Generation X: tales for an accelerated culture by Douglas Coupland

Author:Douglas Coupland [Coupland, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780312054366
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1991-03-14T06:00:00+00:00

as interesting to me as watching ice hockey on TV, but I kept up a good show of interest. But then he started mentioning one name more than others, the name Arlo. Arlo, I take it it was his best friend, something more than that—whatever it is that men become during a war, and who knows what else.

"Anyhow, one day Curtis and Arlo were out 'on a shoot,' when the fighting got life-threateningly intense. They were forced to lie down on the ground, covered in camouflage, with their primed machine guns pointed at the enemy. Arlo was lying next to Curtis and they were both hair-trigger itching to shoot. Suddenly, this hummingbird started darting into Arlo's eyes. Arlo brushed it away, but it kept darting back. Then there were two and then three hummingbirds, 'What the hell are they doing?' asked Curtis, and Arlo explained that some hummingbirds are attracted to the color blue and that they dart at it in an attempt to collect it to build their nests, and what they were trying to do was build their nests with Arlo's eyes.

"At that point Curtis said, 'Hey, my eyes are blue, too—,' but Arlo's sweeping gestures to move the birds out of his eyes attracted the enemy fire. They were attacked. That was when a bullet entered Curtis's groin and when another bullet entered Arlo's heart, killing him instantly. "What happened next, I don't know. But the next day Curtis joined the mop-up crews, in spite of his injury, and returned to the battle site to collect and bag the dead bodies. But when they found the body of Arlo, they were all as aghast as anybody who picks up bodies regularly can be, not because of his bullet wounds, (a common enough sight) but because of a horrible sacrilege that had been performed on his corpse —the blue meat of Arlo's eyes had been picked away from the whites. The native men cursed and crossed themselves, but Curtis merely closed Arlo's eyelids then kissed each one. He knew about the hummingbirds; he kept that knowledge to himself.

"He was 4-F'ed that day, and by nightfall was numb and on a plane back to the States, where he ended up in San Diego. And at that point his life becomes a blank. That's when all of the things he wouldn't tell me started to happen.

"' 'So that's why you're looking at the hummingbirds all the time, then,' I said. But there was more. Lying there on the floor, lit by a sad triad of three birthday candles that also illuminated a sullen beefcake on the bedroom wall, he began to cry. Oh, God, weep is the right word.

102 GENERATION X

He wasn't crying. He was weeping and I could only place my chin on his heart and listen—listen while he blubbered that he didn't know what happened to his youth, to any of his ideas about people or niceness, and that he had become a slightly freaky robot. 'I can't even break into porno now because of my accident.

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