NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  The remaining Awakened hurled themselves at the row of SUVs, a wave of yellow. The Cat Sleepers held their positions, though, and increased the tempo of their firing as the helicopter hovered over the scene.

  Charles watched the battle unfold, clenching and unclenching his hands. Then he looked up once more. This time he saw us. A look of intense hatred possessed his features. Unable to form words, he howled, a crazed sound that seemed to intensify the fighting like lightning seems to intensify a rain storm.

  By now, a few of the Awakened had reached the nearest SUV and rammed their staves through the open windows into the bodies of shooters who’d paused to reload. Shaken, the other Cat Sleepers abandoned their positions and began to fire on the run, seeking cover behind trees and other vehicles parked on the street. The line was broken, but Charles’ people were still falling by the dozen as the gunmen in the helicopter kept firing.

  And so Zoe and I made our way home. That’s what you do when you run out of options: you go home. Ask a failed college student or a new mother whose partner disappears. Ask the parolee and the schizophrenic. No matter what home is. Even if home is a false hope. You just pick yourself up and go there. Then you sit down and wait to see what happens next.

  The old apartment building was in no better or worse shape than any other. Broken glass outside and the sweet smell of decomposition within. We climbed the dark stairs then locked ourselves inside the apartment, which looked much the same as it had ever done, despite having been looted in a desultory fashion during our absence.

  I went out on the balcony. There wasn’t much to see, though there was plenty to hear. Shots and screams echoed back and forth through the trees, rising and falling like the ocean’s swell. I went back inside.

  There was no radio to turn on to drown out the sounds. All I could do was close the balcony doors and the windows and wait for it to be over.

  It was hard to remain awake. My eyes burned with everything I’d seen and done. I played a game of hide and seek with Zoe and the grizzly; I pinched myself and bit my lips, just as Tanya had done two weeks earlier.

  In the late afternoon, I put Zoe to bed, closing the blinds in the bedroom as tightly as I could, then sat on the couch in the living room thinking about what to do next. If he’d survived the rout in the park, Charles would be coming after us very soon, and this would be the first place he’d look.

  The time was drawing very near when the Awakened would no longer present any sort of threat to Zoe and she would be free to go—and I would be free to sleep. But what to do in the interim?

  There was no way to fortify the ground level which was, typically for Vancouver, made mostly of glass. So I did the only thing I could think of and spent the night throwing furniture down the stairwell’s gullet. It felt a lot like madness, but an enjoyable madness. I went down to the second floor and began to drag chairs, tables, exercise bikes, cappuccino machines, and even some of the lighter couches out of the apartments and down the hall in order to pitch them into that black hole. I worked like a devil in the sweltering darkness, laughing to myself, at myself, stripped to the waist and dripping with sweat. It was about the best time I’d had since the world ended. My body felt wonderfully used and my mind was clear to the point of transparency.

  When the stairwell was filled to the second level, I climbed up and jumped up and down on that contortion of stuff, cramming it as tightly as I could. Then I climbed up to the third floor and repeated the process. Now, however, I began to approach my task as a kind of jigsaw puzzle, figuring out how best to jam this chair against that chest of drawers or this guitar into that microwave oven. I imagined Charles’ people trying to untangle the mess and laughed some more.

  By the time the sun rose, I’d filled the stairwell up to the fourth floor. Sliding down the nearest wall, my muscles burning, I laughed and cried. Nod was almost over. My final stand had begun.

  DAY 17: Churchyard Cough

  A consumptive cough, indicating the approach

  of death

  As the next day began, the skyscrapers began to direct their long shadows toward the park, pointing accusingly toward the wreckage of the Rabbit Hunt. The streets were utterly quiet, except for the familiar whoomph of herons landing and taking off from the cedars across the way. They’d launch themselves and disappear, but the bough they’d abandoned would bounce up and down in slow motion for a good thirty seconds longer.

  The way I saw it, the longest Zoe and I would have to survive up here would be a week before the remaining Awakened were either dead or completely incapacitated. In the meantime, I was pretty sure I could scavenge enough food from the building to keep us going. In fact, I’d already managed to secure a few cans of lonelyhearts food: kippers, asparagus, and water chestnuts. Yellow label stuff mostly. Even demented foragers had their standards.

  In order to last the week, though, the main thing we’d need would be water, and I had a theory that I was eager to try out. When I envisioned the building’s water supply, I pictured an incredibly intricate three dimensional grid—a completely sealed unit. But it couldn’t be a perfect grid: there had to be slopes and sags. And if this was so, there would be water trapped in the lines at various points; flat runs of copper behind walls and inside ceilings that previous scavengers would almost certainly have missed.

  With this in mind, I found a hacksaw and set to work kicking in the drywall behind sinks, tubs, and toilets. I’d hack through copper tubing and direct the severed ends toward a plastic bucket I’d found. And it worked. Not a lot came out, just a trickle here and a trickle there, but by noon I had almost two litres of metallic-tasting but clean water for Zoe and me to drink. I felt like the most resourceful guy in Vancouver and—given the nature of the competition—I probably was.

  Back in the apartment we ate lunch: cold mushroom soup with crackers and stale water. It was a silent meal, needless to say. Zoe fed the grizzly crackers (it was a messy eater) with her typical attention and contentment.

  As I watched her, I wondered what would become of these children when we were gone. Would they grow up into mute adults and, in turn, have mute babies of their own? If I’m to be honest, part of me recoiled slightly at the thought of a planet populated by Zoe’s kind. The thought of a universally-benign species taking over the planetary reins seemed like a kind of cheat, seemed pointless. What about struggle? What about confusion and turmoil? All those tried and true character builders? What about words?

  But if I’m forced to hazard a guess, Zoe and her friends are probably just some sort of next step in evolution. In that case, I’m one of the throwbacks and my opinion doesn’t count any more than that of a Neanderthal surveyed about the potential of stone wheels or harnessed fire. Ug.

  After we finished our lunch, I went out on the balcony and saw, as I’d expected, Charles.

  He was standing on the sidewalk glaring up at me. Around him were gathered what was probably the last ten of his yellow-faced Thousand. Zoe appeared beside me, her chubby hands clutching the iron rails of the balcony like the world’s tiniest jailbird.

  Watching Charles’ trembling face turned up at me, I thought of something my father had said a few years back about his cancer diagnosis and the anticlimactic tumour that had failed to kill him. He said the worst thing about having cancer was that nothing really changed. You were still you, even in the middle of that potentially-life-ending drama. The phone calls and tinfoil-wrapped lasagnes lasted for a few days or a week, then they stopped and you were just lumped with cancer like you were lumped with a job or a mortgage or a second-rate marriage. That, he felt, was the disease’s most terrible secret: not the suffering it prompted, not the death it dealt in, but its ultimate mundanity. Well, that afternoon Charles looked as though his body housed a cancer too phlegmatic to finish him off. And he looked as though he’d been trying to scratch the cancer out of himself with his fingernails for decades. Nod was nothing new to Charles—it was an old and bitter dream. In the end, it wasn’t some sort of monster th
at stared silently up at me until night fell and he crept away, but an ordinary man. And that was the most terrifying thing I ever saw in Nod: humanity.

  DAYS 19–22: Rough Music

  A ceremony which takes place after sunset, when performers, to show their indignation against some man or woman who has outraged propriety, assemble before the house and make an appalling din with bells, horns, tin plates, and other noisy instruments.

  I’m writing purely to keep myself awake now. I began this journal three or so days ago and have been scribbling constantly when not hunting for water and food for Zoe. And finally I find myself here in the present tense. The action tank is dry, and what follows will be strictly denouement—I hope.

  It’s not quite safe to let Zoe go yet, though the pull to sleep is almost overwhelming. A couple of times each day I almost lose it, almost become a complete stranger to myself and drift away once and for all. Then I think of Zoe and slowly ease myself back down into myself, a ghost wiggling back into its former body through a hole in the top of the head, gripping the ears for traction. But it’s getting harder.

  Ever since the Rabbit Hunt went south, there’s been a lot of activity around the base of my apartment. Charles and his remaining followers keep trying to burn the building down. It’s kind of funny, actually. In all fairness, though, it’s hard to burn down a concrete building—even when one is in full possession of one’s wits.

  Each day at nightfall, Charles crawls up onto a pathetic stage they’ve built and makes some sort of rambling, increasingly incoherent speech about the Ragnarok taking him home, about my evil nature, and about the beast I am supposed to be harbouring up here in my tower of darkness. Then he collapses and twitches like a trout in the belly of a boat. An hour or four pass and then he staggers to his swollen, curled feet and froths some more. After that he and the two or three who still follow him around go and set some half-assed fire in the lobby. I hear giggling, then growling, then sobbing.

  Last night, though, their efforts almost came to something. I heard crackling and smelled smoke, but concrete construction foiled them yet again. Still, for a while, it must have been exciting. When they’re not setting fires, they try to untangle the jammed stairwells or worm their way up into the ceilings. But so far, so good.

  Earlier this evening, while Zoe played with her bear, I snuck down to the fourth floor. Leaning out of a window directly above the stage, I called Charles’ name. He looked up and smiled faintly, clawing with blind hands in my general direction. Poor Charles. Never sleeping means that he is ceaselessly himself—and the honest-to-Bosch truth is that that has to be a good working definition of Hell. Not just to be Charles all the time, but to be any of us.

  ‘Paul? Is that you? Come out to play, Paul!’

  ‘How are you doing, Charles?’

  ‘I’m a king, Paul! Nod is mine!’

  ‘Well, you’re welcome to it.’

  ‘I saw you, you know. Before! I saw you step over some smelly drunk on the sidewalk one day. Was he sleeping? Was he dead? You didn’t care! You didn’t see him, Paul! To see anything you’d have had to stay awake for days, right? But I saw things all the time. There’d be a pretty couple in the park, breaking up. Then the next day I see lover boy and there are bags under his eyes. So I pay attention and watch him making his rounds for the next few days—to work, to Starbucks, to Safeway, and home. Maybe to the bank. I watch the bags under his eyes get deeper. Then I know he’s seeing something. Maybe he even looks at me for a second when he walks past. He starts to see me! But then something scares him, and he scurries away. Then what? A week later I see him reading a newspaper, and he’s been put back together. Magic! He did it with drinks or dope or some fresh pussy, or I don’t know what. Then he doesn’t see me anymore. He doesn’t see anything.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Charles. I’m sorry if your life was hard. But it was hard for a lot of people.’

  ‘Why don’t you come down here, Paul? Come visit old Charles.’

  ‘You know I can’t do that. I’ve got to take care of the child.’

  Suddenly, he is in a frenzy, writhing on his stage, trying but unable to stand.

  ‘Protecting the child? Why? Innocence is just torture delayed. And torture delayed is just worse torture!’

  And then he was on his knees, weeping. After a few minutes, slowly, agonizingly, he crawled to the edge of his stage, fell to the ground with a thud, and slithered out of sight. No more danger. No more plans. No more followers. No more Nod. That was the last time I ever saw him.

  DAY 24: Hot Cockles

  A Christmas game. One blindfolded knelt down, and being struck had to guess who gave the blow.

  Every day is important; each day makes us. Even the nothing ones—especially those, given how they silt up, slowly burying other, seemingly more momentous, moments beneath their weight. I see that now.

  What we used to blithely call ‘wasting time’ was actually a euphemism for the tenement architecture of our lives; there wasn’t an ounce of waste in a ton of those lost hours. Proof of this could be seen in the fact that even as we imagined we were killing time with movies and phone calls, careers and frozen pizzas, time was slowly but surely killing us. But who knew? It may not end up being a compelling defence to have to make before a ticked-off Jesus come Judgement Day (quite possibly today, now that I think about it), but still it’s true—who knew?

  In these final hours, I meditate on the passing of Nod and—of course—on words. There’s more power in words than people think. How does the Bible begin? In the beginning was the Word. Nod was the miracle of the undergraduate poet, the sensitive young person who discovers that he or she can combine adjectives and nouns higgledy piggledy and come up with all sorts of fantastic monsters: cowering towers, fierce slumber, panicky taxis, shy murderers, and the like.

  During my time in Nod, I came to believe that if something can be imagined it must be possible. Want proof? We imagined space flight, then it happened for real. We imagined holograms and they happened too. We imagined teleportation and just a couple of summers ago I read how some Australian scientists teleported a beam of light an inch or two. So is a Rice Christian or a Blemmye or a burning ice cube or a green sun or a widowed scarecrow just some meaningless assemblage of sounds and letters? Or, in some way, are they all real? Wow, I’m really babbling here in Babylon, holed up in my tower of words.

  What would it be like to be an animal in that cold frontier beyond words? A grizzly pacing out infinite forest? A blind crustacean at the bottom of a frigid black sea? To see without words, to emerge from words’ insect haze and breathe only air?

  I can’t tell you what it’s like. Instead, you get all this. Words, words, words. Meaning swishing slowly back and forth like the tail of a hackling dog, menacing centuries. Nod.

  I lower Zoe from the fourth floor. In a basket, on a rope. She lands gently on the sidewalk, untangles herself, then runs off toward the park without looking back, grizzly dangling. Goodbye again, Tanya.

  So this is my final entry. Time to say goodbye to it all, to the world and all of the words I’ve loved so much. Goodbye to it all.

  I go to my bed and lie down flat on my back.

  Goodbye to chocolate and puppies and hard ons and old running shoes and used books and Christmas morning and crisp newspapers and babies and Coca Cola and sunburned skin on white cotton sheets and bad moods and late night eating and high speed Internet and Charlie Brown and ice cream and Beatle music and Beach Boy harmonies and fruit smoothies and thrift stores and black and white photos and favourite books and cold beer and snow storms and heavy rain and meals in restaurants and arriving and departing and exhaustion and the need to piss and tiredness and bicycles and cars and kisses on the neck and stretching and arguments and water and salt and paintings and shade and Dickensian waifs and waxy pine needles and hot sand and the smell of cedar and every line Shakespeare ever wrote and shaving and sore muscles and crunching ice cubes and mail boxes and popcorn in movie theatres
and pay cheques and the smell of limes and

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Bluemoose Books (Kevin and Hetha Duffy, Lin Webb and particularly my editor, Leonora Rustamova, whose insight and good humour were invaluable). Thanks also to various early readers who encouraged me, including Almeda Glenn Miller, Teralee Trommeshauser, F. Paul Markin, Donna Tremblay, Stephen May, and Robin Yassin-Kassab. Finally, thanks to my wife, Charlene, for numerous read-throughs and many valuable suggestions, and to our sons Ethan and Liam for hashing stuff out on long drives down south—your cheques are in the mail.

  Copyright © Adrian Barnes 2012

  First published in 2012 by

  Bluemoose Books Ltd

  25 Sackville Street

  Hebden Bridge

  West Yorkshire

  HX7 7DJ

  www.bluemoosebooks.com

  All rights reserved

  Unauthorised duplication contravenes existing laws

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the-British-Library

  Paperback ISBN 9780956687692

  Hardback ISBN 9780956687685

  All sub-headings taken from Brewer, The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Reprinted in 1993 by Wordsworth Editions. Originally published in 1894.