NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  ‘Let’s get going,’ Charles said, pointing at the bridge. A handful of tiny figures were moving down the bridge’s arc toward us.

  Quickly, then, we began to retrace our footsteps down the Causeway. And as we walked, Charles spoke to Tanya of Nod while I gripped Zoe’s hand and bit my lip.

  Charles chattered away to Tanya like a nervous sophomore trying to impress a cheerleader.

  ‘All the days before were false starts, rehearsals for the Eternal Day. What we called Time was just the tally of those false starts. Sun up, sun down. Tick, tick, tick. Past, present, future. Plod, plod, plod. And by sleeping, we’d get amnesia each day because we weren’t ready for life. Put it all down to rehearsal, to not being ready. And now the rehearsal is over and we’re awake and given this world to do something with.’

  Tanya listened without comment, but also without scorn. Charles’ crew were listening to the story too. They nodded to one another and smacked their lips dryly in a manner that indicated they’d heard this non-bedtime story before.

  ‘But it’s so scary.’

  Said Tanya.

  Charles nodded.

  ‘Yes, scary. We’re going through a big change. Imagine how you must have felt when you were a newborn baby, leaving the womb and being forced, squeezed, out into the light and the world. Hunger and anger. Loss and gain. All of that. Imagine how it must have felt. But you got over it, right? You dealt with it.’

  ‘I guess so.’ She was staring vacantly into the distance, but I could tell she was listening.

  ‘Well, this is the same thing, only it’s being done to our minds, not our bodies. Scary, scary, scary. And some people can’t handle being Awake. And that’s okay. They run off and hide in sleep, which is really the same as saying they want to die. They don’t want to be. They crave oblivion. And that’s death.’

  That brought her back to earth. Tanya glared at me and Zoe.

  ‘They can always die. We can help them die if that’s what they really want. Or we can help them to live.’

  ‘But if this is so wonderful, why am I so ugly?’ Tanya whispered, fingering her lank hair with quivering fingers, her face corpse-pale beneath its dead weight.

  ‘Ugly is as ugly does,’ Charles replied, almost leaping on her question. He appeared to have an answer for everything. ‘The little Sleeper Demons in the woods aren’t pretty. They’re a mockery. Little shiny plastic toys. They look like people but they’re not!’ He softened his tone. ‘Pretty is as pretty does.’

  ‘Tell us about the Sleepers!’ cried a voice from the crowd, a gaunt man with a skull grin. ‘I want to hear more about the Sleepers!’

  Charles spoke more loudly. ‘The Sleepers are the failures! Throwbacks! Nodgod didn’t see fit to bring them along on the journey into the Eternal Now. Like he left behind the apes when he brought man up!’

  Here Charles’ minions laughed as though on cue. Some of them began grunting and hopping.

  ‘They can’t stand in the light or the night of Eternal Day.’

  Laughter.

  ‘They run and hide their sleepyheads when the sun falls down.’

  Jeers.

  ‘They’ll keep hiding in Oblivion and then they’ll just fade and die. Like flowers planted among the spiders in a cave. By a madman.’

  ‘But the TV said we’re the ones who’re going to die…’ the questioner’s voice trailed off and there was silence. All eyes fixed on Charles as he bowed his head, striving to master a thought or a feeling, or maybe to become a statue. When he spoke, his gaze flickered past everyone in regular rotation.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about time. Haven’t you got ears? There are no days, there is no ‘month’. This isn’t today and it isn’t yesterday or the future either. You won’t die in ‘a month’ because there is no month. Eternity is right now. And why has Nodgod given us this Eternal Day?’

  ‘To fill it with our works,’ came the reply from a dozen pairs of dry lips. ‘To build a new city.’

  ‘And will we rest?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘And are there demons in the woods and Rawhead Bloody-Bones strolling around the streets with our teeth rattling in their pockets?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And who is the Admiral of the Blue?’

  ‘He who will rebuild a city that will last forever in one Eternal Day.’

  Zoe was standing beside me, staring expressionlessly up at Charles. I reached down and took her hand, but she pulled it away. Then Charles turned to me and did something strange.

  He winked.

  And then something even more strange.

  The sky above the cedars flashed white and our shadows, which had lain placidly behind us, were scalded into the asphalt. Blinded, I pulled Zoe toward me and we fell flat on the ground.

  Somewhere in time and space I heard a voice thick with hysterical revelation: Charles’.

  ‘The Brazen Head! The Brazen Head has spoken!!’

  DAY 8: Waking a Witch

  If a ‘witch’ was obdurate, the most effectual way of obtaining a confession was by ‘waking’ her. For this purpose an iron bridle or hoop was bound across her face with four prongs thrust into her mouth. The bridle was fastened to a wall in such a way as the ‘witch’ was unable to lie down, while men were constantly by to keep her awake.

  ‘There’s someone here you need to meet,’ Charles whispered, his dumpster breath coiling into my ear.

  I opened my watering eyes, my single mandated hour of sleep now over. This regimen was making my eyes twitch, and I occasionally saw electric flickers of movement in the periphery of my vision—coming attractions, I supposed, for the visions of Nod the Awakened were seeing all around them. An hour wasn’t long enough to allow me the Dream, and its absence left me sullen and resentful. And yet, my meagre ration of sleep had to have been a bounty compared to the absolute zero that Tanya and everyone else around me was subsisting on. I couldn’t imagine and still can’t. All I think of when I try to imagine absolute sleeplessness is a single day that never ends—a good working definition of Hell. Hell is time, isn’t that obvious? Take your greatest pleasure or your greatest fantasy and let it come continuously true—for a day, a week, a year, a decade. And that’s hell.

  Behind Charles’ blue-clad form, gritty, Tang-coloured light swam through the classroom window. Seattle dust.

  Ever since we’d arrived back from Stanley Park, my mind kept compulsively returning to the awful light that had thrown us down on our faces. The flash had only lasted a fraction of a second but had left us temporarily blind. We lay on the Causeway with our arms over our heads long after the light died away, terrified it would happen again. All around me a chorus of panting and retching, and the scratching of fabric on asphalt. Voices whimpered Charles’ name, and when he answered them, I could hear aftershocks rippling through his Admiral Voice. As for me, the insides of my eyelids were scarred with bright, pale patches of light.

  It wasn’t until we picked ourselves up and looked across the park toward the clear blue skies south of us that we realized what had actually happened.

  There, in the sky across English Bay and above Point Grey, stood a mushroom cloud, still and imperious, stretching from the horizon to the upper limits of the atmosphere, where it squashed up against outer space. We could just see the cloud’s thick, cottony stem, obscured by distance and horizon, but its massive head was fully visible.

  Someone had hit Seattle, two hundred-odd kilometres to the south, with a nuclear warhead. For the first time since this whole thing had begun, tears came into my eyes. Tears for whom? For myself? For Tanya? For a few million dead Americans? To be honest, at that moment I was more inclined to envy the dead than to mourn them. And even if I’d wanted to mourn, four or five million were too many to shed tears over. Tears are more personal than that. We don’t read a news story about twenty thousand dead in an earthquake and weep. At best, we sigh and tell the wife. More often, we shrug and go check our Facebook messages.

  Really, I don�
�t know why I cried. Maybe I wept for the sake of scale as I imagined us all as viewed from a cosmic distance, so tiny and insignificant. From space, even that gigantic cloud would be nothing more than a tiny pimple on Earth’s fat, round face. I remembered my hypothetical asteroid, the one that might wipe out the planet while we slept. Now it had happened, to Seattle, and who was to say but that there might be a sister missile to the one that hit Vancouver’s sister city fizzing our way across the Pacific right now?

  All our sci-fi nightmares were coming true. And then a thought hit me: everything we can imagine is possible. Everything. All my life I, along with most of the rest of the world, had been subjected to an endless loop of cultural snuff porn: annihilation by nuke, war, economic catastrophe, and/or zombie attack. But I’d never taken it seriously. Maybe, by crying, I was mourning an innocence that, a week ago, I’d have indignantly denied I possessed.

  In the end, though, I think I wept because I just didn’t understand it. Any of it. And when my tears eventually stopped flowing, did it mean that I’d understood? Or was it that my brain or soul was simply too small to hold such massive grief for more than a few moments? Had grief just paused near me for a moment, shrugged and moved on?

  ‘Paul?’ Charles was still crouched beside me, reeking and creaking as he leaned in much too close, ‘Time to get to work.’

  I stood quickly, trying to avoid proximity. Zoe was still asleep in her nest of blankets beneath the teacher’s desk, choke-holding the stuffed grizzly. Tanya had told Zoe its name was Ralph or something, but a name had no way of sticking to our silent ward and slid off onto the floor before being kicked into a thoughtless corner. The namelessness of Noddish bears. That said, Zoe seemed to have formed a real attachment to the creature. It was hard to imagine Zoe needing anything, but there you were: everywhere she went, the bear went too.

  Charles and I had cut a deal when we’d arrived at the school: a room with a lockable door for the three of us. A safe place to hide the dangerous shame of mine and Zoe’s sleeping from Charles’ acolytes.

  But where was Tanya?

  ‘She’s working,’ Charles said, somehow able to read my thoughts.

  ‘Working?’

  ‘We keep busy. Nice and safe and snug and working hard. Tomorrow Never Comes. Right? But why am I telling you?’ He actually paused and smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘It’s in your book! What does procrastination mean, Paul? It means waiting for tomorrow. There’s no time like today. Ha! There’s no time BUT today. Life must flow in unbroken lines…’

  Charles was chanting these words, mostly to himself. He had been pretty displaced in the old world, but he fit into ‘Nod’ better than anybody else I’d met so far. His words didn’t flow in ‘unbroken lines’ of logic, but they did flow steadily, and when they encountered a logical obstacle, they just flowed right around it. There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile. And here were Tanya, Zoe, and I, deep inside his crooked house.

  ‘What sort of work is she doing?’

  ‘This. That. This and that. This, that, and the other. Come with me, and I’ll show you.’ He saw me look toward Zoe, the back of whose tousled head was just visible from where we stood and sneered. ‘Don’t worry, Paul. No one will fuck with the little demon while you’re gone.’

  When Charles called Zoe a demon that first time, I took it as irony, just like when he’d winked at me after addressing his massed masses the day before. Charles occupied a funny place in Nod, as far as I could see. I’m pretty sure he knew the new world order he was trying to orchestrate was ‘made up’—after all, he was making it up himself—and that the children in the park weren’t literally demons. On one level. On another level, he didn’t have a clue. I found myself thinking of Moses coming down from the mountain carrying stone tablets and raving about some burning bush, of Jesus in his lonesome desert, checkmating the devil and emerging with a mission. Were these fantastical revelations simply fibs that turned into delusions that turned into accepted truths centuries later? Consider Joseph Smith, Jr, the founder of Mormonism only a century and a half ago. He’d been a small time salesman and huckster; then one day he claimed that an angel had dictated a new book of the Bible to him. And within no time whatsoever his spiel was granted that special hands-over-ears status we accord religion. Smith tended to look crazier than Jesus or Moses to many, but that might be because he was simply the most recent of the last three millennia’s worth of prophets. They were just newer. Or consider L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. Nothing particularly wacky about his visions of telepathic aliens compared to those of his predecessors. Scientology would fit Nod like a leather glove.

  And here, next in line, stood Charles, thinking up a storm. He was taking pages from my poor, unfinished manuscript, yanking out words, and using them to name things. It was as though he’d been Cain, wandering the earth for millennia before finally finding his way back to a broken and abandoned Garden of Eden, where everything had been uprooted and thrown about by a petulant God. And now Cain was tidying up the mess, completing the naming process that had been abandoned by his disgraced father, Adam.

  Me.

  Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to crawl into a closet, barricade myself there, and dream my Dream forever. How long since this drawn-out ending had begun? Eight days? Nine? I’d already lost count. If the Brazen Heads were right, there was only another two weeks until the bodies of the Awakened followed their minds into the abyss. How much more madness would froth up before it was over? Surely there was only so crazy a person could become and still be able to eat, drink, and stand upright. Certain logical patterns of organization pertaining to movement and vision had to be maintained. Or so I hoped.

  ‘Come with me,’ Charles snapped. I was seeing a pattern. He was servile when we were around his people but bossy as hell when we were alone.

  I locked the classroom using the key Charles had solemnly handed me the night before, as though I was too stupid to know it had twin upon twin. We made our way down the locker-lined hallway to a door at the far end.

  A half dozen or so of Charles’ followers were milling about, all engaged in some sort of clockwork task or another. One woman, her face obscured by curds of matted hair, stood hunchbacked in a doorway, murmuring into a dead cell phone cupped in her hands. Occasionally, she would stab at the keys of its text pad.

  Charles snorted. ‘She’s talking to the dead. On her dead cell phone. Let the dead message the dead.’

  Next to her an enormously fat man, a stub of a broom in his hands, was endlessly sweeping the same patch of floor. The linoleum beneath his broom was wearing thin. A patch of liquid pooled at his feet. Piss. I held my breath.

  ‘A-Admiral…’ he said as we passed.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What did Nodgod tell you yesterday in the park?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear His oration?’ Charles asked, apparently disgusted.

  ‘I just fell down. I was too scared.’ The fat man shook his head and his jowls flapped. There’s a point of obesity where, like it or not, whatever your other personal achievements or qualities, all you are is ‘the fat man’ or ‘the fat lady’. The world is a gawking four-year-old.

  ‘Soon enough I’ll share with you all what Nodgod revealed to me.’

  The fat man was weeping. ‘Thank you, Admiral.’

  I’d like to describe Charles’ followers in more detail, but there was a lank and greasy sameness to them that makes it difficult. Weight, age, and gender were about all that differentiated them—and guessing gender was starting to be a crap shoot. Perhaps the wellspring of their uniformity lay in the identical expressions on their grey faces. They were catatonic patients in a mental ward who might suddenly fly into superhuman rages for no reason. Desks might fly. Dolls might dismember. Dull and dangerous, they needed to be medicated, but the pharmacies were empty.

  One thing they all had in common was a task. Each of them was doing something. Or, rather, each of them was doing anything—it didn’t se
em to matter what. Busy work. One old man was folding newspaper pages into tiny squares and stacking them neatly on a table. A teen-aged girl beside him was busily cutting another sheet of newspaper into confetti, slowly, laboriously.

  ‘We aren’t pokes, but we do poke about,’ Charles said, noticing my curiosity. ‘And if we don’t, we’ll get such a poke.’

  He wanted to see if his Nod-erudition was impressing me. The word ‘poke’ has several meanings. First, ‘a lazy person’, second, to busy oneself without definite object’.

  ‘I read this,’ he held up my manuscript, ‘almost all the time. What strikes me about the word ‘poke’ is how it has two completely opposite meanings. Think of the power!’

  ‘Power?’

  ‘We can rename. If we need to we can even change the meaning of words. Or make up new ones and make them mean what we want. And that’s how we’ll do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘My eyes are changing, Paul! I see new things—and I can name them with your words. When Nodgod spoke yesterday, the meaning of it all just about swallowed me whole! He’s wiping the slate clean, giving us sanction to start over! You must be so fucking thrilled, Paul! Most writers just hope to get a few people to read their stuff, but your book is going to create a whole new world. You’re a prophet.’

  ‘Not me. This is your game, not mine.’

  Charles spun toward me so quickly I thought he might fall over. As it was, he staggered.

  ‘No! This didn’t come from me! I’m the messenger, but you’re the vessel! Just be sure you’re a worthy vessel. Word to the wise.’

  We had now arrived at the door at the far end of the hall. A sinewy Asian man whose muscular arms and chest were covered in tattoos stood in front of it. When Charles opened the door, he shuffled silently to one side, and after we entered, I heard him shuffle back into position.

  A long and skinny room, a book room. Two windows at the far end in the dusky distance. Charles led me between the shelves of books, thirty or so copies of each title, most of them, judging by the crappiness of their designs, relics of the eighties or nineties. Halloween orange spines. Futuristic fonts on taped-up covers.