Apocalypse for Beginners (11 page)

Hope took off her sneakers, wriggled her toes a little and went to work on the bag of nachos.

“So, what’s new?” I asked without taking my eyes off the screen.

“Twenty dollars.”

She fished out a wad of oily bills from her back pocket, lifted up one end of a cushion and, as I looked on dumbfounded, slipped her hand into the space under the armrest of the couch, extracting a large brown envelope stuffed with banknotes.

“You keep money hidden inside our couch?!”

“An excellent hiding place, don’t you think?”

The envelope was two inches thick. It held Hope’s entire savings, representing a year of delivering papers, shovelling snow, pushing lawnmowers and shredding documents at the cement plant. Why hadn’t she opened a bank account? No answer. She resealed the envelope and stashed it away again in the couch’s entrails.

On the screen, the zombies dragged their feet like sleepwalkers. Growls and blank stares—directing the extras must have been fairly straightforward.

So here was the surprise of the day: Hope, with all her passion for science, just loved zombie movies. The Randall in her, no doubt.

“You know what? I always try to spot familiar faces.”

“Sounds like fun. Look, there’s our neighbour, Mrs. Sicotte.”

“And that’s Mr. Bérubé, behind the artificial palm tree.”

“Nice one!”

“Hey! There’s one who’s barefoot!”

Hope was right. At the very edge of the screen, a large living-dead man in a striped shirt was walking around with no shoes or socks. A mere detail, but not for Hope. She was obsessed with shoeless characters.

“What happened to his shoes?”

“No idea.”

She moved her toes around in bewilderment. Then she smoothed out the bag of nachos and, grimacing, polished off the pinch of spices and food colouring left at the bottom.

“It reminds me of pictures of Hiroshima after the bombardment. There were barefoot corpses piled up in the streets. As though they’d lost their shoes in the explosion. Weird, eh?”

“They may have been wearing sandals.”

“Good point.”

The sky was saturated with northern lights, a vast turquoise illumination throbbing from the zenith to the horizon in every direction. With a magnetic storm of this magnitude, it would be a miracle if every Hydro-Québec transformer didn’t blow before dawn.

The municipal stadium was deserted—not a single living dead to be seen. Yet the baseball field was lit up by a dozen sodium floodlights that probably drained as many megawatt-hours as Equatorial Guinea.

A brand-new sign had been nailed up near the ticket booth:

We went in without bothering about the sign or the hour.

From a plastic bag that she had brought along Hope pulled out a Mason jar half-filled with a clear liquid.

“Vodka,” she explained.

She regularly drew off some of the contents of her mother’s bottles, which she then cut with water (no holds were barred when it came to reducing maternal blood alcohol levels). But on that night, instead of pouring the vodka down the toilet, Hope had decided to hold a tasting session.

“Purely out of scientific curiosity. I’d like to know what goes on inside Ann Randall’s skull.”

She unscrewed the lid and took a swig with her nose scrunched up. All for a good cause. She handed me the jar,
which I raised to the health of Marie Curie before helping myself to a large gulp—grmmppphlltz!!

The night’s dew had soaked the bleachers, so we opted for the greasy bench in the dugout. We took turns drinking from the jar at a leisurely pace while we read the graffiti carved into the plywood: “Marcus was here,” “Die Scum” and “Go hang yourself.”

Using her set of keys, Hope added “17 07 2001.” Sigh.

I found a bat that had rolled under the bench, so between gulps we swatted pebbles into the stratosphere. The only thing that could be heard on the field was our conversation punctuated with the clack of the wood striking the stones.

The vodka started to abrade the rough edges of reality. Hope held forth on Mikhail Gorbachev’s first name, Jewish folklore and the end of the Cold War. She sent a pebble flying into centre field and reclaimed the Mason jar, which by now held only a few drops of vodka.

Appearing out of nowhere, a cat loped across the field. When it caught sight of Hope, it swerved around and came over to rub against her ankles for a moment. Then it suddenly took off again to resume its feline business.

“Hey—my mother’s had some news from the Randall family.”

“Really?”

“My cousin Dan went berserk at the beginning of the month.”

“When was he expecting the world to end?”

“March. Theoretically, the planet was supposed to get sucked into a black hole.”

To emphasize how mistaken her cousin was, she pointed to the stadium with a sweeping gesture and capped her mute commentary with a shot of vodka—the last.

“He shut himself in his cellar with a crate of dynamite and sent the bungalow into orbit.”

“No kidding?”

“My mother received the clipping from the
Chronicle-Herald
, if you don’t believe me. There’s even a picture of the crater. A nice big hole that’s probably still smoking as we speak.”

The Randall family was always full of surprises, most of them not very good. There was an awkward silence while I tried to calculate the time remaining before July 17, 2001. Hope read my mind.

“Don’t worry. There are still 3,984 days left.”

Very comforting.

Hope had stepped up to the plate with the bat resting on her shoulder, ready to send a perfect pebble flying over Greenland, when the floodlights suddenly went out. As our eyes gradually grew accustomed to the dark, the turquoise throb of the northern lights reclaimed possession of the sky.

Hope sighed.

“There is a time to gather stones together and a time to cast stones away.”

In conclusion, the effects of vodka were the following: Bolshevik breath, slurred speech and cryptic statements. As for learning exactly what was cooking inside Ann Randall’s head, we still had no idea. The experiment was a failure—so much for basic research.

One morning in August, without warning, Ann Randall chucked her miserable job and announced that she had resolved to start her life over again in the Dominican Republic. She was going to be a barmaid in a hotel on the Caribbean seashore. Sun, palm trees, coral beaches and rum.

“It’s time I rounded out my education,” she declared as she poured a measure of Moskovskaya into her orange juice.

Seeing that her daughter was unconvinced, Ann Randall produced the application for employment at the Club Playa de Puerto Plata, including the duly completed forms, the stamped envelopes and two passports sent away for early in the summer under the pretense of needing them for an unspecified vacation. There could be no
doubt: she had embarked on a career of alcoholism with the efficiency of a model student.

Incredulous, Hope examined her brand-new passport. A grown-up discussion was called for. She made it clear that she would not let herself be dragged along to the Third World. That she would soon be entering junior college. That in a few months she would legally be an adult. That she had absolutely no intention of being Lada’d a second time. That she had plans of her own, which happened to be incompatible with the Dominican Republic and piña coladas. That, that and that.

Her mother looked at the passports, grumbling a little, but willing to give some ground. So she began immediately to search through the Yellow Pages for a local watering hole.

Our summer contract at the cement plant had just ended and we had, without missing a beat, resumed our daily TV marathon: hours upon hours of watching the news,
The Price Is Right
,
Three’s Company
and all the memorable trash that, as Hope put it, made up “an enlightening snapshot of North American civilization on the eve of its annihilation.” Whoopee.

Meanwhile, my own mother was overpowered by a peculiar attack of orientalism. She’d started cooking with tofu, studied guidebooks to Zen meditation, bought Buddhas and bonsais at Zellers. What’s more, she plonked
one of those pint-sized evergreens on the TV set as a declaration of war against popular Western culture. Television was the Enemy.

The bonsai turned out to be an insufficient argument, so, without even reading the riot act, my mother ousted us from the Bunker, right in the middle of a James Bond festival. We would have to catch
Moonraker
some other time.

Brutally forced to go cold turkey, we wandered the streets looking for a substitute—any screen would do. The Princess Theatre was closed for the week (due to “flooding,” according to the sign taped to the door, but we assumed this meant the plumbing). Hope looked over the fall program of the Great Explorers and appeared mildly interested in the visit of Katia Krafft, scheduled for late November. But could we survive until then in the absence of televised stimulation?

The sun was setting, and Hope suggested we go to the drive-in theatre. Unfortunately, the only drive-in in the area had closed down years ago, and since then the screen had been used for target practice by men at loose ends who, on Friday nights, would come down to empty their .22s and drink lukewarm Black Label beer. It was a destination best avoided.

Hope sighed and kicked at a steel bolt, which in turn put a star-shaped ding in the door of a big, brand-new
Ford. She asked me if I thought my mother’s TV embargo would be maintained for much longer.

“Until I go to university, I guess. When she’s made her mind up about something, she sticks to her guns.”

(Which, come to think of it, reminded me of someone else I knew.)

In our boredom, we watched the mercury arc street-lamps light up one by one along Lafontaine Street. The notice in the window of the funeral co-op announced a wake for Mrs. Louis-Robert Gendron-Lavallée, who had passed away on the night of July 13. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Canadian Cancer Society.

At times the apocalypse seemed very near. At other times, it seemed far, far away.

Having squeezed the tent, sleeping bags and cooler into the trunk of the Honda, we fled the city like a couple of neo-hippies, with the windows down and our hair blowing in the wind.

We headed randomly eastward. At Cacouna, we tried our luck on a tractor road that snaked through black spruce until it reached a rocky cove. The place was deserted, sunny and reeked of kelp. Adopted unanimously.

We spent a languid afternoon reading in the sun. The wind drove away the occasional mosquito, and the beer waited in the cooler for nightfall. Suntan lotion and hot dogs cooked over hot coals—the camping trip was a veritable anthology of the maudlin clichés that make life bearable. Yes, with the city far behind and the Cold War receding to a distant horizon, life all at once seemed oh so bearable.

While she stirred the embers with a twig, Hope brought me up to date on her mother, who had succeeded (believe it or not) in getting hired at a bar without so much as an interview. Hope asked me if I knew the place. It was called the Ophir.

“You mean the Ophir
III
,” I specified. Of course I knew it. It was legendary in Rivière-du-Loup.

The very first Ophir was a hotel built during the boom generated by the Grand Trunk. It looked like a gold-rush brothel: a white four-storey building, all wood and banisters, set on the side of a hill. However, this historic building burned down in sketchy circumstances at the end of the 1960s and was immediately replaced by the Ophir II, Serving Canadian and Polynesian Food. This second avatar also went up in smoke as a result of an unfortunate deep-fryer mishap. Since then, the renowned street corner has been occupied by the Ophir III. Bar Salon Fireproof—
Bienvenue aux Dames
.

Of course, the surrounding neighbourhood had not retained very much of its heritage charm. The Grand Trunk trains, hauled by locomotives spewing fire and steam, had given way to liquid nitrogen tank cars and to containers—Maersk, Hanjin, Hapag-Lloyd and China Shipping.

“Interesting story,” Hope said.

She pulled her twig out of the fire and examined its glowing tip.

“My mother decided to work at the Ophir because of the name. Did you know it comes from the Bible?”

“Really?”

“Ophir was the mythic land of King Solomon’s gold mines. My mother saw it as a good omen.”

She planted the tip of the twig in the sand, but then lost interest and threw it in the fire. The thought of her mother working in a bar was obviously upsetting her. I reassured her that her mother could have done worse than the Ophir.

“I guess,” Hope sighed.

She admitted that, in fact, her mother seemed to have found a greater degree of balance and serenity than ever before. The Ophir was having a better effect than the clozapine, largely because the bottles were not equipped with measured pourers and the inventory was managed with good-natured laxness. A point in favour of cocktail bars. Ann Randall was now indulging all day long and
worshipped the resident barflies as true Doctors of Alcohology. In the field of quiet self-destruction, she had found her masters, and she was constantly bending Hope’s ear about the coterie of regulars sitting at the counter.

“You’d be surprised to see how much those men can teach us!”

Hope rolled her eyes. “To listen to her you’d think that the Dalai Lamas go to the Ophir when they retire!”

I made a mental note of this information. It would be good to know where to look if ever we needed a Dalai Lama.

The sun went down in an endless sky. The nearest cloud was little more than a microscopic orange dot directly over Baffin Island, and we decided to sleep under the stars. Having grafted our sleeping bags together, we spooned on the coarse sand ten paces from the fire.