HOUR THREE

GOD'S LITTLE DUMPSTERS

Karen

Karen and her three barmates are standing inside the door to the cocktail lounge, as a quartet, panting like dogs.

Luke asks, “How many other entrances are there into this place?”

“Just the rear delivery door,” Rick says.

“Come on.”

The two men race towards the rear door, with Rick hopping the bar to retrieve a shotgun from beneath the cash register.

Karen’s brain’s amygdala, like Rachel’s, fortified by adrenaline, is now kicking in and is making a dual recording of current events — life now feels like it’s happening in slow motion for genuine biological reasons.

Her BlackBerry rings — the outside world! It’s Casey. “Mom?”

“Casey.” Karen knows to downplay her situation. “Sweetie, are you okay?”

“I’m with Misha. We’re outside the Husky station down at the crossroads. It’s been one great big hockey riot for the past half-hour. There’s no gas left. Everyone’s going apeshit. I’ve been taking pictures.”

“You’re okay?”

“Of course I’m okay. I’ll send you some photos after this. How did it go with Mr. Right?”

“It didn’t work out too well. Casey . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I want you to go home. Okay, sweetie?”

“No way. There’s too much action going on. It’s crazy everywhere. It’s kind of awesome.”

“Casey, I don’t care how awesome it is. I want you to go home, and once you get home I want you to phone the police and tell them to come immediately to the hotel lounge I’m at right now.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Don’t worry about me, Casey. Just do as I say. The phones aren’t working properly here. I don’t know how your call made it through. Go home. Call the police. Tell them to come here.”

“Wait, Mom — aren’t you flying back today?”

“I doubt it. I’m at the Airport Camelot Hotel.”

“Mom, you’re scaring me. Something’s really wrong there. I can tell!”

“Don’t be scared. But go home. Call the police.”

“Mom?”

The phone dies and Karen stares at the garnish caddy filled with pineapple chunks, orange slices, and maraschino cherries. She remembers her college job waitressing. The bar’s owner, Gordy, had told her that garnishes are the lungs of a restaurant, sucking up all the impurities and crap in the air and leaving the room fresher for everybody. “Karen, garnishes are God’s little Dumpsters,” Gordy had said. “So use the goddam cling wrap on them now.” And that was how Karen became addicted to cling wrap, and that’s why she finds herself cling-wrapping slightly dried-out beverage garnishes while thinking about riots, looting, no cars, no planes, and no food. She catches sight of herself in the mirror behind the liquor bottles. Her hair is a mess, as if she’s groomed herself using only moistened fingertips. How rare it is that we catch glimpses of ourselves in mirrors — usually in public spaces — and see ourselves as strangers see us. Beneath the mirror sits a jar of beef jerky that looks like strips of sun-dried hobo. How can men eat that stuff?

From the computer across the room, Rachel says, “Oil is now technically $900 a barrel. But in reality, it’s no longer for sale. And . . . and now my Internet connection has failed.”

Karen yells, “Try the TV.”

The beautiful but spooky Rachel goes to fiddle with the TV controls. Karen hears the two men dragging something heavy to block the rear door.

Karen says, “I’m going to make an inventory of all the food in this place.”

Rachel, in her toneless white-mouse-breeding voice, replies, “Yes, a caloric assessment of our environment is a good idea.”

A brief investigation reveals that the bar has no kitchen and that their larder consists of fruit wedges, beef jerky, and ten kilos of Cajun-flavoured bar snacks containing blanched peanuts, pretzels, sesame sticks, toasted corn, pepitas, chili bits, and soy nuts, or, as Karen views it with her new survivalist mindset, Legumes, grains, seeds, and pods — ideal for life during wartime.

She discovers a stack of new airtight Rubbermaid containers and begins distributing the food into them. She finds this task oddly soothing. It occurs to her that when you have one specific task at hand, the whole world looks completely different — more focused, somehow. Rinsing out a bowl, she thinks, Most of us have only a dozen or so genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler. Right now, she thinks, life feels like one of those real patches, with no additives or fillers or starch. My universe has become huge! The world is full of wonder and fear, and my life is a strand of magic moments strung together, a succession of mysteries revealed. She feels as if she is in a trance.

Karen remembers another moment in her life that felt as big: when her husband proposed to her, saying: “A ring is a halo for your finger. From now on, we no longer cast two shadows, we cast one. You stole my loneliness. I don’t want to lose you.” While emptying out the bar-mix dregs from a white bulk bin, Karen reflects that falling out of love can happen as quickly as falling in, and that falling out of love is just as surely one of life’s big moments.

Worry kicks in: Will Casey go home? Will she reach the police? And if she does, are there enough police near the airport to provide safety to a world coping with no oil?

There’s a cracking noise outside the glass door. Karen and Rachel look up, then freeze. Jesus Christ, the sniper’s outside. Karen walks to the door as though approaching, say, Madonna, at a restaurant — the reward might be great, or it could be a possibly fatal slap in the face. She peers over the cigarette machine through a slot in some smushed-up tablecloths and sees an old red car from the 1980s zoom past through the narrow walkway, barely missing Warren — poor, doomed Warren, marinating in a pool of his own blood on the other side of the barricaded glass door. Warren, part of a now long-gone world once fuelled by oil. Sure, Warren looked like the kind of guy who spent weekends with a metal detector, combing beaches for lost wedding rings, but he didn’t deserve — wait! She emerges from her trance for a moment. Somewhere outside is a freaking sniper! She backs up quickly and looks at Rachel; the TV screen is out of view. She says, “Just a car going past. No idea who it was.”

“Can you see any activity in the hotel?”

“Nothing.”

Karen returns to her spot by the bar and chews on an orange slice. Okay, Karen, very well. Your old life is gone now — no more sitting at the waiting room desk, watching destabilized souls come and go while you sit in an Aeron chair pushing electrons around with a stick. Your new life, barely ten minutes old, is dreamlike yet more real than real — like the vivid dreams you have in the morning just before waking up, the brain’s richest sleep cycle. No more eight-hour days breathing office air that smells like five hundred sheets of twenty-pound bond paper roasting at a low temperature in a nearby oven. No more afternoons in which time feels stillborn. Work was never meant to be a person’s whole life, so why do so many of us believe it is?

Karen imagines the Safeway back home — probably already completely looted. And Casey? She’d be fine. And maybe the airport would open again soon. It had to. It might take a week, like after 9/11, but she would get home. She once heard that the best thing for the planet would be for everyone to stay in one place for five years: no more transience, no more geographical cures, no more petro-holidays. just a simple commitment to one spot.

Luke and Rick return from the back. “No one’s getting in through that door,” Rick says. “Not without a tank.” He calls to Rachel. “Any news?”

“My guess is that oil is currently unavailable at any price. And I can’t get the TV to work.”

The men stand on either side of the front door, looking for any action outside. “Nothing,” Luke says. “Just Warren.”

Rick peeks out and says, “Hey, I see a jet that just took off — a jumbo. It’s . . . Air France.”

Rachel says, “I’m guessing it’s that plane’s last flight. It has to get home to its native hangar.”

The men head to the bar, where Karen, in Mom-mode despite the seeming apocalypse, is pouring a bowl of bar mix for them. She asks Rick, “What’s your guess — a solo sniper or one gun among many?”

“No idea,” Rick says. “I’m trying to figure out in my head what direction the shots came from. As far as I can tell, right above us.”

“Hey!” Luke interrupts. “Does that phone work?”

Everyone makes the connection at once: a landline. Karen reaches for it, hears a dial tone, and dials 911. The sound from the receiver is loud. The phone clicks, dials, clicks again, and then plays, of all things, an automated hurricane warning. “No surprise there. Any of you have kids?”

Rick says, “A boy. Tyler. School’s out for the day. He may be home now.” He pauses.

“Okay,” Karen says, “while we try to figure out some other way of getting help, I’m having a drink. Who else wants one?”

___

The quartet sat on the floor behind the bar with their drinks, positioned halfway between the exits — the safest location, given all options. There was some discussion about the chaos that would surely ensue in the outside world, echoes of the 1973 oil shock but infinitely worse: the only gas people were going to get was whatever they still had in their tanks, maybe enough to get to work a few more times — except work was probably gone now too. Kill your neighbour for a tank? Why not? Will the military help out? Oh, please. Karen remembered a few months back seeing a truck that looked military, but she wasn’t sure if it was real or from a film shoot.

Society was frozen, with no means of thawing out. No more cheap, easy food, no more travel, and, most likely, no more middle class.

Karen got a sad vibe from Luke as he thought about society’s cookie crumbling; from Rachel, she perceived no emotion.

There was a silent patch, then Rachel said, “Growing up, I had to take courses on how to live with normal people.”

“What do you mean?” asked Karen, curious to finally learn something about the woman in the $3,000 Chanel dress, or a very good copy of one.

“How to interpret the noises you make and the things you do. Like laughing. Medically, clinically, I have no sense of humour. A lesion in my brain’s right hemisphere creates tone-blindness that hinders my ability to appreciate what you call humour, irony, passion, and God. Another right-hemisphere lesion strips my speech of inflection and tone. People say I sound like a robot. I can’t tell. And finally, I have autism-related facial recognition blindness syndrome. Which is all to say that when people make the laughing noise, I have to talk myself out of being frightened.”

“Is there a name for your condition?”

“I have several. I have autistic spectrum disorder. I have problems with inhibition and disinhibition, as well as mild OCD. My sequencing abilities are in the top half percentile. I know pi to just over one thousand digits.”

“I’ve seen a few people with that come through the office I work in — used to work in. So you can’t tell faces apart?”

“No.”

“Can you tell if loud people are angry or happy?”

“A little bit. But in normalcy training I learned a set of questions one can ask to neutralize emotionally extreme situations, such as right now.”

“Like what?”

“For example, you can always ask neurotypical people what their job is, and what they’ve learned through their jobs. And, as I believe we need a distraction here, I’m going to initiate this procedure. Luke, you have a wad of cash in your pocket and recently lost your religious faith. Can you tell us more about what you do?”

Luke waited for Karen to hand him his drink before saying, “Up until this morning I was a pastor in a nice little church beside a freeway off-ramp up in Nippissing. But yesterday I lost my faith, and this morning I stole the church’s entire renovation fund, jumped on a plane, and came here.”

“Seriously?” asked Rick.

“Yup. Twenty grand.” Luke sipped his Scotch.

“So,” said Rachel, “technically you’re unemployed?”

“Yup.”

“Can you tell us anything you’ve learned about people from your job as a small-town pastor?”

A funny expression crossed Luke’s face — a combination of amusement and relief. “It seems like I’ve been waiting over a decade for someone to ask me that very question.” Luke paused for a moment, as if ordering his thoughts, then said, “Here goes. To start with, if you’re at work and someone’s bothering you, ask him or her to make a donation to a charity. Keep a charity can and donation envelopes in your desk. They’ll never bug you again. It works.”

“What else?”

“What else? Okay, chances are you feel superior to almost everyone you work with — but they probably feel the same way about you. Also, more men than you might think beat their wives with full plastic bottles of fabric softener.” Luke stared at the ceiling as he continued his litany. “Relentlessly perky women often have deeply rooted fertility issues. Also, for the first time in history, thanks to the Internet, straight people are having way more sex than gay people. And I think I can easily generalize and say that too much free time is a monkey’s paw in disguise. Humans weren’t built to handle a structureless life.”

Rachel asked, “What else?”

“What else . . . Here’s one: by the age of twenty, you know you’re not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you’re not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in — you wonder if you’re ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate.”

Luke paused and rubbed a finger around the rim of his glass. “You know, in the end I just got so darned tired of hearing about the same old seven sins over and over again. You might think it would be interesting, but it’s not. Would someone please invent an eighth sin to keep things lively?”

Karen resisted her impulse to interrupt.

Luke continued, “I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years . . . what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story’s pretty much over.”

Luke polished off his drink. “You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn’t care. I guess that’s what’s scariest: not caring about the loss.”

Rachel said, “So you feel sad for, and frightened by, yourself.”

“Yes.”

There was a silence, then Rachel asked, “Rick, what have you learned from your job?”

“I’ve learned that I’m often my own worst enemy. I’ve learned that I’d rather be in pain than be wrong. I’ve learned that sometimes failure isn’t an opportunity in disguise: it’s just me. I’ve learned that I’ll never be rich, because I don’t like rich people. I’ve learned that you can be a total shithead, and yet your soul will still want to hang out with you. Souls ought to have some kind of legal right to bail once you cross certain behaviour thresholds.”

“Anything else you’ve learned from work specifically?” asks Rachel.

“I won’t go too much into my work history, except to say that I was actually making an okay go of my gardening business until someone who doesn’t deserve their soul swiped my truck and all my equipment, and that’s how I ended up working in this bar, hearing the same things you heard from your parishioners, Luke — except I probably get the opposite end of the bullshit spectrum: the wishful thinking and the grandiosity people launch into by beer number three. Do people — did people — ever tell you the good stuff? Or did they just dump on you with all their crap and baggage?”

“Just the crap. I think maybe I should have been a bartender.”

“You’re missing nothing. Aim low, brother. Sell roadside corn. There’s a lot to be said for having a small, manageable dream.” Rick looked at Karen. “What about you?”

“Me? I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t learn much. I work as a receptionist for three psychiatrists. I see a lot of crazy. But I think crazy people — okay, not crazy, but people at the extremes of normal behaviour — are more interesting than so-called normal people. I’ve learned that one of the biggest indicators for success in life is having a few crazy relatives. So long as you get only some of the crazy genes, you don’t end up crazy; you merely end up different. And it’s that difference that gives you an edge, that makes you successful.”

“I’ve never thought of it that way,” said Luke.

“I’ve also learned that if you’re on meds, it’s much better to stick to them. I mean, would you rather jump off a bridge because you couldn’t be bothered to take one lousy pill? Also, when agitated patients come in, I tell them some kind of story about my cat, Rusty. Listening to people tell stories is very soothing. When someone is telling you a story, they hijack the personal narrator that lives inside your head. It’s the closest we come to seeing through someone else’s eyes.”

Rick

In his early twenties, Rick worked at a Texaco gas station, and when he was pumping gas, he liked to watch the numbers rev higher and higher on the pumps. He pretended these speedily increasing numbers didn’t represent money at all; rather, one penny equalled one year. He watched Western history begin at Year Zero-Zero-Zero-One and clip upwards and upwards: the Dark Ages . . . the Renaissance . . . 1776 . . . railways . . . the Panama Canal . . . the Great Depression . . . World War II . . . suburbia . . . JFK . . . Vietnam . . . disco . . . Mount St. Helens . . . 1984 . . . grunge . . . until, WHAM!, he’d hit the wall of the present with the death of Kurt Cobain. Whenever Rick did this mental exercise, there was a magic little piece of time a few numbers past $19.94 when he felt as if he were in the future.

And that’s how he feels standing inside the lounge after barricading the front door against the outside world. Except now there’s no other time stream to slip back into; he’s now living in the future 24/7. He rubs a cut on his left index finger, incurred while moving the ancient cigarette machine, its faded, yellowing image of Niagara Falls making it look older than a relic from King Tut’s tomb. He already knows he’s going to miss the past a lot. He hops the bar and scoops up the Winchester Model 12 shotgun stashed beneath the cash register, then follows Luke to the rear exit, where he and Luke use a dolly to jimmy the hulking ice machine in front of the locked door.

Rick doesn’t know what to make of the trio he’s been billeted with by the gods. As far as he can see, Luke is a disastrous drunk and possibly a scammer, Karen is a soccer mom going wrong, and Rachel is from another planet. But he doesn’t spend too much time thinking about them. He’s busy scanning the back area, looking for something, anything, he could use to kill a human being. But there’s precious little to weaponize, save for broken bottles and some cutlery. Thankfully, he has the shotgun his ex told him he was crazy to keep on the premises. She’d stopped by with Tyler a year or so ago, taken a look around the place, and said it was like a crack den without the crack. “And what’s with the stretch-waist rugby pants you’re wearing, Rick? Jesus, you look like a 1982 liquor store clerk with herpes.” Tyler was cleaning out the dish of bar mix, and Pam slapped his fingers away, saying, “Jesus, Tyler, they’ll put anything in that stuff.” She looked at Rick. “So let me get this straight — you want to keep a shotgun around so you can shoot somebody over something stupid like a hundred bucks from the till?”

Who’s got the last laugh now?

Rick thinks, Right now is the end of some aspect of my life, but it’s also a beginning — the beginning of some unknown secret that will reveal itself to me soon.

Rick thinks, Nothing very, very good and nothing very, very bad ever lasts for very, very long.

Rick thinks, My head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and this churning and no real sense of where the earth ends and the heavens begin.

Rick wants a drink.

Rick wants a great big crowbar to crack him open so he can take whatever creature is sitting inside him and shake it clean like a rug, then rinse it in a cold, clear lake, and then put it under the sun to heal and dry and grow and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.

And then suddenly he’s sitting with three semi-strangers on the ceramic tiles behind the bar, getting at least one of his wishes granted: a double vodka and soda with a lemon twist. Guilt be damned! Rick knows that alcohol will initially enhance his experience of events as they take place, even though in the end it will scramble his recall of the present tense, like sprinkling MSG into the soup tureen of his consciousness and waiting for the time headache to begin.

The group has been discussing what they’ve learned from their jobs — not something Rick might expect in a situation like this, but the unexpectedness of the topic feels intense and correct. Karen has just finished and it’s Rachel’s turn, but before she begins she asks, “Rick, what is the killing capacity of your shotgun?”

“This puppy? Five shots in the chamber, double-ought buck — pretty much all you need for human beings.”

“Are you skilled at using it?”

“I am.” Rick thinks, This robot woman is hot.

But robot woman has Rick nailed. “That’s good, Rick. Please, may I ask you to limit the number of cocktails you drink over the next few hours? Marksmanship may become a life-or-death skill the four of us will require.”

Rachel then starts to tell them what she has learned from her job breeding white mice. “To begin with, I suggest raising as few male mice as possible, as they secrete a glandular odour that is hard to get used to, even after months of daily exposure.”

Oh dear God, Rick thinks. I suppose white mice have to come from somewhere. Costa Rica? West Virginia? But from Rachel’s garage? That’s a lot to absorb. And how did she know about me and my booze jones? Forget about it. What else can I use in this heinous dump to kill people? Rick scours the bar area, looking for items he can weaponize: an unopened Coca-Cola syrup canister heated on the coffee burner until hot and then shot with the Model 12 would make an excellent bomb; any pen or pencil can be rammed into the jugular à la Joe Pesci; a sniper’s head could be wrapped in a white tablecloth and then pushed underwater in a grey plastic busing tray.

Rachel is still talking about white mice. Rick realizes he is a little bit drunk after blowing fourteen months of sobriety. Rachel says it is fairly easy to assess a mouse’s needs, and Rick finds himself saying, “I agree.” The others stare at him, and he continues, “But people are different from mice. Never let anyone assess what you want or need out of life. You might as well send them engraved invitations saying, ‘Hi, this is what I want you to prevent me from having.’ Life always kills you in the end, but first it stops you from getting what you want. I’m so tired of never getting what I want. Or of getting it with a monkey’s-paw curse attached.”

If being interrupted annoys Rachel, her face shows no sign of it.

“I’m not bitter,” Rick adds. “But what if I was? At least you’d know where I stand.”

Somewhere in the distance something explodes. The conversation stops and everyone cocks their ears.

Luke looks at Rick and says, “The heart of a man is like deep water.”

“I’m no better than my father,” Rick says. “He’s in Saskatchewan. His liver has gone all marshmallowy. He should have been dead ten years ago. But instead he started taking 2,000 IUs of vitamin D a day, so now he’s got an immune system like a pit bull’s rubber chew toy.”

“My father is an alcoholic,” Rachel says. “And he doesn’t think I’m a true human being, so I’m going to surprise him by reproducing. Then he can’t say I’m not human anymore.”

The group stares at her. To Rick she says, “Please don’t drink anything more today. For my sake.”

Rick looks at Rachel, thinks it over, then puts down his drink. He never realized it could be this easy.

___

There was another explosion, closer this time. “It’s not just that there’s no jet noise,” Luke said. “There are no sirens either. It’s as if it’s not just cars and planes and helicopters that have stopped — it’s like time has stopped.”

Karen said, “You’d think by now there’d be a SWAT team here. Not to mention the Navy SEALs, James Bond, and Charlie’s Angels.”

Rachel was looking at Rick with an intensity he found sexy and hadn’t thought she was capable of. Rick, meanwhile, had toppled the first domino in the cascade of falling in love. He had once seen a TV game show that asked how many times the average person falls in love. The answer was six. Since then, Rick had come to believe that people are able to fall in love only six times in their life. According to this rule, Rick was left with just one more love — he’d burnt through five already, three of them before he turned twenty-two — and now here was the moment when the hammer strikes the anvil and the chain is forged and the love grows strong, becomes real, becomes permanent. Rick wanted to fall in love again — even more than he wanted to reinvent himself via the Power Dynamics Seminar System — but what if this last love didn’t work out? Then he’d be lonely for the rest of his life, or worse, he’d have to find some newer, more extreme experience than love, whatever that might be. Nevertheless, sitting there on the ceramic floor, he wondered, Does Rachel feel anything for me? How can I make her feel something for me, this woman who has no anatomical capacity to experience emotion? I bet I could get through to her. I bet I could make her understand what it means to be in love. “Rachel, can I get you a drink?”

“Please. A ginger ale.”

“Coming right up.”

Karen said, “Guys, what exactly are we going to do here? Just wait? For what — to get shot, like Warren?”

Luke said, “I think maybe that’s all we can do.” He had found the banker’s box that served as the bar’s lost and found. There were three cellphones in it. He tried all three for dial tones and got one. “Rick, buddy, you take it. Call your kid.”

Rick handed Rachel her ginger ale and took the phone from Luke. But before he could dial, Karen’s phone rang. “Casey?”

“Mom, they set fire to the outlet mall! You can probably see the smoke from outer space. It’s anarchy here.”

“Casey, are you at home now?”

“I am. But I wish I was out there, looking at all the craziness.”

“Did you get through to the police?”

“I’m trying. The phones are all screwed.”

“Casey, stay home. I don’t want you going anywhere. Can you get hold of your father?”

“I can’t get through to him.”

The connection died.

Rick tried to reach his son but couldn’t get a dial tone on either Karen’s BlackBerry or the phone from the lost and found. The four sat in silence.

Luke

Three years ago, Luke’s father’s early-onset Alzheimer’s became so relentless that he could no longer live at home — his unforgiving father, who had once said to Luke while they were walking along a beach, “I don’t cast a shadow, son, I cast light”; his firm, unforgiving father, Caleb, who had once told Luke that the opposite of labour is not leisure but theft.

Caleb had always treated Luke as if there was no doubt he would follow in his footsteps, yet at the same time Caleb made it consistently clear that Luke would never be as spiritual as himself. Like most father/son ego battles, the going could be both nasty and pathetic. Several times Caleb entered Luke’s bedroom when Luke was nine and caught him playing with plastic soldiers. He fetched the cordless phone, brought it into the bedroom, sat down on the bed, and said, “Fine, have your soldiers kill each other, but every time one of them dies, I am going to sit here and telephone his mother.”

“Father, they’re plastic soldiers.”

“To you, but not to the better part of you.”

“Okay. Call their mothers.”

“Okay, I will. That one toppled over there . . .” Luke’s father dialled seven numbers, and even though Luke could hear a busy signal, his father said, “Hello, Mrs. Miller. This is Pastor French calling. I’m afraid I have terrible news for you, Mrs. Miller: your son is dead. No, there’s no mistake. He was shot today in a battle. What battle? I don’t know. You’d have to speak to the person I once thought was my son to find out what sort of battle. I’m sorry, Mrs. Miller. Mrs. Miller, stop your screaming and crying. Yes, I’m absolutely sure he’s dead. Yes. And my son is the killer.”

The battle never did end, not until the Alzheimer’s struck, and struck swiftly. Luke’s overwhelmed mother managed to locate a care facility on the west coast that specialized in patients whose lives had been spent in the ministry. She’d been driving Caleb across the country when an avalanche from a British Columbia mountainside swallowed their car and a dozen others, covering them with so much rock and soil that excavation was impossible. Since then, Luke has had to live with the knowledge that those meat-covered skeletons resting inside their Volkswagens or Cutlasses or camper vans are still there, and will still be there, exactly where they are right now, trapped forever inside the mountain, until the sun goes supernova in a billion years or so. Those bodies bind us to the future. They’re time-frozen. Tomorrow = yesterday = today = the same thing, always.

And their entombment is different from being buried in a graveyard. Six feet of dirt is nothing. In a hundred years, raiding the graves of our current era will be an excellent source of income for the unscrupulous. But to be inside a mountain — that messes with Luke’s mind. When does time end? When do people end? On his flight into Toronto this morning, Luke thought about time and evolution. Let’s think long term, Luke. What are we evolving towards? Do we just go along, day by day, drinking coffee, building golf courses, making photocopies, and having wars until we all mutate and turn into a new species? How long are we supposed to keep on doing all this stuff we do? If we don’t mutate quickly, in ten thousand years we’re merely going to be the same humans we are now, except we’ll have run out of resources. Will the planet’s population ever decrease? It will have to, if not simply because our sun will go supernova. So where, between now and the sun going supernova in a billion years, does society end? When do people end? When does the population start to shrink? It’s a mathematical certainty. So then when? When? When?

Even with his faith recently nullified, Luke believes in sin. He believes that what separates humanity from everything else in this world — spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss, and Mount McKinley — is that humanity alone has the capacity, at any given moment, to commit all possible sins. Even those of us who try to live a good and true life remain as far away from grace as the Hillside Strangler or any demon who ever tried to poison the village well.

In Luke’s eyes, sin defines our lives in ways both pathetic and monstrous. And Luke knows that monsters exist: entities with human forms but no souls. Ronnie, who set fire to his house with his two children inside. Lacey, who extinguished cigarettes on her baby’s arms. In the face of monsters, a mere seven deadly sins seems almost charming, and certainly out of touch with the twenty-first century. Luke thinks sins badly need updating, and he keeps a running list in his head of contemporary sins that religions might well consider: the willingness to tolerate information overload; the neglect of the maintenance of democracy; the deliberate ignorance of history; the equating of shopping with creativity; the rejection of reflective thinking; the belief that spectacle is reality; vicarious living through celebrities. And more, so much more.

Man, Luke thinks, I am one judgemental prick. I’m turning into my father — I have to try harder to be different. Losing faith wasn’t enough. But, of course, Luke has also learned from his flock that the harder one tries to be different from one’s parents, the more quickly one becomes them.

Luke notices that Rick has his eyes set on Rachel, and Rachel seems to have hers set on Rick. Luke’s embezzled twenty grand is most likely worthless in a post-oil economy, so his Darwinian advantage over Rick is gone. But Luke’s need to stay alive overpowers all, even his need to reproduce. And before long, Luke finds himself looking up at Rick, who’s standing on the bar, prying a ventilation grille off the ceiling. The plan is for Rick and Luke to crawl up into the ventilation system and try to find grilles or faceplates they can pop out so they can scan the area around the building, locate the sniper or snipers, if possible, and find a safe way out of the situation.

The ceiling grille comes off with a dry hiss reminiscent of soil being tossed onto a coffin. Rick stores it above the ceiling, inside the crawl area, and looks inside. “Holy crap. There’s a ton of space up here. Seriously. It’s huge.”

Karen says, “Keep your voice down.” Karen and Rachel are still on the floor behind the bar.

“I’m going in. Hand me the shotgun once I’m up there.”

“Be careful with that thing!” Karen says.

Rick lifts himself up inside the crawl space. Luke passes him the shotgun, then joins him. It’s dark but not black inside. Roasting hot sunlight seeps in through vent holes on both sides, as well as from various tubes and shafts connecting the roof to the building’s guts.

Luke says, “Shh . . .” and puts his finger to his lips. “Do you hear that?”

The men fall silent. Above them, over towards the east side of the roof, they hear footsteps crunching on the gravel.

Luke says, “It’s him.”

___

Luke and Rick crept through the crawl space until an opening appeared in the ceiling. Rick peered up, then gave Luke the okay sign and quietly pulled himself up into a slatted ventilator housing. Luke quickly followed. Through the slats, they could see the sniper. He was standing at hyper-attention by the knee-high wall that encircled the roof of the cocktail lounge. He resembled a high school chemistry teacher — certainly no swarthy terrorist cliché. A black beard, beige slacks, a dark blue James Dean zip-up jacket, a black baseball cap, plus repeat-sex-offender eyeglasses like those of his murder victim Warren. Wait, Luke realized, he’s wearing Warren’s actual glasses. This guy is a trophy taker.

“One guy?” Rick whispered.

“What the hell is he doing on the roof? And how did he get up there?”

Rick said, “I’m going to take him out,” and Luke said, “Do it,” then stopped Rick. “Wait. Are we sure this guy’s alone?”

The two men scoped the 360 degrees around the housing. To the south, huge fires burned at the source of the explosions. As Rick and Luke watched, there was another explosion, accompanied by a glowing mushroom-shaped cloud rich with turquoise highlights. But as for people, they saw nobody, and the monster’s body language gave no indication that he was communicating with anyone. For the most part, his attention was focused on the fifteen-storey hotel block across the breezeway from the bar. It was hard to imagine anyone at the hotel being stupid enough to be standing by its windows. They could hear a few sirens, but far away, and there was a fraction of the normal traffic noise. The world had gone mute.

Despite the dusty enclosure’s roasting heat, Luke felt chilled as he watched the monster, who was standing straight, ears cocked, waiting to kill. It reminded him of the time he had food poisoning in California and thought he was boiling to death and freezing to death at the same time. Outwardly, the monster seemed so harmless — that’s what scared Luke the most. Still waters truly do run deepest.

Luke said, “Let’s not make any noise and screw this up. Jesus, look at that chemical cloud coming in.” A peanut-shaped cloud the size of a weather system was drifting towards the building, but its impending arrival didn’t alter the monster’s behaviour. He walked efficiently back and forth along the lounge’s eastern lip, scouting out new targets, unfazed by any possibility of retaliation. He heard something below, out in front of the hotel. With hawk-like speed, he raised his rifle and took three shots. Luke and Rick heard a woman scream, and then there was silence. The monster knelt on the gravel, concealed by the roof’s lip, and reloaded a 6.5-millimetre Italian carbine with a four-power scope, identical to the one used by Lee Harvey Oswald to kill John F. Kennedy in 1963. Rick recognized it and told Luke what it was, adding, “This guy’s good. This guy knows his history.”

“That’s very comforting, Rick.”

“I’m just saying this guy is a player.”

“So shoot him already.”

Rick tried manoeuvring the shotgun into a position from which he could aim and fire, but the shape of the vent made it impossible. Luke looked across the roof to a larger vent. “We have to go over there.”

So the two men went back down to the crawl space and crept towards the other side of the roof. They heard the monster’s crunching steps above them. He would walk, stop, continue walking, then stop again. When they reached their destination, Luke said, “There’s no way he knows we’re here. I think we can nail the bastard from in there.”

They pulled up into a newer, larger ventilation structure. Bingo.

Rick whispered, “I think we can do this.”

Luke said, “Come on, come on, be done with it,” and realized that, in his impatience, he sounded like Caleb. And then, in the midst of all the craziness, Luke found himself thinking about families. In the end, every family experiences an equal amount of trials, conditions, quirks, and medical dilemmas. One family might get more cancer, another more bipolar or schizo, but in the end it all averages out. It’s a testament to the ambivalence most people feel about their families that they don’t care to know more of their family history than the past three generations. There are so many reasons for not wanting to know. Caleb had once said, “Be as pious as you want; people are slime.” Luke himself would say, “We’re all slime in the eyes of God.”

Luke snapped back to the present moment. “Get on with it,” he hissed. “Shoot.”

“Right.”

Rick had his finger on the trigger when another chemical explosion startled him and the shotgun’s barrel clanked against an aluminum slat. The monster swivelled. Rick fired and missed, and he and Luke saw the monster raise his rifle and aim it at the ventilation housing.

“Jesus, let’s get out of here!”

The two men dropped back into the crawl area and raced to the opening above the bar. Rick shouted, “Catch!” and dropped the shotgun down to Rachel. Within seconds, both men had scrambled back into the lounge.

Karen demanded, “What happened?”

“It’s one guy,” said Luke. “He’s armed to the teeth.”

“Is he coming down through the roof?” Rachel asked.

“No. He’s not stupid. If he did, we’d have a massive tactical advantage.”

Karen asked, “What’s he doing on our roof? Why isn’t he picking off people at the airport or some place with more people?”

Rachel asked, “Did he appear to have any sort of focus — was he scanning any particular area?”

“Yes,” said Luke. “The front door of the hotel. He didn’t even care about those chemical explosions upwind.”

Rick added, “I’ll go turn off all the fans. You can’t believe how much fallout there is out there. And it’s all headed this way.”

Rachel

Rachel is feeling slightly guilty because when she was at the computer, supposedly looking up the price of oil, she was actually visiting a white mouse-breeding website to see if the day’s events had altered the price of mice. It hadn’t changed, but then the site staff is always so slow to update. Just before the computer crashed, she caught the $900 sweet crude oil price on the Drudge Report.

The bar’s TV set is also no help, and Rachel feels as if she isn’t contributing to collective safety the way the others are doing. Karen is inventorying food. The men are safeguarding the lounge’s rear entrance. Rachel feels like the female character on a TV outer space drama who sits at the control deck doing little but repeating things the captain has already said — and that’s the last character she wants to be. Whenever the subject of TV came up during lemonade-and-cookie time at normalcy training, Rachel and her classmates agreed that they wanted to be aliens, not humans, as long as they weren’t the emotionless Spock aliens, because that was what everyone expected them to be. Rachel is neither an alien nor a robot, and she does, indeed, experience emotions — even if the emotions are usually variations of confusion. But she knows there are many things her brain simply isn’t wired to “get.” The list includes humour, beauty, voice inflection, musicality, irony, sarcasm, and metaphor. Metaphor! How is a burning book supposed to represent Hitler? Or fascism! A book is a book. Hitler is Hitler. Why do fields of daisies in soft focus equal love? They’re plants! Not love!

Love.

Well, at least Rachel gets love. Or she thinks she gets it — she hopes she gets it, because it’s all that neurotypical people ever seem to talk about or sing songs about. She does feel strongly about a few things, and she hopes this is love. She loves the first thirty seconds of “A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours” by the Smiths — the song’s noises that, in a way that defies verb tenses, remind her of what it feels like to be a ghost. Rachel also loves the sight of pigeons huddled for the night below the downtown bridges. She loves the first snowfall of the year, and she loves grilled cheese sandwiches with double ketchup, as long as the ketchup is on the side and in no way touches her sandwich until she elects to dip it. She loves her mice and her parents and Mrs. Hovell at the training centre. And she especially likes her Second Life avatar — her fearless disembodied electronic double who ventures into all rooms and spaces, who doesn’t have to experience such mundane problems as muggy weather and unexpected noises, who doesn’t need to eat the disgusting-textured salty-sugary-greasy, always unpredictable stuff that normal people call “food.” Her avatar is free, and her only goal is to roam the universe pursuing truth and victory. Her avatar has emotions; she simply chooses not to use them.

When the men finish barricading the rear door and they all wind up sitting behind the bar, the others seem stressed and frightened. Rachel has learned to recognize people’s states of mind from their body language, since she can’t read facial expressions. Rachel is neither stressed nor frightened; she believes adequate measures have been taken to ensure their collective safety. But she has an idea that might help cut the tension. Mrs. Hovell once told her, “Rachel, if you’re ever in a real fix and need something to discuss, ask people what their jobs are and what they have learned from them.” Mrs. Hovell is full of good advice. Another piece that always works for Rachel is this: Whenever you encounter a person who appears exhausted and stressed, tell them, “You look really great. You look really relaxed. I wish I had what you have.” It immediately relaxes them.

So Rachel brings up the subject of jobs, and (thank you, Mrs. Hovell) the question works — everyone is distracted for a little while. As she is telling the group about her mouse-breeding business, Rick interrupts her with a series of statements she knows are gloomy. Rachel has trained herself not to respond to interruptions. But of pivotal importance is the fact that Rick, with his nihilistic outbursts, very much resembles her father — and therefore he should ultimately be the man to sire her child. The only problem is that Rick’s face lacks distinguishing characteristics and is difficult to memorize. Rachel stares at him, trying extra hard to find anomalies that would make it easier for her to pick him out of a crowd if he were to wear clothing other than a bartender’s black pants and white shirt. Is that a mole? No. A scar? No. At least Leslie Freemont, with his white mane, was highly recognizable. He also had a mole on his left cheek, an asymmetrical mouth, and almost triangular spatulate fingernails — but the hair made those details unnecessary. Happily, Rick is also looking closely at Rachel. Most people don’t like being studied this way. Rachel wonders if Rick’s willingness to be studied will make him an even better father. As a bonus, he offers to get her a ginger ale at the very moment when she feels in need of a beverage. He is what her mother would call a gentleman. Except, her mother’s opinion doesn’t matter to her; only her father’s opinion counts.

This is when Karen’s daughter phones with her news about the new world without oil — a world that possibly has no need for expertly bred white mice. Rachel tries not to listen in on the conversation and starts looking around, analyzing the room around her. She tries to determine if the bar’s designer consciously set out to create an environment that fosters zero-commitment sexual hookups. While taking the bus to the lounge that morning, she had thought the bar would be covered with sparkly surfaces, and the music in the background would sound beepy, like Super Mario video games. Instead she looks around her and sees low-wattage lighting, no bright colours save for the icky red vinyl wall by the computer, and a collection of fabric-covered stools that don’t seem to have been properly cleaned and are most likely brimming with decades’ worth of bum molecules. Finally, she looks up at the ceiling, which is when she notices a ventilation shaft entrance.

Once the men have gone up into the crawl space, Karen and Rachel resume their positions on the floor behind the bar. Karen’s arms are crossed, a sign of worry. Rachel says, “Karen, you look really great. You look really relaxed. I wish I had what you have.”

Karen pats her hair and says, “Really?”

Rachel says, “Yes.”

Karen says, “Because obviously there’s been so much confusion. I thought my look had come slightly apart.”

Rachel says, “No, you look terrific. Karen, I have a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“I’ve decided to make Rick the father of my child. What do you think of this decision?”

Karen pauses, is about to say something, pauses again, and then says, “Well, I hope you have a steady income stream of your own. Can white mice do that for you?”

“Yes, I believe society will continue to need white mice, even a society permanently crippled by diminished oil and all of the political, economical, and environmental anarchy the shortage has already begun to unleash.”

Karen asks, “Rachel, are you human?”

Rachel replies, “I’ve been asked that question many times. I know it is meant humorously and I don’t take offence at it.”

“I was just —”

“That’s okay, don’t worry. I personally worry that maybe I’m nothing more than my medical condition. If I didn’t have my brain anomalies, which others seem to perceive as damage, maybe I’d be a normal person instead — whatever I was actually meant to be like, something better than just a broken woman. If I was normal, I wouldn’t have to go to normalcy training lessons — and my father wouldn’t be ashamed to tell his work friends that I’ve entered the Fifty Thousand Mouse Club.”

“Rachel, I work in a psychiatrist’s office. I see people all day, in and out of their conditions. Who they are at any given time is usually based on whether they’re sticking to their meds.”

“What is your conclusion? Are these people really people? Or are they only their conditions?”

“I think we’re everything: our brain’s wiring, the things our mothers ate when they were pregnant, the TV show we watched last night, the friend who betrayed us in grade ten, the way our parents punished us. These days we have PET scans, MRIs, gene mapping, and massive research into psychopharmacology — so many ways of explaining the human condition. Personality is more like a . . . a potato salad composed of your history plus all of your body’s quirks, good and bad. Tell me, Rachel, and be honest: if you could take a pill and be ‘normal,’ would you?”

Rachel thinks about what Karen has said. After an uncomfortably long time, she says, “ Potato salad?”

And that’s when Rick shouts, “Catch!” and drops his shotgun down into the lounge.

___

Things happened quickly, yet in slow motion. Rick raced to shut off the ventilation system, while Rachel, Karen, and Luke went to the front door to look for ways to further block it. Looking outside, they saw a chemical blizzard — it was like watching the World Trade Center collapse, but with coloured dust, not just grey, and with what resembled fragments of hornets’ nests drifting and landing higgledy-piggledy in all directions. Daylight had vanished. The red carpet that led along the covered walkway to the hotel was inch-deep in crud, as was the body of the unfortunate Warren.

Karen asked, “What the hell is that stuff?”

Luke shouted for her to get away from the glass. “He’s off the roof and he’s coming this way.”

From the left, a stone’s throw away, came the sniper, his face curled into his chest. He lurched towards the lounge, a duffle bag slung over one shoulder, his other arm trying to protect his face from the toxic blizzard but still holding a rifle.

“Karen, get Rick’s gun! Get it now! Rachel, help me put these stacking chairs in front of the door. If he reaches for his rifle, run like hell.”

Rachel worked fast to further barricade the door, inserting heavy steel stacking chairs into whatever slots she could. They heard the sniper trying to open car doors outside the hotel. Through a slit in the fabric of one of the tablecloths, Rachel saw the sniper curse, particles getting stuck in his mouth as he did. Most of his concentration and energy was going into trying to breathe and cover his eyes at the same time. Rachel saw two dead pigeons fall onto the dust-covered pavement, and she knew it would only get worse. And then it did. The sniper looked up, seemed to realize there were people behind the barricaded door, and raced towards them.

Rachel wasn’t frightened, nor was she confused. She walked away from the door and said, “He’s here. Is the shotgun ready?”

Rick ran in from the back and grabbed his weapon from Karen. “Where is he?”

“Outside the door.”

“Crap.”

They heard shattering glass and the sound of feet kicking at something. The sniper’s voice called, “Get this machine out of the way!”

Rick peeked around the corner: The sniper was trying to get in — as were the toxic cloud chemicals. The sniper said, “It’s either let me in or we all die from this crap that’s blowing around. Choose your fate. I promise I won’t shoot if you let me in, but I sure as hell will if you try to seal this door against the chemicals without letting me in.”

Rick shouted out, “Throw your rifle inside.”

There was silence.

“I said, throw your rifle inside or we shoot you.”

More silence.

“Okay, then, hellfire it is for you.”

They heard some stacking chairs topple to the ground, then the Italian rifle was tossed into the lounge.

“Okay,” said Luke, picking up the rifle. “Let him in and let’s seal up that door. I can’t even see Warren through all that chemical shit out there.”

As Luke covered the door with the rifle, Rachel and Karen opened a slot in the clutter barrier just big enough for the sniper to enter the lounge. Once he was past them and moving towards the bar, arms up and the canvas duffle bag in his left hand, Rick took over covering him with the shotgun while Luke, Rachel, and Karen worked together to barricade and seal the door. Karen had found a roll of duct tape in the closet and immediately started taping tablecloths to the door frame.

“What’s in the bag?” asked Rick.

“Nothing. Check for yourself.” The sniper set the bag on the bar.

Rick inspected the bag and found only shell casings and some bloody rags. The sniper went behind the bar and rinsed his face under the tap. Rick stood guard while the others finished sealing the door, using garments from the lost and found and a black plastic signboard with its few remaining white plastic letters spelling rotarian salad bar here. An air-raid siren flared in the background. Rachel had only ever heard this sound in movies and was surprised the sirens were used in real life. As she and Luke jammed a set of old curtains into the last remaining cracks in the shattered door and Karen duct-taped the tablecloths in place around the barricade, making the door as airtight as possible, the siren’s wail shrank. Their air supply was safe for the time being.

They moved back into the lounge, Luke pausing to pick up the rifle, which he had set down while helping with the door. The sniper had removed his shirt. He was a small man, with pale skin that was inflamed from the chemicals outside. His voice was raspy. He nodded towards his duffle bag. “I’m not going to try and kill you, but I do get to keep my stuff. That’s part of the deal.”

They stood watching him. Rachel said, “My name is Rachel. This is Luke and Karen and Rick.” The sniper grunted. Rachel said, “You look really great for someone who’s been through what you’ve just been through. You look really relaxed. I wish I had what you have.”

“Tell Rick to take his gun off me.”

“I can’t do that,” said Rick.

The sniper looked around behind the bar, at the ceiling, and at the rear area. Something by the cash register caught his eye, and he laughed. He went to the machine and ripped a magazine clipping off the side. It was a colour photo of Leslie Freemont looking inspirationally forty-five degrees off camera, up into the sky. “What the hell is a picture of this freak doing here?”

“That’s Leslie Freemont,” Rick said.

“I know damn well who it is.” He reached into his duffle bag and removed one of the bloodied rags. Rachel took another look and saw that the material was actually a blood-clotted shock of white hair. The sniper threw Leslie Freemont’s scalp onto the bar. “I know how to deal with false prophets.”

Player One

The thing about the future is that it’s full of things happening, whereas the present so often feels stale and dead. We dread the future but it’s what we have. I can tell you here that while Luke keeps the shotgun aimed at the sniper’s head, Karen and Rick will duct-tape him to a chair. On completion the group will learn that the sniper is a talker. He will say to the assembled group, “Imagine, all of you, feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold of the day.”

The sniper will say, “Imagine no longer being trapped in a dying and corrupt world, but instead making a new one from this one’s shattered remnants.”

The sniper will say, “Imagine that for an unknown reason you have begun to rapidly lose your memory. You now no longer know what month it is, say, or what type of car you drive, or the season, or the food in your refrigerator, or the names of the flowers.”

The sniper will suck in some breath and say, “Quickly, quickly your memory freezes — a tiny, perfect iceberg, all memories frozen, locked. Your family. Your sex. Your name. All of it turned into a silent ice block. You are free of memory. You now look at the world with the eyes of an embryo, not knowing, only seeing and hearing. Then suddenly the ice melts, your memory begins returning. The ice is in a pond — it thaws and the water warms and water lilies grow from your memories and fish swim within them. And that pond is you.”

Finally, the sniper will say, “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

At that point, Karen will blink, while Rick, newly in love with Rachel, is thinking, You know, shoot me if you want, you whack-job. It doesn’t matter because I’ll die a happy man. Chemical cloud? Eat me! I don’t care, because you can’t corrode the love that protects me like a triple-wax polish on my old Barracuda. Booze? Don’t even try killing me this time, booze. It’s over between you and me. I am a man in love, and for this brief chunk of time, life and death have become the same thing — living is the same as dying as is living as is dying as is —

This is when the power will go off.

Luke’s first instinct when the lights go out will be to shout, “My jewels!” — a joke that always got a laugh when the church’s power kept failing after the ice storms a few years back. But a joke is not what’s going to be needed when everything turns black — or not even black — it will feel like the world turned itself off — this relentless entropy that’s swallowing Luke’s universe like an angry time-space wormhole. Everything I can think of, he will think, is going, item by item by item: cars, electricity, Cancun holidays, frozen Lean Cuisine dinners, the give-a-penny/take-a-penny jar at the local Esso station — hell, the whole Esso station — police safety, water out of taps, clean air — it will feel to Luke as if the world now has rapid-onset Alzheimer’s and is itself systematically disintegrating. His father would have loved this sensation of End of Days. His father wanted to go to heaven and would have cheerfully taken the next bus there without hesitation. That poor, dumb bastard who scared or insulted away or betrayed all the people who otherwise ought to have been in his life, and who somehow managed to turn Luke into himself.

But no, Luke will reject what is happening as being the end of the world, and he will reject what has up until now seemed to be his inevitable conversion into his father . . . his father, who would have said, with a pathetic false English accent — like, who was he trying to impress, anyway? — his family, who knew that Caleb had only once been to England, in 1994 for three nights at a Heathrow Airport hotel for a symposium on the subject “Man in the Age of the Rampant Machine” — machines! In 19forGod’ssake94! Caleb, who would most predictably have said, there, in the Airport Camelot cocktail lounge, “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the New Year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than any known way.’”

Rachel will stare at Leslie Freemont’s scalp and she will think it resembles a very large dissected white mouse — or maybe a rat — but Rachel doesn’t like rats, because rats might bite her, whereas mice would never hurt her. Rachel won’t, however, be freaked out by the scalp. The scalp’s presence will make her enter her clinical mode, as though she were in the local medical supplier’s lab wearing one of those freshly laundered coats they hand out that smell faintly like lavender, their crisp, starchy fabric on her forearms giving her the happy sensation of an itch being properly scratched. But the scalp? It’s just a specimen, and, as it can’t hurt her or enter the one-metre invisible circular comfort zone around her body — the zone within which it might touch her, breathe on her, or offer any sort of swift temperature change — Rachel will remain in a heightened but calm state. She knows the others are frightened, but she knows better than to tell them to not be afraid — doing so has gotten her in trouble in the past. And what on earth could there possibly be to fear from falling down into Daffy Duck’s cartoon hole?