Apocalypse for Beginners (12 page)

I woke up in the middle of the night. Hope was fast asleep—the wind blowing in from the open water had cured her insomnia. I could hear the faint wash of the ebb tide, and at the far end of the mud flats, if I raised my head a little, I could see the reassuring pulse of the lighthouse at Cap de la Tête au Chien: one long flash followed by two short ones. Overhead, the constellations had
travelled quite a distance, so that Orion now looked down on the river.

For a long while I gazed at the Milky Way, trying to see it for what it was: our galaxy’s downtown. According to Hope, the Earth orbited somewhere in the suburbs, in an insignificant galactic arm. It was enough to make you feel irrevocably confined to the margins.

The feeling was disturbing but not unpleasant. Hope and I were alone not just on the planet but in this whole sector of the universe. Adam and Eve, banished from Eden, exiled on a virgin planet that stank of kelp.

We re-entered civilization the next morning, our clothes full of sand and our hair full of smoke. Hope’s hand rested on my thigh, and I kept having an urge to drive all the way to Japan, but reality intervened and we had to stop to fill up the tank.

I spotted an old mom-and-pop gas station on the 132. The pumps were a sixties vintage, and a yellowing sign announced just one item:
régulier 43.8¢/litre avec service
. The attendant, a sort of sumo wrestler wearing a John Deere cap, was sitting in the sun on a pyramid of cans of motor oil, reading the newspaper. The Honda rolled over
the compressed air hose, triggering the bell, and the wrestler stood up unhurriedly with the tabloid folded under his arm. As he pressed his hands against the edge of my window, I felt the car listing.

“Ahoy, captain! What’s your pleasure?”

“Fill it up, please.”

“Right you are.”

He laid the newspaper on the roof of the car and set to work. Hope stepped out into the sun. I watched her stretch. As she raised her arms her T-shirt lifted slightly and exposed her navel. There was a mahogany glow on the perfectly tanned surface of her belly, a stirring testimony to the many hours spent at the municipal swimming pool since June.

She winked at the attendant, and in response he touched two fingers to the visor of his cap. By way of making contact with the world again, she picked up the newspaper roasting on the roof the car. A moment later she leaned over toward me.

“Have you seen this?”

I skimmed the first page and raised my eyebrows. I could see nothing very significant—just the results of the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Montreal.

“No, in the corner!”

I looked. Set in a small box between the weather and the winning Mini-Loto numbers was an item announcing
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing wrath of the Most Holy United States of America, whose craving for petroleum was unquenchable. A prelude to all the nastiness to come. Details on page 47.

So much for our return to civilization.

The sweltering summer was followed by a rainy fall. The wind slapped dead leaves and plastic bags against the windows of the Bunker, which was once again submerged in semidarkness.

A new era, a new routine. We had started junior college, and Hope was still plagued by insomnia. The fall slipped past like a 16 mm film that has been wound and rewound on the projector until it ends up flapping around in the air.

Toward the end of November, my mother’s TV embargo suffered a major setback. Robert, the owner of the Ophir III, had a three-metre parabolic antenna installed on the roof of his establishment. The appendage was clearly too heavy for the frail roof structure, and its installation immediately gave rise to non-stop conjecture as to the exact moment the 300 kilos of galvanized steel would plunge through the layers of asphalt shingles, wood, mineral wool and drywall and crash down in the
middle of the counter, right at a spot where the Dalai Lamas (who proved to be skilled geometers) had incidentally stopped sitting.

Robert had kind-heartedly promised everyone drinks on the house in the event of such a disaster.

Hope and I had front-row seats for the antenna’s inauguration. But we were out of luck, because all the contraption could pull in was snow, U.S. evangelists and the Albuquerque weather report (“sunny, 78°F, sun rising at 6:34”). Only subscribers could unscramble the interesting channels, and subscriptions were restricted to citizens of the American Empire.

Yet Robert was a man of honour, and the solution to this problem arrived in the mail two weeks later in a bubble-wrap envelope adorned with lovely tropical stamps and a return address in Nassau, Bahamas. Inside the envelope was a pirate decoder (Robert preferred the term “homemade”), including a keyboard on which, once a week, the user had to enter a password obtained through a highly democratic subscription. Hurray for free enterprise!

Now the big saucer could pick up 150 television channels, but of these the screen yielded nothing but the Sports Network, for the entertainment of our Dalai Lamas. On behalf of the rising generation, Hope and I laid claim to the slightest program break. However, program breaks were a rare thing indeed (you could always find a baseball
game being played somewhere on the globe), so in total we managed to watch about 45 minutes of TV a day, in bits and pieces. We very sensibly sacrificed
Gilligan’s Island
in order to optimize our use of airtime—which essentially involved staying abreast of preparations for the huge, impending mess in the Fertile Crescent.

Since no journalist had as yet been deployed, we had to bide our time watching stock footage. UN headquarters. Marines polishing their assault rifles. F-14s taking off from American aircraft carriers. Iraqi or Iranian or Jordanian military personnel driving jeeps across the desert. Forests of oil derricks.

On CNN, political pundits sounded off on the subject of Saddam Hussein. One of them—possibly affected by the recent death of Curtis LeMay—pounded the table, asserting that if the Iraqi army refused to lay down its arms, the U.S. Air Force ought to roll out its ballistic missiles and blast that horde of barbarians back to the Stone Age.

And so on.

The weeks passed with flurries of activity and snow. We celebrated Hope’s eighteenth birthday, then Christmas. For the first time in years my parents abstained from hosting the Bauermann powwow, and Christmas Eve was observed with a reduced contingent. Hope was the only one who was not a family member, and my father fell over himself to make her feel at home. He had even given her
David Suzuki’s latest book as a gift. How in the world had he learned of her admiration for the famous biologist? No clue.

Hope was radiant. And why not? Her mother, pleasantly soused behind the counter of the Ophir III, was celebrating under the protective gaze of a dozen Dalai Lamas. No one mentioned it, but we thought back to her incarceration a year before, which already seemed centuries ago. So we lightheartedly raised a glass of Baby Duck to the future.

Three weeks later Baghdad was pounded by the first wave of Tomahawk missiles.

A fine snow was falling on the neighbourhood where the train station was located, and a convoy of containers stirred up graceful powdery swirls as it trundled along the tracks.

We shook the snow from our boots and coats, swung open the door and entered the close atmosphere of the Ophir. Seaport taverns must have given off that same odour of fermented barley and tobacco back in the glory days of buccaneering. It was a stench that contained more history than any museum.

A quiet half-light filled the room. It was nearly empty, except for three Dalai Lamas working the first booze shift at the bar. A surrealist match of buzkashi was under way on the TV screen: some horsemen were dragging a veal carcass through the dust on an unnamed mountain range of Central Asia. SportsChannel had evidently diversified its programming.

Ann Randall, inconspicuously tipsy, stared into space with a cigarette hanging at the corner of her mouth. She greeted us with a thin smile and leaned over the counter to kiss us on the cheeks.

“Hi, you two! How’re you doing?”

“Couldn’t be better. Is the TV available?”

She silently consulted the Dalai Lamas, who responded by casting an indifferent glance at the game of buzkashi (3–0 for the Uzbek team). No objections, as long as we freed up the airwaves for
Hockey Night in Canada
.

Hope immediately tuned in to CNN, where the latest pictures from Iraq confirmed our worst predictions: the Americans seemed determined to wipe Baghdad off the face of the planet.

Norman Schwarzkopf stated at a press conference that the American armed forces were in fact carrying out delicate surgical operations. It was now possible to “neutralize” a high-ranking Iraqi official as he ate breakfast, while his wife continued to munch on her Al-Mecca
Flakes at the other end of the table. At worst, there would be a few grains of plaster to be brushed away from the sleeve of her dressing gown. Ballistic lacework.

Ann Randall served us two glasses of Baghdad Sunrise, a drink invented by Hope: a double shot of instant coffee, Moskovskaya, Jack Daniel’s and a drop of cream. Ideal fuel for keeping the troops alert and lively until closing time. Because that was how long we needed to wait to reclaim possession of the television for an hour or so, the time it took to evict the Dalai Lamas, mop the floors, roll the small change and flip the bar stools up onto the counter. But what wouldn’t we do in exchange for our daily dose of TV—and at any hour, too, since there was always something going on in Baghdad. The American media, shrewdly embedded within the armed forces, broadcasted the fireworks live, night and day.

Hope dubbed it “Glasnost, Texas-style.”

We spent the evening in our usual spot. Hope reviewed her notes for Integral Calculus 101, while I slapped together a Spanish composition, and between periods of the hockey game we watched the methodical destruction of the ancient city of the Abbasid caliphs. For our supper, we had packed a supply of astronaut-flavoured ramen, every package stamped with the fateful date.

Toward midnight there was hardly a soul left in the bar. Everyone had cleared out after the Canadiens’ defeat,
which happened to coincide with the end of the Sports Fans’ Special: 2 for 1 on all Labatt products—enough to sway even the most avid athlete. Therefore, hardly a soul left, except for a CNR brakeman marking the end of his shift before heading over to the company hotel to snore the night away. Hope took advantage of the situation to regain control of the television.

The sun was rising over the Iraqi desert, and CNN was airing its nightly hit parade: a salvo of Tomahawk missiles had (delicately) struck a residential neighbourhood during the night. Captured through a zoom lens, the explosions resembled molten balls of silica. A mad glassblower was running amok in Baghdad, with his blowpipe glowing white-hot.

The brakeman stopped poking around in the peanut bowl and stared at the screen.

“Looks like the end of the world,” he sniffed.

“Or the beginning of a new one,” Hope replied glumly.

The man gave her a bewildered look before focusing his whole attention back on the peanut bowl. I wondered whether we hadn’t been better off before the satellite antenna went into operation.

Just as we were about to set out for the Ophir for another night of fragmented TV, I received a call from Norbert, a classmate in my drama course, who informed me that they were “cracking open a few cold ones” at his place in order to fend off the ambient gloom.

Hope said she was in, so we instantly changed the flight plan. After a stopover at the corner Irving station to pick up a case of beer, we landed at Norbert’s. The door was opened by a glassy-eyed individual with a goatee, an Afro haircut and a black cat perched on his shoulder. He invited us to leave our boots in the hallway and slipped away, reeling.

It could be roughly estimated that Operation Cold Ones had been in full swing since mid-afternoon. Twenty-odd partiers filled the living room and a dozen others were scattered around the apartment. No sign of Norbert on the radar screen. Clusters of empty bottles surrounded virgin canvases, tubes of paint and bundles of brushes marinating in solvent. R.E.M. was playing at full blast, and off in a corner, clips of Kuwait flashed by on a black-and-white TV that no one was watching.

An aroma of hash and Hawaiian pizza wafted through the shambles. I wondered if there was any pizza left.

Hope wanted to hang out in the kitchen, at a reasonable distance from the musical epicentre. On our way there
we bumped into plaster casts, two-by-fours and headless mannequins. As we passed the washroom, behind the shower curtain I could make out the silhouette of what I believed was a mannequin topped with a deer’s head. A dozen wet towels covered the floor, and perched on the toilet tank was an impressive collection of mouldy old Marvel comics—dozens of issues of
Captain America
,
Spider-Man
and
Fantastic Four
left there for the literary enjoyment of visitors to the lavatory. The pile, which reached almost to the ceiling, sagged sideways and was just barely prevented from collapsing by the corner of the wall.

In the kitchen, several blackened butter knives were arranged in a star shape around one of the stove burners. Cases of beer had been stacked on the window ledge, and the window itself was covered with a good half-inch of frost. Sitting on either side of a litter box, two bearded guys were listing all the films since the fifties that featured the destruction of the Statue of Liberty. They seemed to be taking the discussion very seriously.

Hope, who was famished, raided the fridge. We sat on the counter with our two beers and a jar of Polish-style pickles. The smell of dill and vinegar blended harmoniously with the fragrance of cannabis resin. Equipped with a relatively clean fork, Hope speared a pickle.

“Who lives here?”

“Norbert Vong.”

“Norbert
Vong
? That’s not very ‘local colour.’ ”