Generation A (14 page)

SAMANTHA

Hello earth!

It was as Finbar and I drove home from our day trip that I had my first big out-of-body event—in one swoop I was up above the car, watching Finbar and myself. I knew that it was me in the passenger seat, yet all the strings had been cut between me and . . .
me
. I was dead, yet alive; alive, yet dead. I thought,
Cripes, is this the afterlife? If so, I’ve screwed up royally.
Was I a ghost? From my aerial viewpoint, I tried to see if I had arms, and when I couldn’t see any, I freaked. I remembered a TV show where the hero is immortal and is stabbed and shot but always survives. But what if he got vaporized in an atomic blast? Technically, he’d still have to be immortal, right? But his problem is that he’s now nothing but dust. Do the dusty scraps and bits of rubble from his body magically come together from the jet stream and make him a fresh new hero again? Does he rise from the ashes? Or does his spirit still live, except now he’s screwed because he has no body in which to put himself, so he becomes a disembodied entity blanketing the planet, everywhere and nowhere, like ozone.

And then I was back in Finbar’s car and the moment was over. Finbar looked at me and asked if I was okay. I gave him a patently fake yes, and he didn’t push it. “Home in twenty minutes,” said the dashboard, using the voice of Peppermint Patty from the old Charlie Brown cartoons.

When we got back to his place, I ran to the computer and called Zack while linking my camera into the house’s wireless system.

“Sam?”

“Zack.”

“Hi.”

“Hi. Did you buy your apple?”

“You remembered! It was crisp and juicy, thank you. It was a Braeburn.”

“Braeburns? My uncle used to grow them. I wrote a Braeburn essay almost every year going through school.”

“You did?”

“I did. Braeburns were one of the first ‘bi-coloured’ apple varieties, a trait that in the 1990s came to be essential for sales success. The first wave of supermarket apple varieties were either bright red Red Delicious or shades of solid yellow or green like Golden Delicious and Granny Smiths. But the Braeburn had modern colouring and a sweet but never sugary flavour that made it first of the new-wave of modern apple varieties.”

“I’m impressed.” Zack then sent me a link, and I watched Harj at a house party with hundreds of Aberzombie & Felch staffers somewhere in Ohio.

“
What?
”

“That’s what I said.”

Harj was walking up a staircase, dressed like a Fitch clone—he certainly didn’t look like the guy in the photos from the
New York Times
.

“
That’s
Harj?”

“It is. They’ve made him over and christened him Apu.”

“How on earth did he end up with them?”

“No idea.”

There was a pipping sound on our connection, a sound that the world had gotten used to since the Americans stopped paying their satellite bills to the Chinese—the sound of disconnection. “Zack call me when—”

VeeeeeeeeEEEEp!

Dial tone.

Silence.

Bloody hell.

Doorbell.

I opened the door to find Louise from the Project Mellifera Response Team on Finbar’s steps.

“Hello, Sam. How are you?”

“I’m doing okay. Do you want to come in?”

“Sure.” Louise doffed her coat and looked around. “Nice place.”

“It is.” I went to the computer. “You’re never going to believe who I was just online chatting with.”

“Who?”

“Zack.”

“Good. That saves me some time searching around. The global Response Team wants to get you and the four others together.”

“Why?”

“Research, I imagine. This comes from the top. I’m just following orders.”

JULIEN

The black hood was removed from my face, and before me was . . .
Serge?

“How was your coma, Sean Penn?”

“Shit. How long was I out?”

Serge’s expression implied bad news. “It’s been three months, Julien.”

My face collapsed and he burst out laughing. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. You’ve been out for five minutes. Drink some orange juice, and when you’re done that, we’ll get some potato salad and some wurst in you.”

A purse-lipped woman gave me a carton and a coffee mug. The orange juice was real. I said, “This is real orange juice. Who’s paying for it? My father will freak if he gets the bill. He’s an accountant. This is Switzerland.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“What’s going on—am I under arrest?”

“No, you’re not under arrest. You’re in my care, and we’re going on a trip together.”

“Where to?”

“Haida Gwaii.”

“Haida
what?
”

Serge said, “It’s a remote island off the western Canadian coast—near the southern tip of the Alaska panhandle.”

Haida Gwaii? Canada? Alaska? Antarctica? He might as well have said we were visiting the moon.

I shrugged. “At least I won’t have to go back to the Sorbonne.”

Serge handed me a plate of food. I ate it like a dog eating from a bowl. When I’d taken the edge off my hunger, I asked, “So why are we going to this Gwaii place? What’s there?”

Serge said, “It’s the site of the last known active bee’s nest. The others will be there, too. Zack and Sam and Harj and Diana.”

“When do we leave?”

“After you eat.”

“What about my stuff ?”

“You don’t have any stuff.”

He was right. I owned nothing. The contents of my room had been taken away and had yet to be returned.

I finished the last of my food. “Let’s ditch this dump.”

Crossing the pole in a military transport plane was a new experience for me. I stayed up in the cockpit for much of the flight, curious to see the soot lines the Russians had drawn—crazy zigzagging patterns of carbon stripes on the remaining ice packs, soaking up heat, accelerating ice break up to create new shipping routes. The pilot said, “The carbon speeds up iceberg calving by a factor of a thousand.”

As I looked down on the world, I had a fleeting sensation of mastery over my universe. I felt like I was helping the SS
Yamato
flee a destroyed planet in pursuit of a new home amidst an overwhelming darkness . . .

The
Yamat
o and her crew—aided by an antimatter woman, Teresa of Telezart [known as Trelaina in the dubbed English version]—face the onslaught of the Comet Empire, a civilization from the Andromeda Galaxy that seeks to conquer Earth, led by the Great Prince Zordar.

The Comet Empire has restored to life Earth’s greatest enemy, the Gamilonians’ leader, Desslar, who is eager for revenge.

After a massive battle that destroys both Earth and Comet Empire forces, the
Yamat
o crew defeats Zordar’s, but at the cost of the ship and their lives.

Finally, my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins.

DIANA

I arrived in Haida Gwaii a few hours after Serge and Julien. Apparently, Serge had been instrumental in landing us all in our neutral chambers—which at the time seemed like a good thing. And he was also pretty hot, and we were on an island, so
ooooo . . . fuck me ragged, Johnny Bravo
. Julien, on the other hand, made very little impression on me, nor I on him:
Annoying baby dumbfuck
.

“Nice to meet you, Diana.”

He had a generic European accent and was ill-dressed for the sheets of rain that greeted our arrival and our subsequent piling into an ancient Carter-era pickup truck. “Learn to coordinate your clothes, dipshit. The bees chose you?”

“Yes, they did.”

We drove to the site of the last known active beehive, which was now a
UNESCO
World Heritage site. It was in a mossy region on the north coast, just south of the Sangan River, where the wet peat soil drowns the roots of evergreens. Scientists and wannabe shamans had long ago picked the site clean of dirt, gravel and rocks.

This strangely lifeless circle rested within a landscape that was not unlike a six-foot-deep sponge cake. Serge told us that the bordering forest has the highest density of living organisms per square foot of any place on earth, and that was easy to believe. Within that forest, from all directions—up, down and sideways—life squished out like a Play-Doh Fun Factory. We stood quietly, and I felt I could hear the forest growing. We heard a raven’s
chalk-chalk
cluck.

In any event, nature wasn’t as novel an experience for me as it was for Julien, who seemed to have been born inside a video arcade. In the wilderness of our new island home, he flip-flopped from awe to boredom to awe to boredom, finally settling on petulance.

We were staying in the small town of Masset, population 770, in one of many government-built houses left behind when the Canadian military decommissioned a radar facility in the 1980s. Since then, the buildings within their untreed lots had variously stood empty, been made over by hippies, been vandalized, been burned down, been converted into salmon smokeries and, in the case of our house, been given just enough care throughout the years to ensure inhabitability. It could have been a house in my neighbourhood in Northern Ontario; to Julien, it was no better than a crack den. He promptly hogged the best room—“the best,” in this case, having a view of a snippet of ocean; my window looked out onto the char-coaled stubs of a similar house that, to judge by the growth of brambles and huckleberry, had burned down before 9-11.

“Oh, Diana,” Julien said, “we’re going to be living like farm animals.”

“Don’t whine. We have everything we need.” Though the place did resemble a halfway house furnished with two hundred dollars and a dream that died en route to the thrift store. “Julien, try to think of this as an adventure.”

We bought fish from the locals while we waited for a supply barge to make the trek from the coast. These locals were all members of the Haida tribe (non-Haida had been given the boot some years earlier), and they tolerated us only because Serge had persuaded them that our presence might, in some way, bring back the bees. In any event, their feelings were made clear when they showed up around sunset that first night and examined everything in our house, like CSI techs looking for evidence. “They’re looking for Solon,” said Serge. “It’s banned here.”

“Really? How come?”

“Because once you take Solon, you stop caring about the tribe.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

After my overwhelming reaction to even the smell of its blister packaging, I was happy that it was banned from the island.

In those first few days, all we did was walk around the village area, trying not to attract too much attention to ourselves. Most of Masset’s dozen or so stores were shut down, and along the wide streets, crows and ravens loitered like bored teenagers. The Haida were trying to return to their older way of life, fishing and hunting. At the end of a small street, where a co-op grocery store once stood, were racks of skinned Sitka deer awaiting conversion into pemmican. An introduced species, the Sitka deer roamed the island, multiplied like Norway rats and were a delicious, readily available treat.

After a week, Serge came down to the beach, where Julien and I were skipping stones on an ocean that had turned eerily glassy, as the Aleutian currents rip past the islands like steel wool. “Zack and Sam will be joining us tomorrow,” he said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

That night we celebrated with deer stew and dandelion wine, got a bit drunk and then, out of boredom, decided to search every nook of our house for clues to who had lived in it before us. At the bottom of the bathroom drawer, we found an ancient calcified toothpaste tube containing Tweety Bird’s Berrylicious Looney Tunes toothpaste, with clinically proven fluoride protection.

“And look,” said Julien. “It comes in a ‘no-mess stand-up tube.’”

We locked eyes.

We looked back at Tweety’s preposterous body and head.

We locked eyes once more.

I said, “Let’s get right to the point. Tweety Bird: gay or straight?”

“A raging homo, I think. Or at least a eunuch.”

“Julien, we haven’t even established if Tweety Bird is a boy bird or a girl bird.”

“Good point. I used to think boy, but now that you ask directly, I don’t know. A female-to-male transsexual, most likely. Is it possible for birds to experience gender dysphoria?”

“This may be the first known incident. What species of bird is Tweety supposed to be, anyway?”

“A canary?”

“A canary, sure—if you’re wasted on peyote.”

“Tweety does have a hydrocephalic skull. And that voice . . .” Julien tried doing an impression, and it wasn’t pretty.

“Tweety Bird is just plain spooky,” I said.

We stared at the toothpaste tube some more. Then Julien said, “Gender and sexuality are kind of irrelevant with Tweety Bird, because it’s impossible to imagine him/her having sex, anyway.”

“Hot wild-assed monkey sex.”

“Sex with
toys
.”

It was a nice moment. A bonding moment. So we finished the dandelion wine and then Julien began rambling about a Japanese sci-fi cult he’s into, the Battlestar Tomato. My eyes glazed over. Then he began telling me about that online world he was addicted to, which accelerated my passing out drunk. I hadn’t done that in a long time and it was
fun
.