Technicianswho couldn't look more bored even were they to tryhook 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 upwardagaina 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. Pamwhat 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. Richardcan 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 Valiumspills 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 worldone 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 bodyhow 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 worldthat 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 knowhow 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."
"And Megan's fatherdo you still see him?"
"Absolutely. We're engaged." Karen smiles at Richard over Gloria's shoulder. Gloria gives an appropriate smile reaction, then says, "Cut!"
Gloria unclips her mike and bolts toward a door where the minions cower. "Why the hell didn't we know about this? Who researched thisAnthea? Get her on the phone now. Noshe's in 213, not 310. We're going to have to retake the intro. Is the weather going to hold?"
There's panic for the next ten minutes, and then Gloria returns."Speed and" Clack! "Rolling" Gloria turns into "Gloria" instantly, like a plugged-in appliance. "Karen, so you're engaged now?"
"Indeed I am."
"Will we be able to meet him?"
"I think not. He's far more private than I am."
"What's his name?"
"Richard."
"So Richard waited all these years for you? All these decades, your one love waited?"
Karen pauses. Her eyes begin to mist updamnit! She fell into Gloria's trap of tears. "Yes"sniffle"he did." Now her eyes flood. Gloria heaves a relieved breath and knows this will be a dynamite kicker.
"Gloria," calls a technician, "we lost the sound on that one. We have to redo the take."
Gloria mutters a curse and the process begins again in a startlingly machinelike process: "Karen, so you're engaged now?" Gloria bats the eyes: blink blink blink.
"Yes."
"Will we be able to meet him?"