NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  ‘A group? What group?’ He was getting angry. ‘And what plan? Why are you hiding things from us after we’ve taken you in and fed you? Wh-what are you up to?’

  ‘They’re planning to go into the park soon and exterminate the children. They say the kids are demons.’

  Uproar all around us. London gasped, but then pulled himself together and raised a hand. Silence fell like a dropped hammer.

  ‘What do you mean, ‘exterminate’ them?’

  ‘They plan to march through the park and drive the children into the ocean and drown them.’

  ‘Where are these people?!’ London was keeping his fury on a choke chain, but just barely. ‘When do they plan on doing this?’

  ‘I don’t know. Soon.’

  ‘Then where? And how many?’

  London signalled to one of his guards and a rifle muzzle slowly began to rise and point at me.

  ‘They’re in the West End, down near Davie.’

  The rifle drooped. London nodded for me to continue, reassured by the old place names.

  ‘There are a couple of hundred of them and they’ve taken over a school. They’re the ones who call themselves the Awakened. They’re well-armed.’ This was a lie, but the results were what I’d hoped for. Eyes that had been locked on mine now met each other around and around the room. My stock was rising. ‘I can help you.’

  London took his time replying and when he did his accent was back in place. ‘What makes you think you can help us, old chap? What makes you think we need your help?’

  ‘I didn’t say you needed it. I just said I could offer some assistance. If you choose to accept my offer.’

  He nodded, mollified. ‘And what is your offer?’

  ‘They see me as some sort of prophet. It sounds weird, but they’ll do anything I tell them to. I can keep an eye on their plans, keep you in the loop.’

  ‘And why are you making this very kind offer?’

  ‘It sounds like you don’t want the children in the park hurt. Neither do I. That puts us on the same side.’

  Dr London chewed on my words for a good long while.

  I knew he wouldn’t be able to fault my logic. What I didn’t know, though, was why he didn’t want the kids in the park killed. What did he have in mind for them? A kind of collective cognitive fog cloaked the Cat Sleepers. On some level they had to know their time was as limited as that of the people outside their chain link fences. So what was their game?

  The doctor spoke. ‘Do me the kindness of taking a walk around the base while I think your offer over. In fact, it’s late in a busy day, and I need some sleep. We can talk more in the morning.’

  ‘Sure.’ I stood up and left the cafeteria as London gathered a couple of his people around him and they began to talk in excited whispers.

  The main floor of Science World was large: ten or twenty thousand square feet of mostly open space beneath the dome. For the next few hours, as I wandered around, London’s soldiers watched me out of the corners of their eyes but kept at their tasks, which mostly appeared to consist of arranging and rearranging their formidable arsenals of weapons and food: they must have raided a Costco and a Home Depot back before things went completely apeshit. Nobody wanted to talk, but everywhere I went people stared hard at me.

  A couple of dozen cots had been set up in the former gift shop near the front of the building and the windows covered by thick sheets of black felt. I could make out a few of London’s people as they lay on their backs in the dark, eyes closed, faking sleep for the same reason a woman fakes an orgasm or a man professes religious conversion: desperation to belong. Probably, they thought they really were sleeping.

  In the furthest corner of the main space, a curtained-off area with two sentries posted outside attracted my attention.

  ‘What’s in there?’ I asked one.

  ‘The lab,’ she replied, eyes twitching as she exchanged a nervous look with her partner.

  ‘What sort of lab?’

  ‘The doctor’s operating theatre. It’s where he does his—’

  ‘If you don’t know, you shouldn’t ask,’ her partner butted in angrily. ‘Questions lead to lies.’

  I was about to ask about his curious statements, which rang with Orwellian undertones, when I saw something that made me keep my mouth shut. Just behind a gap in the curtains that served as the entrance to London’s ‘operating theatre’ stood a cardboard box filled to overbrimming with running shoes of various sizes. Buzz Lightyear’s face grinned wickedly at me from a tiny pair on top.

  Then a voice from behind me: ‘Dr London is ready for you now.’

  Back in the cafeteria, combed and clean, London and six of his people, Dave among them, were all sitting on one side of a table, like a kind of military tribunal.

  ‘We’ve decided to accept your offer,’ London announced grandly. ‘One of our goals for pushing west into the city will be to save the children in the park. But if these people you speak of put their evil plans into action first, it could be a disaster. So here’s what will happen. We will return you to this school of yours, and in return you will keep us informed as to the group’s plans. When they choose a date for invading the park, you will let us know. Can we trust you?’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t know if you can or not. But you have to. And I have to trust you. Isn’t that right?

  London scowled. ‘Yes, I guess that’s about right.’

  He wasn’t happy, and I didn’t blame him. There was no way I was going to help add to the sad pile of running shoes behind that curtain. But neither of us had any choice for the moment.

  DAY 12: Raw Lobster

  A policeman. Lobsters, before they are boiled,

  are a dark blue.

  Next morning Dave and two other heavily-made-up Cat Sleepers escorted me back to the West End in total silence. I was pretty sure they’d been ordered not to speak to me and they were twitchy—quick to take aim at anything that moved. We took the same route as the day before: SkyTrain tracks to Granville, then a quick march down the centre of Robson to Denman, past the scene of the previous day’s ‘angel sighting’ where a carpeting of new bodies were being feasted upon by dogs, cats, and miscellaneous birds. Dave and his companions snigger-whispered among themselves as the cats hissed and the dogs growled proprietarily.

  Thank God for the ocean breeze, because the city was beginning to stink. There had always been an edge of rot to the air near the ocean, but that edge was becoming decidedly sharp as it mixed with the growing reek of Nod. But then, people who extolled the benefits of sea breezes had always ignored the decay mixed in with the salt. After all, what were seashells but empty coffins? What were starfish on the beach but bloated corpses, rotting in an alien environment?

  A slight digression. For anyone with an interest in words, Lewis Carroll has always been a sort of demi-god and his Wonderland a clear precursor for Nod, with Charles as a kind of Humpty Dumpty, declaring his suzerainty over the kingdom of words. That morning, smelling the rancid tang of the air, I remembered his hate poem, “The Sea”. Tonight as I write this, I can’t get it out of my mind. Here’s about half of it, all the stanzas, at any rate, that I can remember:

  There are certain things— a spider, a ghost,

  The income-tax, gout, an umbrella for three -

  That I hate, but the thing that I hate the most

  Is a thing they call the sea.

  Pour some salt water over the floor -

  Ugly I’m sure you’ll allow it to be:

  Suppose it extended a mile or more,

  That’s very like the sea.

  Beat a dog till it howls outright -

  Cruel, but all very well for a spree;

  Suppose that one did so day and night,

  That would be like the sea.

  I had a vision of nursery-maids;

  Tens of thousands passed by me -

  All leading children with wooden spades,

  And th
is was by the sea.

  Who invented those spades of wood?

  Who was it cut them out of the tree?

  None, I think, but an idiot could -

  Or one that loved the sea.

  Isn’t that Nod? That edge of cruelty and danger? Those spades cut from the trees that line Birchin Lane? Carroll, that strange bachelor, always befriending little girls on trains and writing them letters. This particular poem, I’m pretty sure, was written to just such a child. Creepy crawly. Charles, the Admiral of the Blue, was a species of nursery-maid as well as a Humpty Dumpty. I imagined him on his Rabbit Hunt, but hunting children, not leading them. An army outfitted with paddles and threshing sticks cut from the cedars of Stanley Park. Paddle-shaped wounds in all the trees.

  It’s late, and I’m writing by candlelight. Only a couple of tea candles left. Eight hours of light packed into each, or so their packaging claims. Down below, on the street, Charles’ people are singing; they’re always singing cheesy old pop songs lately.

  Bye Bye, Miss American Pie

  Drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry…

  They sing all day and night in what must be a deliberate effort to keep me awake. Sometimes I hear soft snatches of an old Beatles tune, other times frenzied takes on nursery rhymes. “Yellow Submarine” and “Twinkle, Twinkle” on endless repeat. Sometimes the sounds chill me. Other times, they make me laugh, but when that happens, the foaming-over sound of my own voice makes me realize that there’s no real escape or release to be had.

  Transcribing Carroll’s words just now, I found myself stopping and dwelling on the word ‘sea’ as it appears on the page. The letters S, E, and A have lost whatever glue was holding them together, and this is like Nod as well: A S E A S E A S E A S E A S E A S E…

  We turned a corner and saw the school. Then gaped.

  In my absence of less than a day, the entire building had been painted bright yellow, every last brick of it. Every door. Even most of the windows had been covered with thick splashes of the bright, sticky paint. The effect was of some art installation designed by a cynical, grant-benumbed artist to ‘blow the minds’ of the general public. And somehow the building also looked smaller now, like a Tonka Toy schoolhouse.

  Its grounds were seething with bolstered numbers of the Awakened; Charles’ Thousand was getting within reach.

  ‘That the place?’ Dave now spoke for the first time that morning and there was a sardonic edge to his voice.

  ‘That’s it.’

  He grunted. ‘Poor bastards. They must have raided every hardware store in the city to get enough paint for that.’

  ‘Makes you feel kind of sorry for them,’ one of the other guards said quietly.

  ‘Almost,’ Dave growled. ‘Almost does. Christ, there are a lot of them.’

  What must it have felt like, gazing out of one claptrap world, straight into another? The Cat Sleepers had to have seen their own reflections staring back at them at a moment like that.

  Dave looked around for a while then pointed to an apartment about two blocks from the school, one with a direct sightline of the yellow monstrosity. ‘We’ll be setting up shop over there. Take this flashlight and when you find out when their little Rabbit Hunt is supposed to begin, flash it on and off out that window. Day or night. We’ll be watching.’

  He handed me a small red flashlight and pointed to a window on the top floor of the southeast corner of the school, the only one on that side of the building that remained unpainted.

  ‘Got it?’

  I nodded and put the flashlight in my pocket.

  ‘Good. Now, when you’ve done that, make your way to the alley behind the school and wait. We’ll meet you there and take you away from this fucking nuthouse.’

  Then they left me. Dave had said ‘nuthouse’, but he’d been staring at the school like a covetous squirrel.

  As I drew near, a few of the people on the lawn came running to greet me, giving my return a deranged ‘daddy’s home’ vibe. The excited reception was something of a relief as I’d considered it a toss up as to whether they’d greet or eat me following my recent disappearance.

  The first to speak was a pale young guy I vaguely remembered as having been up front during my speech on the lawn. He had the tangled hair and wide, unblinking eyes of a true believer—all dilated, receptive pupil. True Believers always look, to me, like dogs with their heads out the car window: in the grip of something they can’t comprehend but surrendering to the joy of it without thought or reservation. A pretty picture until you reach over and surprise it with a pat on the back.

  ‘Oh, hey. Hi. You’re back! Where were you?’ He kept asking questions as his companions gathered around me. ‘What did you see? Why did you leave?’ Apparently, I was the grain of sand in the oyster of Nod and some sort of pearl of wisdom was expected. Have you seen the ship, Paul?’

  He said my name shyly, as though aware of some presumption, then stopped, having stumbled, through trial and error, upon the zeitgeist of the hour: the mysterious new arrival in English Bay. The crowd was now packed tight around me, and the stench made me want to gag. There was no chance of escape, but then again I didn’t want to escape. There was nowhere on earth left to go but forward, toward Zoe and what remained of Tanya somewhere inside that sick-yellow school.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ I lied, ‘I was just on the ship.’

  A circle of gasps: there wasn’t a doubter among them.

  ‘Want to know what I saw there?’

  They didn’t reply. Didn’t even breathe, just held their gasps in their chests and waited.

  ‘People who have a message for us, and they’ve come all across the ocean from China to deliver it.’

  Women and men began to weep. A dozen voices asked the same question at the same time. ‘What message? Are they Awake like us? Are they here to help us?’

  I raised my hands. ‘I’ll tell you when the time comes, but right now I have a message I need to give to the Admiral.’

  I pushed and the crowd yielded. The main doors were flung open, and I marched inside. Fuck Charles. I was going to grab Tanya and Zoe and make a break for it. Fuck London and his Cat Sleepers too.

  The school’s interior had been painted the same yellow as its exterior and the smell was almost overwhelming. The floor was tacky with paint, and walking those halls was like passing through the sickly intestines of some giant cartoon whale. I went straight upstairs to the classroom where I’d left Zoe, trailed by a dribbling of the mob from outside.

  The door to the classroom was open, and Zoe was gone. The classroom itself remained unpainted, just as I’d left it. Sat in the middle of the floor, like a parent waiting up for a partying teen, sat the nameless grizzly.

  ‘Where’s Char…the Admiral?’ I demanded of the wild-haired young man.

  ‘He’s in the Blue Room. Down there.’

  The Blue Room. If anything had been funny anymore, that would have been hilarious. I envisioned Charles on a blue throne, listening to some demented modern jazz quartet, snapping his fingers while snacking on blue cheese.

  ‘Show me the way.’

  We all marched down the hall past doddering, shadowy forms to the Blue Room. I pushed open the door and went inside.

  There was something bathetic in the plain fact of the room’s blueness, and I laughed out loud at the sight. In many ways, Charles was still the Charles I had known before: sad and silly. The room was filled with a bizarre assemblage of looted goods: expensive-looking paintings and hangings; shelves of hardcover books; the biggest flat screen television I’d ever seen; and a hundred pieces of bric-a-brac piled in the corners. In the centre of this bizarre bazaar sat Charles, of course, sprawled on a royal blue sofa and ready for his audience with me.

  And Tanya. She was sitting on his lap, nuzzling his pimply neck. The sight made my breath catch in my throat, but I couldn’t say it was unexpected. Why wouldn’t Charles have made this happen? Why wouldn’t he have taken even this from me?


  Tanya stared straight ahead, through me, through the wall, toward some distant place I couldn’t see. A thin white dressing gown covered her body. She was shaking and coughing, not bothering to cover her mouth.

  Charles started talking the instant he saw me. ‘It’s really true, isn’t it? What they say in the New Testament? That a prophet gets no honour in his hometown? That he can’t do miracles on his home turf? Can’t get it up, spiritually? Would you say that you’re in concurrence, Paul?’

  The ‘Admiral’ had always made it cringingly obvious that he’d read a lot of books. He’d been a regular at the Joe Fortes library before, but probably shouldn’t have bothered. Books hadn’t brought him closer to people, they’d dragged him farther away. Seeing Tanya here with him, it occurred to me that whatever she had once seen in me, she probably now saw—in a funhouse mirror way—in Charles. It was a hard thought to accommodate.

  I swallowed and tried not to look at Tanya. ‘What have you done with the little girl?’

  He ignored me. ‘I always wondered about Jesus, you know. What do you think it meant when he couldn’t do his miracles for the folks back home in Galilee? Know what I think? I think maybe that detail is a tiny little truth that snuck into the narrative and survived a couple of thousand years. Maybe there were no miracles. Maybe Jesus was a faker and the folks back home just didn’t fall for his bullshit. Fucking prophets. What do you think, Paul?’

  I thought fast. ‘Why a faker? Maybe there’s another explanation. What if he never pretended to be the Son of God? Maybe all that talk of miracles is just a bunch of bullshit that desperate little toadies made up hoping to keep their fingers stuck in the magical pie after they killed him.’

  Charles’ grin dropped dead. ‘Fuck you, Paul.’

  ‘Where’s the kid? We had a deal.’

  ‘Demon, Paul! Demon. Look at it from our perspective. We didn’t know if you were coming back. We had to put it somewhere safe. It might have bitten someone. Did you all know that Paul here keeps demons as pets?’

  Murmurs from the massed flesh behind me.

  ‘I have my reasons for the things I do. I wrote the book on this place, Admiral. Or have you forgotten that? You got all of this,’ I swept my hand around the room and included Tanya, ‘from me. What I choose to do with ‘demons’ is my own business. Where is she?’