Player One

by Douglas Coupland

  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?”

  Luke will feel as if time is moving in slow motion, and will reflect on the nature of time. If the day’s events were a story, readers would have to wait for the next chapter to find out what happens next. When it comes to paintings, on the other hand, one glance is all you need to divine what will follow. Life is more like a book than a painting. Life makes you wait. Life forces everything into a sequence, time-coded by emotions and memories. Luke will decide that this is why people get mushy and think their lives have to be stories — to rationalize time’s total domination over their lives.

  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.

  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?

  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 j
ust 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?”