Player One: What Is to Become of Us (16 page)

“I had nothing to do with this God thing. I have no idea where it came from.”

“Mysterious ways and all that,” said Bertis. “So, Rachel, you and I are friends now.”

“We are?”

“Yes, we are. We share the most important thing in common: our belief.”

“I guess we do.”

Rick said, “Don’t even try to lure her down your road, dickwad.”

“My road? Rick, may I remind you that you have no road at all? If I were to accompany you, to follow you, where might we be going?” He looked at Rachel. “We, at least, have a path, don’t we?”

“A path?”

Karen said, “Rachel can’t understand metaphors.”

“Oh. So I can’t tell her that she now has a new set of eyes, capable of seeing miraculous new visions?”

“You could, but she wouldn’t get it. Besides, I read medical journals during my lunch break, and whenever surgeons give vision to adults born blind, it always goes horribly wrong.”

“Really?”

“Really. The newly sighted never get the hang of it — the way objects move in space and time, colours. Even something as simple as lettuce can scare the pants off them.”

“I still like you, even though you’re depressing,” said Bertis.

“Why do you keep telling me you like me?”

Luke said, “It’s an old trick called flattery. He thinks you’re a potential convert, so he’s buttering you up.”

“Buttering?” Rachel asked.

“It’s a metaphor,” said Luke and Karen in stereo.

Suddenly there was a thump from the direction of the front door, and everybody jumped, startled.

Rick said, “Stand back.” He put his back against the wall, shotgun in his right hand, and scootched doorward.

When the noise came again, this time Rachel placed it as someone ramming themselves against the cigarette machine inside the shattered glass door.

Karen said, “It may be the police.”

Rick said, “
Shh
,” and scootched closer still.

Bertis turned to Rachel and whispered, “Rachel, could you cut me loose here?”

“No.”

“I’m in great pain, Rachel, and sitting up is making it unbearable. I need to lie down on my back and reduce the blood pressure to my lower body. One believer
has
to help another.”

“I’ll undo your legs and put the chair back on the floor. You’ll be lying down, sort of.”

“Good. Do it quietly.”

Karen hissed at Rick, “Can you see anything?”

Rick shook his head.

Luke looked at Rachel, who was cutting the duct tape from Bertis’s legs. “What the . . . Rachel,
stop
!”

“Luke, I’m only undoing his legs so his blood can circulate properly.”

Bertis said, “It’s just my legs. I need to lie down. It’s to help my toe. The one you shot off.”

Luke glared at Bertis. “Okay, Rachel, lean him on his back, or whatever it is he wants. But don’t untape his hands.”

As she tilted Bertis’s chair backwards to the ground, Rachel looked at his hands, which were peeling slightly from the chemicals — no wedding ring, a Medic-Alert bracelet, calluses on his fingertips.

Rick cautiously pulled back a tablecloth to look out the door, then shouted, “Holy Christ — it’s a kid! A teenager. Quick! Help me get this crap away from the door.”

Luke indicated that he would keep standing guard over Bertis, and Rachel and Karen ran to help Rick pull the cigarette machine, the furniture, and the other clutter away from the door. Rachel saw a teenage boy covered in pink dust. His eyes and mouth had been rubbed clean, but they were flaring red.

Rick reached through the door frame and pulled the boy inside.

“Good God,” said Karen. “It’s the boy from the plane.”

“What boy from what plane?” asked Rachel.

“The boy with the iPhone.”

Player One

Many things will happen next, and these things will happen quickly, because time does flood, and time also burns, and during this burning flood, Karen will know the world has changed for good. She will sit with the boy from the plane and Luke, and she will think about Casey and her family and she will know that something far greater than 9/11 has occurred — the entire world has now turned into the Twin Towers, and it will never feel normal ever again — and that, in itself, will be the new normal. And somehow Karen will be at peace with this — but not now, for other things must happen, and they must happen quickly. Time speeds up, time speeds down, always time, always rattling our cages, taunting us with our never-ending awareness of its presence, our only weapon against time being our free will and our belief that life is sacred and our hope that we have souls.

And that’s when Rick will remember he’d been drinking earlier on, that he’d slipped and lost his sobriety — and then he will wonder if everything now happening to him is just a slip-dream, not reality — wouldn’t that explain everything! — and so he’ll whack himself on the head, trying to wake himself up, but he won’t wake up, and he’ll know this isn’t a dream.

He’ll shout, “I’m cursed! We’re all of us cursed!”

Luke will tell him to calm down, but Rick won’t. And the blood on the floor in front of him will remind him of high school biology classes. He’ll remember that all those mammalian embryos look the same until a certain point in their development, but then somewhere down the line human beings become damned. Are other mammals cursed? What makes humans unique? Our ability to experience time? Our ability to sequence our lives? Our free will? What single final Russian roulette gene sequence condemns us all? We’re so close to other animals, and yet we’re so utterly different.

Rick will think,
The universe is so large, and the world is so glorious, but here I am with chilled black oil pumping through my veins, and I feel like the unholiest thing on earth
.

“We’re all born lost,” Rick will say, and Luke will reply, “I don’t have an answer to that.”

Luke will survey the remains of the day strewn about the lounge, and as he does, he’ll be unsure what to do.
Should I pray? I’m no longer convinced I have a soul
.

Then Luke will get paranoid. He will wonder if God is using him. Then he will think,
Well, faith or not, in the end, we are still judged by our deeds, not our wishes. We are the sum of our decisions, and with decisions so often comes sorrow.

Luke accepts Karen’s hand — a hand that cares, a hand that can mould his inner life, a hand that will touch his face and make him see the truth. With her, he will realize that everyone on earth is damaged goods. And
that
is the wonder of it all.

This is when Rachel will have a vision. It won’t be a dream or a hallucination — it will be a real vision, more real than real, actually, as clear and bright and dust-free as an online second world, and the vision will be this: Rachel will be crawling through the empty-streeted remains of the suburb in which she grew up. It will be the middle of the day, but suddenly the sky will go black, but not eclipse black. Rather, as occurred in the candlelit bar, the optical sensation will be more as if the sun has simply gone out. And yet the sun will still be above, yet it will be casting no light, not even like a full moon. The big black sun will be shining down in the middle of the night. And beneath this dead sun, Rachel will see cars stopped in mid-journey, their drivers gone. The front doors of homes will be open, and she knows that were she to walk into these houses, meals would be sitting on the table, some still warm, yet there will never be people coming back to eat them. Some TV sets might still be on, yet were she to change channels, all the scenes would be devoid of people — the sitcom living rooms, the football stadiums, and the six o’clock news stations — nobody there.

And amid this switched-off landscape, Rachel will find herself breathing hard, and blood will be pounding within her head, and she will be shouting to anybody who will listen, “Awake! Awake! I come to bear good news! Anyone who can listen, awake! Awaken! Our time has come. You are thirsty! You are starving! And you ache to rebuild from the ashes of the present. And my news is this — hallelujah, we are ready to enter the Third Testament. Our time has come. Now we move onward. Fiction and reality have married. What we have made now exceeds what we are. Now is the time to erase the souls we damaged as we crawled down the twentieth century’s plastic radiant way. Listen to me! We will soon be reborn. Heed my words, I beg you, as now my vision is coming to an end. Awake! Awake! This is Rachel saying goodbye to you all!”

HOUR FIVE

THE VIEW FROM DAFFY DUCK'S HOLE

Karen

The teenage boy enters the candlelit lounge screaming, “My eyes! Rinse my eyes! Oh, God, my
eyes
.” Karen half pushes, half yanks him towards the bar, where Rick grabs a pitcher of melted ice water and sluices it over the boy’s face. The boy shouts, “I can barely see . . . I
can’t
see.”

“Hang on,” says Karen. “Rick, is there any kind of hose back there?”

“No, just this.” Rick aims the five-variety soda nozzle at the boy’s face, using its cold, clean pressure to rinse visible chemical fragments from the boy’s skin. Meanwhile, Luke continues to guard Bertis.

Karen sees Rachel taping the tablecloths back over the lounge door. She hasn’t bothered to barricade it again, and Karen understands why — she had the same thought herself:
What if another innocent needs help? We need to be able to let people in quickly
. Helping others trumps protecting themselves. The barricade has become a liability rather than a necessity; all they need now is an airtight barrier against chemicals.

Karen asks, “What’s your name?”

“It’s Max. My lips . . . my lips are stinging.”

“Oh Jesus. Max, honey, hang in there, okay?”

Karen is having a flashback to five years ago, when Casey had antibiotic-resistant
E. coli
poisoning. The craziness, the hospital, the sadness, and, oh, the helplessness.

Rachel heads behind the bar and turns on the tap, but no water emerges. In her toneless voice she says, “The water isn’t working. Max, I want you to remove your clothes. Right now. Drop them on the ground — don’t throw them, don’t kick up any dust. Then we’re going to take you out to the back area and rinse your body with whatever we can find. Nobody touch Max’s clothes. We’ll bag them later. Karen and Rick, you rinse your hands now with whatever you can find.”

While Rick hoses down Karen’s forearms, Bertis calls from the floor, “Excuse me, I never got the royal treatment like this guy,” to which Karen says, “No. You didn’t.”

Rachel looks in her purse and removes a prescription container, from which she takes some pills and puts them in Max’s hand. “Take these.”

“What are they?”

“Propanolol. It’s a beta blocker that curtails adrenaline production, which in turn reduces memory production, which in turn reduces post-traumatic stress.”

Rick says, “What?” looking at Rachel as if she were a grizzly bear riding a unicycle.

Rachel continues, “The hippocampus loses its ability to make memories adhere to the brain. Guys fighting in Iraq take it all the time. I keep them in case I have a too-big freakout in public.”

Rick says, “Are they safe?”

“They are.”

Max pops the pills in his mouth and swallows them, and Rick hoses out Max’s mouth with what remains from the soda pump. Max continues disrobing as best he can, though his movements are awkward thanks to adrenaline and fear. Karen sees deep, anthraxy lesions on his arms and legs. When his cargo shorts hit the ground, she hears a thud. She’s guessing that in a pocket of those shorts is the iPhone holding pictures of her taken on the plane what feels like a lifetime ago but was really just earlier that day. For Karen, that thud marks the official start of the rest of her life, and of a whole new way of life — a new world that exists within a state of permanent power failure. A perpetual Lagos, a never-ending Darfur. A world where people eat fortune cookies without bothering to read the fortunes. A world where individuality means little: People are simply Scrabble tiles with no letters, Styrofoam packing peanuts, napkins at McDonald’s.

Karen decides that at the first opportunity, she’s going to ask Rachel for a few of those pills. Just last month, in the break room with Dr. Yamato, Karen joked that the smartest thing science could do would be to make a pill called September 10; if you took it, it would be as if 9/11 had never happened. Now Karen wants a pill that will make the whole twenty-first century disappear — that will make this unavoidable future vanish. Dr. Yamato said that earth was not built for six billion people, all running around and being passionate about being alive. Earth was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

“Aren’t you being a charmer,” Karen said, packing up her cubicle for the day.

Dr. Yamato, crabby after a three-day bipolar symposium, went on, saying, “Karen, history may well prove worthless in the end. Individualism may prove to be only a cruel and unnecessary hoax played on billions of people for no known reason — a bad idea dreamed up by God on the Eighth Day.”

Karen had laughed — laughed!

Rick takes over guard duty, and Luke and Karen escort a limping Max to the storage room, over by the recycling bins.

Karen asks, “Where were you when the explosions happened? How did you get here? Were you with your family? Where are they if you’re here?”

Max stands in his boxer shorts and says, “We were in a rental car headed downtown.”

Luke says, “There’s no bottled water or club soda here. The best I can do is melted ice from the machine.”

“Do it.”

Karen reboots the conversation. “Your family was in the rental car.”

“Headed downtown. Me. My dad. My sister.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“She moved in with her trainer last year. I don’t know.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s no big deal. So, we were the last car out of the lot before they stopped renting. The guys at the counter were making weird faces. I looked at their monitors, and there was an override message saying
STOP ALL REFUELING IMMEDIATELY
and then
STOP ALL NEW RENTALS IMMEDIATELY
.
Ouch!
” The melted ice water smells like Teflon and nickels and dimes as it flows over Max’s scalp, then dribbles down his torso. “It feels like my entire body’s been stung by hornets.” A tear forms in his right eye, clearly visible against his angry crimson skin.

Luke grabs a bottle of vodka, pours some into a plastic cup, and adds some Coke to it, then places the cup in Max’s hands. “Drink that.”

“What then?” asks Karen.

“We didn’t get very far. The police began to barricade all the highway routes to the airport. People everywhere were freaking out, and, like, ten thousand people were trying to get back to the airport to fly home. But, I mean, all the flights were stopped — what were they thinking? There’s no gas anymore. And then suddenly this guy came and pointed a gun at us, and his buddy started siphoning the gas out of our car. There were a couple of cops nearby and they didn’t do anything. This guy just stood there holding a gun, and the other guy drained the tank, and then he made my dad drop the car keys into the gas tank so we couldn’t get away driving on what gas remained.”

Luke gently lifts Max’s left arm and rinses it with the melted ice water.

Karen asks, “What did you do then?”

“That’s when the explosions happened.”

“What were they?”

“I don’t know. Nobody does. We saw that the fallout was headed our way, so we tried to run away from it, but it kept changing course and was on top of us by the time we got to this hotel.”

“Was there no other place to go to for safety?”

“What — like under an overpass? No way. That stuff is pure chemical. I tried going into the hotel, but it’s locked. Why would they do that?”

Luke and Karen swap glances.

“Where are your father and sister?” Luke says.

“I don’t know. We got separated. We couldn’t see — from the fogginess of the chemicals and then because our eyes stopped working. And the air was so thick. There was no echo, like in a storm. I — I have no idea where they are.” Max begins to cry, and he says to Karen, “I know you. You’re that pretty lady from the plane. I recognized you when I first came in, even with only a little bit of eyesight.”

Rachel comes in with a bottle and a fresh candle. “I found some more water. I’ll keep looking.” Rachel leaves and Luke says, “Max, I’m going to rinse as much as I can off you.”

“Okay.”

Karen looks around as Luke drizzles water over Max. She notices that Rick keeps extra bartender outfits hanging back here. “Try on this shirt,” she says, wrapping Max’s hand around it. “You’re shivering.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m cold.”

Max manages to put on the shirt, but the pants sting his raw skin and he cries out. Karen sits on a crate and says, “Max, come and sit beside me. Luke, go fetch the iPhone from Max’s cargo pants.” Max puts his arms around Karen’s neck.

___

Karen remembered holding Casey in the hospital five years ago, the first time she’d held her since she was maybe five or six. Holding her child felt nice. Children have weight. They’re warm. You can feel their heart and lungs pumping from within.

Now Max asked, “Am I going to be blind forever?”

Karen said, “No, sweetie, your eyes will be fine. And soon all of this will be over and you’ll be home.”

Max sat beside Karen, his head slumped and resting on her chest. He was a big kid, not fully grown but almost there.

“I didn’t mean what I said earlier.”

“What do you mean?”

“That bit about not caring about my mother. Because I do.”

“I know you do, Max.”

“She just left us. How can someone do that — just leave you, like you’re nothing to them?”

“People do it all the time. It’s the dark side of people.”

“I miss her all the time, and she won’t even answer my emails. She pretends she doesn’t know how to work a Gmail account. And then she accidentally cc’ed me about a barbecue she was having the afternoon she was supposed to be at my sister’s violin recital.”

“Violin recital? My daughter plays the violin.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. She’s fifteen and going through a goth phase right now. I was worried she’d stop going to lessons because it wasn’t cool or something.”

“I don’t get the goth thing.”

“I don’t, either. When I was her age, you had only two choices: popular or unpopular. There are so many things you can be these days.”

“What’s your name?”

“I’m Karen.”

“My skin hurts, Karen.”

Karen almost burst into tears but stopped herself and said, “So, Max, yesterday I went into Subway and bought a sandwich that was totally different from the one I’d normally get. Different toppings, bread, condiments. I got chili peppers and cucumber slices.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And then when I went to eat it . . .”

“What?”

“It tasted like somebody else’s sandwich.”

Max smiled. “That’s funny.”

“So tell me, Max, why is it that chickens don’t taste like eggs? And why is it that traffic lights are red and green but don’t seem the least bit Christmassy?”

Max chuckled.

“I’m a bit drunk. Is this gin I’m drinking?”

“It’s vodka.”

“I’ve been drunk before.”

“Have you, now?”

“I got bed spins. I hated it. Crème de menthe and rye in my friend Jordan’s basement. But now is different. You know what I wanted?”

“What do you mean, ‘What I wanted’?”

“To do before I die.”

“Max, you don’t need to think that way.”

“I wanted to get shot.”

“You
what?
”

“I wanted to get shot. And survive. And what I wanted to do after getting shot was to get my driver’s licence and then buy a car, a real wreck from the 1990s, and shoot some holes in its side, because that would be the coolest thing you could ever have on a car. You’d be instantly cooler than if you had a Mustang or Lamborghini.” Max’s face was lit up as though he were six and Karen had allowed him to lick chocolate cake batter from a pair of electric beaters.

“I’m drunk,” Max said.

“You are.”

“My body is on fire.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie. It’ll get better.”

“I don’t know where my father and sister are.”

“I don’t know where my daughter is, but I know she’ll be okay. You can’t worry that way.”

Luke came back in. “Here’s the iPhone.”

“Hand it to me, Luke.” Karen looked at the iPhone. “My boss has this same model. Why don’t I look at some of your pictures, Max?”

“I can’t see them.”

“That’s okay. I’ll look at the pictures and ask questions, and you can fill me in.”

“Okay.”

Karen fiddled with the screen until she managed to bring up a photo of Max’s father and sister at an airport gate. “You’re at the airport. Where are you from, Max?”

“Calgary.”

Karen scrolled ahead. “What’s your sister’s name?”

“Heather. A real eighties name. My mother likes it.”

A few shots later Karen came to the photos of herself — two taken without her knowledge, the third of her flipping young Max the bird. “And then we come to . . .”

“You found the photos of you, huh?”

“Yes, I did.” That last photo was just as funny as Karen had imagined it would be. She smiled. She could sense Luke standing behind her. He had said almost nothing the entire time they’d been in the storage room, but his presence had been strong. She hadn’t felt so reassured by another person since her wedding.

Max said, “Hold your breath.”

“Huh? Hold my breath?” Karen asked. “Why?”

“Just do it. Please?”

Karen held her breath, and so did Max.

Max said, “You know, I bet if we froze right here and didn’t move and didn’t breathe, we could stop time from moving forward forever.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I do.”

Karen looked at Luke, who gestured,
Why not?
He sat down beside her and took her hand, and the three of them sat there, not breathing, frozen in mid-motion, trying to stop time. And for an infinitely thin moment, time did stop.
Heck
, thought Karen,
time could be starting and stopping all the time, and we’d never be the wiser because we are so utterly time’s prisoners. In the time it took to think these words, time might have stopped for a billion years. How will we ever know it didn’t?

Karen looked at Luke. Their eyes locked, and Karen knew then that the two of them were connected forever. And then the candle went out, and the room became as dark as the air between two bedsheets.