Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures) Page 3

  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 the 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.

  Rachel also knows she is something called “beautiful,” but she has no idea what that is. Until she was seven, she was unable to look into a mirror without screaming. If you showed her a collection of photos of different people with one of herself in the group, she’d be hard pressed to find herself in the lot. But she knows that because she has this thing called “beauty,” people treat her differently than they would if she did not possess it. According to her father, having beauty makes her existence tragic — whatever “tragic” means. She can’t figure that out, either. It means that something good happened but was then wrecked. It means a waste of a human being.

  But Rachel is going to prove that she is not a waste. For example, she has proven that she can dress herself stylishly, just like a regular human woman. She read in a magazine that all women should have a little black dress and that all women love Chanel clothing, so she took all of the money she made from her mouse-breeding business and she visited the downtown Chanel boutique and bought a little black dress and shoes at a cost of $3,400, the amount she would receive for 8,200 mice. Rachel also visited a First Choice Haircutters outlet and asked for a makeover, because she had heard that all women love makeovers — and men find a woman who has been made over to be highly attractive. And then, having assessed her menstrual cycle, and dressed and groomed like a fertile and desirable human woman, she took a taxi to the airport hotel cocktail lounge because she has learned in Internet chat rooms that this is where people go to have flings. A “fling” is a human term to describe a zero-commitment, most often non-procreative, one-time-only sexual act. People in and around airports are usually experiencing a reduced sense of identity, and travellers like to flirt and experiment sexually in ways they would never do in their everyday environments.

  So now Rachel is in a hotel cocktail lounge, using an out-of-date computer infected with multiple viruses that, when activated, trigger the noisy onscreen arrival of a Las Vegas slot machine depicting human vaginas that click into place along with an enticement to meet the right woman online, now, as long as a Visa, Amex, JTB, or MasterCard number is given. A quick search reveals that the web link is to a server in Belarus, a statistically unwise place to ship credit data.

  Rachel is ready to begin her quest for motherhood.

  ___

  Rachel saw the sunburned bartender and wondered how old he was. The bartender seemed to be in reasonable condition, but Rachel remembered that, as an employee, he was probably not inclined to be sexually disinhibited and thus in search of a fling. The bartender was speaking with a woman who looked about thirty-six — or perhaps thirty-four if she was addicted to alcohol. It’s much easier to determine a woman’s age, as nature is far more generous in offering visual prompts in that department. Seated at the bar was another man — early thirties? He appeared well-nourished, and Rachel tried to determine whether he was handsome. “Handsome” is the male equivalent of beautiful, and to neurotypicals handsomeness indicates good breeding stock. Having studied copies of InStyle magazine for years, trying to understand the language of looks, Rachel remained unable to calibrate any rules of attractiveness. On the other hand, the man at the bar, who had had two drinks since he had arrived, kept two large rolls of money in his jacket pocket. Rachel took this to mean he was rich and could be a good provider to a child.

  The man looked at Rachel several times as she sat by her computer. She interpreted this as sexual interest and knew that it was her role to provide a countersignal, so she stood up and sauntered across the room in the manner of high-fashion models on TV.

  On meeting the man
— Luke — Rachel found him agreeable enough. Luke had a couple of drinks in him, so she knew he was more likely to laugh than if he was sober, and she hoped he wouldn’t laugh. She hated laughter. Laughter was like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence that reminded her she wasn’t human. And it was an awful sound, almost as annoying as crying babies.

  A TV commercial showed a reindeer, so Luke brought up the subject of reindeer and Rachel thought she handled it very well. Then came the subject of religion, and she thought she held her own there, too. There was a conversational lull after Luke said something about sparrows, during which Rachel looked around the bar.

  Luke then asked her what ideas she’d had that day, a question that seemed, even to Rachel, slightly out of the blue. Perhaps this was what she had read was called “foreplay.”

  “Is that a foreplay question, Luke?”

  Luke smiled and almost made a laughing noise, but pulled back, which came as a relief. “Nope. Not foreplay. Our church is losing younger members, so they give us brochures on how to connect with young men and women. This one brochure told me that women love being asked that question, but they never get asked it. So I asked it.”

  Rachel was unable to understand the veneer of emotion coating Luke’s voice. Bitterness? Decoding tone of voice was even harder for her than distinguishing one face from another. But she was almost paralyzed with pleasure at being called a woman, and the sensation made her rattle on more than she normally might as she answered his question. “I did have a new idea today. I was thinking about characters on science fiction TV shows who possess immortality, and how, when they’re shot, the bullet wound quickly heals and they come back to life. Or, if they lose a limb, it grows back. But what about when they get blown up? From the blown-up chunks there’s one piece that I suppose you would call the Master Chunk, which regenerates itself completely while the other body parts decompose. And then I got to thinking, what if an immortal character was blown up by an atomic bomb — which piece of the body would constitute the Master Chunk, and how would it reconstitute itself? And I figured that as long as one DNA molecule survived, then that’s what the character would need in order to reconstitute and make itself immortal. But also, Luke, from what I’ve read, from the way the universe is constructed, and from the way atoms are built, the creation of life is an inevitability; in fact, the universe seems to have been built to be one enormous life-generating machine. So, even if the immortal’s DNA was destroyed, its component atoms would still contain the inevitable destiny of forming a living being.”