Generation X

by Douglas Coupland

  "The manager is heard through a bullhorn, asking shoppers to calmly vacate, but no one's paying much attention. Carts are left in the

  MENTAL GROUND ZERO: The location where one

  visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb; frequently, a shopping mall.

  aisles and the bodies flee, carrying and dropping looted roast beefs and bottles of Evian on the sidewalk outside. The parking lot is now about as civilized as a theme park's bumper cars.

  "But the fat man remains, as does the cashier, who is wispily blond, with a bony hillbilly nose and translucent white skin. They, your best friend, and you remain frozen, speechless, and your minds become the backlit NORAD world map of mythology—how cliche! And on it are the traced paths of fireballs, stealthily, inexorably passing over Baffin Island, the Aleutians, Labrador, the Azores, Lake Superior, the Queen Charlotte Islands, Puget Sound, Maine . . . it's only a matter of moments now, isn't it?

  " 'I always promised myself,' says the fat man, in a voice so normal as to cause the three of you to be jolted out of your thoughts, 'that when this moment came, I would behave with some dignity in whatever time remains and so, Miss—' he says, turning to the clerk in particular, 'let me please pay for my purchases.' The clerk, in the absence of other choices, accepts his money. "Then comes The Flash.

  " 'Get down,' you shout, but they continue their transaction, deer transfixed by headlights. 'There's no time!' But your warning remains unheeded.

  "And so then, just before the front windows become a crinkled, liquefied imploding sheet—the surface of a swimming pool during a high dive, as seen from below—

  "—And just before you're pelleted by a hail of gum and magazines—

  "—And just before the fat man is lifted off his feet, hung in suspended animation and bursts into flames while the liquefied ceiling lifts and drips upward—

  "Just before all of this, your best friend cranes his neck, lurches over to where you lie, and kisses you on the mouth, after which he says to you, 'There. I've always wanted to do that.'

  "And that's that. In the silent rush of hot wind, like the opening of a trillion oven doors that you've been imagining since you were six, it's all over: kind of scary, kind of sexy, and tainted by regret. A lot like life, wouldn't you say?"

  PART TWO

  NEW ZEALAND GETS

  NUKED,

  TOO

  Five days ago—the day after our picnic—Dag disappeared. Otherwise the week has been normal, with myself and Claire slogging away at our Mcjobs —me tending bar at Larry's and maintaining the bungalows (I get reduced rent in return for minor caretaking) and Claire peddling fivethousand -dollar purses to old bags. Of couse we wonder where Dag went, but we're not too worried. He's obviously just Dagged-out some place, possibly crossing the border at Mexicali and off to write heroic couplets out among the L.A., learning about a black-and-white superbursts that allow him to work. HAnd this is given some advance no knock myself out coversaguaro, or maybe he's in CAD systems or making 8 movie. Brief creative endure the tedium of real fine. But I wish he'd

  tice so I wouldn't have to ing his tail for him at

  work. He knows that Mr. MacArthur, the bar's owner and our boss, lets him get away with murder. He'll make one quick joke, and his absence will be forgotten. Like the last time: "Won't happen again, Mr. M. By the way, how many lesbians does it take to put in a light bulb?" Mr. MacArthur winces. "Dagmar, shhh! For God's sake, don't irritate the clientele!" On certain nights of the week Larry's can have its share of stool-throwing aficionados. Bar brawls, although colorful, only up Mr. M.'s Allstate premiums. Not that I've ever seen a brawl at Larry's. Mr. M. is merely paranoid.

  "Three—one to put in the light bulb and two to make a documentary

  about it."

  Forced laughter; I don't think he got it. "Dagmar, you are very funny, but please don't upset the ladies."

  "But Mr. MacArthur," says Dag, repeating his personal tag line, "I'm a lesbian myself. I just happen to be trapped in a man's body."

  This, of course, is an overload for Mr. M., product of another era, a depression child and owner of a sizable collection of matchbook folders from Waikiki, Boca Raton, and Gatwick Airport; Mr. MacArthur who, with his wife, clips coupons, shops in bulk, and fails to understand the concept of moist microheated terry towels given before meals on airline flights. Dag once tried to explain 'the terry-towel concept' to Mr. M.: "Another ploy dreamed up by the marketing department, you know— let the peons wipe the ink of thriller and romance novels from their fingers before digging into the grub. Très swank. Wows the yokels." But Dag, for all of his efforts, might as well have been talking to a cat. Our parents' generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.

  But life goes on.

  Where are you, Dag?

  *****

  Dag's been found! He's in (of all places) Scotty's Junction, Nevada, just east of the Mojave Desert. He telephoned: "You'd love it here, Andy. Scotty's Junction is where atom bomb scientists, mad with grief over their spawn, would come and get sloshed in the Ford saloon cars in which they'd then crash and burn in the ravines; afterward, the little desert animals came and ate them. So tasty. So biblical. I love desert justice."

  "You dink. I've been working double shift because of your leaving unannounced."

  "I had to go, Andy. Sorry if I left you in the lurch."

  "Dag, what the hell are you doing in Nevada?"

  "You wouldn't understand."

  "Try me."

  "I don't know—"

  "Then make a story out of it. Where are you calling from?" "I'm inside a diner at a pay phone. I'm using Mr. M.'s calling card number. He won't mind."

  "You really abuse that guy's goodwill, Dag. You can't coast on your charm forever."

  "Did I phone Dial-a-Lecture? And do you want to hear my story or not?"

  Of course I do. "Okay, so I'll shut up, already. Shoot." I hear gas station dings in the background, along with skreeing wind, audible even from inside. The unbeautiful desolation of Nevada already makes me feel lonely; I pull my shirt up around my neck to combat a shiver.

  Dag's roadside diner smells, no doubt, like a stale bar carpet. Ugly people with eleven fingers are playing computer slots built into the counter and eating greasy meat by-products slathered in cheerfully tinted condiments. There's a cold, humid mist, smelling of cheap floor cleaner, mongrel dog, cigarettes, mashed potato, and failure. And the patrons are staring at Dag, watching him contort and die romantically into the phone with his tales of tragedy and probably wondering as they view his dirty white shirt, askew tie, and jittery cigarette, whether a posse of robust, clean-suited Mormons will burst in the door at any moment, rope him with a long white lasso, and wrestle him back across the Utah state line.

  "Here's the story, Andy, and I'll try and be fast, so here goes: once upon a time there was a young man who was living in Palm Springs and minding his own business. We'll call him Otis. Otis had moved to Palm Springs because he had studied weather charts and he knew that it received a ridiculously small amount of rain. Thus he knew that if the city of Los Angeles over the mountain was ever beaned by a nuclear strike, wind currents would almost entirely prevent fallout from reaching his lungs. Palm Springs was his own personal New Zealand; a sanctuary. Like a surprisingly large number of people, Otis thought a lot about New Zealand and the Bomb.

  "One day in the mail Otis received a postcard from an old friend who was now living in New Mexico, a two-day drive away. And what interested Otis about this card was the photo on the front—a 1960s picture of a daytime desert nuclear test shot, taken from a plane.

  CULT OF ALONENESS: The need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships. Often brought about by overly high expectations of others.

  CELEBRITY

  SCHADENFREUDE: Lurid thrills derived f rom talking about celebrity deaths.

  "The post card got Otis to thin
king.

  "Something disturbed him about the photo, but he couldn't quite figure out what.

  "Then Otis figured it out: the scale was wrong—the mushroom cloud was too small. Otis had always thought nuclear mushroom clouds occupied the whole sky, but this explosion, why, it was a teeny little road flare, lost out amid the valleys and mountain ranges in which it was detonated.

  "Otis panicked.

  " 'Maybe,' he thought to himself, 'I've spent my whole life worrying about tiny little firecrackers made monstrous in our minds and on TV. Can I have been wrong all this time? Maybe I can free myself of Bomb anxiety—'

  "Otis was excited. He realized he had no choice but to hop into his car, pronto, and investigate further—to visit actual test sites and figure out as best he could the size of an explosion. So he made a tour of what he called the Nuclear Road—southern Nevada, southwestern Utah, and then a loop down in to New Mexico to the test sites in Alamogordo and Las Cruces.

  "Otis made Las Vegas the first nighl. There he could have sworn he saw Jill St. John screaming at her cinnamon-colored wig floating in a fountain. And he possibly saw Sammy Davis, Jr., offer her a bowl of nuts in consolation. And when he hesitated in betting at a blackjack table, the guy next to him snarled, ''Hey, bub (he actually got called "bub"—he was in heaven), Vegas wasn't built on winners? Otis tossed the man a one-dollar gaming chip.

  "The next morning on the highway Otis saw 18-wheel big rigs aimed at Mustang, Ely, and Susanville, armed with guns, uniforms, and beef, and before long he was in southwest Utah visiting the filming site of a John Wayne movie—the movie where more than half the people involved in its making died of cancer. Clearly, Otis's was an exciting drive— exciting but lonely.

  "I'll spare the rest of Otis's trip, but you get the point. Most importantly, in a few days Otis found the bombed New Mexican moonscapes he was looking for and realized, after a thorough inspection, that his perception of earlier in the week was correct, that yes, atomic bomb mushroom clouds really are much smaller than we make them out to be in our minds. And he derived comfort from this realization—a silencing of ihe small whispering nuclear voices that had been speaking continually in his subconscious since kindergarten. There was nothing to worry about after all."

  "So your story has a happy ending, then?"

  "Not really, Andy. You see, Otis's comfort was short lived, for he soon after had a scary realization—a realization triggered by shopping malls, of all things. It happened this way: he was driving home to California on Interstate 10 and passing by a shopping mall outside of Phoenix. He was idly thinking about the vast, arrogant block forms of shopping mall architecture and how they make as little visual sense in the landscape as nuclear cooling towers. He then drove past a new yuppie housing development—one of those strange new developments with hundreds of blockish, equally senseless and enormous coral pink houses, all of them with an inch of space in between and located about three feet from the highway. And Otis got to thinking: 'Hey! these aren't houses at all—these are malls in disguise.'

  "Otis developed the shopping mall correlation: kitchens became the Food Fair; living rooms the Fun Center; the bathroom the Water Park. Otis said to himself, 'God, what goes through the minds of people who live in these things—are they shopping?"

  "He knew he was on to a hot and scary idea; he had to pull his car over to the side of the road to think while freeway cars slashed past.

  "And that's when he lost his newly found sense of comfort. 'If people can mentally convert their houses into shopping malls,' he thought, 'then these same people are just as capable of mentally equating atomic bombs with regular bombs.'

  "He combined this with his new observation about mushroom clouds: 'And once these people saw the new, smaller friendlier explosion size, the conversion process would be irreversible. All vigilance would disappear. Why, before you knew it you'd be able to buy atomic bombs over the counter—or free with a tank of gas! Otis's world was scary once more."

  * * * *

  "Was he on drugs?" asks Claire.

  "Just coffee. Nine cups from the sound of it. Intense little guy." "I think he thinks about getting blown up too much. I think he

  THE EMPEROR'S NEW MALL: The popular notion that shopping malls exist on the insides only and have no exterior. The suspension of visual belief engendered by this notion allows shoppers to pretend that the large, cement blocks thrust into their environment do not, in fact, exist.

  needs to fall in love. If he doesn't fall in love soon, he's really going to lose it."

  "That may be. He's coming home tomorrow afternoon. He's got presents for both of us he says."

  "Pinch me."

  MONSTERS EXIST

  Dag has just driven in and looks like something the doggies pulled out of the dumpsters of Cathedral City. His normally pink cheeks are a dove gray, and his chestnut hair has the demented mussed look of a random sniper poking his head out from a burger joint and yelling, "I'll never surrender." We can see all of this the moment he walks in the door— he's totally wired and he hasn't been sleeping. I'm concerned, and from the way Claire nervously changes her hold on her cigarette I can tell she's worried, too. Still, is all anyone can ask for, ness look so, so— know why. l've seen before. It's of the same relief and despondent faces of friends returning Dag looks happy, which but why does his happisuspicious? I/ think I this flavor of happiness phylum of unregulated giggliness I've seen in the from half-years spent in

  Europe—faces showing relief at being able to indulge in big cars, fluffy white towels, and California produce once more, but faces also gearing up for the inevitable "what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life?" semiclinical depression that almost always bookends a European pilgrimage. Uh oh. But then Dag's already had his big mid-twenties crisis, and thank God these things only happen once. So I guess he's just been alone for too many days—not having conversation with people makes you go nuts. It really does. Especially in Nevada.

  POOROCHONDRIA

  Hypochondria derived from not having medical insurance.

  PERSONAL TABU: A small rule for living, bordering on a superstition, that allows one to cope with everyday life in the absence of cultural or religious dictums.

  "Hi, funsters! Treats for all," Dag yells to us, reeling through the door, carrying a paper loot sack across Claire's threshold, pausing briefly to snoop Claire's mail on the hall table, and allowing a fraction of a second for Claire and me to exchange a meaningful, raised-eyebrow glance as we sit on her couches playing Scrabble, and time enough also for her to whisper to me, "Do something."

  "Hi, Cupcake," Claire then says, click-clicking across the wood floor on platform cork wedgies and hamming it up in a flare-legged lavender toreador jumpsuit. "1 dressed as a Reno housewife in your honor. 1 even attempted a beehive do, but I ran out of hairspray. So it kind of turned into a don't. Want a drink?"

  "A vodka and orange would be nice. Hi, Andy." "Hi, Dag," I say, getting up and walking past him, out the front door. "Gotta pee. Claire's loo is making funny sounds. See you in a second. Long drive today?" "Twelve hours." "Love ya."

  Back across the courtyard in my clean but disorganized little bungalow, I dig through my bottom bathroom drawer and locate a prescription bottle left over from my fun-with-downers phase of a year or two ago. From the bottle I extract five orange 0.50 mg. Xanax brand tranquilizer tablets, wait for a pee-ish length of time, then return to Claire's, where J grind them up with her spice pestle, slipping the resultant powder into Dag's vodka and orange. "Well, Dag. You look like a rat's nest at the moment, but hey, here's to you, anyway." We toast (me with a soda), and after watching him down his drink, I realize in an electric guilt jolt in the back of my neck, that I've misdosed him—rather than having him simply relax a bit (as was intended), I now gave him about fifteen minutes before he turns into a piece of furniture. Best never to mention this to Claire.

  "Dagmar, my gift please," Claire says, her voice contrived and synthetically perky, overcomp ensating for her concern a
bout Dag's distress-sale condition.

  "In good time, you lucky lucky children," Dag says, tottering on his seat, "in good time. I want to relax a second." We sip and take in Claire's pad. "Claire, your place is spotless and charming as usual."

  "Gee, thanks Dag." Claire assumes Dag is being supercilious, but actually, Dag and I have always admired Claire's taste—her bungalow

  is quantum leaps in taste ahead of both of ours, furnished with heaps of familial loot snagged in between her mother's and father's plentiful Brentwood divorces.

  Claire will go to incredible lengths to get the desired effects. ("My apartment must be perfect.") She pulled up the carpet, for instance, and revealed hardwood flooring, which she hand-refinished, stained, and then sprinkled with Persian and Mexican throw rugs. Antique plate silver jugs and vases (Orange Country Flea Market) rest in front of walls covered with fabric. Outdoorsy Adirondack chairs made of cascara willow bear cushions of Provençal material printed by wood block.

  Claire's is a lovely space, but it has one truly disturbing artifact in it—racks of antlers, dozens of them, lying tangled in a brittle calciferous cluster in the room adjoining the kitchen, the room that technically really ought to have been the dining room instead of an ossuary that scares the daylights out of repairpersons come to fix the appliances.

  The antler-collecting obsession started months ago, when Claire "liberated" a rack of elk antlers from a nearby garage sale. A few days later she informed Dag and me that she had performed a small ceremony to allow the soul of the tortured, hunted animal to go to heaven. She wouldn't tell us what the ceremony was.

  Soon, the liberation process became a small obsession. Claire now rescues antlers by placing ads in the Desert Sun saying, "Local artist requires antlers for project. Please call 323. . . .' Nine times out often the respondent is a woman named Verna, hair in curlers, chewing nic otine gum who says to Claire, "You don't look the the scrimshaw type to me, honey, but the bastard's gone, so just take the damn things. Never could stand them, anyway."