Apocalypse for Beginners

by Nicolas Dickner

  “Has he been gone for very long?”

  “Nine months. Eight, maybe. I can give you his new business card, if you want.”

  He swung his chair around, fished about in the mass of papers pinned to the cubicle wall and extracted a rectangular piece of pasteboard.

  Hope carefully examined Kamajii’s card—English on one side, Japanese on the other. She took a deep breath to ward off her nausea. All around, the cubicles and the furniture seemed to vibrate. Hope was in a video game, standing in front of the Gates of Heaven, and she was about to be teleported ten thousand floors away.

  59. SUPERCHARGED

  Business card in hand, Hope charged through the glass doors on the ground floor and spewed an ambiguous blend of bile and coffee against the turquoise tiles right at the foot of the bearded lion.

  She spat several times, wiped her mouth with an old handkerchief, and leaned against the wall, gasping for breath and sweating despite the freezing rain. She wanted to be back home.

  Hope pocketed the business card and then, supercharged on coffee, shot away like a bullet and marched for several minutes in a straight line. She eventually bumped against the A-frame signboard of a travel agency announcing unbeatable prices for last-minute tickets. Hope walked in with no second thoughts. The next scene unfolded as if in a dream, half in Mandarin, half in English. As it happened, the agency actually was selling a ticket at half price—an eleventh-hour cancellation, a deal not to be missed, departure at 3:23 p.m. Hope pulled the envelope out of her bag and slapped a wad of bills down on the counter.

  Five minutes later she hopped into a cab and zoomed off to the airport.

  60. YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR

  I had just eaten when the telephone rang in the Bunker. I dove over the couch, grabbed the handset and accepted the charges. Hope was in the international departures area of the Seattle airport. Her flight was leaving in fifteen minutes.

  “Which flight?”

  “US Airways 1212 to Tokyo.”

  I rubbed my eyes, trying to digest this new information. Hope’s voice moved closer to the telephone then away from it and was in danger of disappearing at any moment. The soundtrack behind her included a fuzzy voice enumerating flight and gate numbers. I pictured flight information boards clicking out all the destinations in the world.

  Hope talked about her Mission, her meeting with John F. Kennedy and the enigmatic Mekiddo corporation. But I wasn’t really paying attention, being too busy sizing up the magnitude of the situation. Alone at the opposite end of the continent, noticeably under the influence of caffeine, Hope was preparing to take off for Tokyo.

  “What are you going to do there, exactly?”

  She hesitated for a second.

  “Don’t know yet. I’ll see once I get there.”

  “You’ll see once you’re there?!”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve gotta run now. They just made the final boarding call.”

  Standing by myself in the dim light of the Bunker, I pondered that uncharacteristic hesitation and the vagueness of her answer. I couldn’t imagine Hope letting herself get swept along by events. It just wasn’t like her—there was much more Hope than Randall in her.

  She must have had a plan up her sleeve. A secret plan embedded in her mind at an impossible angle, designed to travel express with no stops along the way.

  A plan with enough room for just one person.

  61. MAY I BORROW YOUR GAS MASK?

  Hope opened her eyes just in time to see the final seconds of a short travel film entitled Between Tradition and Modernism. Her ears were buzzing. In her lap was the emergency procedures brochure showing passengers fleeing from fire, asphyxiation, drowning—please remain calm.

  The pilot announced the final descent in picturesque English. It was 3:32 p.m. local time, practically the same time Hope had left Seattle. But this was 3:32 tomorrow. By virtue of an amusing temporal sleight of hand somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, passengers and crew had leapfrogged over twenty-four hours.

  Hope released the pressure in her eardrums and reset her watch, fascinated by the idea that an entire day had literally vanished into thin air.

  The 747 made a faultless approach over Narita airport and softly touched down. As the plane slowly taxied toward the gate, Hope scanned the tarmac through the porthole: dozens of square kilometres of concrete, tanks of kerosene, beat-up baggage carts. Here and there, members of the ground crew walked around, dressed in high-tech overalls, ears covered with huge shells, eyes protected by dark glasses. They looked like people working in a toxic environment.

  Around the terminal, Hope counted about forty 747s, each of them bearing the colours of a different airline: Saudi Arabian Airlines, Aeroflot, Lufthansa, Aerolíneas Argentinas, Qantas, TAM, Air China, American Airlines, Delta, Air India.

  After she got off the plane, Hope went along the corridor that led to the immigration counters. There was an endless, tightly packed line of travellers, coiled like the small intestine of some fantastic beast. Hope heard people speaking English, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese. Two men with New Zealand accents were discussing the range of a 747. A young woman was reading yesterday’s República. Some kids were squabbling in Mandarin. Babel, upside down.

  In his glass cage, an immigration officer inspected Hope’s passport without making the slightest comment and stamped it with a ninety-day tourist visa. Wham! Welcome to the land of ramen.

  She walked straight past the baggage carousels and into the arrivals area.

  First stop, the foreign exchange office, where she bought ¥29,092 (before the three per cent commission). The figure seemed astronomical, but Hope kept in mind that this stack of bills was worth just US$200. She examined a ¥5,000 note, holding it up against the light. It was anybody’s guess how much range such a sum could provide in a city like Tokyo. A week? Two days? Ten minutes?

  She slipped the money into her back pocket, twisted the transaction receipt and lobbed it at the nearest trash-can but missed. When she bent down to collect the piece of paper, she almost knocked her head against a nail-clipper vending machine.

  Japan promised to be strange.

  Hope mentally converted the prices displayed on the vending machine. She was stunned by the results. Who could afford to clip their nails in this country?

  She turned away from the machine and surveyed the arrivals area. Every so often, the public address system transmitted messages in Japanese. It was the first time Hope found herself in a place where she could not understand a single word. She needed to get her hands on a phrase book, one of those vacuous lexicons listing all the commonplaces of commercial tourism. Where can I find a hotel? How much is this kimono / vase / knife? I am looking for the train station / post office / washroom. Thank you, that is very kind of you. Goodbye.

  Hope stepped into a newsstand and, with a great deal of gesturing and a few snippets of English, managed to get her point across to the cashier, who suggested Rough Planet Tokyo. The guidebook included a section of ready-made phrases, for example: “Where is the nearest bunker?” (Sumimasen, kono atari ni chika sherutaa wa ari masu ka?) or “May I borrow your gas mask / anti-radiation suit?” (Gasumasuku / houshanou bougyo suutsu o kari te mo ii desu ka?)

  Japan promised to be very strange indeed.

  62. THE GREAT PRIMAL SOUP

  Sitting in the subway car, Hope scrutinized Hayao Kamajii’s business card for the umpteenth time. She opened her Rough Planet guide and studied the map of downtown Tokyo, in the middle of which she had marked the (theoretical) location of the Mekiddo offices with a red X. It had taken her nearly a half-hour to decipher the address printed on the business card. Not that she lacked a sense of direction—the guidebook devoted an entire chapter to the Japanese address system, which was apt to drive even an astrophysicist crazy.

  The subway gradually filled up as it approached the city centre. Hope noticed that a number of the passengers wore surgical masks. What did they know that she didn’t? She fli
pped through her guidebook: “Do you know where some antibiotics / morphine can be found?” (Moruhine / kousei busshitsu ha doko de te ni hairu ka shitte masu ka?)

  She began to chew on her fingernails and found they had a funny taste.

  The last few days had zipped by so quickly that Hope had denied the existence of her own body. She took a moment to inspect her hands, something she had not done since leaving New York. The electric blue varnish was peeling and the nail of her right index finger was cracked, not to mention all the grunge that had built up day after day. Underneath, millions of bacteria, spores and germs were napping, and with a good microscope it would have been possible to reconstitute her itinerary from Norbert Vong’s smoky kitchen to the Narita Airport, with all the stops and stages in between: Sammy Levy’s office, the Greyhound bus ride, various vending machines spread throughout the northern United States, the noodle shop in Seattle’s Chinatown and the unending flight on the US Airways 747.

  For a second, Hope imagined that the chewed-off bits of her nails had been sent to a virgin, lifeless planet, like the Earth at the time of the great primal soup. Perhaps they would contaminate that nourishing environment and engender new life forms there. First to appear would be the one-celled organisms, then jellyfish, then teeming vertebrate fish, swimming and crawling, emerging from the oceans, developing technologies and languages and religions and cities and, ultimately, civilizations that would war against each other and build spiral towers and live in fear of the end of the world. A whole world born out of a few grungy bits of fingernail.

  Hope was suddenly sorry she hadn’t invested in a nail clipper.

  63. CUL-DE-SAC

  Hope changed lines three times and resurfaced on Akko Boulevard. The streets were packed, yet the area did not look like a commercial district: no skyscrapers, no hordes of salarymen or messengers, but lots of restaurants, boutiques, laundries, bookstores. Certainly not the kind of neighbourhood Hope would have associated with the headquarters of a multinational corporation.

  The display window of an electronics store attracted her attention. Behind the glass, a dozen screens rebroad-casted a dozen channels: ten times ten derricks aflame in the Kuwaiti desert.

  She took her bearings and set out in the direction indicated by the address numbers. After ten minutes of deduction and triangulation, she halted at the spot where, indisputably, the Mekiddo offices should have stood. But instead of the lion with the bearded human head there was some sort of swimming pool or Turkish bath. She backtracked and checked the street signs three times. The address still seemed to jibe with her calculations. Had she made a mistake?

  She pushed open the glass door. The lobby was suffused with the odour of chlorine and disinfectant. A young man seated at the cash was completely engrossed in a novel. He spoke a little English, and Hope asked him if she could go in to see the pool. He made an ambiguous gesture that she took for a yes.

  Alone in the women’s locker room, Hope carefully examined the faucets, the counters, the tiles. Everything was brand new and sparkling.

  Hope removed her boots and followed the corridor leading to the pool. What she found there was far from exotic, but given the total absence of bathers, the atmosphere was vaguely unsettling. Perched on his tall chair, the lifeguard was snoozing. Behind him, the alignment of the buoys on the wall was so perfect as to appear surreal.

  Whatever this place was, it was obviously not the Mekiddo mother ship.

  When she returned to the lobby, Hope showed the business card to the cashier. Had she erred in her calculations? The young man shook his head: This was the right spot, but the Mekiddo offices had moved three months ago.

  Where?

  The young man, who seemed to find the question very amusing, plunged into his book again without answering.

  Back on the sidewalk, Hope was somewhat shaken. This investigation was shaping up to be more complicated than what she had expected. She looked at her watch, opened her Rough Planet to the chapter on accommodations, and found a youth hostel a two-minute walk away, at the end of a cul-de-sac.

  It was a narrow, quiet street, evidently inhabited by working people, since Hope did not cross paths with anyone except a Jordanian—or possibly Syrian—cleaning lady. In other words, she said to herself, it was a good place to set up a headquarters. But instead of a youth hostel, what she found was a vacant lot closed off from the street by a fence.

  She verified the surrounding addresses several times. She had not made any navigational errors—the hostel had disappeared. Did anything ever stay put in this city?

  Hope let out an extended yawn. A blend of sleepiness and nausea began to overtake her. She spotted a bar on the ground floor of a crumbling building stuck between a Buddhist temple and a fruit store. A neon light sputtered around a very un-Japanese-looking name: Jaffa’s.

  The building appeared to be on the brink of collapse, but the storefront looked inviting. Hope stepped inside.

  The interior was bathed in a comforting half-light. “Sir Duke” was playing softly and two students were sipping beers in a booth, surrounded by books. A girl stood behind the counter. Mid-thirties, Mao-collar shirt, dreadlocks tied up in a bun, cigarette suspended from the corner of her mouth. She was drying the glasses with an air of nonchalant virility probably picked up from a John Wayne movie.

  Hope noticed a pay phone on the wall near the toilets. She tottered up to it and grabbed on to it as if it were a lifebuoy. She opened her Rough Planet, dropped a few coins in the slot and dialed the youth hostel number. A peculiar dial tone gave way to a recorded message in Japanese—a long, unfathomable message. She hung up, and the telephone regurgitated the yen.

  Hope rubbed her eyes, glanced unenthusiastically at the list of youth hostels in the neighbourhood. Her mind began to blur. She brought her left hand up to her lips and absentmindedly chewed on the nail of her forefinger. She frowned and spat: her fingernail tasted of polish. She eyed the girl at the bar. Maybe she had some nail clippers.

  She dropped all her change into the pay phone and punched in the Bunker’s number. A few seconds went by. An operator eventually took the call and launched into a non-stop explanation in high-speed Japanese. Something was obviously amiss. The number may have been incomplete, or she had not put in enough yen or, then again, maybe the tectonic plate of North America had sunk into the magma.

  She looked at the Rough Planet table of contents, found the “How to dial a telephone number” section, sighing. She would have to learn everything over again from scratch.

  A huge weight bore down on her shoulders. She was done in, no longer willing to struggle against matter, let alone a Japanese telephone operator. She hung up. Yawned. Leaned against the wall. She gently let herself slide down and dropped onto her heels with her eyes shut. “Just a quick nap,” she muttered. “A quick tiny little nap.”

  64. 1945

  Hope opened her eyes in a panic. She was lying on a futon under a heavy quilt. Where was she?

  She propped herself up on one elbow and looked around: tatami, sliding rice paper doors, cabinets camouflaged in the walls—a veritable museum of traditional Japanese architecture. There was a bathroom at one end and a kitchenette at the other, with a fireplace unobtrusively heating the apartment.

  Who would have thought that houses like this still existed in Japan? It looked like a movie set, but one where the realistic effect had been pushed to the limit by an obsessive designer. The wood showed subtle signs of wear in the places touched time and again by a passing hand. The edges of the tatami were threadbare. A complex smell of wax, starch and soap pervaded the room.

  So it definitely wasn’t a movie set. Someone lived here.

  Next to the futon, an overturned wooden crate served as a night table. On it lay a flashlight, an ashtray holding three dubious cigarette butts (Dubek No. 9) and a bilingual (Arabic–English) edition of A Thousand and One Nights. On the floor, a few dozen books stacked against a wall included French, English, Japanese and Hebrew titles. Hope o
pened an edition of the Talmud and ran a perplexed finger over the austere blocks of Hebrew lettering. Just who was the person who lived here?

  She found her clothes and bag neatly folded at the foot of the bed. While she dressed, she examined the room with growing disbelief. No electrical appliances of any sort—not even a switch or light bulb. Just the fireplace quietly burning. On the wall hung a yellowed calendar opened to August 1945.

  Hope felt dizzy: What if she had actually been thrust back in time? She nervously shuffled through the bills and magazines scattered on a small desk, and sighed with relief when she finally came upon an edition of Ha’aretz dated March 12, 1991.

  She explored the house on tiptoe. It was hardly any bigger than the Randall Pet Shop. But it was oh, so much more tasteful! She marvelled at the washroom, especially the sunken blue ceramic bath. Perched on the tiny toilet was a box of sanitary napkins. Hope registered the clue: the occupant was a woman.

  When she looked in the mirror, Hope discovered a wreck with dark rings around the eyes and cracked lips. She splashed water on her face and washed her hands. Her fingernails brought a scowl of disgust to her face. She opened the taps of the bathtub and, from a basket serving as medicine cabinet, pulled out a nail clipper and a bottle of nail polish remover. While the hot water was running, she cleaned, cut and filed her fingernails with painstaking precision. The clippings showered down on the floor tiles amid the gentle fragrance of keratin and steam.

  After a while, Hope was enveloped in a sweet emptiness. She tested the temperature of the water, took off her clothes and slid into the tub. A faint smile lit up her face. She took a deep breath and let herself sink below the surface.

  65. AN IMPOSSIBLE ANGLE