HOUR FOUR

HELLO, MY NAME IS: MONSTER

Karen

Karen stares at the black-haired sniper, with his blistered face and seemingly powder-burned forearms. Her body still shaking, Karen asks her duct-taped prisoner, “Okay, then, what’s your name?”

“You tell me. What do you think my name ought to be? What do I look like? Am I a Jason? A Justin? A Craig?”

Karen begins wondering, in earnestness, if he looks more like a Justin than a Jason or a Craig — and then chides herself for so quickly going in a mundane direction. This guy truly believes he did good by killing Leslie Freemont . Karen wonders when and where Leslie was scalped, and if his assistant, Tara, escaped.

Luke blurts out, “Monsters don’t need names.”

“Then that’s my new name. Hello, my name is: Monster.”

“Very funny.”

“Very well, then, my name is Bertis.”

“We should just shoot you, Bertis,” says Rick.

Bertis is cavalier. “Then shoot me. I’m at the end of one aspect of my life, but also at the beginning of some unknown secret that will reveal itself to me soon.”

Karen thinks, What if God exists, but he just doesn’t like people very much?

Rick asks, “Why were you stalking Leslie Freemont?”

“He was a fraud. He had it coming.”

“Why did you shoot the others, then?”

“Because I can see clearly enough to decide who lives and who dies.” He pauses and surveys the room. “Oh, don’t give me those faces. They died because it was their time. Their leaders are dead. History has abandoned them. The past is a joke. Me and what I’m doing is what was meant to happen next.”

“Who died and made you God?”

Bertis laughed. “Don’t be a child. Grow up. The people I shot bothered God. They angered Him. They wasted His time. Look at modern culture. Look at Americans — they’re like children, always asking for miracle this or love that, or Gee, I tried my hardest. But God created an ordered world. By constantly bombarding Him for miracles, we’re asking Him to unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon. In repayment for being an endless nuisance, Americans have become a quarter-billion oil-soaked mallard ducks. I didn’t know this oil crisis was going to happen when I woke up this morning and vowed to take out that quack, Freemont — it’s one of life’s little bonuses.”

Karen says, “You can’t lump a quarter-billion people all in together. That’s absurd. Those quarter-billion people have almost nothing in common except that they’ve been told they have lots in common.”

Bertis looks at Karen. “I like you. But you’re wrong. People are pretty much all the same — unless they’ve achieved Salvation, at which point they all become one person, one source of light. We humans have infinitely more in common with each other than we do difference. Look at this bar. Look at this hotel, the airport. Ever wonder why they sell flags and family coats of arms and KISS ME, I'M ITALIAN T-shirts in airports and tourist traps? Ever wonder why religious groups hang out there? Because a plane trip takes you away from all the things that make you comfortable. A plane trip exposes you to situations and landscapes unthinkable until recent history, moments of magnificence and banality that dissolve what few itty-bitty molecules of individuality you possess. After a plane trip, you need to rebuild your ego, to shore up your sense of being unique. That’s why religions target airports to find new recruits. You —” He nods at Rick. “You’re a bartender. You do nothing but watch people dissolve in front of you all day. Or scramble themselves with booze. And I bet you have no illusions about what goes on in the hotel next door.”

“You’re right on that.”

Karen remembers her assignation with Warren, which now feels as if it happened three weeks ago.

Bertis purses his lips and X-rays the door area to see the hotel behind it. “Nasty, nasty hotel. Cracked-out teenagers watching trash TV and eating sugar. Fornicating on towels decorated with Disney cartoons and brands of beer. And maybe on a good day you’ll find a prophet alone in an empty room on the top floor, the elevator rusted shut; a prophet stripped of his founding visions, forced to live in a world robbed of values, ideals, and direction.”

The four of them stand staring at Bertis, who sits with perfect posture.

“Look at you all. You’re a depressing grab bag of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of the most banal form of capitalism. No seasons in your lives — merely industrial production cycles that rule you far better than any tyrant. You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well all be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they’re ever going to be.”

“I agree with him,” says Rachel, sending a ripple through the group.

“Really?” asks Rick, genuinely surprised.

“Not the meaningless bit. But the bits about everyone being the same. I can’t tell faces apart. It’s hard to tell people apart. I can’t distinguish personalities. When my high school yearbook came out, it was like looking at a thousand identical faces. I couldn’t even find myself.”

“I think you’re unique,” says Rick.

“You do?”

“I do. It’s not just that you’re beautiful. It’s your mice. And the way you think so hard about everything. I’ve never seen anyone think so hard in my life.”

Rachel confesses, “Earlier, when I was supposed to be looking up the price of oil, I was actually looking up the price of white mice.”

“So you feel guilty. We now have official evidence that you’re human. Welcome to the club.”

“Really? There’s a club?”

“No, there isn’t. But I’m starting one now, and I welcome you to join me.”

Rachel walks over to Rick and says, “Thank you,” seemingly hypnotized.

Rick says, “What’s the great thing about normal, anyway? What’s normal ever done for you?” Rachel smiles.

“So what is it we’re supposed to be doing here, then?” Bertis snaps.

“Doing?” she says.

“Are we waiting for the police to show up? Is this some hokey citizen’s arrest? Am I going to be brought to justice? I’ve been outside, and trust me, there won’t be any cops here for a week.”

Karen asks, “What’s it like out there?”

Luke, who’s been pretty quiet up to now, says, “Excuse me, Karen.” In a flash, he raises the rifle and fires it at the floor in front of Bertis, hitting his foot. Bertis screams, then cries out, “What the hell did you do that for?”

“I had to do something to you. I’m sick of waiting for the law. And knowing the courts in this country, instead of sending you to rot in prison, they’ll send you to Disney World with a life counsellor and a dozen juice boxes.” Luke sets Bertis’s rifle down on the bar. He says to Bertis, “That was richly satisfying and you richly deserved it.”

“You’ll burn for that.”

“That from you of all people.”

The carpet near Bertis’s foot resembles a run-over squirrel, but Karen’s seen worse. Even though it’s hard to be compassionate for Bertis, she goes to the bar and pulls a bottle of vodka down from the mirrored racks. She walks over to Bertis. “I’ll sterilize it.”

Bertis is inspecting his shattered toe, grimacing. He glowers at the room, and his voice deepens as Karen unscrews the vodka bottle’s cap. “You’re all of you praying a prayer — a prayer so deep and strong and insistent you hardly know you are praying it. It comes from that better place inside you — the place that remains pure. You never manage to access it, but you know it exists.” Bertis glowered at a six-foot-tall cardboard cut-out promoting Chilean wine. “I don’t need to justify my actions to the courts of this world. The only valid viewpoint to make any decision from is Eternity.”

“Lovely,” says Luke.

Bertis squints. “You don’t believe in believing, do you?”

“You picked a very strange day to ask me that question.”

Rachel says, “Luke was a pastor up until yesterday. Then he lost his faith and stole twenty thousand dollars from his church’s bank account and flew here, to this airport, essentially at random.” She looks to Luke for confirmation.

“Timing is everything,” says Luke. Karen grabs a white linen napkin and tears it down the middle, improvising a bandage, which quickly reddens as she lashes it onto Bertis’s toe.

___

Suddenly incapable of processing any more of what was happening to her at the present time, Karen let her mind drift back to that morning, a morning that had begun so full of hope. She remembered packing her toiletries for the flight, looking in the mirror, and thinking, Karen Dawson, you are a well-nourished, rich-looking white woman. You could burn polka dots onto the mayor’s front door with a crème brûlée torch and nobody would bother you. And this Warren fellow will be putty in your hands. Then she caught herself from a certain angle and saw her mother’s face contained within her own — a face now blankened by Alzheimer’s, a face resting in an expensive ozone-smelling room in Winnipeg. Am I going to get Alzheimer’s? My genetic counsellor says three chances in four. Karen’s mother was no longer knowable; her mother was gone. Staring at herself in the mirror, Karen wondered, When do people stop being individuals and turn into generic humans? And from there, when do they stop being human and become vegetable, then mineral?

Perhaps people are all, in the end, unknowable. But at least some people are loveable, and at least some of them love you. Of course, they can also stop loving you. When Kevin fell out of love with her — and into love with another receptionist, no less — Karen wondered, How many married men are out there whispering like truffle pigs in the ears of temps by the office snack-vending machine? She wondered, How many are spending their noon hours in a motel down by the lake? And their wives — how many are starting to drink Baileys while folding laundry? How many are almost sick with jealousy over “that bright young gal” who’s turned the marketing department upside down with fresh ideas? That bright young gal with a future as big as Montana and legs like Bambi’s mother’s.

As she looked in the mirror, Karen thought, Okay, so there’s no permanent love in this world, and you can never really know anyone, but at least there’s heaven. Perhaps heaven is being in love and the feeling never stops — the feeling of intimacy never stops — you feel intimate forever.

Zipping up her sandwich bag filled with cosmetics in airline-approved bottles smaller than 1.5 ounces, Karen began wondering if she was past love — if she had felt pretty much all the emotions she was ever likely to feel, and from that point on it was reruns. She wondered, Which is lonelier: to be single and lonely or to be lonely within a dead relationship? Is it totally pathetic to be single and lonely and to be jealous of someone who is lonely inside a dead relationship? I feel like the punchline to a joke I might have told ten years ago.

What had happened to her earlier good spirits? She ought to have been whistling ditties to the love gods, but now she felt manless and marooned as she contemplated a life of repetitive labour, a few thousand more microwaved dinners followed by a coffin. What a wretched tailspin to have fallen into. She chalked it up to nerves over meeting Warren.

At the breakfast table, Karen learned that Casey had chosen that morning to unveil an even more extreme version of her blue and black hair: a set of blue extensions that bulked it up, doubling its volume. But Karen was not going to be roped into a style squabble. Not today. Not over a bowl of oatmeal.

“What do you think of my new do?” Casey asked.

“It’s great. It’s fine,” Karen said.

“It’s part of my campaign to become immortal.”

“How’s that, Casey? Pass me the brown sugar.”

“History only remembers people who invent new hairdos: Julius Caesar. Einstein. Hitler. Marilyn Mon-roe. Why bother with conquering Europe or discovering nuclear science when all you need is a bit of style innovation? If Marie Curie had given a bit more attention to her appearance she’d have been on the ten-dollar bill.”

“Very clever.”

Casey senses that Karen’s not in a fighting mood. “Mom, what do you think happens to you after you die?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you believe in something specific, like a religion, or do you think maybe there’s a warm cosmic flow, followed by the total extinction of your being?”

“Casey, this isn’t something I expected to be discussing on a Tuesday morning.”

“On Star Trek: Generations, Soran said, ‘Time is the fire in which we burn.’ Imagine that, Mom, burning inside a fire of time.”

“It’s Tuesday fricking morning, Casey. And you know I’ve got a big day ahead of me. You tell me, what do you think about an afterlife?”

“I don’t know,” said Casey. “If I was truly practical and green and into recycling and all of that, I’d request that you put my body into a big pot and then reduce it until it turns into that soup powder they put in your ramen noodles.”

“But you’re not practical.”

“No, I am not. I want to be buried, not cremated. And no coffin. I repeat, no coffin — just put me in the dirt.”

“Just dirt? That’s kind of ick.”

“Not true. Being soil is a good idea — I’d be moist and granular, like raspberry oatmeal muffins.” Casey scraped up the remains of her oatmeal. “Kendra from my twirling class says death is like a spa resort where everything is pre-decided for you and all you have to do is lie back and submit to the regime.”

“Kendra sounds a bit lazy to me.”

“Kendra is wicked lazy.”

“Let’s go. I can drop you off on the way to the airport.”

“But you haven’t told me what you think about death!”

“Well, Casey, I don’t remember where I was before I was born, so why should I be worried about where I’ll go after I die? When we die, we have no choice but to join every living thing that’s ever existed — and ever will.”

“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.

Bertis says, “I don’t see a ring on your finger, Pastor Luke,” and Luke is taken aback. “Ah. So now I’ve pushed one of your buttons. You don’t strike me as queer, so I’m going to have to guess that you’re damaged goods somehow. And you know I’m right, don’t you? Karen, what do you think — is Luke damaged goods?”

Luke thinks, Man, this guy is good at creating awkward moments. Then he looks at Karen. She’s standing halfway between him and Bertis, with her arms crossed. And he can tell from her face that she really does want to know why he has ended up alone.

“Let me get this straight. With everything that has happened — and is happening — you both want to know why I’m still single?”

Karen and Bertis nod.

“Okay, then . . .”

Why are you single, Luke?

___

Luke thought about this. Why?

“Well, my dad was a pastor and so I rebelled — yes, son of a preacher man and all that, and let me tell you, it really is catnip to women — but then by twenty I’d seen enough of the world to know that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves, and I came back to the church. And . . .” Luke became as wistful as it’s possible to be while pointing a shotgun at someone’s aorta. “I knew I was a soul in trouble — that’s how I viewed it at the time. But when I went back to the church, the women there wanted a goody-goody, a private express lane to God, Ten Commandments or less. And the thing is, I was no longer a bad boy, but despite becoming a pastor I was never a goody-goody either. And nobody in the middle ever liked me. And you know, I’ve been here on earth for thirty-something years, and I don’t think there is even one person who ever really knew me, which is a private disgrace. I don’t even know if people are knowable.”

With those last words, Karen became totally focused on him.

“Figuring this stuff out takes time. I’m rambling. I’m human; I’m still trapped inside of . . . time . . . trapped inside the world of things.”

“Don’t stop,” said Karen. “You’re not rambling. Keep talking.”

“Okay, so, yes — I probably am damaged goods and, yes, I think I am a broken person. I seriously question the road I’ve taken, and I endlessly rehash the compromises I’ve made in my life.” Luke sat down at the table across from Bertis. Karen sat between them.

“Go on,” said Bertis.

“At one point, I really felt like I had a soul — it felt like a small glowing ember buried deep inside my guts. It felt real.”

“So then, who dumped you?” Bertis asked, adding, “Takes one to know one.”

“Does it matter?”

“It does.”

“No, it doesn’t, because none of it matters, because no matter what I do I’m going to inherit Alzheimer’s from my bastard father.” Karen’s eyes flared open wider. “That’s the real reason for most things in my life that go sideways. The day I turn fifty-five, my universe is going to start erasing itself. So what’s the point of doing anything?”

They heard some noises from out back.

Karen asked, “What is that?”

Bertis said, “I think those two are getting it on.”

More noise.

Karen asked, “She is over eighteen, right?”

Bertis looked at Luke, whose face featured a small pout. “You’re jealous, aren’t you?” asked Bertis. “Let me guess — you thought she liked you better.”

Karen butted in. “More important to me right now, Bertis, is what is your deal?”

“Excuse me?”

“You. Rifle. Killing people.”

“Karen, I can see you’re not a believer.”

“In what?”

“God. A great truth.”

“I’m listening.”

“You need to accept that your current path is death in disguise.”

“Go on.”

“You need to look at the universe as a place filled with huge rocks and massive globs of burning gas that obey laws, but then ask yourself, to what end? Remind yourself that we are living creatures — we have mystical impulses, impulses that tell us the universe is a place charged with mystery, not just a vacuum filled with rocks and lava. We’re all born separated from God — over and over, life makes sure to inform us of that — andyet we’re all real: We have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must.”

“Okay.”

“Your life is too easy, Karen. You’ve been tricked into not questioning your soul. Do you know this?”

“I’m listening.”

“Karen, tell me, what is the you of you? Where do you begin and end? This you thing — is it an invisible silk woven from your memories? Is it a spirit? Is it electric? What exactly is it? Does it know that there exists a light within us all — a light brighter than the sun, a light inside the mind? Does the real Karen know that, when we sleep at night, when we walk across a field and see a tree full of sleeping birds, when we tell small lies to our friends, when we make love, we are performing acts of surgery on our souls? All this damage and healing and shock that happens inside of us, the result of which is unfathomable. But imagine if you could see the light, the souls inside everybody you see — at Loblaws, on the dog-walking path, at the library — all those souls, bright lights, blinding you, perhaps. But they are there.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “You talk kind of pretty for a monster.”

Bertis swivelled his head to Luke. “You keep quiet.” He turned back to Karen. “Karen, I like you, and this could be the day you finally wake up from the long, dead sleep that has been your life until now.”

“So, you’re telling me I’ve been asleep for some four decades? What was it I was doing all that time, then?”

“I don’t know. Being a part of the world — being in time rather than in Eternity. I can hear your soul, Karen. I can hear it just a bit, creaking like a house shifting ever so slightly off its foundations. In my heart it feels like that moment once a year when I smell the air and know fall is here — except it’s not the fall, Karen, it’s forever. Take down the barricade and look out the door there. Look out into this terrifying and gleaming new century, where the sun burns the eyes of innocents, where the sun burns whenever and wherever it wants, where night no longer provides respite. Where are you to find mercy in a place like that? Where will you find the correct path? There will be anarchy. Office buildings will collapse, and when they dig through the rubble, the people who were inside will be found compressed into diamonds from the force. The diamond is your soul.”

Luke heard footsteps, and Rick and Rachel entered the bar.

“Ah,” said Bertis. “The lovebirds.”

Rick came in talking. “Hey, you — Bertis — how did you get up on the roof of this place, anyway?”

“There’s an Ontario Hydro truck with a cherry picker beside the east wall.”

“Well, that was simple.”

Rachel

Rachel asks Karen, “Karen, is this what dreams are like?”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“Right now, like this — there are no lights, and yet things are still happening. Is this what dreams are like?”

“You mean you’ve never had a dream?”

“Not that I remember. Dreams are for normal people. I just sleep.”

“That’s so sad.”

“Why would it be sad?”

“Because . . .” Karen paused. “. . . Because dreams are part of being alive.”

“I think dreams are a biological response to the fact that our planet rotates, and that for a billion years earth has had both a night and a day.”

“You’re being unfair to dreams. They can’t be neatly put in a box like that. They can be wonderful.”

“But if you accept dreams, you also have to accept nightmares, and I know nightmares are bad things. And if dreams are so special, why is it that no person or company has ever tried to make a drug that leads to better dreaming? Sleeping pills, yes, but dreaming pills? Have scientists even asked that question?”

More candles are lit and Rachel sees Rick’s face glowing orange above a bowl lamp covered in white mesh and lit by a candle inside. He’s showing teeth, but the corners of his mouth are upturned, so she knows he is smiling at her. “No, Rachel, it’s not a dream,” he says, “just real life. Here. You. Me. Us. Now. And dig these cheesy candles, like we’re eating spaghetti at the restaurant with Lady and the Tramp.” Rachel is pretty sure she can now distinguish Rick from Luke. At this moment, it’s Rick’s voice that determines his identity. Rick — the father of her child as of mere moments ago.

As she helps Rick light candles around the room, Rachel wonders if he fathered her child because she is beautiful or because he is in love with her or because he is, as her mother would say, a dog. But how can a man be a dog? Or vice versa? And even if they could, why would being a dog be bad? Rachel’s father says that if cats were double their usual size, they’d probably be illegal and you’d have to shoot them, but even if dogs were three times as big, they’d still be good friends to people. Rachel sees that as a good way of comparing the two species.

Rachel replays her memories of the previous half-hour — both her normal memories and the backup copies generated by her brain’s amygdala. When Rick asked Rachel to come help him fix the leak that was allowing toxins into the building, she was happy to help. And then something new entered her life, something she couldn’t explain. Rick was standing on some plastic crates and Rachel was holding his legs, keeping him stable as he shut the window’s louvres. But when he was finished, he didn’t get down — and Rachel didn’t let go of his legs, even though Rick no longer required stability. She somehow knew that if she let go of him she would miss out on something she might never again experience. She felt, well . . . the thing is, she felt. She had feelings she had no words for — which is how normal people must go through life, ad-libbing through unclear situations, trying to label things that can’t be labelled.

Rachel thought, Okay, God, I’ve been hearing a lot about you today. So this is the one time I’m ever going to speak to you, so you’d better be listening. Dear God, please send me a sign that this is how it feels to be human. Dear God, please send me a sign that this is how it feels to be a woman. Dear God, oh please, for once in my life let me be like the others — just this once and I’ll never bug you again. I might even believe in you. But if you’re going to do this, you have to do it now. It can’t be later. It has to be now, while I’m standing here in the storage room of a cocktail bar near an airport in the early half of the twenty-first century in the middle of the North American continent. It has to be now, while I’m holding these legs in my arms, feeling the muscles move within them, feeling their heat. I’m touching another person, and I don’t want to run away or scream — in fact, I want the opposite. So there you go, God — it’s all I’ve ever wanted and all I’ll ever ask you for.

And God gave Rachel what she wanted.

___

Rachel looked out over the candlelit lounge. No one was talking, so Rachel said, “Sometimes when things are quiet at home, I’ll play Scrabble with my family, but we remove some of the vowels to make the game more challenging. Do you have a Scrabble game here, Rick?”

“Nope. But can I get you a fresh ginger ale?”

“Thank you, Rick.”

The lounge was getting humid, and Rachel disliked that — the humidity felt like strangers were touching her. A part of her wanted to retreat into her Happy Place, but after recent events, the place no longer had the appeal it once did. Rachel figured she now had to be pregnant — she had to be, because she’d followed all the rules for getting pregnant. And besides, people can’t take babies to Happy Places because babies need to be cared for all the time. And strangely, going to the Happy Place would mean going back in time in a way that wasn’t good. Rachel had come too far in the past few hours — she had earned her right to be a part of the world. And besides, God had given her what she wanted. Perhaps God was the Happy Place and she’d been mislabelling Him all her life.

The blister-faced Bertis looked at her and said, “So, Rachel, what do you believe in?”

“Me? I believe in God.”

Bertis seemed surprised. Everyone did. “You do?”

Rick looked at her. “Really?”

“Oh yes.”

Rick said, “But I thought God was . . . I mean . . . you’re not really the God type.”

“No. You’re thinking of the autism spectrum personality cliché. I think God is real.”

Luke asked if she’d always believed in God.

“No. It’s a new belief.”

“Oh. But an hour ago you were asking us why normal people . . .”

Rachel saw where Luke was going. “People change, Luke.”

“Okay, but then, do you also believe in evolution?”

“Of course.”

“Doesn’t one belief cancel out the other?” Karen asked.

Rachel replied, “Not at all. God made the world, and how He went about doing it is whatever it took to get the job done. So it involved fossils and dinosaurs and billions of years. If that’s what was required to create our world, then what is the big problem? The world is here. We live in it.”

Luke asked, “You have no trouble with the time frames involved — all that time?”

“Luke, human beings were probably not meant to think about time. It’s that simple. When people think about time too much, it always seems to cause bad feelings. Infinity is the worst concept of all. What was God thinking when He invented infinity?”

Rachel was secretly loving God. She loved the way God could be used to answer all questions. She no longer had to think things through — although this was probably not the spirit in which one was supposed to embrace belief. She wondered what the fellow members of the Fifty Thousand Mouse Club would make of her conversion — if it would make them see her as less scientifically credible.

Bertis looked at Rick and said, “Hey there, Fornicator. First you made her a fallen woman, but then you redeemed yourself by making her a believer. Good work.”

“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!”