Generation A (26 page)

ZACK

We all turned to stare at Serge, who said, “It’s not what you think.”

“
What
isn’t what we think?” I replied.

“What you just heard. Harj’s story.”

“As far as we know, it’s just a story. Why are you being defensive?”

“I am not being defensive, but I need you to know I’d never do something like that to the five of you.”

“Okay, then. Maybe now is a good time to finally tell us what really has been going on these past few months.”

“It’s . . .” Serge fell silent. The rain was falling hard, droning on the roof while we sat wordless. And then Serge bolted for the door—that honey-tongued fucker tried to
flee
. This from a guy who could charm his way out of a buried coffin. What a tard. If he’d stayed put, he probably could have sweet-talked his way around us—but he didn’t.

It was a good thing Harj had had the foresight to stand between Serge and the door, because when Serge bolted, Harj rolled a kitchen chair into his path, causing him to fly ass over teakettle and bash his head on the top corner of the mud room’s bright orange Honda space heater. He was knocked out for a minute.

“Right,” said Diana. “Get the duct tape.”

We duct-taped Serge to a kitchen chair. I thought the girls were gentle souls, but the two of them were lashing the tape onto his wrists and ankles with such energy that I was spooked.

“Uh, gals, maybe you could ease up a bit on the tightness?”

Sam looked up at me. “You’re siding with this lying French fuck?”

Harj said, “We are not fully sure that he is a lying French fuck, at least not yet.”

We turned on Harj: “It was
your
story.”

“You’re right. It was. And . . . I must stand by it.”

Diana, ripping a three-foot strip of tape off a roll, asked, “How did you figure all of this out?”

“Google. More or less.”

“Seriously?”

“I connected a few dots. Perhaps I misconnected them.”

“If you’re wrong, then why did he try to scram? Personally, I think we should drag him down into the basement and let him rot for a while. Ugh. I can’t
believe
that everything we’ve been through has been about
Solon
.” Diana was disgusted.

Sam said, “
Yeah
. Let’s cram his nose into the crack between the floor and the dryer by the dead mouse.”

Instead, we placed Serge in the middle of the room. We then sat in sofas and chairs, staring at him; for the first time in my life, I felt like I was in a scene from a violent indie film. We’d nabbed the evil villain. Would we slice off an ear? Bring out a car battery and some cables and generate a bit of nipple fatigue?

Waking up, Serge realized he’d miscalculated badly. “So I’m now your prisoner?”

“You are.”

“That was brilliant,” said Sam, “making a dash for the front door.”

“I think you’d better release me. You all think you know the truth, but you don’t.”

“You mean the truth that lies on the other side of the front door? Were you running to fetch it for us?” I asked.

“You don’t trust me now. I understand that.”

Diana slapped a piece of duct tape over his mouth. “Whatever he tells us is going to be smooth, and it’s going to be untrue. We know that. So I think we need to have a quick talk before we listen to one word more of this guy’s crap.”

But Harj had a question for Serge and removed the tape. “Serge, can you please tell me how you found me a few days ago in Kentucky? I have no chips in me. How did you do that?”

“Actually, you
do
have a chip in you. All of you do.”

It was like we had spiders crawling inside our skins. I have to say, few things in life are creepier than knowing there’s something buried inside your body. Tapeworms have nothing on chips.

“My phone’s got a chip detector in it,” Diana said. “I never thought to use it.” She scanned Harj; there was a chip on the back of his leg, behind his knee. “Okay, then, that won’t be too hard to remove.”

Harj asked why they should remove it.

“Because until you remove it, you won’t be free.”

“Ah,” said Harj. “Freedom: the elusive goal of the Craig.”

Diana snapped, “Do you want it gone or not?”

“Okay. Yes. I do.”

Diana said, “Good. I’m going to scan everybody.”

It turned out we all had chips embedded behind our knees. Diana said, “Okay, the next hour isn’t going to be much fun, but I know Serge has a bottle of Oxy in his kit, and there’s a kickass bowie knife in the kitchen.” She set up her chip-removal surgery in the lower bathroom tub. The Oxy made us feel like birthday balloons adrift in a summer sky, but it didn’t fully kill the pain of the bowie knife slipping in and digging around in search of treasure. One interesting thing I noticed was that pain isn’t actually so bad as long as everybody around you is experiencing it too. In any event, Diana’s work was quick and clean. She dug out her own chip last, and I was impressed by the cleanliness of what could have been bloody geysers. After our surgeries were completed, we entered the living room, stitched and limping.

Julien asked, “So what do we do with Serge—torture him?”

I said, “You know, I don’t think we’re torturing types.”

Sam removed the duct tape. “Okay, Serge, talk. We’re listening.”

“Perhaps I could tell you some stories myself.”

“You? Telling stories? Why?”

“You have every right to be concerned.”

“
Concerned?
We want to fry your ass.”

“Then let me tell stories—the way the five of you have been telling stories.”

“Why should we?”

“Because the night is still young. Because, in the end, you’ll do whatever it is you’re going to do. Because if you add my stories to yours, you’ll understand the full story.”

“The full story?”

SERGE

“The full story. So please sit back and listen to me.”

Sam said, “Okay. Start telling.”

So I began.

The Gambler

by Serge Duclos

There was once a young French scientist who found himself one cold night in the darkened bedroom of an apartment in Locarno, Switzerland, a room that looked out over frozen Lake Maggiore, a beautiful, tiny, dull place where Italy kisses Switzerland. The apartment was not the scientist’s; it was a corporate VIP guest suite that technically belonged to a pharmaceutical kingpin whose wife had died a decade before. He never used it. Why was our scientist in this bed room? Because, as happens with so many people, he had crashed and burned. This was on his mind as he looked out the window and saw rooftops, alpish mountains, some cold, glinting lights to the south in Italy and the silhouettes of
Washingtonia
palm fronds, static in the windless night.

No, the scientist was not in the bedroom with the pharmaceutical executive; the executive was, that evening, in Qatar, selling half a silo of generic Wellbutrin to a convention of Arab building contractors to give their homesick workers from the Asian subcontinent. The Qatari contractors didn’t know it, but the antidepressants were time-expired and would have been landfilled had not, half jokingly, the young French scientist suggested, during a laboratory meet-and-greet, that homesick Asian subcontinent guest workers were a potential market for those drugs. His reward for this brilliant idea was a set of keys to the beautiful but quiet Swiss apartment, plus a week to do as he wanted. As for the executive, on his fifth day in Qatar, he contracted reverse flesh-eating disease and returned to Switzerland in a charcoal grey Tyvek bag.

Now, our young French scientist didn’t live in Locarno. He lived and studied in Montpelier, France, a university city, the capital of the province of Languedoc-Roussillon, which bordered the Mediterranean Sea. His specialty was human proteins, specifically neuroproteins that work as markers inside the brain to signal both the beginnings and endings of specific thoughts—that act as signposts, street lights, highway signs, bridges for the way all people and animals think. People were only beginning to understand the role of these proteins in all aspects of thought and existence.

The scientist had a lot on his mind, only part of which was guilt at being complicit in the moral and economic clusterfuck that was the Qatari antidepressant deal. Other parts of him were worried about different things. For example, he was worried that his girlfriend was cheating on him. She worked in the lab two down from his and spent her lunch hours eating steak tartare (for the animal protein) and reading pro-Palestinian political tracts while using an isometric thigh-slimming device that gave her a near-goddess status in bed. Suzanne was moody, and young enough to not even realize she might one day not have the liberty of picking and choosing her bedmates. So, because of his near-crippling jealousy, our young scientist found it hard to concentrate on his specific laboratory task, which was this: he aimed laser pulses through a micromisted protein broth. This allowed him to isolate and separate specific proteins within. It was a job that needed much skill and decades of education but was about as fun as stocking cardboard boxes at a Body Shop. The scientist wondered if his entire youth had been wasted in attaining what was essentially an ultra-high-tech McJob.
And
, to go back to what was stated earlier, he was worried that his girlfriend was cheating on him simply because she could, and because her take-him-or-leave-him attitude kept his own brain’s neuroproteins on constant nuclear alert.

“Wait,” Zack said. “You’re talking about yourself here, right?”

“This is a story,” I said.

“Can you at least stop using the phrase ‘young scientist’? It’s driving me nuts.”

“What name do you suggest?”

“Trevor.”

“
Trevor?
Why
Trevor?
”

“I don’t know. It’s a good name. Very science-y. If a Trevor invents something smart, you think to yourself, ‘Man, that Trevor is right in character, being a smart dude, discovering stuff.’ ”

“Okay, then, Trevor it is.”

“Thanks.”

The Gambler

(continued)

by Serge Duclos

Trevor’s boss was a career bureaucrat, not a scientist, and Trevor’s pleas to upgrade his job category were met first by a yawn and then by a recollection that young whippersnappers pissed him off. If Trevor’s boss had his way, the world’s cocky young scientists would be corralled and put to work on the night shift at the Department of Standardized Weights and Measures. “So, Trevor, my dear, please shut the fuck up. Oh, and by the way, I run an even-keeled ship here. I don’t want highs and I don’t want lows. This place will be running long after you and I are dead, so please just go back to separating your water droplets. If you find the job boring, so be it. Boredom is a form of criticism—so maybe you should go job-hunting. Goodbye.”

As this was being said, Trevor was thinking:
Is Suzanne cheating on me? What good is a girlfriend you can’t trust?
The whole notion of
girlfriend
seemed American and synthetic, an archaic pairing concept from Pixar cartoons. Domestic partner? No, they didn’t live together. Close personal friend? No. Technically, they were nothing. They just spent a lot of post-work time together, having sex and eating, and it was all going nowhere, and besides, she was so goddam political when she wasn’t in the sack, and when she got going on Zionism and all that, it was like she’d turned herself into the world’s most unlistenable satellite music station. She’d start to blab and he’d go off into daydreams about long-chain carbon molecules, his mother’s knee-replacement surgery or old Smurf cartoons, only to be roused by a poke in the ribs and a jeremiad along the lines of, “And who do you think ended up paying for the Six-Day War, huh? Who? Tell me,
who!
”

And there are other things to know about Trevor, things that made him worry, that led to his crash and burn and a dirty weekend (if that was what he wanted) in a lovely but spookily geriatric apartment in scenic Locarno. For example, Trevor was a gambler. Not a casino gambler—no Baden-Baden or San Sebastian for him; rather, he was the most incurable form of gambler, one of the ones who goes to Gamblers Anonymous meetings and everyone else in the room feels a chill in their hearts. It was more than just the fact that he’d memorized the entire cyber-tour of all of Harrah’s Nevada properties, and it was more than the fact that the first sentence out of his mouth was: “I’ve been here sixty minutes already and I can guarantee you, 3 to 1, that all of the people in this room can’t go without coughing for sixty seconds, starting
now
.” They knew Trevor was a hopeless case because they saw that his need to gamble was so hard-wired into his brain that his life was one perpetual bet. He was consigned to live in the constant near future. He was always inside various levels of “next.” He was never in the “now.”

The next three stoplights may or may not be green—and if they’re not, then what are the chances I’ll see three red cars before I pull into the school’s lot? Or yellow cars? You don’t see yellow cars any more—why? Leo in Gamma Studies says yellow paint lowers the chance of reselling the car later on. But by what percentage would yellow paint versus silver kill the deal? Go online. Look up car colour trends since 1987; cross-index them with actual resale charts. Maybe buy a yellow car, even, if the odds favour you. Is Suzanne fucking around? There’s the office. Email will take my mind off things. Email! The odds that she’s cheating are 1 in 3. The odds that she’s cheating are 2 in 5.

Zack said, “Serge, hang on a second. You have a gambling problem?”

“I’m not Trevor.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“Take from my story whatever you like. And please give me a sip of your dandelion wine, if you will.”

Harj kindly held a glass of wine and a straw to my mouth. I took a sip and then we returned to our friend “Trevor.”

The Gambler

(continued)

by Serge Duclos

Trevor lost all of his junior researcher paycheques playing online poker and was living on economic fumes. He ate only bread and cheese, and one day he bought rabbit because it seemed both inexpensive and kind of cool. When Suzanne came into the kitchen and saw raw rabbit skinned and lying atop brown waxed paper on the kitchen counter, she screamed and ran into the bathroom, crying. Trevor sat outside the locked bathroom door, asking her what was wrong and to please come out.

Suzanne finally opened the door and said that cooking rabbits was like cooking babies. Seeing the pieces there like that reminded her of abortions she’d had that she wasn’t very proud of. She was going to take what few things she kept in his apartment and leave.

And so Trevor was single, broke from gambling debts (Ladbrokes Online; Club USA Casino), crippled by never-ending gambling chatter inside his head and saddled with an asshole science-hating boss. He was wondering if the pieces of his life would ever join together like a story when his phone rang. It was Solange from the international sales division in Lyons, saying that the VP of sales was so impressed by his idea to ship time-expired antidepressants to the United Arab Emirates that he wanted to personally reward Trevor with keys to the VIP suite on Lake Maggiore. As well as the suite, a generous sum had been deposited into Trevor’s bank account.
Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé!

Trevor got on a train to Switzerland that followed a coastal route and then moved inland: Monaco, Genoa, Milan and Locarno. He hadn’t packed very much because, while happy to be escaping his life, however briefly, he was too angry and worried to pack—and because he was young enough that he could still sleep in his clothes and, when he woke up, look rumpled and sexy rather than squished and homeless. So he was on this train and he had no laptop—his first holiday from information ever.

Sam said, “Wait a second . . . you went somewhere without a laptop or PDA?”

“
Trevor
did, yes.”

“What was he thinking?”

“He paid for his mistake.”

“Go on . . .”

The Gambler

(continued)

by Serge Duclos

Trevor had nothing to read, and so, bored by the glamorous Mediterranean views, he walked through the train’s cars, looking for reading material left behind by previous passengers. In a second-class car, along with some abandoned homework, he found a much-disintegrated copy of
Finnegans Wake
( James Joyce; 1939), a novel that, when he opened it and selected a random paragraph, made him feel like he’d just had a stroke. He spoke English, but this didn’t feel like English—it felt like sound effects. Still, the paragraph burned itself into his brain:

Sian is too tall for Shemus as Airdie is fiery for Joachem. Two toughnecks still act gettable, and feign that as an embryo he was worthy of starving (he was an outlier straddling the walls of Donegal and Sligo, and a vassal to Corporal. Mr. Llyrfoxh Cleath was among his savoured invitations) but every fair thee well to night blindness came uninvited. He was in the wilds of the city of today; coals that his night-embered life will not beg being anthologized in black and white. Adding lies and jest together, two toughneck shots may be made at what this abundant wallflower. Sian’s nighttime wardrobe, we believe, a handful of ring fingers, a callow stomach, a heart of tea and cakes, a goose liver, three-fourths of a buttock, a black adder truncated—as young Master Johnny on his first louche moment at the birth of prethinking, seeing himself Lord this and Lord that, playing with thistlecracks in the hedgerow.

He sat down and went through the paragraph over and over. It could have said:

. . . Whaam! Smash! Ahooogah! Ding! Grunt! Sploosh! Doinggg! Thud! Bamm! Shazaam! Glub! Zing! Blbbbtt! Thump! Gonggg! Boom! Kapow!

Joyce’s paragraph made no sense, and yet it made a kind of sense. Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don’t work that way. French?
Dieu!
Misplace a single
le
or
la
and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.