Apocalypse for Beginners (19 page)

But being smart did not make much difference in this pursuit.

Because, while it was easy to speak to a receptionist at Mekiddo, as soon as you scratched below the surface, the situation became tricky. Every phone call went astray in the convoluted telephone system, ended up at the wrong extension or in a voice mailbox that did not accept any messages, please call back later. Often, the connection would be cut off without warning. Conversely, at other times it was Merriam who gave up, exasperated after listening for forty-five minutes to a loop of Ravel’s
Bolero
. Occasionally someone answered: a mysterious party—male? female? mythical creature?—could be heard breathing at the other end for a minute before abruptly hanging up.

Hayao Kamajii continued to elude them in space and time.

73. BETTER EQUIPPED THAN IN 546

Rivière-du-Loup was already registering 25°C in early June, when I started my summer contract at the cement works.

All that remained of the sinecure of the year before was a sweet memory. In Hope’s absence, I was sent to slave away in Purgatory (officially known as the bagging plant), where my job was to haul sacks of Portland cement. At the daily rate of two hundred sacks, thirty kilos per sack, I would be lugging six metric tons of cement a day, enough to pour several kilometres of Berlin Wall by the end of August.

My first day had been hell, and most of the other employees had bolted sometime earlier when I finally gathered up enough energy to stagger out of Warehouse No. 3. My legs were numb and my right shoulder was one massive bruise.

I glanced at my watch: 7:30 a.m. in Tokyo. What did that city look like at breakfast time? I pictured gutters, puddles, overcast skies—typhoon season was a few days away and they were forecasting several weeks of heavy rain. Thank you, Weather Channel.

I took a Kleenex out of my pocket and purged my sinuses of three kilos of Portland cement. It was going to be a long summer.

The Honda sputtered for a while before starting up. Its aging machinery was growing more and more fragile, and it would obviously be a few months at most before the transmission gave out, or the valves, or God knows which obscure oily organ. The best thing would be to take advantage of whatever life the car had left in it.

I headed off toward the Bunker with all the windows rolled down. My shoulder was aching and that old song about mining was playing on the radio: “Sixteen Tons.” A little too close to home.

Out on the open road, I started to cry like a baby, due to the combination of the wind and the cement trapped under my eyelids. I had brought along my swimming trunks and decided to take a cold dip in the municipal swimming pool, even if, without Hope, the place would probably seem pretty grim.

Something was not right—I sensed it even before rounding the corner of the arena and catching sight of the swimming pool. There was something hovering in the air—an abnormal, suspicious smell: mouldy lumber, heating oil, crushed concrete. The area was ringed by roads department fences.

Sitting on the hood of the Honda, with a lump in my throat, I looked at the excavator reigning over a hill of planks and pipes: what was left of the municipal swimming pool locker rooms. They had demolished the fence, no doubt to clear a path for the trucks, thus partially exposing a deep crater surrounded by pieces of concrete, twisted reinforcement rods and bits of turquoise tile. Floating amid the debris was a lonely bright red lifebuoy.

I watched the excavator for a long time. It was a gigantic, shining new Mitsubishi with scarcely a few scratches showing on its paint. There was no denying, the barbarians were better equipped than in AD 546.

74. KILLING TIME

Hope opened her eyes. A ray of sunlight reached across the floor as far as her hand. She stretched a little, heard the rasp of a lighter on the other side of the futon, followed by a deep inhalation and the distinctive stench of Dubek No. 9. Merriam was smoking her first cigarette of July.

“You were talking in your sleep,” Hope said.

Intrigued, Merriam propped herself up on an elbow.

“Oh, really? What was I saying?”

“No idea. What language do you dream in?”

Merriam took a puff, with an air of giving it some serious thought.

“Good question. I think I still dream in Hebrew.”

“Even after four years in Japan?”

“Even after four years in Japan.”

She rubbed her nose and blinked her right eye.

“I guess that should mean something …”

Her sentence was interrupted by a coughing jag. Hope frowned.

“How many cigarettes do you smoke a day?”

Merriam shrugged.

“Dunno. I’m trying to quit.”

While Merriam carefully took another drag on her cigarette, Hope sat up with her legs crossed and grabbed a little plastic box containing a set of miniature instruments: scissors, three nail clippers in different sizes, a series of files, a pumice stone and a cuticle trimmer. She spread her tools out on the quilt and launched into an intense manicure. Since her nails were already short, she was working on a scale of a fraction of a millimetre, applying microscopic file strokes, refining a curve, meticulously shaping a cuticle.

Merriam watched her work for a moment.

“How many times a day do you cut your nails?”

“Dunno. I’m trying to quit.”

Merriam doused her cigarette and shut herself in the bathroom, from which various aquatic noises could be heard. She emerged after a couple of minutes with a gloomy look on her face.

“
Attention, camarade
: We are entering menstrual no man’s land.”

“The what?”

“You’ve never heard this? When several girls live together, their menstrual cycles eventually become synchronized. Due to pheromones, I suppose.”

She began to rifle through the cupboards in search of something to eat. Hope pouted and went at her left index finger with a curved file.

“Well, you know, I’ve never had a period. And that certainly isn’t about to change in Tokyo.”

Merriam stopped searching.

“You’ve never had a period?”

“Never.”

“Childhood disease?”

“Nah. No disease, no injury, no deformity. I’m a medical mystery.”

Merriam scratched her head, taken aback by what she had just learned, or by the lack of food in the cupboards—it was hard to say which. Finally, she roused herself.

“Get up, comrade! We’re going out to eat. My treat!”

It was nearly noon, and the pocket-sized snack bar was swarming with people. They sat down at the counter and the owner bellowed at them in a blend of Yiddish and Japanese. They ordered the standard smoked meat tasting of kelp, with a dubious pickle on the side, along with a serving of tempura and a large cup of oily tea.

Merriam opened her pack of cigarettes: only three left. She would soon have to restock. She always smoked more during typhoon season, a meteorological mania acquired upon arriving in Japan and which she was now unable to give up.

She lit her cigarette, blew a stream of bluish smoke toward the ceiling.

“Well, what are your plans for the day?”

“The usual. Find Hayao Kamajii. What about you?”

“The usual. Kill time.”

Two plates showed up in front of them. Merriam twisted her cigarette butt into an ashtray and bit into a piece of tempura.

“I thought of something last night. How would you feel about working at the Jaffa? You have to face facts: it may be months before you find Kamajii.”

Hope turned the idea over in her mind. Living in Tokyo was expensive and there were several months left before October 12, the date printed on her return ticket. She had already borrowed a fair amount from Merriam, who pushed generosity to the point of not keeping a count, but Hope knew the exact sum she owed, down to the last yen. Working at the Jaffa would allow her to pay off her debt and afford her a certain degree of freedom.

She promised to think it over.

75. SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY OF THE DAY

It was two weeks since the last trace of the municipal swimming pool had been completely erased. Not one chunk of concrete remained. The roads department workers had raked the ground, unrolled a few strips of turf and installed a sign announcing the upcoming construction of a youth centre. All of a sudden, I felt old.

The demolition of a dilapidated outdoor swimming pool represented a minor change in the overall scheme of an entire city—even a city the size of Rivière-du-Loup—but to me it nevertheless seemed as if an essential part of reality had just disappeared. Without that crumbling old swimming pool, the universe felt slightly off kilter.

I felt a growing disinterest in the world above ground. When I was not busy hefting bags of cement, I stayed holed up in the Bunker. I reread the collected works of Isaac Asimov, keeping the telephone within reach—just in case, after months of radio silence, Hope Randall might deign to remember my existence and phone number.

It had just gotten dark when my mother called down to me from the top of the stairs.

“Michel? Could you go get me some things at the grocery store?”

Yawning, I grabbed the list that she held out to me: a pint of 2% milk, a loaf of sliced multigrain bread, margarine—the absurd sort of staples that you never noticed were missing before 9 p.m.

The Honda had been taken to the garage the day before and I decided to get out the old CCM that was rusting away in the depths of the shed and had not been greased or oiled for a number of summers. I inflated the tires, checked the brakes—and then, off to Steinberg’s.

The supermarket was quiet and I strolled unhurriedly along the aisles. I paused for a moment at the bin of Mofuku ramen. There was the perpetual sale—3 for 99¢—and the perpetual pink and yellow astronaut. The USSR had fallen, municipal swimming pools were being eradicated, but those infuriating ramenauts were still holding on. True, our civilization was evolving, but not necessarily in the right direction.

I was leaving the supermarket when I heard sirens.

There was an orange glow in the sky on the far side of the shopping centre. It was clearly a fire, but I could not figure out what could be burning in that direction, aside from the municipal arena and a narrow vacant lot—in other words, nothing really flammable. I hopped on my bicycle, tied my bags to the handlebars and set out in the direction of the fire.

Scientific discovery of the day: Yes, a baseball stadium can burn.

I had trouble understanding how fire could spread in an empty structure like the bleachers, but in the end maybe that old dry wood had only been waiting for the right opportunity.

The police were surveying the different entrances to the site, and a dozen firefighters were in the midst of a confab, huddled in a semicircle near the trucks. Apparently, this was their first-ever stadium fire and they were trying to decide how to approach the blaze: Would it be better to make their way across right field or over home plate, or whether (more fundamentally) it was really worth the trouble to save the creaky old wreck.

They finally uncoiled the hoses, hooked them up to a fire hydrant planted at the edge of the vacant lot and started spraying, but there was a visible lack of conviction in the operation. A column of smoke rose into the sky, black on black.

I pedalled away, neither rushing nor looking back. When I arrived home, flakes of soot were snowing down on the neighbourhood.

76. THE NINETEENTH STOP

The address of Mekiddo changed more quickly than the local weather. That day, their offices were to be found in the Gilo borough, at the other end of the city. According to Merriam, the train ride there would take an hour.

Hope took just enough money to pay the return fare, pocketed her
Rough Planet
and set out immediately. She liked to think that speed was important, that one day she would succeed in overtaking Mekiddo. Up to then, she had lost the race twenty-seven times.

Tokyo was between rush hours and the suburban trains were quiet. The passengers got on and off without saying a word, lost in thought. Housewives, toothless centenarians, miscellaneous riders.

Hope stepped off at the nineteenth stop, light years from the city centre. The streets around the station were fragrant with hibiscus and wood fires. There was something about this neighbourhood, a kind of aura, despite the nondescript architecture. Gilo had evidently been an outlying village. Tokyo had swallowed it up during the sixties, but the village spirit was still lurking in the vicinity of the train station.

Rough Planet
in hand, Hope walked for about ten minutes until she reached the address she was looking for. Needless to say, however, there wasn’t the slightest trace left of Mekiddo. At any rate, why would a multinational locate in a neighbourhood like this? Instead, there stood a new baseball stadium, which looked as if it had gone up the night before. The box office still smelled of fresh paint and some employees were sweeping up. A group of kids were already playing on the field.

Hope bought a can of Star Cola at a vending machine, but just as she hit the button, she realized her mistake: she had just spent the money for her return ticket!

She banged her head a few times against the vending machine. Dispirited, she nevertheless collected her beverage and climbed the bleachers to sit down.

The players were no more than twelve years old and wore Tokyo Swallows uniforms that were too big for them. The only sound was the whack of the balls and the occasional shout. The newly drawn lines were so neat as to appear unreal.

Hope looked around for an adult but saw none. She tried to imagine a world that, through some mysterious disaster, had been rid of all humans over twelve years old. The result, she mused, would not exactly be the apocalypse—more like a Charlie Brown comic strip.

Sitting in the uppermost bleachers, she could make out the tops of the downtown skyscrapers, like the echo of a distant universe. How on earth was she going to get back to the Jaffa? She searched through her pockets—on the off chance—but came up with nothing but her old train ticket, duly cancelled. She tore it into bits and scattered them on the breeze.