DAY 2: John a’ Dreams

A begging imposter, naked vagabond

When I woke the next morning it was full daylight and Tanya’s side of the bed was a mortuary slab of absence. I found her in the living room. Where the previous morning she’d looked pregnant with unwanted knowledge, she now looked as though she’d given birth, misplaced the baby, and been up all night trying frantically to remember where she’d left it. Was it in the fridge? The laundry hamper? The microwave?

The laptop was open on her blushing bare knees; her eyes were Google goggles.

‘How long have you been up?’ I asked. Then, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No. It’s good that one of us could sleep.’

‘Nothing?’ Nothing. ‘Listen, you’re just freaked out. You’ll sleep when you’re tired enough. Everybody will. It’s just a…’

Tanya stared down at her laptop, thighs quaking. She pressed down on them, but her hands just started shaking too.

‘Do you know how long I have left, Paul? If I don’t sleep?’

‘I don’t want to go in that dir—’

‘Thirty two days. Or less. That’s what they’re saying. Five more days until something called ‘sleep deprivation psychosis’ sets in. Until I go insane, Paul.’

‘That’s ridiculous. Lots of people have insomnia and they don’t go crazy.’

‘No. They say even insomniacs doze a little, but this is different. For the last two nights I’ve been completely awake, all night long. I don’t even feel sleepy. So six days to insanity, then thirty two days, max, until total body breakdown and death. Watch. This guy’s been on like every five minutes.’

She stabbed the remote at the Monolith, upping the volume. Some lab rat gussied up in a white coat. Bulging eyes, thick eyebrows, and fat lips. I couldn’t stand to see the self-importance in his eyes.

‘He says they’ve done studies where they’ve tried to see how long they can keep people awake, but nobody’s ever been able to handle more than six days totally awake before their brains shut down. He thinks that—’

‘Turn it off.’

‘But I’m not—’

I grabbed the remote, cutting off both Tanya and the rat.

‘Let’s go out and get some breakfast.’

She didn’t say a word as we dressed. I grabbed a printout of my latest draft of Nod, and we headed for the nameless greasy spoon where we ate breakfast once a month or so. Eggs, hash browns, toast, and unlimited coffee, all for five dollars a head. Battery eggs, white bread, waxy cheese: the place was a hate crime against both nature and nutrition. The food tasted terrible, too—‘food in only the strictest technical sense of the word’ was how Tanya put it—but the soup kitchen pricing kept us coming back, balanced out the expense of our Friday night sushi fest.

It was a joke between us how we could never remember what the place was called. In fact, it had become our custom to lower our eyes when we approached the restaurant’s faded green awning; we didn’t want to spoil the fun. The Saturday Breakfast was also a chance for me to run my latest pages past Tanya. And even though this clearly wasn’t a normal Saturday morning, it seemed necessary to pretend that it was.

The streets were quiet. Not quiet as in empty, but quiet as in lots of people, but nobody saying much. Bright and blustery, then, as we glided down Denman Street among the human beings, none of us fooling anyone with our poorly-performed pantomimes of normalcy. During the early days of colonization, native people, on the verge of starvation and comically outgunned by European religious maniacs, would sometimes profess religious conversion in order to obtain food staples for themselves and their children. In return, our ancestors mocked their desperation by calling them Rice Christians. Well, that morning in Vancouver we were all Rice Christians, treading lightly, hoping not to piss God off. Which was a good thing because all around us was a city of glass.

Green glass apartment towers in the background of every breeze-blown view, big glass fronts on all the stores—the West End was a place where everybody wanted to see and be seen: a place for promenading, for reflections and transparency. All that glass added up to a kind of war cry: this is how mighty we are, this is how bold: we’ll build a city out of glass on the edge of the ocean, God, and dare you to smash it down. No fear of insurrection or weather, of hurricanes or invasion, the towers declared in their gargantuan fragility. The wind was a mere amusement, a pretend-wind threading its way between the skyscrapers like a clown with a handful of balloons weaving through a birthday party. And in the face of all this smiling glass, the people walking by had seemed indestructible, as dense and centred as black holes. Until this morning. Now the city had tipped somehow and we were all slowly sliding toward English Bay.

Strangeness glazed all the normal sights; everything looked the same as before, but no one could have taken in the scene and not known something was very different. This morning we were a city of glassy eyes.

‘Those guys,’ Tanya whispered, pointing to a gay couple and their matching black labs, ‘They aren’t walking their dogs. Their dogs are walking them.’

And I saw it, literally saw her metaphor made real. The dogs looked calm and confident while the humans attached to the other end of their leashes were mere dragged baggage.

What else? I looked around.

All eyes were directed inward; everyone had their introspecs on. As we passed silent bakeries and cafes we could see money changing hands; we could hear the clink of coins being counted then splatting onto marble counters. People hunched across tables, reading one another’s lips.

‘As if what they’re whispering about isn’t exactly what everyone else is whispering about,’ Tanya said loudly, causing a few heads to turn, first toward us—then quickly away.

Reaching the restaurant, we sat down at a table by the open front window and ordered from the waitress. She was a tank-faced woman of Slavic descent who looked like she’d spent her youth being fed steroids in some old Soviet bloc waitress training facility. Then we settled into silence, scrutinizing our cutlery. Some mornings there’d be dried egg yolk on the tines of one of our forks, and we’d call the waitress over. She’d replace the utensil without apology, indeed, with something verging on contempt for our bourgeois, our kulak squeamishness.

I turned my knife in the sun, and as it flashed I remembered my dream. Two nights in a row. I was just going to tell Tanya about it when I saw, heading straight toward us, Charles.

How to introduce Charles into this narrative?

While my lack of enthusiasm kept the bulk of humanity at arm’s length, it almost seemed to attract people like Charles. Maybe it’s the fact that we misanthropes don’t discriminate—the people hater hates everybody equally. Maybe this sad sack egalitarianism makes the Charleses of the world, used as they are to being dismissed out of hand, feel raised to uncommon heights of social desirability when bathed in its jaundiced glow.

Charles smelled bad. What more do I really need to say? He was an outsider always looking for a way in. But no one would let him in. Instead, we relegated him to the status of dumpster diving ‘local character’. As though he were fictional.

I can say of myself that I have no time for people until I understand them, and then I whiplash all the way from contempt to pity. A shitty way to live: the worst of everything. Contempt is bad, but pity’s worse. Pity’s sticky: it clings to the poor fool who presumes to be in a safe enough place from whence to do the commiserating.

‘Oh shit.’ Tanya had seen him.

‘Hey, Paul.’ Charles spoke to me but looked down at the empty chair beside her.

‘Hi Charles.’

I’d never learned his last name; we’d never been introduced. I only knew his first name because people spoke about him behind his back when he left the table. Always Charles. Never Chuck, never Charlie. The formality a shuffling away.

‘How’s the new book coming, Paul?’

Involuntarily, I glanced down at my manuscript on the chair beside me and prayed he wouldn’t notice it. Charles knew I wrote. Had checked my books out from the Joe Fortes library where he and dozens of other floaters spent their days. Checked them out and, oddly enough, read them.

‘Slow.’ He probably thought the whole world spoke in Tarzan-like monosyllables. But you couldn’t shut him down with curt replies—brevity just opened up more space for his words.

‘Okay if I sit?’ he asked, preemptively folding himself into an empty chair.

Charles had the red plastic face of someone who lived rough. His expression was friendly, but fixed that way, as though with bobby pins or staples. He was fairly tall but came across short, with all the awkwardness and crumpledness that entails—like a hinged skeleton you pull out of a cardboard box each Halloween and half-heartedly thumbtack to your front door.

‘How’s Miss Soviet Union 1962 this morning?’

As he said this, Charles glanced around to make sure the waitress wasn’t near. He was invoking a triangle of intimacy: we three were talking about her. She was the outsider, not him.

‘She’s okay.’

‘You’re too nice. I bet she’s not going to sell much coffee this morning.’

‘It’s not funny, Charles,’ Tanya said, as though to a floor-peeing puppy.

‘Starbucks is going to be empty today. And I quote, “The New York Times reports that the American Starbucks chain has been forced to shut down a thousand outlets in the last year.” And that was before. People are no longer buying into—. It’s definitely a broadcast from the new Russian-Chinese satellite string, Paul. It’s like something out of an Ian Fleming novel.’ He pronounced it ‘Fleeming’. ‘They’re disrupting our brainwaves with some sort of static. We’ll start to panic and the markets will fall apart, just like after 911, then after a couple of days they’ll march in and buy us all up. It’s so obvious.’

‘Yeah, but the Chinese aren’t sleeping either. So where does that leave you?’

The waitress slapped our plates down on the table.

‘No. No satellite. God.’

We all stared as sunlight made brutal cement of her skin.

‘And why would God do this to us?’ Charles said finally, supercilious for my benefit.

‘Because of faggots and terrorists and the shit television, stupid street bum. God is telling us no rest for the wicked. Now He will see who listens to Him.’

She folded tuberous arms across her chest. There was no room for the conditional or hypothetical in the woman’s English; she was all declaratives and imperatives.

It was too much for Tanya, who had no time for Bible babblers, having been raised by a couple and having moved across a continent to escape their take on bliss.

‘You keep your hateful opinions to yourself, or I’ll talk to the owner.’

There was spittle on Tanya’s lower lip, and she wiped it away without self-consciousness.

The waitress smirked.

‘Fuck you,’ she said, then turned and left us.

‘Fuck you too, bitch!’ Tanya screamed after her, a single vein throbbing blue in the centre of her forehead.

‘Can you believe that?’ Charles asked me eagerly. ‘What do you think about all this, Paul? You look pretty well-rested. Did you sl—?’

‘And fuck you too, Charles.’ Tanya whirled back around.

‘I don’t—’

‘Nobody asked you to join us. Nobody ever asks you to join them. Ever shut up long enough to wonder why?’

Charles jumped up, hiding his hands behind his back, like he’d been bad.

‘I didn’t mean to intrude,’ he said, his face growing redder.

Tanya laughed, possessed by the cruel ghost of two nights’ lost sleep.

‘Intrude. Please. Disturbing people is all you ever do. Don’t insult us by pretending you don’t know that.’

‘Tanya…’ I began.

‘Tanya,’ she mimicked. ‘Am I wrong? Is he welcome? Did you want him to come over? Shall we order him the Special?’

Charles backed across the room, his eyes fixed on mine, bumping into chair after chair until he disappeared out a back door that led into the alley. We sat silently, Tanya staring at her congealing food and me at mine. The egg yolks were lemon meringue where they should have been tangerine. A vision of caged, armless mothers flashed through my mind, but I shook it off.

‘Did you have to do that?’

‘He was going to ask you if you were a Sleeper.’

And that was the first time I heard the word used in its new sense—capitalized. Had Tanya picked it up off the television or had she coined it herself? Or were a few billion frazzled brains simultaneously beginning to name this new reality?

‘So?’

‘I just didn’t think it was a good idea to tell him.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know why not, Paul. No reason I guess. But fuck him anyway. I don’t have time for it. Let’s just eat.’

We did our best with the food we’d been given but only managed crusts and coffee. After a while, one of us, I can’t remember who, said, ‘This is only the beginning, isn’t it?’

We both looked around then and the restaurant was empty, no waitress, no Charles, no other customers. Just like no one had set foot in the place for a thousand years.