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

a happy ending or even an unhappy ending. It’s simply going to be one more event in her life that becomes a dot on a wall that won’t connect with any other dots to form a line with any beauty or meaning. She feels like she’s in a Discovery Channel clip showing wildebeests at a watering hole. The voice-over is telling viewers that wildebeests’ lives don’t have to be stories, the way people’s lives do. Wildebeests only have to exist, lucky things, and they’ve done a good job of being alive on earth — as does pretty much everything on the planet save for human beings.
    On the TV screen are three people in a flooded Midwest town, sitting on their roof having a barbecue and smiling as they wave to passing news copters. Karen feels a wash of jealousy: change entered the lives of these people unbidden. Change never happens in her own life, and while she’d gladly change her life herself, she has no idea in what way to change it. She feels like a taxidermied version of herself. How quickly time passes, and how your mistakes add up one day to something less than what you wanted .
    “Warren, does your life ever feel like a story?”
    Warren’s body freezes. “A story? No. Yes. I don’t know. I think so. Why?”
    “Why? Because I think the story part of my life is over.”
    Karen had hoped a cocktail lounge would disinhibit her, make her more truthful in a randy way. She hoped that openness would turn into intimacy, that truth would lead to closeness, but instead the cocktail lounge is making her crabby as her repressed ideas and thoughts percolate to the surface.
    Warren orders a second Scotch and watches a news clip about a small meteorite strike in Scotland. Karen thinks about Casey, age fifteen, walking into the kitch-en last month, saying, “On December 4, in the year 65,370,112, a meteorite will strike the earth and all life will be killed.” It makes Karen dizzy to think about the year 65,370,112, and yet that year will arrive as surely and relentlessly as the biweekly shopping flyers that clutter her front porch.
    Casey described the next Ice Age to Karen as having “ice so thick and heavy it will puncture the earth’s crust, generating molten blisters of nickel and bauxite and pitchblende. When that happens, the oceans will turn to steam. Life will end.” How did Casey wind up being such a morbid child? Karen will never forget the moment her body froze at the Loblaws butcher counter a year back when Casey, out of the blue, asked if she could buy a pint of blood. Karen, in a rare moment of motherly composure, asked Casey why she might need this, and Casey said she and two friends wanted to invent a ritual.
    “What kind of ritual?”
    “I dunno. Something spooky.”
    “You have to be careful with rituals, Casey.”
    “Thanks for the advice, Mom.”
    “No, seriously. Sometimes with rituals you can open doors that can never be closed again. Not just with Ouija boards. Any ritual.”
    “Huh?” For once, Karen had entered Casey’s world, and with bonus points for biting her tongue and not including the ritual of marriage along with the ritual use of Ouija boards.
    Now Karen finds herself draining her drink and wanting another. But Rick is in the back area of the bar, with his head inside an ice machine. Karen wishes he would come back and say something that would lighten the mood. And get her another drink. The next drink might help things heal. Karen thinks back to just before Kevin asked for the divorce, when she asked him why he drank so much. He said he was trying to forget something, but he didn’t know what it was. Kevin had been laid off and had entered a dark, scary brain-hole; he glumly forecasted a capitalist future in which all of humanity was in jail, and all people did was sit in their jail cells and shop online.
    The news shifts to a story about cancer. Karen uses this opportunity to tell Warren, “You know, you’ve had cancer countless times in your life, except your body got rid of