Player One: What Is to Become of Us (3 page)

The woman looked at Rick. “I’m Karen.”

“Rick.”

They shook hands as the trainwrecky guy down the bar stared, breaking the moment by asking for a neat Scotch.

Luke

Luke is nursing a Scotch and wondering why it is that having money makes people feel so good — medically, scientifically, clinically
good
. What chemicals does it release? What neurons does it block? And just why is it an absolute given that having money — some money,
any
money — always feels better than having no money? There was a quote at the bottom of the snarky email sent to him yesterday by the Bake Sale Committee, one of those automatically attached quotes from some Internet program, and, as it was written by Oscar Wilde, probably went unread by the dutiful committee member. It said, “The thing about being poor is that it takes up all of your time.” So true.

But Luke is a pastor at a church locally known as “The Freeway Exit Church” more than by its proper name, The Church of New Faith, and so he has his own spin on money. He knows that what makes human beings different from everything else on the planet — or possibly in the universe, for that matter — is that they have the ability to experience the passing of time and they have the free will to make the most of that time. Dolphins and ravens and Labrador dogs come close, but they have no future tense in their minds. They understand cause and effect, but they can’t sequence forward. It’s why dogs in dog shows have to be led from task to task, because they’re unable to sequence. They live in a perpetual present, something humans can never do, try as they may. And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical form. Cash. Cash is a
time crystal
. Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has
money
.

Luke — shaggy haired, a bit pudgy, and slightly rumpled, in designer garments nabbed from the church’s flea market the previous April — currently has lots of money, because just this morning he looted the church bank account. It wasn’t something he set out to do when he woke up, but now, with a few drinks in him, he understands that it was a long time coming, and that it took a specific incident to trigger the theft. The incident transpired like this: Late yesterday afternoon, Luke met with the women from the Bake Sale Committee to discuss the upcoming sale. Luke doesn’t normally like chairing these meetings and has long-time volunteer Mrs. McGinness do it, but Mrs. McGinness is still in Arizona, helping her meth-whore daughter through her latest divorce. So Luke was sitting there, ready to chair the meeting, and eight women were supposed to be there, but only seven showed up. Luke asked, “Where’s Cynthia?” and the ladies at the table mumbled whatever, so Luke said, “Isn’t it funny that the Rapture finally happens and the only person to be taken away is Cynthia?”

Talk about the dog farting. Seven sour faces gave Luke the permission he didn’t know he needed or was looking for to empty the church’s renovation fund and vanish. It was such a clear, lucid moment, like the fugue he feels just before the onset of one of his small seizures. If the bank had still been open, he would have gone right then. And if he had any doubt about his new criminal calling, it was squelched by Sharon Truscott’s clipped little email a few hours later saying that the ladies didn’t appreciate having their piety mocked.

And now Luke is in a cocktail lounge that’s meat-locker cold and smells of cleaning products in a city he’s never visited before, with twenty grand in his jacket pockets, bundles of cash that sit like stones in a suicide’s garment, weights meant to take one faster and more thoroughly to the bottom of the river — or perhaps they’re more like helium balloons that will only take him higher and higher.

Or perhaps they will make him drunker.

Luke orders another Scotch from the bartender, who looks like one of those guys with multiple DUIs and revoked driving licences, and who’s busy chatting up a middle-aged, barflyish, Sharon-like woman. He has just overheard them introducing themselves as Rick and Karen. Karen is obviously there to hook up with someone she’s met on the Internet. Luke can’t believe how many people meet on the Internet these days. It came out of nowhere and now it’s the cause of over half the problems his flock comes to him with: online gambling debt, get-rich-quick schemes, porn addiction, parents freaked out about the sites their kids visit, shopaholism. He can’t even call the things people do on the Internet
sins
, because it’s all so dull, really, just people sitting in front of screens, and what’s
that
? Who cares? Ministering to souls was way more interesting when people actually interacted in real life. He hasn’t had a shoplifter or an affair within his flock in years. Now
that’s
interesting — oh so human — but Internet sinning? Nope. Goddam Internet. And his computer’s spell-check always forces him to capitalize the word “Internet.” Come on: World War Two
earned
its capitalization. The Internet just sucks human beings away from reality.

Luke wonders what Shakespeare had to say about money. Something clever, no doubt. Goddam Shakespeare. Luke used to pepper his sermons with lofty Shakespearean quotes because he thought it made him look smarter than he really was, and it also made his flock feel smarter because it validated any years they’d spent in college or university. But lately the younger flock members have let it be known to Luke that his quotes are kind of boring and mechanical and remind them of those automatic quotes by Nietzsche or Kafka that web bots insert at the bottom of emails that somehow, in some almost impossible to connect way, funnel truckloads of cash into the ever-expanding Eastern European pornography industry. And a Scotch with ice certainly helps lubricate Luke’s belief that intelligence has been democratized and flattened. Luke feels both behind and in front of the curve.

The curve. What the hell is “the curve”?

Luke hates the twenty-first century.

Luke is a thief.

Luke remembers once believing in what he believed in: that one day he would no longer have to live inside linear time; the concept of infinity would cease to be frightening. All secrets would be revealed. Automobile ignitions would refuse to turn over; parking lots would melt like chocolate; water tables would vanish; and the planet would begin to cave in on itself. There would be great destruction; structures such as skyscrapers and multinational corporations would crumble. His dream life and his real life would fuse together. There would be loud music. Before he began to turn immaterial, his body would turn itself inside out and fall to the ground and cook like steak on a cheap hibachi, and he would be released and he would be judged and he would be found pure.

But his congregation talks about the afterlife as if it were Fort Lauderdale.

Whatever. What matters now is that Luke is practically vibrating with freedom.

And he has decided that, although he is a failure, failure is authentic, and because it’s authentic, it’s real and genuine, and because of that, it’s a pure state of being, unlike the now-hopefully-dead fakey-fakey Luke — and feeling authentic feels great!
Heck, maybe I’m an outlaw now — I
am
an outlaw now!

And now Luke has twenty grand in his pockets, and he’s watching a little red-headed dude come into the bar and put his hand on Karen’s thigh. She doesn’t look too happy to meet him. Screw it. They’ll both just keep looking until they each settle for someone equal to themselves on the food chain. That’s the way Charles Darwin works.

Luke’s conscience suddenly rattles him. By force of habit, he talks to a God he once believed in, but this time with a small twist:
Lord, I know that faith is not the natural condition of the human heart, but why did You make it so hard to have faith? And now it’s too late, because I don’t believe in You anymore. Why did I never discuss my doubts with any human beings? My elders could have set me on the righteous path. But maybe in the end it’s best to keep one’s doubts private. Saying them aloud cheapens them — makes them a bunch of words just like everybody else’s bunch of words. If I’m going to fall, I’ll do it on my own terms.

Ironically, being honest with himself about his crime is making Luke feel genuinely spiritual as he looks at the cool Hitchcock blonde at the pathetic “business centre” across the room. He wonders if she’s noticed him. What would she think of his crime? Luke thinks she’d look at his shoes in particular, and those shoes would speak to her, and what they would say is “Payless,” and she’d write him off, so screw her; the moment he gets into town, he’s buying a pair of ultra-executive shoes in a swanky store, and he’ll never feel ashamed of his grim footwear ever again.

What’s that? She just looked at him — and she’s smiling? Hot
diggity
!

Hot diggity and yet:
crippling fear
. Lovely on the outside, most likely monstrous on the inside — if his former flock is any litmus. She’s most likely addicted to video games and online shopping, bankrupting her parents in an orgy of oyster merino and lichen alpaca. Fancy a bit of chit-chat? Doubtful. She’d most likely text him, even if they were riding together in a crashing car — and she’d be fluent in seventeen software programs and fully versed in the ability to conceal hourly visits to gruesome military photo streams. She probably wouldn’t remember 9/11 or the Y2K virus, and she’ll never bother to learn a new language because a machine will translate the world for her in 0.034 seconds. But most of all, this cool Hitchcock blonde is a living, breathing, luscious, and terrifying terminal punctuation mark on Luke’s existence, a punctuation mark along the lines of
This is the New Normal, Luke, and guess what — it’s left you in the weeds, and
you
, pastor, reverend, good sir, have outlived your cultural purpose and
you
, father, forgive me, are a chunk of cultural scrap metal, not even recyclable at that. Go huddle together for security with those other doddering, outmoded walking heaps there at the bar with you. Compare your turkey-wattle chins and Play-Doh waistlines and grow misty-eyed discussing the collapse of Communism and the final episode of
Friends
.

___

Having figured all of this out, Luke remained unsure what to do. Cultural irrelevance be damned, he hadn’t had a date in over a year. A date: he cursed himself for his self-censorship; Luke hadn’t
gotten
laid
in years.

He smiled back at the blonde, who actually seemed a bit awkward. With his head, he motioned her over to the bar. She froze, and Luke thought,
Oh crap, too forward
. But then she stood up and walked over to Luke with a strangely mechanical gait. He wondered if she was a model, and if that was how models were walking these days.
She’s so beautiful
, Luke thought.
Cartoon beautiful. She’s a Barbie doll.

She approached Luke, touched the stool beside him, and said, “I am going to sit here.”

“Please do.”

She sat on the stool, but her body language made it seem as if she’d never sat on a bar stool before and it had a learning curve, like learning how to ice skate or juggle. She stabilized and stared at the bottles against the bar’s mirrored wall. Luke looked at her, and she seemed unconcerned about being stared at. He said, “A guy walks into a bar, and the bartender looks at him and says, ‘Hey, what is this — a joke?’”

If Luke wanted a reaction, he didn’t get it. “My name is Luke.”

There was a pause. “My name is . . .” There was another pause. “. . . Rachel.”

“Nice to meet you, Rachel.”

“Yes.”

Luke felt way out of his league, and awkward as all get-out. He needed to order more drinks, and maybe some snacks, but what do you feed a woman like this — hamburgers made of panther meat? Peacock livers on Ritz crackers? Do beautiful women even eat food? “Can I order you a drink?”

“Oh. Yes. A ginger ale, please.”

“Great. Bartender?” Luke called for Rick’s attention but got only part of it, as Rick was watching the loving Internet couple interact.

“What can I get you?”

“A ginger ale for Rachel here, and a Glenfiddich with ice for me.”

“Right away.”

Luke reached into his jacket pocket for one of the wads of cash and threw a fifty-dollar bill on the bar, and suddenly he was carried away back in time — back to when he still thought of himself as a good person; back to when every moment made him feel as if he was getting away with something; back to when he didn’t need to loot twenty thousand dollars from the church bank account to land himself that feeling; back to when every moment felt like a drink with a beautiful woman at a bar; back to when he felt that his prayers still counted, still made a difference, when praying sent a beam out into the heavens as powerful as a sunbeam breaking through clouds at the end of a prairie day, like a light beamed from a sidewalk outside the Kodak Theater at the Academy Awards. Luke didn’t feel lost, but he didn’t feel found, either.

On the mute TV above the bar, there was an ad for something colourful, useless, and no doubt destined to clog the planet’s overtaxed landfills with more crap, and for some reason, a computer-animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was endorsing the product. Luke said, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in July? We need Christmas in July like a hole in the head.”

The beautiful Rachel said, “You mean Rudolph the
Useful
Reindeer.”

“Huh?”

“It’s a fact, Luke. If Rudolph hadn’t been able to help the other reindeer, they’d have left him to be eaten by wolves. I think the other reindeer would have laughed while the fangs punctured his hide. Rudolph was an outcast who became an incast only because of his utility. That’s not a judgement. It’s a statement of fact.”

Luke looked at Rachel. He had a shivering sensation that he was speaking with someone not even human, temporarily given human form. Was he simply being insecure about her beauty or was she genuinely alien? Or perhaps she was the desired end product of an entire century’s eugenic efforts at physical perfection, and with that perfection now having been achieved, humanity was now left free to pursue other avenues of perfection. He said, “I take it you’re not a big fan of Christmas?”