Generation A Read Online Free PDF

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