Free The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland Page B

industry. Everybody would invest cleverly in the stock market, but because everybody would make millions, all of the world's currencies would collapse, and banking would come to an end. The world's bauxite miners, banana pickers and assembly line workers would rebel against their soul-deadening jobs, and would begin roaming the world's streets in pursuit of knowledge. Since geniuses don't make food, starvation would become rampant. Dazzlingly intelligent hordes would invade neighbourhood after neighbourhood, flushing out caches of freeze-dried astronaut food and tinned goods.
    Throughout this rapid decline, billions of newly minted book readers, in between pangs of starvation, would pick up a copy of any of Steve's five novels, read them and find them lacking. And it would be young Kyle Falconcrest, in between his time spent translating Chaucer into Mandarin and developing a perpetual motion device, who would cast the first stone.
    And to think Kyle expected Steve to feed him!

Roger

    DeeDee, I'm not trying to lure your kid into my car with a pile of candy or something, so layoff, okay? She can make up her own mind about things. And thanks for thinking of me as Mister Cosmic Fucking Nothingness. That makes me feel good.
    Since when did you get so negative, eh? You were a sweet kid in high school-not stuck up, ever. And for what it's worth, I remember the week your body blossomed. Man, it happened so quickly with you. Trust me, it's the sort of thing guys notice. All of the guys in our grade did. You were a peach, and I remember wanting so badly to stroke your cheeks in social studies in ninth grade. You sat by the alarm bell, and for two weeks in spring, the sun came around and haloed your face during the last class of the day. It was like you were made of something insanely delicate, like dandelion fluff, and anything harsher than a gentle breath would destroy you.
    Do you remember high school? I don't. I dream about it every now and then, but only things like opening my locker or missing a big test-all that symbolic stuff. I try to recreate a sample day from back then, and I blank out.
    Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't. I remember being outgoing and probably smooth with the ladies. But ... imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.
    Or maybe memories are like karaoke-where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning-and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better to not know the lyrics to your life.
    Do you ever wonder what the old gang remembers when they hear your name? More than anything, DeeDee, I bet people would remember your face the moment you got dumped in the dunk tank during the school fair, when the strap came off your Cheerios bikini and you blushed the colour of cherry cough syrup. It was totally funny and not sexy, nipple and all.
    Bethany has had a lot of people go away on her, and so have you. People leave in so many different ways. People go nuts. They abandon you. They stop liking you. They get lost in their own worlds and they never come back. Or they simply give up. And yes, they die.
    DeeDee, cut me some slack. I'm not a void, and I'm not a monster. Bethany is a muse. I thought muses were a stupid concept from the past, but they're not. She helps me write, and I don't know why. Because of her, I was able to start my first novel, and it's going amazingly well. You never know-it could be a really successful book that sells a lot of copies, and it could be my