The Gum Thief (32 page)

By the time he reached the theatre the premiere was over and the klieg lights had been switched off with a volley of electrical poundings. The street was dark. Steve decided to continue his search into the centre of town. When his eyes readjusted to the night, they were filled with saturated neons from store signage and a continuous stream of car lights, those sturdy white and red beacons. Inside a restaurant, he saw tables covered in white linen and burning votive candles, and a set of triplets sharing a birthday cake that was alive with dozens of blazing white sparklers. He looked to his right, and there was Gloria, standing there too, watching the triplets and their cake and their white light. She was crying, and Steve said, "Gloria, don't cry. There's no need to cry at all." He put his arm around her and said, "Come with me. I want to take you somewhere."

"Where?"

"It's a surprise."

Steve took Gloria around the corner, where a fountain was shimmering with candy-coloured lighting, and said, "Over there, across the plaza-" and Gloria asked, "What's that?" and Steve replied, "Let's find out."

It was a white building, lit from below like a cake in a movie, a cake from which a titanic chorus girl might at any moment explode.

"Come inside," said Steve.

Gloria looked over and saw a plaque indicating that they were entering a planetarium. "Steve," she said, "what is this about?"

"Shush." He took her by the shoulder and, while the staff wasn't looking, they slipped past a burgundy velvet cord and down into a long, dark, muffled hallway. "Through here," he said, and they opened a door and walked into a universe pure and clean, the stars like puddles of baby formula spilled across the heavens. They were the only two people in the planetarium, and Steve asked Gloria
to
sit down beside him, and so she did. From within the planetarium's central apparatus a cog whirred and a lens twirled and the central projectors sprang to life. Steve took Gloria's hand, felt how cold the rings were on her fingers. Together, they watched a
swath of northern lights dash across the universe.

Steve turned to Gloria and said, "What if it turned out that you and I weren't even human-what if it turned out that you and I came from some other planet, far away? What if it turned out that you and I were aliens, different from everyone else on the planet, and that everything we did was thus supernatural and profound-even the smallest of our daily acts would be filled with grace and wonder and hope-wouldn't that be something!"

"It would," said Gloria.

"And what if we threw away everything we have now-our house, our books, our stove, our carpets, our
dust-and
we started again somewhere new, cut ourselves away from the past and headed into the unknown like a space rocket-wouldn't that be something?"

"I'd like that very much, Steve. That
would
be something."

Steve heard only his breathing and Gloria's. The stars kept their silence. Steve nudged Gloria, "Look, it's the Big Dipper."

"It is."

"And over there-Orion."

"Yes, it is."

"You know, Gloria-"

"Hush, Steve."

"Why, my love?"

"Because sometimes words can kill what it is we have right now."

"But, Gloria, I don't think I've ever told you this as such, but I think you're very ...
beautiful."

Gloria squeezed Steve's hand, and then Steve remembered something he'd kept in his trouser pocket all day but had forgotten. "Good God, how could I forget something so simple?" He reached into his pocket and removed a small package, and then held an offering up to Gloria. "Gloria, my dear-gum?"

c-

Roger, as your instructor, I have
to
tell you that the truly good author creates a novel so true that it loses the voice of its individual author. We all strive to write "the universal book," one so good that it seems unauthored. Your
Glove Pond
(Roger, what sort of name is
that?)
has a voice that is too idiosyncratic. You need to lose your ego and create a work that speaks in the voice of the "Platonic everyman," not only the voice that you, Roger Thorpe, create.

Your characters also seem like real people, which might sound like a compliment, but don't jump
to
that conclusion. Characters need to sound as if you made them up, or else people won't feel as if they're reading
writing:
bold, ballsy,
masterful
writing-and they won't feel that they're meeting people who couldn't otherwise exist were it not for books.

Location wise, your book takes place in your own day-today world, and that's
wrong.
Books must be set in an imaginary places-otherwise, how will a reader know you've used your imagination? And I
know
you worked at Staples, Roger, so it's really not fair to the other writers in this class who tried to locate their books in different, exotic,
imaginary
places. Hilary set her fiction assignment in a vampire's cave-now
that's
a location. Dhanni set his collection of free-association verse on another planet; that takes
work.
Staples? I can go there any time and experience it myself. I don't need or want art that tells me about my daily life. I want art that tells me about somebody
anybody-else
but me.

As a side note, I also think it was inconsiderate of you to mention our class's exercises in bread buttering. Your classmates tried hard to empathize with the buttered bread slice. After you left last week's session, some of us stayed behind and had a discussion about your attitude towards your bread. In the name of making better art, I have to tell you that we found your attitude a bit ... smug. Who says a piece of bread can't have a soul, a sense of drama or a point of view? Julie's buttering had me almost in tears thinking about its plight. Andre's buttering made me yearn for a stronger United Nations. Yours just left us ... cold.

However, I think there is some hope for you-this book you've written can be used as a teaching aid in class. I'd like to distribute chapters of it, and then we will, as a group, analyze them, then go in and remove offending bits and replace them with what we unanimously agree are creative solutions. Only then can your characters crackle with life, and only then will readers feel they've visited a new place, met new people, joined their quest!

I don't think I'd try to publish this, Roger. You'd only be setting yourself up for disappointment. I've written several books, one of which was published, so I think I have some authority on this subject. My book of collected short stories,
Mama's Cranberries
was published by To Catch a Dream Press and won the 2004 Eileen Braithwaite Memorial Trust Prize for Fiction Dealing with Equality.

I am a fan of the arts, Roger-I love art and culture and music-and don't we all? It gives life colour and meaning. We
writers-I feel I can speak to you man to man here-inhabit a giving, loving, feedback-filled community rife with generosity and selfless bonhomie. When something good happens to one writer,
all
writers read about it and rejoice! Take
that,
TV! Take
that,
cinema! Take
that,
Internet! We writers will never go away! We are strong!

Now, I feel I have to ask you why you're not contributing to the coffee jar. It may be just a few quarters, but they all add up, and I don't feel it's my responsibility to subsidize my class's "habit." Please, at the next class, remember
to
pony up your share of the funds.

You did finish a book, Roger. I'll give you that.
If
you like (and I don't think this is stepping out of any boundaries here), I can supply you with private editing at a rate of $40 per hour, which is the going fee for editors with my credentials. There would also have to be a "rereading fee" for me to once again go through your novel, but that, again, is standard practice.

See you at next Wednesday's class,

Ed Matheson, B.A.

Creative Writing Instructor and winner of the
2004
Eileen Braithwaite Memorial Trust Prize for Fiction Dealing with Equality

www.edmatheson.com

Douglas Coupland
was born on a NATO base in Germany in 1961. He is the author of the number-one international bestseller
JPod,
soon to be a TV series, and eight earlier novels, including
Eleanor Rigby, Hey Nostradamus!, All Families Are Psychotic,
and
Generation
X. His books have been translated into 35 languages and published in most countries around the world. He is also a visual artist and sculptor, furniture designer and screenwriter, as well as the author of
Souvenir of Canada,
its sequel
Souvenir of Canada
2, and
Terry,
the story of Terry Fox. He lives and works in Vancouver.