Generation A

by Douglas Coupland

  So anyway, on the flight to Sweden—specifically to the town of Solna, outside Stockholm, home of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control—I spoke at length about the Yamato and World of Warcraft to the three militarytards minding me. None of them showed any interest in either the Yamato or World of Warcraft—so that shows you the colourless pit we call society. I would have preferred travelling in the company of the hectoring protein specialists, but they vanished once I was loaded into the transport vehicle.

  I actually fell asleep en route to Stockholm. I’d been up for thirty hours by then and couldn’t keep my eyes open as the three tards haggled over the remaining egg salad sandwich somewhere over Denmark. When I awoke, I was in my room. Watch out, IKEA: viral laboratories know your gig—stylish, neutral and beautifully constructed.

  You’ve probably heard about the neutral rooms, so I won’t go on about mine. My contact voice was that of leather-skinned French pop singer/survivor Johnny Hallyday, whose tonsils had been marinating in Scotch and nicotine for half a century. It seemed kind of funny, but then, enough about me—let’s quickly learn more about Johnny Hallyday.

  JULIEN PICARD PRESENTS:

  A Shameless and Cheesy

  Wikipedia Dump on the

  Life of Leathery French Pop Star

  Johnny Hallyday

  Johnny Hallyday was born Jean-Philippe Smet in Cité Malesherbes, Paris, France, to a French mother, Huguette, and a Belgian father, Léon Smet. His parents separated not long after his birth, and he was raised by his paternal aunt, Hélène Mar. His pseudonym was borrowed from his cousin’s friend Lee Halliday; it turned into Hallyday when it was misprinted on a record label. He was married on April 12, 1965, to Sylvie Vartan, a French singer. They have a son, David Hallyday, who is also a singer, born David Michael Benjamin Smet on August 14, 1966.

  In those earlier years, Johnny was seen as a less than caring father. His career had taken control of his life; his focus was on his next song rather than on his family. Although Johnny Hallyday and Sylvie Vartan were France’s Golden Couple of their generation, they divorced on November 4, 1980, two days after the election of Ronald Reagan. Hallyday married a model named Babeth Etienne on December 1, 1981, in Los Angeles; the marriage lasted two months and two days.

  Hallyday’s love affair with French actress Nathalie Baye began in 1982, after they met on a television program. Nathalie gave birth to their daughter, Laura, at the end of 1983. They separated in 1986.

  He married Adeline Blondiau in 1990, and they divorced in 1992. In 1996, he married Laetitia Boudou. In 2004, the couple adopted a Vietnamese baby girl they named Jade.

  In 2011, Hallyday’s left foot was severed at the tendon by a Komodo dragon in a petting zoo in Dallas, Texas. In 2012, he admitted to his extraterrestrial origins and was delivered to a waiting alien spacecraft in a shuttle piloted by English-billionaire-turned-rogue-supervillain Richard Branson.

  To be honest, I chose Johnny Hallyday’s voice because my mother went to one of his concerts when I was small, and took me with her when the babysitter didn’t show up. It was the only time I’ve ever seen her display simian behaviour in public, along with thirty thousand housewives all dressed like cleaning ladies waiting for the Number 18 bus to Porte de la Chapelle. I mean . . . I was kind of embarrassed, but to see my mother express emotion—that was something rare.

  The fact that Johnny’s still around seems unreal to me—as if he’s accidentally dropped into our world from a parallel time stream. And while I’m actually quite a good singer, the few times I tried singing a Hallyday classic in the Neutral Chamber, Johnny’s own voice shut me up: too much branded media information.

  Fine.

  Like the others, I endured the daily ritual of being asked contorted questions, followed by bloodletting.

  If you were to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you do it facing the Pacific Ocean or the city of San Francisco?

  Can you imagine a situation where pain might feel good?

  Do meek drivers drive you crazy?

  Do you like or dislike religious people?

  Do you enjoy talking to attractive strangers more than unattractive strangers?

  If you had to destroy one beautiful thing, what would it be?

  Is recklessness sexy?

  There were thousands of these queries, and they could get repetitive and baffling very quickly . . .

  Do ringing telephones frighten you?

  Do you shoplift in your head?

  If you had Tourette’s, what would be the forbidden words you would shout out in public?

  Some days I’d come away from the interrogation sessions angry, and some days I’d feel as if I’d just watched a really good movie.

  Wait . . .

  In the previous paragraph I used the word “days,” but we had no idea whether it was day or night. We had no time markers. I learned afterwards that I actually run on a twenty-five-hour cycle, not twenty-four. (It’s more common than you think). Zack had no cycle at all, and Diana had the most perfect twenty-four-hour cycle anyone in the research crews had ever encountered.

  The cretinous scientists who stole a month of my life at least had the good manners to debrief me at the end of my quarantine. Zack and the others never received this courtesy. Their governments pretty much shipped them home in orange crates, with a bag of potato chips, one juice box and no useful information. So, yes, once again I met with the protein scientists Serge and Céline, who flew to Sweden to debrief me.

  We were to meet in the canteen. I arrived early and raided the chafing trays like a Viking, thrilled to see real food again, even if it was canteen food.

  I was halfway through my third portion of lasagna when they arrived.

  “Ah, look, Céline—it’s young Sean Penn once more,” Serge announced.

  “Serge, please don’t start with that,” I said.

  Céline asked what my month had been like. I told her it had been boring—and yet at the same time not. “It was like being in a dentist’s chair. You’re not doing anything, but at the same time you are doing something. I wish I’d had a carton-load of Solon with me.”

  The two of them made eyes at each other and went to fetch coffee. They reminded me of people who show up for dinner who’ve been having a raging fight until the moment they knock on your door.

  Céline sat down with a steaming cup and said, “Julien, you must have questions. Please ask, and if we can answer them, we will.”

  That sounded reasonable. I spoke between bites of food. “Why was my room so boring? Why wasn’t I allowed any books or TV or movies? And by the way, the bookcase they used wasn’t generic—it was IKEA, from their Billy bookcase series, and not only that, in my mind I was mentally taking it apart and putting it back together with an invisible Allen key. So much for brand neutrality!”

  “Who put a recognizable brand in the room? Idiots,” Serge said to Céline, and then he turned to me. “I’m going to tell you something, and it’s going to be weird, so brace yourself.”

  “Okay.”

  “There are molecules that the human body produces when one enters various states of mind.”

  “Like adrenaline.”

  “Adrenaline is a very coarse molecule—a peasant’s molecule.” Serge found himself amusing. “The molecules we’re talking about are almost-invisible proteins that are nearly impossible to recognize and to isolate. It’s why we were always taking so much blood from you. The questions we asked you were designed to put you in specific frames of mind, and from these we tried to decode your body’s response in terms of molecule production. Books and movies, or any form of culture, would create molecules that would obscure our findings.”

  I thought this over. “What does this have to do with bees and me being stung?”

  “Our thinking is that the bee sensed something in you that it didn’t sense in other people, either the absence or presence of one of these molecules.”

  Céline added, “We don�
�t think it was a virus or germ that made the bees vanish. We think it was one of these newly discovered molecules called ‘eons’ that made the bees go crazy.”

  “Eons?”

  “Tiny proteins we didn’t know about until recently.”

  “Wait—so I’m the antidote to vanishing bees?”

  “You flatter yourself,” Serge said. “People your age love thinking they’re special.”

  “Jesus, Serge, why is it you have so much trouble with younger people?”

  “Serge is just jealous,” Céline replied. “He thinks young people aren’t people yet. I take the broader view: nature gives young people . . .” she paused, “fluid personalities because society would otherwise never get soldiers to fight its wars. Young people are still capable of being tricked by idiotic ideas.”

  Serge said, “By the way, you won’t want to go back to Paris. You’re only one of five known bee stings.”

  “Where were the others?”

  “Zack in the U.S., Samantha in New Zealand . . . and then there was one in Northern Ontario, in Canada, and one in Sri Lanka. That’s it. And so you’re a bit of a rock star. You’d best lie low for a while.”

  Céline added, “Bigger than Johnny Hallyday.”

  “I’m so sick of that guy’s voice.”

  Serge said, “Your grandmother lives in Geneva. You should go stay with her. The Swiss will make less of a big deal about you. And your father’s there all month.”

  “When do I leave?”

  DIANA

  A few years ago, one of the girls, Elaine, was late for a meeting to discuss the Christmas pageant. There were twelve of us at the church wanting to get on with things, so I joked, “Isn’t it funny that the Rapture has finally occurred and the only one who got taken away was Elaine?” Talk about the dog farting. Zero sense of humour, those people.

  You make my nipples dry-barf, you infected whores.

  Oops.

  I mention this because when I was placed in Level-4 bio-isolation, I felt like I was the one who’d been taken away and at the same time like the one left behind. Explain that. My neutral chamber was roomy, but the boredom, oh God.

  One thing I did in my head for much of my time there was compose online singles ads. I think the voice of Courteney Cox Arquette would have told me to stop if she’d known I was doing this, but I had to do something to melt away the hours.

  Ad one:

  “I am God’s stalker. I know where He is, and He is not safe from me. Once I find Him, I’m going to tie him up and make him a home-cooked meal and force Him to sit and eat with me and appreciate the amount of work I’ve gone to on his behalf. Non-smoker preferred.”

  Ad two:

  “Hi. I’m always sad—should I be trying to conceal this from a potential mate? Also, I hate exercise. The astronaut Neil Armstrong once said, ‘God gave us a finite number of heartbeats, and I’m not about to waste mine running down some street.’ I love animals, but not those dogs that have Star Trek Ferengi foreheads.”

  Ad three:

  “Hello, potential mate. At the moment I’m a prisoner in a Level-4 disease containment facility, where I’m fed strange cubes of food and denied any form of culture or media for reasons of which I’m still unclear. I’m not a vegetarian, but I’d prefer someone who doesn’t have two freezers filled with venison and game that’s never going to be eaten. That’s just scary.”

  Foul-mouthed ex–church lady here. I want to make you a bet. I bet I can make you think differently about your own head if you read just this one paragraph. Are you with me? Here’s what you do: rub behind your ears and then smell your finger—chances are you won’t like the result. Now I want you to take your index finger and massage the gums surrounding your top front teeth, squeezing out some of the guck trapped between your teeth and gums. Now rub your fingers lightly together and smell. Pee-yoo. The essence of halitosis.

  How do I know this? Aside from being a foul-mouthed ex–church lady, I’m also a dental hygienist. I know, I know—why would a person choose to be a dental hygienist? Let me tell you, it’s not like I was at a career counsellor’s office one day, poring through the pages of Career Magazine, saw an ad for dental hygienists and said, “Stop! That’s the job for me.” No, it’s one of those jobs people fall into: perhaps you’re interested in teeth but don’t want to commit a huge chunk of your life to getting a DDM. Or maybe you just want something to do until you have kids and drop out of the labour market. Or, like me, you just got kind of lazy and had parents on your back telling you to move on with your life and . . . one day you wake up and discover you’ve become a dental hygienist.

  Because I have Tourette’s, I make an awesome hygienist. Nobody gets away with anything on my beat. Have you been flossing regularly? Don’t say you have been, because I can tell you haven’t—so tell me why you’re not following my orders. By the way, your breath stinks, either because you don’t brush or because you’re doing a terrible job of it. Once I show people the guck-beneaththe-gums trick, they almost always begin to brush properly.

  I spent my first few hours out of isolation in a Winnipeg coffee shop, waiting out a snowstorm for my contact person, named Denny, to pick me up. I was kind of insulted that I was being treated as if I were a duffle bag filled with low-grade pot; I miss the days when governments had money. Denny was apparently snowbound on the other side of town, and so there I was, shunted into a coffee shop, its floor covered in icy grey boot sludge. The age of the clientele appeared to average between seventy and seventy-five. My first five donuts tasted heavenly; the sixth one made me feel like a pig.

  The only reading available was religious tracts somebody had left atop the trash can, but honestly, I was so happy to be reading something, anything, that I even read the 4-point Helvetica Light ingredients list on an empty cruller box a previous diner had kindly left on my table. The tracts were a curious blend of Olde Tyme religion, Mormonism and personal hygiene—sort of like me, minus the Mormon part. I read:

  JOSEPH SMITH

  Born 1805, Sharon, Vermont

  Died 1844, Carthage, Illinois

  What did I want my own tombstone to read?

  DIANA BEATON

  Born 1990, Kapuskasing, Ontario

  Died 2077, Becquerel Crater, Mars

  I am a child of science fiction. What can I say?

  My cellphone rang. It was my would-be escort, who’d now encountered a freshly generated snowbank at a Portage Street intersection and would be an hour longer. Fucking cunt.

  I walked over to the trash can, saw the business section of the Winnipeg Free Press and lunged for it. I had sat down and begun to read about new developments in solar fuel cells when I had a “blink” moment and looked up. Everyone in the restaurant was staring at me. I’d never felt so under the microscope in my life. I broke the silence: “What the fucking fuck are you looking at?” Awkward! “I’m just waiting for someone. Relax, yes, it’s me.”

  Afterwards, a few people came up to me and lamely asked for an autograph, and the penny dropped that this was going to be the rest of my life.

  Fortunately, a guy named Rick saw what was going on and asked if I needed a ride somewhere. I gladly accepted a lift to the airport; screw the useless Denny. I had my Visa card and money in the bank. If the airport gods were rooting for me, I could be back in my own house by dinnertime.

  Well, I must say that the good thing about being in wintry places like Manitoba and Northern Ontario is that airports treat snowstorms like summer breezes. Rick bought me a head scarf and some horn-rimmed reading glasses. People yammer on about how hard it is to fly, but not in this part of the world: uranium and nickel discoveries keep the octane flowing. I checked in electronically and, with one hub in Sudbury, I was soon landing in North Bay. I called a cab and headed for home—only to find that home was now a pile of planks and beams and plywood sheets in stacks, the only vertical item being my chimney.

  The cab driver was pressing me to either get out or go somewhere else. I told him t
o fuck off, and when I stepped out of the car for a closer look at what was once my house, he drove away. There I was, the sun about to set, the weather chilly, with no idea of where to go next. I heard Kayla barking from the house across the street. I’d very much been hoping that the Humane Society had taken the dog away from the evil bastard Mitch.

  At this point, I was feeling sorry for myself. My parents were in Nova Scotia, and I didn’t feel like going there particularly. Shit, I hadn’t even phoned them yet. Well, it goes to show how family-oriented I am. I realized I could go to the dental clinic and crash there while figuring out what came next. At the dental office, I typed my password into the keypad—it still worked—and was reassured by the office’s familiar minty-antiseptic odour. I phoned my parents in Nova Scotia, but their number was no longer in service. Okay.

  I wondered where I was going to sleep. Certainly not on the waiting-room sofas, which would be crawling with people’s ass molecules. I sat at Patty the receptionist’s desk and ordered a pizza. Beside some files I saw a stack of bright yellow boxes of Solon. What was Patty doing with Solon? I thought only people who were rotting in jail or trapped in factory jobs took the stuff. I read the box:

  PRODUCT INFORMATION

  SOLON CR®

  (Dihydride Spliceosomic Protein snRNP-171)

  Sustained-Release

  Chronosuppressant Tablets

  DESCRIPTION: SOLON is a protein with chronosuppressive features. It is a synthetic spliceosomic protein, a complex of specialized RNA and protein subunits that removes introns from a transcribed pre-mRNA (hnRNA) segment.