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

  “Suicidal impulses?”

  “No. I just didn’t want to exist. Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave. And then I saw this Freemont guy on TV and it was like he could see the hole in my soul and had a way to fix it. He was so confident. People liked him. He knew how to succeed. He could prove to me that life is bigger than we give it credit for — that something huge can just happen out of the blue. We can enter a world where all the women wear those nice, clean sweaters from Banana Republic and sing along to the radio in key, a world where the guys drive Chevy Camaros and never stumble or screw up or look stupid. I thought Leslie Freemont’s ideas would make me feel young again.”

  “I don’t think your face reads as old.”

  “That’s an interesting way of phrasing it. But I am. Old. Trust me.”

  “There’s that expression normal people use: You’re only as young as you feel.”

  “I beg to differ, Rachel. When you’re young, you feel like life hasn’t yet begun, like life is scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays — whenever. But suddenly you’re old, and the scheduled life never arrived. I find myself asking, ‘Well, then, exactly what was it I was doing with all that time I had before I thought my life would begin?’”

  Rachel said, “I think we should go back to the bar, Rick.”

  “No way. I want to stay here forever. Right here. Right now. With you.”

  “There’s a sniper out there, and Karen and Luke might want help guarding him.”

  “I know.”

  Rachel got onto her knees and looked at Rick. Rick kissed his fingertip and touched it to her lips. He said, “You know, I have always liked the idea of Superman, because I like the idea that there is one person in the world who doesn’t do bad things. And who is able to fly.”

  “Superman is absurd,” said Rachel. “The notion that people can fly is ridiculous. In order to fly, we would have to have chest muscles that stretched out in front of us for five or six feet.”

  Rick smiled. “I used to pray to God. I asked, ‘Please, God, just make me a bird, a graceful white bird free of shame and taint and fear of loneliness, and give me other white birds among which to fly, and give me a sky so big and wide that if I never wanted to land, I would never have to.’” Rick looked into Rachel’s eyes.

  Rachel said, “But you can’t be a bird. You’re a person. People can’t be birds.”

  Rick smiled again. “But instead God gave me you, Rachel, and you are here with me to listen to these words as I speak them.”

  Rachel blinked and looked Rick in the face. Rick was unsure whether he’d connected. Rachel said, “Rick, in normalcy class we learned that people are often most attractive and charismatic when they are confused and when they think that nobody could possibly like them.”

  “Are they?”

  “Yeah. Please, Rick. Stand up and come with me. Okay?”

  “Roger.” Rick stood up. “What I like about you, Rachel, is that I never know what’s going to come out of your mouth next.”

  Rachel said, “Rick, when Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, do you think he thought he was trading up or trading down?”

  “Donald Duck? Trading down, obviously. Who wouldn’t want to fly?”

  Luke

  Bertis says, “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

  Karen blinks.

  The power goes out, and nobody is surprised. A dribble of light comes in through the barricaded doors, but nothing useful, only enough to allow Karen to locate a box of table candles and matches from behind the bar; light is somewhat restored.

  Bertis looks across the room at Luke and changes his tone. “So, you’re a thief?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Your twenty grand’s probably not worth much by now. How ironic. Your flock will be angry.”

  Luke is nonchalant. “They’ve got bigger things to worry about. They probably don’t even know yet that I did it. And when they learn that the money’s not worth anything anymore, I’ll be off the hook. Didn’t plan it that way, but that’s how it rolled.”

  Karen gets up and goes to Bertis, dribbling more vodka over the remains of his toe. Bertis’s face betrays a sting as he says, “You should have stolen something more purely valuable, Luke. Maybe some DNA cloned from the Pope’s Band-Aid — or a dab of antimatter from that supercollider thingy over in Switzerland.”

  Luke says, “Okay, you’ve scored your point. Want me to shoot off your other toe?” The candlelit room and the shotgun make the room feel like a painting from a few centuries back — a domestic interior. Some dead hares and partridges would look at home in the environment.

  Bertis is snide: “Oops. Looks like power’s gone to your head.”

  Karen intervenes. “Fellas, look, stop it right now.”

  Luke knows that Karen is right to stop this from escalating. But wow! . . . It’s late afternoon and Luke is now a prison guard in a cocktail lounge filled with what smells like burning snow tires leaking in from the outside. How did his life come to this? Twenty-four hours earlier he was . . . What was I doing? I know: trying to decide if a McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish was eco-friendly and whether to upgrade my cable package and put it on the church’s tab. Church: how strange to think of it right now. Luke is in the foxhole, but it’s not making him question his newly found atheism. He asks Bertis, “Why would you kill Leslie Freemont?”

  “Why? Because he wanted to go to heaven without dying.”

  “Excuse me — explain that to me.”

  “He was a prisoner of the world. He thought earthly happiness was all we needed. ‘Power Dynamics Seminar System.’ What the hell is that? Leslie Freemont thought humans saw themselves as bottomless wells of creativity and uniqueness. But God refuses to see any one person as unique in his or her relationship to Him. Nobody’s special. And life on earth is just a bus stop on the way to greater glory or greater suffering.”

  Bertis is pushing many of Luke’s father buttons.

  When Luke was growing up, Caleb had spoken with the same evangelical fervour as Bertis. That old bastard, Caleb, dead three years now, reclaimed by the soil, by the planet, by the solar system. Why would someone have a son just so he could have a sparring partner? So that he could create a smaller-scale version of himself? At one point Luke thought he’d gotten over Caleb’s spiritual belittlement — in his teens, when he likened God and Caleb to the weather: You may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it. Sadness and grief are part of being human and always will be. That’s not for one person to fix. Luke became the bad boy every mother fears her daughter will get entangled with: unlikely bouts in which he hot-wired cars behind the tire shop, and times when he’d vanish for days doing ecstasy with the unpopular kids who smoked beside the lacrosse field dugout. Luke told himself that belief in God was just a way to deal with things that were out of your control. His father said that was pathetic, that it did nothing to address the moral obligations of the individual.

  Luke realizes that his rebellious phase was a necessary step on his path to becoming a pastor. Nobody wants advice from a goody two-shoes.

  Karen asks Bertis, “Are you married?”

  Bertis snaps, “No. You?”

  Karen says, “No. But I was. Were you ever?”

  Bertis pauses long enough to make it clear that the answer is yes.

  Luke says, “She abandoned you, didn’t she?”

  Bertis flips out. “How dare you talk to me about my life like that?”

  Ahhh . . . Luke has seen this before: hyperfaith abandonment syndrome — people, usually guys, going too gung-ho on faith after someone leaves them. Just another OCD, not much different from hoarding newspapers or compulsive handwashing.

  Bertis says, “I don’t see a ring on your finger, Pastor Luke,” and Luke is taken aback. “Ah. So now I’ve pushed one of your buttons. You don’t strike me as queer, so I’m
going to have to guess that you’re damaged goods somehow. And you know I’m right, don’t you? Karen, what do you think — is Luke damaged goods?”

  Luke thinks, Man, this guy is good at creating awkward moments. Then he looks at Karen. She’s standing halfway between him and Bertis, with her arms crossed. And he can tell from her face that she really does want to know why he has ended up alone.

  “Let me get this straight. With everything that has happened — and is happening — you both want to know why I’m still single?”

  Karen and Bertis nod.

  “Okay, then . . .”

  Why are you single, Luke?

  ___

  Luke thought about this. Why?

  “Well, my dad was a pastor and so I rebelled — yes, son of a preacher man and all that, and let me tell you, it really is catnip to women — but then by twenty I’d seen enough of the world to know that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves, and I came back to the church. And . . .” Luke became as wistful as it’s possible to be while pointing a shotgun at someone’s aorta. “I knew I was a soul in trouble — that’s how I viewed it at the time. But when I went back to the church, the women there wanted a goody-goody, a private express lane to God, Ten Commandments or less. And the thing is, I was no longer a bad boy, but despite becoming a pastor I was never a goody-goody either. And nobody in the middle ever liked me. And you know, I’ve been here on earth for thirty-something years, and I don’t think there is even one person who ever really knew me, which is a private disgrace. I don’t even know if people are knowable.”

  With those last words, Karen became totally focused on him.

  “Figuring this stuff out takes time. I’m rambling. I’m human; I’m still trapped inside of . . . time . . . trapped inside the world of things.”

  “Don’t stop,” said Karen. “You’re not rambling. Keep talking.”

  “Okay, so, yes — I probably am damaged goods and, yes, I think I am a broken person. I seriously question the road I’ve taken, and I endlessly rehash the compromises I’ve made in my life.” Luke sat down at the table across from Bertis. Karen sat between them.

  “Go on,” said Bertis.

  “At one point, I really felt like I had a soul — it felt like a small glowing ember buried deep inside my guts. It felt real.”

  “So then, who dumped you?” Bertis asked, adding, “Takes one to know one.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does.”

  “No, it doesn’t, because none of it matters, because no matter what I do I’m going to inherit Alzheimer’s from my bastard father.” Karen’s eyes flared open wider. “That’s the real reason for most things in my life that go sideways. The day I turn fifty-five, my universe is going to start erasing itself. So what’s the point of doing anything?”

  They heard some noises from out back.

  Karen asked, “What is that?”

  Bertis said, “I think those two are getting it on.”

  More noise.

  Karen asked, “She is over eighteen, right?”

  Bertis looked at Luke, whose face featured a small pout. “You’re jealous, aren’t you?” asked Bertis. “Let me guess — you thought she liked you better.”

  Karen butted in. “More important to me right now, Bertis, is what is your deal?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You. Rifle. Killing people.”

  “Karen, I can see you’re not a believer.”

  “In what?”

  “God. A great truth.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You need to accept that your current path is death in disguise.”

  “Go on.”

  “You need to look at the universe as a place filled with huge rocks and massive globs of burning gas that obey laws, but then ask yourself, to what end? Remind yourself that we are living creatures — we have mystical impulses, impulses that tell us the universe is a place charged with mystery, not just a vacuum filled with rocks and lava. We’re all born separated from God — over and over, life makes sure to inform us of that — andyet we’re all real: We have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your life is too easy, Karen. You’ve been tricked into not questioning your soul. Do you know this?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Karen, tell me, what is the you of you? Where do you begin and end? This you thing — is it an invisible silk woven from your memories? Is it a spirit? Is it electric? What exactly is it? Does it know that there exists a light within us all — a light brighter than the sun, a light inside the mind? Does the real Karen know that, when we sleep at night, when we walk across a field and see a tree full of sleeping birds, when we tell small lies to our friends, when we make love, we are performing acts of surgery on our souls? All this damage and healing and shock that happens inside of us, the result of which is unfathomable. But imagine if you could see the light, the souls inside everybody you see — at Loblaws, on the dog-walking path, at the library — all those souls, bright lights, blinding you, perhaps. But they are there.”

  Luke rolled his eyes. “You talk kind of pretty for a monster.”

  Bertis swivelled his head to Luke. “You keep quiet.” He turned back to Karen. “Karen, I like you, and this could be the day you finally wake up from the long, dead sleep that has been your life until now.”

  “So, you’re telling me I’ve been asleep for some four decades? What was it I was doing all that time, then?”

  “I don’t know. Being a part of the world — being in time rather than in Eternity. I can hear your soul, Karen. I can hear it just a bit, creaking like a house shifting ever so slightly off its foundations. In my heart it feels like that moment once a year when I smell the air and know fall is here — except it’s not the fall, Karen, it’s forever. Take down the barricade and look out the door there. Look out into this terrifying and gleaming new century, where the sun burns the eyes of innocents, where the sun burns whenever and wherever it wants, where night no longer provides respite. Where are you to find mercy in a place like that? Where will you find the correct path? There will be anarchy. Office buildings will collapse, and when they dig through the rubble, the people who were inside will be found compressed into diamonds from the force. The diamond is your soul.”

  Luke heard footsteps, and Rick and Rachel entered the bar.

  “Ah,” said Bertis. “The lovebirds.”

  Rick came in talking. “Hey, you — Bertis — how did you get up on the roof of this place, anyway?”

  “There’s an Ontario Hydro truck with a cherry picker beside the east wall.”

  “Well, that was simple.”

  Rachel

  Rachel asks Karen, “Karen, is this what dreams are like?”

  “Huh? What are you talking about?”

  “Right now, like this — there are no lights, and yet things are still happening. Is this what dreams are like?”

  “You mean you’ve never had a dream?”

  “Not that I remember. Dreams are for normal people. I just sleep.”

  “That’s so sad.”

  “Why would it be sad?”

  “Because . . .” Karen paused. “. . . Because dreams are part of being alive.”

  “I think dreams are a biological response to the fact that our planet rotates, and that for a billion years earth has had both a night and a day.”

  “You’re being unfair to dreams. They can’t be neatly put in a box like that. They can be wonderful.”

  “But if you accept dreams, you also have to accept nightmares, and I know nightmares are bad things. And if dreams are so special, why is it that no person or company has ever tried to make a drug that leads to better dreaming? Sleeping pills, yes, but dreaming pills? Have scientists even asked that question?”

  More candles are lit and Rachel sees Rick’s face glowing orange above a bowl lamp covered in white mesh and lit by a candle inside. He’s showing teeth, but the corners of his
mouth are upturned, so she knows he is smiling at her. “No, Rachel, it’s not a dream,” he says, “just real life. Here. You. Me. Us. Now. And dig these cheesy candles, like we’re eating spaghetti at the restaurant with Lady and the Tramp.” Rachel is pretty sure she can now distinguish Rick from Luke. At this moment, it’s Rick’s voice that determines his identity. Rick — the father of her child as of mere moments ago.

  As she helps Rick light candles around the room, Rachel wonders if he fathered her child because she is beautiful or because he is in love with her or because he is, as her mother would say, a dog. But how can a man be a dog? Or vice versa? And even if they could, why would being a dog be bad? Rachel’s father says that if cats were double their usual size, they’d probably be illegal and you’d have to shoot them, but even if dogs were three times as big, they’d still be good friends to people. Rachel sees that as a good way of comparing the two species.

  Rachel replays her memories of the previous half-hour — both her normal memories and the backup copies generated by her brain’s amygdala. When Rick asked Rachel to come help him fix the leak that was allowing toxins into the building, she was happy to help. And then something new entered her life, something she couldn’t explain. Rick was standing on some plastic crates and Rachel was holding his legs, keeping him stable as he shut the window’s louvres. But when he was finished, he didn’t get down — and Rachel didn’t let go of his legs, even though Rick no longer required stability. She somehow knew that if she let go of him she would miss out on something she might never again experience. She felt, well . . . the thing is, she felt. She had feelings she had no words for — which is how normal people must go through life, ad-libbing through unclear situations, trying to label things that can’t be labelled.