Apocalypse for Beginners (8 page)

“So what was she doing at the Saint Vincent de Paul?”

“The usual obsession: more and more food. And, hey, it’s free—just imagine! Like dangling a loaded syringe in front of a junkie.”

She gave the door a little punch and let out a growl.

“Anyway, I don’t know what happened. She attacked the Christmas tree, broke a couple of things. They called the police.”

I remarked that Hope was pretty calm, despite the turn of events.

“Bah, I’m used to it. In Yarmouth, I had to manage things so that the social workers wouldn’t send me to a foster home. Someone should give me a degree in the art of negotiation.”

I parked the car in front of the police station, just under a sign that said, “Parking Prohibited. Towing At Your
Expense.” The street was quiet, with a few snowflakes dancing in the orange light of the mercury arc lamp. All of Rivière-du-Loup was huddled indoors waiting for the Christmas Eve celebrations.

While Hope was having a discussion with the police officer on duty, I pretended to take an interest in the artificial Christmas tree standing in a corner of the waiting room, its branches sagging under layers of tired tinsel. It was easily the saddest evergreen in all of North America.

The officer was lecturing Hope, his fists on the counter. He was not supposed to let a minor take her mother out of jail, whether it was Christmas Eve, Easter morning or two days after Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. Hope pleaded Mrs. Randall’s case: Anyone could see she was not in her normal frame of mind, and the best thing for her would be to go home to rest and to take a generous dose of clozapine and a sedative. A night in prison would do nothing to improve the situation.

The police officer grumbled a little and began to fill out a form. He would make an exception, but only because the detainee had not been violent and had not resisted arrest.

“Do you have a proof of residence?”

With a practised air, Hope produced a telephone bill.

“I’m going to send the file over to the public clinic. Your mother needs to see a health professional.”

Hope nodded: Yes, yes, she was familiar with the procedure.

The officer dumped onto the counter Mrs. Randall’s personal effects: a handful of change, a wristwatch, a Bic pen (no cap) with multiple teeth marks and a set of keys. While Hope pocketed the items, the police officer opened the cell and escorted Mrs. Randall to the hallway.

Her eyes had a faraway look. Hope’s movements were strangely protective as she helped her mother with her coat.

“Are you okay, Mom? How are you feeling?”

“I’m hungry.”

“Okay, then, let’s go home.”

As we drove back, the silence in the Honda weighed ten thousand tons. I steered the car over the icy streets, Hope stared up at the car roof, and her mother, leaning her head against the window and mumbling inarticulately, seemed more preoccupied than ever with the end of days. What new omens had she observed during the last few hours? Graffiti on the wall of her cell? The artificial Christmas tree in the waiting room? The policeman’s moustache? Or simply that a girl of seventeen had been obliged to get her mother out of jail on Christmas Eve?

I pulled up in front of the Randall Pet Shop and helped Hope extract her mother from the back seat. Propping her up on either side, we stumbled our way to the door. While Hope fumbled with the lock, Mrs. Randall rambled on, her arm dangling over my shoulder.

Once inside, Mrs. Randall said she was not hungry any more, that she would rather sleep until 1997, or even longer, if possible. That she would wake up only in the event of an unaccredited apocalypse, thank you very much. While Hope removed her boots and coat, I pulled opened the sofa bed. The springs creaked, indicating the need for a few drops of oil. Everything in that dump rusted from the dampness.

Hope helped her mother climb under the sheets, pulled the blankets up to her chin, kissed her on the forehead. Ten seconds later, Mrs. Randall was droning away in Aramaic.

Hope sat down at the foot of the bed and rubbed her eyes. The negotiations with the policeman had demanded an output of thousands of kilowatts in the space of a few minutes. I fidgeted with the car keys and looked around me. The Pet Shop was cold, dark and even messier than usual. An odour of rabbit piss hung in the air. The dining table buckled under piles of paper, notebooks, cash receipts
and boxes of Kraft Dinner. I noticed a stack of bills, probably unpaid.

I was embarrassed to be a witness to all this and badly wanted to be somewhere else, and yet I didn’t want to turn my back on Hope.

She stopped massaging her eyes and scanned the room. She, too, would have preferred not to be there. I suddenly understood how there might be something reassuring about the end of the world.

Hope sighed.

“Do you know what I dreamt of last night?”

I sat down beside her without speaking. The sofa groaned. Behind us, bits of Hebrew and Akkadian could be heard.

“I dreamt that the animals were coming back to the Pet Shop—giraffes, elephants, zebras. A long line of exotic animals stretching back to Lafontaine Street. They came through the door two at a time and took over. Parrots in the curtains. Lizards in the drawers. Chimpanzees in the closet. They ate our food supplies, but my mother didn’t care. She was lying on the couch without any clothes on. I tried to cover her with a coat, but she refused. She laughed and drank wine straight from the bottle, saying that everything was over.”

Hope sighed again. She kissed me on the temple.

“Go home. It’ll be all right.”

Stepping outside, I drew a deep breath of icy air to cleanse my lungs of the smell of the Pet Shop. I brushed my finger over my temple, where Hope had kissed me. All at once, I liked that part of my body.

I got behind the wheel of the Honda and headed home, where my absence had most likely been noticed. Already, I anticipated the barrage of questions. What sort of story could I think up? The car’s interior weighed down on me and I switched on the radio. Nana Mouskouri was still pa rum pum pummelling the airwaves.

After Christmas, things quieted down. Mrs. Randall regained a modicum of stability thanks to the triple doses of clozapine that Hope meted out to her each morning. At that rate, however, the reserves would probably be depleted by the summer, and no pharmacist would accept a prescription that had been repeatedly crumpled and ironed out. These problems would have to be dealt with in due course.

Since the Christmas episode, I felt I’d been entrusted with new responsibilities. Every day, I made sure that Hope was all right and that her mother had not instigated some new psychodrama. Hope never needed anything but seemed happy to know I was close by.

The end of the winter holidays coincided with the outbreak of the biggest flu epidemic of the decade, a particularly virulent strain concocted in the megalopolises of Southeast Asia. My grandmother swore that this was the Great Return of the Spanish Flu. At school, the classrooms were riddled with unoccupied desks, and everything was running in slow motion. “Carnage” was number one on the word-of-the-week chart.

At the Bauermann residence, my mother’s immune system was the first to give way. She found herself bedridden with a temperature of 40, and the slightest movement was enough to make her moan with pain. My father dispatched me to the Steinberg supermarket with a list consisting essentially of large amounts of vitamin C and ground beef. Ultimately,
Homo sapiens
had remained a hunter-gatherer.

I took advantage of the errand to stop by the Pet Shop, since it had been forty-eight hours since I’d last heard from Hope. She hadn’t shown up at school or at the Bunker, and she wasn’t answering the phone. I had already begun to fear the worst.

As I parked the Honda, there was Hope, who, as it happened, was also on her way to buy groceries. Great minds, etc. She slipped into the front seat.

For someone who was supposed to be down with the flu, she seemed to be in excellent shape. Actually, she had
not been sick at all. She had simply been commandeered by her mother, who, without prior notice, had barricaded herself into the pantry by fastening the door with a couple of screws. Quite an unexpected reversal.

“Before shutting herself in, she poured everything that might count as a cleaning product down the toilet: dish soap, detergent, shampoo. She nearly blocked the pipes by trying to flush down the garbage bags.”

“What made her do that?”

“Oh, who knows? I have trouble making out what she mumbles through the pantry door. Stuff about germs and the regeneration of the planet. I’ve given up trying to make sense of it. The upshot is I’m going to take the opportunity to give the apartment a good scrub before I let her out of the dungeon.”

“But I thought she was getting better.”

“You can’t take anything for granted where the Randalls are concerned.”

The store was closing in thirty minutes. There were no customers to be seen, only deserted aisles and a long stretch of empty shelves in the Vicks VapoRub section. Clearly, this flu was taking a toll.

We split up to carry out our respective missions. We would rendezvous by the cleaning products in five minutes.

As I went by the refrigerators, I noted the latest Asian invasion: tofu. Out of curiosity, I examined one of the
packages. For the time being, this was an exotic and unsavoury item. But in a few years it would be a perfectly ordinary part of our diet, as mundane as Nutella and the H-bomb. In the wake of the Great Tofu War, we would be slightly more Asian, but no one would notice. Another unwritten chapter in the history of the middle class.

My eyes swept over the area as I sought to identify the items that, on the historical level, denoted something new. Which products had appeared since my birth, since my parents’ birth? Kiwis, garlic, asparagus? In which year had the first lemons been shipped north of the 47th parallel and sold in our little hinterland town, hundreds of kilometres from the Port of Montreal?

What strange times, when a simple fruit could conjure an enigma.

I loaded up on 50 volts’ worth of various citrus fruits—just barely enough to run a quartz watch—and grabbed a package of ground beef without slowing down on my way to the cleaning products aisle. Hope was holding a bottle of detergent in each hand as if gauging which of the two flavours would inflict the most damage. She frowned and dropped both bottles into her cart, where they joined a box of steel wool, some scouring pads, dish soap and a jug of bleach.

Around us, an industrial silence reigned. The only sound was the swishing of the ventilation system. A post-apocalyptic stillness. But what sort of calamity could have
left buildings intact, the electricity grid functioning, the products neatly arranged on the shelves?

“Zombie invasion,” Hope suggested.

At the far end of the aisle, an obese woman in a fur coat shuffled by, dragging her feet and pushing an empty cart. I had the fleeting conviction that, holy moly, Hope was right: the dead were abandoning the cemeteries!

A moment later there was nothing left but the sound of the fans and a peculiar wistfulness. For a second, Hope and I had been the last people on earth. Now, we were just the last people in the cleaning products aisle.

Conspicuously located near the cash registers was an enormous bin of marked-down Captain Mofuku ramen—hundreds of astronauts floating in empty space, all wearing the same stupid smile, 3 for 99¢.

Leaning over the bin, Hope very methodically examined the merchandise: (a) she picked up a package of ramen, (b) studied it carefully, (c) made a face, (d) chucked the package into the bin of marked-down candy canes and (e) started over at step (a) apparently with the intention of continuing until she reached the bottom of the container. Should I intervene? The cashier looked on with a jaded expression.

After a while, however, Hope interrupted the inspection and brought to my attention a disturbing piece of news, to say the least. All the packages, without exception, had the same expiry date printed on them:
2001 17 JUL
.

The list of Eastern perils (influenza, tofu) was soon augmented by a snowstorm originating in the Atlantic basin. The few snowflakes frolicking in the sky around midnight turned into a raging depression that swept over the province, wiping out roads and uprooting hydro towers.

The high school was closed down for the day, and I didn’t see Hope until after supper, when she rang at the front door (the door leading directly to the Bunker was now buried under six feet of snow). She was white from head to toe, and her face was completely hidden behind a frost-covered scarf, except for a thin opening for an old pair of ski goggles to peer out of.

When my father opened the door, he yelled something about a mujahideen invasion, which brought a smile to Hope’s face. Anything that could boost her morale was welcome.

Clutching mugs of hot chocolate, we huddled under three layers of sleeping bags and took part in Friday-night
Mass:
The Nature of Things
. Suzuki discussed drosophilae and the human genome, but I failed to grasp a single word because of the maddening familiarity with which Hope had draped her leg over mine.

Nothing could be more natural than this simple gesture, but at the same time it was the Halifax explosion, the eruption of Krakatoa, a supernova. I felt more and more dizzy as the warmth of her leg softly radiated through our jeans. If only the blizzard would rage on for another three days!

I glanced at the ground-level window of the Bunker. We were buried far below the surface. On the other side of the glass lay a wall of snow or ash or cement—hard to tell.

During the commercials, Hope related the latest developments on the domestic front. After scrubbing down the apartment, she had extricated her mother from the closet by jimmying the door hinges with a screwdriver. The recluse was not looking very good: hair dishevelled and eyes vacant, she hugged a bag of basmati rice. She had agreed to eat a bowl of soup (quadruple dose of clozapine), refused to take a shower, and then went off to work, anxiously looking around her the whole time. In sum, a partial victory.