Generation A by Douglas Coupland
“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—neuroproteins.”
“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.
JULIEN
Nique ta mère, the day was a catastrophe—nothing but hangovers, death, a soul-suckingly stupid visit to the UNESCO bee’s nest, more violence and then a final massive, crazy and insane burst of death and destruction.
After our trip to the bee site, Diana went into town to clean some teeth and Sam and Zack went along for the ride, to try to find more and better booze. Serge was gone most of the afternoon; I saw him walking along a gravel side street, glued to his headset and PDA—I assumed he was reporting to Paris about our dismal communal lifestyle, which is like a derailed early 1970s hippie social experiment.
I went for a walk alone along the town’s Andromeda Strain forlorn streets, trying to sequence a story I was working on. I saw ten Haida guys chase another guy through an intersection, and then they were gone, like in a cartoon, but a cartoon with real baseball bats and real axes that ended with screams and then silence to the we
When I got back, Diana filled us in on island gossip: “Solon. They found a box of it inside an old piano in the teen activity centre. The island is crawling with the stuff.”
“So the kids are all taking it now?”
“Looks like it.”
I asked Diana if Solon withdrawal is bad.
“I researched this stuff. Former users profoundly miss the sensation of solitude. They resent having to care about other people. They never get over their craving for solitude.”
Dinner was a small salmon, plus a hideous satanic buffet of canned foods: those strange, squishy, nutritionless tinned vegetables Americans love that turn their bodies into fat, disgusting Winnebagos.
After we finished, we heard a small jet approaching overhead—unusual, as nothing but us had arrived on the island after the world lost interest in the UNESCO site.
The jet flew past the house, northeast towards the airstrip, and then there was an explosion. Encore, nique ta mère!
We raced outside to see a plume of smoke rising in the distance. We got in the truck and raced to the airport, where we found the remains of a private jet on the ground, to the airstrip’s right side, going into the forest—a hundred-metre-long strand of crumpled metal, strewn luggage, fractured camera equipment and burning debris. The island had no fire department, but then nothing could have survived a crash like that, and the best any of us could do was stand and gawp along with two Haida guys while wracking our brains, trying to figure out who could have been on the plane.
The two men seemed to be actively looking for something—in a way that suggested they weren’t looking for a human being. This was odd, so we sidled their way, and then one of them called out and the other came over to a slightly charred but otherwise fine pine box that had been expelled on first impact. It was labelled AEROSPACE-GRADE DRIED MEALS. The older guy jimmied it open with a strip of metal from the crash. Inside it there were hundreds of boxes of Solon.
“Bonanza.”
The younger guy walked over to his truck and brought back a jerry can of gasoline. He doused the Solon with gas and torched it with a lit cigarette. I had the feeling there would soon be more bodies hanging from the Esso sign.
Zack asked them, “Hey, how come more of you didn’t come out to see this crash? I mean, this is pretty wild.”
“Everybody’s pretty busy right now.”
“Oh?”
Amongst ourselves, we’d wondered how the plane had crashed, and the younger Haida guy surprised us by volunteering the answer: “We switched off the runway lights and used some fake lights to make it crash.”
We all went apeshit—I mean . . . nique ta mère! Zack went especially apeshit. “What the fuck are you people thinking? You crashed a fucking plane!”
“What business is it of yours?”
“What business is it of ours? Are you crazy? Are you retarded?”
The two guys came over to us, right up to Zack. The older of the two said, “We only allow you to stay here because of the bees. Stop making noise.” Then the younger guy began playing air guitar with the blue top half of a suitcase. Zack jumped him and dragged him to the ground, and everybody started yelling. Harj and Sam jumped on top and pulled the two apart.
Zack’s face was candy red. “What are you people thinking?”
They each dusted themselves off, and the young guy said, “We’re thinking we need to do what we have to do to protect ourselves. End of story.” He and his friend walked. I was actually kind of in awe of them. They had turned the real world into World of Warcraft, and they were owning every second of it.
Serge arrived and smoked cigarettes and looked at the burning mess. “So much camera equipment. A shame—so expensive.”
“Don’t use up all your diseased cuntfucking compassion at once, Serge,” said Diana, adding, “I just creamed my panties.”
Serge asked, “How many people—skeletons—do we see here?”
We did a count: pilot and three passengers, details of their gender unreadable.
Zack said, “It’s the Channel Three News team.”
Diana looked at Zack. “I just figured this out. You invited them here, didn’t you?”
“What are you saying, Diana?”
“You butt-raping shitsucker, you heard me perfectly well. You brought them here, you fucking media whore. Jesus. Your Uncle Jay told us you’d try exactly this kind of stunt.”
“Uncle Jay’s been in touch with you? Son of a bitch.”
“Cry us a river.”
“Diana, look, Jesus, it’s not like I wanted this to happen. Yeah, I invited them here, but to be honest, I needed the money. We’re all going to need the money in the future. And what’s wrong with a little press, anyway? We can’t live here in Narnia forever. And Serge knew they were coming, too. They had clearance.”
We looked at Serge, who shrugged. “Yes, I, too, am thinking about your futures. You will need money. I thought I was doing you a favour.”
“So who put the fucking Solon on the plane?”
Zack said, “Don’t look at me. I didn’t even think they were coming for weeks yet.”
Our heads racing, we stayed until the fires burned themselves out. There was nothing to save and nothing left to see, so we drove home in silence. I wondered how the Haida knew the Solon was on the plane, and I did contemplate what might have happened if the flight had not crashed and the Channel Three News team had shown up at the door. I don’t think they would have had anything interesting to film. It’s not like we’re human daisies and the bees are queuing up, waiting to woo us.
We all sat down and storytelling began with almost no preamble.
The Anti-Ghosts
by Samantha Tolliver
There was once a group of people whose souls had been warped and damaged and squeezed dry by the modern world. One day, their souls rebelled altogether and fled the bodies that had contained them. And once a soul leaves a body, it’s all over; there’s no going back.
The thing is, the bodies that had created the souls remained alive and continued their everyday activities, such as balancing chequebooks, repairing screen doors and comparison shopping for white terry-cotton socks at the mall, while their souls met in small groups at the intersections of roads, confirming with each other that what had happened was real—and it was—and that they hadn’t all turned clueless at once.
“So, are we ghosts?”
“I don’t think so—the bodies we came from are still alive.”
“Are we monsters?”
“No. Monsters can interact with the world. All we can do is drift around—pass through walls—and live a life of perpetual mourning.”
“Are we the undead?”
“No, we are not. But we sure aren’t alive, either.”
The souls felt like house pets that have survived a hurricane only to find their homes and owners gone. They watched the world go onward, but they were unable to be a part of change or progress. They watched the bodies that spawned them grow older. They were surprised by how cruel it is to grow older in the modern world when everything else seems to stay young.
The souls wondered why they weren’t going to heaven or hell or anywhere else. There was just endless drifting, navigating through the world like turkeys or chickens or swans with clipped wings—birds that can barely fly. And even though they’d fled their bodies in rebellion, the souls missed their bodies the way a parent misses its child.
And then one day the souls became so angry with their situation that they lashed out at the world and—surprise!—the gestures they made in anger allowed them to connect with the world again: vases tipped over, doors slammed, windows broke, data was scrambled, light bulbs popped.
The souls were stoked. Their ability to manipulate their anger and to engage with the living world grew and grew. They began to jam car engines and trip alarms. They learned how to curdle milk and burn food. They crippled satellites and sal
And so they smashed all they could smash, creating wars without opponents. Their rage became their art. They no longer wondered if they were good enough to deserve their bodies—their life. Instead, they challenged their bodies to deserve them.
This was not the end of the world, but it was the beginning of sorrows.
The Man Who Loved
Reading and Being Alone
by Julien Picard
Once upon a time there was a man who loved reading and being alone. His name was Jacques and he lived in a large American suburb, surrounded by a million morbidly obese people and a hundred dying malls. Jacques liked reading because it calmed his brain. Jacques liked reading because it made him feel like an individual person instead of a slice of pie in a PowerPoint demonstration or a bar in a census chart.
Jacques mostly slept during the day because the noise of his neighbours going about their lives was too much for him to handle: the mail truck, leaf blowers, children playing—why couldn’t they all do this somewhere else? Why do they have to live their lives out in public, for Christ’s sake? Where does private end and public begin? Stop making noise! I can hear!
It wasn’t the noise itself that bothered Jacques—although that can’t be denied—it was the knowledge that there were living human beings out there making that noise, human beings whose very existence so geographically close to him cancelled his own sense of solitude.
To cope with life, Jacques worked—then read—mostly at night, when there were no gardening noises, construction noises or trucks with their never-ending beeps-in-reverse. He tried moving to the country but quickly learned that rural areas had noises that were just as bad, if different: barking dogs (Oh God, all dogs ever do in the country is bark!), farm equipment, backup generators, chainsaws and all-terrain vehicles.
What was Jacques to do?
And then one day, on craigslist, he found a job as a lighthouse keeper. He took it—and at first it was glorious. No people! None! Zero! The passing cries of stray gulls and gannets he could handle. These animals hadn’t been domesticated. All was perfect with Jacques’s world, until he started noticing waves—a sound that had been happening for billions of years and that would continue for billions more. The incessant shushing and lapping and brushing sounds began to wear on his nervous system. He couldn’t ignore them, and his hyperawareness made them ten times as annoying as his old neighbour’s kid’s trampoline birthday party or the UPS truck doing a three-point turn in a nearby driveway.