Generation A (18 page)

I wish I could say that she ran after her parents in a vain effort to save them, in the process becoming a house pet, too.

But instead, Kimberly looked at her parents’ house, which was now all her own. She went in the front door, threw open all the windows, let fresh air inside and sang, “It’s mine, mine, mine now! All of it, mine!”

DIANA

Julien’s story resonated for me because when I was young, we had to stay in a cabin out in the country, and the wire mesh windows and forest noises scared the pants off me. And this got me to thinking about my screwed-up parents, who I almost never discuss, and so I dawdled a bit to figure out the gist of my story. A bit more wine was poured, and after we found a bag of stale lemon-flavoured cookies, and after a bathroom break, we reconvened in the candlelit room.

“Serge . . .”

“Yes, Diana?”

“To echo what you were saying earlier, why is it so hard to invent a story when every moment of our lives we’re basically winging it and writing stories on the fly?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, even me asking you this question is part of the story of my life—and the lives of everyone here. I could have grabbed a knife and gone psycho on everybody. Or I could have hopped around like a bunny rabbit.”

“But you didn’t,” Serge said.

“So then, why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives? How hard can it be to change gears and say,
You know what? Instead of inventing and telling stories, I’m going to make my
life
a more interesting story.
”

“I agree,” said Zack. “Why is it that, instead of going off on a cross-country killing spree, we stay home and surf for porn?”

Julien said, “Now you know why I like online war games.”

“Okay,” I said, “time for me to tell my story.”

The Short and Brutal Life

of the

Channel Three News Team

by Ms. Diana Beaton

Chloë was sitting at her kitchen table, looking out at the sunny day, when her front doorbell rang. It was the police, come to tell her that her mother had been arrested for murdering the local Channel Three News team—two anchorpeople, the weather guy and four studio technicians. Her mother, acting alone, had arrived at the TV studio carrying an oversize rattan handbag and pretended to be a sweet old thing interested in meeting the hostess from a cooking show. The moment she was close to the newsroom set, she asked to visit the washroom, slipped away, removed several guns from her handbag and came back firing. She was knocked to the ground by a surviving cameraman and her pelvis fractured. She was in hospital, in stable condition. A video of the event was already circling the planet on the Internet. Chloë watched the ninety-second sequence with police officers flanking her; its violence was so otherworldly that Chloë thought she was in a dream. The police asked if she would go to the hospital with them, and she said, “Of course,” and off they drove, cherries flashing.

The main entryway was cordoned off, but the cruiser was allowed to slip past the security guards and story-crazed media. They elevatored up to the top floor, where a quartet of officers guarded her mother’s room. Chloë had always expected that one day she would visit her mother in the hospital with a broken hip, just not under the current set of circumstances.

“Mom?”

“Hello, dear.”

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“I’m more than happy to tell you.”

“Wait—where’s Dad?”

“He’s not available right now.”

“Oh Jesus, he’s not going to go out and shoot somebody, too, is he?”

“Aren’t you quick to jump to conclusions!”

“Mom, you killed seven people.”

“Good.”

Chloë tried to compose herself while her mother serenely smiled. “So, why’d you do it?” she finally managed to ask.

“Our New Vision church group had an ‘enlightenment fasting’ up in the mountains last weekend. It was glorious. And during group prayer, I was lifted up above Earth and when I looked down on this planet, it was black like a charcoal briquette. At that moment I realized that Earth is over, and that New Vision will take me to a new planet.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No, I’m not kidding you, Chloë. Your father and I want you to join us.”

“Mom. This is awful. Wake up—wake
up!
”

Chloë’s mother looked at her with the same bland face she used when she thanked polite men for holding a door open for her. “You should be thrilled for me, dear. I believe it was
you
who was a fanatic of that comic strip from the 1970s—what was it—the
Yamato
? You of all people must understand what it feels like to want to leave a destroyed planet and roam the universe trying to fight an overwhelming darkness.”

“It was just a
comic
, Mom.”

“For ‘just a comic’ it certainly took hold of your imagination. I think you’re jealous of me, dear.”

“
What?
”

“You’re jealous because right now I’m actually inside that cartoon—on the other side of the mirror—and you aren’t. But you
can
be. Join us.”

“Mom, just stop it. Why did you kill those people?”

“I killed them because they were famous.”

“
What?
”

“The only thing our diseased culture believes in is fame. No other form of eternity exists. Kill the famous and you kill the core of the diseased culture.”

“So you killed the Channel Three News team? They’re barely famous even here in town.”

“If you watch the news right about now, you’ll see that New Visioneers around the world have shot and killed many people at all levels of fame. To decide who is ‘more famous’ than anyone else is to buy into the fame creed. So we have been indiscriminate.”

Chloë’s sense of dread grew stronger. “Who is Dad going to kill?”

“What time is it?”

Chloë looked at her cellphone’s time display. “Almost exactly five o’clock.”

“In that case, right about . . .” Chloë’s mother looked at the ceiling for a second, whereupon she heard small cracking sounds coming from the hospital entranceway. “Right about now he’s just shot the news reporters covering my shootings.”

“Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .” Chloë ran to the window: pandemonium. She turned to her mother: “Holy fuck! What is wrong with you?”

“Is your father dead?”

“What?” Chloë looked out the window again and saw her father’s body sprawled on a berm covered in Kentucky bluegrass. “Yes. Mother of God. He is!”

“Good. He’ll be on the other side to greet me with the rest of us who have fulfilled our mission today.”

Chloë staggered out into the hallway, gasping, but police and hospital staff paid her little attention as they braced for the next wave of wounded, dying and the dead. She shouted, “Dear God, I am so sorry!” and was ignored.

On a nursing station’s TV screen, newscasts were coming in, showing the faces of murdered celebrities from around the world.

Chloë ran back into the room to find her mother glowing.

“Mom, you’re crazy. Your cult is crazy.”

“I want all of your generation to come join me and band together to smash all the shop windows of every boutique in the country, to set fire to every catwalk, to shoot rockets into Beverly Hills. It will be beautiful—like modern art—and people will finally stop believing in the false future promised by celebrity.”

Chloë wanted to vomit. Gurneys loaded with bodies were shunted quickly past the room’s door and her mother went on talking: “In the last days of World War Two, the Japanese emperor told the Japanese to sacrifice themselves, to die like smashed jewels. And so I say to you, Chloë, die like a smashed jewel. Destroy, so that we can rebuild.”

Outside it had grown dark—not regular darkness, but a chemical darkness that felt linked to profound evil. The moon was full. Chloë and her mother caught each other staring at it at the same time. Her mother said, “I wish the Apollo astronauts had died on the moon.”

“
What?
”

“Then it would be one great big tombstone for planet Earth.” Her mother popped something into her mouth.

“Mom—what was that?”

“Cyanide, dear. I’m off on your Battleship
Yamato
. Why don’t you come, too?”

Chloë ran for help, but the staff were too busy with the wounded, so she watched her mother die, writhing on her bed, then falling still.

Stunned, Chloë walked back out into the hallway. There was blood everywhere. The floor was smeared; the whole place smelled of hot, moist coins. She heard gunshots coming from the elevator bank, and screaming staff ran down the hallway past her. She saw an orderly in turquoise surgical scrubs coming towards her holding a sawed-off shotgun, and the look in his eye told Chloë that this was a New Vision follower.

He was whistling, and as he came nearer, he said, relaxed as can be, “Looks like you’re one pretty darn famous little lady now, aren’t you?”

Chloë ran into her mother’s room and kissed her mother’s mouth violently, sucking in the remains of the cyanide. She tasted the chemical as it entered her bloodstream and knew death would be quick.

The whistling stopped as the orderly loomed in the doorway. Chloë said, “Know what? I leave this planet on my own terms, you freak.” She was dead before the buckshot pounded her chest.

HARJ

I have always prided myself on being a good listener, and after listening to Diana’s story, it occurred to me that common threads might be woven into the fabric of our stories. Certain themes tended to recur: royalty, cults, the way we hear words, the way we tell stories, superheroes, disaster, aliens—Channel Three News teams. I kept this observation to myself, as I did not want to make my new friends self-conscious.

And for me to invent a story on the spot? Difficult, but I very much wanted to be a part of our gang—the alcohol and the candlelit intimacy were seductive and corroded that part of my brain that fears such things as public speaking and karaoke. And so I began.

Nine Point Zero

by Harj Vetharanayan

The king
2
was up in his hot-air balloon, looking down over his mighty kingdom, proud that he had been born to rule over it and silently happy with his lot in life. It was the middle of a sunny weekday, and life in the kingdom was happening as usual: the roads were full, the children were at school, and the last of the lunchtime diners were heading back to their workplaces. That was when the earthquake struck.

2 Yes, royalty.

It was a nine point zero; within fifteen seconds, it demolished the older, less seismically prepared buildings in the land. After that, the newer buildings began to drop. Throughout the kingdom, those people who had survived did a clumsy dance out onto the wobbling streets to avoid falling debris—shards of glass and masonry.

The noise of the quake was deafening. Such a roar! It was the planet itself shifting and readjusting; the people on the street couldn’t even hear each other yell.

The king, up in his hot-air balloon, was the only person who experienced none of the quake’s violence, which continued to roar and roar and destroy—a quake that wouldn’t stop. By the quake’s fifth minute, most of his kingdom’s houses were gone and all dams had broken. Reservoirs had drowned whole suburbs. Office towers had fallen on their sides and the quake’s continuing lunging motions shook them until only twisted steel beams remained.

The king’s heart had broken and still the quake continued! Survivors were becoming seasick from the ground’s lurching—they lay vomiting on the crumbling parking lots and sidewalks. Trees fell. Birds were unable to land on the moving surfaces and were relieved to sit on the rim of the king’s hot-air balloon basket.

Fires broke out and the rubble burned. The king watched, helpless to stop it, tears in his eyes, flocks of confused birds circling his basket.

After ten minutes, survivors truly wondered if they were lost inside a dream; the pounding earth was almost boring, like a carnival ride that had gone on far too long.

After fifteen minutes, there was nothing left to destroy. All the buildings were gone. All statues, all communications towers, all laboratories, all movie theatres, all gyms, all gone.

And then the earthquake stopped.

The king, his nerves in ribbons, his eyes cried out, landed his balloon atop what was once a mighty supermarket. The quake had shaken it so badly that the remains had settled into a grey powder, beneath which the larger chunks slept, neatly graded by size. As he stepped out onto the dust, he remembered a photo he’d seen of the first footstep on the moon.

The roads and parking lots had cracked open, and the pavement fragments above had broken like soda crackers, then shattered, then turned to dust. Front yards had liquefied, swallowing whole houses and trees, which now lay deep within the planet.

The king tried to find survivors, and soon he did: stragglers, caked in dirt and vomit, still seasick and crazed from the fifteen-minute quake, all of them feeling like they were hallucinating upon seeing their perfectly intact, well-groomed king.

They began searching for food and water and medicine and liquor, but little could be found in the rubble and dust.

The king helped a middle-aged woman who was picking away at the spot where there had once been a convenience store. She held up a clear bottle of liquid and asked the king what it contained.

“Fruit Solutions with Omega 3 . . . but why are you asking me that? It says so right on the label,” he replied.

The woman ripped off the cap and poured half the bottle’s contents onto her face to rinse out her eyes; she then drank the remaining liquid and groped through the dust for more bottles that were identical.

A former four-lane commercial strip was so destroyed it couldn’t even be called a path. There the king found a couple of hipsters in cargo pants and vintage early-1990s Soundgarden T-shirts. They held up some cans and asked the king what was in them: “Who’s Your Daddy Energy Drink, with caffeine, taurine and B vitamins . . . but why are you asking me that? It says so right on the label.” They quickly opened the cans and guzzled the contents, ignoring the king.

The king walked farther and met his old high school teacher, who was alive only because he’d called in sick that day and had been stuck in traffic taking his Jack Russell terrier to the vet when the quake struck, riding out the fifteen minutes in the padded comfort of his 2010 Nissan Sentra. The teacher said, “Oh, King, hello. Such good luck to find you. Please, please, tell me, what does this bottle contain?”

The king looked at it. “Bleach. But why are you asking me that? It says so right on the label.”

“It’s a funny thing,” the teacher said, “but I can no longer read.”

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said—I look at the shapes on this label and they look like upside-down Hebrew mixed with right-side-up Korean. No idea at all what any of it says. By the way, I see a tsunami coming. Let’s hope we’re far enough away from the coast here.”

The king had little time to reflect on the fact that the quake had stripped its survivors of the ability to read. A massive tsunami barfed and sloshed inward from the coast, turning the recently powdered city into a rich, dark brown cake batter that stopped just inches away from the king’s royal shoes. A small aftershock jiggled air bubbles from the batter. His world fell silent.

Behind him, a chimney collapsed, the last remaining perpendicular line to be seen for miles around. The hipsters and the middle-aged lady and the old high school teacher stood beside the king. The woman said, “I’m glad at least one person is still able to read. Otherwise, we’d never be able to rebuild from scratch everything we had before, back to shiny and brand new, as if none of this had ever happened!”

Another tsunami washed in atop the first one, bright red for some reason. Industrial colouring agents? A trainload of cough syrup? Did it matter? The king stumbled over to the teacher’s destroyed Sentra, half buried with the remains of the road; he leaned against it and retched. With his index finger, he wrote the words
THE KING IS DEAD
on its dusty window, and when he was asked what he’d just written, he told his subjects, “A map.”