NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  Then another door at the back.

  He paused, hand on the doorknob, suddenly solicitous.

  ‘There’s somebody in here that you really need to meet, Paul.’

  He went in, and I followed. To our right an old woman shrouded in rags crouched on the floor, cradling a metal shish kebab skewer in both hands. She looked up at me and tittered. Directly across from her, slumped against the far wall, was a man in his early twenties. He looked up. Despite the haggard, exhausted look on his face, I could tell right away that he was a fellow Sleeper. One end of a bike chain was locked around his throat; the other was attached to a thick metal pipe that ran from the floor to the ceiling.

  He wore khaki shorts and a torn and stained T-shirt with Captain America on the front. Someone who had, until recently, appreciated kitsch. Now his T-shirt looked terribly sad, like a Spice Girls T-shirt from the 1990s that you might see on a hungry African kid in a charity appeal. We’d put so much stock in T-shirts. Personal flags replacing, perhaps, national ones in an age of ascendant ego. But here in Nod, the single citizen nation state of Captain America had been overrun, its flag torn down and trampled.

  Captain America’s arms were covered in small cuts and oozing welts that showed no signs of healing. It wasn’t hard to figure out where they had come from. Or why they’d been inflicted. Meanwhile, Skewer Woman lovingly polished her weapon.

  Charles’ voice took on a wheedling tone as he tried to forestall my objections.

  ‘Therapy, Paul. Salvation. But not punishment. Not cruelty.’

  Skewer Lady nodded in confirmation.

  ‘He’s been good. Pretty good.’ She made a tentative stab in the direction of her prisoner. ‘Scissors to grind. Scissors to grind.’

  ‘Who are you?’ the prisoner stared at me, agog. ‘You’re not one of them.’

  ‘I know it’s ugly, surface ugly, Paul, but try to see this as triage in a war zone. Think of it as love. There’s Truth all around him, but he can’t be it so long as he keeps drifting off into Oblivion. Like a dog, like a fucking booze hound running for the bottle. He keeps turning away from the sun. So he gets burned. What’s a sun to do?’

  ‘He keeps hiding his eyes,’ the old woman joined in, nodding and weaving, ‘but the sun is always shining. He falls flat on his face and tries to worship the night. I’ve seen him!’

  She lunged at him, but Charles kicked her arm away. She pulled back into herself, whimpering.

  ‘Only if he tries to sleep, Judy. You know better than that.’

  Judy. It seemed impossible that her name was Judy.

  Muttering, she settled back down into her corner.

  ‘Did they get you too?’ Captain America asked me, his face contorted as he tried to paste me into his world. ‘Fuck. No, that’s not it. You’re with them! Why aren’t you tied up? Why don’t you run?! Oh, God!’

  ‘Shut up,’ Charles said casually, and the prisoner jerked just as if someone had yanked hard on his chain. ‘No one wants to hear what you have to say. ‘Scornful dogs will eat dirty puddings’. You’ll see things differently in a day or two when you wake up. And then you’ll thank us.’

  Charles addressed me. ‘This is sin, Paul. You should hear him babble about the dream he was having when we found him…’

  ‘His precious dream!’ Judy spat. ‘His darling dream world filled with golden light!’

  Back out in the book room, Charles grabbed my arm. ‘Do you see now?’

  Behind the closed door, Captain America was screaming.

  I was shaking. ‘See what?’

  ‘We’re the children of Cain, Paul. We’ve wandered through the day and the night for thousands of years. It’s been our punishment. But now it’s ending. We’re waking up from our dream and seeing what Nodgod wants us to see! That one,’ Charles sneered back over his shoulder, ‘is offensive to the Unsleeping Lord who gave us this day! And you. You, you, you. You see. You wrote the book that describes it all. But you still sleep and you pal around with demons. And I can’t quite figure it out…’

  Charles fell silent and began to pace. I waited as he wandered up and down the aisles, his fingers trailing, as I imagined, along the spines of high school classics: The Chrysalids and Animal Farm. Lord of the Flies. 1984. Apocalypse and dystopia. Despairing visions. Every high school had taught these books. Every teen had been injected with them. What had possessed us?

  Charles’ footsteps stopped in the next aisle.

  ‘Do you know your Bible, Paul? I know mine. Do you know about Moses?’

  I did, and my mouth went dry.

  ‘Moses, Paul, guided the Chosen People to the Promised Land but God did not allow him to enter.’ A pause. ‘Now, why was that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Charles walked back to the aisle where I stood.

  ‘I don’t know either, Paul, but I’m starting to have thoughts.’

  He stared at me without blinking, like he was trying to burn away some obscuring film that concealed me.

  ‘What thoughts, Ch—Admiral?’

  A smile twitched across his face.

  ‘So much in names, so much in what we say and don’t say. So much in what we almost say. So much in what we never think to say. Or hide away. Maybe God had a little bitsy problem with Moses. Can you guess what sort of problem?’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  Closer. ‘Maybe God thought Moses was a little too arrogant, doing God’s work for him.’ Closer. ‘Maybe Moses got himself and God mixed up.’ Far too close. ‘Maybe Moses thought he was God.’

  Then the clouds blew away and Charles was grinning.

  ‘Or maybe not. Who knows! Time’s a tattletale, Paul. It’ll spill all the beans eventually. And here in Nod, there’s lots and lots of time. All will be revealed.’

  I sensed an opening in his good humour. ‘Where’s Tanya?’

  ‘Tanya? She’s working. I already told you that.’

  ‘No. I mean, I’d like to go talk to her.’

  He came back around into my aisle, shrugging. ‘Go for it. She’s wiping down some chalkboards. Top floor. First door on the south side.’

  I turned to go.

  ‘But what about your work, Paul?’

  ‘What work?’

  ‘You’ve got a speech to give tomorrow morning. Remember? Right now my people are out on the streets, spreading the word. There are about fifty of us now, but I need a thousand.’

  ‘A thousand?’

  He ignored me even as he answered. ‘A thousand’s the number for a Rabbit Hunt.’

  Rabbit hunt? The term didn’t ring any bells, didn’t come from my manuscript.

  ‘What’s a—?’

  ‘Go see to your Tanya, Paul. Go check on your little pet demon, too—but keep it locked up. If anyone with open eyes sees it, it might get squashed. Anyone with open eyes would think the thing had just crawled out of Demon Park.’

  Demon Park. I didn’t even have to stop to think what that meant. The new words were falling into place with shocking ease.

  When I found Tanya, it was somehow no surprise to see her scrubbing intently at a small patch of chalk-free blackboard. Sweat dimpled her forehead and she was working her jaw, grinding her teeth. I came up behind and put my hands gently on her shoulders.

  She turned and clawed at me until I backed away. Then she stood still, head down, face covered by lank hair, as she heaved bales of breath in and out of her chest, a striped red and blue eraser still clutched in her trembling right hand.

  ‘Medusa?’ I said gently.

  ‘Don’t call me that! Medusa was a monster. Do you think I’m a monster?’

  Then she looked up, and I saw a monster.

  About as much of my Tanya remained in the face that now seethed at me as remains in a photo album from which all the prints have been torn and shredded; nothing there but yellowish outlines where pretty pictures had once lain. A plundered past—nothing but teases for my poor, pathetic memory. Tanya was gone.

  In the sun-soake
d classroom her dear, dear face, resembled a shrunken head in a natural history museum. Ancient and unknowably foreign, lopped off and dried mid-scream. Denied a decent burial. I could go on. I do go on.

  Back to her question. Did I think she was a monster? Did I think that eight days had undone an entire life, undone two intertwined lives? That was the burning question and it was a real bonfire, the burning bush of a question I’m still here trying to face, still trying to answer.

  So back to her question.

  ‘No. You’re not a monster.’

  Where just a couple of days earlier, love had been Omission, now it was a bald-faced lie. Love a lie. But a real lie, a true lie.

  ‘Charles doesn’t think I’m a monster.’

  ‘Charles? Since when do you care what Charles thinks?’

  She squinted, trying to fix me in her glare. ‘I was wrong about him.’

  There was no point in arguing. I was sure that, to Tanya, Charles did make sense.

  Casually. ‘We should talk, Paul.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘A lot of things. About bedtime arrangements. About demons. About putting makeup on sleepy-bye eyes.’

  I could see that she wanted to turn back to her chalkboard, that she was forcing herself to keep facing me as though I was the monster, impossible to look upon. Emotions heaved and shuddered within me, rising and falling but unable to escape the gravitational field of my body. I was seasick with feeling as grey sea serpents of horror and mourning roiled in my gut. That was my real welcome to Nod, I think. Until that moment, part of the old world had been alive in me in the form of hope. But now that votive candle had been snuffed, and I was a wisp of climbing smoke.

  ‘You won’t miss me while you’re snoozing, Paul.’ She stretched her head forwards and upwards as she examined my jaw line from below. ‘But you look so sad! Lost something precious? I can comfort you if you like. How about I share some juicy secrets with you? It might take a little of the sting away.’

  She began to slap the eraser into her free palm, causing clouds of chalk dust to rise and whiten her. Hard and harder.

  ‘I would have left you.’

  I bit my lip.

  ‘I can see it in your eyes! Ha! You know it too!’

  I said nothing, tried not to think.

  ‘It wasn’t enough, what we had. You know that. You know you weren’t offering me enough. You fucking idiot. No friends, no life. Your stupid books and your stupid fucking sour attitude! There was nothing there to make a life from. One more fucking sushi night with us alone in that apartment might have done me in! You hate people. You wanted me to hate people, and if I’d stayed with you that’s what would have happened. You know what? I bet you’re glad that this happened. I bet you think we all deserved it. That’s why you wrote that book of yours.’

  She paused to gather her ammunition and shot me a wild look that didn’t contain an ounce of regret.

  ‘Well, guess what? Fuck Sushi Fridays. You remember another little ritual? My girls’ nights out? With Tori Strawberry? Well, they weren’t just girls’ nights out, not sometimes. You’d sit there at home, too good to go out and party. But we partied. Lots of stiff, fat cocks. So fucking easy to find. You men are so fucking easy! They say girls are easy, but it’s fucking boys and their fucking cocks! Smile at them and—boing—they’re out and rubbing against you. You never had me, not really, Paul.’ She stopped and watched me. ‘Why so glum, chum? There’s nothing to cry about.’

  This was no news. The evening when she told me she’d been abused by an uncle, I’d held her and felt special, like we shared a burden. And other things she hadn’t told me but which I’d been able to discern in her eyes when she drank hard liquor. This was no news.

  She leaned still further forward and turned her head sideways, neck cricking.

  ‘Don’t be such a baby, Paul. Anything you want to say? Any questions? I’ve got work to do. Charles says that idle hands…but you know all those old sayings, don’t you, Mr. Prophet.’

  I turned and fumbled my way to the door. At the last moment, though, she called me back.

  ‘Paul. Look at me, Paul.’

  Her voice had changed. I turned and looked at her. For a strobe-lit second, she was herself again.

  ‘It isn’t true. I didn’t do anything bad. I love you, Paul. Always remember that, no matter what I say or what you see me do. This is true, right now. The rest is all lies. Darling.’

  Then she sniggered, spat at my feet, and turned back to her work.

  For hours after that, I was as fragile as the shell of a battery egg. If I’d touched anything, I’d have shattered and pale yellow soul-yolk would have slithered out of me and puddled on the floor. I stayed locked in what was now mine and Zoe’s classroom, struggling to hold a face together for the child’s benefit, not that she seemed to require such support. When Charles would call through the door for me, I’d answer ‘soon’ to whatever it was he was saying and hold my breath until he left. Mostly, though, I just waited for the pain to kill me.

  But it didn’t. I just endured. And through enduring, I learned suffering’s dirty little secret: the sufferer is always bigger than the pain. You roll around on the floor like a baby. You vomit up tears. You shit your thoughts into a plastic bag and try to asphyxiate them. I did all that. And still existence persisted. From the ceaselessly beckoning no-time of my Dream to an empty classroom where time burned endlessly like a torture cell light bulb: through it all, pain remained something inside me—remained, therefore, something ultimately smaller than me.

  Visions stabbed at me with their kebab skewers. Tanya in a hotel room. Tanya in a bar. Laughing, dancing, sucking, moaning. An animal she—and an animal me, spasmodically imagining it all. Had she been telling the truth? Had she been lying? I still have no idea. Both possibilities seemed to carry equal weight.

  Eventually I realized that someone was watching me. Zoe.

  The bear peeked out from behind her crossed arms—four eyes fixed on mine. And somehow eyes brought me back from wherever I’d been. And as I returned, a matryoshka doll of nested feelings opened up before me: mine for Tanya; Tanya’s for Zoe; Zoe’s for the bear.

  Tanya was gone, the Dream lay ahead, and in between them lay the necessity of some sort of safe haven for a child in this mad world.

  By midnight I knew what I had to do. I emerged to face Charles, looking better in his eyes by virtue of looking so bad, and we walked the candle-lit halls and discussed what I was going to say the next morning. Occasionally, screams and moans drifted in from the Book Room. And just like I’d ignored the more unsavoury parts of the news a week ago, I tried my best to ignore them. For the moment.

  DAY 9: Panjandrum

  A village boss, who imagines himself the ‘Magnus Apollo’ of his neighbours

  Dear Diary, So what’s the deal with all this dear diarizing?

  In order to write or, more precisely, to be sane and write, one needs either an audience or at least some idea of an audience; there’s a fine line between ‘writing’ and babbling to oneself. You can’t just write to no one—even if no one ends up reading what you’ve written. And with the world about to end and everyone I’ve ever known either dead or done for, that’s a problematic caveat as I sit here scribbling away on this pad of yellow paper. I tell myself writing helps keep me awake, keeps me from drifting off permanently into the golden light, but that’s not really the whole truth.

  So who are you, invisible reader? You’re not one of the Awakened, and I don’t think you’re the kids in the park, either. Neither of those groups strike me as particularly bookish. Are you one of my fellow Sleeper adults? But surely I’m not spilling any beans here that haven’t already been pelted down on their heads by the million. They’ve had the dream. They’ve lost everything and everyone. They don’t need this little memoir. Besides, they won’t be hanging around Nod much longer either: their dreams will swallow them up whole about the same time the Awakened pass on out of this world. So who are yo
u?

  Maybe you’re alien archaeologists and you’ve discovered this yellow tablet a thousand years from now. Maybe you’re a diary-snooping God. But then again, maybe you’re the truth, and you just need some figuring out.

  Shortly before dawn, Charles’s red-veined hands jerked me from my Dream and back into Time. Time for our chat with the loping, oozing citizenry of Nod. Time for my debut.

  While I gnawed at a rancid bagel that tasted for all the world just like a rancid bagel (one retrieved from a dumpster and given a good polish by a sticky shirt sleeve), Charles fussed about where the speech was going to happen.

  ‘We could have it in the gym, but there are only fifty of us and it might look empty. We could have it outside, but who knows what could happen out there.’

  His school marm-ish anxieties were almost endearing. You could tell he wanted to ask my opinion but was worried I’d mock him. In the end he decided we would speak on the front steps of the school. There, we’d be within earshot of the street and available to the walking wounded, but, if we found ourselves under sudden siege, we’d be able to retreat and barricade the double doors behind us.

  Outside, a grey day. The faithful were garbled together, waiting and restless on the lawn. A fight erupted at the back of the crowd as two burly, bearded guys set about ripping one another new assholes—literally from the sound of it—while everyone else either pretended nothing was happening or egged on the combatants. I watched, Charles watched, we all watched. Drawn by the smell of violence, strangers kept drifting up, alternately bold and fearful, until the audience was about two hundred strong.

  I’ve given some serious thought as to how I should present the speech—or speeches (in the end I spoke three times)—I gave while under Charles’ leathery wing. I think the best way will be to include it as a text. Some of it was improvised, much of it came from the introduction to Nod, and bits of it—the shrill and polemical bits—came highly recommended by Charles. My words varied slightly with each reiteration, but not that much.