Nod (10 page)

I’d run out of words. Faces peered through the glass in the skinny windows beside the doors—trees behind them, shaking their fists at the sky.

‘The folks out there want to come in and see you, but I don’t think you’re ready to meet them yet. Let me make this easy for you, Paul. Okay?’

I bowed my head.

‘Just ask me what you can do to help.’

‘What can I do to help, Charles?’

He clapped his hands, and I jumped.

‘We’ve got to get organized, Paul. It’s all a piece of shit. Just think of me as the martini man, sipping away. It’s all shit but not
really
. Understand? Well, you will. We need a guide, Paul. A leader, a figurehead, a guru, a plaster saint. We gotta get
organizized.
Did you ever see
Taxi Driver
? Robert DeNiro? You should. Have. It’s gone for good now. No more movies, ever. Hah! People are staggering around out there, smacking each other on the heads with bricks, Paul. It’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing for the species! Who’s insane? That’s insane. People aren’t insane: it’s the things they do that are crazy. Clearly, clearly, clearly. So we need to make some sense here. ‘What we can’t change has to be a church’, Paul. Get it? We have to enshrine you because your book makes sense. It makes sense to me, Paul. Christ, I was up all night reading it when I got it the other day. That’s not as impressive a statement as it once was, I’ll admit that into evidence, but still! There were other things I could have been doing. Lots of other things we need to do. So let’s talk turkey.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Turkey!’ He grinned wildly into my face.

I laughed with no hope in my heart. Now I was seeing both the name of the game and my role in it. Forget Rice Christian, Charles planned to set me up as a Rice Jesus. He’d been a little cracked before all this, which presumably meant he was two steps ahead in this new reality. When the world stops its rotation and begins to spin backwards, I suppose, stragglers suddenly find themselves ahead of the pack. It must have been quite a feeling.

‘Okay. Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk what comes next. Next you need to go out there with me, tell those poor saps that you’ll guide them through these changes, help them to live in Nod.’

‘But I…’

‘Do you really think you ‘just’ wrote that book, Paul? Is your self-esteem really that low? Do you really think that, prior to seeing that burning bush in the desert, Moses thought he’d see a fucking burning bush in the desert? Or do you think that Moses was a fucking nutbar, Paul? And what about the civilizations that grew out of that encounter between that nutbar and that nutbush? Were they nutbar civilizations? Can you answer that? We won’t even go into Jesus. Christ! These things, they happen. Nobody knows who or why or where or when. Things just happen, Paul. I mean, can’t you see that, Paul?’ He threw his arms out. ‘Isn’t it obvious? So let’s just accept that things are happening. Okay? As a start.’

Charles’ left foot tapped out a double time beat.

‘Okay.’

‘Good. Now, here’s what’s going to happen next. We’re going to go out there and do a meet and greet. I’ll do most of the talking. You just look mysterious and…and potent, okay? Impotent if you can swing it! Just kidding! All you need to know is this: being Awake is a gift from God. It’s the next step forward. It’s allowing us to see the bigger universe. And that expanded universe can be a scary place. Be compassionate. But we need to be worthy of this opportunity, right? Worthy. There have been reports of monsters already, Paul. Monsters on the edge of people’s vision. Bat creatures and walking trees. We can name them and that way we can own them like Adam did in Eden. Right? Nod, right? But some other reports, too. Of creatures making contact.
Bloody Bones
is out there. You remember him, right? And
Bloody Hands
. All in the streets, Paul, scraping around. And you and I are going to help the people out there deal with these demons, Paul. We’re going to get comfortable with the New World Order.’

‘I don’t know if I’ll know what to say, Charles.’

But his words blazed right on past mine. I was reminded of firestorms that sucked all the oxygen out of a place. In a forest, after one of these, firefighters would find deer and other animals, still standing, burned to charcoal.

‘And then we’ll go to that apartment of yours and get you your girlies and bring them here to the school, which will be our cathedral for the next few days. Then bigger digs. And food. After all, little Zoe needs milk, right? Even shelf milk will do. Right, Paul?’

My heart stopped.

‘Shelf milk. Ha. That’s right. We’ve been watching over you for the last two nights, Paul. If not for my sentries, you’d have been beaten to death in your sleep by some of the more confused people out there. They’re going from door to door, Paul, offering mischief. Doing crazy shit. Bat shit crazy. Chugging little nonsense factories, right? But we’ll straighten them out, don’t sweat it.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said feebly.

‘Don’t lie to me, Paul; I’m not green in the eye. The walls have ears and eyes and even fingers. Glory holes. The walls have cocks now and it’s easy to find yourself
fucked
when your back’s to the wall. Ha! Now listen.’ He dropped his voice and became sober. ‘I can tell that you’re a Sleeper, which is problematic. I can’t make sense of that yet. But we’ll deal with it at a later date. For now, just get with the program. You’re going to have to do some things. Restrict your sleep! Have some sense of decorum! Get some bags going beneath those eyes! What are you thinking, walking around in this fucking mess so daisy fresh and fragrant, Paul?’

Charles leaned toward me and sniffed. Then he clapped his hand on my shoulder and pushed me toward the door and those faces pressed against the glass.

‘And one more thing. A little thing but a big one. Stop Charlesing me. Don’t call me Charles anymore. I’m the Admiral of the Blue now. Cheesy, I know. But what the fuck, eh?’

And then he pushed the doors wide open. The light poured in. The crowd splashed backward, then pooled, then slowly crept toward me.

A reproof to those who defer till to-morrow what should be done to-day.

I’d taken Charles’ advice and only slept around two hours the previous night, sat up reading through old magazines by candlelight while Tanya ignored me, staring at some book hour after hour without turning a page.

Now, in the early morning light, it was almost showtime. While Zoe watched from the sofa, hands clasped beneath her chin, Tanya smeared eye shadow under my cheekbones in an attempt to make me look even more haggard than I already felt. She giggled furiously—like a fury—but when her task was complete, she fell back, mouth slack, eyes dull. I tried to snap her out of it.

‘How do I look?’

She chomped her mouth shut and pinched herself hard, something she’d taken to doing during the last twenty four hours. Her forearms were mottled with black and blue niblets of pain.

‘It’s just you. You in makeup.’

Those were the first words she’d addressed to me in over twelve hours. And even now she was speaking, not to me, not at me, but through me. It was as if we’d been married for fifty years and I was visiting her in the Alzheimer’s ward with not our daughter, but our granddaughter.

I recall a passage from
Being and Nothingness
, a portly little tome I’d forced myself to read one summer as an overly earnest undergraduate. About the only thing I remember from its six hundred-odd pages was when Sartre, expanding on Descartes, wrote that the reason we know others exist is because when they look at us, we feel
looked at
. He called the entity that was staring back at us the Other. From that meeting of the eyes, everything else in our fragile human universes blossomed forth. But! Think of how easily human status is taken away—by war, by hospitals, by arguments about whose turn it is to take out the recycling. How easily we can turn people into things. And now Tanya had turned me into a thing.

My heart ached at the separation I felt, but I swallowed down the pain as best I could, not wanting to upset any of the three children in the room: oblivious Zoe, the little boy in me who didn’t understand what was happening, or the deranged toddler who crouched, teeth bared, behind Tanya’s face.

* * *

Yesterday, Charles and a couple of his zombies had accompanied me back to the apartment then left, promising to return for us in the morning. But late at night I heard movement in Mrs Simmons’ apartment. Knowing it was Charles’ people didn’t make me feel any better.

Creepy-crawly.
There’s a word of fairly modern derivation. From 1968, although it sounds like it could have come from centuries earlier, straight from the pages of Brewer. Charles Manson and his Family, prior to the Tate-La Bianca murders, would sneak into wealthy homes high up in the Hollywood Hills. Late at night, while the owners slept, they’d tiptoe around in the dark, moving things. Rearranging furniture. Pocketing a few items. And then they’d leave, before dawn. Practicing.

The situational irony of my own Admiral of the Blue sharing a Christian name with the head of the Manson Family wasn’t lost on me. Was Manson a product of the twentieth century or a sleeper agent from an earlier one? Or was he a time traveller vomited up from some nightmare future? Or were centuries and eras merely convenient but artificial categories we created to render ‘reality’ manageable through cowering consensus? In that light, a Charles Manson wasn’t an aberration so much as a frightening reminder about what lay beneath things, ready to pop up and yell ‘Boo!’ at any time.

There’s an old English phrase that means roughly the same thing:
Miching Malicho
. Even though you’ve almost certainly never heard it before, you can probably sense the phrase’s general meaning from sound alone.
Miching
: a crimped, furtive verb.
Malicho
: a virtual portmanteau inversion of “Draco Malfoy” from the
Harry Potter
books. And that’s what it means: a furtive doer of bad deeds. Our language is so laden with associations that writers can easily cough up names pre-loaded with portent. Darth Vader, Uriah Heep, Gollum.

I could see the heroic efforts that Tanya’s trembling hand was making. For Zoe’s sake. Tanya had emerged from her state of near-catatonia, pulled her hair into a greasy ponytail, and grown suddenly talkative.

‘I love this child.’

‘I can see that.’

‘And she could be any child. That’s the point. I could love any child, and by loving my Zoe, I love every child. That’s lucky, Paul. I feel really lucky.’

‘That’s great.’

Her face was finally paying the full price for a week without sleep and showers. As I’ve already noted, her mouth now had a tendency to droop open when not in use. Her head hung as though on a coat hanger, and when she looked up, she always seemed to be looking at me over the rims of invisible reading glasses. And she had started sniffling away at some sort of cold. God know what sorts of diseases were flying around out there as overstressed immune systems began to crash and burn.

It was all I could do to look at her, honestly. All I could do not to burst into tears and run out of the room.

‘Why you and not me, Paul? Is there a reason? If you’re chosen, you must know the reason.’

‘There’s no reason.’

Was there a reason?

‘Yes there is. There’s always a reason for everything. Tell me.’

Maybe there was a reason.

‘No. It’s always been this way—random. Why did you and I have food to eat and safe beds to sleep in when we were kids, while the kid next door got abused and the kids in Africa starved?’

She flinched, then placed her mascara wand on the coffee table and held a mirror up to my face.

‘Welcome to my world.’

I looked and found myself ridiculous—an extra from an Eighties Hair Metal video. Or so I would have seemed to someone with a good night’s sleep under their belt. To the people wandering around outside, I probably just looked par for the course.

‘It’s time to get going.’

‘Where are we going?’

The deal I’d cut with Charles was that the three of us would move into the school today. His followers had been busily boarding up the main floor windows, fortifying the place. That was the deal. In reality we intended to do no such thing.

‘North.’

‘To the North Pole? Are we going to seek refuge at Santa’s place?’

‘We’ll find some millionaire’s place in North Van and take it over. Live like kings.’

She put her hand on my cheek but avoided my eyes.

‘There’s nowhere to go that isn’t here, Paul.’

‘You want Zoe to be safe, don’t you?’

She paused.

‘Yes.’

It was said about Vancouver that once you went beyond five-kilometre-deep North Vancouver, that was it: that was the end of ‘civilized’ North America. After leaving North Van, you could walk straight to the Arctic Circle and never see a soul or a settlement. This couldn’t be literally true: you’d have to cross the occasional forlorn highway or encounter a string or two of hydro lines, but the point still held. Maybe we’d hole up in that imaginary mansion for a few days, then try our luck with the bears and cougars. Maybe if we got far enough away from the city, the curse would lift.