Apocalypse for Beginners

by Nicolas Dickner

  “Can you imagine what would have happened if they’d been fiddling around with citrus fruits? Everything would have another name. We would be taking courses in citricity, and the lemon would be an official unit of electric measurement!”

  “That’s pretty absurd.”

  “Yeah, but all units of measurement are absurd. It doesn’t matter if you measure time with drops of water or the rotations of a cesium atom—both are merely absurdities with different degrees of accuracy. Everything else is cultural.”

  Right then I observed a sparkle of excitement in her eyes. She opened her chemistry textbook to the conversion tables and began jotting down notes in the margins of the book and punching numbers into her calculator.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m converting the Hiroshima atomic bomb into lemons.”

  Of course. What could be more obvious?

  Hope explained that all you needed was a little logic and a smattering of data to obtain a significant, if not altogether exact, answer. In other words, the renowned Fermi method.

  In this particular case, you could start with the fact that a lemon contains 15 to 20 calories, that is (she tapped away on her calculator) an average value of 73.2 kilojoules (×). The Hiroshima bomb, on the other hand, released an estimated 15 kilotons of energy, amounting to approximately 6.3 × 1013 kilojoules (y).

  To convert the bomb’s energy, you had only to divide y by ×, which resulted in a total of 8.6 × 1011 lemons or, more plainly, 860,655 megalemons, the equivalent of Florida’s agricultural output over a period of six thousand years.

  18. AN ORDINARY COMPONENT OF EVERYDAY REALITY

  Hope went back to work, calculator in hand, and was now computing the volume 860 billion lemons would take up.

  Around us, the other students were busy with their coils of copper wire, their sticky fruits and their stacks of loose-leaf filled with scribbled notes. As for me, I pondered the heresy of converting the deadliest explosion in the history of humankind into lemons.

  Yet it was inevitable that it should come to this sooner or later.

  For the average citizen in 1945, the atomic bomb came from the future, just like the extraterrestrials in The War of the Worlds. While physicists were piercing the core of the atom, people in the countryside were still using oil lamps to light their houses.

  My grandfather, Wilhelm Bauermann—who had grown up with the steam engine, mustard gas and the Model T Ford—was unable to grasp that the atomic bomb was fundamentally different from dynamite. When he talked about Hiroshima, he imagined a mountain of those cardboard sticks they used in the gypsum quarries.

  The children of the postwar years had witnessed the advent of the Boeing 747, LSD and the H-bomb, and by the time my generation arrived on the scene, 100-kiloton intercontinental missiles already belonged to ancient history. They were like the microwave oven, Captain Mofuku chicken-flavoured ramen or satellite TV—an ordinary component of everyday reality.

  No, Grandpa Wilhelm could never have understood how the Hiroshima bomb differed from good old dynamite, and even less how it could be compared to lemons.

  19. EINSTEIN WAS WRONG

  My parents had gone down to Montreal until Wednesday to take part in the annual convention of North-Eastern Cement Producers—forty-eight hours of scintillating discussions on all the latest additives, the whole event awash in weak coffee and lukewarm beer.

  Lounging on the couch with our feet up on the coffee table, Hope and I were doing our best to diminish the reserves of frozen mini-pizzas. While I flipped through the TV Guide, Hope kept half an eye on a news report about Berlin. Nothing new under the sun.

  I asked about Mrs. Randall: Was she making any headway with the date of the end of the world? Hope sighed. No, her mother was getting nowhere. As a matter of fact, she was showing dangerous signs of restlessness. Hope wondered how much longer the clozapine would continue to keep her condition stable. Fundamentally, the issue was not pharmaceutical. All she needed was to find that date and her mental health would immediately improve.

  Hope threw her head back and stared at the ceiling for a long time.

  “The problem is in her method. She mixes everything up. Mysticism, bogus mathematics, the Kabala, astrology … It lacks elegance.”

  “Elegance?”

  “An old mathematical concept. The more an idea is unnecessarily complicated, the less elegant it is.”

  “I see. So absolute elegance would look something like E=mc2?”

  Hope blinked and sat up with a start.

  “Do you have dice?”

  Of course I had dice. Every North American home worthy of the name had an old Monopoly game stored away in a closet. It took me two minutes to find ours. Hidden under the bundles of banknotes, property titles and miniature bungalows was a pair of dice. But, as hard as I tried, I could not see the connection with the theory of relativity.

  “There’s no connection. Except that it reminded me of Einstein’s famous statement: ‘God does not play with dice.’ ”

  She gave me a lopsided smile.

  “But Einstein was wrong. God does play with dice!”

  Assembling pen and paper, she drew a grid and wrote down a series of numbers. I tried to follow but lacked some basic data.

  “It’s simple. I’m going to find the date of the end of the world by chance.”

  “By chance?”

  “Can you think of anything more elegant?”

  No, I couldn’t. Hope would throw the dice. Even numbers would mean “yes” and odd numbers would mean “no.” This simplest of conventions would allow her to determine the date through a process of elimination.

  The dice clattered across the coffee table. I loved that sound. It took me back to my childhood when my family would spend entire evenings around the Monopoly board. It had been years since we last played, and it felt rather bizarre, in hindsight, to picture my family gathered around a small-scale model of the world, taking part in simulated financial wars.

  While I daydreamed, Hope tossed the dice. Between throws, she wrote certain numbers down and crossed out others. This method was not only elegant but quick, and two minutes were enough for her to determine that the apocalypse would happen on July 17, 2001.

  Well, at least that was one thing out of the way! Now we could look forward to spending a quiet evening.

  Hope said nothing. She was testing the date in her head, running her mind over it as if it were the sharp edge of a knife.

  “Not a very credible date, is it?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, preferring to let the Randalls form an opinion on the matter. Hope looked at the dice resting innocently in the palm of her hand. There was no question of a computational error; that was the whole advantage—and absurdity—of chance.

  “And why exactly do you find that July 17, 2001, lacks credibility?”

  “July! Can you really imagine the apocalypse happening during the construction holiday?”

  To tell the truth, yes, I had no trouble conjuring up this image—but maybe I’d just read too much science fiction.

  “Okay, fine. July’s no good. So which month would you see it occurring?”

  She mulled over the question. Clearly, April, May and June were out. A springtime doomsday could simply not be taken seriously. August and September were lame choices—the end of the world would look like an ad campaign. “Super-Powerful Armageddon, 20% more Ammonia!” Ridiculous. October, in a pinch, could qualify. In November, on the other hand, the end of days would seem redundant. Any time during the winter could fit the bill, so long as it didn’t fall during the holidays.

  Sitting with her arms folded, Hope cast a disgruntled look at the dice. What good was it resorting to chance if you couldn’t manage to trust it?

  I watched her grapple with her internal contradictions. This chink in her self-assurance brought to light a more human, more feminine Hope. Who would have thought that doubt could be so sexy?

  20. TORA! TORA! TORA!

&nb
sp; Surfing the channels, we came across the second half of a film about Pearl Harbor. Instant consensus. Tucked under three old sleeping bags—relics of those sunny days when my family partook of the joys of camping—we watched the screaming Zeroes swoop down on the Pacific Fleet. On the deck of the warship, a brass band hastily finished playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was the sort of ludicrous scene that we relished.

  Just as the USS California was being blown up, Hope cried out, “What about December?”

  “What?”

  While the debris was raining down on the harbour, the Zeroes launched another volley of torpedoes. We could actually smell the stench of diesel.

  “In December. The end of the world. Just like the attack on Pearl Harbor. Not bad, eh?”

  My response has been lost to history.

  The news came on immediately after the film. The Lebanese president René Moawad had been killed in a bomb attack and we were seeing the first pictures to arrive from Beirut. In the bright sunshine, a mushroom of black smoke rose high into the sky. Hope frowned. On second thought, the summertime could prove as likely a moment as any for the world to end.

  We pulled the plug on the television around midnight and bedded down where we lay, wrapped in the sleeping bags that reeked of mothballs, using cushions for pillows.

  It took me a long time to drift off, due to the disturbing effect of Hope lying so close, with her back to me and her body pressing into mine. I finally managed to fall asleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night. The VCR clock showed 2:37 a.m., and I realized that Hope was no longer beside me. She was sitting on the couch, gnawing at her fingernails.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  She shook her head.

  “What do you think of February?”

  I was speechless for a moment as my neurons revved up one by one.

  “No better or worse than any other month.”

  She sighed.

  “No. That’s not it. It feels too contrived. So … are you hungry?”

  By way of response, my stomach rumbled loudly.

  We went on a supply raid in the kitchen, where I knew the location of the reserves of chicken-flavoured Captain Mofuku ramen. Genuine bunker food—non-perishable and mould proof. The package design, on the other hand, was a hazard for the eyes: a pink and yellow astronaut with a cretinous smile behind his visor, orbiting a planet made of noodles. True, this was bunker food, but anyone stuck forty metres below ground surrounded by shelves stacked full of these obnoxious astronauts was in danger of losing his mind before succumbing to malnutrition.

  We opened the ramen packages and put the kettle on to boil. Hope fidgeted with the empty wrapper while she continued to ruminate.

  “What about March?”

  I hesitated. It wouldn’t work. March was the Ayers Rock of the calendar—an enormous red, smooth month stranded in the middle of nowhere. Hope nodded.

  “You’re right.”

  “Listen … why not simply trust the dice?”

  Hope didn’t answer. Absently, she toyed with her ramen package, folding it over and over with her thumbs. From a distance, she might have been taken for someone playing with a Chinese abacus. Suddenly, she stopped. She smoothed out the wrapper with the edge of her hand and thrust it under my nose, her index finger pointing to where it said, Meilleur Avant—Best Before 2001 17 JUL.

  I smiled. An amusing coincidence—that’s all. Hope spread her arms out excitedly.

  “An amusing coincidence?! Do you have any idea what the odds are for such an amusing coincidence?!”

  No, I did not have any idea. Nor did Hope, for that matter, but she swore she would calculate it when she had a couple of minutes.

  She grabbed the kettle, splashed some boiling water in her bowl, and watched the mushroom cloud of steam rise toward the ceiling. She said no more on the subject of the apocalypse, but folded the wrapper four times and carefully slipped it under her belt.

  21. A LITTLE PRAYER

  The weeks passed; winter was fast approaching. In Berlin, sections of the Grenzmauer disappeared one after the other and gave way to a long series of vacant lots, promising a spike in real estate speculation. On the Potsdamer Platz, construction cranes were concentrated in numbers unequalled anywhere else in this part of the galaxy. Nothing looked more like the end of a world than the beginning of another.

  Meanwhile, Hope was radiant. Her slightest gesture was charged with youthful electricity, as if the little girl that she had never allowed to come out was emerging after a long hibernation. She smiled from morning to night, whistled softly, lobbed snowballs at me—and the girl was a good shot, too.

  The December sleet pelted down, and Hope blossomed amid the frost for the pleasure of my eyes alone, since none of my classmates seemed to notice the spectacular transformation. Were they so severely nearsighted that they failed to see how dazzling Hope was? Oh well, their loss was my gain.

  Of course, as with all good things, there were some minor annoyances. Hope had taped the treasured Captain Mofuku ramen wrapper inside her locker (beside the picture of David Suzuki) and scribbled the numbers 17 07 2001 everywhere: in the blank spaces of her notebooks, in her books, on her arms, her desk, her jeans, and even in the cafeteria’s infamous ravioli sauce.

  It was as if the numbers 17 07 2001 no longer represented the date of the apocalypse, and even less the expiry date of a package of ramen, but something like one of those little prayers that Buddhists would copy onto scraps of paper, which they then sent drifting on the four winds.

  In the end, though, it was a small price to pay to see Hope so radiant.

  Unfortunately, the same could not be said of Mrs. Randall, whose attempts to find fault with the Gregorian calendar had resulted in a long string of failures. The facts had to be faced: the date showing on the calendar was neither May 1988 nor February 1987, but undeniably December 1989.

  As a result, she had abruptly lost interest in her calendars and almanacs. But in spite of this, certain clues suggested that she was still not rid of her obsession. Once a Randall, always a Randall. One night, Hope came into the Bunker and handed me a newspaper folded four times.

  “I found this under our couch when I was sweeping up.”

  It was a copy of the Saint-Laurent, the local weekly, opened to the classified ads. In the “Cars for Sale” section, a frenzied hand had circled all the clunkers going for under $400.

  I didn’t know what to make of it, so Hope helped me out: Her mother’s obsession had just entered an insidious phase. She would soon start packing provisions and collecting road maps of Western Canada.

  “You think she’s going to pull up stakes again?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Haven’t you been giving her the clozapine every morning?”

  “The dosage may not be effective any more. It’s happened before.”

  Hope was at a loss. There was no chance of persuading her mother to consult a specialist, still less of forcing her to do so, and no doctor would sign a prescription without seeing the patient. Hope clearly would have liked for me to come up with a bright idea, but nothing came to mind and she seemed frustrated by my silence. She frowned and stuffed the newspaper into her backpack. She would have to manage on her own—again.

  My mother came downstairs holding a basket of dirty laundry against her hip. “For tomorrow’s lunch, I put the leftover shepherd’s pie in some Tupperware,” she announced on her way to the laundry room.

  Hope gave me a strange look.

  “Your mother makes your lunch?”

  “Uh … Sometimes. Yeah.”

  She made a show of disbelief and looked away. On the television, a preacher was praising the mercy of God Almighty. Do not suffer alone in your little corner. Come and meet Him. Open your heart, open your eyes. Every answer can be found in the Bible.

  22. THE ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PSYCHIATRY

  The winter’s first snowfall came on a Saturday morning. Objective for the day: produ
ce a diagnosis of Mrs. Randall’s mental condition.

  As she stepped into the municipal library, Hope cast a sceptical glance at the loans counter, where two aging librarians were filing catalogue cards. In her view, a civilization overly preoccupied with archives was surely a civilization on the decline.

  She stationed herself in front of the catalogue and went through the cards in the “Neurology and Psychiatry” section. She jotted down a few interesting call numbers and then, after looking left and right, grabbed a bundle of cards, opened another drawer and planted them haphazardly, like the bulbs of some rare and dangerous plant—the seeds of a new virgin forest.

  Her spirits lifted by this small act of terrorism, she scurried away to the stacks.

  After leafing through a few works by amateurs, Hope went on to more serious stuff: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Psychiatry, a tome weighing some eight kilos and claiming to cover all the psychological disorders that have afflicted the human race from the Sumerian religious wars to Ronald Reagan’s first term in office.

  Sitting cross-legged on a chair, Hope spent the whole afternoon combing through the encyclopedia with the aim of identifying the subcategory of fruitcake that her mother belonged to. I had taken refuge in an old Yoko Tsuno comic book, but from time to time I would unobtrusively peek over her arm, and what I glimpsed was far from reassuring: an assortment of syndromes, episodes, relapses, phases, differential diagnoses, tricyclic antidepressants, neuroleptics, paranoias, hallucinations and hereditary factors, illustrated here and there with cross-sections of cortex, nebulous graphs and bipolar mice.

  For three hours straight, Hope scrutinized this selection from every possible angle, from the Ahenobarbus complex (“variety of pyromania aggravated by an unwholesome attraction to stringed instruments”) through to Romero-Ruuk syndrome (“dementia characterized by general muscular rigidity and sudden cannibalistic urges”). She lingered for a while over the highly exotic Type III Jerusalem syndrome (“nervous breakdown experienced by some tourists on their first visit to Jerusalem; those affected believe they are the Messiah, announce the End of Days and are subject to a compulsive need to cut their fingernails”), but finally came to the conclusion that the encyclopedia was outrageously incomplete since there was not a single reference to the malady that dozens of Randalls had endured for seven generations.