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

the condition and you never even knew you had cancer. What we call ‘cancer’ is actually a term for the cancers that stick around.”
    “You don’t say.”
    “Interesting, huh?” Karen knows her cancer fun-fact would probably have sounded much better if it was read off a screen inside an email; spoken in real life, it makes her sound like a church lady. Life is so often a question of tone: what you hear inside your head versus what people end up reading or hearing from your mouth. Karen also hates her tendency to turn into a Jeopardy! game when she’s nervous, and yet she begins prattling away: “And colds and flus are basically nature’s way of training your body to fight cancer. You know the old maxim, Never sick a day in their life, and then one day, pow! People prone to colds and flus live longer. It’s a fact.”
    Did I really just say, “It’s a fact”?
    Warren is quickly drifting away into TV land, and at that point it isn’t like Karen wants Warren to stick around — but if he’s going to be leaving, Karen wants the exit to be on her terms. She needs just that eensiest bit of control, so she can emerge emotionally intact from this random situation. She hammers the final nail into the coffin of her Internet date: “Warren, if you were a contestant on Jeopardy! , what would your six favourite categories be?”
    Under his breath, Warren mutters, “Jesus H. Christ. Are you a talker, or what?”
    Karen’s life may well not be a story. She knows this now. She knows that seeing your life as a story is probably just some corny residue left over from the era of Hollywood studios, and of a society full of newspapers and magazines kept robust through healthy advertising revenue, as well as middle-class book clubs in which overeducated people fake-read the second half of the book and pretend they know more about the evening’s wine than they actually do.
    Karen has noticed that young people no longer seem to care if their lives are stories. Not Casey, and not that little pervert on the flight earlier that afternoon. He’d probably no more view his life as a story than he would view his life as that of a sea cucumber. He and Casey inhabit a world of screen grabs, website hits, and precisely tabulated numbers of friends and enemies. Why, that little pervert on the plane would see Karen only as a hot mom who gave him a bit of sass. Karen knows that her photo is probably now on Facebook and she’s been labelled a cougar. And guaranteed, the kid on the plane would have no pity were he to see Karen in a cocktail lounge with a failed Internet hookup, the makeup in the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes by now crumbling like the pyramids, all illusions of youth vanishing. Where did the years go? When time is used up, does it go to some kind of place like a junkyard? Or down a river like the waters beneath Niagara Falls? Does time evaporate and turn into rain and start all over again?
    It feels odd for Karen to be a person without a story, like so many other people out there now, left marooned at a certain age without a narrative engine to pull them through their days. In the old days, she could at least have adopted a role within the community: the divorcée cautionary tale; the tough old broad who . . . she doesn’t even know. The tough old broad who makes birdhouses out of licence plates? The tough old broad who fills X number of years until her death doing nothing of consequence until science, genetics, nutrition, and life decisions collectively fail and take her to the inevitable end?
    ___
    Karen sat on her bar stool, watching Warren, clad in his repeat-sex-offender eyewear, watching the bar’s TV. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. No, dear God, no, this can’t be happening. A part of Karen was suddenly disgusted by the part of her that was oddly turned on by the part of Warren’s personality that was actually kind of base and mean and sexy — the part of him that had charmed and seduced her into a