Apocalypse for Beginners

by Nicolas Dickner

  “Call Canada?”

  “Your family. Your friends. Your boyfriend. Anyone you like. In any case, just feel free to use the bar phone. The bill disappears on one of the boss’s six hundred accounts.”

  She arranged the bundles of money as she spoke and then scribbled some numbers on a piece of paper, slipped the (meagre) earnings into an envelope and locked everything into a small safe hidden under the counter. Then she rubbed her hands together in satisfaction and glanced at the clock. Twenty past midnight. Out of a drawer she pulled a large cloth-bound edition of the Torah, which concealed a bag of tender green buds, a pack of rolling papers and a plastic lighter.

  Hope watched her crush a bud and blend it with tobacco on the cover of the Torah, brush a small amount into a piece of the thin paper and roll it with her thumbs. She flicked her tongue back and forth across the edge of the paper, and voilà! Then, like some manic engineer, she examined the joint to ensure it was properly shaped. Hope smiled and took a gulp of tea.

  “Nice work!”

  “Thanks. I’ve had lots of spare time since I moved to Japan.”

  The smell of sulphur and resin floated into the air. Merriam took two ceremonious puffs and offered the joint to Hope, who declined with a little wave.

  “You’re wrong not to accept. It’s an excellent remedy for jet lag. What’s more, this stuff is aeroponic: the plants grow with their roots exposed to the air. A method developed by the Japanese Space Agency to make farming possible in a weightless environment.”

  Hope laughed.

  “Who’d want to farm in a weightless environment?”

  “Good question. I guess it would be someone who had doubts about the future of the planet.”

  71. CARPET BOMBING

  An oceanic wind swept over the roof of the building and the sound of ten highways kilometres away was clearly audible, rumblings transported by the biting cold.

  Leaning against the guardrail, Hope admired the city lights—billions of lumens, radiating and then evaporating in space. Tokyo was no doubt visible from the moon.

  Merriam yawned and pulled out a pack of No. 9. A flash of the lighter and then there was another little red light shining in Tokyo.

  “The Americans tested napalm around here, you know.”

  “Oh?”

  “A few months before Hiroshima. Everything you see around us, forty square kilometres—levelled. In one night. A B-29 every two minutes. Eight tons of bombs per plane. I’ll let you do the arithmetic.”

  The tip of the cigarette pulsated against the darkness like a heartbeat, appearing almost alive.

  “According to the census there were forty thousand people per square kilometre living in this district. Large families crowded into houses made of wood and paper.”

  “Like this house?”

  “Not really, no, but the materials used were similar. Once the fire started it was impossible to put out. Also, napalm has the consistency of jelly. It sticks to clothing, and hair.”

  She took two long drags on her cigarette.

  “When the bombardment ended, at about five in the morning, the U.S. Air Force had killed a hundred thousand people and left a million homeless. In military jargon it’s called carpet bombing. You flatten the landscape down to carpet level.”

  Hope fought back a shiver, either from horror or the cold—she couldn’t quite tell.

  “Hard to believe it happened right here …”

  Merriam took one last puff and rubbed her cigarette out in a muddy ashtray standing near the Shinto shrine.

  “Wait a minute, I think I have a picture.”

  They took off their shoes and went inside the house. Merriam brought out a battery lamp and a gas radiator. The radiator coughed a little as it started up. Merriam rubbed her hands for a moment in the lukewarm breath of the heater. Then she searched through her bookcase and drew out a large illustrated book.

  The History of Tokyo, she translated.

  She riffled the pages and stopped on an aerial photo of the neighbourhood taken the day after the bombing. A cemetery, or a crater—no, more like a mass grave. It was possible to make out the bodies heaped together in the streets and at the intersections. And in the exact centre of the still-smoking scene was the building that now housed the Jaffa, inexplicably upright.

  Merriam unrolled the futon with a kick and flopped down on her back without bothering to look for a pillow or a quilt.

  “The building survived due to a combination of factors. On the north side, the adjacent building had already burned, and there was a lane on the south side that served as a firebreak. Miraculous, all the same.”

  She yawned, groped around until she found her pack of No. 9, stuck a last cigarette between her lips and forgot to light it. A second later she was asleep.

  Standing in the middle of the room, Hope was unable to tear herself away from the sight of those hundreds of bodies, blackened and twisted beyond recognition, piled on top of each other like dead branches. A dress rehearsal for the end of days.

  72. IN SPACE AND TIME

  Hope liked Merriam, and vice versa, even though they basically knew almost nothing about each other. Merriam asked no questions—at any rate, no tactless questions (why Hope never called Canada, for example)—and when asked about her own life, she usually broke her answers off in mid-sentence.

  All the information that Hope had patiently gleaned could fit into a short paragraph.

  Born in Jerusalem in the midfifties, Merriam grew up in a kibbutz on the Negev plateau. Her mother was an agronomist and her father, Japanese. She lived in Tel Aviv, and then Greece, studied archaeology at the Sorbonne for several years before finally settling in Tokyo in 1987 at the beginning of the economic bubble. The yen was strong then, the Nikkei went soaring into a cloudless sky, and there was a labour shortage throughout the archipelago.

  But economic bubble or not, Hope was no closer to unravelling the mystery as to what may have prompted someone with a Ph.D. in archaeology from the Sorbonne to come eke out a living in a seedy Tokyo bar. Perhaps the explanation lay in those unopened fancy envelopes from the Israeli embassy that were gathering dust on the table.

  Merriam was a woman of contradictions. For instance, she could hold forth on carbon dating, the human genome or infrared photography, and then, the very next minute, smoke a joint as long as your arm and listen to Stevie Wonder with the volume cranked up, while staring into space (what she called “taking leave of the planet”). She never left the Jaffa except to do her shopping in the neighbourhood, yet she still knew Tokyo like the back of her hand. And not once had she asked Hope why she insisted on meeting Hayao Kamajii, which did not prevent Merriam from going all-out to support Hope’s Mission.

  The weeks passed with each day looking much like the day before.

  Every morning, Hope and Merriam woke up at dawn (which, in Merriam’s time zone, meant ten o’clock), grabbed a quick breakfast, called directory assistance, asked for the new address of the Mekiddo Kabushiki Gaisha, please, chose a means of transport (bicycle, metro, Tony Lamas) and dashed over to the aforementioned address.

  Unfortunately, the directory assistance databases always lagged a few hours—sometimes days—behind reality. With each sortie, Hope and Merriam found themselves looking at buildings that were abandoned or for sale, vacant spaces, makeshift parking lots, demolition sites or, more rarely, brand-new buildings that had sprung up overnight like mushrooms.

  This business went on repeatedly for two weeks, at which point Merriam decided that it would be smarter to call Mekiddo directly, speak to Kamajii and arrange to meet him.

  But being smart did not make much difference in this pursuit.

  Because, while it was easy to speak to a receptionist at Mekiddo, as soon as you scratched below the surface, the situation became tricky. Every phone call went astray in the convoluted telephone system, ended up at the wrong extension or in a voice mailbox that did not accept any messages, please call back later. Often, the connection would be c
ut off without warning. Conversely, at other times it was Merriam who gave up, exasperated after listening for forty-five minutes to a loop of Ravel’s Bolero. Occasionally someone answered: a mysterious party—male? female? mythical creature?—could be heard breathing at the other end for a minute before abruptly hanging up.

  Hayao Kamajii continued to elude them in space and time.

  73. BETTER EQUIPPED THAN IN 546

  Rivière-du-Loup was already registering 25°C in early June, when I started my summer contract at the cement works.

  All that remained of the sinecure of the year before was a sweet memory. In Hope’s absence, I was sent to slave away in Purgatory (officially known as the bagging plant), where my job was to haul sacks of Portland cement. At the daily rate of two hundred sacks, thirty kilos per sack, I would be lugging six metric tons of cement a day, enough to pour several kilometres of Berlin Wall by the end of August.

  My first day had been hell, and most of the other employees had bolted sometime earlier when I finally gathered up enough energy to stagger out of Warehouse No. 3. My legs were numb and my right shoulder was one massive bruise.

  I glanced at my watch: 7:30 a.m. in Tokyo. What did that city look like at breakfast time? I pictured gutters, puddles, overcast skies—typhoon season was a few days away and they were forecasting several weeks of heavy rain. Thank you, Weather Channel.

  I took a Kleenex out of my pocket and purged my sinuses of three kilos of Portland cement. It was going to be a long summer.

  The Honda sputtered for a while before starting up. Its aging machinery was growing more and more fragile, and it would obviously be a few months at most before the transmission gave out, or the valves, or God knows which obscure oily organ. The best thing would be to take advantage of whatever life the car had left in it.

  I headed off toward the Bunker with all the windows rolled down. My shoulder was aching and that old song about mining was playing on the radio: “Sixteen Tons.” A little too close to home.

  Out on the open road, I started to cry like a baby, due to the combination of the wind and the cement trapped under my eyelids. I had brought along my swimming trunks and decided to take a cold dip in the municipal swimming pool, even if, without Hope, the place would probably seem pretty grim.

  Something was not right—I sensed it even before rounding the corner of the arena and catching sight of the swimming pool. There was something hovering in the air—an abnormal, suspicious smell: mouldy lumber, heating oil, crushed concrete. The area was ringed by roads department fences.

  Sitting on the hood of the Honda, with a lump in my throat, I looked at the excavator reigning over a hill of planks and pipes: what was left of the municipal swimming pool locker rooms. They had demolished the fence, no doubt to clear a path for the trucks, thus partially exposing a deep crater surrounded by pieces of concrete, twisted reinforcement rods and bits of turquoise tile. Floating amid the debris was a lonely bright red lifebuoy.

  I watched the excavator for a long time. It was a gigantic, shining new Mitsubishi with scarcely a few scratches showing on its paint. There was no denying, the barbarians were better equipped than in AD 546.

  74. KILLING TIME

  Hope opened her eyes. A ray of sunlight reached across the floor as far as her hand. She stretched a little, heard the rasp of a lighter on the other side of the futon, followed by a deep inhalation and the distinctive stench of Dubek No. 9. Merriam was smoking her first cigarette of July.

  “You were talking in your sleep,” Hope said.

  Intrigued, Merriam propped herself up on an elbow.

  “Oh, really? What was I saying?”

  “No idea. What language do you dream in?”

  Merriam took a puff, with an air of giving it some serious thought.

  “Good question. I think I still dream in Hebrew.”

  “Even after four years in Japan?”

  “Even after four years in Japan.”

  She rubbed her nose and blinked her right eye.

  “I guess that should mean something …”

  Her sentence was interrupted by a coughing jag. Hope frowned.

  “How many cigarettes do you smoke a day?”

  Merriam shrugged.

  “Dunno. I’m trying to quit.”

  While Merriam carefully took another drag on her cigarette, Hope sat up with her legs crossed and grabbed a little plastic box containing a set of miniature instruments: scissors, three nail clippers in different sizes, a series of files, a pumice stone and a cuticle trimmer. She spread her tools out on the quilt and launched into an intense manicure. Since her nails were already short, she was working on a scale of a fraction of a millimetre, applying microscopic file strokes, refining a curve, meticulously shaping a cuticle.

  Merriam watched her work for a moment.

  “How many times a day do you cut your nails?”

  “Dunno. I’m trying to quit.”

  Merriam doused her cigarette and shut herself in the bathroom, from which various aquatic noises could be heard. She emerged after a couple of minutes with a gloomy look on her face.

  “Attention, camarade: We are entering menstrual no man’s land.”

  “The what?”

  “You’ve never heard this? When several girls live together, their menstrual cycles eventually become synchronized. Due to pheromones, I suppose.”

  She began to rifle through the cupboards in search of something to eat. Hope pouted and went at her left index finger with a curved file.

  “Well, you know, I’ve never had a period. And that certainly isn’t about to change in Tokyo.”

  Merriam stopped searching.

  “You’ve never had a period?”

  “Never.”

  “Childhood disease?”

  “Nah. No disease, no injury, no deformity. I’m a medical mystery.”

  Merriam scratched her head, taken aback by what she had just learned, or by the lack of food in the cupboards—it was hard to say which. Finally, she roused herself.

  “Get up, comrade! We’re going out to eat. My treat!”

  It was nearly noon, and the pocket-sized snack bar was swarming with people. They sat down at the counter and the owner bellowed at them in a blend of Yiddish and Japanese. They ordered the standard smoked meat tasting of kelp, with a dubious pickle on the side, along with a serving of tempura and a large cup of oily tea.

  Merriam opened her pack of cigarettes: only three left. She would soon have to restock. She always smoked more during typhoon season, a meteorological mania acquired upon arriving in Japan and which she was now unable to give up.

  She lit her cigarette, blew a stream of bluish smoke toward the ceiling.

  “Well, what are your plans for the day?”

  “The usual. Find Hayao Kamajii. What about you?”

  “The usual. Kill time.”

  Two plates showed up in front of them. Merriam twisted her cigarette butt into an ashtray and bit into a piece of tempura.

  “I thought of something last night. How would you feel about working at the Jaffa? You have to face facts: it may be months before you find Kamajii.”

  Hope turned the idea over in her mind. Living in Tokyo was expensive and there were several months left before October 12, the date printed on her return ticket. She had already borrowed a fair amount from Merriam, who pushed generosity to the point of not keeping a count, but Hope knew the exact sum she owed, down to the last yen. Working at the Jaffa would allow her to pay off her debt and afford her a certain degree of freedom.

  She promised to think it over.

  75. SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY OF THE DAY

  It was two weeks since the last trace of the municipal swimming pool had been completely erased. Not one chunk of concrete remained. The roads department workers had raked the ground, unrolled a few strips of turf and installed a sign announcing the upcoming construction of a youth centre. All of a sudden, I felt old.

  The demolition of a dilapidated outdoor swimming pool
represented a minor change in the overall scheme of an entire city—even a city the size of Rivière-du-Loup—but to me it nevertheless seemed as if an essential part of reality had just disappeared. Without that crumbling old swimming pool, the universe felt slightly off kilter.

  I felt a growing disinterest in the world above ground. When I was not busy hefting bags of cement, I stayed holed up in the Bunker. I reread the collected works of Isaac Asimov, keeping the telephone within reach—just in case, after months of radio silence, Hope Randall might deign to remember my existence and phone number.

  It had just gotten dark when my mother called down to me from the top of the stairs.

  “Michel? Could you go get me some things at the grocery store?”

  Yawning, I grabbed the list that she held out to me: a pint of 2% milk, a loaf of sliced multigrain bread, margarine—the absurd sort of staples that you never noticed were missing before 9 p.m.

  The Honda had been taken to the garage the day before and I decided to get out the old CCM that was rusting away in the depths of the shed and had not been greased or oiled for a number of summers. I inflated the tires, checked the brakes—and then, off to Steinberg’s.

  The supermarket was quiet and I strolled unhurriedly along the aisles. I paused for a moment at the bin of Mofuku ramen. There was the perpetual sale—3 for 99¢—and the perpetual pink and yellow astronaut. The USSR had fallen, municipal swimming pools were being eradicated, but those infuriating ramenauts were still holding on. True, our civilization was evolving, but not necessarily in the right direction.

  I was leaving the supermarket when I heard sirens.

  There was an orange glow in the sky on the far side of the shopping centre. It was clearly a fire, but I could not figure out what could be burning in that direction, aside from the municipal arena and a narrow vacant lot—in other words, nothing really flammable. I hopped on my bicycle, tied my bags to the handlebars and set out in the direction of the fire.