Generation A (3 page)

JULIEN

12THE ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS, FRANCE

I think fate is a corny notion. Everything in this world is cause and effect, process not destiny. A bee sting? How sentimental. How old-fashioned. And then, after we were stung, everyone treated us like a collection of Wonka children.
Pfft
.

I was stung while I was sitting on a bench in Bois de Vincennes beside a pair of aging papist hags who were bickering about identity theft chip-and-PIN credit cards and complaining about how they have to shred their garbage before they throw it out. Yes, the Romanians and the Russians and the Triads must be waiting on tippytoes to pounce on them:
With Madame Duclos’s electrical bill, we will bring Caisse d’Epargne to its knees!
Their voices got me so angry—angry at the fabric of time, at whatever it is that makes time seem to drag on forever, that makes life feel so long. All I wanted to do was tell them that their religion is decadent and obsolete. I wanted to tell them that their religion was invented thousands of years ago as a way of explaining to those people lucky enough (or unlucky enough) to live past the age of twenty-one the fact that life is too short. These crones, I wanted to tell them that what I would look for in a religion is an explanation of why life is so
long
. I’m still looking.

Forget religion, I want to
mutate
. I want so badly to mutate. I was sitting in the sun in the Bois de Vincennes, willing my body to mutate into whatever it is human beings are slated to turn into next. Do we get giant drosophila fly eyes? Wings? Elephantine snouts? I dream of the day we mutate into something better than the hyped-up chimps we are, chimps who eat Knorr Swiss cream of cauliflower soup while pretending not to notice that half the planet’s at war, fighting over . . . what? Over the right to eat packaged soup without having to emotionally accept our species’ darkness. We are one fucked-up claque of monkeys. Groundskeeper Willie called us cheese-eating surrender monkeys: he almost had it right. But it isn’t just the French—as a species we are all cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

I am not normally the sort of person who sits on park benches in the 12th arrondissement on a sunny day. In fact, I am the opposite of that sort of person. I didn’t even know what time it was when I was rudely and cruelly ejected from the Astrolite gaming centre on rue Claude Decaen. I was having what is called a shit fit. I had this shit fit because I had spent 114 solid days in-game on World of Warcraft, and was at the end of a twenty-four-hour levelling jag, when my avatar vanished. Not even a little pouf of smoke—I, Xxanthroxxusxx, simply ceased to be. I did the usual things. I shut down. I unplugged. I rebooted. I checked the options and preferences. I logged back into the world. And still I was
gone
.

Bleep.

I am willing to agree that I am not the easiest person to be around. That is because I set high standards for myself. If people are unwilling to live up to my standards, I am not willing to accept them, especially Luc, the greasy bastard at the Astrolite’s front desk, who expectorates all day into a blue Rubbermaid spittoon.

A
spittoon
.

He considers it a colourful character trait; I see it as the devolution of the species. But even the greasy Luc should know that to have one’s “self ” vanish from any world for no known reason is
not
something one takes lightly. In fact, one is well entitled to have a shit fit when this happens. Luc should have been more understanding of this, and I, in the midst of my shit fit, should not have criticized Luc’s love of anime comics, declaring them bourgeois escapist ecotourism of the brain. Or something like that. I don’t remember exactly.

And so I was out on the street, tossed into an outdoor Las Vegas casino of timelessness. It was sunny out—ugh!—morning sun or afternoon sun? Noonish, I supposed. I looked around at the cars and the Starbucks and the shop windows and the middle-aged people looking calm and rich, and I thought,
I hate the world
. I hate the way everything has a surface—hardness; softness—the way everything has a
smell
: chestnut blossoms and roasting chickens.

I hate the way our bodies move through the world, clip-clop, like beef marionettes. I hate how the world has turned into one massive hamburger-making machine, how the world is only about people now—everything else on the planet must bow to our will because there’s no longer any other option. Fundamentalists rejoiced when the bees died out; to them it was proof that the planet exists entirely for and was entirely about
people
. How could such thinking not make you want to go out and vomit into the street? And then I thought,
Julien, are you an environmentalist now?
I remembered World of Warcraft and I dragged myself along boulevard Poniatowski, turned down avenue de Général Dodds while avoiding the dog merde and tourists too stupid to realize they’re in the 12th arrondissement, and then crossed avenue du Général Laperrine (all these generals; all these wars) and entered Bois de Vincennes, so matronly, so boring, so permanent and a bit too much for my head to absorb just then. My head was a disaster. So I sat down on a bench with two crones afraid of tomorrow. I looked at the trees. What season was it? Summer? Fall? Leaves don’t really fall from the trees any more, do they? They just kind of sit on the branch and randomly commit suicide sometime before January. Seasons are passé. Only suckers believe in seasons.

I stared at a dead leaf while the barking of the hags pounded my ears. I made a disgusted sound and said, “God, I hate the real world.” That’s when I was stung—a feeling like a paper cut concentrated into a single point of skin. At a club, Ralphe once stuck me with a pin and told me I had
AIDS
—talk about shit fits! Ralphe is an asshole, and the pin was a Coke tab he’d somehow bent into a small jabby thing. But it stung, and so did the bee sting.

I looked at this winged insect on my forearm and swatted it away in panic. The two crones looked down at the bee and then fell to their knees and began to pray.

DIANA

NORTH BAY, ONTARIO, CANADA

My name is Diana, and yes, I was named after Diana, Princess of Wales, just as my mother was named after Jackie Kennedy.
Plus ça change
. I’m the oldest of the Wonka children ( Julien’s term), and because of this, at first, I was more like an older sibling than a peer. I remember very clearly how and when I was stung.

It was Sunday afternoon and I’d been on Sunday school baking duty. I was washing out some cake tins that had been soaking in water, and I remember dawdling because the tins smelled so wonderful—almond and sugar and lemon—and then feeling sad because almonds are pretty much a thing of the past. I remember all those photos of California almond groves, the close-up shots of the branches where there’d be maybe one almond per tree. The smell of artificial almond extract in turn got me to brooding about the fact that I was thirty-four and single, with no prospects on the horizon. I dried my hands and decided to go online and perhaps find some nice guy to date on a religious dating bulletin board.

“Bulletin board”—I know, how pre-millennial, but I’m a conservative woman, and while I wasn’t achingly desperate to be with someone, it’s hard for a woman my age to find something long-term, especially if you’re not a putting-out machine like my sister, but she’s another story.

This time, instead of looking at M4W, I went to W4M. I wanted to check out the competition:

Hello, my name is Richelle, I’m 23 and I love the Lord passionately, I am totally on fire for my King! My relationship with the Lord is central to my life. I am originally from Ontario, but . . .

Hi there! Well, here goes: I’m Michelle, 22, and number one, I’m a Christian. I want Christ to be present in every part of my life. I’m searching for someone who shares this same passion . . .

I’m Sarah, 20. I am seeking a soulmate, someone to live with in Christ and serve Him with. I’m a gentle person and soft-spoken. I try my best to love others as He . . .

My heart sank. How could I compete with these young things? To them, belief is like memorizing the alphabet—they’re too young to ever have doubts.

I sat back in my chair, one of those generic black jobs from Staples, and for the first time consciously tried to map out an aloneness strategy for the rest of my life. I had to acknowledge that there’s this hole inside me—I’ve spent my life worrying if people can see this hole. Maybe I should own my hole and be proud of it, even if that sounds disgusting. Maybe I should walk through life slumped over, my face and body reflecting my void.

Fuskshitpisscunt.

Isn’t it shocking when it first happens? I have Tourette’s—for real. But you get used to it very quickly. Usually, by the fifth volley of “cunts,” people can tune me out. I don’t notice it much myself any more.

Mind you, I don’t walk around saying “fuckshitpiss” all the time. I also blurt out whatever comes into my head as if I’m a living, breathing, inside-out machine. I would argue that we all think such things; I merely say them out loud.

. . . lard-ass

. . . pig-snout nose

. . . fist-fucker

. . . Big Bird

. . . wife beater

With me, what you hear is what you are.

Okay, back to the day of the sting.

I was still slumped in my Staples chair when I heard a dog yelping across the street—Kayla, the Doberman pinscher—one of those yelps that indicate fear and pain blended together. I flew out the front door and onto the sidewalk, hot and wet after a midday storm, to find Kayla’s owner, Mitch, pounding on his dog with a two-by-four.

A few neighbours up and down the street were watching but not doing anything to help the poor dog, so I ran up to Mitch and put my face right in his face and said, more or less, “You mean ugly fucker; everyone hates you. Stop hitting your dog, fucker, fuck you and die; I’ll kill you any way I can.” Poor Kayla was yelping and one of her legs was bleeding, and she was crouched as far away from Mitch as her tether permitted.

Mitch took another token swing in Kayla’s direction, but I inserted myself between him and the poor yelping dog. Mitch started brandishing the two-by-four at me, screaming some pretty awful things, but people like him don’t frighten me. I could smell peanut butter on his breath, and a small particle of something flew into the corner of my left eye. But still I didn’t flinch.

That was when Pastor Brandeis (Erik) drove up with his wife, Eva, in a ramshackle old Ford from the 1990s filled with baby gear, cardboard boxes and that air of poverty you sense when you pass such a car on the highway and think,
Those people will be driving around for the rest of their lives like that, looking for a place they’re never going to find, and there will always be a crumpled box of Pampers in the rear window alongside unreadable self-help books and badly folded T-shirts.
Erik and Eva had come to discuss the next weekend’s Sunday school session with me.

I will admit that I was in love with Erik, and two weeks earlier, with the touch of a hand and a whisper, had subtly let him know this—but, given the Tourette’s, I also said, “Fuck me, please fuck me.” My feelings were not reciprocated, and as a result, I was no longer a charity case: I was a distinct liability. On the afternoon of the bee sting he’d only dropped by because he had yet to devise a way to shed me from his flock or find someone else to manage the semi-annual bake sale. He’d brought Eva for protection, which made me angry because, well, I wanted her dead in the worst sort of way. Everyone thinks I’m a doormat, but I want to kill people as much as the next person.

So it was a messy scene. All of the cowardly neighbours decided to come over now that there was no possibility they might need to intervene. Erik asked Mitch the pointedly stupid question, “Why are you hitting your dog?” As if there was some reason that would justify it! Was Kayla the Doberman cheating on Mitch? Did Kayla pawn Mitch’s collection of Vietnam-era Zippo lighters and spend the proceeds on lottery tickets and meth? The way Erik asked his question made it sound like maybe there was a chance Kayla deserved what she got. “Erik, how can you ask a stupid question like that? What on earth could a dog do to justify a beating?”

“It’s my dog,” Mitch said, “and I can do what I like with it.”

“She’s a living thing, not a lawn mower, and she’s a
she
, not an
it
.” I was outraged.

Erik said, “Diana, it’s an animal.”

Mitch looked pleased.

“What’s that supposed to mean? He can beat on the dog all he wants with no repercussions?”

“Look, it’s not like I approve of beating dogs,” Erik said.

Mitch’s face fell.

“But the thing is, Diana, dogs don’t have souls. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what happens to them.”

“It doesn’t
matter?
”

“This guy’s a jerk, but he’s not sinning.”

Mitch gloated. “See? I’m not a sinner—get your religious ass off my front lawn.”

I ignored him. “Erik, you mean you condone what this hillbilly is doing?”

“I don’t like it, but it’s no sin.”

“You’re serious?”

“I am.” Erik gave me a fuck-off stare.

Eva said, “Come on, Diana. Let’s go inside and discuss the bake sale. I’m thinking of making a cobbler.”

“If I disagree with you, am I kicked out of the flock?” I glared daggers at Erik.

He offered a shrug. “Well, yes.”

Ahh . . . excommunication.

That’s when I got stung.