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fish wasn’t witty and ironic or anything—it was just a fish. And finally there was Reid, who had a chromed fish skeleton. I thought Reid was going to be the Keeper, but Reid was generic in his willingness to avoid commitment.
    Jesus, look at me labelling these guys like this. In all fairness, they’d probably label me a stuck-up gym bunny and claim that it wasn’t their duty to provide me with their version of the fish like it was shade on a hot day.
    So, yes, I had a few things on my mind when I was photographing my bread slice on a sheep-stinking roadside, not the least of which was jealousy about being in the other hemisphere—the loser’s hemisphere—of being the opposite of Madrid, and sadness because the bees had vanished and therefore so many roadside flowers had all but vanished with them: the cudweed, the monkey musk, the brass buttons, the catchfly. I felt a generalized sense of wonder about the size of the planet and my useless little role atop it or under it.
    And then my cellphone rang and, as I said, I got stung.
    Bingo.

JULIEN
    12THE ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS, FRANCE
    I think fate is a corny notion. Everything in this world is cause and effect, process not destiny. A bee sting? How sentimental. How old-fashioned. And then, after we were stung, everyone treated us like a collection of Wonka children. Pfft .
    I was stung while I was sitting on a bench in Bois de Vincennes beside a pair of aging papist hags who were bickering about identity theft chip-and-PIN credit cards and complaining about how they have to shred their garbage before they throw it out. Yes, the Romanians and the Russians and the Triads must be waiting on tippytoes to pounce on them: With Madame Duclos’s electrical bill, we will bring Caisse d’Epargne to its knees! Their voices got me so angry—angry at the fabric of time, at whatever it is that makes time seem to drag on forever, that makes life feel so long. All I wanted to do was tell them that their religion is decadent and obsolete. I wanted to tell them that their religion was invented thousands of years ago as a way of explaining to those people lucky enough (or unlucky enough) to live past the age of twenty-one the fact that life is too short. These crones, I wanted to tell them that what I would look for in a religion is an explanation of why life is so long . I’m still looking.
    Forget religion, I want to mutate . I want so badly to mutate. I was sitting in the sun in the Bois de Vincennes, willing my body to mutate into whatever it is human beings are slated to turn into next. Do we get giant drosophila fly eyes? Wings? Elephantine snouts? I dream of the day we mutate into something better than the hyped-up chimps we are, chimps who eat Knorr Swiss cream of cauliflower soup while pretending not to notice that half the planet’s at war, fighting over . . . what? Over the right to eat packaged soup without having to emotionally accept our species’ darkness. We are one fucked-up claque of monkeys. Groundskeeper Willie called us cheese-eating surrender monkeys: he almost had it right. But it isn’t just the French—as a species we are all cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
    I am not normally the sort of person who sits on park benches in the 12th arrondissement on a sunny day. In fact, I am the opposite of that sort of person. I didn’t even know what time it was when I was rudely and cruelly ejected from the Astrolite gaming centre on rue Claude Decaen. I was having what is called a shit fit. I had this shit fit because I had spent 114 solid days in-game on World of Warcraft, and was at the end of a twenty-four-hour levelling jag, when my avatar vanished. Not even a little pouf of smoke—I, Xxanthroxxusxx, simply ceased to be. I did the usual things. I shut down. I unplugged. I rebooted. I checked the options and preferences. I logged back into the world. And still I was gone .
    Bleep.
    I am willing to agree that I am not the easiest person to be around. That is