Nod (14 page)

She squinted, trying to fix me in her glare. ‘I was wrong about him.’

There was no point in arguing. I was sure that, to Tanya, Charles did make sense.

Casually. ‘We should talk, Paul.’

‘About what?’

‘A lot of things. About bedtime arrangements. About demons. About putting makeup on sleepy-bye eyes.’

I could see that she wanted to turn back to her chalkboard, that she was forcing herself to keep facing me as though I was the monster, impossible to look upon. Emotions heaved and shuddered within me, rising and falling but unable to escape the gravitational field of my body. I was seasick with feeling as grey sea serpents of horror and mourning roiled in my gut. That was my real welcome to Nod, I think. Until that moment, part of the old world had been alive in me in the form of hope. But now that votive candle had been snuffed, and I was a wisp of climbing smoke.

‘You won’t miss me while you’re snoozing, Paul.’ She stretched her head forwards and upwards as she examined my jaw line from below. ‘But you look so sad! Lost something precious? I can comfort you if you like. How about I share some juicy secrets with you? It might take a little of the sting away.’

She began to slap the eraser into her free palm, causing clouds of chalk dust to rise and whiten her. Hard and harder.

‘I would have left you.’

I bit my lip.

‘I can see it in your eyes! Ha! You know it too!’

I said nothing, tried not to think.

‘It wasn’t enough, what we had. You know that. You know you weren’t offering me enough. You fucking idiot. No friends, no life. Your stupid books and your stupid fucking sour attitude! There was nothing there to make a life from. One more fucking sushi night with us alone in that apartment might have done me in! You hate people. You wanted me to hate people, and if I’d stayed with you that’s what would have happened. You know what? I bet you’re glad that this happened. I bet you think we all deserved it. That’s why you wrote that book of yours.’

She paused to gather her ammunition and shot me a wild look that didn’t contain an ounce of regret.

‘Well, guess what? Fuck Sushi Fridays. You remember another little ritual? My girls’ nights out? With Tori Strawberry? Well, they weren’t just girls’ nights out, not sometimes. You’d sit there at home, too good to go out and party. But we partied. Lots of stiff, fat cocks. So fucking easy to find. You men are so fucking easy! They say girls are easy, but it’s fucking boys and their fucking cocks! Smile at them and—boing—they’re out and rubbing against you. You never had me, not really, Paul.’ She stopped and watched me. ‘Why so glum, chum? There’s nothing to cry about.’

This was no news. The evening when she told me she’d been abused by an uncle, I’d held her and felt special, like we shared a burden. And other things she hadn’t told me but which I’d been able to discern in her eyes when she drank hard liquor. This was no news.

She leaned still further forward and turned her head sideways, neck cricking.

‘Don’t be such a baby, Paul. Anything you want to say? Any questions? I’ve got work to do. Charles says that idle hands… but you know all those old sayings, don’t you, Mr. Prophet.’

I turned and fumbled my way to the door. At the last moment, though, she called me back.

‘Paul. Look at me, Paul.’

Her voice had changed. I turned and looked at her. For a strobe-lit second, she was herself again.

‘It isn’t true. I didn’t do anything bad. I love you, Paul. Always remember that, no matter what I say or what you see me do. This is true, right now. The rest is all lies. Darling.’

Then she sniggered, spat at my feet, and turned back to her work.

* * *

For hours after that, I was as fragile as the shell of a battery egg. If I’d touched anything, I’d have shattered and pale yellow soul-yolk would have slithered out of me and puddled on the floor. I stayed locked in what was now mine and Zoe’s classroom, struggling to hold a face together for the child’s benefit, not that she seemed to require such support. When Charles would call through the door for me, I’d answer ‘soon’ to whatever it was he was saying and hold my breath until he left. Mostly, though, I just waited for the pain to kill me.

But it didn’t. I just endured. And through enduring, I learned suffering’s dirty little secret: the sufferer is always bigger than the pain. You roll around on the floor like a baby. You vomit up tears. You shit your thoughts into a plastic bag and try to asphyxiate them. I did all that. And still existence persisted. From the ceaselessly beckoning no-time of my Dream to an empty classroom where time burned endlessly like a torture cell light bulb: through it all, pain remained something inside me—remained, therefore, something ultimately smaller than me.

Visions stabbed at me with their kebab skewers. Tanya in a hotel room. Tanya in a bar. Laughing, dancing, sucking, moaning. An animal she—and an animal me, spasmodically imagining it all. Had she been telling the truth? Had she been lying? I still have no idea. Both possibilities seemed to carry equal weight.

Eventually I realized that someone was watching me. Zoe.

The bear peeked out from behind her crossed arms—four eyes fixed on mine. And somehow eyes brought me back from wherever I’d been. And as I returned, a matryoshka doll of nested feelings opened up before me: mine for Tanya; Tanya’s for Zoe; Zoe’s for the bear.

Tanya was gone, the Dream lay ahead, and in between them lay the necessity of some sort of safe haven for a child in this mad world.

* * *

By midnight I knew what I had to do. I emerged to face Charles, looking better in his eyes by virtue of looking so bad, and we walked the candle-lit halls and discussed what I was going to say the next morning. Occasionally, screams and moans drifted in from the Book Room. And just like I’d ignored the more unsavoury parts of the news a week ago, I tried my best to ignore them. For the moment.

A village boss, who imagines himself the ‘Magnus Apollo’ of his neighbours.

Dear Diary, So what’s the deal with all this dear diarizing?

In order to write or, more precisely, to be sane and write, one needs either an audience or at least some idea of an audience; there’s a fine line between ‘writing’ and babbling to oneself. You can’t just write to no one—even if no one ends up reading what you’ve written. And with the world about to end and everyone I’ve ever known either dead or done for, that’s a problematic caveat as I sit here scribbling away on this pad of yellow paper. I tell myself writing helps keep me awake, keeps me from drifting off permanently into the golden light, but that’s not really the whole truth.

So who
are
you, invisible reader? You’re not one of the Awakened, and I don’t think you’re the kids in the park, either. Neither of those groups strike me as particularly bookish. Are you one of my fellow Sleeper adults? But surely I’m not spilling any beans here that haven’t already been pelted down on their heads by the million. They’ve
had
the dream. They’ve
lost
everything and everyone. They don’t
need
this little memoir. Besides, they won’t be hanging around Nod much longer either: their dreams will swallow them up whole about the same time the Awakened pass on out of this world. So who are you?

Maybe you’re alien archaeologists and you’ve discovered this yellow tablet a thousand years from now. Maybe you’re a diary-snooping God. But then again, maybe you’re the truth, and you just need some figuring out.

* * *

Shortly before dawn, Charles’s red-veined hands jerked me from my Dream and back into Time. Time for our chat with the loping, oozing citizenry of Nod. Time for my debut.

While I gnawed at a rancid bagel that tasted for all the world just like a rancid bagel (one retrieved from a dumpster and given a good polish by a sticky shirt sleeve), Charles fussed about
where
the speech was going to happen.

‘We could have it in the gym, but there are only fifty of us and it might look empty. We could have it outside, but who knows what could happen out there.’

His school marm-ish anxieties were almost endearing. You could tell he wanted to ask my opinion but was worried I’d mock him. In the end he decided we would speak on the front steps of the school. There, we’d be within earshot of the street and available to the walking wounded, but, if we found ourselves under sudden siege, we’d be able to retreat and barricade the double doors behind us.

* * *

Outside, a grey day. The faithful were garbled together, waiting and restless on the lawn. A fight erupted at the back of the crowd as two burly, bearded guys set about ripping one another new assholes—literally from the sound of it—while everyone else either pretended nothing was happening or egged on the combatants. I watched, Charles watched, we all watched. Drawn by the smell of violence, strangers kept drifting up, alternately bold and fearful, until the audience was about two hundred strong.

I’ve given some serious thought as to how I should present the speech—or speeches (in the end I spoke three times)—I gave while under Charles’ leathery wing. I think the best way will be to include it as a text. Some of it was improvised, much of it came from the introduction to
Nod
, and bits of it—the shrill and polemical bits—came highly recommended by Charles. My words varied slightly with each reiteration, but not that much.

‘What has happened is no accident!’ Charles was waving my manuscript back and forth. ‘It all makes sense and this man,’ here he dragged me forward, ‘this man wrote it all down before the curse of sleep ended, before we Awoke! It’s good news!’

The crowd went completely still, so that the bored screaming of the seagulls was the only sound until I began to speak:

Is this a surprise? If so, ask yourself what you imagined would happen when the old world died—or you did. Did you imagine some lame Heaven where you’d be kissed up to by hosts of angels fascinated by all your wonderful qualities? Would there be better food in the Afterworld? Better sex? Better television? Looking around you today, are you ready to admit that, at the very least, you lacked imagination?

Where did you think you were two weeks ago? In a place called ‘Vancouver’? On a planet called ‘Earth’? Did you really think those words named something real? Well, they didn’t. It was just a story—a story we told one another and agreed to believe in. We looked at the people around us and agreed to call each other ‘brother’ and ‘lover’ and ‘friend’ and ‘boss’. And we felt these agreements made us permanent. And we cared about hockey and democracy and phone bills. And we clung to those words like a barnacle clings to a rock.

And so we went from sunrise to sunrise, slipping in and out of sleep
[I quickly learned to pause here for a round of teeth gnashing]
but never once thinking that there was anything more to this ‘world’ of ours than kneeling buses and ghost friends on our computers and fat-free cookies.

But we were wrong. There was a lot more to the world than that: there were a lot more words out there. There was Nod.

Nod was always out there, always peeking around a corner and watching us. In poverty. In the misfiring DNA of cancer cells. Embedded in the hoodsof drunken SUVs that ploughed down innocent children. But now the pretending is over! Nod is the full meal deal, the director’s cut of the world with all the ugly, nasty bits put back in. It’s not a world for cowards. It’s not a world for the weak. There are demons here in Nod, and monsters, and giant spires that poke through the sky. Eight mile high mushrooms. Flaming swords and Brazen Heads. Anything you can imagine. Angels walking through the alleys, demons beckoning from the shadows.

Nod is what we’ve been given. It’s what we deserve. We’d better get used to it.

When I finished, Charles stepped forward to make his plea for brotherhood and unity among the cracked masses, but for a good five minutes they wouldn’t listen, just kept whooping and stomping for me. I’d taken the hard, bitter line, and they’d looked around them and seen a hard, bitter world. The scene playing out in front of us looked like the mosh pit at a punk rock festival in some deeply damaged Eastern European country. As he watched, Charles kept his smile in play, but when he glanced sideways at me, beneath his contorted red face I could glimpse a rawer and even redder one, a flayed face. A flaying face.

Eventually, the mob simmered and Charles spoke some more, growing larger as he began by reciting lines from Nod—or, more properly, a passage from Genesis, as quoted in my manuscript:

‘And Cain went out from the face of the Lorde and dwelt in the lande Nod on the east syde of Eden. We are the race of Cain, all of us. But good news! The punishment is now complete! The barren old world of our wanderings is now over. Here in Nod we’re called on to establish the new Eden. The old world ended in Fire—did you see the flash? But did you hear what Nodgod said at that moment? I did!’

And so on—the standard evangelical pitch. After Charles finished, most of the crowd stayed for the metaphorical juice and cookies; after all, they had nowhere else to go that didn’t involve being alone, hungry, and homi- or suicidal.