Player One

by Douglas Coupland

  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 enemy. 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 prevent 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.”

  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 h
im.”

  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.”