Short stories by Alexander Teaspoon* and Lucy Cameron

Boomerang Bullets

It’s like someone is shooting bullets at your leg and screaming Hunger’s Empire!

Desktop pictures, all empirical and shit, on your mantelpiece where you keep your computer. Why do you keep your computer there? What’s the use? Like he said, “what’s the use?” What? Animals and trees and people and more people crowd my vision of nothingness to keep me in touch with the earth I once knew.

Fuck that, I still know it like I know my feet jogging, although I never do that. Dancing bullets hitting my peripheral view (if I would have eyes in my legs, that is), everywhere whooshing by like I could hear them. I want to hear them so bad, so bad that I could not cry. You know when you want to do something so bad you’re crying but really you’re not, like you’d want to cry but not really although you are but not in the sense you’ve been taught by having to fake cry for your girlfriends who think you aren’t sensitive enough so they shoot bullets at you and then you cry because one of them hits you where your eye would be? (If you had eyes in your leg, that is.)

Okay yeah, he has beautiful eyes like a captain out of a clear blue sky (that’s the colour of his eyes) and I can’t imagine how life would be without eyelashes protecting you from shit penetrating into your eyes like the lead perforating your every tendon like a boomerang. Boomerang fucking bullets. That’s a new concept, probably not. Fucking war and shit. Whoa what’s happening, do I even want to know? Do I? Do you? Are we the same or thinking the same or acting the same or is that all the same? I don’t know if I want to know if I do? If that makes sense, I don’t know. So your fucking Stetson is crooked. Like I care, although I do. Because it’s important for the cold you know, modern fur or whatever. So the bullets all ran out and my vision is clear, thanks captain! You’re a blast!

A rough draft is what this is. All nervous like inside. Proper fucking heartthrob you are! Whatever sprung to your feet or where they sprung when you ran which is pronounced the same in Swedish. Like her asking what the time is over and over again and people actually believing her like “muppets,” as the captain would say. Going inside and stealing stuff because that’s what you do when you’re a prolific Swedish thief. Right? Yeah right. So moving forward which is backward and nowhere to be seen as the bullets start raining vertically in the wrong direction. The earth saying: “Fuck you rain, I’ll just make you feel what I’ve been feeling like for the past forevers. And yeah you are afraid, of course, why not and why yes. You are completely utterly aware that you are inexplicably right. Like everyone that ever lived before you, even those who didn’t live for very long. Like my Mother’s miscarriage. Sister. Which is a dire subject to point out, as I have no idea what that is like and I hope you won’t ever know. What it feels like.”

That’s my thought about the current crisis in the midst of my own crisis consisting of fucking bullets flying everywhere. Dance dance dance. And dance faster not that the bullets are increasing in speed but you are. You are so excited about everything that you can’t stop so a bullet hits you. Whatever. Like you would care now or at any other time? This is what everything you’ve ever felt before feels like. This excitement towards moving towards something new. Like the door that will get you out of here, like the different door which you got out of involuntarily, now referring to my mother’s miscarriage of course! Which I am very sorry for addressing again. Trigger Warning, Trigger Warning. Like the articles with the comments you know? The comments everyone fucking lights up like Christmas fireworks in the countries that do those sorts of things. I hope there are countries like that, otherwise this meaningless tradition will have meaning like the turkey instead of swine at the table, waiting, while you’re calling your relatives masturbators with your grandmother in their graves. At the cemetery which has the gates that you want to walk through very fast, like the door. Or the shirt or whatever people walk out of.

And I, yes I (it changed, see analyze the shit out of it, like now, please) will now walk out of the saloon because, surprise; (yeah fucking semicolons) this was me all the time like everything is all the time and you can’t escape it (me) because I made you shoot, I put the bullets in. The fucking boomerang bullets I picked from your mantelpiece next to your computer that splintered my already fucked up leg. That’s it, now I can’t walk anymore, ever. So I’ll run out of this place. Now.

this is the whole thing

“this is the whole thing” is not a part of this

Chat conversation end

This is the whole thing. “This is the whole thing” is not a part of this. Oh wait now it is. Chat conversation end.

 *Alexander Teaspoon is the penname for someone who may or may not be a U1 Arts student, depending on the immigration workers’ strike, which he supports.

***

Where we’re at

We are driving through the Fairbanks hills, past the stables and butter-coloured mini-mansions, through orange groves and strawberry fields, as I administer Sonia’s vitamins. Her hands are calm at ten and two; her head barely clears the dashboard. Sonia is a tiny person, and when we drive together I am always somewhat surprised she can reach the pedals. In public, from behind, she looks like my child. In the passenger’s seat, I am sifting through a canvas sack filled with supplements, vitamins, pills, eyedroppers, and some immuno-gummies that are rejected on the basis of their sugar content. I help myself.

“This is where my energy healer is,” she points as we fly past a new shopping centre. The green arrow that is us inches forward on the screen embedded in the dashboard. “She is amazing. I walk in with a cold and come out completely healthy and balanced.”

We wind further through eucalyptus trees and arbutus, past the produce stand my mother used to shun when we were growing up. I can’t remember why. I am trying to remember exactly how long it has been since I was here last, but I am getting the numbers mixed up with the pills, and Sonia weighs the handful I offer her with some suspicion. “The person who owned all of this land just died without a will,” she says, waving her hand vaguely at a thick forest to the east. “There’s like 16 family members in court about it.” “That’s crazy.” I am mildly concerned that my sweat and hair dye are staining the cream-colored seat. The woods give way to clusters of low-lying gated communities named after trees before we are sucked up onto the 5. No one feels compelled to shift lanes to accommodate the merge; the cars find their places intuitively. Two by two like reindeer they adjust, and once in traffic we float north effortlessly.

“Good thing there is no traffic,” Sonia says. We haven’t moved in five minutes, or maybe we have.  The sign imposing the fine for litter on the Sea World-sponsored highway seems slightly bigger than it was.

A few hours later the sun has set, and the sky is still blue. The backseat of the car is filled with the harvest of our errands: boxes, strings of white lights, and bridesmaids dresses body-bagged from the dry cleaners. We are waiting patiently in a semi-circular line-up for a double-double, no tomato, no onion, a hamburger all-dressed, a small order of fries, a small vanilla shake. A young man with a southern drawl and a microphone in his ear leans in the window of our car to take our order and tells us it will be about eight minutes. Sonia considers this figure and grudgingly accepts, as if she would have abandoned the wagon chain if he didn’t cut us a satisfactory deal. “We are all at the mercy of her blood sugar,” Sonia’s mother once said to me.

Sonia looks like a small gray bird at this time of day. She is giving her friend advice over the phone, chewing the insides of her cheeks in concentration. The friend, I am briefed, has just gotten out of a relationship and does not see any point in anything anymore. I suggest that not seeing any point is maybe better than seeing no point, but Sonia rolls her eyes. Her phone sucks life from the cigarette lighter as she composes her statements thoughtfully. I am staring at the lights reflected in the lagoon that was virtually lifeless when I left ten years ago, but has recently been experiencing a resurgence of biological activity according to the woman at the juice stop this morning. The line-up of cars isn’t moving forward, but Sonia keeps absently relaxing her foot on the brake so we are inching slowly closer to the massive chrome bumper of the truck in front of us.

“She wants to know when it will stop hurting,” Sonia explains. “She thinks that if she has a timeline to work towards it won’t be so bad.” She pauses. “The not-knowing,” I add dumbly. There is a canal of waste waters unknown beside the In-N-Out directly down the bank and to our right that leads into the lagoon. It is cordoned off by barbed wire, which seems excessive. For a moment, I imagine what it would be like to leap from the car, vault over the fence, and swim the ravine down to the lagoon. “I don’t know… yeah.” I must have some advice to offer this situation, but I can’t focus. It won’t be articulated. I remember a kid who sat next to me in an English class in early high school who refused to speak in class, and when called upon would snarl angrily under his ketchup breath, “The revolution won’t be televised.” I thought he was brilliant, and years later when I figured out this was a popular slogan not of his own invention, I wasn’t really disappointed. Slogans are great communicators. They are the hamburgers of human experience.

“It doesn’t get easier,” I go on, and Sonia looks at me like why do you have to be so negative and I look up and left like I don’t know. She sighs and hovers over the glowing screen, looking for something to say. The car in front of us rolls up to the light of the window, and the forearm of a man who must barbecue often extends to collect his bounty. “You learn to be quiet about it,” I am rambling. “It doesn’t get better, but if you can get good at keeping silent then I think everything that you aren’t saying eventually just dissipates. Quiet is safe.” I don’t know if I agree with what I am saying, but Sonia is typing quickly, and I don’t think any of it has to do with what I’ve said. She nods digestively, her eyes screwed to a focal point. “Oh. You can go now.”

We jerk forward to the open window and slam to a stop. The kid in the drive-thru window is attractive and there is some sort of subverted balcony scene playing out between him and Sonia as she pays and asks for extra ketchup. There are still the same soft peaks of green-gray foam in the ravine amongst the cattails that used to excite me as a kid. Once on a field trip I studied and recorded them for an entire afternoon.

It is almost completely dark as we pull into the parking lot of a campground two exits south to divide our spoils. I am trying to speak under the radio rather than over but end up muttering like the woman on the bus who gets two seats to herself. It seems to me that all advice is wasted; people are going to do just what they want, what they have been unconsciously counting on, whatever it is they think will make them happy. Sonia doesn’t agree, and says, then no one can really communicate, with an implied, Idiot. We listen to a full song without talking. “She isn’t having a good time,” Sonia says finally, about the friend I presume. We watch the horizon purple and grow darker and flatten. Sonia’s burger is getting cold and the fat ossified, self-loathing. “No,” I agree. I want to say something else, to feel for this friend of my friend, but the words are stillborn in my stomach.

The link between cause and effect seems broken, or like it was never that simple in the first place. My milkshake is turning into cream in the cup-holder as I watch a man with a shopping cart cross six lanes of traffic in the dark. We head home following the instructions of a disembodied car voice that can’t pronounce the street names but whose superior directions are unquestioned.

 Lucy Cameron is a U4 Philosophy and English Literature student, and an editor for The Veg Literary Magazine. 

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Justin is a Good Kid, our radio interviewer tells us; he doesn’t use drugs, and when Naomi asks him one day out of the blue where she can buy some, he doesn’t even know where to go. (Me, listening: mentally flag this point of suspicion – American teenagers, you have at least a rough idea about what the kids behind the portables are up to.) Justin says he’ll see what he can do. A couple of days later he comes through, and Naomi offers to pay him back for it – here, their stories diverge. Justin says he declined at first and then caved to pressure and accepted the money. 25 bucks, not a even a ticket to prom, not a big deal. Except in this particular case that 25 bucks meant a felony charge for a freshly-minted eighteen-year-old.

As it turns out, Naomi (suffice to say, not her real name) was a part of a larger plan: that of the state police department, which had orchestrated a sting operation across Florida high schools to crack down on drugs. The girl who never did homework and slept in class was a 25-year-old undercover narcotics officer. Ain’t it the way.

The ethics and efficacy of undercover policing have long been under scrutiny. From “informants” who spy and exact information in the hopes of avoiding sentencing, to “paid agents,” insiders to routinely receive cash for information, to your average undercover cop, the already corrupt system becomes a further tangled web of motivation, extortion, and duplicity. On their website, the Canadian Justice Department quotes legal literature on the subject, saying that “there is little information about how effective undercover investigations are, what they cost (economically, psychologically, constitutionally), or why they fail. Similarly, the extent to which police departments use the strategy is unknown.” The New York Police Department (NYPD) reports having 120 undercover officers in its Organized Crime Control Bureau. In 2008 alone, the Service de police de la ville de Montréal (SPVM) reported conducting 764 undercover operations. You think, gee, that’s kind of a lot – then you realize that these numbers are essentially meaningless. Justice works in mysterious way, evidently.

The show switches to the next segment, but I am stuck thinking about this Floridian kid and the felony charges he’s going to carry for the rest of his life. For radio purposes, the anecdote is presented in a humorous, light-hearted manner, but beneath the “I got punk’d!” jocular sound bytes of its protagonist lies a much darker narrative about surveillance, intimacy, and state control.

Listening to this story, my mind moves in ten directions at once. Why are the Florida police out to get some unassuming high school kids? How long will these ridiculous charges follow and stigmatize this kid? Infinitely? Entrapment…what? Ultimately what I can’t get past is how clearly this incident illustrates the sadistic and immoral mechanism of undercover policing. Policing in general has got to be one of the biggest snafus of modern society, but that’s another article. Undercover policing presents its own particularly disturbing brand of injustice that warrants consideration.

As a widespread control tactic that is only becoming increasingly prevalent as it finds more creative avenues, undercover policing undermines the bonds between people. It is a psychological weapon that corrodes human relationships from within, and undercuts public trust, open dialogue, and the foundations of community. We become closed off, fearful, suspicious, fiercely individualistic, and, what’s worse, justified in adopting this garrison mentality because the threat of undetected surveillance all around us is real. And somehow, it is accepted.

This kind of gross infiltration, although it may not directly affect many of us living day-to-day, has varied and damaging consequences in the collective psyche, especially within activist communities. June 2010 saw what was invariably one of the most outrageous incidences of this kind of state-sanctioned violence in recent memory – at least in Canada.

In January 2009, when the Guelph Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) was beginning to organize around the G20 summit that would be held in Toronto the following summer, they were joined by two new members, Brenda Dougherty and Khalid Mohammed. Where Khalid was somewhat gruff and aggressive in his demeanour, Brenda was a soft-spoken, mild young woman with glasses and a nervous laugh. She said she had just gotten out of a long-term relationship with an abusive partner; any behavioural abnormalities were chalked up to emotional stress. Group members recall that Brenda would bake for meetings; she was always taking notes, always asking everyone how they were doing. She went out of her way to lend emotional support to her allies. And while there were some rumblings of suspicion about Khalid between group members, Brenda was never reproached. Six months later, she had been smoothly integrated into the ABC and the personal lives and confidence of its members. She moved into an anarchist space and directed her energies toward organizing direct action around the G20.

At 4 a.m. on June 26, 2010, just before the summit was to begin, police invaded the homes of the several prominent activists. Brenda Dougherty was Brenda Carey: an undercover officer posing in one of the most elaborate sting operations in Canadian history.

In hindsight, considering the $653-million budget the Canadian government allocated for security, the mass arrests, pepper spray, broken windows, batons – a montage entirely too familiar by now – it is evident that the government was prepared to take any steps necessary to quash dissent. The familiar montage: today, this seems to be how Canada works. Undercover policing, intimate infiltration, betrayal: this is how the state protects itself. In the case of Justin Laboy and his sad baggy of weed, we are left scratching our heads. “Kill them with kindness”: an invisible display of excessive force.

Media coverage of the 18-month-long infiltration of southern Ontario anarchist chapters has since provided all the compelling details of the real-life Canadian espionage episode. Missing from the picture is the damage not captured in the images of police brutality that plastered headlines – the interpersonal trauma that results from betrayal. It is not an experience one expects to understand without having lived it personally. To share your life with someone, to let a new person into a space where you share your struggles, politics, personal hardships – a space predicated upon open communication and respect for difference – this intrusion is a disturbing perversion of faith. The institutionalization and normalization of such tactics tears at the fabric of human relations. Granted, there is no way to speak of humanity as a quilt without sounding lobotomized, but consider: what are we doing to each other? When the woman who bakes you muffins is putting you in prison, when you want to impress your high school crush and end up in juvenile detention, we make prisons of our minds.

Lucy Cameron is a U3 English and Philosophy student, possibly an SPVM officer, who knows. She can be reached at lucy.cameron@mail.mcgill.ca.

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A pause. ‘But it isn’t free,’ one might argue. ‘Even if an internship is not compensated monetarily, it is an opportunity to gain knowledge/experience/hands-on training. It is an investment in your future.’ There was a time when I, too, was of this persuasion. Now I think it is major bullshit, for reasons we will return to momentarily.

On the flip side, one might ask why we should care at all about the ways in which upper-middle-class (probably) white kids elect to spend their summers. A thousand tiny violins for the kids who feel they are being exploited while attempting to ascend the ranks of the white-collar workplace. This is completely valid. The problems of unpaid interns pale in comparison to just about every other exploitative practice of their corporate employers. When you consider the physical labour that is outsourced by North American corporations in countries where our iParaphenalia are born, it’s hard to juice tears for the 22-year-old kids stapling spreadsheets to their hands in Midtown office buildings. The fact that a person is even in a position to consider an unpaid internship to butter their resume or garner practical learning experience designates incredible privilege. Nevertheless, these practices of exploitation – local and global, minor and major – are not unrelated.

Even those among us who can’t or won’t entertain the idea of working at an unpaid job should consider the implications of this trend. With the economic downturn, many companies are turning to unpaid interns as a source of free labour. Paid entry-level positions are being cut in favour of a revolving door of recent graduates willing to work for free as they buttress their portfolios, perhaps in the hopes of being offered a job upon the expiration of their (non)contract or simply to gather ‘experience’ as they wait out the recession. But these sorts of agreements between intern and employer are often ambiguous, indirectly articulated and offer no guarantee of future employment (‘But you said!’). They are contingent on a future that is entirely uncertain. In many cases, the paid entry-level positions everyone and their grandmother are fighting for are precisely those that have been eliminated in favor of unsalaried internships.

Equally dubious is the legal status of interns in relation to their employers. Unpaid interns are not classified as employees and do not have the same (read: any, beyond basic civil) rights. No salary means no taxes and hundreds of millions of dollars saved by North American corporations every year. It is as if we are volunteering just to keep the system on its feet.

If unsalaried interns are vulnerable, the majority of unemployed Gen-‘whY me’s are concomitantly disadvantaged by shifting expectations. Individuals who can afford to work for free wind up with a pancake stack of internships on their resume and thus sit ahead of those working doubles at Medieval Times in anticipation of January’s hydro bill.

Of course, there are people who navigate the perilous waters of no-dollars jobs and work to make it happen for themselves. Plenty of unpaid interns work multiple jobs in order to finance their more glamorous, intellectually-stimulating day jobs. In many cases a second job can make the dream job feasible, but it adds up to a hell of a lot of hours. Spend all day at the real job, then a swift, Clark Kent phone booth change and off to the job that pays for it. Family time, creative time, leisure time – all of these legitimate personal needs – suffer as a result.

When did we become accustomed to thinking that this was an acceptable offer? I am not talking about time spent working on projects of passion; I am talking about what we consider and classify as ‘work’ and why it needs to pay the rent. Compensation for labour is a basic necessity and if this sounds like it issues from a sense of entitlement, rightly so. Ross Perlin states it simply in Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy: if a business cannot afford to pay its employees minimum wage, it cannot afford to be in business. When I read that a company is soliciting young, intelligent people to work for them for forty hours a week for the possibility of a high-five and a birthday card, it offends me in more than a ‘my mom thinks I’m special’ kind of way.

If this is the new standard, we have to wonder where it came from and how it has become naturalized in our society. Speaking to serial interns, several phrases recur in the rationalization process. ‘Investing in the future’ is a big one, as is the old culturally-engrained adage ‘paying [one’s] dues.’ Such rationales are entrenched in a conservative ideology that dictates an illusive, infinitely-delayed reward system while dehumanizing the ‘human capital’ at its disposal. The system is psychologically damaging: it makes us feel that we cannot be self-sufficient until we jump through its hoops. To have your work undervalued, to feel indebted to a company you are working to impress while a sad bag of conciliatory Sun Chips from the vending machine puts you at a net loss for the day – are these really the options?

Well, no. Obviously not. The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that I’ve fallen into the same mind trap that dictates this insane logic of dues-paying to a higher authority. I’ve become caught up in the false dichotomy Perlin addresses in Intern Nation: the perception that “the only alternative to high-powered careerism is ‘Do you want fries with that?’” And while Perlin and other voices in the internship debate call for companies to meet minimum wage requirements for their interns, I realize I would never want to work for an organization that was inclined to systematically exploit their lower orders in the first place. Why bend over backwards and forfeit all person-time just to demonstrate my readiness for the white-collar working world I never wanted? My resume doesn’t stack up like pancakes; I can deal with that. Resolve: to refigure my commitments, consider the oxymoronic term ‘business ethics,’ and radically revise my search engine keywords.

Lucy Cameron is a U-whatever English and Philosophy student. Tell her how wrong she is at lucy.cameron@mail.mcgill.ca.

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