Generation A (6 page)

DIANA

When I was stung on that cool Ontario afternoon, my response was the same as it would have been before bees became extinct: I shouted, “Fuckity fucking
fuck
, ow, holy
shit
that hurts, motherfucker!” I slapped my arm and the bee fell to the ground. Mitch, Erik and his wife were staring at me as if I were bleeding from my eyes. “You fucking fuckheads, stop staring!” Even Kayla the battered dog appeared taken aback by my language. “Don’t pretend to be so sanctimonious, you cheesy, hypocritical fucks.”

Erik looked at Mitch. “She has Tourette’s.”

Then I realized what had happened to me. I reached down and picked up the insect. “Oh, dear Lord, it’s a
bee
.” The other three inched towards me. Mitch dropped his two-by-four and said, “It’s mine. It’s my bee. We’re on my property.”

“No, it’s not. It was in the air,” Erik said. “In this country, you own mineral rights to the soil beneath your property, but you don’t own air rights.”

“The moment that thing landed on Sister Garbagemouth here,” Mitch said, “it ceased being airborne and it is hence part of my property.”

Erik said, “
Only
if you own Diana’s body, too. But slavery’s currently illegal. So it’s Diana’s bee.”

Erik’s wife looked at it closely. “I’d forgotten how small they are. To think I used to be frightened of them. And look, it’s been collecting pollen. See—its little pollen saddlebags are full.”

It dawned on me that I should leave before Mitch’s greed got the best of him, so I beelined (yes! A pun! I know, puns aren’t funny, but I love them! Possibly connected to my Tourette’s) to my place, where I shut the kitchen door behind me and locked it, leaving Mitch, Erik and his wife gaping. I swept away some cinnamon and sugar left over from the morning’s toast, and placed the bee on top of a white sheet of paper on the kitchen table.

We all wanted the bees to come back, but in our hearts, none of us believed we deserved them—and then here I go and kill one. My temples were thumping furiously. I felt guilty that this living thing was now dead because it chose to sting me. I knew I had to phone the authorities.

I began to pray, then remembered that I’d not only been stung but had also just been excommunicated.

I let my hands drop and considered the act of praying. Does praying make my body emit waves like a cellphone? Am I always emitting waves, even when I’m doing dishes? Does deliberate praying merely increase the power of those waves? What is the physical mechanism whereby prayers are “heard”?

I wanted to pray but couldn’t bring myself to do so. Between animal violence, excommunication and being stung by the first bee in Canada for God knows how many years—and losing faith in the process of prayer—I’d had quite the half-hour. And it wasn’t over yet. While I was staring at the bee atop its white paper, Mitch started to pound on the door. “Give me back my bee, you stupid bitch!” The door was jiggling, and I doubted its ability to withstand a full-on Mitch attack, so I gathered up my bee and retreated to the basement storm cellar, locking it from the inside. This wasn’t cowardice; this was me being practical—and not wanting my specimen damaged. (In a few weeks I’d watch archived news footage of the RCMP doing a takedown of Mitch on my front lawn, smashing his face into the dandelions and sorrel, pulling his arms back with delicious amounts of force and cuffing his hands behind him.
Ahh . . . excess force
. Sometimes I rather like it.)

Maybe five minutes later there was a knock on the cellar door. Much to my relief, it was the RCMP, clad in haz-mat suits. Overkill? Through the plastic they demanded, “Give us the bee. Give us the bee.” I did. It went into a small box, like one for a wedding ring. I got to the top of my basement stairs to find my house being tarped with white polypropylene sheets. Outside the front door, the whole neighbourhood was being shrouded. For the first time in my life, the future felt futuristic.

I think I’m coming across as Miss Cool Customer here, discussing the Mitch/Kayla debacle, my bee sting and all those goons wearing haz-mat suits as if I were doing a homework assignment on the 1962 Congo Crisis. I’m such a total fucking hypocrite.

I haven’t mentioned how, during this whole bee sting episode, a quarter of my brain was preoccupied with finding a way to stick a Henckels four-star carving knife into Erik’s wife’s pearl-clad throat to clear the way for my infatuation with him—but another quarter wanted to drag Erik down to Lake Nipissing and drown him for being a smug prick and for taking Mitch’s side against the dog, as well as for excommunicating me from my little Baptist escape inside a converted pet food store on McIntyre Street—a place that still smells, after all these years, of kibble, especially at the back, where we keep the piano. Erik and I bought the piano for a song on craigslist from a family warring over who got the dead mother’s Audubon placemats. They were too preoccupied to bargain. As long as we had two hundred bucks and a truck to haul the thing away before sunset, it was ours. We celebrated this deal with gin and tonics at a grill on the edge of town, where people wouldn’t recognize us. Neither of us are drinkers. In that first boozy flush, I asked coded questions about
Eva
(notice how I hate using her name) to determine if they were happy or not. “Do you guys talk much during dinner?”

“No, not since she got her promotion as day hostess at that new Beatles theme restaurant. Too much on her mind, I guess.”

I believed that what was on Eva’s mind was actually Miguel, the Beatles restaurant prep chef, a known rake recently separated from his umpteenth, a shitty little Latin sleaze. I saw him and Eva sharing nachos and refried beans at Mexicali Rosa’s one night, and they
weren’t
discussing shepherd’s pie or thirty-percent-off coupons for seniors.

Then I asked, “Any kids on the way?”

“You’d think there would be, but we’re having problems in that area—sorry, I shouldn’t really be talking about this.”

“I’m Switzerland. Consider me a neutral middle party. All I care about is you and Eva and the flock. I gave up on things of the flesh after Andy.”

Andy is my ex, a probably gay guy with major father issues and a set list of twenty sugary guitar songs he plays at social gatherings upon the slightest provocation. He smells of Rogaine and failure. Andy and I were never much of anything, but maybe it makes people more comfortable to think I’d at least had
someone
in my life.

I found myself telling all of this to Sandra from the Emerging Blood-Borne Agents Division of Winnipeg’s Level-4 lab, one of only fifteen Level-4 labs in the world: thirty coats of paint on every surface, with an epoxy floor three inches thick. Marburg? Tallahassee-B flu?
Screw that
—they cleared out the entire place for
me
. I was H5N,
SARS
-Guangxu and holy retribution all snarled up into one friendly little bee sting that left the facility in shock. And Sandra was my admitting nurse. Or scientist. Or . . . who knows what anyone does in these places.

I said, “Listen to me talk and talk. I feel like I’ve just unloaded twenty clowns from a Volkswagen bug.”

Sandra said, “Not to worry. How are you feeling right now?”

I’d been flown the twelve hundred miles to Winnipeg inside a plastic bubble like a child’s swimming pool. “I feel fine. It was good to vent about Erik and all that. Thank you for listening.”

I must add that Sandra was on speakerphone on the other side of a two-inch-thick Lucite window.

“Anything else unusual happen lately?” she asked. “Anything that stands out? A new perfume? An old box you found in the attic?”

I had a vision of my house being taken apart like it was made of Lego. It was the one thing I owned that I actually cared about, an inheritance from my paternal aunt. It was an early 1960s rancher, and boring as dirt, but I loved it.

“Your house is fine. You’ll never know we were there.”

I was creeped out—was she reading my mind? But Sandra just looked down at her papers. I asked her, “Sandra, what do you know that I don’t?”

“How do you mean?”

“When I got here, I looked at the guy pulling the syringe’s plunger when I gave my first blood specimen. He was treating my blood like it was Elvis come back to life and performing at Aloha Stadium. His fingers were practically vibrating. Something big’s going on.”

“I really can’t say.”

“I’m just wondering . . . when a blackfly bites you, it goes
deep
. When a bee stings you, it’s maybe the top layer of skin and a few nerves—it’s pretty superficial. How much damage can one bee sting do?”

Sandra said, “Zack’s body nearly exploded from one little sting.”

Of course I knew about Zack. Everyone on earth did. “Yeah, but Zack was allergic,” I said. “Look, my father was a vet, so I grew up hyper-aware of mad cow and bird flu and all that. I’m aware of invisible cooties that jump species.”

“I really can’t say anything more.”

“Gotcha, you lying cunthead with badly dyed roots.” Pardon my Tourette’s.

Of the five Wonka children, I was the only one who knew from the start that we weren’t just random stings. Though Harj figured it out pretty quickly, too, and then his insights dwarfed my own.

HARJ

A bee! A bee! You can’t imagine what a thrill it gave me to see one. I remember as a child seeing them swarm the jacaranda trees in the harbour or flitter amid the plumerias beside the post office under the high noon sun. An early teacher, Mrs. Ames from Connecticut, a bored
UNESCO
housewife, had taught us in detail about bees, training us to think of them as friends, not enemies—a smart decision, I think. One could say the same thing about worms. Unless we are taught from an early age to like and love them, they are rather disgusting things to cope with when encountered. For that matter, a plate of Bolognese spaghetti might be a terrifying thing to encounter for the first time. I could make a list of other such examples, but I will not.

Nobody in the call centre witnessed my bee stinging me. I looked at it, and it was like seeing a long-lost friend—the happiness it brought me!

I quite forgot young Leslie from the
New York Times
on the other end of the line. She probably interpreted my silence as artistic temperament, but she finally asked, “Werner? Werner, are you there?”

I told her that my name wasn’t actually Werner, it was Harj, and that I was sorry I had led her on, and that I was actually working in an Abercrombie & Fitch call centre in Trincomalee, the capital of Sri Lanka.

“Don’t dick with me. I’m on deadline.”

“I just told you the truth. If you like, give me some words and I will write them on a piece of paper and then photograph them for you, and in the background you can see my hateful boss, Hemesh, as well as the guava bins at the far end of the warehouse.”

For whatever reason, she gave me the words
EASY-BAKE OVEN
. I wrote this and then held them up to the camera. The resulting photograph had Hemesh’s morbidly obese posterior neatly positioned to the right. I also sent her a photo of myself making a peace sign, and then said to her, “Do you want to know something far more interesting than this?”

“This would be hard to top, Harj.”

I photographed my bee on the desktop and sent the image to her. “This thing just stung me. You heard me say ouch.”

“Nice try.”

“I am not speaking in jest. Let me zoom in on it.” This was a chance to exploit my cellphone’s micro-zoom lens, which could turn an area the size of my pinkie fingernail into a 200-meg file. I photographed the bee atop the piece of paper that said EASY-BAKE OVEN and sent the file.

Leslie paused, then said, “You’re kidding.”

“No, I am not.”

“Huh.”

Hemesh looked in my direction and, hateful boss that he is, was able to intuit that I was not doing productive work for the Abercrombie & Fitch Corporation. He yelled something at me, and I told young Leslie that I had to go. I said, “Thank you for expressing interest in our winter collection, and please shop again in the future with Abercrombie & Fitch.”

Hemesh gave me the evil eye. “Was that a personal call?”

“No. That was a difficult customer from New York City.”

“You’re on Midwest duty. How did that call get through to you?”

“Ask the IT department. I sit here, I answer the phone and I sell our fine array of merchandise.”

“I’m watching you, Harj. I don’t care how much slang you teach everybody else. If any co-worker starts to slack, then
pfft
, there goes my bonus bottle of Johnny Walker Red.”

“Yes, sir.”

And so I returned to work, stowing the treasure that was my bee inside the thin drawer of my desk. With hindsight, I see that this was not a particularly smart idea, but then you must understand the wrath of Hemesh and his unceasing quest to win his weekly bottle of Johnny Walker Red.

It was perhaps an hour later when I sensed that something was wrong. I asked Indhira in the cubicle beside me if she thought something strange was happening—she agreed, and then she determined the cause: no flights were coming into or leaving from our next-door neighbour, Bandaranaike Airport. Then our cellphones ceased to function and our Internet access turned to an error message. Hemesh was predictably angered as he watched the gods of mischief partying all night on a bottle of whisky that ought to have been his. He screamed at us to remain seated until we knew what was happening and rushed out.

I have insubordinate tendencies, and I got up and walked over to the guava bin for a snack. I glanced out the side door and saw perhaps fifty men in white biohazard uniforms, as well as perhaps a dozen Sri Lanka police officers in gas masks encircling the building. Three of the policemen were arguing with Hemesh, who probably decided at that very moment to do something grossly inappropriate such as fetch a package of cigarettes from the elastic map webbing on the inside door of his light chocolate 1984 Mitsubishi Delica L300. Whatever it was Hemesh was arguing about, he was definitely losing. When he stepped outside of the ever-shrinking military ring surrounding our building, they shot him and he fell onto the coral-coloured dirt in a sack-of-potatoes way, dead before he hit the ground.

At this point, I added up all the 2+2s of the past hour, then made a dash for my desk and the drawer that held my bee. I sat on my chair, opened the drawer to take a look at it, then slammed the drawer shut just in time to see scores of rifles pointed my way. Arms raised, I nodded towards the bee; a visitor in white quickly scooped it up. I was then marched out of the building and into the parking lot, where a Russian Mi-24 Hind helicopter was landing.

Here is what happened next: three haz-mat workers grabbed the edges of a translucent condom-shaped body bag. They motioned to the policemen, who poked my kidneys with their rifle muzzles, and I stepped into the bag. Its upper seal was then twisted shut and I was loaded into the helicopter like a poorly-taped-together package. We then roared off the call centre’s depressing weed-choked parking lot. From within my condom’s translucent tip, I looked down upon the world. I looked at the piggledy mess of city streets, brocaded and still unmapped by Google—as if we in small Asian cities don’t notice these things—and I remembered the silted monsters coughed up by the waters in 2004. I remembered all the things I usually don’t let myself remember about my dreams: things that weren’t supposed to happen but do, places where anything is possible, places where I meet Gwyneth Paltrow and a big Dalmatian dog, and together we explore air-conditioned castles.

I looked down on Trincomalee and felt awkward and small—a chunk of disgraced meat at the end of a phone line, forced by the global economy to discuss colour samples and waffle-knit jerseys with people who wish they were dead. Is this a world a holy man might deem worthy of saving? What if there
was
a new Messiah—would he coldly look at atmospheric CO
₂
levels and call it quits before he began? Would he go find some newer, fresher planet to save instead?

Oh Lord, I am tired. I am tired of thinking of the day of the sting over and over, and thinking of what I might have done differently. Up there in the Russian helicopter, I felt dead and then reborn, like I’d taken a drug that would forever change my brain. Before I passed out from a quick jab of a somnipen, delivered by a young epidemiologist named Cynthia, I felt like the fetus at the end of the film
2001
, signifying everything and nothing, rebirth and sterility, good news and bad news, the difference between sanctuary and its opposite.

It was not the way I expected to visit New England, but I will take what I am given. Connecticut! Land of stately homes, bored
UNESCO
housewives and a middle “C” that remains resolutely silent. When my military transport plane landed there, I felt like phoning Sri Lanka to order a waffle-knit Henley with double-reinforced collar buttons, in cream fabric (if available) and with emu-coloured trim. Or perhaps I could locate one of my company’s many customers and ask them if I was correct in guessing that they secretly wished they were dead.

We landed at the New London Naval Submarine Base, on the east bank of a river near a town called Groton. “Don’t you worry, Apu. We’re almost there.” My guide was Dr. Rick, an American military physician who joined my journey in Guam.

The moment I said hello to Dr. Rick, he nicknamed me Apu, and I knew there was no point in fighting it, so for my great adventure I became Apu. I believe Americans can only absorb one foreign-sounding word or name per year. Past examples include Häagen-Dazs, Nadia Comaneci and Al Jazeera. I am too humble to ask these Americans to make “Harj” their official foreign word for the year.

Since Guam, I had not been allowed to have visual contact with the land or ocean, but after much pleading on my part, Dr. Rick decided that some scenery couldn’t hurt and had promised me a window view on the journey’s final leg.

On the ground in Groton, there was some discussion as to how I would be transferred into a helicopter. In the end, owing to biohazard protocols, I had to be carried like a corpse, with Rick holding my hands and a private holding my feet. They placed me into a Bell 206B3 JetRanger III helicopter.

“Wait! I never even got to touch the ground!”

“Can’t let you touch the ground, Apu. It’s the rules.”

“But I wish to set foot on Connecticut.”

“Too late, my friend. You’re going to Hyattsville, Maryland.”

Maryland?
Such a bitter disappointment. I had no pictures in my head of Maryland. No snow-covered trails filled with rosy-cheeked Caucasians. No cocoa. No grandmothers knitting scratchy cable-knit sweaters to compete with those sold by Abercrombie & Fitch. I knew nothing of Maryland.

Rick said it was going to be a choppy ride and buckled me into my seat. I restated that the weather seemed beautiful—perhaps seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit?—and Rick said, “You got it, Apu: seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, with a chance of a blizzard. You’ve gotta love this century.”

“Snow?”

I’d never seen snow, and my bitterness at not setting foot in Connecticut eased. Although, a chance of snow did seem odd, given the gloriousness of the day.

We lifted off and flew east over the Atlantic Ocean. I asked why this was, and was told it was to minimize any contamination between land-borne germs and me—and thus I missed seeing the great cities of the Eastern Seaboard.

After an hour or so we flew in from the Atlantic over some estuarial flatlands to Hyattsville and then over a maze of concrete and highways and large rectangular boxes arranged in clusters: suburbia! Factory outlet malls! Now
this
was interesting—I imagined teenagers having sex to loud music and parents with no morals having flings inside unnecessarily large vehicles. All of these people below me with a calm, elegant death wish, wearing Abercrombie & Fitch garments.

Ahead of me I saw Washington DC in a raging blizzard. Dr. Rick said, “Sorry ’bout this, Apu,” and sprayed me in the face with a narcotizing mist, and when I awoke I was in a clean, attractively furnished room with invisible lighting and no-name furniture and bed linens.

“Rick? Anyone?”

There was no answer, nor did I expect one. I felt quite alone, and how could I not? But since the tsunami, solitude is my natural condition, so I didn’t worry too much. A good rest in a nice bed with perfect air was a treat I’d never known, not even as a child. I tried to focus on recent memories but to no avail. Rick’s narcotic spray—and the brutalizing effects of travelling from the other side of the planet inside a plastic bag—had eroded my thoughts, making them fuzzy and hard to descramble, sort of like the satellite signals that come into Trincomalee from the feeds out of Perth. (Oh, those Australian accents! With a single vowel from a female Aussie, you could cut glass.)

In any event, my incarceration differed little from those of Zack, Samantha, Julien and Diana. When the music stopped, we all ended up in these strange and clean rooms, alone with our shock and confusion and sense of wonder.

I thought about the bee and what it must have done to me. Had it infused me with a virus or bug or some other form of non-Harj information—information that was going to multiply within me to produce possibly horrific consequences? I did not want this. Instead, I hoped the bee had put something safe and kind and healing into my system, something better than me, something that would grow and make the world a place where idiots like Hemesh are not shot to death in parking lots and where outlet malls are always beautiful and are kept at a temperature just cool enough to require wearing a sweater.

I fell asleep.