NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  There in the now, Tanya rolled onto her back and crossed her ankles.

  ‘Remember how I pretended I was a desperate actress who thought she was auditioning for a commercial, and you were the sneaky porn guy holding auditions?’ Now she was using her seductive voice, and it was creeping me out. ‘I did that for you, Paul, even though I thought it was borderline fucked-up. So do this for me now.’

  And so I tried.

  I could barely get an erection, only managing after a few minutes of near-frantic pumping, courtesy of Tanya’s white-knuckled right hand. She got back onto all fours. The odd couple again: a beige fleck of shit in the crinkles of her asshole; a rawness to the lips of her vagina.

  She came after five minutes or so, a pinched half-orgasm that wasn’t going to do the trick, wasn’t even going to raise her hopes.

  ‘Don’t stop.’

  I didn’t. There was no way I was going to come myself, which was lucky. I kept at it for as long as I could stand, maybe forty minutes or so, until my knees burned and my erection diminished, first transforming into a half-filled water balloon, then into nothing much at all. Eventually, I flopped out and lay beside her, rubbing my knees. She stared at the ceiling while I stared at her profile. At the three day mark, Tanya actually looked better than she had after two days, like her old self but in slightly sharper focus.

  I blinked back tears. We were going to grow old together, either in a couple of decades or a couple of weeks and maybe there wasn’t as much difference between those two timelines as I’d have thought forty-eight hours earlier. And if Tanya only had four weeks left, the same lessons would need to be learned, the same pride swallowed, as if we had incontinence and dementia to look forward to.

  But we probably didn’t.

  As the blood flowed back into my calves, Tanya’s rib cage rose and fell.

  ‘The transmission ban—’

  ‘It won’t change anything.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  She turned her head my way.

  ‘You don’t know that, either.”

  ‘Well, and you don’t know that.’

  ‘And so on.’

  Tanya moved toward me and nestled her face under my chin. Horribly enough, I felt my penis begin to stir again. The incipient erection felt stupid and slug-like against my thigh. I shifted slightly, hoping to conceal it from her.

  ‘I think it’s time we started planning for what comes next.’

  ‘Why don’t we just go to sleep?’

  ‘I’m not going to sleep, Paul.’

  I heard myself begin to whine.

  ‘You don’t know that. That’s just something out of a movie. Doomed people in movies always have this sad foreknowledge of what’s coming down the pike. But that’s just Hollywood bullshit melodrama. You don’t know you’re not going to sleep.’

  She struggled to keep her temper as she composed a response to my idiot optimism.

  ‘We have to start planning for what’s going to happen next. Even if you’re right and it doesn’t last, we still have to plan. If I’m wrong, we’ll laugh about it in a couple of days.’

  I swallowed, twin feelings tugging at my trachea. A passionate desire to save the woman I loved. And something else—a bastard thought I couldn’t control: If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. An idea as inevitable as math.

  Everybody dies eventually. So if eight billion of us die in the next four weeks is that significant? All this sleeplessness plague could do was align those billions of inevitable deaths into a slightly narrower window of time—a matter of efficiency, not tragedy. If, during any one of a million previous nights, a giant asteroid had smashed the earth into gravel while we all slept, would it have mattered? With no one left to mourn the wreckage, one could even argue that it wouldn’t be a bad way to end things at all: egalitarian if nothing else. I even thought of a scene in Star Wars where Princess Leia receives news that her home world has been destroyed by Darth Vader’s Death Star. She throws a hairy fit, but two scenes later, she’s back to flirting with Han Solo.

  I slapped these thoughts down, hating myself.

  ‘Listen, Tanya. There’s no way this will keep on. First thing is we’re going to get you out of the city. We’ll head north, find a—‘

  A knock on the apartment door. Having forgotten there was a world outside, I started, then got up and threw on my old grey dressing gown.

  ‘Look first, Paul. Don’t just open up the door. Anybody could be out there.’

  I went and squinted through the peephole, wondering if a crazed mob would be outside, if a crazed mob would even fit in our narrow hall. But all I saw was the old woman who lived next door. Mrs Simmons. A widow but still married to the corpse who’d bullied the bulk of her life away. Old man Simmons had been, she’d confided to Tanya more than once in the elevator’s confessional, a real piece of shit—his communion with the world a binary code made up of rapidly alternating slaps and silences.

  In the fishbowl of the peephole, Mrs Simmons’ faded face darted left and right. She was a skinny old thing but with jowls that gave her the appearance of having a puppet’s hinged jaw; when she spoke, someone else seemed to be pulling the strings.

  When I opened the door, she jumped back and pressed against the opposite wall, cowering in her pink tracksuit. Three nights without sleep had left the old woman sucked juice-box dry.

  ‘Are you okay, Mrs Simmons?’

  She became aggressive with her bony chin. ‘That noise. Is that noise coming out of your place?’

  ‘What noise?’ For a moment I thought the poor woman had overheard our sex efforts, but then I remembered that our bedroom was on the wrong side of the apartment for that to be the case. That and how silent our fucking had been.

  Mrs Simmons peeled herself off the wall and inched toward me, glaring.

  ‘Don’t tell me you don’t hear it!’

  It’s always bad news when the meek get assertive: an order, a question, a threat, and a plea all rolled into one. In Heaven, the Bible and Bono both say, all the colours bleed into one; in Hell, I’ve since learned, feelings do the same thing. Swampwater was what we called the various Slurpee flavours we mixed into one cup as kids, one on top of the other. Neon pink, lime green, cola brown. Another hole in the language, another new word of my own invention. The old woman’s voice swampwatered with feelings.

  ‘If I don’t tell you that, Mrs Simmons, then I don’t know what else I can tell you.’

  ‘You,’ her words rattled in her throat. ‘You. You hear it. Don’t lie to me. It’s coming from the walls, or maybe from outside.’ Then she tried on a little girl voice. ‘Please don’t lie. It’s unkind.’

  Suddenly, Tanya was behind me.

  ‘We haven’t heard anything, Mrs Simmons. Promise. It’s probably just nerves. Everyone is—’

  The old lady’s tongue flicked at the cracked corners of her mouth. ‘Don’t tell me about nerves. I know about nerves. I know nerves from forty years back. I knew nerves back before nerves were even invented. Someone’s out there humming slow and low. It’s quiet, but you can hear it if you listen.’

  ‘I don’t hear anything, I swear.’

  Her expression broke apart. ‘Don’t lie! Oh, God, there’s no reason! If we lie to each other there’ll be no one to turn to. And if there’s no one to turn to then—’

  ‘But we don’t hear—’

  Mrs Simmons snapped her head around and fixed us with hateful eyes, suddenly another someone else.

  ‘I said no lies!’ Then she changed again and her voice took on a childish inflection once more. ‘It’s a terrible thing to do to an old woman! Please think about what you’re doing, Paul.’

  It was as though she was thrashing back and forth in time, from pleading, uncomprehending child to bitter, denying adult.

  She swooped down to a whisper. ‘Pretending it’s not happening won’t make it go away. You can’t ignore it.’

  I looked at Tanya, wondering for a moment if she heard
something like what Mrs Simmons was describing. Catching my glance, she narrowed her eyes and shook her head sharply, furious about whatever it was she saw in my expression.

  Then the power went out and in the dull glow of the emergency lights, we looked at one another. None of us expected it to go on again.

  DAY 4: Accidental Colours

  Those which depend on the state of our eye, and not those which the object really possesses, as when coming into a dark room from the sun. The accidental colour of red is bluish-green, of black, white.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Framed by lengthening light, the man in the orange hazard vest stared at nothing. I spoke, but he didn’t reply—just stood there as though stillness was mankind’s natural state, as though we were a race of Easter Island figures. He was a Stop Sign Guy: a giant red lollipop tight in his right hand, he was one of a group of city workers attempting to repair a power pole that had been knocked down that morning in the alley behind our apartment. A runaway Brinks truck, since duly sacked and towed, had done the deed.

  A shock to see them working. Why fix a power pole when the power is gone? I suppose the answer was too obvious, too bedrock, for me to see, even then. To my credit, however, I was beginning to understand that incredulity was now an outmoded response to unfolding events.

  Tanya frowned and waved her hand in front of his glazed eyes. ‘Hey? Anybody in there?’

  While the rest of his crew stood huddled beside their crane, talking intensely, Stop Sign Guy’s head tilted slightly back as he stared through the blushing sky toward almost-visible stars above and beyond, his mouth agape. In addition to ‘hanging open’, ‘agape’ also means love, as in the way our mouths go slack when we see Beauty. It’s an ancient Greek word, used in more recent times by Martin Luther King Jr. to describe what he termed ‘disinterested love’—Jesus love, Buddha love. Stop Sign Guy had become a slack-jawed statue. Were statues, I wondered, filled with love? Were they enchanted men and women, jaws hanging slack, who’d been flash-frozen by beauty? Had they seen something that had brought their world to a standstill? Were they beings somehow beyond us, beyond our grasping, snapping little world, transfixed by infinity? Agape, just like me—in my dream?

  He was a bony little fellow with nicotine fingers. Young but somehow done with youth. I’ve observed that people whose career trajectories arc toward the holding of stop signs eight hours a day are either really thin or really fat. And they all smoke.

  We were about to turn and walk away when, suddenly, Stop Sign Guy was back from wherever he’d been. His mouth closed, he swallowed, and we made eye contact.

  He smiled. ‘Sorry. What was that?’

  Casual, as though nothing strange was going on. The television had said this would happen: momentary space-outs coupled with a band-of-pressure feeling around the skull right around day four or five. Stop Sign Guy smiled helplessly, the kind of fellow who had questionable taste in music and disturbing taste in movies but who would come over on short notice to help you move something heavy. And be truly grateful for the beer he’d receive as payment.

  ‘Our car’s parked behind your crane. We were just wondering how long you guys are going to be.’

  Tanya and I had come up with a plan: we were going to drive out of the city before things got really ugly, most likely really soon. Some tycoon’s empty mansion up at Whistler would suit us well, we thought. Might as well find somewhere nice for the little woman to lose her mind and for me to stretch out my arms and greet the apocalypse. Or maybe it was simpler than a plan: maybe we were just getting incredibly motivated to take flight.

  The night before had been loud, even louder than the preceding day. Looking out our windows we’d been able to see that while the rot hadn’t spread noticeably further on the surface of things, it had dug deeper and plunged its roots into the city’s bloodstream. People running around like spiders, darting in and out of shadows beneath the full moon, intentions unfathomable. Picture an old apple whose skin hasn’t yet collapsed—but beneath that skin the flesh is soft as cheesecake. You sense, smell even, that it’s gone rotten, but you don’t know for sure until you touch it and feel it yield beneath the slightest pressure of your thumb.

  We heard the occasional gunshot, but easily adapted to that: if anything, given the hard lessons TV news and cop shows had taught us all our lives, it seemed odd that sporadic gunfire hadn’t been a normal part of life all along.

  Stop Sign Guy was gone again. Hard hat off, he was massaging the back of his head, like his memory was knotted up back there. Bundles of nerves roping up from his body into his brain. Yank them, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, and he’d jerk.

  ‘Hey! Asshole! What’s your problem?!’

  A man in tan overalls, a rage of muscles knotted beneath his superhero-tight T-shirt, had broken off from the group by the crane and was striding toward us. A creature of the gym, he was all swollen limbs and chest. As he neared us, I thought of Blemmyes, headless mythical creatures, their eyes, nose, and mouth lodged in their chests.

  ‘It’s no biggie, Al.’ Stop Sign Guy was back and speaking up in my defence.

  The Blemmye ignored his crew mate and snarled at

  me through gritted teeth. ‘I said, ‘What’s your problem?’

  asshole.’

  There was a question behind his question, and that shadow question was ‘Do you want to dance?’

  The Blemmye moved toward me, and I took a step backward: the opening figure in our mambo.

  ‘I was just asking when you guys were going to be finished. Our car—’

  Then I was on the ground, and he was on top of me, swinging drum-taut fists into my sides. The back of my head felt damp and warm; I’d either landed in a puddle of hot soup or I was bleeding. My arms went up to protect my face, but when I realized my ribs were about to be broken I forced them down, lying at attention while he pummelled my biceps and elbows.

  And then I found I didn’t much mind.

  I felt the pain, or rather saw pain fireworks exploding before my eyes. Physical pain was suddenly just nerve information, a series of tiny electrical charges whose combined voltage wouldn’t be sufficient to power up a small mouse’s iPod. I was curiously detached.

  And so instead of screaming for help or begging for mercy, I simply lay there and watched the Blemmye’s face as it swung at me again and again, now panting with exertion. A shrieking demon. Or a wailing baby. Or a professional wrestler, mid-orgasm, perhaps. And what was that streaming in his eyes? Rage? Fear? Shock? Sadness? All of them? Slowly, my field of vision saturated with strange cellophane colours. I saw the faces of Stop Sign Guy and the other crew members behind the Blemmye’s hulking shoulders as he leaned into his work. Their bared teeth were animal signals for their own swampwatering emotions: the same Trick or Treat Mrs Simmons had been offering the night before.

  Time took a hike then, the Blemmye’s blows registering like silent exclamation points, until interrupted by a shrill scream that had to be coming from Tanya—a distant, soaring cry horrified to find itself naked in the open air.

  ‘You’re killing him!’

  The beating didn’t last long after that. Violence stale-dates; you can’t just pound away at a man until all that’s left is a red puddle seeping into the ground; you can’t take someone much past hamburger, really, not even if you’re a serial killer or Gitmo interrogator. Soon enough, hands appeared on the Blemmye’s torso and dragged it off me. Three generic cops who’d appeared out of nowhere.

  ‘You shouldn’t have pushed him,’ the Blemmye howled, straining against an octopus of arms. The creature’s humanity was, as far as I could see, gone. Did it even have a head? I didn’t think so. I’m still not sure.

  ‘Pushed him? I never—’

  ‘Ray, he didn’t push me,’ Stop Sign Guy said, eyes flicking back and forth between the creature and me. ‘Why’re you saying that, dude?’

  The Blemmye howled and increased its struggles.

  ‘If you can walk, you
better get out of here, man,’ one of the cops told me. He jerked his chin toward Stop Sign Guy. “You too, pal.’

  ‘Why are you mad at me?’ Stop Sign Guy whined, backing down the alley. ‘What did I do? It’s not fair.’

  Listening to Stop Sign Guy’s voice, I felt like getting up and pummelling him myself. Not fair. Words like ‘fair’ or ‘reason’ seemed aligned with antiquated concepts like ‘vapours’ or ‘humours’ or ‘ether’. Similarly, ‘why’ seemed a completely ludicrous path of enquiry. Why are you beating me, sirrah? On Birchin Lane it’s the last question that needs asking; on Birchin Lane it’s a pathetic question, an admission of weakness and defeat. To use the old jailhouse term and not the modern rock and roll one, a punk’s question.

  As if to prove my thesis, the Blemmye now turned toward Stop Sign Guy and began to gnash and strain in his departing direction, tendons popping.

  Tanya helped me to my feet, and I steadied myself against a Smithrite that reeked of puke and putrefaction.

  The cops had their guns out now, one pressed to each side of the Blemmye’s head. It was like something out of a Tarantino remake of the Three Stooges: if they both shot, they’d kill each other as well as my attacker.

  ‘Shut up, motherfucker! Shut the fuck up!’

  ‘Paul,’ Tanya whispered, ‘Can you walk?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Stand back, give me a shot at him!’ one cop cried.

  The other cop crabwalked backward while his partner stood up and pointed his gun down toward the Blemmye’s heart while speaking softly. ‘You stupid motherfucker. You pathetic fucking piece of shit.’

  The Blemmye was writhing like a beetle on its back, arms and legs thrashing as it sought to avoid the gun’s glare.

  We staggered down the alley and onto Denman Street. No one followed us. Seconds later we heard a shot and a loud whoop but kept moving.

  A lot of broken glass on the sidewalk: trip and you’d cut yourself badly. Yesterday there had been big shards but today the glass had been crunched down into slivers. Tomorrow, perhaps, it would be a crystal powder: Vancouver distilled to its snortable essence.