NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  Reaching the restaurant, we sat down at a table by the open front window and ordered from the waitress. She was a tank-faced woman of Slavic descent who looked like she’d spent her youth being fed steroids in some old Soviet bloc waitress training facility. Then we settled into silence, scrutinizing our cutlery. Some mornings there’d be dried egg yolk on the tines of one of our forks, and we’d call the waitress over. She’d replace the utensil without apology, indeed, with something verging on contempt for our bourgeois, our kulak squeamishness.

  I turned my knife in the sun, and as it flashed I remembered my dream. Two nights in a row. I was just going to tell Tanya about it when I saw, heading straight toward us, Charles.

  How to introduce Charles into this narrative?

  While my lack of enthusiasm kept the bulk of humanity at arm’s length, it almost seemed to attract people like Charles. Maybe it’s the fact that we misanthropes don’t discriminate—the people hater hates everybody equally. Maybe this sad sack egalitarianism makes the Charleses of the world, used as they are to being dismissed out of hand, feel raised to uncommon heights of social desirability when bathed in its jaundiced glow.

  Charles smelled bad. What more do I really need to say? He was an outsider always looking for a way in. But no one would let him in. Instead, we relegated him to the status of dumpster diving ‘local character’. As though he were fictional.

  I can say of myself that I have no time for people until I understand them, and then I whiplash all the way from contempt to pity. A shitty way to live: the worst of everything. Contempt is bad, but pity’s worse. Pity’s sticky: it clings to the poor fool who presumes to be in a safe enough place from whence to do the commiserating.

  ‘Oh shit.’ Tanya had seen him.

  ‘Hey, Paul.’ Charles spoke to me but looked down at the empty chair beside her.

  ‘Hi Charles.’

  I’d never learned his last name; we’d never been introduced. I only knew his first name because people spoke about him behind his back when he left the table. Always Charles. Never Chuck, never Charlie. The formality a shuffling away.

  ‘How’s the new book coming, Paul?’

  Involuntarily, I glanced down at my manuscript on the chair beside me and prayed he wouldn’t notice it. Charles knew I wrote. Had checked my books out from the Joe Fortes library where he and dozens of other floaters spent their days. Checked them out and, oddly enough, read them.

  ‘Slow.’ He probably thought the whole world spoke in Tarzan-like monosyllables. But you couldn’t shut him down with curt replies—brevity just opened up more space for his words.

  ‘Okay if I sit?’ he asked, preemptively folding himself into an empty chair.

  Charles had the red plastic face of someone who lived rough. His expression was friendly, but fixed that way, as though with bobby pins or staples. He was fairly tall but came across short, with all the awkwardness and crumpledness that entails—like a hinged skeleton you pull out of a cardboard box each Halloween and half-heartedly thumbtack to your front door.

  ‘How’s Miss Soviet Union 1962 this morning?’

  As he said this, Charles glanced around to make sure the waitress wasn’t near. He was invoking a triangle of intimacy: we three were talking about her. She was the outsider, not him.

  ‘She’s okay.’

  ‘You’re too nice. I bet she’s not going to sell much coffee this morning.’

  ‘It’s not funny, Charles,’ Tanya said, as though to a floor-peeing puppy.

  ‘Starbucks is going to be empty today. And I quote, “The New York Times reports that the American Starbucks chain has been forced to shut down a thousand outlets in the last year.” And that was before. People are no longer buying into—. It’s definitely a broadcast from the new Russian-Chinese satellite string, Paul. It’s like something out of an Ian Fleming novel.’ He pronounced it ‘Fleeming’. ‘They’re disrupting our brainwaves with some sort of static. We’ll start to panic and the markets will fall apart, just like after 911, then after a couple of days they’ll march in and buy us all up. It’s so obvious.’

  ‘Yeah, but the Chinese aren’t sleeping either. So where does that leave you?’

  The waitress slapped our plates down on the table.

  ‘No. No satellite. God.’

  We all stared as sunlight made brutal cement of her skin.

  ‘And why would God do this to us?’ Charles said finally, supercilious for my benefit.

  ‘Because of faggots and terrorists and the shit television, stupid street bum. God is telling us no rest for the wicked. Now He will see who listens to Him.’

  She folded tuberous arms across her chest. There was no room for the conditional or hypothetical in the woman’s English; she was all declaratives and imperatives.

  It was too much for Tanya, who had no time for Bible babblers, having been raised by a couple and having moved across a continent to escape their take on bliss.

  ‘You keep your hateful opinions to yourself, or I’ll talk to the owner.’

  There was spittle on Tanya’s lower lip, and she wiped it away without self-consciousness.

  The waitress smirked.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said, then turned and left us.

  ‘Fuck you too, bitch!’ Tanya screamed after her, a single vein throbbing blue in the centre of her forehead.

  ‘Can you believe that?’ Charles asked me eagerly. ‘What do you think about all this, Paul? You look pretty well-rested. Did you sl—?’

  ‘And fuck you too, Charles.’ Tanya whirled back around.

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Nobody asked you to join us. Nobody ever asks you to join them. Ever shut up long enough to wonder why?’

  Charles jumped up, hiding his hands behind his back, like he’d been bad.

  ‘I didn’t mean to intrude,’ he said, his face growing redder.

  Tanya laughed, possessed by the cruel ghost of two nights’ lost sleep.

  ‘Intrude. Please. Disturbing people is all you ever do. Don’t insult us by pretending you don’t know that.’

  ‘Tanya…’ I began.

  ‘Tanya,’ she mimicked. ‘Am I wrong? Is he welcome? Did you want him to come over? Shall we order him the Special?’

  Charles backed across the room, his eyes fixed on mine, bumping into chair after chair until he disappeared out a back door that led into the alley. We sat silently, Tanya staring at her congealing food and me at mine. The egg yolks were lemon meringue where they should have been tangerine. A vision of caged, armless mothers flashed through my mind, but I shook it off.

  ‘Did you have to do that?’

  ‘He was going to ask you if you were a Sleeper.’

  And that was the first time I heard the word used in its new sense—capitalized. Had Tanya picked it up off the television or had she coined it herself? Or were a few billion frazzled brains simultaneously beginning to name this new reality?

  ‘So?’

  ‘I just didn’t think it was a good idea to tell him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know why not, Paul. No reason I guess. But fuck him anyway. I don’t have time for it. Let’s just eat.’

  We did our best with the food we’d been given but only managed crusts and coffee. After a while, one of us, I can’t remember who, said, ‘This is only the beginning, isn’t it?’

  We both looked around then and the restaurant was empty, no waitress, no Charles, no other customers. Just like no one had set foot in the place for a thousand years.

  DAY 3: Nails Driven Into Cottage Walls

  This was a Roman practice under the notion

  that it kept off the plague.

  At 8am the next morning something called the International Microwave Communication Ban went into effect. Someone in an office somewhere took a deep breath, exhaled and flipped a switch. Instantly, ISPs and cell service providers around the world went down. More switches were flipped and the landlines went silent too. The night before, posters had gone
up all over the city announcing that Xbox controllers and garage door openers were now verboten. The idea was to bring down the walls of static that permeated our lives and see if we could unclench our brains and snooze in the resulting stillness.

  Then, at 8:01, it hit me. Tanya and I were on our own. The network of threads binding us to family and friends had been torn down. Suddenly distance became real, probably for the first time in our lives. Toronto was infinitely distant and even the condos of friends across English Bay seemed impossibly far away.

  Was it time to mourn yet? Almost, almost.

  Although the ban was UN-sanctioned and backed by the threat of military force, there were rumours that Russia and China weren’t playing fair, that they were keeping an electronic exoskeleton of services online in order to avoid what would have to be devastating impacts on their economic, military, and political infrastructures. No doubt they were—and no doubt we were too.

  At 9am uniforms appeared. The police, the army, the fire brigade, and for all I knew, the SPCA—the powers-that-be deployed anyone who could lay their hands on some sort of official-looking outfit into the streets. Vans with antennae cruised past slow and coy, followed by jeeps loaded down with gum-chewing reservists. Why did good-hearted Canadian boys, brought up with the sweet succor of liberal marijuana laws and universal health care, suddenly look so badass and American the moment you slapped a uniform on their backs and handed them a pack of Juicy Fruit?

  I was out there in the thick of it, trying to get to the Safeway to stock up on provisions. There was a lineup of around five hundred people outside of the store. People were being admitted in groups of ten by a group of soldiers at the door. ‘Cash only’ read a handwritten sign, inevitable now that credit and debit cards were defunct. And how long until the centuries-long spell was broken, money turned back into paper, and we reverted to bartering eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth?

  ‘Any idea how long it takes to get in?’ I asked the woman ahead of me.

  She didn’t reply but simply shook her head stiffly and shuffled forward.

  The answer was it took three hours.

  When I finally reached the door, my entry was blocked by a pock-marked soldier with a twitch in his eyes that made me think he was winking ironically each time he spoke.

  ‘Arms up.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He patted me down, pulled my cell phone out of my jacket pocket, and tossed it into a pile of electronic devices behind him. A half million dollars’ worth of high tech goodies reduced to the status of broken old Transformers toys.

  ‘Why are you taking them? They don’t work anyway.’

  ‘Got cash?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fifty or sixty bucks.’

  He snorted. ‘That should get you a pack of bologna. Happy shopping.’

  He stood aside, and I went in.

  I soon saw what he meant. All the nicely-printed shelf tags had been pulled off and prices written directly on the goods in red felt pen. They were now roughly triple what they’d been two days ago. At least capitalism was still alive and functioning properly. The thought of that invisible hand still busily bitch-slapping the poor and desperate was almost reassuring. After all, in order to muster up the will to profiteer, one needs to be able to envision a future in which to spend one’s ill-gotten gains.

  The shelves were rapidly emptying. I checked my wallet and thought fast. My three twenty dollar bills weren’t going to go far, so I had to think protein. More than that, I had to think unpopular protein. In the peanut butter section, a T-shirt-shredding fist fight had broken out between two burly men. A shattered glass jar lay on the floor between them as they wrestled above the slimy, jagged mess.

  In the ethnic aisle I got lucky and caught sight of a half dozen jars of tahini at the back of a top shelf. Survival of the tallest. I grabbed four—all I could afford. Then, clutching the jars to my chest, I pushed my way toward the checkout stand.

  Coming out of the store I saw that the line had now swelled to a couple of thousand panicky people who were surging forward against the line of soldiers. Something ugly was going to happen soon. An idea had to be growing in that massive line up: why pay when every defenseless person leaving the store with an armful of groceries is a sort of walking Food Bank?

  Not liking my chances of making it safely through the parking lot with my meagre purchases, I took a hard right and headed around the side of the building, stuffing the jars of tahini into my jacket and zipping it up tight.

  The loading zone behind the building was deserted except for a dreadlocked young woman and her kindergarten-aged daughter who sat on a low kerb. The mother looked to be the sort of ersatz hippie whose long skirt and high-maintenance hair were about all that separated her from a typical welfare mom. She was crying openly, while her daughter stared at me, unfazed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, fatally.

  ‘Three guys. They took our food and ran off that way.’ She pointed toward the parking lot, screamed ‘Fucking bastards!!’ then covered her face and sobbed some more. Was her story true? Did it matter?

  ‘Here.’ I unzipped my jacket and took out a jar, giving it to the little girl. That old devil pity. ‘Do you live far from here?’

  ‘Two blocks.’ She answered cautiously, seemingly afraid that I was about to appoint myself their protector and house guest.

  ‘Then get going and lock the doors behind you when you get there.’

  She still looked suspicious. ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  They got up to leave, but I stopped them, took out another jar and handed it to the little girl. She smiled up at me but said nothing.

  ‘Is your daughter okay?’ I asked.

  ‘She hasn’t said a word in two days. But she still—’

  Deciding against sharing the obvious fact that her daughter still slept, the woman grabbed the child’s hand, and they turned and ran.

  Walking home was like visiting a rapidly-degenerating patient in intensive care. Commerce was almost done; the chain stores were down for the count but some mom and pop places were still open, but warily, looking at the sidewalks through slitted windows, though they had little left to sell except for magazines and car air fresheners.

  Menace was in the air. I didn’t see anything youtube-worthy, but the indefinable strangeness I’d noticed when Tanya and I went out for breakfast the day before had grown a little less indefinable overnight. People’s faces were the big indicators of what was going on. People’s faces looked like shit. Men weren’t shaving and women weren’t doing their hair. Everything and everyone was starting to look slightly greasy. Slightly off-one’s-meds and teetering-on-the-edge-of-one’s-rocker. And cops. There were cops and soldiers everywhere. They clutched guns and stood in clusters on the corners, waiting, blue and green. Shattered cell phones like smashed candy on the pavement.

  That night Tanya started begging me for sex.

  I hope that doesn’t sound even slightly erotic because I do mean begging. She’d become obsessed by the idea that if I could only fuck her into insensibility, she’d break through whatever wall of static surrounded her and sleep. And she had support in this belief: in the twenty-first century there was always plenty of support for any old thing you might care to have a crack at believing. The previous day she’d been glued to the television, watching, transfixed, as people called into talk shows and claimed in loud voices that they’d made themselves sleep through any number of methods, sex marathons being fourth on the list, right after drinking, praying, and drugging. What was fifth? I can’t remember. Maybe shopping. The sleep-claimers were all crackpots, needless to say, but it didn’t matter: crackpotism was going mainstream. I imagined the next issue of Cosmopolitan, if it ever came out: 50 Hot New Ways to Screw Yourself into Dreamland!

  ‘Paul. Fuck me.’

  Without waiting for a reply, she marched into the bedroom and stripped. I hesitated in the doorway as she knelt on the mattress, hands clasped before h
er, forehead resting on her knuckles, offering up her pale ass. She looked like a pantomime horse: her rear half ready for fornication, her front seemingly engaged in prayer. Confronted by the odd couple of her dishevelled vagina and sternly puckered asshole, I bit my lower lip and looked away. Nobody wants sex to be too naked. Not completely naked. It was a terrible moment, almost awful enough to wipe away other, better memories of our lovemaking.

  ‘Come on!’

  I can still hear the contempt in her voice. At times everyone wonders how deeply buried contempt is beneath the surface of their friends’ and lovers’ smiles; most of us suspect—accurately, I believe—that it lies in a shallow grave, gasping for breath beneath a damp mulch of manners and restraint. Was there ever such a thing as unconditional love? It’s hard to say, given that those closest to us always seemed to want or need the most. The purest love we ever had was probably for strangers or imaginary people: for Mother Theresa or Santa Claus. Or babies, before they got branded or tattooed with identity, or old people after theirs had been spayed and neutered by dementia or waning libido.

  I have a theory. By now this won’t surprise you. My theory is that we needed love because we were so hard to like. Simple, huh? We’re so unworthy of anything, so wavering, so temporary. All love was pain in that it was rooted in pity for our wretched souls. And yet, only love could hope to hold us together. And without love?

  ‘Come on.’

  Contempt pooling. Deepening. It isn’t her, I told myself. It’s just what’s happening to her. To us.

  ‘Tanya, I can’t just—’

  ‘Remember that afternoon at the Pan Pacific last summer?’ she asked, twisting around to scowl at me over one freckled shoulder.

  The Pan Pacific was a luxury hotel beloved of rich Asian tourists and lumpy old we-earned-it-so-now-we-better-spend-it Canadians in town for some high-end shopping. It was only five blocks from our apartment, but once in a while we treated ourselves to a night there, considering the erotic jumpstart of an unfamiliar bed well worth the expense. Those elegant rooms must have been invisibly splattered with decades and gallons of cum and sweat, no doubt, and vomit and shit and tears. But you couldn’t see any of that and the room was always new to us when we knelt on the bed, facing one another.