Apocalypse for Beginners (23 page)

I carefully inspected the box for an expiry date. There was none.

I left the MaxiPrix empty handed. Across the street, the convenience store still announced that it would be opening in five minutes. What if the sign had been hung up two hours earlier and old Ngô had accidentally shut himself inside the beer refrigerator? I would have to face the end of the world without Mrs. Ngô’s shrimp rolls. There was no end of nuisances that I would have to bear.

On the corner of the street an old orange Datsun had just overheated. The driver had lifted the hood and a plume of black smoke drifted skyward. A big Italian man burst out of the nearby jewellery store armed with a fire extinguisher, and he blanketed everything—the Datsun, the fire and the driver—in a cumulus of carbonic snow.

What sort of comedy had I stumbled into?

Back home, the mailbox had come under assault: a bagful of circulars, three bills, an offer for a credit card and the menu of a sushi bar. I climbed the stairs slowly.
My head was spinning and I urgently needed to find something edible within the next five minutes. The sushi option suddenly looked a little more attractive.

I flung down the pile of mail, which fanned out on the dining table, and I noticed a light blue envelope with a red border. Airmail paper.

A dozen Japanese stamps covered half of the envelope.

I went to sit on the balcony holding the letter in one hand, a Heineken in the other, and my penknife between my teeth.

Sipping my beer several times, I looked at the envelope. I was reluctant to open or even touch this supernatural, blinding apparition. I almost expected it to disappear at any moment. But it stayed there, in my lap, unmistakably tangible.

On the reverse side someone had written an interminable address. A Tokyo address.

I imagined Hope giving the flap a lick, wiping away a pearl of saliva with her thumb and then, as serious as a child, doing a series of unbelievable quantum calculations with the stub of a pencil to make sure that the envelope would leave at the right time, cross the entire planet, going from one plane to another, from one post
office to another, and arrive in my hands exactly today, at sunset.

The stamps were exquisite, a veritable trove of Japanese iconography: giant squid, Mount Fuji and several Hello Kittys.

What was I afraid of?

I finished my beer and gathered my courage. A stroke of the knife and the envelope was slit open. There was nothing in it except for a bland plastic wrapper, empty as well. Nothing else. Not a word, not a letter, not even a haiku on a Post-it.

Just an empty wrapper.

I smoothed it out with the palm of my hand and examined it carefully, intrigued at first, then incredulous, and finally a hair’s breadth away from a nervous breakdown. Despite the absence of any Latin script, there could be no ambiguity as to the product that this wrapper had contained.

Sanitary napkins.

More specifically (based on my recently acquired expertise), these were extra-thin, hypoallergenic napkins with NanoNikki™ micropores and super-leakproof-yet-ultrasoft wings. A model made for today’s active young Japanese woman.

Hope Randall was no longer a medical mystery.

Mirabel Airport was gently sliding downhill. Its impending death had been announced for years. Decried, despised and soon decommissioned: the great cycle of life.

As for me, I was quite happy to depart from Mirabel. Given the growing rumours of closure, I felt like a visitor among virtual ruins—the ideal blend of archaeology and science fiction. Shielded by the glass wall, I tried to imagine an abandoned airport. How much time would it take before the couch grass crept into the joints of this flawless concrete? Before the tarmac was breached by tufts of straw, by willows and dogwoods and alders?

The perennial questions of a Bauermann.

I turned away from the glass wall. The terminal was deserted, peaceful and depressing at the same time. All that was missing was a scattering of the living dead.

A few dozen passengers bided their time near Gate 12: globetrotting women on a budget, farm machinery salesmen, nuns, middle-class Mexicans drinking bottled water, migrant workers, thirty-year-olds in worn-out jeans. The grandeur and misery of the low season.

The flight attendants took their positions at the check-in counter, and I drew a whole collection of boarding passes out of my pocket. I had purchased an exotic ticket on the Internet, an unbeatable deal, which would mean
flying to Acapulco, San Diego and Honolulu before finally heading for Tokyo—in total, thirty-one hours of travelling.

The time needed to think about what came next.

Behind the counter a flight attendant picked up the intercom handset, cleared her throat and welcomed us aboard Air Transat flight 1707 to Acapulco.

“This is a pre-boarding announcement. Passengers requiring assistance or travelling with small children, please proceed to Gate 12.”

The passengers stood up. Stretched. Checked their luggage. A line soon formed in front of the counter. The atmosphere gradually became charged with the tension generated by the imminent departure, but I remained serene. Leaning my back against the glass wall, I fanned myself with the sheaf of boarding tickets. I felt light, immortal. I was Paul Newman.

Things were much better now that the end of the world was behind us.

Despite impressions to the contrary, a novelist is never completely alone.

I wish to thank a number of people who have contributed to the making of this book, starting with Antoine Tanguay, who patiently listened to me construct and deconstruct the project, and whose maverick erudition nourished my thinking at various times. Bernard Wright-Laflamme, Martin Beaulieu and Pierre Blais read and commented on the text and corrected certain factual mistakes. Jeremy Barnes assisted me in clarifying the relationship between nuclear explosions and citrus fruits (although the calculations in
Chapter 17
are my own, and I take full responsibility for the errors or inconsistencies that may be found there). Masumi Kaneko and Julie Sirois translated the
Rough Planet
excerpts. Isabel Flores Oliva was there.

A warm word of appreciation for Lazer Lederhendler, my trusted translator, who worked at a breakneck pace and produced an exceptional translation. Very special thanks go to Pamela Murray, whose enthusiasm, intelligence, and sharp eye helped make this English version
into an edition in its own right. Thanks also to Shaun Oakey and Kathryn Exner. Editors exist to show that a text can still be improved after five hundred readings.

Finally, I want to express my gratitude to my family, in particular Marie Wright-Laflamme, Jean-Luc Laflamme and Louise Plante, without whose support the manuscript would have advanced at the painful rate of fifteen kilometres a day.

NICOLAS DICKNER
’s first novel,
Nikolski
, won three awards in Quebec, one in France, and was the winner of Canada Reads 2010. He currently writes a weekly column for
Voir
, and is working on his next novel.

LAZER LEDERHENDLER
won the Governor General’s Literary Award for his work on
Nikolski
, which also won a Quebec Writers’ Federation Award. He lives in Montreal.