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 plate, 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?
Karen was in tears and Luke took her hand. In doing so, he accepted the sorrow of the human condition. Luke knew that this was the moment his father would have stated, “This is all God’s doing.” And then he would have turned to Luke and said, “And now, son, would be a good time for a prayer.”
Rachel/Player One
This is Rachel, a.k.a. Player One. I’m no longer with you, but I’m not in pain or anything, so please don’t worry. I finally get to see what exists down inside that black cartoon hole Daffy Duck used to slap onto the ground to get himself out of trouble. The birds are here with me now, and so are the plants and all of God’s fine animals. I’m sitting in a glade, with all the creatures in the forest sitting around me, a dove on my left palm and a grey squirrel on my right. I am dozing, resting, feeling completely at peace. Stillness is what I have here — wherever here is. I’m no longer a part of the world, but I’m not yet a part of what follows.
I don’t know how long I’ll be here. This is a stopping point only, and you’d think I’d be bored here, but boredom exists only in linear time. Eternity isn’t linear, so there’s no boredom. No current events, either. Eternity is free of news because there’s no timeline. It’s everything and nothing. No calendars inside Eternity.
It is cooler here, too, and quiet. And I don’t look at things the same way anymore, because — well, guess what — I now understand metaphors! That’s a surprise. I know that one thing can be something else. A burning book indeed equals fascism. Gently cooing doves equal peace. In my ears I hear a noise, and that noise is the sound of the colour of the sun. That’s like four metaphors wrapped up into one! Anything can be anything!
I don’t think my child — if that’s what it was when I was shot, my fertilized DNA clump — is here with me. But I’m not sad, because the DNA clump is probably in a here of its own.
I have mostly happy memories of being alive on earth. I remember how shampoo foam circling the bathtub drain resembles galaxies. I remember my father driving around the block three times so I could hear the whole version of Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” on the radio. I remember being allowed to stay home from school to reprogram the coffee maker to display European time instead of North American time. And I remember the bathroom steaming up and my mother’s handwriting appearing as if by magic on the foggy mirror: the words “I ♥ Rachel.” I didn’t know what that meant — why would someone mix a heart shape with letters? But of course it meant she loves me — hearts equal love! And I know this because of how my heart was beating with Rick. That’s a happy memory, too.
Poor Rick. Poor Luke. Poor Karen. Poor Max . . . Poor everybody, really. Humans have to endure everything in life in agonizingly endless clock time — every single second of it. Not only that, but we have to remember enduring our entire lives. And then there is the cosmic punchline that our lives are, in fact, minuscule compared to geological time or the time frames of the galaxies and stars.
Dreams help fix the curse and gift of time perception. I wonder if humans are the only animal to know the difference between sleeping and dreaming. Dogs and cats probably don’t differentiate too much between dreams and real life. And people probably didn’t much either until the past few centuries. Nor did they over-analyze the voices they heard in their heads during the day — they probably didn’t even realize that they themselves were creating those voices. They probably thought the voice in their head was the king, or the gods passing in and out like some cosmic late-night AM radio station bouncing off the lower ionosphere, allowing them to hear distant ideas and sounds.
I wonder if my DNA clump is sleeping. Can eggs sleep? Can sperm sleep and dream? They’re only half-creatures, really — how can they be alive? And how can they dream? I think the division point between where life begins and ends is far murkier than we might think.
The only other sounds I can hear around me down inside Daffy Duck’s hole, other than nature sounds, are prayers and curses; they’re the only sounds with the power to cross over to wherever it is I am. Do prayers create electrical fields? Is that how they cross the universe? Who’s to say? I have no idea how cellphones connected me to call centres in Mumbai, but they still did it. Poor humanity, praying and cursing and praying and cursing. What is to become of us as a species?
A part of me doesn’t worry about us. If we can breed wolves into wiener dogs in ten generations, what might we do with a billion years? Never mind what God might do with a billion years. Human existence has been so short. For every person currently alive, there are nineteen dead people who lived before us. That’s not that many, really, and maybe our time as a species was only ever meant to be short. Luke is right: Human DNA truly is, in so many ways, a total disaster. I heard him say that just before I came here — or I’m pretty sure it was Luke. He and Rick were both wearing bartender’s outfits. I’m a broken record, but why can’t people wear name tags?
What would God say about evolution? Why has nobody ever asked that specific question that particular way? God’s probably been having a big chuckle since eighteen-fifty-whatever, watching humans scramble and bunker and fight and scream over evolution. God made our DNA, thus God made us. What matters is that He got us here, to this point. Or maybe the DNA did it all. Whether you’re a believer or a nonbeliever, it’s a win-win scenario.
I think cloning is where it’s probably going to get really fun. Imagine being a lab worker in 2050 and creating a great-great-great-grandchild during a coffee break. Or blackmailers holding your hairbrushes hostage, something like, “Give us your money or we’ll make ten of you — and then kill them all.” Or maybe captains of industry rewriting their wills, deeding everything to themselves down the line, forever and always. And imagine being born and getting an owner’s manual written by the previous versions of you — like the manual that comes with a 2011 Volkswagen Jetta. Imagine all the time this would save us — wasted time, hopeless dreams. Maybe this is how we get to evolve forward, electively mutating our way out of our present dire situation — because mutation on its own isn’t going to make it happen. Human beings are going to have to speed things up considerably if we’re going to survive on this piece of milky blue rock. We need technology, and thank heavens technology is the inevitable result of our freakish DNA. I’m quite certain that intelligent beings on other planets have had growth curves just like ours, and maybe they’ve mutated forward too, but it’s not like aliens are going to come do our hard work for us.
Back when I was young, I used to believe in Superman. He was an alien life form, just like me. I chose to believe I was from some other planet, because if I were, then I wouldn’t have to be a “beautiful” girl marooned in a North American suburb at the
start of the twenty-first century — a beautiful girl who couldn’t tell one person’s face from another and who could only sleep covered with ten blankets’ worth of weight on top of her, whose father didn’t think of her as a real human being, and who would scream if potatoes touched the meat on her plate. Instead, as a space alien like Superman, everything I did would be supernatural and meaningful. Even the smallest of my daily acts would be awe-inspiring and shocking. I remember watching silkworms pupate in science class. Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That was me. But of course, Superman is an anatomical impossibility, and I’ve lost my sense of kinship with him, and just who am I now? Sometimes I think humans don’t even exist as discrete persons. Rather, there is only the probability of you being you at any given moment. While you’re healthy, that probability remains pretty high, but when you’re sick or old, it shrinks. Your chance of being “all there” becomes less and less. When you have Alzheimer’s, like Luke’s dad and Karen’s mom, the probability of being you drops to almost zero — and then you die, and it really is zero — except here I am now, talking, so who’s to say?
I’m not being too cheerful, am I? I have to watch it with that sort of thing. I may be in the hereafter, but my normalcy training seems to be sticking. I don’t want to give offence to other people. I don’t need the trouble. Being different is hard, and being different in the New Normal is going to be harder still.
The New Normal.
You people still on earth are now inhabiting an era in which all human personality characteristics are linked to some form of brain feature. Personality is a slot machine, and the cherries, lemons, and bells are your SSRI system, your schizophrenic tendency, your left/right brain lobalization, your anxiety proclivity, your wiring glitches, your place on the autistic and OCD spectrums — and to these we must add the deep-level influences of the machines and systems of intelligence that guided your brain into maturity. I could go on, but do remember that, in the end, it’s real people at the end of all these variables, not androids. And if you don’t have the courage to face the truth about how we are made, then you don’t deserve the wonder that comes with being alive, regardless of how your particular slot machine generated you. Knowing your demons won’t chase away your angels, and you won’t be able to kill your demons, so you can’t get melodramatic that way.
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