Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures) Page 7
Suddenly there was a flash on the horizon, followed by a booming sound that raced through the truck’s cab like a banshee. Its four passengers looked up and saw a small mushroom cloud maybe five kilometres from the lounge.
Luke said, “Holy crap!”
Rachel instantly analyzed it: “It’s not nuclear. It’s chemical. Oil, most likely, given the black smoke at the bottom.”
Warren rushed out of the lounge and looked at the fireball. He looked around, saw his barmates in the truck, and shouted, “Holy crap!” Rachel wondered what it was about extreme disaster that made people invoke both religion and excrement — bookends to mark the polarities of the human condition?
Rick and Karen tried using their cellphones, without luck. Luke was entranced by the chemical cloud — he just kept looking at it, mesmerized, as if it were the face of God.
Warren started to head their way, but three steps from the lounge door his head jerked sideways, with what looked like an explosion of red feathers but was obviously, when Rachel thought about it for a millionth of a second, blood.
Because Rachel’s amygdala was still double-processing, this event, like everything else that had happened since the price of oil hit $250, occurred in slow motion.
A second pulse of blood shot from the centre of Warren’s chest, and even before he hit the ground, it was obvious that he was dead.
Time stopped. Karen screamed. The sun suddenly seemed a dozen times too bright. Rick swatted the cab’s passengers down with his arm: “Everyone, down!”
Rachel responded to the violence with the fugue state her brain often deployed when overwhelmed, a state that made the meaner boys in her class at school call out during fire alarms, “Rachel’s gone to her Happy Place.” Rachel thinks there’s a lot to be said for Happy Places, and if the bullies and teasers knew what the Happy Place was like, they’d not only leave her alone, they’d be begging her for directions. When Rachel goes to hers it’s like being in a noisy, crowded restaurant with music blaring, when suddenly the music is turned off and everybody leaves. There is calm. She can be objective. She can analyze. She feels free and powerful — it’s as if suddenly she’s been given the search result for every keyword ever put into Google. She comes away from her Happy Place calm and unworried, as if her brain has had a chicken white-meat sandwich and a glass of milk.
Sitting there in the truck with Rick, Karen, and Luke, Rachel was in her Happy Place, and she remembered something her mathematics teacher had once said to the class: “When you think about all the coincidences that might have happened but never did, then you begin to look at the universe in a different way. At any moment, trillions of sextillions of coincidences might have happened in your daily life, and yet, upon reflection, you realize that coincidences almost never occur. Coincidences are so rare as to be remarkable when they do occur. Coincidences are, in fact, so rare that it’s almost as if the universe is engineered solely to keep them at bay. So when a coincidence or something extraordinary occurs in your life, someone or something worked awfully damn hard to make it happen — which is why we must always pay attention to them.”
Rachel’s take on this is the opposite: she believes every moment of life is a coincidence. It’s all or nothing.
The teacher, however, also said, “The opposite of coincidence is entropy. Entropy is laziness. Entropy is energy being sucked away into nothingness. Entropy is the universe clocking fake hours on its time sheet. Entropy wants your car’s tires to go flat; it wants your cake to fall; it wants your software to crash. It wants bad things for you. So remember, stay halfway between coincidence and entropy and you’ll always be safe. Take my word for it, a day in which nothing bad happens is a miracle — it’s a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong failed to go wrong. A dull day is a triumph of the human spirit; boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.”
That was when Rachel left her Happy Place and looked over at Warren’s body. Karen was still screaming, but Luke kept her from leaving the truck. Rachel was trying to figure out if Warren’s shooting was a coincidence or if there was cause and effect between his death and the fireball five kilometres away. Terrorists? Oil depot screw-up? Anarchists?
Rick, meanwhile, continued to yell to everyone to lie as low as possible, out of view of snipers. He said, “I’ll start the truck and we’ll boot directly out of here.” But when he turned the key, the engine made a sickening I’m-not-going-to-start noise. “Oh God, Pam is right, I’m nothing but a goddam genetic dumpster. I do deserve everything that happens to me. I am a bad, bad person.” He paused. “Does anyone else here have a car?”
No one did.
“What did Warren drive?”
Karen, through tears, said, “A truck, I think.”
“What kind?”
“A truck truck. I don’t know. They’re all the same to me.” Karen’s voice had gone very high and pitchy.
Rachel said, “The only safe place to be is in the hotel. The lounge is too isolated. We have to run for cover.”
Rick said, “I agree.” The forcefulness of his words made Rachel wonder if Rick was an alpha male. Maybe he ought to be the one to father her first child. But there wouldn’t be any child unless they ran to safety. Crawling out the passengerside doors, the group of four readied themselves to sprint hotelwards. Rick said, “One, two, three . . . go!”
They sprinted past Warren’s corpse into the breezeway between the hotel and the lounge. They tried entering the main hotel building first, but on reaching its doors, they found them locked. They rattled the doors to little effect. They saw no people through the tinted glass.
Rick yelled, “Plan B — back into the lounge!”
Like flocking sparrows, they raced across the covered walkway to the lounge. Rick bolted the glass door and then he and Luke moved an ancient, dust-covered cigarette machine from a closet and pushed it in front of the door. On top of it they jammed a collection of folding tables and navy blue tablecloths. The door opened out, but anyone trying to get in would have a fairly substantial obstacle before him, and getting past it would slow down the intruder enough to give the group of four time to assume the best defensive positions.
Rachel peered into the closet where the cigarette machine had been stored. On the floor were spiders’ nests and a clump of business cards so old they lacked area codes in front of the phone numbers. Even amidst the confusion, this absence of area codes struck Rachel as remarkable. Sometimes the events that mark the change from one era to another are so slow that they are invisible while they happen. At other times, like now, eras change within the seconds it takes words to scroll across the bottom of a TV screen.
Player One
This is Player One here with your story upgrade. I know that you, as this story’s user, may be curious and wondering what are the next sequences to come, so I will not tease. What will happen next is that Karen’s head will continue to spin, and as with Rachel, Karen’s brain will make a duplicate copy of the afternoon’s events. She will remember a game she played as a child, called Pretend You’re Dead. She and her friends would run around, and someone would shout “Stop!” and they’d all drop to the ground. As quickly as possible, they had to shout out how they’d like to reincarnate, without overthinking their decisions. More often than not, they chose horses, cats, dogs, and colourful birds and insects. It will dawn on Karen, as she sits there behind the bar, in hiding from one or more snipers, that never once in all the times she played the game did anybody choose to come back as a human being. Good decision, she will think. We are a wretched species, indeed.
Rick will ask both himself and the cosmos, Why is it that the only way we ever seem to take steps forward in life is through pain? Why is exposure to pain supposed to make us better people? And the universe, like a cosmic high school principal speaking over a celestial PA system, will tell him, “Well, Richard, good things don’t change people, and what is the point of doing anything if you’re not going to change?”
So Luke will be sitting there in the bar wondering if the only reason time exists is so that emotions and dramas have an arena in which to play themselves out. What vanity to assume that an entire dimension exists solely to amuse human beings! Yet, to be practical, this theory would help explain the incredible advance planning and hard work the universe put into creating life — not just on earth but probably everywhere else, too — to allow emotions to rule the universe. Life can still have a purpose without God, he will think.
Oh! If only there were some way of leapfrogging dimensions so that I could take time and flatten it into a kind-of painting that made the past and the future instantly readable — how king-like that would be! But there’s always a catch, Luke will think. There’d always be some higher dimension that would prevent me from apprehending my own dimension fully. Nobody escapes. The only fact that makes our imprisonment within time bearable is that we’re all trapped inside the cosmic cocktail lounge together.
Rachel will make a timeline in her head of all of the events that have just occurred, and Rachel will do this because she’s good at sequencing — and that’s not just knowing pi to over a thousand digits. Sequencing events allows her to strip them of their ability to frighten her. Sequencing events makes them safer. Her grade ten English teacher once learned in the staff room of Rachel’s ability with pi and wondered if she could sequence other things as well — so he asked Rachel to write down everything that had happened in her day so far, a keyboarded list that clocked in at fifty-five minutes and just over seven thousand words.
“You should write stories,” he had suggested, but Rachel told him stories were pointless. “Things go from A to B to C,” she said. “Calling it a story changes nothing. It’s just a sequence. That’s all it is.”
“What about the emotions stories stir up?” he protested.
“Sequences don’t cause emotions.”
“But they help us understand the universe — our reason for living!”
“3.1415926535897932384626433 . . .”
Rachel couldn’t read his facial expression, but she did hear him sigh as he walked away to leave her in peace. And as she catches a final glimpse of Warren’s corpse through a gap between the ancient cigarettemachine and the doorframe, Rachel will resume a mantra she hasn’t used in years, the mantra that goes 3.1415926535897932384626433 . . . And then, while mentally cycling through pi, she will look up at the ceiling, notice a ventilation shaft entrance, and then say to Rick, “Does that panel connect to a ventilation system that leads up to the roof?”
Rick will look up at a rectangular slot covered with a grille. “Yes,” he will say, “it does.”
HOUR THREE
GOD'S LITTLE DUMPSTERS
Karen
Karen and her three barmates are standing inside the door to the cocktail lounge, as a quartet, panting like dogs.
Luke asks, “How many other entrances are there into this place?”
“Just the rear delivery door,” Rick says.
“Come on.”
The two men race towards the rear door, with Rick hopping the bar to retrieve a shotgun from beneath the cash register.
Karen’s brain’s amygdala, like Rachel’s, fortified by adrenaline, is now kicking in and is making a dual recording of current events — life now feels like it’s happening in slow motion for genuine biological reasons.
Her BlackBerry rings — the outside world! It’s Casey. “Mom?”
“Casey.” Karen knows to downplay her situation. “Sweetie, are you okay?”
“I’m with Misha. We’re outside the Husky station down at the crossroads. It’s been one great big hockey riot for the past half-hour. There’s no gas left. Everyone’s going apeshit. I’ve been taking pictures.”
“You’re okay?”
“Of course I’m okay. I’ll send you some photos after this. How did it go with Mr. Right?”
“It didn’t work out too well. Casey . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I want you to go home. Okay, sweetie?”
“No way. There’s too much action going on. It’s crazy everywhere. It’s kind of awesome.”
“Casey, I don’t care how awesome it is. I want you to go home, and once you get home I want you to phone the police and tell them to come immediately to the hotel lounge I’m at right now.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Don’t worry about me, Casey. Just do as I say. The phones aren’t working properly here. I don’t know how your call made it through. Go home. Call the police. Tell them to come here.”
“Wait, Mom — aren’t you flying back today?”
“I doubt it. I’m at the Airport Camelot Hotel.”
“Mom, you’re scaring me. Something’s really wrong there. I can tell!”
“Don’t be scared. But go home. Call the police.”
“Mom?”
The phone dies and Karen stares at the garnish caddy filled with pineapple chunks, orange slices, and maraschino cherries. She remembers her college job waitressing. The bar’s owner, Gordy, had told her that garnishes are the lungs of a restaurant, sucking up all the impurities and crap in the air and leaving the room fresher for everybody. “Karen, garnishes are God’s little Dumpsters,” Gordy had said. “So use the goddam cling wrap on them now.” And that was how Karen became addicted to cling wrap, and that’s why she finds herself cling-wrapping slightly dried-out beverage garnishes while thinking about riots, looting, no cars, no planes, and no food. She catches sight of herself in the mirror behind the liquor bottles. Her hair is a mess, as if she’s groomed herself using only moistened fingertips. How rare it is that we catch glimpses of ourselves in mirrors — usually in public spaces — and see ourselves as strangers see us. Beneath the mirror sits a jar of beef jerky that looks like strips of sun-dried hobo. How can men eat that stuff?
From the computer across the room, Rachel says, “Oil is now technically $900 a barrel. But in reality, it’s no longer for sale. And . . . and now my Internet connection has failed.”
Karen yells, “Try the TV.”
The beautiful but spooky Rachel goes to fiddle with the TV controls. Karen hears the two men dragging something heavy to block the rear door.
Karen says, “I’m going to make an inventory of all the food in this place.”
Rachel, in her toneless white-mouse-breeding voice, replies, “Yes, a caloric assessment of our environment is a good idea.”
A brief investigation reveals that the bar has no kitchen and that their larder consists of fruit wedges, beef jerky, and ten kilos of Cajun-flavoured bar snacks containing blanched peanuts, pretzels, sesame sticks, toasted corn, pepitas, chili bits, and soy nuts, or, as Karen views it with her new survivalist mindset, Legumes, grains, seeds, and pods — ideal for life during wartime.
She discovers a stack of new airtight Rubbermaid containers and begins distributing the food into them. She finds this task oddly soothing. It occurs to her that when you have one specific task at hand, the whole world looks completely different — more focused, somehow. Rinsing out a bowl, she thinks, Most of us have only a dozen or so genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler. Right now, she thinks, life feels like one of those real patches, with no additives or fillers or starch. My universe has become huge! The world is full of wonder and fear, and my life is a strand of magic moments strung together, a succession of mysteries revealed. She feels as if she is in a trance.
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Karen remembers another moment in her life that felt as big: when her husband proposed to her, saying: “A ring is a halo for your finger. From now on, we no longer cast two shadows, we cast one. You stole my loneliness. I don’t want to lose you.” While emptying out the bar-mix dregs from a white bulk bin, Karen reflects that falling out of love can happen as quickly as falling in, and that falling out of love is just as surely one of life’s big moments.
Worry kicks in: Will Casey go home? Will she reach the police? And if she does, are there enough police near the airport to provide safety to a world coping with no oil?
There’s a cracking noise outside the glass door. Karen and Rachel look up, then freeze. Jesus Christ, the sniper’s outside. Karen walks to the door as though approaching, say, Madonna, at a restaurant — the reward might be great, or it could be a possibly fatal slap in the face. She peers over the cigarette machine through a slot in some smushed-up tablecloths and sees an old red car from the 1980s zoom past through the narrow walkway, barely missing Warren — poor, doomed Warren, marinating in a pool of his own blood on the other side of the barricaded glass door. Warren, part of a now long-gone world once fuelled by oil. Sure, Warren looked like the kind of guy who spent weekends with a metal detector, combing beaches for lost wedding rings, but he didn’t deserve — wait! She emerges from her trance for a moment. Somewhere outside is a freaking sniper! She backs up quickly and looks at Rachel; the TV screen is out of view. She says, “Just a car going past. No idea who it was.”
“Can you see any activity in the hotel?”
“Nothing.”
Karen returns to her spot by the bar and chews on an orange slice. Okay, Karen, very well. Your old life is gone now — no more sitting at the waiting room desk, watching destabilized souls come and go while you sit in an Aeron chair pushing electrons around with a stick. Your new life, barely ten minutes old, is dreamlike yet more real than real — like the vivid dreams you have in the morning just before waking up, the brain’s richest sleep cycle. No more eight-hour days breathing office air that smells like five hundred sheets of twenty-pound bond paper roasting at a low temperature in a nearby oven. No more afternoons in which time feels stillborn. Work was never meant to be a person’s whole life, so why do so many of us believe it is?