Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures) Page 8

  Karen imagines the Safeway back home — probably already completely looted. And Casey? She’d be fine. And maybe the airport would open again soon. It had to. It might take a week, like after 9/11, but she would get home. She once heard that the best thing for the planet would be for everyone to stay in one place for five years: no more transience, no more geographical cures, no more petro-holidays. just a simple commitment to one spot.

  Luke and Rick return from the back. “No one’s getting in through that door,” Rick says. “Not without a tank.” He calls to Rachel. “Any news?”

  “My guess is that oil is currently unavailable at any price. And I can’t get the TV to work.”

  The men stand on either side of the front door, looking for any action outside. “Nothing,” Luke says. “Just Warren.”

  Rick peeks out and says, “Hey, I see a jet that just took off — a jumbo. It’s . . . Air France.”

  Rachel says, “I’m guessing it’s that plane’s last flight. It has to get home to its native hangar.”

  The men head to the bar, where Karen, in Mom-mode despite the seeming apocalypse, is pouring a bowl of bar mix for them. She asks Rick, “What’s your guess — a solo sniper or one gun among many?”

  “No idea,” Rick says. “I’m trying to figure out in my head what direction the shots came from. As far as I can tell, right above us.”

  “Hey!” Luke interrupts. “Does that phone work?”

  Everyone makes the connection at once: a landline. Karen reaches for it, hears a dial tone, and dials 911. The sound from the receiver is loud. The phone clicks, dials, clicks again, and then plays, of all things, an automated hurricane warning. “No surprise there. Any of you have kids?”

  Rick says, “A boy. Tyler. School’s out for the day. He may be home now.” He pauses.

  “Okay,” Karen says, “while we try to figure out some other way of getting help, I’m having a drink. Who else wants one?”

  ___

  The quartet sat on the floor behind the bar with their drinks, positioned halfway between the exits — the safest location, given all options. There was some discussion about the chaos that would surely ensue in the outside world, echoes of the 1973 oil shock but infinitely worse: the only gas people were going to get was whatever they still had in their tanks, maybe enough to get to work a few more times — except work was probably gone now too. Kill your neighbour for a tank? Why not? Will the military help out? Oh, please. Karen remembered a few months back seeing a truck that looked military, but she wasn’t sure if it was real or from a film shoot.

  Society was frozen, with no means of thawing out. No more cheap, easy food, no more travel, and, most likely, no more middle class.

  Karen got a sad vibe from Luke as he thought about society’s cookie crumbling; from Rachel, she perceived no emotion.

  There was a silent patch, then Rachel said, “Growing up, I had to take courses on how to live with normal people.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Karen, curious to finally learn something about the woman in the $3,000 Chanel dress, or a very good copy of one.

  “How to interpret the noises you make and the things you do. Like laughing. Medically, clinically, I have no sense of humour. A lesion in my brain’s right hemisphere creates tone-blindness that hinders my ability to appreciate what you call humour, irony, passion, and God. Another right-hemisphere lesion strips my speech of inflection and tone. People say I sound like a robot. I can’t tell. And finally, I have autism-related facial recognition blindness syndrome. Which is all to say that when people make the laughing noise, I have to talk myself out of being frightened.”

  “Is there a name for your condition?”

  “I have several. I have autistic spectrum disorder. I have problems with inhibition and disinhibition, as well as mild OCD. My sequencing abilities are in the top half percentile. I know pi to just over one thousand digits.”

  “I’ve seen a few people with that come through the office I work in — used to work in. So you can’t tell faces apart?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell if loud people are angry or happy?”

  “A little bit. But in normalcy training I learned a set of questions one can ask to neutralize emotionally extreme situations, such as right now.”

  “Like what?”

  “For example, you can always ask neurotypical people what their job is, and what they’ve learned through their jobs. And, as I believe we need a distraction here, I’m going to initiate this procedure. Luke, you have a wad of cash in your pocket and recently lost your religious faith. Can you tell us more about what you do?”

  Luke waited for Karen to hand him his drink before saying, “Up until this morning I was a pastor in a nice little church beside a freeway off-ramp up in Nippissing. But yesterday I lost my faith, and this morning I stole the church’s entire renovation fund, jumped on a plane, and came here.”

  “Seriously?” asked Rick.

  “Yup. Twenty grand.” Luke sipped his Scotch.

  “So,” said Rachel, “technically you’re unemployed?”

  “Yup.”

  “Can you tell us anything you’ve learned about people from your job as a small-town pastor?”

  A funny expression crossed Luke’s face — a combination of amusement and relief. “It seems like I’ve been waiting over a decade for someone to ask me that very question.” Luke paused for a moment, as if ordering his thoughts, then said, “Here goes. To start with, if you’re at work and someone’s bothering you, ask him or her to make a donation to a charity. Keep a charity can and donation envelopes in your desk. They’ll never bug you again. It works.”

  “What else?”

  “What else? Okay, chances are you feel superior to almost everyone you work with — but they probably feel the same way about you. Also, more men than you might think beat their wives with full plastic bottles of fabric softener.” Luke stared at the ceiling as he continued his litany. “Relentlessly perky women often have deeply rooted fertility issues. Also, for the first time in history, thanks to the Internet, straight people are having way more sex than gay people. And I think I can easily generalize and say that too much free time is a monkey’s paw in disguise. Humans weren’t built to handle a structureless life.”

  Rachel asked, “What else?”

  “What else . . . Here’s one: by the age of twenty, you know you’re not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you’re not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in — you wonder if you’re ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate.”

  Luke paused and rubbed a finger around the rim of his glass. “You know, in the end I just got so darned tired of hearing about the same old seven sins over and over again. You might think it would be interesting, but it’s not. Would someone please invent an eighth sin to keep things lively?”

  Karen resisted her impulse to interrupt.

  Luke continued, “I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years . . . what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story’s pretty much over.”

  Luke polished off his drink. “You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn’t care. I guess that’s what’s scariest: not caring about the loss.”

  Rachel said, “So you feel sad for, and frightened by, yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a silence, then Rachel asked, “Rick, what have you learned from your job?”

  “I’ve learned that I’m often my own worst e
nemy. I’ve learned that I’d rather be in pain than be wrong. I’ve learned that sometimes failure isn’t an opportunity in disguise: it’s just me. I’ve learned that I’ll never be rich, because I don’t like rich people. I’ve learned that you can be a total shithead, and yet your soul will still want to hang out with you. Souls ought to have some kind of legal right to bail once you cross certain behaviour thresholds.”

  “Anything else you’ve learned from work specifically?” asks Rachel.

  “I won’t go too much into my work history, except to say that I was actually making an okay go of my gardening business until someone who doesn’t deserve their soul swiped my truck and all my equipment, and that’s how I ended up working in this bar, hearing the same things you heard from your parishioners, Luke — except I probably get the opposite end of the bullshit spectrum: the wishful thinking and the grandiosity people launch into by beer number three. Do people — did people — ever tell you the good stuff? Or did they just dump on you with all their crap and baggage?”

  “Just the crap. I think maybe I should have been a bartender.”

  “You’re missing nothing. Aim low, brother. Sell roadside corn. There’s a lot to be said for having a small, manageable dream.” Rick looked at Karen. “What about you?”

  “Me? I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t learn much. I work as a receptionist for three psychiatrists. I see a lot of crazy. But I think crazy people — okay, not crazy, but people at the extremes of normal behaviour — are more interesting than so-called normal people. I’ve learned that one of the biggest indicators for success in life is having a few crazy relatives. So long as you get only some of the crazy genes, you don’t end up crazy; you merely end up different. And it’s that difference that gives you an edge, that makes you successful.”

  “I’ve never thought of it that way,” said Luke.

  “I’ve also learned that if you’re on meds, it’s much better to stick to them. I mean, would you rather jump off a bridge because you couldn’t be bothered to take one lousy pill? Also, when agitated patients come in, I tell them some kind of story about my cat, Rusty. Listening to people tell stories is very soothing. When someone is telling you a story, they hijack the personal narrator that lives inside your head. It’s the closest we come to seeing through someone else’s eyes.”

  Rick

  In his early twenties, Rick worked at a Texaco gas station, and when he was pumping gas, he liked to watch the numbers rev higher and higher on the pumps. He pretended these speedily increasing numbers didn’t represent money at all; rather, one penny equalled one year. He watched Western history begin at Year Zero-Zero-Zero-One and clip upwards and upwards: the Dark Ages . . . the Renaissance . . . 1776 . . . railways . . . the Panama Canal . . . the Great Depression . . . World War II . . . suburbia . . . JFK . . . Vietnam . . . disco . . . Mount St. Helens . . . 1984 . . . grunge . . . until, WHAM!, he’d hit the wall of the present with the death of Kurt Cobain. Whenever Rick did this mental exercise, there was a magic little piece of time a few numbers past $19.94 when he felt as if he were in the future.

  And that’s how he feels standing inside the lounge after barricading the front door against the outside world. Except now there’s no other time stream to slip back into; he’s now living in the future 24/7. He rubs a cut on his left index finger, incurred while moving the ancient cigarette machine, its faded, yellowing image of Niagara Falls making it look older than a relic from King Tut’s tomb. He already knows he’s going to miss the past a lot. He hops the bar and scoops up the Winchester Model 12 shotgun stashed beneath the cash register, then follows Luke to the rear exit, where he and Luke use a dolly to jimmy the hulking ice machine in front of the locked door.

  Rick doesn’t know what to make of the trio he’s been billeted with by the gods. As far as he can see, Luke is a disastrous drunk and possibly a scammer, Karen is a soccer mom going wrong, and Rachel is from another planet. But he doesn’t spend too much time thinking about them. He’s busy scanning the back area, looking for something, anything, he could use to kill a human being. But there’s precious little to weaponize, save for broken bottles and some cutlery. Thankfully, he has the shotgun his ex told him he was crazy to keep on the premises. She’d stopped by with Tyler a year or so ago, taken a look around the place, and said it was like a crack den without the crack. “And what’s with the stretch-waist rugby pants you’re wearing, Rick? Jesus, you look like a 1982 liquor store clerk with herpes.” Tyler was cleaning out the dish of bar mix, and Pam slapped his fingers away, saying, “Jesus, Tyler, they’ll put anything in that stuff.” She looked at Rick. “So let me get this straight — you want to keep a shotgun around so you can shoot somebody over something stupid like a hundred bucks from the till?”

  Who’s got the last laugh now?

  Rick thinks, Right now is the end of some aspect of my life, but it’s also a beginning — the beginning of some unknown secret that will reveal itself to me soon.

  Rick thinks, Nothing very, very good and nothing very, very bad ever lasts for very, very long.

  Rick thinks, My head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and this churning and no real sense of where the earth ends and the heavens begin.

  Rick wants a drink.

  Rick wants a great big crowbar to crack him open so he can take whatever creature is sitting inside him and shake it clean like a rug, then rinse it in a cold, clear lake, and then put it under the sun to heal and dry and grow and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.

  And then suddenly he’s sitting with three semi-strangers on the ceramic tiles behind the bar, getting at least one of his wishes granted: a double vodka and soda with a lemon twist. Guilt be damned! Rick knows that alcohol will initially enhance his experience of events as they take place, even though in the end it will scramble his recall of the present tense, like sprinkling MSG into the soup tureen of his consciousness and waiting for the time headache to begin.

  The group has been discussing what they’ve learned from their jobs — not something Rick might expect in a situation like this, but the unexpectedness of the topic feels intense and correct. Karen has just finished and it’s Rachel’s turn, but before she begins she asks, “Rick, what is the killing capacity of your shotgun?”

  “This puppy? Five shots in the chamber, double-ought buck — pretty much all you need for human beings.”

  “Are you skilled at using it?”

  “I am.” Rick thinks, This robot woman is hot.

  But robot woman has Rick nailed. “That’s good, Rick. Please, may I ask you to limit the number of cocktails you drink over the next few hours? Marksmanship may become a life-or-death skill the four of us will require.”

  Rachel then starts to tell them what she has learned from her job breeding white mice. “To begin with, I suggest raising as few male mice as possible, as they secrete a glandular odour that is hard to get used to, even after months of daily exposure.”

  Oh dear God, Rick thinks. I suppose white mice have to come from somewhere. Costa Rica? West Virginia? But from Rachel’s garage? That’s a lot to absorb. And how did she know about me and my booze jones? Forget about it. What else can I use in this heinous dump to kill people? Rick scours the bar area, looking for items he can weaponize: an unopened Coca-Cola syrup canister heated on the coffee burner until hot and then shot with the Model 12 would make an excellent bomb; any pen or pencil can be rammed into the jugular à la Joe Pesci; a sniper’s head could be wrapped in a white tablecloth and then pushed underwater in a grey plastic busing tray.

  Rachel is still talking about white mice. Rick realizes he is a little bit drunk after blowing fourteen months of sobriety. Rachel says it is fairly easy to assess a mouse’s needs, and Rick finds himself saying, “I agree.” The others stare at him, and he continues, “But people are different from mice. Never let anyone assess what you want or need out of life. You might as well send them engraved invitations saying, ‘Hi, this is what I want you to p
revent me from having.’ Life always kills you in the end, but first it stops you from getting what you want. I’m so tired of never getting what I want. Or of getting it with a monkey’s-paw curse attached.”

  If being interrupted annoys Rachel, her face shows no sign of it.

  “I’m not bitter,” Rick adds. “But what if I was? At least you’d know where I stand.”

  Somewhere in the distance something explodes. The conversation stops and everyone cocks their ears.

  Luke looks at Rick and says, “The heart of a man is like deep water.”

  “I’m no better than my father,” Rick says. “He’s in Saskatchewan. His liver has gone all marshmallowy. He should have been dead ten years ago. But instead he started taking 2,000 IUs of vitamin D a day, so now he’s got an immune system like a pit bull’s rubber chew toy.”

  “My father is an alcoholic,” Rachel says. “And he doesn’t think I’m a true human being, so I’m going to surprise him by reproducing. Then he can’t say I’m not human anymore.”

  The group stares at her. To Rick she says, “Please don’t drink anything more today. For my sake.”

  Rick looks at Rachel, thinks it over, then puts down his drink. He never realized it could be this easy.

  ___

  There was another explosion, closer this time. “It’s not just that there’s no jet noise,” Luke said. “There are no sirens either. It’s as if it’s not just cars and planes and helicopters that have stopped — it’s like time has stopped.”

  Karen said, “You’d think by now there’d be a SWAT team here. Not to mention the Navy SEALs, James Bond, and Charlie’s Angels.”