Apocalypse for Beginners

by Nicolas Dickner

  Hope and I were getting ready for our final exams, slouched in front of a long commercial for Craftmatic vibrating beds interspersed with bits of B movie, when my mother opened the Bunker door.

  “How would you two like to work at the cement plant this summer?”

  She explained that the job would involve sorting boxes of documents that had been piling up since the sixties. Eight-week contract, a decent wage, air conditioning. If we would take the trouble to dislodge our adolescent butts from the couch long enough to fill out a few forms, the job was ours.

  Hope and I exchanged a quick nod of agreement. My mother tossed me the keys to the Honda, and in no time we were far away.

  The sun beamed down, and Rivière-du-Loup smelled of dust and summer vacation. All over town the cherry trees were in bloom, and a snowfall of petals filled the air before being ground down to a beige slurry by the traffic.

  On the outskirts of the industrial park, Hope suddenly straightened up in her seat to get a good view of the area. She recognized this place. She had come here about ten months earlier.

  She saw herself again, sitting in the tow truck, squeezed between her mother and a giant man smelling of sweat and grease. The Lada, dead from overexertion, followed behind, duly hitched, laden with the vestiges of their previous life: a few articles of clothing, several sacks of rice, a collection of old bibles, cans of beans and tuna in oil, jars of relish and ketchup, and four volumes of Teach Yourself Russian at Home. The entire load pressed down on the poor rear shocks and, from time to time, the tailpipe could be heard scraping the asphalt and flinging out a shower of sparks.

  Final destination: Élisée Ouellet Valvoline Garage—General Repairs—Iron and Metalwork.

  After a heroic 1200-kilometre effort, Comrade Lada ended her days in a muddy yard, amid the remains of hundreds of vehicles. Its carcass was cannibalized for a few months before being reduced to a metal cube. Nothing was as easy to compress as memories.

  “Is it still very far?” Hope asked as she turned forward again.

  I pointed at the silos and minarets of the cement works. A cement mixer drove past in the opposite direction, and the driver hailed us with a double beep of the horn—he’d recognized the family Honda. I waved in reply. We were in friendly territory.

  Mrs. Bilodeau was waiting for us in the office, holding the forms. All we needed to do was to fill in our social insurance numbers, sign at the bottom and keep the pink copy. Between phone calls she talked about the weather and asked us what programs we had enrolled in for the fall term. Her unwavering good mood dipped slightly when Hope asked to be paid in cash. Mrs. Bilodeau answered that normally the accountant never made that kind of exception, but she would see what could be arranged.

  She checked our forms, slipped two blank cards into her big Olivetti, rapped out our addresses and filed them in a Rolodex.

  “Welcome aboard!”

  As we left the office we bumped into my father wearing his white foreman’s helmet. He gave Hope a Paul Newman smile and she responded with a wink. They were fond of each other, those two. My father glanced at his watch and asked if Hope would like to visit the facilities.

  “There’s nothing in the world I’d rather do, Mr. Bauermann.”

  “Ah! Just seventeen and already a shameless liar!”

  He grabbed two old orange hardhats from the back of his 4×4 and cleared away the objects littering the seat: a toolbox, a pair of gloves, a half-empty cup of coffee and a stack of bills held together with a clip—all of it covered with a fine layer of cement.

  We sped away, despite the 10 km/h speed-limit signs, and raced toward the first station of the cross.

  34. ANYTHING THAT BURNS

  As we made our way up the cement route, my father trotted out his little lecture, which I barely listened to, having heard it a hundred times before: The invention of cement went back to the Roman Empire, and it was thanks to the material’s exceptional solidity that the structures built back then, like the Baths of Caracalla and the Pantheon in Rome, were still standing. (He would usually add that today half of global cement production took place in the People’s Republic of China—a fact that spoke for itself.)

  We made a quick stop at the kiln, where my father explained how the raw mix was gradually heated to 1500°C, until it melted and was transformed into clinker, something roughly equivalent to the volcanic rock lining the bottom of barbecues. The clinker was then crushed, the end product being the sacrosanct Portland cement, bedrock of our civilization and pride of the Bauermanns.

  I must have dozed off for a few minutes, because all at once the two cohorts were talking granulometry, calcium sulphate (CaSO4) and additives. My father mentioned that sugar was occasionally added to the cement as a way to slow down the setting process, which set Hope off discussing covalent bonds and crystallization. My father was in seventh heaven.

  While they chatted about molecular chemistry, a truck passed us, gracefully swung around, and with a belch of diesel exhaust dumped three tons of used tires near the fuel conveyor belt. The tires tumbled over each other like carcasses and, as they bounced, spewed out rainwater and mosquito larvae. Hope looked on wide-eyed.

  “You heat the kiln with tires?”

  “Tires as well as all manner of automotive detritus—vinyl, plastic, rubber. The plant has an agreement with Élisée Ouellet. We also use residues of solvent, old grease, leftover cuttings of siding. Basically, anything that burns.”

  We continued on toward the mill and the packing facilities. Hope, suddenly gone quiet, craned her neck to take one more look at the mountain of combustibles at the base of the kiln. The scraps of a civilization that was devouring itself.

  35. I AM SHIVA

  Archive duty, Day 1.

  Mrs. Bilodeau showed us the place where we would be working, poetically baptized the Filing Cabinet Room. It was a musty, windowless office crammed to the ceiling with about a hundred warped cardboard boxes.

  Our mission for the next eight weeks was to sort the contents of the boxes, consisting for the most part of old tax reports, accounting paperwork, press clippings and user’s guides for machines now lying ten metres below the surface of the municipal landfill. Some of the documents would be refiled, and some would end up in limbo (i.e., other boxes that other adolescents would open at some improbable point decades in the future). The rest—anything dated before 1981—was to be sent back to the primal void.

  Mrs. Bilodeau introduced us to the device that was supposed to dispose of all this paper: an ancient shredder that, despite weighing 50 kilos, was anything but industrial.

  “The machine can get quite moody. It can handle about twelve pages at a time, so, above all, don’t overload it. If the blades jam, the whole thing has to be taken apart.”

  I examined the apparatus with a sense of disquiet. Clearly, the odds were that we would spend the better part of our contract managing the appetite of this papyrovore. It would have been much quicker to send our paper trash directly to the kiln’s furnace, along with the used tires and the scraps. But I kept this idea to myself. After all, we weren’t being paid to sabotage our own source of income.

  After a few final instructions—in particular, to watch our fingers—Mrs. Bilodeau let us take over. Hope immediately set the Machine in motion. She picked up a folder titled “Taxes 1968—Annexes” and fed it into the rollers. At the other end, the fiscal year 1968 emerged as curly spaghetti. Hope was exultant.

  “I am Shiva, the destroyer of worlds!”

  Hope never was at a loss for the appropriate turn of phrase.

  36. IN THE BATHS OF ROME

  For the rest of the summer, Hope and I filed papers from nine to five. The same monotonous routine was repeated every day: unpack boxes, feed shredder, verify dates, make piles, feed shredder, drink coffee, pack more boxes, feed shredder. The air conditioning was too strong and the coffee too weak, but the pay was good.

  Actually, the main drawback of the job was the dust. Everything in the plant gene
rated airborne particles: the crushers, the mills, the conveyors, the chimneys and, especially, the to-and-fro of heavy machinery. The roads were spread with used oil, but a good day of rain was the only thing that could alleviate the problem. It was our bad luck that a dry wind had prevailed over the whole region since June.

  We waged a losing battle. Despite the sealed windows and an impressive array of air filters, several kilos of dust seeped into the administrative building every day. At night, the janitor would vacuum the place from top to bottom, but the next morning the slightest surface was once again covered with a whitish film. As resistance was futile, a ban was placed on objects that were impossible to dust off, such as knick-knacks and venetian blinds. There were, however, three exceptions: Mrs. Bilodeau’s fern (in constant danger of asphyxiation), computer and calculator keyboards (protected with plastic covers) and human beings (impossible to protect).

  As members of the third group, we went home every evening carrying a fine grey powder in our eyebrows, sinuses, pockets, even our underwear. After work, we would go for a dip in the municipal outdoor swimming pool, the only way for us to feel moderately clean again.

  We experienced intense moments of joy as the buildings of the industrial park receded in the rear-view mirror. The car radio pumped out a mixed bag of R.E.M., Samantha Fox and the Fine Young Cannibals. In the backyards of the bungalows people lit their hibachis, and hundreds of little plumes of smoke drifted skyward, miniature immolations fuelled by kerosene and pig fat.

  The municipal swimming pool was an antiquated, crackled thing built after the war (no one was sure which one), and every spring it faced the threat of permanent closure. The locker rooms reeked of chlorine and damp wood, the showers worked spasmodically, there were gaps in the wall tiles, and the only diving board—a bona fide safety hazard—had been taken down and banished to the couch grass behind a fence.

  Swimming in this dilapidated structure afforded me a truly archaeological sort of pleasure. We were the last bathers in the thermae of Rome, just months before the fall of the empire. The barbarians were approaching and we were basking in the sun.

  Under her layer of cement, Hope grew more and more tanned, more and more resplendent. Within the entire geometry of the vast universe, there was nothing more graceful than the slender outline of her figure stretched out on a beach towel, the curve of her back or the imprint of her wet foot on the cement. To admire her for a few minutes was all it took for me to descend into profound erotic bliss. But the party in question was oblivious, blinded as she was by the sun and by the end of the world looming and rumbling at the gates of the empire.

  37. THE MOST NATURAL EVENT ON EARTH

  Right in the middle of the construction holidays in July, the summer was hijacked by a heat wave. Day after day on the AM radio, Environment Canada repeated the same remorseless information: clear skies, high 32°C, 101.3 kPa pressure on the rise, no wind. The Amazon rainforest.

  Sweltering days were followed by stifling nights, and Hope began to suffer from insomnia. There was nothing terribly surprising about this—everyone was having trouble sleeping—but Hope seemed to be more affected than most. She ran on automatic pilot during the day, occasionally conking out or feeding the wrong documents into the shredder. Then, when the sun went down, she grew restless, and by midnight she was completely wired.

  For nearly six days she had not slept more than one hour a night, and that hour was fraught with nightmares. There was nothing new on the subconscious front: as always, Hope would see, over and over, processions of exotic animals invading the Pet Shop. Wildebeests in the bathroom, boas in the sink. Zebras, gazelles, zebus.

  But, with or without the nightmares, it was impossible to get any sleep at the Pet Shop. Her mother came home from work in the late afternoon, drank and smoked, and then sank like a stone into a deep sleep soaked in gin and nicotine and punctuated with her Mesopotamian patter. Until 10 p.m. the people using the laundromat could be heard chatting as they sat on the sidewalk, and all night there was the roar of the Chinese restaurant’s air conditioning.

  The circumstances were in fact so conducive to sleepless nights that Hope just stopped trying. She would steal away from the Pet Shop, wander around for hours or hang out in the bleachers of the municipal stadium. More often than not she would just show up at the Bunker. She would quietly slip in through the back door, which I always left unlocked, and sometimes, when I woke up to take a leak at around 3 a.m., I would find her sitting cross-legged on the couch, blue and spectral in the glow of the cathode screen, totally engrossed by an infomercial.

  I would sit down beside her without speaking and watch people rowing in the air, cutting tin cans with a kitchen knife or defrosting steaks, as if this were the most natural event on earth.

  38. SPICES AND COLOURING

  It was late evening when Hope showed up at the Bunker. She was wearing a grimy T-shirt and smelled of grass and unleaded gasoline. Because, as if the thirty-five hours a week at the cement plant and the morning paper route were not enough, in her spare time Hope mowed the neighbours’ lawns in the evenings, after we came back from the swimming pool. If not for the noise, she would have mowed lawns all night. Sleep no longer had any place in Hope Randall’s life.

  She flopped down across the couch, grabbed the bag of nachos and glanced at the movie I was watching—an old VHS tape of my brother’s. The movie featured four survivors aboard a helicopter. Hunkered down on the roof of a shopping mall, they watched as the living dead milled around the parking lot before slowly converging on the doors.

  The girl seemed horrified:

  “What are they doing? Why do they come here?”

  Her companion shrugged.

  “Some kind of instinct … Memory of what they used to do. This is an important place in their lives …”

  Two militiamen inspected the roof, armed with M-42s and rifles fitted with telescopic sights—apparently, zombie films were secretly funded by the NRA. Leaning over the skylights, the militiamen scrutinized the interior of the shopping mall. The living dead were rambling past the shuttered stores, among the artificial plants and vending machines.

  Hope took off her sneakers, wriggled her toes a little and went to work on the bag of nachos.

  “So, what’s new?” I asked without taking my eyes off the screen.

  “Twenty dollars.”

  She fished out a wad of oily bills from her back pocket, lifted up one end of a cushion and, as I looked on dumbfounded, slipped her hand into the space under the armrest of the couch, extracting a large brown envelope stuffed with banknotes.

  “You keep money hidden inside our couch?!”

  “An excellent hiding place, don’t you think?”

  The envelope was two inches thick. It held Hope’s entire savings, representing a year of delivering papers, shovelling snow, pushing lawnmowers and shredding documents at the cement plant. Why hadn’t she opened a bank account? No answer. She resealed the envelope and stashed it away again in the couch’s entrails.

  On the screen, the zombies dragged their feet like sleepwalkers. Growls and blank stares—directing the extras must have been fairly straightforward.

  So here was the surprise of the day: Hope, with all her passion for science, just loved zombie movies. The Randall in her, no doubt.

  “You know what? I always try to spot familiar faces.”

  “Sounds like fun. Look, there’s our neighbour, Mrs. Sicotte.”

  “And that’s Mr. Bérubé, behind the artificial palm tree.”

  “Nice one!”

  “Hey! There’s one who’s barefoot!”

  Hope was right. At the very edge of the screen, a large living-dead man in a striped shirt was walking around with no shoes or socks. A mere detail, but not for Hope. She was obsessed with shoeless characters.

  “What happened to his shoes?”

  “No idea.”

  She moved her toes around in bewilderment. Then she smoothed out the bag of nachos and, grimacing, polis
hed off the pinch of spices and food colouring left at the bottom.

  “It reminds me of pictures of Hiroshima after the bombardment. There were barefoot corpses piled up in the streets. As though they’d lost their shoes in the explosion. Weird, eh?”

  “They may have been wearing sandals.”

  “Good point.”

  39. MARCUS WAS HERE

  The sky was saturated with northern lights, a vast turquoise illumination throbbing from the zenith to the horizon in every direction. With a magnetic storm of this magnitude, it would be a miracle if every Hydro-Québec transformer didn’t blow before dawn.

  The municipal stadium was deserted—not a single living dead to be seen. Yet the baseball field was lit up by a dozen sodium floodlights that probably drained as many megawatt-hours as Equatorial Guinea.

  A brand-new sign had been nailed up near the ticket booth:

  SUMMER HOURS

  NO AXESS

  AFTER 11 P.M.

  We went in without bothering about the sign or the hour.

  From a plastic bag that she had brought along Hope pulled out a Mason jar half-filled with a clear liquid.

  “Vodka,” she explained.

  She regularly drew off some of the contents of her mother’s bottles, which she then cut with water (no holds were barred when it came to reducing maternal blood alcohol levels). But on that night, instead of pouring the vodka down the toilet, Hope had decided to hold a tasting session.

  “Purely out of scientific curiosity. I’d like to know what goes on inside Ann Randall’s skull.”

  She unscrewed the lid and took a swig with her nose scrunched up. All for a good cause. She handed me the jar, which I raised to the health of Marie Curie before helping myself to a large gulp—grmmppphlltz!!

  The night’s dew had soaked the bleachers, so we opted for the greasy bench in the dugout. We took turns drinking from the jar at a leisurely pace while we read the graffiti carved into the plywood: “Marcus was here,” “Die Scum” and “Go hang yourself.”