NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  ‘Just light. It went on forever.’

  Tanya looked up toward my face, but her eyes could no longer see, which meant it looked as though she saw everything. This was how she would die. This was how the world was dying.

  ‘Pretty Zoe’s in the furnace room. It’s hot down there. Hot as Hell’s Gate…’

  She smiled as she trailed off. Then another murder. I cut her throat with an orange box cutter I found in a cupboard then cradled her head, suddenly tiny and nut hard beneath all that raving hair, as her body thrashed a little, but not too much, and her blood dyed my blue jeans purple.

  When it was over, her earlobes, the ones she’d told me marked her as alien, marked her as mine. I bowed my head and kissed each one in turn.

  DAY 14: Walking Gentleman

  In theatrical parlance, means one who has little or nothing to say, but is expected to deport himself as a gentleman when before the lights.

  Your indulgence for an elegy.

  We met in university, in a second year philosophy class. I was there because I believed that three hundred year old arguments about the nature of the universe were somehow time sensitive (I know, I know), while Tanya enrolled—so she said—because the class fit her timetable. After we graduated I went on to write my books and she became a well-paid publicist for a fairly large chemical company with a host of dubious contracts. We strove to maintain the fine balance I mentioned earlier, with intellectual ‘purity’ on my side of the ledger and the slapping heft of the bacon she brought home on Tanya’s. When the pedal hit the metal and the rubber hit the road, though, the scales tipped in her favour. She could mock my financial worthlessness all she wanted, but I couldn’t really dig too deeply at her hollow careerism given that it put bread on the corporeal table. Rather than confront this disconnect in some conclusive manner, however, we did as most couples and just lived with it as best we could.

  Ours was a classic mismatch with all the makings of a screwball comedy. Did hilarity ensue? Sometimes. At other times, though, during the outtakes, awkward silences and buried resentments ensued as well. And if you made a two-hour movie covering a seven year relationship there were going to be a lot of outtakes. But still, we soldiered on.

  After three or four years together, we began to understand one another a little. It came to light that Tanya liked my verbosity because it spoke to something trapped inside her that needed to get out. As for me, there was something appealing about the outward shell she’d been developing, her World Armour. The hardness of that shell implied a softness at the centre, a secret place into which I probably hoped I could retreat—a mirror for my own lack of outward form—when I got sick of the sound of my own voice or the thought balloon shape of my own thoughts.

  Then, as time loped along, Tanya changed in a way I could never quite get my head around. Maybe her armour thickened to the point where there was no point of entry for someone as amorphous as me. Amorphous: that’s amore, always morphing. It got tricky when I realized one day that I’d have to begin to get used to the idea of living without the shelter she’d once seemed to offer, and that she’d have to accept that I was needy. But still we kept trudging forward. Maybe everyone had to wade through this muck, we thought. Still, there was now something stranger-like about her; and I sensed that if we were to remain together, I’d have to learn to love and protect that strangeness.

  It sounds like a bleak landscape, but it wasn’t, not really. There were romantic sunsets and soft shadows as well as forensic facts under antiseptic light. We made love and laughed together. And we watched our favourite shows throughout what had to be the Golden Age of Television, no matter how dubious a sobriquet that is. We liked to cook together on Sunday afternoons. Those things counted too.

  At least that’s how I saw it. God knows I never said any of this stuff, not to Tanya or to anybody else. Nobody says these things—it’s against the rules—but deep inside we know that we are, each of us, unknowable and ultimately alone, even when we love.

  Most of the people we’d known were busy playing out a game of ‘no limits’ in their relationships and careers. They were serial Humpty Dumpties, falling apart then putting themselves back together again, over and over, beneath new horizons made of unfamiliar hips and thighs. Maybe I’d been unsociable because I feared infection, and maybe Tanya had been out there with them, swimming around in the genetic soup. I’d thought Tanya and I were different, that we were going to swallow reality whole and let it live inside us despite the surfeit of fantasy on offer. Big oops: in the end it turned out that reality was bigger and crueller than I’d imagined.

  Wherever my love for Tanya lived, wherever it lives now, that place was neither the old Vancouver nor Charles’ cracked-out Fantasyland. Love lives someplace else. Is that it? Or are there simply no words for what I’m trying to say?

  In the basement a skeletal crew. Eyes bulging in the dimness, they sat hunched over tables strewn with rusty iron bars, steel hooks, baling wire, and rope. Working, making. Long staves with ragged clusters of sharp metal fixed to their ends. Floating above candles, their faces were goblin-like. All around them, in the dimness, a forest of completed staffs were stacked against the walls. The weapons appeared numberless, but I knew how many there were, or would very soon be: precisely a thousand.

  A gate to Hell? Yes.

  But was Zoe down here? I peered hard into the dim and distant corners. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to hide her, but then again the basement was a cavernous place—a moonscape of unfinished concrete and impenetrable shadows. It was terrible to think of that poor little thing, so obviously a creature that belonged in the light, locked away down there.

  Then I saw it—the school’s ancient furnace skulking, cold and dunce-like in a far corner; a rusted box with an arthritic assemblage of pipes extending up into the rafters. A small iron door in its exact centre. If you lived in a place like Nod, where else would you stow a demon?

  The goblins were beginning to notice my presence. Several were watching me, eyes probing but not penetrating, jaws working silently.

  ‘What? What?’ asked a woman at the nearest table. ‘What?’

  ‘Will you be ready soon?’ I asked as imperiously as I could manage. It’s tough work being a prophet: every time you ask someone for the time, your reputation is in mortal peril.

  She nodded for a full ten seconds, eyes shut, before replying. ‘Yes, yes, we’ll be ready when the sun comes up. Not the next sun, but the one after. Yes, yes. We’re almost ready…’

  In two days, then. It was time to give the Cat Sleepers their heads up.

  It was almost dawn. Back in the classroom, I signalled Dave as instructed. Almost as soon as I’d finished, an answering flash came from down the block. If nothing else, insomniacs make great watchmen. I ran down to the black alley, exchanged a few whispered words with the three Cat sleepers, then crept back upstairs and turned my mind back to Zoe. If the Rabbit Hunt was to take place in two days, then tomorrow would be the obvious time to rescue her from the basement, given that almost all of Charles’ people would be otherwise occupied. It wasn’t an airtight plan—it wasn’t a plan at all—but it was a hope. And a hope in Nod was something.

  My eyes were burning and raw, and I wanted nothing more than to lie down on my bed of textbooks and close them for a while. But before I could move, rough hands grabbed me from behind, and Charles’s voice whispered into my ear.

  ‘No biggie, Paul, no biggie. Nobody’s going to hurt you, but there’s something down at the beach that you really need to see.’

  That ‘something’ was colossal. An aircraft carrier, run aground on the edge of English Bay. The American warship— the name ‘USS Nassau’ was painted on its side—appeared to have approached land under full power and had managed to beach itself so far up onto the shore that the prow was completely exposed. Five or six storeys high, one side of its grey hull was blackened and pitted, torn and buckled, while the other side was untouched—unflinching grey in the early morning sunl
ight. The crowning bizarreness to the scene was the sound coming from within the vessel: humming, low and steady, but with shrill overtones that wove in and out. Someone had neglected to turn off the engine. Clearly, this was the ship whose lights I’d seen out in the bay.

  Beside me, Charles stared hard, trying to cram the sight into Nod. He looked like shit—like one of those inflated dummies you’d see outside drive-thru espresso kiosks, the ones that, powered by a big fan, would fill with air, trembling and rigid, then go limp for a moment only to inflate again seconds later. On the way over here, he’d limped when he walked and drooled when he talked, wiping his nose constantly.

  We’d arrived here at the head of a silent procession of around two hundred of the Awakened. They now stood arrayed around us in a protective ring, and that was a good thing, because we were far from alone on that beach. Around the ship, around us, hundreds of others were gathered. Charles’ contingent, which had felt mighty when we’d left the yellow school, now seemed decidedly puny.

  It suddenly struck me that not everyone left alive even knew about Nod. Everyone? Holy shit, I thought, almost no one knew about Nod. The vast majority of the Awakened were living in nameless kingdoms of their own terrified devising, and now they were ranged all around us, trembling and grinding their teeth. The creatures I’d seen two nights ago had now taken human forms, but were no less bizarre for that.

  ‘What do you think, Paul?’ Charles asked in a conversational tone. He’d pulled himself together: there was no indication in his ruby red eyes that he was impressed by the immensity of what we were all gawking at—or that he’d heard of Tanya’s death.

  ‘You’re the Admiral of the Blue. You tell me.’

  He didn’t answer, so I looked around. The crowd appeared weak and disoriented, dangerous only in the heft of their numbers, though that was dangerous enough. How did they keep going? They must have been reduced to drinking drain water and licking empty tins of cat food clean by now. Walking back from the SkyTrain station I’d seen a group of women gnawing bark peeled from an arbutus tree, red like beef jerky. Swallow. Cramp. Retch. Repeat.

  Suddenly, Charles spoke loudly, to everyone within earshot.

  ‘We’ll board the ship! Your Admiral will greet its captain! Make room!’

  A cheer from the residents of Nod at this and a curious craning of necks from the rest. Charles’s eyes were glazed with fierce tears as he watched his people clear a spot on the beach near the ship, into which we quickly moved. I almost felt happy for the poor bastard; you couldn’t deny that he’d come a long way from cadging conversational scraps along Denman Street.

  Hands on hips, Charles ordered one of his men to throw a rope with a large hook tied to one end up at the destroyer’s rails. No small feat, given that the ship’s deck was easily forty feet above our heads and backlit by the sun to boot. It took eight or nine tries, but finally the hook cleared the rails and clanked onto the deck. The non-Nod crowd cheered this achievement and pressed forward, drawn to any display of resourcefulness and order. The Awakened’s ring of linked arms, five deep, rippled but held.

  ‘Listen!’ Charles cried.

  And the crowd listened.

  ‘This ship is named the Ragnarok! There’s a message for us up there on its decks, and it’s a message that you all need to hear! I promise you that if you wait, you’ll all hear it!’

  Ragnarok. A pretty good name for a nuclear powered warship, I had to admit: the Norse word for ‘apocalypse’. Better than ‘Nassau’ with its connotations of frat boy vacations and disco music, anyway.

  The guy who’d hooked the rope somehow managed to shimmy up and disappeared over the railing. A few minutes of silence followed during which all eyes remained fixed on the ship’s horizon. Finally, the black speck of the climber’s head reappeared and the crowd exhaled as a rope ladder tumbled down. Charles called three of his people over. Big men and all of them had bandages around their heads, blood in caked rivulets down their necks. He pointed at the ladder, and the five of us began to climb.

  The deck was echo empty. No planes, nothing except for the unbelievable complexity of the bridge tower and its cacophony of antennae and satellite dishes. A metal planet, silent except for a string of flags that snapped in the wind and the seagulls’ distant, wind-borne desolation. One of Charles’ damaged gym apes reached over the rail and hauled up the ladder. Now we were alone.

  Charles eyed the bridge tower with the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy, longing to climb it and make it his own.

  ‘There are worse places to die,’ he mused, to himself but with my overhearing him very clearly in mind.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Than here. In the sun. You won’t mind, will you? I’d say, given recent bereavements, that you’re about done with Nod. Am I wrong, Paul? It’s time. Probably, it will be like one of those dreams of yours. You can lie on your back and stare at the sun while we do it. You know, Aztec-style.’

  Then he nodded, and before I could react his men moved in close. I felt something cold and sharp digging into my ribs.

  ‘A giant Roc is going to fly straight down out of the sun and martyr you, Paul. But don’t worry: it’s a noble ending. You’ll fight back very bravely and you won’t have died for nothing. You’ll save my life, and as you lie dying you’ll anoint me king with your last gasp—I’ll make sure everyone knows you were a hero.’

  I must have smirked, because Charles grew livid.

  ‘That’s how the story crumbles, Paul. All the way back from the Old Testament, the new one, and all the way through Nod: the prophet brings the truth, and then he dies. Simple.’

  I didn’t answer, so he kept on talking.

  ‘So nice that it’s just you and me here at the end, Paul. They,’ he indicated his crew, ‘can’t hear a thing, so we can talk frankly and openly. Look at that one. He was a fucking lawyer two weeks ago. That’s why I chose him for my special guard: irony. He drove an Audi. Now he snips his ears off with garden shears just because I suggest that it might be a good idea if he wanted to avoid having demons whisper terrible suggestions to him in the dark. It’s a wonderful world, Paul. Fucked up as it ever was, for sure, but still wonderful. A real meritocracy. Finally.’

  ‘You can kill me if you want to, but you’re going to die yourself, Charles. Really soon—you know that, right? And your Rabbit Hunt is going to fail. There’s no point in any of it.’

  He shook his head and spat. ‘No! I’ve got babies in my eyes. There are babes in the wood, Paul. In Demon Park. People in the stocks, locked in the wood. Then there’s babies in the eyes and that’s love. So we’ll have a Rabbit Hunt and we’ll flush out those demons and we’ll put them in the stocks and we’ll have their eyes and our love will keep us alive.’ He hacked desperately into his sleeve. ‘You wouldn’t understand. A riddle has been set, Paul. Your entire fucking manuscript is a giant riddle, and I’m the one who’s solved it. Not you. You don’t even know where the question marks go. The answer to the riddle is ‘name it and it’s yours’. And I’m—’

  Charles’ supervillain soliloquy was interrupted by a male voice, crackling at top volume over the ship’s PA system.

  ‘It was me! I did it!’

  Charles looked around wildly. So did his crew, in earless imitation of their master. There was no way to tell where the transmission was coming from.

  ‘It was me! If you’re looking for the man, I’m the goddamned man!’

  Then I saw it: movement on the bridge tower. I bolted. It took Charles and company a couple of heartbeats to react, but by then it was no contest. Charles and his goons were the walking wounded, but I was still a rough approximation of my old ten-kilometres-four-days-a-week self. By the time I reached the base of the bridge tower, they were more than fifty feet behind me.

  A series of metal stairs zigzagged up the bridge’s side. Picking one at random, I began to climb. I quickly learned that military ships were specifically designed to be scalable: where one set of steps ended, either another would
begin or there would be a set of metal hoops welded onto the wall that led to a ladder or another set of stairs. It felt like a series of lucky breaks but my progress was really the design of whatever Norse god had constructed the Ragnarok. In no time, I was nearing the top—the winner in a giant game of Snakes and Ladders.

  Meanwhile, that frantic voice was still broadcasting.

  ‘I had a cancer brain and it told me to make a mushroom cloud. Get it? You fucking maniacs! Now I’ll tell you how to make your own goddamn mushroom cloud!’

  A male voice with a Texan accent whose cadence seemed to reflect the unseen speaker’s military profession: driving points home in a staccato style.

  ‘I see you coming. I see you climbing. Better come quick, boy.’ His voice mocked me. ‘Time’s a wasting! Come on, boy! You’re almost there!’

  And then I was there. Standing on a thin deck that ran around the top of the bridge. I looked down. Charles and company were huffing and puffing up toward my perch. I turned and peered in through the window.

  He was terribly burned. A stained officer’s uniform over barbequed skin that was hanging from his body in curling chunks. And between those chunks was the molten lava of raw, red under-flesh. Scraps of hair clung to his head and his eyes were haunted blue, their whites blazing as he stared at me from across a frontier of unimaginable pain.

  Tearing my eyes away, I tried to turn the door handle but it was locked. I pounded on the glass, but it wasn’t glass—it was something much stronger.

  ‘Not so fast! No one gave you permission to enter the bridge, son!’

  ‘Let me in!’

  He tapped his ear and shook his head, laughing silently, a microphone pressed between the stubs of his ruined hands.

  ‘Your friends down there want to do you harm, do they? Worried you might get hurt? You’ve come to the wrong place. Son, I’ve killed millions. It’s not that big a deal. I’m the biggest mass murderer in the history of the god damn world.’

  I was listening to a public address system while, right in front of me, the officer’s frayed lips synched badly to the bullhorn sound. Behind me the stairs clanged louder and louder. I looked around, but there was no other way down. Then I turned back to the officer and noticed something. His eyes. They were clear and steady amid the smoking wreckage of his face.