Apocalypse for Beginners

by Nicolas Dickner

  Ann Randall, inconspicuously tipsy, stared into space with a cigarette hanging at the corner of her mouth. She greeted us with a thin smile and leaned over the counter to kiss us on the cheeks.

  “Hi, you two! How’re you doing?”

  “Couldn’t be better. Is the TV available?”

  She silently consulted the Dalai Lamas, who responded by casting an indifferent glance at the game of buzkashi (3–0 for the Uzbek team). No objections, as long as we freed up the airwaves for Hockey Night in Canada.

  Hope immediately tuned in to CNN, where the latest pictures from Iraq confirmed our worst predictions: the Americans seemed determined to wipe Baghdad off the face of the planet.

  Norman Schwarzkopf stated at a press conference that the American armed forces were in fact carrying out delicate surgical operations. It was now possible to “neutralize” a high-ranking Iraqi official as he ate breakfast, while his wife continued to munch on her Al-Mecca Flakes at the other end of the table. At worst, there would be a few grains of plaster to be brushed away from the sleeve of her dressing gown. Ballistic lacework.

  Ann Randall served us two glasses of Baghdad Sunrise, a drink invented by Hope: a double shot of instant coffee, Moskovskaya, Jack Daniel’s and a drop of cream. Ideal fuel for keeping the troops alert and lively until closing time. Because that was how long we needed to wait to reclaim possession of the television for an hour or so, the time it took to evict the Dalai Lamas, mop the floors, roll the small change and flip the bar stools up onto the counter. But what wouldn’t we do in exchange for our daily dose of TV—and at any hour, too, since there was always something going on in Baghdad. The American media, shrewdly embedded within the armed forces, broadcasted the fireworks live, night and day.

  Hope dubbed it “Glasnost, Texas-style.”

  We spent the evening in our usual spot. Hope reviewed her notes for Integral Calculus 101, while I slapped together a Spanish composition, and between periods of the hockey game we watched the methodical destruction of the ancient city of the Abbasid caliphs. For our supper, we had packed a supply of astronaut-flavoured ramen, every package stamped with the fateful date.

  Toward midnight there was hardly a soul left in the bar. Everyone had cleared out after the Canadiens’ defeat, which happened to coincide with the end of the Sports Fans’ Special: 2 for 1 on all Labatt products—enough to sway even the most avid athlete. Therefore, hardly a soul left, except for a CNR brakeman marking the end of his shift before heading over to the company hotel to snore the night away. Hope took advantage of the situation to regain control of the television.

  The sun was rising over the Iraqi desert, and CNN was airing its nightly hit parade: a salvo of Tomahawk missiles had (delicately) struck a residential neighbourhood during the night. Captured through a zoom lens, the explosions resembled molten balls of silica. A mad glassblower was running amok in Baghdad, with his blowpipe glowing white-hot.

  The brakeman stopped poking around in the peanut bowl and stared at the screen.

  “Looks like the end of the world,” he sniffed.

  “Or the beginning of a new one,” Hope replied glumly.

  The man gave her a bewildered look before focusing his whole attention back on the peanut bowl. I wondered whether we hadn’t been better off before the satellite antenna went into operation.

  46. PLUTONIUM

  Just as we were about to set out for the Ophir for another night of fragmented TV, I received a call from Norbert, a classmate in my drama course, who informed me that they were “cracking open a few cold ones” at his place in order to fend off the ambient gloom.

  Hope said she was in, so we instantly changed the flight plan. After a stopover at the corner Irving station to pick up a case of beer, we landed at Norbert’s. The door was opened by a glassy-eyed individual with a goatee, an Afro haircut and a black cat perched on his shoulder. He invited us to leave our boots in the hallway and slipped away, reeling.

  It could be roughly estimated that Operation Cold Ones had been in full swing since mid-afternoon. Twenty-odd partiers filled the living room and a dozen others were scattered around the apartment. No sign of Norbert on the radar screen. Clusters of empty bottles surrounded virgin canvases, tubes of paint and bundles of brushes marinating in solvent. R.E.M. was playing at full blast, and off in a corner, clips of Kuwait flashed by on a black-and-white TV that no one was watching.

  An aroma of hash and Hawaiian pizza wafted through the shambles. I wondered if there was any pizza left.

  Hope wanted to hang out in the kitchen, at a reasonable distance from the musical epicentre. On our way there we bumped into plaster casts, two-by-fours and headless mannequins. As we passed the washroom, behind the shower curtain I could make out the silhouette of what I believed was a mannequin topped with a deer’s head. A dozen wet towels covered the floor, and perched on the toilet tank was an impressive collection of mouldy old Marvel comics—dozens of issues of Captain America, Spider-Man and Fantastic Four left there for the literary enjoyment of visitors to the lavatory. The pile, which reached almost to the ceiling, sagged sideways and was just barely prevented from collapsing by the corner of the wall.

  In the kitchen, several blackened butter knives were arranged in a star shape around one of the stove burners. Cases of beer had been stacked on the window ledge, and the window itself was covered with a good half-inch of frost. Sitting on either side of a litter box, two bearded guys were listing all the films since the fifties that featured the destruction of the Statue of Liberty. They seemed to be taking the discussion very seriously.

  Hope, who was famished, raided the fridge. We sat on the counter with our two beers and a jar of Polish-style pickles. The smell of dill and vinegar blended harmoniously with the fragrance of cannabis resin. Equipped with a relatively clean fork, Hope speared a pickle.

  “Who lives here?”

  “Norbert Vong.”

  “Norbert Vong? That’s not very ‘local colour.’ ”

  “He’s from Laos.”

  While I wrestled with the pickles, Hope spied a bottle of nail polish on the edge of the sink and carefully examined the label.

  “Is his name really Norbert?”

  “I think he changed his first name when his family came to Quebec. They immigrated in the late seventies.”

  “Boat people?”

  “Exactly. If I’m not mistaken there were six or seven Laotian families who settled in Rivière-du-Loup.”

  “A strange place to immigrate.”

  “You know, now that you mention it, they all left for Toronto after two years. The Vongs are the only ones who stayed.”

  Hope opened the bottle of nail polish and sniffed at the contents inquisitively. Then she daubed some polish on her thumbnail, which turned an unlikely electric blue flecked with sparkles. If I’d been asked to come up with a name for that colour, I would have leaned toward Plutonium.

  Finding the results to her liking, Hope went on to do the all the nails of her left hand, followed by those of her right hand. While waiting for the solvents to dry, she dreamily chomped on a pickle. The hash fumes were unleashing swarms of neurotransmitters in our brains.

  “Can I steal a cigarette from someone?”

  Three hands instantly proffered three packs. She lit a Craven “A,” took a deep puff, and exhaled. Hope smoking a cigarette—I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  “Scientific curiosity, my dear Watson!”

  She pulled off her socks (thick grey woollen ones that she bought by the dozen at the army surplus), sent them sailing to the far side of the kitchen and began to paint her toenails. I felt as if I were observing an extremely rare natural phenomenon, like a total eclipse of the sun, or the flowering of a bamboo forest, or the eruption of Mount St. Helens.

  “I have to go pee,” she announced as she completed the final brush stroke. “We’ll be right back after the break.”

  She disappeared, waving her fingers in the air. Left alone, I fondly observed her socks on
the floor. It was the first time I ever felt moved by an old pair of woollen socks.

  Near the litter box, one of the bearded guys (the one wearing engineer-style glasses) was explaining that American filmmakers had proven incapable of destroying New York and always ended up attacking symbols—the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, for example—instead of real buildings.

  “ … and that’s because the Americans have never been attacked on their own territory. New York has never been bombed or napalmed. They haven’t experienced destruction on the tangible, architectural level. Any Lebanese man on the street knows more about it than all the specialists in Hollywood put together.”

  As he spoke, he reached over to the case of beer and exchanged an empty bottle for a full one.

  “When a Japanese director decides to raze Tokyo, it’s a whole other kettle of fish. They’re very thorough. You can sense the expertise. Have you seen Akira?”

  His listener shook his head. The guy wearing glasses took a swig of beer.

  “The Japanese, my friend, really know what they’re doing.”

  I was wondering whether this theory made any sense or if, on the contrary, it came under the heading of unadulterated crap, when Hope suddenly re-entered my field of vision. Standing in the kitchen doorway, nails sparkling and eyes aghast, she looked stunned. She was holding an old issue of Spider-Man stained with dampness and obviously drawn from the stack on the toilet tank. It was opened to a page full of ads.

  “Have you seen this?”

  I arched my eyebrows. All I could see was that good old advertisement for Amazing X-Rays, and I thought Hope must be joking around. She shook her head.

  “No, in the corner!”

  My eyes shifted to the left and my heart froze.

  PREPARE YOURSELF!

  THE WORLD WILL END ON JULY 17, 2001

  DON’T WAIT TO DISCOVER

  THE PROPHECIES OF CHARLES SMITH

  TRANSLATED INTO 18 LANGUAGES (INCLUDING TIBETAN)

  SEND MAIL ORDERS TO:

  LEVY PUBLISHING —PO BOX 2816362 NEW YORK

  47. A TINY OASIS OF WARMTH

  I read and reread the box in disbelief, repeating that it was nothing more than a coincidence, but Hope wasn’t buying that. For her, the probability of another crackpot predicting the end of the world for July 17, 2001, was on the order of 1 in 16 billion.

  Having suddenly lost our appetite for partying, we spent a long time searching for our boots in the jumble of soles, laces and odours of the apartment hallway. Hope ended up putting on a pair at random (surreal white Tony Lama boots).

  The city was dead—not a single car in the streets. A warm front had rolled in during the evening and we could hear the snow crackling on the ground. We were (once again) the last living creatures on the continent, surrounded by thousands of abandoned bungalows where the lights went on every night and went off every morning, activated by an army of automatic timers.

  We walked slowly. More tired than she had let on, Hope clung to my waist and leaned her head on my shoulder. I heard her grumble as we passed the municipal stadium.

  “Charles Smith. Talk about a name for a prophet.”

  It was colder inside the Bunker than outside. We climbed under the covers without even undressing.

  Hope fell asleep almost at once, pressed against my back, her breasts resting between my shoulder blades. I sensed an erection taking shape under the layers of bedding but refrained from making the slightest movement. I was afraid to interfere with an infinitely delicate ceremony: Hope’s breath on my neck, her arm across my chest, the tips of her fingers under my belt.

  Our two bodies formed a tiny oasis of warmth in a universe that had been cooling down inexorably for fifteen billion years.

  48. CRUMBS AND FOAM RUBBER

  I woke up in the early afternoon, my head throbbing and my heart tilting at a forty-five-degree angle. The other half of the bed was empty and cold. Hope had decamped to take care—I assumed—of Hope’s business.

  I swallowed three pills of the first analgesic I could find, took a boiling-hot shower and went upstairs. The house was deserted and gave me the impression of a third-rate New Zealand sci-fi movie. The light hurt my eyes. I hated Sundays. I poured myself a large glass of orange juice, snapped up the newspaper (with a flurry of toast crumbs) and went back down to the Bunker.

  I was about to drop down on the couch when a detail caught my attention: one of the cushions had been removed and then put back askew. A bad feeling came over me.

  I tossed the cushion aside, plunged my arm inside the couch and groped around in its entrails for a good while. There could be no mistake: instead of a thick envelope stuffed with money, my hand found nothing but springs, foam rubber and unidentified crumbs.

  Hope had closed her secret account.

  49. THE END IS NIGH

  Hope got off the bus and, without any hesitation, strode across the terminus, her Tony Lamas cutting white streaks through the grey of the morning.

  She stopped at the foreign exchange office to transmogrify a few dollars and used the change to buy a map of Manhattan. Then she went to a pay phone and dialed 411 to get the address of Levy Publishing, which she memorized. According to the map the Lower East Side was an hour’s walk away.

  Hope was in no rush.

  She headed due south on Broadway in the light rain, moving at a relaxed pace, taking everything in with her curious eyes. Each stride brought something new to marvel at. At the corner of Lafayette, she gave a dollar to a vagrant carrying a sign that read The End Is Nigh. In the window of a Dairy Queen, she waved to a double of David Bowie sipping a milkshake cold and long. From time to time she would stop to tap on a wall and was amazed to find it dense and solid against the palm of her hand. So this is what New York looked like, the city so often attacked by Hollywood.

  As she passed a TV repair shop she remembered—oddly enough—the existence of a certain Mickey, several hundred kilometres to the north, and ducked into a telephone booth to bring him up to date, calling collect.

  50. MORE RELIABLE THAN A PACKAGE OF RAMEN

  MICKEY: What the hell are you doing in New York?

  HOPE: I want to meet Charles Smith.

  MICKEY: The prophet? Have you got his address?

  HOPE: No.

  MICKEY: You have a plan?

  HOPE: I’m going see his publisher to start with. After that, I’ll see how things stand.

  MICKEY: It makes no sense.

  HOPE: …

  MICKEY: Okay. Fine. Assuming the publisher agrees to give you the address. Do you really think this Smith, how can I put this …

  HOPE: … will turn out to be a more reliable source of information than a package of ramen?

  MICKEY: You took the words right out of my mouth.

  Momentary silence.

  HOPE: We’ll see.

  51. THE MOST UNPLEASANT PUBLISHER IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE

  Hope stepped into the lobby of one of those glazed-brick office buildings so prevalent on the Lower East Side. She ran her finger over the list of tenants: an import-export company, a photography agency, a number of unidentified businesses and (bingo!) the offices of Levy Publishing, suite 701.

  While the freight elevator, of Great Depression vintage, climbed from floor to floor in painfully slow motion, Hope tried to work out a clever plan of attack. She had not come up with anything by the time the gate opened onto the seventh floor. She would have to ad lib.

  The offices of Levy Publishing sat directly opposite the elevator, behind a glass door that Hope walked through without hesitating.

  There was no one at the reception desk. Through a side door, Hope glimpsed some girls who were busy filling cardboard boxes with piles of books. Seeing that the girls took no notice of her, Hope used the time to survey the reception area. A few chairs, a desk, a corridor and—notably—a large portrait of Charles Smith, a man in a white medieval-style shirt, with piercing eyes and a pair of eyebrows worthy of Zeus.

 
The picture covered one whole section of wall, an indication of Smith’s stature in the Levy Publishing catalogue.

  “May I help you?”

  Hope turned and found herself standing face to face with a generic receptionist: fifty-sevenish, grey pantsuit, hair tied up in a bun, an air of endless weariness and endless impatience.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Smith.”

  “You’re looking for Mr. Smith?” the secretary responded, narrowing her eyes.

  Hope gave her an emphatic nod, thinking it better not to say any more. The secretary picked up the telephone and exchanged a few words with an unspecified individual while looking Hope up and down. Her gaze lingered momentarily over the plutonium-blue nail polish and the cowboy boots, which elicited a nascent smile. Then she hung up.

  “Please come this way.”

  She walked down the corridor ahead of Hope. The place had seen better days: pitted walls, stained carpet, swarms of dust mites. To all appearances, Levy Publishing was not in the habit of hosting formal visits.

  At the far end of the hall, behind the very last door, was a man in shirtsleeves with a yarmulke riding askew on the top of his skull. Seated at a huge oak desk, he was eating a Reuben on rye over a paper plate. A little plaque on the desk identified him as Sammy Levy himself, the founder-owner-director of Levy Publishing and the most unpleasant publisher in the known universe.

  52. A RAPIDLY EXPANDING NICHE

  In a corner of the office, a TV on mute was tuned to CNN: George Bush giving a press conference with the stock prices streaming by at the bottom of the screen. A subtle dialogue going on between the two.

  The room was spare, but the window afforded a breathtaking view of New York. Dozens of skyscrapers filled the field of vision, and at the mouth of the Hudson, to the west, rose the twin towers of the World Trade Center. A commercial space like this in Manhattan must have cost a fortune, but, given the condition it was in, Hope figured that the lease had been signed in the 1970s.