Generation A (20 page)

JULIEN

Nique ta mère
, the day was a catastrophe—nothing but hangovers, death, a soul-suckingly stupid visit to the
UNESCO
bee’s nest, more violence and then a final massive, crazy and insane burst of death and destruction.

After our trip to the bee site, Diana went into town to clean some teeth and Sam and Zack went along for the ride, to try to find more and better booze. Serge was gone most of the afternoon; I saw him walking along a gravel side street, glued to his headset and PDA—I assumed he was reporting to Paris about our dismal communal lifestyle, which is like a derailed early 1970s hippie social experiment.

I went for a walk alone along the town’s
Andromeda Strain
forlorn streets, trying to sequence a story I was working on. I saw ten Haida guys chase another guy through an intersection, and then they were gone, like in a cartoon, but a cartoon with real baseball bats and real axes that ended with screams and then silence to the west of Tehaygen and Rock Point Road. I didn’t go to witness the results.

When I got back, Diana filled us in on island gossip: “Solon. They found a box of it inside an old piano in the teen activity centre. The island is crawling with the stuff.”

“So the kids are all taking it now?”

“Looks like it.”

I asked Diana if Solon withdrawal is bad.

“I researched this stuff. Former users profoundly miss the sensation of solitude. They resent having to care about other people. They never get over their craving for solitude.”

Dinner was a small salmon, plus a hideous satanic buffet of canned foods: those strange, squishy, nutritionless tinned vegetables Americans love that turn their bodies into fat, disgusting Winnebagos.

After we finished, we heard a small jet approaching overhead—unusual, as nothing but us had arrived on the island after the world lost interest in the
UNESCO
site.

The jet flew past the house, northeast towards the airstrip, and then there was an explosion.
Encore, nique ta mère!

We raced outside to see a plume of smoke rising in the distance. We got in the truck and raced to the airport, where we found the remains of a private jet on the ground, to the airstrip’s right side, going into the forest—a hundred-metre-long strand of crumpled metal, strewn luggage, fractured camera equipment and burning debris. The island had no fire department, but then nothing could have survived a crash like that, and the best any of us could do was stand and gawp along with two Haida guys while wracking our brains, trying to figure out who could have been on the plane.

The two men seemed to be actively looking for something—in a way that suggested they weren’t looking for a human being. This was odd, so we sidled their way, and then one of them called out and the other came over to a slightly charred but otherwise fine pine box that had been expelled on first impact. It was labelled
AEROSPACE-GRADE DRIED MEALS
. The older guy jimmied it open with a strip of metal from the crash. Inside it there were hundreds of boxes of Solon.

“Bonanza.”

The younger guy walked over to his truck and brought back a jerry can of gasoline. He doused the Solon with gas and torched it with a lit cigarette. I had the feeling there would soon be more bodies hanging from the Esso sign.

Zack asked them, “Hey, how come more of you didn’t come out to see this crash? I mean, this is pretty wild.”

“Everybody’s pretty busy right now.”

“Oh?”

Amongst ourselves, we’d wondered how the plane had crashed, and the younger Haida guy surprised us by volunteering the answer: “We switched off the runway lights and used some fake lights to make it crash.”

We all went apeshit—I mean . . .
nique ta mère!
Zack went especially apeshit. “What the fuck are you people thinking? You crashed a fucking
plane!
”

“What business is it of yours?”

“What business is it of
ours
? Are you crazy? Are you retarded?”

The two guys came over to us, right up to Zack. The older of the two said, “We only allow you to stay here because of the bees. Stop making noise.” Then the younger guy began playing air guitar with the blue top half of a suitcase. Zack jumped him and dragged him to the ground, and everybody started yelling. Harj and Sam jumped on top and pulled the two apart.

Zack’s face was candy red. “What are you people
thinking
?”

They each dusted themselves off, and the young guy said, “We’re
thinking
we need to do what we have to do to protect ourselves. End of story.” He and his friend walked. I was actually kind of in awe of them. They had turned the real world into World of Warcraft, and they were owning every second of it.

Serge arrived and smoked cigarettes and looked at the burning mess. “So much camera equipment. A shame—so expensive.”

“Don’t use up all your diseased cuntfucking compassion at once, Serge,” said Diana, adding, “I just creamed my panties.”

Serge asked, “How many people—skeletons—do we see here?”

We did a count: pilot and three passengers, details of their gender unreadable.

Zack said, “It’s the Channel Three News team.”

Diana looked at Zack. “I just figured this out.
You
invited them here, didn’t you?”

“What are you saying, Diana?”

“You butt-raping shitsucker, you heard me perfectly well.
You
brought them here, you fucking media whore. Jesus. Your Uncle Jay told us you’d try exactly this kind of stunt.”

“Uncle Jay’s been in touch with you? Son of a bitch.”

“Cry us a river.”

“Diana, look, Jesus, it’s not like I wanted
this
to happen. Yeah, I invited them here, but to be honest, I needed the money. We’re
all
going to need the money in the future. And what’s wrong with a little press, anyway? We can’t live here in Narnia forever. And Serge knew they were coming, too. They had clearance.”

We looked at Serge, who shrugged. “Yes, I, too, am thinking about your futures. You will need money. I thought I was doing you a favour.”

“So who put the fucking Solon on the plane?”

Zack said, “Don’t look at me. I didn’t even think they were coming for weeks yet.”

Our heads racing, we stayed until the fires burned themselves out. There was nothing to save and nothing left to see, so we drove home in silence. I wondered how the Haida knew the Solon was on the plane, and I did contemplate what might have happened if the flight had not crashed and the Channel Three News team
had
shown up at the door. I don’t think they would have had anything interesting to film. It’s not like we’re human daisies and the bees are queuing up, waiting to woo us.

We all sat down and storytelling began with almost no preamble.

The Anti-Ghosts

by Samantha Tolliver

There was once a group of people whose souls had been warped and damaged and squeezed dry by the modern world. One day, their souls rebelled altogether and fled the bodies that had contained them. And once a soul leaves a body, it’s all over; there’s no going back.

The thing is, the bodies that had created the souls remained alive and continued their everyday activities, such as balancing chequebooks, repairing screen doors and comparison shopping for white terry-cotton socks at the mall, while their souls met in small groups at the intersections of roads, confirming with each other that what had happened was real—and it was—and that they hadn’t all turned clueless at once.

“So, are we ghosts?”

“I don’t think so—the bodies we came from are still alive.”

“Are we monsters?”

“No. Monsters can interact with the world. All we can do is drift around—pass through walls—and live a life of perpetual mourning.”

“Are we the undead?”

“No, we are not. But we sure aren’t alive, either.”

The souls felt like house pets that have survived a hurricane only to find their homes and owners gone. They watched the world go onward, but they were unable to be a part of change or progress. They watched the bodies that spawned them grow older. They were surprised by how cruel it is to grow older in the modern world when everything else seems to stay young.

The souls wondered why they weren’t going to heaven or hell or anywhere else. There was just endless drifting, navigating through the world like turkeys or chickens or swans with clipped wings—birds that can barely fly. And even though they’d fled their bodies in rebellion, the souls missed their bodies the way a parent misses its child.

And then one day the souls became so angry with their situation that they lashed out at the world and—
surprise!
—the gestures they made in anger allowed them to connect with the world again: vases tipped over, doors slammed, windows broke, data was scrambled, light bulbs popped.

The souls were stoked. Their ability to manipulate their anger and to engage with the living world grew and grew. They began to jam car engines and trip alarms. They learned how to curdle milk and burn food. They crippled satellites and salted drinking water. They learned to hijack the power of electrical storms to set fire to landscapes. They learned that anger is beauty. They learned that the only way they could create was to destroy, that the only way to become real once more was to fight their way back into the world.

And so they smashed all they could smash, creating wars without opponents. Their rage became their art. They no longer wondered if they were good enough to deserve their bodies—their life. Instead, they challenged their bodies to deserve them.

This was not the end of the world, but it was the beginning of sorrows.

The Man Who Loved

Reading and Being Alone

by Julien Picard

Once upon a time there was a man who loved reading and being alone. His name was Jacques and he lived in a large American suburb, surrounded by a million morbidly obese people and a hundred dying malls. Jacques liked reading because it calmed his brain. Jacques liked reading because it made him feel like an individual person instead of a slice of pie in a PowerPoint demonstration or a bar in a census chart.

Jacques mostly slept during the day because the noise of his neighbours going about their lives was too much for him to handle: the mail truck, leaf blowers, children playing—why couldn’t they all do this somewhere else?
Why do they have to live their lives out in public, for Christ’s sake? Where does private end and public begin? Stop making noise! I can hear!

It wasn’t the noise itself that bothered Jacques—although that can’t be denied—it was the knowledge that there were living human beings out there making that noise, human beings whose very existence so geographically close to him cancelled his own sense of solitude.

To cope with life, Jacques worked—then read—mostly at night, when there were no gardening noises, construction noises or trucks with their never-ending beeps-in-reverse. He tried moving to the country but quickly learned that rural areas had noises that were just as bad, if different: barking dogs (
Oh God, all dogs ever do in the country is bark!
), farm equipment, backup generators, chainsaws and all-terrain vehicles.

What was Jacques to do?

And then one day, on craigslist, he found a job as a lighthouse keeper. He took it—and at first it was glorious. No people! None! Zero! The passing cries of stray gulls and gannets he could handle. These animals hadn’t been domesticated. All was perfect with Jacques’s world, until he started noticing waves—a sound that had been happening for billions of years and that would continue for billions more. The incessant shushing and lapping and brushing sounds began to wear on his nervous system. He couldn’t ignore them, and his hyperawareness made them ten times as annoying as his old neighbour’s kid’s trampoline birthday party or the UPS truck doing a three-point turn in a nearby driveway.

Finally, Jacques phoned his employers and said he had to pack it in, which was a sad day for him, as it meant he was doomed to spend the rest of his life being tortured by the existence of other people.