Apocalypse for Beginners

by Nicolas Dickner

The Randalls called this phenomenon the “Night-time Revelation,” the “Light,” the “Prediction,” or, more often than not, the “Spell from Hell.”

  Every Randall was apprised of a different date, which in no way made it easier for them to be taken seriously. What’s more, a Randall who outlived his or her end of the world would then experience a mental breakdown and an inclination to damage public property. The story would usually end in an asylum or suchlike.

  Indeed, the Randall family tree could be used in a course on the history of psychiatry in North America over the past one hundred and fifty years, from the cold shower to the lobotomy, occupational therapy, the straitjacket and lithium, right through to deinstitutionalization.

  Case No. 1: Harry Randall Truman, the patriarch, lost his mind in the fall of 1835, shortly after the passage of Halley’s comet. He prophesied the return of Moses aboard an incandescent whaler, and subsequently burned down the barn of the Presbyterian pastor. The neighbours wrestled him to the ground, tied him up and shipped him off to the Halifax Mental Asylum, where he lived out his days in the wing reserved for pyromaniacs and other sociopaths.

  Case No. 37: Gary Randall holed up for fifteen years in a plywood shack that boasted a window through which he would greet any psychotherapist (a rare bird) with a few volleys of his 12-gauge shotgun. They found him clutching his firearm one morning after the temperature had dropped to 40 below—stiff, blue and completely divested of his obsession.

  Case No. 53: Henry Randall Jr., Hope’s grandfather and a veteran of the Depression, behaved more constructively. He channelled his anxiety into founding the Minoritarian Reform Church of the Seventh Ruminant, a para-Christian sect that predicted Armageddon would take place on June 12, 1977. As good a way as any to kill time. The church existed until the aforementioned date, after which Henry killed himself by gulping down a fistful of roofing nails.

  And so it went with Gary Randall, Harry Randall, Harriet Randall, Hanna Randall, Henry Randall, Randolph Randall, Handy Randall, Hans Randall, Hank Randall, Annabel Thibodeau (née Randall), Henryette Leblanc Randall, Hattie Randall, Pattie Randall and so on, while the planet persisted in spinning around like a bad joke.

  4. PURELY ACCIDENTAL

  Ann Randall was born in Yarmouth in March 1954, on the same day that the Americans tested a new hydrogen bomb in the Marshall Islands.

  She was a quiet young girl, stunningly and precociously beautiful, whose gift for languages was phenomenal. At the age of ten she had a full command of English and French and was learning Latin from an old Vulgate stolen from the church sacristy, an autodidactic theft to which the priest turned a blind eye.

  Her lonely childhood was spent between a father kept busy presiding over the Minoritarian Reform Church of the Seventh Ruminant, and a disturbed mother, whom Ann lost when she was twelve years old. That summer the poor woman, exhausted from waiting for a firestorm that never materialized, swallowed the entire contents of the family medicine cabinet: pills, cough syrup and bandages. After her stomach had been pumped, she was sent to Halifax for emergency psychiatric treatment—and never came back.

  On September 1, 1966, at dawn, after two days of cramps and migraines, Ann Randall, still shaken by her mother’s confinement, woke up sweating so profusely that the sheets clung to her body. Off Yarmouth, the rumbling of a storm could be heard.

  From that moment Ann knew—and would never for an instant forget—that the end of the world would take place in the summer of 1989.

  She was struck at once by the vision’s lack of detail. The summer of 1989? That was all? Yet her cousins had assured her that not only would she be informed of the exact date of the end of the world (down to the minute) but that she would be presented with explicit images, tactile sensations, smells. She had been promised a revelation in CinemaScope, but all she received was a blurred and poorly framed slide.

  Sitting up in her bed, she became aware of another event—one that was wet, sticky and unmistakable. She slid three fingers between her thighs and they came back stained with brownish blood. Her Spell from Hell was sealed.

  Ann went to school for another few years, earning consistently high marks, but she dropped out in Grade 12 without giving any reason. And actually, no one asked. She took a job at the municipal library (comprising a few bookcases in the basement of the town hall), where she shelved books and polished her Latin.

  When she was eighteen Ann had a fleeting affair with a court clerk and became pregnant. It was, of course, an accident; procreation among the Randalls was always purely accidental. The circumstances of this particular nocturnal episode remained hazy, but according to local legend, the act was committed after closing time in the children’s book aisle. The gossip was that Ann had been looking for trouble.

  The clerk, a family man and an upright citizen, stayed out of sight and left Ann to deal on her own with public opinion and the tiny carbon copy of his genetic code.

  The pregnancy set an entire series of fuses popping in Ann Randall’s brain, which was immediately subjected to waves of apocalyptic anxiety and uncontrollable manias. For example, she earmarked half of the library’s annual budget for the purchase of an extravagant collection of ancient texts: bibles in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek, a facsimile of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Enûma Eliš and the Book of the Dead. She never bothered going home any more, instead spending her nights in the town hall basement studying the dead languages of Mesopotamia and eating ramen noodles.

  After several months, completely worn out, she tried to end it all by swallowing a bottle of Aspirin, which resulted in severe liver damage. The examination at the hospital brought to light, first, the drug poisoning, then the psychotic episodes, and, finally, the existence of the fetus. Three diagnoses for the price of one.

  She was referred to an obstetrician, who sent her on to a social worker, who entrusted her to a psychologist, who in turn transferred her to a psychiatrist, so that she eventually went home with a hefty prescription of 250 mg of clozapine, to be taken every morning with orange juice, along with a tablet of doxylamine for nausea.

  Now that the psychotic episodes had stopped, Ann could resume her tasks at the library. Everything appeared to be under control. She floated in a state of euphoria, swelling at the midriff, shelving books, stamping cards. It was through this veil of medication that Hope came into the world, three weeks early (punctuality was undeniably on the wane for the Randalls).

  Grandfather Henry came to the nursery, answering the call for help and stayed just long enough to take a quick look at the baby and declare that her name would be Mary Hope Juliet.

  Mary Hope Juliet—airdropped into a cuckoo’s nest.

  5. A DISTURBING LOGIC

  As an infant, Hope was perceptive and independent-minded. She rarely cried and refused the breast very early on. She had not inherited her mother’s fragile beauty, but there was an undeniable gracefulness in her figure and her gestures. Her hair was straight and unruly, and the freckles that blossomed on her face during the heat wave of 1977 rounded out the impression of a little girl who had been abandoned in the heart of the Amazonian jungle.

  The years went by. Ann shelved books and followed her prescribed dosage. Hope attended the elementary school across the street. She had few friends, and family visits were rare. The Randalls gathered at the funeral parlour every two months or so, each time an aunt or a cousin succumbed to her or his personal apocalypse, and such evenings were just about the only social life they had.

  All in all, it was a life that held no surprises.

  Things began to fall apart the day that Ann quit her job at the library, taking with her the collection of bibles (whose removal, as it happened, went quite unnoticed). She found a job as a cashier at Sobeys, and set about hoarding considerable quantities of food—enough to keep a large family self-sufficient for many months.

  This food-related disorder was governed by a disturbing logic: Ann refused to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, that is, food whose
value was necessarily ephemeral. She thought in terms of calories per cubic metre, protein and nutritional benefit. Above all, no perishables. She came home from Sobeys with enormous provisions: five-pound bags of rice, ten-pound sacks of potatoes, four cans each of red beans and stewed tomatoes, twenty cans each of tuna in oil, pears, peaches, peas. And ramen—hundreds of packets of ramen that she stored in every available space.

  When her daughter asked her what the purpose was of all these supplies, Ann Randall answered mysteriously, “To barter, when the Chinese show up.”

  Hope was only eight and a half but already found her mother’s sense of humour suspect.

  6. TEACH YOURSELF RUSSIAN AT HOME

  After a few relatively uneventful years, Social Services reactivated the Ann Randall file. A routine visit had made clear that something about this family was not quite right. Specifically, aside from the legal guardian’s psychiatric history, here she was, storing packets of ramen and tins of sardines by the thousands. Suspicious.

  Fortunately, Hope was on the alert. Whenever a social worker threatened to drop in on them, Hope would scrub the floor, pour a litre of bleach into the toilet bowl and fill a pretty wicker basket with apples and oranges. In this carefully prepared environment, Ann Randall managed to look almost ordinary.

  The stratagem was repeated every six months, and Hope gradually learned to create an illusion of normalcy. She soon grasped that certain details appeared fishy, especially their not owning a television, which served not merely as another home appliance but as proof of one’s allegiance to society. So Hope went out scavenging and came back with someone’s discarded old black-and-white Zenith. The bottom part of the screen was dead, but as long as the set stayed turned off it did the trick.

  As soon as the TV was installed in the dining room, the social workers’ attitude shifted. They took note of this positive sign and their visits became less frequent. Between inspections, however, the television had to be stowed away. Ann Randall would not tolerate an apparatus that caused retinal cancer and rotted the brain.

  The arrival of the television represented a turning point in Hope’s life. Until then, the only source of information available in the house had been her mother’s bible collection. Hope had read the King James version once, without skipping a single page, and that was enough, thank you very much.

  Now, however, she locked herself in the closet every night to watch the international news on CBC, old late-night feature films, and, above all—that inviolable appointment—David Suzuki and The Nature of Things. Astronomy, genetics, chemistry: there was nothing that did not interest her. Every Friday night the good news emanating from Vancouver, British Columbia, was relayed from repeater to repeater across the continent via the Hertzian highway and touched down in a beat-up television inside a closet in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, where it irradiated the brain of a young girl with a craving for science.

  The Cold War was drawing to a close. The advent of Mikhail Gorbachev was a good omen, perestroika was a good omen and glasnost was a very, very good omen. From now on, there would be no more talk of nuclear holocaust; instead, speculation focused on the imminent opening of a McDonald’s on Red Square.

  Hope had the foresight to make collect calls to every Halifax bookstore with the aim of locating a Russian-language textbook. She finally tracked one down at the Book Room. The following week, a highly disgruntled postman delivered three enormous packages, tightly wrapped in brown paper, containing the seventeen volumes of Teach Yourself Russian at Home.

  While her mother chewed on her nails in the kitchen, Hope shut herself in the closet, furtively turned on the TV, and in the stroboscopic glow of the screen learned all about personal pronouns, conjunctions and conjugations.

  She was in the midst of memorizing her first irregular verbs when the Chernobyl accident occurred.

  A simple maintenance oversight, a mere thirty seconds of negligence, and a nuclear power plant in the middle of the Ukraine began to melt down as easily as caramel on the stovetop. Hope stayed glued to the TV for three days. For the first time, the whole world could follow every moment of a calamity unfolding on Soviet soil, a scenario that two or three years earlier would have been the stuff of science fiction.

  For Ann Randall, on the other hand, Chernobyl was one of several omens—there were, after all, only three years left before 1989—and she once again was stricken with a blend of anxiety and insomnia as well as abrupt and inexplicable bouts of feverish excitement. And there was something new: she began to speak Assyrian in her sleep.

  Assyrian or Hebrew or possibly Sumerian, was what Hope surmised, on grounds that were actually rather thin. Her mother fell asleep each night reading a bulky multi-language bible. Was some sort of contamination taking place? At any rate, whatever it was bore no resemblance to Russian.

  For Hope, self-appointed guardian of domestic balance, this apocalyptic psychosis was not some quaint family idiosyncrasy but a bona fide problem. So she dragged her progenitor to the psychiatrist, who confirmed that the dosage of clozapine, after many years of effectiveness, seemed no longer to be working. A new dosage and a new routine were prescribed.

  What accounted for this sudden lack of response to the medication? The doctor could not say for sure. He raised various possibilities: the natural history of the illness, changes in the body’s metabolism, the effects of habituation. For her part, Hope believed there might be an undocumented incompatibility between clozapine and the international news.

  Still, whatever the explanation, from now on she would have to intensify her efforts to preserve domestic stability. The resulting tension only heightened her solitary tendencies and increased the number of hours per week spent in her closet retreat.

  She felt overwhelmed by the situation, but to whom could she turn for help? Certainly not the Randalls. They tolerated but did not really accept her, quite simply because Hope had not yet endured her Spell from Hell. What kind of Randall were you if you had no idea of your date for the end of the world? Barely a sub-Randall, a maggot, a foreign object orbiting around the family tree.

  Hope walked the line between two worlds, unable to set her foot down in one or the other. Luckily she had David Suzuki.

  7. STRUCK DOWN BY FATE

  Inevitably, the summer of 1989 arrived.

  Hope’s mother was in the grip of indescribable dread, magnified because she did not exactly know what to expect. It had been some time since she had swallowed any pills whatsoever, and the unopened bottles of clozapine were gathering dust in the medicine cabinet. Consequently, she spent her evenings playing solitaire on the kitchen table and jumping at the slightest squeak, which her imagination immediately amplified and transformed into a cataclysm.

  At all times the neighbour’s television could be heard through the wall—a mixture of The Price Is Right, Three’s Company and Wok With Yan, occasionally pierced by angry shouts that could be ascribed to the immoderate consumption of beer. The mayhem began every morning at six and went on until midnight. It was enough to drive anybody insane—and Ann Randall’s sanity hung by such a fine thread she was like one of those cartoon characters holding on to the cliff’s edge with a shaky index finger.

  Her anxiety steadily mushroomed, until, one night in July, everything collapsed.

  Hope was drifting between two phases of sleep when she was awakened by the clink of dishes. Someone was rummaging around in the cupboards. She edged her way to the kitchen, which she found in state of total chaos. Her mother was frantically emptying the fridge.

  “What are you doing, Mom?”

  Ann Randall turned around with a start, looking like a burglar caught red-handed. She stared at her daughter for a moment and, unable to recognize her, continued to empty the fridge.

  “I’m packing.”

  “To go where?”

  “West.”

  Ann Randall truly believed that she could gain some time by escaping toward the west, perhaps by virtue of the clock’s reversal as one travelled westwar
d through the time zones. Even more likely, however, was that her thinking was based on an abstruse biblical interpretation of the cardinal points or on the lyrics of a Led Zeppelin song that she had heard on the radio earlier that night. There was no way of knowing.

  Hope acquiesced, getting out of her pyjamas and putting on the first clothes she could find: an old pair of ripped jeans, a T-shirt and a New York Mets baseball cap. She wistfully packed her bag, managing to jam in a half-dozen volumes of her Russian textbooks. She took a last look inside the closet—the small cocoon furnished with her books, her TV, her cushions, her David Suzuki posters. She sighed. Why hadn’t she been born into a family obsessed by deer hunting, the Super Bowl or municipal politics?

  In the kitchen, her mother had almost finished emptying the fridge. She thrust a bag of provisions into Hope’s arms.

  “Here, go put this in the car.”

  Hope reluctantly obeyed. In front of the house their ancient Lada was waiting, all its doors open. It was an ailing, second-hand car purchased the year before with the family’s meagre savings. The trunk overflowed with bags, knick-knacks, clothing. Ann Randall had even jettisoned the spare tire to make room for her bible collection. Every seat except the driver’s was laden with boxes, and the floor was covered with sacks of flour, boxes of ramen, jars of relish, bottles of vinegar, ketchup and soy sauce, jars of mustard.

  Hope looked at the poor Lada with its sunken shock absorbers. Anything over thirty kilometres per hour might be too much to expect of it.

  She returned inside, grabbed her bag and hurried to the bathroom. In the medicine cabinet were rows of clozapine, twenty-odd bottles. Suddenly she heard the noise of a car door slamming shut. Ann Randall had just sat down behind the steering wheel. Hope tossed the drugs into her bag, fished out the prescription (folded twelve times) from under the jar of Vaseline and raced back to the car before her mother got a notion to take off on her own.