Generation A (5 page)

SAMANTHA

“
¿Una abeja le ha picado?
”

“
¡Si!
Yes, Simone—I mean . . .
what?
Sorry, I . . .
what the
 . . . ?”

“
¿Samantha, usted está fingiendo?
”

“No, I’m not fucking with you, I’ve just been stung.”

I’d swatted a bee off my forearm and into the central grooves of a well-established bayonet aloe. The bee was thoroughly dead . . .
murdered
; I felt sick about it, and later on I’d be chided for having done some damage to the bee when I swatted it. Meanwhile, Simone, in downtown Madrid at the corner of Calle Gutenberg and Calle Poeta Esteban de Villegas, was giving me shit: “
¡Llame a policía!
”

“Call the po
lice
? To tell them what—I killed a bee? Like I want to end up in prison.”

“
Usted tendrá que hacer algo.
”

“Jesus, I know I have to do
some
thing. But calling the authorities? I don’t know.”

“
¿Lastimó?
”

“Pain? No. Not really. Pretty much like I remember it from when I was six.”

“
Tome una fotografía de ella.
”

“Brilliant idea.” I got down on my knees and snapped a jpeg of my bee. The phone was a new Samsung that allowed me to take a 20-meg shot with no blurring or smudginess. I sent the photo to Simone.

“
¡Caramba!
”

“Caramba, indeed.”

Here’s the thing: unknown to me, Simone was forwarding the photo to everyone on her (it turned out) globally extensive friends list, complete with explicit geocoordinates.

“
¡Hey! No se olvide a la fotografía de la rebanada del pan.
”

The Earth sandwich: Right. I’d forgotten to photograph my bread slice. “Gotcha.” I photographed my slice, zapped it to Simone and told her I had to go. I hung up and sat there staring at the bee carcass.

The wind had picked up and I was getting bloody chilly. I looked at the small red bump on my arm where the stinger had gone in. Had this really just happened? The big news the month before had been Sexy Zack with his Samoyed dog eyes being stung in Iowa—imagine having images of yourself driving a corn harvester naked being the most viral video in planetary history—fortunately for him he was hot, but still. Then they’d hidden him away, and the world hadn’t seen him since.

But people aren’t stupid—well, actually, people
are
stupid—which explains wars. There’d been a slew of copycat stings, and I didn’t want people thinking I was another barmy loser looking for fifteen seconds of fame. But wait . . . I
did
get stung, and there hadn’t been a bee in New Zealand for six or seven years. Why was I trying to talk myself out of reporting this?

Thing is, when something genuinely cosmic happens to you, your tendency is to believe the experience isn’t real. So there I was trying to figure out what dimension of the sting was inauthentic because interesting things don’t happen to people like me. They don’t.

The sun came out from behind a cloud. I was suddenly sleepy. I closed my eyes and a little while later I was woken up by three biology students from Massey University in Palmy. They were photographing the dead bee in the aloe’s crook.

One of the girls asked, “Can I see the sting?”

“Pardon?”

“Your sting.”

“Uh. Sure.” I showed her. My forearm might as well have been the Shroud of Turin.

And then I heard the choppers.

Okay.

In hindsight, I can see why we were renditioned into sterile environments. And whereas the others were manhandled and drugged, I had a pretty civilized transition. I was standing on the grass with the three rather dim students, displaying my sting, when six choppers morphed from tiny specks on the horizon into hulking brutes threatening to blow us over. They landed around us in a hexagonal formation, each about two hundred yards away. The moment they hit the ground, the blades stopped. The machine’s engineering impressed me. Chinese?

Five figures dressed in haz-mat suits emerged from each chopper. Maybe a dozen of them had rifles—yes, rifles, in happy little New Zealand. One of them turned out to be Louise, a fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, head of the New Zealand Project Mellifera Response Team and author of such articles as “Developmental parameters and voltinism of the Rufus pineapple flea,
Hystrichopsylla mannerixi
in suburban Dunedin, New Zealand” and “Five new species and a new tritypic genus
Haliplus
associated with 2009 Norfolk Pine collapse on Christmas Island.” Louise’s face was framed behind a Plexi-faced haz-mat window. She said, “Young lady, I truly hope this is real. I was hosting a wedding shower when the call came in, and I was actually enjoying myself for once.”

I said, “It’s a real bee.”

“Where is it now?”

I pointed to the aloe and she bent down to look at it. She was silent for a minute or so, and then I noticed that she was crying and seemed embarrassed to be caught in the act. “Curse these damn suits,” she said. “The one thing you can’t do in them is dry your eyes.”

“It’s bigger than I remember,” I said.

“It is, isn’t it?” She tried to pull her breathing together. “Lord, I feel like I’ve just seen the ivory-billed woodpecker come back from the dead.”

In the meantime, I saw that the grad students were being manhandled into a van. Louise got out some gear and gently tweezed the bee into a glass box, then stood up. She looked at me: “We have to go now, Samantha. Come along.”

Shit.

She knew my name without having asked me. I had a hunch that Louise knew what I ate for breakfast on this date fifteen years ago, and I wasn’t wrong. “You’ll be flying with me in that helicopter there, and I’m going to ask you to put on this suit. It doesn’t breathe well, so you might sweat. I have to supervise some sample gathering, but we’ll be lifting off in a few minutes.”

“My car . . . my stuff . . .” I pointed to my car in the distance. Three workers were vacuuming it, the tubes emptying into yellow drums. The midday sun was hot.

“Your car will be taken care of. Don’t worry. But do put on your suit. Now.”

Shortly after we lifted off and the noise had subsided, she said, “We’re headed to Auckland. It’ll be a half-hour.”

“Will we be there long?”

“No.”

There was a silence, and I knew it was pregnant: “So where are we going?”

“Atlanta.”

Jesus. “
What?
”

“To the Centers for Disease Control. We don’t have the right facilities down here.”

“For what?”

“Studies.”

“Studying what? Maybe I don’t want to—”

Louise looked at me. “Samantha, dear, I have the authority to ask any one of these fine gentlemen around us to gas you and put you on a plastic sled and fix you there with nylon belt restraints. As you can see, I’ve chosen not to do that since you strike me as the sensible type. For now, just answer my questions. Some of them are direct—rude, even—but today is not a day for niceties.”

“Okay.”

The thought of flying to the United States in my crap gym sweats with my third-favourite pair of runners wasn’t pleasant, but dammit, this was the most interesting thing to happen to me in ages.

From an attaché case, Louise removed a (fully collated and alphabetized printed-out) dossier on me. She flipped through it. The noise from the chopper wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, either. “I have all the basics here: your name, credit data, old emails and all Internet searches from the past two years, your work history, your medical data—and by the way, don’t worry, we have lots of asthma inhalers where we’re going. What else? A list of known sexual partners—”

“
What the fuck?
”

“Please, just bear with me here. We also have a list of all your fitness centre clients, their medical and occupational histories—”

“Louise, Jesus, why do you even need me here?”

“My dear, because
you
were stung. I didn’t get stung. Nobody else in New Zealand got stung.
You
did. Now, tell me everything you’ve eaten or ingested in the past forty-eight hours.”

Right. So I rattled off my sad little semi-anorexic list, throwing caution to the wind. I went into minute detail, right down to how many times I shook the cinnamon shaker over my coffee.

One question really threw me: “Samantha, have you recently picked any scabs and eaten them?”

“Okay, I confess, I did.”

“Your own, I take it.”

“A small one that was on my elbow.” I showed her the almost-healed patch. “Louise, this is getting creepy.”

“We have to cover all our bases.”

As we approached Auckland Airport from the south, I felt about as pure as an oil spill. The drought had been going on for ages. The city was brown and I felt I embodied the spirit of whatever it was that had made the place die.

I was expecting a luxury jet, but instead our plane for the trip was a U.S. military transport craft with a flat grey fuselage and maybe six windows where there ought to have been forty—the sort of vessel that could contain secrets as well as answers. When our chopper landed, we walked maybe ten steps to a wheeled aluminum gangplank that led into the plane’s interior, a huge, hollow echoey mess—like the inside of the van my old friend Gary used to keep for his bungee jumping business: scratched metal panels, cords and snaps and canvas duffel bags. All that was missing was fast-food litter and cum rags. A few rows of thrashed grey leather seats bearing the Alaska Airlines logo were bolted onto the floor.

“You know how the economy is these days,” Louise said when she saw my face. “In any event,
you
get the clean room.”

She ushered me towards the rear of the plane, where she opened the door to a smallish Plexi-walled room.

It was, if nothing else, clean. White on white on white, with a custom mattress to allow for sleep during turbulence. “How long is the flight?”

“Fourteen hours. You can remove your suit now.”

“Louise, do me a favour, can you give me some drugs to make it go more quickly?”

“Drugs?” She closed the door behind us. “Samantha, everything that enters and leaves you for the next month goes into sample jars and will be scanned beneath electron microscopes. No drugs today, especially none from your regular ganja supplier . . .” she rifled through some pages, “Ricky Ngau at the chip stand on Ruahine Street. By the way, their fish isn’t fish. It’s textured tofu.”

“Jesus, why is it so important for you to look at me so closely? My bee sting was random!”

I got a reproachful look. “Your sting may have been random—but what if you were, well, for lack of a better word, chosen.”

“Chosen?”

“Selected. Or located. Or sought out.”

“I hardly think so.”

“We’re not taking any chances. Aside from you and Zack, there hasn’t been a bee sighting for five years.”

“Is Zack still in quarantine?”

“He is.”

“In Atlanta?”

“No. In North Carolina—a place called Research Triangle Park. Dreadful name for a city, but there you have it.”

“Did you see his . . .
clip
?”

Who hadn’t? “More than once.” Louise cracked a smile. “He certainly found a perfect way of blending history with comedy and soft porn.
You’re
already circulating the planet, too, by the way.”

“Seriously?”

“Not as naughty as young Zack, but those students filmed you napping, and then they filmed your bee. You’re news.”

I wondered what my beliefless parents would make of all this.

The jets began to roar and the plane turned towards the runway. A man came from the front, a very American-looking guy: a no-nonsense, raging, don’t-fuck-with-me, play-by-the-rules guy who would tell you that he hated women between the third and fourth beer. Louise introduced him. “Samantha, this is Craig. Craig will be in charge of you the moment we enter U.S. air space.”

JULIEN

The Armée de Terre sealed off the 12th arrondissement like a bug beneath a drinking glass. Overreactionary pigs—no subtlety, no finesse.

Papist Hag Number One photographed my bee, cellphoned the authorities, shipped them the image and then returned to her prayers. I picked up the bee corpse, from where it seemed to float atop the pebbles. I put it in my hand and looked at its stinger. It was tiny but undeniably fierce-looking; my eyesight is good. The skin surrounding the sting was pink, and it itched, but I resisted the temptation to scratch. When I looked up, a variety of policemen and -women were approaching me, looking hateful and overloaded with weaponry. They escorted the Hags about fifty metres away and placed them in the care of a trio of cops. An officer cop grabbed my arm, as another demanded to know where the bee was. I pointed to where I’d laid it on the bench; from their reactions one would think they’d found a lithium trigger for a nuclear warhead, not just some stupid supposedly extinct bug. One of the cops made a walkie-talkie confirmation that it was a genuine
Apis mellifera
. Then they asked me what had happened. A crowd was starting to grow curious around us. I probably looked like a busted shoplifter. Fuck everybody. I heard a large motor—a truck like you’d see on the Périphérique, not downtown. It was white; one of those bloated, disgusting things fat Americans drive around their deserts while they wait to die. It pulled up beside us over the lawn of Bois de Vincennes, and a group of (I suppose) scientists got out. I heard helicopters—five SA-330s coming in from the north, over Montreuil. All I wanted was to be back in World of Warcraft, not on this wretched planet with its trees and old crones and cause and effect.

An alpha scientist barked at me to go into the fat American death trailer, which I did only because clubs were being waved in my face. Inside, I was shoved into a small Plexiglas detention room.
Cochons
. I asked one of them if I could use his cellphone. They seemed surprised that I didn’t have one and a big to-do was made about that. They told me that if I gave them a number they would dial it, but I would not be allowed to use the phone myself. Fuck all of you. And who was I going to call, anyway? My parents? They’d have to pry my mother away from YouTube, where she sits padlocked to a better era and cries while watching Torvill and Dean skate Bolero at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics over and over and over. Dad?
Diana Ross sings the theme from
Mahogany
, “Do you know where you’re going to?” . . . a black girl from Detroit experiences Rome and history for the first time while seated in the back seat of a shitty yellow taxi with lots of lens flare and bad B-unit camera photography. “I am a poor black American girl! I have been transformed on the quickie ride from Da Vinci Airport! If only the world could see Rome for three-point-five minutes like this, we’d all be living inside some record producer’s wet dream of post-capitalist freedom!”

My father wants to believe that the world is easy to understand. Let him and my mother see me on the news. For the time being, I was sitting on a blue plastic stool inside the plastic room, with two policemen watching me while a scientist orchestrated the arrival of several more fuckpig monster labs on wheels.

The alpha scientist, who told me his name was Serge, asked if I was single or if I still lived with my parents.
Still?
I said it wasn’t his business, and he smiled and said, “Ah, with his parents, still.” Serge was short and thin and was dressed like a bureaucrat underneath his doctor’s whites.

A woman asked where my parents worked. I told them that my mother was employed by a generator company called Asea Brown Boveri and that my father worked in the payroll software division—integrated vertical—at
CERN
.

“Any siblings?”

“My brother is in marketing at Kellogg’s. My sister is at Nokia in Helsinki. Could our family be any more complicit in globalization? I was sent to English immersion starting in kindergarten.”

“What do you do?”

“School. The Sorbonne.”

“Ahh.
Nous avons un génie ici à notre milieu
. Studying what?”

“None of your fucking business.”

Serge looked at the woman. “Céline, aren’t we
lucky
to have Sean Penn as our first European bee sting in six years! Look in our refrigeration unit—I think we have some vials filled with the antidote to the Academy Award performance here.”

“Very funny.”

Serge gave me the let’s-play-ball stare. “Look, Julien, you’re twenty-two and your frontal lobe is incomplete. Argue all you will, but it’s a scientific fact. And part of having a frontal lobe still in development is the sense that you have a right to scorn everything around you, but all you really are is a biological cliché. Your brain has a few more years to go, so for the time being, you’re this judgment robot and everything you think and feel is the product of incomplete cortical hook ups and hormone-driven whims. So don’t try to pull any sort of superiority trip on me, because at the moment, what you consider to be your personality is, to me, an unwanted and boring obstacle in the way of finding out what we need to know.”

“Which is what?”

He paused slightly here, one of those pauses you look back on later and say to yourself,
Ah, that’s when I should have been more alert.
He said, “We’d like to learn what it is about you that attracts bees. That information might be of astonishing significance to the rest of the planet.”

“Oh.”

“So act like a fucking man.”

Céline said, “Just talk with us. Are you wearing cologne today?”

“Do I look like a club kid?”

“A simple ‘no’ will do. When did you last shower?”

“Four days ago.”

“Okay. Are you taking any prescriptions?”

“No.”

“What did you eat today?”

I had to think this over. “What do you mean by ‘today’?”

“Excuse me?”

“I think I’ve been up for twenty-six hours now. I don’t think the word ‘today’ applies to me.”

“What were you doing for twenty-six hours?”

“Playing World of Warcraft at this place on rue Claude Decaen.”

The woman was perplexed. Serge explained: “It’s a massive multi-player quasi-real-time online role-playing game set in a persistent-state parallel world that—”

“Got it.” The woman asked instead what I had eaten since I last slept.

“A strawberry yogurt. And half a Toblerone.”

“Alcohol? Sweet drinks?”

“No.”

The two of them looked at me, then the woman asked, “When was the last time you attended school?”

“Um. About three weeks ago.”

“Really?”

“My parents don’t know, and I’d prefer if you kept it quiet.”

They both looked at me. Serge said, “In a few hours you’re going to be rather well known. Your old life is over, Sean Penn. Like it or not, you’ve got a new life.”

Something beeped near the steering wheel. I looked out the windshield to see people in white smocks draping several townhouses with white nylon tarps. The Sean Penn jokes began to pile up.

Has Mr. Penn locked himself in his trailer?

Tell me, is Mr. Penn brooding and lost?

Sean, no smoking on government property!

Inside my degrading plastic box, I felt like a hamster. “My name is Julien,” I shouted.

Serge said, “Sean, Sean, Sean . . . watch your temper.”

The woman, Céline, said, “Please, Sean, don’t hurt us. We’re not paparazzi here to take photos of you.”

“Actually,” Serge said, “we
are
here to photograph you.” He held a military-grade Pentax capable of snapping three hundred 2-gig photos per second. “Let’s see the stinger.”

“Are you going to remove it?”

“In a moment.”

Céline held a focus chart while Serge did the zoom. Dozens of police and fire sirens blared away outside our crass, bloated, imperialistic Winnebago. From the racket, it sounded as if they were closing down the entire Bois de Vincennes. I mentioned this to my comedy duo. “The park?” said Serge. “They’ve shut down the entire
arrondissement
. All traffic north of the Seine and inside the Périphérique has been frozen. Every tree, every shrub, every bouquet of flowers and every building is being tarped and/or inspected. They’re determined to find the hive.”

“Will they?”

“I hope so.”

“What kind of scientist are you?”

He bristled for one billionth of a second before replying, “Typical young person—so self-involved he waits for a half-hour before he even asks. Tell me, Sean, have you been told you’re special your entire life? Is everything you do wonderful?”

I said, “This is fucked.”

“Ahh. Struck a
nerve
.”

“Serge, stop bugging him.” Céline caught my eye. “Serge is an expert on . . . proteins.”

“Oh?” I didn’t know much about proteins. “I saw a diagram of a hemoglobin molecule once, all folded and full of twists and surprises. If I ever design video games, it’d be a good map for a system of caves.”

Serge said, “Spoken like a man who still lives with his parents.”

There were two holes in the Plexiglas room, with gloves built into them, like something from a Chechen nuclear waste treatment facility. Serge reached in and, with Cirque du Soleil precision, opened a set of mini-doors, took my hand and tweezed out the stinger. He put it in a pillbox. “Now it’s time to take some blood.”

“Blood?”

“Yup, blood.”

Blood freaks me out. It’s one of the many reasons I reject the real world. “How much?”

“A bucket,” said Serge. “Just like Carrie.”

“Shush, Serge!” Céline looked at me. “A litre.”

“Hey! I’m pretty skinny. A litre to me is a big deal.”

“We have to take it now to establish benchmarks,” Céline said.

I looked away while they stuck their needle in, but I made the mistake of looking at the plastic bag when it was nearly full. The deep maroon colour was so . . .
liquidy
looking. I jerked and the needle popped out of my arm and blood sprayed all over my little room.

“Right,” said Serge, pissed. He twisted some sort of valve, and the next thing I remembered was waking up, far, far away.