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 person 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.
Warren’s hands were rubbing the rim of his highball glass. Rick appeared and, to her surprise, handed Karen her second drink of the afternoon. Warren asked, “Feeling better?” and, oddly, she was. And that was the point when Warren yelled out, “Jesus H. Christ, oil just went to $250 a barrel!”
Warren and Karen sat transfixed, watching a CP24 newscaster interrupt regular news to show images of OPEC leaders fleeing a São Paulo hotel dining room after a large explosion of some sort. The news crawl beneath it reported light crude oil listing on the Dow at US$251.16 a barrel.
Warren said to Karen, “Is that for real? Holy shit. Just like they said.”
Rick looked at Karen and asked with genuine amazement, “They? Who’s they?”
Karen said, “Actually, it was just this one guy named Hubbert.”
Rick asked, “Who’s Hubbert?”
Warren said, “Dr. Marion
King Hubbert was a Shell Oil geologist who predicted in 1956 that US domestic oil production would peak around 1970 and that global production would peak around 2000.”
“And . . . ?”
Warren continued, “That production peak is called Hubbert’s Peak. And it looks like it’s finally happened.”
As an aside, Karen said, “The 1970s oil shock set his calendar back by a decade. But he was right.”
“How on earth do you people know this?”
“It’s kind of weird,” Karen said. “We met in a — God, this is so embarrassing — a Peak Oil Apocalypse chat room.”
“Man,” Warren said, “wouldn’t Hubbert freak to see oil over $250 a barrel.”
Rick said, “You mean you two actually did meet in a Peak Oil Apocalypse chat room?”
Warren said, “Yeah, so what? There are a lot of collapsitarians like me out there.”
Karen, slightly embarrassed, added, “I was in a dark patch — visiting the doom and gloom sites — we all do that sometimes. God knows there are enough of them.”
“Look!” Warren shouted. “Look at the crawl: oil just hit $290 a barrel!”
And then the bar’s power went out, just long enough for everyone to think, Oooooooooooh. And then the power returned, but the TV’s cable connection was dead.
Rick
Rick looks over at the high-tipping Mr. Trainwreck now trying to pick up Miss Ginger Ale, or . . . or what, exactly, is going on there? What’s the deal with Miss Ginger Ale? None of her gestures make any sense to Rick; she seems to have some kind of genetic malfunction; she’s like one of those Japanese department store greeting robots he’s seen on YouTube.
There is a lull in their conversation, so he heads over that way, and Miss Ginger Ale looks at Rick and says, “Did you know that every human being on earth is related to a single woman who existed 160,000 years ago in a place we now commonly call France?”
“Seriously?” said Rick. “Related to every person on earth?”
“Yes.”
“Man, she must have been one total slut.”
Mr. Trainwreck snorts, then swallows the Scotch in his mouth and has a belly laugh, which seems to confuse Miss Ginger Ale. But Rick has done his job as bartender — enlivening the lives of his guests — and he walks to the rear of the bar and inspects the ice machine, which has been on the fritz of late. While fiddling with its guts, Rick is, of course, wondering, Where is Leslie Freemont? Is Leslie Freemont bailing on his meeting with me? Rick looks at his phone: Leslie is fifteen minutes late. Where is he! Where is he! Where is he! And for that matter, where is all the gardening equipment that was stolen along with my truck? And for that matter, where is the better version of myself that I’ve been hoping for since high school?
In moments like these, when time slows to a crawl, Rick wishes he could start drinking again. Man, I loved booze. Booze made me feel the way being in a womb must feel. If fetuses aren’t getting alcohol, what, exactly, are they getting in there that makes the womb everybody’s dream vacation spot?
Rick catches his reflection on the freezer’s shiny surface. Uh-oh — my teeth! My teeth are dirty! Leslie Freemont will see my teeth and deem me deficient! Rick, like many people, tends, accurately or not, to blame his teeth for many of the perceived wrongs in his life. He slips into the bathroom and quickly overbrushes his molars, and blood drips into the sink’s chipped white ceramic bowl. Rick rinses out his mouth gunk and returns to the bar. When he sips from a cold cup of coffee, his mouth detects a familiar and undesirable taste: that of cooked liver. Huh? Why am I tasting liver? And then he realizes that what he’s tasting is dead blood cells, which is the reason liver tastes like liver, because the liver is the body’s blood purifying system. This observation amuses Rick, but it also reinforces his practice of not eating any piece of meat that once had a job: livers, kidneys, thymus glands . . . wings. Rick will only eat meat meat. Of course, within Rick’s universe of unemployed meat, hot dogs and hamburgers are exempt from his rule, his thinking being that if you chop up something finely enough and turn it into a geometric shape, it will always become quite palatable.
Rick looks at Karen; her Internet date is clearly tanking. He knows he could put the pair of them out of their misery and discuss the weather with them, but the only way people are going to learn is from their mistakes.
In any event, Rick likes the way he feels right now and wants to keep it going. It feels like Christmas morning. When he woke up this morning, the day felt different than it normally does. Usually, when he opens his eyes, there are a few glorious moments before he remembers who he is, where he is, and what he’s become. And after that he’s Wile E. Coyote, running off the cliff and suddenly realizing he’s going to pancake onto the desert floor below. And this is when his automatic thinking kicks in, the tape loop along the lines of: Maybe I didn’t try hard enough to wake up this morning. If only I was more awake, more alert, I could look closely enough at the world and a magic revelation would be mine — if only I could wake up just that little bit more. Dammit, I spend my whole life looking and looking and looking at the world, but I guarantee it, the moment I move my head away from my patch of ground will be the exact moment the earth cracks open — and if I’d been watching, for just that one second, I’d have seen the core of the planet, molten and white.
But wait — today with Leslie Freemont, I will wake up that extra little bit!
Leslie Freemont will widen Rick’s point of view and make Rick feel good about himself. For example, Leslie says it doesn’t matter where in the universe you are, all emotions are the same, a universal constant — and yes, we as humans get to experience them all. It’s what makes us superior to animals. Leslie is awesome smart. Leslie is like a glamorous train passing through the landscape, people waving at him all the way. Rick, on the other hand, is a bus. People don’t wave at buses. Wait — he’s not even a bus; he’s a stalled car with a flat tire on the side of a gravel road nobody ever uses. And his passenger window is broken and replaced by plastic dry-cleaning bags and clear packing tape.
Rick looks across the bar and witnesses Karen’s misery. Suddenly he feels magnanimous. He takes pity on Karen, with her obviously awkward chit-chat, and decides to mix her another Singapore sling. He looks up the drink in his mixology book and is newly shocked by the list of ingredients; he can’t believe the crap people used to put in their bodies in the twentieth century.
As he mixes the drink, Rick’s thoughts return to Leslie Freemont. Won’t young Tyler be proud when he finds out his father has a dynamic new way of seeing the world! Up until now, Rick has been passionless, but the Power Dynamics Seminar System has made him realize how unimpressive his old life was. The Power Dynamics Seminar System is a bright new sun casting a trillion new shadows in his brain, and his Tyler will see him in a whole new light!
Rick then imagines a magic custody afternoon sometime in the future in which Pam will walk into the room just as he’s telling Tyler about Leslie Freemont. Pam will say something like, “Rick, I’m holding a do-I-give-a-shit-ometer in my hand, and the needle’s not moving. Shut up. Your afternoon with Tyler is over. Go back to your crappy little basement apartment and get hosed and curse at the universe.”
Rick takes a sip of the Singapore sling. Rick . . . what the hell! This is not the recurring
dream about slipping that Rick has a few times a week. This is real life. Oh dear God, what was I thinking? Oh jeez-Louise, a fourteen-month AA chip right down the toilet. Tyler can never find out about this.
But the genie is out of the bottle, and the genie is rushing to the reptile stem of Rick’s brain. Instead of feeling buzzy and great, Rick feels weakness and fear and self-loathing and kind of like he’s falling into a hole. He remembers walking through a local graveyard as a child, with three friends. He told them he had the ability to see corpses buried in the ground, that they had a radioactive green colour, and this impressed his friends no end. And then he convinced himself that he actually had this power, and he walked through parks and rode along highways imagining radioactive dead green bodies everywhere. One morning he looked at his face in the mirror and he was green, and he honestly believed he was dead. And that’s how he feels now.
He pours the drink down the sink, runs to the ice machine, and sticks his head inside, trying to cool the burning shame. The sub-zero mist enters his nostrils, freezer-burning his membranes. His sweat is cold. Leslie Freemont is going to meet Rick at the bottom of a shame spiral; this is not what the day was supposed to be like.
Work.
Right.
Rick mixes a new Singapore sling. Work will save him in the end. He takes the drink to Karen, but her eyes inform him that she no longer needs rescuing . . . perhaps her tide has turned; maybe she’ll score after all. Then Karen and Warren see something on the TV and go all chimpy about, of all things, the price of crude oil. Crude oil? Rick learns that they met in an online crude oil discussion group. Who on earth hooks up in an online discussion group about crude oil?
And then the power goes out.
And then the power comes back on.
And then the TV stops working.
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