Nod (5 page)

Not liking my chances of making it safely through the parking lot with my meagre purchases, I took a hard right and headed around the side of the building, stuffing the jars of tahini into my jacket and zipping it up tight.

The loading zone behind the building was deserted except for a dreadlocked young woman and her kindergarten-aged daughter who sat on a low kerb. The mother looked to be the sort of ersatz hippie whose long skirt and high-maintenance hair were about all that separated her from a typical welfare mom. She was crying openly, while her daughter stared at me, unfazed.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, fatally.

‘Three guys. They took our food and ran off that way.’ She pointed toward the parking lot, screamed ‘Fucking bastards!!’ then covered her face and sobbed some more. Was her story true? Did it matter?

‘Here.’ I unzipped my jacket and took out a jar, giving it to the little girl. That old devil pity. ‘Do you live far from here?’

‘Two blocks.’ She answered cautiously, seemingly afraid that I was about to appoint myself their protector and house guest.

‘Then get going and lock the doors behind you when you get there.’

She still looked suspicious. ‘Okay. Thanks.’

They got up to leave, but I stopped them, took out another jar and handed it to the little girl. She smiled up at me but said nothing.

‘Is your daughter okay?’ I asked.

‘She hasn’t said a word in two days. But she still—’

Deciding against sharing the obvious fact that her daughter still slept, the woman grabbed the child’s hand, and they turned and ran.

* * *

Walking home was like visiting a rapidly-degenerating patient in intensive care. Commerce was almost done; the chain stores were down for the count but some mom and pop places were still open, but warily, looking at the sidewalks through slitted windows, though they had little left to sell except for magazines and car air fresheners.

Menace was in the air. I didn’t see anything YouTube-worthy, but the indefinable strangeness I’d noticed when Tanya and I went out for breakfast the day before had grown a little less indefinable overnight. People’s faces were the big indicators of what was going on. People’s faces looked like shit. Men weren’t shaving and women weren’t doing their hair. Everything and everyone was starting to look slightly greasy. Slightly off-one’s-meds and teetering-on-the-edge-of-one’s-rocker. And cops. There were cops and soldiers everywhere. They clutched guns and stood in clusters on the corners, waiting, blue and green. Shattered cell phones like smashed candy on the pavement.

* * *

That night Tanya started begging me for sex.

I hope that doesn’t sound even slightly erotic because I do mean
begging
. She’d become obsessed by the idea that if I could only fuck her into insensibility, she’d break through whatever wall of static surrounded her and sleep. And she had support in this belief: in the twenty-first century there was always plenty of support for any old thing you might care to have a crack at believing. The previous day she’d been glued to the television, watching, transfixed, as people called into talk shows and claimed in loud voices that they’d made themselves sleep through any number of methods, sex marathons being fourth on the list, right after drinking, praying, and drugging. What was fifth? I can’t remember. Maybe shopping. The sleep-claimers were all crackpots, needless to say, but it didn’t matter: crackpotism was going mainstream. I imagined the next issue of
Cosmopolitan
, if it ever came out:
50 Hot New Ways to Screw Yourself into Dreamland!

‘Paul. Fuck me.’

Without waiting for a reply, she marched into the bedroom and stripped. I hesitated in the doorway as she knelt on the mattress, hands clasped before her, forehead resting on her knuckles, offering up her pale ass. She looked like a pantomime horse: her rear half ready for fornication, her front seemingly engaged in prayer. Confronted by the odd couple of her dishevelled vagina and sternly puckered asshole, I bit my lower lip and looked away. Nobody wants sex to be too naked. Not completely naked. It was a terrible moment, almost awful enough to wipe away other, better memories of our lovemaking.

‘Come
on!
’

I can still hear the contempt in her voice. At times everyone wonders how deeply buried contempt is beneath the surface of their friends’ and lovers’ smiles; most of us suspect—accurately, I believe—that it lies in a shallow grave, gasping for breath beneath a damp mulch of manners and restraint. Was there ever such a thing as unconditional love? It’s hard to say, given that those closest to us always seemed to want or need the most. The purest love we ever had was probably for strangers or imaginary people: for Mother Theresa or Santa Claus. Or babies, before they got branded or tattooed with identity, or old people after theirs had been spayed and neutered by dementia or waning libido.

I have a theory. By now this won’t surprise you. My theory is that we needed love because we were so hard to like. Simple, huh? We’re so unworthy of anything, so wavering, so temporary. All love was pain in that it was rooted in pity for our wretched souls. And yet, only love could hope to hold us together. And without love?

‘Come
on
.’

Contempt pooling. Deepening.
It isn’t her
, I told myself.
It’s just what’s happening to her
. To us.

‘Tanya, I can’t just—’

‘Remember that afternoon at the Pan Pacific last summer?’ she asked, twisting around to scowl at me over one freckled shoulder.

The Pan Pacific was a luxury hotel beloved of rich Asian tourists and lumpy old we-earned-it-so-now-we-better-spend-it Canadians in town for some high-end shopping. It was only five blocks from our apartment, but once in a while we treated ourselves to a night there, considering the erotic jumpstart of an unfamiliar bed well worth the expense. Those elegant rooms must have been invisibly splattered with decades and gallons of cum and sweat, no doubt, and vomit and shit and tears. But you couldn’t see any of that and the room was always new to us when we knelt on the bed, facing one another.

There in the now, Tanya rolled onto her back and crossed her ankles.

‘Remember how I pretended I was a desperate actress who thought she was auditioning for a commercial, and you were the sneaky porn guy holding auditions?’ Now she was using her seductive voice, and it was creeping me out. ‘I did that for you, Paul, even though I thought it was borderline fucked-up. So do this for me now.’

And so I tried.

I could barely get an erection, only managing after a few minutes of near-frantic pumping, courtesy of Tanya’s white-knuckled right hand. She got back onto all fours. The odd couple again: a beige fleck of shit in the crinkles of her asshole; a rawness to the lips of her vagina.

She came after five minutes or so, a pinched half-orgasm that wasn’t going to do the trick, wasn’t even going to raise her hopes.

‘Don’t stop.’

I didn’t. There was no way I was going to come myself, which was lucky. I kept at it for as long as I could stand, maybe forty minutes or so, until my knees burned and my erection diminished, first transforming into a half-filled water balloon, then into nothing much at all. Eventually, I flopped out and lay beside her, rubbing my knees. She stared at the ceiling while I stared at her profile. At the three day mark, Tanya actually looked better than she had after two days, like her old self but in slightly sharper focus.

I blinked back tears. We were going to grow old together, either in a couple of decades or a couple of weeks and maybe there wasn’t as much difference between those two timelines as I’d have thought forty-eight hours earlier. And if Tanya only had four weeks left, the same lessons would need to be learned, the same pride swallowed, as if we had incontinence and dementia to look forward to.

But we probably didn’t.

As the blood flowed back into my calves, Tanya’s rib cage rose and fell.

‘The transmission ban—’

‘It won’t change anything.’

‘You don’t know that.’

She turned her head my way.

‘You don’t know that, either.’

‘Well, and you don’t know
that
.’

‘And so on.’

Tanya moved toward me and nestled her face under my chin. Horribly enough, I felt my penis begin to stir again. The incipient erection felt stupid and slug-like against my thigh. I shifted slightly, hoping to conceal it from her.

‘I think it’s time we started planning for what comes next.’

‘Why don’t we just go to sleep?’

‘I’m not
going
to sleep, Paul.’

I heard myself begin to whine.

‘You don’t know that. That’s just something out of a movie. Doomed people in movies always have this sad foreknowledge of what’s coming down the pike. But that’s just Hollywood bullshit melodrama. You don’t
know
you’re not going to sleep.’

She struggled to keep her temper as she composed a response to my idiot optimism.

‘We have to start planning for what’s going to happen next. Even if you’re right and it doesn’t last, we still have to plan. If I’m wrong, we’ll laugh about it in a couple of days.’

I swallowed, twin feelings tugging at my trachea. A passionate desire to save the woman I loved. And something else—a bastard thought I couldn’t control:
If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.
An idea as inevitable as math.

Everybody dies eventually. So if eight billion of us die in the next four weeks is that
significant
? All this sleeplessness plague could do was align those billions of inevitable deaths into a slightly narrower window of time—a matter of efficiency, not tragedy. If, during any one of a million previous nights, a giant asteroid had smashed the earth into gravel while we all slept, would it have
mattered
? With no one left to mourn the wreckage, one could even argue that it wouldn’t be a bad way to end things at all: egalitarian if nothing else. I even thought of a scene in
Star Wars
where Princess Leia receives news that her home world has been destroyed by Darth Vader’s Death Star. She throws a hairy fit, but two scenes later, she’s back to flirting with Han Solo.

I slapped these thoughts down, hating myself.

‘Listen, Tanya. There’s no way this will keep on. First thing is we’re going to get you out of the city. We’ll head north, find a—’

A knock on the apartment door. Having forgotten there was a world outside, I started, then got up and threw on my old grey dressing gown.

‘Look first, Paul. Don’t just open up the door. Anybody could be out there.’

I went and squinted through the peephole, wondering if a crazed mob would be outside, if a crazed mob would even fit in our narrow hall. But all I saw was the old woman who lived next door. Mrs Simmons. A widow but still married to the corpse who’d bullied the bulk of her life away. Old man Simmons had been, she’d confided to Tanya more than once in the elevator’s confessional, a real piece of shit—his communion with the world a binary code made up of rapidly alternating slaps and silences.

In the fishbowl of the peephole, Mrs Simmons’ faded face darted left and right. She was a skinny old thing but with jowls that gave her the appearance of having a puppet’s hinged jaw; when she spoke, someone else seemed to be pulling the strings.

When I opened the door, she jumped back and pressed against the opposite wall, cowering in her pink tracksuit. Three nights without sleep had left the old woman sucked juice-box dry.

‘Are you okay, Mrs Simmons?’

She became aggressive with her bony chin. ‘That noise. Is that noise coming out of your place?’

‘What noise?’ For a moment I thought the poor woman had overheard our sex efforts, but then I remembered that our bedroom was on the wrong side of the apartment for that to be the case. That and how silent our fucking had been.

Mrs Simmons peeled herself off the wall and inched toward me, glaring.

‘Don’t tell me you don’t hear it!’

It’s always bad news when the meek get assertive: an order, a question, a threat, and a plea all rolled into one. In Heaven, the Bible and Bono both say, all the colours bleed into one; in Hell, I’ve since learned, feelings do the same thing. Swampwater was what we called the various Slurpee flavours we mixed into one cup as kids, one on top of the other. Neon pink, lime green, cola brown. Another hole in the language, another new word of my own invention. The old woman’s voice swampwatered with feelings.

‘If I don’t tell you that, Mrs Simmons, then I don’t know what else I
can
tell you.’

‘You,’ her words rattled in her throat. ‘You. You hear it. Don’t lie to me. It’s coming from the walls, or maybe from outside.’ Then she tried on a little girl voice. ‘Please don’t lie. It’s unkind.’

Suddenly, Tanya was behind me.

‘We haven’t heard anything, Mrs Simmons. Promise. It’s probably just nerves. Everyone is—’

The old lady’s tongue flicked at the cracked corners of her mouth. ‘Don’t tell me about nerves. I know about nerves. I know nerves from forty years back. I knew nerves back before nerves were even invented. Someone’s out there humming slow and low. It’s quiet, but you can hear it if you listen.’

‘I don’t hear anything, I swear.’

Her expression broke apart. ‘Don’t lie! Oh, God, there’s no reason! If we lie to each other there’ll be no one to turn to. And if there’s no one to turn to then—’

‘But we don’t hear—’

Mrs Simmons snapped her head around and fixed us with hateful eyes, suddenly another someone else.

‘I said no lies!’ Then she changed again and her voice took on a childish inflection once more. ‘It’s a terrible thing to do to an old woman! Please think about what you’re doing, Paul.’

It was as though she was thrashing back and forth in time, from pleading, uncomprehending child to bitter, denying adult.

She swooped down to a whisper. ‘Pretending it’s not happening won’t make it go away. You can’t ignore it.’

I looked at Tanya, wondering for a moment if she heard something like what Mrs Simmons was describing. Catching my glance, she narrowed her eyes and shook her head sharply, furious about whatever it was she saw in my expression.