I was halfway through my third Boost and my tenth letter when my cellphone rang. I’d forgotten I even owned one. The ring tone was “Africa” by Toto: Uncle Jay.
“Numbnuts, you were supposed to be home tomorrow, not today.”
“I don’t even know what day today is.”
“It’s Saturday.”
“Who told you I was supposed to be home tomorrow?”
“The woman from the Centers for Disease Control.”
Note the absence of a greeting. Uncle Jay is warmth personified.
“I’m fine, Uncle Jay. How are you?”
“Smartass.”
I asked, “So what happens now?”
“What do you mean?”
“What am I supposed to do now? Hang out all day with my Wii?” Not farming—that’s for sure. A letter from Monsanto Corn had informed me that there were still unrepentant gene traces on the property.
“How about growing something other than corn?”
“Corn still runs the state. You know that’s not going to happen.”
“You’ve got a point,” Jay said. “It seems to me that you now have the best thing and the worst thing in the world at the very same time.”
“What would that be?”
“Too much free time.”
“I’ve just had a month of free time, and I never want any again.”
On the table was a stack of Wellbutrin SR Post-it notes. As I stared at them, I realized how much I’d missed logos and brands.
“You’re not contagious or anything, are you?”
“Fuck off, Jay.”
“Language.” Then he said to me, “If I see you on one TV talk show, or if you post anything weird on the Internet, or if I see any fame-whoring, you’re cut off. Fame is only going to cause trouble.”
“Gotcha.”
Being on TV is fun. Producers love me because I don’t put on the brakes the way most people do. What I’m thinking and feeling is what I say. Producers also love quietly stealing my food litter from trash bins: DNA trophies.
Q)
Do you think the bee was attacking you?
A)
I don’t think bees attack people.
Q)
Were you into insects as a child?
A)
Sure. In second grade Justin di Marco said I was chicken shit and wouldn’t eat a dead fire ant. Screw him, so I ate a live one.
Q)
What did it taste like?
A)
Crunchy. Salty. I mean, there’s not much difference between eating lobster and eating a bug. One’s just bigger is all. I think of flying insects as sky lobster.
Q)
You run a farm by yourself. That’s a lot of work.
A)
Yes and no. In general, I’m too lazy to hold down the Shift key when I type, but when it comes to my plants, I think of them as art.
Q)
Like the big hoo-hoo you cut out of your cornfield?
A)
Exactly.
Q)
Are you superstitious? Getting stung must have made you a little bit so.
A)
My Uncle Jay’s the superstitious one. He honestly believes he got glaucoma because he snorted drugs in the dual-gender handicapped bathroom at Olive Garden.
Q)
He sounds like a character.
A)
He is. When I was a kid, he took me to SeaWorld in San Diego, and he got a four-week suspended sentence for trying to throw pennies into the blowholes of dolphins. Now he’s found God and he’s not as much fun.
Q)
Did they ever find the beehive belonging to the bee that stung you?
A)
No.
Q)
There was a girl in New Zealand who was stung last week.
A)
Apis mellifera?
Q)
Yes.
A)
Cool. Where is she now?
Q)
In quarantine, the same way you were. It’s all online—her and her bee.
A)
Did they find the hive down there?
Q)
No.
A)
Anyone else get stung?
Q)
Three others. One in Europe, one in Canada and one in Sri Lanka.
A)
Huh.
Q)
I wonder if the group of you shares anything in common.
A)
Something genetic?
Q)
Or viral or . . . who knows.
After the taping, I went online and saw the other Wonka kids for the first time. It was like that dream where you find rooms in your house you never knew existed.
SAMANTHA
The enforced neutrality of our rooms was a bit excessive. The five of us were baffled not so much by the absence of clutter or things that might contain germs as by the absence of any kind of information. Of course, the food was bloody appalling—nursing home food that had been blenderized and formed into gelled cubes. Lisa told me I was the first person to ever use this particular room, and I said I wasn’t surprised. It turns out they’d had the rooms ready for years in case somebody got stung, and I later found out they’d given up hope of ever finding anyone. These neutrality chambers had sat in blackness for five years.
Okay.
A moment of pride here: of all of us, I was the only one who didn’t mind speaking to Lisa, the feminine voice they’d worked so hard to perfect. But then, I’m one of those people who have no problem with the default ring tone on their mobile. I went two years with Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” until friends finally did an intervention at the gym’s fifth birthday party.
Zack chose to work with “Ronald Reagan,” which is very Zack; at one point I think he almost convinced Ronald to speak in a Scooby-Doo accent. Julien chose the voice of a French pop star named Johnny Hallyday. Diana chose Courteney Cox Arquette and Harj chose Morgan Freeman, which was probably the best pick. Harj understands hierarchy.
Our daily routine was to wake up, answer some questions, meditate, donate a bit of blood, go back to sleep and . . . it was sooooooooo boring, like a Qantas L.A. to Sydney flight that never lands. When I wasn’t bored, I felt like a little California condor chick being fed by a hand puppet shaped like a mama bird—central to the scene, yet clueless.
But you know, there are limits. After a few days I mutinied and demanded to speak with a human voice I actually recognized—if you’ve ever phoned a large corporation and been stuck in voice-mail hell, you know the sensation. And so they piped in Louise. “Samantha, this isn’t good science.”
“Louise, I’m going crazy.”
“Don’t go crazy. It’ll last a bit longer, and then you’re free.”
“How much longer?”
“I can’t say.”
“You’re no better than Lisa.”
“Samantha, the point is that we really have to be as neutral as possible.”
“Why?”
“Because science is about being neutral, and our results are too valuable to screw up.”
“Then give me something to make time go more quickly. That new stuff, Solon. My mother takes it.”
There was a pause. “Solon? Sorry, Sam, I can’t give you Solon.”
“Why can’t I see you, at least? I haven’t seen a human being in a week. How come?” (I don’t know if anyone mentioned it, but staff never used the corridors outside the rooms. This added a stagy apocalyptic feel to the experience, as though everyone but me had been taken away by a Stephen King plague.)
“Samantha, just take my word for it that what we’re doing is based on sound science and your time here is finite.”
“Right. As opposed to infinite? Lisa tells me my family is fine and all.”
“No need for a tone, Samantha. Just hang in there, okay?”
“Fat lot of good you are.”
“Goodbye, Samantha.”
I tried to calm mysel
f by playing Earth sandwich in my head. The opposite of Atlanta would be about a thousand miles west of Perth, in the Indian Ocean. It wasn’t a fun month. But it passed. I did calisthenics, yoga, weight training (with light fixtures) and was systematically sprayed with a narcotizing mist every time they needed my body for whatever scary shit they were doing with me. I lost the five final remaining pounds of flab left on my frame and at least had that as a plus.
I thought about my beliefless parents floating about the Southeast Asian archipelago, eating chocolate brioches while discussing the absence of God as though he were a lost hiker found dead at the bottom of a cliff.
And I did more sit-ups.
And I did more crunches.
And I did more . . . you get the point.
They dropped me off in Los Angeles in time to catch the once-a-week L.A.–Auckland commercial flight. Seeing as the security budget for me was zilch, the combined U.S. and New Zealand governments found me a wig and a slutty dress to conceal my identity for the flight. My discharging officer termed the costume “lifestyle-inappropriate,” asked me for my autograph and then dropped me off curbside at the LAX decontamination shuttle.
After the weeks of boredom in my cell, I felt like I’d trashed my school uniform and was now ditching school. The fun thing about dressing like a slut is that people treat you like a slut. Feminism be damned; a man came up to me at LAX and gave me an unsolicited shoulder massage. And from my brief experience at the Terminal 6 bar, I learned that a woman need never pay for her own drinks if she plays her cards right. Cripes, listen to me—but I was so effing tired of being the goody two-shoes! My two brothers spent their lives getting away with blue murder, but if I got caught with something as minor as the smell of cigarette smoke on my sweater, I was grounded and had to hear my parents’ heavily freighted, judgmental sighs for at least a week.
I was given an A seat and thus had a Pacific panorama for the entire flight. At one point the captain asked everybody to pull down their shades so that people could see their video screens properly. “In any event, there’s nothing out there to see.” I glanced out and saw the ocean forever, some wispy clouds and a sun too bright to focus on—like a snapshot of life after death—a very boring life after death.
Remember, I’d had a month to mull over my mother’s phone call, and hadn’t yet drawn a final conclusion. It was hard not to stop overthinking the matter of my own beliefs.
As we flew over the northeast coast of the North Island, there were scrub fires all over; the smoke was sulphur yellow and so thick and tarry it seemed that it, too, might catch fire. It also made it unsafe to land, and we were rerouted to Palmerston North. Hallelujah! That meant a mere twelve-minute cab ride home, and I wouldn’t have to wait in Auckland for a shuttle flight. The landing was quick, and my customs and immigration processing non-existent. To be on the weekly flight from L.A., you had to be somebody; nobodies don’t take twelve-hour flights these days.
I shared one of the city’s ten cabs with a gay dental researcher named Finbar, who took one look at my wig and said, “What the hell died on top of your head? Take that thing off now, or I’m going solo and you’re hitchhiking.”
I did, and my scalp felt like lungs breathing for the first time in half a day.
Finbar said, “Much better.”
It turned out we lived close to each other, and he soon added 2 + 2. “You’re Sam, the B-girl! Crap, won’t the gang be flubbered when I tell them I shared a cab with you.” Finbar demanded that we go to my place first. He said much of the neighbourhood had been under a white outdoor tennis court bubble for weeks, and had only recently been reopened for the people who lived there. “Your neighbours aren’t going to be too thrilled to see you come home.”
“But I didn’t even get stung there. I got stung out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Hardly the middle of nowhere now. Bee-52 has been a massive local tourist draw since it happened. It’s like the Klondike out there.”
“Bee-52?”
“Where Weber Fork Road meets Route 52. It’s the holiest place in the country. Where have you been?”
“Incarcerated in a clean facility a hundred feet beneath the surface of suburban Atlanta.”
“Hotlanta!”
“Why do people always say Hotlanta when you say Atlanta?”
“The place is hot, is why.”
We were nearing my apartment. Finbar asked, “Is the drought still going on there?”
“Year seven. Third year with not even a drop of rain.”
“Poor fuckers.”
“Did they find the hive?”
“No.”
Finbar was right—my neighbours had been forced out of their houses for two weeks, and once they were allowed back home they were besieged by dumbos come to stare at the flat I’d been renting, wondering if it exuded some sort of cosmic bee-attracting chemical. Nonsense, of course, especially as my flat was no longer there. It was just a concrete pad surrounded by gawkers. I got the driver to drop me off at the end of my family’s driveway and said goodbye to Finbar there.
I had no luggage on me, and it struck me that it was strange to have no luggage after such a long trip—as if I’d just been dragged out of a Mercedes’ boot by South American kidnappers.
And I was dressed like a cheeky slut.
The key by my parents’ door wasn’t where it usually is, in the totara shrub’s middle crotch, so I rang the doorbell, heard nothing, rang again, then heard my father bellow something rude. I opened the mail slot and called to him. The door soon flew open and my father was radiant. “Sammy! You’re home!”
A reunion is always nice, so please insert some generic welcome-home family greetings here. The temperature only changed when I asked why ringing the doorbell had ticked off my dad so much.
“Oh, the zoo we’ve had around here, Sammy,” he said. “And those scientists going through the house and yard like we were concealing strangled bodies. That bee has caused more bloody trouble. You must know that they’ve dismantled your flat. I think they’ve got all your bits and things in a warehouse in Cloverlea.”
My mother chimed in, “But it’s a lovely warehouse, too, very posh.”
“Aren’t I lucky, then!”
Thanks to Finbar, the whole country soon knew I was back. That first hour home with my parents was the only hour I had with them. The press and the gawkers showed up and the camera flashes began, and it was soon obvious that I couldn’t stay with my parents. People seemed to think that Zack and the rest of us possessed some magic X factor that could fix them and answer all their questions. Bloody annoying.
So, then, what do you do? Go find a mini storage locker, lock yourself inside and store yourself forever? Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible. I was stuck.
I figured it this way: the one option I could see was to simply wait for the ruckus to die down. If people found out how boring I really am, they’d drop the woo-woo line of magical thinking.
I was unwillingly famous, broke and without a hideout. The only person I could think of who might be able to help me was my scientist friend, Louise. And though I’d never met him, the thought entered my head that I should be staying with Zack.
JULIEN
Until I discovered World of Warcraft last year, I spent my days mostly in my room, reading a series of translated Japanese illustrated novels called The Voyage of the Battleship Yamato. I watched animated versions on DVD—it had been renamed Star Blazers in foreign markets, and all the sex and subtle fascism in the Japanese version deleted by non-Japanese distributors. Apparently there are new uncensored boot legs out there. Somebody please post them! I must see them! I want them to live on forever as disembodied electrons floating through the world’s airwaves and hard drives—and there, they will join the newscast footage of me being carried out of a Winnebago in a thick blue plastic bag and into an idling biohazard truck.
Back to The Voyage of the Battleship Yamato
. . .
The animated version’s “fromage factor” was high. It was made in 1973—an animation industry low-water mark—but it seems more authentic than today’s tacky computer-generated spectacles. You can tell that the people who made it loved what they were doing, even if they were doing it with a minimum of taste and style.
The story is of a small multinational crew journeying through space in a hollowed-out asteroid in search of the planet Iscandar in the year 2199. An alien race known as the Gamilonians are raining radioactive bombs on Earth, rendering the planet’s surface uninhabitable. Humanity lives in refuges built deep underground, but the radioactivity is slowly infiltrating the underground cities too.
Are you still reading? I know, but bear with me.
Earth’s space fleet is hopelessly outclassed by the Gamilonians’, and all seems lost until a mysterious space probe is retrieved on Mars. Blueprints for a faster-than-light engine are discovered, and Queen Starsha of the planet Iscandar in the Large Magellanic Cloud sends a message saying that she has a device, the Cosmo-Cleaner D (a.k.a. Cosmo DNA), that can cleanse Earth of its radiation damage.
Hang on just a bit longer . . .
The inhabitants of Earth secretly convert the ruin of a WWII Japanese battleship, the Yamato, into a massive spaceship. Using Queen Starsha’s blueprints, they equip their new ship with a warp drive and a new, incredibly power ful weapon called a wave motion gun that fires from the bow. A tiny but intrepid crew of 114 leaves in the Yamato to travel to the Large Magellanic Cloud to retrieve the radiation-cleansing device. Along the way, they discover the plight of their blue-skinned adversaries: Gamilon, sister planet to Iscandar, is dying, and its leader, Lord Desslar, is trying to irradiate Earth so that his people can move there, at the expense of the barbarian humans.
And so on.
I guess that’s what all sci-fi is about in the end: societies competing for survival. Variations on George Lucas and his pasteurized mythologies. When I was still pretending to go to the Sorbonne, I took a class called Heroes and the Monomyth. The moment I started attending, I simply stopped caring about grades or anything else. I decided that knowledge comes from real life and from travel and interacting with others. So I decided to spend all of my awake time playing World of Warcraft. How amazing to see all that mythology acting itself out in real time, fuelled by genuine human sentience! Real life can be mythologically sci-fi, too. For example, my father spends five days a week at CERN, on the French side of Geneva, and is technically only a hundred metres away from its Large Hadron Collider. Soon he’ll be moving to offices closer to the Low Energy Antiproton Ring. If that’s not sci-fi, what is?
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