Douglas Coupland - Miss Wyoming

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Douglas Coupland

Miss Wyoming

Chapter One

Susan Colgate sat with her agent, Adam Norwitz, on the rocky outdoor patio of the Ivy restaurant at the

edge of Beverly Hills.Susan was slightly chilly and kept a fawn-colored cashmeresweater wrapped

around her shoulders as she snuck breadcrumbs to the birds darting about the ground. Her face was

flaw-lessly made up and her hair was cut in the style of the era. She was a woman on a magazine cover,

gazing out at the checkout-stand shopper, smiling, but locked in time and space, awayfrom the real world

of squalling babies, bank cards and casualshoplifting.

Susan and Adam were looking at two men across the busyrestaurant. Adam was saying to Susan, "You

see that guy on theleft? That's 'Jerr-Bear' Rogers, snack dealer to the stars and thehuman equivalent of an

unflushed toilet."

"Adam!"

"Well, it's true." Adam broke open a focaccia slice. "Oh God,Sooz, they're looking at us."

"Thoughts have wings, Adam."

"Whatever. They're both still staring at us."

A waiter came and filled their water glasses. Adam said,"And that other guy—John Johnson.

Semisleazebag movie pro-ducer. He vanished for a while earlier this year. Did you hearabout that?"

" It sounds faintly familiar. But I stopped reading the dailies awhile ago. You know that, Adam."

"He totally vanished. Turns out he OD'd and had some kindof vision, and then afterward he gave away

everything he had—his house and cars and copyrights and everything else, andturned himself into a bum.

Walked across the Southwest eatinghamburgers out of McDonald's dumpsters."

"Really?"

"Oh yeah. Hey . . ." Adam lowered his voice and spoke out the side of his mouth. "Oh Lordy, it looks

like John Johnson'sfixated on you, Sooz, gawping at you like you were Fergie orsomething. Smile back

like a trouper, will you? He may be gaga,but he's still got the power."

"Adam, don't tell me what to do or not to do."

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"Oh God. He's standing up. He's coming over here," saidAdam. " Lana Turner, be a good girl and tuck

in your sweater.Wow. John Johnson. Whatta sleazebag."

Susan turned to Adam. "Don't be such a hypocrite, Adam, likeyou're so pure yourself? Know what I

think? I think there's a touch 'o the 'bag in all of us."

John was by then standing a close but respectful distancefrom Susan. He looked at her with the unsure

smile of a highschool junior bracing himself to ask a girl one social notchabove him to dance at the prom,

his hands behind his back like a penitent child.

"Hello," he said. "I'm John Johnson." He stuck out his rightarm too quickly, surprising her, but she took

his hand in hersand slid her chair back onto the flagstones so that she could sur-vey him more fully—a

sadly handsome man, dressed in clothesthat looked like hand-me-downs: jeans and a frayed blue ging-

ham shirt, shoes a pair of disintegrating desert boots with adifferent-colored lace on each foot.

"I'm Susan Colgate."

"Hi."

"Hi to you."

"I'm Adam Norwitz." Adam lobbed his hand into the mix.John shook it, but not for a moment did he

break his gaze onSusan.

"Yes,"' said John. "Adam Norwitz. I've heard your namebefore."

Adam blushed at this ambiguous praise. "Congratulations onMega Force," he said. Owing to John's

radical decision of the pre-vious winter, he was not making a single penny from his cur-rent blockbuster,

Mega Force. In his pocket were ninety $20 bills,and this was all the money he had in the world.

"Thank you," said John.

"Adam told me that you're a sleazebag," said Susan. John,caught completely off guard, laughed. Adam

froze in horror,and Susan smiled and said, "Well, you did say it, Adam."

"Susan! How could you—"

"He's right," said John. "Look at my track record and he'd bebang on. I saw you feeding birds under the

table. That's nice."

"You were doing it, too."

"I like birds." John's teeth were big and white, like pearls ofbaby corn. His eyes were the pale blue color

of sun-bleachedparking tickets, his skin like brown leather.

"Why?" Susan asked.

"They mind their own business. No bird has never tried tosneak me a screenplay or slagged me behind

my back. And theystill hang out with you even if your movies tank."

"I certainly know that feeling."

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"Susan!" Adam interjected. "Your projects do well."

"My movies are crap, Adam."

Across the terrazzo, Jerr-Bear made the ah-oooo-gah, ah-oooo-gahnoise of a drowning submarine in

order to attract John's atten-tion, but John and Susan, alone among the annoyed lunchtimecrowd, ignored

him.

Adam was trying to figure a way out of what he perceived asa dreadful collision offaux pas , mixed

signals and badly tossedbanana cream pies, and said, "Would you and your, er, col-league, like to join us

for lunch, Mr. Johnson?"

John suddenly seemed to realize that he was in public, in a restaurant, surrounded by people bent on

eating food and gos-siping, and that this was the opposite of the place he wanted tobe. He stammered, "

I—"

"Yes?" Susan looked at him kindly.

"I really need to get out of here. You wouldn't want to comewith me on a—I dunno—a walk, would

you?"

Susan stood up, catching Adam's bewildered eyes. "I'll callyou later, Adam."

Staff scurried about, and in the space of what seemed like abadly edited film snippet, John and Susan

were out on NorthRobertson Boulevard, amid sleeping Saabs and Audis, in daz-zling sunlight that made

the insides of their eyeballs bubble asthough filled with ginger ale.

"Are you okay for walking in those shoes?" John asked.

"These? I could climb Alps in these puppies." She smiled."No man's ever asked me that before."

"They look Italian."

"I bought them in Rome in 1988, and they've never let medown once."

"Rome, huh? What was going on in Rome?"

"I was doing a set of TV commercials for bottled spaghettisauce. Maybe you saw them. They were on

the air for years. Theyspent a fortune getting everybody over there and then they shot it inside a studio

anyway, and then they propped it with cheesyItalian stuff, so it looked like it was filmed in New Jersey."

"Welcome to film economics."

"That wasn't my first lesson, but it was one of the strangest. You never did commercials, did you?"

"I went right into film."

"Commercials are weird. You can go be in a reasonably suc-cessful TV weekly series for years and

nobody mentions it to you,but appear at threea.m. in some god-awful sauce plug, and peo-ple phone to

wake you up and scream, 'I just saw you on TV!' '

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A mailman walked by, and once he'd passed John and Susan,in cahoots they copied his exaggerated

stride, then made devil-ish faces at each other.

"You gotta hand it to him," Susan said about the mailman, now out of earshot, "for a guy his age, he sure

works it."

"How old do you think I am?" asked John.

Susan appraised him. "I'll guess forty. Why do you ask?"

"I look forty?"

"But that's good. If you're not forty, then it means you've ac-crued wisdom beyond your, say, thirty-five

years. It looks goodon a man."

"I'm thirty-seven."

"You still haven't told me why you asked."

"Because I think about how old I am," John replied, "and Iwonder, Hey, John Johnson, you've pretty

much felt all the emotions you're everlikely to feel, and from here on it's reruns. And that totally scares

me. Doyou ever think that?"

"Well, John, life's thrown me a curveball or two, so I don'tworry about the rerun factor quite so much.

But yeah, I dothink about it. Every day, really." She looked over at him. "Forwhat it's worth, today is my

twenty-eighth birthday."

John beamed. "Happy birthday, Susan!" He then shook herhand in a parody of heartiness, but secretly

savored how coolher palms were, like a salve on a burn he didn't even knowhe had.The novelty of

strolling in their city rather than barrelingthrough it inside air-conditioned metal nodules added an

un-earthly sensation to their steps. They heard the changing gearsof cars headed toward the Beverly

Center. They listened to bird-calls and rustling branches. John felt young, like he was back ingrade

school.

"You know what this feels like—our leaving the restaurantlike that?" Susan asked.

"What?" John replied.

"Like we're running away from home together."

They walked across a sunbaked intersection where a His-panic boy with a gold incisor was selling maps

to the stars' homes. John asked Susan, "You ever been on one of thosethings?"

"A star map? Once, for about two years. I was deleted in areprinted version. Cars would drive past my

place and then slowdown to almost a stop and then speed up again—every day and every night. It was

the creepiest thing ever. The house had goodsecurity, but even then, a few times I was spooked so badly

Iwent and stayed at a friend's place.You?"

"I'm not a star." Just then the Oscar Mayer wiener truck droveby and cars all around them honked as if

it were a weddingcortege. Screwing up his courage, John asked, "Susan—Sue— speaking of curveballs,

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here's one for you. A simple question: doyou think you've ever met me before?"

Susan looked thoughtful, as though ready to spell out her re-ply in a spelling bee. "I've read about you in

magazines. And Isaw a bit of stuff about you on TV I'm sorry things didn't workout for you—when you

took off and tried to change yourself orwhatever it was you were trying to do. I really am." The wiener

hubbub had died down, and Susan stepped in front of John tosurvey him. His eyes looked like those of

somebody who's lost

big and is ready to leave the casino. "I mean, I've been prettytired of being 'me' as well. I sympathize."

John moved as if to kiss her, but two cars behind themsquealed their tires in a pulse of road rage. They

turned aroundand the walk resumed.

"You were a beauty queen, weren't you?" John asked. "MissWyoming."

"Oh Lord, yeah. I was on the beauty circuit since about the ageof JonBenet-and-a-half, which is, like,

four. I've also been achild TV star, a has-been, a rock-and-roll bride, an air crash sur-vivor and public

enigma."

"You like having been so many different things?"

Susan took a second to answer. "I never thought of it that way. Yes. No. You mean there's some odier

way to live?"

"I don't know," said John.

They crossed San Vicente Boulevard, passing buildings androads that once held stories for each of

them, but which nowseemed transient and disconnected from their lives, like win-dow displays. Each

recalled a bad meeting here, a check cashed there, a meal. . . .

John asked, "Where are you from?"

"My family? We're hillbillies. Literally. From the mountains ofOregon. We're nothing. If my mother

hadn't escaped, I'd proba-bly be pregnant with my brother's seventh brat by now—and somebody in the

family'd probably steal the kid and trade it fora stack of unscratched lottery cards.You?"

In a deep, TV-announcer voice he declared, "The Lodge Familyof Delaware. 'The Pesticide Lodges.' "

His voice returned to nor-mal. "My maternal great-grandfather discovered a chemical tointerrupt the

breeding cycle of mites that infect corn crops."

A light turned green and the boulevard was shot with trafficand the pair walked on. Susan was wrapped

in a pale lightfabric, cool and comfortable, like a pageant winner's sash. John was sweating like a

lemonade pitcher, his jeans, gingham shirtand black hair soaking up heat like desert stones. But instead of

seeking both air-conditioning and a mirror, John merely un-tucked his shirt and kept pace with Susan.

"You'd think our family had invented the atom bomb fromthe way they all lorded about the eastern

seaboard. But thenthey did this really weird thing."

"What was that?" Susan asked.

"We went through our own family tree with a chain saw.Ruthless, totally ruthless. Anybody who was

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found to be sociallylacking was erased. It was like they'd never even lived. I havedozens of great-uncles

and aunts and cousins who I've nevermet, and their only crime was to have had humble lives. One

great-uncle was a prison warden. Gone. Another married awoman who pronounced 'theater' thee-ay-ter.

Gone. And heavenhelp anybody who slighted another family member. Peopleweren't challenged or

punished in our family. They were merelyerased."

They were quiet. They'd walked maybe a mile by now. Johnfelt as close to Susan as paint is to a wall.

John said, "Tell me something else, Susan. Anything. I like your voice."

"My voice? Anybody can hear my voice almost any time ofday anywhere on earth. All you need is a

dish that picks up sig-nals from satellite stations that play nonstop cheesy early eight-ies TV shows." They

were outside a record store. Two mohawkedpunk fossils from 1977 walked past them.

John looked at her and said, "Susan, have you ever seen aface, say—in a magazine or on TV—and

obsessed on it, andmaybe secretly hoped every day, at least once, that you'd run into the person behind

the face?"

Susan laughed.

"I take it that's a yes?"

"How come you're asking?"

John told Susan about a vision he'd had at Cedars-Sinai Medi-cal Center the year before that led him to

make a drastic life de-cision. He told Susan that it was her face and voice that had cometo him during his

vision. "But what happened was that monthslater, after I'd gone and completely chucked out all of my old

life, I realized I didn't have this great big mystical Dolby THX vi-sion. I realized that there'd merely been

some old episode ofthat TV show you used to star in playing on the hospital's TV setbeside my bed. And

it must have melted into my dream life."

It made a form of sense to Susan that this man with sad, paleeyes like snowy TV sets should have seen

her as a refuge andthen found her. Years before she'd stopped believing in fate. Fatewas corny. Yet with

John that long-lost tingle of destiny wasonce again with her.

A leaf blower cut the moment in two, and just as John wasabout to raise his voice, Cedars-Sinai came

into view far in thedistance, between a colonnade of cypress trees and a billboardadvertising gay

ocean-liner cruises. John's shirt was now soakedthrough with sweat, so they stopped at a convenience

store andbought an XXLi-love-la white cotton shirt and two bottles ofwater. He changed out in the

parking lot to the amused oglingof teenage boys who yelled out, "Boy supermodel steals thecatwalk!"

John said, "Fuck "em," and they crossed Sunset. It was gettingto be late in the afternoon, and the traffic

was crabby and scle-rotic. They entered a residential neighborhood. Susan was feel-ing dizzy and sleepy

and said, "I need to sit down," so they did,on the curb before a Wedgwood-blue French country-style

house under the suspicious gaze of an Asian woman on the sec- ond floor."It's the sun," said Susan. "It's

not like it used to be. Or, Ican't take as much as I used to." She lay back on the Bermudagrass.

Suddenly worried he'd been the only one spilling the beans,John said, "Tell me about the crash. The

Seneca crash. I'll betyou never talk about it, do you?"

"Not the full story, no."

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"So tell me." Susan sat up and John put his arm aroundher. Staring at the pavement, like Prince William

behind hismother's coffin, she told the story. And she might have talkedto him all night, but two things

happened: the lawn sprinklersspritzed into frantic life, and a Beverly Hills police patrolcar soundlessly

materialized. Two grim-faced officers got out,hands on weapons on hips. Soaked, Susan started to stand

up,but her tired knees buckled. John helped pull her up, say-ing, "Jesus, we try and take a quick rest and

in comes theSWAT team. Who pays your salaries, you goons? I pay yoursalaries. . . ."

"There's no SWAT team, Mr. Johnson. Stay calm," said oneof the officers. "Ma'am"—he looked more

closely at her—"Mrs. Thraice? Can we help you? Give you a lift? You weregreat in Dynamite Bay."

Dynamite Bay was a low-budget actionpicture now in wide video release and not doing too badly.Adam

had been proclaiming it as the revival of Susan's actingcareer.

She took a professional tone. "Hello, boys. Yes, I'd love a ride."She turned toward John and smiled

regretfully. "I'm great for long walks but otherwise I'm not really Outward Bound mate-rial. Another day,

another pilgrimage." She entered the rear pas-senger seat, and the officer shut the door. She rolled down

thewindow. "To Beechwood Canyon, boys." She looked out atJohn. "You know—I don't even know

my own phone number,

Call Adam Norwitz." Just as the cruiser pulled away, she rolledup a silk scarf, wet from the sprinkler,

and handed it to John."What actually happened after the crash is a much better story. I should have told

you that instead. Phone me." And then she wasgone and John stood, clutching the silk to his heart while

thesprinkler drenched his feet, as though they were seeds.

Chapter Two

Two days before she turned twenty-five, Susan took a planefrom New York, where she'd gone to

audition for the part of a wacky neighbor on a sitcom pilot. Not the lead—the wackyneighbor. Next

stop: mother roles. The audition hadn't gonewell. The producer's Prince Charles spaniel had the runs,

whichhad the hotel management badgering him with phone calls anddoor knocks while Susan was

bravely making the most of stale coffee-tea-or-me jokes written by USC grads weaned on a life-time of

Charles in Charge, plus four years of Gauloises and Felliniephemera.

In beaten retreat she boarded Flight 802 from New York toLos Angeles, sitting in Coach Class, as

Where-Are-They-Now?waves of pity washed over her from the other passengers ea-gerly attuned to

the scent of celebrity failure. Thank heaven forthe distracting tarmac rituals—the safety demonstration,

thesmall tingle of anticipation just before acceleration and lift-off.Banks of TV screens dislodged from the

ceiling hawking DisneyWorld, the Chevy Lumina and sugary perfumes. A Cheers rerunbegan.

The seat-belt light went off, and the flight attendants glumly hurled packets of smoked almonds at the

passengers. Airlineswere so disinterested in food these days, thought Susan, who

had once been reigning queen of the old MGM Grand airline flights between coasts, playing poker with

Nick Nolte, polish-ing toenails with Eartha Kitt and trading gossip with RoddyMcDowell. Her fellow

Flight 802 passengers ripped into theirnuts all at once, a planewide locustlike chewing frenzy followedby

the salty solvent odor of mashed nuts. Ah, the fall from grace.

Susan sat in her window seat, 58-A, and idly watched the landscape below. To her left was an older

couple—he an engi-neer of some sort, and she a mousy 1950s wife. Mr. Engineerwas convinced they

were currently flying directly over James-town, New York, "the birthplace of Lucille Ball," and craned

over Susan, jabbing at what looked like just another Americantown that bought Tide, ate Campbell's

soup and generated atleast one weird, senseless killing per decade. Later, Susan wouldlook at a map of

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the eastern United States and realize how trulywrong Mr. Engineer had been, but at the time she gawked

downward in some misplaced mythical hope of seeing a tinylittle dot of flaming red hair.

It was at this point the engine blew—the left engine, clearlyvisible to Susan from her seat. Like a

popcorn kernel—poomp!—the blast was muffled by the fuselage. The recoil shot flight at-tendants and

their drink trolleys into the center bank of seats,while oxygen masks dropped like lizard tongues from the

ceil-ing. The jet began tumbling and die unseat-belted passengers,such as Susan, floated like

hummingbirds. She thought to her-self, I con float. She thought, I'm an astronaut. Everything was mov-ing

too quickly for fear. There was some moaning during the drop, some cursing, but no hysteria and little

other noise.

Then the pilot regained control of the plane, and the harness-ing of its reins made it feel as if its bulk had

walloped onto con-crete. The oxygen hoses swooned like cartoon water lilies, andthe TV screens

resumed playing Cheers.For the next two minutes normal flight resumed. Susan feltsome relief as Mr.

Engineer described to Mrs. Engineer exactlywhy the plane would remain flyable.

Then the descent began again, a descent as long as a song onthe radio, a downward free float—smooth

and bumpless. Susanfelt as though the other passengers must be angry at her forjinxing their flight—for

being the low-grade onboard celebritywho brought tabloid bad luck onto an otherwise routine flight.She

avoided looking at them. She put on her seat belt. She feltclenched and brittle. She thought, So this is

how it ends, in a crash overLucy's hometown, amid syndicatedIV reruns, spilled drinks, and moaning en-

gines. Once the plane hits the ground, I'll no longer be me. I'll go on to beingwhatever comes next.

She felt a surprising relief that the plastic strand of failed identities she'd been beading together across her

life was com-ing to an end. Maybe I'll blink and open my eyes and I'll find myself hatchingfrom a bird's

egg, reincarnated as a cardinal. Maybe I'll meet Jesus. But whateverhappens, I'm off the hook! Whatever

happens, I'll no longer have to be a failure or a puppet or a has-been celebrity who people can hate or

love or blame.

Then, like the yank of a cyclone roller coaster, the plane shearedand bounced and slid into soil. The

noise was so loud that it over-powered all other sensations. The visions she saw came at her fastas

snapshots—bodies and dirt and luggage strewn toward her as though from a wood chipper—the

screams of tortured metal andcompressed air. And then silence.

Her seat had come to a stop along with a section of fuselage.The engineer, his wife and their two seats

were . . . gone. Herchair rested alone, bolted to its piece of fuselage, perfectly verti-cal. She was still for

about a minute, a small plume of smoke ris-ing far off to the right. She smelled fuel. Gently she unclasped

the seat belt of 58-A and rose to look across a fallow sorghumfield. A brief survey of her body showed

she was unscratched,

yet it appeared to her that all the other passengers were crushedand broiled and broken along a debris

path that stretched halfa mile across the sorghum field hemmed with tract housing.There was a brief gap

between when her plane crashed andwhen people began streaming from the suburb toward the

wreckage. During that moment Susan had the entire planewreck and the crumpled passengers to herself,

like a museumlate on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. The bodies around her seemedas though they'd been

flocked onto the plane's hull and onto the gashed sorghum field from a spray can. A clump of unheated

foil-wrapped dinners covered a stewardess's legs. Luggage had burst like firecrackers and was mixed

with dirt and roots anddandelions, while cans of pop and bottles of Courvoisier were sprinkled like

dropped marbles. Susan tried to find somebodyelse alive. There were limb fragments and heads. The

soot-covered fuselage contained a cordwood pile of dead passengers.

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She felt like a ghost. She tried to find her bodily remains therein the wreckage and was unable to do so.

She grew frightenedthat the relationship between her mind and body had beensevered.

Teenage boys on bicycles were the first to arrive, droppingtheir bikes as they began sleepwalking

around the perimeter.They looked so young and vital. Susan approached them andone of them shouted

out, "Hey, lady, did you see that?! Did yousee it come down?" to which Susan nodded, realizing the boys

had no idea she was a passenger and didn't recognize her.

Then she was lost in a crowd of local onlookers and trucks,parping sirens and ambulances. She picked

her way out of themelee and found a newly paved suburban road that she fol-lowed away from the

wreck into the folds of a housing devel-opment. She had survived, and now she needed sanctuary and

silence.She looked at the street names: Bryn Mawr Way, Appaloosa Street, Cornflower Road. After a

short walk down Cornflower,past its recently dug soils and juvenile trees, she saw a newlybuilt home

with a small pile of newspapers accumulated on the front stoop. She went to the door, rang the bell and

felt her shoulders relax when no one answered. Peeking in, shesaw a cool, silent middle-class chamber,

as quiet and inviting asthe treasure vaults of King Tut must have seemed to their discov-erers. She felt a

calm that reminded her of riding in the back of the family's Corvair at night as a child, looking up to see

stars through the sun roof, the most glamorous concept in the world.

She tried opening the front door, but it was locked. At theside of the house, the garage door was

locked, and at the backshe tried the kitchen's sliding door. No luck. With a rock the sizeof a peach, she

smashed a hole in the glass, released the latch,and entered the kitchen. She made a quick scan for alarm

systems—life in Hollywood had made her an expert—but therewere none. Relief! And so quiet.

She smelled the air, poured a glass of tap water and scannedthe various items magneted onto the fridge

door: family pho-tos, two attractive children, a boy and a girl, and a photo of themother, who looked to

Susan like one of those soccer moms shesaw profiled in women's magazines, the sort of woman who en-

dures childbirth with a brave smile, incapable of preparing nu-tritionally unbalanced picnic lunches. There

was a photo of thefather, athletic, in a blue nylon marathon outfit with the daugh-ter papoosed onto his

back. Also on the fridge was a calendarwhose markings quickly let Susan know that "The Galvins"were

going to be in Orlando for seven more days. She looked inthe fridge and found some forgotten carrot

sticks and nibbledon them as she walked into the living room and lay on thecouch. The faint barks and

wails of sirens reached her and she

turned on the TV A local news affiliate's traffic helicopter wascovering the crash. The events on TV

seemed more real to herthan did her actual experience. Rescue workers, she was told,had yet to locate a

survivor. The death toll was placed at 194. Susan took it all in. She was frightened by her inability to

react to the crash. She was old enough to know about shock, and sheknew that when it came, its

manifestation would be harsh and bizarre.

Late afternoon sun filtered in through the living room sheers.Susan turned on the air-conditioning and

walked through thesilent house, and paused to press her cheek against the coolplaster of the upstairs

hallway. She saw a warren of three bed-rooms and two bathrooms, whose normalcy was so extreme she

felt she had magically leapt five hundred years into the futureand was inside a diorama recreating

middle-class North Ameri-can life in the late twentieth century.

The bathroom was large and clean. Susan drew a bath,disrobed and entered the tub, submerging her

head in the chlo-rinated gem-blue water, and when she came up for air, shebegan to cry. She had

emerged flawless—unpunctured and un-bruised, like a Spartan apple fresh from the crisper at Von's.

Herskin clammy, her knees pulled up to her chin, Susan thoughtof her mother, Marilyn, and of Marilyn's

addiction to lotterytickets: Quick Picks, Shamrock Scratches, 6/49s. From an early age Susan had a

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deep suspicion of lotteries. Sure, they gave aperson the opportunity to win $3.7 million, but in openingthe

doors to that possibility, they also opened other doors— doors a person probably didn't want opened,

and doors thatwould remain uncloseable. A person opened herself up to the possibility of both

catastrophic good and bad. Was deliveranceSusan's repayment for years of refusing to scratch Marilyn's

Pokerinos?She splashed water on her face, rinsing away her tears. Herteeth felt gluey, and she spritzed

water into her mouth andrubbed her tongue around them. She no longer felt she mightbe dead or a ghost.

Her chest stopped heaving. The sky was darkening, and she toweled herself dry, put on Karen Calvin's

terry robe and re-turned to the kitchen, where she heated a can of cream-of-mushroom soup. Once the

soup was ready, she took it and a boxof Goldfish crackers into the living room to watch TV. Wouldthe

neighbors see the lights and suspect an intruder? Shepushed the thought away. The neighborhood

seemed to havebeen air-freighted in from the Fox lot, specifically designed forpeople who didn't want

community, and she suspected shecould probably crank up a heavy metal album to full volumeand

nobody would bat an eye.

The local news teams were out in force, and Susan wasn't surprised when an old news service head shot

of herself ap-peared on screen behind the anchor's head. She rememberedthe day she'd posed for that

particular shot. Her husband Chris, the rock star, had stood behind the photographer making quack-ing

noises. She was happy to be away from Chris and auditionsand mean tabloid articles. Wait—where was

she? Ohio? Ken-tucky? She got up and went to check mail on a small credenzaby the front door.

Seneca, Ohio. Good.

She returned to the couch to hear more about her supposeddeath, wondering how long it would take the

authorities to re-assemble the bodies and dental fragments and realize she wasn'tthere. She wondered if

her unbuckled seat belt in 58-A wouldbe a giveaway.

She fell asleep on the couch, and woke up the next morninghungry and curious. The TV was still on, and

as she surfed itschannels, she learned the truth of the axiom that the last thing

we ever learn in life is the effect we have on others. She was alsoable to calculate with disheartening

precision the exact caliberof her rung in entertainment hell:

• "Forfeited a middling acting career for the trash of rock

and roll."

• "Small-town girl makes it big and then small again."

• "Smart enough, but made some bad decisions."

• " Long-suffering wife of philandering rocker hubby."

• "A recent small brainless part in a small brainless

movie."

She saw her mother and stepfather being interviewed onCNN on their lawn in Cheyenne. Marilyn held a

framed photoof Susan up against her stomach as though hiding a pregnancy.It was an early teenage

photo taken about three minutes before she became famous, just before her world expanded like an ex-

ploding spacecraft in a movie. Her stepfather, Don, was cross-armed and stern. Both were speaking

about Susan's death, bothuttering "No comment" to the prospect of suing the airline.Following them was

a ten-second clip of Susan in her most re-membered role as Katie, the "good" daughter in the long-

running network series Meet the Blooms. Following the clip, thenewscaster added gravely, "Susan

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DouglasCoupland MissWyoming ChapterOneSusanColgatesatwithheragent,AdamNorwitz,ontherockyoutdoorpatiooftheIvyrestaurantattheedgeofBeverlyHills.Susanwasslightlychillyandkeptafawn-coloredcashmeresweaterwrappedaroundhershouldersasshesnuckbreadcrumbstothebirdsdartingabouttheground.Herfacewasflawlessly...

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Douglas Coupland - Miss Wyoming

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