Apocalypse for Beginners (14 page)

A shiver ran up her spine. She could see the receptionist searching through some shelves with her back to the doorway. Hope had only about ten seconds to act. She flipped up the cover of the Rolodex and located SMITH Charles, with the prophet’s full contact information listed: home, office, telephone, fax.

She tore out the card and slunk off without saying goodbye.

“New York reeks!” was how Hope summed things up as she chewed on a hot dog an inch away from the handset. I immediately asked for a geospatial update.

“I’m in a phone booth at the corner of Fortieth Street and Eighth Avenue.”

These particulars evoked no mental picture for me. Between mouthfuls, Hope explained in detail her visit to Levy Publishing, praised the fifty-cent hot dogs served at Bobby’s—which I gathered was a nondescript stand on Forty-second Street—and dwelled for a (long) while on the ergonomic virtues of her new Tony Lamas. I tried to visualize the phone bill.

In any case, troop morale seemed high, despite the admittedly slow progress of the investigation. For the time being, all Hope knew was that Charles Smith could be reached at the offices of Mekiddo, a company located in Seattle, Washington.

“What does this company do?”

“No idea.”

“Is that all you’ve got?”

“Yup, that’s all.”

“Very promising.”

“Well, I’ve gotta run. The bus to Seattle leaves in ten minutes.”

“Are you joking?”

“Have I mentioned my new boots? They’re really comfortable. You should get some.”

This leave-taking filled me with nothing but apprehension. I wanted to dissuade Hope, to convince her to come back, but I just didn’t have it in me. It took a lot of courage to stand up to Hope. The most I could manage was to remind her that she had a major calculus exam coming up on Thursday afternoon.

“The mission I’m on,” she stated just before hanging up, “is more important than differential calculus.”

Hope spent three nights and two days on the road. She crossed three time zones and two watersheds. She changed buses five times, and every bus seemed more run-down and uncomfortable than the one before, but they all had little screens suspended from the ceiling and tuned exclusively to one channel:
Thank You for Travelling with Greyhound
.

She watched the landscape stream past. Cornfield, scrapyard, soybean field, cornfield, incinerator, drive-in theatre, industrial park, Wal-Mart, cornfield, Ford dealer, cornfield, motel, deserted GM factory, empty lot, marshalling yard, soybean field, industrial park, nuclear power plant, cornfield, motel, cement plant, seedy neighbourhoods along the railroad tracks, seedy neighbourhoods under the A-41 interchange, seedy neighbourhoods behind kilometres of chain-link fence, industrial park, river, bungalows, skyscrapers, garbage dumps and countless small animals that had ended their days as roadkill.

When her brain had had enough, Hope did math problems in her head, read the newspapers left behind by other passengers, dozed off curled up in her seat. She subsisted on vending machine fare—the sort of food that is digested in seven minutes and induces fits of hypertension.

Sugar, liquid glucose, cocoa butter, powdered whole milk, hydrogenated vegetable oil, cocoa paste, lactose, powdered skim milk, powdered whey, low-fat cocoa, milk fats, malt extract, salt, emulsifier, soy lecithin, egg white, milk protein, wheat flour and flavouring. Enriched wheat flour, water, sugar and/or glucose-fructose, yeast, vegetable oil (soybean and/or canola), salt, calcium sulphate, esters of diacetyl tartaric acid of mono- and diacylglycerols, mono- and diacylglycerols from vegetable sources, calcium propionate, sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate, corn flour, calcium phosphate, soybean flour, sunflower oil, wheat starch, ammonium phosphate, calcium peroxide, wheat gluten, ethyl alcohol, sorbitol, polysorbate 20, sodium propionate, enzymes, dextrin, cornstarch, carboxymethylcellulose, ammonium sulphate, malt, calcium carbonate, sesame seeds. Vegetable oil (soybean and/or canola), relish (diced cucumbers, glucose-fructose, vinegar, potassium sorbate, xanthan gum, natural flavour (from vegetable sources)), mustard (water, vinegar, mustard seeds, salt, sugar, caramel colouring, spices), water, frozen egg yolks, vinegar, powdered onion, salt, spices, xanthan gum, potassium sorbate, garlic powder, hydrolized vegetable proteins (corn gluten, soybean, wheat gluten), calcium sodium edetate, colouring (paprika).

On the third day at dawn, Hope alighted in Seattle, white as a shard of porcelain. She ingested a burger and took stock of her resources: whitish Tony Lama boots (2), prophet’s contact information (1), slightly depleted budget (1).

A game plan started to take shape in her mind.

She bought a map of Greater Seattle and installed herself at the Starbucks to peruse it, downing three bold daily special coffees in a row. There were fifteen or so newspaper vending machines lined up at attention in the hall of the bus terminal, and inside each of them the headline announced the withdrawal of the American troops from the Persian Gulf.

The rush hour was at its peak. People were scurrying in every direction, and Hope realized that, for the first time in her life, she had no schedule or agenda or dosage to follow—only a Mission. It was a happy blend of truancy and crusade. Feeling a sudden lightness, she ordered a fourth coffee and polished her boots with a handful of napkins.

First step: Locate the Mekiddo headquarters. That was easy, since the street was listed in the index of the map. The company was situated on 6
^th
Avenue, in the heart of Chinatown, about a twenty-minute walk. Hope folded the map and set out.

The Mekiddo building offered a classic example of post-industrial architecture. The turquoise facade of synthetic resin—avant-garde during the Vietnam War—had fallen into chronic disrepair. Here and there, shabby brick facing peeped out where a panel was missing. The resin shell must have concealed an old warehouse or a boxing gym or a print shop.

An American flag snapped glumly against its aluminum mast, right next to the battered company name: Mekiddo Corporation Inc. Flanking the name was a rusted logo—a sort of winged lion with the head of a bearded man. An arcane corporate hybrid.

Spray-painted near the door someone had added a piece of unforgiving graffiti: There Were No Good Old Days.

“That’s good to know,” Hope told herself.

On the surface, Mekiddo might have been an import-export company, a money-laundering operation for drug dealers or a road-engineering firm on the brink of bankruptcy.

Careful not to be conspicuous, Hope hopped from one foot to the other while she sized up the situation. The temperature hovered just above zero, but the dampness went right through her. When the cold finally became unbearable she took shelter in a noodle shop directly across the street.

The restaurant was empty and lunchtime was still a
long way off. She strategically chose a seat by the window and, without taking her eyes off the target, haphazardly ordered a number 17 (lemongrass rice noodles with shrimp). A TV on the counter was tuned to a Vietnamese version of
The Price Is Right
, rebroadcast via satellite, no doubt.

Her number 17 soon arrived. These noodles were nothing like Captain Mofuku’s! Hope unsheathed her chopsticks, pushed her three shrimps to the edge of the bowl and began to devour the noodles. Between bites she glanced at the building. Fifteen minutes went by and she had yet to see anyone go through the door.

Hope crossed the street, dodged the truck of a dried-seahorse dealer and entered the mysterious turquoise building.

Aside from the strange bearded feline’s head bolted to the wall, there was no one in the lobby. A fluorescent tube was flashing messages in Morse code. Hope walked up to the reception desk. The chair had evidently been unoccupied for quite a while: abandoned on the imitation granite surface was a Mekiddo-coloured cup lined at the bottom with a cracked layer of coffee, and the newspaper underneath the cup was dated February—the picture on
the front page showed the Kuwaiti desert bristling with flaming derricks.

Under the newspaper, Hope found a notebook with the company’s organizational chart and a list of the staff’s personal extension numbers. She ran her finger down the list until she reached
SMITH
, Charles—3
^rd
Floor, Section 9, Cubicle 47. The hour of their meeting was at hand.

Hope stepped into the elevator under the menacing gaze of the big cat. The car smelled of oil and linoleum glue, and the machinery creaked in a worrisome way. The doors opened onto a huge space divided into cubicles by movable wall panels. Modular architecture—grey and efficient.

Still not a soul in sight.

In fact, the building looked as if an emergency evacuation had taken place there several weeks earlier. The ceiling was covered with fireproof tiles, some of which had been torn out, exposing bundles of electric wiring.

Hope ventured into the labyrinth and let herself be guided by a sound that was the only sign of life: the squeaking of a poorly lubricated ventilation fan somewhere at the far end of the floor. She wandered around until she came to the realization that this was the third time she had come across the same broken office chair. She was going in circles.

She tried to remember the classic methods for getting out of a labyrinth. Consistently turn left? Draw a map of
your movements? Leave a trail of paperclips? More pragmatically, she climbed on a desk to get an overall view of the area.

What she saw in every direction was chaos and desolation. Piles of papers dumped on the desks, abandoned photocopiers, dried-out ivy plants—all covered with a thin film of dust.

Suddenly, Hope cried out: there was a head peeking out over the labyrinth! A few panels away, a man was silently watching her. They eyed each other for several seconds—Hope was about to conclude that she was staring at a mannequin—when the man spoke up.

“Can I help you?”

“Uhh … I’m looking for someone.”

The man squinted. Hope thought he looked suspicious, but on second thought
she
was the suspicious-looking one, standing there on the desk. She climbed down and headed toward the man by following the directions that he shouted to her over the panels. Right, left, third aisle on the right, then left again.

He was waiting for her in his cubicle, sitting in the shadow of a hill of paperwork topped by a half-full pot of coffee. Hope greeted him with a nod.

“Do you know Charles Smith? I was told he works here.”

The man rubbed his chin as he observed Hope. An invisible twenty-four-hour beard rasped under his fingers,
and the crooked part in his hair gave him the appearance of a John F. Kennedy gone mad.

“You’ve got a weird accent. Where are you from?”

“Québec.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Eastern Canada.”

A spark of recognition flashed across his face.

“So you speak French!
Je appris le français quand je suis jeune
.”

Hope gave him a polite sign of acknowledgment. Then she pointed to the labyrinth of cubicles with a sweeping gesture: What exactly was this place? The set for a film on Chernobyl? The man found this comparison “funny.” This
place
, he explained, was the North American headquarters of the Japanese company Mekiddo—at least, what was left of it, since the offices would be closing for good in exactly (he checked his watch) thirty-seven minutes.

Hope felt a knot in her stomach.

“So Smith doesn’t work here any more?”

By way of response, the man tilted his head toward the adjacent cubicle, which had been hastily vacated, like all the others.

Hope dejectedly plunked herself down on a stack of boxes, raising a cloud of dust. She had crossed North America for nothing.

The man chewed on an imaginary toothpick. He did not seem surprised by the situation. On the contrary, one got the distinct impression that he had been expecting this encounter for weeks, that it was his very last assignment and that once Hope exited the building he too could finally leave this place.

He pretended to spit out his toothpick.

“So you’re looking for Chuck. And you’d like to talk to him about the end of the world, right?”

“Coffee?”

He took two Pyrex cups out of the drawer and inspected them under the fluorescent lights. They were almost opaque under the accretion of fingerprints, but this did not seem to bother him, and he proceeded to pour two generous servings of coffee.

“Milk?”

“No thanks.”

“You got that right. There is no more milk. They took the fridge away last week.”

Hope took a gulp of what assuredly must have been the worst coffee on the entire West Coast. It was bitter, oily and beyond strong, so that from the very first sip she
could feel the caffeine percolating into the remote corners of her brain.

Without batting an eyelid the man drained his cup and gave himself a refill. He sniffed and started on his second cup, but this time less hastily. No sound could be heard except for the constant squeaking of the fan and the muffled whine of Boeings flying by directly overhead. Hope looked for a way to kick-start the conversation.

“So you knew Smith?”

“Ah! No one really knew Kamajii.”

“Kamajii?”

The man explained that Charles Smith’s real name was Hayao Kamajii and that he was from Japan, but that, like so many Asians, he used a Western name to work in the States. In fact, he was an expert mimic: not only was his English flawless—tinged with a slight British accent picked up in Hong Kong—but he had an almost supernatural ability to imitate any accent after only a few minutes.

“In my opinion, he’s a bit autistic. All day long I would see him do things like this”—he pretended to twist a paper clip—“for hours at a time. He did origami. He made little drawings.”

“What was his job?”