Free Generation A by Douglas Coupland Page B

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