Nod (13 page)

And here, next in line, stood Charles, thinking up a storm. He was taking pages from my poor, unfinished manuscript, yanking out words, and using them to name things. It was as though he’d been Cain, wandering the earth for millennia before finally finding his way back to a broken and abandoned Garden of Eden, where everything had been uprooted and thrown about by a petulant God. And now Cain was tidying up the mess, completing the naming process that had been abandoned by his disgraced father, Adam.

Me.

Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to crawl into a closet, barricade myself there, and dream my Dream forever. How long since this drawn-out ending had begun? Eight days? Nine? I’d already lost count. If the Brazen Heads were right, there was only another two weeks until the bodies of the Awakened followed their minds into the abyss. How much more madness would froth up before it was over? Surely there was only so crazy a person could become and still be able to eat, drink, and stand upright. Certain logical patterns of organization pertaining to movement and vision had to be maintained. Or so I hoped.

‘Come with me,’ Charles snapped. I was seeing a pattern. He was servile when we were around his people but bossy as hell when we were alone.

I locked the classroom using the key Charles had solemnly handed me the night before, as though I was too stupid to know it had twin upon twin. We made our way down the locker-lined hallway to a door at the far end.

A half dozen or so of Charles’ followers were milling about, all engaged in some sort of clockwork task or another. One woman, her face obscured by curds of matted hair, stood hunchbacked in a doorway, murmuring into a dead cell phone cupped in her hands. Occasionally, she would stab at the keys of its text pad.

Charles snorted. ‘She’s talking to the dead. On her dead cell phone. Let the dead message the dead.’

Next to her an enormously fat man, a stub of a broom in his hands, was endlessly sweeping the same patch of floor. The linoleum beneath his broom was wearing thin. A patch of liquid pooled at his feet. Piss. I held my breath.

‘A—Admiral…’ he said as we passed.

‘Yes?’

‘What did Nodgod tell you yesterday in the park?’

‘Didn’t you hear His oration?’ Charles asked, apparently disgusted.

‘I just fell down. I was too scared.’ The fat man shook his head and his jowls flapped. There’s a point of obesity where, like it or not, whatever your other personal achievements or qualities, all you are is ‘the fat man’ or ‘the fat lady’. The world is a gawking four-year-old.

‘Soon enough I’ll share with you all what Nodgod revealed to me.’

The fat man was weeping. ‘Thank you, Admiral.’

I’d like to describe Charles’ followers in more detail, but there was a lank and greasy sameness to them that makes it difficult. Weight, age, and gender were about all that differentiated them—and guessing gender was starting to be a crap shoot. Perhaps the wellspring of their uniformity lay in the identical expressions on their grey faces. They were catatonic patients in a mental ward who might suddenly fly into superhuman rages for no reason. Desks might fly. Dolls might dismember. Dull and dangerous, they needed to be medicated, but the pharmacies were empty.

One thing they all had in common was a task. Each of them was doing something. Or, rather, each of them was doing anything—it didn’t seem to matter what. Busy work. One old man was folding newspaper pages into tiny squares and stacking them neatly on a table. A teen-aged girl beside him was busily cutting another sheet of newspaper into confetti, slowly, laboriously.

‘We aren’t pokes, but we do poke about,’ Charles said, noticing my curiosity. ‘And if we don’t, we’ll get such a poke.’

He wanted to see if his Nod-erudition was impressing me. The word ‘poke’ has several meanings. First, ‘a lazy person’, second, to busy oneself without definite object’.

‘I read this,’ he held up my manuscript, ‘almost all the time. What strikes me about the word ‘poke’ is how it has two completely opposite meanings. Think of the power!’

‘Power?’

‘We can rename. If we need to we can even change the meaning of words. Or make up new ones and make them mean what we want. And that’s how we’ll do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘My eyes are changing, Paul! I see new things—and I can name them with your words. When Nodgod spoke yesterday, the meaning of it all just about swallowed me whole! He’s wiping the slate clean, giving us sanction to start over! You must be so fucking thrilled, Paul! Most writers just hope to get a few people to read their stuff, but your book is going to create a whole new world. You’re a prophet.’

‘Not me. This is your game, not mine.’

Charles spun toward me so quickly I thought he might fall over. As it was, he staggered.

‘No! This didn’t come from me! I’m the messenger, but you’re the vessel! Just be sure you’re a worthy vessel. Word to the wise.’

We had now arrived at the door at the far end of the hall. A sinewy Asian man whose muscular arms and chest were covered in tattoos stood in front of it. When Charles opened the door, he shuffled silently to one side, and after we entered, I heard him shuffle back into position.

A long and skinny room, a book room. Two windows at the far end in the dusky distance. Charles led me between the shelves of books, thirty or so copies of each title, most of them, judging by the crappiness of their designs, relics of the eighties or nineties. Halloween orange spines. Futuristic fonts on taped-up covers.

Then another door at the back.

He paused, hand on the doorknob, suddenly solicitous.

‘There’s somebody in here that you really need to meet, Paul.’

He went in, and I followed. To our right an old woman shrouded in rags crouched on the floor, cradling a metal shish kebab skewer in both hands. She looked up at me and tittered. Directly across from her, slumped against the far wall, was a man in his early twenties. He looked up. Despite the haggard, exhausted look on his face, I could tell right away that he was a fellow Sleeper. One end of a bike chain was locked around his throat; the other was attached to a thick metal pipe that ran from the floor to the ceiling.

He wore khaki shorts and a torn and stained T-shirt with Captain America on the front. Someone who had, until recently, appreciated kitsch. Now his T-shirt looked terribly sad, like a Spice Girls T-shirt from the 1990s that you might see on a hungry African kid in a charity appeal. We’d put so much stock in T-shirts. Personal flags replacing, perhaps, national ones in an age of ascendant ego. But here in Nod, the single citizen nation state of Captain America had been overrun, its flag torn down and trampled.

Captain America’s arms were covered in small cuts and oozing welts that showed no signs of healing. It wasn’t hard to figure out where they had come from. Or why they’d been inflicted. Meanwhile, Skewer Woman lovingly polished her weapon.

Charles’ voice took on a wheedling tone as he tried to forestall my objections.

‘Therapy, Paul. Salvation. But not punishment. Not cruelty.’

Skewer Lady nodded in confirmation.

‘He’s been good. Pretty good.’ She made a tentative stab in the direction of her prisoner. ‘Scissors to grind. Scissors to grind.’

‘Who are you?’ the prisoner stared at me, agog. ‘You’re not one of them.’

‘I know it’s ugly, surface ugly, Paul, but try to see this as triage in a war zone. Think of it as love. There’s Truth all around him, but he can’t
be
it so long as he keeps drifting off into Oblivion. Like a dog, like a fucking booze hound running for the bottle. He keeps turning away from the sun. So he gets burned. What’s a sun to do?’

‘He keeps hiding his eyes,’ the old woman joined in, nodding and weaving, ‘but the sun is always shining. He falls flat on his face and tries to worship the night. I’ve seen him!’

She lunged at him, but Charles kicked her arm away. She pulled back into herself, whimpering.

‘Only if he tries to sleep, Judy. You know better than that.’

Judy. It seemed impossible that her name was Judy.

Muttering, she settled back down into her corner.

‘Did they get you too?’ Captain America asked me, his face contorted as he tried to paste me into his world. ‘Fuck. No, that’s not it. You’re with them! Why aren’t you tied up? Why don’t you run?! Oh, God!’

‘Shut up,’ Charles said casually, and the prisoner jerked just as if someone had yanked hard on his chain. ‘No one wants to hear what you have to say. ‘Scornful dogs will eat dirty puddings’. You’ll see things differently in a day or two when you wake up. And then you’ll thank us.’

Charles addressed me. ‘This is sin, Paul. You should hear him babble about the dream he was having when we found him…’

‘His precious dream!’ Judy spat. ‘His darling dream world filled with golden light!’

* * *

Back out in the book room, Charles grabbed my arm. ‘Do you see now?’

Behind the closed door, Captain America was screaming.

I was shaking. ‘See what?’

‘We’re the children of Cain, Paul. We’ve wandered through the day and the night for thousands of years. It’s been our punishment. But now it’s ending. We’re waking up from our dream and seeing what Nodgod wants us to see! That one,’ Charles sneered back over his shoulder, ‘is offensive to the Unsleeping Lord who gave us this day! And you. You, you, you. You see. You wrote the book that describes it all. But you still sleep and you pal around with demons. And I can’t quite figure it out…’

Charles fell silent and began to pace. I waited as he wandered up and down the aisles, his fingers trailing, as I imagined, along the spines of high school classics:
The Chrysalids
and
Animal Farm
.
Lord of the Flies. 1984
. Apocalypse and dystopia. Despairing visions. Every high school had taught these books. Every teen had been injected with them. What had possessed us?

Charles’ footsteps stopped in the next aisle.

‘Do you know your Bible, Paul? I know mine. Do you know about Moses?’

I did, and my mouth went dry.

‘Moses, Paul, guided the Chosen People to the Promised Land but God did not allow him to enter.’ A pause. ‘Now, why was that?’

‘I don’t know.’

Charles walked back to the aisle where I stood.

‘I don’t know either, Paul, but I’m starting to have thoughts.’

He stared at me without blinking, like he was trying to burn away some obscuring film that concealed me.

‘What thoughts, Ch—Admiral?’

A smile twitched across his face.

‘So much in names, so much in what we say and don’t say. So much in what we almost say. So much in what we never think to say. Or hide away. Maybe God had a little bitsy problem with Moses. Can you guess what sort of problem?’

‘No, I can’t.’

Closer. ‘Maybe God thought Moses was a little too arrogant, doing God’s work for him.’ Closer. ‘Maybe Moses got himself and God mixed up.’ Far too close. ‘Maybe Moses thought he
was
God.’

Then the clouds blew away and Charles was grinning.

‘Or maybe not. Who knows! Time’s a tattletale, Paul. It’ll spill all the beans eventually. And here in Nod, there’s lots and lots of time. All will be revealed.’

I sensed an opening in his good humour. ‘Where’s Tanya?’

‘Tanya? She’s working. I already told you that.’

‘No. I mean, I’d like to go talk to her.’

He came back around into my aisle, shrugging. ‘Go for it. She’s wiping down some chalkboards. Top floor. First door on the south side.’

I turned to go.

‘But what about
your
work, Paul?’

‘What work?’

‘You’ve got a speech to give tomorrow morning. Remember? Right now my people are out on the streets, spreading the word. There are about fifty of us now, but I need a thousand.’

‘A thousand?’

He ignored me even as he answered. ‘A thousand’s the number for a Rabbit Hunt.’

Rabbit hunt?
The term didn’t ring any bells, didn’t come from my manuscript.

‘What’s a—?’

‘Go see to your Tanya, Paul. Go check on your little pet demon, too—but keep it locked up. If anyone with open eyes sees it, it might get squashed. Anyone with open eyes would think the thing had just crawled out of Demon Park.’

Demon Park. I didn’t even have to stop to think what that meant. The new words were falling into place with shocking ease.

* * *

When I found Tanya, it was somehow no surprise to see her scrubbing intently at a small patch of chalk-free blackboard. Sweat dimpled her forehead and she was working her jaw, grinding her teeth. I came up behind and put my hands gently on her shoulders.

She turned and clawed at me until I backed away. Then she stood still, head down, face covered by lank hair, as she heaved bales of breath in and out of her chest, a striped red and blue eraser still clutched in her trembling right hand.

‘Medusa?’ I said gently.

‘Don’t call me that! Medusa was a monster. Do you think I’m a monster?’

Then she looked up, and I saw a monster.

About as much of my Tanya remained in the face that now seethed at me as remains in a photo album from which all the prints have been torn and shredded; nothing there but yellowish outlines where pretty pictures had once lain. A plundered past—nothing but teases for my poor, pathetic memory. Tanya was gone.

In the sun-soaked classroom her dear, dear face, resembled a shrunken head in a natural history museum. Ancient and unknowably foreign, lopped off and dried mid-scream. Denied a decent burial. I could go on. I do go on.

Back to her question. Did I think she was a monster? Did I think that eight days had undone an entire life, undone two intertwined lives? That was the burning question and it was a real bonfire, the burning bush of a question I’m still here trying to face, still trying to answer.

So back to her question.

‘No. You’re not a monster.’

Where just a couple of days earlier, love had been Omission, now it was a bald-faced lie. Love a lie. But a real lie, a
true
lie. ‘Charles doesn’t think I’m a monster.’

‘Charles? Since when do you care what Charles thinks?’