Generation A Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 on 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.
    When I was growing up, Mother Nature was this reasonably hot woman who looked a lot like the actress Glenn Close wearing a pale blue nightie. When you weren’t looking, she was dancing around the fields and the barns and the yard, patting the squirrels and French kissing butterflies. After the bees left and the plants started failing, it was like she’d returned from a Mossad boot camp with a shaved head, steel-trap abs and commando boots, and man, was she pissed . After the bees left, the most you could ask of her was that she not go totally apeshit on your ass. My dad and I used to drive into Des Moines to hook up with his pseudoephedrine dealer, and whenever we saw dead animals on the road, he’d say, “Blank ’em out, Zack, blank ’em out.” After I’d seen enough roadkill, it became pretty easy to blank ’em all out. And that’s what the world did with the bees: we blanked ’em out. And now Big Mama’s out for revenge.
    Wait—was that motion somewhere out there in the antechamber? I ran to look: false alarm. Should I try to use the bed to ram the door open? Nope. Bolted to the floor. Fuck .
    My stomach gurgled again. I was really getting hungry. A few weeks ago Charles told me