Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures) Page 9

  Rachel was looking at Rick with an intensity he found sexy and hadn’t thought she was capable of. Rick, meanwhile, had toppled the first domino in the cascade of falling in love. He had once seen a TV game show that asked how many times the average person falls in love. The answer was six. Since then, Rick had come to believe that people are able to fall in love only six times in their life. According to this rule, Rick was left with just one more love — he’d burnt through five already, three of them before he turned twenty-two — and now here was the moment when the hammer strikes the anvil and the chain is forged and the love grows strong, becomes real, becomes permanent. Rick wanted to fall in love again — even more than he wanted to reinvent himself via the Power Dynamics Seminar System — but what if this last love didn’t work out? Then he’d be lonely for the rest of his life, or worse, he’d have to find some newer, more extreme experience than love, whatever that might be. Nevertheless, sitting there on the ceramic floor, he wondered, Does Rachel feel anything for me? How can I make her feel something for me, this woman who has no anatomical capacity to experience emotion? I bet I could get through to her. I bet I could make her understand what it means to be in love. “Rachel, can I get you a drink?”

  “Please. A ginger ale.”

  “Coming right up.”

  Karen said, “Guys, what exactly are we going to do here? Just wait? For what — to get shot, like Warren?”

  Luke said, “I think maybe that’s all we can do.” He had found the banker’s box that served as the bar’s lost and found. There were three cellphones in it. He tried all three for dial tones and got one. “Rick, buddy, you take it. Call your kid.”

  Rick handed Rachel her ginger ale and took the phone from Luke. But before he could dial, Karen’s phone rang. “Casey?”

  “Mom, they set fire to the outlet mall! You can probably see the smoke from outer space. It’s anarchy here.”

  “Casey, are you at home now?”

  “I am. But I wish I was out there, looking at all the craziness.”

  “Did you get through to the police?”

  “I’m trying. The phones are all screwed.”

  “Casey, stay home. I don’t want you going anywhere. Can you get hold of your father?”

  “I can’t get through to him.”

  The connection died.

  Rick tried to reach his son but couldn’t get a dial tone on either Karen’s BlackBerry or the phone from the lost and found. The four sat in silence.

  Luke

  Three years ago, Luke’s father’s early-onset Alzheimer’s became so relentless that he could no longer live at home — his unforgiving father, who had once said to Luke while they were walking along a beach, “I don’t cast a shadow, son, I cast light”; his firm, unforgiving father, Caleb, who had once told Luke that the opposite of labour is not leisure but theft.

  Caleb had always treated Luke as if there was no doubt he would follow in his footsteps, yet at the same time Caleb made it consistently clear that Luke would never be as spiritual as himself. Like most father/son ego battles, the going could be both nasty and pathetic. Several times Caleb entered Luke’s bedroom when Luke was nine and caught him playing with plastic soldiers. He fetched the cordless phone, brought it into the bedroom, sat down on the bed, and said, “Fine, have your soldiers kill each other, but every time one of them dies, I am going to sit here and telephone his mother.”

  “Father, they’re plastic soldiers.”

  “To you, but not to the better part of you.”

  “Okay. Call their mothers.”

  “Okay, I will. That one toppled over there . . .” Luke’s father dialled seven numbers, and even though Luke could hear a busy signal, his father said, “Hello, Mrs. Miller. This is Pastor French calling. I’m afraid I have terrible news for you, Mrs. Miller: your son is dead. No, there’s no mistake. He was shot today in a battle. What battle? I don’t know. You’d have to speak to the person I once thought was my son to find out what sort of battle. I’m sorry, Mrs. Miller. Mrs. Miller, stop your screaming and crying. Yes, I’m absolutely sure he’s dead. Yes. And my son is the killer.”

  The battle never did end, not until the Alzheimer’s struck, and struck swiftly. Luke’s overwhelmed mother managed to locate a care facility on the west coast that specialized in patients whose lives had been spent in the ministry. She’d been driving Caleb across the country when an avalanche from a British Columbia mountainside swallowed their car and a dozen others, covering them with so much rock and soil that excavation was impossible. Since then, Luke has had to live with the knowledge that those meat-covered skeletons resting inside their Volkswagens or Cutlasses or camper vans are still there, and will still be there, exactly where they are right now, trapped forever inside the mountain, until the sun goes supernova in a billion years or so. Those bodies bind us to the future. They’re time-frozen. Tomorrow = yesterday = today = the same thing, always.

  And their entombment is different from being buried in a graveyard. Six feet of dirt is nothing. In a hundred years, raiding the graves of our current era will be an excellent source of income for the unscrupulous. But to be inside a mountain — that messes with Luke’s mind. When does time end? When do people end? On his flight into Toronto this morning, Luke thought about time and evolution. Let’s think long term, Luke. What are we evolving towards? Do we just go along, day by day, drinking coffee, building golf courses, making photocopies, and having wars until we all mutate and turn into a new species? How long are we supposed to keep on doing all this stuff we do? If we don’t mutate quickly, in ten thousand years we’re merely going to be the same humans we are now, except we’ll have run out of resources. Will the planet’s population ever decrease? It will have to, if not simply because our sun will go supernova. So where, between now and the sun going supernova in a billion years, does society end? When do people end? When does the population start to shrink? It’s a mathematical certainty. So then when? When? When?

  Even with his faith recently nullified, Luke believes in sin. He believes that what separates humanity from everything else in this world — spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss, and Mount McKinley — is that humanity alone has the capacity, at any given moment, to commit all possible sins. Even those of us who try to live a good and true life remain as far away from grace as the Hillside Strangler or any demon who ever tried to poison the village well.

  In Luke’s eyes, sin defines our lives in ways both pathetic and monstrous. And Luke knows that monsters exist: entities with human forms but no souls. Ronnie, who set fire to his house with his two children inside. Lacey, who extinguished cigarettes on her baby’s arms. In the face of monsters, a mere seven deadly sins seems almost charming, and certainly out of touch with the twenty-first century. Luke thinks sins badly need updating, and he keeps a running list in his head of contemporary sins that religions might well consider: the willingness to tolerate information overload; the neglect of the maintenance of democracy; the deliberate ignorance of history; the equating of shopping with creativity; the rejection of reflective thinking; the belief that spectacle is reality; vicarious living through celebrities. And more, so much more.

  Man, Luke thinks, I am one judgemental prick. I’m turning into my father — I have to try harder to be different. Losing faith wasn’t enough. But, of course, Luke has also learned from his flock that the harder one tries to be different from one’s parents, the more quickly one becomes them.

  Luke notices that Rick has his eyes set on Rachel, and Rachel seems to have hers set on Rick. Luke’s embezzled twenty grand is most likely worthless in a post-oil economy, so his Darwinian advantage over Rick is gone. But Luke’s need to stay alive overpowers all, even his need to reproduce. And before long, Luke finds himself looking up at Rick, who’s standing on the bar, prying a ventilation grille off the ceiling. The plan is for Rick and Luke to crawl up into the ventilation system and try to find grilles or faceplates they can pop out so they can scan the area around
the building, locate the sniper or snipers, if possible, and find a safe way out of the situation.

  The ceiling grille comes off with a dry hiss reminiscent of soil being tossed onto a coffin. Rick stores it above the ceiling, inside the crawl area, and looks inside. “Holy crap. There’s a ton of space up here. Seriously. It’s huge.”

  Karen says, “Keep your voice down.” Karen and Rachel are still on the floor behind the bar.

  “I’m going in. Hand me the shotgun once I’m up there.”

  “Be careful with that thing!” Karen says.

  Rick lifts himself up inside the crawl space. Luke passes him the shotgun, then joins him. It’s dark but not black inside. Roasting hot sunlight seeps in through vent holes on both sides, as well as from various tubes and shafts connecting the roof to the building’s guts.

  Luke says, “Shh . . .” and puts his finger to his lips. “Do you hear that?”

  The men fall silent. Above them, over towards the east side of the roof, they hear footsteps crunching on the gravel.

  Luke says, “It’s him.”

  ___

  Luke and Rick crept through the crawl space until an opening appeared in the ceiling. Rick peered up, then gave Luke the okay sign and quietly pulled himself up into a slatted ventilator housing. Luke quickly followed. Through the slats, they could see the sniper. He was standing at hyper-attention by the knee-high wall that encircled the roof of the cocktail lounge. He resembled a high school chemistry teacher — certainly no swarthy terrorist cliché. A black beard, beige slacks, a dark blue James Dean zip-up jacket, a black baseball cap, plus repeat-sex-offender eyeglasses like those of his murder victim Warren. Wait, Luke realized, he’s wearing Warren’s actual glasses. This guy is a trophy taker.

  “One guy?” Rick whispered.

  “What the hell is he doing on the roof? And how did he get up there?”

  Rick said, “I’m going to take him out,” and Luke said, “Do it,” then stopped Rick. “Wait. Are we sure this guy’s alone?”

  The two men scoped the 360 degrees around the housing. To the south, huge fires burned at the source of the explosions. As Rick and Luke watched, there was another explosion, accompanied by a glowing mushroom-shaped cloud rich with turquoise highlights. But as for people, they saw nobody, and the monster’s body language gave no indication that he was communicating with anyone. For the most part, his attention was focused on the fifteen-storey hotel block across the breezeway from the bar. It was hard to imagine anyone at the hotel being stupid enough to be standing by its windows. They could hear a few sirens, but far away, and there was a fraction of the normal traffic noise. The world had gone mute.

  Despite the dusty enclosure’s roasting heat, Luke felt chilled as he watched the monster, who was standing straight, ears cocked, waiting to kill. It reminded him of the time he had food poisoning in California and thought he was boiling to death and freezing to death at the same time. Outwardly, the monster seemed so harmless — that’s what scared Luke the most. Still waters truly do run deepest.

  Luke said, “Let’s not make any noise and screw this up. Jesus, look at that chemical cloud coming in.” A peanut-shaped cloud the size of a weather system was drifting towards the building, but its impending arrival didn’t alter the monster’s behaviour. He walked efficiently back and forth along the lounge’s eastern lip, scouting out new targets, unfazed by any possibility of retaliation. He heard something below, out in front of the hotel. With hawk-like speed, he raised his rifle and took three shots. Luke and Rick heard a woman scream, and then there was silence. The monster knelt on the gravel, concealed by the roof’s lip, and reloaded a 6.5-millimetre Italian carbine with a four-power scope, identical to the one used by Lee Harvey Oswald to kill John F. Kennedy in 1963. Rick recognized it and told Luke what it was, adding, “This guy’s good. This guy knows his history.”

  “That’s very comforting, Rick.”

  “I’m just saying this guy is a player.”

  “So shoot him already.”

  Rick tried manoeuvring the shotgun into a position from which he could aim and fire, but the shape of the vent made it impossible. Luke looked across the roof to a larger vent. “We have to go over there.”

  So the two men went back down to the crawl space and crept towards the other side of the roof. They heard the monster’s crunching steps above them. He would walk, stop, continue walking, then stop again. When they reached their destination, Luke said, “There’s no way he knows we’re here. I think we can nail the bastard from in there.”

  They pulled up into a newer, larger ventilation structure. Bingo.

  Rick whispered, “I think we can do this.”

  Luke said, “Come on, come on, be done with it,” and realized that, in his impatience, he sounded like Caleb. And then, in the midst of all the craziness, Luke found himself thinking about families. In the end, every family experiences an equal amount of trials, conditions, quirks, and medical dilemmas. One family might get more cancer, another more bipolar or schizo, but in the end it all averages out. It’s a testament to the ambivalence most people feel about their families that they don’t care to know more of their family history than the past three generations. There are so many reasons for not wanting to know. Caleb had once said, “Be as pious as you want; people are slime.” Luke himself would say, “We’re all slime in the eyes of God.”

  Luke snapped back to the present moment. “Get on with it,” he hissed. “Shoot.”

  “Right.”

  Rick had his finger on the trigger when another chemical explosion startled him and the shotgun’s barrel clanked against an aluminum slat. The monster swivelled. Rick fired and missed, and he and Luke saw the monster raise his rifle and aim it at the ventilation housing.

  “Jesus, let’s get out of here!”

  The two men dropped back into the crawl area and raced to the opening above the bar. Rick shouted, “Catch!” and dropped the shotgun down to Rachel. Within seconds, both men had scrambled back into the lounge.

  Karen demanded, “What happened?”

  “It’s one guy,” said Luke. “He’s armed to the teeth.”

  “Is he coming down through the roof?” Rachel asked.

  “No. He’s not stupid. If he did, we’d have a massive tactical advantage.”

  Karen asked, “What’s he doing on our roof? Why isn’t he picking off people at the airport or some place with more people?”

  Rachel asked, “Did he appear to have any sort of focus — was he scanning any particular area?”

  “Yes,” said Luke. “The front door of the hotel. He didn’t even care about those chemical explosions upwind.”

  Rick added, “I’ll go turn off all the fans. You can’t believe how much fallout there is out there. And it’s all headed this way.”

  Rachel

  Rachel is feeling slightly guilty because when she was at the computer, supposedly looking up the price of oil, she was actually visiting a white mouse-breeding website to see if the day’s events had altered the price of mice. It hadn’t changed, but then the site staff is always so slow to update. Just before the computer crashed, she caught the $900 sweet crude oil price on the Drudge Report.

  The bar’s TV set is also no help, and Rachel feels as if she isn’t contributing to collective safety the way the others are doing. Karen is inventorying food. The men are safeguarding the lounge’s rear entrance. Rachel feels like the female character on a TV outer space drama who sits at the control deck doing little but repeating things the captain has already said — and that’s the last character she wants to be. Whenever the subject of TV came up during lemonade-and-cookie time at normalcy training, Rachel and her classmates agreed that they wanted to be aliens, not humans, as long as they weren’t the emotionless Spock aliens, because that was what everyone expected them to be. Rachel is neither an alien nor a robot, and she does, indeed, experience emotions — even if the emotions are usually variations of confusion. But she knows there are many things her b
rain simply isn’t wired to “get.” The list includes humour, beauty, voice inflection, musicality, irony, sarcasm, and metaphor. Metaphor! How is a burning book supposed to represent Hitler? Or fascism! A book is a book. Hitler is Hitler. Why do fields of daisies in soft focus equal love? They’re plants! Not love!

  Love.

  Well, at least Rachel gets love. Or she thinks she gets it — she hopes she gets it, because it’s all that neurotypical people ever seem to talk about or sing songs about. She does feel strongly about a few things, and she hopes this is love. She loves the first thirty seconds of “A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours” by the Smiths — the song’s noises that, in a way that defies verb tenses, remind her of what it feels like to be a ghost. Rachel also loves the sight of pigeons huddled for the night below the downtown bridges. She loves the first snowfall of the year, and she loves grilled cheese sandwiches with double ketchup, as long as the ketchup is on the side and in no way touches her sandwich until she elects to dip it. She loves her mice and her parents and Mrs. Hovell at the training centre. And she especially likes her Second Life avatar — her fearless disembodied electronic double who ventures into all rooms and spaces, who doesn’t have to experience such mundane problems as muggy weather and unexpected noises, who doesn’t need to eat the disgusting-textured salty-sugary-greasy, always unpredictable stuff that normal people call “food.” Her avatar is free, and her only goal is to roam the universe pursuing truth and victory. Her avatar has emotions; she simply chooses not to use them.

  When the men finish barricading the rear door and they all wind up sitting behind the bar, the others seem stressed and frightened. Rachel has learned to recognize people’s states of mind from their body language, since she can’t read facial expressions. Rachel is neither stressed nor frightened; she believes adequate measures have been taken to ensure their collective safety. But she has an idea that might help cut the tension. Mrs. Hovell once told her, “Rachel, if you’re ever in a real fix and need something to discuss, ask people what their jobs are and what they have learned from them.” Mrs. Hovell is full of good advice. Another piece that always works for Rachel is this: Whenever you encounter a person who appears exhausted and stressed, tell them, “You look really great. You look really relaxed. I wish I had what you have.” It immediately relaxes them.