Apocalypse for Beginners

by Nicolas Dickner

  Paternal restraint in all its splendour.

  I read the message three times, unsure of exactly what my feelings were. I wavered between tears and laughter. How could Ann Randall have dared to die four days before the end of the world? At this level, irony surely had to be renamed.

  I closed the message and went back to the weather forecasts. The map of warm fronts painted all of Ontario in incandescent waves. It didn’t bode well for us.

  I flipped through my datebook. Nothing very urgent planned for the next forty-eight hours. I dropped my sandwich in the wastebasket and left a message on my supervisor’s voice mail (“feeling sick, could be stomach flu, taking the rest of the day off”) and decamped without even shutting down my computer.

  After collecting a few personal items at my apartment—toothbrush, clothes, water bottle—I fled the island aboard my old Toyota.

  88. A SERIOUS DENT IN REALITY

  So, there I was, on yet another never-ending trip to my hometown: five hours of rectilinear highway, several litres of iced tea, and a break for bladder relief at the halfway point. The speakers blared out Moby in a loop—it was the only cassette in the car that was still playable. I counted the road signs, trying not to think too much.

  It was late afternoon when I arrived in Rivière-du-Loup.

  Some thirty cars were parked haphazardly in front of the Ophir. A few old men were conversing by the door, hands in their pockets, cigarettes in their mouths. I had an urge to turn around, but I finally parked the Toyota at the far end of the train station, near the farm co-op, and trudged over to the Ophir, still trying not to think too much. That was the main thing: not to think too much.

  The wake had just begun, but the place was already packed, the air thick with sweat and smoke. They must have jettisoned the chairs, because everyone was standing.

  My heart clenched, or maybe it was my stomach. What had I come here for? To pay my respects to Ann Randall, of course—but I had never been very big on funerals and I could just as well have sent a message from Montreal. Tele-condolences. Anyway, there was not one familiar face among this gloomy crowd. No hands to shake, no one to embrace. All around, regular customers were speaking in hushed voices. A few Dalai Lamas (still sober) huddled together at the counter with grim faces. Ann Randall’s departure had clearly put a serious dent in reality.

  I looked around for the guest of honour and spotted her on a shelf behind the bar, reduced to a few cubic centimetres of fine ash. A shovelful of Pompeii in a granite urn. A photo of Ann in her better days had been placed nearby, along with a pack of cigarillos and a bottle of Rémy Martin Grande Champagne Cognac, obviously purchased at great cost for the occasion. A generous snifter had been filled and set down for the deceased.

  I found these offerings unexpectedly moving, and averted my eyes.

  Robert cut through the crowd to shake my hand, as though we were old friends, which was odd since I was barely seventeen the last time we had seen each other. The prodigal son syndrome. Robert had put on weight, lost some hair. He explained how he had organized everything: the incineration, the obituary, the wake. The Ophir had in a way been Ann’s home. So, had I heard anything from Hope? No. Nothing. Robert shook his head.

  “You don’t just abandon your mother like that, right?”

  I nodded politely, but, frankly, I doubted that life was that simple.

  In the absence of any close relatives, Robert had taken care of the Final Clean-up at the Pet Shop. Otherwise (he said indignantly) the owner would have dumped everything in the garbage. I wouldn’t have blamed him. As I recalled, the place had already gone a long way toward dumpification. Robert admitted that he had not found much worth keeping. He had sent 20 kilos of non-perishable goods to the Saint Vincent de Paul and stuffed almost forty bags into the Chinese Garden’s garbage container. The rest fit into a few boxes, one of which, by the way, was meant for me.

  From under the counter, he pulled out a heavy cardboard Premium Florida Lemons crate. Under the tired flaps I discovered Ann Randall’s famous collection of bibles, smelling of musk and fungus. Robert made a vaguely explanatory gesture.

  “I figured this would interest you …”

  I nodded without saying anything. After exchanging a long handshake with Robert, I left the Ophir loaded down with my box of bibles, which weighed a ton. The box went into the Toyota’s trunk between my toolbox and a spare tire.

  89. THE BURDEN OF PERPETUATION

  The kitchen smelled like home: tomato soup and grilled chicken. The TV was tuned to the news. My mother gave me a casual kiss, as if I’d been living in the bungalow next door (she lived outside of time and space, like all mothers).

  “Have you eaten? I’ll heat up some chicken for you.”

  My father shook my hand, asked me how the drive down had been, offered me a beer. It was strange to see him at home so early in the evening. He had sold the cement works six months before and now belonged to that population of free, unfettered men who ate dinner at a decent hour of the evening.

  The sale had concluded the final chapter of the Bauermann dynasty. The concrete plant and the fleet of trucks had fallen to the enemy two years earlier. My father could have dug his heels in for another ten years, but what good would it have done, since his sons had no intention of taking over the business? The elder son was a psychoanalyst in Toronto, and the younger cultivated his scoliosis hunched in front of a monitor in a cubicle in downtown Montreal. So my father had accepted the offer of PanAmerican Concrete, a multinational that we’d heard him rail against thousands of times. After several proudly independent decades, Bauermann Concrete Inc. had finally been engulfed by the global economy. Another unwritten page in the history of the middle class, etc., etc.

  My father would never admit it, but getting rid of the company had ultimately been something of a liberation. He was like Butch Cassidy: too sensitive to work in concrete.

  We drank our beer as we watched TV without paying much attention. Satellite pictures of a hurricane flashed by on the screen, followed by George W. Bush standing among the rubble of a Dallas suburb. My mother placed a steaming plate in front of me.

  “How’s Karen?”

  I set to work on the chicken while carefully calibrating my answer. “Karen has left,” I finally announced as I speared a potato.

  “Left? Where has she gone?”

  “Nowhere. Somewhere else. She’s left me. We’re not together any more. Could I have the salt, please?”

  A deep sense of relief washed over me. The worst was behind me. The words had been uttered, the heresy confessed.

  Though my father had given up on the continuation of the business, my mother still had expectations for the continuation of the family. My brother being unofficially gay, the burden of perpetuation rested on my shoulders. My mother monitored my love life with a microscope, and each of my breakups affected her more than me. Among all the women I had been with, Karen had seemed the ideal candidate. For the first time, one of my partners fiercely wanted to have babies. Several. Soon. In fact, that was what had led to our breakup: she had grown tired of waiting for me to be ready. She had packed her bags one Thursday morning, stating that she didn’t intend, quote, to procreate at forty-one like a fucking boomer.

  She had taken the futon and the coffee maker.

  When she heard the news, my mother shook her head. I knew what was coming. How many girlfriends had I had over the past ten years? Seven, eight? What was I thinking? I would be thirty soon and it was about time I grew up …

  My father cut short her lecture.

  “Leave him alone. He’ll find someone when he’s ready.”

  My mother sighed before backing off. My father winked at me, but it was plain to see that he too was a little concerned about my future.

  90. KILN

  Up at dawn, as rumpled as an old Cracker Jack wrapper, I ate breakfast with my father. He could not get used to his new role as a free man and persisted in waking up every morning at five. As for my mother
, she always slept until eight. I claimed that I could not wait until then—which was, in a way, absolutely true—and promised to come for a longer visit at Thanksgiving.

  My father walked me to the Toyota, barefoot, holding his coffee. He said nothing in particular to encourage me, but his Paul Newman smile did the job. Robust handshake, slap on the back—and I was off.

  I was about to head toward the highway when I had a stroke of inspiration and veered off toward the industrial park.

  The PanAmerican Concrete logo dominated the entrance to the cement works. A foreign body. I passed the guardhouse (unoccupied) and drove on until I was under the kiln, where the ever-present tires, plastic waste and piles of anthracite were heaped up. I opened the trunk of the Toyota, grabbed the box of bibles and dumped it among the old tires. Ten kilos of additional fuel, courtesy of Ann Randall.

  After a quick stop to fill up on gas and caffeine, I was back on the 20. I put on the Moby cassette with the volume all the way up, but after hearing the first few bars I felt nauseous. I punched the Eject button and pitched the tape out the window.

  I drove back to Montreal in total silence, except for the radio antenna whistling in the wind. Five hours straight, not even the briefest of pit stops. I crossed the Victoria Bridge in the early afternoon. Already, a traffic jam was forming on the west side.

  91. ONLY ABOUT THIRTY HOURS OF ANXIETY LEFT

  I could have stayed away for the rest of the day, but a nebulous feeling nudged me in the direction of the office. Professionalism, curiosity, docility—or simply the fear of being alone with myself in the middle of the day?

  As I walked through the glass doors, it occurred to me that the air conditioning alone justified the sacrifice.

  As soon as I sat down at my computer I checked my email. Nothing interesting. Three Nigerian heirs were offering me a sizable commission on some colossal inheritances. I disintegrated them with my index finger—shazam!—and quickly browsed through the news. New phase of the recession in Japan. Meeting of the Arab League to counter the violence in the Middle East. Organic meat, flavour of the month.

  Then I opened Google and keyed in a search for “Hope + Randall”: the 345,702 results sent me reeling.

  It appeared there were about fifty Hope Randalls on the planet, including a real estate agent, a Triple-A Midget hockey player, a Carmelite renamed Mary Rose of Jerusalem (1842–1903), a post-doctoral researcher in nuclear physics and an orthophonist specialized in glossalia. There were also a certain number of Randall Hopes, in particular an Olympic wrestler, a Jesuit with a degree in Danish literature and a trucker who collected tutus.

  I sifted through the results, in vain. After twenty minutes, I took a different tack. I found the telephone number of the Canadian embassy in Japan and logged on to the nearest atomic clock. In the Tokyo time zone, poetically baptized +0900 UTC, it was nearly two in the morning. Most human beings there (including the Canadian diplomatic corps) were softly snoring on futons as thin as soda crackers.

  A disturbing detail: as Tokyo was located to the west of the International Date Line, the local calendar already indicated July 17, 2001. The countdown had just begun, and there were only about thirty hours of anxiety left to endure.

  Assuming that Tokyo had meanwhile not been wiped off the face of the earth, the embassy offices would open at around 7 p.m. Montreal time. I wrote down the telephone number, taking care not to omit any of the fourteen digits.

  92. MADAME HIKARI

  A typical day at work—nothing worth mentioning. On the way home I stopped at Ngô’s, the local convenience store, where old Ngô himself was sitting behind the counter, laboriously filling in sudoku grids.

  I bought a dozen shrimp rolls—one of Mrs. Ngô’s culinary masterpieces—a ripe-to-perfection mango, three limes and a six-pack of Heineken. As I was paying, I noticed a series of Aloha prepaid telephone cards pinned up behind the cash. The list of rates covered every country on earth, including a few dubious states not even recognized by the UN. The rate for Japan was ten cents a minute.

  “Do these cards work okay?”

  Mr. Ngô replied with a gently enthusiastic nod, and I added a twenty-dollar card to my bill.

  When I got home, I put the rolls in the oven and the beer in the fridge. Then I picked up the telephone and dialed the twelve digits on the card followed by the fourteen digits of the Canadian embassy in Tokyo. I succeeded in getting the numbers right—a good beginning.

  The embassy receptionist had trouble understanding what I was after and shunted me on to hold. Japanese-style music, faint electronic fizz. The Aloha card was doing its job, despite the slight distortions. At ten cents a minute, a degree of tolerance was in order.

  My call was finally transferred to a certain Mrs. Hikari, whose French was passable. I explained my problem: I was trying to get in touch with a Canadian citizen who had been living in Japan for a number of years and whose mother had just died. Could the embassy help me find her?

  Mrs. Hikari listened to me without speaking, promised to do whatever was possible (God knows what that might mean in diplomatic parlance) and took down my contact numbers at home and at work. Before hanging up she offered me her very sincere condolences.

  I ate my shrimp rolls on the rear balcony with my feet up on the guardrail, inhaling long gulps of ice-cold beer. The breeze was heavy with the fragrance of flowers—the neighbour’s balcony was crammed with dozens of flower boxes and pots. A genuine Buddhist sanctuary.

  It was a while since the sun had gone down amid the smog, but an orange glow lingered on the horizon—an enormous blaze consuming the entire western part of Montreal.

  93. AN ORDINARY DAY

  Five hours of sleep, lukewarm shower, glass of juice, and away I went to punch in like a model citizen.

  The scene at the Rosemont Metro station looked like something straight out of the Blitz: hundreds of travellers crowded the platform, some of them sitting on the ground. The ticket attendant explained to me that half of the underground network would be out of service for an indefinite (and, therefore, considerable) length of time. Three separate incidents were to blame: a suicide at the Berri station, a fire in the electrical system at Lucien-L’Allier and a gas alert at Jarry.

  Up to that point, July 17, 2001, had looked like an ordinary day.

  I went back upstairs to take the emergency shuttle, but the situation was hardly better on the street. Two or three hundred people were waiting on the sidewalk. The usual lineup had melted down to an aggressive mass, and each time a bus stopped in front of the station, the crowd rushed the doors as if a humanitarian evacuation was under way. An ambulance was parked on the median next to someone who had been trampled or crushed against the doors, no one really knew.

  I resigned myself to the pedestrian alternative. The walk downtown would take forty-five minutes, but that seemed more reasonable than risking one’s life to take the bus.

  When I arrived at the office, it smelled of strong coffee and panic. A California multinational had just launched a vicious takeover bid on our company, and all the signs suggested that this torpedo would reach us shortly after the financial markets opened. The future: uncertain.

  I was strangely immune to the ambient anxiety. I floated outside my body, a few metres above the scene.

  Midmorning, our department head called a meeting. The buyout was indeed going ahead, but it was essential to stay calm: the buyers had promised that no jobs would be cut. For the time being we would have to crank up our output because the transition required that we finish up a number of projects.

  In other words, we had seventy-two hours to do several weeks of work.

  The situation was crystal clear: they planned to make us sweat before announcing the layoffs. The Romans had already used this sort of method in the galleys. Around the room, my colleagues talked timetables, schedules, achievability, priorities and unpaid overtime. The union representative was on his cellphone, and the department head was slinking toward the exit.

&
nbsp; Still hovering a few metres above myself, I observed the Styrofoam cups in which the coffee was growing cold and thinking that those damned containers would not decompose for another three thousand years. One hell of a lot of timetables.

  94. TAKE HEART!

  The rest of the day continued along the same lines: a power outage, two computer system crashes and a twenty-minute evacuation due to a (false) fire alarm. Emails were going around, spreading rumours of sabotage. Inevitably, the backlog built up and some of us had to be sacrificed for the common good. Single, no children—I had all the prerequisites to qualify for overtime work.

  The usual quitting time had long passed when my telephone rang. A double tone, signalling an outside call. The call display said undisclosed number. I immediately recognized Mrs. Hikari’s voice, proof positive that on the morning of July 18, 2001, Tokyo had not been swallowed up. Take heart!

  But the good news stopped there.

  With unsettling candour, Mrs. Hikari told me that the options for locating a Canadian citizen were quite limited. As a rule, it amounted to consulting the embassy’s database (a two-minute procedure). If this produced no results, they simply gave up.

  Hope was not registered in their database, but, in light of the circumstances, Mrs. Hikari had taken the liberty of giving the Japanese immigration agency a call. There was no sign of Hope there either, which meant that she had no visa and no visitor’s permit.

  To sum up, Mrs. Hikari explained, this left only three possibilities:

  Hope had a tourist visa that she renewed every ninety days by leaving and then re-entering Japan (an option both onerous and costly).

  Hope lived in Japan illegally.

  Hope had simply left Japan.

  Of course, none of these three hypotheses fell within the embassy’s jurisdiction.