Generation A

by Douglas Coupland

  “Julien, I think you should go back to the Sorbonne. I spoke with the registrar two weeks ago. The university has given you a leave of absence, which was kind considering you apparently haven’t attended classes in months.”

  Caught.

  “Would you care to tell me why?”

  “I got sucked into the Warcraft world and couldn’t leave.”

  “The next semester starts in three weeks—that’s when you’re going to Paris.”

  My grandmother was watching TV in the background; it showed images of Sam’s return to New Zealand. She was dressed more provocatively than I might have expected.

  I had no laptop in Geneva, and no hand unit. I wanted to use my father’s machine, but he was intently visiting Martian space mission discussion sites, specifically a site touting one-way “colonizing” flights. I asked him, “They can’t be serious—sending an astronaut to Mars, knowing that he’ll never come back? That’s a suicide mission.”

  “No, it’s colonization.”

  “No, it’s a suicide mission.”

  “They’ll wait there for the next colonist to arrive so they can get a civilization going.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I do.”

  So I went out for a walk on Geneva’s clean streets, which made me feel like the planet still had money. I saw a woman in heels and an apron out hand-pollinating a flowering grapevine; a military jet flew over us; I couldn’t remember what season it was. A trio of meth-heads slithered past a newsstand and stopped to look at me like I was a billboard advertising something too expensive to buy. In the old days they’d have been heroin addicts, but poppies require bees.

  My life was no longer my own. I was outside myself looking in, and it was intolerable. I had to connect with Zack and Sam and Diana and Harj. That was clear to me.

  The next morning my father said he didn’t want to give the impression that he didn’t believe in the future just because he wanted to send colonists on one-way missions to Mars. “Julien, I haven’t given up hope for Earth.”

  My father decided to prove this by taking me on a field trip to his workplace, CERN. I’m not a media whore like Zack, but I hoped to get a bit of attention there—but all I got were highly intelligent people staring at me as though X-raying my DNA, wondering if I contained magical bee-attracting particles. I’d gone from never having met a scientist in my life to meeting nothing but scientists. Fortunately (or unfortunately), my visit went horribly wrong (or right), and the net result was my being shipped to Canada.

  Here’s what happened: we were at the Compact Muon Solenoid facility, where my father had two friends who worked in a big, ugly underground chamber that looked like the jumbo insides of an air conditioner and went on for twenty-five kilometres. One might wonder what a Compact Muon Solenoid is. I did. It’s a 12,500-ton digital camera with 100 million pixels that takes 3-D pictures of Large Hadron Collider collisions 40 million times per second. Want more?

  There were twenty people with me in the group—a few scientists, my father and a polytechnic school group from Marseilles. The adults were arguing about whether we were technically in France or Switzerland, while the students were discussing Higgs Boson particles and their stamp collections and staring at me like I was a rare animal. I needed to find a pissoir in the worst way, so I ducked down a steel rampway and into a promising-looking hallway in pursuit of relief. I was wearing a hard hat and a lab coat and fit right in. Suddenly there was an explosion so loud that I was deaf for a few seconds afterwards. The blast blew some signage off the concrete walls beside me, and there was smoke that smelled like no smoke I’d ever smelled before. Alarms were going off everywhere. I ran back the way I’d come to find an automatic security door bolted down in front of me like in a James Bond villain’s alpine hideaway. And that was when I realized I’d pissed my pants.

  Have you ever pissed your pants in public? It’s hard to imagine anything more humiliating. Not only does it look bad, but you also smell of piss. People aren’t supposed to smell of piss. It is wrong.

  I didn’t want anyone to see the blossoming piss on my jeans, so I ran away from the explosion and into a corridor that seemed more janitorial than scientific. At least the air was cool and clean. I walked for a few hundred metres, until I came to a door that led into a classroom of some sort, no windows—it was deep underground—just chairs, a lectern, a screen and a telephone that didn’t work. I tried opening the door on the other side of the room, but it was locked down. Fuck. So I tried going back into the janitorial hall; the door was locked behind me.

  By this point my pants were getting cold and clammy. The ventilators had been turned off to prevent toxic fumes from spreading within the facility, and I smelled rank.

  I heard a smaller boom from somewhere in the building, and then the lights flickered. I think most people might freak in such a situation—it was not unlike being buried alive. I simply lay down on the floor and contemplated the irony of yet again being trapped in a boring room.

  I had an ancient PlayStation Portable that I’d found where I’d left it in my father’s glove compartment years back, and I played Metal Gear Acid for an hour or so, then had a quick nap, from which I was woken by chilly, wet pants.

  The wall phone was dead. I went to the door and began hammering on it and calling out for help. The door was thick, and on the other side my efforts must have sounded about as forceful as a kitten frolicking with a piece of dangled yarn.

  I took a sheet from a calendar on the wall to see if I could slip a message beneath the door. No way. I had to laugh at my plight—I was basically back in the neutrality chamber!

  How long was I there? Two days. No food or water. I felt like one of those New Orleans senior citizens trapped in their attics by Katrina, waiting for the rescue boat.

  God, I was thirsty! Forget hunger; thirst is what obsesses you past hour twelve. When the door was finally blasted open by a crew of Swiss police, I was deliriously happy to see them, but they weren’t so happy to see me. They handcuffed me and put a black Tyvek sack over my head and told me to sit on what felt like an electric golf cart. Of course I was shouting out things like, “What the fuck are you morons doing?” but they did not respond. Even my genuinely desperate pleas for water were ignored.

  We drove in the electric golf cart for maybe half an hour. When we stopped, some Geneva police, in their grotesque Swiss canton patois, quacked about getting me upstairs. We took an elevator up, and I was taken off the golf cart and seated in a room, dizzy from all the motion.

  Then I heard a familiar voice say, “Remove the sack, please,” at which point I passed out.

  DIANA

  You can guess what happened. Out of curiosity I opened that box of Solon. I popped open a blister-packed pill, but I hadn’t even put it close to my mouth when, blooey, I was lying on the floor, choking on my own tongue. The only reason I’m alive now is because two greasy-haired juvies had broken into the back storeroom, pursuing Oxy. They heard me gagging, dialled 911, put the phone up to my mouth and then fled with their drugs. And good for them! I like it when people accomplish their goals, large or small. Unfortunately, they ate some of their loot and were found strung out in the Lakeshore Drive A&W and are now wearing orange jumpsuits and clearing brush beneath those new power lines the Chinese government just bought up near Hudson Bay.

  So then, fuck me ragged, I’d spent a month in a pleasant but boring medical room, only to end up inside another boring medical room within the day. But I much preferred being in a real-world room, and logos made me feel like the universe was back to normal. Some guy walked down the hall in a Tab T-shirt and I felt almost giddy.

  I’m told I’m lucky to be alive, but what I remember most about my hospital stay were two visits by the most annoying people in my world: my sister, Amber, and that putz of a pastor, Erik.

  Amber came first. “So, are you enjoying your fifteen minutes of fame?” Right out of the gate she had to take me down a peg.

  “Wel
l, look at this—it’s good old douche bag. Hi Amber, I’m fine, thanks, and fame is really incredible; you ought to try it some time.”

  “No need to be a smarty-pants. I’m just glad they got you here in time.”

  “You should have seen the medic. He was so cute that I ovulated on the spot.”

  “Eeyooo. That didn’t sound like Tourette’s.”

  “Sometimes I can be risqué, you know.”

  “So how are you, Diana?”

  “I have no fucking idea. Honestly. I got stung, they put me in a very nice cage for a month—”

  “Where? Here in town?”

  “No. The Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health in Winnipeg. Anyway, I came home but my house wasn’t there—so I went to the office because I could still get in.”

  “You could have phoned me.”

  “You live two hours away.”

  We lapsed into silence. Time with Amber is always punctuated by pursed little silences. She sees herself as the family intellectual and listens to NPR. Her favourite topics are things like Cicero, Flaubert, New Yorker cartoons involving museums and maybe poets from the Indian subcontinent. Amber is kind of like that mineral kimberlite: there are diamonds inside her, but man, is it a lot of work to find them.

  She asked, “Have you called Mama and Papa yet?”

  “Their number’s disconnected.” Amber and I agree about our parents, who joined some wacko cult that scares the pants off us. We just don’t like being near them, period.

  When she departed, I deeply enjoyed her absence, though I was left to weigh options for my future. No home, no job, nobody close to me . . . and then I heard a knock on the door and saw a bouquet of carnations being carried in by . . . Erik.

  My first words were, “How the fuck did you get in here?”

  “The woman out front knows you’re a part of my flock.”

  “Like fuck I am.”

  “Really, Diana, can’t you tone down the ‘fucks’ even a little?”

  “No, you sanctimonious, hypocritical weasel dick.”

  “Oh Diana,” he said with a star-fucker’s eyes. “You truly are a challenge sent to us by God.”

  “Erik, just stop it.”

  “Your spark is still alive.”

  “What do you want from me, Erik?”

  “To minister to your soul.”

  “Ugh. You make me want to take a brain shower. You excommunicated me a month ago. Remember that?”

  “We were all a bit hot-tempered that day.”

  “You just want publicity for your church.”

  “You make that sound like a bad thing. I was there—so was Eva—when you were stung. We’re a part of this, too. If we hadn’t called the authorities, your crazy neighbour would have killed you.”

  “I was quite safe in my storm cellar, thank you.” A penny dropped. “You’ve been milking this whole bee thing all month, haven’t you?”

  His face confirmed this. Later I googled to find that Erik had been on every news venue possible, from Google News right down to the free sheet they hand out on the North Bay bus system.

  “‘Milking’ makes it sound coarse. But the sting was beneficial for us, yes.”

  “Jesus, Erik. I’ve left. It’s over. The only reason I joined was to get into your pants, and right now I have no idea why I would have wanted that.”

  “Diana, have you ever heard of the Last Generation?”

  “What?”

  “The Last Generation.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “I’m not. Your being stung is just one more indicator that the Last Generation is among us and we are it.”

  “I may indeed think that we’re the last generation, but it’s not because of your religious mumbo-jumbo.”

  “But you agree with me.”

  “Erik, get out of here.”

  “Your sting was the beginning of sorrows. It is one of the events that will lead to the end of the world.”

  “Nurse!”

  “We are like the generation before Noah built the ark. The people were caught up in the cares of their own lives and were not paying attention to Noah’s warning. The same is true now.”

  “Stop being so high on yourself.”

  Two orderlies removed Erik, and I asked that there be no more visitors. I was still too weak to do much, but I went online to explore the hubbub surrounding me. Instead, I quickly became more interested in the other four people who got stung. I saw how each of us led lives that were deeply isolated in their own ways. I think the modern world isolates people—that’s its job—but there are so many different ways to be lost and there was a unity to the texture of all our lives when the stingers went in. It was a moment when relationships with the planet were in full play: Zack and his satellites; Sam and her Earth sandwich; Julien and his World of Warcraft; me with the air rights above Mitch’s property; and Harj and his call with the New York Times—a coincidence? I didn’t think so. And we all know how this ended, so I’m not trying to sprinkle some pixie dust on it after the fact. We were damaged goods—we are damaged goods—but we were damaged in a distinct way that happened to overlap with our mutant protein-making genes. If we were albino, we’d have known from the day we were born, but instead it took bees to point out our difference. Go figure.

  HARJ

  Oh, to live the life of a Craig—a life of the gods! A heady blender drink of beer, casual American style and questionable morality.

  The Craigs and the female Craigs took me to their bosom and made me one of their tribe. The girls, they were in love with me in a way I’d never imagined possible. My intimate knowledge of both apparel and the cleverness of modern retail integration were ambrosia to these lovely, ambitious things, especially young Andrea. We stood in one of the hundreds of tastefully appointed rooms at the A&F headquarters as she introduced me to her co-workers.

  “Guys, meet Apu here. Isn’t he just the cutest thing!” She turned to me. “You don’t look like a terrorist to me at all, Apu. Wait—” Her brows furrowed. “You’re not in a sleeper cell, are you?”

  “No. I do not approve of violence.”

  “Good. Let’s kit you out in some pre-distressed waffle-knit Henley shirts. Apu, we’re going to take you from Third World to world class. What’s your favourite colour?”

  “Shoji.”

  “Shoji?” A dreamy look came into Andrea’s eyes.

  “Yes. Sort of an off-white, with hints of the exotic Far East.”

  I began a medley of banter from the Trincomalee call centre. “Would you like that Italian merino wool cable-knit sweater chunky? For only twenty dollars more, the same sweater is available in cashmere. Perhaps a Prince of Wales vest in Duncan tartan with genuine antler buttons? Buy one now and you’ll receive a complimentary three-pack of earth-toned socks made of free-range Chilean fleece.”

  Someone at the back of the room said, “Apu, tell us about your bee sting.”

  So I told them about the bee sting, and of my flight to America and my month below ground in the neutrality chamber—and then of my voyage to the fabulous Abercrom bie & Fitch corporate campus.

  When I was done, Craig Number One came up to me and said, “Apu, my man, you are staying at our place from now on. We’ve got an extra room, and you can stay as long as you want.”

  New Albany is a magical place filled with massive estate homes built within mighty neighbourhoods with imperial-sounding names like Lambton Park, Clivdon, Fenway and Lansdowne.

  “Andrea, the names of these neighbourhoods—they sound so exotic, as if they were high-end alpaca coats selling between the price points of $1,500 and $2,000.”

  “Apu, you are so adorable. I could eat you up right here and now.”

  I thought, My, this young lady travels certainly quickly, from zero to frisky, and I’ve never even met her parents.

  Under a big, warm sun, we drove to an area called Market Square. It boasted a Starbucks, the Chocolate Octopus candy company and the Rusty Bucket C
orner Tavern. “That’s my hangout,” said Andrea. “We have a bunch of famous people who live here in New Albany, too.”

  “Who might they be?”

  “Former race driver and racing team owner Bobby Rahal, as well as Leslie Wexner, the founder of Limited Brands. I’m hungry.”

  “Oh my.”

  “Cool, huh?”

  “You are very lucky to have such prosperity and access to so much gasoline.”

  “We kind of run the planet here. It comes with the turf. Let’s eat. I’m starving.”

  We went into a restaurant and Andrea ordered no-fat, no-carb nachos for herself, while I ordered a vegetarian platter. She bought me a beer that was both brewed and bottled in Mexico. I thanked her but kept my mouth shut—why on earth would someone choose a beverage made in Mexico? When it arrived, it sat on the table and I stared at it as though it were from the Dark Ages. People want America, not Mexico. Well, maybe at least the idea of America . . . America before the year 2000.

  Andrea seemed to know everybody in the restaurant and was talking with people from all sides. Me? I was drunk on the knowledge that a girl as beautiful as Andrea chose to sit with me in a beautiful restaurant. Then my picture appeared on the TV above the bar area. No one there could have imagined that the gentleman in the photo was me, as the gentleman in that photo was standing in Trincomalee and sweating heavily while wearing a wife-beater shirt covered in duck’s blood after having helped a neighbour press the bird for a delicious religious feast. Even I did not believe I was me at that point. And I didn’t need a beer to get drunk. Life had done that for me. I had (to use a term favoured by the Craigs) “peaked.”

  My afternoon with Andrea was sadly cut short by her appointments for a bikini wax and a chakra alignment. She dropped me off at the Craigs’ place—a miniature White House with columns and a lawn of uniform green, free of any weedy blemishes. I bent down to touch it with my hands—it was soft, like cold fur.

  At the front door stood Craig Number One, wearing madras Bermuda shorts (Chesapeake blue with Cherokee red and Sacramento yellow bands) and an XXL acid-washed T-shirt bearing the name of a fictitious football team. Apu! My man! Good timing! The party’s just beginning! Let me show you your new room!