NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  ‘What has happened is no accident!’ Charles was waving my manuscript back and forth. ‘It all makes sense and this man,’ here he dragged me forward, ‘this man wrote it all down before the curse of sleep ended, before we Awoke! It’s good news!’

  The crowd went completely still, so that the bored screaming of the seagulls was the only sound until I began to speak:

  Is this a surprise? If so, ask yourself what you imagined would happen when the old world died—or you did. Did you imagine some lame Heaven where you’d be kissed up to by hosts of angels fascinated by all your wonderful qualities? Would there be better food in the Afterworld? Better sex? Better television? Looking around you today, are you ready to admit that, at the very least, you lacked imagination?

  Where did you think you were two weeks ago? In a place called ‘Vancouver’? On a planet called ‘Earth’? Did you really think those words named something real? Well, they didn’t. It was just a story—a story we told one another and agreed to believe in. We looked at the people around us and agreed to call each other ‘brother’ and ‘lover’ and ‘friend’ and ‘boss’. And we felt these agreements made us permanent. And we cared about hockey and democracy and phone bills. And we clung to those words like a barnacle clings to a rock.

  And so we went from sunrise to sunrise, slipping in and out of sleep [I quickly learned to pause here for a round of teeth gnashing] but never once thinking that there was anything more to this ‘world’ of ours than kneeling buses and ghost friends on our computers and fat-free cookies.

  But we were wrong. There was a lot more to the world than that: there were a lot more words out there. There was Nod.

  Nod was always out there, always peeking around a corner and watching us. In poverty. In the misfiring DNA of cancer cells. Embedded in the hoods of drunken SUVs that ploughed down innocent children. But now the pretending is over! Nod is the full meal deal, the director’s cut of the world with all the ugly, nasty bits put back in. It’s not a world for cowards. It’s not a world for the weak. There are demons here in Nod, and monsters, and giant spires that poke through the sky. Eight mile high mushrooms. Flaming swords and Brazen Heads. Anything you can imagine. Angels walking through the alleys, demons beckoning from the shadows.

  Nod is what we’ve been given. It’s what we deserve. We’d better get used to it.

  When I finished, Charles stepped forward to make his plea for brotherhood and unity among the cracked masses, but for a good five minutes they wouldn’t listen, just kept whooping and stomping for me. I’d taken the hard, bitter line, and they’d looked around them and seen a hard, bitter world. The scene playing out in front of us looked like the mosh pit at a punk rock festival in some deeply damaged Eastern European country. As he watched, Charles kept his smile in play, but when he glanced sideways at me, beneath his contorted red face I could glimpse a rawer and even redder one, a flayed face. A flaying face.

  Eventually, the mob simmered and Charles spoke some more, growing larger as he began by reciting lines from Nod—or, more properly, a passage from Genesis, as quoted in my manuscript:

  ‘And Cain went out from the face of the Lorde and dwelt in the lande Nod on the east syde of Eden. We are the race of Cain, all of us. But good news! The punishment is now complete! The barren old world of our wanderings is now over. Here in Nod we’re called on to establish the new Eden. The old world ended in Fire—did you see the flash? But did you hear what Nodgod said at that moment? I did!’

  And so on—the standard evangelical pitch. After Charles finished, most of the crowd stayed for the metaphorical juice and cookies; after all, they had nowhere else to go that didn’t involve being alone, hungry, and homi- or suicidal.

  It began to rain gently, and nobody except me seemed to notice that the drops that ran down over my upper lip and into my mouth tasted funny. Neither had anyone else seemed to notice the slimy grey film that had begun appearing on white surfaces. Later that afternoon when I crouched in a remote corner of the playground and took my first shit in three days, my stool was crayon yellow.

  While Charles’ people, Tanya among them, began to shepherd the newcomers toward the school, Charles himself wasted no time dragging me back inside, to a dim corner where no one could see or hear us.

  ‘What was that, Paul?’ Something new in his eyes. Fear, I hoped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The way you spoke.’

  ‘I did what you asked. Charles.’

  My little power play was blatant. I knew I’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, my secret weapon having been the fact that I didn’t give a damn about a world that didn’t give a damn about human beings: my contempt had spoken to the crowd. Now Charles would have to deal with the fallout—with the Seattle in my words—if he wanted to keep the spotlight focussed on him.

  ‘You’re good with words, Paul. But of course that’s not news.’ His self-mastery was impressive, despite the wildness of his eyes and the slack condition of his skin. ‘I don’t mind if you call me by my old Sleeper name when we’re alone, Paul, but you need to know that we’re renaming everyone out there. New Eden. Take up where Adam left off.’

  ‘Save it for your zombies, Charles.’

  He reddened three times. First shade, anger. Second shade, rage. Third shade, the strain of repression of said rage.

  ‘Are we done here?’ I asked. ‘Or am I still your prisoner?’

  My mind flew, on paper wings, to the Book Room and perched there.

  ‘Give me my thousand. Then you can go.’

  But go where? Through the hundred kilometre gauntlet of suburbs that sprawled to the east? North toward the mob on the Lion’s Gate Bridge? South toward the mushroom cloud? West into haunted, hunted Demon Park? No. Charles’ plan would be that I’d go straight to martyrdom, skewered on a kebab stick. There’s a natural point in the development of any religion where the prophet becomes first a nuisance and then a positive liability. Just imagine Jesus walking into an evangelical church while the collection plate was being passed around—or into a Catholic priest’s chamber while the altar boy’s frock is pulled up over his head. At some point it’s inevitable that the prophet has to go. When you stop and think about it, that’s the take-home message of the entire New Testament: off the prophet. The rules were set, then. Zoe and I had until Charles got his ‘thousand’, whatever that was.

  ‘A thousand? Why not? I’ve always liked round numbers. Charlie.’

  And I left him there, swallowing, swallowing.

  Pacing the halls that day, I was both famous and feared. The two states are inextricably linked; the famous always have the power to negate the existence of the non-famous in much the same way a light bulb takes out unwary moths—unthinking annihilation in the face of what Rainer Maria Rilke called, referring to angels, ‘overwhelming existence’. Charles had lifted me up in the eyes of his followers, and I had to be grateful for that. The haggard Awakened Uriahed and Heeped all over me as I passed by; they Pecked and they Sniffed. When people crawl, they always remind me of Dickensian grotesques. His novels were Nod-like with their small contingents of ‘normal’ people constantly under siege from the massed hordes of the twisted and absurd. The hard thing when reading a Dickens novel is to keep faith with the normal, not to be seduced and swept away by the freak show.

  All in all, being feared suited my mood; I wore my new role gladly, like armour donned against the assaults of my own heart. As I strode through my day, I felt my face adjust to its new role of prophet: my chin rose, my cheeks drew down, and my eyebrows tightened and drew nearer one another. And then, when I turned a corner and found myself alone, I would laugh. At myself, and a little too intensely for my own liking. Then I’d frown, then laugh again: dizzy circles of me, spinning around.

  I made sure that Zoe was fed and watered. She seemed the same as always, content to play with her bear and other toys she’d found in the classroom’s cupboards. She was goodness and sweetness, but I could only watch her wordless world from a distanc
e. I was alone and would have to get used to it as best I could.

  So long I was able to maintain my status as Rice Jesus, I was confident that I didn’t need to fear for Zoe’s safety: no one would dare enter our classroom without permission. No one would question why I chose to keep a ‘demon’ there either. The fermenting imaginations of the Awakened would fill in any gaps left lying around. There were no more gnawing questions in anybody’s mind: just a plethora of fantastical answers, gnawing away.

  Twelve more days until the Awakened were mostly dead and those who remained would be so incapacitated that they’d be incapable of hunting anything, and Zoe would be safe. We were pretty much half way there, and the odds were that Charles’ little kingdom was the safest place to pass at least a few more of those days.

  DAY 10: Procrustes’ Bed:

  A robber of Attica, who placed all who fell into his hands upon an iron bed. If they were longer than the bed, he cut off the redundant part; if shorter, he stretched them until they fit it.

  Planning aside, the next night I pushed my newly-minted luck—rolled that golden coin down those empty hallways toward the screams that echoed out from Captain America’s cell. His anguish had become more than I could ignore, and my thoughts first built a nest then roosted outside the closet at the back of the bookroom.

  For the last couple of nights I’d noticed that my thoughts were turning more and more toward the Dream. It was like a physical craving. The Dream was gravity, bending my thoughts in its direction so that every one of the dozens of problems I faced seemed as though they would be most easily solved through the closing of my eyes. Each time I slept the pull was greater, the return to Nod more difficult. In fact, I was beginning to worry that each night’s sleep might be the one that never ended, the one that left Zoe alone in Charles’ dark world.

  And yet, the more the Dream drew me toward it, the more I also became aware of what my fellow Sleeper was going through, awake for days on end. By comparison, the stabbing of skewers seemed a trivial thing.

  Captain America’s pitiable cries were even affecting the otherwise unflappable Zoe. Indeed, this was the first thing I’d seen affect her in any way, despite the fact that she’d already seen the full menu of ‘things no child should ever see’—but which, we adults conveniently forget, they actually see all the time. Children are the eternal, silent witnesses to every human sin, and the more we tatter their purity, the more we extol the clean white blouses of ‘innocence’. Already during her short spell inside our fractured narratives, Zoe had seen both Tanya’s terrible descent and my wallowing in the muddy bottom of that fall; she’d seen spooky, twisted shapes at every corner.

  When Captain America cried out, Zoe didn’t start or cry, but she stopped in her solitary play and looked down into her lap for a moment or two, the lack of expression on her soft, still-babyish face itself a kind of expression.

  The rescue mission I now found myself contemplating was tricky. There was no predictable ebb or flow to life among the Awakened, no supper or bedtimes. The structure, such as it was, was all based around intense focus on individual tasks, both mundane and esoteric. Charles’ Awakened worked furiously and continually, mostly scrubbing and wiping, conjuring and praying. That afternoon I’d passed three of them gathered around an old yellow typewriter someone had dragged up from the basement. They took turns hitting random keys, eyes shut tight. After a few minutes of this, they pulled out their sheet of paper and crowded together by a broken window, anxious to see what wisdom they’d transcribed, presumably from the mouth of Nodgod. As they scanned the page, their faces twisted and fell.

  To my mind, it seemed likely that the Awakened were speeding up the rate of their own decay and death through their efforts. But what did I care about that? It was the same before, when people would warn about the inevitability of environmental destruction (now looking to be reversed, assuming too many more nukes don’t go off before they rust away). Conserve, conserve, they’d whinny, knowing full well that their anaemic efforts would never make an ounce of difference. For myself, I’d always muttered, consume, consume, reasoning that the sooner we hit the crisis point, the sooner we’d be forced to stop shitting where we ate.

  The practical point here is that there was no natural time at which to stage a daring rescue of the good Captain. There would be no sleepy-headed guards at midnight, no lunch-bloated siestas in the afternoon. One time was as good as another, and so I decided to make my attempt when Zoe fell asleep.

  I tucked her in, grizzly on guard, then wrote and pinned a large note to the classroom door, threatening every sort of revenge I could imagine (An Iron Maiden! Procrustes’ Bed! The Dread Horrors of the Oubliette! All that good dungeon stuff) on anyone who might dare disturb her slumber.

  Back in the book room, I stopped and listened at the door. Hearing nothing but that head-roar we optimistically call silence, I gingerly turned the knob and went inside.

  A single candle flickered. Both prisoner and guard looked eagerly up, each hungry for a break in their common drudgery of stimulus/response. How many days had they been trapped in here together? Captain America seemed to be melting into the floor, and I wondered if he’d begun to welcome the periodic stab of that skewer as a blessed release from the monotony.

  Three buckets brim-full of shit and piss stood in one corner; a couple of empty cans and a milk jug filled with murky water stood in another. I gagged and looked up. The ceiling was high enough to be invisible in the faint light. I looked back down and found Captain America’s eyes locked on mine.

  ‘I’m Paul.’

  ‘My name’s—’’

  Skewer Lady screeched, obscuring whatever he said next.

  ‘No! He’s a liar! His name is Rag!’

  The three syllable version of ‘rag’, I should note. I turned on her.

  ‘No. He still has his old name, just like I do and just like you do, Judy.’

  She mumbled words that never made it out of her closed mouth.

  ‘What did you say?’

  She spoke to the floor. ‘My name is Gytrash.’

  I tried not to laugh but let out a smirk. Gytrash, a northern English spirit that waylaid travellers caught on the road too late at night.

  ‘Gytrash. Okay. Gytrash, I’ve come for ‘Rag’. The Admiral wants him downstairs.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘The Admiral wants you to stay here and be ready when he comes back.’

  She scowled and shook her head.

  This was going nowhere. I grabbed her and pushed her against the wall. She began to laugh.

  ‘You can stop me, but you can’t stop the Rabbit Hunt. Can’t save the demon children…’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Skewer Lady just giggled to herself. ‘Can’t save the demons! Can’t save their souls!’

  ‘What is a Rabbit Hunt?’ It wasn’t a phrase from Nod.

  Her voice took on a sing-songy tone. ‘The Admiral will take a Thousand…drive the demons into the sea. Admiral hates dreamy little heads going to pull their bodies from the water and let us drink their blood…’

  Spying a roll of duct tape hanging from a nail, I grabbed it, ripped off a piece and plastered it haphazardly across her mouth. She tried to stab at me with her skewer, but I pulled it from her hand and threw it away. I hadn’t given any thought to what to do about her when I stole her prisoner.

  She kept babbling through the tape, which didn’t completely cover her mouth. I could only pick out and guess at random words as I tore off another piece and applied it.

  ‘Juggle…leaves…stop…shining…wave…stop…’ It was like an emergency broadcast from a group of hysterical Fridge Magnet poets.

  Finally, I simply took the whole roll and wound it around her head three or four times. That silenced her. She just sat there on the floor looking ridiculous. I turned my attention toward Captain America.

  ‘Let’s get you out of here.’ I was in full comic book action mode now.

  ‘Out of where?’ he
asked, tears blackening the grey fabric of his filthy T-shirt. ‘There’s nowhere to go. I just want to sleep…’

  A set of keys hung beside the door, just beyond his reach. I tried one after another on the U-shaped bike lock that chained his neck to the pipe until it clicked and opened.

  ‘Get up.’

  He shook his head. I went over to Gytrash, pulled her over to the pipe as gently as I could, and locked her duct-taped head to the pipe while she struggled feebly, animal growls emerging from beneath the tape.

  Captain America still wasn’t moving, so I slapped him. ‘Get up!’

  He staggered upright.

  ‘Now listen. When we leave the book room, there’s a stairwell directly across the hall. Two flights down and we’ll reach an exit into an alley. You understand?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  I needn’t have bothered with the rescue drama. When we went out into the hall there were a only few of the Awakened scattered up and down its length, illuminated by dim candlelight. A couple of them glanced up as we passed, but none showed any interest.

  We made it to the alley without encountering anyone else.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Captain America moaned. ‘There’s nowhere to go!’

  A good point. I had no idea where we were going. My goal had been a simple one: to get him out of the school. Now that I’d accomplished it, I might as well have turned around and gone back inside for all the ideas I had left.

  ‘Is there anywhere you want to go?’

  He began to cry again.

  ‘Tell me your name again, man.’ I always appreciate the efficacy of a quick ‘man’ when it comes to creating instant intimacy. I could pull off a ‘man’, but never, quite, a ‘dude’.

  ‘Brandon. But there’s nowhere to go.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Brandon. Anywhere is better than where you were. Listen, here’s the deal. I can get you away from here to somewhere where you can sleep for a few hours. Are you listening? Then when you wake up, you’ll be able to think more clearly and consider your options. Okay?’