Apocalypse for Beginners

by Nicolas Dickner

  Around us, an industrial silence reigned. The only sound was the swishing of the ventilation system. A post-apocalyptic stillness. But what sort of calamity could have left buildings intact, the electricity grid functioning, the products neatly arranged on the shelves?

  “Zombie invasion,” Hope suggested.

  At the far end of the aisle, an obese woman in a fur coat shuffled by, dragging her feet and pushing an empty cart. I had the fleeting conviction that, holy moly, Hope was right: the dead were abandoning the cemeteries!

  A moment later there was nothing left but the sound of the fans and a peculiar wistfulness. For a second, Hope and I had been the last people on earth. Now, we were just the last people in the cleaning products aisle.

  28. DISTURBING NEWS

  Conspicuously located near the cash registers was an enormous bin of marked-down Captain Mofuku ramen—hundreds of astronauts floating in empty space, all wearing the same stupid smile, 3 for 99¢.

  Leaning over the bin, Hope very methodically examined the merchandise: (a) she picked up a package of ramen, (b) studied it carefully, (c) made a face, (d) chucked the package into the bin of marked-down candy canes and (e) started over at step (a) apparently with the intention of continuing until she reached the bottom of the container. Should I intervene? The cashier looked on with a jaded expression.

  After a while, however, Hope interrupted the inspection and brought to my attention a disturbing piece of news, to say the least. All the packages, without exception, had the same expiry date printed on them: 2001 17 JUL.

  29. AMENORRHEA MYSTERIOSA

  The list of Eastern perils (influenza, tofu) was soon augmented by a snowstorm originating in the Atlantic basin. The few snowflakes frolicking in the sky around midnight turned into a raging depression that swept over the province, wiping out roads and uprooting hydro towers.

  The high school was closed down for the day, and I didn’t see Hope until after supper, when she rang at the front door (the door leading directly to the Bunker was now buried under six feet of snow). She was white from head to toe, and her face was completely hidden behind a frost-covered scarf, except for a thin opening for an old pair of ski goggles to peer out of.

  When my father opened the door, he yelled something about a mujahideen invasion, which brought a smile to Hope’s face. Anything that could boost her morale was welcome.

  Clutching mugs of hot chocolate, we huddled under three layers of sleeping bags and took part in Friday-night Mass: The Nature of Things. Suzuki discussed drosophilae and the human genome, but I failed to grasp a single word because of the maddening familiarity with which Hope had draped her leg over mine.

  Nothing could be more natural than this simple gesture, but at the same time it was the Halifax explosion, the eruption of Krakatoa, a supernova. I felt more and more dizzy as the warmth of her leg softly radiated through our jeans. If only the blizzard would rage on for another three days!

  I glanced at the ground-level window of the Bunker. We were buried far below the surface. On the other side of the glass lay a wall of snow or ash or cement—hard to tell.

  During the commercials, Hope related the latest developments on the domestic front. After scrubbing down the apartment, she had extricated her mother from the closet by jimmying the door hinges with a screwdriver. The recluse was not looking very good: hair dishevelled and eyes vacant, she hugged a bag of basmati rice. She had agreed to eat a bowl of soup (quadruple dose of clozapine), refused to take a shower, and then went off to work, anxiously looking around her the whole time. In sum, a partial victory.

  The Nature of Things was over and, remote control in hand, I hopped around the channels. Headlining the nightly news was the forecast of a foot of snow by Sunday, and then, as an afterthought, the trial of the captain of the Exxon Valdez, the opening of the first McDonald’s in Moscow and the arrival of Soviet troops in Azerbaijan. Hope giggled.

  “There’s a conspiracy of meteorologists to take control of the media!”

  On the TV screen images flashed by: a convoy of buses stuck in the snow, cars gone headfirst into the ditch, snowplows, snow blowers, trucks. This was followed by a pathetic variety show, which was then followed by a B movie. Poor Canada.

  Lying so close together, we generated a substantial amount of heat, and so Hope removed her woollen sweater. I immediately noticed three band-aids in the crook of her elbow. An odd place to sustain an injury. She admitted, somewhat reluctantly, that she had spent the day at the hospital.

  “Oh? Anything the matter?”

  “Not really. I had to have some gynecological tests.”

  While she idly rubbed her leg against mine, she explained that, despite being almost eighteen, she hadn’t yet begun to menstruate. She had already consulted a doctor in Yarmouth but had never undergone a serious examination. For the past two weeks she had submitted herself to a battery of tests: blood, lymph, vaginal discharge, urine and other mysterious fluids. She had swallowed barium, had had iodine injections, had been smeared with strange gels, had subjected her pelvis to X-rays and ultrasounds and had even gone through an MRI exam, of which she gave me a description worthy of Steven Spielberg.

  I was surprised at having been completely unaware of all those trips to and from the hospital. Hope truly had a talent for camouflage.

  “And did they find anything?”

  She shook her head.

  “The plumbing is in working order. I produce the right hormones and ovulate every twenty-eight days. In fact, my ovaries are more reliable than an atomic clock. The mucous membranes of my uterus refuse to vascularize, but the doctors still don’t understand why. They’re baffled.”

  Diagnosis: Hope was afflicted by amenorrhea mysteriosa: “an inexplicable lack of menstruation.” In other words, modern gynecology was throwing in the towel. Hope reached toward my cup of hot chocolate, fished out a marshmallow and slipped it into her mouth.

  “I’ve become a medical mystery. Fascinating, isn’t it?”

  I pictured Hope floating in a jar of formaldehyde—but quickly brushed the image out of my head.

  “But, um … you’re feeling all right?”

  “I feel like the Bermuda Triangle.”

  “What does your mother say?”

  “That there’s no problem that can’t be fixed with a good old end of the world.”

  30. RANDALL THINKING

  I had dozed off in the middle of a documentary on the Guajá, an aboriginal tribe recently discovered in the depths of the Amazonian basin, one of the most secluded regions of the planet. These natives wore loincloths, painted their bodies and had never had any direct contact with post-Columbian civilization. Also, they had greeted the anthropologists’ helicopter with a volley of arrows. Good, upstanding people.

  The documentary had long given way to an infomercial when the telephone rang. I opened my eyes. The VCR display showed 12:43 a.m. and a bleached-blond motor-mouth was working away on an abdominal exerciser. My hand lifted the receiver and my brain went into gear (in that order).

  At the other end, Hope’s voice had a sombre ring to it.

  “Is it a bad time?”

  As a response, I yawned.

  “Can you come over to the Pet Shop? I could use a hand.”

  “You could use a hand? At a quarter to one in the morning?”

  “I don’t feel like explaining on the phone.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right there.”

  “Bring some bandages.”

  “Bandages? Are you hurt?”

  She had already hung up.

  I listened for signs of activity upstairs. Dead silence. My father had been putting in long days at the cement plant, and I suspected that my mother had been popping sleeping pills for a number of months. The conflict between my brother and father had churned up some choppy water in the vast ocean of her maternal love. Life in a typical North American bungalow.

  I got dressed, filled my backpack with whatever might serve from our medicine cabinet—band-aid
s, gauze, tape, compression bandages with clips—and stole out the back door like a Sioux.

  In the street, ice crystals swirled over the pavement. Winter. Endless winter.

  Hope was waiting by the door with folded arms and a furrowed brow. I looked her up and down and, seeing no sign of injury, let out a sigh of relief.

  Inside the Pet Shop the usual chaos prevailed: dishes and dirty laundry scattered throughout, dust in every corner and a faint odour of reptilian feces. In other words, nothing out of the ordinary, except for Mrs. Randall, who was lying in the middle of the floor unconscious and hastily covered with a shabby bathrobe. Under her head, a bloodstain was soaking into the carpet. Her upper lip—which had probably split when she fell—was still bleeding despite an improvised compress of paper towels. The cleanup would not be easy.

  Hope gestured nervously, almost impatiently, in her mother’s direction.

  “I think she’s okay. Aside from the lip, I mean.”

  “What happened?”

  She sighed. After months of denial her mother had finally conceded that errors in calculation were not a factor, and that, to all appearances, there was very little chance of the end of the world coming any time soon.

  “So?”

  “Use your imagination: You spend twenty years waiting for the end of the world, and poof! Nothing happens.”

  Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t understand. But this was Randall thinking, and there was no point trying to make sense of it.

  In any case, Mrs. Randall had decided to (quote) drown her sorrows. Hope explained that in spite of her psychotic inclinations, her mother had always been a diligent young woman, so her aim was not to become more or less an alcoholic. She had purchased a bottle of vodka and downed two-thirds of it in thirty minutes flat, wincing as she guzzled. Then she had removed all her clothes and collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  I was worried, so I pressed my forefinger against Ann Randall’s wrist. The pulse seemed normal. A little slow, maybe, but regular.

  “Do you think she’s in a coma?”

  Hope eyed the bottle of vodka with a puzzled expression.

  “No. My guess is an adverse reaction between the alcohol and the clozapine.”

  “Okay, what’s the plan?”

  “Did you bring the bandages?”

  “First we have to disinfect the wound.”

  “There’s some vodka left in the bottle.”

  She tipped the bottle over a gauze pad and cleaned the wound as best she could. Bits of Sumerian escaped from her mother’s lips when she wasn’t moaning—an encouraging sign under the circumstances. Already, the bleeding was letting up. Hope placed two enormous bandages over the lip, stating that this would do for now. She would see tomorrow morning whether stitches would be needed.

  “Well, we can’t just leave her on the floor all night. We have to get her into bed.”

  Grabbing hold of each end—Hope at her feet and me at her shoulders—we attempted to lift Mrs. Randall. Mission impossible. By virtue of certain mysterious forces, this delicate woman now weighed several tons. There was no way to roll her or push her a little or even raise one of her arms. She was bolted to the carpet.

  Finally, we just gave up and, after covering her with some blankets, left her where she was. Hope preferred to watch over her alone and walked me to the door, where she thanked me with a casual kiss on the cheek.

  I didn’t feel sleepy any more, so instead of going straight home I went for a walk. The truth was I needed to mull over a nagging question: If every Randall became unhinged when the apocalypse failed to show up, was Hope bound to suffer the same fate? The fact that July 17, 2001, seemed infinitely far off did nothing to reassure me.

  Lafontaine Street was deserted. Reigning over the window of Elvis Dubé’s Karate Studio was a portrait framed in Christmas lights of the King in a kimono. I crossed the street to get away from this spectacle only to find myself in front of Bébé Plus and its display of 1990 models of jogging strollers. The wall was plastered with supersonic infants, the exact antithesis of babies as dead weight.

  I thought of the Guajá, those Amazonians who had never had the least contact with modern civilization. They evidently had not missed very much.

  31. ONE DAY AT A TIME

  The next morning Ann Randall woke up with a gash across her lip and a peculiar glint in her eye.

  Since she didn’t recognize either her daughter or the Pet Shop, Hope concluded that the vodka was still addling her brain. The amnesia lasted for hours. Ann Randall had apparently ventured out a little farther than what we’d thought—to somewhere in the vicinity of a coma.

  The upshot was that we had to provide her with a full rundown of the situation: who we were, where she was, what her job was. By bombarding her with information we managed to reboot the operating system. But instead of simply reverting to normal, the Ann Randall that sprung up before our eyes was completely changed.

  Even Hope (who had, after all, seen a lot) was astonished by her mother’s new lifestyle. Every morning at seven she would start knocking them back: vodka and orange juice until noon, Bloody Marys for lunch, vodka and soda water until bedtime. And she never left for work without a one-litre thermos of strong tea rectified with rum.

  For a beginner, Ann Randall had been quick to find her cruising speed.

  But alcohol represented only the first stage in an ambitious strategy. Ann Randall went on to eliminate her legendary program of domestic self-sufficiency in foodstuffs. Out went the bags of rice, protein supplements and four-litre jugs of water. Frozen food made a triumphant breakthrough in the Randall fridge: egg rolls, pizza (mini, pocket and traditional), chicken wings, apple turnovers and other edibles brimming with glucose, butylated hydroxytoluene, hydrogenated vegetable oil and Red E123.

  And as if this dramatic shift were not enough, Ann Randall started to smoke two packs of Craven “A” per day, not to mention a substantial number of Gauloises (from which she removed the filters), menthol cigarettes and some foul cigarillos laced with port.

  She smoked and gorged and imbibed with painstaking fervour, as if she were trying against all odds to set off her own personal apocalypse incrementally. One day at a time.

  Hope had stopped administering the clozapine. Not only did the dosage appear to be entirely inappropriate but there was the steadily growing risk of a harmful reaction with the alcohol. Having flushed the last pills down the toilet, she kept her fingers crossed.

  Ann Randall nevertheless continued to mutter in Sumerian when she slept. Somewhere under the surface, remnants of the young Yarmouth librarian endured.

  32. TEXTURE

  There were ten minutes left before math class and I walked Hope back to her locker, where she’d forgotten her calculator.

  We headed down to the main floor, carried along by the surge of students crowding the stairway. At certain times our feet didn’t even touch the ground; we constituted a single carefree mass of hormones and muscles. One false step and we’d be swallowed up and mashed like potatoes.

  While we fought for our lives, I asked how Ann Randall was doing. Any better? Hope shrugged—she couldn’t really say. More and more she had the impression of living with a stranger, certainly easier to get along with than the previous stranger, but hardly easier to understand.

  Actually, Hope was beginning to suspect that the amnesia was long term, as if her mother had deleted large tracts of her memory. Hope had tried to talk to her about Yarmouth, about their frantic departure, but gotten nowhere. And there was no way of determining whether Ann Randall had forgotten or if she simply refused to touch on the subject.

  “Maybe she never really knew why exactly we left Yarmouth.”

  “Elementary, my dear Watson. Because we were destined to meet!”

  Hope rolled her eyes with a smile of despair.

  We arrived at her locker and she began to hunt through the clutter for her calculator. As I watched her digging, I thought of the months of strain she’d been under
and marvelled at her ability to keep a cool head at all times. Her mental health was evidently much stronger than her mother’s. So, in the end, maybe the Randall family was not completely hopeless.

  While I was having these comforting thoughts, I noticed a sort of texture covering the entire inner surface of her locker. At first I supposed it was wallpaper, but it was hardly her style to indulge in frivolous ornamentation.

  The strange pattern had actually been written out in felt pen—a skein of hundreds and hundreds of words. But when I looked closer I realized that the words were actually numbers, always exactly the same numbers manically scribbled thousands of times:

  17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001

  33. IN FRIENDLY TERRITORY