Generation A (30 page)

Authors: Douglas Coupland

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Science Fiction, #General, #Computers, #Satire, #Bee Stings, #Information Technology

BOOK: Generation A

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HARJ

So many things begin and end with the sea, do they not? Sailors vanish. Boats sink. Jewels are thrown to its bottom. The bad woman drowns. Life crawls from its glinting waters and draws air into its lungs and joins the land forever.

Months later, the island had run out of auto fuel, so Julien and I decided to walk to a strange beach up the coast to fill the day. We started out early in the morning, as the sun was rising orange and cold, like someone who hates his job. I wondered what season it was, and then decided to never again ask myself that question.

We ended up standing by the ocean a few miles up Tow Hill Road, on a beach that had no sand or driftwood or shells, just a billion rocks, all of them different colours, all of them the size and shape of an egg. After walking through clots of sound-muffling firs, we reached Egg Beach, with its rhyming, crunching waves.

They had stopped making Solon by then, as our stories did, finally, reach the world—but there was no glory in it. None that we cared about, anyway. As our five personalities continued to merge, all we cared about was staying together, and so we did—on the island and away from humanity. You see, that’s our big secret: if you eat stuff made from our brains, you become one of us. We all become each other, one big superentity. Miss America wishes for world peace and so do we, except with us it might come true.

“It’s strange,” I said to Julien. “I don’t feel like I actually did anything to help. I feel perhaps fraudulent. Which is to say, here I am, a living cure, and I don’t know how that feels.”

He nodded.

Storms were washing up plastics of the north Pacific, mostly from Asia: flip-flops and whiskey and shampoo bottles; plastic helmets, children’s toys, fishing floats and disposable lighters.

Julien asked me, “Harj, what was the tsunami like—as it was happening? What was it like to be there during it? You’ve never actually told us.”

“Well, it was sort of like right here, right now, except that I was three storeys up when the water just rushed inland and never stopped. And there was no actual wave—it was as if that big vat of Zack’s brain matter sloshed inland about a kilometre and then ran out of force. It smelled like dirty salt, and I remember the fish drowning in the air, flopping about, and when I squinted they looked like coins, like treasure.”

The waves of Egg Beach crashed on the shore, keeping their distance.

I sat down on the stone eggs and thought of everything life had coughed up for me since the moment of my sting. Different sorts of waves that spouted forth . . .

. . . Winnebagos

. . . Mexican beer

. . . bodies hanging from lampposts

. . . helicopter rides

. . . casually elegant piqué-knit polo shirts.

The list is long, but I think it will soon be over, once the five of us become whatever thing it is we’re turning into.

Could I have imagined my new life a year ago? I don’t think so. I began my trip as a lost soul. I was a bar magnet with only one pole, a number divisible by zero. Somehow the group of us killed Superman. We entered the Rapture. We cut away those bits of ourselves that had become cartoons. And we turned the world back into a book.

“Did you hear they found a beehive over in Tacoma, down in Washington,” Julien said.

I began to imagine the lives of those bees that survived over the years just long enough to find us and sting us and send us their message, to tell us
their
story. I began to imagine small cells of them—not even hives—surviving from year to year, nesting under highway overpasses and the dusty eaves of failed shopping malls—foraging for pollen in the weeds growing alongside highways, their wings freezing and falling off in the winter and in the summers their wings rotting and leaving them crippled as they tried to keep their queens alive, finding little comfort in each other, finding solace only in the idea that their mission might one day succeed, that they would one day find us, with our strange blood—knowing that we were the only hope they ever had of moving forward—that we were the only hope they had of finding their way home.

Footnote

∗
It’s worked for me lots of times before, and sometimes not giving a shit keeps things lively. For example, a while back I went through this phase where I totally didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything, so just to mess things up, I wore eyeliner for a week, and raggedy old clothing. Net result: chick magnet. I’d go to convenience stores and hurl myself at the windows in an attempt to make them shatter . . . there’s even some security-cam footage of it somewhere in flickr world. Net result: chick magnet plus cool reputation. There’s a lot to be said for not giving two flying fucks, Mr. Darwin.

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Also by Douglas Coupuland

A Note About the Type

Dedication

Generation A