen years? What other world did she visit? She is furious with herself for not remembring. Her coma was dreamless, but she knows she went to some place real. Not the place you go when you die—some other place. She thinks back to the previous week, the week before the coma, and she remembers being chased by darkness. Darkness? What? Some of it returns to her. She was trying to find a way to cheat the darkness. And she lost in the end. Shit.

She tries to raise her arm but the sensation is as though she is trying to lift a telephone pole. Megan, her "surprise daughter," will be in soon to help her with stretching exercises. Megan and Lois and Richard are taking shifts. Her tendons apparently need to tenderize before muscle can rebuild. She feels as though she's an item on a menu.

Why has she been kept alive? She can't imagine the point of it. She's happy to be awake but is secretly appalled at the thought of the money and human effort it must have taken to keep her going for so long.

What has happened to the world? What has happened to the people in her world?

She's been awake just a little bit of time, but much is apparent. Richard: He's so different yet he still holds her the way he used to— bodies retain memories long after the mind forgets them. His face is so ravaged. Drinking? How did that happen? And Ham and Pam on heroin? Such a punch line. It's as though Karen walked through a door in 1979 and directly entered a health guidance class showing a film on the unmentioned perils of aging.Wendy, working hard—too hard, it seems. She's not much in love with Linus—obvious to anybody—nor is Linus much in love with Wendy. His soul is full of glue. Karen seems to have understood everyone's life immediately; the others think she is too out of it—too clued out about the modern world—but Karen sees all. She remembers the innocent pointless aims of their youths (Hawaii! Ski bum at Whistler!) and sees that they were never acted upon. But at the same time, larger aims were never defined. Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.

Her friends are not particularly happy—not with their lives. Pam had rolled her eyes when Karen asked her if she was happy.

"No."

"Fulfilled?"

"No."

"Creative?"

"A little."

Through the monsters they design and the TV shows they work on, they give vent to the loss they feel inside. Expressions of pettiness, loss, and corruption. She asked not to see any more of their FX photos. Yuck. The photos sit on a stack beside flowers from the mayor as well as from various studios and film production companies wishing to purchase rights to her life story.

On top of it all, the world itself has changed. Karen must try and absorb seventeen years of global changes. That can wait. And she thinks she'll go crazy if one more person tells her that the Berlin Wall came down and AIDS exists in the world.

One week later, Wendy still can't comprehend Karen's return to the living and her complete retention of all her brain power. Wendy knows the medical statistics. To others, Karen's awakening is a lottery win—a prize behind Door Number 3, a pair of snowmobiles. But to Wendy, Karen is a river running backward, a rose that blooms under moonlight—something transcendent, an epiphany.

Wendy thinks of Karen's long rehab road to reach the point whereshe will be able to perform simple everyday functions once more. Brittle bones; atrophied ligaments. Yet her face is already fully animated, and she smiles as clearly as always. Already her arms are now skittishly mobile, storky chopsticks reaching for gum and the squeeze bottle of water. Checks and balances. Karen is a time capsule—a creature from another era reborn, a lotus seed asleep for ten thousand years that springs to life as clear and true as though born yesterday.

Wendy is concerned about swamping Karen with too much information or too much novelty. As a doctor, she can limit certain things. Richard has been coming in with the annual volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia and teaching Karen about the new years leading up to 1997. He is already at 1989: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the AIDS quilt—Karen must be so amazed at this. And then there's crack. Cloning. Life on Mars. Velcro. Charles and Diana. MAC cosmetics. Imagine learning so much stuff at once.

Karen and Pam have spent some hours sifting through style magazines together; Wendy beamed with pleasure at the sight—so much like the old days. Good gossipy jags: "Oh, and Karen, food is amazing these days. It suddenly got good around 1988," Pam says, making Karen eager to try all the new food trends—Tex-Mex, Cajun, Vietnamese, Thai, Nouvelle, Japanese, Fusion, and California cuisine—"sushi, gourmet pizzas, tofu hot dogs, fajitas, flavored ice teas, and fat-free everything."

Lingering in the back of Wendy's mind, though, is the phenomenon of Hamilton and Pam having stereo heroin nightmares. The nurse showed Wendy the tape of stereo dreaming as well as parallel stalagmite brain readouts. So now Wendy has two medical mysteries on her hands at the same time. Best to keep the video hush. Pam and Hamilton are unaware it even exists. Best to scoot Karen home immediately—away from public intrusion.

Megan enjoys visiting her mother at the hospital, where she helps her flex her arms and legs and fingers. She has never been able to help others, and the sensation is as though she had opened her bedroomdoor and found an enormous new house on the other side full of beautiful objects and rooms to explore.

Megan is relieved that Karen has a good sense of humor and, though older, is technically the same age. "Megan, tell me, all the young girls I see on TV these days dress kind of, um …"

"Slutty?"

"Your word, not mine."

"It's Lois's word." Megan giggles. "Lois is from another era where girls had to be doormats. Nowadays we dress for strength. Didn't you?"

Karen ponders her adolescence: "No. I think we felt equal to guys but never more forceful than them."

"I guess that's a switch. Soon we'll have you going to the gym."

"I think I'm a bit far gone for that."

"Crap—Mom." Megan loves saying Mom with extra vim, as each mention is a small stab at Lois.

Yes, Karen is happy to see that Megan is rebellious—and that she talks back to Lois. Karen had never dared. Megan is also angry—at Richard and at her parents and at the world. And Karen is angry with Richard for being so shiftless in helping raise Megan. That's something to be dealt with in the future. Karen is mad and lost and found and bewildered. The new world lies before her eyes like an opened chest of treasure, a flock of birds over Africa, a thousand TVs all playing at once.

Wendy thinks about Karen. Unsurprisingly she is front-page news the world over; a medical oddity, a feature-section story, tabloid grist. Yet the only photo the media have is Karen's old graduation photo. The media have been unable to snap a new picture of Karen; such a photo has become the golden fleece of journalism. There have been attempts to bribe relatives—Wendy herself was approached by a French photographer, Linus by the Germans. Such cheek. And to think that Karen never wanted to be photographed even at the best of times—it would be too cruel to exhibit her in such a frail, emaciated state.Friends and family want to protect Karen and her innocence from the modern world, the changes that have occurred since her sleep began. Her innocence is the benchmark of their jadedness and corruption. The world is hard now. The world doesn't like simplicity or relaxation.

The world also wants photos of Megan—the girl who met her dead mother. Dozens of photos of Megan abound, courtesy of her schoolmates. She is the "Lost Child," the "Child of Corpse Born."

In particular, the U.S. news networks have been fearsome in demanding interviews at top dollar and wide exposure. "Maybe in the future, Richard, but not now." What Karen doesn't tell Richard is that she feels the onset of some previously withheld news on the brink of making itself clear. From where? What? A message from the other side—from the place she went to for all those years. She needs to wait for the right moment to use it correctly.

18 EXTREME BODY FAILURE

Less than two weeks after awakening, Karen is taken home to Rabbit Lane. She has gained two more pounds; Lois changes her diapers and inspects her waste as though Karen were a Chinese Empress, reading meaning into her waste's patterns like tea leaves on a cup's bottom. "Mom, do that somewhere else, pleeeze."

"Dr. Menger says you can start on solids next week."

"Gee."

"No need to be sarcastic, young lady."

Once home, Karen is both relieved and annoyed by the absent signs of time's passage, by the same owls, furniture, knickknacks and carpets that adorn the house. Only Megan's room, Once Karen's, gives evidence of time's march: posters of strange young pop stars engineered to disturb parents, unfamiliar and annoyingly provocative garments strewn hither and yon and a plaque on the door made in wood shop: MEGAN'S SPACE.

Richard spends an inordinate amount of time in Karen's new room, which was previously George's never-used den. At night he sleeps on the floor beside Karen's bed, and sometimes on the bed with Karen. Thus the geography of their lives has become the same as when they were teenagers. The two of them quickly develop baby talk words between themselves and when they aren't together they begin to experience a sweet ache. Their conversation devolves into a secret patois and the two are wonderfully aware that they are in love.

"I look like a telethon child," she tells Richard. "My body may be interesting to others as a science project but that's all. I'm not sexy."

"Well I'm head over heels for you," says Richard.

"Toot toot, Beb," Karen says.

"Ick," says Megan, overhearing them speak, beginning to feel pangs of jealousy. Megan is allowed to be helpful, and enjoys being so, but between Lois and Richard, she feels the way she imagines a Best Supporting Actress must feel when she loses her Oscar. Megan and Karen have many chats, but they aren't as deep or intimate as her chats with Richard. Karen saves all her intimacy for Richard. How can she jimmy her way inside Karen's heart? Fashion? How pathetic. Dyeing Karen's hair was fun, and the new hairdo is at least serviceable. But that was just a few hours. She must try harder. Food? Lois has taken complete charge of both Karen's nutrition and her hospital functions. Lois is blissed out. Even a few days earlier, when a coyote from the canyon made off with the bison friche, Lois took the event with almost cheerful equanimity. "Nature's way. Sigh. Here, Karen— freshly squeezed orange juice—no pips, either."

Karen jokes with Richard that her bedroom is a jail cell with Lois as warden. "It's her dream situation, Richard. I'm her dietary lab rat. No chance of escape." She bites her knuckles. "There must be something karma-ish about this. I might as well be a newborn."

"We'll break you out of here soon enough."

"As if."

"Don't be so negative."Richard is happier than he's ever been, juggling Karen and his TV work. Hamilton and Pam are happy enough, too, juggling work with Narcotics Anonymous meetings and clinic visits. They live in a bedroom cocoon of un-rewound VCR tapes, rancid yogurt containers, empty prescription bottles, color-coded vitamin jars, half-eaten meals, lipsticked napkins, stained blankets, and half-read magazines and books. Wendy oversees their recovery.

Richard, looking at all of their lives from a distance, sees the recurring pattern here, the one mentioned on a rainy poker night months ago—a pattern in which the five of his friends seem destined always to return to their quiet little neighborhood. Karen notices this, too. What she doesn't tell Richard, though, is that in a strange way her old friends aren't really adults—they look like adults but inside they're not really. They're stunted; lacking something. And they all seem to be working too hard. The whole world seems to be working too hard. Karen seems to remember leisure and free time as being important aspects of life, but these qualities seem utterly absent from the world she now sees in both real life and on TV. Work work work work work work work.

Look at this! Look at this'. People are always showing Karen new electronic doodads. They talk about their machines as though they possess a charmed religious quality—as if these machines are supposed to compensate for their owner's inner failings. Granted, these new things are wonders—e-mail, faxes, and cordless phones—but then still … big deal.

"Hamilton, but what about you—are you new and improved and faster and better, too? I mean, as a result of your fax machine?"

"It's swim or drown, Kare. You'll get used to them."

"Oh, will I?"

"It's not up for debate. We lost. Machines won."

After life has calmed down somewhat—after the initial flushes of wonder have pulsed and gone, Richard waits until he and Karen have the house alone—a cold gray overcast afternoon day hinting at snow but unwilling to deliver."Karen," he gently asks, "do you remember the letter you gave me?"

"Letter?"

"Yeah. The envelope. That night up Grouse. I was supposed to give it to you the next day unless something happened—which it obviously did."

"Yeah." She mulls this over. "I remember. You never mentioned it. I thought you'd left it unopened, that it was forgotten."

Richard pulls Karen's letter from its envelope where it has lived for nearly two decades, removed every so often for confirmation of its existence. "Here." He hands it to Karen.

December 15 … 6 Days to Hawaii!!!

Note: Call Pammie about beads for corn-rowing hair. Also, arrange streaking.

Hi Beb. Karen here.

If you're reading this you're either a) the World's Biggest Sleazebag and I hate you for peeking at this or b) there's been some very bad news and it's a day later. 1 hope that neither of these is true!!

Why am I writing this? I'm asking myself that. I feel like I'm buying insurance before getting on a plane.

I've been having these visions this week. I may even have told you about them. Whatever. Normally my dreams are no wilder than, say, riding horses or swimming or arguing with Mom (and I win!!) but these new things I saw—they're not dreams.

On TV when somebody sees the bank robber's face they get shot or taken hostage, right? I have this feeling I'm going to be taken hostage—I saw more than I was supposed to have seen. I don't know how it's going to happen. These voices — they're arguing—one even sounds like Jared—and these voices are arguing while. I get to see bits of (this sounds so bad) the

Future!!

It's dark there—in the Future, I mean. It's not a good place.Everybody looks so old and the neighborhood looks like shit (pardon my French!!)

I'm writing this note because I'm scared. It's corny. I'm stupid. I feel like sleeping for a thousand years —that way I'll never have to be around for this weird new future.

Tell Mom and Dad that I'll miss them. And say good-bye to the gang. Also Richard, could I ask you a favor? Could you wait for me? I'll be back from wherever it is I'm going. I don't know when, but I will.

I don't think my heart is clean, but neither is it soiled. I can't remember the last time I even lied. I'm off to Christmas shop at Park Royal with Wendy and Pammie. Tonight I'm skiing with you. I'll rip this up tomorrow when you return it to me UNOPENED. God's looking.

Karen

Solid evidence confirms her fears. "I wrote this. Yes. Didn't I?"

"Okay…"

"And what I say in it is real. It exists. Yes." There's a defiant note to her voice.

"I don't doubt you, Karen, not at all." Silence falls between them. Karen fidgets with a Tetris game Megan gave her to help improve her dexterity. Richard looks at her averted eyes. He asks quietly, "What is it—who are they—them—whoever?"

"I'd rather not if that's okay. My ankles hurt."

"You know who they are?"

She looks up: "I do; I don't. I tried to run away and I got caught. They're not going to let me get away again."

"What do you mean, 'get away'? And who's they?"

Karen wishes she could be more forthcoming. At that moment Megan bounds into the room, bumping into a chair as she does so. "Ouch. Hi kids. Ready for some stretching, Mom?"

Karen is all too glad to have her talk with Richard end. "Sure.Let's go." Richard's stomach flutters; he feels like he's being shipped off to war.

Mom.

Lois.

Owls—nothing has changed. Or maybe not. Lois seems slightly hardened, probably the result of Megan's shenanigans. Lois isn't quite as vain as she once was. The outfits are there but gone is the constant preening. George—Dad—comes home early from the shop. He sits beside Karen's bed, dewy-eyed.

Karen likes 1997 people because they're never boring—all these new words they have—the backlogs of gossip, of current events, and of history.

"What was it like?" George and everybody else keeps asking, "What's it like to wake up?"

Like? Like nothing. Honestly. Like she woke up and it was seventeen years later—and her body was gone.

But her answers are consistently lame to deflect them away from darker ideas that are returning to her memory. Her day-to-day memory is fine. Some people from UBC gave her some psychological memory tests. Her memory is as good as the day she passed out. She even remembers the page number of her last algebra assignment. But the darkness? It's taking its time.

She knows people are expecting more from her. A certain nobility is demanded—extreme wisdom through extreme suffering. People tread lightly around her.

"I'm not made of uncooked spaghetti, everyone. Jesus—come a little bit closer, okay? I promise I won't splinter."

One afternoon Wendy is having a coffee on Lonsdale with Pam. Wendy has decided she needs to know what Pam saw during the stereo dream. "Pam, remember when you OD'd last Halloween. I've always wondered what you were seeing inside your head. Your brain readouts looked like wheat blowing in the wind. Do you remember?" "Oh yeah. It was wild. I don't think I've thought about it muchsince then." She puts more sugar into her cup. "It was like a bootleg video of natural disasters and it even had a theme song. Remember when we used to do choir? Oranges and lemons, say the bells of Saint Clement…"

"Go on."

"There was this empty freeway. Texas. Very clear about that. And mud. Like a monsoon—in Japan. Again, no mistaking that. There were fields in Africa—all up in flames. And then this gross one—these rivers in Bangladesh or India—just full of bodies and fabric. The last thing was a big digital clock sign—Florida. Definitely Florida. The time was 00:00 and it was 140 degrees out." Pam puts down her cup. "Wow. I can't believe I remembered all that. But I did. Me with a brain like a damp paper towel."

"It sounds beautiful in an eerie way."

"It was. And it was real—it was no movie. That's for sure."

Later that afternoon Wendy contrives a reason to visit Monster Machine—dropping off some long-ago borrowed books to Hamilton. "Got time for a quick coffee?"

"For you, the Moon."

A few minutes later in the staff coffee room during a lull enhanced by canned music that Hamilton describes as "Eleanor Rigby played on a didgeridoo," Wendy brings up Hamilton's Halloween overdose, and like Pam, he remembers it vividly yet is surprised he hasn't thought of it since. "Texas—a freeway—all quiet, like a sci-fi film. Oh, and music—a children's choir singing 'Oranges and Lemons.' What else—mud. Lots of mud. Slopping onto Tokyo. Some fields in Africa burning. Bodies in a river in India …" Hamilton's eyes aren't fixed on Wendy but are distant and reminiscing: "And the time and temperature in Florida. Dade County? Zero o'clock and 140 degrees Fahrenheit. There."

Wendy is immobilized with shock. "Wendy—what's up? You look like you've seen our most recent monster creation—come on—I'll show you."

They stumble into the main shop full of urethane and fiberglass odors. Hamilton leads Wendy to a decapitated torso with a handsticking out from the neck. Wendy nods approval but her mind is elsewhere.

The news cameras and TV trucks left a while ago, having given up attempts at garnering photos. Linus snaps some black-and-white head shots of Karen and her recently dyed and styled hair. From this selection, one photo is chosen, copied and given out to the press at large. Nobody in the family has given interviews.

Karen's body, hidden by day under a Canucks hockey jersey, is slowly returning to life—fingers, then hands and then forearms; ankles, feet and then the knees. Richard and Megan and a trained therapist oversee many hours each day of bending, rotating and stretching Karen's sad little body, porking up as it may be. Richard helps Karen relearn to write her signature and he's shocked at how difficult the effort is for Karen. Her round girlish signature of yore is now an angular nursery school blotch.

Lois makes sure Karen eats; her stomach, essentially unused to solids for nearly two decades, can accept only the tiniest amounts of food, but Lois, always happy to merge science and dining, is happy to see the amounts rising gram by gram and Karen's body filling out.

Richard has bought an extraordinarily expensive Norwegian wheelchair equipped with a hammocklike sling that allows the passenger, Karen, to travel across bumpy surfaces such as forest paths, and so outside the two of them trek. It's too late in the year for tourists; their only intrusion is a quick greeting from a strolling neighbor; passing dogs lick Karen's face. The chair's sling makes Karen feel utterly dependent and while Richard tries to yank the chair up a rocky patch, Karen's eyes tear; she misses nature.

"Richard, just give it a rest a second," she says. She collects her breath. "Just look at the trees. So alive. So pure. So blameless and strong." Light dapples the leaves of the undergrowth; Karen shivers.

"What is it,Kare?"

"Richard, look at my body. I'm—I'm nothing anymore. I'm a monster—some monster cooked up by Hamilton and Linus. I'm ateenager trapped in an old crone's body. I've never even lived, barely. What if you get tired of taking care of me all the time?"

Richard stills the chair and lifts Karen out of it, then cradles her in his lap while looking at the canyon and river and tall fir trees below. Karen calms down and apologizes: "Time out. That was uncool."

"Cool? Karen, please. Cool is not an issue. Coolness is for eighteen-year-olds." He rethinks that statement in light of her mental age, and he holds her close to him. "Karen, I hear your voice and it's like having jewels rustling across my heart." He pitter-pats her chest with his fingers; Karen loves touching and she loves Richard's sentimental blurts.

Karen leans her head on Richard's shoulder; it still takes so much effort to lift it. "You're being sentimental," she says. She feels odd being so intimate with an older man. Mentally her taste is what a teenager might choose: a first year college guy; a steady North Van guy who plays hockey on weekends. She has had to radically redefine her vision of sex. And Richard, lying there every night, holding her and spooning with her. She has felt him go hard a few times and sensed him pulling away in silent awkwardness, pretending to be asleep. But in his sleep he is hard and he does press against her and between her legs. She finds herself enjoying this—wanting this—but she is unable to imagine herself making love again. She hasn't even been able to ask Wendy about the medical side of all this, but she knows she'll soon be doing so.

Richard is in love with Karen, and she with him, but their connection to each other needs to progress or perish. She's angry that she may never again be with Richard as they were up on the mountain.

Richard finds himself wanting Karen and it feels perverted. He, too, is embarrassed to ask advice from anybody. More times than he can remember he has been aroused by Karen during the night. Lois and George have been understanding of the two of them sleeping together. They understand the healing effect of skin on skin. But how far should it go? What would Karen say if he asked her? What would she think?

Perv.

"Do you remember that night up on the mountain, Richard?""Yeah."

"I remember it, too." Karen cocks her ear to listen to the river. "I dragged you into that. I was pushy."

"I didn't mind."

"I thought maybe you'd think I was a slut or something."

"Oh, I rather doubt that."

"Well, I did think of it that way. I avoided your eyes afterward. On the chairlift. And at the party afterward—up in the car. I felt bad. I feel bad now." A heron swoops by and Richard makes a gesture to lift Karen into her chair, but Karen says, "No. Not right now. I need to ask you something."

Richard says sure.

"I need to know if—if I was—" Karen's voice squeaks here then becomes a whisper. "If I was any good or not."

"Oh Karen, honey!" He bends down and kisses her sallow cheek and rubs her neck, skeletal still, like bones being reduced in a kitchen pot. "Of course you were. That's one of my happiest memories."

Karen starts breathing in staccato. Richard speaks in a soothing monotone to relax her: "See those paths over there?" he says, pointing to lines within the forest where the trees grow along thin road-width glades, "Those used to be logging roads, a long time ago. Linus told me he'd read through old maps and found out that a train had run right through the spaces now occupied by our houses. Sometimes I think of the ghosts of trains flowing nightly through my head. I mean, up here we have our world of driveways and lawns and microwaves and garages. Down there inside the trees … it's eternity."

"You know, Richard …"

"What?"

"That night up Grouse—"

"Yeah?"

"It's—well it's the only time I'm ever going to have. I don't think I can live with that."

"I don't get it. I mean …"

"Richard, just shut up for a moment. Listen to what I'm feeling."There is a silence and then, boom!—with all her effort Karen lifts herself out of Richard's arms in a manner that attempts to be graceful but which ends up looking undignified. She crumples on the muddy soil. Richard is frightened she might be broken.

Karen's weakness is utterly at odds with the landscape's rigor. She tries to crawl away with her arms, inching forth like a worm, soil smudging her face and sleeves, her face grim and determined. With her mouth she tries to drink the sky; her sweater and shirt and jeans are cold and wet, and her fingers clasp and rip a fern. Richard lets Karen move a fair distance and then walks alongside her and then lies down on the soil beside her. She is shivering; he gives her his coat and says, "That's not true at all." He then lifts her and carries her home and leaves the wheelchair where it sits. He can come fetch it later. If.

"Two strong arms," says Karen.

Richard says, "Yes," and kisses her.

19 DREAMING EVEN THOUGH

Pam's detox has not been as shaky as Hamilton's—cramping mostly, eternal period pain, constipation, and dizzy headaches. Today the two are chauffeuring Karen around on a tour of the city, showing her new and modern things. The sun has emerged—cold and bleached, weak and low on the horizon out beyond Burnaby and Mount Baker; sunglasses are required by all. Karen is buried within an ivory-colored sheepskin coat of Pam's. "Très glam, Kare, you sexy detox kitten. Meow."

Hamilton has strapped Karen into the front seat with extra nylon harnesses for legs and chest, carefully checked Karen's neck brace, and promised Richard that he'll drive under the speed limit at all times. He notices Karen's mood this morning: beautiful, lively, and loquacious. There is good reason for this. The night before, Karen and Richard made awkward but delicate love and afterward he asked her to marry him and she accepted. Well, Richard, I'm thirty-four and I can count the number of times I've done it on two fingers.

By now Karen has taken many drives with her family and friends and has seen the changes progress has wreaked. She's seen the city of Vancouver multiply and bathe itself in freighter loads of offshore money. Blue glass towers through which Canada geese fly in V-formation, traffic jams of Range Rovers, Chinese road signs, and children with cell phones. Karen rather likes the new city and she rather likes the small things in life that are new: blue nail polish, hygiene products, better pasta.

Karen wishes she could shop in the department stores, but a recent excursion to the Park Royal mall caused such pandemonium they decided not to repeat the experience. The theoretical purpose of today's road trip is to buy a copy of Royalty magazine. Karen wants to see pictures of Princess Diana. She can't believe she missed out on the entire fable—the wedding, the kids, the flings, the divorce, and finally her rebirth as a private citizen—and then, the end. Diana's life is one of the few things that makes her jealous that she's been away. "Pam, it's just like in high school when we felt like everybody was out there partying but us."

"But, Karen, I don't remember feeling that way."

A sigh. "God, you good-looking people drive me nuts."

Hamilton is grouchy this morning, Pam is withdrawn, and Karen is preoccupied by what she sees outside and what's inside her head. Three people sitting in the same car but not really together.

"Look," Karen says, "an old Datsun B-210. Like Richard's back in school."

"Don't see many of those around these days," Hamilton says.

Karen asks, "Is Vietnam making cars now, too?"The Jeep comes to a stop sign and Karen's sunglasses slip off. Hamilton replaces them and continues driving. "Hey, Kare," he asks, "how do you feel being here now? After so long. I mean, not just what's new and different, but what does now feel like?"

"Urn—"

"Is that too annoying a question? I mean, you've been out of the coma for a while now. You must be used to it, right? Kick me if I'm yanking your chain too hard."

"No. I mean yes. I mean wait, Ham—let me think."

They pass a clique of high-schoolers. Their fashions seem alien yet attractive to Karen. She would have enjoyed wearing these new styles.

"Pammie asked me, too. I told her, imagine walking a million miles … in heels, and she kind of got it."

"Hey, Karen, don't shit me. That's crap. I could have told you that. There's other stuff. You know there is. How does it feel? I mean, seventeen years. Spill. And if you don't spill I'll spend the next hour telling you about the Berlin Wall coming down and AIDS."

Only Hamilton can speak to her like this. Brat. He's always been able to go way off the edge with Karen. She likes him for this. "Well, okay, Hamilton. As one bullshitter to another. Very well." The Jeep is on the highway now, headed west toward Horseshoe Bay. The day is becoming pale blue and clean and cold. The ocean far down below the highway is a flat anvil blue.

"Okay. You know what, Hamilton? There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now." She lifts her scrawny arm and nibbles her finger and the act is a large effort on her part. "I mean, nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems to be able to endure simply being by themselves, either—but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more, only to go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other. They work, watch TV, and sleep. I see these things. The whole world isonly about work: work work work get get get … racing ahead … getting sacked from work … going online … knowing computer languages … winning contracts. I mean, it's just not what I would have imagined the world might be if you'd asked me seventeen years ago. People are frazzled and angry, desperate about money, and, at best, indifferent to the future."

She grabs her breath. "So you ask me how do / feel? I feel lazy. And slow. And antique. And I'm scared of all these machines. I shouldn't be, but I am. I'm not sure I completely like the new world."

Hamilton's jaws clench and Karen sees this. "I know—you want me to say how great everything is now, but I can't. It's pretty clear to me that life now isn't what it ought to have become."

They drive past the Cypress exit, the Westmount exit, and the Caulfield exit. Pam coughs in the backseat, a cough like two thick steaks flapping against each other, and Hamilton reacts: "Jesus, Pam—honk those things into a Baggie and maybe we can fry them up for dinner."

"Ha."

More mountains and ocean. "I think I know what you mean," Hamilton says. "If you look at the world as a whole, we have to admit life's good here where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a bohemia or a creative underworld to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag—or a life of crime, or even religion. And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what… death') There's nothing. There's no way out now." A pulp mill up the fjord of Howe Sound stains the sky with an ash-white glaze. Hamilton asks, "What about the people you know—Richard, Wendy, Pam, and me? What changes have you noticed in all of us?"

"You mean friends and family?"

"Yeah."

Karen tells him only the palatable half of the Story. "The thing I'm noticing is that nobody's really changed in seventeen years; they're simply amplified versions of themselves. Mom is as … er … regulatory as ever. Dad's nice but weird. Richard is still earnest and a cutie-pie and he tries so hard. You're still a brat. Pam's quietly beautiful. Linus is still on Mars. Wendy may be a doctor and everything, but in her head she's still handing in essays and getting A's. Everybody's become, yeah—more like themselves."

The car hums, and they look at the mountains and the city. "Remember when we went to Future Shop to buy a camera?" Karen asks. The others nod. "Did you see the categories they had there for their products? 'Simulation'; 'Productivity'; 'Games.' I mean, what kind of world is this? And please tell me what's happened to time! Nobody has time anymore. What's the deal? Shit. Now I'm in a bad mood." Lowering the window allows into the Jeep the faint industrial fart smell of a pulp mill. Karen retreats behind her sunglasses. She doesn't tell Hamilton that she had expected people to be grown up at the age of thirty-four. Instead, they seem at best insular and without a central core, which might give purpose to their lives.

Hamilton talks: "And what of your lovely daughter, Megan?"

Karen smiles: "Isn't she the coolest, Ham? So strong. So sure of herself. Imagine being so together at seventeen—wow." She pauses: "Well, in a way I am seventeen. So maybe I can be as cool as her, too. Yes."

"I think you're going to have to be older," Pam says from the backseat, talking through a yawn. "People are expecting you to be wise after all that sleep. To most people you're not seventeen anymore—you're one thousand years old."

It's true. People treat Karen as though she can sense not only color, smells, and sound, but something else—something rich and sublime and far beyond color. She has this subtle feeling people are a touch jealous of this. What frustrates her, too, is that she knows she's seen things, but these things are locked away and unreachable.

Megan now has morning sickness and wonders how much longer she can keep her secret. She avoids nearly all her old friends and lives at

Richard's condo, essentially alone, since Richard spends most of his time with Karen or at work. She likes the solitude; she's too young tounderstand the throbbing weight of loneliness. She has tossed out most of her old Goth clothing and now favors a pared-down, somewhat athletic look. She has also dropped out of school and works part-time with Linus; she'd like to work there full-time someday once her baby is in day care.

For lack of peers, Megan is reduced to having to speak with adults. Megan can't believe that she actually wants to speak with Lois. A good rousing fight would be fun. Karen ("Bio-Mom") is great, if not slightly clued out (Well, she did miss two decades). But there remains an awkwardness between them. A jealousy? Emotionally, they are both the same age; both need attention from Richard, Lois, and the others. Yet on some deeper level they just don't connect. They're too much the same and each poses a form of competition to the other. They're wary.

Blond walnuts; a blush; a smile before she closed the door.

It's a rainy day: Karen and Wendy sit in Wendy's kitchen discussing a small party soon to be held on the day after Christmas—a party celebrating Karen and Richard's engagement. The ceremony is to be small: immediate friends and family only. No dates allowed; no strangers. There isn't too much to plan, so it's fun for Karen and Wendy to arrange things. Wendy's life is so stressful; she enjoys having a girly-girl break. A dress? That's Pam's department. Food? Endive with cream cheese, prosciutto and melon. "What happened to food?" Karen asks. "Food used to come in a box or a can. Now there's dozens of everything and it's all so fresh."

Their coffee cups run low. God bless NutraSweet. There is a pause at the end of their chat, a pause that indicates that a change in conversational gears is now possible.

"Wendy," Karen asks while looking out the window at some of Linus's old monsters standing beside the garage, "have you ever noticed— Wait." Another pause. "Have you ever noticed our lives are maybe …"

"Maybe what'?" Wendy's tone of voice almost says, Please don't. Please don't talk about this."Well, I mean, I know my waking up was like a million-to-one shot. And I can't explain that, but even still—"

"But even still what?"

"Well, we all seem to have more … not coincidences—more like spooky things in our lives than most people do. I mean, don't we?"

Wendy's reply is dry and therapeutic: "When did you start feeling this?"

"The day I woke up. That's a good start: We all ended up at the hospital that day. What are the odds of that? And I'm noticing that we all ended up returning to the same old neighborhood like so much undeliverable mail. I bet we probably couldn't escape Rabbit Lane even if we tried."

Wendy's unsure where to go with this. "So you think this all means something more, do you? Something big?"

"Yeah." Karen pours more coffee, eager to do such a mundane task with her new stronger arms. The liquid shakes. "Then there's these visions I've had."

"Oh?"

"Wendy, listen up. I'm serious. You're a doctor. Listen." Karen tells Wendy of the images she saw, how she believes it was no accident that she went into a coma in 1979. Karen then asks, "Haven't you ever seen anything weird that wasn't real life, but wasn't a dream either?"

Wendy enters a form of trance. "I…" She pauses. "I saw Jared. Years ago. He came and talked to me. Back when I was lonely, back before Linus and I were married. He'd told me I wouldn't be lonely forever. He said he was doing what he could. He was real; he was there. I was in love with him back in high school. You knew that, right? Even now I'm still in love with Jared. In my own way. Of course, I love Linus, too. Oh, these feelings are complex."

"We all knew about you and Jared," Karen says. "The worst kept crush in school. But he was such a dog, Wen—I mean, he'd hump anything in a bra like he was a Great Dane going at the sofa."

"But Jared wasn't just a crush. I was in love with him. I've never doubted that. Ever." Wendy remembers what had really happened—the sleepover with Jared's older sister, Laura, walking into the sauna while looking for soap, opening the door to find Jared naked, eyes closed, his butt roasting on the cedar. She remembers the brief second (a second and a half?) before Jared knew she was there, the smell of salt air in her lungs and Jared's skin melting like cake frosting, his balls like two blond walnuts, his member turgid, and the embarrassment afterward, slamming the door shut. She remembers avoiding Jared's eyes for weeks afterward, blushing if she even saw him far down the school's corridors. And then came October 14, 1978, the day Jared snuck up behind Wendy and whispered, See you after the game. Meet me in the parking lot. I've got a bag of candy to give you. And then came the collapse on the football field followed by the thousand passionate nights that never were to come Wendy's way. And she's never told anybody, because who would believe it? Because she is only Wendy: dutiful, sexless, brainy, and almost a tragedy (in her father's eyes) had Linus not happened along. Romantic beauty is for others. She wonders if she entered medicine only so that she might see naked men's bodies with impunity. This thought frightens her.

"Do you still ever speak with him?"

"No. He's gone. I don't know if it was even really him. It was probably in my head. I work too hard. I don't get enough free time. I still try to talk to him sometimes, but he's never returned. Real or not, I miss him."

"To me, Jared feels like just a year ago," Karen says. "But for you, Jared's gone for almost twenty years. And the feeling has never gone away?"

"Never."

The phone rings, but Wendy doesn't answer. There's a silence between the two. Wendy says, "Off the record? I think, yeah, all your vision stuff means something. But who's to say what? There's no pattern, no direction, no relationship."

"Let's just keep our eyes open, agreed?"

"Agreed."…

20 AFTER AMERICA?

Ten days before Christmas, Lois and George approach Karen, who sits by the living room TV watching a tape of The Thornbirds. Karen intuits that their approach will be taxing in some way.

"We'd like you to do that TV interview, dear."

I knew it. "Which one?"

"I don't like that tone of voice, Karen. We're only thinking about the best interests of you and Megan."

"Explain that to me, please." She remotes off the TV.

"They're offering a good deal of money, dear," George says. "You could certainly use it. Megan, too."

"You could put her through college on it," Lois adds.

"Oh, puh-leeeze. I think we should all know by now that Megan is not and is unlikely to ever be college material."

Thus begins an hour-long tussle, after which Karen finally agrees to do a network TV interview for an astronomical sum of money, to be taped in three days—on the condition that the money be put into trust for Megan until the age of twenty-one. "And you're not allowed to tell her how much, because I can just imagine her killing time until she gets a big bundle to blow."

Almost instantly, lawyers are phoned, moneys are negotiated, and people from both American coasts descend on Karen's doorstep for a Thursday shoot. As Karen's friends are intimate with almost every aspect of TV production, they mastermind lighting schemes and color effects and are bossy with their imported colleagues as they protect Karen. Pam instructs Karen on posture (where possible), deportment, breathing, pacing, makeup, and styling. Their competence is a wonder to Karen; for the first time, she understands that her friends have actual skills. Richard and Hamilton "danger-proof" the Christmas tree while Linus stands lost in his own world, mentally rearranging the furniture to best visual advantage.

My friends know how to put a good face on a bad situation, Karen thinks.

"I wouldn't be nervous, Kare," Pam says while applying a Christian Dior 425 foundation. "TV isn't about information. It's about emotion. People will be hearing your words, sure, but first they'll be checking out your skin and hairdo."

"Then I'm up shit creek."

"Piffle. You've got good skin and bones and people will probably feel cheated if you don't look a bit weird. Which lipstick do you want?"

"Do I really have to do this, Pam?"

"What, makeup? God yes. Even the healthiest people on TV look like corpses without it. The less they look at your skin, the better they'll hear what you're saying."

This makes sense to Karen. She calms down, lets Pam do her work, and watches out the front window as a newscaster who looks surprisingly like Lois has her hair brushed and dictates notes to minions. Lois, standing on the lawn, raptly watches.Karen recalls her conversation with Richard, who was unsure why she, a photo hater at the best of times, would participate in such an intrusive procedure. Well, it's not going to atone for two decades away from Megan, but it's something practical I can do to help her. It makes me feel motherly. And Megan wants to be interviewed, too.

A few minutes later, Lois, obviously thrilled, says, "Karen, this is Gloria."

Gloria walks in, wearing a red suit and flashing teeth like baby corn, teeth so perfect she looks as though she has three rows, not two. A white, paper makeup bib sticks out from her collar. "I'm so happy to meet you, Karen. Are you relaxed?" The woman's hand almost crushes Karen's fingers. Before Karen can reply, Gloria is saying, "That's terrific. It's probably best we don't talk too much right now. It makes for a better show if I meet you the same time the world meets you. Paula said she had a lovely pre-interview with you." A smile. Gloria's eyes: blink blink blink. An assistant asks if Paula called. Yes, Paula called. Gloria is out of the room, but her voice is audible. "Aren't these owls just the dearest things!" Karen can hear Lois blush with pleasure.

Technicians—who couldn't look more bored even were they to try—hook up cables, manipulate light meters, set up reflectors, and link a satellite feed from one of three vans. Karen feels like she's in a movie in which scientists discover alien life-forms inside a suburban house. Her hearing vanishes; suddenly, she is deaf. She turns her head and sees Richard and Linus at the dining room table chatting with Megan. Wendy is on the back patio playing with a neighbor's cat. George is out of sight in the front hallway.

And suddenly she is lost in a blast of white light. Her eyelids shut, her arms jitter, and her face bleeds water. "Christ!" says Pam. She, Richard, and Linus come over; Karen's face is running like a river. "Karen." Richard taps her shoulder gently. "Karen!"

She now remembers where it was she went. She was up in the stars and then she descended to Earth, shimmering and blue, into the swirls of clouds over the Atlantic, flying and swooping, joining the birds and feeling like a bright color. And then she was pulled upwardagain—a hand, a clasp behind her shoulders where her wings ought to have been. She was pulled up in the stars. Once there, she turned around and saw the Moon, and then the hand dropped her there— inside a crater. She was dressed for warmth, but this is outer space and why should it matter?

"I remember," Karen says. "Yes, I remember." In her head, she walks into a crater and kicks some dust, which falls downward at one-sixth Earth gravity. "And it's going to happen. It's going to happen here."

She blinks and can hear again.

"Karen, you're scaring the crap out of me," Pam says. "What happened? Are you okay?"

Her eyes open. "It's going to happen here."

"What is? What's going to happen, honey?"

Karen snaps out of it. "Oh. Pam—what did I … ?—I spaced out there."

"From a cosmetician's viewpoint, you did more than space out, Kare."

Pam reworks Karen's face, gooey with sweat and foundation. "Is it fixable?"

"Of course. Relax. Richard—can you get Karen a glass of water?" Richard scuttles to the kitchen and returns with a glass. When he hands it over, Karen says thanks, but refuses to look him in the eye. A few moments later, she looks to her right and sees both Richard and Wendy looking concerned. A technician shouts out, asking if everybody's ready to tape; and so the taping begins.

We now bring you a girl, or rather, a young woman, who's been very much on the world's mind these past few months. On a cold December evening back in 1979, Karen Ann McNeil, a pretty and popular Vancouver, Canada, teenager, was at a party. There, she drank two weak vodka cocktails and took two Valiums—pills she used to calm her metabolism after a two-month crash diet. The price she paid for this youthful folly? Karen spent the next seventeen years in a coma, during which time she gave no evidence of higher brain functions or otherpromising signs. Then, miraculously, after a bronchial infection earlier this fall, Karen awoke on the morning of November first. Her brain functions were fully normal, as was her memory. She could even remember her homework assignments from the week before the coma.

And what sort of world did Karen wake up to? A dramatically different world—one without the Berlin Wall and one with AIDS, computers, and radicchio. She also woke up into a world where she now has a daughter, Megan, born nine months after Karen entered her coma.

I met with Karen recently at her home on a mountain suburb of Vancouver. I found her sparkling with words and, I have to admit, I was a bit shocked at her appearance. Karen left her coma weighing eighty-two pounds. By interview time, she was up to ninety-three, but seventeen years have left her body ravaged by diminished muscle capacity. Fortunately, her mind and face are as animated as they were that fateful December night seventeen years ago… .

"What about your body—how do you feel now that it's"— pause—"so different than the way it was in 1979?" Gloria has been drilling for tears and is annoyed at the lack of a geyser. She mistakes Karen's disbelieving pauses at Gloria's rude intrusions for emotion. "Do you miss your body?"

"I'm fine with my body, Gloria. It returns more to normal every day. There are people out there in far worse straits than me. I can stick it."

The interview isn't going well at all. Karen reali/es that Gloria wants to present a plucky, back-from-the-brink-of-death woman, eager to sing the praises of the new and changed world. Instead, Karen seems not all that happy and not too thrilled with modern life. And she won't cry.

"What's the biggest change in the world you've noticed so far, Karen? What strikes you as the deepest change?"

Behind Karen stands the Christmas tree, cheerful and twinkling.

She is alone in the room with just the TV people, Pam as makeup, and Richard as emotional support. The others she asked to leave, so asnot to pressure her with her answers. Karen speaks: "You know what it is, Gloria? It's how confident everybody comes across these days. Everybody looks like they're raring to go all the time. People look confident even when they're buying chewing gum or walking the dog."

"You like that then?"

"There's more. You take these same confident-looking people and ask them a few key questions and suddenly you realize that they're despairing about the world—that the confidence is a mask."

"What kind of questions?"

"What do you think life will be like in ten years? Are you straining to find some kind of meaning? Does growing old frighten you?"

"Hmmm. We're a culture searching for meaning. Yes." Gloria doesn't like this avenue. Her face morphs into a new position. Suddenly, Gloria's smiling. "You have a daughter now, Karen: Megan." Conspiratorial leer. "We need to know—how does it feel to wake up and discover you have a seventeen-year-old?"

"Feel? It's a pleasure. And a surprise. Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly there's a teenager there saying, 'Hi, Mom.' In a way, I feel like a sister. I ask myself, If I were back in high school, is Megan somebody I'd be friends with."

"And?"

"I don't think I would. She'd be too confident to follow the crowd. She'd be offbeat, and I'd wish I could just talk to her and see what's in her head."

"And Megan's father—do you still see him?"

"Absolutely. We're engaged." Karen smiles at Richard over Gloria's shoulder. Gloria gives an appropriate smile reaction, then says, "Cut!"

Gloria unclips her mike and bolts toward a door where the minions cower. "Why the hell didn't we know about this? Who researched this—Anthea? Get her on the phone now. No—she's in 213, not 310. We're going to have to retake the intro. Is the weather going to hold?"

There's panic for the next ten minutes, and then Gloria returns."Speed and—" Clack! "Rolling—" Gloria turns into "Gloria" instantly, like a plugged-in appliance. "Karen, so you're engaged now?"

"Indeed I am."

"Will we be able to meet… him?"

"I think not. He's far more private than I am."

"What's his name?"

"Richard."

"So Richard waited all these years for you? All these decades, your one love waited?"

Karen pauses. Her eyes begin to mist up—damnit! She fell into Gloria's trap of tears. "Yes"—sniffle—"he did." Now her eyes flood. Gloria heaves a relieved breath and knows this will be a dynamite kicker.

"Gloria," calls a technician, "we lost the sound on that one. We have to redo the take."

Gloria mutters a curse and the process begins again in a startlingly machinelike process: "Karen, so you're engaged now?" Gloria bats the eyes: blink blink blink.

"Yes."

"Will we be able to meet… him?"

"No."

"What's his name?"

"That's private."

"Very well. So your boyfriend waited all these years for you? All these decades your one love waited?"

Karen pauses. "Yeah. He did." No tears. Gloria is furious.

How many of us have a love so true it spans eternity? A purity of need so clear it can remain strong in the face of all that the world throws at us? This is Karen Ann McNeil, the woman who fell to Earth, the woman for whom the people in her life never gave up waiting.

"What about your friends, Karen? How do you feel to see them all aged seventeen years overnight? Do you still hang out with them?""They're my life, really. Them and my family. If they weren't here, I don't think I could handle the world." Karen is disgusted with the platitudes she's dishing out. She sounds to herself like a Miss America contestant allowed out of the soundproof booth and given thirty seconds to answer questions that will, to a large degree, define future directions of her life.

Gloria looks peeved. We need more drama. A woman named Randy comes over; she and Gloria have a hushed discussion over notes on Gloria's crisp red lap. Pam powders Karen's face. "How's it going, Kare?"

"I think I'm a dud. And they're furious about losing the crying scene."

Karen thinks over what Pam blurted out in the car the other day— about how people expect her to be a thousand years old now, not just thirty-four. She knows this is what Gloria wants to get at.

"Karen—" Gloria returns. "Let's just do a few more questions. This must be tiring for you."

"It's my pleasure. When are you interviewing Megan?"

"After you," says Gloria. "And then we'll do the two of you together. Everything is out of sequence, but we patch it all together in post-production." Gloria's face looks harsh, unwilling to spare any niceness energy until production noises are made. The board claps and once again she becomes "Gloria."

"Karen." Gloria puts on her serious look, cradles her chin atop her hands, and looks deeply at Karen. "The world is curious—and I know this is a simple question, but I need to ask it—how does it feel to be a modern Rip Van Winkle? Almost twenty years asleep. My my. What's it like inside your head? What's it like to be you right now?"

"You know what I feel? I feel useless in this modern world. I'm unable to do anything but lie around. I feel like I'm the only person on Earth who relaxes anymore. And then I think about all the bad stuff that's about to happen and I feel sorry for the world because it's nearly over."

Cut!

Assistants run over. "Karen, what on Earth was that?"Karen blinks and looks out the window at the sky, competing for attention with the camera lights. "I'm not sure. It just came out." Richard slips around a corner and motions for Wendy to come over. He tells her what happened.

"Karen," Gloria says, "let's try that one again. Maybe we can ask about the, er, bad stuff with another question. Agreed?"

"Sure. It's your show."

Rolling…

"Karen." Gloria again looks deeply at Karen and repeats word-perfectly, "The world is curious—and I know this is a simple question but I need to ask it—how does it feel to be a modern Rip Van Winkle? Twenty years asleep. My my. What's it like inside your head? What's it like to be you right now?"

"I feel useless as tits on a board. I sit around all day doing dick-all while everybody else runs around like crazed cartoon characters."

A semi-defeated silence follows. Gloria asks, "Anything else?"

"Seeing as your asking, yes. The world's going to be over soon."

Cut!

"Karen, I— Excuse me a second." Gloria darts outside. An assistant, Jason, comes in to play good cop. He's a slow walker; his eyes have seen something. He doesn't discount the odd and he sees a possible miracle where others see dreck. "Karen," he says, motioning the film crew to keep rolling, "when you say the world's over, what, exactly, do you mean!"

"What I said. I …" There is a pause and a voice speaks, the voice of Karen who was away all these years. "Three days after Christmas. That's when the world goes dark. There's nothing that can be done and there's no escaping. I saw it happen in 1979. By accident, some doors had been left open and I got a peek. I wasn't snooping. I just saw it at the right time. I thought I could sleep my way out of it—I wasn't sure of the date it was going to happen. I wanted to be asleep forever. It's not the same as death, but it's the only way we have to escape time. That's what makes us different from every other creature in the world—we have time. And we have choices."

Jason is quiet. The camera still rolls. Richard, Pam, and Wendywatch. In the lull, they can hear Gloria's voice saying, "What am I supposed to do when she keeps shutting down and spouting claptrap. Does she not have the word 'retake' in her vocabulary?"

"Gloria, she's been in a coma for twenty years almost. People expect her to be odd."

"I can't believe we lost the tear shot."

Jason says, "Are there any details you can give, Karen. Places? names? Is it a bomb or is it—"

"It's sleep. Nearly everybody falls asleep and then they go. It's painless. Where do you live?"

"New York."

"You'll go. Gloria goes. Everybody there goes."

"And this doesn't make you sad?"

"It hasn't happened yet. I won't know until it's over."

"What about you and your family and friends. Don't you worry for them?"

"There's nothing I can do to help them one way or another. All of this was decided a long, long time ago. And I don't know specifically who lives and who doesn't. So I can't tell you people, really, I can't."

"And you?"

"Me? I get to live. I know that for sure." Karen seems to have no more to say on this subject.

Jason's face is thoughtful. "Thanks for telling me this."

"I might as well." And then Karen wakes up while still asleep. She startles: "Wha—?—I spaced out again there. I dreamed I was telling you the world was going to shut down."

"A dream?"

"No. Not really. I suppose not."

21 YOUR DREAMS OF WAR

Karen feels release and confusion. She knows that her words have annoyed the Americans and baffled—perhaps even slightly frightened—her friends.

She knows that she is in the center of some sort of mass transformation—one larger than just her mere reawakening. But how big will this change be? Miracles always have limits. When one is granted wishes, one is granted only three wishes—not four or five or ten. What will be the limits here?

Karen feels trapped inside the biggest déjà vu in the world. Her behavior seems preordained, like a queen who spends her day cutting ribbons, judging flower shows, and overseeing state dinners—all of these activities preordained. And she has decided, somewhere between her co-interview with Megan and the camera crews' taping the two of them hobbling down Rabbit Lane, that she'll try and play it dumb about her on-camera statements of impending doom. Already she is detecting that Richard and Wendy think her comments might be evidence of incipient madness. Oh God.

She misses running and she misses her hair and she misses being normal, being absorbed by the crowd. She has decided that the best way for her to go through life is for her to view even her smallest actions and gestures as coincidental, charged, and miraculous. It was the way she remembered life felt at the age of sixteen and it is a way she is determined to re-create.

Beef south/chicken north.

The night of the TV shoot, Karen goes to bed almost immediately, thus precluding any discussion of what she had told Gloria and then Jason. She is still asleep when Richard leaves for work the next day. During the day, when he calls home, there is no answer—Christmas shopping. He phones Wendy at her office and the two of them convene at Park Royal for coffee, where dispirited Christmas mall music serenades their baffled conversation. Wendy stirs the sugar in her coffee thirty times and says, "I think that Karen's memory and thought processes maybe aren't as clear as we'd hoped for, Richard. Are you scared—about going south?"

Richard, obligated to visit Los Angeles, says yes. He leaves on the twenty-seventh and returns on the twenty-eighth.

"Can't you go some other time?"

"No. We're behind schedule as it is. Besides, it's so preposterous. If I stay home, I'll only reinforce whatever fantasy or phobia it is Karen's going through." He bites a muffin. "It is fantasy, right?"

"Who's to say? It's like those cartoons of guys with long beards holding a sign on a street corner saying THE END IS NEAR; there's always a little part of you that wonders, what if? Yeah, it's spooky. Have you spoken about this with her yet?"

"No. It's been crazy. I will tonight. Holidays throw everything intoa mess. But one question, Wendy, if you were me, would you go?"

"I'd probably go, too."

Later that evening, Richard and Karen have their first real fight, which colors the entire next week. "The twenty-eighth is not going to be a good day, Richard."

"Karen you can't just say, 'Oh, something awful's going to happen.' You have to tell me why. You have to tell me what you know. And why."

Karen sighed. "What about trust?"

"Karen, whether or not I believe you on this particular issue has nothing to do with whether or not I love or trust you. Karen—look at it from my point of view."

"How do you explain what Wendy told us about Pam and Hamilton in the hospital—their stereo freak-outs?"

"I can't."

"Doesn't that note I gave you back before my coma mean anything?"

"Of course it does."

"The fact that I'm on TV on the twenty-seventh doesn't sway you? You can't stay here for moral support?"

"It's bad luck. I'll watch it down there. I'll watch it on speaker-phone with you."

"So you're still going to go?"

"I will—unless you can get a helluva lot more specific about what's going to happen and when. The sleep thing doesn't cut it."

"Richard, I want to be able to tell you. I'm not being a cow and keeping something away from you on purpose. There are these background voices I hear. The only time they became clear was on film with Gloria."

Richard looks at her as calmly as he can, worrying that something is going wrong with Karen after her miraculous wake-up. "It's only for one day, Karen. One piddly little overnight; I promised the office

I'd do it months ago. They're not going to be able to find someone to go instead of me during Christmas week."

"What are you doing there that's so important?"Richard then feels he is arguing with a teenager. "I have to go over sets and budgets with the crew down there. It has to be done and it has to be done in person."

"Whatever."

"Please don't whatever me."

"Whatever."

In spite of tensions, a truce is called and Christmas and the engagement party continue as planned. It is a day of small gifts and gentle surprises. Megan hand-made a roomful of decorations using construction paper and silver hearts. The windows are slightly steamed and the air is tinged with eggnog. Pam and Wendy boo-hoo shamelessly over the toasts, and even crusty old Hamilton has a lumpy throat while Linus seems concerned about the structural integrity of the meringue cake.

One truly odd moment occurs halfway through the event. Guests hear a galvanizing crack crack! on the living room window, where an ostrich pecks the glass with a cruel, hilarious beak. It is as though everybody fell into a deep warm dream. Then another ostrich appears and begins clacking its beak onto the living room window while the room devolves into guffaws and chaos. Karen loves it: "Oh, Richard, this is just the bee's knees. Did you plan this just for me? It's so sweet."

Mr. Lennox from the house around the corner scoots into view with a coil of rope. A small mustachioed man, he apologizes profusely. "They escaped from the garage. I was supposed to take them out to Abbotsford, but everything's closed for the holidays."

Megan asks, "What does anybody need with a pair of dorky-looking ostriches?"

"Why Megan—they're the meat of tomorrow. Lean as tofu and tasty like beef. They're my retirement fund. Please, can you hold on to that rope for me?"

A well-cheered ostrich rodeo ensues. Poor Mr. Lennox is petrified that his investment might be damaged. "Oh, Christ—just don't Jet them get into the forest. Then we're doomed. They'll break their legs or get eaten by coyotes. They're that stupid."By late afternoon, the sky has gone black and cold and the core group of friends sit by the fire eating huckleberry muffins.

Later, the doorbell rings. Linus answers. It is Skitter, but Linus doesn't know him by face.

"Megan here?"

"Megan, your friend's here." Megan and Jenny soundlessly gloss over to the front door, into their coats, and out of the house. Richard, looking at CD's by the Christmas tree, hears nothing. Minutes later, Linus asks, "Who's biker dude?"

"Huh?"

"The guy Megan just left with. The guy with the scar."

"Guy with a scar?" Richard clues in. "Shit."

Flying home from Los Angeles, the captain allows Richard to peek out the front cockpit window a few minutes after takeoff. Richard sees the view of God: a dappled sky like a baby's giggles, volcanoes stretching up the coast, the Earth's gentle curve at the horizon. Back in his seat, while idly flipping through a two-week-old Newsweek and rereading an article about Karen, Richard mentally reviews the past week only to find himself chilled. A drop of cool sweat crawls like a slug through his hairline and into his eye.

Richard's plane ride continues—a cold ride: the airlines are saving money by not heating the cabins as they once did. Dinner service comes and goes. The sun, low on the horizon, is wan and colorless: a December sunset; even sunlight feels dark.

Richard thinks about last night in his hotel room, watching Karen's TV appearance on a speakerphone with the family. It was a tight little production and Gloria had managed to orchestrate a predictable level of syrupy rudeness.

Afterward, he and Karen spent nearly an hour on the phone apologizing to each other, whispering endearments, and feeling close in that special way that only phones provide. I think this darkness stuff is all in my head, Richard, I'm not going crazy and I'm sure these ices and stuff will soon be gone.

Afterward, Richard fell into a dreamless sleep.Then this morning he drove to Culver City, but after ten minutes of work, he started to panic. He went to the washroom, rinsed off his face, breathed furiously, and then instinctively hightailed the rental car to LAX, catching the next flight up the coast, paying for full-fare Business Class, desperate to be aloft, the wheels no longer on the ground.

On the tarmac while awaiting takeoff, he looked out the window of his ZF seat just in time to see a blue-overalled airline luggage handler praying at the feet of another obvious dead luggage handler. The man from a fuel truck was screaming into a cell phone while an airline employee threw his blazer over the employee's head. An ambulance came, the body was sheeted, the stewardess closed the door latch, and the plane took off.

Now, five miles above Oregon, Richard continues trying to make sense of his rashness and his tangled feelings. He tries using the GTE Airphone, but service is out. "Good afternoon, this is your captain speaking. We're experiencing a delay on the ground at Vancouver. Traffic controllers there have requested we stay aloft for half an hour or so while the situation down there is rectified. I hope you'll understand our situation and continue enjoying today's flight. As a goodwill gesture, flight attendants will be serving complimentary beer and wines."

There are groans and cheers while the jet flies over Seattle and then follows I-5 up to the Canadian border. The traffic below looks jammed like he's never seen it before. Holiday sales.

Once near Vancouver, the plane circles the city then flies over the Coast Mountains and makes lazy-eights over the pristine frozen alps and lakes behind, a flying tour of Year Zero. Another delay is announced, and then finally, after two hours of dawdling, the plane lands on the runway, but just before doing so, the runway lights that guide the way go black.

22 NATION OR ANT COLONY?

At Vancouver's airport, Richard's flight is the only moving plane on the tarmac. The captain announces another delay, and the passengers spend one more hour on the tarmac—a problem with ground staff, but not to panic, even though, as passengers can plainly see, half the building is without light and there's not a single ground person in view.

The passengers become increasingly crazed with the discovery of a seat-buckled dead salesman in 670 and then a dead teenager in 18E Fear amplifies. Passengers can plainly see that there's no action at the airport—no trucks or luggage carts or other activity. Another whole Section of the terminal's lights blink then fail, and finally the flight attendants pop open the door and the passengers slide down an inflatable yellow escape chute. To enter the airport, they pass through a utility door with quiet, orderly docility. Upon finding a dead stewardess propped against an access door, this soon devolves into anarchy. Outside it's raining and inside the building it's cold. There are almost no people present—at the immigration lineup there are no staff, save for one woman in the corner wearing a white paper breathing mask waving them onward. Bodies are strewn about the airport. Passengers scuttle toward the mild hum of the luggage carousel, which chugs and dies, never again to cough forth the passengers' luggage.

Something has gone dreadfully wrong. Richard is dazed. Karen's future has come true. An adrenaline fang bites the rear of his neck.

There are no staff at customs. The phones are blank and no taxis wait outside—only one or two cars speeding like mad through the main traffic corridor. Richard hears a voice calling his name—it's Mr. Dunphy, no, Captain Dunphy, a neighbor from West Van,

"Richard? Is that you, Richard Doorland?"

"Oh. Hey, Captain Dunphy. Hi. What the hell's going on here?"

"Christ. You wouldn't believe it. You on the Los Angeles flight?"

"Yes, but—"

"There was a real debate about whether they should let you land or let your fuel run out flying over the mountains." Richard is dumbstruck. "The tower operators thought that planes would bring in more infected people, but it turned out everybody was dropping off. The moment you touched the runway they turned off the lights and went home. C'mon, let's scram."

They bustle through a labyrinth of metal corridors, ramps, and NO ACCESS hallways for which Captain Dunphy has a magnetic card. At the end of their jaunt, they stand on the runway's apron, where the rain has temporarily stopped and clouds blot the sky like sullied dinner plates. From a piece of yellow luggage that has fallen from the hold of a 73 7 and then split open, Richard takes a large winter coat. Captain Dunphy grabs an electric luggage wagon.

"Where are we going?" Richard asks.

"To the jetty at the runway's end. My brother Jerry's coming over from West Van in his sixteen-footer to pick me up. Called him on mycell phone—I just got in from Taipei. Fucking nightmare. We had three deaths onboard and the passengers were going ape-shit between Honolulu and Vancouver. Screaming, wailing—Christ. We had to bolt shut the cockpit door."

The two scan the horizon for a boat or a light. "I wouldn't have believed it possible in all my years flying. I'm just glad I was able to get home. Once we docked, all the passengers simply ran. They didn't even wait for their luggage. I don't even know where these people could have gone. Waiting relatives? No taxis then, too."

"The plague—what is it?" Richard asks, his mind spooling out plotlines from 1970s sci-fi movies. "Who's dying? Old people? Babies? Any one group?"

"No pattern. Everybody. It brought down planes everywhere. All the big cities are fucked up. Vancouver, too. Noon today people started dropping like flies. It's pointless trying to drive anywhere downtown. It's a parking lot clogged with desperate, freaked-out people. People who catch this thing—whatever it is—have this powerful urge to sleep, so they lie down wherever they are—in their cars, on the mall floors, in the offices. A minute later, they're dead."

The runway drive is far longer than Richard might have thought. North, toward the city, Richard can see the plumes of smoke of several fires and patches of the city with failed electrical grids. They park near the muddy water at the runway's end. They hop off the luggage cart and stand in the rain as Captain Dunphy blinks a flashlight. They can see a boat coming toward them in the distance, and soon they hear a boat's engine in the December wind. Captain Dunphy blinks the flashlight to signal his brother; the boat berths sideways against the shore onto which sloppy water laps feebly. Captain Dunphy sees Jerry's suspicious face and says, "He's with me, Jerry. This is Richard, my neighbor."

"Hop in. It's going to be dark soon. Christ, the city's a mess. Everywhere's a mess. This plague—it's speeding up."

They hop into the boat, which jolts away from the shore like a knife tugged from a magnet. As the boat slaps against the small whitecaps, its passengers goggle the fevered city. Richard tries tophone home to Karen on Jerry's cell, but something's not working.

As they near West Vancouver, binoculars reveal that Lions Gate Bridge is full of cars. On the mountain, fires are burning—their gray plumes more reminiscent of autumn leaf burn-offs than of burning houses.

The boat travels up the shore and docks at a private dock a mile west of the Park Royal Mall, currently in flames. Onshore, Mrs. Dunphy is in a Volvo. They weave throughout West Vancouver's curves and hairpins. They see cars parked on the roadsides with dead drivers behind the wheels. A minivan stops at a stop sign and they briefly see four children looking out the rear window, chalky silent faces frightened out of their wits. At the corner of Cross Creek and Highland, two men try to stop them, but Mrs. Dunphy stomps the gas pedal as they race down the hill toward home. A shot is fired, which cracks the rear window.

On Rabbit Lane, the electricity still works, but Lois's and George's cars are gone. Karen is on the floor by the blank, snowstorming TV. Her knees are up to her chin, but her eyes are far, far away. She's shivering madly. Her forearms resemble a freshly plucked chicken.

"Karen? Karen—honey?" Richard says, but there is no response. He picks her up in his arms and is about to stand up when Karen speaks.

"It's happening," she says. "It's here. What I saw back then …"

"I know, honey."

"I tried to run away from it so long ago."

"Karen—I know, but you've gotta tell me. Something big's going on—all over the world. And you know what it is. Tell me, please." Karen squeezes her eyes shut and says nothing. Richard is exasperated: "Jesus H. Christ, Karen, can you tell me what's going on! Speak tome!"

She says, "The world's falling asleep. But not me. I don't know about you."

"Who told you?"

"The voices—they came in clearly this afternoon. I could finally hear them. Him. Jared. It. I don't know."Richard carries her onto the couch, smothers her body in blankets, and ignites the gas fireplace, which throws off considerable heat. He then cradles Karen in his lap and she calms down. Richard collects his thoughts. "Now tell me, Karen, what are we in for? Why us? Why here? Why you and me and … ?"

"Richard, I have a brain the size of a seventeen-year-old's. It's not always easy."

"Does anybody else live?"

"I don't know. I only know about us here close to home."

"What are we supposed to be doing?"

"I told you I don't know. Now stop this."

Richard thumps the sofa. "Jared! Jared! Can you hear me?"

"Don't scare me by thumping like that. Anyway, he, or whatever it is, can't hear you, Richard. He's busy."

"How obvious. I should have known."

"This is not a very good time or place for sarcasm, Richard."

"It's called irony these days."

"Whatever."

23 STEEL MINK BEEF MUSIC

She breathes deeply; the plastic-wrapped beef cool on her cheeks.

The lucky people, thinks Lois, will fall asleep inside their sleep: blissful sleepiness followed with a visit to dreamland forever— heaven—the cold clear hills that graced the world of her youth.

Lois was at Super-Valu in Park Royal, striding purposefully amid the store's glorious aisles of glorious food all gloriously lit, when the sleeping began. She was savoring the waves of admiration sent her way by staff and shoppers who recognized her from the previous evening's broadcast.

"You are so strong," said one young woman.

"A saint," said another. Lois's cheeks burned with pleasure.

Lois was the first shopper to notice a sleeper, a young woman in blue sweat clothing asleep beneath the cauliflower and broccoli bins. Lois bent down to gently tap her on the shoulder; a shank of hair fell from the woman's face revealing her peaceful death mask.

Paramedics were called, and no sooner had the young woman been moved into the back office when a shout came from down the mall outside the Super-Valu—news of another death. A nervous buzz began among the shoppers. "Just the oddest thing, isn't it?" said the woman in line in front of Lois. "Plastic bags, please—I mean, you just don't see something like that too often and then—"

Lois's eyes flared wide open; behind their till the cashier was yawning, falling down onto her knees and taking a nap before them. "Hello?"

The cashier from the next till came over. "Susan? Susan?" The cashier looked up at Lois. "No," Lois said, "it can't be."

The woman grabbed the intercom and beckoned management down to the tills pronto. Another shopper fell asleep on the frozen foods aisle's cold white floor. With news of this, delicate pandemonium broke out. Customers abandoned their carts and dashed for the exits. A voice came over the speakers announcing that due to technical problems, the store would have to close for the day.

Lois watched the shoppers panic. The man behind her squeezed his full cart through the space behind the clerk and left the store without paying. Lois, like some shoppers, moved out of the checkout area and stood silently in one of the main aisles to watch the scene unfold. Two more shoppers keeled over; the mall's tiny first-aid post lost its ability to cope with trauma. From some unknown corner, a siren, dormant since the days of the USSR, woke up frightened and cranky.

At the end of the aisle Lois saw her neighbor, Elaine Buchanan, piling steaks and chickens into a cart. She walked down to say, "Elaine—"

"Lois. If you're smart, you'll do this, too. Whatever's going on is way bigger than any of us." Elaine lurched slightly, putting a Family-

Pak of hamburger into the storage area on the cart's bottom. "That does it—I'm bailing out of here. Better for you, too.""But Elaine—how do we know this isn't just a local thing?"

"Lois, listen to the sirens."

Lois had the strange sensation of being back in the 1960s, back when grocery stores had contests where a winner could keep all the food that could be crammed into a cart within sixty seconds. She had always wanted to win that particular prize.

Many shoppers had taken Elaine's strategy to heart; Lois stood and watched her world go random, shoppers pilfering the shelves as fast as tinned pyramids could topple. There was a scream, a shout, the sound of tipped carts and breaking jars. And then the main lights failed and emergency lighting kicked in. Lois saw panicked silhouettes, like visions of souls in the underworld, percolate over by the front entrance where lazy daylight chinked into the structure. Another body hit the ground.

The lights returned and the store was almost empty of patrons; a few lay conspicuously asleep on the floor. Rather peaceful looking, Lois thought. She bent down to look into their faces and said good night to them. She walked out toward the front of the store and nobody stopped her or prodded her onward. Shrill alarms continued flaring from unknown corners. Turning around, Lois saw that the store was all but abandoned. The lights failed once more and Lois calmly walked around the supermarket bathed in pale orange emergency lights. Nearby, Elaine lay asleep on the floor, a cartload of beef her tombstone.

The Super-Valu was her empire. Today is the twenty-eighth—the day her daughter had foolishly predicted some kind of end. Karen. Who is this child of mine? What did I ever do to deserve her? What did I ever do that led us to this, this collapse of the world? Lois rifled through her memories of Karen's youth, but found no particular incident that might lead her to believe Karen was special—marked for a strange destiny.

Lois thought of Karen and the children who grew up so wild inside the forest. She remembered what the realtor had said when they bought the Rabbit Lane house in 1966. George had asked him if there were any community centers for the kids to go to. The Realtorlaughed and pointed to the forest. "That's all you need." Lois has no doubt that the children did filthy, vile things in there. Drugging. Fucking. Drinking.

She yawns and looks down at the frozen meat section. So cool and comforting. Her upper skull is tingly, and she remembers photographs of Elizabeth Taylor with a bald, scarred head after brain surgery. I think I've had just about as much of this world as I'm able to take. I'm pooped. I'm sleepy. I just want to go home. She lifts her legs and climbs up onto the meat. She breathes deeply; the plastic-wrapped beef cool on her cheeks. She closes her eyes and goes home.

Linus and Pam are filming on location a few miles up the mountain in a vast, stuccoed bunker resembling a cross between a medical/dental center and the compound of a South American drug lord. It is a neighborhood of houses built in the early nineties designed solely to maximize floor space and ignore the outer world save for a postcard city view out the front windows. The view dictated that the neighborhood be free of trees. Even at the best of times, a drive through its unpeopled streets lined with blank white boxes was spooky; on a glum day charged with blood, it is outright haunting.

The job of the day is a cop-and-buddy film involving guns and betrayal with just about all the actors turning into what Linus calls "lawn sprinklers" at the end. The shoot is going slowly, and the star, hung over from a holiday binge, is forgetting his lines, walking into walls, ad-libbing dumb sight gags, and causing continuity issues that take an hour apiece to clean up while Linus and Pam refit the star with blood charges, makeup, hair, and fresh shirts and pants. As the day wears on and the number of takes multiplies, the minds of workers on the set begin to wander and look out at the view of the city.

Cut.

Pam walks around the living room, touching up the shooting victims who will spend most of their day lying in strange contortions on the furniture and floor, pretending to be dead. She smiles and is a good sport, but in the back of her mind she's thinking of Karen's broadcast last night. She came across as so … sugary gooey. NotKaren at all. Megan came across as an average-seeming teenager. Oh, if the audience knew the truth! And Lois came across as Belinda Q. Housewife. Well, that's TV—that's what TV does.

After lunch, the crew and actors are all in better moods. While setting the mock-dead actors back into place, Linus says, "Pam—look out at the city, the fire." Pam looks out, and rising from somewhere in the city is a smoke plume, pointy at the bottom and rising into a slippery triangle like a mar/ipan tornado.

"Office building fire?"

"I dunno."

The scene continues. The star, mistakenly thinking his enemies have been killed by the CIA, opens his front door calmly for perhaps the first time in his life, only to be assailed with machine-gun fire from which he escapes (of course). After this, he turns around to see black-sweatered armed thugs whom he promptly shoots dead in a series of quick takes. Only the star survives.

"You know, Linus, I wish movies could be filmed in sequence."

"Body number three needs spritzing."

Pam heads to body number three to freshen up the blood. "Wakey wakey, drug lord," Pam says, but the actor plays dead. Pam says, "Smart-ass," and returns to the edge of the scene and through a side window notes that there are now several plumes over the city. She nudges Linus: "Look."

The scenes requiring the bodies are finished. Pam helps them up and out of their mucky togs. "Hey smart-ass—the scene's over." Smart-ass doesn't move. "Oh God, you actors—do you ever get enough attention? C'mon, Gareth, you have to prep for the next scene."

Gareth still doesn't move. Hands on hips, Pam looks out the window of the city now covered with a score of plumes—columns, holding up the sky. She shivers and gets on her knees. In her bones, she feels the truth: "Gareth? Gareth? Oh, shit. Dorrie? Get Dorrie!" Dorrie, the production assistant, comes over. "He's dead."

"What's that?" The director, Don, comes over.

"Call an ambulance.""Dead? Nobody dies during a shoot."

"Don, how can you be a prick at a time like this?"

There's a ruckus out by the catering truck; one of the servers, a plump fortyish woman, has been found dead at the feet of the lunch buffet table. Someone rushes in to say, "Sandra's dead. Call 911. Quick—who ate lunch here?"

A buzz passes through the workers: food poisoning.

"No. It can't be. Gareth's girlfriend made him a macrobiotic lunch. He never eats the catered stuff."

"You mean—well if it's not food poisoning …"

"Nine-one-one's gone dead. I can't get through to the States, either."

"Phones are all dead, Don."

Shit.

Already actors and crew are evaporating from the set. Pam and Linus wipe the makeup and fake blood from Gareth. Outside, they can already see the city on fire, too many fires to count. They walk out onto the balcony. "Karen," Linus says.

"I know."

"We should go home."

Inside the house, the director is screaming at those people still remaining. Don comes out onto the deck, glowers at Pam and Linus, looks at the city, and then screams at nobody in particular.

"Let's wash up," Pam says.

Yet in the end, Pam and Linus stay longer than the others. Duty. Linus says, "My parents are visiting family out in the Fraser Valley, an hour away at the best of times. Pam, take a look through these binoculars—there's no traffic moving anywhere."

Pam looks. "My parents," she says, gently lowering the binoculars. "They're down in Bellingham with Richard's parents—after-Christmas sales."

"Hamilton?"

"At home. Wendy?"

"She's on double-shift at the hospital." They turn around and their eyes catch: fear.Gareth's body still rests on the floor as the sky darkens. A few of the crew members, unable to get anywhere in nightmare traffic and unable to think of anywhere else to go, return to the house. As a group, they wrap Gareth in a canvas tarpaulin and place him in a cool, animal-proof garden shed. And a few minutes later, as Linus and Pam pull out of the driveway in their car, the neighborhood's electricity fails and they drive down the hill under a soot gray sky.

Wendy's "day" had already passed the twenty-six-hour mark when her first sleeper arrived dead at the hospital just shortly into the lunch hour—a North Van housewife a neighbor had found sleeping on the steps outside her house, her Collie's leash in her hand, the dog whimpering. Wendy was examining this body when two more sleepers were brought through the door—an eight-year-old girl who had fallen asleep on a swing set and an elderly woman's husband who had fallen asleep on the passenger side of her car while driving to the pet food store. She thought he might have had a stroke.

And then the cord of normalcy snapped. Over the next several hours, Wendy helped catalog perhaps a hundred more sleepers, most of whom had been driven to the hospital by friends or family, owing to overtaxed ambulances. And for every body taken to the hospital there were hundreds if not thousands out there who didn't make it.

Later in the day, the radio broadcasted a plea saying that the hospitals were unable to process any further patients. Nothing was known about this new sickness, nor was any treatment available.

And now the hospital staff are confused and frightened beyond words, but they work on. Wendy reaches the thirty-four-hour mark and is dead on her feet and needs to sleep, yet at the same time she needs to go home—to check on Linus—Linus—as well as to … as well as to … what? Phones are out, cell phones, too.

What is happening is what Karen knows about. This also has something to do with Pam's and Hamilton's stereo dreams. The answer isn't at the hospital. The answer is back at Rabbit Lane.

Stepping over log booms of the dead, she is feeling almost as tired as the day's sleepers. She understands the sleepers and their completelack of fear as they go groggy and lie down wherever the need hits them. Wendy feels the same way, but she knows it's only sleep she needs at the moment, not death.

Linus had dropped her off at work yesterday, her own car being in the shop. She finds that the only transportation alternative available now is walking: Taxis gone; don't know how to steal a car. Walking will take a few hours, but she refuses to hitchhike—even out on Lonsdale all civil decency seems to have evaporated. In the dark, she walks up to the Trans-Canada highway, where cars are traveling at speeds she thought unimaginable. She spots two accidents—either sleepers or leadfoots—but no emergency vehicles attend the scene. Nobody seems to be slowing up, even for a juicy rubberneck, which strikes Wendy as most unusual human behavior. She considers this when, without warning, the Esso station by the Westview overpass explodes like a jet at an air show—bodies like ventriloquist dolls puked into the sky as though in a cartoon or an action-adventure film.

The traffic slows down and freezes, never to start again. 7s everybody going home? Will home be safe? Or perhaps home is only familiar. What do they expect at the other end that will make them feel safe? What will make them strong?

Wendy walks over to the gas station, where seared bodies lie in the grass embankment just below: all six thoroughly dead, no survivors. Shards of a VW bus remain where the gas pumps once stood amid the husks of shotguns and rifles. What can Wendy do? She's so tired she can barely think, let alone act.

From the grass below the station, Wendy picks up a twenty-four-pack of M&Ms and decides to walk onward; nobody can be saved here. And what other choices does she have? Only the electricity, perversely, seems to be intact: streetlights and the storefronts light the looted Westview Mall. Sleeping and dead bodies lie crash-dummied across the asphalt, sprinkled with broken liquor bottles and shop-front glass. How many people are dead? How many people will die?

Why is this happening? Am I infected? Is Linus okay? Where was everybody and will they reach home safely?Wendy looks onto the Trans-Canada, where many people like her, stranded without cars, are walking dronishly down the freeway's margin, shuffling inside the glare of the headlights stalled behind them. A middle-aged man in a yellow raincoat is asleep under the overpass. A multicar pileup has plowed off the Mosquito Creek bridge and down into the ravine.

Wendy decides to walk overground, through quiet suburban streets, around the small commercial strip at Edgemont Village where the armed forces are guarding a Super-Valu. Even there she can see a dead soldier asleep in a Starbucks alcove.

In one of the smaller streets, she finds a ten-speed bike lying on its side for no discernible reason. She looks around—nobody near—then takes it and pedals toward the dam, where she crosses over and reaches home through the dark forest she knows by heart.

24 THE PAST IS A BAD IDEA

Megan is keeled over a flower bed vomiting up the eel that writhes within her stomach; camouflaging her pregnancy is becoming increasingly difficult. In the flower bed's soil, she sees beer bottle caps and cigarette butts. Ugh. Skitter is no dream neighbor: shitty, oily car wrecks rust inside the garage; the lawn is a crab-grassed junkyard.

She feels her stomach giggle, as though the eel has left and a small bird is now fluttering inside her—this new piece of life. She wonders what personality her new child will have. Will it be condemned to loserdom with Skitter's DNA? Megan hasn't told Skitter about her pregnancy, nor does she feel likely to. Once she tells him, the child is no longer just her own; she'll have to share it. She doesn't want this.

She was tempted to mention her pregnancy last week when the Americans were up taping the TV show, but pulled back.

The TV show: Megan can't believe how sucky she looked in it, but she thinks it was more good than bad. She's happy that she and Karen came across as pals rather than as a mother-daughter unit. And Megan's also happy that they only gave Lois a small amount of air-time. Ha!

Walking in through Skitter's basement door, she catches a reflection of herself in a scrap of mirror leaning against the wall. Last night her head looked fat, but Karen, so emaciated in real life, looked almost fashionably thin. So what they say about cameras adding ten pounds is true. More like twenty.

Back inside the kitchen, Megan finds a clean mug and makes instant coffee and turns on the radio to a local rock station, at which point she notices sirens in the background obscuring the music. She looks down at her arms in the watery midday light: She is stronger now. She eats only good food. She exercises. She no longer does drugs, and she feels ridiculous being in Skitter's house—as though she's been forced back into the seventh grade. Stupid of her to end up here. She can faintly hear Skitter and Jenny making it in the bedroom.

The first sip of coffee burns her tongue, and she idly kills time melting a few undissolved coffee nodules on top of the coffee. She reads biker magazines for a while and time vanishes. She needs to vomit and again heads out into the flower bed. There, after a dry wretch, she lifts her head and sees a pair of plaid-trousered legs protruding from behind a corner of the neighbor's house. She walks over to investigate. It is an older man—sixty? He seems to have had a heart attack. She rings the man's doorbell, but nobody answers, so she returns to Skitter's to phone an ambulance. The phone is dead.

There is a song on the radio—"Blue Monday"—a rhythmic 1980s dirge. Then the radio signal goes blank. Megan goes to change the station, but the stations all sound foreign. The music has vanished. Just voices now: a crisis is occurring, but authorities are unable to be more specific. The gist is that people are dropping like flies all over town—a panic is gridlocking the city and causing untold violence. Megan looks out the window: small birds flittering in the firs; a touch of rain. Certainly no crisis could be happening here. Is this a joke?The radio station has decided to cancel all music; other stations have done the same. Announcers everywhere are telling people not to panic or use phones or electricity unless their situation is critical. Megan decides that this news is important enough to tell Skitter and Jenny, and she knocks on the bedroom door and hears no reply. She knocks louder, to which Skitter yells, "Jeezws. I'm busy. Get the fuck away." Megan knocks once more. Skitter rips open the door and says, "What?" Jenny is in the background looking defiant, lighting a cigarette and showing off her breasts.

"There's a crisis going on."

"You got me up for a that?"

"Crisis. A plague. People are dying. Like in the movies."

"Go away, and that's a shitty joke." Skitter locks the door and Megan pounds it once more; Skitter returns and yells again for her to leave. At this point, Skitter's car-fixing friends, Randy and Scott, galumph in the front door, both looking pale.

"Hey, Megan. Skitter in there?"

"Duh."

"Skitter," shouts Randy, "the city's all fucked up, man. The news is for real."

"Randy, I…" Skitter looks at the three faces outside his door. He throws a towel around his waist. "Okay. Crank the TV."

"Skitter," whines Jenny, "come back."

"Not now, Jailbait. Time for action."

Megan says, "You're such a pig, Skitter. You don't believe anything until a guy tells you."

Soon everyone is in the living room watching TV. The CNN footage they see tightly clamps their attention: helicopter shots of smoking downtown cores—Atlanta? Los Angeles? New York? All cities have gone random; all major bridges and tunnels are hopelessly snarled, accident-clogged roads everywhere resemble the contents of a child's Halloween sack spilled onto the pavement. A local news helicopter shows Vancouver's freeways and bridges rendered impassable. Pedestrians resembling evacuees trudge to suburban homes far away, occasionally having to gingerly step over bodies.Looting is kept to a minimum—people are too fearful of contamination to steal.

The five people in Skitter's living room stare out the window into the backyard greenery. Is this a bad dream for all of them? Randy and Scott take off to wherever they live. Skitter plays with his mustache and grins: "I'm going to do a bit of window shopping. Megan, Jenny. Coming along?"

"Give me a ride home," Megan says.

"What—to your Dad's place?"

"Rabbit Lane, bozo."

Minutes later, as they drive out onto the larger roads of the suburb, bedlam reigns. Traffic lights are skipped; cars drive over lawns; cars containing sleepers are pushed off the roadside by more robust vehicles. A corner grocery-store owner stands outside his front door with a sawed-off shotgun, a weapon Megan recognizes from her lifetime of TV viewing.

Jenny is jack-rabbiting about the car's front seat, swearing and bug-eyed at the dimensions of the crisis. Sleepers are everywhere—in cars, on sidewalks, in parking lots. "Oh, this is just too weird. Skitter, I wanna go home."

"Soon, enough. I want to do some shopping first."

"Everybody's heading home," Megan says to herself, and she wonders what will happen to these people once they get home. Will they wait to die? Will they sit still? She realizes that there is no tactical advantage to being home. At home all you can do is nothing. Even still, what other place can there be?

The car pulls up to a Shopper's Drug Mart in Lynn Valley, where the parking lot is now a crashing, squealing bumper car ride. All car windows are rolled up and many drivers are simply plowing through the landscaping to escape. The power is out. Skitter leaps out of the car with his down jacket pockets brimming with handguns. At the mall's main entrance, Megan and Jenny can see an RCMP officer telling Skitter to leave. Skitter shoots him dead right there in the head and the two girls scream and hop out of the car. Skitter has gone mental.Megan runs up to the officer and cradles his leaking head. She hears another blast from inside the mall and sees a few stragglers run outside clutching weird, stolen-looking objects: enormous cartons of cigarettes and boxes of appliances. "Jenny!" Megan turns around, but Jenny has fallen asleep on a bench not far away, her mouth open, a forgotten newspaper flapping under her tongue.

Another blast cuts the air. Megan runs to the other side of the lot, opposite the car, and tries to collect her wits. Shortly, Skitter leaves the Drug Mart with cartons of prescription tablets. He looks around, more likely for other armed opponents than for Megan, and when he reaches the car, he hurls the boxes into the backseat and then—and then—nothing.

Megan walks over for a better look; Skitter has fallen asleep in the front seat. Megan is too confused to be terrified for herself. "Oh, God—oh God." The malls seems drained of people, and the parking lot has cooled down to near emptiness. Traffic on the road above is filled with speeders and horns and bumps and squeals.

How to get home?

The sky darkens. She can hear herself breathe. It's only a week past the shortest day of the year and it feels it. Looking at Skitter, she's too afraid of his death to rifle his pocket for his car's keys. She creeps into the mall, now lit only by emergency bulbs. From a sporting goods store she takes a mountain bike and from the drug store some Tylenol-3, two nine-volt flashlights, and Bubblicious gum. A lost springer spaniel behind her barks and startles her. Outside, back in Skitter's car, she takes two handguns then sets out to navigate her way home through the craziness of the highway.

The two miles from Lynn Valley to Westview are vastly more insane than she could have conceived. Nothing is moving save for motorcycles and crazy people driving down the shoulders and over the embankments, plowing whatever lies in their way. Three times, men try to stand in her way to take her bike; three times, Megan has shot them in or near their feet and feels a bit sicker with each crack,

She realizes the next miles of highway leading up to the Rabbit Lane exit are going to be impassable. While planning her next steps, amotorcyclist pulls over in front of her—a big bruiser Yamaha. The driver kicks the kickstand, hops off, winks at Megan, and falls asleep face-first onto the pavement.

Megan instantly hops onto the bike and guns it up Delbrook Road, through Edgemont and across Cleveland Dam. By now it's fully dark. She takes the utility road up to Glenmore then bombs down Stevens and into Rabbit Lane. She is home.

What an ucking-fay aste-way of an ay-day.

Hamilton wakes up with a crashing headache and tumultuous hangover; his brain feels like a boxcar full of dying aliens being buried in the desert soil—an image taken from an old episode of Richard's TV show. Shortly before noon, he hobbles up for water, stubs his toe on a chair leg, curses, feels his head throb, and quickly snugs into the tangle of sheets and duvet that is his lair while he recuperates. The phone rings somewhere in the afternoon; he ignores it. Around three, he gets a glass of orange juice and the morning paper and tries to read the paper in bed, but he's still dizzy. He gives it up, turns out the light, and waits for Pam to return around six.

Wendy is lost in the forest. She is tired. She thought she knew the correct pathway home; now she has only the hushed roar of the Dam to the north to give her guidance. There is no moon or glow from the city—the clouds are too dense. The ten-speed is gone long ago, its wheels bent after snagging a root. She hears occasional explosions or booms down toward the city.

The path twists; trees that fell during last year's storms confuse her memory of the trails. Suddenly, there's a stream where there ought to have been soil and ferns where there ought to have been stone. Wendy falls to her knees—she is beyond tired. She can't even begin to count the hours she has been awake. A half-formulated idea flits within her mind: She will build a nest of ferns to keep her warm until daybreak. This is only a foolish child's dream. She knows it.

She cuts her knee on a burl. She reaches down to hold the cut when in her peripheral vision she sees a pale yellow haze of light float downfrom the treetops, a shape and shade of green and gold, steadily falling down, down, down. She pivots her head to watch the light's steady downward sweep, steady and smooth like a glass elevator. It stops.

"Hello, Wendy." It's Jared, standing before her, impossibly young, unchanged from the sunny day he threw a football to a startled Wendy eating lunch alone in the bleachers.

"Jared? Sweetie? Is that you?"

The light that is Jared holds his finger to his lips and shushes Wendy. He extends his hand and Wendy clasps its lightness—there is no actual touch sensation, yet suddenly she is warm. This is all she'd ever wanted.

She says, "Jared, I've missed you so much. I've—we've all—" She begins to blubber. "I loved you and I miss you and the world has never been the same since you left. And now I'm lost and I'm frightened and the world seems to be closing down and dying. I'm a doctor now—I was at the hospital today. Oh Wendy, stop being so emotional."

Jared kisses his fingers, flicks the kiss at Wendy, smiles, and makes a wanking off gesture. He nods his head to indicate that Wendy should follow. His long curly hair doesn't jiggle as his head moves. Wendy follows him, lit by his body's gentle sulfur color. Wendy's feet squelch in mud patches and her cheeks burn red, thwacked by damp salmonberry twigs. They wind through unfamiliar paths, and they reach a straightaway that Wendy recognizes. Jared stops. He moves his eyebrows the way he did two decades previously to indicate that he's leaving.

"You're leaving? No. Jared—no. Don't go. Please stay with me. Talk. I missed you so much. You were all I ever wanted. It's only half a world without you."

But Jared gently pulls away his hand and walks back three paces. He smiles and melts downward into the soil like a peg in a hole.

Wendy is left behind. She grabs a small stone at the point where

Jared's head left the path and crushes it so hard in her palm that her skin bleeds. For years, Wendy had thought the world was fine andcomplete—that she could make do with what she had worked for and with what life had handed her. Now she knows this has never been true.

She arrives out onto the unlit street and sees her own house unlit, but decides not go there. She sees candlelight down the road at Karen's, so she walks that way. Once inside, she looks around at the familiar faces lit by the flames. She says to them, "I'm going to sleep. I'm not tired—not that kind of tired—I'm exhausted." She tumbles into a warm clump on the couch. Linus places a mohair blanket over her, and Wendy flinches at his touch.

25 2000 IS SILLY

"The Queen is dead."

"Go on," Richard says.

Karen continues: "The two princes are wearing blackout sunglasses. The Queen's body is being lowered into a grave. Only a few people are looking through the palace fence. It's dark out—and raining. The grave is all muddy."

Silence.

"Karen, do you really have to wear that paper bag over your head?"

"It's not just one paper bag, Richard, it's three bags. I can't see my visions properly if there's even one speck of light hitting my face. Even candlelight. It's a recognized paranormal fact."

"You look like a joke wearing it."

"Yeah, a real triple-bagger, Richard."

"Richard," Hamilton says, "could you please shut up? Let Karen speak."

"Hamilton, stop being an alpha male for just one second and let Karen alone."

"Hey, Wendy, excuse me for being so interested in what is decidedly one great big dung heap of a situation. I thought you were asleep."

"I'm not going to sleep through this situation no matter how tired I am."

"He's right, Wen," Pam says, "this is an extremely not good situation. "

''''Quiet, everybody. If you want me to tell you what I can see, then be quiet. Could you all put your personalities on hold for just two minutes?"

Karen is trying to describe the collapse of the world to her friends, who are masking their fear with funeral giggles—a protective, ironic coating. "Okay. Let me see—Pam, did I just hear you yawn?"

Pam jumps: "Yawn? No! Tired? Not at all." The group is petrified of yawning, physical comfort, and anything that might make them restful or sleepy. Their coffee is strong.

"Karen," Hamilton says, "do you have a little list of who makes it and who doesn't?"

"You're being facetious, Hamilton. I don't have a list. And I don't know where my information comes from."

"Hmmm. I think Mr. Liver needs a drink."

"Can we get on with this?" Richard asks.

"Richard, please remove the paper bags from my head. I don't know if this is a good time for me to trance. You people have to stop thinking I have this huge Scoreboard in my head with constant information spewing out that I'm not telling you. It's not like that. I tell you facts whenever I can."

The rooms goes silent. "I need a break. Linus, can you turn on the generator again? Let's scan the radio and watch that CNN tape again."Linus activates the Honda generator and Karen's house on Rabbit Lane regains electric light. The radio squawks out only predictable news: Every human activity has shut down—hospitals, dams, the military, malls. All machines are turned off. Once again, they watch the CNN VHS tapes Karen recorded earlier that afternoon before the power failed. The tape plays and again Pam and Hamilton blanch as they see the images they witnessed in stereo last Halloween play themselves out on screen: Dallas; India; Florida … They have no idea what to make of them.

Sleep that night is dodgy. Helicopters buzz the trees; a military jet strafes the mountain then crashes somewhere down near Park Royal. Blankets and duvets are brought downstairs and the fire is stoked and everybody camps there. Unspoken is the agreement to not display fear. Yet in spite of the fear, Richard is excited by the fantastic changes of the day. They all are. Richard remembers a few years ago on the Port Mann bridge where he witnessed a five-car pileup coming the other way—that same combination of being special and thrilled. He remembers being the only child in his third-grade class not to get a flu one year.

Before lights out, Linus asks for helpers to collect water samples to check with the Geiger counter. Shadows of neighbors can be seen walking out in the rain while the quacking sound of ostriches can be heard down the block.

Karen remembers the exact point of the day when the Great Change began. She'd been sitting alone in the TV room waiting for the noon news rotation on CNN. She was feeling partially angry, restless, and bored, as well as somewhat silly over telling Richard not to go to California.

"Karen, stop beating yourself up over this," Richard had said during one of the many arguments on the subject. "Nothing's going to happen. If I don't go to Los Angeles, then I'm just enabling your paranoia."

"Huh?" Karen remembered that modern people occasionally lapse into a strange jargon of emotional claptrap and hooey. "Richard, I'm only telling you what I saw and heard in my heart.""Please, Karen, don't make this any harder—please."

And so Richard went to Los Angeles. Lois had gone out shopping and George was down at the auto shop; Megan was out with Jenny; and the gang were all out in the world on the one day she knew they oughtn't be.

Chilly, she wore three sweaters and a pair of Richard's gray work socks; her legs that morning were sore and hard to move. She was listlessly watching CNN while trying to unscrew a coffee thermos, at which point the TV screen fuzzed into snow and then flared a brilliant white. She looked up and dropped the thermos. Other lamps in the TV room as well as the kitchen pulsed brightly then browned out while the entire house bumped and wavered as though it were an improperly docking boat.

"It's you," Karen said. "You. You're finally here."

Yes.

To her right, the glass patio door jiggled as she watched its hook unlatch itself—clack. With a rusty dry squeaking, the glass slid across its floor runner and the rain blew a cluster of brown leaves inside. Karen began to caterpillar her body across the room, a throw rug caught on her numb senseless legs like sacks of potatoes strapped onto her waist. Brisk wet air and rain slapped her face as she neared the sliding door. Oh God, the glass is so heavy. Go away. A tug of war began between herself and the door's mass.

Show yourself, Karen said, her weak spindly hands aching as she pushed the door closed ever so slowly. Why'd you do this? Why'd you take my youth? Go away. I know you're here. That should be enough.

She was crying, her face wet, her hands red, feeling as though the tendons were peeling like ribbons from her bones. With a final jolt, the door slammed shut and she fell exhausted onto the linoleum's ancient daisies. There. And then came a crash from the outside, like a tackled football player, oomph, the sliding door's glass shattering into a spider's web lace, a million tiny shards in a fraction of a second—yet only a few tiny shards tinkling out from the middle, allowing the wind to whistle through the small remaining hole. Karen screamed and thenwent silent, laid back on the floor, stared at the ceiling, and waited for what could only be bad news. She grabbed a cool, soft cushion that had fallen from the couch and used it to calm her eyes, holding it over her face. The TV resumed its babbling in the background; Karen found the remote button and began recording a tape.

She thinks: I had so little time to enjoy the world and now it's soon to be over. I don't want to live in what this world is about to become. I yearn to leave my body. I yearn to leave this life quickly and cleanly, as though falling into a mine shaft. I want to climb a mountain—any mountain—and put the world behind me, and when I reach the top turn into a piece of the sun. My body is so weak and scrawny. I miss holding things. I miss wiggling my toes and I miss my period. I never held Megan as a baby.

She thinks: I used to ski once. The sky would be so cold it ached, but I was warm and I sped down the snow like a dancer. I used to jump and twirl. And I've never complained until now—not once. But I wanted to enjoy the world a bit more—just a little bit more.

She can hear a helicopter overhead and booms from downtown. It's happening quickly, isn't it?

She closes her eyes and she sees things—images of blood and soil mixed together like the center of a Black Forest cake; Grand Canyons of silent office towers. Houses, coffins, babies, cars, brooms, and bottle caps all burning and draining into the sea and dissolving like candies. There's a reason for this, she's sure. She sees a convenience store in Texas, and a black-and-white monitor camera shows two children lying on the floor covered in slush drinks. She sees a nerve gas explosion at Tooele, Utah, a yellow ghost rising to haunt the continent. She sees work cubicles—an office in Sao Paolo, Brazil, yellow sticky notes falling like leaves from a tree onto the carpeting.

This is the moment she's been waiting for and dreading. Now it's here.

26 PROGRESS IS OVER

The next day, Richard and Megan drive through the water-soaked mountain, through ten-thousand ranch homes, some of them burnt or burning, past forlorn souls staggering through the landscape firing pistols at the horizon, their faces haggard and failed.

Few other cars are driving. Many houses have their doors wide open and the urban animals—the dogs and raccoons and skunks— have been quick to enter. A car is parked in the middle of a lawn; two dead dogs rest upon a driveway's end.

All the people we've ever known, think Richard and Megan, the best-looking girl in high school; favorite movie stars; old friends; lighthouse keepers and lab technicians. Am-scrayed.

On Bellevue Avenue, they find Richard's parents' condominium blandly indifferent to the world's transformation. Inside, the clocks still tick; two coffee mugs sit unwashed on the drain board; a calendar reads: 2:3 o Crown fixed olive oil chicken stock asparagus Bellingham w. Sinclairs

They can hear the ocean outside the front windows. Upstairs in the main bedroom, the odor of Richard's parents is strong. Their bed has the feel of a memorial stone. Parents.

They were the engines and the rudders of suburban life. Richard's and Pam's parents will never return from the States, nor will Hamilton's father return from Kauai or his mother from Toronto. Linus's parents and Wendy's father are sixty miles away, which might as well be a million. Karen's parents haven't come home, and Karen has given the impression they are not to be expected.

Megan sits on her grandparents' bed and sniffles, then hits herself.

"Why'd you do that, Meg?"

"For being too weak to cry like a real human being."

"Oh, honey …"

Richard puts his arm around Megan's shoulder and he allows her to blubber; he can do so himself later. Once she's cried out, Richard says, "Let's collect some things right now. Some to bury and some to keep."

Megan stands up and halfheartedly shuffles about. A pair of house slippers; a pearl necklace; a pipe; framed photos. Megan clutches a pillow so that she can remember her grandmother's smell.

They walk out onto the deck and look across the water to downtown. The sky is overcast and smoky, tinged with burning wood and scorched brake pads. As Richard looks at the view, Megan goes inside and returns shortly with one of Richard's mother's diamond clip earrings. "Here," she says, "bend down, Dad." Megan takes thediamond and presses it into the center of Richard's palm. He looks at the crackles of white light that glint from within it and he remembers a day long ago with Megan down at Ambleside Beach, a bright day. He was gazing at the sun and the light on the water and had thought that there is a light within us all—a light brighter than the sun, a light inside the mind. He had forgotten this and now he remembers, there on the balcony.

The roads are clear and silent as Linus, Wendy, Hamilton, and Pam drive up the slope of Eyremont Drive. Once at the top, the city lies before them, a glinting damaged sheet of pewter, with fires burning like acetylene pearls fallen from a broken choker. Ropes of smoke rise from the ground as though tethered to the damage; in the harbor, oily gorp has spilled into the waves and burns a Bahamian turquoise blue.

"The ocean's on fire," Hamilton says. "Like a sea of burning whiskey." Linus captures the image on Hi-8.

As of yet, nobody shows signs of mourning; they are still shell-shocked. What exactly is a citizen to do? they wonder. What possible purpose or meaning could there be in this strange situation?

"I was in a train once," Pam says, "in England, returning to London from someone's country house near Manchester." She lights a cigarette. "It was morning and I was deadly hung over and had to get back to London. At eleven o'clock, the train pulled to a stop—it was Remembrance Day morning—and all machinery stopped and all noises and voices stopped, and the world went silent. There was silence for one minute as everybody closed their eyes. A whole country shut its eyes. I felt as though the world had stopped. In my head I thought, So this is what the end of the world is like. I thought, So this is what it's like when time ends. I kind of feel that way now."

The breeze changes direction. "What's that smell?" Hamilton asks. Already they can smell—the smell. Hamilton says, "Uh-oh—Leakers."

Pam screams and throws a camera at him.

Having returned from her grandparents' condo, Megan feels the need to do something productive. She walks to feed the ostriches at the Lennox house a few doors over. The birds' hungry quacking grows louder as she walks across the wet grass and through the Lennox's cheerfully wreathed front door. In the utility room, she finds sacks of corn piled on top of the washer and dryer. Through the opened upper half of the Dutch door leading into the garage, Megan is unable to see the big birds, and then from the side edge of the garage prance two angry, silly faces with Maybelline eyes. They cluck and bobble, making her smile. They're ravenous; she quickly slits open a sack, opens the door, and drags it into the garage. While the ostriches gobble their meal, she fills a bucket of water from the goldfish pond out back. On returning, the two ostriches peck at Megan's hands, eager to have the water for themselves. Megan is enchanted with these frantic, funny animals and she sits on the garage stoop to enjoy them.

The garage is so grotty, she thinks. These poor creatures haven't seen light for days now. She walks inside the garage to the door, wondering if she can open it just slightly so that light and air can come in through the bottom. Bang! The ostriches run through the Dutch door and enter the house, knocking over chairs and tables, quacking and hissing about the living room, and then head out the front door, which Megan had forgotten to close. Oh shit, she thinks, another rodeo.

She storms out onto the lawn, where the two birds are joyfully bouncing about, fluffing their silly little wings. The ostriches vanish into the forest as surely as they had fallen into a river with weights on their knotty legs.

That night the steady hum of Linus's gas generator offers a false sense of stability with its precise rhythms.

Karen places the paper bag on her head and resumes her visions of events around the world: "Skeletons sitting on plastic seats outside a Zurich Mövenpick restaurant."

"Skeletons? Already?"

"No. It's in the future. Oh—I see an Apple computer smashed on the floor of a Yokohama branch of a Sumi … Sumi … Sumitomo Bank. This is all random stuff. I see … morning glories growing outof an Ecuador sewer line and entwining onto a human femur. I see … five brightly-dressed skiers frozen asleep on their skis on the slopes of Chamonix; a Missouri railway car sidled off its tracks, with millions of scratch 'n' play lottery tickets spilled into an overflowing creek. In Vienna, two teenage girls are entering a bakery and filling their pockets with chocolates. And now … now … there. They've just fallen asleep."

"Can't you focus in on our own specifics, Kare?" asks Wendy. "What about my dad?"

"Give me your hand." Wendy grabs Karen's hand. Karen speaks: He's asleep. On his bed. He had no idea what happened. He was napping and fell asleep while he was sleeping. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah."

The others want to know about their families and bustle toward Karen. Hamilton's father fell asleep on the beach and was pulled out with the tide. His mother in Toronto fell asleep in a downtown shopping arcade. Richard's parents fell asleep in a lineup trying to cross the border. Pam's parents got out of the car and walked across, but only got a half a mile or so into Canada before sleeping. Linus's parents died in a car crash on the highway near Langley.

After a silence, Richard asks, "What about Lois and George?"

"Asleep. Mom in Park Royal and Dad in his shop."

"Oh."

The generator huffs and stutters and kicks out and then back in. The lights flicker. They now feel fragile, and the youthful sense of infinity that got them to this moment in their lives is gone. "Richard, please remove the paper bags from my head. I want all of us to go out for a walk."

"But the rain—"

"What is your point? Get some flashlights and rain gear."

Minutes later, the seven walk through the street, where a rain of stunning proportion turns the sky into a sea. "Look," Pam says, "each drop is like a glass of water." Nobody can remember the last time it rained so hard. Water clobbers them on the head; water renders them deaf. Down the street they march, without lights, Karen inher wheelchair, soaked and sad, down the street until they reach the bottom. Richard says, "Karen, can you tell us what's going on—why we're here?"

"Richard—" In spite of the water that gullies down her hood, she looks him calmly in the eye. "The world was never meant to end like in a Hollywood motion picture—you know: a chain of explosions and stars having sex amid the fire and teeth and blood and rubies. That's all fake shit."

"So exactly what are you saying?"

"I'm saying, shh!" Karen whispers as they stand in the rain, drenched, on the pavement at the foot of Rabbit Lane bordering the entrance to the forest. "Listen: There is an older woman in Florida. She's in her kitchen and she hears her wind chimes tinkle. On the kitchen chairs are bags of groceries bought yesterday but never placed in their cupboards. It's cool out and she is wearing a nightie. She walks out of the kitchen door and down to a nearby dock where a warm wind sweeps over her head and through the fabric she's wearing. She sits down and looks at the sky with its stars and satellites and thinks of her family and her grandchildren. She's smiling and she's humming a song, one that her grandchildren had been playing over and over that week. "Bobo and the Jets"? No—"Benny and the Jets." Suddenly, she's sleepy. She lies down on the deck and closes her eyes and sleeps. And that's that. She is the last person. The world's over now. Our time begins."