Player One: What Is to Become of Us Read Online Free Page A

there, but only seven showed up. Luke asked, “Where’s Cynthia?” and the ladies at the table mumbled whatever, so Luke said, “Isn’t it funny that the Rapture finally happens and the only person to be taken away is Cynthia?”
    Talk about the dog farting. Seven sour faces gave Luke the permission he didn’t know he needed or was looking for to empty the church’s renovation fund and vanish. It was such a clear, lucid moment, like the fugue he feels just before the onset of one of his small seizures. If the bank had still been open, he would have gone right then. And if he had any doubt about his new criminal calling, it was squelched by Sharon Truscott’s clipped little email a few hours later saying that the ladies didn’t appreciate having their piety mocked.
    And now Luke is in a cocktail lounge that’s meat-locker cold and smells of cleaning products in a city he’s never visited before, with twenty grand in his jacket pockets, bundles of cash that sit like stones in a suicide’s garment, weights meant to take one faster and more thoroughly to the bottom of the river — or perhaps they’re more like helium balloons that will only take him higher and higher.
    Or perhaps they will make him drunker.
    Luke orders another Scotch from the bartender, who looks like one of those guys with multiple DUIs and revoked driving licences, and who’s busy chatting up a middle-aged, barflyish, Sharon-like woman. He has just overheard them introducing themselves as Rick and Karen. Karen is obviously there to hook up with someone she’s met on the Internet. Luke can’t believe how many people meet on the Internet these days. It came out of nowhere and now it’s the cause of over half the problems his flock comes to him with: online gambling debt, get-rich-quick schemes, porn addiction, parents freaked out about the sites their kids visit, shopaholism. He can’t even call the things people do on the Internet sins , because it’s all so dull, really, just people sitting in front of screens, and what’s that ? Who cares? Ministering to souls was way more interesting when people actually interacted in real life. He hasn’t had a shoplifter or an affair within his flock in years. Now that’s interesting — oh so human — but Internet sinning? Nope. Goddam Internet. And his computer’s spell-check always forces him to capitalize the word “Internet.” Come on: World War Two earned its capitalization. The Internet just sucks human beings away from reality.
    Luke wonders what Shakespeare had to say about money. Something clever, no doubt. Goddam Shakespeare. Luke used to pepper his sermons with lofty Shakespearean quotes because he thought it made him look smarter than he really was, and it also made his flock feel smarter because it validated any years they’d spent in college or university. But lately the younger flock members have let it be known to Luke that his quotes are kind of boring and mechanical and remind them of those automatic quotes by Nietzsche or Kafka that web bots insert at the bottom of emails that somehow, in some almost impossible to connect way, funnel truckloads of cash into the ever-expanding Eastern European pornography industry. And a Scotch with ice certainly helps lubricate Luke’s belief that intelligence has been democratized and flattened. Luke feels both behind and in front of the curve.
    The curve. What the hell is “the curve”?
    Luke hates the twenty-first century.
    Luke is a thief.
    Luke remembers once believing in what he believed in: that one day he would no longer have to live inside linear time; the concept of infinity would cease to be frightening. All secrets would be revealed. Automobile ignitions would refuse to turn over; parking lots would melt like chocolate; water tables would vanish; and the planet would begin to cave in on itself. There would be great destruction; structures such as skyscrapers and multinational corporations would crumble. His dream life and his