Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  That was a new experience for me—but encountering things I’d never seen or done was far more common then. Almost two decades of stagnation ever since. These two girls in the back of the rental would scarce believe that U.S. feeds ever came into Canada, or that we ever made a distinction between sub-human Olympians and the tax-paying, lawn-mowing Americans of legend. Because nowadays they’re all Olympians.

  UNCLE CHAD

  I’m dreaming I’m darning Min’s turquoise sweater until Cuban says, “You asked what my interview subjects knew about all this.”

  I rub my eyes.

  “Well,” he drones, “I put my abstract in the seat pocket there. The very same draft I sent the old girl. Just look that first page over and see whether it’s clear as mud.”

  He shifts his white-haired knuckles on the steering wheel then glances into the rearview mirror at the girls, but they’re too busy texting to pay him any attention.

  “All right back there?” I ask.

  Carla glances outside long enough to make sure we aren’t about to crash but Yukon just keeps typing, her copper hair in her eyes. I’ll take the memory sticks out of the phones when we get back. This is the girl who stapled finger paintings to the condo fence; it wouldn’t be like her to sit on material. Cuban taps the read-out folder with his square yellow fingernail.

  “Might give you a fresh perspective,” he says.

  Undisclosed ID (Cuban Bryant, MA, PhD)

  Chrétien University. Public © 2055 pending review.

  To Fade Away?

  Foreword.

  Personal fame, as humanity had come to understand it, was outlawed in 2038 by 89 per cent of Earth’s governments after dominant figures in the international community realized that no one was paying attention to the world going to hell—the ice caps melted to the size of tennis shoes, a single wildfire raged from Alberta to Ecuador, the world’s precious stock of frozen vegetables tainted with Ebola—and that the world was going to hell because no one was paying attention. Indeed, in that year citizens of more-stable nations increased their view time on celebrity-gossip feeds to a daily average of nineteen hours, while the United States, a markedly less-stable nation, was in the throes of what could only be described as societal meltdown. The only functioning sector of the U.S. economy, in fact, remains the celebrity feeds themselves, with the most popular streaming-homicide addresses apparently commanding $1 billion monthly for marginal advertising space, though following the collapse of the U.S.banking system it remains to be seen who could afford such fees or what form payment might take. Individual U.S. communities now secure their own fuel and food supplies, reportedly by the most violent means possible.

  Dry as toast in August. Just because he was Min’s godfather doesn’t mean he’s going to smell like flowers or even be interesting, I guess—anyway, if the government thought enough of him to have put him on a flight from Ottawa, I shouldn’t drop anchor on him. That’s what I told my office, anyway, and they signed me off for the week—I mean, would the average claimant in our pen have any notion that they’ve waited a year plus a week for their immigration interview? Cuban paid for the car, secured travel licences, and the girls should see the country sometime. “The country.” I showed them Min’s map where the Hudson Sea is still Hudson Bay and Calgary is nowhere near the coast and their eyes just about popped, then Yukon went straight to her room to commemorate the experience of having her eyes just about pop. Which is a worry. What’s she going to do with all that writing?

  “Feed says forty-five degrees outside,” Cuban says. “Is that normal?”

  Apparently he wants us to keep him company, and I suppose it could get dangerous for an old guy heading east through British Columbia. Though I can’t imagine how.

  “For March? That’s probably average,” I say. “How is it in Ottawa?”

  “Cooler than it used to be. Wind off the lakes.”

  The U.S. government was the only non-autocracy in ’38 to refrain from enacting celebrity-secrecy legislation in any form, thus allowing its citizens’ violent glory-hound agendas to continue to chart the national course. Better To Burn Out Than It Is To Rust became the “Olympians’ ” motto—inscribed on the smattering of currency issued in the past seventeen years, and succinctly (though no doubt accidentally) describing humanity’s dilemma to this day, caught as we are between high surface temperatures and even higher water.

  “I meant to ask if you’ve got family out there,” I say. To keep myself awake.

  The road’s shoulders go out three or four metres into the pine trees to make room for the compost trucks. Honestly, I haven’t been on Highway 3 since the ’30’s.

  “No, no,” Cuban says quietly. “Not since the vegetables. And thankfully we never had children in the first place.”

  “What, the Ebola?”

  “My grown niece was pregnant at the time. That was the worst of it.”

  He keeps one hand on the wheel, plucks a wiry hair from his neck and rolls it between thumb and forefinger.

  Accordingly, in ’38 the Canadian federal government outlawed any and all communication with the United States, began construction on a five-metre-high barrier along the two nations’ 6400-kilometre primary border—a floating barrier where it bisects the Great Lake—and passed its stringent Universal Privacy Act. Canadian actors and musicians were purportedly shut up in safe houses between performances to remove them from public scrutiny, but in practice these individuals were exiled to isolated communities. (Of course, thanks to rising seas—Hudson Bay’s eradication of both Manitoba and Saskatchewan being the most glaring example—what community does not seem isolated these days?) The enactment of the UPA fell short of full-blown Stalinism only in that the artists and intellectuals of our era were not, to the best of our knowledge, murdered outright. In ’42 any creator deemed able to contribute anonymously to the “cultural dialogue” (which in my opinion is simply the commitment to not say anything) was issued a Public ID and allowed to produce some form of work for distribution via federally subsidized broadcast feeds. Any existing cultural material deemed “distractingly popular” was eradicated via digital virus, though in the case of artists too well entrenched in the public consciousness—Stan Lee, Eli Roth, Franklin W. Dixon—the eight provinces’ Ministries of Education now insist these individuals were merely figureheads for bland corporations.

  Lord, couldn’t he have been a professor of poker strategy?

  YUKON

  Chad said an ethnomusicologist studies what old music means to a country and its people and I said LIKE ROCKSTARS? and Uncle Chad said EXACTLY and touched the point of his nose. He can remember when everyone knew who the famous people WERE. Dear reader that would have winced. It is better to be secret. For example I SOMETIMES THINK ZRBZTZ21 IS A MAN WITH A BEARD and sometimes I imagine it is a seven-year-old girl sitting in her room talking to the software but I do not care who it is. I just like every one of their songs. Plus it is dangerous if it is not secret because then all the work for the world would be undone for example gpm36c spent 21 hours every day reading about MS CHILDISH O TOOLE then after everything went secret gpm36c invented the OZONE SPIT VALVE. In school we learned Vv3bV was just as distracted as gpm36c before Vv3bV ever thought to sink congeal-pods under the Arctic Circle

  I actually typed SOMETIMES I THINK IT IS A MAN WITH A BEAR before, dear reader, so I went back and fixed it but I ought to have left it because that is pants, that is so good

  UNCLE CHAD

  We’re a hundred clicks from Princeton but hydrogen is down to 18 per cent according to the windshield feed. Which wouldn’t be such a cramp if Cuban’s breath wasn’t a mash-up of herring and garburator.

  None of the far-flung politicians who enacted similar legislation in ’38 have been seen publicly since, and though text-only candidates have purportedly been running and winning in elections for the past seventeen years, the public has no way of knowing whether Cameron Miller, for example, hasn’t remained as Canadian prime minister to this day
.

  “Specifically,” I say, “Miller’s brain in a jar.”

  “Some people will tell you that,” says Cuban, eyes glued to the road.

  All this is public knowledge, of course, but I feel it necessary to establish a rhetorical framework in which to construct the arguments that follow, more often than not from the perspective of the artists themselves. I will recommend changes to federal policy that will never be implemented. I will ask what we’ve lost of our souls.

  “But more likely,” I grin, “it’s his cat that’s been running the show. A brain in a jar wouldn’t have lost its mind over those über-protectionist tariffs.”

  “Maybe you ought to drive,” he says.

  He pulls onto the shoulder and I get rattled by the gravel thunking against the chassis. I’m used to the boat. Over my shoulder the girls straighten up in case they have to dive out the windows.

  “Now how will the university get it published?” I whisper. “I understood the Equanimity people didn’t want any policy out in the—”

  “Oh, speak up, Chad! It’s a rental car—they’d hear if we played charades!” Cuban jerks up the anchor brake. “Even if the book never comes out, at least someone at Equanimity will read it.” His eyebrows climb his forehead, to increase his earnestness. “Maybe the interview this afternoon will make them think. I want to see a show again, you understand, even if it’s in a parking lot and the singer’s wearing a blindfold and a ball-gag— ‘Here at last is a new experience,’ my brain wants to say, ‘the show’s about to begin.’”

  I give him my best-of-luck-with-that-but-it’s-out-of-my-hands look I give every immigration claimant and put his folder in the pocket.

  “It does give a fresh perspective,” I say. “At our office, I know, they saw it as nothing but a refugee problem. All those horrors down south might not have been happening.”

  “That’s the wonder of history,” he says, and his seatbelt flies up like a seagull. “Everyone sees it differently.”

  YUKON

  There are trees growing on the bank right up through the dead ones. Instead of the car I wish we were in the boat where you can feel the spray on your hands or you can lie in the bottom with the enamel on your cheek and pretend every bump and whoosh is the sperm whales underneath us talking. Uncle Chad says his family used to DRIVE A VAN from North Vancouver to Hope or from North Vancouver into Washington State—that would wince so much! Do they even have roads? I saw an old map where that highway was called I-5. I coo that. I will submit I-5 for my PUBLIC NAME because it is so pants. Hit single from I-5 streaming 24 hours continuous

  Oldy Oldster should not have had that hamburger because he keeps foiling and he pretends he has not foiled but I know a foil when I smell one who

  Oops, Carla was supposed to read that. Forgot to get out of notes. I will work harder and that way we will get there eventually.

  Oldster wants to talk to all of the ROCKSTARS that are still alive because their voices might still carry weight. And I like that phrase but how can it be true since no one even knows or cares if the ROCKSTARS are alive or dead? And what could be more useless than dead people?

  “Quick-sotic,” Oldy Oldster says. Out of the blue. KIKS-OTIC? I will check the spelling before I send this, tho Chad said besides Carla there is no one to send to. Thinking about ROCKSTARS makes everything wince. I ask out loud who the ROCKSTAR in Summerland is just in case it is a3b03392 and his bear

  Oldster says, “Before publics her name was Leslie Feist. She is eighty-one years old.”

  They said at school that anyone who does not drown trapped in their attic in a wash of foam can live to be 110. Carla asks out loud “Is that like a feisty serve in ping-pong?” and Dr. Cuban says “Why, yes” and tug-jobs a white hair out of the side of his neck.

  I ask, “What is her public name now?”

  Oldy Oldster laughs like that was loathing and says, “Well girls we cannot know both names at any one time can we?” He is a wad

  DOES YOUR PHONE SAY THIS? writes Carla

  She holds hers up and there is a whirly design in the middle. Mine shows that too, and then

  SUBSCRIBERS IN RANGE: 195 016. NETWORK PRESENTLY: UNMONITORED

  UNCLE CHAD

  “A kid in school asked a funny thing,” Yukon says from the back.

  “What’d he ask?” I get a better grip on the steering wheel than just my thumbs.

  “He asked what ‘unmonitored’ meant.”

  “‘Unmonitored’?” Cuban winks beside me. “Haven’t heard that in fifteen years!”

  I manage to find Yukon’s eyes in the rearview mirror—the zipper-cut has its charms, but being able to see where you’re going can’t be one of them.

  “It used to mean,” I say, “that whatever you said on your phone, the government couldn’t hear that network. Equanimity arrested people for being unmonitored. But your phones don’t even have transmitters anymore, in the meantime everything’s gone satellite, and implants are even easier to monitor, so . . . yeah.”

  Yukon goes back to playing with my late wife’s phone and I remember the texts I sent Min describing my elaborate plans to go down on her—were those archived? Those elaborate plans may have been my last words on Earth to her. Nothing can ever happen so suddenly again. And what’ll be the absolute last words I say? “Implants are easier to monitor”? That’d be one for the books.

  “But then how are we reaching each other right now?” asks Carla.

  “That’s the walkie-talkie function,” I say.

  “What do they teach in school?” Cuban asks, in a tone Yukon is going to eat with a fork and spoon.

  “Pod dynamics of sperm whales,” says Carla.

  “Oh, yeah?” I say, like the girls are still small and describing the underwater hotel they’re going to build us.

  “For one thing,” says Yukon, “every time one whale sends out sonar to find out whether a giant squid or a coral reef is ahead of them, the sonar bounces back for the whole pod to hear and everybody knows what everybody else knows so it’s like they’re reading each other’s minds and don’t even think as individuals. They’re just the group.”

  “Like us!” says Carla.

  “And what do they teach regarding the Universal Privacy Act?” asks Cuban.

  I turn the music up.

  “J’espère voir un ours,” says Carla.

  “What was that?” asks Cuban.

  “She means we go to Chinese school,” says Yukon. “We only learn about China.”

  Maybe this is just what kids are like, but it seems to me the more the world’s difficulties have found solutions the more they talk gibberish. In our country, anyway. I don’t know what it’s like in places like Japan where a half-dozen first-person-streaming celebrities apparently still captivate the population’s waking hours—and sleeping hours too, Jesus Almighty, because what else do they have to dream about?—and everything’s so gone-to-shit you can see the carbon smear from space. The Pacific isn’t wide enough. Just like we’re planting mines along the New Brunswick border—no joke, the things I hear in the bathroom at work could give a person vertigo. But that’s Canada; we may not be famous but they’re still battering down the door to get in.

  “What have you learned about the wall?” Cuban asks over his shoulder. The brown between his teeth must be another hit with the girls.

  “Goes right across Canada,” says Yukon.

  “Cause Olympians are so crazy,” says Carla.

  Which is such a vast understatement I push a laugh out my nose—they were too young, thank God. It had looked like Hitler and the Khmer Rouge competing for the lead-off slot on Entertainment Tonight. The last glimpse of the U.S. I ever had was of their final stubborn fingernail of government, only nine years ago when the girls had been—what, five and six? During lunch hour at work I watched the Classified Federal: the gang-rapes, initially, of Oregon Vice-Auditor Burton and his family via live feed from the Gubernatorial Mansion, and as the Olympians took their turns they pull
ed their spangled wigs off to shout their feed addresses and hometowns into the camera. Not until they beheaded the wife did the Classified Federal go dead, never to return, and to explain my expression as I came through the door I had to tell Yukon and Carla that I’d seen a porpoise get hit by a ferry on the way home, and they really did sympathize because that was honestly the worst thing they could imagine.

  “Don’t suppose they’ve even heard of Cameron Miller.”

  “That’s out of the curriculum,” I say as a westbound composter flies past, tubes flapping. “It’s all concepts now with the individuals taken out. Kids were so starved for celebrity they dressed up as John A. Macdonald and got drunk at their desks.”

  “What school did you go to?” Yukon shouts.

  “Me?” asks Cuban. “At your age I was already at Upper Canada Military College. There was such a thing as peacekeeping abroad in those days—here, what’s this we’re listening to? That sitar sample’s remarkable. Look, goosebumps!”

  “I heard it streaming in line at the food dump,” I say. “They’re called MF33p.”

  “Was that from the Prince song ‘Housequake’?”

  “What songs did Feisty sing?” asks Carla.

  “Hundreds!” says Cuban. “Her last public single was called ‘This Is Not the End My Friend.’ Had a lovely moog organ.”

  “Is she the one with the singing cats?” asks Yukon.

  “You’re thinking of Lionel Richie,” I tell them.

  YUKON

  CHAD SHOULD LOSE THE EYEBROWS, writes Carla, REALLY

  These things are so pants. Hers shakes when the message comes in and mine plays the song from that pelican show

  HE LOOKS LOATHING SINCE HE SHAVED OUT THE MIDDLE OF HIS BEARD

  She types WE ARE ONLY FIFTY KMS FROM THE OLYMPIAN BORDER RIGHT NOW THAT WINCES. THEY ARE NOT EVEN PEOPLE ANYMORE THEY

  I type ZRBZTZ21 IS A MAN WITH A BEAR.

  DR. CUBAN

  I wake up coughing and look down at the Okanagan Valley. Despite what I’ve heard I still expect the same desolation as anywhere, pipelines shining and a refrigerated town, but my hands go soft on the dash when I see this valley hasn’t been changed by the last thirty years—vineyards still on the bluffs, groves of olive between the houses. The old pines are gone, of course, but heat-resistant saplings cover the hills. In actual fertile fields beside the road, people in overalls pull weeds and children run alongside us, kicking up the dirt—nobody waves, of course, because if we’d ever been famous that would be a contravention of the UPA. The girls shade their eyes in the back of the car.