FICTION BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND
Worst. Person. Ever.
Player One
Generation A
The Gum Thief
JPod
Eleanor Rigby
Hey Nostradamus!
All Families Are Psychotic
Miss Wyoming
Girlfriend in a Coma
Microserfs
Life After God
Shampoo Planet
Generation X
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2021 Douglas Coupland
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2021 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada and the United States of America by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: Binge : 61 stories to make your head feel different / Douglas Coupland.
Names: Coupland, Douglas, author.
Description: Short stories.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210147938 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210147962 | ISBN 9781039000520 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781039000537 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8555.O8253 B56 2021 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
Text design: Leah Springate
Cover design: Douglas Coupland
Image credits: Paul Natkin / Contributor / Getty Images
a_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
This book is dedicated to both Siri who lives in my Mac and Siri, my niece (Norwegian goddess of laughter), who was in junior high school when Siri became a thing. Imagine what that must have been like. She’s one of the most delightful talkers and texters I know.
Contents
Cover
Fiction by Douglas Coupland
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
01 Alexa
02 Radiation
03 Splenda
04 Rhnull
05 Thong
06 Theme Park
07 Airplane Mode
08 Lube
09 Incel
10 Team Building
11 Vegan
12 Gum
13 Unleaded
14 Lego
15 Resting Bitch Face
16 Lurking Account
17 Hip Hotels
18 23andMe
19 Sharpies
20 Romcom
21 Subway
22 Hyundai
23 Southwest Airlines
24 Tinder
25 NSFL
27 Dad-Dancing
28 Laptop
29 Karen
30 Taco Bell
31 Kirkland Products
32 Search History
33 Clickbait
34 18+
35 SPF 90
36 Lotto
37 Gaga
38 Liz Claiborne Sheets
39 IKEA Ball Pit
40 Bic Lighter
41 Dasani
42 Oxy
43 Effexor
44 Rubbermaid Tubs
45 CCTV
46 Fentanyl
47 Adderall
48 Risk Aversion
49 Hoarding
50 craigslist.org
51 Clip Art
52 Nike
53 iPhone
54 LAN
55 Olive Garden
56 Dipping Sauce
57 Using
58 Starbursts
59 DUI
60 Norovirus
About the Author
01
Alexa
PEOPLE ASK ME THINGS like where I parked my car, say, 477 days ago and I’m immediately able to tell them it was slot 173 on the third level of the Walgreens parkade and that it cost $1.50 and there was a dark-blue Subaru wagon on my left with a stuffed Garfield doll wearing sunglasses on the dashboard. I don’t need an app to remember this. I’m one of a few people on earth who remembers every single thing they’ve ever seen. Everything. If you think this is bullshit, let me ask you a question: Have you ever been in a car accident or something that, when you remember it later, feels like it took ten minutes instead of ten seconds? Like it happened in slow motion? I bet you have. This is because your brain filmed it twice—once with your regular memory and at the same time with your fight-or-flight memory camera. Most people’s fight-or-flight memory only kicks in when they’re experiencing a traumatic event. Mine has been filming nonstop for my entire life.
I remember the license plate number of the car parked in front of my mom’s when she dropped me off for school on the morning of November 14 in third grade: MDL5588. I remember what my teacher was wearing that day: green dress; bandage on her left hand. I remember the questions on the geography test (of course I scored 100 percent). My parents sent me to school only because they didn’t want me to be socially maladapted, not because I was learning anything new there.
Once doctors figured out what was going on inside my head, any chance at me having a normal life was over. They’d ask me to memorize pi to five thousand digits, but what they called memorization is, to me, simply looking at something and describing it afterward. Tying my shoelace is more work for me than recalling your American Express card number five years after you showed it to me over drinks on that night when there was a waning crescent moon setting directly into the skimming net beside the swimming pool heater that was set at 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
Tell me how you get to work each morning. Obviously you know your route. It’s not a big deal, and if you told it to me fifty times, it would be the same every time. Why wouldn’t it? That’s how my memory works; it’s no different than you telling me your daily route to the office.
Languages are easy…we all learn to speak them without even being aware of it. I learned Navajo in a week. I now speak twelve, but it’s not much fun being a freak when you get right down to it. For instance, it doesn’t help my dating life. Once a person learns about my condition, they immediately assume I’m “monitoring” them and they get paranoid. Like they’re so interesting! People are so similar they could be identical.
The other thing about remembering everything is the sad knowledge that almost all of what’s in my head is unnecessary junk. To get through life, you barely need to remember anything, let alone every single word of a five-thousand-word article on the reintroduction of protein into the post-WWII Japanese diet or all of the end credits for all of the Star Wars movies.
When Google came along, I thought finally everyone would feel what it’s like to be me. But all it did was make people remember less. (Having said that, I have noticed that when people look something up on Wikipedia, they tend to actually remember it; I’m guessing that a certain kind of curiosity triggers your brain to secrete chemicals that cement your newly learned facts in your brain.)
I actually went a bit crazy in my late twenties and started avoiding any situation where I’d see words: not just books and magazines and street signage, but words in the online world as well. Imagine re
membering every scattershot piece of junk you’ve ever seen on even the most basic trip down the rabbit hole—you’d go mad. I thought the cure for my soul was to focus on nature: plants and animals and soil. But without words and language to occupy me, my brain started overcompensating. Soon the landscapes and buildings around me started to explode into astonishing levels of detail. Noticing insects everywhere was the worst of it. And stains. And flaws and bruises. Scratches. The faces and animals I saw in the clouds.
I reached a crisis point when I was walking past a souvenir store near the weekend flea market. I turned my head and saw someone revolving one of those racks full of miniature license plates with kids’ names on them. I did not want to see this.
ABIGAIL
ADDISON
AIDEN
ALEXA
ALEXANDER
ALEXIS
ALLISON
ALYSSA
AMELIA
ANGEL
ANDREW
ANNA
ANTHONY
ASHLEY
AUBREY
AVERY
BELLA
BRANDON
BRAYDEN
BRIANNA
BROOKLYN
CARTER
CHARLOTTE
CHLOE
CHRISTIAN
CHRISTOPHER
CONNOR
DANIEL
DAVID
DYLAN
ELIJAH
ELIZABETH
ELLA
EMILY
EMMA
ETHAN
EVAN
EVELYN
GABRIEL
GAVIN
GRACE
HAILEY
ISABELLA
ISAAC
ISAIAH
JACK
JACKSON
JACOB
JAMES
JAYDEN
JOHN
JONATHAN
JORDAN
JOSEPH
JOSHUA
JUSTIN
KAYLA
KAYLEE
LANDON
LAYLA
LEAH
LIAM
LILY
LOGAN
LUCAS
LUKE
MADISON
MAKAYLA
MASON
MATTHEW
MIA
MICHAEL
NATHAN
NATALIE
NEVAEH
NICHOLAS
NOAH
OLIVIA
OWEN
RILEY
RYAN
SAMANTHA
SAMUEL
SARAH
SAVANNAH
SOFIA
SOPHIA
TAYLOR
TYLER
VICTORIA
WILLIAM
ZOE
ZOEY
Something snapped inside me. I ran to the park across the street and sat down on a bench and cried. I hate feeling sorry for myself.
A woman who ran one of the flea market booths had noticed me take off. She followed me to make sure I was okay. She was sixty-eight years old (24,843 days old, actually), and she really seemed to care about me. Maybe she was just looking to distract me, but she asked if she could draw me. Sure, I said, and I went with her back to her booth and sat in her green folding beach chair. For an hour or so, she drew me with charcoal, and all the while she asked me about myself in a way nobody ever had. When she was done, she showed me my portrait. It didn’t pander. She then asked me to switch places and draw her. Which I did.
And that’s the day I became an artist. Nobody blames an artist for noticing stuff.
02
Radiation
TWO YEARS AGO THIS APRIL, I held my fortieth birthday brunch on the back deck. It was sunny and just warm enough outside that if all my friends wore down vests and my wife, Lucy, supplied a few blankets, we could pretend the weather was warmer than it really was. (By April you are basically desperate for some heat and light.) There were eight of us, all around the same age, as well as a few kids, who we parked in the TV room. It was a good gathering and I was feeling grown-up in a way I find rare: Look at me! I’m having a cosmopolitan fortieth birthday on the deck of a home that has an $800,000 mortgage. I’m truly an adult now!
A quick note about Lucy. Everything my wife does has to be perfect, like a traditionally brined and roasted turkey at Thanksgiving. Also, she has no internal coping mechanism for when things go wrong.
Since all of us were more or less the same age, we spent some time discussing the meaning of turning forty. Nathan, our official web-savvy friend, said, “Craig, if Lucy gets hit by a bus, you’ll be way too old to find a date. You’ll need to check out the Azerbaijani bride websites. You’d be amazed what’s out there.”
Lucy said, “Nathan, don’t put ideas in his head.”
“Seriously, Lucy, we should check one out later. We’ll all choose your replacement.”
“You scallywag.”
Claire, our official witty/cynical friend, then added, “Craig, you’ll have to be on the lookout for gold diggers. The smart ones hang around vintage car events. Let’s be honest, if a woman compliments a forty-something straight guy on the color of his car, in his head he’s already moving her into a love nest.” She took a sip of her beer. “I feel like I should be charging you all actual money for that piece of advice.”
Our friend Noah would normally have been all over this, but he wasn’t. Lucy was the first to notice. “Noah, you look a bit peaky today—the kids keeping you up at night?”
Noah glanced at his wife, Jeannie, and then at all of us. “Well…we’ve been meaning to tell you this, but no time seemed like the right time, I guess. I’ll just say it: I’ve been getting radiation treatment for thyroid cancer. They say I’m going to be okay—but I have to apply this pale-green makeup to my throat so it won’t look sunburned red, and it makes my flesh look like rubber.”
Lucy was horrified. “Noah, I’m so sorry. I—”
“No, don’t be. Jeannie and I are at peace with things. We have every confidence I’ll make it through okay.”
Silence.
Noah finally said, “I shouldn’t have dropped that on all of you. Tom, tell us a joke to change the tone here.”
Tom, our slightly-on-the-spectrum scientific friend, obliged. “A New Caledonian crow, a Great Pacific octopus and Prince Harry walk into a bar—”
And then that’s when the
gods shone down. Lucy glanced up at the sky and said, “Oh look! It’s a bald eagle!”
A bald eagle. In Alaska I guess they’re common, but down here they’re pretty rare. Mother Nature had decided to change the subject.
“I grew up thinking they were almost extinct,” said Claire.
“I think they almost were,” said Tom. “Back then they were probably grinding them up to make paper towels or automotive paint or something.”
“It’s so majestic!” said Jeannie. “It sounds so corny, but look at it!”
And it was indeed majestic.
We stood on the deck watching the eagle soar, making ooh and ahh noises. Then it flew to a crow’s nest at the top of a cedar tree, swooped down, clutched a crow chick in its talons and flew away. The crow parents were in hysterics.
“Holy shit.”
“Oh fuck.”
“Man.”
“Mother Nature.”
“Cruel sometimes or what?”
Silence.
I said, “Let me get some more beer.”
Lucy said, “Let me help you.”
* * *
—
In the kitchen Lucy showed me just how furious she was. “I can’t believe Noah revealed that he has cancer at your fucking birthday party.”
“You opened the door when you asked why he looked so peaky.”
“How was I supposed to know?”
We returned to find the others making idle medical chitchat.
“Beer for all!” I announced.
“I can’t drink at the moment,” said Noah.
“Right. Of course.” He had been drinking soda all day.