"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."