4 ALL FAKE

That first week of Karen's coma was the hardest. We couldn't have known then that the portrait of Karen that began that cold December night inside her Rabbit Lane bedroom was one that would remain unchanged for so long: ever-shrinking hands reduced to talons; clear plastic IV drips like boil-in-bag dinners gone badly wrong; an iceberg-blue respirator tube connected to the core of the Earth hissing sick threats of doom spoken backward in another language; hair always straight, combed nightly, going gray with the years, and limp as unwatered houseplants.

Mr. and Mrs. McNeil tore up from Birch Bay near dawn. Their Buick Centurion's right front wheel nudged over the yellow-painted curb beneath the Emergency's port cochere. Already inside sat my parents, Hamilton, Pammie, Wendy, and Linus, all of us worn out from worry and fear. The McNeils had faces like burning houses. I could see they'd both been quite drunk earlier and were now throbbing in a headache phase. They refused to speak with any of us younger folk at first, assuming that we were all entirely to blame for Karen's state, Mrs. McNeil's accusing red eyes saying more than any shouted curse. The McNeils spoke with my parents, their neighbors and more-or-less friends of twenty years. At sunrise, Dr. Menger emerged to lead the four of them into the room where Karen was lying.

"Thalamus … mumble … fluids; brain stem … mumble … cranial nerve … hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy … breathing …"

"Is she alive'? Is she dead?" asked Mrs. McNeil.

"She's alive, Mrs. McNeil."

"Can she think?" she continued.

"I can't tell you. If this continues, Karen will have sleep and wake cycles and may even dream. But thinking … I have no idea."

"What if she's trapped inside her body?" asked Mr. McNeil. "What if she's—" Mr. McNeil, George, was fumbling for words, "—in there hearing everything we say. What if she's screaming from the inside and she can't tell us that she's stuck?"

"That's not the case, sir. Please."

Meanwhile, Linus was glurping and snorkeling through a cup of vending machine hot chocolate. Hamilton called him an asswipe for being so disrespectful, but Linus said slowly, "Well, Karen likes chocolate. I think she'd want me to have it." There was a pause and a straw poll of eyes indicating this was the conventional wisdom. Hamilton calmed himself but remained in a piss-vinegar mood.

"Richard," barked Mr. McNeil, rounding a corner with the other older folk, "Dr. Menger said Karen took two pills. Did you give them to her?"

I was alert: "No. She had them in her compact. They were

Valiums. I've seen her take them before. Mrs. McNeil gives them to her."

Mr. McNeil turned to his wife, Lois, who nodded her head andmotioned her hand gently, confirming that she was the pusher. Mr. McNeil's posture slackened.

I said, "Karen wants to look good for your trip to Hawaii. She's trying to lose weight."

My use of the present tense shook them. "It's only five days from now," said Wendy. "She'll be fine by then, right?"

Nobody responded. Mrs. McNeil, whispering like a calculating starlet, asked Wendy, "Were … were you girls drinking? … Wendy? … Pammie?"

Wendy was direct: "Mrs. McNeil, Karen couldn't have had more than a drink and a half. Weak stuff, too—Tab and a drop of vodka. Honest. It was mostly Tab. One moment she was standing there wondering if she'd lost her watermelon lip smacker, the next she was on the grass beside the road moaning. We tried to make her throw up, but there couldn't have been more than half a French fry inside her, tops. She was trying to lose weight really fierce. For Hawaii."

"I see, Wendy."

Dr. Menger cut in with the results of the blood-alcohol test, which confirmed next to no alcohol in her system. "Virtually clean, he said. Point-oh-one."

Almost clean. But not clean. Dirty. Tainted. Soiled and corrupted. Shitted. Malaised. Poxed and pussed. Made unclean by her sick teenaged friends who wreck houses.

And we sat there in silence far into the next day, six friends, wretches of transgression, feeling deserving of punishment, sipping lame paper cones of Foremost eggnog brought to us by a nurse leaving night shift, anticipating our burdens, and castigating ourselves with silence. Sunday morning. Already news would be traveling throughout the school community—the early risers off to skate or ski. Karen's mental state would be glamorously linked to the house-wrecker, as though the damaged house had been the actual cause of her ails. And drugs.

I developed a cramp and went to the bathroom. There I found a stall, took a deep breath, and remembered the envelope in my jacket. I opened the envelope. On binder paper it read:December 15 … 6 Days to Hawaii!!!

Note: Call Pammie about beads for cornrowing 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. I hope that neither of these is true!!

Why am I writing this? I'm asking myself that. 1 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 atPark 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. xox

Karen

I thought it best not to show Mr. and Mrs. McNeil the letter at that moment; it could only confuse without offering consolation. I stuffed it back in the vest pocket of my ski jacket and sat and thought of the times I'd used this very bathroom before, back when Jared was in the hospital and before he left us and this world, atom by atom.

I thought of Karen in the intensive care unit and I felt as though I was a jinx of a friend. I stood up and achingly returned to the waiting room. An hour later when the corridors seemed empty enough, we snuck in to see Karen. The machinery of her new life was fully set in motion—the IVs, respirator, tubes, and wave monitors. An orderly shooed us out of the room, and we shambled toward the exit, the world no longer quite an arena of dreams—it was just an arena.

The West Vancouver police interviewed each of us that afternoon, down at the station on Marine Drive at Thirteenth. Understandably, they wanted the story from each of us individually to weed out discrepancies. But there were none. The housewrecker was quickly glazed over, the culprits still lolling about in the cells below us. Afterward at the White Spot restaurant down the road, we hunkered without hunger over cheeseburgers. The only pattern we could see in Karen's behavior on Saturday was that she had been behaving … differently that day. I showed everybody the letter, and we became chilled.