Nod (21 page)

‘I know where Medusa is.’

I turned and saw my wild-haired young friend. The believer.

‘Where is she?’

‘My name’s White-in-the-eye.’ It was once said that the devil had no white in his eye. ‘I can take you there.’

He led me to the next floor down, then toward the furthest end of the hall, talking all the while.

‘How did you know it was coming?’

That stumped me.
Had
I seen Nod coming? It was true that part of me had always remained outside the old world—a ghost with folded arms. I think I always suspected that some sort of fraud was being perpetuated as I watched ‘normal’ play out. Maybe I just expected more of life than it was realistically even going to be able to deliver—maybe I was a romantic.

Real romantics are never the ones with the easy, winning ways about them; the real romantics are always the guarded ones, the paranoid and the worried, the ones with furrowed brows and coffee jitters. After all, anybody looking with open eyes at the world we’d made would have to have been very, very worried.

So maybe, in that way, I had seen Nod’s skull and crossbones mast on the horizon.

‘Maybe. Maybe I saw two worlds, one on top of the other. But it was fuzzy, like when you try on someone else’s glasses.’

White-in-the-eye nodded gravely, then asked me about the ship again. Soon we stopped outside a closed door. Then he turned and spoke, tipsy with revelation.

‘You dreamed up Nod when you wrote your book, right? But Nod wasn’t the dream—the old world was. When you were dreaming of Nod, you were really awake! That’s why you’re the prophet.’

And I got it then. The Awakened had it backward. The old ‘reality’ of Vancouver had been unreal, a dream. Yes. I was with them that far. But the real reality wasn’t Nod—Nod was just all the dreams and nightmares smushed together in a blender.
Real
reality would be whatever remained intact after Nod had hammered down upon our heads and ripped away the last shreds of the veil of the old world. And that would be? What would endure?

Tanya.

White-in-the-eye opened the door and showed me a yellow room awash with light. The sun, visible through the window, smelled like a coat of fresh paint. Tanya lay propped up against a desk, hunched forward, hands between her spread legs. She was breathing with great effort: The Little Engine That Probably Couldn’t For Much Longer. Oxygenated blood wasn’t reaching her gray fingertips and blackened toes. Each breath was a momentous decision, undertaken only after serious consideration. And she wasn’t alone. Outside this room, Death was stalking the dusty halls, picking and choosing as he went. Out in the alley, there was a reeking, akimbo pile of meat that grew every day when I wasn’t looking.

I went over and tried to ease her down onto her back, but she screamed and threw her face at me. It was a horrible sight.

‘I won’t lie down and you can’t fucking make me!’

‘But you can’t breathe like this.’

‘I can’t lie, can’t lie. Sleepers are liars! Golden light, golden lie…’

Weakly, she pushed away the hand I’d placed on her shoulder. She was someone you might have seen begging on a street corner in the Third World: too far gone for genteel Developed World beggary, for the haute couture of the Salvation Army-swathed squeegee kid. She smelled like rotten fish and vomit. I had to turn away to take a breath, and when I turned back she was coughing and gurgling to herself. Her words, though unintelligible, had the intonation of conversation.

‘Tanya. I need to find Zoe. You remember Zoe? The little girl we found? You gave her that stuffed bear?’

She stopped mumbling and looked up, looked at me. Suddenly, someone was home, though peering through a filthy attic window. I struggled to hold her gaze as she crooked her finger, drew me nearer, and whispered, ‘Why didn’t you like people, Paul?’

How could I have replied to that? I could have confessed that I liked the idea of people, but not the reality. I could have said that in some insane way White-in-the-eye had been right and that I
had
seen Nod coming and had been hoping to stand clear of its path. Instead, I opted for the truth.

‘I don’t know why.’

‘I’d have left you I’d have left you I’d have left you I’d…’ Then she stopped and changed direction. ‘What did you dream last night?’

‘I was a giant, taller than the skyscrapers. Walking toward the beach. Then a tidal wave came over the horizon. The water was shining, and it really hurt my eyes.’

‘What happened next?’ She’d heard this story before and was suddenly playing an old game called ‘story time’.

‘The world exploded.’

‘Like a bomb hit it?’

I shook my head into her shoulder. ‘No. Not like that at all. More like it was a collage where the pieces weren’t glued down and someone opened the door and all the pieces just fluttered away.’

‘Just blew away…poor baby. Then what?’ She was being the little girl she’d sometimes liked to be. More than once, in the past, I’d wondered if she stuck with me because I was good at recounting old fairy tales. Because I was good at bedtime stories.

‘Then the pieces all disappeared and there was nothing left but golden light.’

She burrowed into me. ‘And then what?’’

‘Just light. It went on forever.’

Tanya looked up toward my face, but her eyes could no longer see, which meant it looked as though she saw everything. This was how she would die. This was how the world was dying.

‘Pretty Zoe’s in the furnace room. It’s hot down there. Hot as Hell’s Gate…’

She smiled as she trailed off. Then another murder. I cut her throat with an orange box cutter I found in a cupboard then cradled her head, suddenly tiny and nut hard beneath all that raving hair, as her body thrashed a little, but not too much, and her blood dyed my blue jeans purple.

When it was over, her earlobes, the ones she’d told me marked her as alien, marked her as mine. I bowed my head and kissed each one in turn.

In theatrical parlance, means one who has little or nothing to say, but is expected to deport himself as a gentleman when before the lights.

Your indulgence for an elegy.

We met in university, in a second year philosophy class. I was there because I believed that three hundred year old arguments about the nature of the universe were somehow time sensitive (I know, I know), while Tanya enrolled—so she said—because the class fit her timetable. After we graduated I went on to write my books and she became a well-paid publicist for a fairly large chemical company with a host of dubious contracts. We strove to maintain the fine balance I mentioned earlier, with intellectual ‘purity’ on my side of the ledger and the slapping heft of the bacon she brought home on Tanya’s. When the pedal hit the metal and the rubber hit the road, though, the scales tipped in her favour. She could mock my financial worthlessness all she wanted, but I couldn’t really dig too deeply at her hollow careerism given that it put bread on the corporeal table. Rather than confront this disconnect in some conclusive manner, however, we did as most couples and just lived with it as best we could.

Ours was a classic mismatch with all the makings of a screwball comedy. Did hilarity ensue? Sometimes. At other times, though, during the outtakes, awkward silences and buried resentments ensued as well. And if you made a two-hour movie covering a seven year relationship there were going to be a
lot
of outtakes. But still, we soldiered on.

After three or four years together, we began to understand one another a little. It came to light that Tanya liked my verbosity because it spoke to something trapped inside her that needed to get out. As for me, there was something appealing about the outward shell she’d been developing, her World Armour. The hardness of that shell implied a softness at the centre, a secret place into which I probably hoped I could retreat—a mirror for my own lack of outward form—when I got sick of the sound of my own voice or the thought balloon shape of my own thoughts.

Then, as time loped along, Tanya changed in a way I could never quite get my head around. Maybe her armour thickened to the point where there was no point of entry for someone as amorphous as me. Amorphous: that’s amore, always morphing. It got tricky when I realized one day that I’d have to begin to get used to the idea of living without the shelter she’d once seemed to offer, and that she’d have to accept that I was needy. But still we kept trudging forward. Maybe everyone had to wade through this muck, we thought. Still, there was now something stranger-like about her; and I sensed that if we were to remain together, I’d have to learn to love and protect that strangeness.

It sounds like a bleak landscape, but it wasn’t, not really. There were romantic sunsets and soft shadows as well as forensic facts under antiseptic light. We made love and laughed together. And we watched our favourite shows throughout what had to be the Golden Age of Television, no matter how dubious a sobriquet that is. We liked to cook together on Sunday afternoons. Those things counted too.

At least that’s how I saw it. God knows I never said any of this stuff, not to Tanya or to anybody else. Nobody
says
these things—it’s against the rules—but deep inside we know that we are, each of us, unknowable and ultimately alone, even when we love.

Most of the people we’d known were busy playing out a game of ‘no limits’ in their relationships and careers. They were serial Humpty Dumpties, falling apart then putting themselves back together again, over and over, beneath new horizons made of unfamiliar hips and thighs. Maybe I’d been unsociable because I feared infection, and maybe Tanya had been out there with them, swimming around in the genetic soup. I’d thought Tanya and I were different, that we were going to swallow reality whole and let it live inside us despite the surfeit of fantasy on offer. Big oops: in the end it turned out that reality was bigger and crueller than I’d imagined.

Wherever my love for Tanya lived, wherever it lives now, that place was neither the old Vancouver nor Charles’ cracked-out Fantasyland. Love lives someplace else. Is that it? Or are there simply no words for what I’m trying to say?

* * *

In the basement a skeletal crew. Eyes bulging in the dimness, they sat hunched over tables strewn with rusty iron bars, steel hooks, baling wire, and rope. Working, making. Long staves with ragged clusters of sharp metal fixed to their ends. Floating above candles, their faces were goblin-like. All around them, in the dimness, a forest of completed staffs were stacked against the walls. The weapons appeared numberless, but I knew how many there were, or would very soon be: precisely a thousand.

A gate to Hell? Yes.

But was Zoe down here? I peered hard into the dim and distant corners. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to hide her, but then again the basement was a cavernous place—a moonscape of unfinished concrete and impenetrable shadows. It was terrible to think of that poor little thing, so obviously a creature that belonged in the light, locked away down there.

Then I saw it—the school’s ancient furnace skulking, cold and dunce-like in a far corner; a rusted box with an arthritic assemblage of pipes extending up into the rafters. A small iron door in its exact centre. If you lived in a place like Nod, where else would you stow a demon?

The goblins were beginning to notice my presence. Several were watching me, eyes probing but not penetrating, jaws working silently.

‘What? What?’ asked a woman at the nearest table. ‘What?’

‘Will you be ready soon?’ I asked as imperiously as I could manage. It’s tough work being a prophet: every time you ask someone for the time, your reputation is in mortal peril.

She nodded for a full ten seconds, eyes shut, before replying. ‘Yes, yes, we’ll be ready when the sun comes up. Not the next sun, but the one after. Yes, yes. We’re almost ready…’

In two days, then. It was time to give the Cat Sleepers their heads up.

* * *

It was almost dawn. Back in the classroom, I signalled Dave as instructed. Almost as soon as I’d finished, an answering flash came from down the block. If nothing else, insomniacs make great watchmen. I ran down to the black alley, exchanged a few whispered words with the three Cat sleepers, then crept back upstairs and turned my mind back to Zoe. If the Rabbit Hunt was to take place in two days, then tomorrow would be the obvious time to rescue her from the basement, given that almost all of Charles’ people would be otherwise occupied. It wasn’t an airtight plan—it wasn’t a plan at all—but it was a hope. And a hope in Nod was
something
.

My eyes were burning and raw, and I wanted nothing more than to lie down on my bed of textbooks and close them for a while. But before I could move, rough hands grabbed me from behind, and Charles’s voice whispered into my ear.

‘No biggie, Paul, no biggie. Nobody’s going to hurt you, but there’s something down at the beach that you really need to see.’

* * *

That ‘something’ was colossal. An aircraft carrier, run aground on the edge of English Bay. The American warship—the name ‘
USS Nassau
’ was painted on its side—appeared to have approached land under full power and had managed to beach itself so far up onto the shore that the prow was completely exposed. Five or six storeys high, one side of its grey hull was blackened and pitted, torn and buckled, while the other side was untouched—unflinching grey in the early morning sunlight. The crowning bizarreness to the scene was the sound coming from within the vessel: humming, low and steady, but with shrill overtones that wove in and out. Someone had neglected to turn off the engine. Clearly, this was the ship whose lights I’d seen out in the bay.