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 CO2 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 tsunam
i, 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.
ZACK
“What’s your name, then?”
“Call me Lisa.”
“Hello, Lisa. I’m assuming that right now I’m being watched by a hundred different cameras?”
“You are correct in assuming something like that.”
“Then I think I’ll make myself more . . . comfortable.” I’d noticed I’d been garbed in a pair of white cotton underwear that I thought unusual because it had absolutely no logos or branding or any other indication of where it was from. Regardless, I decided to smoulder for the scrumptious Lisa. Nobody can resist Zack in his smouldering mode.
“Zack, I think you need to know that I am actually a composite personality generated by fifteen different scientists feeding text, data and voice information into the system’s central character generator. I’m not actually a woman.”
Fuck. How embarrassing. “Very funny.”
“We’re not very funny people. We’re all work and no play.”
“Then could you maybe change your voice? I don’t want to lie here thinking, even for one second, that there’s a possibility of you being hot.”
“How does this sound?” Lisa’s voice morphed into that of Ronald Reagan.
“Better.”
“Well then, Zack, I’d like you to think of me as a friend.”
How can you argue with Ronald Reagan? It’s like crushing baby chicks with gumboots; no wonder he ruled the planet for eight years. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“The food here blows.”
“Yes, it’s unfortunate-looking, but take solace in knowing that you’re helping science. You’re a hero, Zack.”
“I’m no hero. What happens next?”
“Oh, we’ll need more blood, but you’re young and healthy.”
“What do you mean more blood?” I searched my arms and legs, looking for needle evidence.
“Don’t worry, Zack. Our new blood-removal techniques are invisible and painless.”
“How comforting.” I stood up and walked over to the table to poke the green gel rhomboid on my plate. I took a small taste: a broccoli smoothie. “How long am I here for?”
“A few weeks, maybe.”
“I’ll go nuts.”
Ronald Reagan said, “You’ll be helping your country, Zack. I know we can all count on you.”
“At least get me a TV.”
“No TV, Zack, sorry.”
“Some games, then. Magazines . . . a Mac . . . maybe even some books.”
“I’m afraid we can’t let you have any information in your room that might skew your mood.”
“Not even logos on the furniture and toilet, I noticed.”
Silence.
“So I sit in a room and do nothing for a month?”
“Let’s speak again soon, Zack. I enjoyed meeting you.”
“Thanks ever so much, Ronald.”
“I feel good about you, Zack.”
I looked around me and said, “You know what, I’m going to lie back down on the bed here so that you guys can spray your CIA sleepy gas in my face.”
I lay down, and for the first time since the sting, I began to think clearly about my recent past. I thought of Charles and his webcam . . . crap. Well, I guess the world knows everything about Zack there is to see. To cope with this realization, I chose nature’s ultimate ego-preservation tool: I decided not to give a shit.∗
But in my Level-4 containment facility beneath the surface of North Carolina, I was going crazy. To jack off or not to jack off? Later.
I said to Ronald, “Drain my veins completely, for all I care. Good night. Or good day. Or good whatever-it-is in the real world.”
The jellied cubes began to taste better and better as the weeks progressed. And then, one day, I was evicted without ceremony. They asked me to pick out a few garments from among those lying inside a lost-and-found cupboard—a witness relocation cupboard? No idea. I chose some vintage Gulf War camouflage pants and a wife-beater like my favourite avatar in MarineWarp3: The Blessing. Best. Battle. Game. Ever. They then took me to a tarmac and a waiting C-141 Starlifter transport plane. It looked like it came from a garage sale picked clean by early birds: it was scuffed, pitted and greasy. Its interior smelled like a Salvation Army thrift shop—all it needed was mismatched cutlery and a spew-stained stuffed animal.
During the flight I asked what was supposed to happen now: was I free? Was I to be a long-term lab rat? Could I lead a normal life? None of the military types were willing to give me any answers.
We landed at Oskaloosa Municipal Airport, and the temperature was around the freezing mark, even though the month before we’d had record heat. Nobody met me at the airport—I thought my cheap bastard Uncle Jay could have at least called me a cab. When I got to the bottom of an aluminum gangplank, the plane’s door slammed and within a minute it was airborne, leaving me marooned at the haunted airstrip. When I was little, the place was practically choking with planes all day, and I remember my father stealing a pair of Ray-Bans from the dashboard of a BASF Crop Protection van. These days, there’s grass busting through cracks in the tarmac, and as I walked towards the road I saw a coyote skedaddle across the runway’s south end.
I caught a ride home with a Mexican who made me sing along to mariachi songs. The bed of his truck was filled with bags of onions. In my tragic Spanish, I tried to make conversation, but the most I could understand was that onions are cheap to grow and require little pollination. He then sold me a bag of magic mushrooms for ten bucks. Good old fungi: take that, you delinquent fucking bees.
Of course, no one in the system had told me that, while I was locked up, my cheeky little getting-stung video had become a global number one hit. My humble cornfield was the most Google-mapped location of all time. My cock and balls drawing in the corn had become a popular tattoo. I was humbled: creativity, you are nectar.
Maybe a quarter-mile away from the farm, I saw the first souvenir stand: a mobile home with some folding card tables out front, manned by an astonishingly fat woman wrapped in a blue shipping blanket and cuddling a pug. She was so odd-looking that I didn’t register the T-shirts at first: enlarged screen snaps of me naked. What the . . . ?
There was another stand, then another, and then a small improvised community of people who’d been camping in tents like the farm was Live Aid 1985. There were also tailgate-partying tourists along the roadside who reminded me of the crowds who used to go to the old space shuttle launches in Florida. Nobody was paying any attention to my Mexican’s truck or to me.
At the lane that leads to my place, a pair of armed guards stood before a long, man-high helix of razor wire. I hopped out of the truc
k and walked up to them, but before a word came out of my mouth, the crowd spotted me—I felt like Kurt Cobain, returned from the dead. The guards panicked and were unable to quickly open the razor wire gate, and so I, Zack, got my first taste of fame. I liked it.
A woman old enough to be my mother asked me to sign an envelope for her. My first autograph! So I did, and then she asked if I could lick the envelope shut. A weird request, but I did, and she ran away happy, but others were visibly pissed off. I asked a comely young lady what I’d done wrong, and she said, “She wanted your DNA, bozo—and so do I!” My mind was blossoming with ideas on how to provide her with a sample when the guards finally cut the razor wire and yanked me inside—but only me, no DNA enthusiasts.
The first thing I noticed was that my aging wood barn had been disassembled and the planks stacked like cordwood. Numbers had been spray-painted on their edges, meaning I’m not sure what. It reminded me of the X’s spray-painted onto New Orleans Katrina houses.
My house itself was unlocked, and every item inside had been arranged into rows and piles, and numbered with Sharpies. Many of the items were in plastic zip-lock bags—even an ancient pizza flyer I remembered throwing out the morning of the sting. Fucking hell—to put everything back in place was a task that seemed beyond me. Having said that, my place had never looked so neat and clean.
I sat down on a chair wrapped in a thick, clear plastic condom. I was hungry. Would there be food in the cupboard? I found forty-eight of those meals-in-a-can things senior citizens love. Oh joy. I decided that the first thing I’d do as a free citizen would be to go to the bank, take out some money, go find an apple and pay whatever they asked for it. I wanted my teeth to make something go crunch.
Drinking a chocolate Boost, I walked into the guest room (in truth, the room in which I kept my barbells and dead elliptical training machine) and saw a pile of U.S. Postal Service bags of mail. Holy fuck! I went to one of them and pulled out a letter at random. It was from a grandmother in Michigan who had written a poem about bees. She’d enclosed a memory stick of the poem set to music. I quickly learned that fan mail was incredibly fun and yet incredibly boring at the same time.
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