That was when Pastor Brandeis (Erik) drove up with his wife, Eva, in a ramshackle old Ford from the 1990s filled with baby gear, cardboard boxes and that air of poverty you sense when you pass such a car on the highway and think, Those people will be driving around for the rest of their lives like that, looking for a place they’re never going to find, and there will always be a crumpled box of Pampers in the rear window alongside unreadable self-help books and badly folded T-shirts. Erik and Eva had come to discuss the next weekend’s Sunday school session with me.
I will admit that I was in love with Erik, and two weeks earlier, with the touch of a hand and a whisper, had subtly let him know this—but, given the Tourette’s, I also said, “Fuck me, please fuck me.” My feelings were not reciprocated, and as a result, I was no longer a charity case: I was a distinct liability. On the afternoon of the bee sting he’d only dropped by because he had yet to devise a way to shed me from his flock or find someone else to manage the semi-annual bake sale. He’d brought Eva for protection, which made me angry because, well, I wanted her dead in the worst sort of way. Everyone thinks I’m a doormat, but I want to kill people as much as the next person.
So it was a messy scene. All of the cowardly neighbours decided to come over now that there was no possibility they might need to intervene. Erik asked Mitch the pointedly stupid question, “Why are you hitting your dog?” As if there was some reason that would justify it! Was Kayla the Doberman cheating on Mitch? Did Kayla pawn Mitch’s collection of Vietnam-era Zippo lighters and spend the proceeds on lottery tickets and meth? The way Erik asked his question made it sound like maybe there was a chance Kayla deserved what she got. “Erik, how can you ask a stupid question like that? What on earth could a dog do to justify a beating?”
“It’s my dog,” Mitch said, “and I can do what I like with it.”
“She’s a living thing, not a lawn mower, and she’s a she, not an it.” I was outraged.
Erik said, “Diana, it’s an animal.”
Mitch looked pleased.
“What’s that supposed to mean? He can beat on the dog all he wants with no repercussions?”
“Look, it’s not like I approve of beating dogs,” Erik said.
Mitch’s face fell.
“But the thing is, Diana, dogs don’t have souls. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what happens to them.”
“It doesn’t matter?”
“This guy’s a jerk, but he’s not sinning.”
Mitch gloated. “See? I’m not a sinner—get your religious ass off my front lawn.”
I ignored him. “Erik, you mean you condone what this hillbilly is doing?”
“I don’t like it, but it’s no sin.”
“You’re serious?”
“I am.” Erik gave me a fuck-off stare.
Eva said, “Come on, Diana. Let’s go inside and discuss the bake sale. I’m thinking of making a cobbler.”
“If I disagree with you, am I kicked out of the flock?” I glared daggers at Erik.
He offered a shrug. “Well, yes.”
Ahh . . . excommunication.
That’s when I got stung.
HARJ
When I was young, I had a job helping my oldest brother escort young people—mostly young American tourists—around the island as they tried to “find themselves.” Oh, the awful conversations I have had to endure, listening to a Kris or a Max or an Amy or a Craig discuss what it means “to be free inside one’s head.” I ask you, is it so wrong to want to kill a Craig? The moment these Craigs thought I was out of earshot, they would call my brother Apu and me mini-Apu, and make Kwik-E-Mart jokes. Little did they know that I used my free minutes at the office to watch The Simpsons and Family Guy online, as well as to investigate some amusing categories I still recommend, such as “time-lapse photography,” “Japanese game show,” and “owned.” So I was onto these Craigs and she-Craigs with ankle tattoos of Tweety Bird and Satan.
I was lucky to have had a stable upbringing—and lucky to have a father who worked in a bank, the HSBC, albeit one of its most remote outposts. The logo on the front door was painted over with brick-coloured paint so as not to anger regional political crazies, and my father’s office windows were covered with sheets of plywood that came from the state of Maine; the telltale branding marks on the inside were never overpainted. After returning from school, while waiting for my father to finish work, I would stare at the plywood; I come by my fascination with New England honestly. I would try to imagine the forest it came from: trees so big that the sky was invisible, and rich people like George Clooney riding on horseback across a field of shamrocks, sticking out their tongues to catch snowflakes. These rich people would wear sweaters (I couldn’t even imagine what wearing one might feel like), and they would go to their cabins, where servants would feed them turkey dinners.
I think I am one of nature’s worker bees, and I spent many a humid afternoon staring at the sky above the Indian Ocean, trying to figure out what direction I would take with my life. I knew that I was done with escorting rich young monsters around the island—a job like that could only escalate in taw-driness, and I would end up like my older brother, deeply engaged in the world of sex tourism—European men, and occasionally women, who would show up interested in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka’s “rich and varied culture,” who would somehow almost instantly be whisked to the city’s handjob district for a holiday of tugs, Kleenex and ugly commands. This was not a world I wanted to enter, but the only other options were plantation work or becoming a JVP or LTTE Marxist militant. What was a young man in Sri Lanka to do?
My father did, however, find me part-time work at his office doing minor janitorial duties. On the afternoon of December 26, 2004, I was at the bank, ostensibly to polish its many brass light fixtures, of which my father was proud. I needed the small pay and truly didn’t want to join my family at my cousin’s engagement party, eating coconut-and-grouper patties at the beach at Nawarednapuram while making boring chitter-chatter about the fiancé, Arnood—a sulking Hindu swine who collects Christmas tree ornaments on eBay. Arnood is heterosexual, but only by the thinnest of margins. My aunt and uncle were so glad to get rid of my cousin that they’d have married her to a banyan tree, had the tree bothered to ask for her hand.
It turned out that one of the bank’s new employees had left wide open an Internet connection at his third-floor desk. I saw it the moment I came up the stairs, and good bye Brasso, hello Drudgereport! The whole afternoon became a blur of information until I heard raised voices down on the street, and in the distance a sort of rushing noise that I now associate with the ventilation systems at the Centers for Disease Control. I went to the window, opened its louvres and looked outside to see the tsunami’s grey flood approach my building, safe only because I was on the third floor and the bottom two storeys were concrete.
Even then I knew to search for my family members’ faces within the oozing grey pudding. Even then I knew that the engagement party was a party with death, and even then I knew that I had become the man of the family—except that when I crawled through the salty, stinky debris on the mile-long trek home, all that remained of our house was a slick of red dirt covered with marine litter and a grouper that had drowned in the air. By the time seventy-two hours had passed, I had realized that I had no family left—all of them were gone. It is very strange to no longer have any roots in a country that goes back for tens of thousands of years. I was not allowed to return to my bank job, because my father was no longer there—I had to become everything for myself. I spent a few years subsisting by cleaning up debris and rebuilding structures for NGOs like UNICEF and UNESCO. Unlike many young men my age, I refused to be lured to Dubai, and after the cleanup was complete, I was fortunate to find a job sweeping and cleaning at a call centre for Abercrombie & Fitch in a warehouse building at Bandaranaike Airport. I knew this was only temporary, as my love of American-produced global culture and my knowledge of the inner life of Craigs woul
d one day allow me to become an actual call centre phone staffer, and yes, after some years my wish came true.
I quickly rose through the ranks and was placed in charge of the Abercrombie & Fitch American-Canadian Central Time Zone Call Division. This occurred because I was able to give fellow workers hints not listed on our official standardized greetings sheet—obvious words like “awesome!” or “sweet,” and also more subtle phrases such as, “I can tell from your voice that you’re totally going to enjoy what you’ve already bought, and for a limited time only, get two silk-cashmere short-sleeve cable shells for the price of one, plus a fleece pashmina wrap at no extra cost. Think about it. You deserve it—and think of how free you’ll feel out in the fall air wearing all these hot items.”
I enjoyed helping (I am now quoting an in-house memo) “provide a completely customer-centric operation by consistently enhancing customer service while trying to gain a better understanding of our customers’ shopping patterns and preferences.”
I was an excellent salesman. But I am supposed to tell the story of when I was stung, so I will perhaps return later to tales of Abercrombie & Fitch.
I quickly became contemptuous of the people on the phone on the other side of the planet, twelve hours away. My territory was the North American Midwest, and the only thing that really kept me on the straight and narrow was the possibility of taking over the highly glamorous, Maine-containing New England Division, located over by the guava bins at the far end of the warehouse. The other good thing about my job was unlimited high-speed Internet access at the end of the day (a twelve-hour day, mind you). For this I would have worked for free.
However, I did not wish to be a passive participant in the Internet. I wanted to add my voice to the babble and so, for fun, I created a prank commerce site on which I sold “celebrity room tones.” It was a beautifully designed site (I cloned a Swiss site that sells cutlery) and entirely convincing.
What is a celebrity room tone?
For $4.99 you could visit my site and download one hour of household silence from rooms belonging to a range of celebrities, all of whom promised to donate their royalties to charity. There was Mick Jagger (London; metropolitan), Garth Brooks (rural; some jet noise in the background), Cameron Diaz (Miami; sexy, sunny, flirty) and so forth. For cachet, I threw in household silences from the Tribeca lofts of underworld rock survivor Lou Reed and motherly experimental performance artist Laurie Anderson.
I was quickly flamed by many potential shoppers, hounding me at
[email protected] to ask why their Amex or Visa wouldn’t process.
And then came an email from the New York Times asking to do a short piece on the site for its weekend Style section. So there I was, sitting in an office chair made from three cannibalized office chairs, dripping with sweat and staring longingly at the guava bins, as a woman named Leslie asked me whether I had a prepared artist’s statement and jpegs of myself I could send her. I had told the delightful Leslie that my name was Werner and that I was based out of Kassel, Germany, because it seemed like the kind of place that would be home to over-educated people with nothing better to do than to design commodities like designer silence. I’d affected a German accent and was, in general, very prickly.
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose you would want a photo, as your section is dominated by photos.”
There was a slight pause before Leslie replied, a pause long enough to let me know that she considered me a pain.
I said, “I plan to launch my new line of room tones in coordination with your article’s appearance.”
“A new line?”
“Yes, I’m calling them ‘Nocturnes: Soundscapes for the Evening,’ with an emphasis on nighttime insect noises and a marked deficit of engine and machine noises.”
“You’re telling me there’s a difference between silence in the day and silence at night?”
“Yes. Leslie. Imagine that you are in a completely dark room with your eyes closed. Then you open your eyes. It’s just as dark as with your eyes closed, and yet it’s a completely different kind of darkness than before, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
That’s the exact moment when I met my bee.
ZACK
When I got stung in Maizie’s cab, I had a whatthefuck? moment as I stared at the bee on my thigh—and then I began to swell. Charles asked me what was going on, so I moved the pod camera to show him the bee corpse. He thought it was a joke—and why wouldn’t he? But then I began to seriously balloon, then hyperventilate, and without him at the other end of the satellite link, I’d be dead and the world would never have known that I was the first person on earth to be stung by a bee in almost five years.
When I fell onto the cab floor I shouted, “Charles, you’d better not be jacking off to this!”—I am a sick fuck to the end—but Charles had already contacted the local hospital, plus the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control. Maybe three minutes later I heard choppers on the horizon, sounding like old-fashioned threshers. A trio of them landed a precautionary hundred yards away from me so as not to tamper with the bee zone. Thirty seconds later, some guy in a white Tyvek moonsuit put his fist through the cab window, reached down, pulled my tongue out of my throat, then jabbed an EpiPen into my unstung thigh. Through all of this, Charles was telling me to hang on a bit longer, and when Moonsuit realized this, he punched the camera and the Zack show was over.
Moments later I was able to breathe again and was already apologizing for the inconvenience—which was when the Moonsuit sprayed something in my face and stuck me into a white Tyvek body bag with a clear oval plastic face shield. Then he and his associate loaded me onto a red plastic sled and inserted the sled into the middle of the three choppers. As we lifted off, I looked down on the field and saw my cornstalk cock and balls, and Day-Glo pink tapes that were being uncoiled to divvy my field up into quadrants. Another platoon of choppers was landing near my house, well away from the structure itself as well as the line of poplars (the most likely spot for a bees’ nest). I was feeling woozy now. I was remembering summer flowers of my youth: hawkweed, harebells, thimbleweed, wild bergamot and blue vervain. A sense of loss overcame me, followed by a wash of hope—the bees had returned, hadn’t they! I said a prayer to my personal saint, Saint Todd, patron of rigged slot machines, red tides, kinked garden hoses and uninscribed tombstones, and then I passed out.
When I woke up, I was in what was obviously a hospital room, except that it was a private room. Uncle Jay would never spring for a private room, so something else had to be going on here. When I got up, I tried to open the glass door in the corner, but there was no handle. On the other side of the door were three receding glass anterooms with three separate glass doors through which I could see a hallway. Putting my ear to the seal around the glass door, I could hear ventilation hissing so strongly that it reminded me of a rip in the time/space continuum.
I rapped on the glass and called out, “Hello!” but I might as well have been on the moon as assume anyone on the outside could hear me. I went back to my bed and looked for a phone or cell unit. Nada.
There was no TV, no computer, no thermostat, no medical apparatus, no light switches, no bed controls, no fridge, no books—it was like being in the future and the past at the same time. “Where the fuck am I?”
Silence.
“Who the fuck’s out there?”
Silence.
It’s a cliché, but I tell you, in real life, when you wake up in a medical facility after being kidnapped by a haz-mat squad and tossed into a helicopter, your first impulse truly is to shout out corny shit like “Where the fuck am I? Who the fuck’s out there?”
Corny shit. Now there’s a word picture.
It appeared that whoever was “out there” was temporarily absent. I did a sweep around my room, looking for camouflaged call buttons, speakers, tripwires—you name it—and found none. After maybe a half-hour of this, I noticed something extra spooky about my room: there were no logos o
n anything. There was no little metal plate on the bed showing that it was made in Bumfuck, Wisconsin, by Proud Union Labor—or in Shenzhen by lunch-deprived three-year-olds. There weren’t even holes where such a plate had once been screwed in. Somebody had removed it, spackled in the holes, sanded it and then repainted it. That’s pretty fucky if you ask me. The mattress? Unpatterned and free of any branding.
I looked at the toilet, a rugged beast with a power flush like those scenes in movies when the terrorist blows out the plane door and everything in the passenger compartment gets sucked into the air. Nothing. I looked at the toilet paper: no logos or daisies were embossed on the paper or printed on the inner cardboard tube, but I have to say, from a connoisseur’s standpoint, it was primo shit: three-ply, quilted and bleached, like only the Arabs get these days.
The bathroom fixtures, the toothbrush, the blankets, the furniture—all of it had been stripped of corporate identity. I felt like I was not in a real room but in a room disguised to look like a room.
I chugged a few glasses of tap water and my stomach gurgled. I hoped non-brand-name food would shortly arrive.
I sat down on the bed. No technology, no books, nobody to talk to. Being in no mood to jack off, I lay down and tried to recall the bee sting. The stinger itself was gone, and my leg was back to normal; only a small red spot remained.
A bee.
Huh.
I remembered bees. I remembered seeing them in spring among the bloodroot, the yellow goat’s beard and the swamp buttercups in my grandparents’ back ditch—happy, industrious, slightly furry and oh-so doomed. Then they began to flee their hives, and before there was even time to figure out why, they were all gone. Cellphones? Genetically modified crops? A virus? Chemicals? I remember being upset about it—most kids were. A tornado is awful, but a tornado isn’t about you—you just happened to be there when it struck. But bees? There wasn’t anyone on earth who didn’t have that sick, guilty feeling in the gut because we knew it was our fault, not Mother Nature’s.