NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  ‘This is how!’ she cried, then took the long thin blade, held it toward her wide open right eye with one hand, then reached out and slammed the palm of her other hand into its base, driving the blade in to the hilt.

  The crowd dilated spasmodically as the woman fell, a dropped doll.

  What was left laying there mid-roundabout did look a lot like sleep. She lay on her back, the smooth wooden handle of the knife pointing straight up from her face like the gnomon on a sundial. No blood just yet, just a little clear liquid running down one cheek like a tear. Soon ravens would come and be unkind to her.

  The crowd kept spreading; I grabbed Tanya’s arm and pulled her along as fast as I could manage, trying to stay ahead of its thinning perimeter.

  ‘I won’t tell anyone, Paul,’ she announced suddenly, in a tattletale voice. And then she was angry. ‘Don’t be so fucking paranoid!’

  Several stragglers looked our way, but we looked mad enough together, and any kindling suspicions soon evaporated.

  A block from our apartment, two blocks from Stanley Park, a shocking sight. Five children stood clustered together on the sidewalk. Children like from before, not like the ones we’d seen all morning lurking in alleys, crouched and lidless with terror. These ones were smiling, just like the boy in the ER and the little girl behind the Safeway. A little grubby, but otherwise they appeared unaffected by the chaos.

  Tanya and I stopped in our tracks, like record player needles when a late-afternoon storm hits and the power goes out. In the ensuing silence, the children nudged one another.

  ‘Who are they?’ Tanya asked in wonder, briefly emerging from her fog.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  The oldest was a girl of around ten who wore a T-shirt and pink shorts. The youngest was a boy with longish blonde bangs who couldn’t have been more than two. He held the older girl’s hand and stared shyly at me. These were fellow Sleepers, clear-eyed and unconcerned. As we stood facing one another in our aquarium of silence, the oldest girl kept looking toward a row of shrubs that stood outside a stucco Vancouver-as-California condominium complex.

  I cleared my throat.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  The other four looked to the oldest girl, who stared at me for them all.

  ‘Can I—?’ I began, but they turned and ran, fluttering down the sidewalk toward the park and the slow-waving willows that ringed the perimeter.

  Across the street, a young man with no shirt and tangled black hair raised a quivering arm in the direction of the children’s flight, looked in our direction, and opened his mouth silently. Then he turned and began to plod after them, but much too slowly to ever catch up.

  Then a sound from behind the scraggly row of shrubs that had attracted the children’s attention: giggling.

  The little girl we discovered playing hide-and-seek behind the shrubs wouldn’t tell us her name; like the other children, she either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. She wasn’t silent in a war-traumatized way, but in a shrugging, nothing-much-to-say manner. A pretty little thing, around four years old, with blonde hair and a wide brow—Alice In Wonderland-ish. She returned our smiles and didn’t flinch from Tanya’s touch when she picked her up.

  When we got her home, placed her on the couch and began to pelt her with questions, she simply replied with a bemused tilt of her head. It was as though our enquiries about names and the whereabouts of mommies and daddies weren’t quite up to snuff, but she was too well-mannered to tell us.

  We called her Zoe, Tanya having plucked the name from a mental list of future-children names that women seem to carry around inside themselves like eggs. Women. Eggs in their bodies, babies in their eyes.

  From the moment we’d peered over the hedge and seen Zoe bouncing a small pink ball on the fractured concrete, Tanya had taken fevered possession of her. She scooped her up and marched the final block to our apartment without waiting for me. As I followed, Zoe watched me, her round face bobbing sombrely on Tanya’s left shoulder. The feeling that we were living out our lives together in fast forward was intensified by our sudden acquisition of a foster child.

  ‘Well, if you won’t speak, little missy, maybe you’ll eat!’ Tanya said, a little too brightly, her haggard face working up to a smile.

  She emptied the cupboards, lining up our twin jars of tahini, a jumbo box of Corn Flakes, dandruff-y carrots, bread, and apples on the breakfast bar. The child hopped off the couch, ambled over, and picked up the box of cereal which she proceeded to shake like a giant, ungainly maraca.

  ‘So you like Corn Flakes, do you?’ Tanya asked, then headed over to the fridge and removed our last jug of milk. She opened it and sniffed, screwed up her face in disgust, then brought out a box of granola bars instead.

  As Zoe munched away happily, Tanya came and sat down beside me. I put my arm around her. She flinched and began to pull away, but then something changed and she snuggled in toward me.

  ‘It’s almost like she’s ours, Paul.’

  ‘Almost,’ I replied, not liking the direction Tanya was taking this.

  ‘Do you think we would have had a family?’

  ‘Don’t say “would have”.’

  She sighed in exasperation but didn’t pull away. ‘I don’t know if we would have. Do you think we would have stayed together and got married?’

  ‘I would have married you, even if I had to do it on my own.’ It was a feeble attempt at wit, but it worked. She giggled and swung her legs up onto my lap.

  ‘Maybe I would have married you. You’re pretty cute. Especially when you’re being all serious and writerly. That’s when you’re at your silliest, Paul. Do you know that?’

  ‘Now I know you’re going crazy.’

  Tanya leaned in and gave me a hot kiss under my jaw, on my jugular.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Love you too, Paul. You would have been worth marrying. Me not so much, maybe.’

  ‘Don’t be—’ but she hushed me and we sat together in silence as Zoe, our truncated hypothetical future, munched away. That was the last real conversation we ever had, and I’ll take it with me as far down this road as I end up travelling.

  When it got dark, we lit candles. They didn’t help the weirded-out atmosphere. Coupled with the screaming and smashing sounds from out on the streets, the twitchy yellow light only served to make our apartment seem like the den of some urban Satanist. When she could wriggle free of Tanya’s hugging arms for a few minutes, Zoe entertained herself by silently wafting her hands back and forth across the flames. Eventually we managed to persuade Zoe to blow out the candles and two thirds of us called it a night. Tanya put Zoe to sleep in our bed, I crashed on the sofa, while Tanya sat in the dark and waited for dawn.

  At about four in the morning I was awakened by the sound of someone shouldering the front door. I ran out into the hall and found Tanya already there, flat against the wall with our longest, pointiest kitchen knife clutched in her right hand. We stood there for a few moments until the banging stopped. Voices were raised in dispute, something got slammed on the ground, then footsteps and hawing voices echoed down the hall.

  DAY 6: The Admiral of the Blue

  A butcher who dresses in blue to conceal blood-stains

  At dawn, the sky cracked open and daylight spilled all over our ravaged City of Destruction. Armless birdsong, audible through closed windows, made the worm of devastation even harder to swallow.

  A strangely domestic scene that morning. Tanya was her old self, or might have appeared so to a casual observer. Like an alcoholic hot on the trail of some new resolve, she’d washed and applied makeup and was cheerfully tending to Zoe’s needs, washing and cleaning, playing and feeding, all the while chatting to me or speaking to the silent child in a high, girlish voice, the kind of tone people who aren’t good with kids use when trying to be good with kids. The kind of voice I always suspect kids can see through. Was Tanya good with kids? I had no idea. Even though we’d been together for over three years, our shared mome
nts around the young had been limited to brief encounters with colleagues’ offspring as they were introduced at dinner parties or barbeques before being shuffled back off to their segregated kiddie-kingdoms.

  Zoe didn’t seem to mind, seemed to assume that she and Tanya were just playing a pickup game of mother-daughter pretend. But Tanya wasn’t playing: she was brushing Zoe’s hair in deadly earnest: gentle with the tangles but obviously fighting the urge to pull and tear. For my part, I sat on the couch and kept watch in case she lost it.

  What must it have been like, I wonder now, to have been the only person in the room that morning taking their role in our pretend family seriously? On some level, Tanya must have known that Zoe wasn’t really charmed by her exertions, and that I wasn’t really onside. On some level, it must have really hurt.

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘We should take Zoe out for breakfast when I’ve done with her hair. Show her our Breakfastery-That-Must-Remain-Nameless.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s doable, Tanya.’

  She slapped her cheek, shook her head and laughed. ‘Oh, right. Wow. Of course not. Christ.’ Then, without missing a beat, ‘So what do you have going on today?’

  ‘We should try to find Zoe’s parents, but I haven’t got a clue how to go about it if she’s not going to talk to us.’

  ‘Parents?’

  As though on cue, Zoe turned and smiled through me, then went back to brushing the stuffed grizzly bear Tanya had given her the night before, retrieved from a small stash of childhood stuffies she kept in the bedroom closet. Tanya brushing Zoe brushing the grizzly.

  After a while she put down her hairbrush and smiled. ‘Paul? You know what I just remembered?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That time we went river rafting at Hell’s Gate? Remember how we were pretending to be so nervous? You said you wondered if it really was the gate to Hell and when we came out on the other end we were there, even if everything looked like normal?’

  ‘Remember the drive home?’

  She left Zoe to her bear and came and snuggled up, rubbing her bristly left calf against my thigh.

  ‘We passed the Hell Shell gas station…’

  ‘And the Denny’s of the Damned and the Infernal Ikea. I remember.’

  ‘That was a really fun day.’

  ‘A hell of a day.’

  She looked briefly at me, then down at her lap, her smile fading. My arm was around her shoulder, but I could feel her grow distant again and soon enough she wriggled free and went back over to Zoe and resumed brushing.

  I turned on my laptop. (charge remaining: 18%) and tried to locate a network. No luck. A laptop is a pretty stupid thing to own when the Web is down. I could have played Minesweeper or tapped away at my manuscript until the battery gave out, I suppose, but those were the sum total of my options. Beyond that, my almost-new $3000 MacBook Air might have functioned—very briefly—as a campfire waffle iron or a fairly lame frisbee.

  I tried to make eye contact with Tanya, but she glared at me, hundred-proof hatred pouring from her eyes. So while her unsteady hands plied Zoe with dry Corn Flakes and brownish apple slices, I sat straight-legged on the balcony in a sliver of sun and tried to make my thoughts make sense. Tried to make sense; tried to manufacture it. My head a little factory, chug-chug-chugging away.

  How to break down what was happening? Some children were sleeping, some weren’t. Same for the grownups. The non-Sleepers, child and adult alike, were straightforward in their blossoming psychoses. But there was clearly a difference between the way child and adult Sleepers were handling things.

  I, for example, was at least somewhat disturbed by the murder and mayhem I was seeing. And I was more than a little put out by the thought, for example, of Tanya’s swelling madness and seemingly inevitable demise. But Zoe didn’t appear to notice what was going on. She was young, but not so young that she shouldn’t be scared. In fact, her normalcy was starting to freak me out.

  Of course, I wasn’t completely right in my own head. First off, there was the Dream. Sheepishly, I dub it ‘the Dream’: ‘The Dream of the Golden Light’ sounds like something cheesy from the annals of Chinese folklore or the ramblings of some wake-and-bake New Age guru. Granted, ‘The Dream’ sounds a little pretentious, but what other options do I have? And you can’t say, given the circumstances, that it doesn’t warrant capitalization. Just count yourself lucky that I don’t call it THE DREAM in hysterical all caps. What can I say? Sometimes language just lets us down.

  In the Dream, nothing bothered me, like nothing seemed to bother Zoe when she was awake. Did that perhaps mean that she and the other children like her were living in the Dream full time? It was a thought to keep in mind.

  Earlier, I’d found a pad of legal paper shoved under a cushion on the couch. Tanya’s TV notes, transcribed straight from the mouths of the Brazen Heads:

  Night 6

  Symptoms of depersonalization occur and a clear sense of identity is lost. This is called sleep deprivation psychosis. The effects of sleep deprivation are more psychological than physical. Reflexes are impaired but heart rate, respiration, blood pressure and body temperature show very little change. The main physical consequences seem to be hand tremors, droopy eyelids, problems in focusing the eyes and a heightened sensitivity to pain.

  So. Something to look forward to.

  ‘Paul!’

  Inside, Tanya was rocking back and forth on the couch, oblivious Zoe pressed tight to her hip.

  ‘We haven’t got any milk, Paul. This child needs milk.’

  ‘The power’s out. The milk will have all gone sour.’

  She sneered as she mimicked me. ‘The milk will all be sour’. Jesus Christ, Paul, use that big fucking brain you’re so proud of. There’s going to be shelf milk in the stores.’

  ‘But the stores are all…’

  ‘So, what? We’re just going to sit here and let Zoe die of thirst? Is that your big plan, Paul?’

  Instead of replying, I gazed into the calm sky of Zoe’s face. There’s something holy about the face of a child weathering adult storms; I remember this from my own youth. Squabbles over bills and vacation plans; the uptight soccer dads and chain-smoking moms to whom my peers and I somehow belonged. Up to a certain age, kids can’t engage the grown up madness around them even if they try. They don’t have the chops yet; all they can do is watch and wait.

  While we bickered, Zoe turned her head toward the door, perhaps thinking about making a run for it. Tanya looked at me then triangulated her way down to Zoe. Then she looked back up at me, and her rheumy eyes were filled with tears. She blinked them away and held the child tight, stroking her hair. I can’t say if the stroking persuaded Zoe to stay with us and not flee our mom and pop Bedlam for the Big Box Bedlam outside, but Tanya’s affectionate arm appeared to play at least a small part in Zoe’s willingness to remain.

  Sensing this, Tanya quickly swampwatered her way into the role of the meek and mild hausfrau.

  ‘I don’t want to fight. We just need something for Zoe to drink.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll see what I can do.’

  I went into the kitchen and grabbed the scariest-looking knife on the premises—the same one Tanya had used last night. Concealing it beneath my shirt, I went into the front hall and opened the door. Then proceeded to reel.

  Someone had spray-painted three neon pink words, in all jagged caps, on the opposite wall:

  WELCOME TO NOD

  Not exactly the font or colour I’d have chosen for my imagined dust jacket, but there you go.

  When Tanya didn’t hear the door close and lock behind me, she came to investigate.

  ‘What the fuck? Did you do this, Paul?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘Well, who did?’

  Zoe came up behind us, and Tanya shooed her back into the living room.

  ‘I don’t know…’

  ‘This is from your book, Paul. Your stupid book. Whoever did this has
read your stuff. Who’s read your manuscript? Think!’

  ‘No one. Just you.’

  ‘That’s impossible!’

  For a moment I found myself wondering if this graffiti was Tanya’s work, but quickly dismissed the idea. Her outrage was too savage to be a sham. Think. The book I’d planned to call Nod had been too embryonic to share with anyone besides Tanya. It had seemed a little too poetic and whimsical to run by any of my online colleagues in what we called the Weird Word World.

  Tanya let loose a sputtering chain of ‘fuck’s, shaking her head as she spattered them on the carpet, left and right.

  I looked from her to my thoughts made flesh, and then went out to try to find some shelf milk. Emerging, empty-handed, from the third smashed-in store I’d attempted to plunder that morning, I began to understand all the teacher-talk from my youth about the Importance of Liquids to the Survival of the Human Species. Back at the apartment the water was off and we were down to a couple of litres of Coke and two tetra packs of apple juice.

  A ragged man and woman stood on the sidewalk at the far end of the block, whispering to one another over a plastic shopping bag. They kept sneaking looks in my direction. Everybody I’d seen since leaving home looked like they were carrying an invisible case of nitro-glycerine in their shaking hands. Both dangerous and in danger. Suicide bombers must have felt like this. When I stepped onto their stretch of sidewalk, the couple panicked and ran, dropping the bag. I went up and looked into it and saw the body of a tiny blue baby that couldn’t have been more than a week or two old. The woman, presumably the poor thing’s mother, was peering at me from behind a doorway further down the block, hissing. I crossed the street and kept moving.

  Soon after, I saw a guy who jogged the same Seawall route as me coming out of an apartment building. I didn’t know him well, but we’d chatted a few times. I raised my arm to wave, but when he saw me he turned on his heel and hurried back inside.

  One block further, in front of an elementary school, forty or so people stood in a circle on kid-pounded grass. Someone in the centre of the group was speaking in a low monotone, too far away for me to be able to make out the words. I was intrigued: this was the most orderly scene I’d come across since my trip to the Safeway a couple of days ago. Crouching behind a mailbox I watched, trying to imagine what could make a group of forty sleep-deprived Vancouverites so quiet and attentive. Then, right behind me, someone spoke in a shrill, threatening voice.