“What?” Chloë looked out the window again and saw her father’s body sprawled on a berm covered in Kentucky bluegrass. “Yes. Mother of God. He is!”
“Good. He’ll be on the other side to greet me with the rest of us who have fulfilled our mission today.”
Chloë staggered out into the hallway, gasping, but police and hospital staff paid her little attention as they braced for the next wave of wounded, dying and the dead. She shouted, “Dear God, I am so sorry!” and was ignored.
On a nursing station’s TV screen, newscasts were coming in, showing the faces of murdered celebrities from around the world.
Chloë ran back into the room to find her mother glowing.
“Mom, you’re crazy. Your cult is crazy.”
“I want all of your generation to come join me and band together to smash all the shop windows of every boutique in the country, to set fire to every catwalk, to shoot rockets into Beverly Hills. It will be beautiful—like modern art—and people will finally stop believing in the false future promised by celebrity.”
Chloë wanted to vomit. Gurneys loaded with bodies were shunted quickly past the room’s door and her mother went on talking: “In the last days of World War Two, the Japanese emperor told the Japanese to sacrifice themselves, to die like smashed jewels. And so I say to you, Chloë, die like a smashed jewel. Destroy, so that we can rebuild.”
Outside it had grown dark—not regular darkness, but a chemical darkness that felt linked to profound evil. The moon was full. Chloë and her mother caught each other staring at it at the same time. Her mother said, “I wish the Apollo astronauts had died on the moon.”
“What?”
“Then it would be one great big tombstone for planet Earth.” Her mother popped something into her mouth.
“Mom—what was that?”
“Cyanide, dear. I’m off on your Battleship Yamato. Why don’t you come, too?”
Chloë ran for help, but the staff were too busy with the wounded, so she watched her mother die, writhing on her bed, then falling still.
Stunned, Chloë walked back out into the hallway. There was blood everywhere. The floor was smeared; the whole place smelled of hot, moist coins. She heard gunshots coming from the elevator bank, and screaming staff ran down the hallway past her. She saw an orderly in turquoise surgical scrubs coming towards her holding a sawed-off shotgun, and the look in his eye told Chloë that this was a New Vision follower.
He was whistling, and as he came nearer, he said, relaxed as can be, “Looks like you’re one pretty darn famous little lady now, aren’t you?”
Chloë ran into her mother’s room and kissed her mother’s mouth violently, sucking in the remains of the cyanide. She tasted the chemical as it entered her bloodstream and knew death would be quick.
The whistling stopped as the orderly loomed in the doorway. Chloë said, “Know what? I leave this planet on my own terms, you freak.” She was dead before the buckshot pounded her chest.
HARJ
I have always prided myself on being a good listener, and after listening to Diana’s story, it occurred to me that common threads might be woven into the fabric of our stories. Certain themes tended to recur: royalty, cults, the way we hear words, the way we tell stories, superheroes, disaster, aliens—Channel Three News teams. I kept this observation to myself, as I did not want to make my new friends self-conscious.
And for me to invent a story on the spot? Difficult, but I very much wanted to be a part of our gang—the alcohol and the candlelit intimacy were seductive and corroded that part of my brain that fears such things as public speaking and karaoke. And so I began.
Nine Point Zero
by Harj Vetharanayan
The king2 was up in his hot-air balloon, looking down over his mighty kingdom, proud that he had been born to rule over it and silently happy with his lot in life. It was the middle of a sunny weekday, and life in the kingdom was happening as usual: the roads were full, the children were at school, and the last of the lunchtime diners were heading back to their workplaces. That was when the earthquake struck.
2 Yes, royalty.
It was a nine point zero; within fifteen seconds, it demolished the older, less seismically prepared buildings in the land. After that, the newer buildings began to drop. Throughout the kingdom, those people who had survived did a clumsy dance out onto the wobbling streets to avoid falling debris—shards of glass and masonry.
The noise of the quake was deafening. Such a roar! It was the planet itself shifting and readjusting; the people on the street couldn’t even hear each other yell.
The king, up in his hot-air balloon, was the only person who experienced none of the quake’s violence, which continued to roar and roar and destroy—a quake that wouldn’t stop. By the quake’s fifth minute, most of his kingdom’s houses were gone and all dams had broken. Reservoirs had drowned whole suburbs. Office towers had fallen on their sides and the quake’s continuing lunging motions shook them until only twisted steel beams remained.
The king’s heart had broken and still the quake continued! Survivors were becoming seasick from the ground’s lurching—they lay vomiting on the crumbling parking lots and sidewalks. Trees fell. Birds were unable to land on the moving surfaces and were relieved to sit on the rim of the king’s hot-air balloon basket.
Fires broke out and the rubble burned. The king watched, helpless to stop it, tears in his eyes, flocks of confused birds circling his basket.
After ten minutes, survivors truly wondered if they were lost inside a dream; the pounding earth was almost boring, like a carnival ride that had gone on far too long.
After fifteen minutes, there was nothing left to destroy. All the buildings were gone. All statues, all communications towers, all laboratories, all movie theatres, all gyms, all gone.
And then the earthquake stopped.
The king, his nerves in ribbons, his eyes cried out, landed his balloon atop what was once a mighty supermarket. The quake had shaken it so badly that the remains had settled into a grey powder, beneath which the larger chunks slept, neatly graded by size. As he stepped out onto the dust, he remembered a photo he’d seen of the first footstep on the moon.
The roads and parking lots had cracked open, and the pavement fragments above had broken like soda crackers, then shattered, then turned to dust. Front yards had liquefied, swallowing whole houses and trees, which now lay deep within the planet.
The king tried to find survivors, and soon he did: stragglers, caked in dirt and vomit, still seasick and crazed from the fifteen-minute quake, all of them feeling like they were hallucinating upon seeing their perfectly intact, well-groomed king.
They began searching for food and water and medicine and liquor, but little could be found in the rubble and dust.
The king helped a middle-aged woman who was picking away at the spot where there had once been a convenience store. She held up a clear bottle of liquid and asked the king what it contained.
“Fruit Solutions with Omega 3 . . . but why are you asking me that? It says so right on the label,” he replied.
The woman ripped off the cap and poured half the bottle’s contents onto her face to rinse out her eyes; she then drank the remaining liquid and groped through the dust for more bottles that were identical.
A former four-lane commercial strip was so destroyed it couldn’t even be called a path. There the king found a couple of hipsters in cargo pants and vintage early-1990s Soundgarden T-shirts. They held up some cans and asked the king what was in them: “Who’s Your Daddy Energy Drink, with caffeine, taurine and B vitamins . . . but why are you asking me that? It says so right on the label.” They quickly opened the cans and guzzled the contents, ignoring the king.
The king walked farther and met his old high school teacher, who was alive only because he’d called in sick that day and had been stuck in traffic taking his Jack Russell terrier to the vet when the quake struck, riding out the fifteen minutes in the padded comfort of his 201
0 Nissan Sentra. The teacher said, “Oh, King, hello. Such good luck to find you. Please, please, tell me, what does this bottle contain?”
The king looked at it. “Bleach. But why are you asking me that? It says so right on the label.”
“It’s a funny thing,” the teacher said, “but I can no longer read.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said—I look at the shapes on this label and they look like upside-down Hebrew mixed with right-side-up Korean. No idea at all what any of it says. By the way, I see a tsunami coming. Let’s hope we’re far enough away from the coast here.”
The king had little time to reflect on the fact that the quake had stripped its survivors of the ability to read. A massive tsunami barfed and sloshed inward from the coast, turning the recently powdered city into a rich, dark brown cake batter that stopped just inches away from the king’s royal shoes. A small aftershock jiggled air bubbles from the batter. His world fell silent.
Behind him, a chimney collapsed, the last remaining perpendicular line to be seen for miles around. The hipsters and the middle-aged lady and the old high school teacher stood beside the king. The woman said, “I’m glad at least one person is still able to read. Otherwise, we’d never be able to rebuild from scratch everything we had before, back to shiny and brand new, as if none of this had ever happened!”
Another tsunami washed in atop the first one, bright red for some reason. Industrial colouring agents? A trainload of cough syrup? Did it matter? The king stumbled over to the teacher’s destroyed Sentra, half buried with the remains of the road; he leaned against it and retched. With his index finger, he wrote the words THE KING IS DEAD on its dusty window, and when he was asked what he’d just written, he told his subjects, “A map.”
ZACK
“Jeez, Harj, could you be any more depressing?”
“Zack, to create a happy ending for its own sake is no different than masturbation of the brain.”
!!!
Okay.
Sometimes you’re travelling along through this wacky thing we call life, when you’re assaulted by an idea so potent that it obliterates all other forms of stimulus. The notion of neuromasturbation was precisely one of those ideas.
Harj and the others kept on talking, but I’ll never know about what. I was trying to figure out what would be the brain’s equivalent of lube or movies of Croatian nurses engaged in fourgies.
I heard Harj’s voice come back into focus. It had to be three minutes later. “. . . and so that,” said Harj, “was the way I helped save Christmas.” He looked at me. “Zack? Zack? Are you okay?”
“Just thinking.”
“It is time for you to tell a story.”
“And so I will, and I promise a happy ending.”
The room was growing cold. We took what blankets we had and moved close together, though Serge remained seated on the other side of the room.
I began my second story.
Yield: A Story
about Cornfields
by Zack Lammle
One day, people everywhere started looking around at all the other people and realized that everybody was looking younger. Well, not so much younger as . . . smoother. Wrinkles were vanishing not only on human faces but on their clothing, too—and for at least the first sixty seconds after people realized this, they ran to their mirrors, saw their reflections and said to themselves, Dang! I am looking hot today!
But then that first minute ended and people began noticing other things. For example, stains were vanishing from clothing and furniture, and surfaces everywhere began looking Photoshopped and sterile. Hairdos were looking cleaner and more geometrical—no more flyaway strands. Plants and animals began looking cuter and more rounded, and it dawned on everyone at the same moment: Holy shit! We’re all turning into cartoons!
Being aware of what was happening didn’t slow down the pace of cartoonification. With precision and speed, the world was being reduced and crispened and stylized. Some people turned into manga characters. Others turned into high-res video game characters and avatars. Still others turned into classic cartoons, with faces where only the mouth moved when they spoke, and eyes that blinked once every seven seconds.
The world’s cartoonification was emotionally troubling, and it was bad for the economy, too, as people stopped eating and taking shits, or doing anything else that was unclean or unable to be reduced to colourful dots, lines, polygons or digital mesh.
A world of financially insolvent cartoons? Noooooooooo!
And then from Iowa came both hope and fear: a cornfield in that state had yet to convert into a cartoon cornfield. It had remained as real as ever, and cartoon people drove from everywhere in cartoon cars just to see something that hadn’t turned into squiggles and lines and polygons.
The only problem with the cornfield was that the cartoon people couldn’t get into it.
When they tried to enter, they hit an invisible wall. Cartoon planes flying towards the cornfield crashed into that same invisible wall; they fell to the earth in flames, with huge ink letters above them that said Whaam!! and K-k-k-keeeRACK!!
From within the cornfield came a loud, bellowing voice like that of actor James Earl Jones, claiming that it was responsible for turning the world into a cartoon and that it was enjoying every second of it.
The situation was dire and the world needed a hero, and it found one. He went by the name of Coffinshark the Unpleasant, and cartoonification had barely touched him—at most, he looked like he’d had a lot of good cosmetic work done. He had that slickness that made people think that, if he tried, he could easily pass as a member of the local Channel Three News team.
People gasped in disbelief as Coffinshark smashed a hole in the invisible wall and entered the cornfield, vanishing quickly in its thousands of rows.
Near the middle of the field, he heard James Earl Jones shouting, “Coffinshark the Unpleasant! You are a loser and will never catch me!”
“But what if I do?”
“You won’t.”
“I will.”
The voice was indignant. “You don’t even know who I am!”
“When I catch you I will.”
“Just you try!”
And so Coffinshark raced through the cornfield, trying to find the source of the voice. Sometimes he felt as if the voice was just a few stalks away; at other times the voice seemed distant. As Coffinshark chased the voice, he began making random turns within the corn, and soon the voice became confused.
“Coffinshark! What the fuck are you doing? You’re supposed to be chasing me!”
“But I am chasing you.”
“You don’t have a clue what you’re doing!”
“You’re right,” said Coffinshark. “I don’t.” He stopped and looked up at the sky and said, “Okay, Big Boy—you got me. Why don’t you come and hammer me into the ground right now.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“I’m serious.”
“You people are idiots. I’m glad I turned you all into cartoons. It’s all you deserve.”
“Well, come on, squash me like a bug.”
The voice sighed and said, “Very well! As you wish!” From the sky, a huge finger came down. Just before it squished Coffinshark, the voice cried out, “Oh shit! ”
With all of his running, Coffinshark had drawn a huge button in the cornfield, and he had trampled down more cornstalks to spell out the words SATELLITE VIEW. As the finger squished Coffinshark, it pushed the button and the world immediately resolved back into the real photographic life-as-normal deal.
Coffinshark picked himself up off the flattened corn, looked down at his torso, arms and legs and saw that what little cartoonification had occurred to him had vanished—and he missed it already. “Screw this,” he said to himself.
He took all the money he made from saving the world and flew to Beverly Hills, where he had large amounts of cosmetic surgery—after which he leveraged his new looks to become a successful
TV newscaster, only to be murdered a few months later.
But that is another story . . .
“. . . And that, my friends, is a happy ending.”
My friends were quiet for a few moments, and then Diana said, “My brain feels all tingly and moist.”
“Me? My brain just ejaculated,” said Julien.
Sam said, “Coffinshark had a good ending, but knowing that he dies later subverts the happiness.”
Harj said, “Ah, like the film Pulp Fiction: you, the viewer, know John Travolta is killed, and yet when he leaves the restaurant with Samuel Jackson at the end, your head is in a happy place. A very sophisticated ending indeed, Zack.”
“Thank you.” I then tried to think of the neuromasturbation equivalent of Kleenex.
SAMANTHA
Jesus, what a pitiful morning. After Zack’s cartoon story, we all fell asleep, only to be woken up by the next-door neighbour’s chainsaw—he’s an old coot who uses it to carve eagles and whales, which he trades for Malaysian porn cartridges with a demolition team that comes through twice a year to sell off chunks of the old DEW Line facility by the airport. Instead of being five sexy, frisky young things waking up with alluring bed-head, we looked more like five hoboes who’d collectively shared and soiled a boxcar. We had braid-rug patterns dented into our faces, and the burnt-rubber stench of cheap alcohol leaking from our pores like snot from a runny nose.
I rubbed my eyes and remembered our storytelling from the night before. It had been so . . . intimate. It had felt like we were quintuplets in utero. Then I caught Julien’s eye and he pulled his gaze away and I knew he felt the same way. Plus, we all had hangovers of the gods.
My clanging head made me impatient and confrontational with Serge, who had been up for ages writing notes at the kitchen table. I demanded to know just what else we were supposed to be doing in Haida Gwaii besides making up stories. He made the face I imagined he’d make if we insulted his cooking.
“It’s science, Samantha. Just believe me and go along with it.”
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