NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  Our footsteps as we minced along sounded like boots trudging through crusted snow. There were people everywhere, leaning against doorways, sitting on benches and staring, acres of space around them all, all of them looking like leftovers pushed to the back of the fridge.

  Two police cars moved slowly down the street as we turned onto Davie, heading east. All the other vehicles, many of them with their windshields smashed and their roofs caved in, were parked or abandoned in the middle of the road.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Those fucking maniacs.’ She screamed the last word over her shoulder then turned back to me. ‘Listen, we’ve got to get you to St. Paul’s. That’s at least fifteen blocks away. Do you think you can walk that far? I don’t think we’ll be able to—there aren’t any cabs.’

  Her voice was pulling me back from wherever I’d been.

  ‘I’ll try.’

  Dusk, the Blindman’s Holiday. Too dark to work by daylight and too soon to light candles. A rheumy-eyed mutt stood in the middle of the sidewalk watching us. He didn’t move, so we stepped around him. Dogs behave differently at night than they do during the day. Not just now: it’s always been that way. At night the ones that have a bone to pick with humankind come growling a little nearer than they would in full sunlight while the frightened, shrinking ones slink a little deeper into the shadows. Now the same thing was happening to the people.

  With the deepening of evening, some of the shadowy figures we encountered looked away when I glanced in their direction while others stared back hard, their pupils black and sharp. A week ago I would have thought they were playing tough, but now I saw that it was more than that. They were trying to make us into objects, to force our eyes down and strip away our humanity. Look down and lose or stare back and be prepared for a fight? The old urban conundrum had taken on a sinister new urgency; choices that, until a few days ago, had only to be made in crack alleys or biker bars were now popping up, like toadstools, all around us.

  Tanya stopped. Unprepared, I stumbled against her. She turned and searched my eyes.

  ‘What’s with you, Paul?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What I mean is you’re not showing any emotion. That fucking gym ape back there was going to kill you. You know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you’re not that brave. You should be shaking in your boots.’

  She was pushing at buttons, hoping to trigger some outrage, but I didn’t have any to offer her.

  ‘I know that too.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The beating didn’t hurt. And it didn’t scare me. I don’t know why.’

  She rubbed her temples with the tips of her fingers, then spoke through gritted teeth. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. You’re supposed to be taking care of me! What am I doing babysitting you?’

  She was right, of course. And that hurt, even if the beating hadn’t. There were black rings under Tanya’s eyes, and her makeup was poorly applied, resulting in a kind of fuzziness around her face that made it hard for me to look at her. It was time to man up and play the strong, silent part. There was no way I could tell her about the Blemmye now. Thinking of the absurdity of the situation I laughed, as much from a dearth of options as from any other cause.

  ‘What’s so fucking funny, Paul?’ Tanya pushed me away and stepped back in revulsion. ‘It’s not funny!

  I slumped, clenching my stomach muscles to keep myself upright.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing’s funny. Just like at McDonald’s the other night. Let’s just keep moving.’

  Down a side street a group of young men were walking in our direction, hooting, but not, so far as I could see, at us. Not yet. Suddenly I was very much aware of Tanya’s attractiveness—that and the limp that marked me as easy prey.

  I started doing my best to feign a normal stride. On the next block, a tall man in a dirty woollen overcoat, hair long and stringy, leaned against the brick wall of a bank next to a darkened ATM, watching us. He could have been a hobo, could have been a poseur; for years it had been getting harder and harder to tell the difference. When we passed him, he began to follow, stopping when we stopped, walking when we walked.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ Tanya yelled at one point.

  He didn’t reply, just stood there, watching us and breathing with his whole body.

  After a while we ignored him. Lions and gazelles on the Serengeti. I ask you: what else was there to do?

  By the time we were a block from Burrard Street and the hospital, it was dark. We passed through the parking lot of a locked-down Shopper’s Drug Mart, its barred windows and doors a set of gritted teeth. I glanced over at Tanya.

  A red dot was bobbing on her forehead.

  ‘There’s some sort of light shining on your face,’ I whispered. ‘I think it’s a laser sight.’

  She wrinkled her brow. ‘What are you…?’

  ‘Look.’ Grunting, I pulled her to one side and stuck my free hand up in the air to catch the firefly.

  For a moment she stared at the red spot wriggling on my palm, still not comprehending. Then, in tandem, we looked up into the forest of blind skyscrapers that surrounded us.

  ‘Where’s it coming from?’ she whispered.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I dropped my hand a half a heartbeat before a patch of the asphalt behind us shattered. The red light began to dance crazily on the ground. Another shot. And then another.

  Tanya grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the loading dock at the rear of the hospital. A fourth shot, this time right in front of us. Blinded by grit from the flying asphalt we stopped and turned, ants thwarted by a small boy’s hand. We made as if to move toward the drug store, but the red dot shook its head while our feet lurched this way and that inside shoes that seemed glued to the ground.

  Then the light was gone, and we heard laughter.

  At first I thought it was the invisible gunman, but it wasn’t him—it was the guy in the trench coat who’d been following us. He was standing in the middle of the parking lot, about thirty feet behind us, dancing with the beam of light. The red spot travelled a ticklish path up and down his torso, then across his face. He’d step and the light would move to him. He laughed and nodded at us and didn’t seem so threatening anymore; he looked like he wanted us to be in on the joke.

  Then the light fixed on his chest. A fifth shot and he fell, breakdancing in black blood.

  We didn’t try to help him. Whatever that says about us, the thought didn’t even enter our heads. Instead, we ran for the shelter of the hospital. Tanya was ahead of me, still holding my hand, and I saw the red dot trace a slash across the back of her T-shirt. But there were no more shots and we made it to the cover of the loading dock. Perhaps the gunman had become entranced by the game he was playing, had been unwilling to reload as that would have meant calling off his red light for a few seconds. That’s what probably saved us. That and our cowardice.

  The emergency ward opened onto the hospital’s lobby, which was cordoned off by a grim line of soldiers sporting identical guns and faces, anonymous and grey. There was some lighting—obviously a hospital would have its own generator—but not much. Every third fixture was working. We emerged into the ER like scriptless extras on a film set. An apt simile, because the Emergency Room was a horror movie.

  Nothing especially new here, of course. Every time I’ve been in an emergency ward I’ve experienced that horror movie dread, the feeling that something terrible is going to come flailing around the corner at any moment, that every conceivable choice open to you is the wrong one and will lead straight to the gates of Hell.

  Why are we even here? I wondered to myself. What on earth did doctors do with broken ribs anyway? You always see bandages wrapped around people’s chests in movies, but what does a tight bandage do except push shattered rib shards deeper into the hot and floppy depths of your innards?

  We passed a middle-aged man who reeked of rum. He lay on the linoleum
wringing himself like a sodden dishcloth, his checked shirt covered in a slimy, clear vomit that puddled beside his head. He smacked his swollen lower lip again and again, opened his eyes wide, then winced in slow motion.

  People sat bleeding against the walls, heads bowed, ashamed to be seen leaking, cupping themselves in various ways, thinking clotting thoughts in the absence of medical attention. In front of us, a lone doctor in filthy green scrubs stood screaming at a pimple-faced teen in an Eminem T-shirt. The kid had the dyed-black hair, ragged shag, and scabby face of someone whose problems predated the current crisis. His forehead was a mass of blue and purple bruises; blood trickled down where the skin had ruptured.

  ‘You fucking idiot!’ The doctor slapped the boy, who was trying to stagger past him. He blocked the kid’s way and slapped him again, harder. Seeing us, the doctor—a classic A-type—began issuing orders.

  ‘You!’ He meant me. ‘Hold this piece of shit for me. Every time I leave him alone he goes over to that wall and smashes his head into it.’ I saw a stained, cracked spot on the wall where the glossy white paint had been breached. ‘Then he falls down and lies there for a few minutes and gets up and does it again. He’s already got…You hold him. I’ve got real patients to see to.’

  The doctor stalked off, and I slumped into an empty chair. The boy tried to stumble past Tanya, and she let him. He did what the doctor had said he’d do—smashed his head then fell to his knees and moaned.

  Tanya came and sat down next to me. ‘What was I going to do? Stand there with my hand up like a school crossing guard until—’

  Something stopped her in mid-sentence.

  For a moment I thought she was freezing up like Stop Sign Guy had, but that wasn’t it. I followed the line of her gaze and saw the most terrible thing in the entire terrible scene. An Indian woman in a sari sat in a bucket chair, expressionless, a small boy on her lap, turned in toward his mother’s warmth. One of the woman’s arms dangled uselessly at her side, broken or dislocated, while the other was wrapped tight around her son’s shoulders. And the boy? He was angel-asleep.

  His eyelids swollen, his lashes long and black, his face unguarded and dreaming. Smiling back at us all from wherever he’d gone. And I knew where he’d gone, knew what dream he was having. I could almost see the golden light shining through his forehead right there in the ER.

  While I stared, transfixed, Tanya moved. She strode toward the mother, a warning on her lips.

  But it was too late. The others had seen him.

  Then all I could think was fairy tales, how the world was a wolf, about to swallow that innocent face whole and force it down into its leathery gullet. Slowly, the crowd moved in on mother and child.

  The kid with the smashed-in forehead had looked up from his gumbo-lap and seen the Sleeper boy too. Even as Tanya made her move, he’d already staggered to his feet and begun to point and prattle.

  ‘That kid’s sleeping! The doctor gave him something to make him sleep!’

  Heads turned and everyone in the room began to press around mother and son.

  ‘What did they give him?’ a pretty redhead in sandals demanded, clenching and unclenching her fists. ‘I want some too! I need some!’

  The mother smiled weakly. ‘Nothing. They gave him nothing, ma’am. We are here for my arm only.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ screamed a man in a pale grey suit, moving toward the pair. ‘Just tell us what the doc gave him. We don’t want to hurt your kid.’

  The very fact of the denial revealed it as a lie, and everyone in the room knew it. You could feel the hesitation as a certain line was reached, then crossed.

  ‘What did the doctor give him? Was it a needle? Check his arm!’

  The little boy was awake now. He looked up at his mother’s face. Just before the thicket closed him off from my sight, his head pivoted and he looked straight at me, smiling calmly. Like he was reassuring me even as the mob enveloped him.

  Then all I could hear was the mother’s voice. ‘The doctor. I haven’t even seen him yet. Please…!’

  The doctor arrived back on the scene and forced his way into the thick of the wriggling mass.

  ‘This is completely absurd,’ I heard him say, his voice barely audible above the screaming that had now started. ‘Believe me, I never—’

  Then all we could see was writhing.

  And sounds I don’t care to try to represent or transcribe: what used to be called the cat’s melody. Then the soldiers came rushing in and began firing.

  And once more we weren’t heroes.

  And then a gap, a hole in this manuscript.

  DAY 5: The Bleeding of a Dead Body

  It was believed that, at the approach of a murderer, the blood of the murdered body gushed out

  When I awoke I could somehow tell, despite the lack of any light beyond the dim glow of a battery-powered exit sign, that it was morning. Tanya’s arms were wrapped around me, but slackly. She hadn’t moved, didn’t seem to have blinked, even, all her live-long night.

  I closed my eyes and felt every touch I’d ever received come alive on my skin, remnants of my latest dream.

  This time I’d been walking down Denman Street with, absurdly enough, an ice cream cone in my hand when the world flung itself apart. Waking up was beyond anticlimax; it was a kind of betrayal. And I felt resentful to be back.

  Lying there, I saw the previous night’s mother and son in my mind’s eye, and behind them the mother and daughter from the Safeway. It’s an image that resonates through centuries, between cultures, between species, even. Mother and child, far up Birchin Lane with the longest gauntlet of all to run.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Tanya asked in a dull voice.

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked, suddenly suspicious.

  ‘It’s nothing, Medusa. Just…nothing.’

  ‘Stop calling me Medusa, Paul. It makes me sound like a monster. Why can’t you call me ‘darling’ or ‘honey’ or something normal? Why does everything have to be one of your stupid geeky references?’

  I didn’t reply, and after a silent while we gathered ourselves together and got going. Crawling out of our hiding place, a jammed together nest of chairs in an empty conference room, we entered the echo-straining silence of an aftermath.

  We made for the loading bays, away from the splatted facts of the halls up front. Maybe my ribs weren’t broken after all; this morning I could limp a little better, could almost fake a sleep-depraved shamble. Following Tanya down the hallway, I saw a large dark patch on the back of her jeans; during the night, she’d pissed herself. I sniffed myself and winced. Hair and nails growing, skin slowly shedding. We were ridiculous factories, producing smells and oils and shit and piss. Better things went into us than ever came out.

  ‘There were footsteps all night. People kept running past. Guns. God, all sorts of horrible sounds. I can’t believe you slept through it,’ she added spitefully, as angry at the word ‘slept’ as she was at me.

  I didn’t reply, didn’t feel fully tethered to Tanya’s ragged world. Rather, I felt like a slowly-inflating balloon, tugged at by clean winds. But what would come of it? Would I eventually bulk up to God-size, or would Death creep in, pin in hand, and burst my bubble?

  We emerged into chill light, shading our eyes, and saw how, overnight, new structures had risen alongside Vancouver’s green glass towers. We wouldn’t have been able to see this new architecture with our old eyes, mind you: we saw them with our new ones. Sharp white spires of thought, thin as needles, pierced the sky, pierced everything on the ground. All my precious orphan Nod-words were crawling closer, each with their own particular, pressing agenda: chokepear, chatterpie. Yesterday’s Blemmye had only been the herald of this new world, a Silver Surfer to the slowly-advancing Galactus whose gargantuan form was drawing nearer and nearer to our blue sky.

  ‘Tanya, I…’

  But that’s all I said. In the time it took those two words to leave my mouth, I
grew sick of my voice, physically ill from intent.

  A billion miles over to my right, Tanya didn’t seem to have noticed that I’d spoken at all. In the sunlight, the skin around her eyes was cracked and dry as a riverbed. She scowled at me, then quickly turned away. I pictured middle-aged couples with nothing left to say to one another but with years and years of life left to live out, sitting in shamed and furious silence beside one another. In restaurants, in cars, on holiday beaches.

  When we were about halfway back to our apartment, we came upon a crowd surrounding a woman standing atop a concrete bench in the middle of one of those tiny roundabouts the city installed back in the 1980s to slow traffic and dissuade johns from cruising for hookers.

  ‘I know how to sleep!’ the woman cried. ‘I know!’

  She was in her forties, with the look of someone grown thin and old waiting for something that she’d known all along was never really going to come her way. Even if nothing was coming, you still had to wait: those were the rules. And if you were waiting anyway, you inevitably ended up pretending that your vigil wasn’t really in vain. To salvage a little dignity. And besides, maybe if you faked it long enough, you’d get lucky and hope would pop up like a morning mushroom on a dewy morning, suddenly whole and instantly there. No one could really say it was impossible, not really. No one knew for sure.

  Anyway, this woman had grown tired long before the world ended: I could see it in her anonymous hair colour, in the way her jeans fit, in the list of her shoulders.

  Her audience pressed close, trampling the ranks of city tulips festooning the roundabout.

  ‘I know how!’

  No one believed she knew anything. Her eyes were too red and raw for her to be in possession of some magical sleep recipe, but the crowd seemed willing, for now, to go along with the charade. With TV over, they were here for the freak show.

  She swept out a knife and held it high. I looked around for a cop, but we hadn’t seen one all morning. Just an abandoned uniform in a heap on a bench.