Nod (15 page)

It began to rain gently, and nobody except me seemed to notice that the drops that ran down over my upper lip and into my mouth tasted funny. Neither had anyone else seemed to notice the slimy grey film that had begun appearing on white surfaces. Later that afternoon when I crouched in a remote corner of the playground and took my first shit in three days, my stool was crayon yellow.

* * *

While Charles’ people, Tanya among them, began to shepherd the newcomers toward the school, Charles himself wasted no time dragging me back inside, to a dim corner where no one could see or hear us.

‘What was that, Paul?’ Something new in his eyes. Fear, I hoped.

‘What?’

‘The way you spoke.’

‘I did what you asked. Charles.’

My little power play was blatant. I knew I’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, my secret weapon having been the fact that I didn’t give a damn about a world that didn’t give a damn about human beings: my contempt had spoken to the crowd. Now Charles would have to deal with the fallout—with the Seattle in my words—if he wanted to keep the spotlight focussed on him.

‘You’re good with words, Paul. But of course that’s not news.’ His self-mastery was impressive, despite the wildness of his eyes and the slack condition of his skin. ‘I don’t mind if you call me by my old Sleeper name when we’re alone, Paul, but you need to know that we’re renaming everyone out there. New Eden. Take up where Adam left off.’

‘Save it for your zombies, Charles.’

He reddened three times. First shade, anger. Second shade, rage. Third shade, the strain of repression of said rage.

‘Are we done here?’ I asked. ‘Or am I still your prisoner?’

My mind flew, on paper wings, to the Book Room and perched there.

‘Give me my thousand. Then you can go.’

But go where? Through the hundred kilometre gauntlet of suburbs that sprawled to the east? North toward the mob on the Lion’s Gate Bridge? South toward the mushroom cloud? West into haunted, hunted Demon Park? No. Charles’ plan would be that I’d go straight to martyrdom, skewered on a kebab stick. There’s a natural point in the development of any religion where the prophet becomes first a nuisance and then a positive liability. Just imagine Jesus walking into an evangelical church while the collection plate was being passed around—or into a Catholic priest’s chamber while the altar boy’s frock is pulled up over his head. At some point it’s inevitable that the prophet has to go. When you stop and think about it, that’s the take-home message of the entire New Testament: off the prophet. The rules were set, then. Zoe and I had until Charles got his ‘thousand’, whatever that was.

‘A thousand? Why not? I’ve always liked round numbers. Charlie.’

And I left him there, swallowing, swallowing.

* * *

Pacing the halls that day, I was both famous and feared. The two states are inextricably linked; the famous always have the power to negate the existence of the non-famous in much the same way a light bulb takes out unwary moths—unthinking annihilation in the face of what Rainer Maria Rilke called, referring to angels, ‘overwhelming existence’. Charles had lifted me up in the eyes of his followers, and I had to be grateful for that. The haggard Awakened Uriahed and Heeped all over me as I passed by; they Pecked and they Sniffed. When people crawl, they always remind me of Dickensian grotesques. His novels were Nod-like with their small contingents of ‘normal’ people constantly under siege from the massed hordes of the twisted and absurd. The hard thing when reading a Dickens novel is to keep faith with the normal, not to be seduced and swept away by the freak show.

All in all, being feared suited my mood; I wore my new role gladly, like armour donned against the assaults of my own heart. As I strode through my day, I felt my face adjust to its new role of prophet: my chin rose, my cheeks drew down, and my eyebrows tightened and drew nearer one another. And then, when I turned a corner and found myself alone, I would laugh. At myself, and a little too intensely for my own liking. Then I’d frown, then laugh again: dizzy circles of me, spinning around.

I made sure that Zoe was fed and watered. She seemed the same as always, content to play with her bear and other toys she’d found in the classroom’s cupboards. She was goodness and sweetness, but I could only watch her wordless world from a distance. I was alone and would have to get used to it as best I could.

So long I was able to maintain my status as Rice Jesus, I was confident that I didn’t need to fear for Zoe’s safety: no one would dare enter our classroom without permission. No one would question why I chose to keep a ‘demon’ there either. The fermenting imaginations of the Awakened would fill in any gaps left lying around. There were no more gnawing questions in anybody’s mind: just a plethora of fantastical answers, gnawing away.

Twelve more days until the Awakened were mostly dead and those who remained would be so incapacitated that they’d be incapable of hunting anything, and Zoe would be safe. We were pretty much half way there, and the odds were that Charles’ little kingdom was the safest place to pass at least a few more of those days.

A robber of Attica, who placed all who fell into his hands upon an iron bed. If they were longer than the bed, he cut off the redundant part; if shorter, he stretched them until they fit it.

Planning aside, the next night I pushed my newly-minted luck—rolled that golden coin down those empty hallways toward the screams that echoed out from Captain America’s cell. His anguish had become more than I could ignore, and my thoughts first built a nest then roosted outside the closet at the back of the bookroom.

For the last couple of nights I’d noticed that my thoughts were turning more and more toward the Dream. It was like a physical craving. The Dream was gravity, bending my thoughts in its direction so that every one of the dozens of problems I faced seemed as though they would be most easily solved through the closing of my eyes. Each time I slept the pull was greater, the return to Nod more difficult. In fact, I was beginning to worry that each night’s sleep might be the one that never ended, the one that left Zoe alone in Charles’ dark world.

And yet, the more the Dream drew me toward it, the more I also became aware of what my fellow Sleeper was going through, awake for days on end. By comparison, the stabbing of skewers seemed a trivial thing.

Captain America’s pitiable cries were even affecting the otherwise unflappable Zoe. Indeed, this was the first thing I’d seen affect her in any way, despite the fact that she’d already seen the full menu of ‘things no child should ever see’—but which, we adults conveniently forget, they actually see all the time. Children are the eternal, silent witnesses to every human sin, and the more we tatter their purity, the more we extol the clean white blouses of ‘innocence’. Already during her short spell inside our fractured narratives, Zoe had seen both Tanya’s terrible descent and my wallowing in the muddy bottom of that fall; she’d seen spooky, twisted shapes at every corner.

When Captain America cried out, Zoe didn’t start or cry, but she stopped in her solitary play and looked down into her lap for a moment or two, the lack of expression on her soft, still-babyish face itself a kind of expression.

The rescue mission I now found myself contemplating was tricky. There was no predictable ebb or flow to life among the Awakened, no supper or bedtimes. The structure, such as it was, was all based around intense focus on individual tasks, both mundane and esoteric. Charles’ Awakened worked furiously and continually, mostly scrubbing and wiping, conjuring and praying. That afternoon I’d passed three of them gathered around an old yellow typewriter someone had dragged up from the basement. They took turns hitting random keys, eyes shut tight. After a few minutes of this, they pulled out their sheet of paper and crowded together by a broken window, anxious to see what wisdom they’d transcribed, presumably from the mouth of Nodgod. As they scanned the page, their faces twisted and fell.

To my mind, it seemed likely that the Awakened were speeding up the rate of their own decay and death through their efforts. But what did I care about that? It was the same before, when people would warn about the inevitability of environmental destruction (now looking to be reversed, assuming too many more nukes don’t go off before they rust away).
Conserve, conserve
, they’d whinny, knowing full well that their anaemic efforts would never make an ounce of difference. For myself, I’d always muttered,
consume, consume
, reasoning that the sooner we hit the crisis point, the sooner we’d be forced to stop shitting where we ate.

The practical point here is that there was no natural time at which to stage a daring rescue of the good Captain. There would be no sleepy-headed guards at midnight, no lunch-bloated siestas in the afternoon. One time was as good as another, and so I decided to make my attempt when Zoe fell asleep.

I tucked her in, grizzly on guard, then wrote and pinned a large note to the classroom door, threatening every sort of revenge I could imagine (An Iron Maiden! Procrustes’ Bed! The Dread Horrors of the Oubliette! All that good dungeon stuff) on anyone who might dare disturb her slumber.

Back in the book room, I stopped and listened at the door. Hearing nothing but that head-roar we optimistically call silence, I gingerly turned the knob and went inside.

A single candle flickered. Both prisoner and guard looked eagerly up, each hungry for a break in their common drudgery of stimulus/response. How many days had they been trapped in here together? Captain America seemed to be melting into the floor, and I wondered if he’d begun to welcome the periodic stab of that skewer as a blessed release from the monotony.

Three buckets brim-full of shit and piss stood in one corner; a couple of empty cans and a milk jug filled with murky water stood in another. I gagged and looked up. The ceiling was high enough to be invisible in the faint light. I looked back down and found Captain America’s eyes locked on mine.

‘I’m Paul.’

‘My name’s—’

Skewer Lady screeched, obscuring whatever he said next.

‘No! He’s a liar! His name is
Rag
!’

The three syllable version of ‘rag’, I should note. I turned on her.

‘No. He still has his old name, just like I do and just like you do,
Judy
.’

She mumbled words that never made it out of her closed mouth.

‘What did you say?’

She spoke to the floor. ‘My name is Gytrash.’

I tried not to laugh but let out a smirk. Gytrash, a northern English spirit that waylaid travellers caught on the road too late at night.

‘Gytrash. Okay. Gytrash, I’ve come for ‘Rag’. The Admiral wants him downstairs.’

‘No!’

‘The Admiral wants you to stay here and be ready when he comes back.’

She scowled and shook her head.

This was going nowhere. I grabbed her and pushed her against the wall. She began to laugh.

‘You can stop me, but you can’t stop the Rabbit Hunt. Can’t save the demon children…’

‘What do you mean?’

Skewer Lady just giggled to herself. ‘Can’t save the demons! Can’t save their souls!’

‘What is a Rabbit Hunt?’ It wasn’t a phrase from
Nod
.

Her voice took on a sing-songy tone. ‘The Admiral will take a Thousand…drive the demons into the sea. Admiral hates dreamy little heads going to pull their bodies from the water and let us drink their blood…’

Spying a roll of duct tape hanging from a nail, I grabbed it, ripped off a piece and plastered it haphazardly across her mouth. She tried to stab at me with her skewer, but I pulled it from her hand and threw it away. I hadn’t given any thought to what to do about her when I stole her prisoner.

She kept babbling through the tape, which didn’t completely cover her mouth. I could only pick out and guess at random words as I tore off another piece and applied it.

‘Juggle…leaves…stop…shining…wave…stop…’ It was like an emergency broadcast from a group of hysterical Fridge Magnet poets.

Finally, I simply took the whole roll and wound it around her head three or four times. That silenced her. She just sat there on the floor looking ridiculous. I turned my attention toward Captain America.

‘Let’s get you out of here.’ I was in full comic book action mode now.

‘Out of where?’ he asked, tears blackening the grey fabric of his filthy T-shirt. ‘There’s nowhere to go. I just want to sleep…’

A set of keys hung beside the door, just beyond his reach. I tried one after another on the U-shaped bike lock that chained his neck to the pipe until it clicked and opened.

‘Get up.’

He shook his head. I went over to Gytrash, pulled her over to the pipe as gently as I could, and locked her duct-taped head to the pipe while she struggled feebly, animal growls emerging from beneath the tape.

Captain America still wasn’t moving, so I slapped him. ‘Get
up
!’

He staggered upright.

‘Now listen. When we leave the book room, there’s a stairwell directly across the hall. Two flights down and we’ll reach an exit into an alley. You understand?’