Apocalypse for Beginners

by Nicolas Dickner

  The Scotiabank clock showed 4 a.m. and 12°C as the two women pulled out of Yarmouth doing 55 kilometres an hour and equipped with a thermos of reddish tea and a road map that was torn along the boundary between Maine and Témiscouata.

  Curled up in a corner of the back seat, Hope tried to catch up on her night’s sleep. She rested her head against the backpack, with the bottles of clozapine shaking next to her ear like maracas.

  When she woke up it was midmorning and they were in the depths of New Brunswick. Her mother had taken the logging road that sliced the province in half—an endless stretch of gravel flanked by thousands of hectares of spruce bearing the Irving dynasty’s coat of arms. For two hours they encountered nothing but convoys of logging trucks and dusty 4×4s. They emerged somewhere in the northwest of the province and crossed the border into Témiscouata, where the yellow haze of forest fires hung in the air. Overhead, CL-215s roared back and forth.

  Hope spoke not a word, immersed in her Russian studies. She knew that her questions would elicit nothing but vague theological gibberish. In any case, the one question that really mattered was how long would they keep on driving like this? Only the mighty Pacific itself could stop Ann Randall, and even then she was quite capable of plowing headlong into the ocean. Some action would have to be taken, but what could Hope do? She had five thousand kilometres to figure something out.

  But then this happened: Comrade Lada’s heart abruptly gave out among the peat bogs a few kilometres south of Rivière-du-Loup, struck down (as it were) by fate. A breakdown of this magnitude could not be ascribed to mechanics but only to karma: five valves overheating at once, the carburetor reduced to mush, gears unhinged and countless nuts and bolts gone AWOL.

  The repairman who came to their aid chewed his toothpick thoughtfully as he examined the vehicle. Then he passed sentence: Kaput! They were better off selling the carcass by the kilo than wasting another minute on the case.

  Ann Randall, who had calmed down somewhat over the twelve-hour drive, took stock of the situation. To go back was out of the question. She asked the mechanic a few questions about Rivière-du-Loup and straightaway deemed it a suitable place to wait for the end of the world.

  They rented the former pet shop located near the kitchen vent of the Chinese Garden Restaurant, Serving Chinese and Canadian Food. With a considerable portion of their savings having gone toward the first month’s rent, Ann had to take a job at a warehouse in the industrial park, where a battalion of hapless souls stuffed paper into knapsacks made in the People’s Republic of China. The work was dreary but adequate. After all, the world would soon witness the total annihilation of all modern civilization, the People’s Republic of China included.

  Ann Randall teetered on the brink of the precipice, always a hair’s breadth away from a relapse that was forestalled only by a minute detail of which she was entirely unaware—each morning Hope dissolved two tablets of clozapine in her mother’s tea.

  8. EINSTEIN’S TWENTY-FIVE SUITS

  On the morning of the first day of school I knocked on the door of the Pet Shop. Hope’s mother had just left, and the only sign of her presence was a heap of warm blankets on the sofa bed. Which didn’t really bother me, as I was in no particular hurry to make the acquaintance of this psychiatric specimen.

  On the way to school, Hope snatched a newspaper peeking out from someone’s mailbox. The front page had a picture of Neptune taken by the Voyager 2 space probe. Hope must have found my enthusiasm wanting, because she proceeded to explain that the probe had been launched in 1977 and the twelve years needed to reach Neptune vividly demonstrated both the vastness of the universe and the extreme smallness of our own planet.

  Seen in this light, the new school year appeared pretty insignificant. Score a point for astronomy.

  The high school atrium was teeming with people. Classes were about to begin and two thousand students crowded around the stairways. Hope and I huddled in a quiet corner and watched the throng. From time to time I pointed out a teacher who was either worthy of interest or not to be trusted. Hope asked me if there was anyone I wanted to see.

  “No, not really.”

  Which meant, of course, that for the moment there was no one more important than Hope.

  We folded our arms and surveyed the students as they bustled about with their new outfits, elaborate hairstyles and finely tuned slang. I casually noted that Hope had been wearing the same clothes for a week: an old pair of torn jeans, a frayed cap and a grey T-shirt. But were they in fact the same? Maybe she was simply emulating Albert Einstein, who, as legend had it, acquired twenty-five identical suits to spare himself the daily bother of deciding what to put on.

  The anecdote made Hope smile. She happened to know a thing or two about the life of the great physicist. For example, Einstein had indeed sent President Roosevelt a letter urging him to develop the atom bomb before the Germans did. He actually had been a socialist Zionist and turned down an invitation to become president of Israel in 1952. And he really had stated: “I don’t know which arms will be used in the Third World War, but the fourth will be fought with linoleum cutters bought at the local Home Hardware.”

  And yet Hope had never heard the story of the twenty-five identical suits.

  The fact was, she always wore the same things because they were the only clothes she had managed to grab before leaving Yarmouth. She had been washing her T-shirt and underwear every night in the kitchen sink, but after three weeks of this routine she admitted that she would soon have to find another solution.

  Maybe it was time to consider the Albert Einstein Method.

  9. THE LAST GREAT MANIA

  By the autumn equinox Hope had so completely adapted to her new ecosystem that anyone would have believed she had always lived here. Even her funny accent was somewhat less conspicuous. Still, she continued to sleep in the bathtub, which did nothing to reassure me of the stability of their situation. Whenever I showed up at the Randall Pet Shop, I was afraid of finding it deserted, evacuated due to another flare-up of nocturnal psychosis.

  As far as Hope was concerned, there was nothing to worry about. Thanks to the miraculous molecules of clozapine, Mrs. Randall’s major phobias had now been reduced to minor and altogether bearable obsessions.

  In the meantime the Pet Shop was looking more and more like a den, or a shooting gallery—disposable housing to discard after use. One Saturday morning, while Mrs. Randall was away, Hope and I confronted the mess head-on. While I swept up, Hope piled dishes in the sink filled with soapy water. A few bubbles floated around the Pet Shop, reflecting everything around them—miniature backup copies of our universe.

  Hope had strictly forbidden me to touch the kitchen table, which sagged under a thick layer of paperwork: equations, lunar phases, kabbalistic diagrams and Captain Mofuku ramen packages. This jumble represented the last great mania, which the clozapine had not managed to subdue: Mrs. Randall persisted in searching for the date of the end of the world.

  In her view, the situation was perfectly clear: if the apocalypse had failed to take place during the summer of 1989 as predicted, then the calendar must be at fault. All her evenings were devoted to solving this problem. She converted the Julian calendar into the Hebrew calendar and vice versa, claimed that here and there a handful of leap years had not been factored in, fumed at Gregory XIII, cursed the incompetent astronomer who in 1847 had misplaced a comma.

  No doubt about it, Mrs. Randall was off her rocker. Hope shrugged indulgently.

  “It’s something you can’t understand. A Randall finds comfort in knowing exactly when the world will end. The date is a marker. It gives you the impression you’ve got everything under control.”

  This explanation disturbed me. Since Hope had not yet experienced her Spell from Hell, did it mean she was tormented by the idea of not knowing the date of the apocalypse?

  She burst out laughing. How could Mary Hope Juliet Randall—that hard-core admirer of David Suzuki, that wizard of algebra and molecu
lar chemistry—how could she possibly subscribe to such medieval notions? Please!

  I dropped the subject and resumed sweeping up my pile of crumbs, but for a long while Hope appeared troubled. I had obviously hit a nerve.

  10. COLD FUSION

  In early October, Hope took it into her head to save some money for her personal use. After badgering the district manager for three weeks, she finally persuaded him to assign her a newspaper delivery route. It was an almost miraculous accomplishment at the time, as such routes were jealously guarded preserves, passed on exclusively from father to son and brother to brother.

  As she trekked from bungalow to bungalow every morning with a heavy satchel bouncing on her hip, Hope would read the paper, adroitly unfolded to the international news section. Then, looking like a chimney sweep, she would return to the Pet Shop, shower, eat breakfast, spike her mother’s tea and, at 7:30 on the dot, knock on our door.

  One day, she showed up thirty minutes earlier than usual, her nose smudged with ink, her backpack hanging over one shoulder and a towel around her neck.

  “Did you know that the main ingredient of printing ink is soya oil?”

  “Oh?”

  “Which is why it’s virtually impossible to remove without hot water and soap.”

  “Oh. I see. Problems with your plumbing?”

  “Our shower spits huge clots of rust. Usually I just thump the wall to unblock the artery, but this morning, nothing works. Is it okay if I wash up quickly?”

  Of course she could. I showed her to the bathroom in the basement. But was that story about soya oil for real? Hope assured me it was. Soya oil had replaced petroleum oil in the 1970s during the OPEC embargo. I sometimes wondered what Gutenberg might have thought of our civilization.

  Hope shut herself in the bathroom while I tried to finish my math homework. The last problem—an especially nasty equation with three unknowns—was giving me a hard time, but there was absolutely no way I could concentrate. My attention was entirely bent toward the hiss of the shower on the other side of the bathroom door. I tried to focus on the page, but it was no use. I started thinking about X-rays. My mind set to work on the wall, piercing the atoms, penetrating the prefab panels, the wood, the steam, and mapping out Hope’s slender silhouette lathering under the shower.

  I was still struggling with my equation when Hope emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later, barefoot. She wore a pair of jeans and a Goldorak T-shirt that was a little too small for her—this didn’t help me at all. (She had recently picked up a bagful of children’s clothes at the Saint Vincent de Paul thrift store.)

  She walked around the basement while she dried the nape of her neck, paused to glance at the TV, and then stopped to scrutinize the large photo of my aunt Ida posing proudly in front of the family fleet of cement trucks. Hope stooped down to read the little bronze plaque: Bétons Bauermann Inc.—Fiers Bâtisseurs Depuis 1953.

  Hope stepped toward me with her towel wrapped caliph-style around her head.

  “Algebra problems?”

  I grunted. She grabbed a pencil and, drying her hair with her other hand, cleaned up my calculations. In a few seconds the unknowns gave way to an elegant solution. Then she gestured with her chin at the picture of my aunt Ida.

  “Your family is in concrete?”

  I smiled. My family was indeed in concrete. Just as Hope was pressing me for more information, my mother arrived at the top of the stairs to ask if we felt like waffles. An altogether rhetorical question. I promised Hope to disclose all the facts on the Bauermann tribe, but some other day. We went upstairs.

  The kitchen was filled with a sugary aroma. Laid out on the table were a basket of freshly microwaved waffles, some oranges and a pitcher of corn syrup. My father was reading the business section of the paper, while my mother perused the obituaries. The coffee maker was hard at work and the muted radio provided some ambient noise.

  My father, obviously in a good mood, addressed Hope in a booming voice.

  “Well, what’s new, Miss Randall?”

  Hope beamed a huge smile in his direction and speared three waffles.

  “The usual. Major riots in Leipzig in protest against the Communist regime. Oh, and cold fusion has apparently turned out to be a load of bull.”

  I studied my parents’ faces while she spread a kilo of Nutella on her waffles. Father: amused. Mother: bewildered. My mother folded the newspaper and swept away a few crumbs with the back of her hand.

  “And how is your mother?”

  “Okay, I guess. She works a lot. Doesn’t eat well. But if you really want my opinion, none of that’s as interesting as cold fusion.”

  11. PERFECTLY LIVABLE FOR EXTENDED PERIODS

  Hope was spending more and more time in our basement. Given the rather peculiar atmosphere at the Randall Pet Shop, I couldn’t blame her. She needed a change of scenery, so her Russian textbooks gathered dust while we spent all of our evenings ensconced in the huge, squashy sofa, watching TV with a bowl of pretzels close by.

  The Nature of Things having just ended, we slipped into a slight trough, as we always did on Friday nights. For Hope, no act was worthy of following sensei Suzuki.

  Flipping through the channels, I found a BBC report on the archaeological dig at Pompeii. Hope pretended to pay attention only when the commercials were on—probably just to infuriate me. At every commercial break she would go into raptures, act as if she were in a trance or search for coded messages in the tampon ads (maximum freedom, supreme comfort).

  Why is archaeology so underrated?

  In Pompeii, the sun was beating down on a group of poorly paid trainees who scraped the ground with trowels and brushes. An Italian archaeologist pointed out one of the site’s particularities: The excavation occasionally uncovered hollows left by the victims’ bodies. By simply pouring plaster into one of these cavities and later prying the cast free with a chisel, they could obtain a 3-D Polaroid of a Pompeii inhabitant at the exact moment of death. (This detail briefly snagged Hope’s attention.)

  The camera ranged over a warehouse filled with dozens of such castings. Shelves upon shelves of asphyxiated Roman citizens—recumbent, curled up, snuggling against each other—an entire population turned into concrete.

  I wondered if the eruption of Vesuvius had surprised some Pompeians in a final act of copulation and, if so, whether the archaeologists had managed to make convincing casts of these events.

  Hope yawned and scratched her navel. She stretched out her arm only to find a few grains of coarse salt at the bottom of the bowl.

  “Any pretzels left?”

  I handed her the bag. The TV showed walls covered with ancient graffiti. The Romans hadn’t waited for the invention of spray paint to vandalize public spaces. Hope got up and started wandering around the basement while she rummaged in the bag of pretzels. She paused to look at the picture of my aunt Ida and the cement trucks, and then planted herself in front of my sci-fi novels.

  “Have you read all of them?”

  I nodded. She wiped her hands on her jeans, pulled out an Isaac Asimov title and leafed through it.

  “Where do you buy them?”

  “At Youri’s. It’s a bookstore on Lafontaine Street.”

  She examined the bookshelves from top to bottom until she was kneeling in front of the archaeology section at floor level. Predictably, the contrast made her smile. For Hope, as for most of my peers, it was difficult to recognize the natural connection between science fiction and archaeology.

  The report on Pompeii was finishing and Hope immediately insisted on watching the news. I switched channels just in time to catch veteran anchorman Bernard Derome announcing the top stories. Keywords: devastating, typhoon, Thailand.

  Gay was the most powerful typhoon to hit the Malaysian peninsula in decades. There were winds approaching 200 kilometres an hour, and we watched a little house get blown out to sea like a cardboard box. It was enough to send shivers up your spine. Would our bungalow have fared any better?<
br />
  “Interesting question,” Hope murmured.

  She looked around the basement and stated that, when you thought about it, the North American bungalow shared certain characteristics with a bunker. It was one of the only modern dwellings where fifty per cent of the living space was located below ground level.

  “Previously, houses had cellars, crypts, underground rooms, crawl spaces or secret vaults for storing Kalashnikovs. But the basement of a North American bungalow is different. It’s insulated, heated, furnished, equipped with beds, freezers, cold-storage rooms, a television, a telephone and board games.”

  “Not to mention the angora rug!”

  “Not to mention the angora rug … In other words, it’s perfectly livable for extended periods.”

  As she spoke, Hope fished out a stray pretzel from between two sofa cushions.

  “The modern basement appeared during the Cold War. It’s the product of a civilization obsessed with its future. But when you think about it, you have to go back to the Stone Age to find so many Homo sapiens living underground.”

  She tossed the pretzel into the air. It described a perfect parabola before landing between her teeth. Crunch.

  “In conclusion, modernity is a fairly relative concept.”

  Hope—wow.

  She fell asleep during the weather report, head thrown back, muttering incomprehensibly. I turned down the TV, spread a blanket over her legs and watched her sleep for a moment.

  The human brain is said to consume one-fifth of the energy produced by the body, but Hope’s brain clearly burned up much more. She was breathing quietly. I shut my eyes and imagined her cortex silently splitting pellets of uranium-235.

  12. TERMITES

  We caught the last rays of the autumn sun as we sat shivering in the bleachers of the municipal stadium. We were already wearing tuques and coats as protection against the icy wind rising from the river. With such cold weather in early November, the threat of a new ice age could not be shrugged off. I had rifled through my brother’s dresser and dug up an old down parka that was just slightly too big. Bundled up in the bulky red jacket, Hope looked like a little girl, but she didn’t seem to mind.