Karen says, “You can’t lump a quarter-billion people all in together. That’s absurd. Those quarter-billion people have almost nothing in common except that they’ve been told they have lots in common.”
Bertis looks at Karen. “I like you. But you’re wrong. People are pretty much all the same — unless they’ve achieved Salvation, at which point they all become one person, one source of light. We humans have infinitely more in common with each other than we do difference. Look at this bar. Look at this hotel, the airport. Ever wonder why they sell flags and family coats of arms and KISS ME, I'M ITALIAN T-shirts in airports and tourist traps? Ever wonder why religious groups hang out there? Because a plane trip takes you away from all the things that make you comfortable. A plane trip exposes you to situations and landscapes unthinkable until recent history, moments of magnificence and banality that dissolve what few itty-bitty molecules of individuality you possess. After a plane trip, you need to rebuild your ego, to shore up your sense of being unique. That’s why religions target airports to find new recruits. You —” He nods at Rick. “You’re a bartender. You do nothing but watch people dissolve in front of you all day. Or scramble themselves with booze. And I bet you have no illusions about what goes on in the hotel next door.”
“You’re right on that.”
Karen remembers her assignation with Warren, which now feels as if it happened three weeks ago.
Bertis purses his lips and X-rays the door area to see the hotel behind it. “Nasty, nasty hotel. Cracked-out teenagers watching trash TV and eating sugar. Fornicating on towels decorated with Disney cartoons and brands of beer. And maybe on a good day you’ll find a prophet alone in an empty room on the top floor, the elevator rusted shut; a prophet stripped of his founding visions, forced to live in a world robbed of values, ideals, and direction.”
The four of them stand staring at Bertis, who sits with perfect posture.
“Look at you all. You’re a depressing grab bag of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of the most banal form of capitalism. No seasons in your lives — merely industrial production cycles that rule you far better than any tyrant. You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well all be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they’re ever going to be.”
“I agree with him,” says Rachel, sending a ripple through the group.
“Really?” asks Rick, genuinely surprised.
“Not the meaningless bit. But the bits about everyone being the same. I can’t tell faces apart. It’s hard to tell people apart. I can’t distinguish personalities. When my high school yearbook came out, it was like looking at a thousand identical faces. I couldn’t even find myself.”
“I think you’re unique,” says Rick.
“You do?”
“I do. It’s not just that you’re beautiful. It’s your mice. And the way you think so hard about everything. I’ve never seen anyone think so hard in my life.”
Rachel confesses, “Earlier, when I was supposed to be looking up the price of oil, I was actually looking up the price of white mice.”
“So you feel guilty. We now have official evidence that you’re human. Welcome to the club.”
“Really? There’s a club?”
“No, there isn’t. But I’m starting one now, and I welcome you to join me.”
Rachel walks over to Rick and says, “Thank you,” seemingly hypnotized.
Rick says, “What’s the great thing about normal, anyway? What’s normal ever done for you?” Rachel smiles.
“So what is it we’re supposed to be doing here, then?” Bertis snaps.
“Doing?” she says.
“Are we waiting for the police to show up? Is this some hokey citizen’s arrest? Am I going to be brought to justice? I’ve been outside, and trust me, there won’t be any cops here for a week.”
Karen asks, “What’s it like out there?”
Luke, who’s been pretty quiet up to now, says, “Excuse me, Karen.” In a flash, he raises the rifle and fires it at the floor in front of Bertis, hitting his foot. Bertis screams, then cries out, “What the hell did you do that for?”
“I had to do something to you. I’m sick of waiting for the law. And knowing the courts in this country, instead of sending you to rot in prison, they’ll send you to Disney World with a life counsellor and a dozen juice boxes.” Luke sets Bertis’s rifle down on the bar. He says to Bertis, “That was richly satisfying and you richly deserved it.”
“You’ll burn for that.”
“That from you of all people.”
The carpet near Bertis’s foot resembles a run-over squirrel, but Karen’s seen worse. Even though it’s hard to be compassionate for Bertis, she goes to the bar and pulls a bottle of vodka down from the mirrored racks. She walks over to Bertis. “I’ll sterilize it.”
Bertis is inspecting his shattered toe, grimacing. He glowers at the room, and his voice deepens as Karen unscrews the vodka bottle’s cap. “You’re all of you praying a prayer — a prayer so deep and strong and insistent you hardly know you are praying it. It comes from that better place inside you — the place that remains pure. You never manage to access it, but you know it exists.” Bertis glowered at a six-foot-tall cardboard cut-out promoting Chilean wine. “I don’t need to justify my actions to the courts of this world. The only valid viewpoint to make any decision from is Eternity.”
“Lovely,” says Luke.
Bertis squints. “You don’t believe in believing, do you?”
“You picked a very strange day to ask me that question.”
Rachel says, “Luke was a pastor up until yesterday. Then he lost his faith and stole twenty thousand dollars from his church’s bank account and flew here, to this airport, essentially at random.” She looks to Luke for confirmation.
“Timing is everything,” says Luke. Karen grabs a white linen napkin and tears it down the middle, improvising a bandage, which quickly reddens as she lashes it onto Bertis’s toe.
___
Suddenly incapable of processing any more of what was happening to her at the present time, Karen let her mind drift back to that morning, a morning that had begun so full of hope. She remembered packing her toiletries for the flight, looking in the mirror, and thinking, Karen Dawson, you are a well-nourished, rich-looking white woman. You could burn polka dots onto the mayor’s front door with a crème brûlée torch and nobody would bother you. And this Warren fellow will be putty in your hands. Then she caught herself from a certain angle and saw her mother’s face contained within her own — a face now blankened by Alzheimer’s, a face resting in an expensive ozone-smelling room in Winnipeg. Am I going to get Alzheimer’s? My genetic counsellor says three chances in four. Karen’s mother was no longer knowable; her mother was gone. Staring at herself in the mirror, Karen wondered, When do people stop being individuals and turn into generic humans? And from there, when do they stop being human and become vegetable, then mineral?
Perhaps people are all, in the end, unknowable. But at least some people are loveable, and at least some of them love you. Of course, they can also stop loving you. When Kevin fell out of love with her — and into love with another receptionist, no less — Karen wondered, How many married men are out there whispering like truffle pigs in the ears of temps by the office snack-vending machine? She wondered, How many are spending their noon hours in a motel down by the lake? And their wives — how many are starting to drink Baileys while folding laundry? How many are almost sick with jealousy over “that bright young gal” who’s turned the marketing department upside down with fresh ideas? That bright young gal with a future as big as Montana and legs like Bambi’s mother’s.
As she looked in the mirror, Karen thought, Okay, so there’s no permanent love in this world, and you can never really know anyone, but at least there’s heaven. Perhaps heaven is being in
love and the feeling never stops — the feeling of intimacy never stops — you feel intimate forever.
Zipping up her sandwich bag filled with cosmetics in airline-approved bottles smaller than 1.5 ounces, Karen began wondering if she was past love — if she had felt pretty much all the emotions she was ever likely to feel, and from that point on it was reruns. She wondered, Which is lonelier: to be single and lonely or to be lonely within a dead relationship? Is it totally pathetic to be single and lonely and to be jealous of someone who is lonely inside a dead relationship? I feel like the punchline to a joke I might have told ten years ago.
What had happened to her earlier good spirits? She ought to have been whistling ditties to the love gods, but now she felt manless and marooned as she contemplated a life of repetitive labour, a few thousand more microwaved dinners followed by a coffin. What a wretched tailspin to have fallen into. She chalked it up to nerves over meeting Warren.
At the breakfast table, Karen learned that Casey had chosen that morning to unveil an even more extreme version of her blue and black hair: a set of blue extensions that bulked it up, doubling its volume. But Karen was not going to be roped into a style squabble. Not today. Not over a bowl of oatmeal.
“What do you think of my new do?” Casey asked.
“It’s great. It’s fine,” Karen said.
“It’s part of my campaign to become immortal.”
“How’s that, Casey? Pass me the brown sugar.”
“History only remembers people who invent new hairdos: Julius Caesar. Einstein. Hitler. Marilyn Mon-roe. Why bother with conquering Europe or discovering nuclear science when all you need is a bit of style innovation? If Marie Curie had given a bit more attention to her appearance she’d have been on the ten-dollar bill.”
“Very clever.”
Casey senses that Karen’s not in a fighting mood. “Mom, what do you think happens to you after you die?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you believe in something specific, like a religion, or do you think maybe there’s a warm cosmic flow, followed by the total extinction of your being?”
“Casey, this isn’t something I expected to be discussing on a Tuesday morning.”
“On Star Trek: Generations, Soran said, ‘Time is the fire in which we burn.’ Imagine that, Mom, burning inside a fire of time.”
“It’s Tuesday fricking morning, Casey. And you know I’ve got a big day ahead of me. You tell me, what do you think about an afterlife?”
“I don’t know,” said Casey. “If I was truly practical and green and into recycling and all of that, I’d request that you put my body into a big pot and then reduce it until it turns into that soup powder they put in your ramen noodles.”
“But you’re not practical.”
“No, I am not. I want to be buried, not cremated. And no coffin. I repeat, no coffin — just put me in the dirt.”
“Just dirt? That’s kind of ick.”
“Not true. Being soil is a good idea — I’d be moist and granular, like raspberry oatmeal muffins.” Casey scraped up the remains of her oatmeal. “Kendra from my twirling class says death is like a spa resort where everything is pre-decided for you and all you have to do is lie back and submit to the regime.”
“Kendra sounds a bit lazy to me.”
“Kendra is wicked lazy.”
“Let’s go. I can drop you off on the way to the airport.”
“But you haven’t told me what you think about death!”
“Well, Casey, I don’t remember where I was before I was born, so why should I be worried about where I’ll go after I die? When we die, we have no choice but to join every living thing that’s ever existed — and ever will.”
“You’re getting cosmic, Mom. Get cosmic more often. But what do you really think of my hair?”
“In the car. Now. You’re not going to goad me into trashing your hair.”
Since then, Karen had crossed a continent, had a failed romantic liaison, witnessed a murder, participated in the collapse of the Western world, and taken a religious nutcase as a prisoner.
Rousing herself from her reverie, Karen looked at her dead phone. She noticed that Rick and Rachel had left the room, and that Luke was now guarding Bertis with the shotgun. She thought of Casey, at home watching smoke plumes spout from around the city, lashing together heaven and earth. She sat across the table from him and said, “You know, Mr. Bertis, if you have something to say, I’m listening.”
Rick
Rick is in love. How quickly the universe disposed of Leslie Freemont to make room in his heart for the beautiful young Rachel. Nothing about the current situation fazes him. He feels no fear, just warmth. He feels as if he can shoot laser beams from the tips of his fingers and, correctly aiming at the right person, make them feel holy. He feels like a superhero called Holy Man.
And he has a shotgun. That helps, too. And Luke shooting off Bertis’s left toe — that was intense, but Bertis deserved far worse.
Rick detects shades of Leslie Freemont in Bertis’s speech patterns. In fact, Bertis is a better Leslie Freemont than Leslie Freemont ever was. He is about to raise the subject when Rachel twists her head and sniffs like a border collie. “There’s a chemical leak. The outside is getting in. It’s coming from out back.”
Sensing an opportunity, Rick takes it. He passes the shotgun to Luke, saying, “We’re going to fix the leak. Come on, Rachel.”
Rachel asks, “You shut off all the overhead vents, correct?”
“Tight as a drum.”
“It’s coming from over there . . .”
Rick follows Rachel to the rear storage area, where that morning he’d been getting a weekend’s worth of empties boxed for the recycler. Above the crates is a small louvred window, slats open. “That’s the leak,” Rachel says. “Can you reach it?”
“I’ll have to stand on the crates.”
“I’ll stand below and make sure they’re stable. And I’ll hold you.” The chemical dust coming in feels like ground glass in Rick’s eyes and throat. Rachel throws Rick a bar rag to cover his face. He climbs up on the crates and stands on his tiptoes, Rachel steadying him at his knees as he shuts the window. “There. It’s closed,” Rick says.
But Rachel doesn’t let go of his knees. And Rick doesn’t want her to let go. He wants the moment to last forever. This would be his heaven: the moment when the spark ignites and you know it’s all going to happen, that your instincts were correct.
The rear area is quiet. Rick can hear both Rachel’s and his own breathing. He’s fully aroused and knows it will soon be time to come on strong.
Rachel says, “Nobody’s ever kissed me before.”
“Oh?” Rick says, staring at the closed window.
“No. Often, if people even touch me, I scream. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t stop myself.”
Rick hops off the crates and stands directly in front of Rachel, face to face. Rachel inspects his face. She says, “I see you have a scar beside your eye.”
“I got stabbed.”
“Stabbed in the face?”
“It was a stupid fight. It was a long time ago. I don’t do that anymore. Fight, I mean. Only when I go on a bender, but I haven’t been on one for fourteen months now.”
“Did it hurt?”
“What — getting stabbed? Not really. You’d think it would, but no. In fact, it was kind of cool. Like my soul jumped out of my skin for a second, like a salmon jumping out of a river.”
Rachel says, “I’m glad you have an identifying trait I can recognize you by.”
“Yeah?” Rick can feel Rachel’s breath on his face, like the air before a late-afternoon summer storm.
“You look very relaxed,” Rachel says.
“Yeah?”
“Maybe. I can’t tell, really. They told us in normalcy training that if you tell normal people they look relaxed, they actually do relax. It’s a coping tactic.”
Rick kisses Rachel. She doesn’t respond at first
, and he wonders if he’s wrecked everything and come across as a perv, but then she ignites and practically bites his face off with passion. Rachel’s so energetic it’s actually freaking Rick out a bit, but she’s young and her reptile cortex knows what it wants. And Rick is older and knows how to deliver. And he’s loving it, getting down and dirty in the back of the bar as if he were young again. It’s just the two of them in their own little universe, and suddenly everything in the world makes sense, because without the crap and the death and the drudgery and the endlessness of life, it would be impossible for passion to exist.
___
Nothing very, very good and nothing very, very bad lasts for very, very long. A half-hour later, Rachel and Rick were on the floor. Their clothes were relatively clean, and Rick was oddly proud that he had been such a good custodian of the space. And who’d have thought the storeroom, with light filtering in from the main bar area, could look and feel romantic? Rachel turned her head and looked at Rick. “Rick, why was Leslie Freemont so important to you?”
“Leslie Freemont? Honestly?”
“Yes.”
Rick looked up at the ceiling. “Well . . . because starting a few years back, I began feeling like my life was no longer my own. I felt like I was this person stuck inside the body of someone named Rick. I had access to his memories and knowledge, but I wasn’t Rick.”
“Do you mean schizophrenia? Or dissociative identity disorder?”
“No. Those would be interesting. Those would be fixable with medicine. What I have can’t be fixed by medicine — or booze — even though I tried. I mean, I had a kid and a wife, and then, once my marriage ended, I looked around me and everyone in my life had changed — grown older, become different, moved on. So I tried to avoid life by sleeping all the time, but my problems invaded my dream life. Man, that sucked. And then there was the drinking. And I became invisible to people under thirty. And I learned that women want guys the same age as me, but without my mileage. I had to learn to cope with the knowledge that my chance to make big strokes in life was over. I was never going to be rich or really good at doing something — anything. So I scraped together what I could and got a truck and tools and started a landscaping business. I was kind of making a go of it, and then it all got stolen — the truck and the tools — and I stopped wanting to exist anymore.”
Player One: What Is to Become of Us Page 11
