Generation A (19 page)

ZACK

“Jeez, Harj, could you be any more depressing?”

“Zack, to create a happy ending for its own sake is no different than masturbation of the brain.”

!!!

Okay.

Sometimes you’re travelling along through this wacky thing we call life, when you’re assaulted by an idea so potent that it obliterates all other forms of stimulus. The notion of neuromasturbation was precisely one of those ideas.

Harj and the others kept on talking, but I’ll never know about what. I was trying to figure out what would be the brain’s equivalent of lube or movies of Croatian nurses engaged in fourgies.

I heard Harj’s voice come back into focus. It had to be three minutes later. “. . . and so
that
,” said Harj, “was the way I helped save Christmas.” He looked at me. “Zack? Zack? Are you okay?”

“Just thinking.”

“It is time for you to tell a story.”

“And so I will,
and
I promise a happy ending.”

The room was growing cold. We took what blankets we had and moved close together, though Serge remained seated on the other side of the room.

I began my second story.

Yield: A Story

about Cornfields

by Zack Lammle

One day, people everywhere started looking around at all the other people and realized that everybody was looking younger. Well, not so much younger as . . .
smoother
. Wrinkles were vanishing not only on human faces but on their clothing, too—and for at least the first sixty seconds after people realized this, they ran to their mirrors, saw their reflections and said to themselves,
Dang! I am looking hot today!

But then that first minute ended and people began noticing other things. For example, stains were vanishing from clothing and furniture, and surfaces everywhere began looking Photoshopped and sterile. Hairdos were looking cleaner and more geometrical—no more flyaway strands. Plants and animals began looking cuter and more rounded, and it dawned on everyone at the same moment:
Holy shit! We’re all turning into cartoons!

Being aware of what was happening didn’t slow down the pace of cartoonification. With precision and speed, the world was being reduced and crispened and stylized. Some people turned into manga characters. Others turned into high-res video game characters and avatars. Still others turned into classic cartoons, with faces where only the mouth moved when they spoke, and eyes that blinked once every seven seconds.

The world’s cartoonification was emotionally troubling, and it was bad for the economy, too, as people stopped eating and taking shits, or doing anything else that was unclean or unable to be reduced to colourful dots, lines, polygons or digital mesh.

A world of financially insolvent cartoons?
Noooooooooo!

And then from Iowa came both hope and fear: a cornfield in that state had yet to convert into a cartoon cornfield. It had remained as real as ever, and cartoon people drove from everywhere in cartoon cars just to see something that hadn’t turned into squiggles and lines and polygons.

The only problem with the cornfield was that the cartoon people couldn’t get into it.

When they tried to enter, they hit an invisible wall. Cartoon planes flying towards the cornfield crashed into that same invisible wall; they fell to the earth in flames, with huge ink letters above them that said
Whaam!!
and
K-k-k-keeeRACK!!

From within the cornfield came a loud, bellowing voice like that of actor James Earl Jones, claiming that it was responsible for turning the world into a cartoon and that it was enjoying every second of it.

The situation was dire and the world needed a hero, and it found one. He went by the name of Coffinshark the Unpleasant, and cartoonification had barely touched him—at most, he looked like he’d had a lot of good cosmetic work done. He had that slickness that made people think that, if he tried, he could easily pass as a member of the local Channel Three News team.

People gasped in disbelief as Coffinshark smashed a hole in the invisible wall and entered the cornfield, vanishing quickly in its thousands of rows.

Near the middle of the field, he heard James Earl Jones shouting, “Coffinshark the Unpleasant! You are a loser and will never catch me!”

“But what if I do?”

“You won’t.”

“I
will
.”

The voice was indignant. “You don’t even know who I am!”

“When I catch you I will.”

“Just you try!”

And so Coffinshark raced through the cornfield, trying to find the source of the voice. Sometimes he felt as if the voice was just a few stalks away; at other times the voice seemed distant. As Coffinshark chased the voice, he began making random turns within the corn, and soon the voice became confused.

“Coffinshark! What the fuck are you doing? You’re supposed to be chasing me!”

“But I
am
chasing you.”

“You don’t have a clue what you’re doing!”

“You’re right,” said Coffinshark. “I don’t.” He stopped and looked up at the sky and said, “Okay, Big Boy—you got me. Why don’t you come and hammer me into the ground right now.”

“You can’t be serious!”

“I’m serious.”

“You people are idiots. I’m glad I turned you all into cartoons. It’s all you deserve.”

“Well, come on, squash me like a bug.”

The voice sighed and said, “Very well! As you wish!” From the sky, a huge finger came down. Just before it squished Coffinshark, the voice cried out, “Oh
shit!
”

With all of his running, Coffinshark had drawn a huge button in the cornfield, and he had trampled down more cornstalks to spell out the words
SATELLITE VIEW
. As the finger squished Coffinshark, it pushed the button and the world immediately resolved back into the real photographic life-as-normal deal.

Coffinshark picked himself up off the flattened corn, looked down at his torso, arms and legs and saw that what little cartoonification had occurred to him had vanished—and he missed it already. “Screw this,” he said to himself.

He took all the money he made from saving the world and flew to Beverly Hills, where he had large amounts of cosmetic surgery—after which he leveraged his new looks to become a successful TV newscaster, only to be murdered a few months later.

But
that
is another story . . .

“. . . And that, my friends, is a happy ending.”

My friends were quiet for a few moments, and then Diana said, “My brain feels all tingly and moist.”

“Me? My brain just ejaculated,” said Julien.

Sam said, “Coffinshark had a good ending, but knowing that he dies later subverts the happiness.”

Harj said, “Ah, like the film
Pulp Fiction
: you, the viewer, know John Travolta is killed, and yet when he leaves the restaurant with Samuel Jackson at the end, your head is in a happy place. A very sophisticated ending indeed, Zack.”

“Thank you.” I then tried to think of the neuromasturbation equivalent of Kleenex.

SAMANTHA

Jesus, what a pitiful morning. After Zack’s cartoon story, we all fell asleep, only to be woken up by the next-door neighbour’s chainsaw—he’s an old coot who uses it to carve eagles and whales, which he trades for Malaysian porn cartridges with a demolition team that comes through twice a year to sell off chunks of the old DEW Line facility by the airport. Instead of being five sexy, frisky young things waking up with alluring bed-head, we looked more like five hoboes who’d collectively shared and soiled a boxcar. We had braid-rug patterns dented into our faces, and the burnt-rubber stench of cheap alcohol leaking from our pores like snot from a runny nose.

I rubbed my eyes and remembered our storytelling from the night before. It had been so . . .
intimate
. It had felt like we were quintuplets in utero. Then I caught Julien’s eye and he pulled his gaze away and I knew he felt the same way. Plus, we all had hangovers of the gods.

My clanging head made me impatient and confrontational with Serge, who had been up for ages writing notes at the kitchen table. I demanded to know just what else we were supposed to be doing in Haida Gwaii besides making up stories. He made the face I imagined he’d make if we insulted his cooking.

“It’s science, Samantha. Just believe me and go along with it.”

“Telling stories is science? Since when?”

“You know what eons are, correct?”

“Those small proteins. The ones they discovered a few years ago.”

“If by
they
, you mean
me
, then yes.”

“
You
discovered eons?”

“Not in general. But I discovered a few specific microproteins—
neuro
proteins.”

“That’s impressive.”

“Thank you.”

“So what do eons have to do with us making up stories?”

Serge delivered a patronizing sigh. “Storytelling makes the body secrete a special eon.”

“Seriously? You’re not shitting me?”

“Yes, Sam, it’s true.”

“Why do you want us to make—
secrete
—these eons?”

“Please just trust me for the time being.”

A phantom serial killer’s ice pick impaled itself into the back of my head. I didn’t feel like arguing science with Serge any more.

Diana came in the front door and plunked herself down at the table. “What’s the deal with Solon around here?”

“Sorry?” Serge was gruff; he was not a person to tolerate a tone bordering on insubordination.

“Solon. Someone’s been smuggling it onto the island by the truckload. It’s become a huge issue, apparently. I saw some guy by the docks yesterday, and his face looked like an uncooked steak. Somebody beat the crap out of him, and I bet you anything it’s related.”

“I’d hate to see Solon on the island,” Serge said. “The Haida would be doomed.”

“Would they?”

“
Certainement
. At least, in theory. Nobody’s actually tested it. Solon is a new drug, and we’re only now learning its larger effects on society.”

“Have you used it?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must still be using it. I hear it’s more addictive than Oxy or meth,” Diana said.

“Believe me, reports of its addictiveness are overblown. And the first thing the Haida did upon my arrival here was a full search. Serge has no Solon.”

I thought,
It’s really creepy when someone refers to themselves in the third person.

Serge continued, “In the meantime, please stick with your storytelling. Diana, later on, why don’t you show these others the
UNESCO
beehive spot?”

Around noon we were walking to the docks to buy some fish for supper. We rounded a corner onto Collison Avenue and there were two Haida guys, our age, bike chains around their necks, dangling from the front beams of the abandoned Esso station. We silently watched the two bodies slowly rotating in the wind. A gang of crows on the eaves of a neighbouring roof bobbed and cawed, wondering when it might be time to swoop in for scraps.

Diana broke the silence: “Solon users.”

Zack added, “Man, these Haida people are
not
fucking around. Should we call the cops or something?”

“We’re on a remote island off the coast of northern British Columbia,” Diana came back. “Even if the authorities could afford to travel here, the bodies would be long gone, and methinks they would encounter only silence from the Haida.”

“Right.”

We decided it was best not to stand there gawking, and instead continued to the docks where we didn’t raise the subject of the two corpses, nor did anyone else.

We traded a disc Zack had with 128,000 songs on it—pretty much every song ever recorded from 1971 to 1980—for a medium-sized flounder. It wasn’t much to offer, but then we didn’t have much to give.

While we were trading, Diana was talking to some locals whose teeth she was set to clean later in the day—the woman denies it, but she loves her job. As we walked away from the docks, she said, “Those two hanged guys are the first Solon users they found. Apparently, there are dozens still out there.”

Serge came to meet us, hands in pockets, his long Eurocrat jacket flapping in the salty, slappy wind.

Julien said, “I don’t get why they executed them. Can’t they just shun the users? Or put them in a cage and let the Solon work its way out of their systems?”

Serge said, “The problem is that the rest of the tribe would never really trust them again. Would
you?
The tribe members would all know that the Solon users prefer, in their hearts, to be by themselves than with the tribe.”

Back at the house, we cleaned and cooked the flounder, and everyone was silent as we mulled over the Solon hangings.

Six silent people in a room got me to thinking about the voice we hear in our heads when we read, the universal narrator’s voice you may well be hearing right now. Whose voice
is
it you’re hearing? It’s not your own, is it? I didn’t think so. It never is. So I posed the question out loud. Serge was in the kitchen nook, looking at an online science paper, and he bolted upright as though I’d just whacked his solar plexus with a big stick. “
What
did you say?”

“When you read a book, whose voice is it you hear inside your head?”

“It’s certainly not my own voice,” said Harj, and the others chimed in with the same claim.

“Then whose is it?”

I said my interior narrator’s voice was sort of like a TV news reader’s—clean and generic.

“New Zealand accent?” asked Harj.

“Slight. But maybe not. Now that I think about it, not really.”

After some more discussion, the consensus was that our interior voices were those of network TV news broadcasters.

Diana had a theoretical explanation: “It’s because when you write a story, you spell it out using twenty-six letters and convert organic spoken language into a tiny chunk of real estate called a sentence or paragraph. And once this is done, the reader comes along, looks at that little chunk of real estate and reinflates it back into words inside the brain. But because you’ve used only twenty-six sterile little letters to accomplish this, all of the texture and messiness of a genuine human voice is lost. You’ve turned speech into something homogenized and sterile. There are sounds bouncing around inside your head, but they’re actually the ghosts of sounds.”

In the absence of any better idea, we left for the
UNESCO
beehive. It was hailing outside, but then it quickly warmed up to twenty-one degrees Celsius.

Right.

For me, the hive was an anticlimax—I mean, I wasn’t expecting an Arthurian sunbeam extending down from heaven—but we
did
trudge through hell’s half-acre of moss and roots and mud, only to come to a circular patch of dirt that resembled a brown, littered parking lot. The tree where the nest had once rested had been picked clean away.

Diana said, “It was different when we visited. The lighting and the time of day.”

Zack did a pig call: “Heeeeere,
bee, bee, bee, bee, bee, bee, bee!
”

I felt cynical and cross and was thinking that a nice sixkilometre jog would fix my head when Julien elbowed my side. I looked up and saw Zack’s bootlegger, the tall man with the flat nose, staring at us from within the forest.

He didn’t flinch when we all stared back. We knew right away that he was a Solon user.

And then he was gone.