Binge Read online

  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

  26 Gender Reveal Party

  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

  AVA

  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.