Apocalypse for Beginners (3 page)

Now, however, she locked herself in the closet every night to watch the international news on CBC, old late-night feature films, and, above all—that inviolable appointment—David Suzuki and
The Nature of Things
. Astronomy, genetics, chemistry: there was nothing that did not interest her. Every Friday night the good news emanating from Vancouver, British Columbia, was relayed from repeater to repeater across the continent via the Hertzian highway and touched down in a beat-up television inside a closet in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia,
where it irradiated the brain of a young girl with a craving for science.

The Cold War was drawing to a close. The advent of Mikhail Gorbachev was a good omen, perestroika was a good omen and glasnost was a very, very good omen. From now on, there would be no more talk of nuclear holocaust; instead, speculation focused on the imminent opening of a McDonald’s on Red Square.

Hope had the foresight to make collect calls to every Halifax bookstore with the aim of locating a Russian-language textbook. She finally tracked one down at the Book Room. The following week, a highly disgruntled postman delivered three enormous packages, tightly wrapped in brown paper, containing the seventeen volumes of
Teach Yourself Russian at Home
.

While her mother chewed on her nails in the kitchen, Hope shut herself in the closet, furtively turned on the TV, and in the stroboscopic glow of the screen learned all about personal pronouns, conjunctions and conjugations.

She was in the midst of memorizing her first irregular verbs when the Chernobyl accident occurred.

A simple maintenance oversight, a mere thirty seconds of negligence, and a nuclear power plant in the middle of the Ukraine began to melt down as easily as caramel on the stovetop. Hope stayed glued to the TV for three days. For the first time, the whole world could follow every
moment of a calamity unfolding on Soviet soil, a scenario that two or three years earlier would have been the stuff of science fiction.

For Ann Randall, on the other hand, Chernobyl was one of several omens—there were, after all, only three years left before 1989—and she once again was stricken with a blend of anxiety and insomnia as well as abrupt and inexplicable bouts of feverish excitement. And there was something new: she began to speak Assyrian in her sleep.

Assyrian or Hebrew or possibly Sumerian, was what Hope surmised, on grounds that were actually rather thin. Her mother fell asleep each night reading a bulky multi-language bible. Was some sort of contamination taking place? At any rate, whatever it was bore no resemblance to Russian.

For Hope, self-appointed guardian of domestic balance, this apocalyptic psychosis was not some quaint family idiosyncrasy but a bona fide problem. So she dragged her progenitor to the psychiatrist, who confirmed that the dosage of clozapine, after many years of effectiveness, seemed no longer to be working. A new dosage and a new routine were prescribed.

What accounted for this sudden lack of response to the medication? The doctor could not say for sure. He raised various possibilities: the natural history of the illness, changes in the body’s metabolism, the effects of habituation.
For her part, Hope believed there might be an undocumented incompatibility between clozapine and the international news.

Still, whatever the explanation, from now on she would have to intensify her efforts to preserve domestic stability. The resulting tension only heightened her solitary tendencies and increased the number of hours per week spent in her closet retreat.

She felt overwhelmed by the situation, but to whom could she turn for help? Certainly not the Randalls. They tolerated but did not really accept her, quite simply because Hope had not yet endured her Spell from Hell. What kind of Randall were you if you had no idea of your date for the end of the world? Barely a sub-Randall, a maggot, a foreign object orbiting around the family tree.

Hope walked the line between two worlds, unable to set her foot down in one or the other. Luckily she had David Suzuki.

Inevitably, the summer of 1989 arrived.

Hope’s mother was in the grip of indescribable dread, magnified because she did not exactly know what to expect. It had been some time since she had swallowed any pills
whatsoever, and the unopened bottles of clozapine were gathering dust in the medicine cabinet. Consequently, she spent her evenings playing solitaire on the kitchen table and jumping at the slightest squeak, which her imagination immediately amplified and transformed into a cataclysm.

At all times the neighbour’s television could be heard through the wall—a mixture of
The Price Is Right
,
Three’s Company
and
Wok With Yan
, occasionally pierced by angry shouts that could be ascribed to the immoderate consumption of beer. The mayhem began every morning at six and went on until midnight. It was enough to drive anybody insane—and Ann Randall’s sanity hung by such a fine thread she was like one of those cartoon characters holding on to the cliff’s edge with a shaky index finger.

Her anxiety steadily mushroomed, until, one night in July, everything collapsed.

Hope was drifting between two phases of sleep when she was awakened by the clink of dishes. Someone was rummaging around in the cupboards. She edged her way to the kitchen, which she found in state of total chaos. Her mother was frantically emptying the fridge.

“What are you doing, Mom?”

Ann Randall turned around with a start, looking like a burglar caught red-handed. She stared at her daughter for a moment and, unable to recognize her, continued to empty the fridge.

“I’m packing.”

“To go where?”

“West.”

Ann Randall truly believed that she could gain some time by escaping toward the west, perhaps by virtue of the clock’s reversal as one travelled westward through the time zones. Even more likely, however, was that her thinking was based on an abstruse biblical interpretation of the cardinal points or on the lyrics of a Led Zeppelin song that she had heard on the radio earlier that night. There was no way of knowing.

Hope acquiesced, getting out of her pyjamas and putting on the first clothes she could find: an old pair of ripped jeans, a T-shirt and a New York Mets baseball cap. She wistfully packed her bag, managing to jam in a half-dozen volumes of her Russian textbooks. She took a last look inside the closet—the small cocoon furnished with her books, her TV, her cushions, her David Suzuki posters. She sighed. Why hadn’t she been born into a family obsessed by deer hunting, the Super Bowl or municipal politics?

In the kitchen, her mother had almost finished emptying the fridge. She thrust a bag of provisions into Hope’s arms.

“Here, go put this in the car.”

Hope reluctantly obeyed. In front of the house their ancient Lada was waiting, all its doors open. It was an ailing,
second-hand car purchased the year before with the family’s meagre savings. The trunk overflowed with bags, knick-knacks, clothing. Ann Randall had even jettisoned the spare tire to make room for her bible collection. Every seat except the driver’s was laden with boxes, and the floor was covered with sacks of flour, boxes of ramen, jars of relish, bottles of vinegar, ketchup and soy sauce, jars of mustard.

Hope looked at the poor Lada with its sunken shock absorbers. Anything over thirty kilometres per hour might be too much to expect of it.

She returned inside, grabbed her bag and hurried to the bathroom. In the medicine cabinet were rows of clozapine, twenty-odd bottles. Suddenly she heard the noise of a car door slamming shut. Ann Randall had just sat down behind the steering wheel. Hope tossed the drugs into her bag, fished out the prescription (folded twelve times) from under the jar of Vaseline and raced back to the car before her mother got a notion to take off on her own.

The Scotiabank clock showed 4 a.m. and 12°C as the two women pulled out of Yarmouth doing 55 kilometres an hour and equipped with a thermos of reddish tea and a road map that was torn along the boundary between Maine and Témiscouata.

Curled up in a corner of the back seat, Hope tried to catch up on her night’s sleep. She rested her head against
the backpack, with the bottles of clozapine shaking next to her ear like maracas.

When she woke up it was midmorning and they were in the depths of New Brunswick. Her mother had taken the logging road that sliced the province in half—an endless stretch of gravel flanked by thousands of hectares of spruce bearing the Irving dynasty’s coat of arms. For two hours they encountered nothing but convoys of logging trucks and dusty 4×4s. They emerged somewhere in the northwest of the province and crossed the border into Témiscouata, where the yellow haze of forest fires hung in the air. Overhead, CL-215s roared back and forth.

Hope spoke not a word, immersed in her Russian studies. She knew that her questions would elicit nothing but vague theological gibberish. In any case, the one question that really mattered was how long would they keep on driving like this? Only the mighty Pacific itself could stop Ann Randall, and even then she was quite capable of plowing headlong into the ocean. Some action would have to be taken, but what could Hope do? She had five thousand kilometres to figure something out.

But then this happened: Comrade Lada’s heart abruptly gave out among the peat bogs a few kilometres south of Rivière-du-Loup, struck down (as it were) by fate. A breakdown of this magnitude could not be ascribed to mechanics
but only to karma: five valves overheating at once, the carburetor reduced to mush, gears unhinged and countless nuts and bolts gone
AWOL
.

The repairman who came to their aid chewed his toothpick thoughtfully as he examined the vehicle. Then he passed sentence: Kaput! They were better off selling the carcass by the kilo than wasting another minute on the case.

Ann Randall, who had calmed down somewhat over the twelve-hour drive, took stock of the situation. To go back was out of the question. She asked the mechanic a few questions about Rivière-du-Loup and straightaway deemed it a suitable place to wait for the end of the world.

They rented the former pet shop located near the kitchen vent of the Chinese Garden Restaurant, Serving Chinese and Canadian Food. With a considerable portion of their savings having gone toward the first month’s rent, Ann had to take a job at a warehouse in the industrial park, where a battalion of hapless souls stuffed paper into knapsacks made in the People’s Republic of China. The work was dreary but adequate. After all, the world would soon witness the total annihilation of all modern civilization, the People’s Republic of China included.

Ann Randall teetered on the brink of the precipice, always a hair’s breadth away from a relapse that was forestalled only by a minute detail of which she was entirely
unaware—each morning Hope dissolved two tablets of clozapine in her mother’s tea.

On the morning of the first day of school I knocked on the door of the Pet Shop. Hope’s mother had just left, and the only sign of her presence was a heap of warm blankets on the sofa bed. Which didn’t really bother me, as I was in no particular hurry to make the acquaintance of this psychiatric specimen.

On the way to school, Hope snatched a newspaper peeking out from someone’s mailbox. The front page had a picture of Neptune taken by the
Voyager 2
space probe. Hope must have found my enthusiasm wanting, because she proceeded to explain that the probe had been launched in 1977 and the twelve years needed to reach Neptune vividly demonstrated both the vastness of the universe and the extreme smallness of our own planet.

Seen in this light, the new school year appeared pretty insignificant. Score a point for astronomy.

The high school atrium was teeming with people. Classes were about to begin and two thousand students crowded around the stairways. Hope and I huddled in a quiet corner and watched the throng. From time to time
I pointed out a teacher who was either worthy of interest or not to be trusted. Hope asked me if there was anyone I wanted to see.

“No, not really.”

Which meant, of course, that for the moment there was no one more important than Hope.

We folded our arms and surveyed the students as they bustled about with their new outfits, elaborate hairstyles and finely tuned slang. I casually noted that Hope had been wearing the same clothes for a week: an old pair of torn jeans, a frayed cap and a grey T-shirt. But were they in fact the same? Maybe she was simply emulating Albert Einstein, who, as legend had it, acquired twenty-five identical suits to spare himself the daily bother of deciding what to put on.

The anecdote made Hope smile. She happened to know a thing or two about the life of the great physicist. For example, Einstein had
indeed
sent President Roosevelt a letter urging him to develop the atom bomb before the Germans did. He
actually
had been a socialist Zionist and turned down an invitation to become president of Israel in 1952. And he
really
had stated: “I don’t know which arms will be used in the Third World War, but the fourth will be fought with linoleum cutters bought at the local Home Hardware.”

And yet Hope had never heard the story of the twenty-five identical suits.

The fact was, she always wore the same things because they were the only clothes she had managed to grab before leaving Yarmouth. She had been washing her T-shirt and underwear every night in the kitchen sink, but after three weeks of this routine she admitted that she would soon have to find another solution.

Maybe it was time to consider the Albert Einstein Method.

By the autumn equinox Hope had so completely adapted to her new ecosystem that anyone would have believed she had always lived here. Even her funny accent was somewhat less conspicuous. Still, she continued to sleep in the bathtub, which did nothing to reassure me of the stability of their situation. Whenever I showed up at the Randall Pet Shop, I was afraid of finding it deserted, evacuated due to another flare-up of nocturnal psychosis.