Apocalypse for Beginners (21 page)

“Good date,” she finally declared. “Prime numbers, Mickey, that’s the secret.”

She poured herself a finger of cognac and said nothing more.

Damned Randalls.

After a while I got tired of hearing about Saddam Hussein. I drained my beer and went out for a walk.

In the moonlight, the city looked like a Japanese water-colour, and the paper mill emitted an odour of rotten eggs. I ended up at the municipal stadium or, to be exact, at the place where the municipal stadium had stood a few weeks earlier.

Not even the slightest evidence was left of the fire. The day after, the rubble had been removed and the ground levelled by a bulldozer. The municipal council had voted in favour of rebuilding a larger, better-equipped stadium on the outskirts of the city. The layout of two new streets and the construction of thirty condominium units were announced a week later, and an illustrated sign was put up at the perimeter of the site, like a giant postcard from Eden. I was surprised at how quickly the project had been set in motion. Someone somewhere seemed to be in a hurry to obliterate whatever was left of the old stadium, to erase it from collective memory. It seemed almost suspicious.

The sign resembled a modernist manifesto. Boundless optimism, perfectly trimmed hedges. You could sense the echoes of the postwar boom. The only things missing were plutonium-fuelled cars, household robots and velocopters.

Standing beside me, Hope examined the billboard with a sarcastic smile.

“Yessir, it sure looks clean and tidy.”

She turned away from the billboard toward the adjacent streets. Etched against the moonlight were the bluish silhouettes of the bungalows, perforated here and there by TV screens.

“Can you imagine what the world looked like before?”

“Before what?”

“Before bungalows.”

I frowned. Yes, I knew what the world looked like before. I had seen archival photos at an exhibition of the historical society. This poorly drained depression was once an ancient peat bog. Spruce, reddish lakes covered with sphagnum. Flowering pitcher plants, water lilies, probably a few migrating birds’ nests. Frogs, bulrushes, mosquitoes, flies, butterflies, dragonflies. Muskrats, raccoons, garter snakes. Countless small animals, bacteria, single-celled organisms.

The results of millions of years of evolution.

Hope sighed.

“Can you imagine the effort it takes to
wipe out
a peat bog? It doesn’t happen on its own. You have to drain the land, unload thousands of tons of gravel, level the ground with bulldozers, graders, steamrollers. Dig sewers, plan streets. Install water and electricity systems.”

All at once, my view of the surrounding bungalows shifted: Now they encircled the empty lot and were preparing to close in on it and bury it in silence—like a blanket of peat moss on the surface of a lake. One world swallowing another.

“The UN inspectors can say what they like, the fact remains that the bungalow is the primary weapon of mass destruction invented during the Cold War.”

I burst out laughing. Who but Hope could be so matter-of-fact in spouting such fantastically outrageous comments?

The laughter stuck in my throat. I suddenly, brutally, realized the magnitude of my mistake. Like an idiot, I had let Hope run off to the far side of the world without reacting, instead of going after her to convince her to turn around or disappear along with her. But I had done nothing. Now it was too late, and I knew she would not be coming back.

Alone on a vacant lot, I watched the world disintegrate around me.

I grew up in a world obsessed by the apocalypse.

On the playground of my primary school, the atomic holocaust was just another topic of discussion. Between games of hopscotch we would talk about bunkers, radiation, plutonium and megatons. Some of us, though completely hopeless in mathematics, could cite detailed statistics on the Soviet nuclear arsenal, and this quantified knowledge made our fears all the more tangible. Who would get their share of Soviet warheads? Would we die roasted, vaporized or irradiated?

We were the pre-war generation.

Bunkers were only halfway reassuring. Who would want to spend three weeks crammed together below ground, eating sardines packed in oil, playing poker with matches and defecating into a tin can, only to resurface at the dawn of a nuclear winter that was going to last forty more years?

We were a little taken aback by the fall of the USSR. No matter—there was still acid rain, the disappearing ozone layer, carcinogenic substances, cholesterol, desertification, the fluoridation of drinking water, asteroids, whatever. The specifics didn’t matter, so long as it was imminent.

We saw the end of the world everywhere. As far as we
were concerned, even a trivial change of date was liable to trigger the collapse of civilization or at least a return to the Middle Ages and everything that that entailed: black plague, cholera, carnage, crusades … elevator breakdowns. The Gregorian calendar as a catalyst for destruction—why hadn’t someone thought of that before?

On the night of December 31, 1999, the dials slowed down in one time zone after another—but nothing happened, and the sun rose over a civilization unscathed. True, a grandmother in the suburbs of Pittsburgh lost her weekly shopping list, but everywhere else human beings continued to get high, to copulate and to keep an eye on the stock markets. Kids still combed through the garbage in the dumps of Calcutta. Other kids, in Sierra Leone, polished their old Yugoslavian AK-47s. Thousands of pumps sucked out oil through the Earth’s crust. Why should anyone have been concerned about the end of the world?

Greenhouse gases, tsunamis, particle accelerators, radon, nanotechnologies, the market economy, black holes, epidemics of neuro-eruptive infants, peak oil, ice-nine, the reorientation of the Earth’s axis and deorbiting episodes, genetic mutations, azoospermia, the atrophy or hypertrophy of the Sun, sticky or scaly creatures emerging from the ocean depths, the inversion of the poles, the industrial transformation of human beings into chipboard
panels, increasing entropy, gravitational anomalies, androids, pelagic methane, saturated fat and hydrogenated fat, bird flu pandemics, pesticides and/or herbicides, riots, antibiotics and the People’s Republic of China. The list of perils looked more and more like the ingredients printed on a package of ramen—an implausible inventory. But we had gone beyond the point of any plausibility. We had been expecting the end of the world for so long that it was now part of our DNA.

Anyway.

I often thought about all this. Not every night, but almost. I may even have been thinking about it at the exact moment Ann Randall died at the age of forty-seven years and four months. The death certificate was signed at the Hôtel-Dieu, the hospital of Rivière-du-Loup, just before midnight on July 13, 2001.

“A very bad date,” Hope would have declared.

The news of Ann Randall’s death reached me at noon. All my co-workers had gone out to eat, leaving me in conversation with my computer. I didn’t really feel like going outdoors: for several days Montreal had sat under a layer of yellowish air, and just looking through the window was
enough to make me choke. I was eating a repulsive tuna sandwich while reading the forecasts on Environment Canada’s website (smog warning in effect) when my father’s message showed up on my screen.

Paternal restraint in all its splendour.

I read the message three times, unsure of exactly what my feelings were. I wavered between tears and laughter. How could Ann Randall have dared to die four days before the end of the world? At this level, irony surely had to be renamed.

I closed the message and went back to the weather forecasts. The map of warm fronts painted all of Ontario in incandescent waves. It didn’t bode well for us.

I flipped through my datebook. Nothing very urgent planned for the next forty-eight hours. I dropped my sandwich in the wastebasket and left a message on my supervisor’s voice mail (“feeling sick, could be stomach flu, taking the rest of the day off”) and decamped without even shutting down my computer.

After collecting a few personal items at my apartment—toothbrush, clothes, water bottle—I fled the island aboard my old Toyota.

So, there I was, on yet another never-ending trip to my hometown: five hours of rectilinear highway, several litres of iced tea, and a break for bladder relief at the halfway point. The speakers blared out Moby in a loop—it was the only cassette in the car that was still playable. I counted the road signs, trying not to think too much.

It was late afternoon when I arrived in Rivière-du-Loup.

Some thirty cars were parked haphazardly in front of the Ophir. A few old men were conversing by the door, hands in their pockets, cigarettes in their mouths. I had an urge to turn around, but I finally parked the Toyota at the far end of the train station, near the farm co-op, and trudged over to the Ophir, still trying not to think too much. That was the main thing: not to think too much.

The wake had just begun, but the place was already packed, the air thick with sweat and smoke. They must have jettisoned the chairs, because everyone was standing.

My heart clenched, or maybe it was my stomach. What had I come here for? To pay my respects to Ann Randall, of course—but I had never been very big on funerals and I could just as well have sent a message from Montreal. Tele-condolences. Anyway, there was not one familiar face among this gloomy crowd. No hands to shake, no one to embrace. All around, regular customers were speaking in hushed voices. A few Dalai Lamas (still sober) huddled together at the counter with grim faces. Ann Randall’s departure had clearly put a serious dent in reality.

I looked around for the guest of honour and spotted her on a shelf behind the bar, reduced to a few cubic centimetres of fine ash. A shovelful of Pompeii in a granite urn. A photo of Ann in her better days had been placed nearby, along with a pack of cigarillos and a bottle of Rémy Martin Grande Champagne Cognac, obviously purchased at great cost for the occasion. A generous snifter had been filled and set down for the deceased.

I found these offerings unexpectedly moving, and averted my eyes.

Robert cut through the crowd to shake my hand, as though we were old friends, which was odd since I was barely seventeen the last time we had seen each other. The prodigal son syndrome. Robert had put on weight, lost some hair. He explained how he had organized everything: the incineration, the obituary, the wake. The Ophir
had in a way been Ann’s home. So, had I heard anything from Hope? No. Nothing. Robert shook his head.

“You don’t just abandon your mother like that, right?”

I nodded politely, but, frankly, I doubted that life was that simple.

In the absence of any close relatives, Robert had taken care of the Final Clean-up at the Pet Shop. Otherwise (he said indignantly) the owner would have dumped everything in the garbage. I wouldn’t have blamed him. As I recalled, the place had already gone a long way toward dumpification. Robert admitted that he had not found much worth keeping. He had sent 20 kilos of non-perishable goods to the Saint Vincent de Paul and stuffed almost forty bags into the Chinese Garden’s garbage container. The rest fit into a few boxes, one of which, by the way, was meant for me.

From under the counter, he pulled out a heavy cardboard Premium Florida Lemons crate. Under the tired flaps I discovered Ann Randall’s famous collection of bibles, smelling of musk and fungus. Robert made a vaguely explanatory gesture.

“I figured this would interest you …”

I nodded without saying anything. After exchanging a long handshake with Robert, I left the Ophir loaded down with my box of bibles, which weighed a ton. The box went into the Toyota’s trunk between my toolbox and a spare tire.

The kitchen smelled like home: tomato soup and grilled chicken. The TV was tuned to the news. My mother gave me a casual kiss, as if I’d been living in the bungalow next door (she lived outside of time and space, like all mothers).

“Have you eaten? I’ll heat up some chicken for you.”

My father shook my hand, asked me how the drive down had been, offered me a beer. It was strange to see him at home so early in the evening. He had sold the cement works six months before and now belonged to that population of free, unfettered men who ate dinner at a decent hour of the evening.

The sale had concluded the final chapter of the Bauermann dynasty. The concrete plant and the fleet of trucks had fallen to the enemy two years earlier. My father could have dug his heels in for another ten years, but what good would it have done, since his sons had no intention of taking over the business? The elder son was a psychoanalyst in Toronto, and the younger cultivated his scoliosis hunched in front of a monitor in a cubicle in downtown Montreal. So my father had accepted the offer of PanAmerican Concrete, a multinational that we’d heard him rail against thousands of times. After several proudly independent decades, Bauermann Concrete Inc. had finally been engulfed by the global economy. Another
unwritten page in the history of the middle class, etc., etc.

My father would never admit it, but getting rid of the company had ultimately been something of a liberation. He was like Butch Cassidy: too sensitive to work in concrete.

We drank our beer as we watched TV without paying much attention. Satellite pictures of a hurricane flashed by on the screen, followed by George W. Bush standing among the rubble of a Dallas suburb. My mother placed a steaming plate in front of me.

“How’s Karen?”

I set to work on the chicken while carefully calibrating my answer. “Karen has left,” I finally announced as I speared a potato.