Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland Read Free Book Online

“Oh, please. Everyone knows the witness relocation program is a hoax.”
    “A hoax? How?”
    “The FBI simply shoots the person and buries the body. If it’s a family, then they shoot the family and bury the bodies. The fact that you never hear from them again perversely proves the success of the program.”
    Warren says, “I like that. I like you .”
    At least Karen has no worries that Warren has overriding psych issues. She’s seen enough patients go through her office to diagnose many of them simply by the way they react when she hands them a pen to fill out forms: paranoids jump; depressives stare at the pen; people off their meds begin free-association diatribes on ink. If people simply take the pen and use it, Karen knows they’re probably going to make only a single visit. Warren’s personality may be iffy, but there is no pathology in practice. She then, perversely, begins to wonder whether she is out of Warren’s league or if he is out of hers. She wonders if Warren looks like the sort of man who would borrow your car and return it to you with several dents and no explanation — and on its seats would be a stain all the club soda on earth would be useless against. Karen has the woozy, regretfully sick morning-after sensation she has when she’s been eBaying while drunk the night before. What have I done, flying halfway across a continental land mass to meet a man I’ve known only electronically for two weeks, and only visually from two brazenly fraudulent JPEGs?
    Karen attempts humour: “Looks like we’ve hit the awkward patch pretty quickly.”
    Warren says, “The awkward patch usually happens a bit later,” then catches himself, saying, “It’s not like this is something I do all the time.”
    “How many times have you done this?”
    Warren’s pupils clench like sphincters. “I’m just messing with you, Sunshine.”
    Sunshine? Where is that coming from?
    The bar’s TV set displays South Carolina religious extremists protesting Halloween. Karen has the oddest feeling that, in dressing up to meet Warren, she’s actually wearing the Halloween costume version of herself. She thinks of what a strange prospect it would be to throw a party themed “Come as the Halloween Costume Version of Yourself.” She runs this idea past Warren, whose neck stiffens a bit, a reaction that informs Karen that he doesn’t much enjoy abstract discussions.
    “How do you mean, come as the Halloween version of myself?”
    “I guess it would be dressing up like a highly amplified version of yourself.”
    “I don’t get it.”
    “Well, you look at your wardrobe and your hair and you exaggerate everything and — I guess it’d be dressing like a caricature of yourself. Like those unflattering political puppets on that English TV show.” She pauses. “Forget it.” Warren’s Scotch arrives, and she says, “I think if people had real courage, they’d wear their Halloween costume every day of the year. At the very least, you’d make a lot more friends a lot more quickly. Like, ‘Hey, I like togas, too!’ Or, ‘ Star Trek ? I’m in.’ Your costume would be a means of filtering down to the people you’d probably like the most.”
    Warren holds up his glass, forestalling further discussion, then says with a lewd smirk, “To us.”
    To us? Uh-oh.
    Warren is mentally bedding Karen, and while almost everyone wants to be thought of as sexy, Karen realizes that the empowered sexiness she felt on the plane was merely a manifestation of her new role as loser bait. She looks at Rick, now speaking with the desperate-looking trainwreck a few stools over. Suddenly, Rick’s attractiveness has risen considerably; she feels embarrassed being with Warren, as though she had accidentally sat at the wrong lunch table in high school.
    Warren asks, “How was your flight?”
    “Fine. Lovely. Thanks.”
    The two begin reading the news crawl on the TV screen. Karen realizes that the encounter isn’t going to be a story with