Generation A
Page 25
“We do.” We’d made multiple copies of the evening’s webcast stories, culminating with the unfinished story of Trevor that was still playing itself out, there on the island. And so, come dawn, the five of us walked into town with half a white bedsheet taped onto an ancient aluminum rod from a children’s playground. It rippled in the wind. If bullets had entered our bodies or if a noose had circled my neck from nowhere, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Our worries were quickly validated as we came up to the Esso station: two more dangling bodies—those of the two men from the jet crash, the Solon burners. This came as a surprise; we’d thought they’d be the ones orchestrating the hangings. We pantshittingly walked farther into town, but we didn’t see any people. There was nobody there to surrender to. Everybody was gone.
“What the . . . ?”
Julien said, “Maybe they’re in the old village.” Masset has two locations: the new Masset, in which we lived, and old Masset, an Indian reserve two miles up the road. We went home to fetch the pickup. Diana drove while Harj and I stood in the bed, holding up the white flag.
As we approached old Masset, we slowed to a crawl; we didn’t want to surprise anybody. But once there, all we found were a few barking dogs. No Haida.
We stopped in front of a burnt-down house with a knee-high necklace of sun-bleached grey whale vertebrae in its front yard. Diana said, “They’ve obviously all gone somewhere together, but where?”
We cursed.
“So where should we go now?” I asked. “Special forces are probably going to be here to wipe us out any moment.”
“Nobody’s going to take us out,” said Diana. “Everyone knows everything now. So they can’t kill us. We’re safe that way.”
“If you need to believe that, believe it. But I think we’re fucked.”
“Let’s go to the airstrip,” suggested Harj. “We can see the crash remains in full daylight.”
In the absence of a better idea, we drove to the airstrip. Again, no people; only the chilled remains of the previous evening’s crash, easier to see now, as all of the dead grass and brush surrounding it had burnt to stubble. Harj wandered over to the patch of debris holding the bodies and began to pray.
“Why?” I asked him. “I thought you didn’t believe in anything much.”
“I am not praying for the dead. I’m praying for myself, that I can make some sort of sense of what’s happening to us.”
Diana said, “I can agree with that.” She called to Julien and Sam. “Come here. We’re going to say a prayer for the Channel Three News team. Are you in?”
“Sure.”
And that’s how the five of us ended up having a two-minute silent prayer for the Channel Three News team.
Praying is funny. When you pray, you leave the day-to-day time stream and enter a quieter place that uses different clocks and values things that can’t be seen.
At the two-minute mark, we heard choppers arriving from the east. “Shit. Scram!” Diana yelled.
We could hear three or four choppers arriving at the airstrip and then hovering before they landed. We charged into the adjoining forest. Sounds from the outer world instantly muffled as plant life soaked up noises. We didn’t think we’d been spotted, but this didn’t stop us from charging farther into the maw, wading through moss up to our hips, climbing rotten hemlocks the size of freight containers, which crumbled like cookie dough under us. After maybe fifteen minutes we stopped and collected our breath and our wits. I asked if anybody knew where we were, and Julien, king of satellite map skills, knew exactly. “We’re close to the Sangan River. If it’s low tide, we can walk up it and into the Naikoon forest—we’re actually only fifteen minutes from the UNESCO bee’s nest.” So off we went to the nest. Why not? As with the airstrip, it was a destination in the absence of any other.
A lot of spooky shit was going through my head—mostly the thought of Solon’s makers lobotomizing me and hooking my body up to a respirator and feeding tube for the next five decades. This thought fuelled me onward. Fucking Solon. Fucking bees. Fucking century.
The tide was low but rising, and the river was the colour of bad Mexican whiskey. A school of oolichan darted within its flow, and birds in the trees made their noises. Diana became a self-appointed Little Bo Peep, in charge of herding us to the nest site, and she and I began having a stupid argument over what to do once we got there. Three, maybe four more choppers flew overhead. They could have been the government, come to inspect the crash site. They could have been Solon’s goons. They could have been . . . well, that’s what we were arguing over as we arrived at the nest to find several hundred Haida of all ages sitting wordlessly around the site of the vanished hive. To the side were dozens of open boxes of Solon. A ceremonial wooden bowl was being passed slowly around among them, each Haida taking a sip.
“They’re drinking the fucking Kool-Aid!”
Several of the Haida turned and shushed us.
Sam said, “We can’t let them take that shit. It’ll destroy them.”
Diana said, “It’s not our business.”
“But it . . .”
But it wasn’t our business. It was the Haida’s business, and we sat and watched them partake, the bowl and packages of Solon moving silently, first across the elders in the front row, then going backwards, one by one. By the time the third row was taking their pills, the people up front were standing up and walking away. They walked past the five of us, and their bland facial expressions were like those of people who are headed home, wondering how many emails they have in their inbox.
Within ten minutes all the Haida had drunk the Kool-Aid, and within twenty minutes they were all gone.
We walked to the circle of dirt and sat down. A helicopter flew directly overhead and then returned. It hovered over us, then landed in a bog beside the circle, but after what we’d just seen, we no longer cared. It felt as if something far larger than us had played itself out.
The blades came to a stop, and we wondered what might emerge—Navy SEALs brandishing AK-47s? A Channel Four News team? But instead it was an older woman. Sam said, “Louise?”
Louise looked at her and smiled. “Sam—you’re alright. Good.”
“Louise, what are you doing here?”
“Making sure you’re okay.”
We’d all stood up and come forward by then, but our body language told Louise we weren’t comfy in her presence. She said, “No, I’m not connected to Solon, and no, I’m not here to kill you or sedate you or capture you or anything else.”
Sam introduced her to each of us. We could see a few figures inside the helicopter, but they didn’t emerge.
Louise asked, “Where’s Serge?”
“Back at the house. We’ve made a prison cell for him.”
She looked quite shocked by this, but not in a bad way.
“Frontier justice,” I said. “That bastard fuelled the entire Indian tribe here with fucking Solon. They’re going to be toast now.”
“Wait—that’s all he did?”
“Huh? We thought that was more than enough to merit imprisonment. And you should know all of this. We’ve vlogged and blogged everything here since we arrived.”
“Actually, no, you haven’t. Serge had a scrambler set up. The outer world has no idea what’s been happening here.”
Motherfucker!
Louise continued, “Can I ask what it was he was doing with you people here?”
“Some kind of experiment—making us invent campfire stories with the goal of generating an antidote to Solon. And he was always going on about Finnegans Wake.”
“I see.”
“What—you mean there’s some kind of truth to that?”
“Well, possibly. Actually, yes.”
I said, “Louise, I think we’re missing something here.”
“I think you’re right.” Louise sucked in some breath and looked into the forest.
Sam said, “Please tell us, then. We’re in the dark.”
�
��You see, Sam, Serge didn’t want to invent a cure for Solon any more than he wanted to fly to the moon,” Louise said.
“So, then, what was he doing with us?”
“My dear, you haven’t figured it out yet, have you?”
“Figured what out, Louise?”
“Samantha, I don’t quite know how to tell you this, but Serge wanted the ultimate Solon hit. He wanted to eat your brains.”
HARJ
So many things begin and end with the sea, do they not? Sailors vanish. Boats sink. Jewels are thrown to its bottom. The bad woman drowns. Life crawls from its glinting waters and draws air into its lungs and joins the land forever.
Months later, the island had run out of auto fuel, so Julien and I decided to walk to a strange beach up the coast to fill the day. We started out early in the morning, as the sun was rising orange and cold, like someone who hates his job. I wondered what season it was, and then decided to never again ask myself that question.
We ended up standing by the ocean a few miles up Tow Hill Road, on a beach that had no sand or driftwood or shells, just a billion rocks, all of them different colours, all of them the size and shape of an egg. After walking through clots of sound-muffling firs, we reached Egg Beach, with its rhyming, crunching waves.
They had stopped making Solon by then, as our stories did, finally, reach the world—but there was no glory in it. None that we cared about, anyway. As our five personalities continued to merge, all we cared about was staying together, and so we did—on the island and away from humanity. You see, that’s our big secret: if you eat stuff made from our brains, you become one of us. We all become each other, one big superentity. Miss America wishes for world peace and so do we, except with us it might come true.
“It’s strange,” I said to Julien. “I don’t feel like I actually did anything to help. I feel perhaps fraudulent. Which is to say, here I am, a living cure, and I don’t know how that feels.”
He nodded.
Storms were washing up plastics of the north Pacific, mostly from Asia: flip-flops and whiskey and shampoo bottles; plastic helmets, children’s toys, fishing floats and disposable lighters.
Julien asked me, “Harj, what was the tsunami like—as it was happening? What was it like to be there during it? You’ve never actually told us.”
“Well, it was sort of like right here, right now, except that I was three storeys up when the water just rushed inland and never stopped. And there was no actual wave—it was as if that big vat of Zack’s brain matter sloshed inland about a kilometre and then ran out of force. It smelled like dirty salt, and I remember the fish drowning in the air, flopping about, and when I squinted they looked like coins, like treasure.”
The waves of Egg Beach crashed on the shore, keeping their distance.
I sat down on the stone eggs and thought of everything life had coughed up for me since the moment of my sting. Different sorts of waves that spouted forth . . .
. . . Winnebagos
. . . Mexican beer
. . . bodies hanging from lampposts
. . . helicopter rides
. . . casually elegant piqué-knit polo shirts.
The list is long, but I think it will soon be over, once the five of us become whatever thing it is we’re turning into.
Could I have imagined my new life a year ago? I don’t think so. I began my trip as a lost soul. I was a bar magnet with only one pole, a number divisible by zero. Somehow the group of us killed Superman. We entered the Rapture. We cut away those bits of ourselves that had become cartoons. And we turned the world back into a book.
“Did you hear they found a beehive over in Tacoma, down in Washington,” Julien said.
I began to imagine the lives of those bees that survived over the years just long enough to find us and sting us and send us their message, to tell us their story. I began to imagine small cells of them—not even hives—surviving from year to year, nesting under highway overpasses and the dusty eaves of failed shopping malls—foraging for pollen in the weeds growing alongside highways, their wings freezing and falling off in the winter and in the summers their wings rotting and leaving them crippled as they tried to keep their queens alive, finding little comfort in each other, finding solace only in the idea that their mission might one day succeed, that they would one day find us, with our strange blood—knowing that we were the only hope they ever had of moving forward—that we were the only hope they had of finding their way home.
Footnote
∗ It’s worked for me lots of times before, and sometimes not giving a shit keeps things lively. For example, a while back I went through this phase where I totally didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything, so just to mess things up, I wore eyeliner for a week, and raggedy old clothing. Net result: chick magnet. I’d go to convenience stores and hurl myself at the windows in an attempt to make them shatter . . . there’s even some security-cam footage of it somewhere in flickr world. Net result: chick magnet plus cool reputation. There’s a lot to be said for not giving two flying fucks, Mr. Darwin.
Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Copyright
Also by Douglas Coupuland
A Note About the Type
Dedication
Generation A
1. Harj
2. Zack
3. Samantha
4. Julien
5. Diana
6. Harj
7. Zack
8. Samantha
9. Julien
10. Diana
11. Harj
12. Zack
13. Samantha
14. Julien
15. Diana
16. Harj
17. Zack
18. Samantha
19. Julien
20. Diana
21. Harj
22. Zack
23. Samantha
24. Julien
25. Diana
26. Harj
27. Samantha
28. Julien
29. Diana
30. Harj
31. Zack
32. Samantha
33. Julien
34. Harj
35. Zack
36. Samantha
37. Julien
38. Diana
39. Harj
40. Zack
41. Serge
42. Zack
43. Harj
Footnote