Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures) Read online

  So Rachel brings up the subject of jobs, and (thank you, Mrs. Hovell) the question works — everyone is distracted for a little while. As she is telling the group about her mouse-breeding business, Rick interrupts her with a series of statements she knows are gloomy. Rachel has trained herself not to respond to interruptions. But of pivotal importance is the fact that Rick, with his nihilistic outbursts, very much resembles her father — and therefore he should ultimately be the man to sire her child. The only problem is that Rick’s face lacks distinguishing characteristics and is difficult to memorize. Rachel stares at him, trying extra hard to find anomalies that would make it easier for her to pick him out of a crowd if he were to wear clothing other than a bartender’s black pants and white shirt. Is that a mole? No. A scar? No. At least Leslie Freemont, with his white mane, was highly recognizable. He also had a mole on his left cheek, an asymmetrical mouth, and almost triangular spatulate fingernails — but the hair made those details unnecessary. Happily, Rick is also looking closely at Rachel. Most people don’t like being studied this way. Rachel wonders if Rick’s willingness to be studied will make him an even better father. As a bonus, he offers to get her a ginger ale at the very moment when she feels in need of a beverage. He is what her mother would call a gentleman. Except, her mother’s opinion doesn’t matter to her; only her father’s opinion counts.

  This is when Karen’s daughter phones with her news about the new world without oil — a world that possibly has no need for expertly bred white mice. Rachel tries not to listen in on the conversation and starts looking around, analyzing the room around her. She tries to determine if the bar’s designer consciously set out to create an environment that fosters zero-commitment sexual hookups. While taking the bus to the lounge that morning, she had thought the bar would be covered with sparkly surfaces, and the music in the background would sound beepy, like Super Mario video games. Instead she looks around her and sees low-wattage lighting, no bright colours save for the icky red vinyl wall by the computer, and a collection of fabric-covered stools that don’t seem to have been properly cleaned and are most likely brimming with decades’ worth of bum molecules. Finally, she looks up at the ceiling, which is when she notices a ventilation shaft entrance.

  Once the men have gone up into the crawl space, Karen and Rachel resume their positions on the floor behind the bar. Karen’s arms are crossed, a sign of worry. Rachel says, “Karen, you look really great. You look really relaxed. I wish I had what you have.”

  Karen pats her hair and says, “Really?”

  Rachel says, “Yes.”

  Karen says, “Because obviously there’s been so much confusion. I thought my look had come slightly apart.”

  Rachel says, “No, you look terrific. Karen, I have a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I’ve decided to make Rick the father of my child. What do you think of this decision?”

  Karen pauses, is about to say something, pauses again, and then says, “Well, I hope you have a steady income stream of your own. Can white mice do that for you?”

  “Yes, I believe society will continue to need white mice, even a society permanently crippled by diminished oil and all of the political, economical, and environmental anarchy the shortage has already begun to unleash.”

  Karen asks, “Rachel, are you human?”

  Rachel replies, “I’ve been asked that question many times. I know it is meant humorously and I don’t take offence at it.”

  “I was just —”

  “That’s okay, don’t worry. I personally worry that maybe I’m nothing more than my medical condition. If I didn’t have my brain anomalies, which others seem to perceive as damage, maybe I’d be a normal person instead — whatever I was actually meant to be like, something better than just a broken woman. If I was normal, I wouldn’t have to go to normalcy training lessons — and my father wouldn’t be ashamed to tell his work friends that I’ve entered the Fifty Thousand Mouse Club.”

  “Rachel, I work in a psychiatrist’s office. I see people all day, in and out of their conditions. Who they are at any given time is usually based on whether they’re sticking to their meds.”

  “What is your conclusion? Are these people really people? Or are they only their conditions?”

  “I think we’re everything: our brain’s wiring, the things our mothers ate when they were pregnant, the TV show we watched last night, the friend who betrayed us in grade ten, the way our parents punished us. These days we have PET scans, MRIs, gene mapping, and massive research into psychopharmacology — so many ways of explaining the human condition. Personality is more like a . . . a potato salad composed of your history plus all of your body’s quirks, good and bad. Tell me, Rachel, and be honest: if you could take a pill and be ‘normal,’ would you?”

  Rachel thinks about what Karen has said. After an uncomfortably long time, she says, “ Potato salad?”

  And that’s when Rick shouts, “Catch!” and drops his shotgun down into the lounge.

  ___

  Things happened quickly, yet in slow motion. Rick raced to shut off the ventilation system, while Rachel, Karen, and Luke went to the front door to look for ways to further block it. Looking outside, they saw a chemical blizzard — it was like watching the World Trade Center collapse, but with coloured dust, not just grey, and with what resembled fragments of hornets’ nests drifting and landing higgledy-piggledy in all directions. Daylight had vanished. The red carpet that led along the covered walkway to the hotel was inch-deep in crud, as was the body of the unfortunate Warren.

  Karen asked, “What the hell is that stuff?”

  Luke shouted for her to get away from the glass. “He’s off the roof and he’s coming this way.”

  From the left, a stone’s throw away, came the sniper, his face curled into his chest. He lurched towards the lounge, a duffle bag slung over one shoulder, his other arm trying to protect his face from the toxic blizzard but still holding a rifle.

  “Karen, get Rick’s gun! Get it now! Rachel, help me put these stacking chairs in front of the door. If he reaches for his rifle, run like hell.”

  Rachel worked fast to further barricade the door, inserting heavy steel stacking chairs into whatever slots she could. They heard the sniper trying to open car doors outside the hotel. Through a slit in the fabric of one of the tablecloths, Rachel saw the sniper curse, particles getting stuck in his mouth as he did. Most of his concentration and energy was going into trying to breathe and cover his eyes at the same time. Rachel saw two dead pigeons fall onto the dust-covered pavement, and she knew it would only get worse. And then it did. The sniper looked up, seemed to realize there were people behind the barricaded door, and raced towards them.

  Rachel wasn’t frightened, nor was she confused. She walked away from the door and said, “He’s here. Is the shotgun ready?”

  Rick ran in from the back and grabbed his weapon from Karen. “Where is he?”

  “Outside the door.”

  “Crap.”

  They heard shattering glass and the sound of feet kicking at something. The sniper’s voice called, “Get this machine out of the way!”

  Rick peeked around the corner: The sniper was trying to get in — as were the toxic cloud chemicals. The sniper said, “It’s either let me in or we all die from this crap that’s blowing around. Choose your fate. I promise I won’t shoot if you let me in, but I sure as hell will if you try to seal this door against the chemicals without letting me in.”

  Rick shouted out, “Throw your rifle inside.”

  There was silence.

  “I said, throw your rifle inside or we shoot you.”

  More silence.

  “Okay, then, hellfire it is for you.”

  They heard some stacking chairs topple to the ground, then the Italian rifle was tossed into the lounge.

  “Okay,” said Luke, picking up the rifle. “Let him in and let’s seal up that door. I can’t even see Warren through all that chemical shit
out there.”

  As Luke covered the door with the rifle, Rachel and Karen opened a slot in the clutter barrier just big enough for the sniper to enter the lounge. Once he was past them and moving towards the bar, arms up and the canvas duffle bag in his left hand, Rick took over covering him with the shotgun while Luke, Rachel, and Karen worked together to barricade and seal the door. Karen had found a roll of duct tape in the closet and immediately started taping tablecloths to the door frame.

  “What’s in the bag?” asked Rick.

  “Nothing. Check for yourself.” The sniper set the bag on the bar.

  Rick inspected the bag and found only shell casings and some bloody rags. The sniper went behind the bar and rinsed his face under the tap. Rick stood guard while the others finished sealing the door, using garments from the lost and found and a black plastic signboard with its few remaining white plastic letters spelling rotarian salad bar here. An air-raid siren flared in the background. Rachel had only ever heard this sound in movies and was surprised the sirens were used in real life. As she and Luke jammed a set of old curtains into the last remaining cracks in the shattered door and Karen duct-taped the tablecloths in place around the barricade, making the door as airtight as possible, the siren’s wail shrank. Their air supply was safe for the time being.

  They moved back into the lounge, Luke pausing to pick up the rifle, which he had set down while helping with the door. The sniper had removed his shirt. He was a small man, with pale skin that was inflamed from the chemicals outside. His voice was raspy. He nodded towards his duffle bag. “I’m not going to try and kill you, but I do get to keep my stuff. That’s part of the deal.”

  They stood watching him. Rachel said, “My name is Rachel. This is Luke and Karen and Rick.” The sniper grunted. Rachel said, “You look really great for someone who’s been through what you’ve just been through. You look really relaxed. I wish I had what you have.”

  “Tell Rick to take his gun off me.”

  “I can’t do that,” said Rick.

  The sniper looked around behind the bar, at the ceiling, and at the rear area. Something by the cash register caught his eye, and he laughed. He went to the machine and ripped a magazine clipping off the side. It was a colour photo of Leslie Freemont looking inspirationally forty-five degrees off camera, up into the sky. “What the hell is a picture of this freak doing here?”

  “That’s Leslie Freemont,” Rick said.

  “I know damn well who it is.” He reached into his duffle bag and removed one of the bloodied rags. Rachel took another look and saw that the material was actually a blood-clotted shock of white hair. The sniper threw Leslie Freemont’s scalp onto the bar. “I know how to deal with false prophets.”

  Player One

  The thing about the future is that it’s full of things happening, whereas the present so often feels stale and dead. We dread the future but it’s what we have. I can tell you here that while Luke keeps the shotgun aimed at the sniper’s head, Karen and Rick will duct-tape him to a chair. On completion the group will learn that the sniper is a talker. He will say to the assembled group, “Imagine, all of you, feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold of the day.”

  The sniper will say, “Imagine no longer being trapped in a dying and corrupt world, but instead making a new one from this one’s shattered remnants.”

  The sniper will say, “Imagine that for an unknown reason you have begun to rapidly lose your memory. You now no longer know what month it is, say, or what type of car you drive, or the season, or the food in your refrigerator, or the names of the flowers.”

  The sniper will suck in some breath and say, “Quickly, quickly your memory freezes — a tiny, perfect iceberg, all memories frozen, locked. Your family. Your sex. Your name. All of it turned into a silent ice block. You are free of memory. You now look at the world with the eyes of an embryo, not knowing, only seeing and hearing. Then suddenly the ice melts, your memory begins returning. The ice is in a pond — it thaws and the water warms and water lilies grow from your memories and fish swim within them. And that pond is you.”

  Finally, the sniper will say, “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

  At that point, Karen will blink, while Rick, newly in love with Rachel, is thinking, You know, shoot me if you want, you whack-job. It doesn’t matter because I’ll die a happy man. Chemical cloud? Eat me! I don’t care, because you can’t corrode the love that protects me like a triple-wax polish on my old Barracuda. Booze? Don’t even try killing me this time, booze. It’s over between you and me. I am a man in love, and for this brief chunk of time, life and death have become the same thing — living is the same as dying as is living as is dying as is —

  This is when the power will go off.

  Luke’s first instinct when the lights go out will be to shout, “My jewels!” — a joke that always got a laugh when the church’s power kept failing after the ice storms a few years back. But a joke is not what’s going to be needed when everything turns black — or not even black — it will feel like the world turned itself off — this relentless entropy that’s swallowing Luke’s universe like an angry time-space wormhole. Everything I can think of, he will think, is going, item by item by item: cars, electricity, Cancun holidays, frozen Lean Cuisine dinners, the give-a-penny/take-a-penny jar at the local Esso station — hell, the whole Esso station — police safety, water out of taps, clean air — it will feel to Luke as if the world now has rapid-onset Alzheimer’s and is itself systematically disintegrating. His father would have loved this sensation of End of Days. His father wanted to go to heaven and would have cheerfully taken the next bus there without hesitation. That poor, dumb bastard who scared or insulted away or betrayed all the people who otherwise ought to have been in his life, and who somehow managed to turn Luke into himself.

  But no, Luke will reject what is happening as being the end of the world, and he will reject what has up until now seemed to be his inevitable conversion into his father . . . his father, who would have said, with a pathetic false English accent — like, who was he trying to impress, anyway? — his family, who knew that Caleb had only once been to England, in 1994 for three nights at a Heathrow Airport hotel for a symposium on the subject “Man in the Age of the Rampant Machine” — machines! In 19forGod’ssake94! Caleb, who would most predictably have said, there, in the Airport Camelot cocktail lounge, “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the New Year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than any known way.’”

  Rachel will stare at Leslie Freemont’s scalp and she will think it resembles a very large dissected white mouse — or maybe a rat — but Rachel doesn’t like rats, because rats might bite her, whereas mice would never hurt her. Rachel won’t, however, be freaked out by the scalp. The scalp’s presence will make her enter her clinical mode, as though she were in the local medical supplier’s lab wearing one of those freshly laundered coats they hand out that smell faintly like lavender, their crisp, starchy fabric on her forearms giving her the happy sensation of an itch being properly scratched. But the scalp? It’s just a specimen, and, as it can’t hurt her or enter the one-metre invisible circular comfort zone around her body — the zone within which it might touch her, breathe on her, or offer any sort of swift temperature change — Rachel will remain in a heightened but calm state. She knows the others are frightened, but she knows better than to tell them to not be afraid — doing so has gotten her in trouble in the past. And what on earth could there possibly be to fear from falling down into Daffy Duck’s cartoon hole?

  HOUR FOUR

  HELLO, MY NAME IS: MONSTER

  Karen

  Karen stares at the black-haired sniper, with his blistered face and se
emingly powder-burned forearms. Her body still shaking, Karen asks her duct-taped prisoner, “Okay, then, what’s your name?”

  “You tell me. What do you think my name ought to be? What do I look like? Am I a Jason? A Justin? A Craig?”

  Karen begins wondering, in earnestness, if he looks more like a Justin than a Jason or a Craig — and then chides herself for so quickly going in a mundane direction. This guy truly believes he did good by killing Leslie Freemont . Karen wonders when and where Leslie was scalped, and if his assistant, Tara, escaped.

  Luke blurts out, “Monsters don’t need names.”

  “Then that’s my new name. Hello, my name is: Monster.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Very well, then, my name is Bertis.”

  “We should just shoot you, Bertis,” says Rick.

  Bertis is cavalier. “Then shoot me. I’m at the end of one aspect of my life, but also at the beginning of some unknown secret that will reveal itself to me soon.”

  Karen thinks, What if God exists, but he just doesn’t like people very much?

  Rick asks, “Why were you stalking Leslie Freemont?”

  “He was a fraud. He had it coming.”

  “Why did you shoot the others, then?”

  “Because I can see clearly enough to decide who lives and who dies.” He pauses and surveys the room. “Oh, don’t give me those faces. They died because it was their time. Their leaders are dead. History has abandoned them. The past is a joke. Me and what I’m doing is what was meant to happen next.”

  “Who died and made you God?”

  Bertis laughed. “Don’t be a child. Grow up. The people I shot bothered God. They angered Him. They wasted His time. Look at modern culture. Look at Americans — they’re like children, always asking for miracle this or love that, or Gee, I tried my hardest. But God created an ordered world. By constantly bombarding Him for miracles, we’re asking Him to unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon. In repayment for being an endless nuisance, Americans have become a quarter-billion oil-soaked mallard ducks. I didn’t know this oil crisis was going to happen when I woke up this morning and vowed to take out that quack, Freemont — it’s one of life’s little bonuses.”