Player One Read online

  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  So now Rachel is in a hotel cocktail lounge, using an out-of-date computer infected with multiple viruses that, when activated, trigger the noisy onscreen arrival of a Las Vegas slot machine depicting human vaginas that click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.”

  Luke looked at her. “Your thinking is way out there, lady.”

  “My doctor tells me I have multiple structural anomalies in my limbic system that affect my personality.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “But what we call ‘personality’ is actually the result of a multifactorial gene process. A structural anomaly in my limbic system alone wouldn’t account for the entirety of my personality.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t.”

  “I also have prosopagnosia, which is an inability to tell faces apart, which, by association, also means I have trouble finding things inside other things, like finding faces or animal shapes in clouds.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I also lack subjective qualities like humour and irony and . . .” Rachel then remembered from her normalcy training that people prefer it when you ask them a question after they’ve asked one of you — and besides, a list of her brain anomalies could take a good fifteen minutes to properly index, so she stopped discussing herself and asked Luke, “Have you had any ideas today, Luke?”

  “Yes, I have. To fill the belief vacuum left by my lack of faith, I’ve decided that all I want from life is for people to like me or envy me — to either be my friend or wish they were me because I have a really cool life. But I’ve spent my life trying to get people to like me, and I’m not sure anyone does, and in any event, all it got me was nowhere. And I don’t have anything in my life anyone could envy, so what’s the point o
f either of those two wishes?”

  Rachel stared at Luke. She was pretty sure now that it was bitterness she heard in his tone. She decided to return to her core mission of finding a desirable father for a child and said, “I see you’re carrying large quantities of money. Is that something you do all the time?”

  Luke spat out the ice cube he was bouncing about inside his mouth. “I stole it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup. I looted my church’s construction fund.”

  “Oh,” said Rachel. “Does that mean you’re rich now?”

  Player One

  Cocktails and laughter — but what will come after? Humans have souls and machines have ghosts. Me — Player One — I’m actually more of a ghost than a soul, but it remains to be seen when I got here and how it happened.

  At the moment, what matters most is that we learn what happens next in this story. What will happen next is that Rick will mix Karen her Singapore sling, and she will begin to drink it. Rick, forty-five dollars richer, will think about Leslie Freemont’s Power Dynamics booklet: “Every second of our life we’re reaching goals of some sort. Every single second of our lives we’re crossing a finish line of some sort, with heaven’s roaring cheers surrounding us as we win our way forward. In our smallest acts — crossing a street, peeling an apple, looking at our watch — it is as though we are accepting an Olympic ribbon to thunderous applause. The universe wants us to win. The universe makes sure we’re winning, even when we lose.” And then Rick will see a non-descript man wearing creepy sunglasses walk into the bar, saunter up to Karen, put his hand on her thigh, and say, “Hey there, Sunshine, I’m Warren.”

  Across the bar, Luke will visit the men’s room and Rachel’s mind will drift away. She will be thinking about the countless planets around the universe where life has, in all likelihood, formed. These life forms are probably carbon-based, but who knows? And chances are those other life forms won’t look like humans. Absolutely not. The second-smartest animal on Earth is the New Caledonian crow. If those crows had longer lifespans and hands like Donald Duck, humans would have been obliterated eons ago. But if two equally smart species can coexist on the same planet, just imagine what other planets might have produced. There might even be entire planets that exist as one organism, like Tele-tubbies suns — or endless seas of prairie grass that together create one being. And of course, inevitably some of these life forms will have achieved sentience. Self-awareness. And Rachel will wonder if she’d be happier with these other life forms than she is with human beings. She will mention this idea to Luke, back from the men’s room, and Luke will say, “Fine, fine, fine. But what I want to know is, do these aliens have an equivalent of free will? Do they perceive time differently? And most of all, what do they do for money?”

  And there will then be big news from the TV set. And then Leslie Freemont will arrive. A photo will be taken. And then later, there will be rifle shots. And that is when there will be blood.

  HOUR TWO

  THE BEST OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE

  Karen

  Karen’s Internet date is lurching sideways quickly and catastrophically. She’s frozen by the discrepancy between Warren’s two Internet JPEGs (slightly game-show hosty, with a whiff of Old Spice) and his actual appearance (bantam roostery, with a pair of aviator glasses that make him resemble a repeat sex offender). And then there is the instant overfamiliarity when Warren places his slightly moist hand on her thigh, followed by another overfamiliarity of, “Hey there, Sunshine, I’m Warren.” Warren — her highly anticipated date — is wearing the bland politician’s smile of someone who knows that the bodies in the car trunk are, indeed, dead. Karen tries painting a happy face on this encounter, but almost against her will she is becoming a disembodied spectre floating above the meat version of herself, watching Warren order a Scotch and soda, then comment to her, “Quite the cocktail bar, huh? Everyone here looks like they’re about to enter a witness relocation program.” To this, Karen says (with a preachy tone in her voice that she has never liked in herself and that comes from nowhere), “Oh, please. Everyone knows the witness relocation program is a hoax.”

  “A hoax? How?”

  “The FBI simply shoots the person and buries the body. If it’s a family, then they shoot the family and bury the bodies. The fact that you never hear from them again perversely proves the success of the program.”

  Warren says, “I like that. I like you.”

  At least Karen has no worries that Warren has overriding psych issues. She’s seen enough patients go through her office to diagnose many of them simply by the way they react when she hands them a pen to fill out forms: paranoids jump; depressives stare at the pen; people off their meds begin free-association diatribes on ink. If people simply take the pen and use it, Karen knows they’re probably going to make only a single visit. Warren’s personality may be iffy, but there is no pathology in practice. She then, perversely, begins to wonder whether she is out of Warren’s league or if he is out of hers. She wonders if Warren looks like the sort of man who would borrow your car and return it to you with several dents and no explanation — and on its seats would be a stain all the club soda on earth would be useless against. Karen has the woozy, regretfully sick morning-after sensation she has when she’s been eBaying while drunk the night before. What have I done, flying halfway across a continental land mass to meet a man I’ve known only electronically for two weeks, and only visually from two brazenly fraudulent JPEGs?

  Karen attempts humour: “Looks like we’ve hit the awkward patch pretty quickly.”

  Warren says, “The awkward patch usually happens a bit later,” then catches himself, saying, “It’s not like this is something I do all the time.”

  “How many times have you done this?”

  Warren’s pupils clench like sphincters. “I’m just messing with you, Sunshine.”

  Sunshine? Where is that coming from?

  The bar’s TV set displays South Carolina religious extremists protesting Halloween. Karen has the oddest feeling that, in dressing up to meet Warren, she’s actually wearing the Halloween costume version of herself. She thinks of what a strange prospect it would be to throw a party themed “Come as the Halloween Costume Version of Yourself.” She runs this idea past Warren, whose neck stiffens a bit, a reaction that informs Karen that he doesn’t much enjoy abstract discussions.

  “How do you mean, come as the Halloween version of myself?”

  “I guess it would be dressing up like a highly amplified version of yourself.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Well, you look at your wardrobe and your hair and you exaggerate everything and — I guess it’d be dressing like a caricature of yourself. Like those unflattering political puppets on that English TV show.” She pauses. “Forget it.” Warren’s Scotch arrives, and she says, “I think if people had real courage, they’d wear their Halloween costume every day of the year. At the very least, you’d make a lot more friends a lot more quickly. Like, ‘Hey, I like togas, too!’ Or, ‘ Star Trek? I’m in.’ Your costume would be a means of filtering down to the people you’d probably like the most.”

  Warren holds up his glass, forestalling further discussion, then says with a lewd smirk, “To us.”

  To us? Uh-oh.

  Warren is mentally bedding Karen, and while almost everyone wants to be thought of as sexy, Karen realizes that the empowered sexiness she felt on the plane was merely a manifestation
of her new role as loser bait. She looks at Rick, now speaking with the desperate-looking trainwreck a few stools over. Suddenly, Rick’s attractiveness has risen considerably; she feels embarrassed being with Warren, as though she had accidentally sat at the wrong lunch table in high school.

  Warren asks, “How was your flight?”

  “Fine. Lovely. Thanks.”

  The two begin reading the news crawl on the TV screen. Karen realizes that the encounter isn’t going to be a story with a happy ending or even an unhappy ending. It’s simply going to be one more event in her life that becomes a dot on a wall that won’t connect with any other dots to form a line with any beauty or meaning. She feels like she’s in a Discovery Channel clip showing wildebeests at a watering hole. The voice-over is telling viewers that wildebeests’ lives don’t have to be stories, the way people’s lives do. Wildebeests only have to exist, lucky things, and they’ve done a good job of being alive on earth — as does pretty much everything on the planet save for human beings.

  On the TV screen are three people in a flooded Midwest town, sitting on their roof having a barbecue and smiling as they wave to passing news copters. Karen feels a wash of jealousy: change entered the lives of these people unbidden. Change never happens in her own life, and while she’d gladly change her life herself, she has no idea in what way to change it. She feels like a taxidermied version of herself. How quickly time passes, and how your mistakes add up one day to something less than what you wanted.

  “Warren, does your life ever feel like a story?”

  Warren’s body freezes. “A story? No. Yes. I don’t know. I think so. Why?”

  “Why? Because I think the story part of my life is over.”