Guest Essay by Douglas Coupland
(unauthorized excerpt from Shampoo Planet)

     And so I am on the floor.
     And Anna-Louise is asleep on the bed above me, the slender, now-adult face scrunched into a corduroy pillow. And she looks so young and so old, dreaming as she no doubt is of calculus and dead friends and trees and flowers and of her escape one day, like the escape I once made, to the big city- a place where many a man will have no trouble finding her just as loveable as I find her now.
     Yes, I am on the floor. This is the New Order. And this is fine. I can't sleep anyway, while I listen to Anna-Louise, a heavy sleeper, dream her dreams in her mind's place- a small room stuffed, no choking with flowers- dreaming flower dreams with all her flowers. "What," I whisper to the elbow sticking out from the mattress above my head, "are you dreaming of, Anna-Louise?"
     Lying here on the floor, sipping a cola, looking at the ceiling, I make a tally in my head, I make a sum- credits and debits- a balance of accounts. What secrets have I traded these past months for other secrets? What sweetness for corruption? Light for Darkness? Lies for truths? Curiosities satisfied in return for anxieties? Overall there appears to be a net loss. I feel there has yet to be one more major revelation coming my way, because I think there's some insight I've plain just missed. Or is this sense of overlooking simply what happens as one gets older? I finish my cola.
     I lay my head down and now I feel drowsy. Maybe in a few months Anna-Louise will come to Seattle to live with me and she can sleep on my floor and we can share a place for a while, and make new friends, and have meals in good restaurants with these new friends and then we will drift apart and lose contact over the years- forget to write Christmas cards or phone. And then our memories will decay, like the heavier transuranium elements, and we will find ourselves divorced from other people, and living in big houses with interlocking pavement stones, room deodorizers, and genuine ten-karat gold faucets. And then we will get even older and our memories will fail almost completely. But no matter what happens- we will each be the last people we forget in each others memories. Because we were each the first to be there.
       I am awakened, strangely, by warm water dribbling underneath my feet. I open my eyes and there is the cool clear light of the moon illuminating the floorscape. Above my head I hear a flutter, and while I am groggy, I see shapes moving in front of me. The geometry of the room is wrong, but it takes me a second to figure out exactly how. A spaniel puppy licks my face.
   What was once a ceiling has become a bridge. The floor above Anna-Louise and me has collapsed from the weight of the carp pond's water and has fallen into the bedroom below- become a gangplank for the many animals of Mr. Lancaster's menagerie.

     The room comes into focus. Budgies and canaries are sweeping into the bedroom's air. Kittens prance and chase the carp which writhe and twitch and flop on the floor by my feet. The lovely mooch of a spaniel puppy licks the cola dribbles at the bottom of the glass at my side and shudders with pleasure as I scratch its head. Animals, one by one by one, are adorning all surfaces of the room, and more of them keep flowing downward into our lives, some pulled by gravity, some by curiosity, skittering down on the slightly springy springboard of the collapsed ceiling.
     Anna-Louise's stereo system is completely wrecked, drenched in water and now home to a trio of pink birds. Not that this matters. All of the technology in the room is wrecked, but it seems beside the point.

     Looking up and above, I focus and see Albert Lancaster, his legs dangling from over the edge of the ceiling. Further behind these legs is his shadowy self. He's sipping a beer and looking at us in the changes in our world below him. I take the glass beside me, clean from the lick of the dog, and raise it up in a toast to Albert. "Skaal," I say.
     "Mphhh . . . What did you say, Tyler?" Anna-Louise mumbles on the bed above me. I stand up, and a tame blue bird lands on my shoulder and tries to nibble on my earlobe. I gently shake Anna-Louise fully awake. "Anna-Louise, wake up," I say. "Wake up- the world is alive."