Douglas Coupland - Player One: What Is to Become of Us

ALSO BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Fiction

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Shampoo Planet

Life After God

Microserfs

Girlfriend in a Coma

Miss Wyoming

All Families Are Psychotic

Hey Nostradamus!

Eleanor Rigby

JPod

The Gum Thief

Generation A

Nonfiction

Polaroids from the Dead

City of Glass

Souvenir of Canada

Souvenir of Canada 2

Terry

Marshall McLuhan

DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Douglas Coupland is the international bestselling author of Generation X, and eleven other novels, including The Gum Thief, Hey Nostradamus!, All Families Are Psychotic, and Generation A, which was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize. His nonfiction books include Marshall McLuhan, Polaroids from the Dead, Terry: The Life of Terry Fox, and Souvenir of Canada. His books have been translated into thirty-five languages and published around the world. He is also a visual artist and sculptor, furniture designer and screenwriter. He lives in Vancouver, B.C.

You can have information or you can have a life,
but you cant have both.

Dougs Law

HOUR FIVE

THE VIEW FROM DAFFY DUCK'S HOLE

Karen

The teenage boy enters the candlelit lounge screaming, My eyes! Rinse my eyes! Oh, God, my eyes . Karen half pushes, half yanks him towards the bar, where Rick grabs a pitcher of melted ice water and sluices it over the boys face. The boy shouts, I can barely see... I cant see.

Hang on, says Karen. Rick, is there any kind of hose back there?

No, just this. Rick aims the five-variety soda nozzle at the boys face, using its cold, clean pressure to rinse visible chemical fragments from the boys skin. Meanwhile, Luke continues to guard Bertis.

Karen sees Rachel taping the tablecloths back over the lounge door. She hasnt bothered to barricade it again, and Karen understands why she had the same thought herself: What if another innocent needs help? We need to be able to let people in quickly . Helping others trumps protecting themselves. The barricade has become a liability rather than a necessity; all they need now is an airtight barrier against chemicals.

Karen asks, Whats your name?

Its Max. My lips... my lips are stinging.

Oh Jesus. Max, honey, hang in there, okay?

Karen is having a flashback to five years ago, when Casey had antibiotic-resistant E. coli poisoning. The craziness, the hospital, the sadness, and, oh, the helplessness.

Rachel heads behind the bar and turns on the tap, but no water emerges. In her toneless voice she says, The water isnt working. Max, I want you to remove your clothes. Right now. Drop them on the ground dont throw them, dont kick up any dust. Then were going to take you out to the back area and rinse your body with whatever we can find. Nobody touch Maxs clothes. Well bag them later. Karen and Rick, you rinse your hands now with whatever you can find.

While Rick hoses down Karens forearms, Bertis calls from the floor, Excuse me, I never got the royal treatment like this guy, to which Karen says, No. You didnt.

Rachel looks in her purse and removes a prescription container, from which she takes some pills and puts them in Maxs hand. Take these.

What are they?

Propanolol. Its a beta blocker that curtails adrenaline production, which in turn reduces memory production, which in turn reduces post-traumatic stress.

Rick says, What? looking at Rachel as if she were a grizzly bear riding a unicycle.

Rachel continues, The hippocampus loses its ability to make memories adhere to the brain. Guys fighting in Iraq take it all the time. I keep them in case I have a too-big freakout in public.

Rick says, Are they safe?

They are.

Max pops the pills in his mouth and swallows them, and Rick hoses out Maxs mouth with what remains from the soda pump. Max continues disrobing as best he can, though his movements are awkward thanks to adrenaline and fear. Karen sees deep, anthraxy lesions on his arms and legs. When his cargo shorts hit the ground, she hears a thud. Shes guessing that in a pocket of those shorts is the iPhone holding pictures of her taken on the plane what feels like a lifetime ago but was really just earlier that day. For Karen, that thud marks the official start of the rest of her life, and of a whole new way of life a new world that exists within a state of permanent power failure. A perpetual Lagos, a never-ending Darfur. A world where people eat fortune cookies without bothering to read the fortunes. A world where individuality means little: People are simply Scrabble tiles with no letters, Styrofoam packing peanuts, napkins at McDonalds.

Karen decides that at the first opportunity, shes going to ask Rachel for a few of those pills. Just last month, in the break room with Dr. Yamato, Karen joked that the smartest thing science could do would be to make a pill called September 10; if you took it, it would be as if 9/11 had never happened. Now Karen wants a pill that will make the whole twenty-first century disappear that will make this unavoidable future vanish. Dr. Yamato said that earth was not built for six billion people, all running around and being passionate about being alive. Earth was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

Arent you being a charmer, Karen said, packing up her cubicle for the day.

Dr. Yamato, crabby after a three-day bipolar symposium, went on, saying, Karen, history may well prove worthless in the end. Individualism may prove to be only a cruel and unnecessary hoax played on billions of people for no known reason a bad idea dreamed up by God on the Eighth Day.

Karen had laughed laughed!

Rick takes over guard duty, and Luke and Karen escort a limping Max to the storage room, over by the recycling bins.

Karen asks, Where were you when the explosions happened? How did you get here? Were you with your family? Where are they if youre here?

Max stands in his boxer shorts and says, We were in a rental car headed downtown.

Luke says, Theres no bottled water or club soda here. The best I can do is melted ice from the machine.

Do it.

Karen reboots the conversation. Your family was in the rental car.

Headed downtown. Me. My dad. My sister.

Wheres your mother?

She moved in with her trainer last year. I dont know.

Sorry.

Its no big deal. So, we were the last car out of the lot before they stopped renting. The guys at the counter were making weird faces. I looked at their monitors, and there was an override message saying STOP ALL REFUELING IMMEDIATELY and then STOP ALL NEW RENTALS IMMEDIATELY . Ouch! The melted ice water smells like Teflon and nickels and dimes as it flows over Maxs scalp, then dribbles down his torso. It feels like my entire bodys been stung by hornets. A tear forms in his right eye, clearly visible against his angry crimson skin.

Luke grabs a bottle of vodka, pours some into a plastic cup, and adds some Coke to it, then places the cup in Maxs hands. Drink that.

What then? asks Karen.

We didnt get very far. The police began to barricade all the highway routes to the airport. People everywhere were freaking out, and, like, ten thousand people were trying to get back to the airport to fly home. But, I mean, all the flights were stopped what were they thinking? Theres no gas anymore. And then suddenly this guy came and pointed a gun at us, and his buddy started siphoning the gas out of our car. There were a couple of cops nearby and they didnt do anything. This guy just stood there holding a gun, and the other guy drained the tank, and then he made my dad drop the car keys into the gas tank so we couldnt get away driving on what gas remained.