Player One Page 3

  Luke wonders what Shakespeare had to say about money. Something clever, no doubt. Goddam Shakespeare. Luke used to pepper his sermons with lofty Shakespearean quotes because he thought it made him look smarter than he really was, and it also made his flock feel smarter because it validated any years they’d spent in college or university. But lately the younger flock members have let it be known to Luke that his quotes are kind of boring and mechanical and remind them of those automatic quotes by Nietzsche or Kafka that web bots insert at the bottom of emails that somehow, in some almost impossible to connect way, funnel truckloads of cash into the ever-expanding Eastern European pornography industry. And a Scotch with ice certainly helps lubricate Luke’s belief that intelligence has been democratized and flattened. Luke feels both behind and in front of the curve.

  The curve. What the hell is “the curve”?

  Luke hates the twenty-first century.

  Luke is a thief.

  Luke remembers once believing in what he believed in: that one day he would no longer have to live inside linear time; the concept of infinity would cease to be frightening. All secrets would be revealed. Automobile ignitions would refuse to turn over; parking lots would melt like chocolate; water tables would vanish; and the planet would begin to cave in on itself. There would be great destruction; structures such as skyscrapers and multinational corporations would crumble. His dream life and his real life would fuse together. There would be loud music. Before he began to turn immaterial, his body would turn itself inside out and fall to the ground and cook like steak on a cheap hibachi, and he would be released and he would be judged and he would be found pure.

  But his congregation talks about the afterlife as if it were Fort Lauderdale.

  Whatever. What matters now is that Luke is practically vibrating with freedom.

  And he has decided that, although he is a failure, failure is authentic, and because it’s authentic, it’s real and genuine, and because of that, it’s a pure state of being, unlike the now-hopefully-dead fakey-fakey Luke — and feeling authentic feels great! Heck, maybe I’m an outlaw now — I am an outlaw now!

  And now Luke has twenty grand in his pockets, and he’s watching a little red-headed dude come into the bar and put his hand on Karen’s thigh. She doesn’t look too happy to meet him. Screw it. They’ll both just keep looking until they each settle for someone equal to themselves on the food chain. That’s the way Charles Darwin works.

  Luke’s conscience suddenly rattles him. By force of habit, he talks to a God he once believed in, but this time with a small twist: Lord, I know that faith is not the natural condition of the human heart, but why did You make it so hard to have faith? And now it’s too late, because I don’t believe in You anymore. Why did I never discuss my doubts with any human beings? My elders could have set me on the righteous path. But maybe in the end it’s best to keep one’s doubts private. Saying them aloud cheapens them — makes them a bunch of words just like everybody else’s bunch of words. If I’m going to fall, I’ll do it on my own terms.

  Ironically, being honest with himself about his crime is making Luke feel genuinely spiritual as he looks at the cool Hitchcock blonde at the pathetic “business centre” across the room. He wonders if she’s noticed him. What would she think of his crime? Luke thinks she’d look at his shoes in particular, and those shoes would speak to her, and what they would say is “Payless,” and she’d write him off, so screw her; the moment he gets into town, he’s buying a pair of ultra-executive shoes in a swanky store, and he’ll never feel ashamed of his grim footwear ever again.

  What’s that? She just looked at him — and she’s smiling? Hot diggity!

  Hot diggity and yet: crippling fear. Lovely on the outside, most likely monstrous on the inside — if his former flock is any litmus. She’s most likely addicted to video games and online shopping, bankrupting her parents in an orgy of oyster merino and lichen alpaca. Fancy a bit of chit-chat? Doubtful. She’d most likely text him, even if they were riding together in a crashing car — and she’d be fluent in seventeen software programs and fully versed in the ability to conceal hourly visits to gruesome military photo streams. She probably wouldn’t remember 9/11 or the Y2K virus, and she’ll never bother to learn a new language because a machine will translate the world for her in 0.034 seconds. But most of all, this cool Hitchcock blonde is a living, breathing, luscious, and terrifying terminal punctuation mark on Luke’s existence, a punctuation mark along the lines of This is the New Normal, Luke, and guess what — it’s left you in the weeds, and you, pastor, reverend, good sir, have outlived your cultural purpose and you, father, forgive me, are a chunk of cultural scrap metal, not even recyclable at that. Go huddle together for security with those other doddering, outmoded walking heaps there at the bar with you. Compare your turkey-wattle chins and Play-Doh waistlines and grow misty-eyed discussing the collapse of Communism and the final episode of Friends.

  ___

  Having figured all of this out, Luke remained unsure what to do. Cultural irrelevance be damned, he hadn’t had a date in over a year. A date: he cursed himself for his self-censorship; Luke hadn’t gotten laid in years.

  He smiled back at the blonde, who actually seemed a bit awkward. With his head, he motioned her over to the bar. She froze, and Luke thought, Oh crap, too forward. But then she stood up and walked over to Luke with a strangely mechanical gait. He wondered if she was a model, and if that was how models were walking these days. She’s so beautiful, Luke thought. Cartoon beautiful. She’s a Barbie doll.

  She approached Luke, touched the stool beside him, and said, “I am going to sit here.”

  “Please do.”

  She sat on the stool, but her body language made it seem as if she’d never sat on a bar stool before and it had a learning curve, like learning how to ice skate or juggle. She stabilized and stared at the bottles against the bar’s mirrored wall. Luke looked at her, and she seemed unconcerned about being stared at. He said, “A guy walks into a bar, and the bartender looks at him and says, ‘Hey, what is this — a joke?’”

  If Luke wanted a reaction, he didn’t get it. “My name is Luke.”

  There was a pause. “My name is . . .” There was another pause. “. . . Rachel.”

  “Nice to meet you, Rachel.”

  “Yes.”

  Luke felt way out of his league, and awkward as all get-out. He needed to order more drinks, and maybe some snacks, but what do you feed a woman like this — hamburgers made of panther meat? Peacock livers on Ritz crackers? Do beautiful women even eat food? “Can I order you a drink?”

  “Oh. Yes. A ginger ale, please.”

  “Great. Bartender?” Luke called for Rick’s attention but got only part of it, as Rick was watching the loving Internet couple interact.

  “What can I get you?”

  “A ginger ale for Rachel here, and a Glenfiddich with ice for me.”

  “Right away.”

  Luke reached into his jacket pocket for one of the wads of cash and threw a fifty-dollar bill on the bar, and suddenly he was carried away back in time — back to when he still thought of himself as a good person; back to when every moment made him feel as if he was getting away with something; back to when he didn’t need to loot twenty thousand dollars from t
he church bank account to land himself that feeling; back to when every moment felt like a drink with a beautiful woman at a bar; back to when he felt that his prayers still counted, still made a difference, when praying sent a beam out into the heavens as powerful as a sunbeam breaking through clouds at the end of a prairie day, like a light beamed from a sidewalk outside the Kodak Theater at the Academy Awards. Luke didn’t feel lost, but he didn’t feel found, either.

  On the mute TV above the bar, there was an ad for something colourful, useless, and no doubt destined to clog the planet’s overtaxed landfills with more crap, and for some reason, a computer-animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was endorsing the product. Luke said, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in July? We need Christmas in July like a hole in the head.”

  The beautiful Rachel said, “You mean Rudolph the Useful Reindeer.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a fact, Luke. If Rudolph hadn’t been able to help the other reindeer, they’d have left him to be eaten by wolves. I think the other reindeer would have laughed while the fangs punctured his hide. Rudolph was an outcast who became an incast only because of his utility. That’s not a judgement. It’s a statement of fact.”

  Luke looked at Rachel. He had a shivering sensation that he was speaking with someone not even human, temporarily given human form. Was he simply being insecure about her beauty or was she genuinely alien? Or perhaps she was the desired end product of an entire century’s eugenic efforts at physical perfection, and with that perfection now having been achieved, humanity was now left free to pursue other avenues of perfection. He said, “I take it you’re not a big fan of Christmas?”

  “I have no orthodox beliefs. I have no pictures of an afterworld for myself. In the past, I have tried to convince myself that there is life after death, but I have found myself largely unable to do this.”

  Alcohol loosens tongues, and Luke knew he was in the presence of an unusual mind. He asked Rachel, “Do you believe in sin?” As he asked this, he was wondering if she considered him hot. At the same time, he was wondering if he had a chance with her. At the same time, his subconscious was churning through a list of random images: the church basement on a Tuesday morning, lit by a cold sun through the south window and quiet as abandoned Chernobyl; fragments of old Battlestar Galactica episodes beaming from his TV while he watched from the kitchen, eating Campbell’s soup straight from the can; a trio of sparrows outside his bedroom window, fighting over who got control of the ledge.

  Rachel said, “I believe only in human behaviour. And I think that if your brain forces you to believe in sin, then you at least ought to calibrate sinning. Religions seem to have no Richter scale of what’s worse than something else. If you do one thing wrong, no matter how small, you’re cast away for eternity. I also find it interesting that no religion has any dimension of ecological responsibility.” Rachel paused. “Luke, I get the impression that you once believed in religion but you no longer do. Am I correct in thinking this?”

  Part of Luke was wondering about Rachel’s speech patterns; hers was neither an indoor voice nor an outdoor voice — something like robotized phone menus for United Airlines: The estimated waiting time for the next available member of the United Airline’s quality assurance team is . . . seventy-five minutes. The rest of Luke was thinking about all the dark secrets he knew about his former congregation — might as well start thinking about them in the past tense now — and he thought about his family members and all the crap they put everyone else through. And he thought about his friends and their families and their ongoing family scandals. And he acknowledged that every human on earth is a bubbling cauldron of dirt and filth. Then Luke became slightly spaced out and looked once more at the TV monitor above the bar: BUS CRASH INJURES THREE. HYDRO RATES TO INCREASE 1.5 PERCENT. OPEC MEETING GENERATES CONFLICT. All the crap and evil and meanness in the world — every single person on the planet! — and the best the news can come up with is BUS CRASH INJURES THREE?

  Luke looked at Rachel. “Yup. I no longer believe in God.”

  “Oh. Okay. Why is that?”

  “Because one morning I saw a sparrow yawn.”

  “Yawning as in waking-up yawning?”

  “Yes.”

  Rachel

  Rachel is sitting at a bad computer in an airport hotel cocktail lounge with red plasticky walls and is contemplating leaving but decides to stay because she is on a mission, a mission that began because last winter, outside the kitchen, she heard her father say to her mother, “God, what a waste of a human life.”

  “Ray, don’t talk like that. We need to find a way to get her to meet people. Maybe some men her age.”

  “And then what — she’s going to get married and raise a happy family?”

  “Ray, why are you even bringing this up?”

  “I’m bringing this up because we never bring it up. No grandkids. No son-in-law. No nothing, just a robot forever, working in the garage eighteen hours a day . . . She has no sense of humour. Medically, clinically, scientifically, no sense of humour. And for that matter, no sense of irony or empathy or affection or —”

  “I’m glad we’re talking about this. You think marriage is an option for her? You think her having a child would make everything better?”

  “Frankly, I do. Never been kissed. Never will be kissed. Christ, how sad.”

  “Stop!”

  As a result of overhearing her father’s sentiments, Rachel has determined that her life’s mission is to bear children and thus prove to the world her value as a human being. She sees childbirth as a profoundly human act, and she would like to try to be human. She’s unsure why she was not allowed to be human, but she now sees a chance to make her move.

  Growing up, she tried to make herself human. She researched what makes humans different from all other creatures, and all she learned was that only humans create art and music — elephants paint with brushes, but that somehow doesn’t count. And only humans tell jokes, only humans cook, only humans have an incest taboo, and only humans have ritual burials. Rachel dislikes and doesn’t understand music, because all it is is sounds; she doesn’t understand art, because all it is is scribbles and dribbles that don’t mesh with photographic reality; and she doesn’t understand humour or the notion of funniness — she only observes confusing braying-type sounds made by people after they hear something called “funny” (and usually after they’ve been drinking alcohol). However, from breeding white laboratory mice in the garage, she knows that an incest taboo is genetically useful, so she’s all for a taboo. And burial rituals strike her as smart, because they allow people to turn back into soil and be useful.

  Identifying the unique threads of the human condition is not something Rachel approaches lightly, and she is not deceived into thinking that high technology is an activity that makes humans different: complex human activities such as enriching uranium, for example, are, by extension, elaborate means of generating heat and of fighting — and there’s nothing special to humans about that. Smashing atoms into quarks and leptons is high-tech, but if you think about it, it’s merely a way of creating incredibly tiny, expensive building bricks, and bricks make houses and birds make nests, so what’s special about that? Rachel once thought that attempts to contact alien species might constitute unique human behaviour, but it’s really no different than a wolf cub standing in the shrubs around a human fire, hoping to be asked to come closer and join a tribe of a different species. But music, art, and humour? Rachel has to take it on
faith that these human qualities exist.

  Rachel has never fit into the world. She remembers as a child being handed large wooden numbers covered in sandpaper to help her learn numbers and mathematics. Other children weren’t given tactile sandpaper number blocks, but she was, and she knows that she has always been a barely tolerated sore point among her neurotypical classmates. Rachel also remembers many times starving herself for days because the food that arrived at the table was the wrong temperature or colour, or was placed on the plate incorrectly: it just wasn’t right. And she remembers discovering single-player video games and for the first time in her life seeing a two-dimensional, non-judgemental, crisply defined realm in which she could be free from off-temperature food and sick colour schemes and bullies. Entering her screen’s portal into that other realm is where her avatar, Player One, can fully come to life. Unlike Rachel, Player One has a complete overview both of the world and of time. Player One’s life is more like a painting than it is a story. Player One can see everything with a glance and can change tenses at will. Player One has ultimate freedom; the ultimate software on the ultimate hardware. That realm is also the one place where Player One feels, for lack of a better word, normal.