And then she rang for another cigarette, her first act as queen.
JULIEN
Zut! I never would have imagined that I, Julien, would one day enjoy spending an afternoon sitting on a stump watching ravens dropping moules onto boulders, or watching a tide come in and eat the sand, or listening to the waves pummel the rocks on the shoreline north of Tow Hill Road, where every rock is the size and shape of an egg. And telling stories? Holy fucking zut!
I asked Serge, “Can you tell us why it’s so weird and so difficult to invent a story? How difficult can it be? And yet it is very difficult.”
Serge said, “Stories come from a part of you that only gets visited rarely—sometimes never at all. I think most people spend so much time trying to convince themselves that their lives are stories that the actual story-creating part of their brains hardens and dies. People forget that there are other ways of ordering the world. But now it’s your turn to tell a story.”
I was smacked by a wave of jet lag—an old-fashioned condition like dropsy or croup or leprosy. When was the last time you heard of anyone with jet lag?
I needed a minute to collect my thoughts—what story to tell? Fuck. I reached for my PDA and looked up “storytelling” for ideas.
Meanwhile, the wine flowed and Harj told us about the Craigs. I bought myself a little more time by telling everybody about the explosion at CERN, and Sam discussed her Earth sandwich. Then Diana told us about her evil neighbour, Mitch—it was getting late by then—and finally Zack began telling us his theories about corn.
And then Serge said it was really time for me to tell a story.
Nique ta mère!
“Okay. Here goes nothing . . .”
Coffinshark the Unpleasant
Meets the Stadium of Pain
by Julien Picard
Everyone stared at me.
I said, “I’m being ridiculous here! The title of my story is definitely not ‘Coffinshark the Unpleasant Meets the Stadium of Pain!’ . . . but I did generate millions of story titles using the uncountable numbers of online plot and character generators.”
I held up my PDA to display its small brilliant aqua screen.
“All genres, all levels of culture, high, low, Marxist and bourgeois. Here’s just one vampire character description out of 2,500 instant vampire descriptions generated online.
“‘Character No. 2,428: This sinful male vampire has narrow eyes the colour of charcoal. His thick, straight brown hair is worn in a style that reminds you of a trailing ribbon. He’s got a beard and a graceful build. His skin is completely transparent, and the blood flowing beneath it seems to glow. He has a small nose and a boxy chin. He can turn into a jaguar, and he has few vampiric disabilities. His diet consists of blood, but he can also eat normal food. He feeds not through his mouth, but via a long tongue with an eel-like end.’”
Sam said, “It’s sort of the death of culture, isn’t it? The death of books. The death of the individual hero. The death of the individual, period.”
I passed my PDA around and scrolled through the plots and names and places that spewed into my laptop’s windows.
Sam said, “Seeing all of these story options is making me feel seasick.”
“They’re not even ideas,” Diana said. “They’re like those kitschy splatter paintings they sell at carnivals.”
Serge said, “You’re not off the hook, Julien. You still have to tell your story.”
I felt fortified by outrage at the modern world. I said, “Okay, here’s my real story. Screw you, plot generators.”
Fear of Windows
by Julien Picard
Kimberly Kellogs was a well-nourished, upper-middle-class twelve-year-old girl who lived in a good suburb of a good American city. Her parents were happy that she hadn’t yet turned into an insolent, shoplifting, purge-dieting, binge-drinking nightmare like all the other girls in the neighbourhood. They counted their blessings.
One night Kimberly was watching a horror movie with her parents, one about outer space aliens invading the suburbs. The movie was made in a cinéma-vérité style, so that the naturalistic and provocative camerawork made the everyday world seem more charged and real, ready to explode like a black nylon backpack in a crowded train station.
Halfway through the movie, a scene showed a family inside their house; they heard funny noises, so they went from window to window, trying to see what the noise could be. When nothing turned up, they stood in front of the living-room window for a moment, admiring the front garden. Suddenly, a huge mean-motherfucker alien with tentacles and fangs and a massive cranium jumped in front of them and spat blood and venom and human body parts onto the windowpane.
Kimberly began screaming and couldn’t stop. In the end, her parents had to give her some Valium they’d been saving for an upcoming holiday flight, and still she spent the rest of the evening in bed with her curtains tightly closed. Through the walls, she could hear her parents fighting over whose idea it had been to let a twelve-year-old girl watch a PG-17 horror movie.
Before he went to bed that night, Kimberly’s father came up to see how she was doing and said, “Let’s open the curtains and let in some fresh air.”
Kimberly freaked out again. It took her father some minutes to make the connection between the curtains, the windows and the monster, and by then Kimberly was so upset that she ended up spending the night in her parents’ room, the blinds drawn.
The next morning Kimberly was fine again—until she remembered the monster. She froze, realizing that there were windows everywhere and that the monster could appear at any one of them at any time.
She willed herself out of the house and onto the school bus, and that was okay because it was moving and raised above the ground, until she realized that an alien could be on the bus’s roof. At school, she spent the day trying not to look out the classroom windows.
During the last period of the day, science, one of her classmates, Luke, said, “Kimberly, come over here. There’s this cool eye-perception test I want to show you.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s to test your eyes to see what you notice more, motion or colour. It’s fun.”
Kimberly was glad to have something to take her mind off the aliens, so she went to sit beside him.
Luke said, “What you do is stare at this image really intensely.”
On the screen was a picture of a boring middle-class living room.
“Let your eyes relax and let your body relax, and then things in the room will move just slightly, or the sofa may change colour just a bit. The image is going to change very slowly. Tell me what changes you notice—colour or shape or motion or whatever.”
So Kimberly sat there and let her body relax for the first time since the horror movie. She stared at the picture and thought of how much it matched her own family’s living room. She was imagining herself in the room, feeling safe and happy, when all of a sudden the screen cut to a full-size screaming vampire face, fangs bleeding, eyes full of murderous bloodsucking rage.
Kimberly went totally apeshit, and nobody knew what to do. Finally, her teacher and a few of the bigger students were able to drag her to the nurse’s office, where she was forced to sign several waiver forms and show proof of her family’s fully paid up-to-date medical coverage before she was given a rich and delicious syringe-load of Dilaudid. Still, the only reason Kimberly didn’t flip out further was because the nurse’s office had no windows and she felt slightly safe there—but she dreaded the fact that she would have to leave the room and walk down windowed hallways and out a door into a car with windows (her mother had been called) and then into a house that had twenty-seven windows as well as one chimney and three ventilation holes for the dryer and the bathroom showers.
The drive home was traumatic. Once inside the house, Kimberly was unable to leave her mother, even for a second.
That night her parents tried reasoning with her, but the harder they tried, the more anxious she became. At
two in the morning, they gave her the remaining eight milligrams of Valium and decided to see if everything would be better in the morning. It wasn’t. It was much worse—a Valium hangover amplified every misfiring neuron in their daughter’s brain. Kimberly, teeth chattering, crept inside the linen closet and shut the door.
“Shit. We have to get her to a doctor,” said her father. “Can you get the day off ?”
“Can’t. Today is our annual End of Season Blowout on Winnebagos. Can you do it?”
“Fine. Come on, pumpkin,” Kimberly’s dad said. “Get dressed and let’s go see if we can make these spooky things go away.”
They drove to the clinic with Kimberly crouched in the nook in front of the front passenger seat. Her father hoped to hell he wouldn’t get stopped for a seat-belt violation.
At the clinic they saw Dr. Marlboro, who was quick to grasp the problem. “Sedatives won’t work,” he said. “Nothing will work. A horrific lifelong phobia has been created. The most we can hope for is that the fear will dwindle with time and become manageable. The decay rate for young people traumatized by the wrong movie at the wrong time is usually six weeks—but the aftershocks linger forever.”
“What kind of quack are you?” Kimberly’s dad said.
“Language, Mr. Kellogs. Goodbye.”
Angry, Kimberly’s father took his daughter to another doctor whom he’d heard would write anyone a prescription for anything.
Kimberly spent the next month in a velvet fog. Then the prescription ran out, and when her parents went to get her another, they found that the pill doctor had fled to Florida to avoid multiple malpractice charges. All the other doctors in town were off-duty, watching golf marathons on TV, and an unsedated Kimberly returned to her full senses. She was yet again horrified by the world.
While Kimberly had been in her fog, spring had turned into summer. Kimberly’s mother had an idea: “Why don’t you sleep outside on the lawn? No windows there.”
She had a point. That night Kimberly slept in the back garden, midway between the house and the fence.
“Well, Einstein,” said her father to her mother. “Glad to see something works. She can’t be living on sedatives forever.”
With a 360-degree view all around her, sleep came quickly to Kimberly. The next morning, she jerked awake, filled with fear, then realized where she was and relaxed. This went on for a month, during which time she stayed outside, only going inside when it was absolutely necessary. The weather was good, and so was life.
Then one morning she woke up to see two men dressed like politicians coming through the carport. They approached the side door and rang the doorbell. Kimberly’s mother answered it and let them in.
As quietly as she could, Kimberly crept up to the house. She snuck from window to window, looking inside, and as she did, she discovered that windows are perfectly fine if you’re on the outside looking in.
Finally, she came to the living-room window. She looked in to see her parents kneeling in front of the men, who were opening up their heads like tin can lids. Jellyfish tentacles emerged and wrapped themselves over her parents’ skulls. After thirty seconds, the tentacles retreated and went back inside the men’s heads and the heads snapped shut. The creatures pulled dog leashes from their pockets, which they attached to Kimberly’s parents. They led her parents out the front door, down the driveway and out onto the road, where other aliens were busy rounding up the neighbours.
I wish I could say that Kimberly did a brave thing and fetched the loaded Colt from her father’s bedside drawer and tried to rescue her parents.
I wish I could say that she ran after her parents in a vain effort to save them, in the process becoming a house pet, too.
But instead, Kimberly looked at her parents’ house, which was now all her own. She went in the front door, threw open all the windows, let fresh air inside and sang, “It’s mine, mine, mine now! All of it, mine!”
DIANA
Julien’s story resonated for me because when I was young, we had to stay in a cabin out in the country, and the wire mesh windows and forest noises scared the pants off me. And this got me to thinking about my screwed-up parents, who I almost never discuss, and so I dawdled a bit to figure out the gist of my story. A bit more wine was poured, and after we found a bag of stale lemon-flavoured cookies, and after a bathroom break, we reconvened in the candlelit room.
“Serge . . .”
“Yes, Diana?”
“To echo what you were saying earlier, why is it so hard to invent a story when every moment of our lives we’re basically winging it and writing stories on the fly?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, even me asking you this question is part of the story of my life—and the lives of everyone here. I could have grabbed a knife and gone psycho on everybody. Or I could have hopped around like a bunny rabbit.”
“But you didn’t,” Serge said.
“So then, why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives? How hard can it be to change gears and say, You know what? Instead of inventing and telling stories, I’m going to make my life a more interesting story.”
“I agree,” said Zack. “Why is it that, instead of going off on a cross-country killing spree, we stay home and surf for porn?”
Julien said, “Now you know why I like online war games.”
“Okay,” I said, “time for me to tell my story.”
The Short and Brutal Life
of the
Channel Three News Team
by Ms. Diana Beaton
Chloë was sitting at her kitchen table, looking out at the sunny day, when her front doorbell rang. It was the police, come to tell her that her mother had been arrested for murdering the local Channel Three News team—two anchorpeople, the weather guy and four studio technicians. Her mother, acting alone, had arrived at the TV studio carrying an oversize rattan handbag and pretended to be a sweet old thing interested in meeting the hostess from a cooking show. The moment she was close to the newsroom set, she asked to visit the washroom, slipped away, removed several guns from her handbag and came back firing. She was knocked to the ground by a surviving cameraman and her pelvis fractured. She was in hospital, in stable condition. A video of the event was already circling the planet on the Internet. Chloë watched the ninety-second sequence with police officers flanking her; its violence was so otherworldly that Chloë thought she was in a dream. The police asked if she would go to the hospital with them, and she said, “Of course,” and off they drove, cherries flashing.
The main entryway was cordoned off, but the cruiser was allowed to slip past the security guards and story-crazed media. They elevatored up to the top floor, where a quartet of officers guarded her mother’s room. Chloë had always expected that one day she would visit her mother in the hospital with a broken hip, just not under the current set of circumstances.
“Mom?”
“Hello, dear.”
“What the hell were you thinking?”
“I’m more than happy to tell you.”
“Wait—where’s Dad?”
“He’s not available right now.”
“Oh Jesus, he’s not going to go out and shoot somebody, too, is he?”
“Aren’t you quick to jump to conclusions!”
“Mom, you killed seven people.”
“Good.”
Chloë tried to compose herself while her mother serenely smiled. “So, why’d you do it?” she finally managed to ask.
“Our New Vision church group had an ‘enlightenment fasting’ up in the mountains last weekend. It was glorious. And during group prayer, I was lifted up above Earth and when I looked down on this planet, it was black like a charcoal briquette. At that moment I realized that Earth is over, and that New Vision will take me to a new planet.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No, I’m not kidding you, Chloë. Your father and I want you to join us.”
“Mom. This is awful. Wake up—wak
e up!”
Chloë’s mother looked at her with the same bland face she used when she thanked polite men for holding a door open for her. “You should be thrilled for me, dear. I believe it was you who was a fanatic of that comic strip from the 1970s—what was it—the Yamato? You of all people must understand what it feels like to want to leave a destroyed planet and roam the universe trying to fight an overwhelming darkness.”
“It was just a comic, Mom.”
“For ‘just a comic’ it certainly took hold of your imagination. I think you’re jealous of me, dear.”
“What?”
“You’re jealous because right now I’m actually inside that cartoon—on the other side of the mirror—and you aren’t. But you can be. Join us.”
“Mom, just stop it. Why did you kill those people?”
“I killed them because they were famous.”
“What?”
“The only thing our diseased culture believes in is fame. No other form of eternity exists. Kill the famous and you kill the core of the diseased culture.”
“So you killed the Channel Three News team? They’re barely famous even here in town.”
“If you watch the news right about now, you’ll see that New Visioneers around the world have shot and killed many people at all levels of fame. To decide who is ‘more famous’ than anyone else is to buy into the fame creed. So we have been indiscriminate.”
Chloë’s sense of dread grew stronger. “Who is Dad going to kill?”
“What time is it?”
Chloë looked at her cellphone’s time display. “Almost exactly five o’clock.”
“In that case, right about . . .” Chloë’s mother looked at the ceiling for a second, whereupon she heard small cracking sounds coming from the hospital entranceway. “Right about now he’s just shot the news reporters covering my shootings.”
“Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .” Chloë ran to the window: pandemonium. She turned to her mother: “Holy fuck! What is wrong with you?”
“Is your father dead?”
Generation A Page 15