Generation A (27 page)

Trevor had an idea about how to decompose
Finnegans Wake
further. He went to the train’s men’s room and held the paragraph up to a mirror, and then he turned the book upside down, still gazing at the same paragraph, and the whole thing turned into pure optical mush, into encrypted code, into Punjabi. He unscrunched a tissue flap somewhere in his neocortex and pretended he was looking at a new language altogether.

Then he went back into the car and sat down, bought a coffee from a passing trolley and reread the paragraph, and he wondered if it might be possible for his brain to turn the paragraph into mush without the benefit of a mirror and reorientation—in the same way that if you say a person’s name over and over and over, it stops making sense.

So he squinted, then opened his eyes wide, and lo, somewhere before Genoa he found that he could turn print into meaningless mush. Letters and words became lines and blobs, and Trevor felt, for the first time in years, a sense of peace, a sense of—wait . . .
holy shit!
—the entire time he’d been performing this exercise, Trevor hadn’t once thought of gambling.
This is not fucking possible
. Was this strange novel a cure for his brain’s incessant gambling chatter? Could this really be happening? And so he opened the book and began to read chunks of it and then turn those chunks back into mush in his head, and he felt nothing but bliss as the train pulled into Milan’s Stazione Centrale, where he had to change trains for Locarno.

Walking through the train station was a joy. He felt that cool, silent, ultra-clear peace you feel around seven at night when you realize that a long hangover is one hundred percent gone. He had forty-five minutes to kill, so he went into a bar and ordered a rather expensive red wine and savoured the silence inside his skull, falling into a reverie broken by an announcement that the Locarno train was about to leave. He made a dash to his platform and barely boarded in time. Once he sat down, he realized he’d left
Finnegans Wake
and his mobile phone in the bar.
Merde
. Well, he could read it online once he got to Switzerland and located a computer.

But as the train’s wheels rolled forward, his gambling mania returned worse than ever—it felt like his brain was punishing him for having taken a holiday from himself:
odds that more than fifty percent of people in this car are using mobile phones: 1 in 7; odds that the next woman who walks into this car is good-looking: 3 in 5
. And on and on. He found a magazine in a vinyl pouch beside the seat and tried to read it, but no go—he wanted his
Finnegans Wake
, dammit. He tried making his brain go random and stared at a flatscreen monitor crawling with stock index numbers while three members of a TV news team discussed Typhoon Ling-Ling.
Odds of 3 to 5 that Typhoon Ling-Ling is a Category 4.

His train pulled into Locarno. It was cold and there was a small amount of snow on the ground.

One in 4 the next cab driver’s fat. Four to 5 they have my favourite kind of ham. Even odds of someone fuckable appearing in the next one-minute window.

He taxied to his guest apartment and opened its door. At first glance, it was a beautiful place to be. It was a homely apartment, designed neither with, nor without, style—more old-fashioned than Ikean, its furniture evoking no memories of time or place—a hotel room, essentially. Fine. But there was no TV, no computer, no wireless router, no radio or stereo system, not even a telephone—nothing electronic. He wondered what sort of aging freak would live in a no-tech world. What kind of VIP suite
was
this? He was already imagining an explanation from Corporate:
the absence of technology creates a timelessness that is restful and conducive to meditation.
Right.

When I began to describe the boring room, my five friends’ eyes opened wide. “Right, I know what you’re all thinking—the boring room and all. Let me get on with this.”

I went on.

The Gambler

(continued)

by Serge Duclos

Trevor began to wonder, and then to fantasize about, how many emails he had in his mailbox, rich, juicy,
fun
emails . . . 37? 41? 43? 257? 99,829? Maybe his ex-girlfriend had sent him a kiss-and-make-up note. Maybe she had enclosed pictures of herself.
And maybe if I looked, I could find
Finnegans Wake
online
.

By now it was dark out, and because it was Switzerland, everything was shut, even the Internet café that catered to the young. Fuck. At the train station, he considered asking someone if he could borrow their PDA, but then realized he’d just look like a con artist. Then he thought more about all the no-doubt incredible emails that were sitting there in cyberland,
just waiting for him
, and he put aside his pride and asked a passing younger person if he could borrow his PDA. He was told to fuck off.

The station shut down and Trevor walked back to the apartment. He searched for books to read; nothing. There was no food in the fridge or cupboards, not even condiments. Desperate for words to look at, he ultimately located an unopened envelope of Knorr Swiss cream of cauliflower soup mix lying flat on the topmost shelf. He tried to scramble the words on the label but instead got a headache. He looked at them upside down in the mirror, but the magic of the train ride was gone. Only books seemed to work for him.

He finally realized that he was stuck in this room for, if nothing else, the night.

He closed the curtains and went to bed. Lying there, his head shooting out sparks in all directions and his eyes closed, he made a bet with himself: if I open my eyes, there’s a 1-in-2 chance I’ll be able to see a chink of light passing through a gap in the curtains.

Trevor opened his eyes. There was no chink of light from the cold Swiss night. He opened and closed his eyes. It was equally dark either way. Which was interesting. The moment he opened his eyes, even though there was nothing to see either way, his brain automatically shifted gears—he could feel it happening: visual cortex; no visual cortex; visual cortex; no visual cortex—a subtle but distinct switch. Do blind people have this same cortical shift? Does keeping your eyes open in the dark waste brain capacity? It was odd to be able to psych out his brain so easily and mechanically.

And then, as Trevor shifted between forms of darkness, he decided to pave the way for the next phase of his life. He wanted to know more about brains and how they shifted gears, and he wanted to be able to find out if there was some kind of chemical or mechanical switch that could turn off the gambling cortex in his head. With
Finnegans Wake
and other books, he might be able to tone down the symptoms, but the treasure was out there and it wanted to be found.

Trevor fled back to Montpelier on the 5:40 a.m. train. Rifling through his small attaché case, he found his copy of
Finnegans Wake
nestled inside a pair of track pants.
Merde!

Once home, he searched online for who was doing the most work in neuroproteins, then a new field. He also emailed requests to colleagues everywhere, telling them what kind of job he was looking for. Soon he got a nibble from a company in a place with the bizarre name of Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Trevor thought,
A place name that uses the word “Triangle”? And North Carolina? What is
North
Carolina? Is it so incredibly different from South Carolina that their names merit subsets?

The strangeness of the company’s location and its complete disconnection from his European life were catnip to Trevor. He wanted new experiences in his brain, not old, predictable ones. Were he to remain in Europe, his new experiences would only ever have the same texture as a cover version of a song he already knew—old buildings doing riffs on other old buildings;
bahnhofs
and
gares
and
staziones
;
change / cambio / wechsel
. Going to America would be like learning a whole new kind of music.

Once there, he did everything he could to maximize a new-seeming life: he bought a Chevrolet minivan; he shopped at malls; he said things like
Have a nice day
to strangers. He even found a new girlfriend, Amber, who had won two Subway franchises in a divorce suit and who had a close personal relationship with her Lord and Saviour, Jesus—which, as with his pro-Palestinian ex-girlfriend, consumed most of her small talk and which he also tuned out, simultaneously jealous of and turned on by her commitment to faith and to fresh, healthful sandwiches. But mostly he threw himself into work, researching the exciting new world of time-suppressing drugs that made life seem either longer or shorter, depending on the user’s life situation. He knew that if an anti-gambling protein existed, here was the place to find it.

On a professional level, the lone factor that hindered his research was time itself. In order to see whether time felt long or short, test subjects had to actually be
using
the drug for a while. A year, minimum. Prisoners were the main test subjects, but they weren’t being told whether the drugs they were getting made time feel longer or shorter, and Trevor actually felt sorry for those who got the time-stretching drug—it was like putting the prisoners in a prison within a prison.

“So, wait a second,” said Diana. “How old was Trevor at this point?”

“Maybe his late twenties.”

“Did he take the drugs for his gambling problem?”

“Let us find out.”

The Gambler

(continued)

by Serge Duclos

At the same time, Trevor, with growing shame, was again racking up gambling debts, though not as quickly as in Europe, because he now had his ragged copy of
Finnegans Wake
to stop the urge. A colleague recommended James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, but it was like the lower-priced house brand of
Finnegans Wake
. Still, his losses added up and, not unlike Zack’s Superman, his powers of resistance began to ebb.

Curiously, it was at this same time that a perplexed colleague diagnosed two people with a rare condition called logo dysphoria—the inability to perceive corporate logos. These “logosuppressives” would look at corporate logos and see a blob of colour—they failed to perceive logos in the way that stroke victims fail to perceive letters and numbers. He called Trevor for help and advice.

Zack asked, “So . . . they’d see a Nike logo but not recognize it?”

“Basically.”

“That’s bullcrap.”

“One would think, but no. Listen further . . .”

The Gambler

(continued)

by Serge Duclos

Trevor thought these people surely had to be faking something as strange as this, but the more he questioned them, the more he learned about something called invariant memory.

What, you ask, is invariant memory? It’s this: any body can look at a cat and tell it’s a cat. They can even look at a lion or a cougar and tell that it’s a cat, too. But there’s no such thing as the perfect cat, or the cattiest cat—an absolutely generic cat. The problem with logos versus cats is that logos exist purely unto themselves. A Starbucks logo is what it is, and
only
what it is. Because logos are absolute rather than a variant, the brains of these two test subjects were unable to read them. Capitalist time bombs? Darwinian masterpieces?