Player One: What Is to Become of Us Page 4

  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 of 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 vers
ion 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.”

  Karen had hoped a cocktail lounge would disinhibit her, make her more truthful in a randy way. She hoped that openness would turn into intimacy, that truth would lead to closeness, but instead the cocktail lounge is making her crabby as her repressed ideas and thoughts percolate to the surface.

  Warren orders a second Scotch and watches a news clip about a small meteorite strike in Scotland. Karen thinks about Casey, age fifteen, walking into the kitch-en last month, saying, “On December 4, in the year 65,370,112, a meteorite will strike the earth and all life will be killed.” It makes Karen dizzy to think about the year 65,370,112, and yet that year will arrive as surely and relentlessly as the biweekly shopping flyers that clutter her front porch.

  Casey described the next Ice Age to Karen as having “ice so thick and heavy it will puncture the earth’s crust, generating molten blisters of nickel and bauxite and pitchblende. When that happens, the oceans will turn to steam. Life will end.” How did Casey wind up being such a morbid child? Karen will never forget the moment her body froze at the Loblaws butcher counter a year back when Casey, out of the blue, asked if she could buy a pint of blood. Karen, in a rare moment of motherly composure, asked Casey why she might need this, and Casey said she and two friends wanted to invent a ritual.

  “What kind of ritual?”

  “I dunno. Something spooky.”

  “You have to be careful with rituals, Casey.”

  “Thanks for the advice, Mom.”

  “No, seriously. Sometimes with rituals you can open doors that can never be closed again. Not just with Ouija boards. Any ritual.”

  “Huh?” For once, Karen had entered Casey’s world, and with bonus points for biting her tongue and not including the ritual of marriage along with the ritual use of Ouija boards.

  Now Karen finds herself draining her drink and wanting another. But Rick is in the back area of the bar, with his head inside an ice machine. Karen wishes he would come back and say something that would lighten the mood. And get her another drink. The next drink might help things heal. Karen thinks back to just before Kevin asked for the divorce, when she asked him why he drank so much. He said he was trying to forget something, but he didn’t know what it was. Kevin had been laid off and had entered a dark, scary brain-hole; he glumly forecasted a capitalist future in which all of humanity was in jail, and all people did was sit in their jail cells and shop online.

  The news shifts to a story about cancer. Karen uses this opportunity to tell Warren, “You know, you’ve had cancer countless times in your life, except your body got rid of the condition and you never even knew you had cancer. What we call ‘cancer’ is actually a term for the cancers that stick around.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Interesting, huh?” Karen knows her cancer fun-fact would probably have sounded much better if it was read off a screen inside an email; spoken in real life, it makes her sound like a church lady. Life is so often a question of tone: what you hear inside your head versus what people end up reading or hearing from your mouth. Karen also hates her tendency to turn into a Jeopardy! game when she’s nervous, and yet she begins prattling away: “And colds and flus are basically nature’s way of training your body to fight cancer. You know the old maxim, Never sick a day in their life, and then one day, pow! People prone to colds and flus live longer. It’s a fact.”

  Did I really just say, “It’s a fact”?

  Warren is quickly drifting away into TV land, and at that point it isn’t like Karen wants Warren to stick around — but if he’s going to be leaving, Karen wants the exit to be on her terms. She needs just that eensiest bit of control, so she can emerge emotionally intact from this random situation. She hammers the final nail into the coffin of her Internet date: “Warren, if you were a contestant on Jeopardy!, what would your six favourite categories be?”

  Under his breath, Warren mutters, “Jesus H. Christ. Are you a talker, or what?”

  Karen’s life may well not be a story. She knows this now. She knows that seeing your life as a story is probably just some corny residue left over from the era of Hollywood studios, and of a society full of newspapers and magazines kept robust through healthy advertising revenue, as well as middle-class book clubs in which overeducated people fake-read the second half of the book and pretend they know more about the evening’s wine than they actually do.

  Karen has noticed that young people no longer seem to care if their lives are stories. Not Casey, and not that little pervert on the flight earlier that afternoon. He’d probably no more view his life as a story than he would view his life as that of a sea cucumber. He and Casey inhabit a world of screen grabs, website hits, and precisely tabulated numbers of friends and enemies. Why, that little pervert on the plane would see Karen only as a hot mom who gave him a bit of sass. Karen knows that her photo is probably now on Facebook and she’s been labelled a cougar. And guaranteed, the kid on the plane would have no pity were he to see Karen in a cocktail lounge with a failed Internet hookup, the makeup in the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes by now crumbling like the pyramids, all illusions of youth vanishing. Where did the years go? When time is used up, does it go to some kind of place like a junkyard? Or down a river like the waters beneath Niagara Falls? Does time evaporate and turn into rain and start all over again?

  It feels odd for Karen to be a pers
on without a story, like so many other people out there now, left marooned at a certain age without a narrative engine to pull them through their days. In the old days, she could at least have adopted a role within the community: the divorcée cautionary tale; the tough old broad who . . . she doesn’t even know. The tough old broad who makes birdhouses out of licence plates? The tough old broad who fills X number of years until her death doing nothing of consequence until science, genetics, nutrition, and life decisions collectively fail and take her to the inevitable end?

  ___

  Karen sat on her bar stool, watching Warren, clad in his repeat-sex-offender eyewear, watching the bar’s TV. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. No, dear God, no, this can’t be happening. A part of Karen was suddenly disgusted by the part of her that was oddly turned on by the part of Warren’s personality that was actually kind of base and mean and sexy — the part of him that had charmed and seduced her into a cocktail lounge 2,500 kilometres away from home. Online he was such a charmer. Karen had thought he would touch her body gently and methodically — this body that needs some hands on it quickly — as though he were at the bank counting a stack of twenties.