Rick is enjoying Bertis’s words — not even because of their content, but because he likes their pattern, their Leslie Freemontishness.
Bertis continues: “Rick, your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you’re digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you’re not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you’re not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you’re wasting your day.”
“Wow,” says Rick. “That spiel is better than what Leslie Freemont offers.”
“That Antichrist. That demon.”
During Bertis’s speech, Rachel has been studying his hands and fingers and his Medic-Alert bracelet, and she suddenly makes a connection. “You have spatulate fingernails.”
“Huh? So what?”
“You’re Leslie Freemont’s son, aren’t you? And I’m guessing that Tara used to be your wife.”
Bertis spits, “You witch!” just as Luke, Karen, and Max enter the room, asking if they’ve found more water.
In one smooth act of choreography, Bertis yanks the tablecloth off the table with his left hand, pulls over the duffle bag, and sets it on his lap. Within a second he has the rifle out of the bag, his right hand on the trigger, and the barrel pointing at Rachel. The bullet hits her chest, and a drop of her blood lands in Rick’s eye.
___
Rick ran to Rachel and wrapped his arms around her. Luke ran over and jumped on top of Bertis, whose face was swelling. He seemed to be having a seizure. Bertis hissed his last words at Luke and Rick — “ God owns everything” — while Luke shouted, “What the hell’s happening out here?”
Rachel looked at Bertis and said, “Peanut allergy.”
“What? How could you know that?”
“His father had it. He said so when he was here. I put peanut dust all over the rifle, just in case,” then her legs buckled, and Rick, assisted by Karen, eased her to the floor. Luke looked at the rifle’s trigger, which was covered in powdered bar mix. “God, what a screwed-up world,” he said.
Rick’s heart lay smashed on the floor like an egg. His sense of time had gone AWOL. He didn’t feel old or young or asleep or dreaming or awake. He was living his whole life inside this one moment. His brain sizzled with hormones and enzymes and misfiring electrical sparks — it was amazing that he could even remember who he was. He probed Rachel’s wound and felt the bullet lodged in her bone. He had the feeling that if he reached deeper into her body he could remove gold coins and keys and tropical birds and diamonds. He thought about the blood flowing through his veins and through Rachel’s. Was her heart beating? Was she cooling off as he sat there with her in his arms?
Luke came over and said, “I’ll make a bandage. I’ll tie these napkins together.”
Rick took the napkins from Luke and held them against Rachel’s wound. He thought, We’re all born separated from God — over and over, life makes sure to let us know this — and yet we’re all real. We have names. We have stories. We mean something. We must. But what if my life is a badly told story? Maybe a badly told story only serves to remind us that there is no life after death.
Karen handed Rick a busing tray filled with melted ice and Rick sucked in a gulp of air as he rinsed away the worst of the blood from Rachel’s chest. Now I know for sure that hate is going to enter my life. I can feel it multiplying within me like a rapidly doubling zygote. And even if I eventually shed that ever-growing hate, let it drop from me like a chunk of concrete — what will fill the hole it leaves? 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.
Luke
Luke is sitting with Karen and trying to remember what day of the week it is. This almost feels like an extravagance from an already-vanished era when knowing the day of the week might somehow have mattered. He asks Karen, “Is it a Tuesday? Was it Wednesday? Will it soon be Thursday? I can’t remember.”
“I can’t either, Luke.”
It feels to Luke like a generic day — or rather, it feels how days must have felt before the seven days of the week were invented. He wonders if the builders of Stonehenge felt this same sense of daylessness. Except with Stonehenge, they probably felt yearlessness and wanted some form of confirmation that the year was about to change, that their winters would end.
Bertis is dead, his corpse dragged out back. Max is resting on a raft of tablecloths; candles light him as he lies still, moaning occasionally. Rachel is alive, but barely, also on a raft of tablecloths, and Rick is by her side, morose and speechless. In the candlelight the blood covering his shirt makes it seem like it is made of Plasticine.
So Luke is sitting with Karen, monitoring Max’s and Rachel’s conditions, giving Max occasional sips of water they discovered in a concealed tray beneath the ice machine.
Outside the cocktail lounge, the chemical dust is still kicking around and Warren is but a fluffy pink speed bump. Until the chemicals stop falling, everybody is going to be marooned in the lounge. Luke tried to go for help, running across the breezeway to the hotel doors, but now they were not only locked as before but barricaded, too. And then, back in the cocktail lounge, he had to strip down like Max and rinse himself off, so now he’s wearing one of Rick’s spare bartender outfits.
Luke knows that technically he ought to be drunk, but he stopped feeling drunk hours ago. He feels super-clear now. He can see everything. And in his mind he’s thinking of a pair of bar magnets he stole decades ago from the high school storeroom, magnets that travelled with him across his life, always stashed in the drawer of his bedside tables alongside a Bible. Luke kept these magnets because he could never figure out why north attracts south and why similar poles repel, but he thought if he looked closely enough, he might see threads hurling themselves across space, fighting each other — visibly fighting each other. In his early twenties he still had the bar magnets, and he asked his older sister, a radiologist, how magnets communicated with each other to either attract or repel. She said, “They have fields around them.”
“Okay, but what’s a field?”
“A field is what surrounds a magnet.”
“That’s a non-answer. How does a field work?”
“Well, we know how to work with fields, to predict how strong they’ll be, how to manipulate them with, say, motion inside of dams, or with particle accelerators.”
“That’s not my question. What I want to know is, are there little electrons down there, like tiny little M&M candy guys wearing boxing gloves, hovering around their poles, duking it out?”
“No, fields don’t operate with particles.”
“So how do they operate?”
“We don’t know.”
“We don’t know?”
“We don’t.”
“So all we know about fields is that they exist.”
“Pretty much. They warp space. You just have to accept that fields are fields, and we’ll probably never understand how they do it. Gravity is a field, too. It does the same thing, except it’s way weaker. It takes a planet the size of earth to generate enough gravitational field to make a rock fall down. One good small magnet can have just as much attractive power.”
“I see.”
But Luke didn’t see. It continued to bother him. If we don’t know what a field is, what else will we never be able to understand? And what other fields exist that are either too big or too small to appreciate on the human level?
Karen says, “I’m sorry about your father. My mother is going through the same thing right now. Alzheimer’s.”
“Huh.” Luke thinks a bit. “I used to think Alzheimer’s was a punishment sent to us as a species for refusing to change our ways.” He pauses a beat. “I hope that didn’t sound preachy.”
“You mean, refusing to change our ways as individuals?”
“Individually, collectively. I’ve learned over the years that people almost never change. The crap I used to hear from my
flock. Most people learn nothing from life. Or if they do, they conveniently forget what they’ve learned when it suits their needs. Most people, given a second chance, screw it up royally. It’s one of those laws of the universe you can’t shake. Maybe they learn something once they get their third chance — after wasting vast sums of time, money, youth, energy. But even if they learn something, it doesn’t mean they’re going to change their lives. Most of them simply become bitter because they never had the strength of spirit to make bold strokes.”
“You probably heard a lot of problems in your line of work.”
“I did. Tell me, has your mother . . . has she forgotten you yet?”
“Yes. Did your father forget you?”
“Yeah. Almost immediately.”
Karen says, “My mom’s sort of turning into an animal now, but I don’t know what kind of animal. She screeches. She makes lowing noises. She has stopped being human. It makes me wonder what it means to be human, as opposed to being something else. But at the same time, I no longer think humans are stuck with our natures the way a dog wants bones or a cat wants to chase mice. There’s a weird kind of hope that comes from that. We can change into something else, even if it’s something we don’t understand.”
“Hmmm,” says Luke. “My battle is trying to decide whether it’s worth making memories if in the end I’m just going to lose them all, through disease or death. What’s the point of it all if I’m just going to go gaga?”
“I hate that expression,” says Karen.
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. The doctors I work for actually use that word every day in the lunchroom. But I still don’t like it.”
Max opens his mouth and gestures for a sip of water, which Karen gives him.
Luke says, “Well, time does erase both the best and the worst of us.” He looks around. “Aren’t we being cheerful?”
They both scan the room and, perversely, laugh — first a giggle, then a nervous gut crunch. Rick looks up, confused, and Luke finally composes himself and says, “Oh man. We’re a disaster of a species, aren’t we? People, I mean.”
Rick croaks, “Are we?”
Luke says, “We completely are. I’m not even going to single out human beings as the Number One disaster on this planet — I’m going to single out our DNA as the criminal. Our DNA is a disaster. Everything we make is the fault of our evil little DNA molecule. Hi, I’m a little DNA molecule. I build cathedrals and go to the moon — heck, I harnessed atomic energy! Take that, viruses.” Luke looks around the room. “And this is what it gets us in the end. Bar mix. Blindness. Toxic snow. A dead energy grid. Phones that don’t work. We’re a joke.”
The room goes quiet again.
Eventually Karen says, “You know, Luke, there’s a good side to forgetting things, too. Like at night, when you’re dreaming and dead friends and relatives show up and you don’t understand that they’re dead — there’s something not quite right about them being there, but they’re definitely not dead. Imagine what this would have been like a few hundred years ago: if you made it to fifty or sixty, the dead would populate your entire dream life. It must have been much nicer for the dreamer than being awake. Forgetting stuff protects us, too, Luke.”
Luke thinks of his own life, pre–oil crash. He once believed that unless a person goes through some Great Experience, that person’s life will have been for naught. He comforted himself with the belief that a quiet life of loneliness could be its own Great Experience. He found himself spending half his time inventing things to say that made it okay to be sleeping alone at night. If he’s honest, he became a pastor because he thought that advising other people on their problems would negate the fact that he had no life. He came to dread hearing the problems of his flock, yet he yearned to share in the problems of someone he actually loved.
And here sits Karen. Luke wants to hear her problems. And it seems she doesn’t mind hearing his. She opens a door. She asks, “Do you have a dog, Luke?”
“A dog. No. Why do you ask?”
“When you’re single and over forty, having a dog is good in that it means you can still form bonds and relationships.”
“But there’s a dark side to that,” Luke says.
“There is?”
“Yup. It could mean that you’ve stopped being able to form connections with other humans.”
“Uh-oh. Always a trap door, isn’t there?”
“Always.”
“I like you, Luke.”
“I like you, too, Karen.”
“Are you lonely, Luke?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
___
The room went quiet. In the distance a siren flared up and down and came and went. Luke said, “I was actually getting to be okay with it — loneliness — but I can’t do it anymore.”
“Loneliness is what brought me to this ridiculous bar,” said Karen. “Is Mother Nature a prankster or what?”
“She is.”
“Do you think you’ll miss being a preacher?”
“A pastor? No, I doubt it. I’m tired of people believing the first thing that passes by their eardrums. I’m tired of the way we’re all hard-wired to believe lies.”
“Churches are a lie?”
“There are thousands of them. Some of them have to be wrong. And I don’t want to think of myself as someone who’s interested only in people who are in pain. I’m not a vampire. I’m not a saint.”
“One of the doctors in my office made an observation. He was Irish and super-Catholic. He said that if there were two Catholics left on earth, one of them would have to be Pope.”
“Ha! That’s good.”
“And Luke, what’s the deal with meatballs, anyway?”
“Meatballs?”
“Yeah, meatballs. Who do they think they’re trying to fool? We all know they’re just meatloaf in disguise.”
“You have a unique perspective on life, don’t you?”
“You have to when you have a fifteen-year-old goth daughter. If you don’t, you develop one pretty quick when you’re in Safeway and she asks the guy at the butcher counter for a pint of cow’s blood.”
“How did you react?”
“I kept my cool, thank you. If it wasn’t cow’s blood, it would have been something else. A flame-thrower. A pneumatic staple gun. When she went through her vegetarian phase, I bought her tofu hot dogs and she gave me this lecture on how vegetarian hot dogs were, technically, more offensive than hot dogs made from meat by-products.”
“How so?”
“She said it was using a way of life based on peace and joy to recreate the worst possible dimension of meat. She said it was like trying to make non-Nazi Nazis.”
“That’s funny.” He paused. “Hey, you know another thing I’ve been thinking about the church? It’s two things, really.”
“What?”
“I was watching the marching band at the school down the street practise on the field, and they were just appalling — a smoking-trainwreck version of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,’ or whatever the song is called — and the old guy who takes care of the equipment was standing beside me watching and he said, ‘Ah, the young angels. You know the secret of marching bands, don’t you?’ I said I didn’t and he said, ‘It’s simple. Even if half of the students are playing random musical notes, it still sounds like they’re a coordinated band.’ And that’s kind of how I feel about organized anything, including religion.”
“You said there were two things about the church.”
“You’re right. Last month I was buying some green plates in the Chinese store, to replace the ones that got chipped in day-to-day use, and I couldn’t find the ones I usually buy. I asked the owner if they were out of production, and he smiled and said, ‘They’ve been in production for four hundred years, and they’ll still be in production in another four hundred. And the stack is over by the window now.’ I guess I don’t want to be just another green pla
te, replaceable, identical, and forgotten.”
“Luke, feeling unique and being unique aren’t the same thing.”
“I know. But still. We have to count. I want to be part of history. I want a Wikipedia page. I want Google hits. I don’t want to be just a living organism that comes and goes and leaves no trace on this planet.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
This was a question Luke had no answer for, but he didn’t have to answer because just then the power came back on and a space that had felt like a medieval painting now felt like a crime scene photo. The horror of the past few hours, frozen like a tableau in a natural history museum: creatures of the Paleozoic era; Conestoga wagons crossing the prairies, shedding pianos and armoires along the way; the International Space Station growing bean sprouts in zero gravity; a cocktail lounge in the middle of the North American continent filled with blood and guns and twisted bodies and scattered bar mix, a testament to the carnage and disaster that befell humanity the moment the oil ran out. Karen sat cradling Max, her psyche held together with Scotch tape and rubber bands, saying nothing that might further trouble the blind boy. Rick sat silent and furious as he held the perfect Rachel, genetically advanced or genetically flawed, depending on how you looked at her soon-to-vanish being.
Life is short, Luke thought. And fate is for losers. And money is almost certainly a crystallization of time and free will — but it needs sweet crude oil to survive.
Luke continued surveying the remains of the day, unsure what to do. His faith was gone, but more than ever he remained convinced he possessed a soul — because his soul had experienced the past five hours and the pain and love it felt — but then, what good was a soul without faith?
Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures) Page 15