NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  ‘No one slept, Paul! No one I talked to slept a wink last night. It wasn’t just you and me. Didn’t you go out? Didn’t you even check the fucking news online?’

  ‘I was—’

  ‘It’s all over everything!’ For a moment I thought she would actually stamp her foot in vexation. As for the news, I still hadn’t digested it—it was still too wriggling and wet to swallow.

  ‘Nobody slept last night, Paul. In. The. Whole. Fucking. World. No one! Well, no. Sarah said she heard on the radio that some people say they slept. Maybe one in a thousand. The radio said the grid crashed in California for four hours because of everyone keeping their lights and TVs on all night. Everybody’s totally freaking out about it. Didn’t you hear anything? I feel like I’m going insane, having to tell you all this!’

  She fell onto the couch beside me and began texting with one hand while throwing her other arm over my shoulder, not especially affectionately, but more as a part of the general sprawl of her moment.

  ‘So fucking weird. So fucking creepy.’

  I tried to make sense of what she’d just said as her fingers hen-pecked my T-shirt and her phone shuddered. Then she pivoted her head and looked directly at me for the first time since she’d arrived home, her eyes, faintly red-rimmed, locking onto mine.

  ‘Paul. Did you sleep last night?’

  I should tell you about my dream now.

  In it, I’m walking along the University of British Columbia’s West Mall, near the clock tower outside Main Library. On the mall itself stand two ten-foot high cones constructed from long, tapered sheets of mirrored glass. As I pass the south cone, I catch the sun’s reflected light, strobing from mirror to mirror. And then the cone explodes with a yawn—like the world is ending, not with a bang or a whimper, but an early bedtime. The sheets of glass don’t shatter, they disassemble and drift off into a burning blue sky. Then slowly, I turn toward the library. Everything is floating: trees, people, benches, windows, walls. The pavement beneath my feet gives way, and I tumble into space. The clock tower follows suit, its massive black hands wheeling off in different directions.

  Then everything fades until all that’s left is the sky and me. My body dissolves next and the sky becomes an all-encompassing sphere of golden light. And then, after a while longer, I disappear and there’s just the light, an awareness of light. I’m seeing it, but not through eyes, or as if my eyes were all pupil, if that makes any sense. And then time disappears and words cease to be and the light lasts forever. I experience eternity, but still somehow wake up in the morning with a hard-on and a gnawing stomach.

  I’ve had variations on that same dream every night since that first one when Tanya tossed and turned beside me, and it’s the most joyous thing I’ve ever experienced [here I pause, pencil in hand, for a full five minutes before continuing]…despite it all.

  By way of compensation, perhaps, bad news gives us a license to overeat. Screw the Friday night sushi, Tanya and I decided. Instead, we went all the way back to our sunburned suburban childhoods—to McDonald’s, in other words—and got ourselves two nosebags filled with hot grease and salt. The place was packed: the floor gritty, the air humid with human heat. No one in the long queue was particularly hungry; we just wanted to eat something, all our faces fixed on the same goal of semi-oblivion through satiation. Emergency room bravado and sombre denial predominated; people studied the menu board with furrowed brows and gnawed lips.

  ‘What do you want, babe?’ Ahead of us, a fat man in an irony-free tracksuit spoke to his companion, a woman sporting an identical outfit, her hair pulled back into a severe ponytail.

  ‘A number two. Diet Coke.’

  Just go ahead and order the sugary stuff, I wanted to tell her. I caught Tanya watching me. She winked, and we burst into guilty giggles.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ the woman turned and sniffed, suspecting, correctly, that she was.

  ‘Nothing,’ Tanya replied, poker-faced. ‘Obviously there’s nothing funny.’

  The crowd stared daggers.

  After McDonald’s, we picked up some Ben and Jerry’s at the packed Safeway then went home and watched the news, gobbling down burgers and fries from our laps while, on a parallel track, we gorged on information.

  The pundits and experts were trout on the dock, flopping back and forth in iridescent suits, carping up theories as to why this was happening, the very dearth of facts goading them on. But what does a flopping trout know about why? A maniacal cavalcade of ideas was spilling out of their mouths: a solar storm had kept us awake all night; magical mystery waves broadcast by cunning terrorists were to blame! Microwave overload!

  Tanya watched with blazing eyes and hunched shoulders, nodding occasionally. I put my arm around her shoulders and rubbed her neck. Every time I tried to speak she shushed me.

  The television’s caffeinated universe kept unfolding. The flesh-draped skulls of the anchormen and women yammered, and their joke shop teeth chattered. And their eyes! You’d have to handle those twitching eyes carefully if you ever found them in the palms of your hot little hands: you’d have to fight the urge to squeeze their jelly till it squished between your fingers. The men and women on TV were brazen heads. Of Irish derivation, a brazen head was omniscient and told those who consulted it whatever they needed to know, past, present, or future: ‘let there be a brazen head set in the middle of the place…out of which cast flames of fire’. Isn’t that television, exactly? In the centre of things, burning away?

  ‘They’re panicking,’ Tanya whispered.

  ‘Yes, they are.’

  ‘They don’t know any more than we do.’

  ‘No.’

  Her cheeks were blotchy and red. ‘Then why don’t they just shut up?’

  On and on through the evening, the Brazen Heads parroted possible explanations that you just knew had been made up moments earlier by other similarly panicked mammals pacing around off-screen. There was consensus on only one point: eight billion cases of insomnia were no coincidence. The odds were on the order of googles and googles to one. It might even have been, as the televangelists and their milky ilk were claiming, the righteous wrath of Great God Almighty, although this theory annoyed me more than the others. If there is a God, then why isn’t the presence of His hand acknowledged in everything? Why do we only drag God in when something cool happens (and make no mistake, the unspoken consensus that evening was that the whole mess was sci fi blockbuster cool)? Why don’t people talk about God when McDonald’s sells another cheeseburger? Methinks ‘tis God’s doing, this sweaty pattie! Yon pimpled youth in the paper cap is naught but his instrument! Some do! Some people watch granny die, writhing in the arms of cancer, and think that’s just fine, part of some big plan. They sound like abuse survivors to me. That said, I suppose my God-unease is similar to my squeamishness about birds: the handlessness of God. I suppose that any of those theories might have been right, but even that first evening I sensed that no explanation was headed our way. What was happening was just a fact. And we weren’t a species interested in facts, as such. We were more into evading or spinning them.

  At any rate, it all came down to Tonight—all the Heads seemed confident about that much. What would happen tonight when we all laid our heads down and either said our prayers or didn’t?

  Translucent bags emptied and tossed, Tanya and I salved our salt-scraped tongues with ice cream straight from the bucket. As I ate, I imagined melting goop filtering down among mulched burgers and fries, filling the gaps and soothing my moaning gut.

  With our stomachs bloated and the television and the Internet going at it so hot and heavy, the living room soon felt crowded.

  ‘Maybe we should go into the kitchen and leave the laptop and the plasma alone,’ I said.

  ‘I almost turned on the radio five minutes ago. I’m so stupid.’

  She laughed, but only for a moment, then I spoke into the silence that followed.

  ‘It’s weird how we can do that.’

  ‘W
hat?’

  ‘Laugh at ourselves.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I turned off the television and the room was instantly too silent.

  ‘It’s like each of us are two people, one watching the other.’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I think I get it. Our world,’ she threw an arm toward the black screen, which stood there looking for all the world like the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey tipped over on its side, ‘is getting fucked over, but we’re also watching it getting fucked over.’

  I nodded. ‘So there’s us getting fucked over and there’s also us watching ourselves getting fucked over.’

  ‘Christ, no wonder I can’t sleep. But is the part of me that’s watching myself get fucked over also getting fucked over, Paul?’

  It was a good question, I think now. Maybe a great one.

  As awareness swelled, tumour-like, in the global consciousness, Tanya’s Tinkerbell of a cell phone chimed and shimmied, impelled by all the usual suspects: our parents back in Toronto, her friends and workmates. My mom cried the whole time we spoke while my dad affected a casual dismissiveness about the whole thing that he clearly didn’t feel. They weren’t different from their normal selves, but neither were they the same. It was as though the volume of their usual personalities had been turned up so high that they were hissing and crackling like a cheap radio at top volume. Indeed, everyone we spoke to that night was nervous and jokey, but circumstance made humour seem like a sinister thing—a guttering cackle etching air in the absence of sense.

  At the end of each conversation we said our goodbyes as lightly as we could, but the silences around those words were formal—airless and still.

  And yet.

  And yet, at the same time, the whole thing was also kind of exciting. Don’t be coy; you know what I mean. Tiny disasters—lost kittens, sobbing moppets—could rend our hearts, but the massive ones inevitably became popcorn-munching spectacles.

  Viva, some part of our brain always cries, calamity. Which may be at least partly why calamity always seemed to find us.

  And here’s the worst part. Listening to Tanya’s conversations as she told friends and relatives about my sleeping, I actually felt myself puffing up a little. How pathetic was that? It turned out that no-one else we knew had slept. I was tempted to feel as though I’d done something special by dozing off. It’s shameful how we feed on our own scraps of press: the survivor of the mass shooting, the lottery winner, the reality show contestant, the writer of wildly unpopular books on words.

  It was almost midnight when we went and looked out the window to see what we feared to see: the blood in our world’s stool. All the city’s lights were blazing.

  We stood there holding hands, feeling each other’s poignant skeletons through layers of skin and fat, a nexus of warmth building up between our fingers and palms. We really were creatures of pure energy, I remember thinking, just like the hippies and the physicists had always claimed—beings made up of ‘energy’ and ‘wave lengths’ and ‘vibes’, so ephemeral that the swishing of a dryer sheet might neutralize our charges and erase us. Feeling so temporary and fragile was nice; the moment felt valuable.

  Tanya squeezed my hand then let go. ‘I’d better try to go to sleep. I’m nervous.’

  ‘Let’s both go to bed.’

  We headed off to the erstwhile big top of our bedroom, took off everything, and pressed our bodies together between the sheets, gerbils in a pet store cage trying to douse our minds and vanish beneath the gaze of incomprehensible giants.

  ‘You sleepy?’ I asked as the sheets warmed around us.

  Her voice was tiny. ‘No. Are you?’

  Compassion is—pretty often—omission. I pulled her close, placing my hand over one of her ears, and pressing the other into my chest. And then I yawned.

  I think now that if all eight billion of us had just shut off the lights and gone to bed that night and left it alone we’d have all slept and the chalice would have passed us by. But let’s be real. Whoever leaves anything alone? Life’s a scab, and it’s our nature to pick at it until it bleeds.

  DAY 2: John a’ Dreams

  A begging imposter, naked vagabond

  When I woke the next morning it was full daylight and Tanya’s side of the bed was a mortuary slab of absence. I found her in the living room. Where the previous morning she’d looked pregnant with unwanted knowledge, she now looked as though she’d given birth, misplaced the baby, and been up all night trying frantically to remember where she’d left it. Was it in the fridge? The laundry hamper? The microwave?

  The laptop was open on her blushing bare knees; her eyes were Google goggles.

  ‘How long have you been up?’ I asked. Then, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No. It’s good that one of us could sleep.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Nothing. ‘Listen, you’re just freaked out. You’ll sleep when you’re tired enough. Everybody will. It’s just a…’

  Tanya stared down at her laptop, thighs quaking. She pressed down on them, but her hands just started shaking too.

  ‘Do you know how long I have left, Paul? If I don’t sleep?’

  ‘I don’t want to go in that dir—’

  ‘Thirty two days. Or less. That’s what they’re saying. Five more days until something called ‘sleep deprivation psychosis’ sets in. Until I go insane, Paul.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. Lots of people have insomnia and they don’t go crazy.’

  ‘No. They say even insomniacs doze a little, but this is different. For the last two nights I’ve been completely awake, all night long. I don’t even feel sleepy. So six days to insanity, then thirty two days, max, until total body breakdown and death. Watch. This guy’s been on like every five minutes.’

  She stabbed the remote at the Monolith, upping the volume. Some lab rat gussied up in a white coat. Bulging eyes, thick eyebrows, and fat lips. I couldn’t stand to see the self-importance in his eyes.

  ‘He says they’ve done studies where they’ve tried to see how long they can keep people awake, but nobody’s ever been able to handle more than six days totally awake before their brains shut down. He thinks that—’

  ‘Turn it off.’

  ‘But I’m not—’

  I grabbed the remote, cutting off both Tanya and the rat.

  ‘Let’s go out and get some breakfast.’

  She didn’t say a word as we dressed. I grabbed a printout of my latest draft of Nod, and we headed for the nameless greasy spoon where we ate breakfast once a month or so. Eggs, hash browns, toast, and unlimited coffee, all for five dollars a head. Battery eggs, white bread, waxy cheese: the place was a hate crime against both nature and nutrition. The food tasted terrible, too—‘food in only the strictest technical sense of the word’ was how Tanya put it—but the soup kitchen pricing kept us coming back, balanced out the expense of our Friday night sushi fest.

  It was a joke between us how we could never remember what the place was called. In fact, it had become our custom to lower our eyes when we approached the restaurant’s faded green awning; we didn’t want to spoil the fun. The Saturday Breakfast was also a chance for me to run my latest pages past Tanya. And even though this clearly wasn’t a normal Saturday morning, it seemed necessary to pretend that it was.

  The streets were quiet. Not quiet as in empty, but quiet as in lots of people, but nobody saying much. Bright and blustery, then, as we glided down Denman Street among the human beings, none of us fooling anyone with our poorly-performed pantomimes of normalcy. During the early days of colonization, native people, on the verge of starvation and comically outgunned by European religious maniacs, would sometimes profess religious conversion in order to obtain food staples for themselves and their children. In return, our ancestors mocked their desperation by calling them Rice Christians. Well, that morning in Vancouver we were all Rice Christians, treading lightly, hoping not to piss God off. Which was a good thing because all around us was a city of glass.

  Green g
lass apartment towers in the background of every breeze-blown view, big glass fronts on all the stores—the West End was a place where everybody wanted to see and be seen: a place for promenading, for reflections and transparency. All that glass added up to a kind of war cry: this is how mighty we are, this is how bold: we’ll build a city out of glass on the edge of the ocean, God, and dare you to smash it down. No fear of insurrection or weather, of hurricanes or invasion, the towers declared in their gargantuan fragility. The wind was a mere amusement, a pretend-wind threading its way between the skyscrapers like a clown with a handful of balloons weaving through a birthday party. And in the face of all this smiling glass, the people walking by had seemed indestructible, as dense and centred as black holes. Until this morning. Now the city had tipped somehow and we were all slowly sliding toward English Bay.

  Strangeness glazed all the normal sights; everything looked the same as before, but no one could have taken in the scene and not known something was very different. This morning we were a city of glassy eyes.

  ‘Those guys,’ Tanya whispered, pointing to a gay couple and their matching black labs, ‘They aren’t walking their dogs. Their dogs are walking them.’

  And I saw it, literally saw her metaphor made real. The dogs looked calm and confident while the humans attached to the other end of their leashes were mere dragged baggage.

  What else? I looked around.

  All eyes were directed inward; everyone had their introspecs on. As we passed silent bakeries and cafes we could see money changing hands; we could hear the clink of coins being counted then splatting onto marble counters. People hunched across tables, reading one another’s lips.

  ‘As if what they’re whispering about isn’t exactly what everyone else is whispering about,’ Tanya said loudly, causing a few heads to turn, first toward us—then quickly away.