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

Author:Douglas Coupland
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Canada, Fiction
ISBN: 0887849687
Publisher: House of Anansi
Published: 2010-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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

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