DAY 8: Waking a Witch

If a ‘witch’ was obdurate, the most effectual way of obtaining a confession was by ‘waking’ her. For this purpose an iron bridle or hoop was bound across her face with four prongs thrust into her mouth. The bridle was fastened to a wall in such a way as the ‘witch’ was unable to lie down, while men were constantly by to keep her awake.

‘There’s someone here you need to meet,’ Charles whispered, his dumpster breath coiling into my ear.

I opened my watering eyes, my single mandated hour of sleep now over. This regimen was making my eyes twitch, and I occasionally saw electric flickers of movement in the periphery of my vision—coming attractions, I supposed, for the visions of Nod the Awakened were seeing all around them. An hour wasn’t long enough to allow me the Dream, and its absence left me sullen and resentful. And yet, my meagre ration of sleep had to have been a bounty compared to the absolute zero that Tanya and everyone else around me was subsisting on. I couldn’t imagine and still can’t. All I think of when I try to imagine absolute sleeplessness is a single day that never ends—a good working definition of Hell. Hell is time, isn’t that obvious? Take your greatest pleasure or your greatest fantasy and let it come continuously true—for a day, a week, a year, a decade. And that’s hell.

Behind Charles’ blue-clad form, gritty, Tang-coloured light swam through the classroom window. Seattle dust.

Ever since we’d arrived back from Stanley Park, my mind kept compulsively returning to the awful light that had thrown us down on our faces. The flash had only lasted a fraction of a second but had left us temporarily blind. We lay on the Causeway with our arms over our heads long after the light died away, terrified it would happen again. All around me a chorus of panting and retching, and the scratching of fabric on asphalt. Voices whimpered Charles’ name, and when he answered them, I could hear aftershocks rippling through his Admiral Voice. As for me, the insides of my eyelids were scarred with bright, pale patches of light.

It wasn’t until we picked ourselves up and looked across the park toward the clear blue skies south of us that we realized what had actually happened.

There, in the sky across English Bay and above Point Grey, stood a mushroom cloud, still and imperious, stretching from the horizon to the upper limits of the atmosphere, where it squashed up against outer space. We could just see the cloud’s thick, cottony stem, obscured by distance and horizon, but its massive head was fully visible.

Someone had hit Seattle, two hundred-odd kilometres to the south, with a nuclear warhead. For the first time since this whole thing had begun, tears came into my eyes. Tears for whom? For myself? For Tanya? For a few million dead Americans? To be honest, at that moment I was more inclined to envy the dead than to mourn them. And even if I’d wanted to mourn, four or five million were too many to shed tears over. Tears are more personal than that. We don’t read a news story about twenty thousand dead in an earthquake and weep. At best, we sigh and tell the wife. More often, we shrug and go check our Facebook messages.

Really, I don’t know why I cried. Maybe I wept for the sake of scale as I imagined us all as viewed from a cosmic distance, so tiny and insignificant. From space, even that gigantic cloud would be nothing more than a tiny pimple on Earth’s fat, round face. I remembered my hypothetical asteroid, the one that might wipe out the planet while we slept. Now it had happened, to Seattle, and who was to say but that there might be a sister missile to the one that hit Vancouver’s sister city fizzing our way across the Pacific right now?

All our sci-fi nightmares were coming true. And then a thought hit me: everything we can imagine is possible. Everything. All my life I, along with most of the rest of the world, had been subjected to an endless loop of cultural snuff porn: annihilation by nuke, war, economic catastrophe, and/or zombie attack. But I’d never taken it seriously. Maybe, by crying, I was mourning an innocence that, a week ago, I’d have indignantly denied I possessed.

In the end, though, I think I wept because I just didn’t understand it. Any of it. And when my tears eventually stopped flowing, did it mean that I’d understood? Or was it that my brain or soul was simply too small to hold such massive grief for more than a few moments? Had grief just paused near me for a moment, shrugged and moved on?

‘Paul?’ Charles was still crouched beside me, reeking and creaking as he leaned in much too close, ‘Time to get to work.’

I stood quickly, trying to avoid proximity. Zoe was still asleep in her nest of blankets beneath the teacher’s desk, choke-holding the stuffed grizzly. Tanya had told Zoe its name was Ralph or something, but a name had no way of sticking to our silent ward and slid off onto the floor before being kicked into a thoughtless corner. The namelessness of Noddish bears. That said, Zoe seemed to have formed a real attachment to the creature. It was hard to imagine Zoe needing anything, but there you were: everywhere she went, the bear went too.

Charles and I had cut a deal when we’d arrived at the school: a room with a lockable door for the three of us. A safe place to hide the dangerous shame of mine and Zoe’s sleeping from Charles’ acolytes.

But where was Tanya?

‘She’s working,’ Charles said, somehow able to read my thoughts.

‘Working?’

‘We keep busy. Nice and safe and snug and working hard. Tomorrow Never Comes. Right? But why am I telling you?’ He actually paused and smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘It’s in your book! What does procrastination mean, Paul? It means waiting for tomorrow. There’s no time like today. Ha! There’s no time BUT today. Life must flow in unbroken lines…’

Charles was chanting these words, mostly to himself. He had been pretty displaced in the old world, but he fit into ‘Nod’ better than anybody else I’d met so far. His words didn’t flow in ‘unbroken lines’ of logic, but they did flow steadily, and when they encountered a logical obstacle, they just flowed right around it. There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile. And here were Tanya, Zoe, and I, deep inside his crooked house.

‘What sort of work is she doing?’

‘This. That. This and that. This, that, and the other. Come with me, and I’ll show you.’ He saw me look toward Zoe, the back of whose tousled head was just visible from where we stood and sneered. ‘Don’t worry, Paul. No one will fuck with the little demon while you’re gone.’

When Charles called Zoe a demon that first time, I took it as irony, just like when he’d winked at me after addressing his massed masses the day before. Charles occupied a funny place in Nod, as far as I could see. I’m pretty sure he knew the new world order he was trying to orchestrate was ‘made up’—after all, he was making it up himself—and that the children in the park weren’t literally demons. On one level. On another level, he didn’t have a clue. I found myself thinking of Moses coming down from the mountain carrying stone tablets and raving about some burning bush, of Jesus in his lonesome desert, checkmating the devil and emerging with a mission. Were these fantastical revelations simply fibs that turned into delusions that turned into accepted truths centuries later? Consider Joseph Smith, Jr, the founder of Mormonism only a century and a half ago. He’d been a small time salesman and huckster; then one day he claimed that an angel had dictated a new book of the Bible to him. And within no time whatsoever his spiel was granted that special hands-over-ears status we accord religion. Smith tended to look crazier than Jesus or Moses to many, but that might be because he was simply the most recent of the last three millennia’s worth of prophets. They were just newer. Or consider L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. Nothing particularly wacky about his visions of telepathic aliens compared to those of his predecessors. Scientology would fit Nod like a leather glove.

And here, next in line, stood Charles, thinking up a storm. He was taking pages from my poor, unfinished manuscript, yanking out words, and using them to name things. It was as though he’d been Cain, wandering the earth for millennia before finally finding his way back to a broken and abandoned Garden of Eden, where everything had been uprooted and thrown about by a petulant God. And now Cain was tidying up the mess, completing the naming process that had been abandoned by his disgraced father, Adam.

Me.

Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to crawl into a closet, barricade myself there, and dream my Dream forever. How long since this drawn-out ending had begun? Eight days? Nine? I’d already lost count. If the Brazen Heads were right, there was only another two weeks until the bodies of the Awakened followed their minds into the abyss. How much more madness would froth up before it was over? Surely there was only so crazy a person could become and still be able to eat, drink, and stand upright. Certain logical patterns of organization pertaining to movement and vision had to be maintained. Or so I hoped.

‘Come with me,’ Charles snapped. I was seeing a pattern. He was servile when we were around his people but bossy as hell when we were alone.

I locked the classroom using the key Charles had solemnly handed me the night before, as though I was too stupid to know it had twin upon twin. We made our way down the locker-lined hallway to a door at the far end.

A half dozen or so of Charles’ followers were milling about, all engaged in some sort of clockwork task or another. One woman, her face obscured by curds of matted hair, stood hunchbacked in a doorway, murmuring into a dead cell phone cupped in her hands. Occasionally, she would stab at the keys of its text pad.

Charles snorted. ‘She’s talking to the dead. On her dead cell phone. Let the dead message the dead.’

Next to her an enormously fat man, a stub of a broom in his hands, was endlessly sweeping the same patch of floor. The linoleum beneath his broom was wearing thin. A patch of liquid pooled at his feet. Piss. I held my breath.

‘A-Admiral…’ he said as we passed.

‘Yes?’

‘What did Nodgod tell you yesterday in the park?’

‘Didn’t you hear His oration?’ Charles asked, apparently disgusted.

‘I just fell down. I was too scared.’ The fat man shook his head and his jowls flapped. There’s a point of obesity where, like it or not, whatever your other personal achievements or qualities, all you are is ‘the fat man’ or ‘the fat lady’. The world is a gawking four-year-old.

‘Soon enough I’ll share with you all what Nodgod revealed to me.’

The fat man was weeping. ‘Thank you, Admiral.’

I’d like to describe Charles’ followers in more detail, but there was a lank and greasy sameness to them that makes it difficult. Weight, age, and gender were about all that differentiated them—and guessing gender was starting to be a crap shoot. Perhaps the wellspring of their uniformity lay in the identical expressions on their grey faces. They were catatonic patients in a mental ward who might suddenly fly into superhuman rages for no reason. Desks might fly. Dolls might dismember. Dull and dangerous, they needed to be medicated, but the pharmacies were empty.

One thing they all had in common was a task. Each of them was doing something. Or, rather, each of them was doing anything—it didn’t seem to matter what. Busy work. One old man was folding newspaper pages into tiny squares and stacking them neatly on a table. A teen-aged girl beside him was busily cutting another sheet of newspaper into confetti, slowly, laboriously.

‘We aren’t pokes, but we do poke about,’ Charles said, noticing my curiosity. ‘And if we don’t, we’ll get such a poke.’

He wanted to see if his Nod-erudition was impressing me. The word ‘poke’ has several meanings. First, ‘a lazy person’, second, to busy oneself without definite object’.

‘I read this,’ he held up my manuscript, ‘almost all the time. What strikes me about the word ‘poke’ is how it has two completely opposite meanings. Think of the power!’

‘Power?’

‘We can rename. If we need to we can even change the meaning of words. Or make up new ones and make them mean what we want. And that’s how we’ll do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘My eyes are changing, Paul! I see new things—and I can name them with your words. When Nodgod spoke yesterday, the meaning of it all just about swallowed me whole! He’s wiping the slate clean, giving us sanction to start over! You must be so fucking thrilled, Paul! Most writers just hope to get a few people to read their stuff, but your book is going to create a whole new world. You’re a prophet.’

‘Not me. This is your game, not mine.’

Charles spun toward me so quickly I thought he might fall over. As it was, he staggered.

‘No! This didn’t come from me! I’m the messenger, but you’re the vessel! Just be sure you’re a worthy vessel. Word to the wise.’

We had now arrived at the door at the far end of the hall. A sinewy Asian man whose muscular arms and chest were covered in tattoos stood in front of it. When Charles opened the door, he shuffled silently to one side, and after we entered, I heard him shuffle back into position.

A long and skinny room, a book room. Two windows at the far end in the dusky distance. Charles led me between the shelves of books, thirty or so copies of each title, most of them, judging by the crappiness of their designs, relics of the eighties or nineties. Halloween orange spines. Futuristic fonts on taped-up covers.

Then another door at the back.

He paused, hand on the doorknob, suddenly solicitous.

‘There’s somebody in here that you really need to meet, Paul.’

He went in, and I followed. To our right an old woman shrouded in rags crouched on the floor, cradling a metal shish kebab skewer in both hands. She looked up at me and tittered. Directly across from her, slumped against the far wall, was a man in his early twenties. He looked up. Despite the haggard, exhausted look on his face, I could tell right away that he was a fellow Sleeper. One end of a bike chain was locked around his throat; the other was attached to a thick metal pipe that ran from the floor to the ceiling.

He wore khaki shorts and a torn and stained T-shirt with Captain America on the front. Someone who had, until recently, appreciated kitsch. Now his T-shirt looked terribly sad, like a Spice Girls T-shirt from the 1990s that you might see on a hungry African kid in a charity appeal. We’d put so much stock in T-shirts. Personal flags replacing, perhaps, national ones in an age of ascendant ego. But here in Nod, the single citizen nation state of Captain America had been overrun, its flag torn down and trampled.

Captain America’s arms were covered in small cuts and oozing welts that showed no signs of healing. It wasn’t hard to figure out where they had come from. Or why they’d been inflicted. Meanwhile, Skewer Woman lovingly polished her weapon.

Charles’ voice took on a wheedling tone as he tried to forestall my objections.

‘Therapy, Paul. Salvation. But not punishment. Not cruelty.’

Skewer Lady nodded in confirmation.

‘He’s been good. Pretty good.’ She made a tentative stab in the direction of her prisoner. ‘Scissors to grind. Scissors to grind.’

‘Who are you?’ the prisoner stared at me, agog. ‘You’re not one of them.’

‘I know it’s ugly, surface ugly, Paul, but try to see this as triage in a war zone. Think of it as love. There’s Truth all around him, but he can’t be it so long as he keeps drifting off into Oblivion. Like a dog, like a fucking booze hound running for the bottle. He keeps turning away from the sun. So he gets burned. What’s a sun to do?’

‘He keeps hiding his eyes,’ the old woman joined in, nodding and weaving, ‘but the sun is always shining. He falls flat on his face and tries to worship the night. I’ve seen him!’

She lunged at him, but Charles kicked her arm away. She pulled back into herself, whimpering.

‘Only if he tries to sleep, Judy. You know better than that.’

Judy. It seemed impossible that her name was Judy.

Muttering, she settled back down into her corner.

‘Did they get you too?’ Captain America asked me, his face contorted as he tried to paste me into his world. ‘Fuck. No, that’s not it. You’re with them! Why aren’t you tied up? Why don’t you run?! Oh, God!’

‘Shut up,’ Charles said casually, and the prisoner jerked just as if someone had yanked hard on his chain. ‘No one wants to hear what you have to say. ‘Scornful dogs will eat dirty puddings’. You’ll see things differently in a day or two when you wake up. And then you’ll thank us.’

Charles addressed me. ‘This is sin, Paul. You should hear him babble about the dream he was having when we found him…’

‘His precious dream!’ Judy spat. ‘His darling dream world filled with golden light!’

Back out in the book room, Charles grabbed my arm. ‘Do you see now?’

Behind the closed door, Captain America was screaming.

I was shaking. ‘See what?’

‘We’re the children of Cain, Paul. We’ve wandered through the day and the night for thousands of years. It’s been our punishment. But now it’s ending. We’re waking up from our dream and seeing what Nodgod wants us to see! That one,’ Charles sneered back over his shoulder, ‘is offensive to the Unsleeping Lord who gave us this day! And you. You, you, you. You see. You wrote the book that describes it all. But you still sleep and you pal around with demons. And I can’t quite figure it out…’

Charles fell silent and began to pace. I waited as he wandered up and down the aisles, his fingers trailing, as I imagined, along the spines of high school classics: The Chrysalids and Animal Farm. Lord of the Flies. 1984. Apocalypse and dystopia. Despairing visions. Every high school had taught these books. Every teen had been injected with them. What had possessed us?

Charles’ footsteps stopped in the next aisle.

‘Do you know your Bible, Paul? I know mine. Do you know about Moses?’

I did, and my mouth went dry.

‘Moses, Paul, guided the Chosen People to the Promised Land but God did not allow him to enter.’ A pause. ‘Now, why was that?’

‘I don’t know.’

Charles walked back to the aisle where I stood.

‘I don’t know either, Paul, but I’m starting to have thoughts.’

He stared at me without blinking, like he was trying to burn away some obscuring film that concealed me.

‘What thoughts, Ch—Admiral?’

A smile twitched across his face.

‘So much in names, so much in what we say and don’t say. So much in what we almost say. So much in what we never think to say. Or hide away. Maybe God had a little bitsy problem with Moses. Can you guess what sort of problem?’

‘No, I can’t.’

Closer. ‘Maybe God thought Moses was a little too arrogant, doing God’s work for him.’ Closer. ‘Maybe Moses got himself and God mixed up.’ Far too close. ‘Maybe Moses thought he was God.’

Then the clouds blew away and Charles was grinning.

‘Or maybe not. Who knows! Time’s a tattletale, Paul. It’ll spill all the beans eventually. And here in Nod, there’s lots and lots of time. All will be revealed.’

I sensed an opening in his good humour. ‘Where’s Tanya?’

‘Tanya? She’s working. I already told you that.’

‘No. I mean, I’d like to go talk to her.’

He came back around into my aisle, shrugging. ‘Go for it. She’s wiping down some chalkboards. Top floor. First door on the south side.’

I turned to go.

‘But what about your work, Paul?’

‘What work?’

‘You’ve got a speech to give tomorrow morning. Remember? Right now my people are out on the streets, spreading the word. There are about fifty of us now, but I need a thousand.’

‘A thousand?’

He ignored me even as he answered. ‘A thousand’s the number for a Rabbit Hunt.’

Rabbit hunt? The term didn’t ring any bells, didn’t come from my manuscript.

‘What’s a—?’

‘Go see to your Tanya, Paul. Go check on your little pet demon, too—but keep it locked up. If anyone with open eyes sees it, it might get squashed. Anyone with open eyes would think the thing had just crawled out of Demon Park.’

Demon Park. I didn’t even have to stop to think what that meant. The new words were falling into place with shocking ease.

When I found Tanya, it was somehow no surprise to see her scrubbing intently at a small patch of chalk-free blackboard. Sweat dimpled her forehead and she was working her jaw, grinding her teeth. I came up behind and put my hands gently on her shoulders.

She turned and clawed at me until I backed away. Then she stood still, head down, face covered by lank hair, as she heaved bales of breath in and out of her chest, a striped red and blue eraser still clutched in her trembling right hand.

‘Medusa?’ I said gently.

‘Don’t call me that! Medusa was a monster. Do you think I’m a monster?’

Then she looked up, and I saw a monster.

About as much of my Tanya remained in the face that now seethed at me as remains in a photo album from which all the prints have been torn and shredded; nothing there but yellowish outlines where pretty pictures had once lain. A plundered past—nothing but teases for my poor, pathetic memory. Tanya was gone.

In the sun-soaked classroom her dear, dear face, resembled a shrunken head in a natural history museum. Ancient and unknowably foreign, lopped off and dried mid-scream. Denied a decent burial. I could go on. I do go on.

Back to her question. Did I think she was a monster? Did I think that eight days had undone an entire life, undone two intertwined lives? That was the burning question and it was a real bonfire, the burning bush of a question I’m still here trying to face, still trying to answer.

So back to her question.

‘No. You’re not a monster.’

Where just a couple of days earlier, love had been Omission, now it was a bald-faced lie. Love a lie. But a real lie, a true lie.

‘Charles doesn’t think I’m a monster.’

‘Charles? Since when do you care what Charles thinks?’

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.