Player One: What Is to Become of Us (14 page)

“You’re getting cosmic, Mom. Get cosmic more often. But what do you really think of my hair?”

“In the car. Now. You’re not going to goad me into trashing your hair.”

Since then, Karen had crossed a continent, had a failed romantic liaison, witnessed a murder, participated in the collapse of the Western world, and taken a religious nutcase as a prisoner.

Rousing herself from her reverie, Karen looked at her dead phone. She noticed that Rick and Rachel had left the room, and that Luke was now guarding Bertis with the shotgun. She thought of Casey, at home watching smoke plumes spout from around the city, lashing together heaven and earth. She sat across the table from him and said, “You know, Mr. Bertis, if you have something to say, I’m listening.”

Rick

Rick is in love. How quickly the universe disposed of Leslie Freemont to make room in his heart for the beautiful young Rachel. Nothing about the current situation fazes him. He feels no fear, just warmth. He feels as if he can shoot laser beams from the tips of his fingers and, correctly aiming at the right person, make them feel holy. He feels like a superhero called Holy Man.

And he has a shotgun. That helps, too. And Luke shooting off Bertis’s left toe — that was intense, but Bertis deserved far worse.

Rick detects shades of Leslie Freemont in Bertis’s speech patterns. In fact, Bertis is a better Leslie Freemont than Leslie Freemont ever was. He is about to raise the subject when Rachel twists her head and sniffs like a border collie. “There’s a chemical leak. The outside is getting in. It’s coming from out back.”

Sensing an opportunity, Rick takes it. He passes the shotgun to Luke, saying, “We’re going to fix the leak. Come on, Rachel.”

Rachel asks, “You shut off all the overhead vents, correct?”

“Tight as a drum.”

“It’s coming from over there . . .”

Rick follows Rachel to the rear storage area, where that morning he’d been getting a weekend’s worth of empties boxed for the recycler. Above the crates is a small louvred window, slats open. “That’s the leak,” Rachel says. “Can you reach it?”

“I’ll have to stand on the crates.”

“I’ll stand below and make sure they’re stable. And I’ll hold you.” The chemical dust coming in feels like ground glass in Rick’s eyes and throat. Rachel throws Rick a bar rag to cover his face. He climbs up on the crates and stands on his tiptoes, Rachel steadying him at his knees as he shuts the window. “There. It’s closed,” Rick says.

But Rachel doesn’t let go of his knees. And Rick doesn’t want her to let go. He wants the moment to last forever. This would be his heaven: the moment when the spark ignites and you know it’s all going to happen, that your instincts were correct.

The rear area is quiet. Rick can hear both Rachel’s and his own breathing. He’s fully aroused and knows it will soon be time to come on strong.

Rachel says, “Nobody’s ever kissed me before.”

“Oh?” Rick says, staring at the closed window.

“No. Often, if people even touch me, I scream. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t stop myself.”

Rick hops off the crates and stands directly in front of Rachel, face to face. Rachel inspects his face. She says, “I see you have a scar beside your eye.”

“I got stabbed.”

“Stabbed in the face?”

“It was a stupid fight. It was a long time ago. I don’t do that anymore. Fight, I mean. Only when I go on a bender, but I haven’t been on one for fourteen months now.”

“Did it hurt?”

“What — getting stabbed? Not really. You’d think it would, but no. In fact, it was kind of cool. Like my soul jumped out of my skin for a second, like a salmon jumping out of a river.”

Rachel says, “I’m glad you have an identifying trait I can recognize you by.”

“Yeah?” Rick can feel Rachel’s breath on his face, like the air before a late-afternoon summer storm.

“You look very relaxed,” Rachel says.

“Yeah?”

“Maybe. I can’t tell, really. They told us in normalcy training that if you tell normal people they look relaxed, they actually do relax. It’s a coping tactic.”

Rick kisses Rachel. She doesn’t respond at first, and he wonders if he’s wrecked everything and come across as a perv, but then she ignites and practically bites his face off with passion. Rachel’s so energetic it’s actually freaking Rick out a bit, but she’s young and her reptile cortex knows what it wants. And Rick is older and knows how to deliver. And he’s loving it, getting down and dirty in the back of the bar as if he were young again. It’s just the two of them in their own little universe, and suddenly everything in the world makes sense, because without the crap and the death and the drudgery and the endlessness of life, it would be impossible for passion to exist.

___

Nothing very, very good and nothing very, very bad lasts for very, very long. A half-hour later, Rachel and Rick were on the floor. Their clothes were relatively clean, and Rick was oddly proud that he had been such a good custodian of the space. And who’d have thought the storeroom, with light filtering in from the main bar area, could look and feel romantic? Rachel turned her head and looked at Rick. “Rick, why was Leslie Freemont so important to you?”

“Leslie Freemont? Honestly?”

“Yes.”

Rick looked up at the ceiling. “Well . . . because starting a few years back, I began feeling like my life was no longer my own. I felt like I was this person stuck inside the body of someone named Rick. I had access to his memories and knowledge, but I wasn’t Rick.”

“Do you mean schizophrenia? Or dissociative identity disorder?”

“No. Those would be interesting. Those would be fixable with medicine. What I have can’t be fixed by medicine — or booze — even though I tried. I mean, I had a kid and a wife, and then, once my marriage ended, I looked around me and everyone in my life had changed — grown older, become different, moved on. So I tried to avoid life by sleeping all the time, but my problems invaded my dream life. Man, that sucked. And then there was the drinking. And I became invisible to people under thirty. And I learned that women want guys the same age as me, but without my mileage. I had to learn to cope with the knowledge that my chance to make big strokes in life was over. I was never going to be rich or really good at doing something — anything. So I scraped together what I could and got a truck and tools and started a landscaping business. I was kind of making a go of it, and then it all got stolen — the truck and the tools — and I stopped wanting to exist anymore.”

“Suicidal impulses?”

“No. I just didn’t want to exist. Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave. And then I saw this Freemont guy on TV and it was like he could see the hole in my soul and had a way to fix it. He was so confident. People liked him. He knew how to succeed. He could prove to me that life is bigger than we give it credit for — that something huge can just happen out of the blue. We can enter a world where all the women wear those nice, clean sweaters from Banana Republic and sing along to the radio in key, a world where the guys drive Chevy Camaros and never stumble or screw up or look stupid. I thought Leslie Freemont’s ideas would make me feel young again.”

“I don’t think your face reads as old.”

“That’s an interesting way of phrasing it. But I am. Old. Trust me.”

“There’s that expression normal people use: You’re only as young as you feel.”

“I beg to differ, Rachel. When you’re young, you feel like life hasn’t yet begun, like life is scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays — whenever. But suddenly you’re old, and the scheduled life never arrived. I find myself asking, ‘Well, then, exactly what was it I was doing with all that time I had before I thought my life would begin?’”

Rachel said, “I think we should go back to the bar, Rick.”

“No way. I want to stay here forever. Right here. Right now. With you.”

“There’s a sniper out there, and Karen and Luke might want help guarding him.”

“I know.”

Rachel got onto her knees and looked at Rick. Rick kissed his fingertip and touched it to her lips. He said, “You know, I have always liked the idea of Superman, because I like the idea that there is one person in the world who doesn’t do bad things. And who is able to fly.”

“Superman is absurd,” said Rachel. “The notion that people can fly is ridiculous. In order to fly, we would have to have chest muscles that stretched out in front of us for five or six feet.”

Rick smiled. “I used to pray to God. I asked, ‘Please, God, just make me a bird, a graceful white bird free of shame and taint and fear of loneliness, and give me other white birds among which to fly, and give me a sky so big and wide that if I never wanted to land, I would never have to.’” Rick looked into Rachel’s eyes.

Rachel said, “But you can’t be a bird. You’re a person. People can’t be birds.”

Rick smiled again. “But instead God gave me you, Rachel, and you are here with me to listen to these words as I speak them.”

Rachel blinked and looked Rick in the face. Rick was unsure whether he’d connected. Rachel said, “Rick, in normalcy class we learned that people are often most attractive and charismatic when they are confused and when they think that nobody could possibly like them.”

“Are they?”

“Yeah. Please, Rick. Stand up and come with me. Okay?”

“Roger.” Rick stood up. “What I like about you, Rachel, is that I never know what’s going to come out of your mouth next.”

Rachel said, “Rick, when Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, do you think he thought he was trading up or trading down?”

“Donald Duck? Trading down, obviously. Who wouldn’t want to fly?”

Luke

Bertis says, “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

Karen blinks.

The power goes out, and nobody is surprised. A dribble of light comes in through the barricaded doors, but nothing useful, only enough to allow Karen to locate a box of table candles and matches from behind the bar; light is somewhat restored.

Bertis looks across the room at Luke and changes his tone. “So, you’re a thief?”

“Looks like it.”

“Your twenty grand’s probably not worth much by now. How ironic. Your flock will be angry.”

Luke is nonchalant. “They’ve got bigger things to worry about. They probably don’t even know yet that I did it. And when they learn that the money’s not worth anything anymore, I’ll be off the hook. Didn’t plan it that way, but that’s how it rolled.”

Karen gets up and goes to Bertis, dribbling more vodka over the remains of his toe. Bertis’s face betrays a sting as he says, “You should have stolen something more purely valuable, Luke. Maybe some DNA cloned from the Pope’s Band-Aid — or a dab of antimatter from that supercollider thingy over in Switzerland.”

Luke says, “Okay, you’ve scored your point. Want me to shoot off your other toe?” The candlelit room and the shotgun make the room feel like a painting from a few centuries back — a domestic interior. Some dead hares and partridges would look at home in the environment.

Bertis is snide: “Oops. Looks like power’s gone to your head.”

Karen intervenes. “Fellas, look, stop it right now.”

Luke knows that Karen is right to stop this from escalating. But
wow!
. . . It’s late afternoon and Luke is now a prison guard in a cocktail lounge filled with what smells like burning snow tires leaking in from the outside. How did his life come to this? Twenty-four hours earlier he was . . .
What was I doing? I know: trying to decide if a McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish was eco-friendly and whether to upgrade my cable package and put it on the church’s tab. Church: how strange to think of it right now
. Luke is in the foxhole, but it’s not making him question his newly found atheism. He asks Bertis, “Why would you kill Leslie Freemont?”

“Why? Because he wanted to go to heaven without dying.”

“Excuse me — explain that to me.”

“He was a prisoner of the world. He thought earthly happiness was all we needed. ‘Power Dynamics Seminar System.’ What the hell is
that
? Leslie Freemont thought humans saw themselves as bottomless wells of creativity and uniqueness. But God refuses to see any one person as unique in his or her relationship to Him. Nobody’s special. And life on earth is just a bus stop on the way to greater glory or greater suffering.”

Bertis is pushing many of Luke’s father buttons.

When Luke was growing up, Caleb had spoken with the same evangelical fervour as Bertis. That old bastard, Caleb, dead three years now, reclaimed by the soil, by the planet, by the solar system. Why would someone have a son just so he could have a sparring partner? So that he could create a smaller-scale version of himself? At one point Luke thought he’d gotten over Caleb’s spiritual belittlement — in his teens, when he likened God and Caleb to the weather: You may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it. Sadness and grief are part of being human and always will be. That’s not for one person to fix. Luke became the bad boy every mother fears her daughter will get entangled with: unlikely bouts in which he hot-wired cars behind the tire shop, and times when he’d vanish for days doing ecstasy with the unpopular kids who smoked beside the lacrosse field dugout. Luke told himself that belief in God was just a way to deal with things that were out of your control. His father said that was pathetic, that it did nothing to address the moral obligations of the individual.

Luke realizes that his rebellious phase was a necessary step on his path to becoming a pastor. Nobody wants advice from a goody two-shoes.

Karen asks Bertis, “Are you married?”

Bertis snaps, “No. You?”

Karen says, “No. But I was. Were you ever?”

Bertis pauses long enough to make it clear that the answer is yes.

Luke says, “She abandoned you, didn’t she?”

Bertis flips out. “How dare
you
talk to me about my life like that?”

Ahhh
. . . Luke has seen this before: hyperfaith abandonment syndrome — people, usually guys, going too gung-ho on faith after someone leaves them. Just another OCD, not much different from hoarding newspapers or compulsive handwashing.