Apocalypse for Beginners (13 page)

Toward the end of November, my mother’s TV embargo suffered a major setback. Robert, the owner of the Ophir III, had a three-metre parabolic antenna installed on the roof of his establishment. The appendage was clearly too heavy for the frail roof structure, and its installation immediately gave rise to non-stop conjecture as to the exact moment the 300 kilos of galvanized steel would plunge through the layers of asphalt shingles, wood, mineral wool and drywall and crash down in the middle of the counter, right at a spot where the Dalai Lamas (who proved to be skilled geometers) had incidentally stopped sitting.

Robert had kind-heartedly promised everyone drinks on the house in the event of such a disaster.

Hope and I had front-row seats for the antenna’s inauguration. But we were out of luck, because all the contraption could pull in was snow, U.S. evangelists and the Albuquerque weather report (“sunny, 78°F, sun rising at 6:34”). Only subscribers could unscramble the interesting channels, and subscriptions were restricted to citizens of the American Empire.

Yet Robert was a man of honour, and the solution to this problem arrived in the mail two weeks later in a bubble-wrap envelope adorned with lovely tropical stamps and a return address in Nassau, Bahamas. Inside the envelope was a pirate decoder (Robert preferred the term “homemade”), including a keyboard on which, once a week, the user had to enter a password obtained through a highly democratic subscription. Hurray for free enterprise!

Now the big saucer could pick up 150 television channels, but of these the screen yielded nothing but the Sports Network, for the entertainment of our Dalai Lamas. On behalf of the rising generation, Hope and I laid claim to the slightest program break. However, program breaks were a rare thing indeed (you could always find a baseball game being played somewhere on the globe), so in total we managed to watch about 45 minutes of TV a day, in bits and pieces. We very sensibly sacrificed
Gilligan’s Island
in order to optimize our use of airtime—which essentially involved staying abreast of preparations for the huge, impending mess in the Fertile Crescent.

Since no journalist had as yet been deployed, we had to bide our time watching stock footage. UN headquarters. Marines polishing their assault rifles. F-14s taking off from American aircraft carriers. Iraqi or Iranian or Jordanian military personnel driving jeeps across the desert. Forests of oil derricks.

On CNN, political pundits sounded off on the subject of Saddam Hussein. One of them—possibly affected by the recent death of Curtis LeMay—pounded the table, asserting that if the Iraqi army refused to lay down its arms, the U.S. Air Force ought to roll out its ballistic missiles and blast that horde of barbarians back to the Stone Age.

And so on.

The weeks passed with flurries of activity and snow. We celebrated Hope’s eighteenth birthday, then Christmas. For the first time in years my parents abstained from hosting the Bauermann powwow, and Christmas Eve was observed with a reduced contingent. Hope was the only one who was not a family member, and my father fell over himself to make her feel at home. He had even given her David Suzuki’s latest book as a gift. How in the world had he learned of her admiration for the famous biologist? No clue.

Hope was radiant. And why not? Her mother, pleasantly soused behind the counter of the Ophir III, was celebrating under the protective gaze of a dozen Dalai Lamas. No one mentioned it, but we thought back to her incarceration a year before, which already seemed centuries ago. So we lightheartedly raised a glass of Baby Duck to the future.

Three weeks later Baghdad was pounded by the first wave of Tomahawk missiles.

45. THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD

A fine snow was falling on the neighbourhood where the train station was located, and a convoy of containers stirred up graceful powdery swirls as it trundled along the tracks.

We shook the snow from our boots and coats, swung open the door and entered the close atmosphere of the Ophir. Seaport taverns must have given off that same odour of fermented barley and tobacco back in the glory days of buccaneering. It was a stench that contained more history than any museum.

A quiet half-light filled the room. It was nearly empty, except for three Dalai Lamas working the first booze shift at the bar. A surrealist match of buzkashi was under way on the TV screen: some horsemen were dragging a veal carcass through the dust on an unnamed mountain range of Central Asia. SportsChannel had evidently diversified its programming.

Ann Randall, inconspicuously tipsy, stared into space with a cigarette hanging at the corner of her mouth. She greeted us with a thin smile and leaned over the counter to kiss us on the cheeks.

“Hi, you two! How’re you doing?”

“Couldn’t be better. Is the TV available?”

She silently consulted the Dalai Lamas, who responded by casting an indifferent glance at the game of buzkashi (3–0 for the Uzbek team). No objections, as long as we freed up the airwaves for
Hockey Night in Canada
.

Hope immediately tuned in to CNN, where the latest pictures from Iraq confirmed our worst predictions: the Americans seemed determined to wipe Baghdad off the face of the planet.

Norman Schwarzkopf stated at a press conference that the American armed forces were in fact carrying out delicate surgical operations. It was now possible to “neutralize” a high-ranking Iraqi official as he ate breakfast, while his wife continued to munch on her Al-Mecca Flakes at the other end of the table. At worst, there would be a few grains of plaster to be brushed away from the sleeve of her dressing gown. Ballistic lacework.

Ann Randall served us two glasses of Baghdad Sunrise, a drink invented by Hope: a double shot of instant coffee, Moskovskaya, Jack Daniel’s and a drop of cream. Ideal fuel for keeping the troops alert and lively until closing time. Because that was how long we needed to wait to reclaim possession of the television for an hour or so, the time it took to evict the Dalai Lamas, mop the floors, roll the small change and flip the bar stools up onto the counter. But what wouldn’t we do in exchange for our daily dose of TV—and at any hour, too, since there was always something going on in Baghdad. The American media, shrewdly embedded within the armed forces, broadcasted the fireworks live, night and day.

Hope dubbed it “Glasnost, Texas-style.”

We spent the evening in our usual spot. Hope reviewed her notes for Integral Calculus 101, while I slapped together a Spanish composition, and between periods of the hockey game we watched the methodical destruction of the ancient city of the Abbasid caliphs. For our supper, we had packed a supply of astronaut-flavoured ramen, every package stamped with the fateful date.

Toward midnight there was hardly a soul left in the bar. Everyone had cleared out after the Canadiens’ defeat, which happened to coincide with the end of the Sports Fans’ Special: 2 for 1 on all Labatt products—enough to sway even the most avid athlete. Therefore, hardly a soul left, except for a CNR brakeman marking the end of his shift before heading over to the company hotel to snore the night away. Hope took advantage of the situation to regain control of the television.

The sun was rising over the Iraqi desert, and CNN was airing its nightly hit parade: a salvo of Tomahawk missiles had (delicately) struck a residential neighbourhood during the night. Captured through a zoom lens, the explosions resembled molten balls of silica. A mad glassblower was running amok in Baghdad, with his blowpipe glowing white-hot.

The brakeman stopped poking around in the peanut bowl and stared at the screen.

“Looks like the end of the world,” he sniffed.

“Or the beginning of a new one,” Hope replied glumly.

The man gave her a bewildered look before focusing his whole attention back on the peanut bowl. I wondered whether we hadn’t been better off before the satellite antenna went into operation.

46. PLUTONIUM

Just as we were about to set out for the Ophir for another night of fragmented TV, I received a call from Norbert, a classmate in my drama course, who informed me that they were “cracking open a few cold ones” at his place in order to fend off the ambient gloom.

Hope said she was in, so we instantly changed the flight plan. After a stopover at the corner Irving station to pick up a case of beer, we landed at Norbert’s. The door was opened by a glassy-eyed individual with a goatee, an Afro haircut and a black cat perched on his shoulder. He invited us to leave our boots in the hallway and slipped away, reeling.

It could be roughly estimated that Operation Cold Ones had been in full swing since mid-afternoon. Twenty-odd partiers filled the living room and a dozen others were scattered around the apartment. No sign of Norbert on the radar screen. Clusters of empty bottles surrounded virgin canvases, tubes of paint and bundles of brushes marinating in solvent. R.E.M. was playing at full blast, and off in a corner, clips of Kuwait flashed by on a black-and-white TV that no one was watching.

An aroma of hash and Hawaiian pizza wafted through the shambles. I wondered if there was any pizza left.

Hope wanted to hang out in the kitchen, at a reasonable distance from the musical epicentre. On our way there we bumped into plaster casts, two-by-fours and headless mannequins. As we passed the washroom, behind the shower curtain I could make out the silhouette of what I believed was a mannequin topped with a deer’s head. A dozen wet towels covered the floor, and perched on the toilet tank was an impressive collection of mouldy old Marvel comics—dozens of issues of
Captain America
,
Spider-Man
and
Fantastic Four
left there for the literary enjoyment of visitors to the lavatory. The pile, which reached almost to the ceiling, sagged sideways and was just barely prevented from collapsing by the corner of the wall.

In the kitchen, several blackened butter knives were arranged in a star shape around one of the stove burners. Cases of beer had been stacked on the window ledge, and the window itself was covered with a good half-inch of frost. Sitting on either side of a litter box, two bearded guys were listing all the films since the fifties that featured the destruction of the Statue of Liberty. They seemed to be taking the discussion very seriously.

Hope, who was famished, raided the fridge. We sat on the counter with our two beers and a jar of Polish-style pickles. The smell of dill and vinegar blended harmoniously with the fragrance of cannabis resin. Equipped with a relatively clean fork, Hope speared a pickle.

“Who lives here?”

“Norbert Vong.”

“Norbert
Vong
? That’s not very ‘local colour.’ ”

“He’s from Laos.”

While I wrestled with the pickles, Hope spied a bottle of nail polish on the edge of the sink and carefully examined the label.

“Is his name really Norbert?”

“I think he changed his first name when his family came to Quebec. They immigrated in the late seventies.”

“Boat people?”

“Exactly. If I’m not mistaken there were six or seven Laotian families who settled in Rivière-du-Loup.”

“A strange place to immigrate.”

“You know, now that you mention it, they all left for Toronto after two years. The Vongs are the only ones who stayed.”

Hope opened the bottle of nail polish and sniffed at the contents inquisitively. Then she daubed some polish on her thumbnail, which turned an unlikely electric blue flecked with sparkles. If I’d been asked to come up with a name for that colour, I would have leaned toward Plutonium.

Finding the results to her liking, Hope went on to do the all the nails of her left hand, followed by those of her right hand. While waiting for the solvents to dry, she dreamily chomped on a pickle. The hash fumes were unleashing swarms of neurotransmitters in our brains.

“Can I steal a cigarette from someone?”

Three hands instantly proffered three packs. She lit a Craven “A,” took a deep puff, and exhaled. Hope smoking a cigarette—I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“Scientific curiosity, my dear Watson!”

She pulled off her socks (thick grey woollen ones that she bought by the dozen at the army surplus), sent them sailing to the far side of the kitchen and began to paint her toenails. I felt as if I were observing an extremely rare natural phenomenon, like a total eclipse of the sun, or the flowering of a bamboo forest, or the eruption of Mount St. Helens.

“I have to go pee,” she announced as she completed the final brush stroke. “We’ll be right back after the break.”

She disappeared, waving her fingers in the air. Left alone, I fondly observed her socks on the floor. It was the first time I ever felt moved by an old pair of woollen socks.

Near the litter box, one of the bearded guys (the one wearing engineer-style glasses) was explaining that American filmmakers had proven incapable of destroying New York and always ended up attacking symbols—the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, for example—instead of
real
buildings.

“ … and that’s because the Americans have never been attacked on their own territory. New York has never been bombed or napalmed. They haven’t experienced destruction on the tangible, architectural level. Any Lebanese man on the street knows more about it than all the specialists in Hollywood put together.”

As he spoke, he reached over to the case of beer and exchanged an empty bottle for a full one.

“When a Japanese director decides to raze Tokyo, it’s a whole other kettle of fish. They’re very thorough. You can sense the expertise. Have you seen
Akira
?”

His listener shook his head. The guy wearing glasses took a swig of beer.

“The Japanese, my friend, really know what they’re doing.”

I was wondering whether this theory made any sense or if, on the contrary, it came under the heading of unadulterated crap, when Hope suddenly re-entered my field of vision. Standing in the kitchen doorway, nails sparkling and eyes aghast, she looked stunned. She was holding an old issue of
Spider-Man
stained with dampness and obviously drawn from the stack on the toilet tank. It was opened to a page full of ads.