Apocalypse for Beginners (6 page)

The first-period bell rang. As if waiting for a signal, the paper bag on Mr. Chénard’s hip split open. Dozens of lemons tumbled down the stairs, bouncing around the students’ ankles.

We hurried off to class, leaving him to deal with his citruses. But Hope was intrigued.

“What do you think he’s going to do with those lemons?”

As a worthy bearer of the Randall name, Hope never let go of an obsession. She twisted and turned it in every direction like a Rubik’s cube and could keep this up in the background for hours, sometimes days. I watched her spend the day sketching the outlines of variously sized lemons on her desk, in the margins of her English notebook, on the palm of her hand.

The mystery was cleared up in the late afternoon in the chemistry lab. Mr. Chénard was going to teach us how to use lemons to put together an electric battery.

The experiment seemed perfectly straightforward. All it required was to stick two electrodes into the unfortunate fruit and, with the aid of a voltmeter, note the very faint electrical current generated by the potential difference. The current was just barely perceptible—around 1.5 volts—so several hundred lemons would have to be hooked up in series for a 40-watt bulb to light up. Of course, the main point of the experiment was not to produce electricity but to explain the role that citric acid, zinc and aluminum played in this curious phenomenon.

Hope and I made a formidable team—admittedly, thanks mostly to Hope—and we completed the experiment in no time. I was already proofreading our report while our closest neighbours were still struggling with their prescribed fruit, trying in vain to lance the peel with the copper wire.

Armed with a scalpel, Hope proceeded to dissect our lemon.

“Do you know the origin of the word ‘electricity’?”

“No idea.”

“The Greeks discovered static electricity by rubbing a piece of amber against some fur. In Greek, ‘electron’ means amber.”

Hope’s face puckered as she bit into a lemon wedge.

“Can you imagine what would have happened if they’d been fiddling around with citrus fruits? Everything would have another name. We would be taking courses in citricity, and the lemon would be an official unit of electric measurement!”

“That’s pretty absurd.”

“Yeah, but
all
units of measurement are absurd. It doesn’t matter if you measure time with drops of water or the rotations of a cesium atom—both are merely absurdities with different degrees of accuracy. Everything else is cultural.”

Right then I observed a sparkle of excitement in her eyes. She opened her chemistry textbook to the conversion
tables and began jotting down notes in the margins of the book and punching numbers into her calculator.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m converting the Hiroshima atomic bomb into lemons.”

Of course. What could be more obvious?

Hope explained that all you needed was a little logic and a smattering of data to obtain a significant, if not altogether exact, answer. In other words, the renowned Fermi method.

In this particular case, you could start with the fact that a lemon contains 15 to 20 calories, that is (she tapped away on her calculator) an average value of 73.2 kilojoules (
×
). The Hiroshima bomb, on the other hand, released an estimated 15 kilotons of energy, amounting to approximately 6.3 × 10
¹³
kilojoules (
y
).

To convert the bomb’s energy, you had only to divide
y
by
×
, which resulted in a total of 8.6 × 10
¹¹
lemons or, more plainly, 860,655 megalemons, the equivalent of Florida’s agricultural output over a period of six thousand years.

Hope went back to work, calculator in hand, and was now computing the volume 860 billion lemons would take up.

Around us, the other students were busy with their coils of copper wire, their sticky fruits and their stacks of loose-leaf filled with scribbled notes. As for me, I pondered the heresy of converting the deadliest explosion in the history of humankind into lemons.

Yet it was inevitable that it should come to this sooner or later.

For the average citizen in 1945, the atomic bomb came from the future, just like the extraterrestrials in
The War of the Worlds
. While physicists were piercing the core of the atom, people in the countryside were still using oil lamps to light their houses.

My grandfather, Wilhelm Bauermann—who had grown up with the steam engine, mustard gas and the Model T Ford—was unable to grasp that the atomic bomb was fundamentally different from dynamite. When he talked about Hiroshima, he imagined a mountain of those cardboard sticks they used in the gypsum quarries.

The children of the postwar years had witnessed the advent of the Boeing 747, LSD and the H-bomb, and by the time my generation arrived on the scene, 100-kiloton intercontinental missiles already belonged to ancient
history. They were like the microwave oven, Captain Mofuku chicken-flavoured ramen or satellite TV—an ordinary component of everyday reality.

No, Grandpa Wilhelm could never have understood how the Hiroshima bomb differed from good old dynamite, and even less how it could be compared to lemons.

My parents had gone down to Montreal until Wednesday to take part in the annual convention of North-Eastern Cement Producers—forty-eight hours of scintillating discussions on all the latest additives, the whole event awash in weak coffee and lukewarm beer.

Lounging on the couch with our feet up on the coffee table, Hope and I were doing our best to diminish the reserves of frozen mini-pizzas. While I flipped through the
TV Guide
, Hope kept half an eye on a news report about Berlin. Nothing new under the sun.

I asked about Mrs. Randall: Was she making any headway with the date of the end of the world? Hope sighed. No, her mother was getting nowhere. As a matter of fact, she was showing dangerous signs of restlessness. Hope wondered how much longer the clozapine would
continue to keep her condition stable. Fundamentally, the issue was not pharmaceutical. All she needed was to find that date and her mental health would immediately improve.

Hope threw her head back and stared at the ceiling for a long time.

“The problem is in her method. She mixes everything up. Mysticism, bogus mathematics, the Kabala, astrology … It lacks elegance.”

“Elegance?”

“An old mathematical concept. The more an idea is unnecessarily complicated, the less elegant it is.”

“I see. So absolute elegance would look something like
E=mc
²
?”

Hope blinked and sat up with a start.

“Do you have dice?”

Of course I had dice. Every North American home worthy of the name had an old Monopoly game stored away in a closet. It took me two minutes to find ours. Hidden under the bundles of banknotes, property titles and miniature bungalows was a pair of dice. But, as hard as I tried, I could not see the connection with the theory of relativity.

“There’s no connection. Except that it reminded me of Einstein’s famous statement: ‘God does not play with dice.’ ”

She gave me a lopsided smile.

“But Einstein was wrong. God does play with dice!”

Assembling pen and paper, she drew a grid and wrote down a series of numbers. I tried to follow but lacked some basic data.

“It’s simple. I’m going to find the date of the end of the world by chance.”

“By chance?”

“Can you think of anything more elegant?”

No, I couldn’t. Hope would throw the dice. Even numbers would mean “yes” and odd numbers would mean “no.” This simplest of conventions would allow her to determine the date through a process of elimination.

The dice clattered across the coffee table. I loved that sound. It took me back to my childhood when my family would spend entire evenings around the Monopoly board. It had been years since we last played, and it felt rather bizarre, in hindsight, to picture my family gathered around a small-scale model of the world, taking part in simulated financial wars.

While I daydreamed, Hope tossed the dice. Between throws, she wrote certain numbers down and crossed out others. This method was not only elegant but quick, and two minutes were enough for her to determine that the apocalypse would happen on July 17, 2001.

Well, at least that was one thing out of the way!
Now we could look forward to spending a quiet evening.

Hope said nothing. She was testing the date in her head, running her mind over it as if it were the sharp edge of a knife.

“Not a very credible date, is it?”

I shrugged my shoulders, preferring to let the Randalls form an opinion on the matter. Hope looked at the dice resting innocently in the palm of her hand. There was no question of a computational error; that was the whole advantage—and absurdity—of chance.

“And why exactly do you find that July 17, 2001, lacks credibility?”

“
July!
Can you really imagine the apocalypse happening during the construction holiday?”

To tell the truth, yes, I had no trouble conjuring up this image—but maybe I’d just read too much science fiction.

“Okay, fine. July’s no good. So which month
would
you see it occurring?”

She mulled over the question. Clearly, April, May and June were out. A springtime doomsday could simply not be taken seriously. August and September were lame choices—the end of the world would look like an ad campaign. “Super-Powerful Armageddon, 20% more Ammonia!” Ridiculous. October, in a pinch, could qualify. In November, on the other hand, the end of days
would seem redundant. Any time during the winter could fit the bill, so long as it didn’t fall during the holidays.

Sitting with her arms folded, Hope cast a disgruntled look at the dice. What good was it resorting to chance if you couldn’t manage to trust it?

I watched her grapple with her internal contradictions. This chink in her self-assurance brought to light a more human, more feminine Hope. Who would have thought that doubt could be so sexy?

Surfing the channels, we came across the second half of a film about Pearl Harbor. Instant consensus. Tucked under three old sleeping bags—relics of those sunny days when my family partook of the joys of camping—we watched the screaming Zeroes swoop down on the Pacific Fleet. On the deck of the warship, a brass band hastily finished playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was the sort of ludicrous scene that we relished.

Just as the USS
California
was being blown up, Hope cried out, “What about December?”

“What?”

While the debris was raining down on the harbour, the
Zeroes launched another volley of torpedoes. We could actually smell the stench of diesel.

“In December. The end of the world. Just like the attack on Pearl Harbor. Not bad, eh?”

My response has been lost to history.

The news came on immediately after the film. The Lebanese president René Moawad had been killed in a bomb attack and we were seeing the first pictures to arrive from Beirut. In the bright sunshine, a mushroom of black smoke rose high into the sky. Hope frowned. On second thought, the summertime could prove as likely a moment as any for the world to end.

We pulled the plug on the television around midnight and bedded down where we lay, wrapped in the sleeping bags that reeked of mothballs, using cushions for pillows.

It took me a long time to drift off, due to the disturbing effect of Hope lying so close, with her back to me and her body pressing into mine. I finally managed to fall asleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night. The VCR clock showed 2:37 a.m., and I realized that Hope was no longer beside me. She was sitting on the couch, gnawing at her fingernails.

“Can’t sleep?”

She shook her head.

“What do you think of February?”

I was speechless for a moment as my neurons revved up one by one.

“No better or worse than any other month.”

She sighed.

“No. That’s not it. It feels too contrived. So … are you hungry?”

By way of response, my stomach rumbled loudly.

We went on a supply raid in the kitchen, where I knew the location of the reserves of chicken-flavoured Captain Mofuku ramen. Genuine bunker food—non-perishable and mould proof. The package design, on the other hand, was a hazard for the eyes: a pink and yellow astronaut with a cretinous smile behind his visor, orbiting a planet made of noodles. True, this was bunker food, but anyone stuck forty metres below ground surrounded by shelves stacked full of these obnoxious astronauts was in danger of losing his mind before succumbing to malnutrition.

We opened the ramen packages and put the kettle on to boil. Hope fidgeted with the empty wrapper while she continued to ruminate.

“What about March?”

I hesitated. It wouldn’t work. March was the Ayers Rock of the calendar—an enormous red, smooth month stranded in the middle of nowhere. Hope nodded.

“You’re right.”

“Listen … why not simply trust the dice?”

Hope didn’t answer. Absently, she toyed with her ramen package, folding it over and over with her thumbs. From a distance, she might have been taken for someone playing with a Chinese abacus. Suddenly, she stopped. She smoothed out the wrapper with the edge of her hand and thrust it under my nose, her index finger pointing to where it said, Meilleur Avant—Best Before
2001 17 JUL
.

I smiled. An amusing coincidence—that’s all. Hope spread her arms out excitedly.

“An amusing coincidence?! Do you have any idea what the odds are for such an
amusing coincidence
?!”

No, I did not have any idea. Nor did Hope, for that matter, but she swore she would calculate it when she had a couple of minutes.

She grabbed the kettle, splashed some boiling water in her bowl, and watched the mushroom cloud of steam rise toward the ceiling. She said no more on the subject of the apocalypse, but folded the wrapper four times and carefully slipped it under her belt.