Generation A (17 page)

Shit
.

Superman’s crimes grew uglier as his superpowers dwindled to mortal levels. Yoda, addicted to Superman’s diamonds, refused to accept any other form of payment. Superman tried offering a Patek Phillipe watch he had ripped from the wrist of some guy who was selling weed behind the Office Warehouse. No go.

And so he robbed a Zales in the strip mall off the interstate. Bad decision. He went down on the third bullet; by the sixth, he was dead.

Back at the bar, Yoda trawled the news sites for exposés on Superman’s private life: the whores, the spare bedroom filled with emptied and unrecycled cans of Boost and Ensure, the back taxes that went all the way back to the Reagan administration. Yoda sighed, fondled his sack of diamonds and then smiled as he looked up and saw Batman enter the bar.

“Ah, Batman. I think the drink for you I have.”

SAMANTHA

So, right, I’ve never been the brown-noser in school, but I
have
prided myself on getting good grades throughout my life, and Serge was the teacher I wanted to please. Zack telling a good story was like the special-needs kid in the class knowing a Keats sonnet. Bloody annoying.

Serge said, “Your turn, Samantha.”

Bloody hell. “Serge, I’m not creative that way.”

“If you relax, you might surprise yourself, Samantha. The brain uses stories to organize its perceptions of the world. Every moment of your life it’s doing things for you that you can barely imagine.”

I went silent from nerves. Serge smiled and said, “Is your PDA working? Go online and look up
The Decameron
.”

“Spell that for me.”

He did.

I read aloud: “
The Decameron
is a collection of short stories written from 1350 to 1353 by an Italian writer, Giovanni Boccaccio. The collection begins with a description of the Black Death. Then we meet a group of seven young men and women who flee from plague-ridden Florence to a villa in the countryside. To pass the time, each member of the party tells stories about lust, the nobility and the clergy.

“
The Decameron
was made into an Italian movie in 1972. A Japanese version,
Tôkyô Dekameron
, made in 1996, featured lesbian torture chambers.”

We sat there digesting this piece of information. Diana dropped a log on the fire, saying, “Well, I guess we’d better update our notions of lust, the nobility and the clergy. Zack is totally on the right track. Let’s tell stories about stalking, superheroes and cults.”

The room became warmer and more intimate. I felt like a child again.

I said, “If Zack can do this, I can do this. But I want to tell a story with a real king, not a superhero.”

Zoë Hears the Truth

by Samantha Tolliver

Once upon a time there was a princess who had no brothers or sisters. Since she was fated to become queen, she spent much of her early life wondering exactly what it is a queen does, aside from displaying excellent table manners and cutting ribbons at the openings of horticultural festivals. Her parents had always told her that when her day came, she’d receive special instruction. In the meantime, she was told to enjoy life.

So Princess Zoë, which was her name, went to the gym. She read ancient scrolls. She played tennis. In order to promote her kingdom’s industrial base, she once had lunch with a Japanese-made robot that simulated Elton John. It was an interesting life. Then one day, during a month of heavy rains and floods, her father became sick and a hush fell over the castle. He called Zoë to his bedside and said, “It’s time we had a talk.”

Zoë’s stomach fluttered because she knew this was when she was to receive her special instructions on how to be queen.

“What is it, Father?”

Rain drummed on the ancient lead-glassed windows.

“It’s simple, really. You need to know that your mother and I don’t believe in anything.”

Zoë was shocked. “
What
did you say, Father?”

“Your mother and I don’t believe in anything.”

“As in . . . religion?”

“Absolutely. No religion for us.”

“Politics?”

“Nope.”

“The monarchy?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why are you telling me this? How can you just sit there and tell me you don’t believe in anything. You’re the king! You have a kingdom, and subjects who worship you.”

“If it makes them happier to worship me, then let them.”

“So wait. You mean you don’t even believe in any form of higher being?”

“That is correct. Nothing.”

“But you’re divinely chosen!”

“So?”

Zoë didn’t know how to handle this information. The room began to tilt like a dock on choppy water. “Did you
ever
believe in anything—when you were younger, maybe?” she asked.

“I tried. Quite hard. Really.”

Zoë got mad. “Papa, you’re a fraud!”

“Grow up just a bit, my little cabbage. Don’t you ever wonder how I get through all my days in such a good mood, even when the peasants threaten to revolt or the queen of Spain overstays her welcome?”

“But don’t you have to believe in
something
?”

“Princess, you’re too old not to have had, how shall I say, certain
experiences
. You’ve had bad Internet dates. You’ve had people be creeps to you. You’ve seen what you’ve seen; you’ve felt what you’ve felt. Ideology is for people who don’t trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.”

“I feel like I’m going mad.”

“Madness is actually quite rare in individuals. It’s groups of people who go mad. Countries, cults . . . religions.”

Zoë said, “I wish I smoked. If I smoked, right now would be a very good time for a cigarette.”

“I’ll have the butler bring us one.” Her father leaned over to a speakerphone beside his bed and said, “Please bring me a cigarette.” Almost instantly, the butler arrived with a mentholated filter-tipped cigarette resting atop a burgundy pillow. “Try it, Zoë. You’ll see what you’ve been missing all these years.”

The butler lit the cigarette for Zoë. She breathed in some smoke, coughed and grew dizzy. “This tastes awful.”

“Sometimes what’s bad for our bodies is good for the soul. Smoke some more. You’ll love it. Soon you’ll be unable to stop.”

Zoë inhaled again. It wasn’t as bad as the first few puffs. “Does anyone else know you don’t believe in anything?”

“Just your mother.”

“Don’t you worry about death?”

“For every living person here on earth, there are millions of dead people before them—and there will be billions of dead people after us all, too. Being alive is just a brief technicality. Why are you so upset?”

“This is a lot to absorb in one blast.”

“
Pshaw
. There’s nothing to absorb. That’s the point. And soon you’ll be queen and you’ll have to go through your days displaying flawless table manners and cutting ribbons to open horticultural fairs. And you’ll have to deal with a few monsters as well.”

“Monsters?” This was news to Zoë.

“Yes, monsters. People who believe in things to the exclusion of their senses. Everyone dumps on politicians as monsters, but they’re actually very easy to handle because at least they’re up front about the system they’re using to avoid reality. The real killers are the quiet believers. It’s always the sullen twenty-year-old who wears the vest into the market square.”

As Zoë sat and finished her cigarette, there was a pleasant quiet moment between father and daughter. The rain pounded on the window like a crazy person trying to get in. She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray designed to look like a miniature version of the Magna Carta. She said, “You’ve heard the news this morning about the floods?”

“I did.”

“They say the Royal Cemetery will soon flood.”

“Won’t
that
be something,” said the king.

“Papa, it’s where you’re going to be buried.”

“Just imagine all of those bejewelled skeletons washing away down into the river.”

“Papa, we’re going to have to find somewhere else to bury you. What are we going to do? Where can we bury you if not in the Royal Cemetery?”

“Surprise me,” said the king, and died, making Zoë queen. And as she sat there thinking about her future, she looked at her cigarette butt and had the strangest sensation that the cigarette was looking back at her.

And then she realized that she, too, didn’t believe in anything.

Then she wondered if not believing in anything robbed her of the ability to fall in love.

And then she rang for another cigarette, her first act as queen.

JULIEN

Zut!
I never would have imagined that I, Julien, would one day enjoy spending an afternoon sitting on a stump watching ravens dropping
moules
onto boulders, or watching a tide come in and eat the sand, or listening to the waves pummel the rocks on the shoreline north of Tow Hill Road, where every rock is the size and shape of an egg. And telling stories?
Holy fucking zut!

I asked Serge, “Can you tell us why it’s so weird and so difficult to invent a story? How difficult can it be? And yet it is very difficult.”

Serge said, “Stories come from a part of you that only gets visited rarely—sometimes never at all. I think most people spend so much time trying to convince themselves that their lives are stories that the actual story-creating part of their brains hardens and dies. People forget that there are other ways of ordering the world. But now it’s your turn to tell a story.”

I was smacked by a wave of jet lag—an old-fashioned condition like dropsy or croup or leprosy. When was the last time you heard of anyone with jet lag?

I needed a minute to collect my thoughts—what story to tell?
Fuck
. I reached for my PDA and looked up “storytelling” for ideas.

Meanwhile, the wine flowed and Harj told us about the Craigs. I bought myself a little more time by telling everybody about the explosion at
CERN
, and Sam discussed her Earth sandwich. Then Diana told us about her evil neighbour, Mitch—it was getting late by then—and finally Zack began telling us his theories about corn.

And then Serge said it was really time for me to tell a story.

Nique ta mère!

“Okay. Here goes nothing . . .”

Coffinshark the Unpleasant

Meets the Stadium of Pain

by Julien Picard

Everyone stared at me.

I said, “I’m being ridiculous here! The title of my story is definitely not ‘Coffinshark the Unpleasant Meets the Stadium of Pain!’ . . . but I
did
generate millions of story titles using the uncountable numbers of online plot and character generators.”

I held up my PDA to display its small brilliant aqua screen.

“All genres, all levels of culture, high, low, Marxist and bourgeois. Here’s just one vampire character description out of 2,500 instant vampire descriptions generated online.

“‘Character No. 2,428: This sinful male vampire has narrow eyes the colour of charcoal. His thick, straight brown hair is worn in a style that reminds you of a trailing ribbon. He’s got a beard and a graceful build. His skin is completely transparent, and the blood flowing beneath it seems to glow. He has a small nose and a boxy chin. He can turn into a jaguar, and he has few vampiric disabilities. His diet consists of blood, but he can also eat normal food. He feeds not through his mouth, but via a long tongue with an eel-like end.’”

Sam said, “It’s sort of the death of culture, isn’t it? The death of books. The death of the individual hero. The death of the individual,
period
.”

I passed my PDA around and scrolled through the plots and names and places that spewed into my laptop’s windows.

Sam said, “Seeing all of these story options is making me feel seasick.”

“They’re not even
ideas
,” Diana said. “They’re like those kitschy splatter paintings they sell at carnivals.”

Serge said, “You’re not off the hook, Julien. You still have to tell your story.”

I felt fortified by outrage at the modern world. I said, “Okay, here’s my real story. Screw you, plot generators.”

Fear of Windows

by Julien Picard

Kimberly Kellogs was a well-nourished, upper-middle-class twelve-year-old girl who lived in a good suburb of a good American city. Her parents were happy that she hadn’t yet turned into an insolent, shoplifting, purge-dieting, binge-drinking nightmare like all the other girls in the neighbourhood. They counted their blessings.

One night Kimberly was watching a horror movie with her parents, one about outer space aliens invading the suburbs. The movie was made in a cinéma-vérité style, so that the naturalistic and provocative camerawork made the everyday world seem more charged and real, ready to explode like a black nylon backpack in a crowded train station.

Halfway through the movie, a scene showed a family inside their house; they heard funny noises, so they went from window to window, trying to see what the noise could be. When nothing turned up, they stood in front of the living-room window for a moment, admiring the front garden. Suddenly, a huge mean-motherfucker alien with tentacles and fangs and a massive cranium jumped in front of them and spat blood and venom and human body parts onto the windowpane.

Kimberly began screaming and couldn’t stop. In the end, her parents had to give her some Valium they’d been saving for an upcoming holiday flight, and still she spent the rest of the evening in bed with her curtains tightly closed. Through the walls, she could hear her parents fighting over whose idea it had been to let a twelve-year-old girl watch a PG-17 horror movie.

Before he went to bed that night, Kimberly’s father came up to see how she was doing and said, “Let’s open the curtains and let in some fresh air.”

Kimberly freaked out again. It took her father some minutes to make the connection between the curtains, the windows and the monster, and by then Kimberly was so upset that she ended up spending the night in her parents’ room, the blinds drawn.

The next morning Kimberly was fine again—until she remembered the monster. She froze, realizing that there were windows everywhere and that the monster could appear at any one of them at any time.

She willed herself out of the house and onto the school bus, and that was okay because it was moving and raised above the ground, until she realized that an alien could be on the bus’s roof. At school, she spent the day trying not to look out the classroom windows.

During the last period of the day, science, one of her classmates, Luke, said, “Kimberly, come over here. There’s this cool eye-perception test I want to show you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s to test your eyes to see what you notice more, motion or colour. It’s fun.”

Kimberly was glad to have something to take her mind off the aliens, so she went to sit beside him.

Luke said, “What you do is stare at this image really intensely.”

On the screen was a picture of a boring middle-class living room.

“Let your eyes relax and let your body relax, and then things in the room will move just slightly, or the sofa may change colour just a bit. The image is going to change very slowly. Tell me what changes you notice—colour or shape or motion or whatever.”

So Kimberly sat there and let her body relax for the first time since the horror movie. She stared at the picture and thought of how much it matched her own family’s living room. She was imagining herself in the room, feeling safe and happy, when all of a sudden the screen cut to a full-size screaming vampire face, fangs bleeding, eyes full of murderous bloodsucking rage.

Kimberly went totally apeshit, and nobody knew what to do. Finally, her teacher and a few of the bigger students were able to drag her to the nurse’s office, where she was forced to sign several waiver forms and show proof of her family’s fully paid up-to-date medical coverage before she was given a rich and delicious syringe-load of Dilaudid. Still, the only reason Kimberly didn’t flip out further was because the nurse’s office had no windows and she felt slightly safe there—but she dreaded the fact that she would have to leave the room and walk down windowed hallways and out a door into a car with windows (her mother had been called) and then into a house that had twenty-seven windows as well as one chimney and three ventilation holes for the dryer and the bathroom showers.

The drive home was traumatic. Once inside the house, Kimberly was unable to leave her mother, even for a second.

That night her parents tried reasoning with her, but the harder they tried, the more anxious she became. At two in the morning, they gave her the remaining eight milligrams of Valium and decided to see if everything would be better in the morning. It wasn’t. It was much worse—a Valium hangover amplified every misfiring neuron in their daughter’s brain. Kimberly, teeth chattering, crept inside the linen closet and shut the door.

“Shit. We have to get her to a doctor,” said her father. “Can you get the day off ?”

“Can’t. Today is our annual End of Season Blowout on Winnebagos. Can you do it?”

“Fine. Come on, pumpkin,” Kimberly’s dad said. “Get dressed and let’s go see if we can make these spooky things go away.”

They drove to the clinic with Kimberly crouched in the nook in front of the front passenger seat. Her father hoped to hell he wouldn’t get stopped for a seat-belt violation.

At the clinic they saw Dr. Marlboro, who was quick to grasp the problem. “Sedatives won’t work,” he said. “Nothing will work. A horrific lifelong phobia has been created. The most we can hope for is that the fear will dwindle with time and become manageable. The decay rate for young people traumatized by the wrong movie at the wrong time is usually six weeks—but the aftershocks linger forever.”

“What kind of quack are you?” Kimberly’s dad said.

“Language, Mr. Kellogs. Goodbye.”

Angry, Kimberly’s father took his daughter to another doctor whom he’d heard would write anyone a prescription for anything.

Kimberly spent the next month in a velvet fog. Then the prescription ran out, and when her parents went to get her another, they found that the pill doctor had fled to Florida to avoid multiple malpractice charges. All the other doctors in town were off-duty, watching golf marathons on TV, and an unsedated Kimberly returned to her full senses. She was yet again horrified by the world.

While Kimberly had been in her fog, spring had turned into summer. Kimberly’s mother had an idea: “Why don’t you sleep outside on the lawn? No windows there.”

She had a point. That night Kimberly slept in the back garden, midway between the house and the fence.

“Well, Einstein,” said her father to her mother. “Glad to see something works. She can’t be living on sedatives forever.”

With a 360-degree view all around her, sleep came quickly to Kimberly. The next morning, she jerked awake, filled with fear, then realized where she was and relaxed. This went on for a month, during which time she stayed outside, only going inside when it was absolutely necessary. The weather was good, and so was life.

Then one morning she woke up to see two men dressed like politicians coming through the carport. They approached the side door and rang the doorbell. Kimberly’s mother answered it and let them in.

As quietly as she could, Kimberly crept up to the house. She snuck from window to window, looking inside, and as she did, she discovered that windows are perfectly fine if you’re on the outside looking in.

Finally, she came to the living-room window. She looked in to see her parents kneeling in front of the men, who were opening up their heads like tin can lids. Jellyfish tentacles emerged and wrapped themselves over her parents’ skulls. After thirty seconds, the tentacles retreated and went back inside the men’s heads and the heads snapped shut. The creatures pulled dog leashes from their pockets, which they attached to Kimberly’s parents. They led her parents out the front door, down the driveway and out onto the road, where other aliens were busy rounding up the neighbours.

I wish I could say that Kimberly did a brave thing and fetched the loaded Colt from her father’s bedside drawer and tried to rescue her parents.