Generation A (24 page)

A week later, Stella decided she’d had enough and began to drink herself into an early grave. She did a remarkably good job, ending up sprawled on the shoulder of the main road, near the speed trap, the town’s largest single revenue generator.

Stella sat there in the grass, singing a song without a tune, and as she did, Jessica and Roy drove into town.

“Roy, look, slow down, there’s a crazy drunk on the roadside over there.”

“Jesus, what a sinking ship. Makes you wonder about life. Hey look—a speed trap. If it weren’t for the crazy lady, we’d have gotten a ticket.”

The two whooped with joy, and Roy said, “Maybe that crazy lady is an important member of society after all! Makes you wonder.”

Jessica said, “Absolutely, Roy. Mother Nature always makes sure that everyone has a role to play in the world. That scary crazy lady is simply living out her destiny.”

JULIEN

I said, “
Nique ta mère
, now
that
was one depressing fucking story.”

“Why? What was so depressing about it?”

“Did Stella really need to drink herself to death at the end of it?”

“She most certainly did.”

“And what about the animals talking to her?”

“What about them?”

“Is that a New Zealand thing—communing with nature?”

“Julien, you’re approaching the stories on too literal a level. Relax and enjoy their texture. Sleep on them. Anyway, it’s your turn to tell one. Put up or shut up.”

It was my turn indeed, and I was underprepared. I had to buy time, so I reopened the earlier discussion about the sheer mental labour required to make up a halfway decent story.

“Serge, there’s probably some neuroprotein that regulates this. What’s it called?”

Serge coughed out an unchewed hunk of bagel. It landed on the carpet beside Diana’s stocking feet. He went as white as a sheet of paper.

“Serge?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you okay?”

“Nothing! I’m fine. Just fine. Now please, start your story, Julien.”

“Very well.”

Bartholomew Is Right There at the

Dawn of Language

by Julien Picard

A long time ago a bunch of people were sitting on a log, looking at a fire, and they were wishing they had language so that they could talk to each other. Grunting was becoming a bore, and besides, they had fire now—they
deserved
language. They’d arrived.

Of course, they didn’t think of it that way—they only had these feelings that went undescribed because there were no words for them. But within this tribe there was this one alpha guy in particular who saw himself as the creative one. He pointed to himself and said, “Vlakk.” He picked up a stick, held it up, stared at it, scrunched his eyes and then pronounced it “glink.” And everyone there repeated “glink” and henceforth sticks became known as glinks and Vlakk was now Vlakk.

Vlakk then pointed at the fire and made up a noise, “unk,” and from then on, fire was called unk. And so on. In one night, Vlakk was able to come up with sound effects for dozens of nouns and verbs—gazelles and smallpox and thorns and wife beating—and because it was just one intelligence making up all these new words, the newly evolving language had a sense of cohesiveness to it—it sounded true to itself the way Italian or Japanese does.

However, Vlakk’s language creation process made one tribe member—whom he’d named Glog—furious. Glog was thinking, “This is crazy! You can’t just go around making up words arbitrarily, based on sound effects!” But of course, Glog didn’t have language, so there was no way for him to articulate his anger at the vim with which Vlakk was cooking up new words. And it’s not as if Glog had some other, better way of naming things; he was just one of nature’s born bitchers and moaners.

Vlakk and Glog and their tribe had many children, most of whom died very young of hideous deaths because it was the distant past and, in general, people didn’t last too long. But enough of Vlakk’s descendants survived to generate new sound effects that went on to become words.

And of course, Glog’s descendants carried his gene for finickiness, and as the new language grew and grew, they continued to protest the arbitrary harum-scarum way Vlakk’s descendants gave words to things like “dung beetles” and “ritualized impalement on sharp satay-like bamboo skewers beside anthills.” As the language evolved over thousands of years, everyone forgot that words had begun as arbitrary sound effects. Words were now simply words, long divorced from their grunting heritage.

As Vlakk and Glog’s culture became more complex, so did its language. Grammar was invented, as was the future tense and gender and verb conjugation and all the things that make learning a new language a royal pain in
la derrière
.

Finally, language entered modern times. If Glog had been king, his far distant grandchild, Bartholomew, would have been his successor. Distant as they were in time, their neocortices were of the same size; Bartholomew was Glog with a good haircut and a fine suit.

Bartholomew was obsessed with new additions to the language. He was particularly incensed by things that caused language to change or evolve. He worked as a copy checker for a large business magazine and spent his lunch hours and weekends writing acid-tipped hate mail to other magazines that incorporated any noun or verb that had entered the language since the dawn of digital culture.
Can’t you see how you’re diluting the language? Corrupting it! Tell me, what is a jpeg? What a sick and diseased and laughable word it is—it’s not even a word! It’s a sound effect; a glottal sideshow freak. It’s a bastard word—a bearded lady of a word.

People at the magazine found Bartholomew to be a lovable kook, but they were very careful never to offend him, because, while he wasn’t the sort of person to anonymously mail you a dead sparrow inside a cardboard milk box as some form of demented condemnation, there lingered the feeling that he had more subtle, untraceable means of punishing a perceived offender, like maybe he was keeping dossiers on all of them. And every year during the office Christmas party, somebody got drunk and made a mock crime scene investigation of Bartholomew’s bookcased folders. Nothing was ever found, but the secretaries in the office would make fun of his cologne. They called it “KGB.”

Fortunately, there was Karen from HR, who was able to allow a ray of light into Bartholomew’s world. Each morning she dropped off the paper versions of his daily copy work and was able to smile and receive a smile in return from Bartholomew. Karen was the office free spirit. She had a Bettie Page hairdo, a nose ring and black knee socks she’d bought in Tokyo, in Shibuya. Other girls in the office stood outside Bartholomew’s office to witness his Karen smile themselves. They knew he was single, and that Carol in the layout department had seen Bartholomew loitering in front of the straight porn section by the newsstand three blocks over from the office.

“Okay,” said Karen, “he’s no big catch . . . but he’s certainly a big challenge.”

Karen tried to come on sexy at first but pulled back, knowing immediately that it was the wrong strategy. This was going to be one tough fish to reel in. So she decided to conquer Bartholomew by email. Short. Sweet. Perky.
Saucy
. Unfortunately, this decision was made right at the tipping point when hand-held devices enslaved the human psyche. Bartholomew was deeply distressed by the collapse of language into chimp-like bafflegab. Oftentimes his co-workers’ text messages exceeded his powers of cryptography.

S|-|ip 70 T0ky0 fi135 L8r 70d4y. |\|0, 7|-|3y d0|\|’7 |-|4v3 4 m4(|-|i|\|3 5|-|4p3d 1ik3 4 fu(ki|\|g ki773|\| 7|-|47 m4k35 5u5|-|i.

He took to keeping his office door shut. He grew a beard, and began drinking his own pee from jars. Okay, he didn’t grow a beard and drink his own pee from jars, but only because that behaviour would have offended another code that ordered his life—one of sanitation, of bodily purity. But he
was
bunkering himself.

Suffice it to say that, for Bartholomew, the supremacy of PDAs heralded the beginning of the end. Well, maybe not the beginning of the end, because he’d been raised in the Glog family tradition, which was to believe that every moment of life heralded the beginning of the end. Perhaps these newly triumphant PDAs, in some profound way, marked the end of language, which was now imploding on itself in an optical scrapyard of slashes, diacritical marks and pointless numerical intrusions.

One morning Karen was on the subway, going to work, and was in a strange headspace because she was starting to actually fall in love with Bartholomew. Knowing it maybe wasn’t the smartest thing to do, she sent Bartholomew a very
lusty
text message.

W|-|3|\| I g37 70 7|-|3 0ffi(3 2d4y, 137’5 m4k3 p455i0|\|473 10v3 0v3r70p y0ur 14rg3 (0113(7i0|\| 0f 1i|\|3d y3110w 13g41 p4d5. S||4rp3|\| u p3|\|(i1, Big B0y

Bartholomew read this and thought, “Good Lord, language has devolved into a series of strung-together vanity licence plates! I can’t be a part of this! I can’t!” So when Karen showed up, Bartholomew didn’t give her his daily smile. Karen was crushed. She sent a proper email, in perfect English, that said,

Dear Bartholomew
,

Earlier today, while I was riding the subway to work, I emailed you a whimsical message. I think it overstepped the boundaries of “what is correct,” but it was meant in jest and I hope you won’t think less of me for it. Karen.

The thing is, Bartholomew ignored this email because he was crazy, and the thing about crazy people is that they really
are
crazy. Sometimes you can get quite far with them and you start telling other people, “So-and-so’s not the least bit crazy,” and then So-and-so suddenly starts to exhibit his crazy behaviour, at which point you say “Whoa!” and pull back—
People were right: this guy is really nuts
.

Karen’s boss, Lydia, saw Karen moping in the lunchroom and said, “Honey, sometimes I think it’s almost more polite to be crazy 24-7, because at least you don’t get people falling in love with you and making a mess of things.”

“But I
love
him.”

“Of course you do, sweetie. Pass me the Splenda.”

As Karen left the lunchroom, Lydia said to her coworkers, “People always seem to fall in love during that magical space before one person sees the other display their signature crazy behaviour. Poor Karen.”

But Karen’s heart mended from her break with Bartholomew, and within two years she was engaged to a guy who made sculptures out of cardboard boxes, which he took to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. And life went on. Bartholomew grew older and buggier. People stopped using land-line telephones altogether. Everyone on earth used PDAs, even starving people in starving countries. All languages on earth collapsed and contracted and Bartholomew’s endgame scenario was coming true—language was dying. People began to speak the way they texted, and before he was fifty, language was right back to the level of the log and the roaring fire. Bartholomew wondered why he even came to work. Nobody paid any attention to what he did but, as the Glog family motto goes, “Somebody has to maintain standards.”

Then one day Karen walked past Bartholomew’s office with her by now teenage daughter. His door was open and he was able to hear the two women speak—they both sounded like the Tasmanian devil character from Bugs Bunny cartoons. They turned around and spoke to Bartholomew: “
Booga-boogaooga-oog?
”

They were asking him if he wanted to go out for lunch, but he understood not a word. He shook his head in incomprehension. The office emptied of staff. Lunch hour ended and nobody came back. Bartholomew thought this was strange. He walked out of his office and walked around his floor. Nobody.
Hmmm
. He went down into the lobby and there was nobody there or in the street, either. He began to walk around the city, but everywhere he looked there was silence. He looked at the TVs that were playing in public spaces: they showed the Channel Three News team’s chairs with nobody on them, soccer fields that were empty, traffic cams trained on still roads.

So he walked back to his office and mulled over the situation, which was actually a kind of dream come true for him—no pesky people to further degrade and cheapen the language! But where had everyone gone? He looked at his screen, where the Channel Three News team finally appeared in a box in the centre:

—Hi, you’re watching the Channel Three News team. I’m Ed.

—I’m Connie.

—And I’m Frank, and if you’re watching this prerecorded message, it means that the Rapture has finally happened and you’ve been left behind.