Apocalypse for Beginners (10 page)

At the other end, Hope’s voice had a sombre ring to it.

“Is it a bad time?”

As a response, I yawned.

“Can you come over to the Pet Shop? I could use a hand.”

“You could use a hand? At a quarter to one in the morning?”

“I don’t feel like explaining on the phone.”

“Okay. I’ll be right there.”

“Bring some bandages.”

“Bandages? Are you hurt?”

She had already hung up.

I listened for signs of activity upstairs. Dead silence. My father had been putting in long days at the cement plant, and I suspected that my mother had been popping sleeping pills for a number of months. The conflict between my brother and father had churned up some choppy water in the vast ocean of her maternal love. Life in a typical North American bungalow.

I got dressed, filled my backpack with whatever might serve from our medicine cabinet—band-aids, gauze, tape, compression bandages with clips—and stole out the back door like a Sioux.

In the street, ice crystals swirled over the pavement. Winter. Endless winter.

Hope was waiting by the door with folded arms and a furrowed brow. I looked her up and down and, seeing no sign of injury, let out a sigh of relief.

Inside the Pet Shop the usual chaos prevailed: dishes and dirty laundry scattered throughout, dust in every corner and a faint odour of reptilian feces. In other words, nothing out of the ordinary, except for Mrs. Randall, who was lying in the middle of the floor unconscious and hastily covered with a shabby bathrobe. Under her head, a bloodstain was soaking into the carpet. Her upper lip—which had probably split when she fell—was still bleeding despite an improvised compress of paper towels. The cleanup would not be easy.

Hope gestured nervously, almost impatiently, in her mother’s direction.

“I think she’s okay. Aside from the lip, I mean.”

“What happened?”

She sighed. After months of denial her mother had finally conceded that errors in calculation were not a factor, and that, to all appearances, there was very little chance of the end of the world coming any time soon.

“So?”

“Use your imagination: You spend twenty years waiting for the end of the world, and poof! Nothing happens.”

Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t understand. But this was Randall thinking, and there was no point trying to make sense of it.

In any case, Mrs. Randall had decided to (quote) drown her sorrows. Hope explained that in spite of her psychotic inclinations, her mother had always been a diligent young woman, so her aim was not to become
more or less
an alcoholic. She had purchased a bottle of vodka and downed two-thirds of it in thirty minutes flat, wincing as she guzzled. Then she had removed all her clothes and collapsed in a heap on the floor.

I was worried, so I pressed my forefinger against Ann Randall’s wrist. The pulse seemed normal. A little slow, maybe, but regular.

“Do you think she’s in a coma?”

Hope eyed the bottle of vodka with a puzzled expression.

“No. My guess is an adverse reaction between the alcohol and the clozapine.”

“Okay, what’s the plan?”

“Did you bring the bandages?”

“First we have to disinfect the wound.”

“There’s some vodka left in the bottle.”

She tipped the bottle over a gauze pad and cleaned the wound as best she could. Bits of Sumerian escaped from her mother’s lips when she wasn’t moaning—an encouraging sign under the circumstances. Already, the bleeding was letting up. Hope placed two enormous bandages over the lip, stating that this would do for now. She would see tomorrow morning whether stitches would be needed.

“Well, we can’t just leave her on the floor all night. We have to get her into bed.”

Grabbing hold of each end—Hope at her feet and me at her shoulders—we attempted to lift Mrs. Randall. Mission impossible. By virtue of certain mysterious forces, this delicate woman now weighed several tons. There was no way to roll her or push her a little or even raise one of her arms. She was bolted to the carpet.

Finally, we just gave up and, after covering her with some blankets, left her where she was. Hope preferred to watch over her alone and walked me to the door, where she thanked me with a casual kiss on the cheek.

I didn’t feel sleepy any more, so instead of going straight home I went for a walk. The truth was I needed to mull over a nagging question: If every Randall became unhinged when the apocalypse failed to show up, was Hope bound to suffer the same fate? The fact that July 17, 2001, seemed infinitely far off did nothing to reassure me.

Lafontaine Street was deserted. Reigning over the window of Elvis Dubé’s Karate Studio was a portrait framed in Christmas lights of the King in a kimono. I crossed the street to get away from this spectacle only to find myself in front of Bébé Plus and its display of 1990 models of jogging strollers. The wall was plastered with supersonic infants, the exact antithesis of babies as dead weight.

I thought of the Guajá, those Amazonians who had never had the least contact with modern civilization. They evidently had not missed very much.

31. ONE DAY AT A TIME

The next morning Ann Randall woke up with a gash across her lip and a peculiar glint in her eye.

Since she didn’t recognize either her daughter or the Pet Shop, Hope concluded that the vodka was still addling her brain. The amnesia lasted for hours. Ann Randall had apparently ventured out a little farther than what we’d thought—to somewhere in the vicinity of a coma.

The upshot was that we had to provide her with a full rundown of the situation: who we were, where she was, what her job was. By bombarding her with information we managed to reboot the operating system. But instead of simply reverting to normal, the Ann Randall that sprung up before our eyes was completely changed.

Even Hope (who had, after all, seen a lot) was astonished by her mother’s new lifestyle. Every morning at seven she would start knocking them back: vodka and orange juice until noon, Bloody Marys for lunch, vodka and soda water until bedtime. And she never left for work without a one-litre thermos of strong tea rectified with rum.

For a beginner, Ann Randall had been quick to find her cruising speed.

But alcohol represented only the first stage in an ambitious strategy. Ann Randall went on to eliminate her legendary program of domestic self-sufficiency in foodstuffs. Out went the bags of rice, protein supplements and four-litre jugs of water. Frozen food made a triumphant breakthrough in the Randall fridge: egg rolls, pizza (mini, pocket and traditional), chicken wings, apple turnovers and other edibles brimming with glucose, butylated hydroxytoluene, hydrogenated vegetable oil and Red E123.

And as if this dramatic shift were not enough, Ann Randall started to smoke two packs of Craven “A” per day, not to mention a substantial number of Gauloises (from which she removed the filters), menthol cigarettes and some foul cigarillos laced with port.

She smoked and gorged and imbibed with painstaking fervour, as if she were trying against all odds to set off her own personal apocalypse incrementally. One day at a time.

Hope had stopped administering the clozapine. Not only did the dosage appear to be entirely inappropriate but there was the steadily growing risk of a harmful reaction with the alcohol. Having flushed the last pills down the toilet, she kept her fingers crossed.

Ann Randall nevertheless continued to mutter in Sumerian when she slept. Somewhere under the surface, remnants of the young Yarmouth librarian endured.

32. TEXTURE

There were ten minutes left before math class and I walked Hope back to her locker, where she’d forgotten her calculator.

We headed down to the main floor, carried along by the surge of students crowding the stairway. At certain times our feet didn’t even touch the ground; we constituted a single carefree mass of hormones and muscles. One false step and we’d be swallowed up and mashed like potatoes.

While we fought for our lives, I asked how Ann Randall was doing. Any better? Hope shrugged—she couldn’t really say. More and more she had the impression of living with a stranger, certainly easier to get along with than the previous stranger, but hardly easier to understand.

Actually, Hope was beginning to suspect that the amnesia was long term, as if her mother had deleted large tracts of her memory. Hope had tried to talk to her about Yarmouth, about their frantic departure, but gotten nowhere. And there was no way of determining whether Ann Randall had forgotten or if she simply refused to touch on the subject.

“Maybe she never really knew
why
exactly we left Yarmouth.”

“Elementary, my dear Watson. Because we were destined to meet!”

Hope rolled her eyes with a smile of despair.

We arrived at her locker and she began to hunt through the clutter for her calculator. As I watched her digging, I thought of the months of strain she’d been under and marvelled at her ability to keep a cool head at all times. Her mental health was evidently much stronger than her mother’s. So, in the end, maybe the Randall family was not completely hopeless.

While I was having these comforting thoughts, I noticed a sort of texture covering the entire inner surface of her locker. At first I supposed it was wallpaper, but it was hardly her style to indulge in frivolous ornamentation.

The strange pattern had actually been written out in felt pen—a skein of hundreds and hundreds of words. But when I looked closer I realized that the words were actually numbers, always exactly the same numbers manically scribbled thousands of times:

17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001 17 07 2001

33. IN FRIENDLY TERRITORY

Hope and I were getting ready for our final exams, slouched in front of a long commercial for Craftmatic vibrating beds interspersed with bits of B movie, when my mother opened the Bunker door.

“How would you two like to work at the cement plant this summer?”

She explained that the job would involve sorting boxes of documents that had been piling up since the sixties. Eight-week contract, a decent wage, air conditioning. If we would take the trouble to dislodge our adolescent butts from the couch long enough to fill out a few forms, the job was ours.

Hope and I exchanged a quick nod of agreement. My mother tossed me the keys to the Honda, and in no time we were far away.

The sun beamed down, and Rivière-du-Loup smelled of dust and summer vacation. All over town the cherry trees were in bloom, and a snowfall of petals filled the air before being ground down to a beige slurry by the traffic.

On the outskirts of the industrial park, Hope suddenly straightened up in her seat to get a good view of the area. She recognized this place. She had come here about ten months earlier.

She saw herself again, sitting in the tow truck, squeezed between her mother and a giant man smelling of sweat and grease. The Lada, dead from overexertion, followed behind, duly hitched, laden with the vestiges of their previous life: a few articles of clothing, several sacks of rice, a collection of old bibles, cans of beans and tuna in oil, jars of relish and ketchup, and four volumes of
Teach Yourself Russian at Home
. The entire load pressed down on the poor rear shocks and, from time to time, the tailpipe could be heard scraping the asphalt and flinging out a shower of sparks.

Final destination: Élisée Ouellet Valvoline Garage—General Repairs—Iron and Metalwork.

After a heroic 1200-kilometre effort, Comrade Lada ended her days in a muddy yard, amid the remains of hundreds of vehicles. Its carcass was cannibalized for a few months before being reduced to a metal cube. Nothing was as easy to compress as memories.

“Is it still very far?” Hope asked as she turned forward again.

I pointed at the silos and minarets of the cement works. A cement mixer drove past in the opposite direction, and the driver hailed us with a double beep of the horn—he’d recognized the family Honda. I waved in reply. We were in friendly territory.

Mrs. Bilodeau was waiting for us in the office, holding the forms. All we needed to do was to fill in our social insurance numbers, sign at the bottom and keep the pink copy. Between phone calls she talked about the weather and asked us what programs we had enrolled in for the fall term. Her unwavering good mood dipped slightly when Hope asked to be paid in cash. Mrs. Bilodeau answered that normally the accountant never made that kind of exception, but she would see what could be arranged.

She checked our forms, slipped two blank cards into her big Olivetti, rapped out our addresses and filed them in a Rolodex.

“Welcome aboard!”

As we left the office we bumped into my father wearing his white foreman’s helmet. He gave Hope a Paul Newman smile and she responded with a wink. They were fond of each other, those two. My father glanced at his watch and asked if Hope would like to visit the facilities.

“There’s nothing in the world I’d rather do, Mr. Bauermann.”

“Ah! Just seventeen and already a shameless liar!”

He grabbed two old orange hardhats from the back of his 4×4 and cleared away the objects littering the seat: a toolbox, a pair of gloves, a half-empty cup of coffee and a stack of bills held together with a clip—all of it covered with a fine layer of cement.