Apocalypse for Beginners (15 page)

“No idea. I never saw him do any work.”

The man took the coffee pot and offered another
round. Hope declined a second too late and found herself holding her sixth coffee of the day.

“One day he tells me he knows the date when the world’s going to end. Shows me a manuscript. The man had a strange sense of humour.”

“Did you read the manuscript?”

He nodded.

“
Oui
. I remember it mentioned an airport.”

“An airport?”

“Yeah. Nice place to wait for the end of the world, huh?”

“I don’t fly very often.”

He opened a drawer and pulled out an old package of cookies. Then he cautiously took a bite before holding out the package to Hope.

“Cookie?”

She shook her head.

“Anyway, a New York publisher accepts the manuscript and it becomes a bestseller. That’s when poor Chuck starts to have problems. The readers don’t want just a book—they want a guru.
Alors ils le … harassent
?”

“
Harcèlent
.”

“
Oui, ils le harcèlent
. His telephone doesn’t stop ringing the whole night. When he leaves his house in the morning, he stumbles over people in sleeping bags: punks, schizophrenics, junkies,
COBOL
coders.”

He bit into another cookie, frowned in disgust and flung the package at the wastebasket, missing the target by several inches. The package smashed against the floor and cookie crumbs flew off in all directions. The man appeared not to notice.

“So this lasts two years. It was crazy! In the end, Chuck just stops going home. He sleeps in the office.”

“He slept here?”

“
Oui
. Sitting in his office chair.”

Hope scanned the surrounding area. The coffee was distorting her vision. The slightest object was fringed with a pink and blue halo, like a 3-D movie. She felt little electric sparks crackling around her nostrils and reverberating down to the bottom of her lungs. That last coffee had definitely been one too many.

“Has he been gone for very long?”

“Nine months. Eight, maybe. I can give you his new business card, if you want.”

He swung his chair around, fished about in the mass of papers pinned to the cubicle wall and extracted a rectangular piece of pasteboard.

Hope carefully examined Kamajii’s card—English on one side, Japanese on the other. She took a deep breath to ward off her nausea. All around, the cubicles and the furniture seemed to vibrate. Hope was in a video game, standing in front of the Gates of Heaven,
and she was about to be teleported ten thousand floors away.

Business card in hand, Hope charged through the glass doors on the ground floor and spewed an ambiguous blend of bile and coffee against the turquoise tiles right at the foot of the bearded lion.

She spat several times, wiped her mouth with an old handkerchief, and leaned against the wall, gasping for breath and sweating despite the freezing rain. She wanted to be back home.

Hope pocketed the business card and then, supercharged on coffee, shot away like a bullet and marched for several minutes in a straight line. She eventually bumped against the A-frame signboard of a travel agency announcing unbeatable prices for last-minute tickets. Hope walked in with no second thoughts. The next scene unfolded as if in a dream, half in Mandarin, half in English. As it happened, the agency actually was selling a ticket at half price—an eleventh-hour cancellation, a deal not to be missed, departure at 3:23 p.m. Hope pulled the envelope out of her bag and slapped a wad of bills down on the counter.

Five minutes later she hopped into a cab and zoomed off to the airport.

I had just eaten when the telephone rang in the Bunker. I dove over the couch, grabbed the handset and accepted the charges. Hope was in the international departures area of the Seattle airport. Her flight was leaving in fifteen minutes.

“Which flight?”

“US Airways 1212 to Tokyo.”

I rubbed my eyes, trying to digest this new information. Hope’s voice moved closer to the telephone then away from it and was in danger of disappearing at any moment. The soundtrack behind her included a fuzzy voice enumerating flight and gate numbers. I pictured flight information boards clicking out all the destinations in the world.

Hope talked about her Mission, her meeting with John F. Kennedy and the enigmatic Mekiddo corporation. But I wasn’t really paying attention, being too busy sizing up the magnitude of the situation. Alone at the opposite end of the continent, noticeably under the influence of caffeine, Hope was preparing to take off for Tokyo.

“What are you going to do there,
exactly
?”

She hesitated for a second.

“Don’t know yet. I’ll see once I get there.”

“You’ll see once you’re there?!”

“Don’t worry. I’ve gotta run now. They just made the final boarding call.”

Standing by myself in the dim light of the Bunker, I pondered that uncharacteristic hesitation and the vagueness of her answer. I couldn’t imagine Hope letting herself get swept along by events. It just wasn’t like her—there was much more Hope than Randall in her.

She must have had a plan up her sleeve. A secret plan embedded in her mind at an impossible angle, designed to travel express with no stops along the way.

A plan with enough room for just one person.

Hope opened her eyes just in time to see the final seconds of a short travel film entitled
Between Tradition and Modernism
. Her ears were buzzing. In her lap was the emergency procedures brochure showing passengers fleeing from fire, asphyxiation, drowning—please remain calm.

The pilot announced the final descent in picturesque English. It was 3:32 p.m. local time, practically the same time Hope had left Seattle. But this was 3:32
tomorrow
. By
virtue of an amusing temporal sleight of hand somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, passengers and crew had leapfrogged over twenty-four hours.

Hope released the pressure in her eardrums and reset her watch, fascinated by the idea that an entire day had literally vanished into thin air.

The 747 made a faultless approach over Narita airport and softly touched down. As the plane slowly taxied toward the gate, Hope scanned the tarmac through the porthole: dozens of square kilometres of concrete, tanks of kerosene, beat-up baggage carts. Here and there, members of the ground crew walked around, dressed in high-tech overalls, ears covered with huge shells, eyes protected by dark glasses. They looked like people working in a toxic environment.

Around the terminal, Hope counted about forty 747s, each of them bearing the colours of a different airline: Saudi Arabian Airlines, Aeroflot, Lufthansa, Aerolíneas Argentinas, Qantas, TAM, Air China, American Airlines, Delta, Air India.

After she got off the plane, Hope went along the corridor that led to the immigration counters. There was an endless, tightly packed line of travellers, coiled like the small intestine of some fantastic beast. Hope heard people speaking English, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese. Two men with New Zealand accents were discussing the range of a 747. A young woman was reading yesterday’s
República
. Some kids were squabbling in Mandarin. Babel, upside down.

In his glass cage, an immigration officer inspected Hope’s passport without making the slightest comment and stamped it with a ninety-day tourist visa. Wham! Welcome to the land of ramen.

She walked straight past the baggage carousels and into the arrivals area.

First stop, the foreign exchange office, where she bought ¥29,092 (before the three per cent commission). The figure seemed astronomical, but Hope kept in mind that this stack of bills was worth just US$200. She examined a ¥5,000 note, holding it up against the light. It was anybody’s guess how much range such a sum could provide in a city like Tokyo. A week? Two days? Ten minutes?

She slipped the money into her back pocket, twisted the transaction receipt and lobbed it at the nearest trash-can but missed. When she bent down to collect the piece of paper, she almost knocked her head against a nail-clipper vending machine.

Japan promised to be strange.

Hope mentally converted the prices displayed on the vending machine. She was stunned by the results. Who could afford to clip their nails in this country?

She turned away from the machine and surveyed the arrivals area. Every so often, the public address system
transmitted messages in Japanese. It was the first time Hope found herself in a place where she could not understand a single word. She needed to get her hands on a phrase book, one of those vacuous lexicons listing all the commonplaces of commercial tourism. Where can I find a hotel? How much is this kimono / vase / knife? I am looking for the train station / post office / washroom. Thank you, that is very kind of you. Goodbye.

Hope stepped into a newsstand and, with a great deal of gesturing and a few snippets of English, managed to get her point across to the cashier, who suggested
Rough Planet Tokyo
. The guidebook included a section of ready-made phrases, for example: “Where is the nearest bunker?” (
Sumimasen, kono atari ni chika sherutaa wa ari masu ka?
) or “May I borrow your gas mask / anti-radiation suit?” (
Gasumasuku / houshanou bougyo suutsu o kari te mo ii desu ka
?)

Japan promised to be very strange indeed.

Sitting in the subway car, Hope scrutinized Hayao Kamajii’s business card for the umpteenth time. She opened her
Rough Planet
guide and studied the map of downtown Tokyo, in the middle of which she had marked the (theoretical) location of the Mekiddo offices with a
red X. It had taken her nearly a half-hour to decipher the address printed on the business card. Not that she lacked a sense of direction—the guidebook devoted an entire chapter to the Japanese address system, which was apt to drive even an astrophysicist crazy.

The subway gradually filled up as it approached the city centre. Hope noticed that a number of the passengers wore surgical masks. What did they know that she didn’t? She flipped through her guidebook: “Do you know where some antibiotics / morphine can be found?” (
Moruhine / kousei busshitsu ha doko de te ni hairu ka shitte masu ka?
)

She began to chew on her fingernails and found they had a funny taste.

The last few days had zipped by so quickly that Hope had denied the existence of her own body. She took a moment to inspect her hands, something she had not done since leaving New York. The electric blue varnish was peeling and the nail of her right index finger was cracked, not to mention all the grunge that had built up day after day. Underneath, millions of bacteria, spores and germs were napping, and with a good microscope it would have been possible to reconstitute her itinerary from Norbert Vong’s smoky kitchen to the Narita Airport, with all the stops and stages in between: Sammy Levy’s office, the Greyhound bus ride, various vending machines spread throughout the northern United States, the noodle
shop in Seattle’s Chinatown and the unending flight on the US Airways 747.

For a second, Hope imagined that the chewed-off bits of her nails had been sent to a virgin, lifeless planet, like the Earth at the time of the great primal soup. Perhaps they would contaminate that nourishing environment and engender new life forms there. First to appear would be the one-celled organisms, then jellyfish, then teeming vertebrate fish, swimming and crawling, emerging from the oceans, developing technologies and languages and religions and cities and, ultimately, civilizations that would war against each other and build spiral towers and live in fear of the end of the world. A whole world born out of a few grungy bits of fingernail.

Hope was suddenly sorry she hadn’t invested in a nail clipper.

Hope changed lines three times and resurfaced on Akko Boulevard. The streets were packed, yet the area did not look like a commercial district: no skyscrapers, no hordes of salarymen or messengers, but lots of restaurants, boutiques, laundries, bookstores. Certainly not the kind of neighbourhood Hope would have associated with the headquarters of a multinational corporation.

The display window of an electronics store attracted her attention. Behind the glass, a dozen screens rebroad-casted a dozen channels: ten times ten derricks aflame in the Kuwaiti desert.

She took her bearings and set out in the direction indicated by the address numbers. After ten minutes of deduction and triangulation, she halted at the spot where, indisputably, the Mekiddo offices should have stood. But instead of the lion with the bearded human head there was some sort of swimming pool or Turkish bath. She backtracked and checked the street signs three times. The address still seemed to jibe with her calculations. Had she made a mistake?

She pushed open the glass door. The lobby was suffused with the odour of chlorine and disinfectant. A young man seated at the cash was completely engrossed in a novel. He spoke a little English, and Hope asked him if she could go in to see the pool. He made an ambiguous gesture that she took for a yes.

Alone in the women’s locker room, Hope carefully examined the faucets, the counters, the tiles. Everything was brand new and sparkling.

Hope removed her boots and followed the corridor leading to the pool. What she found there was far from exotic, but given the total absence of bathers, the atmosphere was vaguely unsettling. Perched on his tall chair,
the lifeguard was snoozing. Behind him, the alignment of the buoys on the wall was so perfect as to appear surreal.

Whatever this place was, it was obviously not the Mekiddo mother ship.

When she returned to the lobby, Hope showed the business card to the cashier. Had she erred in her calculations? The young man shook his head: This was the right spot, but the Mekiddo offices had moved three months ago.

Where?

The young man, who seemed to find the question very amusing, plunged into his book again without answering.