Generation A (15 page)

HARJ

Oh, my bitterness at missing my chance at carnal bliss with Andrea! And oh, my shock at learning that the Craigs were colour-coordinated Solon users. I tumbled out the second-floor window into the remains of a dead magnolia, only to land
plop
on a half-deflated vinyl pool toy promoting beer from Mexico. Through a window, I could see that the house was filled with non-Craigs, while approaching sirens and helicopters told me the situation was about to grow even more perilous to me. So I headed into the wooded area behind the house, and oddly, it reminded me of walking through Gomarankadawela Park in Trincomalee during the annual mongoose festival.

Fortunately, I am fleet of foot, and after a period of hours, I emerged onto Interstate 71—which I knew from Google Maps began in Louisville, Kentucky’s famous “Spaghetti Junction” and ended twenty miles south of Cincinnati. Kentucky—a new goal.

It was a lovely walk. Deep in the night, hours went by with out a car. I walked down the middle of the passing lane, feeling the newly born grasses poking up from the pavement—tickling against the bottom of my jeans. An occasional startled deer pranced away and I was able to hear one or two crickets, and I felt like I was truly in America and my time with the Craigs was only a dream, such as I would have after eating ill-spiced stews prepared by Hemesh’s untalented wife.

What more bad news would come my way as a result of having taken the low road? Where would I go for the long-term? What would I do? To make such decisions, I needed to rest. I stepped over to the side of the road, crawled into a thicket of grass and fell asleep. I was awakened by a strange combination of bright sunlight and a rather strong rain—as well as the sound of a cocking rifle in my ear.

“Okay there, Sleeper Cell, upsy-daisy.”

“I am very sorry, sir, you have the wrong person. My name is Harj Vetharanayan, but people generally call me Apu.”

“A comedian, huh?” With a deft jolt, he drill-pressed my chest with his rifle butt. His face was melon-like but pink. A fleck of spittle hit my left cheekbone. “Found him, boys!” The rifleman’s colleagues joined him. “I’m Chief Clancy Wiggum, and it’s a perfect day for a dose of
terror
, huh, Sleeper Cell?”

“Who is this person you keep telling me I am? I am no such person.”

“So, Mr. Cell—which was your favourite—the North Tower or the South Tower?”

“Excuse me?”

Chief Wiggum continued to hector me with absurd accusations as the other officers handcuffed me and pushed me into the rear seat of a sheriff ’s sedan that was in worse shape than a pirate cab driver’s vehicle back home—it smelled of cheap cologne and diesel fumes. I did not enjoy being in the back seat at all, but I did become curious as to our destination when we drove past what was clearly the police station and into a once prosperous residential neighbourhood now clad in plywood and
NO TRESPASSING
signs.

We arrived at a house whose occupants still made an effort to be middle class—a mowed square of lawn out front, dappled with freshly cleaned white plastic lawn furniture of a sort burped out by tsunamis. I felt a wash of homesickness before I was harshly pushed through the front door and down a mildewy hallway.

“Okay, Sleeper Cell, don’t make one single fucking move until we tell you to. In.”

They locked me in yet another strange bedroom, this one with a barred window that overlooked a rusted-out pair of snowmobiles on the thistled rear lawn. The room’s walls were papered with Mother Goose characters, and scented by a basket containing potpourri, a popular seasonal accessory item ordered in December along with yuletide-themed sweaters.

Upon closer inspection, I saw that there was no aspect of the room, aside from the barred windows, that wasn’t trying to cheer me up or make me feel childlike—and yet the room did not feel like the room of a child. It felt like the sort of room an adult might wish to inhabit if he wanted to ignore the real world and dream about the children he would never have. It depressed me and spoke of a belief in nonsense and magic.

I shouted through the door, “Gentlemen? Hello? Could I have something to eat or drink? A simple cup of coffee?”

Clumsy footsteps approached my door, and the sheriff ’s baritone voice boomed, “Coffee? Who am I—Scrooge McFucking Duck? The deposed Prince of Nigeria? Maybe you’d like some goose liver pâté and a chiffon cake while you’re at it.”

He walked away, sniggering.

I sighed and wondered what it was about me that I was always ending up in odd bedrooms, but never ending up in them in a good way. I removed my shirt and looked at the bruise on my ribcage, the shape and size of a cucumber. This was when I had the odd sensation that I was being picked out of myself—or that my body was doubling like a bacterium, a newer me rising above my body seated on the edge of the bed. I went through the ceiling and roof of the house and was above the fields of Ohio, like a helicopter, but higher and quieter. I kept rising and rising and soon was up where the atmosphere turns into space. I turned and looked at the sun, but instead of being blinded, I felt a moment of awe, a recognition that life on earth was fragile and delicate, and owed everything to the sun. I turned around and looked at the universe and shivered because it was so vast and essentially empty. I thought about Earth, this cosmic pebble circling a D-class star—and even then, this thing we call life inhabits only a tiny skim-coat of this fleck, and even within that thin coat, there isn’t that much life at all. I looked back down at the planet and I thought,
What a marvel to be among the fewest of few molecules in the universe allowed to experience this thing called life—stars and nebulas and black holes by the quadrillion, and yet only a few molecules on Earth get to be alive
.

And then I began to fall back down. Not quite falling, but the descent startled me.
Plop
, there I was, back in the Mother Goose bedroom, a prisoner, with the door now being kicked in by a syringe-toting Chief Wiggum and two very stupid-looking goons as might be seen on 1970s police shows found on a satellite station with a seven-digit channel number.

“We’re going to need a sample of your sleeper-cell cells,” he said, advancing on me.

I resisted but I was coshed on the forehead and woke up with a sore inner arm onto which a Band-Aid had been slapped. My chest was throbbing. I looked on the floor and there was a pizza pocket that had been microwaved but that was now cold, a pitcher of water, an empty but dirty water glass and a half-used, very old-looking bag of orange crystals labelled TANG. I felt like going home, but had no clear idea what home was to me any longer.

So I lay there on the bed, attempting not to panic by concentrating on remembering the names of colour samples from a series of old Martha Stewart brochures Hemesh had forced us all to study. (The contract went instead to some company in Tasmania that became our bitter rival, but that is another story.) In any event, I find that when you think of a colour, the chattering part of your brain turns off and you are calmed. I recommend this technique to anybody in need of peace.

ATLANTIC FOG

BABY BLANKET

BAKERY BOX WHITE

BELL FLOWER

BITUMEN

BLUE ASTER

BLUE CORN

BOX TURTLE

BROOM HANDLE

CAKE BATTER

CAMEO

CASHEW

CHALKBOARD GREEN

CLOUDLESS DAY

CURLEW

DAGUERREOTYPE

DUCK’S BILL

DUCK’S EGG

FADED INK

FOXGLOVE

I was just about to envision “Galapagos” when there was a roar, like the leaf blower of the gods, and several men shouting. My room’s door was busted open yet again! It was a team of DEA agents, just like in movies, except that their outfits were old and threadbare, so shoddy, in fact, that I was unsure if my rescuers were genuine DEA agents—but an open door is an open door. I fled, and as I did I saw my hill-people captors being clubbed on the head like Canadian baby seals. It is uncharitable of me to say so, but I was quite happy to witness them in pain.

Near the house was a helicopter. Somebody shouted, “Hop in!” And so I did, all the while thinking about how blasé I’d become about air travel in recent weeks. We soon landed at a private airstrip where a small corporate jet blazoned with the Disney logo awaited us.

“We are going to Disney World?”

“No.
You’re
going to Canada. We got this jet cheap from Disney.”

I’d read about Disney’s huge fire sale the year before, on reuters.com.

I boarded the jet and the doors closed. I was the sole passenger. Through a smooth five-hour flight, I ate a bag of potato chips and drank a bottle of water. We landed in Masset, on Haida Gwaii, at sunset. Zack and Sam arrived at the small airstrip moments after me, on two different planes.

Who could be paying for all of these extravagant flights? Vintage honey brokers?

At first, the five of us were bashful together—as when a friend tells you there’s another person you must meet, and of course the new person is as awkward as you are. We were on a bizarre and beautiful island on a quintuple blind date or, as Zack would say, a five-way.

Diana shocked me with her swearing disorder, but it is amazing how easily the brain will cancel out a dozen “fucks” in a row.

I had been worried that Zack and Sam would be Craigs, but they were not and that was a relief—nor did they seem like the sorts of people my brother would escort into Trincomalee’s handjob district. One might think Zack could be that type, but in the tropics, men like Zack sit on a beach and remove their shirts and the pleasure dome comes to them; no need to poke through back alleys or bribe a concierge.

Julien was a surprise to me, rather immature for his age. It’s not that I am such a beacon of maturity, but he seems to have had no experiences that might temper him as a soul. He lives in his head, and I am unsure of the depth of anything he feels.

And then there was Serge, who is someone with a secret—I suppose that is everybody, really—but in his case a secret he wants to keep only from
us
. I know, he brought us together and saved us from many potentially ugly situations, but there was a moment when I was hanging up my coat when I first arrived at the house, and we made eye contact for not even a second. I could see that he was calculating something, and I knew we weren’t in our northern Galapagos simply to bring back the bees.

We tried to suss out if and how well he knew our former handlers—Sandra, Dr. Rick and Louise. His response was arrogant and dismissive: “Them? I suppose. Why on earth should I care?”

Diana whispered to me, “Okay, we get it, Buster. You run the show.”

As for our lodgings, even I, with almost no understanding of North American housing, could tell that our house was at least a half-century old, maybe older—it had phone jacks and an antenna and a garage for two cars. It was humble and musty, and the rooms felt like drab tissue boxes. I was told that Haida Gwaii’s economy had been free of booms and busts for the entire twentieth century; a chart showing its economic progress would be a flat line. So it wasn’t as if there was a better place to stay. And the rain, so cold! And the storms, so violent and so common!

The morning after I arrived, we all walked around the town, garnering suspicious stares from the Haida. Our task was to locate alcohol for Zack. He is a declarative fellow: “The dandelion wine here tastes like rat piss, there’s no cough syrup or muscle relaxants anywhere, so a-hunting we will go.”

It is always nice to have a minor goal to motivate a pleasant walk. We stopped by the one local store that remained open. It sold only packages of chewing gum and potato flakes.

Zack’s temper got the better of him. “Booze, dammit, I want booze!”

A Haida man came into the store. Zack said, “Hi. I’m Zack. I’m one of the bee-sting people. Where can I find some decent fucking booze around here?”

The man was tall and had the widest, flattest nose I’d ever seen. He said, “Booze is no problem.”

“Thank Christ. Where do I have to go?”